“Because she’s been watching, haven’t you?” Peter breathed it out. “Jesus, how did you watch all this time and not lose your fucking mind?”
“Find the door.” I deliberately didn’t answer him because I wasn’t sure myself and we were running out of time. I’d done enough hits to know when things were starting to get sticky, when the clock was ticking away, the noose tightening. However you wanted to look at it, we were in deep.
Because I had no doubt that at least three of us would be eliminated if we were caught. They might give Cowboy a second chance.
“There’s no door,” Peter said. “The room has no door.”
“There’s a door,” I said calm as a summer day. “We just have to find it.”
Dinah laughed. “You should ask the dogs where they came in.”
I whipped around and looked at Cowboy. “Can you?”
He swallowed hard. “Maybe.”
“Do it.” We didn’t have time for maybe. Bear didn’t scare easy, and I had no doubt that if he was afraid and alone then it was bad. Very, very bad.
Cowboy closed his eyes. The female next to me let out a low growl and turned to face the door we’d come in.
Peter did the same, his nostrils flaring. “They’re here.”
7
The door handle jiggled on the room I’d trapped us in, a room full of animals that reeked with stress, shit, and cat spray. The cats began to yowl and the dogs took up a chorus that filled the room with more noise than I could handle after a year of near silence.
“Cowboy, hurry up!” I yelled over the din of animals losing their ever-loving minds.
Cowboy grimaced and took a step, then his eyes brightened. “In the floor!”
I didn’t question him. If there was something in the floor, we were going for it. I dropped to my hands and knees, dragging Eligor with me. “Sweep with your hand. Look for some sort of pattern change.”
He did as he was told. I’d give him that much. Not to say I wasn’t considering killing him once we were out of here.
I deliberately let that thought roll through me, but he didn’t so much as flinch. “You staying out of my head now?”
“If they can still read me, I need to stay out of your mind.” He didn’t lift those strange blue-purple eyes from his task.
I scooted across the floor, my hands finding a track that I could just get my fingernails into. “Here.”
Peter dropped next to me. “Good thing you got me.” He dug overlong, thin fingernails under the edge of the lip and heaved the panel up, showing off a deep dark space.
A ramp led down, but no lights. I tugged in the dog and Eligor, then Cowboy next, and Peter last. He lowered the panel and we were plunged into complete darkness.
The sound of water dripping filled my ears, the howls and cries of the animals above us muffled with the closing of the door. “Peter, you’re up.”
“Make a chain,” he said, “or I’ll lose you.”
I reached out and he took my hand, his skin cool. “Cowboy?”
“I got the short one’s hand.”
Peter tugged us away from the ramp, and then we were moving forward, quickly. The ground was flat and rose on a steady uphill grade.
Minutes passed. No pursuit came, but it would take them a while to figure out we’d found this tunnel. Maybe thirty minutes if we were lucky.
Thirty minutes.
“Cowboy, can you still feel the animals?”
“Most are dead,” he said, a pain in his voice, a pain that I’d felt myself when my dogs had died. “I don’t understand how they could be killed so fast.”
“A gun,” Dinah said. “A big one with a scatter spray.”
I shook my head though no one could see the movement in the dark. “No, there were no gunshots.”
“The boss could have done it,” Eligor said. “He is the most powerful of us. I thought he’d left, which was why I felt safe coming to see you—”
“What are we going to do once we’re out?” Peter said. “We all have trackers in our bodies, I’m sure of it.”
“Agreed,” I said. “More than one would be my guess. Kid here can do an EMP pulse, but I think that will be too obvious and they could reverse engineer where it came from.”
Eligor was quiet a moment. “I don’t know how many you have, but you are correct that you have them.”
The female dog bumped against my leg, keeping close. I wanted to run a hand over her head, to feel her there. But there was no letting go of my companions. Peter didn’t slow, and he didn’t take any turns. We kept moving on an incline, step after step. I wasn’t surprised. The exit would need to be far enough away from the building itself so they were not connected, that there was no seeing one with the other. The time was ticking, and I knew we were on the short end of it.
“A hospital then, and an X-ray machine,” I said. “We need to pinpoint all the tracers in us and take them out before we can do anything else. A scalpel should do it.”
“There’s a hospital in the facility,” Eligor said. “With human doctors and nurses.”
Peter gave a sharp laugh that echoed down the tunnel. I squeezed his hand hard enough to grind the bones against one another. “Quiet.”
“Come on, Nix. I couldn’t help it. Does he really think staying in this shithole is a good idea?”
Cowboy’s breathing was labored. “How much further?”
“Hard to say,” Peter said. “Thirteen stories down, on an angle. . . should be close now, I’m getting some fresh air.”
Almost as he spoke, the light around us changed. Although still dark, there were now layers to the darkness, and even better . . . “Fresh air,” I said. A year without it, and the smell had never
