Despite her threat to Spinnerette, Webmistress had actually not sent any of her men after her specifically… Rhyme was the bigger threat by a long shot and she knew it.
Unfortunately, her base’s automated defenses were either destroyed or non-responsive and her living agents were conditioned against using deadly force against a woman. That nobody had yet discovered what exactly would constitute “deadly force” against someone who’d overdosed on waters of immortality didn’t enter into it… their conditioning was stronger than their ability to reason, by design.
No amount of cajoling from their mistress was able to get them to react fast enough to incapacitate Rhyme before she could distract them with the mental shutdown sequence, and so she continued to mow them down like a particularly determined reaper armed with a blunt scythe every time she ran into a group of them. She was doing her best to avoid them after the initial encounter, sublimating her zanier urges beneath her need to accomplish her task, though she was having a harder time holding on to her motivation.
Even as Rhyme danced around the periphery of the internal surveillance system, Webmistress heard her muttering things to herself, things like: “Remember, remember the seventh of September” and “Seven days hath September, April, May, and September.” and “Seven singular sensations every seven moves that she makes.”
“She’s going completely around the bend,” Dr. Clevenger said, watching a security monitor as it switched to a seemingly empty hallway, with a flash of movement at the edge of the screen. “The bend around the bend that she was already around from, I mean… and here I thought she was putting it on.”
“She might have been,” Webmistress said, standing beside her in the cramped control room. “She has her ups and downs. I wouldn’t have sent for her if I hadn’t thought she was in the middle of one of her lucid periods.”
“Yes, well, evidently she was more at the end of it, wasn’t she?” Clevenger said. “That’s the risk one entails when dealing with psychotic lunatics.”
“Yes, from here on out I’ll only deal with the regular type,” Webmistress said. “Incidentally, I’ve been reviewing the security files from the lab on my internal viewer.” She reached out and slashed at the doctor’s forearm with a fingernail, breaking the skin and leaving a thin red line. Clevenger gasped and had time to grab at the tiny cut before she fell over. “I don’t like being lied to, Cassandra… and Rhyme’s right. You really should have waited to see what she could accomplish. The results could hardly have been worse than this.”
Dr. Clevenger gurgled.
“I think that’s the muscular paralytic,” Webmistress said. “If it is, there’s only like a thirty percent chance of respiratory failure. So look on the bright side… there’s only a seventy percent chance I’ll be able to hold you accountable for the destruction of the most expensive lair in the western hemisphere. If that was the muscle agent. If Rhyme doesn’t kill us all.”
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