The Mother's Tale

Chapter Thirty One

Now, Mia would like to think that she had a healthy amount of a will to live, however as this was not something that the average person had any reason to try and quantify, one could reasonably conclude that her desire to keep breathing was actually slightly higher than most. With that said, even if she did find this typically lacking, she most certainly did not have any intention of being obliterated by the fans of an industrial fan. She had survived so much worse in the past, so to imagine herself being bested by an oversized piece of machinery was frankly just an embarrassing prospect at the very least. 
However these were all very eloquent notions of the self and the other, and there was no real space for any eloquence when the very ground itself had been, quite literally, pulled out from under her, sending her hurtling towards what could have been an unpleasant demise. 

But she was no damsel in distress, hoping someone would swoop in and save her at the last second. Not only was it true that anyone thereabouts with any intention of swooping in would only be doing so with the intention of being the one to kill her, she was also quite aware she was alone. 
It had not really found much of a place in her already overly taxed mind but the blinking light of the fan made her a little more aware of the weight of the gun she had pocketed. Or rather, the two came at a similar time, as it was more that she could feel things she had on her person being dragged at by the suction fan and she noticed the light. There were only three bullets in the thing, and she had rather planned to use each of them on whoever it was that was forcing her to go through this, however it seemed it was her only hope for escape.

Hoping that her assumption of the light belonging to a power source was correct, she fumbled the gun and prayed to as many gods as she could think of at the time that her aim was true. It would, after all, have been a shame to have her training wasted if she couldn't even hit a stationary target that was quite literally drawing a bullet to it. 

The gunshot itself was muffled by the constant whirring, but just before she had the misfortune of doubting herself too much, the device let out an almighty roar before falling still. And not a second too soon, too, as the great blades of the fan reached its complete still not a full inch away from where her own slide had stopped. The woman let out a shaky huff through clenched teeth, a sound that could have been anywhere between a laugh, a sigh or something that could have been the beginnings of a sob if she had let it grow any further. But she didn't let herself stop for long enough to let it become anything at all.
After all, she noticed a ladder nestled neatly behind the still occasionally hissing and crackling machine and, while she was not the most fond of the idea of poking about in the bowels of the beast, it did seem promisingly upwards-leading so that worked better than most things had been. If nothing else, she hoped that she would be presumed dead or otherwise unable to reach the ladder itself and so there might be slightly less nightmarish figures waiting to kill her on the other side. 

With a great balancing act that precisely nobody had the privilege of witnessing, and a shimmy up the ladder that was just a smidgeon too warm for her general comfort levels, she was actually left with the impression that she may actually have made something not wildly dissimilar to progress. It felt a little too optimistic to actually consider it progress - the real mark of progress would include but not be limited to her standing beneath the sky and feeling the wind against her skin, which seemed too often to be her marker of progress -  but anything felt a great deal more significant than just laying down and accepting her fate. Not just her fate, but the fate of those she cared about, which made the stakes annoyingly high. 

If she was going to be entirely honest, she was actually feeling a little good about herself having managed to not only get minced, but also managed to continue on an at least somewhat upwards trajectory. So, she allowed herself to carry just a little smugness about as she set an elevator in motion. 
This slightly improved mood lasted all of several moments before a little obscured speaker crackled to life in a way that was getting to be annoyingly familiar by that point.  

"Soon, she'll start her ceremony with your Rose," was what the man used to announce himself, a sense of carrying on a monologue rather than the beginning of a statement, "If that happens, it's all over. For your kid, and for the whole village."

"She's just a baby," Mia snapped, not bothering to try and work out where it was that the man was watching him from, "She can barely hold her own head up, she won't be able to do anything for her."

"Come now, Mia, you and I both know that isn't true. You don't need to lie to me about it, not like you do to everyone else," Heisenberg returned in an annoyingly mocking manner that came far too naturally to him, "But you were right, the kid's not going to do anything for her," a beat, "No, no I'm going to use your Rose to kill Miranda!" 

As the elevator reached its stop, the man over the loudspeaker fell into a strange fit of hysteric, desperate laughter until it ended abruptly as he cut their communication. Conveniently, in the sort of convenience that definitely suggested it was planned, he cut this off just before she was able to snap back a reply. So, and not really bothering to think of playing for dignity, she flashed a rude gesture in the general vicinity of the speaker before she carried on down yet another series of winding corridors. 

There was, as had been a rather consistent state, very little of actual difference to these corridors, bar the occasional mezzanine made accessible by a ladder that seemed to be remaining upright more through sheer willpower than structural integrity if the bolts holding them to the platforms were anything to go by. It was an entirely inconsequential thought to ponder, but the alternative was to get herself caught up in noticing just how high the ceiling was, and indeed, how much further she still needed to go. That was a daunting thought that rather thoroughly stripped any lingering delights at her progress from her if she made the mistake of pondering it too long and so she found herself fixating on the minute and insubstantial details as much as she was able to. 

With no other option but to grit her teeth and bear it, she pressed on. There was a part of her that was a little glad she had not found herself expected to be employed in the factory itself, as it really did manage to create the least hospitable workplace environment it possibly could, and so would have been a nightmare to have to navigate on a regular basis. Of course, if one were to need to navigate it that regularly, she mused as she glanced at the rough map set on one of the walls, she could suppose someone might just begin to remember the layout out of a place of necessity. From her own experience, being lost there was just awful and she would only wish it on the very worst of her enemies. 

Unfortunately, she had spent just long enough being exposed to all manner of mechanical noises that they had begun to slip into background noise and so she hadn't realised when an additional, angry sounding whirring had joined the mix. In fact, she would not have even thought to consider it as something of note, and this was a mistake she would have cursed herself for if she had the time for, as it was joined by yet another crackle of the speakers.

"You really are stubborn. But I'm tired of you." Heisenberg began, sounding almost bored, as if this was not even subtly a threat, "Time to die! Properly, I mean, no more of your playing cockroach." There was a heavy pause. "You can hear it, can't you? Someone's waiting for you."

Tragically for her, yes she could hear it.