Closed Hearts (24 page)

How do you do that?
I asked, then remembered I was supposed to be wrestling with Harrier. I closed my eyes again. Watching Julian curl in pain while I mindtalked to him made me dizzy.
Does Harrier think I’m in here?

He’s busy,
Julian thought.
I’ll explain later. As soon as Kestrel is done, he’ll open the door to leave. Before he can get past the disruptor field, I’ll crush the thought grenade.

That will knock everyone out, including you. What am I supposed to do then?

Do you still have the adrenaline patches?

No.

Can you find some?

Molloy had confiscated the patches stashed in my sock. I would have to jack someone to find the adrenaline-like drug that Kestrel used on me before.

Yes. One way or another.
I prayed my jacking strength would be enough to get the job done.

Then get it and come back for me,
Julian thought.
We’ll get out of here together.

Julian gasped out loud and my eyes popped open. Harrier had a smirk on his face, as if he had just won our wrestling match. The false pain that etched Julian’s face had lessened, as if his internal torment was mostly over.

I had to wrench myself out of Julian’s head. Part of me didn’t want to leave that pool of joy in his mind. A shudder shook me when I was finally free of that feeling. Whatever Julian had done to me—handled me—it left a creepy hangover that made for a confusing cocktail of love and hate. I would sort it out with him later.

“She’s weaker,” Harrier told Kestrel. “Probably a four or five now.”

I scowled at them both, not sure if that was the proper reaction, but they weren’t paying attention to me anyway. Julian had his hands on his knees, panting and concentrating on the floor, as if trying to recover. The love reflex surged again, making me crave another link into Julian’s mind to ask if he was okay.

Kestrel looked up from his scribepad and studied me for a moment. Maybe deciding whether he wanted to put me through more tests with Julian. He nodded to Harrier, who hauled Julian up from the floor. Julian made a show of wincing, but didn’t fight Harrier.

It seemed like I should protest. “Wait!” All three looked at me. Julian kept his face neutral. “Can’t you just… leave him here for a while?”

“He needs to rest,” Kestrel said coldly. “For the next round of tests. Don’t worry, I’ll bring him back when I need to test your limits again.” He tapped his ear. “Patient 607 is coming out with Harrier.” When the door lock clicked, Kestrel held the door and Harrier jostled Julian toward the threshold. Julian coughed. He bent over, coughed again, and then slammed his fist to his chest.

Nausea rippled from my stomach up to my throat, making me curl over, but Kestrel, Julian, and Harrier dropped like stones. I grabbed the cot to keep my balance and then shuffled to the bodies sprawled on the floor. Harrier had landed on Julian, crushing him under his bulk. An urgent feeling welled up and begged me to push Harrier off and check that Julian was all right, but my rational thoughts beat back the lingering love-concern. The clock was ticking before we were discovered, and I needed to get the adrenaline to revive him.

My hair bristled as I passed through the disruptor shield. Another jacker orderly lay in the hallway. The thought grenade blast must have reached through the disruptor shield. I snagged the orderly’s dart gun and hastily tugged his passring off his hand. The ring spun on my finger, so I closed my fist and passed it by the electronic lock on my door. It clicked.

Excellent.

A cluster of shield-protected rooms surrounded mine, limiting my reach, but shields didn’t matter if I had the passring. These cells must hold the mages or other special prisoners of Kestrel’s. Maybe I should let the mages out first? But Julian had told me to get the adrenaline first. I wavered. Which was the rational thought and which was the residual love-handling? I clenched the passring tighter, uncertain of what my own mind was telling me.

Footsteps echoed off the walls, coming my way from down the hall. The shielded rooms stopped me from reaching whoever was coming, so I pressed flat against the wall. A strange buzzing feeling crept along my back as shield energy bled out from the wall and raised the hair on my neck. I leaned slightly away from the wall. Maybe my Impenetrable Mind wouldn’t be as affected by the shield, but now wasn’t the time to test it.

An orderly skittered around the corner. As soon as he was in my line of sight, I jacked into his head. He was a reader, so I made him stand still while I searched his mind. He didn’t have any wake-up meds, but he knew where they were kept—downstairs in the main medical treatment room, which was also the control room that monitored the cells. It was next door to Kestrel’s office, protected by the shielding there.

