But she had to get out.
She withdrew her focus from the walls and dropped onto the side of her cot. After three days of interrogation, Steel had wrapped up her investigation. Janis picked up enough of her thoughts to piece together her goal: exonerating herself of wrongdoing while placing the blame squarely on Janis and Director Kilmer. Janis made it as difficult as she could for her, but Steel only bent the responses to fit the framework she had already constructed in her mind.
Steel didn’t care for Kilmer’s humanism, which she saw as a weakness. She envisioned a future Champions Program of iron-clad policies and procedures. A ruthless machine that she would preside over.
Need to warn Kilmer, Janis thought. Can’t do it from in here, though.
Which was no doubt the point. Agent Steel claimed that keeping her in isolation was for her own safety. But if Janis’s obstinacy had accomplished anything, it was tipping Steel off to her allegiance to the director. She didn’t want Janis trying to help him.
Steel didn’t even budge when Janis told her about her new premonition: nuclear explosions, like the ones she had seen in her recurring beach dream the summer before last. Except now the explosions were everywhere.
A clunk sounded in the metal door and a tray appeared on the sliding food carrier.
“Dinner,” a voice said.
Over the door was an energetic barrier. Like the one Techie had installed at the farm house, it served as both detection field and a means to blunt Janis’s powers. Janis stood up from the cot.
“Hey, I think you got mine mixed up with somebody else’s,” she called. “I’m allergic to, uh, broccoli.”
It was the best she could come up with on no notice. She watched the closed slot the tray had entered by. The other side of the door had fallen silent. The slot slid open. A gloved hand darted into view and hooked a finger over the tray’s edge.
Gotcha.
Janis looped threads of space around the man’s wrist and jerked his arm through to his shoulder. The tray clattered to the floor, splattering milk and canned broccoli over her shoes.
“Hey!” the man shouted.
A ghost image showed Janis a flashing stun beam, but she was a step ahead of him. With another thought, she closed the sliding door onto his arm. Firmly enough to hold but not hurt him.
Yet.
“What are you doing?” he cried. Janis heard another man struggling to help free him.
“Listen to me,” Janis said, applying more pressure. The man’s gloved hand opened and closed like a frantic mime’s. “If you want to get out of this with your arm attached, you’re going to do three things. First, you’re going to open this door. Second, you’re going to lead me to an exit. Third, you’re going to gather my teammates and do the same for them. Do you hear me?”
“Can’t!” the man gasped. “Under orders to—”
Janis doubled the pressure briefly before easing off.
“Arrgh!”
“I said, do you hear me?”
“Yeah, yeah, all right! I hear you!”
“Now, I’m going to keep your arm as insurance until you comply with the first order.”
From the other side of the door, Janis heard the punching of a keypad followed by the clunk of a magnet disengaging. Then two huge bolts slid free. The door heaved open a crack.
Janis formed a protective shield around herself. Using her powers, she pushed the door wider. The man who had fed the tray through the slot shuffled backward, his arm still clamped tight. A second man, the one who had presumably opened the door, stood to one side and aimed a carbine.
“That’s as far as you go,” he said.
Janis twisted the carbine from his grasp and broke the barrel off. With a simple gesture, she shoved the man against the rear wall. He hit solidly and fell forward onto the floor.
Only recently Janis had drawn the line at harming them, but Steel had crossed that line first when she’d had her electroshocked.
They could blame their boss.
Janis turned her attention back to the guard in the door. “Are you ready for step two?”
“Why are you doing this?” he asked.
“Because I don’t want to be here anymore.” Janis wrenched his arm from the slot. “I went along with Steel’s investigation, at first because I wanted to get to the truth and then, when I saw that wasn’t what she was after, I wanted to end my confinement, to see my friends and sister again. But that’s not happening, is it?”
“It’s just a temporary precaution,” the man gasped. “For your—”
Using the same threads of space, Janis wheeled the man around and drew his arm up behind his back such that he had to lean forward to keep his shoulder from dislocating. She shoved him away from the door.
“—own protection!” he managed to finish.
Janis resisted the temptation to wrench his arm higher. She stepped out into the corridor. The elevator was to her left, but a scan of the man’s mind revealed that his partner had already sounded the alarm. By the time they reached the elevator, it would either be shut down or full of agents.
“Take me to the stairs,” she said.
Still leaned forward, the man turned to the right and stumbled down the corridor. Janis attempted to feel beyond the walls, into the rest of the facility, but the disruption fields prevented it. They passed more blast doors, and Janis asked if her teammates were being held down here, as well.
The man shook his head. “Upstairs.”
At the end of the corridor, they arrived before a metal door. With his free hand, the man leaned his weight into the door bar. When it didn’t yield, he punched a sequence into the keypad beside the door.
“I’m locked out,” he said.
Janis huffed out a breath. He was telling the truth.
Behind them, at the opposite end of the corridor, the elevator door slid open. Janis turned. Men in battle armor were emerging, carbines aimed. They advanced slowly. Janis sensed Agent Steel’s cold presence among them.
“No one dismissed you,” Steel called.
“Too bad.”
