djinn wars 02 - taken

by Christine Pope

  Julia went on, “Well, the guy from JPL seemed to understand what Miles was talking about, and it sounded as if the Los Angeles group was in the process of constructing their own device. That was what Miles had been dreaming of — getting every survivor group equipped with one so they could protect themselves.”

  If I hadn’t had a vested interest in making sure one particular djinn got as far away as possible from those goddamn boxes, I would’ve agreed that was a great plan. The only hope for the Immune was to have the ability to defend themselves, and, as far as I knew, Miles’s device was the only thing that seemed to work effectively.

  Maybe too effectively.

  “What’s his deal, anyway?” I inquired. “That is, I understand being angry about what happened and wanting to do something about it, but this obsession of his feels almost too personal.”

  “For him, it is. He lost his wife and baby daughter to the Heat.”

  That was about the last thing I’d been expecting Julia to say. Miles Odekirk was one of those people you had a hard time imagining having sex at all, let alone procreating. But it seemed his losses had been just as profound as anyone else’s.

  I only managed to get one word out in response. “Damn.”

  She let out a tiny breath, barely enough to be called a sigh. “I know. I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose a child. That is, all of us have suffered losses, but there’s something particularly horrible about that. Anyway, losing his family is what’s driving him. I don’t think he’ll ever let it go. And now that he’s got two captive djinn?”

  “He’s never going to let them go,” I whispered. Although the office was heated well enough, ice seemed to be filling my veins, killing all hope. I remembered too well what the lab facility had looked like — building after building, all with what had seemed like miles of corridors. Jace and Natila could be anywhere in there. Anywhere.

  And if I couldn’t find them, how in the world could I possibly save them?

  Chapter Thirteen

  As I’d anticipated, Evony didn’t take the news at all well.

  “Goddamn sons of bitches!” she growled as she stood at the kitchen sink, rinsing away the last of the day’s grime from her hands. For someone who took as much care in her appearance as she did, she didn’t seem to worry too much about her fingernails, only that they were clean. She kept them clipped short and didn’t bother with polish.

  “I know,” I said. I was leaning up against the counter, Dutchie at my feet. It wasn’t quite suppertime yet, and the dog knew better than to beg, but she kept looking up at me wistfully, hoping I’d relent and get dinner for her a few minutes early.

  After she plucked a dishtowel from where it was hanging on the handle of the refrigerator door, Evony dried off her hands, then tossed the towel on the countertop. By then, I’d given up protesting every time she did that. Instead, I picked up the dishtowel and put it back where she’d gotten it. At another time, she might have smiled at my anal-retentive behavior. Right then, though, she was scowling, and didn’t even seem to notice.

  “So,” she said at last, “what’re you going to do?”

  Great. Not exactly the response I was hoping for. “Actually, Evony, I kind of thought this was going to be a ‘what are we going to do?’ kind of conversation.”

  Still frowning, she went over to the refrigerator and got out a beer. It was the last one of the six-pack, since we wouldn’t get a new allotment until the following week, and, judging by the way she tossed the empty box in the trash, I could tell the realization only made her that much more angry. True, she could buy herself drinks at Pajarito’s or at one of the other bars in town in the interim, but that meant using up more of her work vouchers.

  She popped the cap and took a long pull at the beer, then said, “I don’t know what the hell we should do. That place is huge. Or at least, it looks huge. I’ve never been inside. You would know better than I do.”

  “I was in one building,” I protested. “There’s at least ten of them, I think. So I have no idea what they’re all like.”

  “Probably crawling with guards.”

  “I don’t think we have enough survivors here in Los Alamos to make the lab or anywhere else ‘crawl’ with guards, but yeah, I’m sure there are enough to make things difficult.” I wondered then if Dan was among them. He was on the perimeter guard rotation, and I thought he’d put in a few shifts at the jail at the justice center, but of course he would never mention such a thing to me, and not just because the djinns’ presence in the holding cells was supposed to be a secret. Julia’s teasing aside, I knew he was interested in me, and admitting that he’d been playing prison guard to my captured djinn lover was not something he’d probably find too appealing.

