by Rysa Walker
“True . . . although I think you’re borrowing trouble.”
I smile at that, wondering if he’d be pleased or dismayed that he’s just reminded me of an octogenarian former hitcher.
He looks up. “The snow seems to be tapering off, surprise, surprise.”
He’s right. The occasional clump still falls from the trees above us, but it’s intermittent.
I sit back and close my eyes, trying to conserve my energy. Then Aaron jumps up so suddenly that he nearly knocks me off the sled.
“What? Are you getting something?”
“What the . . . ?” He looks over both shoulders and then relaxes a bit, although his expression is still annoyed. “Maria. A little warning would be nice.”
She’s still laughing when I pick up her voice in my head. It seems a little quieter than last time.
Just telling him hello, Anna. Not peeking at his thoughts. Well, not much. I see you find the helicopter is gone. Those two Fudds were not happy. They wanted their day away from the crazy kids. But no. Change of plans.
Cregg’s not staying away overnight?
No. The guy who likes to stay on the top floor, Bazlivetz, he just got a call that they’re leaving Albany in about twenty, maybe thirty, minutes. The flight is a little over an hour. I will let you know when Ashley has taken care of Kokot. And give you countdown for blackout and diversion.
What diversion?
But I’m talking to air, because Maria is gone. I begin relaying what she said to Aaron, but he stops me.
“I caught a lot of it. Not your answers, but what Maria said. I guess that’s why she gave me that blast at the beginning. Conferencing me into the call.” He shakes his head. “So, did Cregg hire a bunch of European guards? The names are kind of unusual.”
Daniel laughs.
Those have got to be nicknames. I don’t know what the first one means, but I heard kokot a lot at The Warren. Even had it yelled at me once or twice. Pretty sure it’s slang for a part of the male anatomy.
Aaron chuckles when I explain it to him, but then his face turns serious. “That . . . that thing with Maria. It would take a lot of getting used to. Someone who can hear your thoughts. Transmit her thoughts back. How can you . . . I mean, that’s pretty much the end of privacy.”
We sit there in silence for a moment, letting that one sink in. Because he’s right. Jaden seems to think Maria is benign enough, and I get that sense as well. But what about someone who can do this who has bad intentions? We already have a pretty good idea what that feels like, constantly wondering which of our thoughts are being handed over to Graham Cregg. So, even though the angry, pearl-clutching moms currently storming the statehouses tick me off, I have to admit that they’ve got reason to be concerned.
Stop it. You can’t think about the bigger picture right now. We need to focus on getting those kids out. Get me the binoculars, okay?
Oh, great. Emperor Daniel is back.
I’m only half annoyed, however. It’s actually something of a relief to have him engaged again.
What are we looking for?
Cameras.
Okay, but we’re taking out the power, so . . .
The camera could be battery operated.
Yes, but the computers would be—
You ever seen those backup battery systems people use at home? Even if you take down the power and the generator, they keep ticking.
That’s the kind of thing that might have been useful to share when we were planning all of this . . .
Didn’t think of it earlier. Look near the corners of the porch, just below the floodlights.
On each of the three visible corners there’s a small box just under the lights. I hone in on the corner facing us and see what appears to be a lens with a blinking light just below.
“They’ve got cameras,” I tell Aaron. “Cameras that may be battery operated. And Daniel just pointed out that the monitors may have a backup battery separate from the generator.”
“Damn. He’s right. Why didn’t I think of that?” He begins digging in the other backpack and pulls out a pistol. It’s not his usual gun—I’m pretty sure that one is in his shoulder holster—but rather one that we grabbed from Vigilance. A silencer is attached to the barrel. Another few seconds of rummaging around, and then he pulls out a small scope.
“We’ll have to take the cameras out first. Or at least the ones facing our way.”
“Do you have another gun?”
He raises his eyebrows. “Yes. I grabbed three from their gun locker. But I thought you said back at Overhills that you don’t know how to use one?”
