The Secret Sea (36 page)

He slipped into the building through a door left open by the fleeing, panicked masses. He hadn't lost the cops just yet, but they were still a ways behind him, pushing through the crowd. People kept stopping them to ask questions or request help, and it was slowing them down.

He was in the lobby of what was, just as the Dutchmen's plans had said, the
SOUTHERN CONFLUX ELECTROLEUM RECLAMATION FACILITY
, according to a large sign just under another sign that read
WELCOME, VISITORS!
Under the name of the facility was a logo of a
C
and a
T
tied together by a lightning bolt, with the words
A CONSOLIDATED TESLA PROGRAM
.

The lobby was large, its floor clad in limestone. Along the walls were lighted dioramas showing what Khalid assumed to be the history of the facility or the company or both. Interesting stuff, maybe, but not anything he had time for right now.

Ahead of him, there was a curved, chest-high desk. Some kind of security post or welcome desk. It was, like the rest of the lobby and most likely the rest of the building, unoccupied, having been abandoned when the alarms went out.
The “feminist army” is in the house, and everyone's running scared.

Frosted glass doors were positioned on either side of the welcome desk. Khalid couldn't tell if they went to different places or joined together once breached. He paused a second to check his Wonder Glass, and just then the two cops caught up to him.

One grabbed him by the shoulder. “Gotcha!”

Khalid struggled against the cop who was holding him, but to no avail. The man was bigger and stronger and just plain meaner—he didn't seem to mind that the bones in Khalid's shoulder were grinding together painfully under his grasp.

“Let go of me!” Khalid yelled. “I need to get in there!”

“Are you nuts? This whole place could blow up at any second. You're coming with us.”

“You don't understand!” Khalid said as they dragged him toward the exit. “I need to be here! My friends are in there!”

“Stop distracting us and we'll go
get
them!” the cop with his hands on Khalid shouted.

“Whoa, wait a sec!” said the other cop, and held up a cautionary hand. Both cops stopped, and Khalid saw over their shoulders that someone was sprawled on the floor just inside the door to the building.

Bright red hair.

Moira.

*   *   *

One cop dragged Khalid along and the other approached her, looming over her in that way only cops can loom. Moira pitched her voice low and breathy.

“Help,” she whined.

The cop with free hands waved his partner to go through to the dock. “Don't worry,” he said to Moira. “I've got you. You're safe. You'll live to have babies.”

“I did something to my ankle,” she said pathetically, reaching up to him. “You'll have to carry me.”

The cop stooped over to scoop her up, and as soon as he was down there, Moira struck.

Moira went for the throat, just as she'd been taught in her self-defense classes. She punched the cop in his exposed Adam's apple. She'd heard once that it was possible to kill someone this way, and she hoped that it wasn't true. She didn't want to kill him, just disable him.

Mission accomplished. The cop, gurgling, went down on one knee, clutching his throat. He wheezed but still managed tortured breaths.

As his partner turned back to help, Khalid took advantage of the situation and broke free. The cop growled and lunged at Khalid just as a heavy, meaty hand clapped onto Moira's shoulder. The cop she'd punched was purple and panting, but he had the presence of mind to reach out to her. She shrieked involuntarily and scrambled backward, but he already had a lock on her, and now his weight was tipping toward her, threatening to fall on top of her.

Khalid, meanwhile, took a jog step out of the reach of his own cop, who drew his stun stick from the holster at his side. The stick arced in the air, spitting blue sparks that danced for moments before burning out. Khalid remembered Officer Cheong's bellow of pain when he'd zapped him back at the park. He wanted no part of that pain. But he wasn't sure how long he could dodge. With every swing and swipe, the cop got closer and closer, and if Khalid turned to run, he would be struck down from behind for sure.

At the same moment, Moira was struggling with the cop who'd grabbed her. Teetering and off-balance on one knee, still choking out each breath, he managed to hold her in place with one hand, no matter how much she kicked and thrashed. She realized that he was about to collapse on her, and then, with that weight pinning her, she'd be caught for good.

