It headed straight toward the transport bay where I stood.
Chapter 8
I BACKED AWAY FROM THE window as if, if I couldn’t see it, I could pretend it wasn’t real. It was impossible. Everyone had seemed so confident the quake wouldn’t be a problem, and the techer had assured us he’d be able to track anything coming. Obviously we’d all been wrong.
I felt sick as I frantically touched my wrist com. “There are fliers above the canyon!” I couldn’t keep the panic out of my voice. “Enact plan Emergency Exodus. Everyone get to the escape pods now!”
I ran to the elevator and rode it down, pacing in the small space. Every second counted. Why was this elevator so slow? I bypassed the allergen shower and hit the button to open the door directly into the entry hall.
When the doors opened, the small open foyer was crowded with confused people. Some of my team were there, along with Tyryn, Jilia, and the Professor. Max Jr. was crying again, but I was glad that Molla and the baby had made it here first. There were three escape pods in this room. They’d be able to get in one.
The internal alarm started going off, a loud beeping that should alert everyone to get to the pod nearest to them.
Xona ran up to me. “What’s going on? Ginni just com’d the techer and he said he hasn’t seen anything on the Sat Imagery.”
“Then they’re cloaked somehow.” I strode forward. “I saw them with my own eyes. Three fliers, circling.”
She swore.
I let my telek expand out beyond my body, beyond the hallway, beyond the mountain and into the air. Yes, there they were. One was landing on a small ledge right near the transport bay where I’d been standing moments ago.
“Shunt, they’re landing!” I looked at Jilia, Tyryn, and the Professor. “Get to your pods and start loading people in, quick as you can.” The pods would shuttle underground through to the other side of the mountain range before launching and turning into normal air transports. “Launch them as soon as they’re at capacity, there’s not much time.”
They nodded, hearing what I didn’t say. Each pod could only seat up to fifteen. There were only ten working pods, and over three hundred people crammed in the Foundation at the moment. There wouldn’t be enough for everyone, but we still had to try to get as many people out of here as we could. I looked around for Henk but didn’t see him. Hopefully he was helping people into pods wherever he was.
For a moment panic swallowed me. I’d failed everyone again. So many people would be left behind. But the next second, I realized there was no time for those thoughts now. I just needed to do what must be done.
More and more refugees came in, shouting to know what was going on. Tyryn and Jilia started directing them into the pods on both sides of the entryway. One pod quickly filled up. They were supposed to be filled half with refugees, half with Rez fighters, but in the chaos, the scared refugees had filled all the seats in the shuttle.
“Tyryn, get on board, then launch!” I called. Tyryn nodded. We needed at least one head Rez operative who knew the launch protocol on board each pod. He entered, taking a couple of extra people with him even though they wouldn’t have harnesses to belt themselves in with. Rez fighters held back the surging crowd so he could slide the door shut behind him. Good, at least one pod was off safely.
I’d been keeping my mind’s eye on the transport that landed. A flood of large bodies poured out of it, followed by a very small one. I felt the contours of the small figure. It felt like a little girl. They were approaching the entrance gate at the transport bay.
“I’ve got to get Adrien out,” I shouted to Xona. “We’ll try to get in Pod 5 by the Med Center. I’ll get it filled and launched.”
She nodded, grabbing Cole’s hand and sprinting down the hallway to help with the other pods.
Suddenly, I couldn’t see anything with my telek at all. All my energy slammed back into my body, making me stagger backward a few steps. The next second, my power was gone completely. I tried to project outward again, but there was no buzzing, no rush of power.
Rand had been rubbing his palms together, no doubt preparing to unleash his power on the intruders, but suddenly he stood up and frowned.
My blood seemed to freeze in my veins. “Rand, what is it?”
“My power,” he said, staring down at his hands. “It’s not working.”
I turned to City. “Does yours work?”
She raised her hand, then frowned when nothing happened.
