At first, Jason didn’t seem bothered by their flirting, but when Nancy planted one on Bill, Jason stood up and left the room. Nancy said she felt completely vindicated by his reaction, but when he came back, he acted as if everything was fine and even patted Bill on the back and wished the couple good luck. Good luck? For a hundred year old, he sure was acting like an immature idiot. But then again, he was a lab man for most of his life and being a famous reporter was still fairly new to him. I’d cut him some slack if it weren’t Nancy he was screwing with.
Ryan stayed out of the entire mess according to Nancy. She said he could care less about anything that didn’t involve me. She said he even slipped and said he loved me. (This made my heart leap all over again.) Everyone was upset and searching for me like mad, but Ryan was on a whole other level of torture. Since he was the last to see me, he felt like it was his fault that I was taken. He kept on saying that he should have gone into the room with me and then it never would have happened. I somehow doubted that, and I made sure I told him that I didn’t blame him one bit all last night.
So as things stood now, Jason had to live with the torture that Nancy may have moved on, and Nancy had to deal with the torture that… well… that was Jason Keroff. I didn’t envy either one of them!
Poor Bill was the pawn in the middle, but he seemed to enjoy being the guy that made Jason jealous. Maybe it was some perverse way of dealing with his own jealously toward Ryan and me.
We left the hospital in two hovers. Nancy, Ryan, Bill and I in Bill’s and Jason in his own.
The drive over to Turner’s headquarters was uneventful except for the three tirades about Jason and his moronic behavior from Nancy. We just let her vent. I’m sure similar conversations were going on in Jason’s head.
Turner’s headquarters was fifty miles outside of Los Angeles. Its official title was “Population Control Center and Research.” I know, very fancy, but the facility was HUGE! As we came within view of the building I realized why there were tours of this place. It was a spectacle unto itself. It looked like someone took a handful of white crystals and placed them in the middle of a red maple forest. It was truly breathtaking. On closer inspection the building itself was made of a white metal that was shaped in every way imaginable from jagged spirals, to three-hundred foot cylinders, to different sized pyramids, to plain square boxes with no windows or doors to be seen. It was a big jumbly mess of shapes and sizes taking up a good square mile of space and that was just the surface. Jason told us that there was an entire underground department that was twice as big (underground equaled the research part of the building).
The ego on my grandpa was just starting to sink in. He really felt like he was untouchable. To have such a fortress that you allowed the general public into everyday was almost like rubbing his power in everyone’s faces. And the crazy architecture to boot felt like an extension of Turner’s twisted mind.
“The metal is used as a transmitter, look at the four corners of the space, their design is old school. Probably to protect information flow.” Ryan pointed to the latticed metal towers at each corner of the building. They looked like mini Eiffel towers, but I had no idea what he was talking about.
“What do you mean?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“The building is used to determine what information goes in and what information goes out, but in the case of your grandpa I’m assuming, it’s the what goes out that matters to him,” Ryan surmised. He was so cute when he was thinking.
“Is that common knowledge, I.Q. boy? Will Jason know?” Nancy asked, a little too pointedly. Jason was obviously still on her mind.
“Probably not. The technology is old, like four-hundred-years-old. It hasn’t been used since the early two-thousands. I did a history paper on it sophomore year and Mr. Gratsby thought I made it up. It wouldn’t surprise me if Turner took it out of the school curriculum hundreds of years ago so he could hide it in plain sight,” Ryan said.
“Another point on the agenda of things to check out.” Nancy sighed heavily. I could tell she was growing more nervous by the second.
“We’ll be okay.” Bill tried to soothe all of us as we reached the public parking area of the building. There were hundreds of people coming for the scheduled tours, which made all of us a little less anxious. We could blend in nicely. “You got the thumbprints?” Bill parked and turned around in his chair to see Ryan.
“Yeah.” Ryan pulled out a small rectangular metal box and opened it.
Inside were four ultra-thin thumb-shaped sheets of material. Ryan had been experimenting with making false thumbprints for the last five years and today was the day we were going to try them out. He programmed them to be four people that didn’t exist which took a lot of time to create their histories and to fake thumbprint records. The only nice thing was that all four of our aliases were seventeen so he didn’t have to make too long of history since you couldn’t thumbprint until you were fifteen anyway. Genius.
“I just hope they work,” Ryan said nervously.
“Let’s find out.” Bill smiled at Ryan supportively.
I still couldn’t figure out their friendship. One minute they were at each other’s throats, the next they acted like the best of buds.
Ryan put the box out for me first. “Take that one.” He pointed to the one farthest to the left.
I picked it up and it felt like really thin rubber. I placed it on my right thumb and it instantly formed to its contours. After a few seconds it blended so perfectly, I couldn’t even see the fake thumbprint at all. “Cool.”
