“Sure, sure,” Dana replied. “Just keep that in mind.”
I clicked off the phone and returned it to Connor. Of course, while I hadn’t been able to make out what Dana had said, I could piece it together myself. And the thought was enough to set an uneasy feeling into my gut as we turned toward the entrance of Project Regen.
There’s this saying about feeling like you’re standing at the mouth of hell, or something like that. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never been big on metaphors, but I had never really understood it until that moment. The first set of lights illuminated a couple of car lengths in front of us, just enough so we could see how the floor sloped downward.
We were going down into the mountain.
“Okay,” Connor announced. “I know that every scrap of intel has led us to believe that Project Regen has been shut down for the past nine months. But we don’t know that. So, let’s be smart about this and assume someone down there might be waiting for us.”
I turned toward him in surprise. Not by his advice—that was probably a good call—but by how serious he sounded. Looking at him, I saw that he had pulled his mask on, instantly changing him from a guy who was more or less interchangeable with the dozens of bros who came into Colossus on a regular basis, to Silver Shot, one of the most famous Actuals in the world. It made me pause. Despite his attitude, Connor had been a superhero for over a decade. And you didn’t last that long unless you knew what you were doing.
I reached down to my gym bag and pulled out my helmet. The world around me got a little smaller as I put it on.
The system worked using some sort of sensor, so the set of lights ahead of us would flick on as we walked forward, just as the ones behind us shut down. Alan said this was probably about “conserving power,” as a place like this would need to be off the grid to prevent detection.
His words, when combined with the feeling of traveling underground, did not do anything to ease the sinking feeling in my gut. The lights only made it worse. We couldn’t pick up on danger until it was right in front of us.
As if on cue, when the next set of lights came on, they illuminated a helluva lot more than just a two-lane road.
“It’s a body,” Connor said, keeping his bow up.
No shit. Had the mass of blood and gore around it not given it away, the stench would. I saw the moment that Connor’s nostrils flattened in distaste, letting me know that the smell had hit him too. It was about this time that I saw the source of this gory scene. This man appeared to be missing his head. Connor and I both came to a stop.
But Alan kept on going.
“Easy, kid,” Connor said.
Alan ignored him, casting an annoyed glance over his shoulder. Given his recent comment about hoodies, I don’t think the guy appreciated people like Connor calling him a kid. Instead, he tip-toed around the gore and crouched down next to the body, reaching out for something with his gloved hand. At first, I thought it was for the weapon that had fallen next to the man (some sort of semi-automatic rifle; my knowledge of guns was pretty limited), but then I realized he was going for something just next to it. A nightstick.
He immediately began to prod the corpse.
“Whoa,” Connor said.
“He’s wearing a uniform of some sort,” Alan said. “With a number across the shirt pocket. 2357…something. The rest is worn off.”
“A serial number?” Connor asked. “Like a prison inmate?”
Alan raised the nightstick, his face unreadable.
“I think it’s much more likely that we’re looking at one of the guards.”
At his words, anger rumbled up from deep inside of me. I curled my hands into fists.
“This man was responsible for keeping Dawn in here?” I asked, voice low.
My powers sparked. But unlike usual, it didn’t just flash at the corner of my vision but flared so brightly that it blinded me for a half second. I blinked.
“It’s impossible to tell if he had any direct contact with Dawn, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility.” Alan examined the body a little more. “This man wasn’t beheaded.”
“You sure about that?” I asked.
“Considering the pieces of brain, bone, and…everything else, I’d say it’s more likely that his head was—”
“Pulverized,” Connor finished with a frown. “Crushed to death.”
I felt my stomach churn. But even the shock of that wasn’t enough to quell the low level of anger building deep inside of me.
“Hey, buddy,” Connor said, his voice low. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I replied, rubbing my eyes with my right palm. “Shouldn’t you let Lilah know about…” I gestured to the headless body. “This?”
“Sure, sure,” he said, and then stepped forward, taking out his phone.
I watched as Connor, wincing, shot a few pictures and sent them to Lilah, his fingers flashing across the screen.
“I don’t suppose either of you have watched enough CSI episodes to tell me how long this guy has been, er…rotting?” Connor asked.
I shrugged, as did Alan, before speaking up.
“I had a biology minor for my undergrad but determining that is a bit beyond me. Although if this place truly has been sealed up since last summer, then the corpse has been protected from the elements and is likely not decaying as fast as it would have elsewhere.”
“Well, it’s not decaying fast enough for my liking.” Connor paused. “Or maybe slow enough.” He stood up straight from his crouching position, then nodded to the wall. “Looks like he came in through there?”
I looked over to see a small door on the side of the wall. Alan approached it, then shook his head.
“It must only be accessible on the other side,” he said.
“Making your hacker’s door code pretty useless.” Connor let out a sigh. “Best to move forward, I guess.”
I nodded, and we kept moving, continuing down the hallway that led deeper underground. After a minute, Connor began to fall back, letting Alan go on ahead. He reached out and forced me to do the same.
“Just a sec,” he said quietly, once Alan looked like he was out of earshot. “I want to talk about what happened back there.”
