Chapter 26
Cass
Jana. Oh please, please. Be alive.
Hurry, hurry, hurry. If Halliwell woke up, vicious as he was, he’d kill Reggie on the spot, just for spite.
But I couldn’t immobilize him, not without wasting precious time.
The Bridge was an office environment, with nothing one could use to bind a man.
No duct tape, twine, rope, electrical cord or plastic ratchet cuffs.
I just had to leave him as he was, unconscious and bleeding, and run down into the dungeons, praying to that benevolent mother goddess to do me one more good turn.
Just one. Please. For Reggie, not for me.
I pounded through the place, buzzing through doors with Halliwell’s stolen passcard. The place was so echoingly quiet. Also weirdly cold, like a meat locker. Or maybe that was just my own perception of Halliwell’s cold, dead heart.
Please, Jana. Hang on. Be there. Be alive.
Dread swelled in my belly as I held up the card to Level Eight. The light flashed green. I walked inside, slowing down as I walked past the glass-walled cells.
I stopped short at the sixth one with a gasp of horror. The floor of the cell was strewn with bodies.
Halliwell’s children. My hell-siblings. Six of them on the ground, twisted and contorted, eyes bulging, faces dark. It did not look like they had been there very long.
Jana was not there, but of the faces turned my way, I saw Haley’s body. I glanced up at the gas canister loaded into the mechanism. It was red.
I forced myself to keep moving, but I knew what I would find when I looked into the next cell.
My hand was clamped over my mouth. I was making a sound, high pitched, barely human.
I recognized Dean, Sybil, Jared and George, because their faces were turned toward me, but once again, I didn’t see Jana’s pale blond hair.
Tears were running from my eyes. It surprised me. I had barely known these people, and I had not bonded with them, or liked them at all. They were cold, emotionally dead, unreachable. Like zombies. Whatever Halliwell had done had destroyed them inside.
But it hadn’t been their fault. They were victims, like Reggie. Even Nicole and Vincent had been victims, from what I understood. It was sad and cruel. And it could so easily have been me. Used and discarded like garbage.
The last cell was the one Shane had occupied, and it had only one body sprawled on the floor. Blond hair. She lay right next to the glass. Face down. Jana. Her canister was red, too, like the other two cells. Oh no, no, no. That … fucking… bastard.
I pounded on the glass. Sprang up and hit the button to open the microphone. “Jana?” My voice wobbled, high and desperate. “Jana? Are you still there?”
I waited, not breathing, but I was sure that she was dead.
And amazingly… she moved.
Slowly, at first. Her hand clenched, then opened, pushing against the glass to roll herself over.
She was wearing a gas mask, like the one I’d seen on the day of Shane’s execution. It covered her nose and mouth. She had an oxygen tank on the ground, hidden inside her coat. I heard it rattle and clank against the tile floor as she forced herself to sit up.
She looked at me with bleared, confused eyes. “Girl. What the fuck are you doing here?” she said thickly. “Didn’t I go to a lot of trouble to get rid of you? And here you are again, like a bad penny. This is not a healthy place for you. Don’t you get that?”
“Jana!” I yelled. “How do I open this door?”
She shook her head and pushed herself up onto her knees. “Only Halliwell has the codes, Cass,” she said. “There’s no way out of here unless he inputs the code himself, using his own unique biometrics. No way at all. He was careful about that.”
“But… but how did you get a gas mask and oxygen?”
She shook with silent, feeble laughter. “I put it in there myself, just in case,” she said.
“He ordered me to switch out the canisters. To make cells six, seven and eight death cells. It felt like an end game move to me, so I hid a gas mask and an oxygen tank inside all of the meal drawers. In every single cell. He didn’t bother to watch our death throes, so he probably didn’t even notice that I’m still alive. He wouldn’t care if he did.”
“Jana, I have to get you out of there!”
