On that note…
I reached out and grasped the wheel firmly at the nine and three o’clock positions, and tried to turn it. Predictably, nothing happened.
It would have been better if Lance had laughed at me. As it was, I had to force myself to ignore his eyes boring into the back of my neck, as if willing me to fail.
All right, fine. I tightened my fingers on the wheel again and tugged. Still nothing.
Focus. I needed to focus. For a few seconds I shut my eyes, bringing to my mind once again that vision of Paul in his cell, waiting with a sort of hopeless patience. And I thought of how much I wanted to hear his voice again, to feel his arms around me and the touch of his mouth against mine. How I was damned if I was going to let some stupid piece of metal stand between me and the man I loved.
Loved. I really was in big trouble.
Metal gave way with a horrifying screech, and the wheel began to turn. Startled, I lifted my hands, and Michael called out,
“Don’t stop!”
I clamped my fingers around the cold, rusted metal and turned. The ground beneath my feet seemed to shake, and the door slowly swung open — not by much, but enough to let the three of us squeeze past.
“Well done.”
I turned to look back at Michael. “How — what — ”
“You don’t need to question. I knew you could do it. Come — Paul is waiting for us.”
He pushed past me and into the opening, followed by Lance, who smiled slightly and said, “Come on, Alice. Time to go down the rabbit hole,” before he disappeared into the side of the mountain as well.
For just a second I hesitated. If anything, the flow of cold and ill will seemed to have increased once the door was open. But I’d just shown myself that I had gifts I didn’t even know I possessed. I’d have to pray they would come to my aid once again.
I took a breath, and followed the two men into the darkness.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
At first I couldn’t see anything. I blinked, eyes straining against the black around me. Then I tried to tell myself that the cool, silent darkness should be reassuring. After all, it would’ve been a lot worse if we’d stumbled into a main hallway populated by blank-faced hybrid guards.
I bumped into something hard and lumpy and smelling vaguely of sweat. Lance’s voice snapped at me, “Watch it!”
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
Michael sounded infinitely more at ease. “Lance, we need you now. You saw this place. You know more of it than either Persephone or I.”
I heard Lance expel a breath, followed by a faint scratching noise, as if he had eased his way along the wall a little ways and the zipper of his jacket had caught on the rock wall. “Give me a minute.”
“Of course.”
I wished I had some of Michael’s tranquility, or failing that, even slightly less jumpy nerves. The dark and the oppressive air around us probably had something to do with it, although it seemed that — for the moment — no one had detected our presence inside the base.
The silence was almost absolute. If there was any activity at the facility, human or otherwise, it had to be a long way from where we were. Although that notion should have reassured me, instead it just reminded me that we’d only taken the first step, that we were still a long way from finding Paul or getting him out of here.
Then I heard Lance say, in a low monotone unlike his usual speaking voice, “Ten levels. Five entrances — six, if you count this one, but no one uses it.” A long pause. “Detention areas are on the eighth level. There’s a bank of elevators north of here…two hundred yards.”
“Elevators?” I demanded. He couldn’t be thinking of us just marching into an elevator and sailing down to the eighth level. Just because there weren’t any guards in evidence up in this forgotten corner didn’t mean the elevators wouldn’t be crawling with guards.
“Shh,” said Michael.
Lance took in a breath. “Stairs…fifty yards from here. Not used much.”
“Now, that’s more like it,” I muttered. Maybe we could get in and out without anyone noticing us. Right. I was willing to believe there could be forgotten stairways tucked into unused corners of the base, but I sort of doubted the detention level would be unmanned. No, there were probably guards and security cameras and laser alarms and God knows what else.
And that was only if we actually made it all the way down there without someone — or something — discovering us.
“Show us,” Michael said, and I heard rather than saw Lance slip past the older man, going farther into the tunnel. “You next,” Michael added. “I’ll bring up the rear.”
Fine by me. I wasn’t afraid to admit to a bit of cowardice. Besides if some alien-human hybrid got the jump on us from behind, Michael Lightfoot was far better suited to fighting him off than I would be. The man might have twenty years on me, but he looked tough and solidly built, whereas I had never even mustered the energy to take the self-defense classes Ginger had advised I take — “a girl can never be too careful,” she’d told me, and I had to admit she was probably right. Then again, I sort of doubted she had envisioned the sort of mess I currently found myself in. More likely, she’d been thinking of fighting off purse snatchers in the parking garage at the Beverly Center.
The tunnel or hallway or whatever it was sloped downward somewhat, but other than that I had absolutely no idea which way we were going. Apparently my bump of direction didn’t work so well underground.
Luckily, I wasn’t the one in the lead, and Lance did seem to have some idea of where to go. After a few minutes he stopped. “Here.” And I heard the creak of a door opening, followed by a flood of light.
All right, it was actually more of a trickle. But after the complete black through which we’d just been traveling, even the wan fluorescent lights in the stairwell seemed blinding. I blinked, and followed Lance down the stairs, with Michael’s footfalls behind me impossibly soft, even though he wore heavy hiking boots and the steps were made of diamond-patterned steel, the sort of thing you saw sometimes on heavy-duty truck bumpers.
