by Carter Roy
Just then, a series of little red bulbs in wire cages near the ceiling flickered on. They were bright enough that we could see where we were going, but not so bright that anything was crystal clear. “Backup generators,” Dawkins said. “I was hoping they wouldn’t have any of those.”
Ahead of us was the top of a stairwell. Dawkins gestured for us to follow. “Nice and easy,” he whispered as we made our way down in the darkness.
The stairwell opened onto a corridor. Far to our left was a pair of double doors like you might see in a hospital, with big square windows set into the top half. Through the glass we could see flickers of illumination—flashlights, maybe, or light from the backup generator.
“Are they going to finish what they were doing to Sammy?” Greta asked.
“I don’t think the backups can generate enough power for that device to work,” Dawkins said. “The whole reason they need their own power substation is that the Eye of the Needle takes a lot of juice. So Sammy should be safe. For now.”
Doors lined the corridor. “Ronan, about where was it that you saw Ogabe’s head?”
I closed my eyes and tried to remember the distance from the operating-room window that Greta had crouched over. “This one,” I said, running to the second door in the series. “I think it’s this one.”
Dawkins tried the knob, then stepped back and kicked it open. “Inside, everyone. And no flashlights! Remember, there are windows in the ceiling.” Once we were all inside, he eased the door shut.
Dawkins raised a finger to his lips. From the other side of the door, we heard the sound of feet pounding past. Someone was barking orders.
After they’d gone, Dawkins took the Zippo from his pocket and cupped his hand around it. In the bit of light he let escape between his fingers, we could see that the room might once have been a small office. Now it was a cell. The desk had been shoved against the wall, and in front of it was a cot.
Lying on top of the cot was the shaved head of a young black man. Its face grinned, and Ogabe’s body pushed its way between the three of us, went to the cot, and gently picked it up.
“Who’s got the tape?” Dawkins asked in a whisper.
“Tape?” I said. “You never said anything about tape!”
“I’m sure I put a roll of duct tape on Gaspar’s workbench when I grabbed the lock-pick set and the screwdriver,” Dawkins said.
“You only brought the screwdriver,” Greta said. “There isn’t any tape.”
In Ogabe’s hands, his head rolled its eyes. The hands shifted the head around until it was tucked into the crook of his left arm like a football, and then he turned his right hand in a gesture that clearly meant “Proceed.”
Dawkins sighed. “Sorry, friend. I got distracted.”
The headless shoulders shrugged, but the face under its arm winked at Dawkins.
“I wonder where that goes to,” Dawkins said, pointing to a door on the left wall. “Greta?”
She unrolled her pick set and a few seconds later, we stepped through and into the office next door.
“Who’s there?” asked a woman’s voice as we came through.
Lying facedown on the cot, hands cuffed behind her back, her feet tied, was a woman in old paint-spattered jeans and a men’s blue button-down shirt. There were bruises on her face, including a nasty-looking cut over her right eye.
My mom. My crazy intense, way-too-bossy, badass, and brilliant mother, fearless protector of Greta Sustermann and my favorite person in the world. Her clothes were stained dark with something new—blood, maybe. And then I didn’t see anything else because my vision got all wavery.
Okay, so I was on the verge of crying. So what? Somewhere deep down I’d believed my mom was going to turn up dead. Without her, I’d be all alone in the world. I’d have my dad, but now I realized something I hadn’t understood before: my dad just didn’t count as much.
She flopped around until she could see us, squinting in the weak light from the Zippo. “Ronan?!” she said, disbelief and anger in her voice. “You should not be here!”
I tried to say “Mom,” but all that came out was a strangled noise, so I just dove down and hugged her. “You’re okay,” I finally managed to say.
“I will be once I get out of these cuffs,” she said. “Why are you here, Ronan?”
“Hold on, Bree, while Greta unlocks you,” Dawkins said.
“Greta is here, too?” my mom said. “Greta Sustermann? I’m going to kill you, Jack!” She struggled for a moment, then relaxed so that Greta could pick the locks on the cuffs.
