Disclaimer: I don't own Dark Angel–although I would really, really like to.
Thanks: Huge thanks to Milla, willow, and Kyre, who helped me improve this piece with their beta-ing and nitpicking.
A/N: This is the first chapter in my young X5s fic. It's set when Max and Jondy are seven years old. I plan to continue with additional chapters, although I can't promise how often. Feedback welcome!
Beneath the Ice
Chapter One: Midnight Run
There will be no light for hours to come, but Jondy wakes. With a stealth born of experience, she leaves both eyes closed and keeps her small body limp in her bunk. Cautiously, she tunes her ears to the breath of each soldier in turn until she is certain: only one is awake. The thick night air chills her legs as she slides to the floor with a careful, practiced motion. She moves down the row of cots in a low stance, avoiding the barred windows that look out on the watchtowers. Jondy's cotton hospital gown sways loosely about her narrow form as she eases around the corner of another soldier's bunk. Glancing quickly toward the door of the barrack, she pokes Max on the shoulder once, then again. Her long, slender fingers are firm and impatient. Other soldiers can stand to slumber in bed all night; some even like to. Ben and Krit, for instance, have to be shaken awake before the guards come so they won't get yelled at. Jondy has never slept in. The restlessness that overtakes her after two or three hours of sleep is so intense that her body hums with nervous energy. Her every sense is alert as she prods Max a third time.
Max slides a hand over the edge of her cot as if turning in her sleep. Crouched on the cold floor, Jondy traces one symbol into Max's palm, then another. The laundry room? The front doors? Max makes no response. Jondy frowns, her delicate features wrinkling with frustration. A spiraling loop of her index finger conveys her final suggestion: play it by ear? At last, Max lays her palm crossways against Jondy's, gripping her with their handshake. Jondy likes to select an objective in advance, but this is Max's favorite type of run: impulsive, high-risk, unpredictable. They have never been caught, which makes Max as increasingly bold as it makes Jondy increasingly edgy.
FLASHBACK::
Col. Donald Lydecker addresses the orderly ranks of a group of children who, though barely older than toddlers, stand perfectly still at attention:
A child who is tended to at night will grow coddled and dependent. That child will not become a soldier. You will remain in the barrack at night, as a unit. Is that clear, soldier?
Yes, Sir. Ben looks miserable. A nomaly had been coming for him. He knew it! Yet when he pounded on the door of the barrack, no one let him out. No one even came to check out the disturbance.
If you have any more of these bad dreams, soldier, your unit will take care of you. Do you understand?
Yes, Sir.
::END FLASHBACK
No one monitors the X5 barrack at night, and the janitorial staff makes its rounds on a fixed schedule. Even Ben's occasional nightmares always come after dawn, during his final REM sleep cycle. Max and Jondy have learned to take full advantage of this predictability. No one has discovered that they roam the building in violation of their orders. If anyone knew...if Col. Lydecker knew...the thought always brings with it a slow, amorphous sense of dread. They have seen glimpses of the laboratories, of the hot white lights, of procedures that were not routine. They know there are things that happen, things that have not yet happened to them. If anyone knew...
Even Zack does not suspect. He woke only once–that first night when Max and Jondy realized the bond they shared. The flash of mutual understanding as Max's eyes met Jondy's across the expanse of bunks had been thrilling. No words were spoken, no hand gestures made. Jondy's skin prickles as she remembers Max's bright eyes flashing with the same energy Jondy feels now, crouched on the floor, itching to move. The two of them had slipped from their cots and raced to the barrack door, taking turns climbing onto each other's shoulders to peer out into the hallway. The light patter of their excited scramble roused Zack from sleep. The CO of the group, he is always alert to the others, always the first to wake when Ben cries out. Sternly, he had ordered them to return to bed. When they lingered, the motion of his gesturing hands grew forceful. It was then they knew they would never tell. Thirty impatient minutes later, as Zack slumbered, they had breached security for the first time.
Max slides to the floor, ready to steal toward the washroom at the far end of the barrack. Jondy leads, ears pricked, moving gracefully down the long aisle between the twin rows of metal cots. She times her steps and her breathing to the sleep rhythms of the others. The two move in an easy synchrony, stepping and pausing with the same motion, the same tempo. A trace of a smile flickers across Jondy's alert face, vanishing as rapidly as it appeared. With a flick of her head, she glances back. In the dark, she sees the expression mirrored for an instant by Max's full lips and big, dark eyes. A diffuse, unfamiliar warmth fills the pit of Jondy's stomach.