“We have protocols.”
“Choke on them. I’m not playing by your rules anymore. I tried that already and look where it got me.”
“They are not my rules. They are the Program’s.”
“I’ll discuss them with Director Kilmer, then.”
“Director Kilmer is no longer in charge.”
Janis hesitated. With Steel challenging Kilmer’s authority, Janis had thought she might find refuge for herself and her teammates back in Oakwood.
But now…
“Who is, then?” she asked, already knowing the answer.
“I am. And as director of the Champions Program, I order you to release my agent and return to your room.”
“You mean my prison cell?”
“If that’s how you choose to look at the protection we’re providing you.”
“Enough with the crap. Open this door.”
“There’s nowhere to go.”
Janis looked from Steel and her men, who were halfway down the corridor, and then back to the door. If Scott were here, he would be able to disable the locking mechanism, but he wasn’t. She studied the concrete that bordered the door, but it was the same dilemma as in her room. She couldn’t bring the wall down without jeopardizing the entire facility.
“Open this door,” she repeated.
“Your fellow teammates are currently free to move about the bunker. I would hate to have to tell them their privileges had been revoked due to one member’s sedition.”
Welcome to Steel’s brave new world, Janis thought. A flue opened deep inside her, breathing hot air across her anger. For a moment, she considered shoving Steel and her men back into the elevator, breaking a few bones while she was at it. Instead, she threw up a barrier.
“That’s close enough,” she said.
The barrel of the lead man’s carbine bumped into something. He reached out a hand to feel the invisible wa
ll.
“This is your final warning,” Steel said. “Return to your room. Now.”
“Or what?”
Steel canted her helmet down, and she activated something on her wrist. An instant later, a high-pitched alarm sounded from speakers along the corridor. Janis clenched her eyes and gritted her teeth. Each pulse felt like a spike driven through both ears and meeting in her gray matter.
Not again.
Her helmet would have blunted the sound’s effect, as the helmets on Steel and her men were, but Janis’s head was naked. She struggled to maintain the barrier and her hold over the man beside her, but she couldn’t. She felt both forces tremble from her control and collapse as the spikes pushed deeper into her head. She threw her hands to her ears and doubled over.
She only wanted the sound and pain to stop. Even if it meant surrendering.
The corridor vibrated with the pounding of boots.
Scott stopped midsentence and cut his gaze from Tyler. Moments before, they had heard several agents board the elevator. Now Scott was picking up the faint ululations of an alarm.
He shot up from the mess hall table.
“Is that what I think it is?” Tyler asked, standing across from him.
“Sonic disruption,” Scott replied, nodding quickly. Steel sometimes threw it at them in simulations, often when the Champions were gaining the upper hand. He suspected the same thing was happening now, but with Janis.
He and Tyler had been plotting how to get her out. The first step would have been to find her—not an easy task given their unfamiliarity with the facility and its multiple, well-guarded levels. But with the alarm-like sound acting as a beacon, that problem was being solved for them.
“C’mon,” Scott said, breaking for the corridor, “there’s a stairway down this way. Elevator’s too chancy.”
He slammed the door bar at the end of the corridor and was stopped cold.
“Stand back,” Tyler said, electricity already prickling through the air.
In their planning of how to find and free Janis, they had discussed combining Tyler’s ability to disrupt electromagnetic fields with Scott’s own to penetrate the underlying systems. But Scott had decided it would alert Steel’s security to what they were up to. Now, with stealth no longer an issue…
“Hit it,” he said.
Tyler released the energy he had gathered into his hands. Scott felt the field sputter out. In an instant, he was inside the relay that directed current to the solenoid—the generator of the magnetic lock. Before the field could restore itself, Scott blew the relay. The lock disengaged.
“We’re in,” he said, hitting the bar.
The door swung open onto a landing between stairways. The ululations grew louder, calling from below. Scott pounded down the steps. At the next landing, he paused to listen.
“One more,” he said over his shoulder. “Be ready to hit the door.”
As the landing rounded into view, Tyler’s spheres were already shooting past, making Scott’s hair bush out like a cat’s. Scott penetrated the door’s circuitry, found the relay, and made it go boom.
He drew the door back but was unprepared for the intensity of sound. As his head reeled, his watering eyes absorbed the scene. A man was to one side of the door, bent forward, holding his arm at the shoulder. Janis was on the other side, still on her feet, but doubled over, hair sweeping the floor. Beyond, Agent Steel’s men were running toward them.
Scott’s hand flew to his chest. “Ooh!”
A streak of laser fire had nailed him, spinning him sideways. His entire arm on that side went slack.
“Get down!” Tyler shouted above the noise.
Scott dropped to a knee as rivers of white current seared the air overhead. Speakers mounted high along the walls of the corridor began bursting. As sparks rained down, the piercing sound disintegrated into a series of burbles, soon replaced by the shouting of Steel’s men.
From the floor, Scott tried to focus into his laser before realizing he was without his helmet. Carbine barrels aimed at him like accusing fingers. Scott went to pivot away, but the men’s trigger fingers were faster. A torrent of laser fire broke against him. He didn’t go down.