  But because I knew I wasn’t brave enough to ask him openly, the question of whether or not Dan was now being stationed as a guard at the lab was sort of moot. About all I could hope was that any plan I did come up with wouldn’t involve him directly. I’d hate to see him get blamed in case Evony and I somehow did manage to free our two djinn.

  She took another large swallow of beer. Lately it seemed as if she’d been drinking way more than she should, but I wasn’t her mother. I didn’t think it was my place to tell her to stop. If that was her way of coping with the situation, there didn’t seem to be too much I could do about it. Besides, it didn’t seem to interfere with her work — she got up every morning and cheerfully headed off to the motor pool. In a way, I thought she preferred hanging out with Shawn and Brent to being with me. Maybe I reminded her too much of what she’d lost, since I’d suffered a similar loss. Or maybe being with the guys was a little bit like being back with her brothers and working on cars.

  Shrugging, she told me, “I don’t know what you want me to say, Jess. I mean, I wish I could come up with some brilliant plan off the top of my head, but I don’t think that way. Even when Jace and Natila were only in the detention center, it would have been hard enough, but now?” Another swallow of beer. Then she said, “I think all we can do is hope this is just a temporary thing. Like, maybe they took them up to the lab or something for tests, and then they’ll go back to the regular jail in a day or so.”

  “Tests?” I repeated. That sounded a lot worse than merely being interrogated. At the same time, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe Evony was now trying to downplay this turn of events because she really didn’t have any idea what we could do about it. Tone sharp, I asked, “What kind of tests?”

  “How the hell should I know? Do I look like a scientist?”

  “No.”

  Evony shot me a glare at that response, but then she only shrugged and drank some more beer. “That doesn’t have to be why they’re up there. It’s just something I thought of.”

  “I hope you’re wrong,” I said. “Because a while ago, Miles Odekirk was asking me if I’d ever seen Jace get hurt or be in pain. I said I hadn’t, since it was the truth, and also because I was hoping that if I made Jace sound really tough, then Odekirk would know it was impossible to do anything that really would hurt him.”

  Those big brown eyes of hers, with their now-familiar cat-eye liner, widened. “Is it? Impossible, I mean. I never saw Natila get hurt, either, but it wasn’t like we were doing much that would put her at risk.”

  I looked past Evony and out the kitchen window, which was more or less oriented to the southwest, in the direction where the labs were located in relation to our house. It was dark now, so I couldn’t really see much. That didn’t matter, though. I knew Jace was out there somewhere.

  At last I said, “I don’t know whether it’s impossible. I can only hope that it’s not what Miles Odekirk is trying to find out.”

  And the nightmarish notion continued to haunt me — that Jace and Natila were now being tortured somehow, and there wasn’t a single goddamn thing I could do about it. The psychic bond that he and I had shared was now broken, shattered by Odekirk’s infernal little box. Jace couldn’t reach out to me, and I certainly
didn’t have the sort of mental gifts that would allow me to reach out to him. I’d never really believed in psychics, but now I wished I was one, just so I could know was happening to him up at the labs.

  At least Julia had made it sound as if Miles Odekirk didn’t max out the settings on his little machines just because he could. No, he would probably get by with inflicting a little less pain if that meant the effective area of the device would be that much greater. After all, if my suspicions were correct, Dr. Odekirk had probably come up with a bunch of new ways of doling out pain. He didn’t need the box to inflict his own personal world of hurt.

  That realization effectively stopped my waffling. Maybe I was being crazy. Maybe I’d be caught, and then nothing Julia Innes could do or say would save me. Right then, I was willing to take the risk if I could hear Jace’s voice again, could have him reassure me that he really was all right, and that yes, they were performing tests on him at the lab, but they weren’t anything he couldn’t endure.

