Reborn(74)

Once inside, I nearly choked on the cold, sterile air. It reminded me of the lab back at the farmhouse, and the cell I’d spent five years locked inside. The walls of the vent closed in around me, and my heart raced in my chest.

I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

Trev had offered to take the lead, but now I was glad I’d shoved him aside, because it meant I was the first one out.

The vent led us to a storage closet, big enough that we could all stand inside once we’d climbed down from the vent.

The air was stuffier here, hot and pressing. With Sam at my left, a gun in his hand, I popped the door open a crack. We were at the back wall, the maze in front of us. Which meant the holding cells were to our left. There were no Branch agents in sight. If I had to guess, Riley had used up a lot of his manpower to guard the outside.

I signaled to Sam which direction we should go, and he nodded in the half dark. The others filed in behind us. I was the first one out of the closet, the need to find Elizabeth fueling me. If she was in a holding cell, she was within my reach, and escape was not far behind.

The first cell was empty. And the second. And the third. The last was open, the floor still painted red with my blood.

I cursed beneath my breath.

Elizabeth was somewhere in the maze, and if she was in the maze then she was in an exam room, and I didn’t want to think about what that might mean.

I wanted the group to divide to cover more ground, but Sam vetoed that, so we all crept through the maze like an army of ants with guns in our hands.

We crossed paths with only two agents, and both were on the floor in seconds, then tucked into offices, out of sight.

The farther we got into the lab, the more I panicked, worried that Elizabeth wasn’t here, that this was some kind of decoy. I could sense Sam growing edgier behind me, but I couldn’t give up yet. Not until I’d searched every corner of this lab.

And finally, somewhere in the middle of the maze, at a window that looked in on an exam room, I froze.

Elizabeth was strapped down on a bed, her dark hair spread across a pillow. A pair of dark-tinted glasses covered her eyes, and electrodes were plastered all over her head.

My gut twisted on itself, and my free hand tightened into a fist at my side.

We were too late.

Too fucking late.





39

ELIZABETH



THE GLASSES WENT DARK.

Something thumped beneath me, and I had the distinct feeling that I was floating, the world carrying on below me, far, far away.

Hands shook my shoulders, and I came crashing back to my body. Sounds floated in and out of my hearing like river currents, and the sounds formed into words that seemed suddenly foreign. So I just stared. Stared and stared at the face looming above me, wondering when it was I’d opened my eyes.

The face belonged to a boy. Black hair curled around his ears and down his neck, and his eyes were two orbs of glowing blue staring back at me.

“Elizabeth,” he said, and the word felt familiar in my head. I repeated it without a sound, forming the word with my lips, testing it out.

“Elizabeth,” he said again, more urgently.

My body trembled in his arms. He tightened his hold around me, and the heat from his touch spread through me, fiery and immediately recognizable.

“We have to run,” he whispered in my ear, and his voice hitched with an emotion I thought might be misery. “Can you?”

I nodded, only because I knew it was what he wanted, and if I was sure of nothing else, I was sure of this: pleasing him pleased me.

So I ran.



He pulled me alongside him, his arm at my waist.

“Keep going,” he said.

There were others with us. A girl. Three other guys. They were young, and I wondered, fleetingly, how old I was.

“Pulling her out like that was wrong,” another dark-haired guy said. He was shorter than the one who’d grabbed me first, less imposing. “I’m afraid of what the consequences will be.”

“We can worry about that later,” my boy said. Not knowing his name, I’d started to think of him as mine. He seemed to know me, anyway. “Right now we just need to get her out of here.”

Noises, not far off, pulled us to a stop. We huddled in an empty office and waited until it seemed safe.

“What is my name?” I asked the blond guy on my right.

“Elizabeth,” he said. He pointed at all the others, rattling off their names before his own, which he said was Cas.

I had thought my name was Blank. But that sounded less familiar than Elizabeth, so I believed this Cas, and decided Blank was a terrible name anyway.

“We are your friends,” Nick said. “Everyone else is an enemy. Remember that.”

“I will.”

We twisted and turned through walls that reached above my head, but did not reach the ceiling. They were all the same.