As we head toward the office, Jack crosses the interior space several times, obviously looking for something. By the time we make it to the doorway, he’s standing in front of a reception desk, holding a tablet. “This is the only one that wasn’t set to auto-lock. And it doesn’t appear to be fingerprint protected.”
I frown at the device. “Fingerprint protected?”
“Like the guards’ guns,” he elaborates. “And presumably any shuttle that belongs to Universal Authority. You can’t operate them unless your fingerprints are authorized. Security is pretty lax here, but we’re still not going to be able to fire a laser pistol, access classified areas, or fly a guard shuttle.”
“We don’t think the medical ships are locked down like that,” Kat explains. “Because they belong to the recipients, not to Universal Authority.”
“So, what is he doing with that thing?” I nod at the tablet Jack is tapping on.
“Accessing the medical monitors,” Jack explains. “So we can tell the system to apply one command to all one of them at once. In this case, the euthanasia command.”
“What will that do to them, exactly?” I ask as I shuffle forward, so I can see the tablet better. I’m leaning less on Kat now, and I feel a little stronger with every step.
“They’ll fall asleep—truly asleep, not just paralyzed—then their hearts will stop. It’ll be peaceful and painless.” Jack shrugs as he navigates a digital menu. “Death is the one mercy they offer donors, in this place.”
“They don’t seem to offer it in a very timely manner,” I say.
“Agreed. But we’re about to fix that.” He holds the tablet out to us, and a prompt on-screen asks if we’re sure we want to carry out the command. I look from him to Kat, who is staring up at me with beautiful, big blue eyes.
“It’s your call,” she says, maintaining a firm grip on my elbow. “You’re the only one of us in the position to speak for them.”
And I believe with all my heart that this is what they would want, if given a choice. Because this is what I would want. But theoretical mercy is one thing; it’s an entirely different thing to actually push the button. To be responsible for the extinguishing of several dozen lives, all at once.
“It’s now or never,” Jack says. “The lab coats could be back any second.”
“Okay.” I angle myself so that I can see through the open doorway, visually acknowledging all of the souls I’m about to free. “Rest in peace,” I whisper. Then I tap the button.
The tablet beeps, and an instant later, a chorus of answering beeps echoes from the monitors on the main floor.
It’s done.
I exhale slowly, trying to focus on the release I’ve just given them. On the peace they will hopefully find.
Jack takes the tablet from me and taps quickly through another menu. “I’ve turned off all of the hallway cameras in this building. As soon as security figures that out, they’ll turn them back on. But this should give us a few minutes. And now we really have to go.” He sets the tablet on the reception desk and turns to Kat, brow furrowed, frame tense. “After this, if they find us, I think being sent to gen pop is a mercy we can no longer count on.” He grabs my other arm, and together, they half-pull me down the hallway running through the center of the suite of offices and medical labs. To my utter humiliation, I’m winded before we make it to the door.
I used to run several kilometers a day!
I want to literally sweep Kat off her feet and rescue her from the butcher and her psychotic medical staff. But that’s not in the cards. At least, not until I’ve been out of bed for more than five minutes.
“Guys?” Kat says as behind us, footsteps echo onto the main floor.
“Shit,” Jack breathes. “Let’s go.”
Kat tugs me carefully into the hall, and we take off as fast as I can manage to make my feet move. Nausea washes over me, and the whole building seems to spin around me.
“Hang in there,” Kat whispers. “We’ll find you some place to sit down.”
That’s the last thing I want, after weeks spent in bed. But she’s right. That’s exactly what I need.
“Um… That way.” Jack points to the right, and they veer me in that direction.
I let them lead me down several hallways, though Kat seems to be just as dependent upon Jack’s directions as I am. And finally, Jack leads us through a push-to-open door, into a stairwell. “Shit…” I breathe. “I suppose an elevator’s out of the question?” With two healing incisions and no recent exercise, stairs feel like they’ll require a Herculean effort.
“There are cameras in the elevators, and the buttons are fingerprint sensitive. If we try to take an elevator, it’ll produce a record of exactly where we went.”
“Stairs it is,” Kat says. “Don’t worry. We’ll help you.”
I let go of Jack’s arm and turn to her, looking down into her beautiful blue eyes. “And I’ll let you. But in case this goes wrong, I want you to know that you’ve already helped me. Even if I die here today, I won’t have a single regret. And not just because you saved me from dying on the operating table, missing half my organs.”
“Well then…why?” she asks, frowning up at me.
“Because I got to see you, after hearing your voice for so long. Because I got to hold your hand. Because I got to do this.” I lean in, fighting through vertigo so that I can press a kiss against her cheek.
Before I can pull away, her arms slide around my neck, and she presses a soft kiss against my lips. “I don’t have any regrets either,” she whispers.
And suddenly I want nothing more in the world than to show her that I can damn well make it up one fucking flight of stairs.
“Okay, you two.” Jack takes my left arm in a professional nurse’s hold. “Let’s find you a room, so you’ll have somewhere to go when I tell you to get a room.”
I ignore the obvious envy in his voice, because he really is a good guy.
