by Lauren Sabel
“Did you ask Michael about Indigo?” Jasper asks. He digs two quarters out of his pocket.
I nod. “Michael told me about this place where Indigo might be. I saw it in a session, but I never knew where it was.” Jasper loads both quarters into the candy machine and presses B2. “Now I do. I think he’s at that warehouse near the salt flats,” I say. “And I think that’s where I saw Charlie too.”
Jasper reaches through the slot and pulls out the last Kit Kat. He quickly unwraps it and offers one side to me, but I shake my head. “Are you sure?” he asks.
“Totally sure.”
Jasper sits down at the table and makes a steeple with his hands, pressing his fingers together until the tips are white. “What are you going to do?” he asks.
“I’m going to call the CIA hotline and warn them that something’s going to happen there,” I say, “and if they don’t believe me, the police. And the FBI. And the goddamn Coast Guard. And then I’m going down there myself.” I push off the candy machine and head toward the door.
“They’ll never listen to you,” Jasper says.
“Maybe not. But it’s the only thing I can do.”
“But going down there yourself? Sounds dangerous to me,” Jasper says. He stands up. “You don’t even know for sure that Indigo’s down there. And why don’t you just call your ex and warn him?”
“I’ve already tried,” I mutter, as I reach the door.
“Where are you going?”
“I left my phone in Indigo’s office,” I say. “I’ll just call the authorities from the road. Are you coming with me?” I grab the doorknob.
Jasper doesn’t respond, but below my palm, I feel the metal lock turn. I jerk the knob, but the door is locked.
I forgot that Jasper has metal bending skills.
“That’s not funny,” I say, jerking on the doorknob again.
“No, it isn’t,” Jasper says in a tight voice.
Shaking my head, I try to turn the metal lock in the opposite direction to unlock it, but it won’t budge. I’m about to scold Jasper for his childish behavior when I hear a voice in my head.
“You’re not calling anybody,” the voice says from inside my mind.
“Did you say something?” I turn around to face Jasper, and confusion sweeps over me.
Jasper is standing beside the table, his chair clattering to the floor beside him. He looks rigid, as if someone is bending his body in an uncomfortable way, and his face is cold and far away. “I wish you hadn’t said that.”
“Hadn’t said what?” I can feel the hair starting to stand up on my arms. There’s something terribly wrong here. I step toward him. “What’s going on, Jasper?”
“I didn’t want to, Callie. He just offered me an apartment, if I would . . . and I’ve never had a home.”
“Jasper, slow down. What are you talking about?”
But now he’s blubbering. “I’m in too deep to get us out. I’m sorry.”
The next few moments are pure confusion.
Jasper moves across the room to the candy machine, and I’m looking at the candy machine and noticing there are no Kit Kats left, and then I’m on the floor, a chair pulled on top of me, and my mind is racing, thinking about what Jasper meant by being too deep to get us out. Across the staff room, a door opens, and there’s somebody coming into the room. I can’t turn my head to see who it is, but I see the reflection of a black turtleneck in the candy machine, and then there’s a wet cloth pressed against my mouth, and I’m breathing in, and in, and in . . .
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
When I open my eyes, I’m in the trunk of a car. I can tell because of the thin strips of light that are flashing through the cracks in the blackness above me. My legs are bent at the knees and pressed against the padded lining, and my neck is bent at a strange angle, so it cramps when I move it.
In the darkness, I remember the lock turning under my hand, and the cloth pressed over my mouth. Jasper. Why did you do it? I tilt my neck back and forth, trying to stretch out the searing pain along my shoulder blades. I’m not sure how long I’ve been in here, but judging by the feeling in my cramped muscles, it’s been quite a while.
My legs are pressed against the wheelbase so I can’t stretch them, but my arms are free. I lift them above my head and grasp the roof of the trunk, trying to find a release button, but there’s nothing to grab onto. I pound my fists against the trunk, but I know it’s hopeless. I can tell that we’re driving fast since I can feel the rumbling of the ground below me, and there’s no way someone could hear me anyway.
