“There’s a chance I’m about to die just trying to get out of the building.”
I nodded, then I glanced up the stairs to see Jackson and Flynn watching us. “Thank you. It’s been … it would all have been a lot harder … all of it … without you.”
They nodded in unison.
Then because that was what always happened in every action movie I’d ever seen — all five of them — I pressed a kiss to Mark’s lips.
He brushed his fingers through my hair — gifting me with another completely novel sensation — and kissed me back.
“Don’t wait for me,” I said. “If I’m not right behind you, I’m not coming.”
I turned away before he could respond, heading down the stairs with Bee on my heels. I knew Calhoun would get Flynn and Jackson out. He was their commanding officer, and that was more important than one night with me. As it should be.
And what Zans and Fish were about to do would ensure that the Collective would be in disarray long enough that Calhoun, Flynn, and Jackson’s involvement in our rebellion would be incidental.
Was it good? With Mark? Better than Fish?
I nodded, answering Bee in my head, not out loud. Different.
She made a thoughtful noise, then we found the others waiting for us one level down.
“Weapons cache next,” I said.
“Already ahead of you, Socks,” Zans said, flicking her fingers toward the door to the corridor.
It crumpled under the assault of her magic, then blew inward.
I swallowed, my throat suddenly tight. “Remember they’re people. Just employees.”
The four of them turned to look at me as one, magic boiling around them. Deadly and fierce, ready to be released. Completely unfettered.
“Anyone who hasn’t evacuated already dies,” Fish said coolly. “Either they’re in our way, or they leave us vulnerable from behind.”
Bee, Knox, and Zans nodded.
“It’s okay, Socks,” Zans said with a sneer. “Fish and I will take the brunt of the murder and destruction. We’re better at it.”
She walked away.
The others followed.
I hesitated. But only for a breath.
Chapter 6
Breaking out of the compound — or in this case, farther into it — was much easier with Knox and Bee leading the way. Though physically, the clairvoyant and telepath were kept safely tucked behind us. Thankfully, any staff who hadn’t already evacuated the fourth level fled before Zans — especially after we busted into the weapons cache and she got her hands on a dozen explosive devices especially tuned to her telekinesis.
I had retrieved my black blades from the cache, choosing to strap on the combination shoulder sheath even though it ruined the line of my dress. Fish and Knox both selected shortswords. Bee opted for her katana. And Zans had added three pouches of ball bearings to her arsenal, attaching them to her utility belt.
When we were done, Fish had set a timing device on the explosives Zans begrudgingly consented to leave behind. Once triggered, all the ammunition in the cache would also explode. The walls and ceiling were fortified concrete, but with the door wedged open, it would definitely clear out the level. Or it might possibly take the entire floor with it.
I had ordered a fifteen-minute countdown when we exited the weapons cache and headed for the opposite stairs. And we were making good use of that time. Fish was able to wipe out all the cameras along each of the corridors we passed through with a single pulse of his nullifying power. That power didn’t just null magic — even magically fortified electronics didn’t stand a chance against it. But with no cameras to follow our progress across level four, whoever was attempting to thwart our rampage was actively pumping gas into every hallway. Our masks were going to fail before we got anywhere near the exterior doors on the main aboveground level at the rate we were going. Because we needed to go down before we went up.
None of us had ever set foot on level five. Not while conscious, anyway. But I was headed there now without hesitation, with Bee and Knox at my heels, eager to get away from the gas that felt like it was melting any and all of my exposed skin. The Collective — or whoever was currently making onsite decisions for the Collective — would be careful with level five. Protective.
Level five was where it had all begun.
Level five might be where it all ended.
The corridor at the base of the stairs was deeply shadowed beyond the airlock door. Security had cut the power, either in an attempt to slow us down or as an automated procedure during evacuation. But various bluish lights were seeping into the corridor from open doors and interior windows, so level five either had a separate electrical panel from the rest of the compound or was running backup generators.
I paused, surveying the corridor while giving Zans and Fish time to catch up to us. Bee and Knox stood as close to me as they could without touching me.
“They’re gathering upstairs,” Bee murmured, her voice remote. “Dozens. At least as far as I can pick up through the layers of shielding.”
“They’ll be wearing every charm they have,” I said. “And by the time we get above ground, they’ll all be activated. Hannigan had some of your hair in what I’d swear was a witch charm. A casting that I would have thought was outside his sorcerer abilities. For all we know, the Collective has your hair stored every time it’s clipped. Any time any of us are clipped.”
Bee’s lips compressed. Only our most recently clipped hair would hold enough magic to target us. Such residual power faded once removed. And that meant Hannigan’s charm had either been a recent acquisition — or was repeatedly renewed.
“Anyone on this level?” I asked.
“Feedback midway along.” That was an indication that someone might be blocking her telepathy.
“Knox?” I whispered. “Got anything for us?”
“We need to move,” the clairvoyant said. “And keep moving. But nothing is going to kill us in the next five minutes that I can see.”
Fish barreled down the stairs, shouldered past me, and pressed his hand to the lock. I felt Zans stop close behind me. The door clicked but didn’t open.
