me; that was a given. But now I was haunted by another terror: failing to save Holland’s next round of victims.
I checked back in with the blue GPS dot that marked Hannah’s location. Before we’d left the RV, I’d downloaded blueprints of the entire campus. There was no question Hannah was inside the locked building. The coordinates matched up perfectly.
Something else was amiss, though.
Expand.
The grid appeared before me, glowing a ghostly blue. I ran a comparison between the GPS location and the blueprints.
Error: Results incompatible.
The blueprints hadn’t shown any basements on campus. But the GPS didn’t lie. Hannah’s coordinates matched up with this building. But not inside it. Below it.
I stepped toward the building’s security camera, motioning the others back. Positioning myself directly under the camera felt all kinds of wrong, but I forced my feet to stay put.
I wanted to get this over with and get inside.
I extracted the copies of Hannah’s eyes from my database, then manipulated the code that would allow her eyes to serve as a cloak for mine. I shivered when the program indicated the change had been implemented. The idea of stealing someone’s eyes was disturbing.
I summoned Hannah’s username. The security system responded.
Initiate retinal scan.
The red line of the laser began its downward descent, scanning my eyes from top to bottom. When nothing happened, I started to worry that the program wouldn’t work. If the alarm went off now . . .
Scan accepted.
The door clicked open, and I led the rest of the group inside after determining there were no humans on the ground floor.
Once the door closed, we were swallowed by darkness.
Night vision: Activated.
Samuel snapped on a small flashlight, and the soft glow revealed a surprise.
The room didn’t look like anything special. Or scary. Ceiling-to-floor shelves lined the middle of the room, crowded with boxes of varying sizes. There was a pile of power tools in a corner: drills, hammers, a jigsaw. Dean Parsons hadn’t been lying, necessarily. It was hard to believe that anything of interest to us would happen here, but I knew that somewhere there had to be a staircase, leading down. I told my team what to look for, and branched off to the left.
If I used my GPS and followed Hannah’s path, it should lead me right where I needed to go.
In fact, it led me right to a row of oversized appliance boxes. Baffled, I turned to tell the others, when I noticed something in the shadows. One of the boxes had been shoved away from the row, as if to make room for something. Or someone.
Bile rose in my throat as I stared at the markings on the floor. I reached down to pull open the trapdoor, but my fingers paused on the carved handle. I didn’t want to go down there again. Or do those tests.
With a shudder, my hand slipped from the handle. I rose and backed away. He was expecting me, but I couldn’t do this anymore.
I had to go home. Before it was too late, and I was in too deep.
I rubbed the back of my neck, feeling the tiny indentation. Then I turned and ran.
I blinked away the memory and stared down at what was apparently a trapdoor. Whatever it led to was something that had scared Sarah into leaving.
“Over here,” I said.
I dug the handle out of the floor, gently eased the door open, and began to climb down a set of rickety metal stairs. The weight of my body made them sway and creak. I hated going in blind. If someone had followed us, we would end up sandwiched in on both ends.
“Samuel, can you stay upstairs, and let us know if anyone tries to follow?”
“Sure. And if I see someone, I’ll just pretend to be a box. They’ll never notice me in this junk heap.”
With Abby and Hunter right behind me, I headed forward. I could feel the angle of the hallway that extended out before us. It sloped down, gently but significantly.
15-degree angle.
Every step only intensified my anxiety.
Hannah’s path glowed like a beacon in my head.
The walls were cold and concrete, the flooring the same. The tunnel was barren. If I’d ventured in here by accident, I’d have no reason not to turn back.
Finally, from around an upcoming corner, I heard a muffled voice.
There was a change in the temperature. It was warmer here, like something was generating energy.
Temperature increase: 5.2 degrees in 55 seconds.
Something ahead of us was creating heat. And the voices: they were getting