A wave of jealousy shot through Leah, but she quickly got control of it. She hadn’t gone without a few friends herself before the invasion.
“Well aren’t you the busybody,” one of the male nurses asked.
“I’m just saying, is all,” Jenny said. “It would be good for Lord Cross to have something for himself. All he does is near kill himself every day trying to take care of this place and these people.”
“Maybe you should tell him that,” the male nurse said.
“Maybe I will.”
Leah stared up at the high-powered medical lights above the operating table. She folded her arms across her chest as they transferred her from the bed.
Waves of fear radiated through her. She thought she was going to be sick, but there was nothing in her stomach. She concentrated on being numb inside, using all of the training she’d received.
In just a couple of moments, they attached her to all the computerized equipment necessary for the procedure. It had all been explained to her the day before, but she didn’t know if that was a good thing. She honestly felt as if she knew too much now.
Thinking about the nanobots being injected into her eye almost drove her out of her mind. Images of runaway robots tearing through her mind kept her on the thin edge of terror. They weren’t clunky or awkward-looking the way they were in the movies. Several of them could fit on the head of a pin.
Like angels, Simon had said.
“All right, Miss Creasey,” the surgeon said as he leaned down to address her. He was probably in his early thirties and calm. “We’re going to give you something to help you to relax. Then we’re going to see about giving you two good eyes. All right?”
Leah nodded. She liked the surgeon’s gung-ho attitude, but she’d been around enough bad things in her life that she knew things didn’t always turn out that way. She was already lying on this hospital bed minus one eye.
Jenny fitted an oxygen mask over Leah’s lower face. A burning sensation flowed along her left arm. Then she breathed in.
“Count backwards from one hundred,” the surgeon said.
Leah tried, but it didn’t work for her. She spotted Simon above her in the observation deck. It was funny. She hadn’t even noticed the deck earlier.
On her second breath, she reached ninety-two. Then her head spun, and she was gone.
TWENTY-FIVE
Something clicked beneath Warren’s left foot. He knew that couldn’t have been good. Since nothing had immediately happened, he left his foot where it was and scoured the darkness with his torch. The dying batteries gave off weak light.
“Stay back,” he told Naomi.
“What is it?”
“I appear to have stepped on something.”
Naomi backed away slowly.
They’d already found three booby traps in the vault and disarmed them. All of them had been nasty things with spikes and sharp blades. Whoever had finished off the vault for Lilith had possessed a sadistic mind and a thirst for blood.
Warren figured the man—or woman, for that matter—had been disappointed by using such elaborate cunning but then not being able to know if anyone got caught up in them. At the moment, Warren hoped the nasty mastermind had gotten caught in one of his own twisted traps at a later date and had a horribly agonizing death.
“Lilith,” Warren called.
She didn’t answer. Since they’d returned to the building, she’d gone off exploring. Evidently her present form interacted with the physical world, but that was by choice. She still walked through walls, and she didn’t set off any of the traps.
“Can I do anything?” Naomi asked.
“Besides come up here so that we can both be killed?” Warren asked sarcastically.
“I wasn’t offering to do that.”
Warren didn’t blame her. He wouldn’t have, either. Gingerly, he knelt and took a closer look at the stone beneath his foot. In their exploration of the first two levels, there were five in all, none of the stonework had been loose.
Unless it had been part of a trap.
The torch burned just bright enough to show that the stone beneath his foot had slid down a fraction of an inch. It had to be a pressure plate. But what was it connected to?
“Well?” Naomi asked.
“It’s a switch.”
She cursed.
Focusing on the positive—that he wasn’t already dead—Warren tried to figure out what he was supposed to do. You can’t stay here, he told himself.
“Perhaps you can jam it,” Naomi suggested.
“How?”
“I don’t know. Can you slip a knife blade down between the stones?”
Warren looked, but the torch’s dying light wasn’t good enough to show him if he could. Even if he had a knife blade thin enough, he wasn’t able to see well enough to do the job.
“No,” he said. “I can’t.”
“Then you’re going to have to move.”
Warren knew that was all he could do. He was lucky he’d heard and felt the click. The first time they’d had no warning. He’d nearly ended up skewered on a trio of spears that had suddenly jutted from the wall. If his reflexes weren’t as fast as they were, if he’d been only marginally slower, he’d have been a dead man.
Now…was he fast enough again?
The decision to be made was which direction he should take. What would the trap maker have thought? Warren blew out a breath. He would have thought no one would have been fortunate enough to notice the pressure switch.
“All right,” Warren said as calmly as he could. “I’m going to jump for it. Watch yourself.”
“I will.”
“On three,” Warren stated. “One. Two. Three.” He leaped forward as far as he could. A rustling noise sounded above. From the corner of his eye, he
