glass and felt the cold, hard floor against my head.
Just before the world turned to complete, impenetrable black I heard something. It seemed so far away-as if I were at the end of a very long and empty hallway.
A door opened. Then I felt hands under my arms and the sensation of being dragged. I could hear the squeak as my heavy boots slid across the floor. Then a door closed. It was still so far away I didn't know what was going on. I was still fading. Fading …
And then I felt the unmistakable feeling of a hand slapping me across the face. Several times. Hard.
'Wake up, Kira. Wake up!'
My eyelids fluttered and I opened my eyes slowly, feeling the stinging on my left cheek. I tried to wet my dry, cracking lips with the tip of my tongue. The world came slowly back into focus.
Colin stared down at me with a fearful expression.
'We don't have much time,' he said. 'Can you move?'
More eyelid fluttering on my part. I swallowed. And then I realized that the air I was now breathing was clear of the poisonous gas. I began taking deep, greedy gulps of it. I drank at the air, filling my lungs with mouthfuls until my head cleared even more.
Out of the comer of my eye I saw his hand raise.
'Slap me again,' I said, 'and it'll be the last thing you ever do.'
He gave me a tentative smile. 'I'm glad you're feeling better.'
'You should know that as soon as I've recovered I am going to kill you.'
He frowned. 'But… but I saved you.'
I kept trying to breathe normally. 'Thank you for saving me.'
He smiled. 'You're very welcome.'
'However, you do know that we wouldn't have even been in that room if it wasn't for you, right? So please forgive me for not offering to buy a round of drinks.'
Colin licked his lips and shuffled his feet nervously. 'I told Gareth to let you go. He didn't listen to me. The man is evil.'
'You think?' I would have rolled my eyes, but I still didn't have the energy. 'Help me up.'
He got to his feet and helped me stand. My ankle still hurt like a son of a bitch from spraining it.
'Gareth had a meeting. I disabled the camera without him knowing. I couldn't do anything about the gas, so I had to come and get you manually.'
'I can't believe you sold us out. For what? A stupid job?'
His expression twisted into one of shame, and he suddenly looked a great deal older than his twenty-one years. 'If I'd known he was going to hurt you I never would have agreed to any of this.'
'But it was okay to hurt Rogan?'
His jaw clenched. 'My sister was one of the murder victims at the university four years ago. She was the only family I had in the world. I wanted Rogan to suffer for that.'
'But he's innocent. Gareth even admitted it in there.'
His eyes filled with tears. 'I was wrong.'
'I'm sorry about your sister.' My heart swelled a little. I didn't even know he'd had a sister. He'd never mentioned her. Then again, I'd never told him about what happened to my family, to my sister.
I guess we had more in common than I thought we did.
I looked at his name tag, which read, COLIN PALMER-PROGRAMMER.
Funny. I'd never known his last name before, either. Never realized that until right now. I guess I'd always been too wrapped up in my own problems to allow myself to really get to know somebody else.
My eyes narrowed as I studied his name tag.
It was red.
Joe said that we'd need somebody with a red name tag to get into the room with the server.
'How long do we have before somebody finds out I escaped?' I asked.
'Not long.' He looked worried now. 'The subscribers will start contacting us now that the feed cut out. Apparently they've been having a ton of problems with the game recently. Gareth will be notified, and he'll know what I did. We'd better go right now.'
I felt a fleeting feeling of compassion for Colin. He'd had a lousy life. I guess I couldn't blame him for latching onto something that seemed like an incredible opportunity with a huge future, working with computers, the one thing he really loved in life.
Lucky for me-and just in time-he realized that he wasn't a monster like Gareth.
'We need to get Rogan,' I said firmly.
Colin nodded, and I watched as he removed the red card from his name tag holder and swiped it in the computerized lock on the right side of the white door.
The door swung open. Rogan turned to look at us and his eyes, shiny with tears, widened.
'Kira!' he exclaimed.
I felt a happy lurch in my chest as I went directly to him and threw my arms around him. But there wasn't any time for further celebrations. In fact, any celebrations could wait until we knew if we were going to live longer than five more minutes. All Colin had done was buy us a little more time.
Hopefully it would be all we needed.
Colin pressed a hidden panel on the wall and a keyboard was exposed. After he touched a couple of numbers Rogan's metal cuffs snapped open and fell to the floor, as mine had earlier. Rogan stood and pulled me to him, crushing me tightly against his chest.
'I thought I'd lost you,' he murmured into my hair, and then captured my face in his hands, staring down at me for a moment before leaning over to kiss me.
The kiss was enough to give me the strength to keep going.
At that moment the thought of stopping Gareth paled in comparison to Rogan's kiss. That was what I was fighting for. More of his lips. More of him.
'Come on.' I grabbed his hand, and the three of us exited the room.
'Are you okay?' Rogan asked gruffly.
'Not really.' I swallowed and hobbled along quickly on my injured ankle. 'I guess sucking in poisonous gas until you're almost dead isn't something you can just shake off.'
Colin didn't say anything. Now that Rogan had joined us he seemed to be a little more afraid. Whether it was because of Rogan's reputation or the fact that he'd almost killed me and was afraid that Rogan would kill him in return, I didn't know. I'd have to give it even odds.
'We need to find Gareth's subbasement office,' Rogan said gruffly. 'Do you know where that is?'
'I haven't been here long enough to completely know my way around.'
'We already took the elevator down past ground level. Is this the subbasement?' I asked. 'Or is there more?'
'There's another floor beneath this one,' Colin said. 'They mentioned it when I took my orientation tour. I'm supposed to start working down there soon.' He sighed. 'I guess that's not going to happen anymore.'
'Can we get to it via the regular elevators?' Rogan asked.
He shook his head. 'No, but there's a flight of stairs. Yeah, right there.' He pointed at a plain white door in front of us that wasn't marked.
Scurrying down the hallway heading toward the unmarked door, I felt the oddest sense of deja vu. Then I realized what was causing the feeling. It was from watching Colin play his networked game of 'Anarchy.' It felt like we were in the game right now, trying to find our way through, trying to save the day from the bad guys without getting ourselves killed.
I suddenly remembered how that game had ended earlier today for Colin.
Colin reached for the unmarked door.
'Wait!' I began, but he'd already turned the handle.
There was a man on the other side. I recognized him as one of the White Coats who'd brought us from the car to the white room. He was the one who'd hit Rogan in the back of the head with the butt of his gun.
