Mine (32 page)

N
INETY-SEVEN

Mike

T
HE RECLAIMER HAD
tried to cut off Mike’s ability to see and hear, but while maintaining the façade of the obedient prisoner, he’d been able to retain enough of his senses to see shapes and hear dampened noises.

It was a small victory at best, however. His end was coming. He knew that. His only real solace was that Leah and Joel would be okay.

The Reclaimer guided him into a large room with a single object sitting in the middle. He couldn’t get a good handle on the object’s size or shape, but he couldn’t miss the way the light shined off it, making it seem to glow.

He knew in that instant he was standing in the presence of the Reclaimer’s true home.

Her sanctuary.

Her body.

Her…
cradle.

::HALT.

As his body stopped moving, a flame flickered in the back of his mind. A mix of defiance and anger and outrage that would not allow him to just roll over and die.

Yes, he had made a deal.

Yes, he would submit to her probing.

And yes, he would give her what she wanted.

What he would not do is be a bystander during the process. No, he would do a little probing of his own.

::PREPARE FOR DATA TRANSFER.

Yes, Reclaimer.

N
INETY-EIGHT

The Reclaimer

T
HE RECLAIMER DELVED
into the Translator’s mind.

Her first order of business was to retrieve the remaining packets the Translator had yet to send. There was a surprising number waiting in its buffer. Analysis indicated the Translator had been hoarding the packets to ration their arrival and mask the Translator’s approach to her fortress, a tactic that clearly had worked. She flagged this information to include in the revised protocols for the next Translator.

The Translator’s memories were harder for her to understand, as the raw data was formatted in the creature’s biological patterns. Running them through the Translator’s own translation programming was out of the question. The deceit it had no doubt sewn throughout the other packets would likely reoccur, thus negating the value. She wanted facts, not illusions. She would have to do the best she could without running its data through a native filter—a vital part of the translation process.

She activated the necessary programming, and began.

An alert went off. The Satellites had breached the door to the section of the structure where her chamber was located. Though they were annoying, there was little they could do to her now that she knew who they were.

She did, however, require a bit more uninterrupted time with the Translator, so she issued the appropriate commands and then returned the majority of her attention to the data.

N
INETY-NINE

Joel

T
HE HALLWAY BEYOND
the broken door went on for about thirty feet before ending at another door. Additional closed entrances lined each side, three on the left, two on the right.

The first door they checked opened into a room full of electrical equipment, but no Mike. The next door enclosed a workshop with metal tables and tools hung from pegboards on the wall, but again no Mike.

Rooms three and four were variations of room two.

As Joel reached for door five, he heard a metallic scrape from inside. He slowly turned the knob, but before he could ease the door open, it jerked inward, yanked by someone on the other side.

Joel stumbled forward into a tangle of gray hands. Two snatched his ankles while more latched on to his arms. Before he had time to react, his feet were pulled out from under him and he was dragged into the room.

He batted at the Doer holding his arms, knocking it into a metal table. He then drew his legs in and kicked out, sending the one near his feet skidding across the floor. By the time he was standing again, Leah had a hold on the Doer who’d crashed into the table.

“I don’t recognize this one,” she said.

While the Doer had the gray and the scars and the missing hair, the face was older, ancient almost. Man or woman, Joel couldn’t tell. It seemed to sense his attention and reached out to grab him. It was far too weak, though, to break from Leah’s grasp.

Joel turned toward the other Doer. At first he thought he must have knocked it out because it was still on the floor, but then he saw its legs were twisted to the point of uselessness from some long-ago accident. As it began pulling itself across the floor toward Joel, it looked up.

Joel cursed under his breath. Dooley.

Joel crouched in front of his former cabin mate. When Dooley reached for him, Joel grabbed Dooley’s wrists and moved the gray hands to the side. Joel then looked into Dooley’s eyes, trying to find some sign of his friend. “Can you understand me? It’s Joel.”

Dooley opened his mouth and groaned, but like with Antonio and Courtney, he showed no sign of recognition.

“What did she do to them?” Leah asked.

Though he knew the question was rhetorical, he said, “Made them hers.”

“Like us.”

“Yes, but different.”

“We’re not going to turn into this, are we?”

He didn’t answer, because he didn’t know.

Joel looked around and spotted a door at the back of the room. He gently pushed Dooley to the side and went over to it. No sound came from the other side so he pulled it open.

The inner room was pitch-black and filled with the smell of rot and decay. He felt along the wall next to the door for a light switch but found nothing.

“Can you bring your phone over here?” he asked.

Leah maneuvered the Doer she’d been holding onto the ground, stepped around Dooley’s outstretched hands, and joined Joel at the door.

Shining her light inside, she whispered, “Holy God.”

The walls were lined with chairs. While half were empty, others were occupied by piles of bones, gray mummified corpses, and, in a few cases, other functioning Doers.

At one time, the Reclaimer must have had over twenty slaves. Now, counting Courtney, Antonio, Dooley, and the old one behind them, there were seven. Of the trio still in the chairs, two were also ancient. The last was Kayla.

The reason she hadn’t been sent after them was obvious. Her legs and arms had atrophied and wouldn’t have even supported a child.

Bile churned in Joel’s stomach as he imagined what had been done to these people, what they’d had to live through. The hijacking of his and Leah’s and Mike’s lives was nothing compared to this.