I swore. “They must have a glitcher with them who can somehow, I don’t know, negate our abilities. Just get to the pods before they blast their way in!” We were no match for Regs without our powers.
“We’ll go get everyone out of the Caf,” Rand said, pulling City along behind him.
They took off sprinting, and I looked around at the crowd. There were only three pods in this bay and far too many people.
“The pods are filling here,” I shouted into the crowd. “Head toward the other pods!” But the noise was so loud, barely anyone heard me.
A loud banging noise sounded above us, shaking the walls. The lights flickered several times and people started screaming.
When the lights came back on, I grabbed a tall refugee man holding his young daughter in his arms. “Follow me!” I shouted. I pulled on the arms of several others who were closest to me, then I took off down the west corridor toward the Med Center. We’d had compound-wide practice routes to the pods before, but the compound hadn’t been nearly so full the last time we ran a drill. I passed more people crowding around pod sites. I slowed for a moment outside Pod 5. It was already stuffed to the brim.
I stopped at the Med Center, but waved the group behind me onward. “There are two more pods at the end of this hall,” I shouted at them. “If those are full, the rubble’s cleared enough, you should be able to follow the switchback around the Caf to get to the pods in the east corridor.”
I turned back to the Med Center. Adrien’s mom, Sophia, had already started draining the tank and was reaching into the gel to pull the electrode patches from his skin. I hurried over to help her. The blue gel was warm to the touch, and I focused on ripping the nodes off Adrien’s forehead.
Jilia’s frantic voice came shouting over my com. Screams filled the background. “They’ve breeched, they’re inside! Pods one and two have launched, we’re a minute away from launching the third. I’m enacting the emergency protocol to slow them down.”
“Stay safe,” I said back, my heart thumping with fear for Jilia, for all of us.
The beeping alert overhead switched to one long ear-splitting tone. The emergency protocol was triggered. The blast doors would shut every thirty seconds now. Once they closed, there was no opening them again.
“Help me lift him,” Sophia shouted. We each reached under one of Adrien’s arms and hefted his slim body over the side of the tank. His foot caught the side and the whole tank tipped over sideways, shattering glass and blue goo all over the floor.
“You need to stand up, honey.” Sophia bent over to help him up.
Adrien tried to obey, but his legs buckled and he fell. We only barely managed to catch him before he crumpled to the ground.
“It always takes half an hour or more for him to be able to walk after he gets out of the tank,” Sophia said.
Laser fire shot past the door opened to the west corridor. They were already here. Sophia’s terrified eyes locked onto mine. I knew it wasn’t herself she was afraid for. It was for her son.
“Drag him!” I shouted to her. “My power isn’t working. We’ll have to take our chances with the east corridor.”
There were two entrances to the Med Center, and we grabbed Adrien by his arms and hauled him toward the far door that opened to the east corridor. It was still partially obstructed by rubble, but we should still be able to get through. The floor was slippery with gel. While it made it harder to stay on my feet, Adrien’s body slid easily across the floor.
I hopped over the boulder bloc
king the bottom of the doorway. The door itself was still jammed so that it was only half-open. I reached back to help Adrien through when three short beeps sounded from the other side of the Med Center. The three-foot-thick metal blast doors in both corridors leading to the Med Center were closing.
Which meant we had exactly thirty seconds to get past the next blast door, and then past one more, to where the pod launch was located. Or else we’d be trapped inside. I took a quick glance out into the hallway behind me. The door was only fifteen feet away, and the path was clear of debris. We’d get there in plenty of time.
I gripped the upper half of Adrien’s body and Sophia shoved from the other side. But his shoulders were so wide, he got caught.
“Sideways,” Sophia shouted, “Turn him sideways.”
I shifted my grip to angle his shoulders sideways through the narrow opening.
“Halt,” a voice called out from behind Sophia. “Turn around!”
