“Don’t worry about that now.”
“What about my mother? Is she… is she dead?”
“Our assumption is that your mother is being ransomed by Alexandru.”
“Ransomed for what?”
Frankenstein looked at the boy with great sadness. “For you, Jamie.”
The monster and the boy sat in silence for a long time, letting those three terrible words sink in, until eventually Frankenstein stood up. His shadow engulfed Jamie entirely, and he reached a hand down to the boy, who took it and let himself be pulled to his feet.
Frankenstein led him along the wooden path and out of the rose garden. They walked in silence across the vast field toward the low dome until they crossed the empty runway and Jamie finally spoke again.
“What do they call all this?” he asked, his voice thick with emotion.
My mother. Oh God, my mother. The thing in the gray coat has my mother.
“This?” Frankenstein replied, sweeping an arm to indicate the huge circular base. “This is Classified Military Installation 303-F. But everyone calls it the Loop, for reasons I’m sure you’re clever enough to work out.”
Jamie glanced around at the enormous circular base and smiled. “Not the base,” he said. “The organization. What’s the organization called?”
Frankenstein smiled. “I’ll let Admiral Seward tell you that,” he answered. “I’m to take you to him now.”
“He’s going to have to wait.”
“And why is that?”
“Because I want to see the girl who tried to kill me yesterday. Right now.”
12
Frankenstein pressed H on the panel in the elevator, and they began to descend. The huge man looked straight ahead, his mouth set in a thin line, and Jamie knew that he was angry.
The elevator doors opened onto a round chamber. In front of Jamie were a thick airlock door and an intercom panel. Apart from that, the walls were bare. The elevator doors began to hiss shut behind him, and he whirled around. Frankenstein was still standing in the elevator, looking at him. He lunged forward and stuck his hand in the narrowing gap.
“What are you doing?” he shouted. “You can’t leave me down here on my own!”
Frankenstein replied in a tight voice full of edges.
“You wanted to come down here. I didn’t tell you to. Instead I have to go and tell Admiral Seward that you’ll deign to come and see him when it suits you.”
Jamie stared at the huge man. When the doors began to close again, he shoved a hand between them, but he said nothing. He just stared at Frankenstein, who returned his gaze.
When the doors hissed for the third time, Jamie let them close. As Frankenstein’s face disappeared behind the sliding metal he thought he saw the monster’s face soften and the wide lips part, as if he were going to say something. But then the doors clicked together, and he was gone.
Jamie turned away from the elevator and examined the intercom panel. There was a small button at the bottom of the metal rectangle, and he pressed it and waited. He was about to press it again when a voice suddenly emanated from the intercom, making him jump.
“Code in.”
Jamie leaned toward the intercom and spoke into the metal grid.
“I don’t know what that means,” he said, and was embarrassed by the tremor in his voice.
“State your name.”
“Jamie Carpenter.”
There was a long pause.
“Proceed,” the voice said, eventually, and the huge airlock door unlocked with a rush of air.
Jamie took the handle in his hand, braced himself for the weight of the huge structure and pulled. The door slid open smoothly, and he stumbled backward, gripping the handle to stop himself from falling. The door was as light as a feather.
There must be some sort of counterbalance. I bet you couldn’t open it with dynamite if it was still locked.
He stepped through the door and into a white room not much bigger than a decent-sized cupboard. There was a second door opposite the one he had just come through, which he pulled shut behind him, and waited for the second set of locks to disengage.
Nothing happened.
Panic jumped from nowhere and settled in Jamie’s throat. He was locked in, trapped in this tiny space, an unknowable distance beneath the ground. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and suddenly it seemed that the walls were closer than they had been when he walked in. He put his hands out and touched the walls with his fingertips, waiting for the sensation of movement, but there was none.
Then the lights went out, and he clamped his teeth together so he wouldn’t scream.
A second later, he was bathed in purple ultraviolet light, as small hatches in the walls opened and flooded the tiny chamber with a rushing white gas.
Then it was over, as quickly as it had begun. The lights came back on, and the second door clunked open. Jamie threw himself against it, pushing it open with his shoulder, spilling out of the- coffin, it was like being in a coffin -room.
He gripped his knees with his hands, doubled over, breathing hard. When the panic had subsided, he stood up and looked around. He was in a long, narrow corridor, brightly lit by square fluorescent lights set flush into the ceiling. To his right was a flat white wall; to his left, a small office behind thick transparent plastic. Thirty feet down the corridor, he could see square floor-to-ceiling holes that had to be the cells, running in parallel down the length of the cellblock. A white line was painted onto the floor on each side, about three feet in front of the cells.
He turned to the office. Behind the plastic, a soldier, wearing the now-familiar all-black uniform, sat at a metal desk. He was looking at Jamie with a strange expression on his face, an uncomfortable mix of anger and pity. Jamie supposed the latter was as a result of what had happened to his dad; he did not know what he had done to elicit the former. But when the man spoke, his voice carried no hint of conflict, just the clipped vowels and tight consonants of anger.
“You here to see the new one?” he asked.
Jamie nodded.
“She’s at the end on the left.”
Jamie thanked the man and turned toward the cells, but the guard spoke again.
“I’m not finished,” he said. “There are rules down here, no matter what your name is. Understand?”
Jamie turned back to the office, his face flushing red with anger. The guard saw this, and smirked.
“Oh, you’ve heard of rules, have you?” he said. “Bet you learned about them from your dad. That right?”
“What’s your problem?” snapped Jamie, and the guard flushed a deep crimson. He lifted himself halfway out of his seat, his eyes fixed on Jamie’s, then appeared to think better of it, and sat back into the chair.
“Don’t pass them anything, don’t tell them anything about yourself, don’t step across the white line,” he said. “Press the alarm next to her cell if there’s trouble. If you’re lucky, someone might come.” With that, he looked away. Jamie walked past the office and between the first two cells. They were empty, but a surge of panic shot through him when he examined the one to his left. The entire front wall of the cell was open; no bars, no glass, nothing. He looked down the corridor and saw that all the cells appeared to be the same. He stepped back to the plastic-fronted office and the guard spoke immediately, without looking up.
“It’s ultraviolet light,” he said, his voice utterly disinterested. “We can pass through it, they can’t.”
