Authors: Richelle Mead
“Sydney could light that whole place up if she was free,” I muttered.
“They go out of their way to minimize our exposure to flammable things,” said Emma. Something small shifted in Duncan’s expression, and she noticed it too. “What, do you know something I don’t?”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does!” She marched up to him and pounded on his chest with her fists. “If you know something that can help them, tell us! Stop being a coward. Dare to hope there might be away out of this! If you hadn’t been so afraid of helping Sydney find those gas controls, maybe she wouldn’t have been caught!”
Duncan flinched as though he’d been hit in the face. “There was nothing I could’ve done! They were already on to her.”
“Then make what she did worthwhile,” cried Emma. “Do you really want to live the rest of your life like this? Because I don’t. I want to get out. I don’t care if I’m on the run. It’s better than living in that trapped existence. You should feel the same way.”
“You don’t think I do?” he countered angrily.
She threw up her hands. “Honestly? No. All I see is that you’re too spineless, even for our captors.”
He gave a harsh laugh. “You think that’s why I’m there?”
“You never step out of line. Why else would they keep you there so long?” she demanded.
He didn’t answer, but Marcus did. “Because he’s Gordon and Sheila Mortimer’s son.”
Emma’s eyes widened slightly. “Really?”
“Who?” I asked, feeling lost.
“I realized it when I pulled up your full name,” continued Marcus. “They’re very powerful Alchemist leaders, Adrian.”
“Ones who can’t risk the rest of the world knowing how their son broke the rules to help some Moroi while he was on assignment,” added Duncan bitterly. He turned to Emma. “That’s why I’ve been held so long—and why they’ll keep holding me. Even if I’m the most well-behaved detainee there, my parents can’t risk the embarrassment of their son’s past coming back to haunt them.”
“Then don’t let them win!” exclaimed Emma. “Fight back. Don’t let them toss you aside like that. Help us with this. For yourself. For Chantal, when you find her.”
The name meant nothing to me, but it hit Duncan hard. “There’s no way to find her,” he said glumly.
“
I
can find her,” interrupted Marcus. “Whoever she is, I’ve got contacts all around the world—lots of them tied to the Alchemists. It might take a while, but we’ll find her. We found Sydney, didn’t we?”
Duncan still looked uncertain, and Emma clutched his hand. “Please, Duncan. Do this. Take a chance. Start living. Don’t let them take everything away from you.”
Duncan closed his eyes and took a few steadying breaths. Despite how anxious I was to save Sydney, I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him. Alchemists, even asshole ones like Keith, were generally bright and competent people. Duncan no doubt had been equally capable—and probably still was. It was
terrible that people like him could be worn down like this, and I prayed we could get to Sydney before it was too late.
“Yes,” he said at last, opening his eyes. “Yes, I know how to start a fire.”
We spent the rest of the night making plans with them. Marcus and the prisoners got to sleep the entire time, but I was exhausted by the time the dream ended, just before sunrise. My body had been awake all night, and my eyes, when I saw them in the mirror, were bloodshot enough to be Strigoi. Eddie and Trey had slept and were anxious to hear what had transpired overnight.
“Get some sleep,” Marcus told me. “I’ll brief them over coffee and make arrangements with the others. This is happening today.”
I lay on the cheap bed after the three of them left, certain I’d never sleep being so close to freeing Sydney. It was all my mind could think about. My body knew better, however, and it only felt like minutes had passed when I later found Marcus waking me up. “Rise and shine,” he said. “The cavalry’s here.”
I squinted against the afternoon light and nodded my way through introductions with Marcus’s backup, a threesome named Sheila, Grif, and Wayne. They’d all made considerable plans as I slept, letting me rest as long as possible. Marcus got me up to speed with the newcomers, letting me better explain my role to them as I in turn took in the little adjustments that had been made throughout the day. There hadn’t been many, though more details had certainly finalized, and Marcus’s team had done a good deal of recon around the actual site. Once everything was hashed out, we found ourselves on the road, and I had to accept the impossible reality that I was finally going after Sydney.
