Enders(16)

“Hey, have a good nap?” Hyden asked, taking his eyes off the road for only a second.

“I was so sleepy,” I murmured, stretching my arms.

“All the excitement must’ve gotten to you.”

He exited the freeway. I didn’t recognize the area. Industrial. Seas of empty asphalt surrounded silent warehouse buildings. We entered the driveway of one of them.

“Where are we?” I asked, still groggy.

“My lab.”

I felt so tired. What had we been talking about before I dozed off ?

Hyden drove behind a boxlike, windowless building, then pulled up close to a metal panel. A red laser beam scanned his license plate. Then the panel rose, revealing an orderly garage. No bikes or toys stored there, just some strange tools and a few metal containers. He drove in, and the panel shut behind us.

Hyden turned off the engine and I reached for my door handle.

“Wait,” he said. “Don’t move.”

“Why?”

“Let me check it out first.”

“But this is your lab, your home, right?” I asked.

“My safe house.”

Hyden got out and examined every corner of the garage, holding a device and running it over the walls and behind each container. I figured he was looking for electronic bugs. I noticed a heat sensor panel on the wall showing Hyden’s body as a moving red blotch. His was the only one, but still he checked everywhere, looking up, down. He couldn’t have been more thorough.

He went to an old-fashioned communication system on the wall and pressed a button. After talking into the speaker, he came back.

“Okay,” Hyden said. “You can get out now.”

He watched over me as I exited the SUV, then led me to a thick metal door and pressed some numbers on a pad on the wall. An elevator door slid open with a heavy grinding sound, like a sliding stone revealing a portal to a magic lair.

As we rode down, the air grew colder, making me more alert. I wasn’t particularly claustrophobic, but the idea of going so far below ground level seemed wrong. Unnatural.

Hyden must have read my face, because he gave me a small reassuring smile.

The elevator door opened up to a corridor. From there, Hyden opened a metal door that led to a large, darkened tech lab. Small lights illuminated various spots, giving the space the effect of a museum exhibit. Airscreens dominated every corner, and strange components filled the room, some hanging from the ceiling—twisted bits of metal, thin, glistening strands of poly-tubing with colored specks moving through them. When I examined them more closely, I saw that the specks were tiny geometric shapes with moving parts. It was geek heaven.

Across the room, hunched over a desk, a man with long, wild white hair kept his back to us as we approached. Could it … ? Could it be him?

“I brought someone,” Hyden said to him.

The Ender turned around. Even in the darkened space, I recognized him.

“Redmond!” I shouted.

I rushed up and hugged him. No sooner had I done it than I felt the awkwardness of it. He was an Ender who wasn’t even related to me, and I felt more for him than I was sure he felt for me. Embracing him just made me ache for my father. I pulled away.

“Callie,” he said with his clipped British accent. “That’s a much better greeting than the last time, when you held a gun to my head.”

I felt my cheeks redden.

“No hard feelings,” he said.

“I thought the Old Man had you captive,” I said.

Redmond looked at Hyden. “Hyden came to me, explained what he was doing, and I signed up. The paycheck is rather good, and I can’t say I mind working for a genius.”

Hyden shrugged in a halfhearted attempt at humility.

“But if the Old Man didn’t take you, who burned down your lab?” I asked Redmond.

“I did,” Redmond said. “We didn’t want to leave anything behind.”

I thought about the safe where he had indeed left something for me—the special key drive that detailed how he had adapted my chip. I didn’t know if he’d ever told Hyden about it, but there was no reason to bring it up. It was more of a backup in case anything happened to Redmond. And he was fine.

“So you’ve been working together. What can you do now?” I asked. “You can’t remove the chip?” Even though Hyden had already told me, I had to ask.

He shook his head. “No. I haven’t made much progress there.”

I knew he was going to say that. But the chance that we could get it out of me and Michael and my brother …

Suddenly I remembered Hyden saying something about the chip and my brother before I fell asleep. I turned to face him.

“What was that you said about everyone going to the cabin? My brother, Michael, Eugenia?”