Halfway down the corridor, a chilling voice calls out my name. I spin and stare in disbelief at the plasma gun pointing directly at me.
27
“I didn’t believe it at first.” Dr. Petrop’s tone is slow and deliberate as she approaches, pointing the gun at my head, “but it’s true, isn’t it?”
“Wh-what are you talking about?” I say, my brain racing to piece together what’s happening. I’m supposed to be meeting the scientist in the basement. What is Dr. Petrop doing down here? And why is she pointing a gun at me?
“Dr. Lodowskow warned me about you,” she continues, taking a step closer.
I don’t miss the menacing undertone in her voice. Like clouds before a thunderstorm, she’s building up to something, but I can’t imagine what.
“He said you’ve been watching him ever since you got here,” she adds.
I shake my head, thoroughly confused. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t even know who Dr. Lodowskow is.”
The broad-shouldered scientist who bears a striking resemblance to Phin steps out of the shadows, his lips set in a grim line. My breath freezes at the sight. His hulking frame seems to have doubled in size since the last time I saw him hunched in the elevachute.
How could I have been so stupid? He didn’t want to hear what I had to say at all. The note was bait to lure me down here. I toss a hesitant glance over my shoulder. I’m trapped. I can’t fight a man of his strength and a woman with a gun at the same time.
“You’re a spy for Preeminence, aren’t you?” Dr. Petrop continues.
“What? No!” I shake my head vehemently. “You’ve got it all wrong.”
Dr. Lodowskow folds his brawny arms across his chest. Gone is the fraudulent slouch of the defeated worker. The man prickles with anger, his posture threatening even in the dim light of the basement. His eyes glitter in the shadows like lasers on a weapon, harsh and accusing.
“We know you were sent here by Preeminence,” Dr. Petrop says. “The application has been monitoring us.” She motions to the ground with the gun. “On your knees, hands behind your head.”
“I can explain everything,” I say, dropping to my knees, but the words slur in my throat as the sharp jab of a needle hits the side of my neck. I look up through blurry vision at Dr. Lodowskow towering over me, his face carving into an angry mountain peak before everything goes black.
When I wake, I am stretched out on some kind of gurney, metal cuffs latching my wrists and ankles firmly in position. I wrench at the cuffs until my wrists are raw, but my bonds are inflexible. My head swims, presumably from whatever drug they gave me to knock me out. I’m not in a hospital room, or even a research laboratory. It’s a storage room piled high with equipment in need of repair, and boxes of parts—disused if I had to guess judging by the dust coating everything.
My head throbs when I try to recollect what happened. My memory is murky. I was in the basement, waiting for the man I believed to be Phin’s father—Dr. Lodowskow. But why? I blink to clear my jumbled brain. I thought he would help me find Velkan, but he must have reported what I said to Dr. Petrop instead. She’s been hostile to me from the outset, suspicious of why I’m here and why her former auxiliary was reassigned without notice. And now it all makes sense. She thinks I was sent by Preeminence to spy on her. What is she hiding? I scrunch up my eyes, trying to figure out what else I might have missed.
My MicroComm clicks on and Ayma’s voice buzzes excitedly in my ear. “Can you talk?” she asks.
I let out a half sob that was meant to come out as a sarcastic laugh. “That’s about all I can do.”
“What’s wrong?” Ayma’s tone shifts to one of concern.
“I came down to the basement to meet the man I thought was Phin’s father. It was a set up. Dr. Petrop was here with him. She held a gun to my head. They drugged me and locked me up somewhere in NeuroOne. They think I’m spying on them for Preeminence. They clamped me to a gurney in some storage room.”
“I’m pulling up the cameras right now. I’ll see if I can find you,” Ayma says.
“Thanks,” I say. “Although I’ve no idea how you’re going to get me out of here.”
“One thing at a time,” Ayma replies.
I let out a frustrated sigh. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
“Well, I would ask you if you were sitting down for this, but that would be unbelievably insensitive—”
“Ugh, so not funny. Just spit it out, Ayma.”
