Chapter 4 Into the fire

After a few armed men came to take us both, we were led to the room I had watched another man enter earlier that day.

A moment later the door closed behind them.

The silence that followed was heavier than the interrogation had been. Then I noticed why.

The air in the room had changed.

A faint pressure behind the eyes. My tongue was dry in a way that drinking wouldn't fix. I drew a breath and got less from it than I expected. I saw the vents getting sealed. The guards were wearing small respirator units fitted just below the jaw.

I turned my head to my right while doing my best to keep myself steady. She was already breathing shallowly. Small controlled breaths. She knew the moment we walked in. I had been breathing normally for several minutes. I was already behind.

The sooner you talk, the sooner you breathe. So I breathed as little as I could manage.

The room was dark. Made fully from metal with windows. A cube of torture. The only light source was in front of us in full white hitting me directly in the face.

The armed men sat us down on two chairs that were screwed to the floor and asked their questions. Simple ones. "Who are you?"

"Patrick Beli—"

"Real names."

I paused. The guard leaned forward slightly.

"I won’t repeat again."

"Da vinci." I said with my breath tight.

"Like the painter?"

"Yes." I said without looking at them.

The guard grabbed my face into his hands. " Give, me, your real name before I reduce the oxygen level to fifteen percent!" He squeezed my face harder.

I was already having a hard time thinking, but I didn't give in. From the corner of my eye, Tasha’s head was still down. But her eyes slid sideways toward me with a frightening expression. I felt she had many things to say at that very moment yet she couldn't.

"My birth name is Davi." Of course that was a lie.

The guards stared for three seconds. Wrote something down and continued.

"What were you doing in Mr. Grandisfield’s room?"

"We were looking at some useful information."

"What information specifically?"

I murmured some nonsense to get him to come close. I was having a hard time breathing and I hated whoever was under that oxygen mask. He leaned in and put his ears close enough to hear what I said. " Information on what's Grandisfield's favorite position."

The guard hit my face with the back of his hand. "Reduce the oxygen level to fourteen percent!" He said, yelling at the screen of light.

I was trying to grab the oxygen harder. Breathing heavily. Much harder than before, with not much air coming through.

Grandisfield walked in. The door opened and a flow of oxygen followed through. I breathed what I could with a deep breath through my mouth. He closed the door and moved slowly, without urgency, his shoes making soft sounds on the cold metal floor. The room didn’t feel smaller when he entered it. It felt more deliberate. He waved the armed men out with one lazy motion of his hand. "Leave us." He said.

They hesitated. "Sir—"

"I said leave."

They left.

He pulled a chair from the corner and sat down across from us—the noises echoing through my ears on repeat, he crossed one leg over the other. Up close he didn’t look like the monster Men of Moon had described. He looked tired. Older than I had expected. But his eyes were sharp.

He studied us for a moment. "Increase oxygen to seventeen percent." He tapped his fingers on the table. "So," he said. "Which one of them recruited you?"

I said nothing. My throat was dry. Beside me Tasha had not moved, had not shifted, had not produced a single sound since we’d been brought into the room. I had assumed it was caution. Now, watching her from the corner of my eye— the absolute stillness of her, the quality of her silence— I was no longer certain it was caution at all. It was something more deliberate than that. Something chosen.

Grandisfield smiled faintly. "Rothmere would be my first guess. He prefers people with your particular sense of guilt." He leaned forward slightly. "Or was it Halverson? He does enjoy sending soldiers after soldiers. Old habits." He said the last part looking at Tasha.

I had no idea who these people were so I l filed them away for later. His hand dropped to his side. Index finger pressed into thumb. "Those men," he continued, standing now, beginning to move slowly around the room, "have been trying to kill me for seven years." He paused behind my chair. I didn't turn around. "And yet here I am."

He stuck his chin up. "I'm sure you know the three big families. The Vaelthors tried to warn us. Before any of this. Before the organization had a name." His voice dropped. "They were the first ones the Men of Moon removed. Three families, the ones who built this place for human civilisation rather than for profit."

The restraints kept me facing forward. So I sat and closed my eyes as the lights in front of me passed through my eyelids, and listened to him breathe behind my head and felt the air in the room getting thinner one slow breath at a time.

There's a specific kind of fear that has nothing to do with what you can see. It lives in the voice behind you, the footsteps you hear without being able to locate, the awareness of your own breathing as something that might run out. The room smelled metallic, faintly sweet in the wrong way by then. I had been in worse situations. I told myself that with some care.

"You were told I’m corrupt," he said, "you were told I’m stealing resources from the colony. That I’m planning something dangerous. Something illegal."

I looked at the floor while the edges of my vision carried faintly. My body started to shake and I breathed with a sense of panic.

Grandisfield continued. "Let me guess," he said. "They told you killing me would save the Moon."

The room was very quiet. I was aware of my own hands, clenched in my lap. I was trying to put the pieces together despite the heaviness of my head.

Grandisfield's Expression changed slightly. He said quietly: "I used to sit at their table once."

The words settled in the room like something dropped from a height.

I lifted my head. "What?"

He straightened. "I helped build the Men of Moon." His eyes shifted to Tasha. "And she already knew that."

The room went completely still. I turned to Tasha. She was looking at grandisfield with the same expression she had worn the entire time like a closed door. And I understood, sitting in that chair, that there were conversations happening in this room that I was not a participant in. That I had been placed in this room like a piece on a board.

I was just picked randomly, I thought. Without knowing anything. Ordered to kill or be killed.

