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by Naomi Hughes


  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WHEN I HAND THE WALLET back to Kyle, I’m certain he’ll discover what I’ve done. The weight of it will be off, or there’ll be dents in the leather where my fingernails dug in, or his big brother radar will tell him there’s a guilty catch in my voice that means I’ve transgressed. So I try to put him on the offensive instead.

  “Dad got called in for another half-shift, but he’ll bring up your bike and some of my things this weekend and stay with us for a bit,” I tell Kyle as I drop the wallet and a bag of Funyuns into his waiting hands. “But he wants to know why you happened to be in town today. Since you’ve been living out of state without telling him, and all.”

  The wide open room echoes with my words. The teeth-rattling storm that’s now raging outside has ensured that the station is mostly empty tonight, with the exception of a lone security guard who’s shooting a suspicious glance in my direction every few minutes. The surgical implants in my leg and shoulder—courtesy of injuries sustained in the explosion, or so I’m told—set off his metal detector when I came inside, and he’s apparently still second-guessing whether I might actually have a pipe bomb hidden in my shoes. The fact that I’m traveling with a guy who’s licensed to concealed carry doesn’t seem to be helping my case, either.

  Kyle winces at my question, leaning against the ticket booth’s counter. “I was spending the weekend for a … bowling tournament,” he tries, and I raise an eyebrow. “A girl?” That’s more likely, but he’s still not meeting my eyes. “Cliff diving,” he mutters at last, sliding the wallet into his pants.

  I let out a slow breath. My plan worked. His ID is in my pocket, and he has no idea it’s missing. I should feel relieved and probably guilty now, but did he say cliff diving?

  He turns back toward the ticket booth and dings the bell for service, then clears his throat. “The data wasn’t corrupted,” he says, his voice low.

  My brain is still stuck on the cliff diving comment—it drove Mom up the wall that he was into the dangerous sport for a while when he was a teen, and it seems like a bad sign that he’s taken it up again now—so it takes me a second to register his words. “What?”

  He shifts his weight and tugs at his coat sleeve, like the room is suddenly too warm. “The data. When you tried to look at the files on the tablet it probably said they were corrupted, right?”

  Quint stiffens at my side and I resist the urge to look at him. “How do you know that?” I demand instead, leaning closer.

  “Encoded high-level agency data is only readable from inside an agency building,” Kyle answers, keeping his eyes on the bell. “Try to open it when you’re not connected to their network and you get that pop-up. It’s possible to unlock the files so you can send them to another computer and read them from anywhere, but it’s a bit of a workaround and you’d still need to be connected to an agency network to do the actual unlocking anyway. I just thought you might like to know … whoever blackmailed you won’t be able to open the files either, not without access to their intranet. Your medical data or whatever it is you were trying to get, it’s safe.”

  He sends me a hesitant sideways glance, and I recognize his words for what they are. This conversation is his version of an olive branch. He can’t say he’s sorry so he’s giving me this instead—this information that he probably isn’t allowed to tell me, in exchange for abandoning us three weeks ago and dragging me to Washington now.

  I fold my arms. “Safe,” I say, and the word scalds my throat. He thinks I’m safe from the blackmailer, safe with the agency. And here it is: a test. Is my brother on my side, or has he been fully converted to his employer’s? Maybe I didn’t have to steal his ID. Maybe there’s still a chance he’d help me of his own free will.

  I put my hand in my pocket, cupping the keycard. My throat aches, but I swallow hard and keep talking because I have to know. “So you think the agency is trustworthy, then?”

  He lifts his head, his expression going flat. “They were good enough for Mom and they’re good enough for me. You, though—you’re starting to sound just like those protestors.”

  The words are a slap in the face. I jerk back, stumbling over my reply. “I’m not siding with the protestors. That’s not what I meant!”

  “Then what did you mean? That you think Mom might’ve been part of some twisted agency conspiracy, that she lied to us every time she told us about her day?”

  His words are toneless, hollow, the way they would be if he’d been practicing the words in his head every day for the last month. The way they would be if he was trying to pretend they weren’t something he was afraid, deep down, could be true.