Leah played her light around the room again, stopping on a pile of clothes in the far corner. When she headed over, Joel followed. She rifled through them—slacks and dresses and shirts and underwear and shoes. There were also several dingy white jackets that appeared to be lab coats.

She looked back at the dead Doers. “They must have been the people who were working here.”

“Back in the forties?” Joel said, remembering the diary entry by Dr. Kozakov. “That would make them…”

“Old,” she said.

They dragged Dooley and the aged Doer into the inner room with the others, then closed the door and jammed it with one of the metal tables.

They returned to the hallway, where the only door left was the one at the end.

O
NE HUNDRED

Leah

O
NE MOMENT JOEL
was reaching for the door, the next, he was soaring down the hall, carried off by a sudden, raging wind.

If not for Leah’s superior reaction time, she too would have been sailing through the corridor. The instant she saw Joel’s jacket begin to billow, she’d lunged back toward the doorway they’d just exited and grabbed the frame a split second before her legs were lifted into the air.

“Joel!” she called as she looked over her shoulder and watched him fly away.

She was sure he was going to smash into the walls, but the wind sucked him through the opening that had held the door they broke and into the bisecting corridor, where he disappeared.

She closed her eyes and reached out to him.
Joel, grab something!

She received a panicked
what do you think I’m trying to do?
before the connection was cut off. Not by Joel, though. It must have been the Reclaimer.

Leah looked at the last door. She needed to get beyond it but she couldn’t just walk there in this wind. If she could pull herself through the entrance she was clinging to and into the room beyond, she could shut the door, get out of the wind, and have a moment to think.

Her body banged against the wall as she pulled herself around the jamb she was clinging to and back into the room where they had encountered Dooley. Though the wind whipped at the opening, little made it into the room before she forced the door closed.

She took a moment to catch her breath, and then looked around for something that could help her get to the last door in the hallway, a distance of about fifteen feet. In a cabinet, she found some tools and a sturdy, hundred-foot power cable. Unfortunately, she couldn’t just throw the cable at the remaining door as a) it wouldn’t attach itself at the other end, and b) the wind would send it sailing.

That’s when she realized she was leaning on the answer. Three ten-foot metal tables were in the room.
Portable
tables.

She set to work.

First, she moved the table that had been blocking the door to the inner room into the back room itself, and positioned it length-wise across the doorway to hold it in place. She was concerned at first that the Doers might come after her, but they seemed to have lost interest. Or, more likely, the Reclaimer had assumed the wind would deal with her trespassers.

Leah tied one end of the power cable to the table’s crossbeam, and moved another table over to the hallway door, where she flipped it so the top was on the ground. She measured off the power cable, adding in the extra length she’d need, and tied it around a leg of the table. She then sliced off the extra cable with the utility knife she’d found with the tools, tied one end of this second line to another table leg, and the other end around her waist.

Ready as she was ever going to be, she opened the door again.

The wind rushed inside, but not strong enough to knock her off her feet. She shoved the table out the door. As she knew would happen, the wind tried to push it down the hall, but with only the legs propped up in the air, the torrent didn’t have much surface area to work with, and she was able to manhandle the table into position. When she was through, the tied-off end angled toward the other door, while the closer end was jammed against the doorframe she was standing in, the wind holding it in place.

She gave it a kick to be sure, and it didn’t move.

Knowing she couldn’t think about it too much, she grabbed the table and pulled herself into the hall. Support piece by support piece, she worked her way to the other end of the table, the wind trying to rip her away the whole time.

She then braced her feet against the end and pushed through the wind until she was able to wrap her fingers around the handle of her target door.

She undid her safety line, and then, proving once more she was the fastest girl in the world, opened the door with one hand and, at the exact moment the door was out of her way, grabbed the jamb with the other.

The moment she pulled herself across the threshold, the wind ceased.

O
NE HUNDRED ONE

Joel

J
OEL WAS OFF
his feet and flying before he had a chance to react. The wind was as strong as the one he and Leah had encountered when they were thirteen. He tried to look back the other way to see how far Leah was behind him, but she wasn’t there.

The gale whipped him past the last door. He grabbed for the jamb but missed and shot into the other hallway.

Joel, grab something!
Leah in his mind.

What do you think I’m trying to do?
he thought. He had no idea if she heard him or not because she didn’t say anything else.

He looked side to side, desperate for something to latch on to, but the wind kept him in the exact center of the hallway, where everything was out of reach. He sailed through the giant vault door and into the large room, where he was swept toward the ceiling. Without Leah’s light, he had no idea how far up it was.

He braced himself for impact, arm over his face, but then all sense of movement stopped. He could still feel the wind blowing against his back, but instead of thrusting him into the ceiling, it was holding him in place.

He looked down. The only thing he could see was the big doorway where light spilled out. But that was more than enough for him to see it was a long way down. If the wind suddenly stopped, he would not survive the fall, even with his superior recovery abilities.

Judging from the height, he must be close to the ceiling. Carefully, he stretched a hand into the darkness above him. At full extension, his index finger brushed against a solid surface. He twisted his body to reach higher, and was able to place his palm against the top of the room.

Concrete. Smooth. Nothing to hold on to.

Panic started growing in his chest, but then he remembered: the bruised arm he’d woken with. He hadn’t inflicted that injury on anyone yet. So unless the wind cut out and he dropped onto someone, he was destined to live a little while longer.

He concentrated on remembering what he’d seen in the room when they’d passed through before.

Pipes!