“The body?”
“No, not the body—with you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Connor let out a sigh. “I’m sorry, man, but Riley filled us in on pretty much everything. Including how your powers are triggered. And you looked kinda pissed—”
“Can you blame me?” I asked, feeling my jaw clench in frustration. “We just ran into one of the men that may have been responsible for Dawn’s kidnapping. Do you expect me to be happy about that?”
Alan slowed his pace ahead, and I realized that I’d been a little louder than Connor was going for.
“And anyway,” I continued, “I’m beginning to think that there’s more to this thing than we realize.”
“Man, we’re already talking about a private organization doing illegal experiments on unwilling participants. How big are you thinking?”
“It’s something that Dana said,” I replied. “He pointed out to me just how close this place is to a major highway. Hell, the power company probably goes down that road all the time. If there was a manhunt for Dawn when she went missing last year, with search dogs and shit, how the hell did no one stumble upon that massive door out there?”
“That sounds like a conspiracy.”
“That sounds like SynergyCorp has deep pockets and maybe used those pockets to make sure this place was never found.”
A set of lights turned on ahead of us, and I had gotten so used to the way they worked in here that I didn’t even think about it until Alan spoke up.
“Found something.”
I looked up to see Alan standing at what looked like the entrance to a large room. I drew closer and realized it wasn’t a room at all. It was a garage.
It was massive. Had to be, to fit all the vehicles. Th
ey were lined up in two slanted rows. There were vans, forklifts, ATVs. All of them in far better shape than the stolen vehicles Calypso had used.
“Shit,” Connor said. “Speaking of SynergyCorp’s deep pockets. Just to leave all this behind?”
“If anything, the body at the gate shows that this shutdown probably wasn’t planned,” I replied. “I bet—hey! Look at this.”
I paused, looking down at a drop of red at my feet. Looking ahead, I could see another small spattering, and another, dried onto the floor.
“Blood trail,” Connor said.
“It leads here,” we heard Alan call out.
We picked up our pace, crossing much of the length of the garage. We came to a shiny black van. All its doors were open, and it was easy to see why.
People had been using them as shields.
And if the half a dozen bodies were any indication, it hadn’t worked.
Feeling less squeamish than before, I crouched down next to one and shook my head.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “These guys were armed, and there’s blood on the ground, but it’s not from them.”
“I may have found the source.”
I headed toward Alan, who stood about twenty feet away from the van, behind a pile of shipping crates. I looked down to see a red stain across the floor. A stain, I would guess, that led to a person.
“Huh, guess they do bleed after all,” I said.
“This isn’t one of the guards.” Alan’s face was a mask.
I frowned and looked over the shipping crates to see a dead woman wearing a ragged sweater and jeans. A makeshift bandage had been wrapped around her bloody chest.
Of course, the gender was just an assumption. But most guys didn’t sport long, red hair.
11
Dawn
I was completely and utterly lost.
I glanced down at my phone, my schedule for the spring semester displayed in neat little boxes. “Intro to Statistics” was listed under Tuesday and Thursdays, with the designated classroom, 202A. I looked up at the door in front of me: 202B. And behind that door wasn’t a cozy little classroom housing twenty uncomfortable desk chairs, but a lecture hall that could hold, according to the fire code on the wall, a hundred and fifty people. I frowned, turning around, expecting my promised stats classroom to appear behind me. Instead, what I got was a white wall displaying an advertisement for Bailey U’s College Republicans. I looked right and left, but there were no other classrooms.
Oh crap, oh crap. Where was I supposed to go? I checked the time on my phone. I still had a good ten minutes to get to class, which would have been fine if I just needed to hit up a different floor, but what if I was in the wrong building?
“Ah, Riker Hall claims another victim.”
I jumped at the new voice and turned around to see a tall, blond boy with fair skin. He was probably around my age or a little older. He had bright blue eyes, a wide, friendly grin, wore a dark-red sweater, and a backpack thrown over one shoulder.
Did I also mention that he was ridiculously attractive?
“Ah,” I said, powers of speech escaping me. “I, um…”
“Sorry, don’t mean to be cryptic,” he said. “You’re trying to find, let me guess…” He peered over my shoulder to look at the door. “202A?”
“Yes! Only…I, um, can’t.”
Oh god. Way to look like a moron, Dawn. Can’t even find your classroom?
“What I meant to say is,” I added. “I’m sure it’s right around here. I just need to look a little farther.”
“Well, that would be true if this building was laid out in a remotely logical way.”
“It’s not?”
“At one point in time, yes. And then they had to go and expand it. Now, all the classrooms in the old wing are marked A, and the ones in the new wing are marked B. Or at least that’s the way someone explained it to me when I got lost last year.”
“So…it’s not only me?” I asked, feeling the tiniest bit of relief.
“Oh, far from it,” he replied. “It’s a beginning-of-the-semester tradition. Professors always expect there to be a few stragglers on the first few days of classes as a result. Only you aren’t going to be one of those stragglers because I’m gonna show you how to get there.”
“That would be wonderful,” I said, fiddling with my backpack strap. “Thank you.”
