Deep Shadows

by Bella Forrest

  All we could do was pray that they were.

  I ran harder, my heart racing, and instinctively reached for the gun strapped to my thigh. I didn’t know whether we would stand any chance of survival if it came to a gunfight with armed soldiers, but I didn’t plan to go down without a fight, either.

  We somehow got to the end of the hall without seeing anyone.

  But that was where our luck ran out.

  The moment we rounded the turn—angling left this time—we came face-to-face with an Authority employee carrying a clipboard and talking into some sort of recording device, standing some twenty feet away.

  We skidded to a blunt stop and froze as he looked up and spotted us, his eyes widening behind thick, nerdy glasses. He wasn’t a soldier, nor was he dressed in a blue suit.

  But he might as well have been, because a moment later he bolted in the opposite direction and started yelling.

  I was tempted to shoot him just to shut him up, but he disappeared around a corner before any of us could even consider it, and we had no time to chase after him.

  We turned as one and sprinted in the other direction, not even attempting to turn left or right as we tore down the hallway in a mad rush.

  Half of my brain was shouting at me that we were going the wrong way, that we’d just done a complete reversal in direction! But the other half was shouting even louder that we had to get the hell out of that hallway, because the man’s yells were going to bring down every soldier within ear’s reach.

  34

  We dashed headlong down the hallway, our eyes darting about manically for a place to take shelter. About thirty seconds later, it became all the more obvious why we needed it.

  The sound of pounding boots echoed down the hall behind us. Still relatively far away—perhaps several halls from us, given how short the halls seemed to be, and how often we’d turned—but definitely on our trail.

  Then, a second later, we heard something else. The man began shouting what sounded like instructions, though we were too far away to make out the words exactly.

  “Doesn’t take a genius to know he’s telling them which way we went,” Jace panted from in front of me. “We gotta find a place to hide.”

  We increased our pace, but Jackie, Alexy, and I were already falling behind the men. These suits were easier to run in than the others had been, but they were still heavier than regular clothes, and my muscles were starting to scream at me. I almost sobbed in relief when the hallway abruptly ended in front of us, at a single door.

  “Through it, through it!” Zion snapped, pushing past Ant, who had paused in surprise. “What are you doing?”

  Zion’s hand shot out, and he yanked at the door, his movements rough and powerful in his hurry.

  But that was where our progress abruptly ended.

  The door was locked.

  Of course it is, I realized a split second later. It was midnight, and we were in a freaking Authority prison. We’d been lucky as hell to get through as many open doors as we had—and we’d been really stupid to think that everything would be left unlocked.

  “Jace, the lockpick,” Zion breathed, stepping quickly from the door.

  Jace shoved a hand into his pocket and dropped to his knees in front of the door, deciding to try the sophisticated gadget first, rather than his own thin rods. It would definitely be faster if this lock would just accept it. He twisted and turned for several seconds, but nothing happened, and we could hear the shouting behind us getting louder—and, if possible, more aggressive. They’d either seen us or figured out exactly where we’d gone, and it didn’t take a lot of imagination to realize that those soldiers had come to the same conclusion I’d just arrived at.

  We were trapped.

  The door wasn’t responding to Jace’s ministrations, and I didn’t think we had time for him to do it the old-fashioned way, which took a lot more finesse.

  “Oh my God, get out of the way!” Alexy suddenly hissed, grabbing Jace by the shoulders and yanking. She motioned impatiently for everyone else to step back, jerked her gun out of the holster on her hip, aimed for the doorknob, and fired three times.

  The door flew open with a blast on the third bullet, banging against the wall on the other side, and we burst through the doorway into what could only have been the front reception area of the building.

  It was brightly lit, and even more sterile than the rest of the building, if that was possible. It looked like it was something that had been built by robots. White walls, white floors, white pillars lining the walls. The only color was pale aluminum along the baseboards, and calling that a color was a stretch. There were about ten desks lining the walls, with computers and stacks of paper on them, but everything was empty.

  If buildings had souls, this one’s had been sucked right out of it. The only decoration was a large version of the Authority’s logo, right over the front door, stark and black against the bright walls.

  This felt like a place that put a bright face on to hide the horrible things that happened here, and I gulped.

  “Through, through!” I shouted.

  We had, thank God, come upon the entryway when all of the desks were empty. Though, in the middle of the night, I supposed that made sense. The people who normally sat at them had presumably gone home.

  But that didn’t mean the building itself was empty. We had soldiers coming up behind us. Quickly.

  I shoved past Zion and Jace, who had paused to haul several heavy desks in front of the door we’d just come through, and darted into the glaring whiteness, slapping a hand against the comm on my neck.

  “Gabby, have you got anything for us?” I hissed. “Anything at all?”

