“Yes, sir. I mean, no sir. We couldn’t get a good aim, sir.”
“I give you one simple order. Fetch the unarmed teenaged girl and escort her to the interrogation room. That does seem like an easy enough task, doesn’t it?”
Silence greeted those words as that was obviously a rhetoric question.
“Find her. And do it fast,” the British voice finally said in what was clearly both an order and a dismissal.
“Yes, sir.”
She heard two of them rush away in the same direction she was heading. The third pair of feet, however, continued back towards the sofa and chairs.
Sofia carefully let the ceiling fall into place again, grabbed the vase and stuffed it down the top of her sweater to be able to move faster. She needed to find a way out of here.
As she made her way across the ceiling, Sofia could sometimes hear people rushing by underneath her. She’d freeze and listen, but no one stopped to talk again so she didn’t risk taking another look.
She figured that if she continued in the same direction, sooner or later she would reach a wall. There should be a door or a window somewhere in that wall. Hopefully. She didn’t have any better ideas, anyway. Sooner or later she would find a way out.
She wasn’t sure what she would do once she got out, but hoped that divine inspiration would strike. Surely, she had made up for a lifetime of atheism with her intense praying during this last hour or so?
“NOOOOOOOOOO!”
The scream that echoed from below, made her jump and vase nearly slipped out her top. The ceiling creaked dangerously below her as Sofia clutched the vase to her chest and prayed some more.
When she didn’t go crashing through she let out the breath she’d been holding. That had been too close. She set off crawling again, wanting to get as far away from whatever that scream had come from as possible, when she heard it again and stopped.
Sofia wouldn’t describe herself as especially altruistic. She knew that she was as self-serving as most of humanity, but she was suddenly struck by the thought that it might as well have been her screaming her lungs out if she hadn’t managed to escape.
It could still become her, said a tiny voice in her head that wasn’t at all happy with what she was considering. It pointed out to her that wannabe heroes often end up true martyrs. Sofia ignored the small voice. She usually did and that might go some way to explain why she was in this mess.
She edged forward in the direction the screams were coming from. As they grew louder, she carefully lifted a piece of the inner-ceiling and pushed it aside so that she could see what was going on below. Her jaw dropped. What was he doing here?
18
Bashing Heads
Sofia swore silently as she took in the scene of what was happening in the room below her.
“Oh, if he’s the reason I’m here I’m going to cut him up and…” Sofia muttered to herself, but wait, someone was already doing that.
She pushed away more of the ceiling and risked dipping her head through the hole to glance around the room and see if there was anyone else lurking in the corners. It appeared empty except for the grey haired man who stood bent over Thomas brandishing a large knife and an overturned lamp on a table.
She was looking into what she could only assume was an interrogation room. She checked for the, as far as television series went, obligatory double mirror, but all she could see in form of surveillance was a camera focused on Thomas and the man trying to kill him.
Sofia secured the vase in her t-shirt and carefully lowered herself from the hole in the ceiling to the table. She wasn’t sure if she would be able to get back up again, but figured that was a later problem.
She winced as her muscles protested the movement, but she still managed to get down from the table to the floor. Slowly, she edged closer to the grey haired man, coming to a stop right behind him.
She hesitated, unsure how to proceed. The man was muttering to Thomas, the knife moving over his skin. She would have to disarm him. She would need to… Thomas screamed again, the man laughed in a super scary way and Sofia followed her instinct.
It turned out her instinct was been to bring the vase down over the old man’s head hard enough to knock him out. It might not be the most civil thing to do, but right then she didn't care about anything but making sure that he stopped trying to murder her classmate.
The man slumped to the floor and Sofia wasted no time getting to Thomas.
“Hey,” she whispered.
Thomas stared at her with wild, unseeing eyes and kept screaming.
“Oy!” Sofia hissed, terrified that someone would hear her.
When whispering didn’t get through to Thomas who kept screaming she slapped him hard in the face.
Thomas was hoarse from screaming and that freakishly large knife was getting close to certain parts he did not want to part with.
The man interrogating him had carefully cut away most of his clothes, all the while laughing and asking if Danny was sure he wouldn’t like to tell him when it was going to blow.
All Thomas could do was scream. Then someone smacked him in the face and instead of darkness he was looking into the green eyes Sofia Hansson. Thomas stared at her. How? Why? What the heck had been in that coffee?
“Are you okay or do I need to hit you again?” she asked him, looking as though she wouldn’t mind that at all.
Thomas stopped screaming. Seconds ago he had been about to have fundamental bits of himself cut off and now he was looking into the face of his former least favorite person in the world. It was the best face he’d seen in his life.
“What are you doing here?” he managed to ask once he was positive that she was not another hallucination.
Sofia raised her eyebrows, rolled her eyes and didn’t answer his question. He stopped grinning.
“We’ve got to go,” she said and not realizing that he was cuffed to the chair she tried to help him up. It hurt.
“Oh, dear,” she muttered and took a step back.
