Final Fantasy VII: Lifestream - Book 1: Arrival

TWENTY-THREE

"Hey, Cloud. Thought you'd be out here."

That was Jessie. Her voice rose up behind me as she strode outside, her boots thudding on the wooden planks of the deck, but it was quiet, almost somber. I stood at the railing, the Seventh Heaven behind me. It had been three days since the mission at the 7-6 Annex and our escape back to the slums. Tomorrow was Reactor 5.

It was early evening, the daylight starting to fade as Jessie came up alongside me and put her hands on the rail. She'd finished up the bomb yesterday afternoon while I'd been out on patrol with Biggs and Wedge clearing out eaters and wererats. Biggs had started coming with us after the Reactor 1 mission now that Lena was back on her feet. Apparently, he was part of the neighborhood watch too, just like Wedge. He'd taken time away from it to look after his sister, though.

While we'd been out today, Biggs had told me a little about her and had explained why she'd been so sick. It was the mako fumes that hung in the air in so many places here in the slums. Some people were more sensitive to them than others, and Lena—from what Biggs and Wedge had said—was particularly vulnerable to them.

She'd been that way ever since she was a child, and the fumes made her so ill at times that she'd be stuck in bed for days. They had a way of moving, floating through the air, so simply avoiding them wasn't easy. This time had been particularly bad, Biggs had explained. Normally, it didn't take her too long to recover. But the mako must've gotten inside her more deeply this time, tearing at her system.

It had been weeks before Lena had begun to feel better and strong enough to be up and about. That hadn't been long before the Reactor 1 mission. Now that I thought about it, I realized I'd seen her cough now and then and rub at her chest. Even when she was well, it still lingered. No wonder Biggs worried about her. Wedge too, no doubt. There were some people, they'd said, that had suffered mako poisoning so severe it had left them in a coma, alive but unable to wake up.

That was what had happened to Biggs' and Lena's mom. She'd been sensitive to the mako fumes as well, every bit as much as her daughter, and had simply never woken up. Biggs had just gone in one day to find her dead. And he was afraid the same thing would happen to Lena one day if Shinra wasn't stopped and the reactors shut down. That was why he'd signed on with Barret years ago.

Having endured losses of my own, I thought I understood him and Wedge a little better now. Maybe they weren't so bad after all. I found I wanted to help them out, for Lena's sake. She was back in Sector 5 now, working at the orphanage and clearing away monsters, and I thought I knew why she stayed there so much. From what I'd heard, the air was a little cleaner over there and the fumes weren't as big or as thick, at least not in the more populated areas.

I glanced at Jessie. "Ready to go?"

"Yeah," she sighed. "Let's just get this done."

"You okay?" I asked.

Jessie shook her head. "No, not really. Can't say as I am. But I don't wanna talk about it out in the open."

"Then let's get goin'," I said. "Tell me when we get there."

Now that the bomb was finished, we had to hide it. Jessie and I had gone over the blueprints with Barret earlier this afternoon to pick out a place. After poring over them for an hour and talking about it, we had decided to put the bomb inside a small interior storage room above the network of suspended platforms that made up the Sector 4 underplate. It was also near the back entrance to Reactor 5.

Jessie and I were going to do this mission alone. It was more about stealth than fighting, and we didn't expect to see much action. We were gonna take the Hardy and drive it through the Corkscrew Tunnel up to the plate. According to the blueprints, there were service ducts that led from the tunnel to the underplate.