“I’m not asking for me.”
Aaron takes a deep breath. “Okay. But I only have one scope.”
I listen to Daniel for a second and then chuckle softly.
“What?” Aaron asks.
“You won’t like it.”
Aaron just stares at me, holding the gun back until I answer.
“Daniel says you might need a scope, but he doesn’t.”
He rolls his eyes and pulls out a second pistol, identical to the first except for the missing scope.
“Is the safety on?”
“Of course the safety is on.”
I still don’t like the way it feels. Cold, even through the leather gloves I’m wearing. Heavy. Ominous. I leave it on the sled next to me while we wait for Maria.
When we hear her voice again, she sounds frantic.
Wait. Do not go yet. The guy on top floor. They called him to say he should clear a path from the landing spot for the zloduch so he don’t have to walk in the snow. Is putting coat on now. Watch for him!
“Clearing that path is going to take a while,” Aaron says. “If we time it right, maybe it will work in our favor. Once we take out the cameras, I’ll go around the back of the house and take him out, too. In a nonlethal fashion, if at all possible. I’ve already got one kill on my conscience. I don’t want another.”
“Okay. But . . . if it’s him or you—”
“Then it will be him,” Aaron says, digging around in his backpack again until he locates a couple of small plastic bags. He tosses me one. Inside is an all-too-familiar-looking portable anesthesia mask. I shudder, having been on the receiving end of one of these. It wasn’t exactly unpleasant aside from the first jolt when Dacia smashed it into my face—just a faint vanilla scent, and then I was out. But I had a vicious headache and felt like barfing when I woke up.
“This will only buy us fifteen or twenty minutes, depending on how big a guy he is.”
“You sure? I was out for a lot longer when Dacia . . .”
“They must have injected you with a stronger drug once you were knocked out. We have something like that too, but I’d rather avoid it if we can. This way he might get back inside before hypothermia sets in.”
I stash the mask in my pocket. A few moments later, the guard comes through the door onto the porch—a short, stocky guy in a jacket, scarf, and one of those hats with earflaps. He stomps around the corner, pulling on his gloves as he goes. Maybe thirty seconds later, he’s back, pushing a snowblower in front of him. He lowers the machine to the ground and then hops off the porch. It cranks on the first try. The guard clears the area around the steps and then turns away from us, inching the snowblower toward the floodlights on the hangar, maybe forty yards away.
“He’s going to realize something is up when those floodlights go out,” I say.
“Yeah, but if we go too soon, we run the risk of alerting them before the others are in position.” Aaron shakes his head. “When Maria gives us the countdown, we go. It won’t give us long, but it’s better than nothing.”
“Agreed. I’m . . . I’m going to go ahead and switch places with Daniel. Just so you know.”
“Wait.” He pulls me in for a quick kiss and then looks into my eyes. “We’ll rendezvous inside on the first floor. Be careful.”
“You, too.”
He straps the empty kid carrier to his back and shoves
my pack behind the tree. As much as I’d love to have the kids’ jackets down there, I’ll be lucky to get myself to the house undetected without the bag, which is stuffed like Santa’s sack. It’s not that far from the house to the tree line. Hopefully they can survive a few minutes of arctic blast until we can reach our gear.
As I shift places with Daniel, Maria’s voice fills my head.
One minute. Be ready!
Aaron grabs the gun on my sled, swapping it out so that I—or rather, so that Daniel—now has the one with the scope. Then he grins and pushes off, hurtling down the hill on his sled.
Daniel mutters a curse, then scoops the pistol up, belly flops onto my sled, and careens down the slope. We pass Aaron just as he spins his sled sideways to stop, crouches down into a drift of snow, and takes aim at the closest camera. There’s a pfft sound and then a ping as half of the camera flies out into the snow.
As my sled slows, Daniel pivots around so that my arms point at the camera to the right. It barely even registers that my hands are holding the gun, especially with the gloves and the unfamiliar fur-lined sleeves of the parka in my line of sight. It’s more like the first-person shooter game I played with Deo a couple of times until we both decided we’d be happier if he played it with someone else.
