Andie forced a smile. “You missed the handoff.”
“Who did you give it to?”
“A friend. She knows the city and is long gone.”
“You’re lying. No one else left the museum.”
“Didn’t they?”
He gripped her even harder, causing her knees to buckle. He held her up and said, “Who was it? Where did they go?”
She gasped in pain and needed a moment to find her voice. “It was Santa Claus. Try the North Pole, asshole.”
With a snarl, Jianyu snapped his fingers. The tall woman in the baseball cap who had been watching the front of the museum stepped forward holding a syringe. Andie struggled, but Jianyu held her tight as the woman jabbed Andie in the biceps with the needle. A warming sensation engulfed her.
“We’ll talk someplace more private,” Jianyu said, his words sending a chill through Andie.
Terrified of whatever drug they had given her, she fought like a desperate animal, trying to rake Jianyu’s eyes and knee him in the groin. Anything to get free. The last thing she remembered, before her world turned black, was his palm shooting forward to connect with the underside of her jaw.
Asheville 25
As Cal approached the Gothic Revival mansion on the edge of downtown Asheville just before nightfall, a purple haze shadowed the mountains ringing the city. Observing the abandoned house induced a flashback to Egypt, from when he and Andie had stood at the gate to the Belle Epoque estate that sheltered—if the AI avatar named Hypatia was to be believed—the surviving remnants of the Library of Alexandria. The memory made him wary, but also induced a stab of disappointment that Andie, attitude and infuriating stubbornness and all, was not by his side.
Cal thought the endless journey from Vietnam to Asheville might have given him an ulcer. He had barely slept on the flights, afraid to turn his back on the other passengers. Using the false ID Zawadi had provided, he had used all his skills to arrive undetected, including dressing as a Hasidic Jew for the journey, a disguise he had pieced together in Hoi An. Once he made it through the Asheville airport, he had changed to jeans, a baseball cap, and a save ferris T-shirt he had found along the way.
Forget Ferris—how about Save Cal?
He had splurged for a taxi and asked the driver to drop him at a sketchy public park near the old mansion. At every turn, he kept expecting a black van to roll up alongside them and disgorge a posse of Ascendants. But so far, so good.
Though the paint on the house was faded and peeling, a whimsical touch of teal remained on the eaves of the steeply pitched roof. He glanced around the street before climbing the iron fence and scurrying to the front porch. The neighborhood around the house was downtrodden, with boarded-up windows and people loitering on the corners, but it also seemed to be gentrifying. Cal had passed a French bakery and a cider bar on the way in. A bakery was one thing, but a cider bar? You might as well truck in the hipsters.
The front door was locked. He hopped over the side of the porch, waded through the weeds to the back of the house, and found a broken window. Once inside, it was evident that squatters had occupied the house for years. Condoms, fast-food wrappers, and drug paraphernalia littered the floor. The couch was sagging. Stains on the carpets and walls.
Nervous someone else was inside, he used the light on the prepaid phone he had picked up at the airport to make his way through the house and ensure he was alone. Rodent droppings were everywhere, emitting a god-awful smell. Some of the floorboards were so mushy he worried he would step right through.
He wished he could contact Dane for backup, but for that Cal needed a data plan. Maybe he could pick up an unlocked phone somewhere later that night. Feeling a strong compulsion to talk to another human being, he fought against the urge to call Andie. Even if she answered, someone might trace the call.
The place seemed truly abandoned. There were no clever artifacts or staircases leading to futuristic data storage rooms. Recalling the layout, he took a deep breath and made his way to the office of Waylan Taylor, the creepy psychologist who had once used the house as the Human Limits Testing Facility.
This dump could be used to test human limits all right—how low they can go.
The sizeable office had been picked clean, the drawers of the mahogany desk emptied. There was no other furniture in the room. Not even a trash can.
Cal set down his backpack and took out a crowbar he had purchased at a Home Depot on the way. The taxi driver had not complained about the delay. He was probably just happy Cal hadn’t taken an Uber.
After pushing the desk aside, Cal stood in the exact spot where he had seen the door in the promotional video. Before he struck the wall, he stood with the crowbar clenched in his hands, wondering what he would find. Maybe the urban explorer’s video had lied or was doctored. Maybe he had come all this way for nothing. He knew Andie might never forgive him for abandoning her. If anything happened to her, he might never forgive himself.
But he had to trust his instincts.
Well, here we go. With a grimace, he hefted the crowbar and tore into the Japanese woodblock–themed wallpaper, punching through the drywall on the first swing. Dane had never located the schematics, but judging from Cal’s own walk-through, a staircase was on the other side of that wall. He guessed an office closet—if
