Corrupted (Alpha's Claim 5)

Slipping into the dimly illuminated maintenance shaft, Brenya stalked the scent of her mate through the air vents as he strolled toward the centralized lift. Guards. Flanking doors as gold as the knife in her hand. She watched them call the elevator as she unscrewed access to the vertical shaft. As if Jacques was above such a menial task.

The lift had already begun to descend before she pulled away the panel. Knife and fork back between her teeth, she sucked a deep breath through her nostrils, wiped her palms on her stolen shirt, and counted to three.

Rocking back on her heels, she jumped.

A moment of blissful freefall. Floating and weightless. Burdened only with gravity and one chance to catch the cables before her.

It was if she had been born for this, the ease in which that rope of engineered steel found her palms. How her skin burned when her body’s momentum continued forward only to be jerked back by a sure grip.

She’d done it!

Of course she had. She was Brenya Perin, who had once breathed outside air and climbed the Dome with one working arm.

She was so much more than a kept pet used to satisfy the sexual urges of a bad man.

The most powerful woman in Bernard Dome.

As the elevator continued its rapid descent, her hair flew upward as she cut through the air, alighted to the cable that bore her weight as if she were the butterfly landing on the side of her beloved Bernard Dome.

Sublevel G2.

The lift slowed, stopped, and Brenya closed her eyes.

All buildings under the Dome followed the same standard engineering code, there were no secrets in design. Making it simple to visualize where she was in regards to Jacques’ rooms.

A map bloomed in her thoughts.

And then she moved.

A short climb down the cable led to a soft landing on the top of the elevator car. From there, she took to the steel maintenance ladder and made her way to the nearest access panel. Spidering through the ducts, unsure of which direction Jacques may have taken, she thought she might have lost him.

Until she heard a male voice, almost imperceptible right below where she crept. Ear to the metal, she made out Jacques’ threat.

“I will have you sedated and fitted with a feeding tube.”

“You can try.”

The voice of Ambassador Jules Havel.

Pulling her ear from the ground, Brenya set her tools before her and strategized.

Unless there was a different maintenance corridor that serviced the room. The ducting in that area had not been designed to be easily deconstructed. Such efficiency in design was only used for rooms that required little ventilation. She didn’t even see plumbing in the tight space.

Even the electrical wiring was scarce.

Ambassador Jules Havel had been tucked into a storage bay.

Ignoring the muffled incompressible sound of male voices below, knife and fork were used to dissect the panel beneath her—dismantling the shaft’s floor as delicately as she would a damaged pane outside the Dome.

14

Breath held, Brenya pried the loose plate free, sliding the square as silently as she might to the side. It was dim in what was clearly a converted storage space. An unreliable source of light offered a low, unsteady glow—changing color and output while doing little to break through the shadows.

Illuminated by that scant flicker, Brenya found…

A single cell.

A single prisoner.

No guard posted within the room.

Brown tangles trailing toward the ground, she ignored the staring Beta absorbing everything an upside-down room might provide.

The stink of Jacques' anger lingered in his absence, as did the scent of her slick—slick he’d rubbed into his skin one of the several times he had mounted her earlier that day.

It was not a pleasant smell.

Yet, it was nothing to the horror of unacceptable design on display.

The haphazardly constructed containment would have led to reassignment, had any engineering grunt from Palo Corps installed the travesty. The entire construct of Jules’ prison was one massive flaw in workmanship. A sheet of the amorphous metal that made up the glass of the Dome had been assaulted by a drill, pinned to concrete with screws. Screws! No human eye might see them, but undoubtedly each drilled hole was surrounded by a mass spider web of microscopic cracks.

These were incredibly strong yet brittle fabrications.

They required the perfect nest into their surroundings. They were built to melt into one another.

That is why, from outside, the Dome looked as if it were one solid half circle of glass. A gently curved, elegant construction of painstakingly crafted pieces… as if the Dome itself were one organism.

To have drilled screws through a single panel to hold those plates in place? An immediate failure in the integrity of the entire structure. To expect screws to hold the weight of that microscopically cracking panel was sheer stupidity of the most insulting sort.

What a waste and ruin of an excellent resource.