If I slowed down, I’d die.
I was deep underground in a facility so secure there were probably only a handful of people who knew it even existed, but someone from the Circle had found Winters there. Someone was still looking for me.
The corridor curved and branched, and footsteps echoed in the hallway. I looked for a way out, but then I realized a pair of guards was running toward me.
A deep voice ordered, “Spread out. Find her.”
I thought maybe I should trust them, but then I remembered I couldn’t trust anybody.
So I pressed myself deeper into the shadows and the pair ran past. As soon as they were gone, alarms began to sound. The overhead fluorescents pulsed. The lights on the surveillance cameras began to blink, and I knew that the system was rebooting. It wasn’t just a camera malfunction, the sirens said. The facility knew there was a breach, a gunman. A body. They would know that I was on the loose, and maybe they would blame me—how did I know? All I was sure of was that I wasn’t safe there.
My side ached and my head hurt, and when the hallway branched, I stopped and looked and listened.
Heavy cables ran overhead, electrical lines that carried currents and pictures and sound. But one hall had fewer lines, so that was where I went.
I slowed my pace, moving carefully. There was a storage room that was locked. A vacant room that I thought must have been a cell. And then there was another door. Through the tiny window, I looked into what must have been a guardroom. Monitors covered one wall, and on them I saw people walking in cells, sleeping on cots.
Red lights whirled. Gates swung shut. The images changed then, and I saw him.
“Preston.”
He was asleep in a cell—I didn’t know where. He looked so peaceful. So innocent. There was no way for him to know that somewhere in that labyrinth, his father’s body was lying on the floor—that I still had his blood on my hands.
And then more than ever I knew I had to get out of there. I had to survive so that I could get him out too.
Thirty yards down the corridor, a metal barrier began to fall out of the ceiling, blocking off the only other exit. I had no idea what lay in that direction, but I knew I couldn’t go back the way I’d come, so I bolted forward. My hands pumped at my sides. My lungs burned, but I didn’t let that stop me as I dropped to the ground, sliding faster and faster. I felt the metal barrier graze against my hair—a few strands even caught in it—nothing but faint traces that I had been there as I made it to the other side.
There was an air shaft. I didn’t know where it led or what would greet me on the other side, but what else was new?
Cold hit me as I opened the shaft.
I didn’t think twice. I shimmied inside. And that was when I felt the fall.
You might think I’m exaggerating. But, believe me, this time I’m totally not. I felt myself begin to slide, with nothing to hold on to. No way to stop my descent. Suddenly, I burst free of the shaft and landed on what felt like a slab of solid ice.
But then even the ground gave way beneath me, and soon I was falling, tumbling. Snow covered me, and I rolled over and over. Freezing dampness clung to my hair and my skin. My teeth rattled, and instantly I understood why my breath had been so labored, why my head had hurt so much.
Agent Edwards hadn’t brought me down to the facility. I clawed backward, easing across the ledge on which I lay.
He’d brought me up.
I looked out at a sky that was so blue it was almost too bright to look at. A few fluffy white clouds floated by. Ridges of mountains surrounded me, and everywhere there was snow and rocks and big pine trees heavy with needles.
Those weren’t the Alps, I was certain. The air and the sky just felt different than they had last fall. My internal clock had reset itself somehow, and I knew the sun felt lower than it should have. I was north. Very, very north. Alaska, maybe? And I was alone, clinging to a narrow ridge, a foot from the edge of the world.
They’d come looking for me eventually, wouldn’t they? Follow my tracks? Find me? But would they reach me before night fell and the temperature dropped? Never before had my uniform skirt felt so short, my sweater so thin. I couldn’t stop shaking and telling myself that I had come too far to freeze to death on that mountain.
People would be looking for me. The gunman would get caught. I was going to be okay, but only if I kept going, so I didn’t look back. A hundred yards down the steep face of the cliff, I saw a loading bay—what I assumed was probably the main entrance to the facility. So I set one foot in front of the other and got ready to make the climb.
Chapter Sixteen
THINGS TO EXPECT AFTER A SECURITY BREACH AT MAYBE THE MOST SECURE PRISON ON THE PLANET (ALSO, AFTER CLIMBING DOWN A MOUNTAIN):
(A list by Cameron Morgan)
Hot chocolate. Seriously. The guards who find you are going to insist that you keep moving and change into warmer clothes, but the real medicine is hot chocolate. The hotter and the chocolatier the better.
Turns out, if you escape from a high-level detention facility, really big, really macho guys stop looking at you like you’re cute and start looking at you like you’re awesome.
After doing a climb like that with no gear and no help, nobody seems to think they need to drug you to get you OFF the mountain.
The trip home takes A LOT longer when you’re fully conscious.
Long trips are an excellent time to think.
You may totally not like what you’re left to think about.
“Cammie!” Mom said as soon as I walked through the school’s front doors. She rushed across the foyer and threw her arms around me. Then, just as quickly, she pushed me away—held me at arm’s length—and examined me as if trying to make sure Agent Edwards was returning me in the same condition I’d been in when I’d left.
I wasn’t. And my mother, spy that she is, could see so.