Going all the way to the first floor by myself, with Julian lying prone, seemed like a really bad idea. Maybe I couldn’t trust my instincts anymore, but I didn’t have time to think it through. Getting help seemed like a rational choice. I unlocked the nearest room with a wave of the passring and pushed open the door. A girl with long, blond hair was curled in a ball on her cot, tall but wafer thin.

“Hey!” I whispered, my voice hoarse. “Ava? Is that you?” When she didn’t move, I jacked into her head. The thought grenade had knocked her out, and her mind still swirled with the electrical vortex it had induced. I tried to wake her, but I couldn’t stay in her head without getting caught in the sparking mental storm. I pulled out and searched for something to prop the door open, but there was nothing.

I reluctantly closed the door again. How far had the effects of the bomb reached? Not far enough to knock out the downstairs guard, but far enough to reach the inmates nearby. I needed adrenaline shots
now
. And a lot of it, depending on how many prisoners had been affected.

I jogged toward the frozen reader guard, gaining distance from my room and the center of the bomb blast. The passkey worked on the last shield-protected room in the hall. Inside was a dark-haired girl doing pushups in her hospital gown. The sleeves bunched up on her muscular shoulders, and the gown pooled on the floor beneath her. She paused, put a knee down, and lunged at me with her mind. It wasn’t the greatest pressure I’d ever felt, but it wasn’t soft either.

“Hey! I’m a friend.” I pushed her away, and recognition dawned on her face.

“Oh! Kira! Of course.” She tucked her legs and sprang up from the floor.

I backed into the hall as she dashed toward me. How did she recognize me so fast? She stuck her head straight through the disruptor field in the doorway without slowing down, glancing quickly up and down the corridor. She nodded in satisfaction at the guard standing nearby, staring at his shoes.

“Well done.” Our faces were now close, her blue eyes piercing mine. “Is my brother with you?”

Of course.
I should have recognized Anna from the fake hospital ID Julian showed me.

“Yes, but I need to find some adrenaline to revive him. And I’m pretty sure they know what’s happened.” We were running the same plan that Anna had originally hatched, so she should know what I meant.

“Right,” she said. “Wait, don’t you have it with you?” She glanced down at my bare feet, frowning as she saw there were no shoes or socks. Then she took in my appearance a little more slowly. “What happened to you?”

I must look worse than I thought. I certainly hadn’t been doing pushups in my cell for the last however many weeks that Anna had been imprisoned here, being experimented on.

My face ran hot. “Things didn’t exactly go according to the plan.” Which was the understatement of the year, but time was a demon breathing hot down my neck. “Ava is in the room across from mine. She was knocked out by the grenade. I don’t know how many of the others are conscious. We need a bunch of adrenaline doses. This guy,” I said and tilted my head to the inert guard, “seems to think the drug lockup is downstairs.”

She examined my hand with the passring. “Is that how you got into my room?”

I nodded.

“Give it to me. The gun too.” She jutted her chin to the guard, who also had a passring and a holstered dart gun. “Take the guard’s passring and gun with you. I’ll check on the others and keep watch until you get back. You find some doses and bring them as fast as you can.” She said this like she expected no protest from me, as if she was used to giving orders and having them immediately obeyed. All along I had thought Julian was the one in charge.

But I wasn’t going to question it.

I handed over the passring and gun. The guard’s fingers were skinny so his passring fit a little better as I fumbled to slip it on. Gripping the guard’s dart gun, I dashed around the corner to get free from the shielded corridor. I skimmed the surrounding hallways and spied a stairwell a split second before I heard feet clanging up the metal stairs and felt a mental surge slamming against my head. I took cover behind the corner, careful not to touch the wall, and jacked the reader guard to amble over. Then I leveled my gun at the stairwell door.

“Anna!” I whispered loudly over my shoulder. “There’s more coming!” She was unlocking doors along the hall. The stairwell door was yanked open, and I pulled back again, out of sight. Anna had disappeared into one of the shielded rooms. At the end of the hall, orange mist curled out of my room, the door still propped open by Kestrel’s body.