With their help, we make it up the stairs, and though I’m huffing and puffing and clutching the still-healing incision in my abdomen by the time we get to the second floor, I’m actually a little impressed by our speed. And relieved that no one has found us yet.
Again, Jack opens the door and peeks into the hall. Then he closes the door and turns to us. “It’s very quiet,” he reports. “The operating and recovery rooms are to the right, and one of the ORs is occupied. You can’t see it from here, but I can hear Dr. Borden giving directions to her staff. Which means there are plenty of witnesses in that direction.”
“So…now what?” Kat says.
“If this floor has the same layout as the first floor, it’s a big rectangle. Which means we can go through the door on the left and approach the recovery rooms from that direction, without passing the operation rooms. The downside to that option is that I have no idea what’s through that door.”
“Doesn’t sound like we have much of a choice, if the butcher and her staff are down the hall to the right,” I say.
Kat nods in agreement. So Jack leads us out of the stairwell and to the left, into a metal-walled hallway that looks just like all the hallways on the first floor.
A few feet from the stairwell, the hallway ends in another oversized, swing-open door, with a press-bar. The kind you can open by backing into it, so that your spine presses the bar, if your hands are full.
“Here goes everything…” Kat carefully presses on the bar. “What the hell…?” she breathes as she peeks into the hallway beyond.
“What is it?” I whisper.
“Come on. It’s all clear—sort of.” She pushes the door open slowly, clearly trying to avoid the squeal of hinges, and Jack maintains his hold on my arm as he helps me through. But then his grip goes slack, and I look up to find him staring ahead in bewilderment.
I follow his gaze as the door closes at my back, and suddenly I understand their reactions.
The walls of this hallway are completely transparent, like the long exterior wall on the main floo
r. From what I understand, having listened to Kat’s chatter for several weeks, they’re made of a special kind of alloy that can be rendered clear or opaque with one press of a button. Or maybe a verbal command.
Through these transparent walls, on both sides of the hallway, we can see a series of what appear to be bare-bones hotel suites, each comprised of a tiny living area, a bedroom, and an attached bathroom. Each suite is entirely exposed by the clear walls, including the bathrooms. It’s like we’re walking down the center of a life-sized dollhouse.
The first couple of suites are empty and unlit, except for a single bulb burning in the bathroom, but I can tell from light shining into the hall farther down that at least three of the suites are occupied.
“Are these recipient rooms?” Kat asks. “Are you sure those are in another building?”
“Positive,” Jack whispers, while we stand frozen. “I don’t know what these are, but there’s no way recipients wealthy enough to travel out here for a transplant would consent to this kind of observation.”
“Spying,” Kat says. “That’s what this is. The question is, who are they spying on?”
“There are cameras.” I point out cameras on the hallway ceiling. “But they’re all aimed through the walls, into those…suites.” Not one of them is pointing at the passage itself, which is essentially a transparent hotel hallway.
“Let’s go.” Kat shudders, clearly creeped out by this setup. So we head down the hall toward the door, all of us tense and silent, unsure what we’re going to find in the occupied suites at the end of the corridor.
My worst-case scenario includes donors like myself, who’re so horribly mutilated they can’t be kept on the main floor, so I actually exhale in relief when I see the normal-looking young woman sitting in an armchair, in the first of the occupied rooms. She’s reading something on a tablet, curled up with a blanket on her lap. The scene looks almost cozy, if not for the fact that she clearly has no idea we can see through one wall of her room.
Evidently that alloy can be made transparent in only one direction.
“What the hell are they doing here?” Kat whispers, even though it’s obvious that the girl can’t hear us.
I turn to find her watching another young woman in a room across the hall.
“Why the hell would UA lock up these women in—” Kat bites off the end of her question when the girl who was reading stands and makes her way toward the bathroom. Exposing a distinctive, round belly.
She’s pregnant.
“Oh my god,” Kat breathes. “Why would they lock up pregnant women?”
I turn for a closer look at the girl across the hall, and sure enough, she’s pregnant too, though not as far along as the one now relieving her bladder, obviously unaware that we can see her.
“That one’s occupied too.” Jack points toward the end of the hall, where light from a third suite shines into the hallway.
“This place is fucked up,” I whisper as we continue down the corridor. Then Jack stops suddenly, staring through the wall at the last girl locked up in what amounts to a glass cage.
“Penny,” he whispers. “Oh my god.”
“Wait, that’s Penny?” Kat lets go of my arm and steps closer to the wall for a better look at a brunette sleeping on a narrow bed, on top of the blanket.
Jack nods. “Tinsley said she was released into the general population.”
“Yeah, that’s what Ava told me.”
“Who’s Penny?” I study her through the wall.
“The girl who was here before me. She slept in my bunk and worked with Jack on the main floor, until she was supposedly sent to gen pop.” Kat frowns as she stares at the sleeping woman. “Though that was clearly a lie.”
Penny’s turned on her side, facing us, but as we watch, she rolls onto her back, and we have a good view of her stomach in profile. Her bump is small, but definitely there.
All three of these caged birds are pregnant.
