Seduction (Curse of the Gods #3)(25)
Could I even be close to Emmy?
I had no idea what was happening with my Chaos, but it seemed to have an agenda. It had brought me to the meeting of Vice-Chancellors—probably because I hated the vice-chancellors—and then it had proceeded to burn down the building. Probably because there was some small part of me that wanted to burn down the vice-chancellors. Even though I now knew the real reason that Emmy was hanging around with the creepy sols, my Chaos had still taken matters into its own hands, intent on ending whatever was going on, once and for all.
Bad move, Chaos. Bad move.
I glanced out the window again, and then quickly slipped to the floor beside the body. I had no idea what they did with these bodies before taking them into Topia, but I was about to find out.
I was about to go and get my Abcurses back.
Unless they had already returned, and were currently scouring Blesswood for my whereabouts. In which case, I was going to find Cyrus and force him to fix this whole mess, because even if it wasn’t his fault, I still liked blaming him.
I started to unwrap the body on the floor, scrunching up my nose the whole time. There was another under-wrapping beneath the outer-wrapping, which was just fine by me, because that really wasn’t something I needed to see. I rolled the body away from the bench seat and felt around for a little handle, since Zac had told me to hide in there. There were two latches on either side of the front panel, and the panel fell outwards when I released them, revealing a small, dark storage space. I rolled the body into the space, accidently hitting the head once or twice—not that it mattered. The person was already dead.
When the body was nicely squished into the storage space, I quickly re-latched the panel and rolled myself up into the top sheet that I had taken off. It wasn’t a very precise job, and I was just laying there on the floor of the cart, one of my feet still poking out of the sheet … but I doubted that anyone really cared about how well-wrapped the bodies were. They were about to be turned into Topian serving robots anyway.
“Another four sun-cycles before I get back from the eighth ring,” I heard Zac saying, his voice becoming clearer again. “Do you have any you want me to take back this time?”
“No,” the raspy voice replied. “We have disposed of them already.”
Well that’s not creepy at all.
I tried to be as stiff as possible, playing dead. I heard the canvas being pulled apart, and then there was a hand on my ankle, right on the exposed foot. Whoever-it-was hauled me out of the cart and dumped me onto another hard surface—something that smelled like musty wood. The sheet slipped off my face, and since my eyes were still wide open, I ended up taking in the entire scene of one of the guardians standing at the opening to the cart and reaching in, while another guardian stood off to the side, watching. I could see his face clearly, and it was deathly pale. It had the same waxy quality as the Topian servers, though somehow less refined. Uglier. I was laying on another cart—open-topped, and considerably smaller. A common cart used to transport fruits and vegetables … and dead people, apparently. That didn’t seem hygienic. I quickly flipped the sheet back over my face and braced myself as a body landed beside me half a click later. The cart thumped several more times, with one of the bodies landing directly on top of me, and then it was moving.
I felt bad for Zac. He was going to discover the body stuffed in the storage space at some point, and probably freak out—but as bad as I felt, I knew it needed to be done. I had to get into Topia. I had to find either Cyrus or the Abcurses, and I had to figure out what the hell was happening to me.
As soon as the thought entered my head, I started to feel dizzy again; the same kind of dizziness as before. My hands were tingling and dark spots were starting to flash behind my eyelids as I screwed them shut. The heat inside of me flamed to scorching levels. I could feel bile rising to the back of my throat, and I curled my hands into fists, my nails cutting into my palms.
This cannot be happening right now!
When I opened my eyes again, the white sheet over my face had disappeared, along with the smell of musty wood and the feel of bodies stacked around me. Instead, I was staring at a rough, stone ceiling, and the surface beneath me was cool and hard.
“Have all the bodies been collected?” a voice asked, sounding close-by.
I turned my head, taking in the rest of the room. There was a row of cupboards beneath a work bench of some kind—one of the cupboards hanging half open. Other than a wash-basin in the corner and the steel bench that I was lying on, the room was bare. A curtain over the doorway was the only thing hiding me from discovery. I started to slip off the bench when the other voice answered.
“One of the bodies is missing. Summon each of the guardians tasked with transforming a server tonight, and figure out who hasn’t submitted yet. Staviti will not want to be kept waiting any longer.”
“I will summon them immediately.”
I froze, halfway off the table, and glanced around again.
What the hell had I done with my guardian? No—scrap that. What had my evil, Chaos alter-ego done with my guardian?
The guardian on the other side of the curtain was still referring to the dead people as bodies, and not servers, so I assumed that Staviti would be needed to put life back into the them. That was an important thing to know, because it meant that I couldn’t just get off the table and start walking around. I would need to figure something else out.