  Dutchie roused when I slid out of bed, since she’d been sleeping on the floor near the entrance to my room. I leaned down and stroked her behind the ears, whispering, “Stay quiet, baby. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  That seemed to reassure her, and she settled back down, nose on her front paws, but eyes open, watching me. I didn’t turn on the bedside lamp; Evony was a fairly heavy sleeper, but no point in risking waking her up at exactly the wrong moment. If this went sideways, I wanted her to be able to say with all honesty that she’d had no idea what I was up to. Luckily, my wardrobe wasn’t that extensive, so even in the darkness it was easy to lay hands on my jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt and a sweater. My boots were sitting next to the bed, and I sat down and pulled them on before tiptoeing out of my room and down the hall. Thank God the house had wall-to-wall carpet — it muffled my footsteps as I crept through the living room and headed to the coat closet. I always kept my gloves stuffed in my pockets and wound my wool scarf around the coat’s hanger, so I didn’t have to go hunting for any of the outdoor items I needed.

  The part that worried me the most was the sound of the garage door opening, but I had to take that risk. From the house, it was a little more than two miles to the lab, a distance that would have been easily walkable in decent weather, but not something I really wanted to attempt in the middle of an icy night at the tail end of January. It had snowed about three days earlier, and the weather had been clear since. That didn’t mean it wasn’t still bitterly cold, with overnight temperatures dropping below zero for the past several nights. I had no choice; I had to drive.

  At least Evony’s room was at the very back of the house, as far from the garage as you could get and still be in the same building. There was a good chance she wouldn’t hear anything, especially since she kept her bedroom door shut most nights. I think it was mostly to keep Dutchie out; Evony was friendly enough with the dog, but that didn’t mean she wanted a border-collie mix snoring next to her all night. Selfishly, I didn’t mind all that much. I wanted my dog in the room with me. Her presence was a comfort, something to help keep me going when I woke up in the middle of the night and realized that the Jace-sized space in the bed next to me remained empty.

  My purse was still sitting on the dining room table where I’d dropped it, so I dug out my keys and then headed for the garage. It was bitterly cold even in that protected space, and I hurried inside the Cherokee, then turned the key in the ignition. At the same time, I punched the remote for the garage door and began backing out as soon as there was enough clearance for me to escape. I didn’t even let the door roll up all the way, but instead pushed the button again so it would close immediately.

  Right before we’d arrived in Los Alamos, Margolis had instituted a curfew…for everyone’s safety, he claimed, but I knew it was more so he wouldn’t have to waste manpower policing the streets. No one was supposed to be out between eleven p.m. and six a.m., except the unlucky few who pulled guard duty on the graveyard shift. Evading the guards wouldn’t be too difficult, though. I’d seen the duty rosters and therefore knew that only two teams patrolled the dark, quiet streets of Los Alamos during those dead hours. It was a risk I was willing to take.

  Even so, that didn’t mean I wasn’t being cautious. The moon was almost full, and so I really didn’t need my headlights. I kept them turned off and drove along slowly, staying on the side streets as much as possible. If I did have the bad luck to run across a patrol, well, I’d tell them I’d woken up with horrible cramps and was going to see Ellen O’Dell, a nurse practitioner who was the colony’s sole medical provider at the moment. Her house really was in the direction of the labs, so my lie should sound plausible enough. Driving around in the middle of the night with no headlights on was another story, but I could say I’d left them off because I didn’t want to disturb anyone. That part was a little shakier, I knew. Then again, in the past I’d found that bringing up the unpleasant subject of cramps was enough to make almost any guy stop asking questions. From what I’d seen on the roster, none of the female guards ever seemed to pull the overnight rotation. I figured I was probably safe from having another woman poke holes in my story.

  All my worries about getting caught seemed to have been for nothing, though. I slipped from street to street and saw no one, nothing moving. Well, that’s not entirely true. As I turned onto Trinity Drive, I saw a brief flash of light reflected in a pair of golden eyes. A second or two later, two coyotes loped across the street and disappeared behind a building. Foraging for food, most likely; I couldn’t think what else would have driven them out on such a bitter night. The outside temperature reading on the dashboard said it was minus two degrees.