“Just paying it forward,” he replied. “Come on.”
With that, he led me to the end of the hall, took a right turn and entered a long, glassed-in bridge that connected—I could only assume—the old building with the new. The windows were fogged over in places, the courtyard outside covered in a fresh coat of snow that had fallen just this morning. The bridge was a little drafty, but if the bundled-up state of the people outside was any indication, I was lucky to be inside.
My unofficial guide opened the door at the end and gestured for me to go through. I thanked him.
And on the other side was the entrance to a small, half-full classroom marked 202A.
“Thank you!” I said, my voice a rush of relief. “I can remember that.”
“You can also enter using the second entrance if it’s not convenient for you to cut through the old building.” He nodded down the hallway. “It’s near a tram stop too, which helps if you’re coming in from off campus.”
“I am,” I added.
“Freshman?”
“Yeah, second semester,” I shook my head. “To be honest, I thought I was done with getting lost all the time. I normally have a better sense of direction.”
“It’s not a small campus. I’m on my third year, and I still get lost. My name is Mark, by the way.”
He extended his hand toward mine.
“Dawn,” I replied, accepting the shake with a smile.
And then Mark hesitated, the smile on his face faltering, his hand hanging on to mine for a little too long.
“Um,” I said, gently pulling back.
“Oh, sorry,” he said. “It’s just…give me a second.”
Mark turned and reached into his backpack. After rustling around for a few seconds, he pulled out a scrap of paper and a pen. He wrote something down and pressed it into my hand. I took it without a thought.
“Well, if you ever find yourself getting lost on campus again, let me know, okay?”
“Oh?” I said, opening the paper to see a phone number written on it. “Oh!”
“Or…anything else, really,” Mark said, beginning to back away. “Guided tours. Coffee. I am multipurpose, I swear. Just text me, all right?”
“All right,” I said, a smile beginning to creep on my face.
“Great,” Mark said, and turned around.
I could not help but notice as he walked away that he had a decided spring in his step.
Not at all like the way he had trudged away from me after exiting those double glass doors.
I opened my eyes to discover that I was not in the illogically numbered Riker Hall, or even in my warm bed at home with my cat. Instead, I was on the top level of the stone bunk bed they had dumped me in two nights before. I swallowed. The low-hanging ceiling provided some shade, but I could tell from the way the light streamed into the door that it was almost time for breakfast. I turned away from it, finding the idea of getting up for anything, never mind more tasteless oatmeal, far from appealing.
I sighed. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine it was the bunk bed from Mark’s dorm room. It was just as uncomfortable. But, despite that, and the fact that it was clearly not made for two people, I had grown fond of it during our time together. There was just something so wonderful about waking up and finding him there. To know that regardless of anything else stressing me out, I was not alone.
And now, it was over. I had tried to talk to him again after our unfortunate breakfast encounter, and that conversation had left no doubts about how he felt about me, about us. We were done.
I had been dumped.
The rest of my pod has
been super nice about it. Probably because Mark had been…well, kind of unpleasant to everyone. Gerry had even suggested asking Mark to relocate to another pod. I had turned him down, and not just because I wasn’t sure if the soft-voiced man would have been able to muster the required level of firmness required to kick someone out. It just seemed unfair for Mark not to have a place to stay.
Especially when, in a way, he was right.
It was my fault that we had been kidnapped. Not because he had come back to the side of the road. No, it was because I was a huge weirdo that couldn’t stomach going to a party. I highly doubted that either of us would have been snatched up had we been in a house filled with people.
Karen had sorta-kinda come to his defense. She pointed out how people who had shown up in pairs would sometimes remark that the other person had changed after getting the injection, and not necessarily for the better. So our breakup had more to do with where we were, than who we were, right?
“You up?”
Karen’s voice was drowsy. I turned around to see her, propped up on one arm on the lower half of her bunk bed, her hair plastered to her face.
“Sorry,” I said. “Did I wake you?”
“Nah,” she replied. “To be honest, I spend most of my nights up anyway. Too much to think about. You know… ice cream, sappy movies, a ridiculous amount of tissues.”
I felt a smile prick at the corners of my lips. “Um…interesting things to think about.”
“Hey, sometimes things are stereotypes for a reason. For me? I haven’t had too many significant breakups in my thirty-four years, but I’ve found that nothing beats a pint of Rocky Road and something insanely girly on my TV.”
The sound of approaching footsteps echoed down the hall.
Karen’s body froze, the smile falling from her face. The fear was infectious, and I felt my breath catch in my throat. Could it be one of the Black Hats? Ready to take me away for another horrible injection? My eyes were glued on the doorway, imagining what monster might step through.
Instead, the least threatening figure imaginable came into our room.
He was a Caucasian guy of average height with a husky build. He wore jorts, a t-shirt for some band I had never heard of, and a puka shell necklace that made the whole outfit look weirdly ’90s. Like almost all the men here, he was in desperate need of a shave. He ran a hand through his overgrown dark blond hair as he walked in the door.
Silver and Gold (Red and Black Book 3) Page 11