The Tomb of Shadows. Peter Lerangis
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“HOW DO I look?” Torquin walked stiffly toward us, wearing the fallen Massa’s garb. The pants had ripped at the seams, his arms dangled out of the too-short sleeves, and his belly protruded from an unbuttoned shirt.
“Like a bear in samajap,” Cass replied. “Too bad it’s getting dark. We could kill them with laughter.”
Aly and I were poised at the edge of the jungle. Fiddle had raced into the dorm, which was now unguarded. Around us, the compound was in utter chaos. The place may have been a great research institute, but it wasn’t built to withstand an assault.
A piercing alarm made us jump. Seconds later, Fiddle raced out the back door of the dorm. Behind him swarmed a group of bedraggled KI people. Two of them were holding Fritz the mechanic by his legs and shoulders. As they disappeared into the jungle to our left, Fiddle gestured toward the escapees. “All of you!” he urged. “Get to MO twenty-one, now!”
“Is Fritz okay?” I asked.
“Diabetic,” Fiddle explained, as KI prisoners streamed out of the dorm. “Needs an insulin injection. Fortunately, there are plenty of medical doctors among the KI. We have a couple of hidden shelters on the island. MO twenty-one is near Mount Onyx. There’ll be insulin in the emergency supplies there.”
I could barely recognize some of the KI staff. Brutus, the head chef, had been beaten badly, his face swollen and red. He had to be helped by two others. Hiro, the martial-arts trainer, was walking with a crutch. They looked toward us, weary and bewildered, as if we were a dream.
Fiddle urged them on, then gathered Torquin, Cass, Aly, and me close. We could hear Massa reinforcements clattering in at the front of the building. “We don’t have much time before the goons figure out what just happened. I’ll stay here and get as many KI people to safety as I can. You guys get to work finding Bhegad’s EP assignment. Aly, you know where to go?”
“Building D,” Aly said.
Fiddle nodded. “Right. The systems control center. But I warn you, the info is encrypted beyond belief.”
“Depends on your definition of belief,” Aly said with a small grin.
“Radio me when you find him.” Fiddle fished a walkie-talkie from his pocket and threw it to me. “The uniforms will give you some cover. Be sure you find those Loculi. Bhegad will know where they are. Do you understand this? Good. I can meet you back at the plane. Where is it?”
“Enigma Cove,” Torquin said.
With a nod, Fiddle disappeared in the direction of the dorm. Cass, Aly, Torquin, and I bolted. We followed the perimeter of the campus toward Building D. I was scared out of my mind. The Massa knew our faces. In the light, we were toast. And the baggy uniforms didn’t help. But the gathering darkness might help us pass for Massa commandos.
As the alarm blared all over the compound, the chaos seemed to multiply in the quadrangle. Officers were screaming at subordinates, commandos were shoving KI staff toward the dorm. No one seemed to care about four more running people.
We crouched behind the squat, square building and peered into the window. Exactly two Massa were in there, pounding on keyboards. “Skeleton crew,” Cass commented.
Torquin stood, gesturing us to follow. He circled the building and strolled through the building’s front door, which had been blasted open. “I help, fellow Massa?” he boomed.
The two men turned. One of them nearly spit out his coffee. “Whoa, nice uniform! What have you been eating, dude?”
Torquin grabbed them by their collars, lifted them out of their seats, and butted their heads together. “Pound cake,” he said.
Aly slid into a seat in front of a console. Her fingers flew over the keyboard. Code flashed across the screen at impossible speed.
“You can actually read that?” I said.
“Shhh …” The scrolling stopped, and the screen filled with random letters and symbols. “Okay, there it is … House of Wenders, sublevel seven. That’s Bhegad’s EP.”
“That’s the underground lab, where they made Shelley the Loculus shell,” Cass exclaimed.
“Where do you read that, Aly?” I asked, staring at the gobbledygook.
“It’s in hexadecimal notation,” she said. “Those combinations each represent letters and characters.”
I stared at her. “You scare me.”
“Actually, I scare me, too.” She turned from the screen, a concerned look on her face. “I wouldn’t have been able to read that even a week ago. Hurray for G7W. Now let’s see if we can scare the Massa …” Swinging around back to the keyboard, she said, “They will have access to our trackers now, right? So before we get Bhegad, why don’t I just zap the KI’s tracking machine—along with some other choice equipment … hee-hee …”
“We can’t just run across the courtyard to the House of Wenders,” Cass said. “There are tons of Massa. Dark or not, someone will recognize us, just like that guard did.”
“Go the long way,” Torquin suggested.
“On it.” Aly’s fingers were a blur. “Overloading the Comestibule circuits … disabling the breakers … should cause a small explosion there. Okay. On the count of three, the lights should go out everywhere except the House of Wenders. The Massa goons who aren’t heading to the dorm will be drawn to the explosion in the Comestibule, buying us some space and time.”
“Wait. What if someone is actually in the kitchen?” I asked.
Torquin looked skeptical. “The long way is better.”
Aly sighed. “I figure that the kitchen-cafeteria is the one place people won’t be during a Massa attack. Let’s hope I’m right. Ready? One … three!”
She leaped from the seat. A distant blast rocked the earth. I staggered and fell to the floor. “I thought you said a small explosion!”
“There goes five fifty-pound sacks of chocolate chips,” Cass said mournfully.
Torquin pushed us all outside. We ducked into a shadow, watching smoke rise from the Comestibule.
Together we sprinted across the compound, which was now pitch-dark, save for the lights in the windows of the House of Wenders, directly across from us. It loomed over the campus, as solemn and stately as a courthouse, its wide marble stairs topped by seven columns. The KI flag that flew on a pole in front was now tattered and blackened. As a group of five Massa raced down the stairs in confusion, Torquin called out to them: “Attack! Comestibule! Go!”
They stomped off toward the commotion, and we headed into the grand entrance hall, racing around the statue of the dinosaur that had spooked me so much when I’d first walked in here. The elevator in the back of the hall was empty. We piled inside and plunged downward to subbasement 7. Torquin held tight to his rifle.
The door opened directly into an enormous domed chamber, lit by a string of buzzing fluorescent lights. Torquin stepped inside, his bare feet slapping on the concrete. The room was full of abandoned workstations, their monitors glowing with the KI symbol.
“Professor?” I called out.
My voice echoed, unanswered, into the dome.
“Empty,” Torquin announced.
“I think we all see that,” Aly remarked.
“Any other suggestions where to go?” Cass said.
With a soft whoosh, the elevator door shut behind us. As I turned instinctively, the room plunged into sudden darkness.
A low, focused hissss came from the ceiling. Three emergency lights flicked on, casting everything in a sickly bluish-white glow. I felt a tickle in my throat. Cass began coughing, then Aly.
Torquin