by Anne Tibbets
I think a coma would have been better.
Here I would surely die of loneliness and boredom.
I thought of Ric and my insides capsized.
I would have given anything to have him sitting at the table across from me, holding his coffee mug backward and flicking his bangs out of his eyes as he read a tablet, absently tapping the screen like an old-fashioned magazine.
The time I’d kept him at arm’s length now felt foolish and infantile.
I wanted to take it all back. Start over. But that was impossible.
I’d blown it.
After a few minutes of sitting and staring at nothing, I heard a click on the floor. With nothing better to do, I walked toward the noise and found a screw on the ground. I picked it up, stared at it a moment, then realized two more were on the floor next to it.
What on earth...?
After a few seconds, a fourth screw seemingly dropped from the ceiling and clinked to the floor.
I looked up.
The screws appeared to have come from the air vent. Each corner of the vent had empty screw holes, which meant it could be easily removed from the wall.
I glanced back at the mirror, figuring it was a two-way and someone might be watching. I wondered if they were playing a trick on me.
Perhaps this was some sort of scientific experiment on human behavior.
If faced with the chance to escape, would I take it?
Seeing nothing left to lose, I took the chair from the table, stood atop it and pried the air vent cover off the wall, then dropped it to the floor.
“Hi!” whispered Sonya.
I nearly fell off the chair as my hands flew to my mouth. “Sonya!”
“Shh!” she hissed. Her dusty face peered at me from inside the air vent. She was disheveled and wore the same black clothing she had on the day of her disappearance. But she smiled broadly, and I almost kissed her right then and there.
She waved me in. “Come on.”
“I thought you were dead!”
“Funny thing about Auberge,” she said, winking at me. “They never thought to search inside headquarters.” She reached her hands toward mine in an attempt to pull me into the airshaft. “Get the lead out.”
I hopped up and down a few times in failed attempts to crawl into the vent. Eventually, I managed to get my torso in.
“Quietly!” Sonya whispered. She slid backward and gave me room to enter. “Wait. Go back and bring the vent cover and screws.”
“Oh. Okay.”
I slithered back out, almost tipping the chair over as my bare feet searched for it, then gathered everything up and hopped up again.
Once I had my torso in the shaft, I used my feet to crawl up the cement wall and pulled with my arms against the smooth metal. It helped to use my hands and feet as traction. By the time I made it inside, my limbs shook from the effort.
The vents felt tight and claustrophobic, but it wasn’t the coma room, so I figured it was a vast improvement.
“This is crazy,” I said. “How are they not seeing us on the security cameras?”
Sonya turned back at me a moment. “Funny how temperamental security cameras can be,” she said. “Always blanking out for a minute or two, then turning back on. You’d be amazed at how long I’ve been chewing this piece of gum.”
“But how will we get out of the building?”
“Leave that to me,” she said.
She waved me halfway down one vent so she could get past me to reattach the air vent cover, then she came back and led me through a series of shafts. I followed.
Left.
Right.
Then down, which we did feet first.
Left again.
Along the way, Sonya would stick her piece of gum to a tiny security camera on the wall, then scuttle forward, reach around and remove it, popping it back in her mouth once we were past.
“Where are we going?” I asked as quietly as I could, though everything sounded as if it echoed in the metal shafts.
“We’ll swing by and get Ric, then hightail it out of here,” Sonya said. “I’ve got a plan.”
“Oh, Sonya. Ric is dead.” The words sounded foreign to me and tasted sour on my tongue. They hurt on a level so deep I was sorry to have voiced it.
Sonya didn’t seem too upset by the news, however, because she continued crawling. “I just left him a few minutes ago. He’s fine.”
“No. I heard a gunshot.”
“He’s wounded, mind you. They shot him in the shoulder when he tried to make a run for it. The idiot. And they beat him up pretty good too. They have him in a cell on the detention block.”
“Really?” I touched her foot for emphasis.
“Yep,” she whispered back. “I just talked to him a few minutes ago.”
I wanted to burst into tears of happiness right then and there but stopped myself. Emotions would have to wait. Besides, I wasn’t sure all my emotions would fit in the air shaft with me barely squeezing along. Sonya made it look easy, but it wasn’t.
“Where will we go once we get out of here?”
“Let’s cross that bridge if we get to it,” she answered.
I didn’t like the sound of that.
Finally, we came to a halt by a large air intake vent and Sonya peeped through the slats.
“Stay here,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
She popped open the vent and passed it back to me. Then she went out the vent head first, grabbing the edge with her hands, and lowered her feet to the ground while she held on.
When her fingers released their hold, I moved forward for a better look.
There was a long cement hallway with shiny metal doors on either side. Each door had a tray slot, just like the one in my coma room, and for a moment I wondered if Sonya had plans to slip inside the room from there, but even she wasn’t that skinny.
Sonya tiptoed down the hall then stopped at a door on the left-hand side. She pulled back the slat on the door and peeped through it.
