by Sam Sisavath
Was it really going to be this easy to just leave?
It’s a trick. It has to be a trick.
There was only one way to find out…
Quinn took hold of the lever—it was slightly cold to the touch—and pushed it down, and the door clicked open without resistance.
It’s a trick…
She had glimpsed it twice already, but there was a surreal quality to the hallway up close. The walls, floor, and ceiling outside were a duller shade of white, and when she leaned out and looked left, then right, the corridor appeared endless in both directions, but she passed that off as a byproduct of the color and the smooth construction of the place.
She stepped outside, her body tensing and hands making fists at her sides.
It has to be a trick.
A (big) part of her was afraid that her instincts were correct, that all of this was some kind of elaborate game. Every inch of her was a living spring as she came to a stop and waited for something to happen.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
She waited ten seconds. Then twenty.
Thirty…
She allowed herself to relax for the first time. Not completely, but just enough that she didn’t feel like something inside her was going to implode if someone so much as touched any part of her.
The lights weren’t as bright out here—or at least not nearly as blinding as when she first glimpsed the hallway from inside the room—and she was able to easily pick out the outlines of other doors around her, on both sides of the corridor. She glanced back at the door she had just come through, at the number 530 stenciled on it. Besides the number, there were no writings to indicate what the room was being used for.
Her last image of Gary flashed across her mind’s eye and Quinn tightened up again. The hallway might have (seemed) been empty, but she was still behind enemy lines. Not just her, but Porter too. That is, if he wasn’t already dead. What were the chances the same people Ringo worked for, who had been chasing Porter all these years, would keep him alive after finally succeeding?
Forget about Porter. You can’t help him now. You can barely help yourself—
She froze.
She hadn’t seen it at first, because like the doors and hallway it was painted white, but there was a dome-shaped security camera on the wall in front and five feet to the right of her. It had the type of fish-eyed lens that allowed it to see a great deal without having to move, and right now she could see her distorted reflection on its round glass lens.
She might have panicked if she didn’t remember what the woman had said:
“I’ve sabotaged access to the security cameras, but it won’t be long before someone shows up who can fix it.”
She unclenched her fists and allowed herself to relax again. Given how long she had been standing out here trying to get her bearings, if the camera were still active someone would have been alerted by now, and the fact that no one was rushing her yet…
Yeah, that’s it. Keep trying to convince yourself all of this makes perfect sense.
The door across from her was marked 531, but it took a little more effort to notice the 532 on the door to her right and the 528 to her left because of the way the numbers were slightly sunken against the smooth surface.
Quinn took another few seconds to really look down both hallways. The color scheme made it difficult to see the ends, which in turn left her having to guess how long the corridor was. Thirty yards to both sides? Fifty? It could have been a hundred, for all she knew.
She was only certain of one thing: The answers weren’t going to come to her.
Quinn turned left and took the first hesitant step down the passageway. It would have been just as easy to go right, but the declining numbers on the doors provided some guidance. Eventually she would reach the beginning. Hopefully.
She noted the numbers on each door as she passed them.
528…
527…
How many doors were there? How many similar hallways like this one, with their own rooms, awaited her at the end of this trip? And was every room like the one she had just escaped from?
526…
525…
There was only one way to find out.
She stopped and turned to face 524.
There was nothing special about it, nothing to distinguish this door from the four she had already passed. The only difference was the presence of another domed camera above it, reflecting back her (nervous?) image.
Quinn thought about Gary, those twin rods sticking out of his forehead, as she took a deep breath and opened the door.
A white room, identical in almost every way to the one she had just escaped from, including a silver chair near the back wall—
And a man in his early forties sitting on it.
He wore a three-piece suit and tie, and he looked at peace. She recognized his blinking eyes as signs of someone in deep REM sleep, and wondered if she looked that peaceful when she was under.
Quinn stepped inside and let the door softly click closed behind her.
She took a moment to familiarize herself with the room. It was a carbon copy of her own in almost every way, including the monitor that hung from a metal bar on the wall next to the door. Quinn turned to face the screen, hoping to see something that would clue her in to what Hofheinz had seen on the monitor in her own room, but there was just the same simple computer rendering of a chair. Unlike her screen, this one had an outline of a person sitting on it and instead of a flashing RELEASE prompt in green letters, there was instead a HOLD in solid red letters.
Hold and release. Even a child could figure that out.
She pressed HOLD, and the letters immediately switched to RELEASE in flashing green letters. She waited for something to happen—a sound to confirm that the chair was freeing its prisoner, or something just as dramatic—but besides the switch from HOLD to RELEASE, the simple rendering of a human figure on the screen disappeared.
Quinn looked over at the man.