An intense wave of magic brushed by me, ripping the door from the frame and throwing it halfway down the long hall.
Fish glanced back at Zans. “You might want to hold something in reserve.”
She shrugged. “Why? I’ve got Socks to amplify me when I need it. Besides, we’re about to blow up the building. I won’t even tap my reserves in the next …” — she glanced at the digital watch on her wrist — “… ten minutes.”
Nul5 shook his head. Then he stepped forward, raising his hands.
Zans pushed past me, placing her hand on his shoulder. “Not yet.”
“We need to knock out the cameras,” I murmured.
“Let them watch. They won’t risk gassing this section.”
Apparently, Zans knew something I didn’t. I glanced at Knox. He shook his head, also in the dark.
Tek5 strode forward, breaking protocol by taking point. She paused to glance into the first couple of rooms off the hall.
I followed, relying on Knox and Bee to alert me to anything I couldn’t see or feel on my own.
Zans increased her pace to a jog, glancing through doorways. Then with a triumphant cry, she darted left through a windowed door midway along the hall.
I nodded to Fish. He took off after her.
Moving methodically, I glanced into the first room to my right. It was office space of some sort, with more rooms branching off it. Medical charts and other things I had no context to understand or enough light to decipher lined the walls.
The first room on the left was an examination room, with a bathroom beyond.
I continued along the hall, steadily assessing each doorway for hazards and targets. I found none.
Then I came to the lab situated across the hall from the door through which Zans and Fish had disappeared. I paused, staring through the glass door and
windows, processing what I was seeing.
Lab equipment, stainless steel counters, glass-fronted fridges.
“Oh, God,” Bee whispered. “Oh my God … are those … are those …?” She grabbed Knox’s arm.
A series of cylindrical aquariums stood on the far side of the lab. Except the glass tanks weren’t holding fish.
Without thinking, I pushed the door. It opened with a whoosh of air. A low hum of electricity emanated from the refrigerators and other containment devices, though the room wasn’t lit. I took three steps into the lab before I managed to gain control of myself and my reaction to what I was seeing.
“Fetuses,” Knox whispered behind me, finishing Bee’s unspoken thought.
Yes. Fetuses in various states of development were suspended in liquid. Dozens and dozens of them. Beyond those glass cases were refrigerators filled with test tubes. I stepped forward until I could read the labels on the middle shelves — Amp5, Nul5, Tek5, Cla5, and Tel5.
Bee moaned, pointing one shelf higher. More test tubes, these ones labeled exactly the same except with a number six in place of the five. The sixth generation.
I went numb. All my emotions shut right down, as often happened in the middle of a battle. I systematically catalogued the tubes on the remaining shelves. Based on the labels, they contained genetic material.
“This is where they cooked us up,” Knox said hollowly.
“You already knew that,” I said, turning away and ignoring the glimpse I caught of the room through the door to my right.
It was filled with beds. Beds that at some point might have held our surrogate mothers. A room in which I might have stolen my secondary magic, claiming the power of empathy during the trauma of birth. And killing the woman who’d carried me under her skin, who’d fed me with her blood and magic.
That much of my birth, I had pieced together. But I knew those details only because various handlers had related the story over and over again. “To control me,” I whispered through numb lips. “To subdue me. To make me afraid of my own power.”
Knox and Bee stepped in front of me, filling my line of sight and calling my attention, my focus, back to the room, to the situation.
“We need to move,” I said.
But I didn’t.
“We should move,” I said again.
Knox nodded, then he stepped back and opened each refrigerator door.
“Zans will take care of that,” Bee murmured.
“This will make certain that nothing survives.”
I strode toward the exit, stepping into the hall and quickly crossing into the room that had been Zans’s primary focus.
Banks of hard drives and various tech lined all the walls of the large room. A massive workstation with a long desk filled with monitors and keyboards sat at the very center. A chair was overturned. A cup of coffee had spilled and pooled across the floor. Someone had left in a hurry.
Zans’s fingers were flying over the keyboard at the center of the desk. Her attention was fixated on data streaming across the monitor. “Wait … wait …”
“We’re out of time.” Fish was moving from bank to bank of hard drives, placing his hands on each in turn and frying anything electronic with focused pulses of his magic.
“We’re going,” I said coolly, turning away before I’d even fully entered the room.
Fish glanced at me, nodding.
Zans glanced at her watch to check the countdown timer in the weapons cache. “We’ve still got eight minutes.”
“To clear the building,” I snapped.
She laughed brittlely. “We’ll survive.”
“Fish,” I said.
Obeying my call without question, he immediately crossed to me.
“Don’t you dare, Socks!” Zans shouted, frantically typing on the keyboard.
I placed my hand on Nul5’s back over his armor, knowing that the tattoo of my blood lay just underneath. A tattoo that allowed my amplifier power to affect the nullifier when all other magic rolled off him.
“You owe me, Amp5!” Zans shrieked.
“I don’t, actually,” I said. Then I started pumping my power into Fish.
