Even though it had raised the cost of her underground lair exponentially, Webmistress had favored large open spaces in its construction. The wide corridors and airy rooms gave little room for an assassin or meddling hero to hide. There were no pillars or potted plants at regularly spaced intervals. Even when materials were being transported from one part of the lair to another, her men were trained to never leave them unattended stacked against a wall.
Spinnerette had always felt eerily exposed while walking the halls of the Web of Shadows. When she was in a city on a mission… or even just out on leave… paranoia and years of experience kept her eyes moving, looking for cover, for escape, for boltholes… there were none in the Web of Shadows. There were plenty of shadows, with the soft ambient light emanating from every surface… depending on where one stood, there would be a multitude of faint shadows projecting from any person in mulitple directions.
Now, with tiny craters gouged out of the wall from large caliber automatic fire, sections of the ceiling and wall dislodged from small explosive shells, disabled autoturrets hanging out of their broken hatches, and large patches of the luminous paint not receiving any power, the light was disturbingly uneven, heightening the effect.
“This is so fucked,” Spinnerette said as she and Rhyme made their way down the deserted hallway, past the obvious signs of battle. “We are so fucked. Nobody crosses the Webmistress.”
“Oh, stop it, sweetie,” Rhyme said. “You’re definite articling her… that’s not a good thing. You know her. She’s not some distant legendary figure. You’ve lived in her home for years, you’ve eaten meals together…”
“Okay, yeah, I get the point,” Spinnerette said.
“…you’ve laughed and you’ve cried together,” Rhyme continued.
“Yeah, right, okay,” Spinnerette said.
“You’ve probably gone to the bathroom in front of each other with the door open.”
“I did once,” Spinnerette said. “Only once.”
“You trusted her and she tr…”
“Okay! I get it!” Spinnerette said. “Why are we going this way? Shouldn’t we be heading away from the devastation?”
“Of course not,” Rhyme said. “As your former mistress regains control of her security apparatus, the sections of the base where said apparatus has not been beaten into submission by her horde of manly minion men is going to become a very uncomfortable place to be. By sticking to the areas they’ve already swept clean, we can avoid conflict before we’re ready. That’s twice she’s beaten me. Twice. Also, the damage the compound’s received may reveal something interesting.”
“Webmistress beat you twice?”
“What?” Rhyme said. “No. She’s never beaten me. She’s never gone against me. Her caution and her overriding sense of self-preservation stops her from going up against any other arches, under ordinary circumstances… but here in her lair? I’m afraid she’s bought into her own hype a little. She thinks she’s a goddess here.”
“But… you just said she beat you twice,” Spinnerette said.
“What? No. Do try to pay attention when I’m talking, Janie,” Rhyme said. “Twice seven is fourteen. Two to the seventh power is one hundred and twenty eight. Seven fingers on each hand, seven pupils in each eye.”
“What?” Spinnerette asked.
“I said if you interrupt me again I’m going to remove the bones from your legs and skewer you with them,” Rhyme said. “Pay attention. Dr. Clevenger has Atlantean biotechnology, stolen from the Amazons. The single most important thing we have to do is you know, the worst part is that our fates are now going to be inextricably intertwined.”
“Isn’t that good?” Spinnerette asked.
“Leaving aside everything she could do with it, if she had half a brain?” Rhyme said. “She has no right to it.”
“I meant, that our fates are intertwined,” Spinnerette said.
“Um… what? Oh, yes,” Rhyme said. “Our fates are interwined, lover. Yours and mine. Completely.”
Spinnerette relaxed for the first time since they’d fled the lab. Her hand reached for Rhyme’s.
Rhyme slapped it away.
“Gods, don’t be so gay about everything, Janie,” she said. “Come on. We’ve got a scientist to kill.”
The auxiliary command center, hidden away in the bowels of the base, was cramped compared to the more public spaces. It was utilitarian and drab. The beige walls and instrument panels and computers gave off a dim, uniform white light that made Webmistress feel like a cadaver every time she caught sight of her skin. She was standing with her arms carefully at her sides so she wouldn’t have to look at herself in that state.
Not that looking at Dr. Clevenger and Andrea Markham was much better. In the command center’s light, Markham’s makeup looked ghastly and whorish, like some kind of perverse clown. She’d looked much better under other conditions, but Webmistress made a mental note to view the next woman she hired—Spinnerette’s replacement, probably—under a variety of lighting conditions. Natural sunlight and public restroom lights, just to be safe.
Dr. Clevenger wasn’t wearing any makeup at all. Webmistress couldn’t decide which of them was worse. Janie, for all her faults, was never irritating to look at. Her looks were so inoffensively bland that she might have been a piece of furniture.
She was tempted to shut down her external ocular system and simply look at pictures of kittens on her internal viewer, but she had to stay focused.
“Do you know how much money I’m losing every minute that we’re down?” Webmistress asked.
“I can only imagine it’s a lot,” Markham said.
“Yeah, so can I,” Webmistress said. “I can only imagine because I can’t get outside the local network to find out.”
“I’m sorry,” Markham said. “I do have the internal cellular network and satellite relay link working.”