His body had slackened against the chair, a sign that he really had been “released” from the chair’s hold. She walked over—slowly, on purpose—and really focused on the man’s face, because there was something about him…
Did she know him? Maybe. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t match his face to a name. The presence of the suit was a clue, but she wasn’t sure what it meant. Like her, he was probably brought here in whatever he was wearing at the time.
Who are you? What are you doing here?
Quinn felt a little guilty as she went through the man’s pockets. The clothing was definitely expensive and tailored for his tall frame, though he looked very odd without shoes. But unlike her, at least whoever had brought him here had allowed him to keep his black socks on. Streaks of gray along his temples gave him a distinguished look, and she was again struck by how familiar he looked.
I know you from somewhere, don’t I?
But it didn’t matter how hard she stared at his face, at the square jaw, because a name escaped her. His pockets were also no help. They were both empty and he didn’t have a wallet on him. The inside folds of his suit jacket were bare, and she had just about given up when she noticed his cuff links. Expensive silver cufflinks with some kind of horse rearing on its two hind legs with wings spreading out from its side. A Pegasus.
Now that’s something you don’t see every day, Quinn thought, and she was reaching for the cufflinks—something that expensive might have initials on them—when the man’s eyes snapped open and light blue pupils widened dramatically in front of her.
“Wait,” Quinn got out just before the man lunged out of the chair and crashed into her chest with his shoulder, his arms simultaneously circling around her waist and tightening like snakes, and suddenly it was very hard to breathe.
Quinn braced herself for the inevitable impact, but was still caught by surprise at the amount of pain that came from being slammed into the floor.
Wait, you idiot, I’m trying
to save you! her mind screamed, but of course she wasn’t able to turn the thought into actual words because the man had landed right on top of her and was straddling her waist, moving like a wild animal that had just been uncaged.
That animal was now trying to choke the life out of her with his bare hands while his face was contorted into a mask of fear and anger. Most of all, she noticed his eyes—they were big and wide and burning with desperation as he shouted, “What did you do to me? Who are you? Where am I?”
She couldn’t answer with his fingers around her throat and the most she could do was turn her head slightly as spittle flew at her face, but some saliva got into her mouth and hit her in the eyes anyway. She might have gagged if she wasn’t on the verge of being snuffed out of existence.
“Where did you bring me?” he shouted. “Who are you? What did you do to me?”
She didn’t bother punching him because she was flat on her back and struggling to breathe, and she didn’t have any leverage to generate nearly enough power to make him release his grip on her. Instead, Quinn stretched out both arms to her sides, balling her hands into fists, and hammered him in both ears at the same time.
He let out a surprised scream and reflexively lessened the pressure around her neck. Quinn took full advantage of the moment’s respite and hit him again in the ears, and this time he released her completely so he could fend off the third attack that he knew was coming.
Except she knew he was expecting it, and even as he pulled back and lifted both hands to shield himself, she lifted her upper half off the floor and fired a quick punch over his right kidney. He grunted, sounding more annoyed than hurt, and when he moved to defend his right side, she did the same to his left kidney.
He growled with frustration and threw himself off her and rolled left.
Quinn rolled right and away from him before scrambling to her knees.
“Stop!” Quinn said, holding out one hand toward the man as she struggled up on wobbly legs. “I’m not your enemy, goddammit!”
The man glared back at her even as he stumbled up on his own shaky legs. He almost fell but reached back and found the wall at the last moment and righted himself. “You brought me here…”
“No, that wasn’t me. I was—”
He was pushing off the wall and charging before she could finish.
Oh, hell.
Quinn waited, knowing she could never outrun him. He was taller—he had at least a good five inches on her—and a longer stride and there was no place in this room or outside in the hallway that she could escape from him. And she saw that the desperate look in his eyes was still there. If he wasn’t crazed, then he was pretty damn close.
God, was that what I looked like while I was sitting in the chair?
So she didn’t bother running and held her ground and watched him come.
He lowered his head slightly when he got halfway, and his hands clenched into fists at his sides.
Closer! Come closer!
And then he was there and Quinn ducked and threw herself forward and to the right. The swoosh! of a gust of air as he whiffed and crashed into the wall as she rolled under his swinging arms.
Quinn didn’t look back because she knew that wasn’t going to stop him. Not even close. So she scrambled back to her feet and took off.
Faster faster faster!
He had already righted himself and was already on her heels in no time, and she thought she could hear him grinding his teeth as he got closer and closer.
She ran for the door, but at the very last moment Quinn darted right and reached for the monitor and grabbed it around the edges. He kept coming and she thought she could actually feel something wet hit the back of her neck as she spun around and swung the computer, using the bracket to swing it from back to front—
Bam!
The crash sounded more like a gunshot than a human face smashing into a computer screen, but it was just as effective. The impact knocked the monitor backward on its smooth metal arm, pieces of the display flitting across the room while the man’s legs gave out under him and he slammed into the floor on his back.