  He works for the agency. Of course they would’ve informed him, questioned him, as soon as a family member became a suspect. They told him Mom might’ve been a conspirator … and he thinks they might be right.

  I stare at him. Surely he couldn’t think that. Not really. “Of course not,” I fumble. “She—she would never. I was talking about the agency, not her!”

  He looks back at his hands, expression still flat. “She was the head of the psychiatric research division. She had one of the highest clearance levels on the base, she knew everyone’s psych profiles, she would’ve been number one on a terrorist’s recruitment list. If the agency was untrustworthy or doing something unethical, she would’ve either known about it and put a stop to it or she would’ve been involved in it. And she didn’t put a stop to anything, did she?”

  The room is closing in on me. “No. That’s not true. Maybe her superior ordered her to work on a project and she didn’t know what it was, or something. Even if the agency is hiding something, that doesn’t mean she’s guilty! We would’ve known if she was the kind of person who could do something terrible on purpose.”

  I clam up. I’m not sure when I stopped trying to convince him, and started trying to convince myself.

  He doesn’t look at me. The silence crackles and burns between us, an invisible electric current, and I understand. There’s nothing else I can say to him. He’s too scared, scared that the newscaster is right, scared to find out we’re wrong. He would never help me look at the tablet, because he thinks he knows what we would find.

  My brother is more afraid than I am.

  I take my hand out of my pocket and lay it on the counter, empty. Quint turns away. I don’t look to see what expression he’s wearing, because I don’t want to know if he thinks I’m right.

  Kyle sighs and dings the bell one last time, glancing into the apparently vacant ticket booth. “Did they send everyone home?” he mutters, and motions at the storm outside. “They had to shut down their subway stop for flooding. Hopefully the last aboveground train makes it through, or we might be in for a long night. Or, you know, longer than it’s already been.” He shoves the bell away and turns, scanning the room for an employee.

  Still distracted by our conversation, I glance into the booth. A computer, a chair, a few shelves, a shoe …

  I blink. The shoe is lying sideways, half obscured behind a shelf.

  And it’s twitching.

  I flounder, try to form words for a few seconds before I finally smack Kyle in the arm to get his attention. He frowns at me. “If you’re resorting to violence now, you should probably keep in mind I’m learning jujitsu and you can’t throw a punch without straining something,” he says, and I flinch and shove my hand in my pocket again to hide my bloody knuckles, but he doesn’t notice.

  I use my other hand to point at the shoe, just in case.

  He follows my gaze and his façade of humor falls away like a dropped mask. He takes a step back, searching for the security guard. “Hey!” he yells. No answer.

  Whoever’s attached to that shoe could be having a heart attack, a seizure, a stroke. I grab the doorknob and try to twist. Locked. I knock hard on the window. “Are you okay?” I shout through it, but the shoe doesn’t move.

  I yank at the knob again, rattling the door in its frame with no results, forgetting to hide my han
d from Kyle. “Damn it, open up!” No one answers.

  Kyle edges me aside. He pulls out his wallet—I go stiff, but he only grabs his driver’s license without noticing the missing keycard—and jimmies the lock. “Misspent youth, don’t fail me now,” he mutters. The lock clicks open. He slides to his feet and shoulders his way into the room.

  I’m right on his heels. Adrenaline pounds through me, focusing my anxiety to a pinpoint purpose. Dad’s had me CPR certified for years and my training is kicking in, urging me to get to the body now, to check pulse, breathing, pupils.

  Kyle reaches the body first and pulls out his phone. “Cam,” he shouts, because he never cared to learn first aid, but I’m already on it. I skid around the corner of the bookshelf and drop to my knees. The guy on the floor is old, maybe late sixties, the grandfatherly type with an old-fashioned trainmaster hat and a front pocket full of lollipops. I shake his shoulder and shout: no response, no breathing. I snatch up his wrist. His pulse is thready and arrhythmic. There’s no blood, no visible wounds. I lift his sleeve, searching for a medical ID bracelet that could tell me if he has a condition. No luck.