I feel around the edges of the trunk until I find a crack leading to the car’s backseat, and when I press my ear against it, there’s a voice coming from inside the car. It’s muffled, but I can still hear it.
“I’m telling you she won’t tell anyone,” Jasper says.
There’s a second of grumbly silence, and then my ears are blasted by the sound of a drum solo pulsing out of the speakers.
My heart beats blood into my brain so rapidly I can feel it pulsing in my temples. Slow my heartbeat down. Try to view my location. I take a deep breath of the stuffy trunk air and try to calm myself down, but I can’t stop the pounding behind my eyes, and my heart is racing too fast to get into a calm viewing mode. I suddenly think of Indigo. Did Jasper have something to do with his disappearance, too?
“Let me out!” I scream, and the sound of my voice fills the trunk with my fear. I need to settle down, breathe, and think of a way out of here, but it’s so dark I can barely tell if my eyes are open or closed.
Panic rushes over me, and even though I know it’s useless, I pound and pound at the trunk until my arms hurt from holding them above me. Then, trapped in the fetal position, I curl my arms tightly into my sides and wait for it to be over.
Sometime later, I hear a popping noise above me and startle awake. I must have fallen asleep from lack of oxygen, because I wake up gasping for air. I can’t feel the wheels moving below me anymore, so I know the car has stopped.
Above me, there’s a slit between the car and the trunk, where I can feel cool air on my face. I suck it in, filling my lungs until they feel like they could burst. When I’ve had enough oxygen, I look through the slit, wondering who left the trunk open for me, and if they wanted me to get away, or just give me enough air to keep me alive a little longer. Strangely, nobody is nearby, so I pop my head out farther.
In the fading light behind the car, I see the curved concrete of a loading dock. I push the trunk open slightly, and try to move my body to get out of it, but it’s asleep. Tingling rushes through all my limbs at once, making me want to scream. I bite down on my lip and maneuver my leg so it’s halfway out of the trunk. As I grip the trunk and pull my belly over it, I smell salt. The EarthScape warehouse is towering over me.
When Jasper and I came here in the bright daylight, the redbrick warehouse looked like an abandoned shell, but now, it’s even creepier. There are only a few windows, and those are too grimy to see into. The salt flats, a hundred yards away, are a white sheen under the cloudy afternoon sky.
I slide the rest of my body out of the trunk until my feet touch the pavement. Immediately falling into a crouch to stay low, I scan the loading dock. Jasper is standing on the concrete edge, and across from him, his back to me, is Monty Cooper. The phrase This Is the Light at the End of the Tunnel is printed across the back of his turtleneck.
I crouch lower behind the car, my mind spinning. If Monty is blackmailing my mom for NASA secrets, and has also convinced Jasper to bring me to this warehouse, then why? What does he have to gain?
On the loading dock, Jasper and Monty are so involved in their conversation that they don’t notice me sneaking around the car.
“Nine-oh-two. Not before, not after,” Monty says sharply.
Jasper nervously shifts his weight from foot to foot. “Understood.”
Keeping my eyes on the loading dock, I tiptoe around the car and crouch down beside the front wheel. I look d
own the street to where I can barely see the cars whizzing by on the highway, and then back at the loading dock, which is now empty.
Before I can move, Monty is standing over me. His safety-pinned jeans are stuffed into his combat boots, and he’s wearing this silver spiky collar, which seems a little much, even for him. “Going somewhere?” Monty asks, leaning down and grabbing me by the arm.
I shake my head as he pulls me off the pavement. “Just stepping out for a minute.”
“That’s what I like about you,” Monty sneers, “always witty.”
I try to yank away from him, but he just grips my arm tighter, his nails digging into my flesh. Against my skin, his fingers are as dainty as a woman’s, and his fingernails are painted black.
A cold shiver creeps over my skin when I realize where I’ve seen those painted fingernails before: when I was looking through the eyes of a killer. Monty’s the person who shot the hacker Bishop Finn in my vision. Or he will shoot him, if it hasn’t happened yet.
