Inescapable (Talented Saga #7) (26 page)

I started crawling in the direction Anya had
indicated, checking over my shoulder to make sure she wasn’t
lagging.

Bluish-green wisps of smoke wafted up
through the cracks in the ceiling tile.

“
Cover your nose and mouth
with your shirt,”
I sent, doing the
same.

“
It’s empty, sir,” I heard
someone say, his voice slightly muffled. “I don’t think they’re
here. We’ve checked most of the ward.”

“
Check again,” growled a
different voice.

“
Dr. Pritcher may not be
with the Lyons’s girl. We have no actual confirmation of
that.”

“
Then why haven’t we found
the doctor yet? She entered this wing ten minutes ago. There is no
record of her leaving. Find them.”

They weren’t saying anything I didn’t
already know, so I blocked out the men’s conversation.

Instead, I tuned back into Anya. Her
thoughts were erratic and terrified. In her mind, this escape was
supposed to be fairly easy. She’d even done a couple dry runs to
determine how much time we would need to reach the pod deck.

Of course, it had never occurred to Anya
that I might screw up my own prison break; that I might stupidly
antagonize a guard, prompting him to request the wranglers. For her
plan to work Anya needed me coherent and able to walk on my own,
which wouldn’t have been the case if the wranglers got to me.
Tangling with them would have put me out of commission for days.
And with the threat of execution looming, I didn’t have days
left.

Basically, my temper had nearly derailed the
entire operation. Awesome.

“
How’s this program of
yours work again?”
I asked Anya, to
distract her.

The poor girl was one surprise away from a
heart attack. Since she’d been so calm and collected when outlining
the plan earlier, I figured maybe rehashing the details would
help.

“
It’s already uploaded
into each pods’ memory. I can remote activate it using my
comm,”
Anya replied.

“
Did I already say you’re
a genius?”

She chuckled softly behind me, tendrils of
tension leaving her body.

“
Do you have a destination
for us in mind?”
I asked, hoping to keep
her talking.

As soon as she began talking, I tuned her
thoughts out, instead focusing my attention where it was
needed.

Danbury McDonough had done me few true
favors in my years with TOXIC, but the countless hours of sensory
training drills were definitely one of them. My hearing was so
acute that I was able to eavesdrop on the many conversations taking
place among our pursuers both above and below us. Anya was still
rattling off the myriad of locations she considered safe options,
but I was far more interested in what the guards were saying to one
another.

Especially since I already knew where I was
going once we reached those pods. And I was going alone.

Nowhere was actually safe for Anya if I was
with her. Alone, she had a much better chance. UNITED would focus
their manhunt on me. And, if they did track down Anya first, she
could always say that I forced her to help me. Without camera
footage to the contrary, it would be hard to prove otherwise.

Most of what I overheard from the guards was
useless; a lot of the chatter was about what would happen to them
if I wasn’t found. One woman suggested it didn’t matter whether
they caught me, that all they had to do was leak my disappearance
to the media and some hate group would take me out of the equation.
Another guard thought torturing Erik until I turned myself in was
the best option. I made a mental note to ask Victoria whether
‘sadistic’ and ‘sociopathic’ were part of a Vault guard’s job
description.

“
Has anybody checked the
chute? The girl could be hiding in there,” I heard someone
suggest.

“
Not a chance. Unless the
girl’s got wings or suction cups for hands, she ain’t in the
chute,” another guard replied.

“—
and it’s off grid and
uninhabited, might—”

“
What’s the chute?”
I asked Anya, interrupting her
mid-sentence.

“
It’s literally a chute
that runs from sea level to the basement. Sort of like an elevator
shaft, but with no car or cables or anything. It’s another
in-case-of-attack precaution. There’s a hatch on the main level and
a hidden entrance on each sub-level. The idea was that people could
parachute down for a quick exit to where the pods are docked, but
it was deemed a safety hazard.”

I smiled.
“Perfect.”

“
Talia, they got rid of
all the parachutes. And we are still over twenty floors up—if we
jump, we’ll die.”

Ignoring her warning, I
asked,
“Do you know where the entrance is
on this floor?”

“
Approximately. I mean, I
know where the chute is, so I have a good idea of where the
entrance must be.”
Anya’s mental voice was
strained, and she sounded close to her breaking point.

I felt horrible. Tiny teeth seemed to be
feasting on my stomach lining, guilt tearing me apart from the
inside out. We had to make it off of Vault, for Anya’s sake more
than mine. The whole kidnapping-forced-accomplice angle would be a
hard sell if the guards confiscated Anya’s communicator and saw
Vault’s blueprints and all the programs she’d written.

No matter what, I couldn’t allow Anya to be
punished for helping me. She had no reason to like me—really, she
had every reason to hate me—yet she’d risked it all to help me.

“
Do you trust me,
Anya?”

“
Yeah, of course,
but—”

“
Tell me where the
entrance is. I can get us down.”

Without waiting for her to send a reply, I
read the answer from Anya’s thoughts. A bathroom. On the med level,
UNITED kept their hidden entrance to the escape hatch in a
bathroom.

Luckily, we weren’t far from it. Reading the
directions from Anya’s mind, we scurried along the vent as if we
had dozens of prison guards hunting us.

Only two minutes later, we dropped through
the ceiling tile and into the single occupant restroom. I saw a
toilet, a sink, and full-length mirror on one wall. Besides the
door, there was nothing that so much as hinted at an exit.