She looked him over before quickly looked away. Was she blushing? He looked down his body. Naked except for his boxer shorts and shoes. Great. As if this day hadn’t already far surpassed his worst nightmare.
Sofia went over to the man that had been interrogating him. Now that Thomas could see him, and the man was inexplicably unconscious, that he didn’t look intimidating at all. He looked old.
A moment later Sofia had found the keys and walked over to free him, efficient as usual. He’d never been happier about that.
“Get up and get over to the table,” she told him.
Thomas had no idea what she was talking about and normally he would deeply resent her giving him orders at all, especially in such a bossy tone, but he was still so incredibly grateful that she was there that he did what she told him.
She moved over to a table and climbed onto it, reaching for a hole in the ceiling he hadn’t noticed before. She placed a strange looking vase in the hole and, to his amazement, tried to heave herself up through the ceiling.
He could see her arms straining in the attempt, her bare feet wriggling. Eventually she lowered herself back to the table, panting.
“Why aren’t you wearing any shoes?” he asked her.
“Why aren’t you wearing any clothes?” she replied tersely.
“Yeah I am I… I’m wearing underwear.”
“Thank God.”
Sofia turned back to the hole and tried to pull herself up again.
“You can’t do that, you’re not strong enough,” Thomas told her bluntly, hurrying over to the table.
They needed to move before someone else came rushing into the room and cuffed him to that chair again. He doubted another class mate would conveniently turn up to save him if they caught him again.
“Yes I can, I just did,” she replied breathlessly, but she wasn’t getting anywhere.
“Here, let me…”
He crawled up on the table, took hold of her legs and pushed her up throu
gh the hole. Then he reached in and pulled himself through after her.
Had he been less terrified he would have been pleased with how well his muscles still worked after a day of being chained to a chair.
Sofia hurried to push the rectangular piece of the ceiling back and the world went black.
“Okay,” she said, still breathing hard. “That was unnecessary, but I appreciate the gesture.”
“It was not unnecessary,” Thomas said with indignation. Couldn’t she just say thank you?
“And you’re welcome for having your life saved,” she continued.
Thomas ground his teeth. Why, of all the people in the world, did she have to be the one to save him?
“Thank you,” he grumbled.
“You’re welcome.”
“What are you doing here anyway?” Thomas asked.
“Hush!” Sofia replied and now he could hear someone enter the room below them.
“Here, take hold of my ankle, we’re going this way. And please be quiet,” she said in a whisper.
Thomas set his jaw, rummaged around in the darkness and managed to locate her ankle. He pinched her, as if by accident, to pay her back for…everything. She returned the sentiment by kicking him in the face in a totally non-accidental way.
“I’m so sorry,” she hissed without a hint of remorse and began crawling.
“Yeah, right.”
Mr. Jones sipped his coffee. Things had taken an unexpectedly violent turn and he was positively shaking with excitement.
The players he’d brought in were turning out to be a lot more creative than he’d first anticipated. He’d willingly admit that he’d underestimated them. Especially the girl.
“Are you sure you want to go ahead with this?” Ms. Matoba asked him.
Mr. Jones glanced at her. Why would she ask him that. Couldn’t she see what was happening? Didn’t she understand what was going on here, what they were doing?
“Why would I want to stop? We’re changing the world.”
Ms. Matoba swallowed and he stared, transfixed at her throat as it moved. “Of course, but things are already getting out of… I mean, things are not going as planned.”
“Exactly! Isn’t it marvellous?” Mr. Jones said, looking back to the monitors.
“But, sir, we do not have complete control over the situation.”
Mr. Jones waved his hand dismissively. “Control is overrated.”
Someone cleared their throat behind him.
“Yes, Mr. Kudowski?”
“Do we know where this is going? I know we have a contingency plan, but she’s already surprised us. Twice.”
“Mm, she’s perfect,” Mr. Jones agreed.
“We can only maintain complete control while they’re still in this particular environment. Outside those walls…”
“They’re not getting outside the walls,” Ms. Matoba assured him. “We’ve made sure of that.”
“Hrrm,” Mr. Jones said. “We should rethink that.”
“What?” Ms. Matoba said just as Mr. Kudowski exclaimed “You can’t be serious!”
“Let’s spice it up. Leave them a few breadcrumbs,” Mr. Jones mumbled to himself.
“Help them pick the right path?” Ms. Hearning asked him, her expression as emotionless as usual.
“Precisely,” Mr. Jones agreed. “The right path.”
He turned back to the monitors, watching in fascination as his creation took on a life of its own.
19
What Hits the Fan
Sofia didn’t want to risk talking to Thomas in case she’d start shouting, so she concentrated on moving forward and tried not to think about why they were here.
Human trafficking wouldn’t have required an interrogation room, but on the other hand, they had been getting rid of Thomas’s clothes so… Sofia gave herself a mental slap. This line of thinking wasn’t helping.
Instead she tried to plan ahead for getting out of the building. Jumping out of a window was still the best she could come up with. She was not at all happy with this plan.