I saw her whispering, but since she was all the way at the end of the hall, I couldn’t hear what she’d said. She nodded twice, then put the slat back down and tiptoed back to me at the intake vent.
“Change of plans,” she said. “You’re going to have to come down. Think you can do it the same way I did?”
“Honestly? No.”
Sonya frowned but nodded. “All right. Wait there.”
She tiptoed back down the hall to the door. Then, pulling a long, thin metal stick from someplace on her body—I couldn’t tell from where with how tightly her leggings and shirt fit; I found it amazing she had anything in her pockets at all—she picked the lock on the door and pulled it open by the handle.
Ric entered the hallway, looking black-and-blue from face to feet, wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing from before, with a large bloody stain on his right shoulder.
“Oh my God,” I gasped, my stomach hitting my toes.
He glanced up at the air vent and smiled weakly at me, but I could tell from the way he was standing that he was in a serious amount of pain.
I couldn’t wait any longer. I slithered past the opening for the air vent, backed into it feet first and dropped to the ground. When my feet hit the floor, my knees buckled and I fell back onto my rump.
Before I was on my feet, I heard the taps of footsteps upon the floor, then felt Ric’s arms around me.
“Are you all right?” he whispered into my ear. His breath was hot and his shirt was stuck to his chest.
I wrapped my arms around him and choked as I held back sobs.
Alive! He was alive.
And he was there.
It meant everything to me, and that scared me to death. Our bodies pressed tog
ether and I felt the undeniable urge to feel his skin against mine. I never wanted to let go.
“Um, guys...?” Sonya said.
Ric broke the embrace and pulled me to my feet with his good arm. I latched onto it with both hands. When we turned to face Sonya, she had a wicked grin plastered across her face.
“You two want a moment alone?”
“Sorry,” he said. I slipped my hand into his and he squeezed it. It felt warm and comfortable and I squeezed it in return to make certain it was there to stay.
Sonya shrugged. “Fine by me. I just thought maybe you’d want to escape first.”
“We do,” I said, trying to focus on the task at hand.
Sonya nodded wryly. “This way, then.”
* * *
We went in the opposite direction from the airshaft and entered a stairwell. I thought perhaps we were going to head up, but instead, we went down. Flight after flight, the three of us, none of us wearing any shoes, trampled down the stairs, stopping at every landing to make sure the coast was clear.
After what must have been ten flights, Sonya led us through a door and down a dark carpeted hallway. She moved ahead to see that it was safe, then waved us closer. We waited for a guard to pass around the corner, then Sonya took a coin from her pocket and flicked it down the hall in the opposite direction. She then yanked open the door behind her, and we crammed inside what appeared to be a dark storage room full of metal tables and chairs. We waited there as two guards pounded down the hall, I presume to check out the noise the coin had made.
“I’ll be right back,” Sonya said.
She slipped noiselessly out the door, into the hallway, leaving Ric and me in the dark storage room alone.
He was still holding my hand and squeezed it again. We stayed like that for a few moments.
“Ahem,” Sonya said.
Ric and I glanced up and over the door and I could just barely see the outline of her head poking out an overhead airshaft vent.
“Come on, Naya,” she said. “I need a hand.”
Using his good arm, Ric helped boost me up, and I followed Sonya through another airshaft until we stopped at a vent and dropped into the middle of a darkened room.
Floor-to-ceiling cabinets holding rectangular black boxes lined every square inch of the walls and formed rows across the room. The soundproof padding on the walls and ceiling muted the hum from the machines. It was the server room, undisturbed as if Sonya hadn’t been there the first time.
It was hard to believe that had been nearly a week ago.
It felt like a lifetime.
Sonya took me to the rack of shelves in the center of the room and braced her feet firmly on the ground, her hands on the shelf corner. “Ready?”
“What are we doing?”
She smiled sadly. “As Tym would have said, we’re crashing the system.”
I put my hands on the opposite side of the shelf and leaned my entire body against the rack. “Ready.”
“Go.”
With a great heave and more than a few tries, Sonya and I toppled over the entire center shelf of server boxes, which knocked one shelf into another, sending them all crashing to the floor. It made a huge noise, and the moment it started tipping, she reached down and swiped her old flashlight from the floor, then boosted me back up into the airshaft.
Following just behind me into the shaft, Sonya wiggled around, pulled a piece of gum off the server room camera and then snatched something from her pocket. She scratched a small stick against the wall, creating sparks.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s called a match.”
With another try against the wall, the match’s end burst into flames. Sonya hardly blinked as she tossed the lit match back out the vent and into the server room.
“Move,” she said, and I slithered toward the storage room, where Ric was waiting.
Before we reached the vent opening, a siren sounded, so loud it hurt my ears. I wanted to grasp at them, but Sonya was pressing me from behind and we were obviously in a rush.
We reached the vent, dropped back to the floor with Ric’s limited help and peeked out into the hallway.
