Beside Dade, Roan scanned the rooms. Roan’s face had gone taut with narrowed eyes, and his mouth was pulled into a thin line. A string of curses punctuated the tense pause.
Venz came on the comm line. He spoke fast, his voice high with excitement as he asked Dade to explain everything he saw.
When Dade finally paused, Venz said, “You’re going to have to do a slide-load. Since there’s nowhere to uplink, we’ll have to use a digi-stream.”
“I thought you couldn’t get into the system?” Dade asked.
“I can’t, but you’re local. You can send a signal out so that I can snag the server. I’ll get you a code. Hang on while I set up a digi-stream transfer.”
Dade’s heart beat in his ears while he waited. His hands felt numb. And then as Venz read off the code, he forced his fingers to type it in as fast as it was relayed to him. After several lines of code, he took a single deep breath and sent the connector. There was a pause during which Dade felt like his insides were suspended.
Finally, the visiscreen registered an upload in progress.
The worm took longer to transfer than Dade thought it would. Lines of code crawled along the screen. The percentage slowed as time ticked by.
It didn’t help that Nastasia constantly tracked their declining time. “Six minutes.”
“Okay,” Dade said under his breath, frustrated. At five minutes, they’d be locked out of the system.
Mina and Saben showed up then. Mina came jogging in while Saben had his blast-phaser pulled low, walking backward. He stood at the door to the unit tower as Mina stepped inside. From this point on, the four of them needed to stick together in case anything went sideways.
She looked around at the two bound guards unconscious on the floor, to the scrolling numbers in front of Dade. She nodded. “Good job.”
“I got the room number,” Roan said. His sounded relieved, and some of his swagger reappeared.
“Excellent. Get the patient file too,” Mina said. “Make sure to get all the notes and a list of everything that was done to her.”
Roan’s eyebrows went high even as he began downloading the information. “I thought this was a grab.”
“It is. But you never know when information will be useful. Better to have it if we need it.” Mina stepped up between them and began to unlock all of the rooms.
In the hallway, Dade heard the swish-swish-swish of the opening metal doors. There was no movement at first. Dade wondered if the patients were too broken to escape. Then he began to see people, cautious at first, peering around the door frames as if they expected to get hit.
The worm still wasn’t finished uploading. They had thirty seconds before they would be locked out of the system. He’d done all that he could and still didn’t know if they’d make it.
Nastasia sounded down the final seconds. “Three, two—”
The system dinged the completion of the uploaded worm.
“One.” Then Nastasia said, “Second phase is a go. Five minutes left until govie reinforcements arrive.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Arden waited until she heard the blast from outside the CRC before they moved. The explosion shook the area. The loud boom reverberated through the metal wall that they clung to. Their limbs stretched like stars. It shook her core as it moved through her, rattling her nerves as much as her body.
They were lodged in the air shaft. Arms and legs extended, pushing against the metal and clinging by grips from their gloves and boots, squeezing and pressing until the shaking stopped.
The second they stabilized, Arden released the suction on her gloves and toed loose her boots, then began to slide down the shaft, her hands and feet still pressed against the metal. She fell fast, gaining speed. Arden pushed outward with her hands and feet to slow her momentum. She felt every bit of the heat and burn, from both the friction and the strain on her muscles.
In the lead position, she was aware of the small window of time they had. They all had to hit the first doors before they began to close. Excitement thrummed from the near impossibility of it.
The halo-glasses in her mask overlaid a projection map to the air-ducting system. Its scrolling feed kept her in sync with the ducts she passed. On one side she had a digital read of their time clock, below that a projected countdown in feet to her target goal. It gave her a digital readout of how fast she was traveling and how many more seconds till she hit the offshoot.
They approached a corner where the ductwork turned into the building. It was a steep angle. At the rate they were dropping, difficult to maneuver. Arden pushed harder against the ductwork, feeling the drag. She couldn’t miss the turn. There would be no time to climb their way back up. And if she continued sliding down this duct, they’d end up too far away from the door to the inner circle.
She was ready for the transition to throw her body off its trajectory. The burn registered with a greater intensity of pain. She could no longer ignore it. Her muscles felt like they were turning to jelly. She just needed to hang on another fifteen seconds.
Arden slowed even more, pushing with everything she had. At the duct, she stepped her foot out so that it would solidly hit the bottom and then allowed the momentum of her fall to carry her forward, sliding into the metal hole. Once inside, she twisted herself into a ball, then moved around to face the opposite way. It was tricky, she being tall and the space tight. Arden grunted with the effort.
Knowing this had to be done fast, she forced herself to twist out of the pretzel position she was in. Her breath was a hot cloud as it recycled back on her through the air-breather. The feeling of claustrophobia made her skin crawl. She wiggled and jerked and got herself situated.
Then she began to crawl as fast as she was able. Behind her, she heard the others moving, righting themselves as she had and crawling forward after her.