“What the hell?” Kat whispers, clearly stunned.
“Come on.” Jack takes my arm again and helps me toward the door at the end of the hall. “Katerina. Let’s go.”
A second later, she takes my other arm, and Jack opens the door to check beyond it. “All clear,” he says. “There’s another stairwell and a bank of elevators a few feet to the right, then the hallway turns back toward the operating rooms. The recovery rooms should be right around that corner. The first one should be the one we want, coming from this direction.”
Kat turns to me. “Are you ready for this?”
I nod. I have no other choice.
She grabs my hand. Then she shoves the door open.
10
KAT
Beau’s hand feels warm in mine, and I swear his grip gets stronger with every second. Despite the danger we’re in and the weird shit we just saw, his touch is a comfort, and I can’t help thinking about the way his lips felt against mine when I kissed him. How right that moment seemed, in spite of where we were and how we got there.
As we approach the corner where the hallway turns right, Beau squeezes my hand and points up. I follow his gaze toward the camera mounted near the ceiling. There’s no red power light, which means the guards haven’t yet discovered that Jack turned the cameras off, probably because they’re all distracted by Tinsley’s mysterious collapse.
Without those cameras, they won’t be able to see where we went, after we left the main floor. So far, so good.
Jack peeks around the corner, then waves us forward. “I think this is it,” he whispers, stopping in front of the first door on the right.
I take a deep breath, then I push the door open just a crack. The lights are off and the room appears empty, so I open the door wider to let both guys in. “Wow,” I whisper as I take my first look around. “This is a recovery room?” It’s more like a hotel suite. We’re standing in a small living area, where the couch and arm chair both obviously fold out into beds, and through an open doorway I can see a more traditional medical space with an adjustable hospital bed and several pieces of medical equipment, including a monitor like the one Beau was hooked up to on the main floor.
“You’d have to be wealthy to be able to afford to fly all the way out here for a transplant,” Beau says, still holding my hand. “And I guess wealthy people expect certain accommodations.”
“This is only the beginning,” Jack says. “I hear the recipient residential building is like some kind of luxury hotel.”
“Wow,” I whisper. A red light near the ceiling catches my gaze and I look up to see another security camera. “I really hope Nan was right about that looped footage.”
“We should know soon enough,” Beau says.
“He needs water and rest.” Jack tosses his head toward the bedroom. “Why don’t you get him settled in there?”
I help Beau toward the hospital bed, but he hesitates a few feet away. “Lying down is the last thing I want, after weeks of being unable to move.”
“How about if I lie down with you?” I give him an inviting smile.
Beau’s left brow rises. “Well, if you insist.” He sits on the bed, then scoots over to make room for me on the narrow mattress. “If that had been an option on the main floor, I might have been willing to hang out there a little longer.”
“I wouldn’t have.” I sit next to him, then I recline on my side with my head propped in my hand, while he lies on his back, looking up at me. “You’re going to have to give your body some time to adjust. You’ve had two major surgeries in the past few weeks.”
“Speaking of which…” Jack comes through the door holding a pneumatic injector. “Let me take a look at those incisions.”
“He’s a nurse,” I assure Beau. “At least, he was before prison.”
Beau folds his hands behind his head and lets Jack pull his shirt up to expose abs that are still surprisingly well-defined, after weeks spent in bed.
“Your first incision looks great. Completely healed,” Jack says. “And this new
one’s doing pretty well too, thanks to that regeneration accelerant they gave you. Which I happen to have snagged another dose of, while I was getting the sedative for Tinsley.” He holds up the injector. “I’m going to give it to you now, because the better shape you’re in, the easier it’ll be for us to get to one of those ships.
Beau nods, and Jack holds the injector to his upper arm. “This might sting for a second.” He presses the button on the end with his thumb, and there’s a soft hiss as the medication is delivered.
Beau doesn’t even flinch. “Thanks,” he says. “For all of this. For risking your life to help me.”
Jack shrugs, as if that’s no big deal. “I’m getting something out of this too, you know.” But we both know he would have helped us even if there were no way for us to take him with us. “Get some rest.”
Jack pockets the empty injector and closes the door on his way into the living area, giving us privacy for the first time since I first “met” Beau on the main floor, more than a month ago.
“This feels weird,” he whispers, even though there’s no one else around to hear. I understand the impulse. Just the idea of speaking to him at a normal volume feels dangerous. “I want to touch you, but I feel like I’m still not allowed to. Like someone might catch us if I even move.”
Warmth blossoms in my face. “You want to touch me?”
“I’ve wanted that more than anything, since the moment I first heard your voice. Even more than I wanted to be out of that bed. I wanted to be able to move, just so I could do this.” He reaches up and gently tucks a strand of hair behind my ear.
“That’s it?” But I can’t stop smiling. “That’s all you wanted to do?”
“That’s just a start.” His hand slides behind my neck and he tugs me down until my mouth meets his again.
His lips are soft against mine, but his hand on my neck feels strong. His strength is coming back quickly. Thank goodness.
“Oh my god,” he murmurs against my mouth. “I dreamed about this.”
“Really?”
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