“What do we do about the door?” George asked. “Just leave it?”
“We can’t,” Gyyx said. “They’ll find it. We need to cover our tracks as much as possible.”
In the faint light from the lightstick beside him, George saw Azrael step back out of the broken door and heard his footsteps rushing up the stairs. Around him the others had gone to action exploring the room and soon he heard Ty and Ciyrs call to Pyra.
“There are some old shelves over here,” Ciyrs called. “We can move them in front of the door. It might not stop them for long, but it will block it long enough to slow them down.”
“We have to wait for Azrael,” Oro said.
Only moments later George could hear the footsteps again and the winged man ducked back into the room.
“I closed the door to the closet and blocked it with some of the equipment so even if they do open it, they will have to move them out of the way to find the gap in the wall.”
Eden nodded.
“Thank you, Azrael,” she said. “We need to get these shelves in front of the door. Zsilvia, Elianna, help me find a door out of here.”
Zsilvia’s hand left George’s as she moved toward Eden. He started toward the warriors and grabbed onto one of the tall sets of metal shelves that had been discarded in the corner of the room. Together they carried the shelves over to the door and positioned them so that four lay on their sides across the door with two more standing vertically in front of them. Gyyx lifted another set and slid it over the tops of the other shelves, following it with another so that those two wedged tightly into place between the other shelves and the ceiling. It would take strength and time to get past the barrier. This at once gave George a sense of security and reminded him that they were moving deeper into a space that was completely unfamiliar.
“Here’s the door,” Elianna called and the group rushed toward her.
George could see an extremely outdated version of the keypad beside the door, but it was clear that it was no longer connected. Eden took hold of the handle and the door immediately opened. They pushed through into another corridor and something seemed familiar to George. He pushed back out of the corridor into the room. He felt for the bag that he had grown accustomed to wearing at his hip since being on Uoria and realized that it wasn’t there. He remembered that he hadn’t carried it with him when he and Zsilvia came back to the lab before the wedding, and the lack of it made him feel angrier. Without the tools that he usually carried, he felt vulnerable and ineffective. Though he had never carried such items when he was at this laboratory before he went to Uoria, after his time on the planet he had developed a deep need to always feel prepared. Being there and engaging with the other species had brought a greater understanding of himself and awareness of his being in connection with others and with the world around him. Before he left Earth, his life had been controlled only by his mind and the research that defined him. After arriving on Uoria and meeting the Denynso, bonding with Zsilvia, and seeing the conflicts and clashes that had unfolded, however, he seemed to awaken to the presence and power of his body. No longer did he immediately go only to the logic and knowledge that he held as the only way that he would be able to help in any situation. Instead, conflict and challenges triggered a compulsion to protect, to work, and to fight. His mind and body had connected and he relied on the tools that he carried with him to allow him to react to whatever they encountered.
Now that he was without his bag and everything that he had carried inside it, he felt thrown back into the life that he had had before he left Earth. He hated the feeling of emptiness and this fueled his hatred toward Ryan even further.
“Can I use your lightstick?” he asked Ty.
The warrior handed him the light and George rushed back into the room. He held the light up over his head and turned so that it scanned across the walls around him. As he oriented himself to face the door where the rest of the group was streaming into the corridor, the light fell onto a boarded-up window. Another was several inches away; the crumbling remains of a counter sticking jaggedly out from beneath it. This was a medical wing.
Chapter Five
Eden moved along the corridor cautiously. The space was heavy with the feeling of abandonment, carrying that strange sense of memory that always seemed to linger in places like this. It was as if there had been such a concentration of life and energy there that it had saturated the walls, the floor, and the air itself, allowing the space to hold on to every moment that it had experienced so that even long after those moments ended, it didn’t forget.
The floor beneath her feet was made of scuffed cream-colored polished cement and in the light of the stick in her hand she could see that the walls to either side were made of ceramic tiles. The tiles were crumbling in some places, further underscoring how long it had been since anyone had walked along this hall. There were closed doors every few feet on either side of her, some featuring small plaques with combinations of letters and numbers that she could only imagine were once a classification system to manage the rooms. Part of her wanted to try to open the doors, but another hesitated, unsure of what she would find if the doors were unlocked as the one leading from the small room had been. Finally, she knew that she couldn’t keep hesitating. They didn’t know where they were or what these rooms were, and they would need to find out if they were going to have any chance of making their way out of the building before Ryan or the hybrids caught up with them.
A set of large double doors loomed ahead of her. She wouldn’t allow herself to hesitate. Pressing Lysander tightly to her with one hand, she pushed through the doors with the other, immediately thrusting the lightstick into the darkness ahead. The door opened out into an even wider hallway lined with more doors. Above her she could see old lights embedded in the ceiling and remnants of what looked like some kind of intercom or communication system positioned in the empty spaces between the rooms. It was an eerie feeling that made the tips of her fingers tingle and her mind intensely aware of each of her senses as if preparing her to respond to whatever the next step would trigger.