Traveling through the vent system and into the CRC set off all kinds of internal building alarms. Had the plan relied on infiltrating through the vents to gain access, they would have been stopped before they’d begun. But with the alarms already triggered, and the other group involved in a firefight in the outer ring of the building, it would be enough of a distraction to get them to the first inside ring door. They still had to be as quiet as possible. Even with the alarms blaring, if anyone heard them, they could easily shoot phase-fire into the ductwork.
Niall crawled directly behind her. His panting sounded loud in their metal coffin. He was too out of shape for this mission. Annem and Coco brought up the rear.
Her brother was slowing them down. She didn’t know why he’d insisted on coming, but it hadn’t been her call. And Mina had said that he needed to be there. Ever since the job had started and they’d gotten into position, he’d acted manic. There was a determination about him she hadn’t seen in years. It struck her as odd. He hadn’t been willing to share any information the entire time he’d been in the hideout and yet had volunteered to come to the CRC with them without so much as a blink of hesitation.
Arden didn’t trust him. He was up to something.
While Arden tracked their way through the maze of steel twists, Coco and Annem were planting sleeping-gas bombs inside the ventilation system. This was the reason Venz had been assigned to their group. He had been unable to get the precise air-shaft coordinates to this part of the ventilation system prior to their infiltration. He switched back and forth between Annem and Coco, giving them instructions while directing Arden through the maze of metal. Using the feed they sent him, Venz told Annem and Coco where to place the sleeping bombs so they would have the most coverage once the air filter kicked on. It was a lot of guesswork. Arden just hoped Venz chose correctly, because they didn’t have another shot at this.
Venz was still speaking with Annem and Coco when Arden came to a section where she didn’t know which way to turn.
Niall crawled up behind her. “Make a right.” His direction was decisive and confident, and sounded exactly like it had when he’d been the Lasair leader.
She didn’t question the order, her body already turning into the adjoining duct. It was like old times, easy to follow his orders. Trusting that Niall knew the plan, that he had it figured out ten steps ahead.
Where had they gone wrong, the two of them? She still loved him, but their relationship felt different. Cautious. Deep down, she knew that he’d fail her again because his priorities were always different than hers.
At the next vent, she stopped to get a location reading. She scanned between the grate to get a visual of the hall they were perched over. Relieved when it appeared they were moving in the right direction.
How did Niall know? There was no way he had been inside the CRC. Yet he spoke with the confident authority of someone who had inside knowledge. That should have been impossible.
There had to be a reason everyone wanted Niall, a reason why they’d kept him alive and tortured him. She was damned well going to find out what that was.
At the next turn, Niall said, “This one. It’s the closest we’re going to get.”
She used her halo-glasses to first check the mapping location. And then when she calculated that Niall was right, she used them again to check the heat sensor to make sure the hall was clear before she pushed the grate out of the ceiling. They didn’t have time to mess with anyone here. There was less than sixty seconds to get to the first door.
“How are you doing?” Venz asked.
“Exiting the vents,” Arden said. She knocked loose the air-shaft cover and dropped down into the hallway. She pulled her phaser, keeping watch on the hall while the others dropped after her.
Coco was the last through.
There weren’t any guards in the hall. It seemed that they’d stuck to their tactical training: a squad going forward to Dade’s group, while the rest had fallen back into the next circle.
“Thirty seconds,” Niall said, indicating the time they had left before the first gate closed.
They ran down the empty hall.
At the gate, they encountered a group of guards. Arden and Niall engaged in a phase-fight with them, while Coco and Annem slid past and into the gate to take care of the guards on the other side.
“It’s closing,” Annem screamed.
Arden nudged Niall to run, then followed. For a second, she shot back at their pursuers, and then leapt and slid past the door just as the gate shut. The gears ground together as the lock clicked into place.
“Gate one is locked,” Arden said into the comm to Venz as she pushed herself up and ran with Niall for the next gate.
Coco and Annem were already ahead, trying to clear their path through more guards. It might give them enough time to get to the next gate before that closed too. They ran past Coco and Annem, who were engaged in a phase-fight, through the second gate, and continued at a dead run to the third gate. There they took on the next set of guards.
Annem alerted them through the comm to Venz that they’d made it to the third gate, and soon they were flying past Arden and Niall to the fourth. They played that back and forth all the way to the sixth gate.
The sixth gate was halfway shut as Arden and Niall ran up to it. Coco and Annem were still outside the gate, shooting wildly. There wasn’t enough time to deal with all the guards here. There were too many. They had to focus on slipping through before it closed.
There was no thought to Arden’s actions. This was their only chance. If they didn’t get in, they’d be stuck between gates five and six, waiting for someone to come and arrest them. They wouldn’t even have to leave the CRC before they were tortured.
Arden pounded through the guards, shooting as she ran. She got as near as she could to Coco and Annem before she ducked for cover. Then she took as many crazy shots as she could, knowing her life depended on it. They were outnumbered, the fight brutal.
The door was three-fourths closed. The siren blared as a warning that the door was about to lock.
Venz counted down the seconds. “Nine . . . eight . . .”