“Your threats scare me not at all,” Dawkins said. “I’ve been killed twice already since yesterday. I’ll explain about the kids later, but trust me—they gave me no choice.”
My mom said nothing, but gave Dawkins a look that I knew well—it said that death was the least of his worries. After a few moments, the second cuff rasped open, and my mother sat up on the cot and hastily untied her legs. She stood and folded me into a crushing hug, then held me away and stared into my face. “You’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Honest.”
A flicker of light from above silenced us. “They’re searching!” Dawkins hissed, dousing the Zippo. “Everyone against the walls.”
We hugged the walls as the beam of a flashlight played through the glass panel in the ceiling. After a moment, it moved on.
“Did you find Dad?” I asked my mom once it was dark again. “Is he okay?”
Mom stared at me in the dark, then turned on Dawkins again. “Why did you bring the children?” she asked, despair in her voice. “This is the worst place. Do you know what they’re doing here?”
“Sadly, yes,” he replied. “We saw a demonstration a few minutes ago, just before the lights went out.”
She sniffed. “Why do you smell like something’s burning?” Then she looked at Ogabe. “And what happened to his head?”
In the next connected office, a woman’s shawl was draped on the cot, and a table held a glass of water with a lipstick smudge on the rim. Dawkins felt the cot and said, “It’s warm. Whoever was here, we just missed her.”
There were footsteps in the corridor outside, and someone tried the handle to the office. We all froze. Apparently satisfied, the footsteps moved on. “When they try Ogabe’s cell, they’ll find our entry point,” Dawkins said. “We need to hustle.”
In the room beyond the office with the shawl, trussed up in much the same way we’d found my mother, a man lay on the cot.
“Dad!” Greta cried.
Gaspar Sustermann wasn’t a big man, but he was broad shouldered and muscular, and his receding red hair only made him look tougher, like a military man in civilian clothes. Greta hugged him where he lay on the cot. She pressed her face against his shoulder and said, “I missed you so much! It’s been a horrible day, Dad, first the train and the swords and then a truck ran over our friend and Ronan and I had to—”
“Sweetie,” Gaspar Sustermann said, “it is great to see you and all, but can you do your old man a favor and open these cuffs?”
“Oh geez!” Greta exclaimed, sitting up and dragging the back of her hand across her eyes. “Of course! Sorry!”
In the final empty cell, Dawkins had Greta work the lock to the hallway while he quickly briefed Mom, Gaspar, and Ogabe’s head on what we’d seen. “This Eye of the Needle device is functional, and they were planning on trying it out on a few test souls—starting with this poor kid named Sammy. Then, I suppose, you two.”
“Kid?” my mom said. “That doesn’t sound right. They have a woman from Brazil, a Pure they smuggled in.” She probed the wound above her eye and winced. “Unless you’re telling me they have two Pure?”
“No, the boy isn’t a Pure, he’s just some foster kid who got caught up in this,” Dawkins said. “We cut the power before they were able to hurt him. But if they have a Pure here, where is she?”
“That shawl,” I said, remembering. “You said we’d just missed her.”
> “They must have had her ready for the Eye once they were done testing.” Looking more worried than I’d ever seen him, Dawkins rested a hand on Greta’s shoulder. “We need that door open now, Greta. We’ve got to get to this woman before they run her through that device.”
“But weren’t they going to run Sammy through it first?” I asked. And then, when I saw the look on Dawkins’ face, I added, “Not that that’s a good thing!”
“They know we’re here,” Dawkins said, “so they’re not going to pussyfoot around with test subjects. They’ll take the Pure’s soul as soon as they’re able.”
“It’s a good thing the power is out, then,” Gaspar said.
There was a soft click, and Greta cracked the door open an inch.
In the empty hallway, there was a flicker as the red emergency generator bulbs dimmed and went dark.
“What’s going on?” I whispered.
