FIRE [FIRST DRAFT]

Chapter 24: Webs

Maybe lying in the dusty and otherwise abandoned janitor's closet was not preferable, maybe having extra-centurial microchips fated for evil wasn't either, but Stefan tried not to be bothered by these things. He was with Aimee, his reality lay tucked in his arm, her head and hand on his chest.

Stefan thought about their conversation in the car about how the microchips made him feel – no matter how hard he tried, he could not pluck the thought from his mind any better than he could pluck a tick from a Maltese poodle. Maybe, he thought, they made him feel invincible. But it was all an illusion; the microchips could be removed. Eventually, Aimee reminded Stefan of that.

"We have to take them out," she broke the silence, sitting up so that he could stand, and then he helped her to her feet.

They made their way to the halls, which seemed longer somehow, winding. It was as though Janet's lab had moved, and reshaped and reformed everything in its wake. But when Stefan finally found it, finally touched its brass handle, he wished it had been harder to find. Stefan opened the door quietly, like a kid about to confess to wrongdoing. Janet glided from one side of her lab to the other, presumably analysing and charting some or other attribute of the microchips.

In time, she noticed them at the door. "Is that the one he got you?" she nodded at Stefan.

He tugged at his sweater, that year's birthday present from Buckley, "Oh. Yeah, it is."

Stefan hanged onto the fabric a little longer, before returning his thoughts to Janet. She hadn't stopped moving. He neared her and she was ceaseless, which surprised him; he thought she would at least try to hide what she was doing.

"So, you were after the microchips all along."

Now, she stopped. "What? Honey, they're a danger to humanity."

Aimee interjected, "Uhm, we came to get our microchips removed." She guessed that Janet already knew about the chip in Stefan, and she did, she could tell just by looking at him.

There was a short cessation of speech before Janet agreed to take the chips out. Stefan sat where Sylvain had been and Aimee sat down next to him. She was surprised to see how quickly Janet had cleaned up the mess of beakers and test tubes and liquids; it was as if nothing was ever there.

As Janet grabbed one of those laser guns, Aimee and Stefan were calm and stagnant. The procedure was as Luna had performed it: after waving the X-ray over Stefan's body, Janet incised his seamless skin with her scalpel, used the laser. He flinched, but barely. Aimee watched the microchip disintegrate until it seemed as if it, too, was never there. She noticed that his calf bled just enough so that two ruby-red droplets stained his chair. There was so much more blood on the recliners downstairs in the jails. Did that mean something? Had the human ewers of that blood received the same meticulous care Stefan was receiving? Had they been at the end of a laser, or were their microchips gleaned from them? These questions spiralled in her mind as Janet cleaned and bandaged Stefan's cut.

Then, it was her turn.

Stefan got up from his seat and walked toward the containers of AIMs. It was surreal, seeing them in such quantities – there were tens of thousands of them. He held one in his hand, and it felt as dangerous to him as holding a shard of glass. Stefan's entire body tensed; the microchips were to be destroyed, not tampered with, so why would Janet have them?

"I know about Buckley's plans," he said as Janet finished bandaging Aimee's arm. "I never thought you would entertain his ambitions. Is this your way of honouring his death, by finishing what he started? Aimee's family was torn apart because of him, because of these chips. So was ours. There was nothing honourable about that man, and there certainly wasn't anything honourable about his death."