Monty follows my gaze to his black fingernails. “You think I’m too old to go to a rave?”
I shake my head. “Based on the necklace, I’d say too nerdy.”
“My bastard father didn’t like it either.” He rotates his collar around his neck with his thumb and pinkie finger. “I got it in India, with my—”
“Guru?”
“Don’t do that!” Monty snaps. “Never interrupt me.” He throws an irritated glance toward Jasper, who’s standing on the other side of the car. “A little help here?”
As Jasper hurries over, I stare at Monty. His bangs look pasted onto his forehead, and his skin seems paler than when I last saw him, possibly because of the black kohl eyeliner smudged around the rims of his eyes.
“Forget your makeup remover at home?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” he glowers at me. “It’s a rave thing.”
“That explains it,” I say sarcastically. It actually does explain the eyeliner, but that’s about it. There’s this hard edge to Monty now that I can’t put my finger on. It’s like he was only playing with that edge before, but now he’s gone off it. Even the vengeful glare in his eyes feels like it comes out of nowhere. But the more I stare at him, the more familiar it is: I’ve seen him look this way when he was talking about his father. Back then, in the office, it seemed justified; his father was the big bad polluter, and he was just trying to right his dad’s wrongs. Or was he? What was he really doing? “You’re right,” I say slowly. “I don’t understand.”
“Let’s just say I’m done playing the nice guy,” Monty says.
“You were never that nice,” I reply. “So it won’t be a huge change.” Jasper grabs my free arm, and I kick out at him, but he holds tight. “Let me go!”
My words are met with tense silence as Monty and Jasper lift me onto the loading dock and drag me across it. To the right of the warehouse door, Monty reaches into a hole dug out between two bricks and pulls out a key. He unlocks the door, puts the key back in the hole, and drags me inside. Held prisoner between the two of them, I shuffle down a dark hallway.
“How about you get your hands off me?” I suggest.
“How about you shut your mouth?” Monty responds.
Jasper shoots me a deadly look, but loosens his grip slightly, glancing at Monty to make sure he didn’t notice.
As they lead me down several winding aisles, filled with every kind of emergency supply I’ve ever imagined, I catalog everything in my mind to help me remember how to get out of here: row 9 is full of bottled water, canned goods, and vitamin packets—I force myself to remember; row 10 is devoted to rescue signal devices: smoke bombs, mirrors, and matches; and row 11 is stocked with batteries, flashlights, and cans of gasoline.
“Preparing for the apocalypse?” I ask.
“What about ‘shut your mouth’ did you not understand?” Monty says.
At the end of the rows of emergency supplies, a white van is parked in front of a glass-walled office. The security guards who sneered at me as they took Indigo away are peeling a Shady Hills decal off the van.
I glare at the guards as I’m dragged past them into the office. Against one wall, there’s the bank of computer screens that I saw in my vision. Every screen is split into four frames, and on each one of them is an image of an aircraft carrier, as seen from a satellite. The ships all have the same military-grade laser, and by the chaos onboard all of them, I can tell that each crew is trying to regain control of their laser’s direction. From above, the ships look similar, but they have different names on the sides, names such as Jefferson and Imperia Italia and Sovetslaya, each with a different national flag.
In front of the computer screens, Finnegan Bishop, distinguishable by his red beard and circular glasses, is typing commands into a laptop. I recognize him immediately, and I wonder how he went from a hacker breaking into NASA’s computer system to name a star after his mom to controlling military-grade lasers in a shady warehouse.
“Finnegan?” I say aloud. He glances over at me quickly, and I can tell how young he is. He can’t be much older than me.
“It’s Finn,” he says before dropping his eyes back to the laptop.
“Zip it, sweetheart,” Monty says.
“I don’t go for the ‘speak when spoken to’ command,” I shoot back.
Jasper tightens his grip on my wrist. “Shhh.”