Between my friends and Marcus’s recruits, we had a veritable caravan. He’d had one of his guys bring a van, with the plan being that it would be used for the bulk of the detainees. After seeing Duncan’s reticence, I’d questioned whether we could even get them to go with us, but Emma had assured us we could. When Sydney had been taken, Emma had found the rest of the salt ink in their room and used it to buy the loyalty of some of the other detainees. “They’ll do what we say,” she’d told me with a smirk. “And they’ll make sure that everyone else does too.”
A mile from the facility, our caravan split in two. Marcus, in my car of all things, and his associates in the van went off to a location they could park at just outside the facility’s perimeter, where they would then approach on foot. Eddie, Trey, and I were going straight into the Alchemists’ front door, with golden lilies on our cheeks that Sheila had painstakingly painted on us to look indistinguishable from the real thing. This part of the plan had been a bit controversial, as Marcus would have been the ideal choice to come in and play at being an Alchemist. His face was so widely known, however, that we couldn’t risk it, and I didn’t have the magical ability to alter both his and my appearance. Maybe if I only needed to look like a Moroi who didn’t resemble Adrian Ivashkov, I could have obscured both of us, but I had to completely change my race. Under no normal conditions would any Moroi come to a re-education building.
We were in Marcus’s Prius (“It’s a totally Alchemist thing to drive,” he’d assured us) and drove straight up the driveway to a checkpoint manned by a guy in a booth. He checked the fake Alchemist IDs Marcus had had made for us and then waved us through. This was all according to plan. Marcus had explained
that a gate guard wouldn’t electronically match our IDs to anything in their database. That was going to come when we actually walked in the building.
“You seriously cannot imagine the déjà vu I’m feeling now,” Eddie remarked, once we’d parked in the lot. It had a handful of other sensible, fuel-efficient vehicles. “This is weirdly similar to when Rose, Lissa, and I broke out Victor Dashkov. It’s kind of unsettling.”
“The exception being that he was a hardened criminal who deserved his fate,” I said. “What we’re doing now is on the side of justice, rescuing those in need.”
“Oh, I know,” he said. “I’m just thinking how that escapade wasn’t without its hitches, and we only broke out one person—not a dozen.”
“It almost makes it easier,” said Trey cheerfully. “I mean, it’s all or nothing. You don’t have to rely on the same subtlety you would getting out just one person. We’re breaking this place open.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” Eddie said.
The front lobby of the alleged desert research facility certainly looked impressive and scientific. All the architecture was glass and metal, with framed pictures of sandy landscapes that were supposedly key to the place’s function. One glass door led off to the left, to a wing where Marcus’s intel had told us the Alchemists who worked on site lived. A young woman sat at the front desk, with a more sinister and unmarked door behind her that we’d been told should be the one entrance into the re-education lair. She looked up at our entrance, startled.
“My goodness,” she said. “I didn’t even see you walking in on the security cameras.”
“Sorry about that,” I said, oozing spirit-induced charisma. “Hope we didn’t startle you.” One of Marcus’s merry men had been out on the grounds early and found a way to get the exterior cameras to loop on themselves, thus hiding everyone’s approach. This was good for me, since my spirit disguise wouldn’t hold up on camera, and good for Marcus, whose posse wasn’t even attempting subterfuge.
“No, not at all.” The girl smiled at us, showing me my illusion was holding up. “What can I do for you?”
“We’re here to see Grace Sheridan,” I said, flashing my ID. Eddie and Trey did the same. Getting that Sheridan person’s first name had been another gem gleaned from Duncan.
The receptionist’s eyebrows knit as she took our IDs to scan. “I wasn’t told of any appointment. Let me call her.”
Her murmured phone conversation was about what we’d expected, as was her surprise when she scanned our IDs and her computer told her we didn’t exist.
“Our department’s a bit—how shall I put this—clandestine,” explained Trey. “There’s no record of us because we generally don’t like to advertise what it is we investigate. However, we understand there’s been a resurgence of it here, and that Miss Sheridan’s been at the center of the case.”
The receptionist relayed this enigmatic message through the phone and hung up a few moments later. “She’ll see you. Right through this door, please.”
I stepped through, not sure what to expect. From the stories, barbed wire and chains on the walls wouldn’t have surprised me. The Alchemists were still keeping it “business casual” on the ground floor, however, as the room we entered looked very much in line with the lobby’s style—with one exception.