My heart leapt into my throat as I looked past Sophia in shock to see three Regs and a slight girl standing right inside the blast door, just feet away from the west entrance to the Med Center. No! They must have made it in before the last door had closed. I couldn’t imagine how they could have gotten here so quickly. But then I remembered how fast the Regs had run in the arena.
A smile curved upward on the girl’s cherubic face. She was a teenager, but she couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. She spoke into her arm com, her voice sweet and high-pitched. “We have visual confirmation on Zoel Q-24.”
I held up my hand out of instinct, but no power crackled to life underneath my fingertips. The guards raised their weapons, and in the same half second, I heard the blast doors in the hallway behind me grating as they began to shut. Our thirty seconds were up.
I leapt backward, my grip on Adrien’s elbow like iron. His mother must have had a similar impulse. She threw Adrien backwards with what seemed like inhuman force. Between her push and my pull, Adrien’s body was finally yanked sideways through the narrow doorway. I kept our momentum going as I dragged him toward the blast door with a strength I didn’t know I had. I dropped down to my knees at the last second. With our bodies still slick from the gel, Adrien and I slid under the blast door right before it shut with a loud clang.
I heard the dull thud of laser fire behind the door and sat stunned for a moment. Adrien’s mother. Sophia, she—
“We need to hurry,” Adrien said, swallowing hard as he stared at the blast door. He blinked rapidly, like he was trying to shake off the befuddling haze of the sedatives he’d been on while in the tank.
I looked over at him, full of grief. “Adrien, I’m so sorry…”
His jaw tightened and he looked away from me, but he didn’t say anything else other than repeating in a monotone, “We need to hurry.”
Bile rose in my throat, but I managed to get to my feet anyway. Sophia wouldn’t sacrifice herself for nothing. I would get her son to safety.
“Try to put a little weight on your feet,” I commanded Adrien, dragging him to a standing position. I pulled his arm around my shoulder and we both stumbled forward. He was so weak, he had to lean most of his weight on me. With each step I was sure it was going to be too much and we were going to topple to the ground and miss the next door.
No. The word blared in my mind. We would not fall. We would not fall. “The pod’s right past the next blast door.”
We got to the next door with five seconds to spare as it slammed shut. The Regs were probably getting through the doors behind us already. Blast doors were only a hindrance to Regs, not an insurmountable obstacle.
I looked around. The pod door was untouched. I’d been afraid it would have already launched without us, but there was no one else here. I spun around and saw that farther down, part of the hallway I’d cleared this morning had caved in again, no doubt from all the blasts shaking the compound. No one else had been able to make it through.
I felt a jolt of sadness mixed horribly with relief. The pod was still clear for Adrien, but so many others would be killed or captured. There was nothing that could be done for them, though. Adrien, at least, I could save.
I turned back to the escape pod door and clicked it open. The pod was a large cylinder, bare except for the seats and belt restraints lining the circular walls, stacked two high. I didn’t speak, just dropped Adrien’s gel-soaked body into one of the chairs near the door.
“Get your belts fastened.” I turned to shut and secure the door. I clicked through a small interface near the door to start the pod. Lights slowly glowed to life along the floor, and the whir of the engine started.
When I finished clicking through the launch sequence, I heard a noise. A loud banging. The Regs were getting through. Henk had estimated when he built the blast doors it would take a Reg at least twenty minutes to get through each one. They must have equipment we hadn’t anticipated.
I swallowed down my terror and sat in the chair beside Adrien, right by the interface. I fastened the belts across my waist and chest with trembling fingers.
I glanced over at Adrien. He looked up at me with his eyebrows furrowed together in bewildered confusion and said, “Sophia.”
Something glistened on his cheek. I couldn’t tell if it was a tear or leftover gel.
I started to say something, but then realized he still hadn’t strapped himself in. I swore and grabbed his straps, clicking them together as best as I could. The banging noise got louder.