  I wasn’t stupid enough to think she’d somehow managed to get into the cameras since we last talked, but part of our planning had been to give her a backup plan as well: if she failed with the cameras (which she had), she was to jump immediately to searching for anything else she could find on the web for this exact building. Maps, blueprints, media stories, you name it. If she’d found anything that could give us any idea of where we were going—

  “Actually, I do,” she said quickly. “It’s not terrific, but I’ve been doing research as quickly as I can, and it turns out that the architect who designed the building you’re in was presented with some big-deal architect-type award just after he designed the place. And because of that, I managed to stumble upon a rough blueprint of the property.”

  “What?” Jace breathed. He then threw an arm around me and yanked me up against him, before rushing forward at a quicker pace. I had the presence of mind to glance behind me and notice Zion doing the same with Alexy, as well as Ant shuffling Jackie along in the same manner, and wondered suddenly if the men had somehow discussed this beforehand. “How to Make the Girls Run Faster 101.”

  I would have been pissed off, but it took way too much focus. I had to keep every ounce of my concentration on the path in front of us—and on listening for sounds behind us.

  Then, as if I’d summoned them myself, I heard the sounds I’d been fearing. The soldiers had reached the door and were banging on it, the noise echoing through the empty reception area and growing even louder.

  “Oh my God,” Jackie breathed.

  “Gabby, if you have specific directions for us, we need them right now!” I yelled.

  “Okay,” she gasped. “Well, they’re not specific because this is more of an artist’s rendering, but I think I can at least get you to where the prisoners are. Where are you guys right now?”

  We turned and ran right down the main aisle, between the two rows of desks, looking to the right and left for any opening that would lead us the hell out of there.

  “Looks like we’re in the main entrance,” Jace said. “Right at the front of the building. We were looking for a camera room, but we’ve picked up a patrol, and they’re after us.”

  “Don’t bother with the camera room,” Gabby replied immediately. “I can give you a general idea of where to go fro
m these plans. If you’re in the main entryway, you want to head to the back of the building from there. That’s where the prison block is, from what I can make out.”

  “How do we get there?” I huffed. “We need directions, Gabby, not ideas!”

  I could hear the door being broken behind us, and the sounds of desks scraping against the floor. There had been a moment of silence, but now the banging had intensified, as though the soldiers had found a battering ram.

  We weren’t going to be alone in here much longer.

  “Straight back from the main doors,” Gabby said. “If you’re running toward the back of that room, there should be a door right in front of you.”

  We tore in that direction, no one else bothering to speak, and within moments we saw what she was talking about: a light blue door that looked garish against the white of the walls. It was the only door we’d seen in this room aside from the one we’d entered, and that was good enough for me.

  When Jace and I reached it, he grabbed the handle and, yanking down on it, found it—of course—locked. Jace took Alexy’s earlier example to heart and promptly blew three holes right through the doorknob with his gun, then threw what remained of the door open. We shoved through, right into a hallway that was only slightly less bright than the entryway.

  This one looked as though it had been built with bricks that had then been painted white. The floor was a dirty gray color, and ahead of us I saw about twenty doors, on the left and right.

  “Gabby?” I breathed. “Where to now?”

  “I can’t give you anything specific,” she replied after a second’s pause. “I can just tell you that the prison block is right in front of you. Maybe one hundred feet. But there aren’t any specific labels on this thing in regard to anything smaller, like offices or anything like that. It’s just an artist’s rendering of the main features.”

  I gulped at that—and then heard the door into the reception area, and the desks, give way behind us.

  “Dead ahead it is,” Zion muttered, and then we were racing again, streaking down the hallway and once more ignoring all doors in our rush.

  I glanced up as we ran, and saw a black camera in the corner of the wall and ceiling, peering back and forth in front of us, and swallowed.

  How many people were watching us? How many more soldiers were in this compound? I wasn’t stupid enough to think that all of the soldiers had started chasing us the first time around. With our luck, there were more straight ahead of us, and more waiting on the other side of them.

  It was painfully easy to envision us becoming quickly trapped in this place. We almost had been already.

  “How is it that we found the longest hallway in the building, right when we need to be turning and hiding?” Jace panted, grasping me closer to his side.

  “If you guys are in the hallway I think you’re in, you’re going to come across an atrium or something similar in about twenty feet,” Gabby suddenly said. “I can see it here on the plan, though it doesn’t have a name. Looks like your prison block is just on the other side of it.”

  I cast my gaze farther ahead of us, and it seemed that she was right. There was an opening ahead. It looked like the hallway ran right into a larger space.

  But that wasn’t going to help us with hiding. I could hear footsteps and shouts behind us, and they sounded like they were getting closer. We had to be in clear view of them, now.

  “Those soldiers are getting closer,” I said, my breath burning in my lungs. “What are our choices once we get into this atrium?”

  “We turn in to the first door on the right,” Zion muttered. “And from there, we find the first unlocked door we can, and get in there. I don’t care if it’s an accountant’s office or a women’s restroom. Get in there and hunker down. If we move quickly enough, we’ll be hidden before those soldiers can see where we went.”

  “What about cameras, genius?” Alexy responded. “If they’ve got cameras in there, they’re going to see exactly where we go!”

  “We worry about that later,” Zion answered. “Hide first, worry about fighting later.”