The washroom door is well-oiled. Jondy pulls the handle in a smooth, silent arc, allowing them just enough of a gap to slip through. Max crouches in the third bathroom stall from the left and leaps straight up, landing with her feet planted on the metal dividing wall, hands pressed to the ceiling for balance. She pushes on a large ventilation tile, lifting it and moving it aside, then pulls herself up through the hole. After a moment's pause, Jondy follows. Replacing the tile, Max inclines her head toward the branch of ventilation duct that runs straight down the outer wall of the barrack. They have long suspected that it plunges to the ground floor of the building. When they first discovered it, they were too small to brace their backs on one side and reach the other with their hands and feet. But they've grown a lot, enough that the circular opening no longer looks like a gaping chasm. Jondy's heart lurches and her adrenaline soars. With a quick nod of agreement, she slips her skinny legs over the edge of the tube and takes a deep breath.
Reaching the bottom of the straight shaft, the two move another ventilation tile aside and drop to the floor of a small closet. The walls are lined with metal shelves stacked with small, white boxes. Jondy reads the box labels, but doesn't understand them. Max points upward: set into the door, a small pane of glass crisscrossed with diamonds of thin wire is almost unnoticeable, separating the dark closet from the darkness on the other side. Max kneels and Jondy steps onto her shoulders. Jondy's monochromatic night vision reveals a narrow hallway leading deeper into the building. Just then, she hears the nearest security camera drop offline, entering its latent phase.
Dropping to the floor, she signals to Max. The door gives easily, swinging outward. Max and Jondy glide swiftly down the antiseptic white hallway, hugging the left wall. At the first corner they come to, Jondy signals left. The pair sprint light-footed down one hall after another, twisting and turning deep into the building. Jondy is a master at evading the security cameras. Leading by a step, she can feel Max's warm breath on her shoulder. The longer they go without encountering personnel, the higher their excitement builds.
At last, in the middle of a long stretch of hallway, Jondy flattens against a wall and waits for her pulse to subside. They have learned to sprint silently, but if they begin to pant from exertion, they risk being heard. The center of the long hall is safe territory; cameras at either intersection aren't angled to reach their resting place. Max glances at the door just ahead of them, then points. Jondy's eyes widen. The solid, white door has a fancy lock above its knob, and the door sill slopes gently down to meet the floor, like the ones at the entrances to the laboratories. The black designation is painted in small, neat capital letters: W1P.
Max and Jondy turn their heads to look at one another, backs pressed side-by-side to the wall. The hallway is silent except for the thudding of their hearts under their thin gowns. Silence can be deceptive, Jondy thinks anxiously, grainy plastic transparencies from class flashing before her eyes. There's no way of knowing what, or even who, may lie on the other side of this door. Still, a potent mix of adrenaline and curiosity surges against her caution. Tense and poised for flight, Jondy slides up next to the lock, struggling to tune out the pounding of her pulse in her ear as she deciphers the mechanism. With a practiced, almost imperceptible motion, she turns the knob and slides the door open a crack. A glance detects no light or movement. Max and Jondy dart in.
Filling the room, rows of high, deep metal shelves are stacked with bags and barrels. There's an odd smell in the air, something like...oats. Jondy and Max look at each other. It's a pantry! Their small faces break into grins. Examining the rows of shelves, they find huge, cylindrical bins of every sort of grain familiar from their Manticore meals. Not much good for a snack, perhaps, but certainly a find. Already, at seven, they have the ability to store complex maps in their heads, drawing on and adding to them without conscious effort. The area of the building they know is still small; rarely do they risk breaking into new territory. Most nights, just avoiding detection is excitement enough.
Max and Jondy explore the pantry, cataloguing its contents, climbing the shelves, and hiding playfully from one another. Imitating a recent drill, they take turns trying to guess which bin the other is crouched behind. Jondy chooses a flour bin she thinks has a good strategic location, but Max's barely-audible footsteps move toward her hiding place almost immediately. Then they stop. Swiftly, Jondy pokes her head up above the rim of the bin. Darting her eyes left, then right, she widens them with simulated panic just before she drops to the floor. Slowly, she peeks around one side of the bin. Tensed for conflict, Max is swiveling her head, unable to identify the source of the threat. Spotting Jondy's impish eyes peeping around the cylinder, Max slowly smiles, then offers her a hand up. Jondy grins and squeezes her hand.