“Khalid!” she yelped, not knowing if he could hear or help, but desperate.

And just then the building shook.

 

SIXTY-FOUR

The ghosts were still shouting, but Zak couldn't allow himself to focus on them. All his attention was on the control panel before him. Beads of sweat slid down his face and dripped from his chin onto the panel, smearing on its surface.

Suddenly his plan to ram the building with the train seemed really, really stupid.

The animation of the air cushion and the train's trajectory had changed, but the cloud at the end was still an orangish yellow, and it still had an exclamation mark in it. He was going to hit. Hard.

Tommy—whichever one of you
is
Tommy—I hope I'm doing the right thing.

He slammed down on the engage button, knowing it was too little, too late, but praying he was wrong.

No!

Yes!

On the control panel, the train was almost atop the air cushion graphic. Zak looked up into the windshield, through and past the ghosts, and saw nothing.

The cushion was invisible after all.

And then he hit it.

*   *   *

Above, the building shook all around Khalid and Moira.

And below …

*   *   *

The alarms disappeared for several protracted moments, replaced by the shriek of rending steel and the pebbly rain of broken ceramic falling on the superway. Zak was picked up bodily as the superway whipped to the left and then the right; he fetched up against the bulkhead and screamed silently, the breath knocked out of him. Then the train shuddered in the opposite direction, and he stumbled toward the other bulkhead, catching himself on the operator's chair at the last second.

He clutched it for dear life as the train zigged and zagged, bashing against the walls on either side of the tube. He had the sense that the train had jumped the tracks, or whatever guidance system it had, and that it was bouncing back and forth in the tube.

The windshield—already weakened by the rounds fired by the police back at the last stop—splintered, then finally shattered into thousands of shards, blown into the cabin by the wind force from the tube. Zak shielded his face with one arm while holding on to the chair with the other. Studs of glass slashed at him.

He risked peeking ahead as the storm of glass ended. Through the windshield, he saw a twist in the tube, but the superway was moving too quickly and still jogging back and forth. It wouldn't make the turn. No way.

He bit down hard on a scream as the train plowed right into the wall of the tube. The last thing he saw was a chunk of ceramic peeled out of the wall, flying toward him, and then he saw nothing at all.

 

SIXTY-FIVE

Both cops paused and looked at each other as the building tremor subsided. Dust filtered down from the ceiling, and lighting fixtures up there swung from side to side. Some of the glass at the front of the building had spiderwebbed.

Khalid took advantage of their moment of confusion to dive at the cop in front of him. The stun stick sizzled as it sliced the air by his ear, narrowly missing his shoulder. A bug-zapper smell permeated the air, and he head-butted the cop, then spun around and grabbed the stun stick.

The cop was bigger, stronger, tougher. There was no way for Khalid to pry the stick loose.

Until he sank his teeth into the man's hand, just below the cuff of his shirt.

The cop's fingers loosened and Khalid snagged the stick, then immediately reversed it and jabbed it into the hand he'd just bitten. The cop yelled and jerked his hand back but didn't go down. Khalid figured the farther away from the brain, the less the impact. So he took advantage of the cop's moment of pain and distraction and thrust the stun stick at the man's neck.

That did the trick. The cop's shout of pain ended with the clack of his teeth slamming together as he bit down. His body stiffened and he stumbled backward, then dropped bodily onto his partner, who lunged forward and collapsed on top of Moira.

“Khalid!” she bellowed.

“Sorry! Sorry!” He zapped the still-moving cop in the back of the neck. The man slumped forward, his head thumping down on Moira's chest.

“Not better!” she yelled, trying to wriggle out from underneath.

“Sorry. Really. Sorry.” He helped her get out from under the unconscious cop and—without a further word between them—they hugged. Tightly.

“Good to see you,” Khalid murmured.

“Can't believe you made it,” Moira replied.

