“That’s going to be a problem,” Janga said. “He’s probably here for me.” She grabbed a jar off the top shelf, unscrewed the lid, and pulled out a small piece of paper. “Here. Take this and go find a terminal. This will let you access the files I found. They will explain most everything. If you want to know more, come find me when they let me out of the stockade.”
“They can’t punish you,” Layla said indignantly. “You haven’t done anything wrong!”
Janga pressed the paper into Michael’s hand, lifted the curtain on the other side of her bed, and shooed them toward the rusted bulkhead. “Go on, get out of here before you’re caught.”
Michael crawled over the bed after Layla, and they climbed out the other side. There was hardly enough room against the bulkhead for them to stand side by side. Janga nodded at them and said, “Good luck.”
The whistling stopped abruptly, replaced by the heavy footfalls of Jenkins’ boots. Michael and Layla began sidling along the bulkhead, their backs against the warm metal, but they halted when the boots stopped in front of Janga’s stall.
“Janet Gardner,” said the sergeant’s gruff voice, “I’m here to place you under arrest.”
The old woman chuckled and then coughed. “My name is Janga. People keep forgetting that.”
THIRTEEN
Rodger was itching for the right moment to talk to Magnolia, but every time he tried, she raised a finger to her helmet to silence him. It was so quiet inside the tunnels that he could hear himself thinking. The echoey distant screeches were gone now, but Rodger knew that the creatures were still out there, on the prowl for fresh meat. He didn’t like the idea of being on the menu.
He checked the mission clock as he followed Magnolia down the hallway. They had spent forty-five minutes searching the passages for a way into the main facility.
“Are we walking in circles?” he asked.
“No.”
Magnolia swept her flashlight over the muddy footprints marking the floor. He followed a line of tracks onto the ceiling.
“Are those from Sirens?”
She nodded.
In all his dives up to now, Rodger had never seen one of the beasts. He had seen plenty of other creatures, from the rock monsters out west to the almost cute feathered lizards in the south, but the closest he had come to a Siren during other dives was hearing their high-pitched alien wails. He longed to see creatures from the Old World, like the ones he had studied in books.
“Hey, Mags, what do you think elephants were like?”
“Shush, Rodger,” she hissed, whirling on him. “I told you to—”
“What’s that?”
She followed his finger to a door at the end of the hallway, and her scowl turned into a grin.
“Hopefully, our way in,” she said. “Come on, we’ve already wasted enough time.”
He hurried after her but quickly fell behind. When he caught up, she was already kneeling at the edge of the partly open steel door. A video camera was mounted on the wall.
Magnolia shined her beam over the dented, rusted skin of the door. Long vertical scratches ran all the way to the bottom, as if someone had dragged a pitchfork across the surface. The door wasn’t open after all—it was bent off its hinges.
“More Sirens?” he asked.
In Magnolia’s light beam was a dent the size of a melon. It looked as if something massive had head-butted the door.
“I… I don’t think so. I’ve never seen one with claws that could make scratches this deep.”
She stood up, and Rodger’s headlamp caught her face. He tried not to stare at her profile, but even with helmet and visor covering most of her features, she was pretty. She rolled her eyes when she caught him looking, and took a step toward the door.
“No,” Rodger said, putting his hand gently on her shoulder. “I’ll go first.”
For once, Magnolia didn’t argue.
He made sure he had a round chambered before shining his light into the passage. From his position, he couldn’t see much but a flight of stairs on the other side of the unhinged door.
Flattening his body and ducking down, he slipped through the space between the door and the frame. As soon as he was through, he swept his beam down the stairway to a landing covered with metal shelves and crates. A sign hung on the wall there, but he couldn’t make out the faded text.
As he turned and gestured for Magnolia, he saw that I beams had been welded in an X onto the other side of the door. Rodger moved his light over the broken barricade. The bolts that had secured the beams to the concrete were still there, but the metal had snapped from the force of whatever wrenched the door off its hinges. The steel was pocked with bullet holes. Raising his light, he slowly played it over walls bearing the scars of a firefight.
Not a fight. A battle.
Magnolia maneuvered through the opening and looked at the broken beams. “Shit, those were sheared right off!”
“Would take a lot of force to do that,” Rodger said.
A raucous thud echoed below them, rattling the shelves on the landing. Both divers angled their guns down the stairs.
“What the hell was that?” he said under his breath.
“Not a Siren.”
Rodger raised his wrist computer and brought up a map. The archives didn’t have a complete layout of the facility, but if the fragments they had pieced together were correct, then the cryogenics lab—and whatever had made that noise—was directly beneath their feet.
Magnolia bent down and picked up a cartridge casing. “You know what this means, right? There were survivors here.”
“But how long ago?” he said, following her down the stairs.
“No idea, but whatever broke through the door sure made quick work of this barricade.”
As they crept down the stairs, Rodger paused to study the sign above the shelving. floor 99. They rounded the next corner to find another flight of stairs covered in debris. A wall-mounted video camera was angled down over beams, desks, chairs, and shelves scattered across the passage as if a tornado had blown through. Dust floated around them in the glow of their lights. It felt as if they were entering a tomb.
Rodger kept picking his way cautiously down the steps, careful not to snag his suit. The radiation down here was minimal, but they still had the return trip to the Hive to worry about. If he tore his suit, by the time he reached the sick bay on the Hive he would have much bigger problems than abnormal bowel movements.
He glanced at the ceiling. Four miles above, his parents were waiting for him. They seemed impossibly far away. The thought gave him a twinge of dread, but he continued onward. Captain Jordan had entrusted him with a mission, and he wasn’t going to screw it up. He patted the vest pocket containing Magnolia’s gift and the ITC card.
There was a door on the next landing, as well as another sign.
“Floor ninety-eight?” he said. “That can’t be right.”
“If the signs are counting down, we’ve got a long way to go,” Magnolia said. She brought her wrist monitor up. “And we have just over two hours to search this place and get topside.”
“Searching ninety-eight floors will take days.” He shifted his light to the door. An open space stretched as far as the beam would go. Magnolia stepped over a crate to look into the room. The warped and dented door lay on the floor, several feet in. The dust layer covering it suggested that nothing had been inside for some time. But that also meant the chance of finding any survivors was slim.
Their beams danced across the space, falling on lockers at the far end of the room. Space suits hung from hooks, and glass partitions were built against the wall. He recognized the chambers as clean rooms—something like the one they had in the Hive’s launch bay to decontaminate divers returning from the surface.