“You can’t,” she repeated. “Face it, and let it go. Funny, how the others never knew the oxygen was there. Just as well, since there was only one mask. Can you imagine the carnage? Those buttheads, fighting over it? That would have been some true Halliwellian entertainment. He lured the others down here on false pretenses, but he had his thugs drag me down by force. I guess he figured I was onto him, after telling me to load the poison gas. He knows I’m broken, but he also knows that I’m not stupid. ”
“You are not broken! Far from it! There has to be a way to reprogram this damn thing. I have to get you out, Jana! You need to live!”
Jana shook her head. “My oxygen is almost out. I’m not sure how many minutes I have. Not many. But if suffocating is too uncomfortable, I can always just take off the mask. Nasty, but quicker.”
“No! Don’t! I’m good at jerry-rigging code. Maybe I can find a way. But please. Could you tell me what he did to make Reggie sick? Halliwell said you found the file.”
She waved her hand. “Yeah,” she said, her voice vague and faraway. “Um, let me think. My brain’s not working too well. It’s the oxygen. It’s almost gone. Makes you stupid.”
“Please, try,” I pleaded. “Before he tells his man to kill her.”
Jana blinked rapidly. “It’s… an implant,” she said slowly.
“That can’t be!” I wailed. “She was scanned up the wazoo for implants! There are none!”
“They would never find this one,” she said.
“It’s cutting edge. Made of a new kind of biological material.
An extremely thin membrane. It wouldn’t show up on any scan.
It has nano-bots on it that attack her cell metabolism and her immune system whenever a certain range of frequencies activate them. ”
“Where?” I begged. “Where did they put it?”
“It’s, ah…” She frowned, tapping her forehead as if to stimulate the memory.
“Under her scalp. Yeah. I saw the diagram. They put it in a week or so before she got sick. In the park. They knocked her down some steps, stuck a needle in her, and in the implant went, and any pain and swelling was chalked up to a bump on the head from the fall. Back right quadrant, ear level. A vertical slit about a centimeter long. The membrane under her scalp is a flat square. Six by six millimeters. I tried to contact you to let you know. I got busted, though. Then he had me dragged down here. Sorry.”
“No. I’m the one who’s sorry.” Tears were running down my face again. “I’m so sorry, Jana. I’ll tell them about the implant right away.”
“Yeah. Better hurry with that. And then get out of here. Quick.”
“But I can’t just leave you here to die!”
“It’s okay. I’m ready. Plus, I did a thing. With your Invisibility Cloak app.”
“What thing?”
“I set bombs.” A smile flashed briefly across her face. “I used your awesome app, in the night. I hid them all over. This whole place is going to blow up to the stratosphere. So you need to get out.”
“When will it go off? Is there a timer?”
Jana pulled down the patch on her chest, and the little wire dangling from it.
“I’m the timer,” she said, with a whispery laugh. “It’s set to go off when my heart stops. I got the idea from him. From that fucking tooth. Poetic justice, right? As long as he’s here when it happens, of course. That bit is key.”
“Oh, he’s here, all right,” I said.
“Good. But so are you, which I did not intend. So leave, Cass. Please. I want you to live.” She pried a phone out from where it was tucked into her sock.
“I brought the phone down here. I was going to call him right before the big moment. When it was too late for him to run.” She let out a weak giggle.
“Run, now. Tell them to get that implant out of your sister and run like hell.”
“But you’re—”
“Run, goddamn it!” She hit the glass. I only heard the dull thump through the microphone.
I ran, scrambling out of Level Eight and up the stairs, to the nearest computer station, on Level Seven. The one where Halliwell had lurked to watch me and Shane on the monitors that night, that now seemed like a hundred years ago.
I dialed Shane’s number as I buzzed the door open. First, I would deal with Reggie’s implant, with Shane’s help, as usual. Then, I had to strong-arm myself into Halliwell’s system and find a way to change that code that opened the cell doors.
I had to be fresh, creative and innovative… under deadly pressure.
So what else was new.