  At last I was clear of town and rising toward the Los Alamos laboratories. I couldn’t risk taking the main road in, not with that guard shack positioned square in the middle of it. Possibly at night it wasn’t manned, but I wouldn’t chance it. When I was a little less than a quarter-mile away, I pulled over onto the side of the road and shut off the engine, then got out.

  The wind hit my face in a blast that felt as if it had blown in straight from Antarctica. I gasped, but that was a mistake, as all it did was force more freezing air into my lungs.

  You can do this, I told myself. This coat is rated up to minus thirty. Now get moving — you’ll warm up.

  Hands jammed in my pockets, I clicked the remote to lock the Cherokee, then began trudging up the hill. Out here, the snow was up to mid-calf, chilling my feet almost immediately, despite my thick boots and heavy socks. It would have been much easier to follow the road, as that had been plowed, but of course I couldn’t do that and hope to avoid detection.

  A wire fence enclosed the facility. Maybe once it had been electrified, or maybe not. And maybe they had some kind of video surveillance out here, although I didn’t see any evidence of it. Miles Odekirk seemed more than a little paranoid, although it was possible he had already analyzed the current population of Los Alamos for any threats and had decided it wasn’t worth wasting the electricity to keep out intruders who didn’t exist. So when I put my hand on the wire fence, nothing happened, and nothing happened when I stepped down on another strand of wire, creating a gap I could slip through.

  I let out a breath but remembered not to pull it back in too quickly. Already I could barely feel my toes. I needed to get out of this open, snowy spot and into the paved section of the facility as soon as I could.

  Hurrying while trying to trudge through calf-high snow only made matters worse, so I took careful, deliberate strides. Unless we got another storm — which wasn’t in the forecast, according to Manny Delgado, the Los Alamos group’s amateur meteorologist — my tracks would be clearly visible the next morning, but there wasn’t much I could do about that. The wind was picking up, creating blowing drifts of snow that looked like ghostly shapes wavering in the moonlight, and if I were really, really lucky, the drifting snow would be enough to obscure the evidence of my passage.

  Well, a girl could hope, an
yway.

  After what felt like an hour but was probably more like twenty minutes or so, I emerged onto the pavement, in what seemed to be the back end of one of the facility’s parking lots. The building the lot was attached to seemed to be completely dark, and there were no cars around. Whether that was a good sign, I didn’t know for sure. They might’ve been trying to hide any evidence of where they were keeping Jace and Natila, or it could simply be that the two djinn were elsewhere on the lab’s campus.

  Still, I had to try.

  Jace? I thought with all my might. I had no idea whether I was doing this at all correctly — in the past, he had always been the one to touch my mind first, and we’d opened a dialogue from there. Now, though, I had to take the initiative, since of course he could have had no idea that I would do anything as insane as venture out to the labs on a sub-zero January night.

  I heard no reply, nothing except the low howl of the wind in my ears, which seemed to come right through the knitted cap I’d pulled down tightly over my head. The moonlight was so bright that I could see the snow drifts tracing their way across the empty parking lot, even though it clearly had been plowed recently.

  All right, nothing here. Time to move on to the next building. I hurried into the lee of the structure, glad for a moment’s respite from the ceaseless wind. This one was mostly dark, but unlike the first building, a few lights showed on the second and third floors. I wondered how many people would be on the lab’s campus during a normal workday. Miles, of course, and a few guards, but did he have any support staff of his own? Julia had never mentioned anyone performing that kind of work, and I hadn’t thought to ask. During my time here, I’d made the acquaintance of quite a few people, but nowhere close to the entire population of the colony. And I had a feeling that anyone who worked up at the labs would have been instructed to stay somewhat aloof. I’d never seen Miles at Pajarito’s, that was for sure.