Three police officers moved around inside the cordoned-off area, talking to each other on their radios and generally just looking intimidating while blocking off the main entrance.
Ducking around the last news van, Ariane headed closer to the hotel, along the short side of the caution tape line.
No hesitation, no fear. That probably should have been a clue. But honestly, I thought she had something up her sleeve, some opening or opportunity that I’d just missed. By the time I figured out what she had in mind, it was too late for second-guessing either her plan or my decision to go along with it.
I followed her lead and then watched in disbelief as she slipped smoothly underneath the caution tape.
Damn it.
I ducked beneath the caution tape after her, my heart hammering.
But the officers were preoccupied with the people outside the tape, watching to make sure the reporters weren’t edging too close, and keeping the crowd at a safe distance.
None of them bothered to turn and look behind them. At least, not at first.
“Hey! They’re going inside!” someone shouted.
“You, stop!” That was a new voice, one filled with authority and unused to being disobeyed. Definitely a cop.
But Ariane had already reached the revolving door, so I kept moving. She pushed through, and I scrambled in after her, sharing the same glass division to save time.
It spilled us out into the lobby, which was empty, surprisingly.
Just inside, Ariane pivoted, raised her hand, and stopped the revolving door in motion as the first officer attempted to follow us in.
“The bolts,” I said quickly. “At the bottom on a couple of the sections. They lock into the ground.” I pointed, and she nodded.
A second later, they snapped into place with a solid-sounding clunk that made the glass reverberate, like someone had tapped on it with a hammer.
“That’s, um, not going to work for very long,” I said, watching the trio of officers shouting into their radios and glaring at us.
I swallowed hard.
“It doesn’t need to,” Ariane said, unperturbed. “This way.”
She moved away from the entrance, heading deeper into the lobby, her steps virtually silent on the black-and-white tile floor. Every thud of my shoes sounded magnificently loud by comparison.
Ariane stopped in the far corner of the lobby in front of the small alcove holding the elevator bank.
I raised my eyebrows. “The elevators? You’re kidding,” I said in a whisper.
“Why not?” she asked, but not like she was really interested, more just filling the silence.
But I persisted. “You’re supposed to take the stairs in emergency—” I began.
“Which means that’s where everyone else will be,” she said.
Uh. Okay. “Sometimes they shut down the elevators—”
The quiet chime of the arriving elevator cut off the rest of my words. “Never mind,” I muttered.
She slipped in as soon as the doors were open far enough, and I hurried in after her.
A burst of running footsteps hit the lobby floor, no doubt someone had taken the stairs. The doors shut, though, before anyone reached us.
Feeling vaguely dizzy from the buzz of adrenaline and fear, I leaned against the wall, closed my eyes, and tried to catch my breath. The soft music playing overhead was still on. It sounded like an instrumental version of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” That was wrong in so many ways.
“Do you have a plan?” I asked Ariane. “I mean, the doors are going to open and we’re going to be right there in front of them.” Probably at least a dozen police officers, maybe SWAT guys, firefighters and EMTs…
“No,” she said, after a moment. “Honestly, I wasn’t sure we’d get this far.”
I opened my eyes to check her expression. Nope, she wasn’t joking. “Maybe a little less honesty would be better,” I said.
“I need to see for myself,” she said quietly. “It would be too easy for someone to simply say that Jacobs and the others were dead, particularly if this is a cover-up.” She shifted, tilting her head until she caught my gaze, her dark eyes so serious and sad. “I don’t want to live the rest of my life, however short it is, looking over my shoulder and—”
“I know, I know,” I said, reaching out and taking her hand in mine. Her fingers were so damn cold, and I realized that no matter how little she showed on the outside, she had to be scared.
“I love you,” I said, moved by a sudden wave of affection and needing to say the words out loud.
Her mouth curved up in a small smile. “‘I know.’”
“Right. Because you’re Han Solo in this scenario,” I said, trying to tease to lighten the mood and because the thought that she was being predictive—Han Solo ends up pretty much dead moments after he says that in Empire—killed me.
But she didn’t have time to respond, because, unlike the endless moments it had taken for the elevator doors to close, it took mere seconds for us to reach the third floor.
Before the doors opened, I could hear the squawk of radios and low, urgent voices. This must be the place.
She let go of my hand and moved to face the doors. “Stand behind me,” she said, eyeing me carefully, as if expecting me to fight her on this.
And you know what? I wasn’t going to argue. We all had strengths—mine, at the moment, did not happen to be stopping a hail of bullets. I wasn’t stupid enough to let my ego get in the way. It wasn’t bulletproof, either.
I nodded and stepped back as the doors opened.
A uniformed officer, his broad face red and sweating, greeted us with a glare as we crossed the threshold out into the small alcove housing the elevator doors.
“Brody, what the hell is this?” he said into the radio on his shoulder. “I got kids coming up in the elevator.”
Brody’s response came in a rush of static that was mostly indecipherable. “…came in the front…locked the damn doors somehow” was all that came through.
