“We’re dancing,” Mia said. “Want to join?”
“No music after ten o’ clock,” Alise said. “The rules are clear!”
“But it’s Saturday night,” Juliana protested.
“And unauthorized wine!” Roza said, pointing. “Look, Alise. Nobody else gets to have wine. The scientists forbid it.”
“Thank you, Roza. Who gave you permission to drink? Where did you get that wine?” Alise demanded.
“Oh, Alise.” Mia’s words were slurred. “We’re just having fun.”
“There is plenty of room for fun within the rules,” Alise said.
“I think someone’s taking their hallway fuehrer job a little seriously,” Juliana said, and Mia laughed.
“Rules must be followed!” Alise barked so hard that locks of blond fell into her face, and her serious tone only made Mia and Juliana giggle more. “That is not a proper use of the common area seating! Get down now!”
Mia and Juliana stepped down from the couch, still holding hands and giggling.
“You are both on administrative restriction,” Alise told them.
“How could this place get any more restricted?” Mia asked through her drunken giggles.
Alise narrowed her eyes at Mia and leaned in close to her. “Try me if you want to find out. Back to your rooms immediately. I will be filling out an incident report for Dr. Wichtmann.” She turned on her heel and marched out of the room.
“Oh, no, an incident report!” Juliana said, and Mia laughed.
“You’re both in a lot of trouble,” Roza said, crossing her arms. “I hope you know that.”
“They might kick us out,” Mia said. “How terrible!”
Juliana and Mia couldn’t stop snickering as the blond girls herded them down the hall and back into their room. The two of them lay on Mia’s bed, whispering and making fun of the other girls, and laughing and shushing each other, until they fell asleep.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Jenny woke feeling stiff, sick to her stomach, and full of cramps. She lay in a hospital bed under dim lights. Someone had replaced her clothes with a thin hospital gown and pasted small circular sensors all over her arms and chest. She could feel them on her neck and face, too, but when she reached up to touch them, she discovered her hands were chained to the bed. So were her ankles. The steel chains were thin but heavy, and allowed only the smallest movements—she couldn’t even scratch her nose if she needed to do that. Naturally, her nose started itching immediately.
She was alone in a cube-shaped cell with clear walls, a clear ceiling, and no furniture. The larger room outside her cell was a concrete bay that looked like the hangar for a small airplane. Dark windows looked down on her from high on one wall.
Jenny recognized it immediately as one of the laboratories at the underground complex in the Harz mountains. For a long, strange minute, she wondered whether she’d somehow traveled back in time...or maybe all her different lives were really happening at once, in some way, and she could move between them.
Then she saw the bank of digital monitors lined up outside a clear wall of her cell, remotely reading the sensors all over her body, spitting out moving graphs of her heartbeat, breathing, blood pressure, brain waves, and other metrics she couldn’t identify, all her inner biological activities displayed and tracked, and probably recorded. They must have gathered their data remotely from the sensors glued all over her body.
This definitely was not the 1930’s, but she was back in the same place. They’d all been captured by the unavoidable man Mariella had seen in Seth’s future, whom Jenny believed would turn out to be the Nazi officer Kranzler, the seer who could reach in and find people’s memories, Mariella’s opposite.
Jenny immediately began to worry about Seth, and about Mariella, too. Where were they?
She looked up at the clear roof of her cube, where a pair of fan units each connected to a ventilation duct that reached away to the laboratory ceiling high above, keeping Jenny’s air separate from everyone else in the underground complex.
Between the fan units, which were located on opposite ends of the cube, a small black dome watched her.
“Hey, I’m up!” Jenny shouted at the camera that had to be inside the dome. “Anybody want to take these chains off?” She waved her hands as much as the restraints allowed.
She looked out through the transparent wall of her cube, toward the steel doors that led out of the lab. Fifteen or twenty minutes passed before one of them opened.
The man who entered bore some resemblance to Kranzler—dark red hair tinged with gray, a broad and stocky build, flat nose, feral green eyes. He wore a dark blue military uniform with a starched white shirt and black tie, and he was followed by three guards in biohazard facemasks and body armor. The guards wore black from their helmets to their boots, with no flag or any other decoration.