Page 125 of Blightfall

“She’s not going to let us go,” I said. “We’re going to die here.”

As I took stock of our options, I became aware that the entire unit was beginning to cool. Goose bumps broke out on my flesh beneath my flightsuit. Every breath irritated my lungs—I could only imagine the gas contained some compound that would prevent our cells from expanding and being destroyed as we froze, but it didn’t feel good.

“We’re not here to attack you,” Nedd said. “We only fired on your ships because they attacked us first. We lied about being from the Superiority. We’re only here to find other humans, and we did! So you don’t need to worry about us. You can let us go. We don’t have to fight each other.”

I didn’t have a weapon to shoot out the compartment, and I couldn’t punch or kick it. The only tool I had available to me was the grate I’d already knocked loose. I didn’t want to do anything to draw Ivy’s attention to the fact that I’d opened it, so I scooted my foot ever so slowly backward, allowing the grate to slide farther along the floor inch by inch, revealing more of the compartment behind it.

“I want to believe you,” Ivy said, “but your friends flew a starfighter through the wall of my incubatorium. Do you know how valuable walls are?”

“Um,” Nedd said, “that wall was made of brick, right? So…not very?”

There, near the top of the compartment, I could see a panel with a number of buttons and switches. If I shuffled the grate cover slightly off-kilter, I might be able to angle the top corner of it to press some of the buttons. I had no way to know which ones did what, and any abrupt change might draw the varvax down on us.

But I didn’t know what else to do, so I had to try. I shifted my foot back, angling the grate cover, trying to get the top corner in place.

“It depends on how rare bricks are in your current environment!” Ivy said. “Supply and demand! But even if I forgive you the destruction of my wall, there’s the fact that you’ve essentially come into my home and assaulted my children with a weapon of war. That’s hardly friendly behavior, now is it? Do you know what that behavior tells me about you?”

Nedd and I exchanged a glance. “What?” Nedd said.

“It tells me you are exactly the sort of people who need my protection! Humans face so many threats. There’s the Superiority, of course, but do you know what the greatest threat is?”

“Our puny little brains?” Nedd suggested.

“Close, but your brains aren’t the only part of you that fails itself.”

“Good thing we have you to take care of us,” I said.

There. The corner of the grate now pointed at the panel. Since I didn’t know what any of the buttons did, I didn’t care which ones I hit. I slipped my toes on top of the bottom part of the grate and applied pressure, so the top corner slowly bore down on the button panel.

“Yes, it is,” Ivy said. “A very good thing.”

Out the window, the varvax teams moved through the warehouse, waking up banks of humans and equipping them for battle.

“Are they really ready to fight?” I asked. “They look a little confused.”

One of the buttons depressed, but nothing seemed to happen. I shifted my foot, sliding the grate an inch to the side.

“The disorientation will wear off shortly,” Ivy said. “It’s natural for them to feel a bit out of sorts when they wake. Some of them have been unconscious for centuries! And the disorientation helps them to understand their instructions. They’re less likely to question their task if it’s given to them in the first few minutes after they awaken.”

Ivy might not respond well to pandering, but she sure did like to talk about herself and her brilliant plans.

I heard a slight scraping sound on the other side of the refrigerator. Nedd froze, and I stared forward until he began talking again. “You say you want to protect humans, and that we need you to save us. But you’re treating those people down there like cogs in a machine, and using them to destroy other humans. That’s a betrayal of everything you claim to represent.”

I snuck a glance down at the grate on Nedd’s side. He’d maneuvered his similarly to mine and was working to get the corner of it angled into a mass of wires, right at the point where they connected to the electrical panel.

I wanted to congratulate him, but that would obviously have to wait.

“My army is not a machine,” Ivy snapped. For the first time, she sounded angry. He’d clearly hit a nerve.

“It was a metaphor,” I said. “You know what a metaphor is, right?”

“I could recite an alphabetical list of eleven million five hundred and ninety-eight of your species’ most commonly used metaphors,” Ivy said. “You think you’re so original, but some of those metaphors have been recorded in use tens of millions of times!”

That was a dodge of the question. I was pretty sure Ivy was just spitting facts to sound smart, which was a classic diversion. If we hadn’t needed to stay on her good side, I might have pointed that out.

I pressed up on the panel, pushing another button, and this time, the gas coming out of the vent stopped.

That bought us some time, at least. Now we needed to figure out how to disable the restraints and the cooling mechanism so we didn’t freeze to death.