“Remember I told you I found an anomaly in Preeminence?”
“Yeah, what about it?” I try to sit straight up, completely forgetting for a moment that I’m still strapped to a gurney.
“It’s not organic,” Ayma says in a hushed tone. “Someone on the inside deliberately grafted a network configuration flaw into the system.”
I gasp, running through the possibilities in my mind. “It couldn’t have been the resistance. Rennan said they’ve been trying for years to hack in.”
“No, it has to be someone at NeuroOne with top-level security clearance,” Ayma says. “If you can find out who it is, we might be able to coordinate our efforts, but that’s not going to happen if you’re immobile. How are you secured to the gurney?”
“Electronic cuffs.” I eye the steel wristbands that disappear into slots in the gurney on either side of my wrists. “It’s some kind of locking mechanism. Can you release it?”
“If I can find you on the cameras I could access the power supply to the room, but it might take a while.”
“Do it,” I say tersely. “Finding out who built that flaw into the system won’t do us any good if Velkan and I are dead by morning.”
“Once I’ve freed you, we need to track down the mole on the inside right away,” Ayma says. “I can’t shut down Preeminence if someone else is working on corrupting the code too.”
I frown up at the ceiling. “If you’d asked me earlier today, I would have suggested Dr. Lodowskow as a likely candidate, but I was wrong about him. He went straight to Dr. Petrop when I tried to make contact with him. The note in the elevachute was a ruse.”
Ayma falls silent and I can almost hear the gears in her brain whirring and coming to the same fantastical idea that I just had. “Do you think there’s a chance it’s Dr. Petrop?” I whisper before she can say it.
“All the signs are there,” Ayma replies after a moment’s thought. “And as head of research, she has the security clearance to access the neural core of Preeminence. She saved Velkan when she saw his IQ test results, and she acted swiftly to put you out of commission when she thought you were a spy and were on to Dr. Lodowskow.”
My heart pounds, my thoughts tumbling over one another like breaking waves. “That would mean … she could be one of our mothers.”
“Possibly,” Ayma says.
I frown at the prospect. I don’t feel any kind of bond with the razor-tongued woman, and she certainly doesn’t look like any of us, sallow-skinned, dark-haired, fine-featured—but that doesn’t rule out the possibility. “The only way we’ll know for sure is to take a chance and tell her who we are,” I suggest.
“If we’re wrong, she might try and kill you,” Ayma replies. “You present a huge risk to her agenda, whatever she’s up to.”
“If she’s not who we think she is, then she’s going to kill me anyway,” I reply. “And Velkan too.”
After a long pause Ayma says. “I’m going to work on getting you out of there before she comes back. We need to think this through before you confront her.”
“Hurry,” I say, as the link goes dead.
The ghoulish room is strangely silent without the familiar sound of Ayma’s voice. Fear fingers its way over me. No one knows I’m down here other than Dr. Petrop and Dr. Lodowskow. If they leave me here to die, no one will ever know.
I freeze at the sound of a lock turning in the door. They’re back! I jerk from one side to the other, but no matter how hard I wriggle to free my hands, I can’t shake
off the metal cuffs.
I stare fixedly at the door, my heart thumping so hard against my ribs that it hurts. I’ll have to confront them now. I need to calm myself and stay coherent.
A moment later, the welcome but startling sight of Velkan fills the doorway.
“Velkan!” I stare at him in disbelief.
“Are you okay?” he whispers.
“I’m fine.” I close my eyes and blow out a heavy breath. “Just get me out of here.”
He closes the door quietly behind him and turns to the control panel on the wall, searching for a way to release me.
“What about the cameras?” I ask, my voice rising in panic.
“There are none in here. We’re in a disused wing of the processing plant.” He flips a switch and with a click my metal cuffs unlock and retract into the table.
“Come on!” He holds out a hand to help me up.
