“Wow,” Sadie murmured. “Is this where old cars go to die?”
It was a valid question. There were cars and Jeeps and trucks packed together, some of them stacked three high, all in varying states of disrepair. Jerome, not amused by Sadie’s comments, beckoned us to follow, and we wound among the rusted hulks toward two sliding doors.
“All these cars,” I murmured. “Why couldn’t we feel the metal?”
Sadie shrugged. “Maybe it was too far away?”
I nodded, but that explanation didn’t feel right. In fact, none of this felt right.
“This is a storage facility,” Jerome explained, looking inside the driver’s side window of one vehicle after another, probably to check for keys or eyeball the gas gauge on the older models. “The ones in back are pretty rough, but the ones up front are in good shape. We can hop in one of these and be out before they know to look for you.”
We? “Hey.” I grabbed Jerome’s arm. “Why are you doing this?”
“Commander Corbeau sent me,” Jerome replied, as if it was obvious.
“Dad?” the three of us said in unison. “He’s okay?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Jerome replied. “Can’t hold a man like him for long. Once he escaped, he went right to the resistance and sent me here for the three of you.”
Untold layers of panic and stress were rinsed off of me like grime in a rainstorm. If Dad had gotten free, it was only a short amount of time until we’d be back in the Otherworld. Maybe we’d even meet him, Micah, and Mom as they charged to our rescue.
“This one’s the one!” Jerome proclaimed, thumping the door of an old blue truck. “Windows are tinted, and I can hotwire it. Let’s hope it has a full tank.”
“Why do tinted windows matter if you’ll be the one driving?” Sadie pressed.
Jerome blinked—something told me that he wasn’t an intelligence officer. “The fact that I can hotwire it is more important.”
“No need for hotwiring,” Max said, stepping forward to lay his hands on the trunk. “I can start it.”
“Really?” I mumbled. Talk about a convenient, if somewhat criminal, talent.
“How do you think I used to get to school?” Max asked.
“Like you ever went,” I smirked.
Max’s smirk faded as he shot me a glare, then he stretched his fingers and repositioned his hands.
Nothing happened.
Max stretched, replaced his hands, and tried again.
Nothing happened again.
“Fuck!” he yelled, kicking the tire for good measure. “They drugged us!”
“What? When?” I demanded. “No one’s been near enough to drug us!”
“The water,” Max said. “Goddamnit, I should have known.” He leaned against the truck and scrubbed his face with his hands. “They dissolved the dampeners in the water. That way, they didn’t need to risk being near us when we had use of our abilities. We drugged ourselves.”
“Dampeners,” I repeated. I’d never heard of any drug called that before. “How were they so sure they’d work on us?”
Max lowered his hands just enough to make eye contact with me. “Who do you think twas their guinea pig?” I shuddered, the chill in Max’s tone turning my blood to ice. I remembered when I found him at the Institute, closed up in that plastic tube with wires and probes covering his skin. I’d never felt so helpless in my life, seeing my big brother reduced to little more than a glorified lab rat. And now we learned that for the past three days we’d been guzzling the same drugs that had been tested on Max. Just another one of life’s cruel little jokes.
“We can still take the truck,” Jerome said, rousing me from my dark thoughts. “I can get it running.” He opened the driver’s side door and wiggled under the dashboard. After a bit of rummaging and swearing, the truck’s engine roared to life.
“Like no one can hear that,” I muttered. Everyone ignored me, probably because I’d been drowned out by said roaring engine. Jerome got behind the wheel as Max and Sadie dragged open the garage doors. I squinted into the sunlight, wondering if this was how moles felt, then my siblings and I hopped into the bed of the truck. We covered ourselves with a ragged tarp that had been left moldering away in the bed, and placed our lives in a Peacekeeper’s hands as Jerome pulled out of the garage.
The truck backfired about every thirty seconds, and the tarp smelled even worse than the cell floor had, but we were moving. We stopped after a few turns and heard Jerome speaking to someone, probably a perimeter guard. Jerome explained that he had to do a pickup of some rather nasty material, hence the jalopy he was piloting. Amazingly, the guard let him drive away without searching the bed, probably due to the unholy stench emanating from the tarp.