Dawkins swung the cell door open, and we carefully edged out into the pitch-black corridor. “The only reason the emergency generator would cut out,” he whispered, “is if—”
With a crackle of electricity, the hallway was bathed in white light.
The generators were back on.
CHAPTER 26:
THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE
Dawkins ran to the double doors at the corridor’s end.
He threw himself against them, then fell back, saying, “Barred from the other side.” Raising his fists, he slammed them against the wire-reinforced glass of one of the windows to get the attention of the people inside. “The facility is surrounded!” he shouted to them. “Stop what you’re doing and come out with your hands where we can see them!”
“You brought help?” Greta’s dad asked. “The place is surrounded?”
“No,” Greta said, frowning and shaking her head. “Dawkins called somebody, but they were too far away to get here in time. We came alone.”
“This is where one of those Tesla guns would come in handy,” I said. I went to the other door and looked in.
The room was small. In its center was the gurney, but now, instead of Sammy, a woman was strapped to it. She was younger than my mom, but not by a whole lot. And she was obviously freaked out of her mind, looking from person to person, talking nonstop, probably pleading—though no one in the room paid her any attention.
At the foot of the table was Sammy’s foster father, Dr. Warner, and next to him the petite blonde woman who was his wife. Beside her was the Bend Sinister agent called Donald and another guy with dark hair and a goatee. They were holding onto Sammy, who looked terrified.
At the head of the gurney was a man I hadn’t noticed from above, a man whose face was completely concealed by a red mask.
“What is that thing?” Greta whispered. “It’s horrible!”
The mask moved, squirming on his face like it was alive, rippling and changing shape with each breath the man took. One moment the mask was long and narrow, the nose and cheeks pointy beneath writhing hair like barbed wire; the next, the nose curled in upon itself, flattened, and disappeared entirely. Another moment, and the jaw and brow widened, thickened, the eyeholes vanishing into folds of flesh as the cheeks swelled up. The shifting never stopped, the mask slithering around the man’s head like a living nightmare. Watching it squirm made me sick to my stomach, but I couldn’t look away.
The only part of the mask that never changed was a large almond-shaped third eye just above the eyeholes. It was closed, but I could guess pretty easily what it was: The Perceptor. The neon green eye Dawkins had said was the Bend Sinister equivalent of a Verity Glass.
If the man in the mask looked at Greta with the Perceptor, I wondered, would he see the blindingly bright burning of her soul? Would he realize that my friend was one of the Pure he was looking for, and come after her next? Would he kill her?
I shoved Greta away from the glass.
“Hey!” she griped, shoving me back. “What are you doing?”
“Sorry,” I said, “but it’s too horrible! I, um, can’t bear to watch.”
By that time, my mom and Dawkins had blocked her from view. “Ronan’s right,” he said. “This is exactly the sort of thing I wanted to protect you two from by leaving you in the car.”
Greta’s dad shielded her with his body, but I could still see. The man in the mask reached up and touched something on his face.
Slowly, the third eye inched open. It burned a sickly electric green.
My breath died in my throat. No wonder the Warner’s first foster kid had been terrified by this mask. No wonder Sammy was afraid of this guy.
Then our view was blocked by another face: Ms. Hand.
She must have been inside the room the entire time. Smiling, she looked at each of us, and then she caught my eye. She mouthed a single word.
“What did she say?” Greta asked from behind me.
“Watch,” I whispered. “She said, ‘Watch.’”
She moved away in time for me to see Mr. Warner administer an injection to the woman on the gurney—some kind of sedative, I guessed, because she quieted down and seemed to fall asleep.
Behind the woman, Mrs. Warner moved to a control panel and flipped a lever. That searing net of red light again crisscrossed the Eye of the Needle. Dr. Warner screwed the silver Conceptacle into place, and the people around the gurney stood back.
“We can’t just stand here!” I shouted. “We have to do something.”
But it was too late: Dr. Warner was already pushing the metal table through the Eye. As we watched in horror, the device did what it had been invented to do: it combed the woman’s soul out of her body.