Tiptoeing to the back of the room, the pair let themselves through a swinging door into the next room...an enormous kitchen! Jondy's face lights up with glee. The kitchen is the same width as the pantry, sharing two walls, but far longer. Scores of utensils on metal pegs line the left wall, behind the long range of stoves and ovens. The bank of refrigerators and sinks that spans the right-hand wall is broken halfway down the room by a pair of large swinging doors. An immense table stretches down the center of the room. Above it, two rows of voluminous cooking vessels hang from the ceiling, their wide mouths facing one another as each pot or skillet dangles by one handle from its metal ceiling hook. Everything is enormous: the capacious refrigerators, the huge, lightweight metal cooking pots, the sinks large enough for Jondy or Max to bathe in.
Mischievously, Jondy springs onto the wood tabletop and races from one end to the other. Max follows. Just then, a clang sounds somewhere to the right. Jondy's eyes widen in alarm as footsteps follow the clang. A moment later, the small round windows set into the swinging doors halfway down the kitchen glow with light. Is there time to regain the pantry? The footfalls continue purposefully. Jondy scans the round windows in fear, then leaps quickly up into a stew pot, folding her small limbs and curling into the low-hanging dip between the bottom of the pot and the side opposite the hook. Max hesitates, then jumps into the pot hanging across from Jondy's. Pulling a steamer attachment out from under her crouched legs, Max fans it open, covering her pot's wide mouth. Jondy adjusts her eyes' focus, trying to see behind the round holes punched into the metal sieve that shields Max from view. The footsteps stop.
Got it, Hal? a deep male voice asks.
Got it. The second man speaks in a tenor pitch. Jondy pictures him as slim and the first man as huskier. Fragments of Max's dark, reassuring eyes reach her through the kaleidoscope of shiny, reflective metal.
A softer clang, followed by a scrape, emanates from the adjacent room. The acoustics of the second clang suggest to Jondy that the room is large, stretching unbroken from the hallway to the same back wall as the kitchen, but well designed to absorb sound. Acoustic tiles on the ceiling, probably, and some type of sound-retardant material in the far wall and the one facing the hallway. Is that why she didn't hear the men coming? She feels the properties of the sound's propagation and faint reverberation in her mind, turning the vibrations over and stretching them out until a three-dimensional grid of the room to the right of the kitchen and pantry snaps into place. Jondy's hearing is legendary among the X5s. Col. Lydecker tries not to overpraise the children, or make distinctions among them, but one day he couldn't hide his pleasure after her performance on a routine hearing test. Very good. Jondy had never heard those words before, she thinks, not spoken to her alone. The rectangular outline shimmers in her mind, exploding with a silent twang of neon green wires and black space.
Muffled footsteps tread toward the kitchen. One door swings inward, throwing a swath of dim light across the center of the room.
Hold up. I think it's got a built-in latch. The man with the deep voice presses the door back till it catches against the wall. Yup. Got it. Jondy forces herself to move her eyes slowly in the direction of his voice. He's a big guy, tall and solid, with a thinning patch on the crown of his head. As he moves to open the other door, she sees that his uniform is military, but not Manticore.
Hal's sigh of relief is audible. Can you imagine if we'd have had to ask that guy for a doorstop? At two in the morning?
Jondy checks the time: it's 02:15:14. This is one of the abilities that developed spontaneously in some of the X5 group. Once they learned to visualize the hands moving, they would run their for hours, then full days, before recalibrating them. After a few months, some were able to move the process to the background of their minds, checking their clocks purely at will. The better calculators simply the time, as Jondy does; they no longer visualize at all. Both Zane and Syl are prodigies in this regard; they developed the ability in infancy. The internal clocks aren't foolproof, though. When Jack begins to shake, his clock zooms in and out and then goes black.
The tall man steps back, out of Jondy's line of sight. Let's move it in.
Hey, Jim, you said you worked this place before?
Another of the refrigerators died on the other side of the complex a few months back. They had us take that one out and replace it in the middle of the night, too. God knows why an air base can't take delivery on a major appliance before 2 a.m. The guy in charge is a control freak, though–you saw.
Max's eyes widen and Jondy frowns. Air base?
Hoist 'er up a bit, Jim urges as the men ease the pallet over the threshold.
Jondy's thoughts churn.
Down there–there's a gap in the line where I took the old one out last night. The whole area was sterile like that–see? I didn't even have to clean behind the thing. Sprayed a little disinfectant for the heck of it. Jim shakes his head disbelievingly. The other job was like that, too.