  His eyes snap open, search the room. Lock onto mine.

  I freeze.

  Something is wrong. Something in his eyes is … wrong, missing, empty. Like he’s already gone.

  Under my fingers, his heartbeat flickers.

  “Don’t,” I whisper, but the word sticks in my throat.

  Once upon a time, my mother told me that souls leave a mark when they pass out of this world. They dance like falling stars, twisting through the night, and then gather all their energy to launch themselves in a final brilliant flash into heaven.

  She was being poetic, but she was wrong. There’s no light, no mark, no beauty. It’s just someone who’s there one moment and not there the next, and it’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever witnessed.

  Quint is at my shoulder. “Something is wrong,” he says, staring down at me.

  The words yank me back into myself and I suck in a breath. How long have I been kneeling here, staring at a dead man?

  Okay. Okay. One hand over the other, middle of his chest, right below the sternum. Fingers interlaced. Elbows slightly bent.

  When you start CPR, you’re making a commitment. Dad’s training echoes in my mind. Two compressions per second. I count down from thirty so I’ll know when to start rescue breaths. Until help arrives or the victim wakes up, that’s your patient.

  “Breathe,” I mutter, but I’m not sure who I’m talking to.

  Twenty five. Twenty four.

  “Something’s off,” Quint says again, but I tune him out because I need to concentrate.

  “Kyle!” I shout over my shoulder.

  “Ambulance on its way!” he shouts back, the barest hint of panic woven through his voice. Neither of us have seen someone die before. Is this how it was for Mom? For all the dead agents? I flinch away from the thought.

  Twenty. Nineteen.

  My own heartbeat thunders and roars, making my fingertips buzz.

  Sixteen.

  The edge of something hard is digging into my palm with each compression—a notebook or something beneath the man’s vest. I readjust around it, but now the compressions are too high to be effective. I pause for a precious second to sweep the vest aside and yank the object out. I’m about to toss it aside when I register what it is.

  A tablet.

  Black. Sleek. Property of Dr. Evette Lila, U.S. Army engraved on the front.

  Clunk. It hits the ground, skids a few inches, and slides to a stop against my knee. I try to inhale, but nothing comes. How did a dead man get my stolen tablet?

  The answer sears through my mind:

  This is a trap.

  I stare down at my patient, agonizing for a long moment, and then I scoop up the tablet and scramble for the door.

  Quint stays where he is, crouched above the body with his head bowed. “Camryn,” he says, very calmly, “either this man has a light-up belt buckle, or you just activated a bomb.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE AIR FLASH FREEZES AGAINST my skin. I stagger to a stop in the doorway and follow Quint’s gaze. An array of tiny green lights peek out from beneath the dead man’s shirt, stretched in a band across his paunchy stomach and disappearing under his back. Upside down numbers shine dimly through the fabric:

  2:00

  1:59

  1:58

  I whirl around, panic screaming in my ears. Kyle is in the doorway, phone plastered to his ear, expression stiff and controlled as he leans out to search for the security guard again. Unable to speak, I lay a hand on his shoulder. He turns around. Sees the tablet. Looks over my shoulder and sees the lights, sees the timer.

  He inhales. Drops the phone. Grabs my hand—too tight, his grip grinding against my fingers. “I’m sorry,” he breathes out, because he’d been more worried about saving me from myself than the blackmailer. And then he’s pulling me across the station, barreling toward the exit. The doors are right ahead. I get there first, reach out, yank.

  Nothing. It doesn’t even give an inch. Dead-bolted—we need a key. The security guard is the likeliest person to have one, but he’s still nowhere to be found, and this lock looks way too sturdy for Kyle to pick.

  “Get back,” Kyle orders, and draws his gun. I have barely enough time to spin away and cover my ears. Crack! Crack! Gunshot singes the air.

  But I don’t turn back around to see if it worked, because from this position I can see the security guard—dead, eyes open, slumped against the metal detector.

  My God. We’re fish in a barrel, and I don’t even know who’s trying to kill us.

  Kyle curses. The gun didn’t work. The doors have safety glass.