I’m woozy from sitting up too quickly after whatever it was they drugged me with. “How did you escape?” I ask, leaning heavily on him as we make our way to the door.
“I didn’t have to. Dr. Petrop dismissed the trespassing charges.”
I digest Velkan’s words as we make our way down a dark hallway and into another deserted storage area. She saved him again. Surely Dr. Petrop must be the mole working to bring down Preeminence. “Did you talk to Ayma?” I ask.
“Yes, she told me about the mole and your suspicions.” Velkan rubs his jaw thoughtfully. “It’s too far-fetched to think it’s Dr. Petrop. She’s fanatical about Preeminence and selecting the best minds to work on her research here. That’s the only reason she spared me.”
“Maybe. But what if the selection committee she said she is a part of is really all about trying to cover her tracks while she saves people from the processing plant? We have to confront her.”
“It’s a huge risk,” Velkan says.
“Doing nothing is riskier,” I say. “Ayma needs to find the person who built the flaw into the system before she can bring down Preeminence.”
My MicroComm vibrates in my ear and Ayma’s voice comes through. “I’ve been discovered,” she blurts out.
“What do you mean?” I ask, panic swelling inside me.
“Whoever built the flaw found my codebreaker and now they’re patching over the loophole. They think I’m Preeminence on their tail, hunting them down. They’re trying to cover their tracks.”
I throw a desperate look at Velkan. “We’re out of options. We need to find out if Dr. Petrop and Dr. Lodowskow are with us or against us.”
Velkan grimaces. “All right, what do you propose?”
I take a quick steadying breath. “Ayma, send a live VidFeed of Phin to Dr. Lodowskow through my CipherSync. If he’s really Phin’s father, he’ll recognize his son and he’ll know who we are. We’ll let him convince Dr. Petrop.”
“If you’re wrong, the VidFeed will allow them to pinpoint your location,” Ayma says.
“I know,” I say. “Do it before they close over the wormhole into Preeminence entirely.”
The MicroComm goes dead and Velkan looks at me with a glimmer of regret in his eyes. “We could be sealing our fate, Trattora.”
“I have to go with my gut,” I say. “Phin’s father sacrificed everything to save him once. If he thinks he’s alive, he will help us. And Dr. Petrop trusts him.”
My CipherSync flashes once and a VidFeed of Phin in the stealth fighter blips as it is forwarded. Velkan and I wait in the semi-darkness, clutching each other, wondering how Dr. Lodowskow will respond to my link.
Minutes tick by in agonizing silence and then a tromping of feet fills the hallway. I straighten up, my heart racing in anticipation. Was the VidFeed enough to convince Dr. Lodowskow that his son is alive?
The door swings open and my heart fills with dread at the sight before us.
28
Military robots surge into the room and clamp on to us with an unassailable grip.
“No!” I stretch my fingers out to Velkan as he is snatched away from me and whisked out of the room. A dark cloth bag slips over my head, shutting out sight and sound. I scream Velkan’s name in vain through the dense material.
I try to activate my MicroComm, but my voice is muffled beneath the heavy cloth and it won’t connect. One despairing thought after another washes over me. If this is the end for Velkan and me, I can’t even warn Ayma and Phin. Maybe they could have run interference with the robot military and given us one last chance to escape. But deep down I know it’s futile. We could never make it out of NeuroOne with Preeminence still in control.
I lose all sense of direction as I am dragged through a maze of corridors. The floor slopes under my feet and I can tell we are going down beneath the basement. The air is heavy and damp, and without the protection of my suit, the cold quickly settles in my bones.
I try calling out to Velkan again, but my voice is hopelessly muffled and my words sound garbled even to my own ear. I’ve no idea if he’s ahead of me or if the military robots have separated us and taken him somewhere else to interrogate him. Just when I’ve convinced myself that I’ll never see the light of day again—that I’m being escorted to the center of the earth where someone or something will put a bullet in my head and my tomb will be wherever I fall—we come to a sudden halt. There’s the sound of a heavy steel door sliding open and I’m pushed through and shoved into a chair.