“Get inside,” Arden shouted to the others. And then she couldn’t worry about anyone else. She focused on shooting every guard she saw. Her breath came out in staccato pants as she reached for the last of her endurance.
She ran. Hot phase-fire seared past her. Close enough to feel the blowback of the displaced air. But Arden kept running, her legs pumping.
“Three . . . two . . .”
She slammed through the door that was just wide enough for her to get through sideways. The metal scraped her hip. She gasped with pain and knew that it would leave a deep bruise.
“One,” Venz said.
The door lock clicked into place.
Arden looked up, at first disoriented. She gasped and swallowed, trying to wet her mouth. The lockdown had been completed. They were inside the center zone. Their movements would no longer be tracked. This room was cut off from the city—from the grid. It was the only place that the cams and vid-feeds truly couldn’t reach. The doors wouldn’t be opened till the threat was cleared and the coding was reset.
It also meant they were on their own. Venz was no longer able to communicate through the comm.
All four of them had made it inside. Niall was standing at the far end of the hall, checking for more guards. To her right, Annem lay on the ground with Coco beside her.
Arden pushed to her feet and walked over.
Annem lay still. A large knife stuck out of the back of her shoulder. Her breathing had shallowed, and she seemed on the verge of passing out. Blood collected in a small pool beneath her.
“We have to pull the knife out,” Arden said.
Coco was shaking her head. “She could lose more blood that way.”
“Think,” Arden snapped. “How are we going to get her out of here with a knife in her back? It has to be done.”
She nodded at Arden’s words, and then reached to extract the knife. The wound gushed blood. Coco immediately tried to stanch it with her hands.
Arden pulled a med kit from her pack, and between the two of them, they field-patched her as best they could. Coco worked silently, her hands steady. A rock. But Arden could tell that her focus was shot. It was on Annem, not the mission.
Niall was standing to the side, observing. “It’s deep.”
“She’s gonna be okay,” Arden said to assure Coco. They were just words, probably lies at that. Yet she felt better saying them.
Above them, the air-filtering system kicked on with a loud groan. And then in succession their sleep bombs detonated. Smoke filled the hallways with a soft swish and a billowing white cloud. Their air-breathers filtered it out, leaving their group as the only people currently on their feet within the center unit.
Niall picked up Annem, slinging her over his shoulder.
Bodies lay on the floors of the hallway, asleep from the gas. They’d fallen where they stood, their limbs askew. Most of them were scientists, dressed in green and blue scrubs or lab coats. But some guards were interspersed with the scientists.
The hub was located in the center of the facility. It was a large room full of metal tables with lab equipment. On one side of the room, there was a whirring bank of machines collecting and collating data. On the other were the consoles that ran the central station. This was the brain of the CRC. They couldn’t log into the system yet. Once the shutdown protocol had been enabled, it blocked off access to the computers within the lab. Plus, there wasn’t remote access—yet.
Both problems would be solved once the worm that the other group uploaded spread its virus through the system. Then they’d have access to all of the CRC and would be able to open the door to any room.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Dade watched in horror as chaos erupted in the women’s wing. Or rather, girls’ wing, since everyone kept here was young, horrifyingly so.
The doors along the hall were open. After the first few patients who’d escaped their rooms started making a ruckus, other patients streamed into the hallway. Some screamed, pulling at their hair or
running broken nails down their faces. Others wandered, running into one another and falling over. They yelled, swinging wildly to avoid things only they could see.
It was loud. One girl’s scream led to two, to four, to eight girls joining her until the sound rippled throughout the space. Some grabbed their heads, shaking them back and forth, emitting keening, wailing cries.
The girls wore white hospital gowns that wrapped around them and tied at the side. They were one-size-fits-all, with so much material that they were voluminous on the girls’ emaciated bodies.
The girls were disheveled and looked brittle. Nests of hair matted thickly on their heads. Self-made scratches hatched their skin. Purple and green bruising segmented around their wrists and ankles from where they’d likely been strapped down. Their feet were bare and dirty with overgrown toenails that had yellowed.
But when he looked into their eyes, Dade’s stomach squeezed. Their gazes were vacant. Whatever horror they faced was inside their minds. Dade wasn’t sure they were aware they were in the hall. They looked haunted. A vital piece had broken inside them.
Dade was careful not to jostle them as he made his way through the mass of bodies. A couple girls stumbled into him and, unbalanced, started to fall. He caught them. His hands bruising their thin skin even though he tried to be careful.
They’d never get out. Never be free again. This place was supposed to be impregnable, and Dade was sure that after this it would be. He wanted to take all of them with him. Let them escape. They deserved lives free of torture.
Even as he thought this, he knew that he couldn’t help them. They wouldn’t make it two feet outside before they were stopped. And what would he do with them even if he could get them out? They had broken minds. It was far too late to help them.
He could end up here if his father had his way. All it would take was one misstep. Then he’d be locked away forever, broken and tortured. Worse, they could take Arden or Saben. His chest burned at the thought.
Mina led the way to the target’s room.
The Stolen Sky (Split City Book 2) Page 23