Dalleena’s Dilemma

By: Ben Bielert

Dalleena closed the window and swept across the cold, metallic archival room. She was deft as a jaguar but felt like one caged. These boxy high-rise buildings were nothing like the warm, woodcraft homes of her people. From the hallway she could hear movement, and she paused, crouching down so as not to cast any shadows. She controlled her breathing, slowing her heartrate, and calming her nerves.

She had to get the schematics or else all was lost.

“They will keep coming unless we can find a weakness.” Her father had told her, the bandage on his leg had begun to weep after he dug the graves for those who had not survived the latest attack.

“I will find one,” she had vowed, “you can count on me.”

When the blue LED of the search drone’s lights passed, and the room was once again bathed in shadow, she searched through the dusty and yellowed papers. There was no light in the building, no need for it. The guards, like her, had been engineered to see in the dark.

She didn’t find the schematics she sought, but rather the building’s floorplan.

“Good enough.” She muttered.

Scanning it, she saw the Engineering lab was three levels above.

The archive had been a longshot, but the schematics would be in Engineering. Getting there would be a challenge. It was too bad, there were so many other floors worth visiting, particularly the Biolab, one floor down, where her people were initially designed. She only got one, and even that required luck.

She slipped into the hallway and waited by a corner, tensed and ready. She soon heard the click clack of a guard’s boots on the steel floor ahead.

She waited until she saw the whites of his eyes, and then she sprang, launching herself into the air and her knee into his temple. Her strike came fast and deliberate, with all the power of her hastened physiology. His reflexes were just fast enough to deliver the sting. A single, insidious jab from the barb concealed within his wrist. One sting would be all it took.

He collapsed on the ground, and she landed next to him. The neurotoxin already began to course through her body. She had 24 hours to live, at best. She snatched the card from his lanyard and went towards the nearest lift.

The lift was a little metal box, pitch black when the doors slid closed, and all too reminiscent of a casket.

The neurotoxin would take its effect slowly at first, she had a few hours before she felt the effects but then she would grow progressively weaker and eventually die paralyzed with a mind reduced to that of a child. That was unless she fetched the antidote from the Biolab. Her fingers hovered over the panel as she considered her decision.

She pushed the button, and the lift whisked her upwards. Her people’s hopes all rested on her shoulders, and she had the strength to carry them.