The cloth bag is pulled from my head and I gulp in a breath only to find myself staring up at Dr. Lodowskow. To his left stands Dr. Petrop, arms crossed and eyes narrowed, and on her left another male scientist, balding with a hollow look in his eyes.
My executioners. Our executioners. Velkan is seated a few feet away from me, a sheen of sweat glistening on his face. I can tell he’s been wrestling with his captors on the way down here. There’s a fresh scratch oozing blood along his right cheek. His chest heaves in and out like he’s out of breath. A wave of guilt goes through me. His fate has been sealed in a single act of rebellion—coming back to free me.
I glance hesitantly around at our new prison. Rocky walls, lit by flickering gaslights—not powered from a central grid.
“We’re in a cave beneath NeuroOne.” Dr. Lodowskow watches my reaction intently. “Beyond the reach of the neural network. Preeminence can’t help you down here.”
Dr. Petrop uncrosses her arms and paces the floor. “So Preeminence uncovered The Expulsion Project. It was a clever ruse, the VidFeed counterfeiting Dr. Lodowskow’s son.”
“It’s not a counterfeit!” I cry out. “It’s really Phin!”
Dr. Petrop gives a dismissive wave of her hand. “We know you are working for Preeminence. There’s no point in wasting our time with elaborate fabrications.”
“No!” I draw myself up straight, my head still throbbing from whatever drug they gave me. “You’ve got it all wrong.”
“Nice try, but I don’t get things wrong very often. Believe me, I know Preeminence better than anyone,” Dr. Petrop continues. “That application knows how to devise the worst ways to torture the mind.” She runs a hand through her hair, struggling with some emotion. “I had a son once.” Her voice is small and faraway, a faint echo of her confident self, but the words hit me like a sledgehammer.
“You still have a son,” Velkan says quietly. “You saved him again today.”
Dr. Petrop raises her head, mid-stride, and looks across at Velkan. Her frown deepens and then her eyes widen, filling with disbelief, shock, and then denial. She shakes her head. “No, it’s not true. My son was part of The Expulsion Project. He left Mhakerta when he was too young to remember.”
I struggle to my feet, a blinding pain stabbing at my temples. “We are the children of The Expulsion Project.”
The balding scientist with the sad eyes makes a strangled sound at the back of his throat. He grips the side of a table, a stunned expression leaking through his lined face. He opens his mouth as if to say something, and then closes it and walks hesitantly across the floor toward me.<
br />
My heart races. Something about him is familiar. Maybe it’s the spirit in his eyes; that same longing for justice, that same desire to right all wrongs that wracks me with every decision I make—that wouldn’t let me leave the tanner woman behind and that drives my determination to crush the body poachers.
The man places a wrinkled finger beneath my chin and gently tilts it upward, studying my face from all angles. “Can it really be you, my child?” he whispers.
“Yes, Father,” I say, struggling to get the words out with the tangled emotions of so many lost years weighing on me. “It’s Trattora.” I yank a hair from my head and hold it out so the red root is visible to him.
He grasps it and stares at it for a long moment before clutching it to his chest and letting out a single sob.
I reach out and trace his cheek, my fingertips tracking through his tears, my father’s tears.
He takes me in his arms and holds me to him in a crushing hug. “I can’t believe it’s you,” he says, over and over, sounding more incredulous each time.
“Is my mother here too?” I ask.
I feel him tense. He forces the words through his lips. “No. Alsashia died in the processing plant several years ago.”
I scrunch my eyes shut, the raw pain in his words slicing through my heart. We came too late to save my mother. I squeeze my lip between my teeth and try to focus instead on the gift I have been given—my birth father.
“How is this even possible?” My father blinks back more tears as he strokes my hair softly. “How did you get here?”
“Our stealth ship is equipped with advanced cloaking technology undetectable by Preeminence,” I say.
Girl of Stone (The Expulsion Project Book 2) Page 21