Inescapable (Talented Saga #7) (25 page)

Talia

Vault, Isle of Exile

Three Days Before the Vote

Anya wasn’t exaggerating when she said that
I’d need her help to escape from the maximum-security prison. Not
only would I have been completely lost without the map on her
communicator, but it was Anya’s retinas that unlocked each door we
encountered. We bypassed elevators in favor of seldom used
stairwells, since the guards’ echoing footsteps warned us the
instant they were nearby—stealth and subtlety were not their
forte.

Initially, my biggest concern was the
security cameras. Other than the cell interiors and the shower
stalls, every inch of Vault was monitored.

“
Already taken care of,”
Anya had told me, when I voiced my concern about the
cameras.

We were currently huddled inside a supply
closet in a section of the medical ward that was conveniently under
construction. Guards were searching the main part of the ward,
preventing us from accessing the stairwell we needed to continue
our journey to freedom. Since this particular staircase was
essential to all three of Anya’s escape routes, she was using a
program on her communicator to map out yet another option.

“
I uploaded a program to
change the security feeds,” Anya explained absently, her thumbs
flying across her communicator’s screen. “Instead of displaying the
live footage from Vault’s hallways, the monitors in the
surveillance room are showing people in Shanghai walking to work,
lovers strolling on the West Bank, children attending school in the
East End, and other fun stuff like that.”

I whistled appreciatively. “Impressive.”

Anya smiled in the darkness. “Thanks. It
wasn’t easy. But we knew the cameras would be the first obstacle. I
switched the feeds remotely as soon as I saw the alert message from
Les. I wasn’t even sure it had worked.” She shrugged. “Must have,
though. Otherwise, the guards would have caught us by now. Erik was
actually the one who suggested swapping the feeds.”

I knew it shouldn’t have
bothered me, the fact that Erik and Anya had been in contact since
my incarceration. Regardless, it did. Even though I
knew
their romantic
relationship was ancient history, and I was his present and his
future. It just did.

Some of the old stirrings of jealousy over
Anya might have sprung from his reaction upon seeing her in the
auction house outside of London. It confirmed that he still cared
about her. Which was natural, of course. It was the reason I’d
risked UNITED’s wrath to save her.

He’s yours,
I reminded myself.
And
you’re his. End of story.

And truly, it was. No one, least of all me,
could deny the love for me he openly wore on his sleeve. Erik would
never choose anyone over me, and I knew it.

At the opposite end of the
hallway from the supply closet, the doors to the construction area
opened. Pulling my thoughts from the needless worrying—it
was
so
not the
time to go all girly and jealous—I concentrated on the source of
the noise. There were two minds moving in our direction.

Fear rolled off of Anya in waves.

“
It’s okay. They aren’t
guards,”
I assured her, switching to
mental communication.

Anya’s eyes widened upon hearing my voice
inside her head. From what I understood, mental conversations were
weird for the uninitiated. Judging by the look on her face, Anya
had never heard someone else inside her mind.

“
Just think the words you
want to speak out loud,”
I sent.
“I’ll hear them.”

It took her a couple of seconds to adjust to
our new silent walkie-talkies. During that brief period, I did my
damnedest not to peek into the shadows of her brain, afraid of what
I might find. Certain as I was of Erik’s unwavering loyalty to me,
I didn’t want to know the specifics of their conversations.

“
How do you know they
aren’t guards?”
Anya asked
finally.

“
Moving too slowly. And
the shoes are wrong. Guards wear heavy boots. Those two are wearing
shoes with soft soles. Probably nurses or doctors. Do you guys keep
extra supplies down here, even though it’s under
construction?”

“
Yeah, we do,”
Anya confirmed.

“
Okay, then you just focus
on finding us another route out of here. I don’t think we’re going
to be able to reach that stairwell any time soon.”

“
Right. Got it.”
Anya refocused on her communicator screen.
“Okay. There is another set of stairs
here.”
She indicated a small rectangle on
the floor plan displayed on her screen.

“
It looks like it only
goes down, not up,”
I pointed out.
“I get using roundabout routes to throw them off,
but we do need to go up eventually.”

“
Not necessarily. We came
up with a couple possible options for actually leaving
Vault.”

Again, her use of ‘we’ made it feel like a
fist was squeezing my heart.

“
Frederick works closely
with the council and was able to access their contingency plan for
evacuating Vault in case of an attack,”
she continued.

Frederick? So when Anya said ‘we’, she
hadn’t simply meant Erik. I wasn’t sure whether that made me feel
better or worse. I appreciated the lengths my friends had gone to
ensure my release, but it sort of felt like Anya had taken my
place.

Yes, I knew exactly how absurd that was,
particularly when I was in the middle of the most difficult mission
imaginable. But no one had ever accused me of being mature.

“
There’s an underwater
port on the lowermost level of Vault,”
Anya continued.

If Anya felt the jealously that spiked
within me, she ignored the sensation. I liked her a little bit more
in that moment.

You know, because breaking me out of jail
wasn’t enough of a reason for us to be friends.

“
We can take one of the
pods to the surface. The fuel tanks are small, though, with just
enough fuel to go approximately fifty miles underwater. Since we’ll
have to use cloaking, likely closer to thirty. Which, in case you
were wondering, will not get us to land. But, the pods double as
hovercrafts. Once we break the surface, we can switch to solar
power and fly just about anywhere.”

The plan was solid, with one small, crucial
exception.

“
Are they tagged? Cloaking
won’t help if the pod has a GPS tracker,”
I pointed out.