The big cop in front of us—his tag said Donnelly—narrowed his eyes at us.
“I don’t mean anyone any harm,” Ariane said, her voice mild.
And some part of me felt the insane urge to laugh. Take me to your leader was probably next.
“But I need to see inside the conference room,” she continued. “The one called Meadowlands.” As if there might be a different conference room holding their attention.
Donnelly’s expression shifted from dark fury to disbelief and then confusion as he looked back and forth between me and Ariane, pausing to take in her appearance from head to toe. Uh-oh.
“Chandler, give me a status on the room,” he demanded into the radio on his shoulder, his gaze glued to Ariane as if I’d ceased to exist. If he’d recognized me from the news, he might very well think she was involved in the “abduction.”
“Unchanged.” This voice came out much clearer and with a faint echo from down the hall, closer to the conference room.
Ariane tilted her head, listening to someone’s thoughts. I wasn’t sure if it was Donnelly or the more distant Chandler. Either way, she got something. “Oh,” she said, after a moment, sounding surprised. “Okay.”
“Okay what?” I asked warily.
“Stay close,” she said. “Move quickly. And I’m sorry.”
“For what, exactly?” I asked, feeling my stomach clench with dread.
But she didn’t answer. “Let’s go,” she said, sidestepping away from Donnelly and waving for me to follow.
“No, no, you’re not going anywhere,” Donnelly said in a booming voice meant to intimidate. And it was working.
He reached for his service weapon, but Ariane was ready.
She lifted her hand to direct her power, pinning Donnelly to the closed elevator doors on the opposite wall, his body frozen in position, like a cartoon character who’d been slammed back and just hadn’t fallen over yet, usually with a matching chunk of wall.
“Please don’t struggle,” she said to him. “I don’t want to push too hard. You could get hurt.”
His eyes bulged as if she’d waved a knife in his face, threatening him.
And to be fair, to him, that probably sounded way more like an intent to harm than the fair warning it was.
But she didn’t have time to reassure him further, because the sound of running footsteps was coming toward us from the other end of the hall—Donnelly’s fellow officers responding to his raised voice. He hadn’t had time to radio for help. He might not have thought it was necessary. It was very easy, and stupid, to underestimate Ariane.
They stopped abruptly as we entered the hallway from the elevator alcove. There were four of them, all CPD officers, and they immediately dropped into formation, two of them on their knees, the other two standing, and four guns pointing straight at us as they shouted:
“Stop!”
“Don’t move!”
“Raise your hands and get on your knees!”
Contradictory orders, and Ariane, of course, ignored them, focusing her attention on holding the men in place.
Only the change in their expressions, from harsh and commanding to alarmed, revealed that she’d succeeded.
Several strained curses followed.
“Please stay calm. I won’t hurt anyone,” she said, removing the weapons from their hands with a gesture, neatly and easily, without so much as a stray shot. With the guns floating in the air ahead of her, she simply stepped between the men, easing through the narrow gap between them.
Jesus. I followed—a much trickier move for someone of my size—and I could feel the force they were exerting against her hold. If sheer muscle and determination (and pissed-offness) could break them loose, they would have done it.
Unfortunately, that was no match for what Ariane had working against them. She could stop a freaking heart. Arms and legs were just no contest for her.
As soon as we were clear of them, though, three more came charging toward us with more of the same. Guns. Threats.
Ariane neatly brushed them aside, but one of them recovered faster, breaking loose as we passed them.
I was closest, so he made a grab for me first.
With a strained expression, Ariane swiped at the air in front of him, a gesture that should have sent him reeling, or at least knocked him back a step or two, but it seemed only to slow him down, and barely.
She was exerting too much of her energy holding the others in place, I realized. That telekinetic ability, however amazing it might be, was a finite resource. It could only be used to do so many things at once. Emerson had treated us to many lectures on that topic at the lab.
I focused on the officer and concentrated on where I wanted him to be, just as Adam had condescendingly instructed during our sessions in the lab.
The officer slammed into the wall, his head hitting with a disturbing thunk that sent a shudder through me. His eyes snapped closed, but his chest still rose and fell. Unconscious, or maybe just stunned. Either way, I hadn’t meant to push quite that hard.
“Shit. Sorry,” I muttered to him.
Ariane stared at me.
“I got it,” I said tightly. Yeah, for the moment.
With a surprised arch of her eyebrows, Ariane nodded, not bothering to argue with me. Which could only be a further sign that I was right. She was tapped out or close to it.
She moved on down the hall—good God, how long was this hallway? It felt much longer when people kept trying to attack us—and I turned, pressing my back against hers to keep an eye on them.
Always cover your six. That was basic Call of Duty strategy. Just never thought I’d actually use it in real life.
I could feel a dull throb starting in the center of my brain, and blood trickled out of my nose and into my mouth at a rate that was unprecedented. Damn it. We needed to hurry up, or I was going to bleed to death before someone got a chance to shoot me.