“You mean you got a screen working that told you the phone network’s still up,” Webmistress said.
“Er, yeah. That’s what I meant. Do you want me to keep hacking away?”
“No. I need you to start making phone calls,” Webmistress said. “Call all the customers with business on hold.”
“You want me to tell them what’s happening.”
“Oh, yes, please tell the world’s most evil, greedy, and sadistic men that the wealthiest and most powerful woman in the world’s security system has been compromised and we’re crouching in a bunker,” Webmistress said. “God, you’re the PR flack. Think of something. Start with Von Stahl and work your way down.”
“Von Stahl?”
“A firmware upgrade for his steelbots was supposed to go live about five minutes ago,” Webmistress said. “Be polite. If he says we’ve failed him again for the last time again, offer him another six months of free antivirus. Clevenger, you take over trying to restore system control.”
“I beg your pardon?” the doctor said. “First of all, I am a geneticist and a surgeon, not a computer hacker. Second of all, you have hired me to do one job and utterly failed to provide a safe working environment while doing so. Third of all…”
“Safe work environment?” Webmistress repeated. “Will you listen to yourself? Good God, woman, you’re a supervillain.”
“I am a scientist,” Clevenger said. “I only do work for hire to fund my research, and my research is above and beyond any arbitrary concerns of morality.”
“Yes, that would be why you’re a villain,” Webmistress said. She started to put her hand up to her face, then stopped at the sight of it. So pale. It had been a while since she’d seen the sun, but her skin looked so nice under a soft blue or purple glow. “The whole ‘above morality’ thing. You want hazard pay? Well, check your contract. You’re already getting it. But you’re not going to get paid unless you can get the system back up and running.”
“My fee is not contingent on me doing ‘tech support’ on your obviously faulty computer system,” Clevenger said. “At this point I could walk away and still be entitled to half, since it’s through no fault of my own that I’m unable to continue the work.”
“Walk if you want, but good luck getting out of here and good luck collecting your money,” Webmistress said. She waved her hand at the computer terminals. “Your bank is experiencing technical difficulties. Now, if this is above your super-dee-duper double Darkwell capabilities…”
“Fine,” Clevenger said. “If it will facilitate payment, I’ll see what I can do.”
“Don’t do me any favors,” Webmistress said. She sat down in a chair, folded her legs, and smoothed out her gauzy, barely-there gown. She cleared her throat, ran her tongue carefully around her teeth, then cleared her throat again. It was time to put on her villainess voice.
A set of three tones played over the hidden speakers throughout the Web. Even though the damage was particularly heavy where they were, with exposed wire and damaged circuit boards, the notes sounded clear and sharp to Rhyme and Spinnerette.
“What was that?” Rhyme asked as the tones repeated a few seconds later.
“Triggers,” Spinnerette said. “They activate the mental conditioning in the soldiers.”
“New orders?” Rhyme asked.
“I don’t know… I don’t recognize that one.”
“Dear Spinnerette,” Webmistress’s voice said from all around them. Spinnerette sucked in her breath and froze at the sound. It was smooth… silky… controlled, the voice she presented to the world, the voice Spinnerette had thought of as her real voice, no matter how many times she slipped out of it.
“Steady as she goes, partner,” Rhyme said, giving Spinnerette a slap on the backside.
“That sound you just heard signaled all my boys to tune out the sound of my voice. They won’t hear a word I say, until I play the countertone,” Webmistress continued. “This is important, because what I have to say to you now is not for their ears. It would be very damaging to their progress as proper men if they heard what I have to say to you.
“I’m disappointed in you, Spinnerette. I brought you into my home. I gave you an identity, a destiny. You were to sit at my right hand side, Spinnerette… but instead, you have chosen to stab me in the back.
“I’ve never believed in torturing women. I think you know this. Whatever the short term gains, whatever the temptation, there is too much suffering of woman in the world as it is. Torturing a man is simply redressing the imbalance. Torturing a woman is exacerbating it. I’m evil by society’s lights, but I have my limits.
“At least, I had them in the past. When I catch you, Janie,” Webmistress’s voice said, cracking and regaining its rough edge as anger got the better of her, ”I am going to make you suffer like no one has ever suffered before. I’m going to invent whole new universes of torture just for you. I’m going to flay you alive, and then I’m going to pay Dr. Clevenger a million dollars for every hour she can keep you alive with no skin and your insides on the outside. And when you finally die, I’m going to take your skull and I’m going to make it into a bidet!”
Another three tones played.
“Well,” Rhyme said. “That was… almost creative. A skull for a bidet, though? What’s wrong with an old-fashioned coffee cup? She could even stencil ‘World’s Greatest Boss’ on the side of it, for irony.” She glanced at Spinnerette, who was standing as if in a trance. “Oh, gods of my ancestors… that actually did it for you? Fucking henchmen. I swear.”
“Huh… what?” Spinnerette asked, dazedly.
“Nothing, sweets… let’s get a move on. We’ve got a cop to kill. Oh, and give me your cellphone.”
“I’m not going to text anyone else!”
“I trust you,” Rhyme said. “But give it to me anyway. I may need it.”
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