I kept count as we descended, and so I knew when we hit the eighth level. The steps continued on below us; of course, since Lance had said there were ten levels to the facility. And that was frightening in its own way, that something as big and as complex as this base had apparently been built right under the noses of the local population, with no one but the most extreme of the alien theorists and UFO chasers even guessing at its existence. How many layers were there of this conspiracy? How in the hell had I ever thought I could do something to stop it?
As far as I knew, I didn’t say anything, but Michael laid a quick, reassuring hand on my wrist. “We only need to focus on the task at hand. The bigger picture can wait.”
Great, I’m just surrounded by psychics. I managed a wan smile, though. Maybe that’s what it required — a group of three, each with his or her own skill set. I knew I couldn’t have gotten this far without Lance and Michael, and conversely, they wouldn’t be here without my help. After all, I was the one who had somehow managed to get us past the heavy door at the end of the canyon.
“So what now?” I asked. “Because I’m pretty sure we can’t just open that door — ” and I jerked a thumb toward a gray-painted structure that looked as if it might have worked at Fort Knox in a past life — “and go sailing in there.”
“Lance?”
He’d been standing near the doorway, head tilted to one side, eyes half-closed. “I’m not getting much. There’s someone — or something — out there, but I can’t get a grasp on it. I don’t think I ever saw this level, but only the upper ones where they do the research.”
“All right.” Michael turned toward me. “You try.”
“Me?” I shook my head. “Look, I’ve already said I’m no clairvoyant — ”
“And yet you saw Paul, were taken away so strongly that you lost almost fifteen minutes in the vision. You can do this.”
It must be nice to ha
ve such an unshakable faith. But he was right — I had done something similar, and less than an hour earlier. Maybe my proximity to Paul would help, would strengthen my inner eye and allow me to see even the things with which I didn’t have a direct connection.
Drawn by some instinct, I moved closer to the door but didn’t touch it. Instead, I stood there, only a few inches away from its metal surface, and thought of Paul, who was now so very close. I closed my eyes, and saw.
His cell was on this floor, at the far end of the level from the stairwell where we were currently hidden. I could feel his energy, sense it pulsing outward, so very different from the other men who populated the floor.
Men. That was using the term loosely, because although they looked human enough, it was their vibrations that seemed to be the source of the wrongness, as if the very air was offended by their existence. Whoever the original “donor” had been, he was good-looking enough…and yet seeing those regular features duplicated over and over seemed to distort them, twist them away from their original symmetry. And even in a high-security facility such as this, you’d think that men stationed on guard duty together would have some contact with one another, some sort of conversation. Not these; they were silent as if carved from stone, and yet I could feel their energy pulsing beneath the surface, darkly, vibrantly alive. I knew then that they were communicating, just not verbally. And if one of them knew something, then all of them would.
I swallowed. This wasn’t going to be easy.
“He’s there,” I told my two companions. “Other end of the floor…of course. There are ten of those hybrid guards on this level, and more on the floors directly above and below. I’m not sure how many. I suppose it doesn’t matter all that much, since ten are too many for us to deal with anyway. And if even one of them raises the alarm, then we’re done.”
“Any ideas?” Lance asked, and for once he didn’t sound mocking. Just worried.
Well, he must be worried if he was asking for tactical advice from me. Obviously a full frontal assault wasn’t going to work, since we weren’t armed, and even if we were, it wouldn’t have mattered much, since it was ten against three and I didn’t even know how to shoot a gun, let alone take out a bunch of trained soldiers enhanced with alien DNA.
What we did have, though, were three people with some highly unusual talents, talents that we could possibly put to use in this situation. Although I had sensed intelligence in the hybrids, I hadn’t sensed much in the way of individuation. Ants and bees weren’t known for having distinct personalities, and I thought that possibly the same sort of dynamic was at work here. If we could fool one of them, maybe we could fool them all.
I’d heard of psychics who were able to use the sheer power of their mind to fool others or coerce them into doing things they would never have contemplated if they’d been in full possession of their faculties. That was a very gray area in the paranormal world, and of course one I’d never done much in the way of investigating. My talents really didn’t lie in that direction, even if I’d had the inclination to abuse them in such a fashion. However, I didn’t have much compunction about using them on the hybrids. I wasn’t sure you could even count them as true people. Besides, I wasn’t going to try to make them jump off the building, or light themselves on fire, or even squawk like a chicken. No, I just wanted them all to be otherwise occupied for the next few minutes so they wouldn’t notice a prisoner being sneaked out right under their identical noses.
“I have no idea if this is going to work,” I said. “But I’m going to try to distract them. Just be ready.”
“Ready for what?” Lance asked. For once I didn’t see anything in his face except worry. He was probably thinking I’d bitten off more than I could chew.
Well, I was feeling approximately the same way, but I knew I didn’t have much of a choice, since we hadn’t armed ourselves with knockout gas or Uzis.
