by Sophie Davis
Her eyes welled up again, and this time the tears streamed freely down her cheeks. Because Damon Bizon would not be returning home. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.
Admission to the Institute was a one-way ticket; no refunds permitted, no exchanges. And Cressa had already boarded the flight.
Talia
Vault, Isle of Exile
Three Days Before the Vote
Anya wasn’t exaggerating when she said that I’d need her help to escape from the maximum-security prison. Not only would I have been completely lost without the map on her communicator, but it was Anya’s retinas that unlocked each door we encountered. We bypassed elevators in favor of seldom used stairwells, since the guards’ echoing footsteps warned us the instant they were nearby—stealth and subtlety were not their forte.
Initially, my biggest concern was the security cameras. Other than the cell interiors and the shower stalls, every inch of Vault was monitored.
“Already taken care of,” Anya had told me, when I voiced my concern about the cameras.
We were currently huddled inside a supply closet in a section of the medical ward that was conveniently under construction. Guards were searching the main part of the ward, preventing us from accessing the stairwell we needed to continue our journey to freedom. Since this particular staircase was essential to all three of Anya’s escape routes, she was using a program on her communicator to map out yet another option.
“I uploaded a program to change the security feeds,” Anya explained absently, her thumbs flying across her communicator’s screen. “Instead of displaying the live footage from Vault’s hallways, the monitors in the surveillance room are showing people in Shanghai walking to work, lovers strolling on the West Bank, children attending school in the East End, and other fun stuff like that.”
I whistled appreciatively. “Impressive.”
Anya smiled in the darkness. “Thanks. It wasn’t easy. But we knew the cameras would be the first obstacle. I switched the feeds remotely as soon as I saw the alert message from Les. I wasn’t even sure it had worked.” She shrugged. “Must have, though. Otherwise, the guards would have caught us by now. Erik was actually the one who suggested swapping the feeds.”
I knew it shouldn’t have bothered me, the fact that Erik and Anya had been in contact since my incarceration. Regardless, it did. Even though I knew their romantic relationship was ancient history, and I was his present and his future. It just did.
Some of the old stirrings of jealousy over Anya might have sprung from his reaction upon seeing her in the auction house outside of London. It confirmed that he still cared about her. Which was natural, of course. It was the reason I’d risked UNITED’s wrath to save her.
He’s yours, I reminded myself. And you’re his. End of story.
And truly, it was. No one, least of all me, could deny the love for me he openly wore on his sleeve. Erik would never choose anyone over me, and I knew it.
At the opposite end of the hallway from the supply closet, the doors to the construction area opened. Pulling my thoughts from the needless worrying—it was so not the time to go all girly and jealous—I concentrated on the source of the noise. There were two minds moving in our direction.
Fear rolled off of Anya in waves.
“It’s okay. They aren’t guards,” I assured her, switching to mental communication.
Anya’s eyes widened upon hearing my voice inside her head. From what I understood, mental conversations were weird for the uninitiated. Judging by the look on her face, Anya had never heard someone else inside her mind.
“Just think the words you want to speak out loud,” I sent. “I’ll hear them.”
It took her a couple of seconds to adjust to our new silent walkie-talkies. During that brief period, I did my damnedest not to peek into the shadows of her brain, afraid of what I might find. Certain as I was of Erik’s unwavering loyalty to me, I didn’t want to know the specifics of their conversations.
“How do you know they aren’t guards?” Anya asked finally.
“Moving too slowly. And the shoes are wrong. Guards wear heavy boots. Those two are wearing shoes with soft soles. Probably nurses or doctors. Do you guys keep extra supplies down here, even though it’s under construction?”
“Yeah, we do,” Anya confirmed.
“Okay, then you just focus on finding us another route out of here. I don’t think we’re going to be able to reach that stairwell any time soon.”
“Right. Got it.” Anya refocused on her communicator screen. “Okay. There is another set of stairs here.” She indicated a small rectangle on the floor plan displayed on her screen.
“It looks like it only goes down, not up,” I pointed out. “I get using roundabout routes to throw them off, but we do need to go up eventually.”
“Not necessarily. We came up with a couple possible options for actually leaving Vault.”
Again, her use of ‘we’ made it feel like a fist was squeezing my heart.
“Frederick works closely with the council and was able to access their contingency plan for evacuating Vault in case of an attack,” she continued.
Frederick? So when Anya said ‘we’, she hadn’t simply meant Erik. I wasn’t sure whether that made me feel better or worse. I appreciated the lengths my friends had gone to ensure my release, but it sort of felt like Anya had taken my place.
Yes, I knew exactly how absurd that was, particularly when I was in the middle of the most difficult mission imaginable. But no one had ever accused me of being mature.
“There’s an underwater port on the lowermost level of Vault,” Anya continued.
If Anya felt the jealously that spiked within me, she ignored the sensation. I liked her a little bit more in that moment.
You know, because breaking me out of jail wasn’t enough of a reason for us to be friends.
“We can take one of the pods to the surface. The fuel tanks are small, though, with just enough fuel to go approximately fifty miles underwater. Since we’ll have to use cloaking, likely closer to thirty. Which, in case you were wondering, will not get us to land. But, the pods double as hovercrafts. Once we break the surface, we can switch to solar power and fly just about anywhere.”