It was not simply a matter of what could go wrong, but more about the vast amount of things that would have to go right in order for them to escape that worried her.
She also knew that they were running out of time. Surely, their kidnappers were already reviewing the footage from the cameras installed in that interrogation room. Soon they’d know exactly where she and Thomas had gone.
When she heard screaming she should have just kept moving. That was what any half-intelligent person would have done. Thomas was perfectly capable of taking care of himself. To be honest she could not completely fault the old guy for wanting to tie him to a chair and chop him into pieces.
She listened to him crawling behind her, his hand warm around her ankle. Okay, so maybe she wouldn't chop him into pieces. But tie him to a chair? She grinned to herself and moved forward only to smack straight into a wall. Thomas face-planted into her backside.
“Ouch! What are you doing?” she whispered as loudly and angrily as she dared.
“Sorry, didn’t know you’d stopped,” he said, sounding grumpier than usual.
“Back off, will you?”
“You were the one who told me to grab your ankle,” he said defensively.
“Yes, my ankle.”
“I didn’t mean to crash into your a…”
“Hush!” Sofia interrupted, excitement replacing her earlier annoyance. “There’s a wall here. Let me check for it a window or a door.”
Thomas backed away so that Sofia could shift up a rectangle of the ceiling. It took her eyes a while to adjust to the sudden light, but when she could see again she saw men and women hurrying through a busy corridor.
They would never be able to get out unnoticed by all of those people. Her disappointment must have shown on her face because suddenly Thomas was right there.
“What is it?” he whispered.
Sofia gave a start. Her gaze shifted to that abominable mouth of his that was also uncomfortably close to her face and immediately pulled away. Instead of answering she shook her head and pointed into the corridor, edging away further so that Thomas could see for himself.
Black clad figures with large guns were running this way and that, looking like oversized ants. They were accompanied by men and women wearing suits.
The suits appeared to be unarmed, but somehow that didn’t calm her. The way they carried themselves made her certain that the only reason they didn’t have guns was that they didn’t need them. Thomas whispered a curse.
Thomas's whole body ached. Not so much from the punches as from falling over with the chair all the time. All he wanted to do now was to stop. Stop crawling, stop trying, and stop breathing. There wasn’t any point to it anyway. The view he’d gotten of the men and women below them told him as much.
Sofia didn’t say anything as he put the rectangle back into place so that they were once again surrounded by complete darkness. Instead she moved closer to him. That in itself was be a sure sign that she was worried.
“Why are we here?” she suddenly whispered and it bothered him that he wasn’t able to see her face in the darkness.
He shrugged, before remembering she wouldn’t be able to see that. “I have no idea. They must have gotten hold of the wrong person,” he answered quietly, hoping the people in hallway beneath them were too busy with whatever they were doing to hear them.
“Why?”
“I can’t recall that I have done anything that anyone would like to interrogate me about. And that… man… kept calling me Danny.”
“What did they want to know?”
Thomas rubbed at his eyes. “They asked me when it was going to blow.”
“When what was going to blow?”
“I don’t know! They said they knew all about Op 92 and just needed to know when it was going to go off.”
Sofia sat quiet for a while, but he had noticed that her quiet periods never lasted for long. He counted down. Three, two, one
…
“Where do you think we are?” she asked him.
It was like he was back in the interrogation room.
“I don’t know. I suppose we’ve been kidnapped by a terrorist group or something.”
“Wouldn’t a terrorist group already know when it’s going to blow? I mean, on account of them being the 'blowers'?” she sighed. “Is that even a word?”
Thomas was fairly sure it wasn’t a word, no, but he didn’t care about her vocabulary right now. They needed to focus on finding a way to get out of here. They could think about the rest later. Or not. Not thinking about this ever again was fine by him.
“Well, I guess, maybe, yeah,” he said and leaned back. His head hit a large piece of metal that went ‘clong’.
“Ouch!” he said, rubbing his head.
“Quiet!” Sofia whispered angrily as though he had hit himself on purpose.
Thomas bit back an equally angry retort while massaging his throbbing head. What was this? Was he being abused by inanimate objects now as well? Then something struck him on a more metaphysical level.
“Sofia? Could you raise the floor or ceiling or whatever we’re on again, please? Thanks.”
Suddenly he wanted to laugh. The metal thing he had hit was a ventilation pipe and Thomas knew that in the end of such a pipe was a barred hole to let fresh air in.
At least he hoped that was the case. It always worked like that in the movies. At least one of those films had to be inspired by reality. Right? He let his hand run along the pipe. They needed to find a way in.
That turned out to be easier than he’d anticipated. It hardly took them a minute to find a lose grid and make their way inside. Sofia, to his great surprise, didn’t protest so long as she got to lead the way as he “had no sense of direction whatsoever”. What exactly did he need a good a sense of direction when they were crawling through a vent leading one way? Not that he cared, he was just happy they were getting out of here.
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