“Eden,” George’s voice called from behind her.
She turned and saw the man pushing through the rest of the group to her.
“Are you alright?” she asked as he approached.
“This is a medical ward,” he told her.
“What?” she asked.
“A medical ward,” George repeated. “That room that we found is an old registration room. I saw the windows in the wall.”
“This laboratory building doesn’t have a medical ward,” Eden protested.
“Not anymore,” Jonah said.
Eden turned to Jonah. The young man was walking toward her, an indecipherable expression on his face.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Before my crew left for our mission, we had our headquarters in the same complex as the old university. The buildings were actually connected by skywalks. One of the university buildings was a hospital.”
“But the old university was demolished,” George said. “It was torn down decades ago so that they could build the new university. All of the buildings in the complex came down.”
“No,” Jonah said, shaking his head. “They might have taken down some of the buildings, but for some reason they kept the hospital. This is the old medical ward. I remember coming into it a few times. When we first got here, I thought that it was the same area as the headquarters building and university, but none of the buildings looked familiar. Now that I’m here, though, I know exactly where I am. This laboratory is far bigger than the hospital was, but this,” he gestured around him, “this is the hospital that was here when I was. It was old even then. They had tried to do some improvements. These keypads look similar to the technology that was implemented just when we left. A lot of the building was already totally outdated, though.”
“So why did they keep it?” Pyra asked. “If it was already so old, why wouldn’t they take it down when they
took down the other buildings?”
Jonah looked around.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense. Why would they seal up an abandoned hospital and build a new laboratory off of it?”
“What’s in these rooms?” Ciyrs asked, gesturing toward one of the doors.
The healer sounded intrigued by the idea of an Earth medical facility. On Uoria, Ciyrs performed his healing treatments in a small clinic attached to his home if they were in the compound. Otherwise, he used his inborn powers or the ointments and medicines that he crafted wherever he needed to, to heal and protect the warriors or whoever needed it. This was the first time that he had the opportunity to see where Earth doctors and surgeons used their skills, as outdated as it may be.
“These are examination rooms,” Eden explained. “It’s where the doctors would see their patients.”
Ciyrs stepped up to one of the rooms and tried the handle. The door opened and Eden came to his side to hold her light up for him to see. The room beyond the door was filled with old chairs. They looked like they had been tossed into the room haphazardly, filling the space with leaning, precarious towers.
“Those were in the waiting room,” Jonah said. “I remember what they looked like sitting out there.”
His voice had become softer as if he were talking to her through the years that had passed since the last time he had stood in that building. They kept walking down the hallway, opening the doors to the examination rooms as they went. Some were completely empty while others held remnants of what the medical facility used to be, including stacked beds, file cabinets, and tangles of equipment. They paused in front of one of the doors and Jonah ran his fingers along the plaque. He gave a soft, mirthless laugh.
“This is the room where I got my final clearance exam before boarding for the Nyx 23 mission,” he said. “Since it was a clandestine mission, we couldn’t all go in together for our examinations like we usually did before a voyage. For the few weeks leading up to the launch a couple of us a day would come in and get examined, pretending it was just a regular department checkup. I was the last one.”
He reached for the handle of the door and pushed, but it didn’t move. He tried again and Eden could hear the clicking of the mechanisms inside the door that told her that the door was locked. She stepped aside and Pyra planted his boot just below the handle, forcing the lock out of place.
The door opened, revealing an intact examination room. Eden was startled by the appearance of the space. Of every room along the corridor, this was the only one that still looked like it would have when the hospital was still in operation. Jonah’s eyes narrowed as he hesitantly stepped over the threshold into the room as if he was being drawn back into the last time he had gone into the room. Eden tried to reconcile the reality that when Jonah had attended that appointment before leaving for the mission, it was years before even her grandparents were born. When he stepped into that room, ready for the same type of examination he had undergone many times before in preparation for missions. He knew that there was a voyage ahead and that it would be unlike anything that he had experienced before as they ventured to an unknown planet. She wondered if he had been nervous, if there had been even the slightest indication that this mission wouldn’t go the way that the others had, that he wouldn’t return until more than a century later.
Jonah crossed to the bed positioned in the center of the room and rested his hand on the mattress. The sheets and blanket had been pulled tightly and tucked in severe corners, the pillow rested at the head of the bed as if awaiting the next patient. Whoever had prepared the room for the hospital to close hadn’t treated it like the room would never been used again. Instead, it had been put back together just as it would have been at the end of any other day, ready for the next morning.
“This is so strange,” Jonah said. “Why this room? Of all the rooms on this floor, why did they keep this room like this?” He looked at the counter on one wall and Eden followed his gaze to the canisters and boxes of medical implements arranged neatly on the surface. A slim silver case sat in the center of the counter and even from the distance Eden could see the coating of dust over it. “Look at this,” Jonah said, walking up to the counter. “They even left a patient file just sitting out on the counter.”