The plan was solid, with one small, crucial exception.
“Are they tagged? Cloaking won’t help if the pod has a GPS tracker,” I pointed out.
Satisfaction overshadowed the fear emanating from Anya. I couldn’t help but smile. My friends really had given this a lot of thought.
“They do. At the same time I switched the camera feeds, I uploaded a program to scramble the tracking signals. We could float ten miles off the coast of Vault and the pod’s tag will show us halfway around the world. And, as a failsafe, I figured out how to launch the entire fleet of pods at once, each one programmed with different destination coordinates. That way, even if someone manages to overwrite my code and descramble the signals, they won’t know which pod to chase after. UNITED can’t spare the manpower to have agents waiting for us at every single endpoint. I also have each pod landing at least one hundred miles from any UNITED base, just in case they get lucky and go after the right one. You and I will be long gone before they get there, no problem.”
“You are a freaking genius,” I told her.
I meant it, too. It would have taken me years to come up with this sort of plan, especially with only a handful of people helping.
Then again, I was able to morph. All of this subterfuge and misdirection wasn’t necessary for someone who was capable of disguising herself as the animal of her choosing. If I wasn’t worried about what would come of Anya for helping me if I left her behind, I’d have just become a fly and zipped on up to the surface.
The door at the opposite end of the hallway banged open.
“You in here, Lyons?” shouted a male voice, which echoed in the empty medical wing.
Are you really expecting an answer? I wondered. How stupid did these guards think I was?
> “Best to surrender now. You won’t make it out of here. No one ever has. So you can choose right now—we’ll bring you in alive, or we’ll bring you in dead,” the man warned.
Guards flooded the hallway from either end. My heart sank. We’d waited too long to make our move, and the backup stairwell Anya had selected was no longer an option.
“Search every inch of this wing,” ordered the same guard who’d called out to me. “Empty every closet, look in every bathroom stall, turn over every mattress. They’re here.”
The guard spoke with such conviction that I began to panic.
He didn’t just think I was close by; he knew with absolute certainty. How? How did they pinpoint my location?
“Am I tagged, like the pods?” I sent to Anya.
She shook her head. “No point. No inmate has ever escaped before. After this, well, I wouldn’t be surprised if they start implanting trackers in prisoners.”
“Then one of those guards out there is extremely sensitive to other Talents. Without a chip in me, it’s the easiest way to track us. That’s not good. I’m like a freaking homing beacon to a person with those capabilities; the guards aren’t going away.”
Any second, I expected the closet door to fly off of the hinges, followed by wranglers storming inside to haul me out by my damp ponytail. I had to take control of the situation before that occurred.
Performing a quick mind count, I tried to gauge the odds of fighting my way out of this. There appeared to be thirty guards out there, give or take a few.
Too many. Had I been alone, I might have taken the gamble. But with Anya to worry about, it wasn’t worth the risk. There had to be another option.
“Got any bright ideas on how to get out of this closet? Preferably one that doesn’t involve handcuffs?” I asked Anya.
My companion smiled nervously. “We go up.” She pointed towards the ceiling. “Drop ceiling tiles. We can crawl.”
Doors up and down the hallway were slamming open. The guards were yelling to one another. The leader was screeching commands to his underlings.
“Block all possible exits. The girls are here,” someone shouted. “They have to be.”
The girls, he kept saying, plural. They knew Anya was with me. How? Without the cameras, the guards wouldn’t have seen us together.
It’s not me they’re tracking, I realized with some relief. It was Anya. Or, rather, Anya’s eyes. Someone with more brain cells than the guards outside the closet must have checked the scans logs and realized Anya entered this area of the medical wing and never left.
Then we still have a chance, I thought. Not only would climbing around in the crawlspace eliminate leaving a digital trail behind us, but it was also pretty much our only option.
“Let’s do it,” I told Anya.
Shelves lined one wall of the tiny closet. Boxes with labels too technical for me to pronounce were stacked from floor to ceiling. At a glance, there was no way of knowing whether the shelves would support our respective weights.
Either they will or they won’t, I decided, sending up a silent pray it was the former rather than the latter.
Then, true to my quintessentially impulsive nature, I scurried up the shelves without another thought.
When I reached the top, I shoved the ceiling tile to one side and hoisted myself through the opening. Down below, Anya started to climb the shelves. Her fingers kept slipping, and she lacked the upper body strength to pull herself up the way I had.
“Stop,” I sent. “I have a better idea. Just relax and close your eyes.”
I didn’t wait for a reply. Using my telekinetic powers, I yanked Anya up and through the opening. Caught by surprise, she gasped audibly as I deposited her next to me in the crawlspace.
Below, the knob on the closet door began to twist. With not even a millisecond to spare, I wedged the ceiling tile back in place with my mind. Light suddenly flooded the closet, leaking through the small cracks around the perimeter of the tile. A rattling noise followed.
“Fall back!” a guard shouted.
Crap. They’d thrown a smoke canister into the closet. We had about five seconds to hightail it out of range. Otherwise, we’d succumb to the noxious fumes.
