to do, there’s a chance it will—the power grid is—I have to be here at the station, and D.J. says there’s a chance what we’re about to do is going to set it off.”
“Okay,” I said again. “How much of a chance?”
“I don’t know. But if, if Elisa and Diego and I, if we don’t—just in case, can you take a message? For Arthur.” He paused. “Tell him they forgave him.”
“Did they?”
“No. Just tell him. And him and the twins and Juwon and Tabitha, tell them—tell them I love them, please.” His voice wobbled.
“Sure.”
“Cas, it’s—it’s been a good time, hasn’t it? We’ve had a good run.”
I didn’t know why I asked the question, then. I shouldn’t have even been taking attention from our walkthrough to keep talking to him, especially not with the new intelligence that Fifer was probably somewhere on the premises. But the doubt had been lurking, chewing at the back of my mind, and maybe I knew I wouldn’t have had the courage to voice it if I hadn’t been dead to all my fear. “Hey, Checker. Honest answer. Would we still be friends if you didn’t think I could be saved?”
He made a choking sound. “What? You can’t ask me that.”
“Why not?”
“You just can’t. And when you figure out the reason, you’ll know why.”
The way he was talking, I wondered if that would be the last thing Checker would ever say to me.
“I gotta go, Cas. Take care, okay? Don’t go in if it’s—get Tabitha, find her, but stay safe. Please.”
“I have to go too,” I said. “See you on the other side.”
“I hope so,” he said, and hung up.
“That was Checker?” Pilar said.
“Yeah. They got fucked.”
She digested this. “They have a plan?”
I shrugged. “I think so.”
“Good.” She pointed. “Cas, what’s that?”
I followed her gaze. A bookshelf had been shifted to the side on runners, and behind it, a metal door as thick as a vault’s stood open.
I tracked back where we’d been in my head. We were somewhere around the middle of the sprawling floor plan, I reckoned. It could be a large safe, but the opening looked more like a darkened hallway, and I thought safe room was more likely.
“For disasters or home invasions,” I said. “And it looks like someone’s inviting us in.”
I stepped carefully into the darkened entrance, snapping up an LED flashlight under my gun hand to flash around. The white light showed only smooth, bare walls.
“It goes deeper,” I said. “Fancy safe room.” Some rich people had panic rooms they could live in for days or weeks, especially in case of natural disaster. Since in California that usually meant earthquake, this one would be sure to be reinforced in every dimension—my brain ran the calculations disinterestedly, seismic amplitudes spiking at resonant frequencies, shear forces that would have to be rebuffed by solidity and minimum thicknesses.
Pilar had out a keychain flashlight of her own, and she angled to cover behind us as we stepped down the short corridor. After a few meters, it opened up into a bunkroom. Aside from the bunks, the side of the room was stacked in neat organization with containers of emergency rations, bags of water, clothes and blankets, gas masks, medicines, sanitation supplies, and everything else a rich person might plausibly need in case of apocalypse.
Or, almost everything. If I’d been designing a safe room, I’d have a lot more gasoline and ammunition in it. But people like the real Willow Grace probably didn’t buy into guns being more important than food.
“I don’t like this,” Pilar murmured. “Cas, if this is a safe room meant to keep people from getting in, doesn’t that also mean it would be hard to get ou—”
The lights came on in a blaze of brilliance. At the same time, the door behind us clanged shut with the resounding finality of reinforced steel.
“—out,” Pilar finished in a resigned tone.
Well, shit.
A loud, obnoxious ticking rose in the silence following her statement.
“Cas—”
I didn’t bother to answer, hurrying through the one door left, which led to a second reinforced room built against the short hallway. This one had originally been for surveillance and communication, with large monitors tiling one wall. Emergency communications gear had been wired into a desktop, but now it had all been pried open and scattered, a sprawling tangle of electrical and fiberoptic spaghetti. And the monitors—half the screens were dark, presumably the feeds I had cut on our way into the mansion, but the other half …
The other half showed black-and-white