They were gassing the rooms.

If Anna was inside a room, she might have gotten caught in the mist.

I tried to quiet my hyped-up breathing. The footfalls had gone silent. I hadn’t seen anything but dart guns since landing in Kestrel’s cell, but Harrier had a real gun when he was guarding the tunnel. It was possible that whoever was around the corner would have guns with real bullets, too. I wrapped my fingers tighter on the gun. What I needed was a clear shot, without getting shot myself. I jacked the reader guard to charge around the corner. As soon as he was in their line of sight, two jacker guards plunged into his mind, wrestling with me for control of his body.

Which was just the distraction I needed.

I let them shove me out of the reader’s mind, then peeked out and fired my dart gun, quickly jerking back behind the protection of the wall. A shot popped the air and something whooshed past me to clatter on the floor down the hall. So they had dart guns, and from my quick look around the corner, I knew the guards were Grizzly and Pemberly. That made two against one and Grizzly was a much stronger jacker, plus they were armed.

Time to run.

I dashed toward my room as fast as my bare feet would carry me. Another shot whooshed past me. I dodged the fallen guard outside my door, kept running, and flung myself around the corner at the end of the hallway. Out of the shielded corridor now, I reached out as I sprinted down the hall. Just one reader guard pounded up a nearby stairwell, desperately checking his dart gun to see if it was loaded. I froze him and searched his mind while I used my passring on the stairwell door. The controller in the shielded medical area next to Kestrel’s office had put the compound in full-scale lockdown and had gassed the tunnels between buildings as well as the cells. Apparently, he also controlled the perimeter shields and the gate.

The shielded control room was definitely where I needed to go. I knocked out the guard and swept the first floor before I reached the bottom of the steps. All the guards were either knocked out, hidden behind shielded rooms, or hot on my tail, like Pemberly and Grizzly. I dashed through the maze of the first floor, working my way to Kestrel’s shielded office by feel.

I swiped the passring by Kestrel’s door and said a silent prayer of thanks when it worked. Locking the door behind me, I quickly scanned his office. His desk was bare except for a scribepad, but the shelf still held my scrubs and shoes from when Molloy had stashed them there! My heart raced as I ran across the room. I tugged on my shoes and snatched my scrubs off the shelf, gently fingering the cloth of the scrubs until I found the thought grenades. With these, I could take down Grizzly and Pemberly and anyone else that I couldn’t jack my way through to get the adrenaline. A thrill pumped through me until I realized I would have to stick my head out the door to see if Grizzly and Pemberly were nearby, which would only give them a chance to shoot me.

If the thought grenades were still here, maybe Kestrel had forgotten about the adrenaline patches as well. I tugged open the top thin, metal drawer of his desk, thinking he might have stuffed them inside, and jerked my hand back when I saw a gun there, black and shiny. Then I remembered Molloy had put Harrier’s gun there when he was frisking me. I picked up the gun, and it weighed heavy and cold in my hand. I tucked it into the back of my pants, but I was still missing the adrenaline doses that I really needed.

Kestrel’s screens caught my eye, lit with scenes around the facility, including shots of the access tunnels, both tinged with mist, and one of the ground-floor entrance. One showed my cell, where Kestrel, Harrier, and Julian lay in a swirling orange-tinged mist. Half a dozen other cells held sleeping jackers, including one with Anna sprawled on the floor in Ava’s room. Her arm stretched toward the door, like she had been trying to get out.

There were no shots of the hallway outside Kestrel’s door, or the rest of the shielded area, which held the medical facility and the central control room. How many people did they have inside that area? I could tell by feel that it was about five times the size of Kestrel’s office. If the thought grenade could reach through the disruptor field, it might be able to reach everyone in the control room. I could knock them out before they knew what hit them.

But I needed to get rid of Grizzly and Pemberly first, before they got me.

I scurried to the door of Kestrel’s office, fingering the thought grenade with one hand and holding the dart gun in the other. I flung open the door, keeping my head safely in the room and propping the door with my foot. A shout came from down the hall, followed by running footsteps. My heart climbed higher in my chest with each banging step that brought them closer. When they were nearly on me, I crushed the thought grenade in my hand.