Ariane stopped abruptly, and I glanced over my shoulder to see what the issue was.
Outside the first conference room, dubbed Sherwood Forest, according to the metal plaque on the wall, five, no, six bodies were laid out on the floor, head to toe, and three on each side of the hall. Oversized sheets, which had obviously been appropriated from a hotel supply closet somewhere, covered them.
Oh God.
Ariane inched forward and bent down to grab the corner of one sheet. I turned to watch.
A pair of EMTs leaned out from a room down the hall, and Ariane froze.
But they looked at her, at the police behind us, and then abruptly retreated, shutting the door after themselves. Smart move.
Ariane returned her attention to the sheet and the body it covered.
I held my breath, not sure if it was out of anticipation or dread at seeing a familiar face. If it was Jacobs under there, I’d celebrate as surely as Ariane. Though that would also drastically raise the odds that Emerson was beneath one of the other sheets.
But when Ariane flipped the cover back, the man was a stranger, dressed in the security team uniform. The bright red GTX logo on his sleeve identified him as one of Jacobs’s men.
She dropped the sheet in place and repeated the same process for the corpse across the hall. Another GTX guard. So was the one after that.
But the next three were Laughlin’s guys.
Six security guards dead, three from GTX and three from Laughlin.
Weirdly, though, only two of the sheets had blood on them, the men having been shot. The other guys were just…dead.
What had happened here?
Ariane frowned and left the last of the bodies to step toward the door to the Meadowlands room door.
“Get in, get in now,” I said, panting. I had no idea what her endurance was, but I knew mine, what little I had, was fading fast. A quick glance back showed movement at the far end of the hall, someone working his way loose from the hold one of us had put on him.
She paused long enough to wave her hand at the guns, still floating in the air a few feet from us, directing them into a tall green can with a recycling symbol on the other side of hall. They landed inside with a cascade of echoing clangs and thumps. Then she tugged on the silver doorknob with a finger, but it didn’t so much as budge. To my complete and utter shock, she then lifted her hand, made a fist and…
…knocked. “It’s Ariane,” she said.
“What the hell?” I spluttered.
But the door silently popped open a few inches and stayed that way, even though there was no sign of a hand.
Ariane pulled the door back just far enough to squeeze through, locking her hand around my wrist and pulling me through after her.
As if I’d want to be left behind in the hall.
But as it turned out, it wasn’t me she was worried about making that decision.
The door closed behind me with a decisive snap, leaving no alternative for escape, even if I would have wanted to.
I hadn’t actually considered what we might find inside the room. Some combination of Jacobs, Laughlin, and St. John, in states ranging from alive to dead and somewhere in between. I suspected the Committee would be long gone.
In that one aspect, I was right. There was no sign of the Committee. But everything else was pretty much beyond anything I could have imagined.
The table that had been Emerson’s this morning was flung across the room, leaning against the one that had been Jacobs’s, and broken glass and the shattered remains of laptops sprayed across the floor.
In the far right corner, I found Emerson, sitting on the floor, his knees drawn up to his chest like a kid sent to the naughty corner in kindergarten, only in this case it looked far more like a refuge than a punishment.
He saw me watching him and gave a tiny shake of his head, as if to tell me to get out or vehemently disagreeing with this version of reality.
Yeah, right there with you.
The table that had been Laughlin’s, on the right side of the room, had been upend
ed, the legs sticking up in the air now, with more of the same kind of destruction and debris around it. It looked like a small, very specific tornado had torn through the room.
Which, from one perspective, wasn’t all that far from the truth.
In the center of the room, in what had been the open space between the tables and was just now empty space in general, Dr. Jacobs knelt on the floor, his hands bloodied as he applied pressure to a leg wound on one of his guards. The only living one left, actually.
The last Laughlin Integrated guard was dead at his employer’s feet, merely a foot away.
But no one was paying any attention to any of this.
Because Dr. Laughlin, his face a mask of effort, his hair rumpled, and blood splattered across the front his white lab coat, held a gun trained on someone else.
There in the middle of the room, her back angled to the corner so she could see anyone approaching, stood a very familiar figure.
Her white shirt was bloodied on the left side, and that arm hung slack at her side, as though it were barely connected to her body. More like something she’d picked up by brushing too close, a dead leaf or a piece of lint.
Blood dripped down her left hand, plinking into a growing puddle on the floor where the carpeting had already absorbed as much as it could hold. But her right hand was raised against Laughlin, clearly the reason for his preternatural stillness and the only thing keeping him from firing.
The room crackled with an electric tension between them, as if lightning might still strike.
“It took you long enough,” Ford said to us through gritted teeth.
ASSESS THE SITUATION.
Even in the hardest, most surprising situations, that combination of training and instincts always surfaced, whispering like a ghost in the back of my mind.
You’re not human. Don’t react like one. That was my father, or rather a perfect reproduction of his voice in my head, lecturing me. Don’t freeze up, don’t hesitate. Use what makes you different. Analyze, weigh the odds against your objective, and take action.