Whatever sedative they’d given her didn’t matter: Once the process started, she woke up and began thrashing and screaming as the gurney rolled through the hoop.
Sammy screamed, too—a long wailing cry that made me want to cover my ears.
And then the woman’s scream abruptly cut off and she went still, her back arched, a fine white smoke wafting out of her open mouth. She looked dead, but as we watched, her body slumped down again, and I could see her chest rise and fall as she breathed.
The Head raised a hand and closed the Perceptor, and Mrs. Warner flipped the lever. The net of light in the hoop disappeared in a burst of static.
It had taken less than a minute.
While Dr. Warner removed the Conceptacle and packed it into a padded steel container, Donald handed Sammy over to his foster mother, Mrs. Warner. She pulled him in close for what might have looked like a hug if she hadn’t just tried to sacrifice him. He struggled, but she clasped him tight.
“What’s happening?” Greta asked from behind me.
“They took that woman’s soul,” I said. “They did it.”
Donald and the goateed man carried the padded steel container through an open door on the opposite side of the room, while the Head, the Warners, and Ms. Hand watched them go. I pounded my fist on the glass, and the Head looked over and stared at me while the thing covering his face pulsed and contorted.
That was when Sammy broke free.
He bit his foster mother’s hand, ducked past Ms. Hand, and threw himself at the door. There was the noise of a metal bolt moving, and something scraped away, and then Ms. Hand was on him again. She gripped Sammy’s shirt and flung him backward.
But he’d done enough.
Dawkins and Ogabe pushed open the doors, and the metal crossbar that had been blocking them clattered to the floor.
Backing away, Ms. Hand shouted, “Go!” and the Head and the Warners fled out the far exit leaving Sammy behind.
On the other side of the gurney stood Ms. Hand, the blade of her drawn sword against the unconscious woman’s neck. “Stop where you are, or I will kill this Pure.”
“Haven’t you done enough to that poor woman?” Dawkins asked, but he did as instructed and paused midstep. So did Ogabe.
Ms. Hand beamed at me. “It was so kind of you to bring us Evelyn,” she said. “I feared we’d lost him entirely, but t
hanks to you, my mission is complete.”
“Why do you want to kill him?” Dawkins asked. “Why does a dopey thirteen-year-old kid matter so much to the Bend Sinister?”
“Kill him?” she said, and chuckled. “No, we never wanted to kill—”
Something struck her in the face.
Ogabe had thrown his head.
Ms. Hand flinched and raised her sword. In that moment, Ogabe’s body swept the unconscious woman up into his arms and backpedaled down the hall. His head rolled off the gurney and to the floor.
“Bree, Gaspar, Greta,” Dawkins said, “chase down that soul. Ronan and I will take care of business here.”
My mom, Greta, and her dad slid past Dawkins and charged after the Warners and the Head.
“You will be too late,” Ms. Hand said, coming around toward us, slashing the air with her sword.
Her foot connected with something, and Ms. Hand glanced down. With a cry of disgust, she swung back her leg, and kicked Ogabe’s head like a soccer ball. It bounced off the open doors and rolled after him down the corridor.
“You have a longsword,” Dawkins said, stepping around the table toward her. “And all I have are my good looks. Hardly seems fair to you.”
“Come closer,” Ms. Hand said, jabbing the blade forward, “and we’ll see how your looks fare.”
“Tempting!” Dawkins replied. “Yet I think I’ll decline your kind offer. At least until I’ve found some means of defending myself.”
Ms. Hand circled around toward Dawkins, stepping over Sammy, who was crouched in a ball on the floor, probably figuring the little kid was no threat to her—if she’d even noticed him at all.
And then he launched himself against the back of her knees in a flying tackle.
She grunted in surprise and flung her hands out to break her fall.
Her sword skittered away on the tile.
Sammy was on it a moment later. Sword in hand, he backed away from her. “Who’s the boss now, huh?” he asked.