This camera doesn’t fly off like the first one but remains partially connected to the wall. It is, however, now pointing straight down at the porch. As soon as the gun fires, however, I’m tossed off my sled into the snow. Daniel’s long string of curses runs through my head, most of them aimed at my “weak-ass” arms, which couldn’t take the recoil as well as his manly ones. Because it couldn’t possibly have been that he just doesn’t know how to control this body.
Aaron quickly takes out the third camera. The guard continues moving forward, snow shooting out in arcs, left and right, in front of him—oblivious, thanks to the silencers and the noise from the snowblower.
We’re still a good ten yards from the generator. Daniel takes two steps through the snow, frustrated that the legs currently at his disposal belong to a body that is nearly a foot shorter than the one he’s used to operating. He’s clearly planning to remain in charge, but I tug him back. And the fact that I can tug him back so easily tells me that his claims that he’s doing just fine are seriously overstated.
I’ve been operating this body for eighteen years, and right now, we can’t afford clumsy. I can do this part. Save your strength until we need you to do something I can’t.
Okay. Just . . . put the safety on the gun. No . . . there. That’s the safety.
Once I figure it out, I shove the gun inside my jacket sleeve, handle first, and snap the closure at the wrist. It’s clunky, but at least I have my hands free and it will be easy . . . or, at least, easyish . . . to grab the gun if Daniel needs it again. Then I climb back onto the sled and begin pulling myself across the snow toward the generator with something equivalent to a butterfly stroke. The ground is fairly level, but I’m still able to move at a faster pace than slogging through knee-high drifts.
As I reach the generator, I hear Maria.
Go, go . . . Oh. You already go. Okay.
And then the lights cut out.
I wish I could see Aaron, to tell whether he made it to the snow-blowing guard before the power outage alerted him. But he’s now beyond my line of sight. I try not to worry, reminding myself that he should have at least a split second of warning courtesy of his spidey sense . . .
Damn it, Anna. Find the switch!
The generator begins to crank up at the same moment that Daniel yells at me. From what we read online, that means I’ve got about ninety seconds. Assuming this is the model we thought it was. I feel around the back, hoping to find the off switch, trying to keep count in my head so that I’ll know when I have to resort to letting Hunter step forward and singe my hand.
My fingers locate the hatch to the power box—it’s closer to the top than I’d thought. I pry it open and flip the switch. The noise continues for a few seconds and then sputters to a stop.
That’s when I hear the beeping. It’s faint at first. I inch my way along the outside wall of the house toward the bushes lining the porch. Just as I reach the corner, a screen door swings open and bangs against the wall. The beeping is louder through the open door—then I hear a woman’s voice saying, “Fire. Fire.”
“Weeks?” Footsteps echo across the porch, and then the man bellows a second time, straining to be heard over the snowblower. His voice sounds familiar, but I can’t place it. “Weeks! Cut that damn thing off and get in here! We got a situation on Level 3.”
The snowblower falls silent as the door slams shut.
Where the hell is Aaron? I peer through the bushes, but all I can see in the dark is the man behind the snowblower, moving this way, with something slung across his back.
The alarm continues. Fire, Fire. Beeeep, beeeep, beeeep.
It’s not until the man reaches the edge of the porch that I realize it’s not the guard. It’s Aaron, in the guard’s hat and jacket. He slips his arms out of the kid carrier, props it against the bushes, and then mounts the steps to the porch.
“Anna?” he whispers as I pull myself up onto the porch. “Or Daniel?”
“It’s Anna,” I answer. “For now. Where’s the guard?”
“On the other side of the snowblower. Threw the sled and my jacket over him.”
We enter the house and begin moving toward the sound of the alarm, but we’re only a few feet inside when the alarm halts abruptly midbeep. The fact that the alarm has stopped and that everyone is still downstairs has me very worried.