I held onto the control stick and said, “Launching in three, two—”
I watched through the pod’s small window as a bright molten red circle appeared on the blast door out in the corridor. I didn’t bother to finish counting. I hit the launch button.
Immediately the pod flew up the chute overhead like a supercharged elevator. The force pressed me down against the seat of my chair so hard it felt like I might slam right through it and out the bottom of the pod.
Several of the packs that should have been stowed securely under our chairs flew out and banged around the floor as the pod rounded a corner and began to accelerate.
After a moment, the buzzing burst to life in my head again. I was too confused by the speed at first, but I finally realized: I had my telek back. We must have gotten far enough away from the glitcher who muted my powers.
I let it expand outward and suddenly the speed and force of the module didn’t seem so daunting. I always felt more in control when my telek was active, like the too-fast world of action and reaction was slowed to an acceptable speed. I felt forward down the tunnel we hurtled down until I could see the whole of it in the projection cube in my mind; it looked like a long worm burrowed under the ground and we were a tiny light traveling through its stomach.
And that’s when I felt the obstruction a couple miles ahead. The whole tunnel was caved in.
Chapter 9
MY EYES WIDENED AND MY heartbeat sped up. I swore under my breath. At the speed we were going, we’d crash into the caved-in section in less than two minutes. I pulled back my telek from the length of the tunnel and surrounded our pod like a net. I imagined the cords of energy wrapping around it, slowing our speed as gently as I could.
Adrien’s head still pitched forward with the sudden deceleration.
I bit my lip hard as I concentrated, trying to transition to lower speeds more gracefully. It would be easier to just bring our pod to an immediate stop, like putting a hand over a rolling marble, but I couldn’t be sure that Adrien and I wouldn’t end up with concussions, or worse.
Finally we slowed and stopped. And not a moment too soon. I projected outward. The cave-in was only fifty paces ahead. The pod cylinder was on its side at this point in the track. Adrien and I hung suspended from what was now the ceiling, held in only by our buckles. When I released the straps belting me in, I tumbled down to the floor. At least my fall was broken by several of the packs that had become dislodged. I clicked the door-release button, but an error message popped up: ERROR: DESTINATIO
N NOT ACHIEVED. AUTO-LOCKS REMAIN ENGAGED.
I impatiently hit the override button, but when the door finally opened, I was met with a wall of rock.
Shunt. I’d hoped there’d be enough space for us to slip around the sides, but the tunnel around the pod was carved with only inches of clearance. We didn’t have time for this. I was sure the Regs had climbed up onto the pod’s track and were sprinting down the tunnel toward us this very second. I wasn’t sure how far we’d made it—maybe five or ten miles? If it was five, they could cover that distance in ten minutes, maybe less.
I unstrapped Adrien, lowering him gently to the ground with my telek. Then I turned and put out my arm again, ripping out the ceiling of the pod that faced the collapsed tunnel. It was melded steel alloy, but with my power, the top popped off with no more resistance than the lid on a food canister.
I grabbed two of the loose packs from the ground, pulled the small rectangular med kit off the wall, and climbed out through the new exit. I looked back. Adrien was slumped against the wall.
“I’m going to lift you out now.”
He nodded.
“Good.” I climbed out through the top of the pod. My mast cells immediately reacted to allergens in the damp tunnel air, but I was practiced enough at deflecting it that I could still lift Adrien’s body out, in addition to keeping the cells under control. Splitting my focus like this used to be difficult. But after months of intense practice, now I didn’t even break a sweat.
It was pitch black in the tunnel. I must have busted the circuitry on the pod’s emergency lights when I took the top off.
In spite of my resolve to stay calm, panic bubbled up in my chest at the darkness. I hastily touched the panel on my arm for light, but it was paltry and only illuminated a small sphere around me. At least Adrien looked a little more alert. I set him down on his feet and he managed to stand on his own, but he still had to lean against the tunnel wall. It was clear that we’d never be able to outrun the Regs.