"This must be the place." I draw my gun and lean forward.
"Yeah…" He focuses on landing the aerocar, hovering before he takes us into a jerky vertical drop. On the pad below, an identical security vehicle sits empty with its engines off. No one else is anywhere in sight.
I retrieve the communication device from my pocket and tell Luther we're preparing to land.
"Milton and Samson have managed to commandeer three of the aerocars. The other pilots decided to turn back, and we let them go," he says. "Entering the coordinates to your location now. Should be airborne shortly."
I advise him to use the same strategy Erik employed to get through port security as fast as possible.
"Smart fellow," Luther says. "I wonder where he gets it from."
I glance at Erik as we touch down gently, more or less, on the landing pad. His natural affinity for piloting vehicles may rival his biological father's. Samson never met anything he couldn't drive. "I have some idea."
The hanger roof closes over us like the petals of a massive plasteel flower, sealing us inside for a decontamination procedure that rocks our vehicle with blasts of pressurized air for well over a minute. At the same time, the tower itself recedes into the ground, rumbling with vibrations that travel through the floor to my seat.
With a violent shudder, our descent halts. An elevator door opens at the far end of the hanger, and two figures step out, followed by more than a dozen others. They stop and stare at us as we exit our vehicle.
"She's done it!" Erik takes off in bounding leaps to meet the people at the elevator. Despite being thirty years his senior, I have no trouble keeping up with him. "You two have a lot of catching up to do," he says, introducing me to a young woman in a white bodysuit.
She looks like the version of me who stepped out of that Sector 50 bunker three decades ago. Before I joined Mother Lairen, Rehana, Shechara, and all of my sisters in a rocky climb up into our cave-sweet-home.
"You must be Sera." I smile at her with instant affection I can't restrain. She strikes me as a very confident and capable young woman. I can't help but be honored that she shares my genes.
"We have the same eyes," she says, studying my face for a moment and seeming to like what she sees. "Some DNA too, I'll bet."
"We have little time," says the injured security clone next to her. Without its helmet, its exposed face is a young Dr. Solomon Wong's—covered in dried blood from a nasty head wound.
"Dunn's right," Sera says. "Get them into those vehicles."
The seventeen young men and women behind her wear matching bodysuits and lost looks on their faces. The clone gestures for them to follow, but instead, they glance at each other in confusion.
"Where is our sister?" they murmur. "Erik, where is Arienna? We were expecting her, too. And where is Dr. Wong? Sera said—"
"We're going to the Revelation Banquet!" Erik says with a broad smile, reaching into his pockets and retrieving handfuls of EMP discs. "Here you go. Take one of these party favors, and make your way to either of the waiting aerocars. Don't delay. We have all sorts of fun activities planned for your entertainment!"
As he hands a disc to each of them mid-stride, they frown curiously and keep walking, following the injured security clone.
"Wait a minute—what happened?"
"Why am I offline?"
They murmur among themselves as the discs disable their neural implants.
"What's wrong with my augments?"
"All part of the fun," Erik calls after them. "Quickly now, everybody aboard!" He herds the last of them toward the vehicles and turns to Sera, keeping his voice low. "Dr. Wong?"
She nods, heading toward the aerocar that was already here. The security clone hands her an activated surveillance drone, and she gives it a pat as one might a pet. Then she tosses it high into the air.
"Wong's behind all of this. The facility, the plan to capture us and put us into cryo-sleep for centuries." She repeats the process with a second drone, and both units fly in separate directions, scanning the hangar for threats.
"Centuries?" Erik stares at her.
"Cryo-sleep..." I echo. "So he's planning something for the future."
"The end of the Ten Domes," Sera says, reaching into the back of her aerocar and pulling out a heavy plasteel apparatus. It slides to the floor with a clunk, and she climbs into the thing, folding it around herself like an exoskeleton. Once she's buckled in place, she tests it by hopping and throwing a few punches. The power-suit whines as it triples the impact of her movements. "He wants to restart civilization."
These government scientists never learn. "They tried the same thing with us, forty years ago. Now all that's left of our Sectors are ruins for your raiders to scavenge."
"Why would they need to scavenge anything at all?" Erik asks. "The Domes are self-sustaining, supplying us with everything we could ever need."
I wince at that. From what Captain Mutegi told us, Eurasia has never been as self-sufficient as it claims. For decades, it has relied on the goods and supplies pillaged by raiders sent all over the globe. Everything they've found has been stripped down, mulched, and repurposed as raw materials and foodstuffs for the citizens of Eurasia to enjoy.
"Another lie from your government." I pat him on the shoulder. "Something else that needs to change."
Sera nods. "Our people deserve to know the truth—about a whole lot of things."
The elevator door slides open, and without warning, countless Dr. Wongs pour out in flailing white lab coats, wielding the same Eurasian pistols Sera and I carry. They start firing immediately, hunching their shoulders and aiming high, knowing better than to hit any members of the Twenty.
I return fire, ducking around the side of Sera's aerocar where Erik joins me. The power of the weapon in my hands is impressive. A single shot blows a hole straight