For the first time since the whole thing began, I felt something close to anger. Not at grandisfield. Not even at the organization. At myself, for walking into a room without knowing what room it was. I had been moved. That was the part that cost me. Not the danger. The ignorance.

Slowly, Tasha raised her head. With a low voice she said. "You talk too much."

Grandisfield locked eyes on her, tilting his head slightly. "Ah," he said. "So you do speak."

He fixed his posture and said, almost as an afterthought, "My documents. I’d like them back, if you don’t mind." A pause. "I have copies of everything naturally. But I am rather fond of the originals."

Nobody spoke for a moment. The room held the weight of what had just been said in it. I was still assembling the shape of it when the door burst open and a rush of oxygen came flooding in.

One of the armed guards, breathing hard. "Sir— we have a situation."

Grandisfield didn’t turn around. "What kind of situation?"

"Two unidentified transports have landed outside the south gate. Forced entry. We believe they’re armed."

"How many?"

"At least a dozen, sir."

A sharp crack echoed through the corridor outside. Then another. Then the rhythm of gunfire moved closer.

"They’re already inside the building."

Grandisfield sighed like his evening had been mildly disrupted. "Well," he said, adjusting the sleeve of his coat, "that was faster than I expected."

He glanced between Tasha and me. Then something crossed his face. Not warmth exactly, but a considered decision. "The second group sent to kill me tonight, which makes you, comparatively, the least of my problems."

He nodded at the guard. Reluctantly the guard came closer to enter the room, but a sound of a bullet followed with him falling sideways. Grandisfield stepped back and pressed his index into his thumb. He came towards us and opened the restraints. Blood rushed back into my hands. I rubbed them. "Wait," I said. "Why are you letting us leave?"

Grandisfield was already moving toward the door. He looked back once. "I’m not letting you go, I’m giving you a choice." He paused and turned to Tasha for a slight second. "Float free."

The hallway outside was chaotic. Smoke moved through the corridor in slow drifts that caught in the throat like dry cloth. The emergency lighting had dropped to crimson, turning every face the same sickly color. An alert came through the speakers: unauthorized personnel detected. Gravity correction commencing. The gravity panels turned off and we were left with the Moon's gravity. Every step we took we landed further than should have. Sparks rained from a conduit in the ceiling and landed without sound on the floor, which was wrong. Everything was slightly muffled, sound behaving the way it does when the pressure seals are compromised. Guards ran past each other shouting instructions nobody was following. The alarms were distant, as if heard through water. Nobody looked at us.

I tried to move.

My legs were working. My arms were working. But there was a half-second delay between the instruction and the action. My vision was slightly blurry.

At the end of the first corridor, half hidden by a fallen door, was the man from the entrance. The one who had only wanted to get to the party. He hadn’t made it very far. Without thinking much of it I kept moving.

Tasha’s hand went inside her jacket. She grabbed a compact mini-gun, and in the same motion her shoe shifted and a knife slid into my hand.

"You always travel with surprises between your… accessories?" I said.

"Focus."

"I’m completely focused. I’m also curious."

"Focus!"

We moved into the chaos. A guard came barreling in our direction, blindness of someone moving through emergency lighting at speed. I sidestepped. Too late.

His shoulder caught mine. I spun into the wall. I hit it hard. The wall pushing back with that strange lunar quality. The impact absorbed wrong, my body floating a half-step sideways before any gravity reestablished itself in my body.

The guard came at me. I held my knife tight. I spun. I missed. He pulled his gun. He shot me. I thought. But I was clear. Tasha had pulled me aside and shot the man in the forehead. I could barely see anything. "Thanks." I said.

I gathered myself. As we ran she fired her gun. Sparks rained from the ceiling. A door exploded to our left and killed the man standing in its way in an instant. My heart was hammering. And it felt enjoyable.

"What’s the plan?" I said, crouching behind a fallen support beam.

"Survive."

"Right. Anything after that?"

Her eyes moved quickly for potential threats. "Survive first."

The further we got from the interrogation room the better my head worked. Oxygen returning to the blood. The half-second delay dissolved. I was breathing.

At the far end of the tunnel, I saw shadows moving. Too smooth. Not guards. Not soldiers. Something else. Tasha pressed herself against the wall, very still. "They’re already here." she whispered.

Somewhere in the building behind us, something else exploded. Soldiers started screaming.

"Wait, is the F.L.A here for Grandisfield?" I said, opening my eyes wide.

"They aren't here for Grandisfield." She said,

"Then who?"

"They're here for you!"

I couldn't say a word. We continued running, taking every turn to mislead them.

By the time we found the maintenance corridor I was thinking at full capacity again. When we emerged into the outer corridor the air hit differently. Cooler, carrying the sharp smell of discharged weapons and ruptured wall panels. My lungs took it greedily. My head cleared by degrees.

I lifted my chin up looking ahead as the gravity failed across the dome. The change was instant. Everyone staggered as their weight vanished down to almost nothing. Men and women, rich and poor who had been standing firmly a moment before lurched upward in wild, clumsy motions, their own movements throwing them off the floor. Some crashed into tables. Others slammed into one another and spun helplessly across the chamber. Every attempt to regain balance only made it worse. People kicked too hard, pushed too hard, and sent themselves drifting in desperate, weightless arcs before crashing back down.

Screams tore through the room. A woman cried out as someone slammed into her from behind, tearing her newborn from her arms. The child drifted upward between the panicking bodies, rising slowly as the mother lunged after it. She pushed off the ground too hard and sent herself sideways, striking another guest and spinning away while the infant floated just out of reach above the chaos.

The gravity in the dome was gone.