“Don’t shush me,” I snap, and Jasper looks away. Across the office, Finn glances at me from his hunched position over his laptop, and there’s sweat beading up on his brow. Is he sweating because he knows what those lasers are going to do? Somehow I doubt that he’d murder knowingly. “You do know those lasers are going to kill people, don’t you?” I ask Finn.
Finn stares silently at me, the sweat beads rolling down his forehead. For a second, he looks as if he’s reconsidering what he’s doing, but then he glances at Monty’s glowering face, and quickly turns back to the computer.
“What the hell happened to you?” I ask Monty. “Did nobody show up for your lecture?”
“Lots of people showed up. They loved it. They loved me,” Monty brags.
“Then what? Did they actually take your name off the building?”
“Shut up,” Monty growls at me, and then turns to face Finn. “Are you into the system yet?” he asks. “We have less than an hour left!”
“I’m going as fast as I can,” Finn says. “But overriding the original programming takes a long time.”
“What did I hire you for? Even an ape could do this.”
“I said, I am going as fast as I—”
Monty slams his small fist on the table, but it hits the edge and bounces off. He winces, and quickly turns his back so we can’t see him inspect the bruise. “Can you read my shirt?” Monty asks, as if that’s why he turned his back to us. “Prepare to be flattened.”
“Okay . . . ,” Finn says slowly.
“I am the light at the end of the tunnel,” he says, pointing to the message on the back of his shirt. Monty picks up a tattered leather jacket from a chair and shrugs it on before he flips it back around. “Get it? You’re staring at your death, and I’m the train!”
“Are you threatening me?” Finn asks.
Monty shakes his head. “But I told you, no mistakes. If we miss it, then all of this was for nothing.” He gestures to the bank of screens. On every ship, panicked sailors are inspecting the lasers, trying to figure out how to regain control of the weapons. “And you don’t get your money.”
“Give me time,” Finn says. “I’ll make this happen, and we’ll both walk away rich.”
“Richer,” Monty corrects. “Richer than Dad ever was.” He glares at Finn. “If you do your job, that is.”
“I told you: it’s a very complicated program. There’s almost fifty lasers,” Finn says, “and they all have to hit the refracting telescope and fuse together at the same time, just as the asteroid passes closest to Earth.”
“Then why don’t we just give up?” M
onty asks, and he slides his hand inside his leather jacket. He looks like a fake drug dealer in a B-movie as he moves his hand a couple of inches out of his coat, just enough for us to see that he has a gun. “I’ll tell you why.” I can’t imagine Monty shooting a gun, but his trembling hands and vengeful eyes—and my vision of him shooting Finn—say he’s desperate enough to use it. “Because we aren’t quitters,” he says.
Finn looks as shocked as I am. “You’re not going to kill me,” he states.
Monty blushes like he’s been caught in a lie, and he slides his gun back into his jacket. “And kill off the things I need to know from that big brain of yours? I’m not an idiot.”
And neither am I. Because I’m suddenly certain of one very important thing: if I have information that Monty needs to know, he can’t kill me either. The only problem is that I have no idea what kind of information that would be.
As I’m scanning my mind for ideas, Monty turns to Jasper. “What is she still doing here?” he asks.
“I can hear you,” I say.
Jasper elbows me in the side, hard. “You didn’t tell me to leave,” Jasper replies.
“No?” Monty rolls his dark-rimmed eyes. “Leave.”
Jasper shifts uncomfortably, but he keeps his hand clamped tight around my arm. “Why do we have to take her to the room?”
“What’s in the room?” I ask. “Jasper, tell me what’s in the room.”
“Can’t you just lock her up somewhere until this is all over?” Jasper asks Monty.
“You know I would like to; really I would.” Monty nervously turns his spiked collar around on his neck. “But she can communicate with her mind,” he says. “So we have to lock up her mind, not just her body.”
Lock up my mind? My gaze flees to the office’s open door. I could make a run for it right now, but I’m not sure if Monty would shoot me in the back or not. He seems nervous about using his gun, but then again, fear makes people do stupid things.