“
Are you sure about
this?”
I asked, frustrated.

“
It’s possible it’s in the
outer room. I can’t be positive. But I’m sure the entrance is in
this area.”

We both frantically scanned the room, but
nothing was out of place.

“
The mirror,”
Anya suddenly sent.
“I
bet it conceals the door.”

She didn’t feel nearly as confident as she’d
have me believe, but we were quickly running out of options.

Placing one hand on either side of the
mirror, I yanked it free from the wall. Cool air rushed out from
the rectangular hole left in its place. Anya and I exchanged
wide-eyed looks of disbelief. I recovered first, sticking my head
through the opening and into the black abyss. The air inside the
chute was thick with moisture, the cold breeze refreshing on my
sweaty skin.

I heard the guards’ thoughts long before I
heard their footfalls. Wrapping my arm around Anya’s waist, I
pulled her to the edge of the chute.

“
You said you trusted me,
right? Hold on.”

I leapt through the opening, pulling her
with me.

Anya’s scream was so shrill that it could
have peeled paint. The shriek continued as we plummeted down the
chute. Even if I’d somehow been able to replace the mirror over the
opening as we jumped, her scream would’ve been heard on every floor
we passed on our downward flight.

Adrenaline coursed through my veins, sending
my senses into overdrive. I embraced the fall, relishing the feel
of wind whipping through my tangled curls and wailing in my ears.
As quickly as we dropped, I had to fight the urge to close my eyes.
Tears blurred my vision, but I didn’t need to see much—just the
light at the end of the tunnel.

In truth, my plan was not exactly what you
might call a sure thing. Anya, with her ability to perform complex
mathematical equations in her head faster than I could spell
‘complex mathematical equations,’ was actually better suited for
calculating the amount of opposing force I needed to stop our
decent. All I had were my instincts.

Trusting in them, as I had so many times
before, I used my powers to slow our falling bodies when the
blackness gave way to light. Arms still wrapped around each other,
Anya and I came to a stop mere inches from the ground.

The abrupt halt cut off Anya’s scream. She
began gasping for breath. Slowly, I lowered us the rest of the way
down. When I released Anya, she fell to her knees and vomited.
Nurturing was not in my nature, so I just watched for several long,
uncomfortable moments. Then, since her current condition was my
fault, I reached over to rub her back and muttered, “You’re okay,
you’re okay. Just get it all out.”

While Anya lost her dinner, I stared around
the cavernous room, awestruck. The chute had deposited us in the
center of a long, narrow dock. Water lapped the edges, coming up
over the sides and soaking the cuffs of my pants. By my estimation,
about twenty pods were docked on either side of the watery
walkway—forty in total. They varied in size, some one-man crafts.
Others meant to hold ten to twelve people.

Anya stumbled to her feet, using my arm for
leverage. Her skin had a sickly green hue to it, and her eyes were
bloodshot and unfocused.

“
Any particular one we
need to take?” I asked gently.

“
That one.” She pointed to
the closest pod, a small four-person craft with two seats in front
and two in back.

I half-carried, half-dragged Anya over to
the sub, popped the hood, and deposited her into the front
passenger seat. By the time I rounded the front end again and
climbed in the driver’s side, she was fumbling with her
communicator.

The top slid closed above us. Water began to
bubble around the craft like jets in a hot tub, the sound
deafening. The craft sank into the bubbles.

We were almost fully submerged when the
first of the guards landed on the lowermost level of Vault, a black
parachute billowing down around him like giant cape.

Erik

Eden, Isle of Exile

Three Days Before the Vote

“
This is
your
fault, Victoria!” I
punctuated the accusation with a punch to the wall, right between
two paintings by Michaela Molins, the councilwoman’s favorite
Techno Era artist.

The sleek chrome frames rattled from the
impact. One, some abstract piece meant to resemble a circuit board,
slid from its hook. I grabbed the painting midair, my grip so tight
that the glass splintered.

“
I take full
responsibility for what happened on Vault,” Victoria replied,
perfectly calm in the face of my outrage.

This only fueled my fury. I squeezed the
painting more forcefully, a shard of glass penetrated my palm.

“
Shit!” I swore, throwing
the damned artwork against the wall. Glass exploded, raining down
around me in sparkling drops.

“
Careful, kid. That
thing’s worth more than a spanking new rec hover,” Miles said
mildly. He was standing near the door to Victoria’s office,
optimally located out of my direct firing range while still being
perfectly positioned to grab me, if necessary.

“
Put it on my tab,” I
growled.

From behind her office desk, Victoria rose
slowly. She pushed a button on her intercom.

“
Hank, fetch the first aid
supplies. It seems Agent Kelley has had an accident.”

“
I don’t need first aid
supplies!” I shouted. “I need my girlfriend!”

It was late—or early, depending how you
looked at it—and Talia had gone rogue nearly an hour before. I’d
spoken with her briefly before she’d disappeared, but was forced to
cut the conversation short due to a stupid meeting about heightened
security measures at my final rally.

Why didn’t you demand they reschedule the
stupid freaking meeting?

If I‘d thrown my weight around and insisted
we move the meeting, I would have been talking to Talia when she
learned the news that made her decide escape was her only option.
Instead, I’d returned to my apartment, opened my mind, and found my
girlfriend careening down an airshaft. Her adrenaline was high and
her emotions erratic.