Satisfaction overshadowed the fear emanating
from Anya. I couldn’t help but smile. My friends really had given
this a lot of thought.

“
They do. At the same time
I switched the camera feeds, I uploaded a program to scramble the
tracking signals. We could float ten miles off the coast of Vault
and the pod’s tag will show us halfway around the world. And, as a
failsafe, I figured out how to launch the entire fleet of pods at
once, each one programmed with different destination coordinates.
That way, even if someone manages to overwrite my code and
descramble the signals, they won’t know which pod to chase after.
UNITED can’t spare the manpower to have agents waiting for us at
every single endpoint. I also have each pod landing at least one
hundred miles from any UNITED base, just in case they get lucky and
go after the right one. You and I will be long gone before they get
there, no problem.”

“
You are a freaking
genius,”
I told her.

I meant it, too. It would have taken me
years to come up with this sort of plan, especially with only a
handful of people helping.

Then again, I was able to morph. All of this
subterfuge and misdirection wasn’t necessary for someone who was
capable of disguising herself as the animal of her choosing. If I
wasn’t worried about what would come of Anya for helping me if I
left her behind, I’d have just become a fly and zipped on up to the
surface.

The door at the opposite end of the hallway
banged open.

“
You in here, Lyons?”
shouted a male voice, which echoed in the empty medical
wing.

Are you really expecting
an answer?
I wondered. How stupid did
these guards think I was?

“
Best to surrender now.
You won’t make it out of here. No one ever has. So you can choose
right now—we’ll bring you in alive, or we’ll bring you in dead,”
the man warned.

Guards flooded the hallway from either end.
My heart sank. We’d waited too long to make our move, and the
backup stairwell Anya had selected was no longer an option.

“
Search every inch of this
wing,” ordered the same guard who’d called out to me. “Empty every
closet, look in every bathroom stall, turn over every mattress.
They’re here.”

The guard spoke with such conviction that I
began to panic.

He didn’t just think I was close by; he knew
with absolute certainty. How? How did they pinpoint my
location?

“
Am I tagged, like the
pods?”
I sent to Anya.

She shook her head.
“No point. No inmate has ever escaped before.
After this, well, I wouldn’t be surprised if they start implanting
trackers in prisoners.”

“
Then one of those guards
out there is extremely sensitive to other Talents. Without a chip
in me, it’s the easiest way to track us. That’s not good. I’m like
a freaking homing beacon to a person with those capabilities; the
guards aren’t going away.”

Any second, I expected the closet door to
fly off of the hinges, followed by wranglers storming inside to
haul me out by my damp ponytail. I had to take control of the
situation before that occurred.

Performing a quick mind count, I tried to
gauge the odds of fighting my way out of this. There appeared to be
thirty guards out there, give or take a few.

Too many. Had I been alone, I might have
taken the gamble. But with Anya to worry about, it wasn’t worth the
risk. There had to be another option.

“
Got any bright ideas on
how to get out of this closet? Preferably one that doesn’t involve
handcuffs?”
I asked Anya.

My companion smiled
nervously.
“We go up.”
She pointed towards the ceiling.
“Drop ceiling tiles. We can crawl.”

Doors up and down the hallway were slamming
open. The guards were yelling to one another. The leader was
screeching commands to his underlings.

“
Block all possible exits.
The girls are here,” someone shouted. “They have to be.”

The girls,
he kept saying, plural. They knew Anya was with
me. How? Without the cameras, the guards wouldn’t have seen us
together.

It’s not me they’re
tracking,
I realized with some relief. It
was Anya. Or, rather, Anya’s eyes. Someone with more brain cells
than the guards outside the closet must have checked the scans logs
and realized Anya entered this area of the medical wing and never
left.

Then we still have a
chance,
I thought. Not only would climbing
around in the crawlspace eliminate leaving a digital trail behind
us, but it was also pretty much our only option.

“
Let’s do it,”
I told Anya.

Shelves lined one wall of the tiny closet.
Boxes with labels too technical for me to pronounce were stacked
from floor to ceiling. At a glance, there was no way of knowing
whether the shelves would support our respective weights.

Either they will or they
won’t
, I decided, sending up a silent pray
it was the former rather than the latter.

Then, true to my quintessentially impulsive
nature, I scurried up the shelves without another thought.

When I reached the top, I shoved the ceiling
tile to one side and hoisted myself through the opening. Down
below, Anya started to climb the shelves. Her fingers kept
slipping, and she lacked the upper body strength to pull herself up
the way I had.

“
Stop,”
I sent.
“I have a better
idea. Just relax and close your eyes.”

I didn’t wait for a reply. Using my
telekinetic powers, I yanked Anya up and through the opening.
Caught by surprise, she gasped audibly as I deposited her next to
me in the crawlspace.

Below, the knob on the closet door began to
twist. With not even a millisecond to spare, I wedged the ceiling
tile back in place with my mind. Light suddenly flooded the closet,
leaking through the small cracks around the perimeter of the tile.
A rattling noise followed.

“
Fall back!” a guard
shouted.

Crap.
They’d thrown a smoke canister into the closet. We had about
five seconds to hightail it out of range. Otherwise, we’d succumb
to the noxious fumes.

“
Which way?”
I demanded urgently.

Anya was frightened, and I hated compounding
her anxiety with my own. But I also needed her to realize there
wasn’t time to contemplate our next move. That luxury had come and
gone.

Anya pointed a shaky index
finger over my shoulder.
“We can access
that stairwell I showed you from back there.”

“
Stay right behind me. And
hurry.”