Everyone took their respective thumbs and put them on.
“Here we go,” Nancy said through a nervous smile.
We exited the car and walked over to the admissions cavern, is the word I’d use to describe it. It was like the opening to an ice cave with fake stalactites hanging from an arched fifty-foot entryway. Even the surface of the archway looked like ice and rock, all an illusion to distract people’s attention to what was really going on inside the building. A metal fence blocked off the opening to the cave, but directed people to a small booth for entrance.
Bill decided he’d be the first to try out the fake thumbprints. If anything went wrong the rest of us could take off, with Bill’s money and station, he’d be able to squirm out of trouble easier than we could.
Bill placed his thumbprint on the scanner.
“Thank you, Mr. Jaloux.” The attendant smiled at Bill.
Bill walked through and waved. We all followed closely behind. No flags. No problems. First hurdle: check.
We entered the cavern, which was pretty realistic even up close. It looked like we were entering into the abominable snowman’s lair with rubber snow and rocky surfaces. Ryan pointed to one of the stalactites. “Cameras. Keep your head down.”
We all did as he said, hoping our faces weren’t on some recognition program of Turner’s. We couldn’t rule anything out, but at the same time what could we do? We couldn’t go back. Moving forward was the key. The alternatives were too scary to think about.
At the end of the cavern was a rotating glass door, which led to the waiting area. We walked through and entered into a large square room that was completely yellow. The walls, the furniture, the floor were all some shade of yellow. It was like the sun puked all over this room. The contrast from the blue and grey cavern to this bright explosion of color was made purely for show. The people entering with us were full of ooohhhs and aaaaahhhs and were beyond excited to see the rest of the building.
“Tours over here, please.” A petite woman dressed in a grey jumpsuit waved us over to the back of the room. With her blonde hair and make-up perfectly in order, she looked like a living mannequin. And the smile that was permanently plastered to her face indicated that she had been doing this job way too long. “Make sure you stick together, it’s a big place in there, we don’t want you to get lost.” All her words sounded rehearsed.
We made sure we were in the back of the group so it would be eas
ier to slip away. Ryan had memorized the floor plans of the building, but we still had to take in account that Turner’s floor plans were probably hiding a few secrets that we’d have to figure out for ourselves. Hopefully, nothing that would sound alarms of any sort, but like I said, we had to keep going. Eventually, Jason would join us, we’d steal the tornado footage, go back to our tour and leave without anyone knowing we were here. Famous last words. I just hoped this time it really would be that easy. For once. Please?
“Through this door, ladies and gentlemen.” Our guide pressed a button and a door slid open for us to enter.
There were about thirty other tourists in our group and, in awe, they all walked through the doorway. I pretended to do likewise while at the same time keeping my head down. The long hallway we walked into was made entirely of black metal and lit with tiny runner lights on the floor and ceiling. It felt like yet another slap to our senses. There had to be some rhyme or reason to all these extreme décor decisions. From what I had learned so far of my grandpa a lot of research probably went into the psychological effects of color and lighting. I just found it interesting where as the general public seemed genuinely amazed.
“After this hallway should be the main assembly hall. We can take the south exit to get to the holo vaults,” Ryan whispered to me and I nodded.
“Unless Jason gets there first,” I said, reminding him that we may not have to split from the group at all if we received a text from Jason that he already had the footage. We weren’t sure if Jason could access the vault. He was going to claim that he needed the holos from his newscast on Virtual Reality Bars and that his news station erased it by accident. (Turner’s headquarters had pretty much all the holo-footage in existence.) Supposedly reporters did it all the time, but we weren’t sure if the footage we were looking for would even be stored there. If we didn’t get Jason’s text, we were going to try to get the holo ourselves and wait for Jason there. All good in theory, but we had no idea what security was going to be like. Probably high, but we didn’t have any other choice. It was either do something pro-active or wait around for Turner’s next attempt on my life. No thank you.
Our hostess turned to the group and began walking backwards while motioning to the strip lighting and metal walls, “This hallway is made with a special type of metal used specifically for transmission waves. All of Population Control’s information is sent through hallways like these throughout the entire facility.” Then she winked at a little girl as if sharing a joke. “We can’t see it, of course, but even as we walk, billions of messages and transmissions are flowing along side us. Think of these hallways as veins and the information traveling through them are the blood cells of life.”
Nancy couldn’t help but roll her eyes. “Is she for real?”