  We reached the opening, then, and hurried through it in a tight pack, turning right as smoothly as a school of fish and heading for the first open door on the right. There were, I saw, a number of doors—or rather, doorways. They were just… openings. I hoped that whatever was down the next hall at least had doors. Otherwise, hiding was going to be difficult.

  The six of us rammed through the first opening before the soldiers behind us hit the atrium, and then started frantically trying doorknobs in the hallway the opening had led to.

  This area was dark, the walls made of some sort of stone, and the entire place had a creepy, forgotten feel. As if this was an area of the compound that rarely saw any cleaning supplies.

  And then, suddenly, a doorknob turned freely in my hand, and I was through the door.

  “Guys, follow me!” I hissed, waving wildly at them.

  The rest of the crew piled into the room, and the last one in—Ant—quietly shut the door behind us.

  “An office,” I breathed, gazing around. Of course it’s just an office, my mind scolded me. Because why would it have been some magic portal right to the prison block that we needed?

  Then I noticed something on the opposite wall. An enormous roll of butcher paper covered the entire surface, with writing everywhere. At the top, near the ceiling, was a rough timeline, written out the old-fashioned way with one long, horizontal line, and hundreds of vertical lines dashed through it, each with a date and a bunch of notes around it.

  And as I approached, right in the middle was a note that caught my eye.

  Appears there is another organization, it read in clear block printing. Name: OH+.

  I came to an abrupt halt and gaped at the words.

  What was the name of our organization doing written on a piece of butcher paper in an office in the Authority compound?

  “Jace, get over here,” I managed, slipping out my phone. “Look at this.”

  I felt his presence next to me a split second later. “Oh my God,” he said quietly.

  I nodded. I didn’t know what it was, but it started with a date over twenty years earlier—and a label running above it that said, quite clearly, SUSPICIOUS WEB TRAFFIC.

  Each vertical hashmark had a date attached to it, and an IP address, then another line down to what looked like quickly jotted-out conclusions. Names of organizations. Names of people. Physical locations.

  A block of text below the timeline set out exactly what they’d been looking for.

  Significant web traffic to any hidden destination is of interest, I read. Specifically, where firewalls are involved.

  So basically, if a lot of IP addresses were accessing a specific point in the web, but that point was hidden by a firewall, they’d assumed that there was something that should concern them behind that firewall. And we were looking at all the places they’d found that matched that description.

  “Oh my God, they’ve been tracking this sort of activity for years,” I breathed.

  I rapidly started taking as many pictures as I could with my camera, because I knew I wouldn’t have time to read everything right now—and this was something we definitely needed to read later. “They’ve known about OH+ right from the start.”

  “But that seems to be a side project,” Zion said, putting his finger up to the OH+ timeline, which diverged from the main timeline. In fact, the OH+ note was nothing more than a vertical dash. “It’s just something they found while they were searching for something else.”

  I nodded, continuing to snap pictures, and moved down the timeline a bit farther. There. Warehouse raid, Belmore. They had recorded the raid we’d done on the warehouse, too. Was that what the entire timeline was about? But no, it couldn’t be; the start of the timeline was about tracking traffic, not protecting their auction site.

  Then I saw OH+’s name again—connected to the raid on the warehouse.

  OH+ s
omehow involved here as well, it read. Reverse hack, arrests made.

  And then, a question: Could they be part of Little J.O.H.N.?

  I turned slowly to Jace, mystified, and then glanced at the others. “What the hell is Little J.O.H.N.?” I whispered.

  Jace shook his head, looking as confused as I felt.

  Ant stepped forward, his face intense as he stared at the butcher paper.

  “It looks like… they’re the ones the Authority has been searching for this whole time,” he murmured.

  He pointed to the timeline again and again, in places that went all the way back to the start of the line, twenty years before the raid we’d done. The name Little J.O.H.N. appeared at each instance, with notes about possible locations, possible IP addresses, and connections to other groups.

  “It… looks like they were the target of the Ministry’s trap, but we ended up springing it before they could,” he went on slowly. “Like, we just got caught because we were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  He closed his eyes and frowned, and although I was trying to absorb what he was saying, I remembered that we didn’t have the time.

  Whatever the reason, we’d been caught, sure enough, and now we had to clean up the mess it had caused. We didn’t have the luxury of standing around in here, puzzling out what this entire thing meant.

  “Whatever it means, we have to go,” Ant continued, shifting out of his daze. “Rob, you’ve got pics, right? Let’s talk about this later, when we’re not in the middle of a prison compound. I don’t know about you, but I want to find my brother and get the hell out of here.”

  I gave him a quick nod, but Zion raised a firm hand, then held a finger to his lips and leaned toward the door, pressing his ear against it.

  I remembered then that we’d come in here to hide from soldiers, not to do research, and felt extremely stupid for spending so long in here. They couldn’t have heard us or they’d have been in here, but that made us lucky, not smart.

  We were counting on luck way too much. It was time to start getting smart, or we were going to find ourselves locked up in those cells with our friends.