  “The keys, check for keys,” Quint urges. I swallow hard, stuff the tablet into my waistband and stride to the body. I avoid eye contact with the dead man as I rummage through his pockets, search his belt. Nothing. His gun is still there, but the key ring is gone.

  “Cam, get away!” Kyle spots the guard and hauls me back, but it doesn’t matter. We’re trapped. My breath comes in rattling wheezes as the panic burns and spirals. If the killer locked the front doors he probably closed off the other exits too, and all the windows are barred. How big will the blast be? The device was small enough to fit on a body, but size matters way less than payload. If the bomb’s on a timer, it means the killer had to give himself time to escape, and if he needs time to escape, it means it’s gonna be big.

  “Tell me you know how to disarm it,” I beg Kyle.

  “I’m an analyst, not a bomb tech!” He drops my arm and shoves a hand through his hair, turning in a circle, fingers tight around his gun. Then he straightens, grabs my arm again, and pushes me toward the stairs.

  The stairs to the subway. Underground, dark, buried beneath yards of dirt. I’ll be trapped—just me and the panic.

  I yank my wrist from his grip and back away. He stops. He’s shouting at me, Quint is shouting at me, but I can’t move, I can’t breathe, I can’t speak.

  Kyle reaches for me again. I plant my feet. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he yells, and I cover my face with my hands because that’s the question I’ve asked myself so often and I don’t know, except I know something is, and I’m helpless in the face of it. If I take one step down those stairs, I will die. The fear is too big, too all-consuming, untouchable, unreasonable. Especially now, with everything I’ve already been through tonight, with no Mom to help me through it.

  “I can’t,” I manage.

  Quint steps between us, gets in my face. He ducks his head until our eyes meet. “If your mom’s death isn’t her fault, then it’s your fault. And now,” he says quietly, enunciating each word, “you are going to kill your brother just like you killed her.”

  The world goes silent and electric and all I see are his eyes, full of urgency and apology. Neither is enough. Not for what he’s said.

  Kyle reaches through Quint, grabs my arm, and ya
nks hard. Unprepared after the shock of Quint’s words, I stumble after him and he drags me down the stairs. SORRY! SUBWAY STOP OUT OF SERVICE, reads the sign on the gate, but the lock gives way under a bullet. Kyle wrenches it open, pulls me through. We scramble over cold turnstiles and into the dark. The whites of his eyes flash when he leans out over the edge of the platform. He pushes me over and jumps in behind me. Splash. The murky water is ankle-deep.

  I’m choking. There’s too much earth around us, burying us, and when that bomb explodes it’ll all come crashing down. Kyle shoves his cell phone at me—mine is still in my backpack, sitting uselessly in front of the ticket booth—and I fumble with it until I manage to flick on the flashlight app. Our noise echoes loud and harsh against the walls as we crash down the tunnel. How long do we have left? One minute? Less? Please let us be far enough.

  Kyle tugs me sideways. “There!” It’s an old maintenance access tunnel, closed off by a heavy metal hatch that looks like something from a submarine. Kyle holsters his gun and grabs the wheel to twist it open. But it’s too tight and the wheel is jagged with rust, and when he steps away blood drips down his fingers, shining black in the cell phone light. He wipes his hands on his pants, winces, and then shrugs off his jacket and drapes it over the wheel. He starts cranking at it again, not looking at me. “Listen, if we get separated—”

  “Kyle—”

  “—keep running. Don’t come back for me.”

  “Shut up and put your back into it,” I gasp out. The wheel screeches, turning a fraction. Kyle pulls harder, grimacing. It creaks open. He motions for the cell phone and shines the light in, then leans back.

  “Go. It’s a ladder, straight down.”

  He pushes me in. The steel rungs are cold and damp and they scratch my palms as I clamber into the darkness, trying to keep my balance, trying not to think about how much deeper I’m going and how much smaller this tunnel is and how I’m trapped, trapped, trapped. My heart is skipping beats now and I can’t catch my breath. I haven’t had a panic attack this bad since right before Mom died.

 

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