Huh?
He pawed himself with his good hand. Not hurt, either.
Janis straightened, and Scott felt the protective field intensify. With the thrust of an arm, she hurled the man with the injured shoulder into the mass of agents. They staggered back in a clatter of armored gear.
“Champions!” Agent Steel called. “I order you—”
Janis shoved with her other hand and, to Scott, it looked like the start of a pinball game. Agent Steel and her men shot back into the elevator, where Janis piled them high. Scott focused into the elevator’s control panel, throwing the switch to close the doors. With the door sealed, Tyler hit it with a bolt, frying the panel and trapping Steel and her men inside.
Janis turned toward Scott, eyes dark, hair falling across her face.
Except for their breathing, the corridor was silent. Scott felt the shield around him fall away. He stepped toward Janis, one arm dangling at his side like a sausage, and hugged her with the other.
“You all right?” He pressed his lips against the top of her head.
“I am now.”
32
Out of respect, Tyler retreated into the shadow of the doorway as Scott and Janis embraced. They hadn’t seen each other in several days, and Scott’s worry upstairs had been plain.
It was a worry Tyler shared.
One of Janis’s eyes appeared above Scott’s shoulder and fixated on him. With a lock of flame-red hair dangling across her dark gaze, she was the image of beauty and power. But in the next moment, her gaze softened with moisture and she stepped from Scott’s embrace.
“Tyler.” She moved toward him. “I am so, so sorry.”
Tyler waved a hand. “Nothing that happened is your fault.”
“If I hadn’t talked with Reginald, if I hadn’t given him our transfer location…” She wiped her eyes with the back of a hand. “I don’t think he took the shot, but whoever did had to have followed him.”
From behind the elevator door, grunts and dull knocks sounded.
“Listen,” Scott said, “why don’t we work that out later. We need to get clear of here.”
“He’s right,” Tyler said, meeting Janis’s heartbroken gaze.
Janis nodded and reached toward him, the corners of her lips tucking into her cheeks in contrition. Tyler accepted her hand. He wanted to hold her, to comfort her for something she had no business blaming herself for. They were in a war, and there were going to be losses. It sucked, but that was the reality. No one was at fault. He wanted to tell her those things. Instead, he squeezed once and watched her bottom lip tremble as their hands fell apart.
“Where to?” she asked.
“The stairs,” Scott said, “as far as they’ll take us.”
“What about Margaret?” Janis asked, seeming to just notice her sister’s absence.
“Probably in her room,” Scott answered.
Two flights up, they pulled the door open onto what Tyler had surmised to be the underground facility’s main level. Margaret’s room was the second one on the left, and they found her reclined on her cot, bent knees propping the same heavy book she’d been reading for the last two days.
She peeked around the maroon cover as they hustled up.
“We’re getting out of here,” Janis said.
“What? Why?”
“Well, for starters, I’ve been imprisoned since Christmas, but I guess you were too absorbed in your reading to notice. But listen, that’s just part of it. Steel’s pushed Kilmer out, she’s taken over his position. It’s her show now, and she’s going to run it however she sees fit.”
Margaret sighed. “And that concerns us how?”
Janis seized her book and flung it against the wall.
“Hey!” Margaret cried.
“It concerns us because Stee
l can’t see the big picture,” Janis said, using her powers now to haul Margaret into a sitting position and then to her feet. Multi-colored highlighters spilled to the floor. “She was fine as long as she was in charge of security, but with control of the Program, her focus is discipline, keeping us in line. I tried telling her about a premonition, one involving an imminent nuclear attack, but we’re nothing more than weapons to her. Can’t you see that? These rooms are like her little gun cases. She’s just the kind of person Mr. Leonard warned us about. Before she shot and killed him.”
“Let me go!”
Margaret flailed her arms, but she seemed to be standing under her own power now.
“You can either come voluntarily or I carry you. Your choice.”
“Fine,” Margaret said, straightening her long gold-colored skirt. She huffed and flipped an empty suitcase onto her cot and cannoned back the top. She set her book inside, then knelt for her pens.
The suitcase slapped closed. “There’s no time for that,” Janis said.
With Janis in the lead, they ran back to the staircase. Margaret followed at a disgruntled jog. Behind her, Tyler heard the elevator shudder into crippled operation. Scott must have heard it, too.
“Be ready,” he said. “They’re going to try to cut us off upstairs.”
Back inside the stairwell, they ran up two steep flights before the steps ended at a large landing and a final door. Tyler disrupted the field over the door long enough for Scott to deactivate the magnetic lock. Bulbs illuminated the stairwell, but the room the doorway gave onto was pitch black.
Tyler gathered atmospheric electricity into his hands until they gave off a crackling glow. He shaped the energy into a sphere and pushed it out ahead of them, a wandering ball of lighting. The room was open with wooden supports rising every ten or so feet. Portraits and blanket-covered furniture were stashed along the walls, lending the room an air of domestic authenticity.
“We must be in the basement,” Janis said.
Tyler nodded along with the others, even Margaret, who was peering around with interest now.
XGeneration (Book 6): Greatest Good Page 18