I could see the wheels in Marcus’s head turning. “Any way you could start a fire? Get access to something flammable?” he asked.
“Sydney could light that whole place up if she was free,” I muttered.
“They go out of their way to minimize our exposure to flammable things,” said Emma. Something small shifted in Duncan’s expression, and she noticed it too. “What, do you know something I don’t?”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does!” She marched up to him and pounded on his chest with her fists. “If you know something that can help them, tell us! Stop being a coward. Dare to hope there might be away out of this! If you hadn’t been so afraid of helping Sydney find those gas controls, maybe she wouldn’t have been caught!”
Duncan flinched as though he’d been hit in the face. “There was nothing I could’ve done! They were already on to her.”
“Then make what she did worthwhile,” cried Emma. “Do you really want to live the rest of your life like this? Because I don’t. I want to get out. I don’t care if I’m on the run. It’s better than living in that trapped existence. You should feel the same way.”
“You don’t think I do?” he countered angrily.
She threw up her hands. “Honestly? No. All I see is that you’re too spineless, even for our captors.”
He gave a harsh laugh. “You think that’s why I’m there?”
“You never step out of line. Why else would they keep you there so long?” she demanded.
He didn’t answer, but Marcus did. “Because he’s Gordon and Sheila Mortimer’s son.”
Emma’s eyes widened slightly. “Really?”
“Who?” I asked, feeling lost.
“I realized it when I pulled up your full name,” continued Marcus. “They’re very powerful Alchemist leaders, Adrian.”
“Ones who can’t risk the rest of the world knowing how their son broke the rules to help some Moroi while he was on assignment,” added Duncan bitterly. He turned to Emma. “That’s why I’ve been held so long—and why they’ll keep holding me. Even if I’m the most well-behaved detainee there, my parents can’t risk the embarrassment of their son’s past coming back to haunt them.”
“Then don’t let them win!” exclaimed Emma. “Fight back. Don’t let them toss you aside like that. Help us with this. For yourself. For Chantal, when you find her.”
The name meant nothing to me, but it hit Duncan hard. “There’s no way to find her,” he said glumly.
“I can find her,” interrupted Marcus. “Whoever she is, I’ve got contacts all around the world—lots of them tied to the Alchemists. It might take a while, but we’ll find her. We found Sydney, didn’t we?”
Duncan still looked uncertain, and Emma clutched his hand. “Please, Duncan. Do this. Take a chance. Start living. Don’t let them take everything away from you.”
Duncan closed his eyes and took a few steadying breaths. Despite how anxious I was to save Sydney, I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him. Alchemists, even asshole ones like Keith, were generally bright and competent people. Duncan no doubt had been equally capable—and probably still was. It was terrible that people like him could be worn down like this, and I prayed we could get to Sydney before it was too late.
“Yes,” he said at last, opening his eyes. “Yes, I know how to start a fire.”
We spent the rest of the night making plans with them. Marcus and the prisoners got to sleep the entire time, but I was exhausted by the time the dream ended, just before sunrise. My body had been awake all night, and my eyes, when I saw them in the mirror, were bloodshot enough to be Strigoi. Eddie and Trey had slept and were anxious to hear what had transpired overnight.
“Get some sleep,” Marcus told me. “I’ll brief them over coffee and make arrangements with the others. This is happening today.”
I lay on the cheap bed after the three of them left, certain I’d never sleep being so close to freeing Sydney. It was all my mind could think about. My body knew better, however, and it only felt like minutes had passed when I later found Marcus waking me up. “Rise and shine,” he said. “The cavalry’s here.”
I squinted against the afternoon light and nodded my way through introductions with Marcus’s backup, a threesome named Sheila, Grif, and Wayne. They’d all made considerable plans as I slept, letting me rest as long as possible. Marcus got me up to speed with the newcomers, letting me better explain my role to them as I in turn took in the little adjustments that had been made throughout the day. There hadn’t been many, though more details had certainly finalized, and Marcus’s team had done a good deal of recon around the actual site. Once everything was hashed out, we found ourselves on the road, and I had to accept the impossible reality that I was finally going after Sydney.
Between my friends and Marcus’s recruits, we had a veritable caravan. He’d had one of his guys bring a van, with the plan being that it would be used for the bulk of the detainees. After seeing Duncan’s reticence, I’d questioned whether we could even get them to go with us, but Emma had assured us we could. When Sydney had been taken, Emma had found the rest of the salt ink in their room and used it to buy the loyalty of some of the other detainees. “They’ll do what we say,” she’d told me with a smirk. “And they’ll make sure that everyone else does too.”
A mile from the facility, our caravan split in two. Marcus, in my car of all things, and his associates in the van went off to a location they could park at just outside the facility’s perimeter, where they would then approach on foot. Eddie, Trey, and I were going straight into the Alchemists’ front door, with golden lilies on our cheeks that Sheila had painstakingly painted on us to look indistinguishable from the real thing. This part of the plan had been a bit controversial, as Marcus would have been the ideal choice to come in and play at being an Alchemist. His face was so widely known, however, that we couldn’t risk it, and I didn’t have the magical ability to alter both his and my appearance. Maybe if I only needed to look like a Moroi who didn’t resemble Adrian Ivashkov, I could have obscured both of us, but I had to completely change my race. Under no normal conditions would any Moroi come to a re-education building.
We were in Marcus’s Prius (“It’s a totally Alchemist thing to drive,” he’d assured us) and drove straight up the driveway to a checkpoint manned by a guy in a booth. He checked the fake Alchemist IDs Marcus had had made for us and then waved us through. This was all according to plan. Marcus had explained that a gate guard wouldn’t electronically match our IDs to anything in their database. That was going to come when we actually walked in the building.
“You seriously cannot imagine the déjà vu I’m feeling now,” Eddie remarked, once we’d parked in the lot. It had a handful of other sensible, fuel-efficient vehicles. “This is weirdly similar to when Rose, Lissa, and I broke out Victor Dashkov. It’s kind of unsettling.”
“The exception being that he was a hardened criminal who deserved his fate,” I said. “What we’re doing now is on the side of justice, rescuing those in need.”
“Oh, I know,” he said. “I’m just thinking how that escapade wasn’t without its hitches, and we only broke out one person—not a dozen.”
“It almost makes it easier,” said Trey cheerfully. “I mean, it’s all or nothing. You don’t have to rely on the same subtlety you would getting out just one person. We’re breaking this place open.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” Eddie said.