Six men stood guard in the room, ranged strategically around two doors: an elevator and a stairwell. The men wore suits and had golden lilies on their cheeks and were among the biggest and bulkiest I’d ever seen among the Alchemists. Their HR department must’ve searched pretty extensively to find the beefiest specimens in their gene pool. Most intimidating of all, however, was that each man visibly had a gun—a real gun that could kill, not the sleek little tranquilizing kind that Marcus had covertly armed Trey and Eddie with. Marcus had said the fallout would be big enough without us leaving fatalities behind and also worried about innocents getting injured in the fray. (It went without saying that no one had suggested giving me a weapon.)
I kept a cool smile on my face, like it was totally normal for me to see a bunch of armed guys there to keep a group of bedraggled prisoners from escaping or having free thought. The elevator chimed, and a smartly dressed young woman stepped out. She was pretty in the kind of way that said she’d run a dagger through your heart and still keep smiling the whole time. She maintained that smile as we made introductions.
“I’m afraid you’ve caught me off guard here,” she said. She leaned forward a little bit to read my ID tag. “I wasn’t expecting you. I wasn’t even aware there was a Department of Occult and Arcane Transgressions.”
“OAT doesn’t make very many appearances—certainly not many public ones,” I said sternly. “But when a debacle of this magnitude reaches my desk, we have no choice but to intervene.”
“Debacle?” Sheridan asked. “That’s kind of an exaggeration. We have things under control.”
“Are you saying one of your detainees didn’t use illicit
magical resources to escape your control and conduct affairs you
still
don’t fully understand?” I demanded. “I’d hardly call that under control.”
She flushed. Seriously, I deserved an Oscar for this stuff. “How do you know about that?”
“We have eyes and ears you can’t even dream about,” I told her. “Now. Are you going to cooperate with our investigation, or do I need to call both of our superiors?”
Sheridan wavered and then cast a self-conscious glance at the stoic guards. “Let’s talk in here,” she said, gesturing us to what looked like a small office adjacent to the room. We followed, and she shut the door as soon as we were all in. “Look, I don’t know who’s been telling you stories, but we really do have everything well in—”
The shriek of a fire alarm in the corner of the room cut her off. It was followed by a crackling sound, and a voice suddenly came from a small walkie-talkie attached to her belt. “Sheridan? This is Kendall. We have a situation.”
Sheridan lifted out the walkie-talkie. “Yes, I can hear the alarms. Where is it?”
“Multiple locations on level two.”
Sheridan winced at the word “multiple.” “How big are they?” she shouted back. “The sprinklers should be able to contain them.” She glanced up at the ceiling and looked surprised. “Are yours on? They should be set off universally for multiple fires. This whole place should be under water.”
“No, nothing’s come on yet,” the voice replied. “Should we wait? Or do you want us to evacuate?”
Sheridan stared at her walkie-talkie in disbelief and then back at the inactive sprinkler in the ceiling. Duncan had said
there were few situations that would actually cause them to evacuate the entire facility, so we’d gone out of our way to create one. Apparently, their art teacher was fighting a smoking habit, and along with a massive gum stash, she kept cigarettes and matches in her desk. Between those and a supply of paint remover, he’d made arrangements with other detainees to start fires simultaneously on their living floor. That was dangerous enough in those conditions, but one of Marcus’s comrades had found exterior control of the facility’s water system and had sabotaged it to delay the sprinklers coming on.
The walkie-talkie crackled again. “Sheridan, do you copy? Do you want us to evacuate?”
It was clear from Sheridan’s face she’d never, ever expected to make a decision like this. After a few seconds, she finally responded. “Yes—you have my authorization. Evacuate.” She gave us a brief glance as she lunged for the door. “Excuse me, we have an emergency.”
In the other room, the guards were on full alert from the screaming of the fire alarms. “We have a Code Orange,” she yelled to them. “Be ready. You two usher the detainees over there for holding. The rest of you, keep your weapons drawn, and watch for—”
The walkie-talkie went off again, this time with a male voice. “Sheridan, are you there?”
She frowned. “Kendall?”