The panic room was entirely different than the last time I’d seen it. Obviously Vanessa was long gone, but the tank with the healing gel was also absent, along with all the hospital equipment. Pushing the door open, I blinked against the bright light, and at the weighty silence. I’d been too preoccupied by the chinks in my paranormal armor to note the hissing murmurs that’d accompanied my careful climb down the crow’s nest ladder-to be honest, I was on the verge of tears-and I wiped my eyes, pretending to rub sleep from them and acclimate to the fluorescent light. I knew the moment Warren and Hunter scented my mood. I couldn’t contain it fully. My grief at this lost power, the stolen ability to heal, was felt as keenly as if someone had died.
I silently admonished myself to pull it together, and studied my surroundings-not looking at the men-hoping that would ground me. The small, sterile room was suddenly depressing in its austerity, and though not normally claustrophobic, I knew that if I were trapped in here, I’d be begging for someone to kill me within days. The cure that was worse than the proverbial disease.
There were rations tucked away, additional sources of heat and light, although sieges meant something different to Zodiac agents than they did to even a mortal paramilitary troop. Those could last weeks, not mere days. Back in the late nineties, New York’s agents of Light had endured one lasting longer than the time it took to conceive, gestate, and birth a squalling child. Learning from that, our troop had installed a side bathroom with a small shower while constructing this one.
Hunter’s memory, which the aureole gifted me with earlier, had shown scattered papers, and there were indeed two maps lying side by side over the centered drawing tables. I tucked my hair behind my ear and bent over them, rubbing my arms, aware that Warren and Hunter were still eyeing me. The maps turned out to be identical, the original pristine but its twin copy marked up in a completely nonsensical fashion. What the maps detailed, however, was clear.
“The flood system?” I said as Hunter came to stand at my side. I heard his deep inhalation as he tried to ferret out my mood. I held my own breath and didn’t look at him. Instead I wondered how long he’d been studying this. Multicolored markings zigzagged and crosshatched the second drawing like an enthusiastic toddler’s art project.
“This is it in full.” I did look up then. His hair was disheveled, and bare-chested, he looked warm, but his eyes were shadowed. Not at all the sinking softness he’d turned on me hours before. I couldn’t tell if it was in reaction to my shuttered mood or in response to whatever he and Warren had been discussing. “Joanna was helping me chart her path into Midheaven.”
Warren gave him a look that said he knew exactly what I’d been helping him with, and we both shifted our gazes to the floor like teens caught after curfew.
“Where the hell did you get it?”
“The Flood Control District.”
Warren quirked a wiry brow. “They just handed you a map of the entire underground system?”
“I told them I was doing a story on the homeless living in the tunnels. Do you know that floodwaters can rise in there at the rate of a foot per minute?” When Warren only stared, Hunter shrugged and went to sit on a corner stool. “What? Your undercover identity is what gave me the idea.”
The strained silence between the men elongated, and I glanced back at the maps.
This was what I’d seen him working on in the shared aureole. The emotion accompanying it had been exhaustion and determination. But exactly what was he doing? The bright intersecting lines gave no clue.
Warren took Hunter’s place at my side, using a fingernail to trace the entrance I’d emerged from all the way to its intersecting point. All lines, I noted, met in the middle. So there really was only one entrance to Midheaven. “Did you make sure everything was as you found it?” Warren asked me.
“Sure,” I said sarcastically. “I even dusted. Right after I lost my powers and before being ambushed by Regan and the Tulpa.”
Warren’s head slowly swiveled my way. “Powers?”
I scrambled to think, before deciding to turn the blame on him. “Well, something was jerked from me upon entry, and it felt pretty powerful. What else could it be?”
I stared at him, daring him to tell me he knew he was sending me to a place that would strip my soul in three tries.
His gaze lingered on my face, and then he ran a hand over his spiky hair. “Well, it won’t be as bad the second time.”
I look at him like he was stoned.
He gave me the same once-over.
“Uh-uh.” I shook my head and backed up until I was leaning into Hunter’s knees. He opened them, giving me harbor in between, and I nestled in tight. Warren’s eyes flickered at the intimacy, but he said nothing. Both things gave me courage. “Not me. No way. That place is evil. The passage alone felt like it was going to kill me.”
“But it didn’t, and that which doesn’t kill you…”
It took all my self-control not to roll my eyes. I’d collected quotes as a teen, mental touchstones, wise words in an unpredictable world. But I hated cliches, and I certainly wasn’t going to spout empty bravado. I nestled in more tightly to the pocket Hunter created for me. I wasn’t feeling particularly brave. “Makes you weaker?”
“Leaves loose ends,” Hunter muttered, his voice stirring my hair. Despite my worry, it stirred other things as well. Sick, I thought, shaking my head slightly, but every bruise had been worth it.
Warren scowled, crossing his arms as his eyes darted between the two of us. “Might be a second chance at redemption.”
Something niggled at me, like a secret whispered in the dark. Someone had just told me something, but who? I leaned against Hunter and remembered his silhouette in sleep. I looked at Warren and the whisper echoed faintly.
“Why would I go back?”
Warren glanced at the maps beside him, then back at Hunter. There was something vaguely threatening in the action. “Hunter, would you mind leaving the two of us alone?” It wasn’t a question.
Hunter remained where he was for about a year under Warren’s direct gaze, before gently easing me forward to stand. A light brush of his fingertips trailed my belly as he crossed in front of me, and then he was gone. Warren and I said nothing for a long time; he allowing no indication of what he thought of this new development, and me making it clear I didn’t care either way.
Finally he leaned back on his elbows, crossing tattered boots at the ankles. “Hunter caught me up on what happened to you in Midheaven. As much as he could, that is. Is it true that it felt like you were gone only hours?”
While a week had passed here. Nodding, I pushed myself up on the stool. I recounted the conversation I’d overheard in the pipeline, that though still broken, Regan was once again back in the Tulpa’s good graces. That she’d been hiding in the pipeline, she still had my conduit, and that she was going to try to bring me to the Shadow leader alive. “She’s been following me everywhere, in both my daily life as Olivia and as the Archer. I know she followed me to Master Comics.”
He watched me with dull eyes, looking less surprised by this knowledge than I thought it warranted.
“She also claims to be tracking me with the help of someone in the troop. An agent of Light.”
“A bluff.” Warren shrugged, immediately dismissing the claim. “Not possible.”
He let that, and the surety with which he said it, sink in. His tone said he was in charge and I should be glad that he was. He must have realized how imperious it was because he shrugged one shoulder and smiled. “Tell me what you can about Midheaven.”
What I could. He knew, then, that I couldn’t tell him everything. But I frowned anyway, wanting to accommodate him. I saw a skeleton with a bowler hat. I saw inky masculine shapes and bright feminine ones. Images zipped by, a very few lingering like mental balloons in my frontal lobe, but when I opened my mouth, they slid away, leaving me with nothing but a fleeting sensory reminder. I shook my head apologetically.
“It’s okay,” Warren said, like he’d been expecting it. “You only remember the people and things linked to your own time and place. Like the man and woman you mentioned to Hunter. Harlan Tripp and Solange?”
I’d figured that out for myself, but I still shook my head. “I remember more than just them. I remember it all.