It probably would have been better if I could have stayed behind and worked from the stairwell; it was always easier to concentrate if I were alone. However, since Paul probably didn’t know Michael and Lance from Adam — and because I knew I didn’t want to have to wait a second longer than necessary to see him again — I inched out in front of the two men and paused for a second, focusing on the discordant sensations from the hybrids who waited only a few yards away from us.
As I’d sensed earlier, there were ten of them. Two stood directly in front of the door to Paul’s cell. Three more were clustered in the center of the detention level, where I thought the elevators were located. A single guard waited at the far end of that floor — near a service elevator, from what I could tell. The other four were ranged up and down the corridor, one of them so close I probably could have hit him with a well-placed softball throw.
But I wasn’t armed with a softball. All I had was my mind and my will and my need to have Paul returned to me.
I took a breath, then another. Just a distraction, something to pull them away long enough that we could get to Paul’s cell. I had a flash then of the cell door, of the key card–operated lock next to it. Wonderful. All right, a distraction that would also make at least one of them drop his key card.
Thought is energy. Brain waves can be measured. Simple electrical pulses. The trick was making those pulses have an effect in the physical world.
As one, the hybrids’ walkie-talkies began squawking. “Code red! Code red! All units investigate possible intruder on Level 7!”
Both Lance and Michael stared at me.
“What are you looking at?” I snapped. “This is only going to work until they figure out there’s nothing going on up on Level 7.”
And in my mind’s eye I saw them converging on the elevator.
Key card, I thought, and that same inner eye showed me one of the guards stumbling, a piece of plastic falling from what should have a secure pocket of his jumpsuit. Perfect.
“Let’s go!”
I didn’t wait to see if the two men were following me. Time was wasting, and the elevator doors had just closed on the ten hybrids. The window had already begun to shut.
Breaking into a run, I headed down the corridor to the spot where I knew Paul’s cell was located. A brief pause to bend down and pick up the dropped key card, and then it was on to the end of the hall, to the blank steel door with the card reader glowing red next to it.
One swipe, and the door opened. Of course it would. At that point, no one knew anything was wrong.
I burst in, closely followed by Lance and Michael, and saw Paul standing in front of his cot. The look of wariness on his face melted away into utter shock.
“Persephone? How — ” He looked past me to my two companions. “Who — ”
“We don’t have time for that,” I broke in. “These are friends.”
“Hi, I’m Luke Skywalker — I’m here to rescue you,” Lance said, with an evil grin.
“And we really don’t have time for that, either,” I snapped. And as much as I wanted to run to Paul and wrap my arms around him, I knew that would take up far too many precious seconds.
In fact, we were already running out of time. The low-level dissonance of the hybrids in the back of my mind altered to sharp spikes of frustration and anger.
“They know they were sent on a wild-goose chase. We’ve got to go now!”
“Back to the stairs,” Michael said.
We all headed for the door and turned to go back in the direction we’d come. A wave of cold hit me, and I said, “No — they’re already coming back down the elevator. We’ll never get past in time.”
To my astonishment, Paul remarked, deadpan, “When you came in here, didn’t you have a plan for getting out?”
“Call me the brains, and I’ll kick your ass,” I told Lance, whose gray eyes had taken on a glint I’d already begun to recognize. “To the service elevator.” And I pointed back along the corridor, past Paul’s now-empty cell.
“Do you know where it comes out?”
“No,” I admi
tted. “But it’s better than just standing here, right?”
“True.” He moved closer, took my hand in his. Just the feel of his fingers around mine was enough to reassure me that somehow we’d be able to get out of this mess. “Let’s go.”
We all jogged to the service elevator, which also had key card access. I swiped the card, and thank God, it worked. The four of us piled into the elevator. Some instinct told me to press the button for Level 3 — I had no idea why, but my spider sense had done a pretty good job so far of keeping me alive, so I was going to follow its lead on this one.
The elevator ascended quickly. We were all silent, watching the red LED numbers flash as we moved from level to level. The unease and worry boiling off the three men was practically palpable. I knew all of us were wondering exactly when the hybrids would figure out where we had gone and would take steps to shut down the elevator so we’d be stranded mid-level, just waiting for them to come along and collect us all.
Miraculously, the elevator made it to Level 3 without incident. The doors opened, and I saw we had entered an area that seemed to be some sort of motor pool; various black-painted Hummers and SUVs in a range of sizes filled the space.
“How did you — ” Paul began, then stopped. “Never mind. Which one?”
“Whatever’s closest,” Lance said, and jogged over to a glossy Suburban.
“Fair enough.”
We all began to follow him. A wash of cold went over me then, and I looked off to the left and saw a pair of blank-faced hybrid guards beginning to run toward us.
“Better hope the keys are in the ignition,” I called out.
At least there wasn’t any testosterone-fueled bickering over who was going to drive. Since Lance was in the lead, he headed to the driver’s seat, while Michael fell in beside him and Paul and I ran for the back seats.
No keys, though. Even as I fastened my seatbelt, I watched Lance slide under the steering column and pop off the protective plastic panel, then start mucking around with the wires he had exposed.
“They’re getting closer,” I said, trying not to sound too urgent.
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