He gasped, arching up and forward, then spread his arms.
Zans lunged for a nearby tower, tearing loose what appeared to be a series of portable hard drives. I had no idea where she would have gotten anything that could have been used to transport data.
“Three …” I said.
Zans screamed, pulling another drive, then another.
“Two …”
She turned to glare at me, baring her teeth in a snarl of utter loathing.
“One.”
Zans leaped toward the door, tearing past us and into the hall.
Fish let loose with everything he had and everything I’d pumped into him. In a flash, his magic swamped the entire room, wiping every device and drive. Monitors exploded. Sparks flew. The bank of drives that Zans had been tearing apart caught fire.
I dropped my hand from Fish’s back, turning into the hall and catching his shudder in my peripheral vision. He shuddered just like that when he orgasmed. Releasing that much magic, having my magic flowing through him unfettered, had to feel better than any tumble he’d ever enjoyed. Though since he was the only one that any of the Five could sleep with without magical repercussions, he had way more experience with that than I did. So I might not have enough context to form an opinion.
Zans was sprawled on the floor in the corridor. I stepped over her, heading toward the door at the far end.
“You’re a stuck-up bitch,” she snarled after me.
I didn’t bother to look back. “You said you were going to take it down, Tek5. Time to step up and prove your word.”
She scrambled to her feet, jogging after me. “Give me a bump, then.”
I paused before the airlock at the base of the stairwell, having not bothered to open any doors or even glance through the windows between me and the stairs. I didn’t want to know what else was housed on this level. I never wanted to know.
Fish, Bee, and Knox joined us.
Zans pressed the drives she’d collected into Fish’s hands. “I need you to ward these.”
“It might not hold with the amount of magic we’re about to throw around.”
“Please,” she begged.
He nodded, tucking the drives into various pockets on his armor, then stepped over to open the airlock at our backs. It was only smart to have an egress before Zans and I got started.
Fish got the door open, stepping through it. Bee and Knox followed.
I shifted behind Zans, placing my hand on the back of her neck, skin to skin. She flung out her hands before her, launching three tiny explosive devices from each, then giving them a push with her power.
I took everything she had and amplified it. I pumped her full of my power, doubling the strength of her own magic. Tripling it.
That magic streamed from her. The devices exploded at the other end of the hall, taking out walls, doors, and windows. Fire raged toward us — and Zans fueled it, tearing through anything that hadn’t been touched by the first explosion with her telekinesis. The corridor warped with magic, concrete and metal twisting, shredding.
“Fuck …” Fish snarled, stepping up beside me just in time to cast a countering wave of magic, creating a nullifying shield between us and the destruction Zans had wrought. “Be more careful next time.”
“We need to go,” Knox murmured. “Now. They’re about to hit the weapons cache.”
Zans cackled. “And find our little surprise.”
“Exactly.”
Bee, Knox, and Zans darted for the stairs.
Then I heard the cry.
It was just a whisper. A sound of mewling pain. I tracked it. It was coming through the closed door to my immediate right.
My heart began beating wildly. Something was alive beyond that door. And dying.
Ignoring the inferno raging behind the ward Nul5 was still holding in place, I spu
n toward the door.
“Leave it,” Fish grunted. He had clearly heard it too.
I ignored him. The door was intersected by Fish’s magic about three-quarters of the way across. But though the handle was on my side of the ward Fish was holding, the hinges weren’t.
“We have to go,” Knox shouted behind me.
“Let me pass, Fish,”
With a pained grunt, Nul5 shoved his magic toward the inferno, pushing it back just enough to clear the doorway.
I grasped the handle, searing my skin — the heat of the fire was already seeping through the walls. As I shoved the door open, the terrible stench of charred flesh assaulted my senses. I gagged, stepping into the room that lay beyond.
Over half of it was already destroyed. Fire was raging, smoke filling the air. Overturned cages were everywhere. As with the fetuses and the genetic material on this level, the Collective had apparently also been experimenting on animals, though to what end, I didn’t know.
My eyes watered. The heat baked my skin.
Something whimpered again, drawing my attention to the far right corner of the room. A pile of dark-furred creatures had clustered under a workstation, having broken out of their cages. But they’d been unable to get out of the room.
A terrible sob was wrenched from me. I threw myself to my knees. I could barely see through the smoke and heat, but I could feel a faint hum of magic. That had to mean that one of the creatures was still alive.
“Socks! Socks!” Knox was screaming, pushing into the room behind me.
Magic whispered around me. Fish was trying to shift his ward to give me some cover.
I reached into the furry, still-warm pile of bodies. Gently lifting one, then another to the side, I searched, searched, searched for the tiny sliver of magic I could still feel. But they were dead.
They were all dead.
Because of me.
Again and again, all I did was take and destroy.
I was sobbing now, crying like I’d never cried in my life.
Bee was there, grabbing my arm, attempting to pull me away. I fought her off, still carefully digging through the tiny furry corpses. I could feel a spark of magic. I would have sworn I could feel it.
The Amplifier Protocol (Amplifier 0) Page 9