“We're, like, on a crime spree or something.” Khalid tilted his head toward the cops on the floor.

“I guess I'll get to be the Bonnie Parker of this universe,” Moira said without a trace of regret as she broke the hug. “I'll take it.”

“Where's Zak?”

“I think that explosion answers that question.”

“I have to tell you something about Tommy. And Godfrey.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, and you're not gonna like it.”

Moira blew her hair out of her eyes. “I don't like much of anything these days.” She took the stun stick from “her” cop's holster. “Let's go find Zak.”

*   *   *

Together, they took the frosted glass door on the left and made their way deeper into the building. Alarms screamed and flashed every few feet along the corridor, and the PA voice kept reminding them to evacuate the premises.

The hallway branched off, but they kept going straight. There was a map on one wall labeled
EMPLOYEE LOCATION
that refreshed Moira's memory as to the contents of the plans she'd stolen from the Dutchmen. The map ended with a door and a label that read
SECURE FACILITY/NECESSARY EMPLOYEES ONLY
.

“How are we gonna get in there?” Khalid asked.

“We'll worry about that when we get there,” she told him, and checked over her shoulder for the millionth time.

“They're not coming after us,” he assured her. “They'll get up and they'll go for backup.”

“Oh, good. More of them.”

“With all the chaos out there, by the time they reach someone and get help, we'll be done.”

Moira laughed, short and harsh. “Done. Yeah, one way or another.”

The lights flickered overhead and died. Only the spinning red alarm lights provided illumination, filling the corridor with bleeding shadows. They'd been running before, but now they slowed down.

“Hold hands,” Moira said, and he felt into the murk until he found hers. “We won't lose each other this way.”

“Good call.”

They crept along. Now that they'd slowed down, Khalid suddenly had time to realize what he was doing. Sneaking through some kind of combination of electricity plant and magical oil refinery. With all the cops in the world massing outside. And who knew how many security guards still lurked within, looking to help people trapped inside? What about magic protection gizmos? He imagined alchemy guns that could change him to a statue, voodoo electric eyes that would trip him up ten feet past where he'd walked through them.

He told Moira about Godfrey and Tommy and Dr. Bookman's theory as they went, resisting the urge to add a note of haughty self-satisfaction. They rounded a corner—slooooowly—and started making their way down another corridor.

“Are you sure this is the right way?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said shortly. “Still here. Still okay. I thought we were in for some sort of massive explosion that was gonna rip holes in the universe.”

“Don't be snotty,” he said. “Dr. Bookman said there
might
be an explosion. And it's probably still to come.”

Her hand went looser in his, but a moment later she squeezed tight. “You're right. I'm sorry. I'm angry. At this place. At Zak for kicking me out of the superway. Sacrificing himself. Either way, if he survived what we just heard, we have to help him. If you're right, he's doing it for nothing.”

“Worse than nothing.”

“Don't remind me.”

Up ahead, a cloud of something filled the hallway, glimmering red in the half light. They stopped. “Can we go around?” Khalid asked.

Moira thought for a moment. “No. The secure part of the facility is right through there. And we don't have time to go around another way.”

So they dropped to their bellies and crawled through, sipping shallow breaths. The stuff in the air tasted like dust, and Khalid soon saw its source—a wall had crumbled off to their left when a ceiling beam crashed through it, and the air was filled with pulverized wallboard.

A small fire burned in the room visible through the hole. An overhead sprinkler rained down on it, containing but not quenching it.

Khalid's eyes stung as he and Moira crawled on. Next to him, she coughed a hard little cough every second or third breath, and Khalid's own throat burned. His eyes watered at the assault of the dust in the air.

They had to pick their way over some fallen chunks of ceiling and buckled sections of wall. The door at the end of the corridor was swathed in a thicker cloud of dust. Khalid took in a deep, gritty breath and risked standing up long enough to try the door. Nothing. Of course. They couldn't get that lucky, that someone would leave a security door open while fleeing. The doors probably locked automatically.