As we continue into the house, I realize exactly how much light was reflecting off the snow. I pull on the night-vision goggles. Aaron does the same and then nods toward an opening at the back of the room.
Finally, we reach the door and see stairs that circle downward. Aaron reaches into his pocket, pulls out one of the chemical lights, and snaps it in two.
That seems like a mistake.
The man calls from below. “Weeks! Get your ass down to Three. Little freak set his bed on fire again.”
I place the voice when he says freak. That’s what he called us back at The Warren, too, and while it’s not exactly an original label for Delphi adepts, Timmons says it with an extra sneer in his voice.
A pale-yellow glow comes into view as we move downward. I lower the goggles. Aaron stops so abruptly that I smash my nose against his back. At first, I think he’s just noticed the light, too, but his body goes rigid. He’s picked up a vibe.
And then I hear Maria.
We are out of our rooms, but trapped on Level 3. Door locks from outside. Hlupák saw the body you left in snow.
How? We shot out the cameras, except for the one at the back.
Is camera at hangar, also. Hlupák is holding two kids—Bree and Maggie—on Level 2. Not Level 3, like he says. That is trick.
His name isn’t Hlupák, is it? It’s Timmons.
Yes. But Hlupák fits much better. Listen to me. Maggie is the blocker I tell you about before. I can’t read Hlupák now. Or Bree. They are like brick wall. And I can’t talk to Maggie either until her shield is down.
But she knows we’re trying to break all of you out. And she approves?
Oh, hell yes. Maggie would bite him if he wasn’t holding that taser. I told her to release the block when she sees you or when you put those lights out. You’ll have four, maybe five, seconds.
Timmons only has a taser?
What? No! He has a gun, and he can shoot your friend. Just can’t use it on a kid. Or on you, for that matter. Cregg told him that when you were at The Warren. That man has plans, and you’re part of them.
Yeah. I pieced that much together. He seems to think that if he can pack me up with enough skills, I can be his personal psychic Swiss Army knife.
Maybe . . .
I nudge Aaron with my elbow and tap my ear. He nods. I really, really hope that he heard what Maria said, because even
a whisper will likely echo in this place. Every footstep I take sounds like it’s made by a full-grown elephant.
We halt a few stairs above the second level. The light seems too diffused to be handheld. Since Timmons was able to see the feed from the hangar, Daniel’s prediction about the backup battery appears to be correct.
As long as Timmons is holding the girls, our window to act is really narrow.
Hunter moves forward tentatively.
Doesn’t matter if it’s on a battery. If you touch any part of the circuit, I can put the light out. It’s probably gonna burn you, though, like before.
Um. It will burn you, too. You’re going to feel it.
Not for long. I’ll be back here in your head, and you’ll be stuck with it.
It’s okay. We’ll do what we have to, right?
“Weeks!”
I squeeze Aaron’s hand as tight as I can and push past him, trying to signal with my eyes that he should stay put.
“No,” he mouths.
Daniel echoes that sentiment.
What the hell are you doing?
Winging it. Be ready, both you and Hunter. Hell, Jaden, too—I might need his tae kwon do again.
At least get the gun out.
No. Aaron will handle the gun. Timmons needs to think I have something even more powerful.
I turn back to Aaron, tapping first myself on the chest and then him. I motion forward with both hands simultaneously. We go in together. Then, one finger up. But wait for it . . .
These are almost certainly not the standard hand signals for any sort of covert operation, but Aaron seems to get it.
I take a steadying breath and then call out, “You know this isn’t Weeks, Timmons. Let’s cut the pretense. There’s a way for you and the other guards to get out of this alive, but only if you listen to me.”
“Who the hell are you?” he yells back.
“The name is Anna. We met at The Warren. I’m surprised you managed to escape after I set your boss on fire. Too bad about your buddy Lucas.” I snort. “Nah. We both know I don’t mean that.”