“Wouldn’t they bring something like that with them when they moved to the new facility?” Eden asked.
“I would think so,” Jonah answered.
He picked the metal file up and brushed away the dust on the front. Eden saw his hand pause and his head lean slightly closer to the front of the file. He continued to brush away the dust with greater intensity and then Eden saw his hand begin to shake.
“Jonah?” she said. “Jonah, what is it?”
She stepped up to his side and held the lightstick up higher. The glow fell on the file in his hand. It was an old-fashioned version of a patient file, a design that hadn’t been used in many years but might have still been in use when the old hospital had been closed many years before. She looked more closely at it and immediately saw what had caused Jonah to pause. There was a name engraved on the front of the file as it would have been on every permanent patient filed. Jonah Kenyon.
Eden remembered the first time that she had seen Jonah in the settlement on Uoria. Though she hadn’t realized what it was at the time because they didn’t yet know that these were not only humans but the members of a lost mission from a century before, he had been wearing a shirt that featured a remnant of his uniform stitched together with other pieces of fabric. On that scrap had been two letters. JK.
“What is it?” George asked from behind them.
Eden took the file from Jonah’s hand and turned to show it to George.
“It’s his patient folder,” Eden said.
“What?” George asked.
“It’s my patient folder,” Jonah reiterated. “The doctor put it right there on the counter at the end of my examination before we left for Penthos.”
“That can’t be,” Eden said, shaking her head. “The hospital was open for years after the Nyx 23 mission. At least a decade, maybe a little more.”
“I remember when he put it there,” Jonah said. “He input the information from my tests, scanned my fingerprints, and sent all of the information to the command leader, then closed the file and put it down right here.”
“The command leader?” Eden asked. “The department head?”
Jonah shook his head.
“No. Nyx 23 was a clandestine mission even within the department itself. The department head and the governing bodies didn’t want anything to do with Penthos or with the Valdicians. Nyx 23 was a small faction within the larger group and planned the mission.”
Jonah opened the file and pressed the button that would have once started the file, but it remained dark.
“It’s been more than 100 years,” Eden said. “The energy cells would have worn out.”
As if the words triggered him, Lysander began to cry. She patted him gently, but his wails only grew louder. The more he cried, the more aware she became of the exhaustion that was coursing through her own body. The voices around her started to sound muffled and the light faded as her eyes started to close.
“We need to get somewhere to rest,” Pyra said.
“No,” Eden said, her voice weak even as she tried to sound as insistent as she could. “We have to keep going. We have to get to the others.”
“Eden,” Pyra said over Lysander’s cries. “Listen to your son. He needs to be changed and fed. He needs to sleep somewhere where he isn’t being jostled around.”
“We have to get out of here,” she said. “Jonah has been here before, he can get us out.”
“I’ve only been to this floor,” Jonah said. “I know that the other floors have other rooms, but we don’t know how much of the original structure was kept or what type of condition it’s in. I wouldn’t know how to navigate us out of here completely on my own.”
“What do you think are the
chances that anyone else knows about this?” Pyra asked, turning his attention to George.
Eden could see George glance around as if he himself was still shocked by the fact that they were inside the long-abandoned medical building.
“I don’t know,” George said. “I definitely didn’t know about it and I’ve been working in this lab far longer than Ryan.”
“Eden, how did you know about it?” Pyra asked.
Eden was starting to feel dizzy. It was as if the nearly two days that had passed since she had slept had all just pounded down into her and were making it so that she could barely stand. She shook her head slightly.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember. I heard about it somewhere. It was just a rumor, but I remember thinking that it seemed strange.”
“What seemed strange?”
“The closets,” she said. “Why so many closets?”
Lysander’s cries seemed to pull away from her, disappearing into the distance as her consciousness pulled her away from the others like she was being pulled backward through a tunnel. She felt her body weaken and her legs give out. All she could do was scoop one arm around the baby as she collapsed toward the ground.
Chapter Six
Jem pressed himself to the wall, trying to make himself as small as possible so that he could disappear into the shadows. He could hear the footsteps of the guard making his rounds through the gallery and he held his breath as they got closer. Behind him Angela and Jacob crouched in the recesses of an exhibit, their smaller forms making it far easier for them to be unassuming in the stillness of the closed museum. Finally, the guard passed by them and the sound of his shoes grew fainter in the distance as he made his way deeper into the galleries that wrapped around the center of the hall. Jem gestured for the others to follow and they rushed into the vulnerability of the open halls. Though he didn’t think that there was more than that one guard patrolling this wing of the museum, Jem couldn’t be sure, which meant that they had to stay cautious until they were safely out of the building.
The Alien's Return (Uoria Mates IV Book 1) Page 4
