Page 124 of The Succubi's Choice

Checking her phone, she still has fifteen minutes before she has backup, because having an Archdemon that can teleport in and out of rooms and knows exactly where Jacqueline is would be helpful.

Exhaling again, she steps forward, to the source of the noise, and...

And the room is empty. Just like every other room she’s seen.

In between the alarm bell ringing, the sound happens again, directly in front of her, but there’s no one in the room.

“Great,” she says to the empty room, before unlocking the deadlock on the outside and pushing the door open.

Everything, down to the smell and the equipment, is exactly the same as every other medical room she’s been a part of, and her skin crawls.

If Jacqueline’s here, and they didn’t evacuate her like they really should have, then, almost certainly, others weren’t as well. Unless they knew she was coming, and knew she was there and kept Jacqueline there as a trap and...

The sound comes again, as if muffled on the other side of the wall, and she exhales, reaching towards the wall with the tips of her fingers.

She’s never thought to touch the walls here, never saw a reason to, but...

It’s the same faux-cubicle carpeted wall that’s all over the government building, the texture rough against her fingertips, but she brushes her hand against it, her heart pounding, until...

The wall is still visible to her eyes, but her fingertips go through it, as if it’s only air.

“Oh okay,” she whispers, holding both her hands out and, encountering nothing, she screws her eyes shut and steps through.

Despite knowing that it’s an illusion and knowing that she can move through it, she stumbles, and braces herself on the portion of the wall that she knows exists and...

Immediately, the light is bright against her eyelids and the siren of the alarm cuts out and the circulated air is cool against her face. The hairs on her arms raise, and she squints.

It’s another room, just like the previous medical room, but cut off from sound and light. Behind her, it’s another one of those cubicle walls, though she can run her hand back and forth through it, the temperature difference obvious.

The room is, obviously, heartbreakingly empty, in another level of creepy.

So she straightens herself, brushes her hands off on her khakis, and opens the door to the hall in front of her. It’s not locked, but there’s a sharp sting of copper in the doorknob that wasn’t in the one on the other side of the false wall.

It’s silent, too silent, the small noises that had guided her there suspiciously absent once she’s in the hall, so she ducks back into the room, holding her hand out as guide, going back through to the warmer, alarm-filled room.

There, in the dim light and the red strobes, stands Katya.

They stare at each other, for a long moment, and Katya’s hand hovers near the butt of her pistol, in the way that Miri knows contorts her shoulder.

Her jaw tilts up, tightening, but her eyes widen. The hand doesn’t move, doesn’t waver, doesn’t get closer to the pistol.

Miri wants to speak, wants to say something, wants to defend herself or blurt out everything but her voice is stoppered up in her throat.

Miri puts a hand out, in some sort of plea, in some sort of hopeful bargain that her friend won’t shoot her.

“What are you doing?” Katya whispers, between the blaring of the alarm.

“They have Jacqueline, she’s somewhere on this floor, I think she’s injured,” Miri says.

Katya nods, a fast acceptance of the fact. “And you’re just here to get her?” She asks, pleading, and Miri knows she’s pleading for her to say she’s blameless, that she did nothing else wrong.

And Miri can’t give that to her.

At her lack of answer, Katya tenses her shoulder, as if getting ready to drop her hand, before...before she relaxes. Abruptly. Her hand hanging loosely by her side, as if the life has gone out of her.

It’s yet another thing that makes her skin crawl, in this entire day of skin crawling awfulness.

“Katya, they had a file on Gabriel, to get him outed from his PhD program,” Miri says, pleading, and her heart is pounding with the need for her friend to get it, to understand. “They were going to ruin his life, just because he knew me.”

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