Guards filled the halls, all running toward the server room, though we could hardly hear a thing with the sirens sounding so loudly.
Once there was a break in the guards, Sonya led us back to the stairwell and we ran up as fast as we could. People from all floors of the building were coming into the stairs as well, running up alongside us.
No one seemed to notice Ric was covered in blood or that none of us had any shoes. I guess they heard sirens, and they ran. No questions asked.
When at last we reached ground level, we followed the crowd and filed out into the lobby, where guards were herding people into the street.
Ric and I, still hand in hand, followed Sonya as we walked away.
I couldn’t believe our luck.
* * *
Out in the street, it was day, but the air was so thick with smoke it felt as dark as night. We followed Sonya a block or two, then turned in to an alley to catch our breath.
“I can’t believe that worked!” I leaned against the building and wiped my hair from my face with a heavy sigh.
“It shouldn’t have been that easy.” Sonya raised an eyebrow. “There were half as many guards as there should have been.”
Ric let go of my hand and pressed the bloody splotch on his shirt. “Where’d they all go?”
He was pale. He must have lost a lot of blood from the bullet wound. But he was on his feet and looked determined. I had the urge to tell him to lie down and rest, but I knew that would have to wait.
Sonya shook her head. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“How’d the fire spread so quickly?” I asked.
Ric coughed. “Something’s wrong. There’s no way it should be this smoky from a fire ten stories underground.”
He was right. The air was black.
Sonya jogged back down the alley. “Wait here.” She turned the corner and disappeared from sight.
Ric winced and leaned against the wall.
“Oh, you poor—What can I do to help you?”
“Don’t suppose you have a sling handy, do you?” He held his arm to his chest as if it were a newborn baby. “Or a scalpel?”
“Here.” I pulled the drawstring from my pants and helped him tie his arm down. That inevitably made my pants loose, so I rolled the top over a few times and knotted them on one hip.
The string didn’t do anything in the way of subduing the pain, but at least it stopped Ric’s arm from flopping around, which would help some.
“It’s not much,” I said.
Ric grinned at me sheepishly. “I’ll take it.”
I raised my hand and absently brushed his hair from his eyes. He closed his lids at my touch and leaned toward my fingers. I froze them in position, absorbing the heat of his skin.
I lingered on the curve of his brow and trailed my hand down his temple, reveling in the feel of him.
When he opened his eyes and looked into mine his expression was ablaze.
The intensity of his gaze paused my hand and I slowly pulled it away.
“Don’t stop,” he whispered.
“I don’t want to,” I admitted, and the realization shocked me. “Just do me one favor.”
He turned his head to the side, listening.
“Don’t die again, or I’ll kill you.”
A laugh erupted from his gut, shaking him from head to toe, and he grunted in pain as his arm banged against his chest.
“Oh,” I moaned with remorse. “Sorry.”
Footsteps approached. Sonya ran up to us, a grim expression on her face. “There’s more than one building on fire. Th
at’s why all the smoke.”
I asked, “Where else?”
Her eyes filled with tears. It was so unlike her both Ric and I were momentarily speechless.
Ric found his words first. “What is it?”
Sonya swallowed hard. “It’s the Line.”
My first instinct was, Good. I hope it burns to the ground. “Are you sure?”
“Just heard some guards talking about it,” she said. “They’re closing it down.”
Ric’s eyes brightened. “That’s fantastic!”
Sonya sniffed. “No. It’s worse than that.”
“What?” My bubble burst. I was missing something big, otherwise Sonya wouldn’t be so upset. I was almost afraid to ask.
Sonya was dour. “They’ve locked the doors.”
“Oh my God,” Ric gasped, and his eyes flared.
“You mean, they’re not letting the girls out?”
Sonya shook her head, apparently unable to say the words.
“They’ll burn to death!” I blurted. Images of all the girls I knew inside the Line walls scorched my memory.
Oh my God.
Peni.
“We have to do something,” Ric said. He pushed off the wall with his good arm but swayed. I reached out to steady him, and he leaned into me.
“You’re not going anywhere, Doc,” Sonya said.
“We can’t just let them die!” he shouted, desperation creeping into his voice.
“I’ll go.” The words were out of my mouth before I’d thought them through.
“You can’t either,” she said. “What about the babies?”
“I’m going. Peni’s in there.”
Ric disagreed. “No, Sonya’s right.”
“I know she’s right. But I’m going anyway.” I leaned Ric up off my shoulder and onto his own feet. Then, shoving my own exhaustion down so far into me I hardly knew it was there, I said, “I’ll meet you at the bridge. Can you get there all right?”
He was white as a sheet. “The clinic. We’ll meet at the clinic.”
“I’m coming with you, Naya,” Sonya said.
“Take him to the clinic first,” I ordered. “Then meet me at the Line. I think I can get in okay, but getting back out could be tricky.”
“No,” Ric said. “Sonya, you go with her. I can make it to the clinic by myself.”