Lemuria: The City of Mysts

Chapter 48: The Hunt

"What are these for?" Cheska pointed at three unlabelled rooms.

"The basement. That's where they started experimenting on the virus. They closed it down a year ago because of an accident in one of the laboratories."

"And level 7?"

"New. They stopped working on it a month ago. There's no elevator and stairs to go down to the sixth floor, you can only go up. And," James tapped on the diagram to zoom in, "see this?" His hand hovered over an enclosed windowless space with two overlapping walls. "It's in the isolation ward. Instead of rooms and rows of beds, there's only a corridor and this room. It has one bed and a restroom...of its own." They exchanged a look. Both of them had the same thought in mind.

"I'm going in there", she said in a low voice. She stepped closer to him, her shoulder came into contact with his arm. Cheske held out the tracer she obtained from the chief of security.

The novelist gaped at her and not just because of her decision. He had felt apprehension rolling off her in waves when she arrived. It was almost gone now right after Cheska declared her intention. James couldn't believe that he could barely sense her in the mix of emotions; his own and Allan's.

She jerked the tracer in his direction. For an instant, he wanted to dissuade her; however, Cheska's amber eyes were hard and resolute. He took the device from her and noticed the bulge on her right sleeve. While he dismantled the tracer's back, he asked: "You're armed?"

Cheska's head slightly moved to the side.

"Don't", James said quickly. "He'll notice."

She immediately returned her gaze to the screen. "I'm armed."

"An artist and a warrior." James gave her a tight smile. "After all this is over, I might make a story out of this." He inserted a chip in the device's circuit board.

"Please don't." Cheska didn't want to relive the events by hearing everybody talking about it as a novel. "And I'm not a warrior."

He glanced at the panther lying beside her feet, then replaced the device's cover. "Do you have anyone else going with you?"

"A few more friends."

"And then you'll storm the castle and save your doctor", he said in almost a whisper.

The corner of her mouth quirked at how he phrased it. "Something like that."

James returned the tracer to her.

Cheska took the device from him and noticed how his hand shook a little. She looked up at him sharply. His expression was even more serious than before. "You do know Louis will kill me if you don't come back alive, right?"

"He won't", Cheska replied. She busied herself on checking that the files she needed were stored in the device. She found that he'd also included a detailed map of Libya.

"And Fred would haunt me for the rest of my life."

She raised a brow at him. "You're doing a poor job convincing me to stay back."

"I'm not trying to." He grimaced.

Cheska tapped her foot twice, a signal for the panther to create the portal to their next destination.

"The virus is transmitted by body fluids", James said.

Allan noticed a shimmer of light beside Cheska and started to move, calling for her to stop. Keena stretched her limbs. Tail swishing and green eyes narrowed to slits, she studied the bodyguard's advance then stepped through the portal.