Jondy presses her lips together. Jim and Hal are nearing the end of the kitchen, maneuvering the large refrigerator on a pallet. Max, facing the stoves, is invisible, but Jondy's pot faces the fridges and the sinks. Jim is so tall that she can't sink all the way beneath his line of sight. Jondy's blue eyes narrow to slits. The eyelids reflect less light, but she can't afford to take her eyes off the men...
There. That oughta last a good ten years. At last, the fridge is in place. Let's hit the road, bud. With that, the men turn and walk out the way they came, pallet in tow, doors swinging closed, without so much as a glance around the room. Quite simply, they are not looking for tiny soldiers perched in cooking pots. Jondy feels she's learning something from their behavior...something applicable to strategy or tactics...but she's not sure what just yet. The round windows blink into darkness. The door to the hallway slams.
Air base?
The metal of Max's steamer attachment glitters pale silver in Jondy's night vision, except where slivers of Jondy's own small face are reflected. Fragments of pale skin and wide, confused eyes mix with the shards of Max's face visible through the swirling constellation of holes. Jondy gestures urgently. If she and Max are swift, Jondy can reach the pantry door in time to hear which way the workmen go. Climbing over the rim of her pot, she drops lightly to the tabletop and removes the steamer that covers Max. The two run to the opposite end of the table, this time not frolicking but moving swiftly and silently, knees rising and falling in unison.
Reaching the door between the pantry and the hall, Jondy presses her ear to the cool metal. She can barely hear the workmen's footfalls–this door must be sound-retardant, too, she thinks–but they're moving away from the direction of the barrack. Jondy shuts her eyes and listens for a specific frequency in the electrical cords that run along the ceiling. The security cameras are so pervasive that monitoring them all at once would unacceptably dilute the guards' concentration, as well as severely limit the size of the images on the security station's split-screen monitors. Jondy can hear whether a camera is actively transmitting, and she knows the standard latency times between transmission phases in the areas of the building she and Max prowl frequently. Nowhere near where they are tonight.
A wave of apprehension sweeps over Jondy. Goose bumps prickle along her skinny arms. Taking corners on the fly, following their instincts, reacting moment-by-moment to the cameras, they've penetrated deep into the building. Now that she must extricate them both, the path they carved out so fluidly has ossified into an impenetrable maze. Necessity steels Jondy's nerves. Under Col. Lydecker's stern hand, she has learned that fear accomplishes nothing. The camera clicks offline. Turning from the door, Jondy signals decisively to Max.
Jondy cracks open the door. Warily, she steps into the hall. As her bare foot touches down on the cold floor, her body is flooded with calm and her senses come to sharp attention. Getting back to the barrack undetected will require more skill than any of last week's regroup-at-rally-point exercises, and she knows it. Even a moment of camera exposure could land their images in front of the night security detail. Jondy leads Max to the corner, then signals right. Nervous when she has time to think, Jondy relaxes in the face of danger. Letting go of conscious thought, she performs the way she was designed to. Racing down one hallway after another, her ears tuned to detect the slightest change in electrical activity, she keeps Max close behind her. Swift movement and frequent turns limit their exposure time in any one hall. Max's frightened breath, rasping on Jondy's shoulder through her thin cotton gown, is a constant reminder that she must not fail. The web of hallways seems endless. Alive with her sense of imperative, Jondy navigates confidently. Each small success, each intersection deftly crossed, gives her a jolt of keen pleasure. When she finally closes the closet door behind them, it takes Jondy a moment to realize that they are almost safe, almost home. Only then does she shiver with fear.
Max leads the way, leaping through the ceiling where they pushed the ventilation tile aside. Jondy gives the shelves of small, white boxes one last glance, then jumps after her, pushing the tile into place and following Max up the ventilation shaft. Jondy's ears detect no one in the washroom. Once again, they steal into the barrack, silent except for the slow, steady breathing of small soldiers. The wave of relief always catches Jondy by surprise: her emotion is so intense, so unguarded. Crouching low, she and Max make their way along the center aisle. Jondy crawls up under the edge of her sheet, sliding into place, then watches Max back to her bunk. The dark night air falls heavily on the small soldiers, sheltering and burying them in the depths of the cavernous room. Jondy closes her eyes. Only later, as the adrenaline filters out of her bloodstream, do her thoughts return to the men and what she heard. For the first time in her seven years, Jondy feels confusion about where she is. There's a lot to think about, and there's a long time yet till dawn.