“Which way?” I demanded urgently.
Anya was frightened, and I hated compounding her anxiety with my own. But I also needed her to realize there wasn’t time to contemplate our next move. That luxury had come and gone.
Anya pointed a shaky index finger over my shoulder. “We can access that stairwell I showed you from back there.”
“Stay right behind me. And hurry.”
I started crawling in the direction Anya had indicated, checking over my shoulder to make sure she wasn’t lagging.
Bluish-green wisps of smoke wafted up through the cracks in the ceiling tile.
“Cover your nose and mouth with your shirt,” I sent, doing the same.
“It’s empty, sir,” I heard someone say, his voice slightly muffled. “I don’t think they’re here. We’ve checked most of the ward.”
“Check again,” growled a different voice.
“Dr. Pritcher may not be with the Lyons’s girl. We have no actual confirmation of that.”
“Then why haven’t we found the doctor yet? She entered this wing ten minutes ago. There is no record of her leaving. Find them.”
They weren’t saying anything I didn’t already know, so I blocked out the men’s conversation.
Instead, I tuned back into Anya. Her thoughts were erratic and terrified. In her mind, this escape was supposed to be fairly easy. She’d even done a couple dry runs to determine how much time we would need to reach the pod deck.
Of course, it had never occurred to Anya that I might screw up my own prison break; that I might stupidly antagonize a guard, prompting him to request the wranglers. For her plan to work Anya needed me coherent and able to walk on my own, which wouldn’t have been the case if the wranglers got to me. Tangling with them would have put me out of commission for days. And with the threat of execution looming, I didn’t have days left.
Basically, my temper had nearly derailed the entire operation. Awesome.
“How’s this program of yours work again?” I asked Anya, to distract her.
The poor girl was one surprise away from a heart attack. Since she’d been so calm and collected when outlining the plan earlier, I figured maybe rehashing the details would help.
“It’s already uploaded into each pods’ memory. I can remote activate it using my comm,” Anya replied.
“Did I already say you’re a genius?”
She chuckled softly behind me, tendrils of tension leaving her body.
“Do you have a destination for us in mind?” I asked, hoping to keep her talking.
As soon as she began talking, I tuned her thoughts out, instead focusing my attention where it was needed.
Danbury McDonough had done me few true favors in my years with TOXIC, but the countless hours of sensory training drills were definitely one of them. My hearing was so acute that I was able to eavesdrop on the many conversations taking place among our pursuers both above and below us. Anya was still rattling off the myriad of locations she considered safe options, but I was far more interested in what the guards were saying to one another.
Especially since I already knew where I was going once we reached those pods. And I was going alone.
Nowhere was actually safe for Anya if I was with her. Alone, she had a much better chance. UNITED would focus their manhunt on me. And, if they did track down Anya first, she could always say that I forced her to help me. Without camera footage to the contrary, it would be hard to prove otherwise.
Most of what I overheard from the guards was useless; a lot of the chatter was about what would happen to them if I wasn’t found. One woman suggested it didn’t matter whether they caught me, that all they had to do was leak my disappearance to the media and some hate group would take me out of the equation. Another guard thought torturin
g Erik until I turned myself in was the best option. I made a mental note to ask Victoria whether ‘sadistic’ and ‘sociopathic’ were part of a Vault guard’s job description.
“Has anybody checked the chute? The girl could be hiding in there,” I heard someone suggest.
“Not a chance. Unless the girl’s got wings or suction cups for hands, she ain’t in the chute,” another guard replied.
“—and it’s off grid and uninhabited, might—”
“What’s the chute?” I asked Anya, interrupting her mid-sentence.
“It’s literally a chute that runs from sea level to the basement. Sort of like an elevator shaft, but with no car or cables or anything. It’s another in-case-of-attack precaution. There’s a hatch on the main level and a hidden entrance on each sub-level. The idea was that people could parachute down for a quick exit to where the pods are docked, but it was deemed a safety hazard.”
I smiled. “Perfect.”
“Talia, they got rid of all the parachutes. And we are still over twenty floors up—if we jump, we’ll die.”
Ignoring her warning, I asked, “Do you know where the entrance is on this floor?”
“Approximately. I mean, I know where the chute is, so I have a good idea of where the entrance must be.” Anya’s mental voice was strained, and she sounded close to her breaking point.
I felt horrible. Tiny teeth seemed to be feasting on my stomach lining, guilt tearing me apart from the inside out. We had to make it off of Vault, for Anya’s sake more than mine. The whole kidnapping-forced-accomplice angle would be a hard sell if the guards confiscated Anya’s communicator and saw Vault’s blueprints and all the programs she’d written.
No matter what, I couldn’t allow Anya to be punished for helping me. She had no reason to like me—really, she had every reason to hate me—yet she’d risked it all to help me.
“Do you trust me, Anya?”
“Yeah, of course, but—”
“Tell me where the entrance is. I can get us down.”
Without waiting for her to send a reply, I read the answer from Anya’s thoughts. A bathroom. On the med level, UNITED kept their hidden entrance to the escape hatch in a bathroom.