Quinn backpedaled, anxious to put as much space as she could between her and the man in case her little gambit didn’t work.
He lay on the floor where he had fallen, his arms splayed at his sides and legs spread far apart. But he didn’t get back up. His nose was broken, but there was just a trickle of blood on his face. The monitor had taken the brunt of the damage—the screen was shattered almost exactly in the middle and had gone black.
Quinn took a moment to massage the area of her neck where the man had almost choked the life out of her before cautiously walking back to him. He didn’t move as she stood over him, then crouched and checked his pulse and was surprised to find it racing. Too fast for someone who was unconscious.
But he was alive. More than alive, in fact.
She stood up to leave when she remembered the cufflinks and crouched back down and pulled one of the silver objects free. The Pegasus was highly detailed, but there was nothing on it to indicate its owner. She turned it over and had better luck:
The initials JS engraved in the middle.
Quinn returned the cufflink to the man’s shirt, then spent a few seconds staring at his face.
She knew him from somewhere, but JS didn’t ring any bells. Of course she was assuming it was his name. It wasn’t a given, by any means.
JS…
She shook her head. Nothing was coming to her, and it wasn’t going to matter how long she looked at his face. It was a handsome face, she had to admit, despite the broken nose and blood. And you didn’t buy a suit like that off the rack.
“Who are you, JS, and why do you look so familiar?” Quinn asked, but of course there was no response.
Chapter 26
“Hofheinz will be back soon. You need to be gone before he does, or you’ll never leave this place.”
Maybe I should have stayed right where I was and waited for him, Quinn thought as she turned the corner at the intersection and saw another long whitewashed hallway waiting for her. Looking to her right offered an identical view.
The new stretch of corridor looked the same as the one she had just left, but with one notable difference: There weren’t any rooms along the walls in either direction; instead there was just one long, uninterrupted hallway. Or at least it looked that way. The truth was that the monotonous whiteness made it difficult to get a handle on distance, so there could have been something between where she stood and where the corridor ended, and she might not have known until she was standing in front of it.
Maybe the lack of doors was a good thing. After her encounter with the man in the suit (Sorry about the monitor to the face, JS), Quinn had taken precautions when she approached the other rooms. She’d looked into them, but didn’t enter.
Each one, without fail, had someone sitting in a silver chair, and she remembered what Xiao had said back in the alley:
“If they capture you, if they put you in the chair, you’ll never see the light of day again. At least, not as the person you used to be.”
Was that “the chair” she had been talking about? If JS was any indication, then yes. So why did it affect JS differently than it had her? Or had it?
Must have because I don’t feel…crazy.
Unless, of course, crazy people didn’t know they were crazy, in which case—
Ugh. Stop it. You’re going to drive yourself—
Don’t say it!
Besides the mysterious Mr. JS, there had been a tall man who could have been an athlete, a young kid who Quinn thought was Aaron for a moment, but the race and age were wrong; an Asian in his fifties with gray hair, a woman in her twenties who could have passed for a supermodel and in fact might have been a supermodel, because like JS, the woman looked familiar.
Quinn hadn’t lingered at any one room. A combination of fear of repeating the JS incident and the faceless woman’s warning nagged at the back of her mind.
&
nbsp; I should have stayed put and waited for Hofheinz, spare myself all this pointless walking around, Quinn thought as she looked down one side of the long hallway. If nothing else, staying in her room would have saved her the lingering pain still coming from her bruised neck, courtesy of JS.
She could have easily gone right, but left seemed the more sensible option. The truth was she had no idea where she was or even what the place looked like. With those unknowns hanging over her head, it was better to keep going left. Even if she ended up at the same place—outside Room 530—it would give her a better understanding of the building’s layout, something she wouldn’t get if she changed directions randomly. And right now even a little information was better than the goose egg she’d been working with since opening her eyes.
Quinn picked up her pace as she went, ignoring one, two, and three more lifeless cameras that seemed to track her movements even though she knew better. The only sounds around her were the dull tap-tap-tap of her bare feet against the oddly warm floor and the hum of the building’s power source in the background.
She didn’t know how long she had been walking, but it seemed to take forever to reach the intersection at the other end. Had it been five minutes? Ten? But that couldn’t possibly be right because it would mean the building was much bigger—and longer and wider—than she had originally suspected. But time was elusive, as was her sense of distance. She blamed it on the constant whiteness. God, there was a lot of white in this place. What she wouldn’t give for some variety in color.
Finally, the turn loomed in front of her, leading to another corridor that extended left and right. She looked for something—anything—that could pass for a YOU ARE HERE marker, but there was nothing—
A door.
It appeared out of the wall to her left without warning, the outline coming into view as she neared. She couldn’t tell just how far she had traveled down the hallway, but it seemed like a good distance. Probably.