The door at the end of the hallway slid open on cue and our tour guide didn’t even have to turn around. She walked backward with an ease that was actually a little frightening, and waved us into the monstrous assembly hall. Four walls, a set of ivory pillars and marble staircases lining each. The theme of this room was smooth marble stone. It felt like entering into Ancient Greece but with air-conditioning. There were stone statues and benches throughout the room. It was almost as if we were in an old graveyard. The more I thought about it, there had to be some kind of sense to all this architecture madness, each room so different from the next, but aside from reading Turner’s mind, we were only guessing.
Several of the people in our tour were gawking over the statues. Nancy and Bill were making some private joke and Ryan was carefully examining every inch of the room. He leaned into my ear, “Back there, behind that faun looking thing.”
The door.
Our exit.
We were pretty far from our escape, but our tour guide was at least herding us in the right direction. I nodded to Nancy and Bill and they stayed close behind us, letting Ryan take the lead. My grip on Ryan’s hand tightened and he squeezed back reassuringly. I was so happy I wasn’t alone in this. After my experience with Brady I found that I never wanted to be by myself ever again. I knew that would change over time, but honestly, the thought of being alone terrified me at the moment. Although, getting caught in my grandpa’s headquarters was quickly rounding off the top of the fear factor list.
“Any word from Jason?” Nancy whispered behind me.
I shook my head.
We were going to do this.
“I hope he’s okay,” I heard her mumble under her breath.
The guide was veering us away from our escape door and on to the next part of the tour.
“Now.” Ryan pulled me behind a particularly large statue of a naked guy and Bill and Nancy followed. “Cameras on the left wall.” As long as we couldn’t see it, it couldn’t see us. “Don’t run, walk casually as if we were still on tour. We don’t want to cause any alarm and running would be an instant red flag.”
We all nodded and walked as relaxed as possible to the next statue. One more to go and then our exit.
Last statue. No problem.
Ryan smiled at me like he was a little excited. I smiled back though the last thing I felt was excitement.
“You guys ready?” I turned to Nancy and Bill.
They were holding hands as well and nodded.
“Please don’t let that door have a siren,” Bill said even though Ryan had assured him about fifty times before we even entered the building that according to the plans the door was for maintenance and had no alarms attached to it. I think this was another case of Bill trying to undermine Ryan.
Ryan’s response was to ignore him, reach over and open the door.
No alarms.
Ryan raised his eyebrow at Bill triumphantly and held the door for all of us to walk through. Bill tried to look as innocent as possible to me and I gave him an encouraging look. He was putting himself on the line for me and any conflict he had with Ryan was between him and Ryan. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it (although according to Nancy the only conflict they had was me, but I was ignoring that for the time being).
We walked through and Ryan shut the door behind us.
Finally, this place looked like a regular building! We were in a hallway painted plain white with cheesy holo-pics of daisy fields and sailboats on its walls.
No cameras.
That we could see anyway.
“There should be a door up here to the right.” Ryan guided us forward. It amazed me that Ryan memorized the entire floor plan. No wonder Turner wanted his brain. He must have known Ryan’s potential and wanted it all for himself. It scared me to think of how many kids were taken by Turner.
Sure enough the door was exactly where Ryan said. He opened it and a gust of hot air blew in our faces. Once we entered the next room we stood on a metal grated walkway of a four-story labyrinth of stairways and platforms. Sporadically, a worker would enter from a doorway, walk up or down a flight of steps and enter another door. It felt almost factory-like with worker bees going to and from their destinations.
“Second doorway down on the opposite side.” Ryan led me with his hand and Bill and Nancy followed.
We tried to hide the clank clank clanking of our footsteps, not wanting to draw any unnecessary attention to ourselves. So far no one was paying any attention to us, which didn’t exactly put my mind at ease. It felt odd that we were able to walk freely through all these rooms. On one hand, this building was a public building and hundreds of strangers come through here every day, but on the other hand, it was my grandfather’s headquarters and I knew what kind of a man he was which meant bad things were most likely happening here. Bad things that he wouldn’t want the public to know.
We reached the door and Ryan pulled it open.
There were people everywhere!
It looked like the hallways at school, hundreds of workers moving in both directions trying to reach their respective destinations. Ryan took us to the left and we entered the fray like we belonged there. No one cared. No one noticed. Talk about z
ombies, but so far no spinning black holes here. Though after seeing that Turner’s staff was dead I was expecting a few at least. The thought honestly scared me a bit. After my last encounter with Grandpa’s staff, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to break through their wall of protection around their black centers. I did it once, but it was under the threat of death and I wasn’t sure if I could do it again.
Another fear was that even if I was able to do it again, would Turner be alerted somehow? I just didn’t know enough about my power to know any of the consequences of using it. It was all so confusing to me.
We shuffled along until Ryan took us through another door. It was another four-story metal melee of catwalks and staircases.
The Riser Saga Page 24