Teleportation, however, was not her only trick. They couldn’t do this to her, not with the power at her disposal. She spotted a trashcan, a large metal one, against the wall. It would do. She backed away and teleported the trashcan into the center of the metal doors. The doors tore apart with an explosion of rending metal, and she jumped through to the other side.
A guard blocked her path, aiming a pistol at her and shouting for her to stand down. He could see her! She realized he must have an infrared sensor, possibly on his gun, probably synched to his eyejack lenses. He was certainly communicating with the other guards, so now they would all know how to see her, too.
From ten feet away, she ripped the gun out of the guard’s hand and snatched it out of the air. Caught up in the moment, she almost shot the man, like he was a generic character in a first-person shooter video game. A chill went down her back at how easily it came to her, and she took her finger off the trigger. She had almost forgotten that her other adversaries had been varcolac puppets, empty shells controlled by their host. This man had a name, a life, a family, and she had almost shot him for no good reason, just because he stood in her way. Without his gun, he was no longer a threat. She didn’t have to kill him.
The door beyond him was glass, and she teleported beyond it just as she registered a sharp jab of pain in her back. On the other side of the door, she looked back and saw that two other guards had run up behind her while she hesitated. In the seconds she had delayed, they had shot her with something. Her vision blurred. They had hit her with some kind of tranquilizer. She had to get away, now.
The noise of the klaxon was relentless. She could hardly think. She spun, her balance wavering, and saw that the décor had changed, from institutional cinderblock to stone and paneling. She was back in the original prison building. A glass window revealed a view of the outdoors: maple trees, the road, a high external fence. All she had to do was make it out there, and she was free. One more jump.
She teleported out into the open air, but this time the shift in perspective threw her completely off-balance, and she fell to the ground. She was beyond the shielding now, and her system was connected; she could teleport anywhere she wanted. The blare of the alarm was muted now, but it seemed to be spinning all around her, to be inside her head. She tried to navigate the eyejack menu, but her eyes wouldn’t focus, and the menu options slipped away. The klaxon was her heartbeat, pounding through her veins.
Footsteps thundered on all sides, and she was surrounded, men shouting at her, weapons aimed. All she had to do was one more thing, but she couldn’t remember what it was. It was tremendously important, but she was so tired. She would remember what it was after she slept.
CHAPTER 19
Less than two hours after Alex walked into the prison, the news feeds gleefully announced her capture. She was the perfect news story—it was hard to beat a young female assassin for ratings—and they had hardly stopped talking about her since Secretary Falk had died. Now, there was fresh grist for the mill, and the talking heads could barely contain their delight. A female murderer caught visiting another female murderer! And both of them physicists! Was there a conspiracy? Had the older one trained the younger? Old footage of Jean Massey’s trial and conviction were replayed, and the speculations were as varied as they were ridiculous.
Sandra didn’t know what to do. All her friends were policemen, likely to side with law enforcement and the justice system. But Sandra wasn’t about to trust the courts with this; there were too many witnesses who had seen Alex pull the trigger. For her to be exonerated, she would have to prove the existence of the varcolac, and prove that Falk and his agents had been killed by it not by her, and there wasn’t much likelihood of that. No, the only way for Alex to get out of prison was for Sandra to break her out. But none of her cop friends would help with something like that. The ones who had been most likely to support her—Danielle and Nathan—had come to her dad’s funeral, and now they were dead.
Her phone chimed. It was Ryan Oronzi. She thought about ignoring him, but he might know something. “What is it, Ryan?” she said.
“Alex isn’t picking up.”
“She’s a little busy right now, being captured and interrogated. Don’t you watch the news?”
“Not much. I guess I have to talk to you then.”
“I guess you do, then.”
“I just wanted to let you know… the varcolac is out again.”
“What?”
“I just thought you should know.”
“What do you mean, it’s out? You mean it’s loose? I thought you said you could control it!”
“Not indefinitely. It defeated its protocol and escaped.”
“Ryan, this thing is trying to kill us. You have to capture it again!”
“It’s not an animal. It’s a thinking being. We can’t just keep it caged up forever.”
Sandra took a deep breath. “It’s a killer. If you can’t control it…”
“It’s not my fault. I’m not a miracle worker.”
“Not your fault? Are you kidding me?”
Ryan’s voice took on a childish whine. “I’ll do what I can, okay?”
“You’ll do better than that, and do it quick, or there will be more deaths on your head.”
“I’ll try, all right?” He sounded affronted. “I’m not powerless. I still have some tricks up my sleeve.”
“If that’s true, then how did it escape? I thought you had them set to apply automatically.”
“Well, I may have accidentally… look, never mind.”
“Accidentally what? Accidentally let the varcolac loose?”
“Never mind. I’m sorry I called. I’ll fix it.”
“Where is it now? Can you at least tell me that?”
The line went silent for so long that Sandra thought he had disconnected. “Well,” he said finally, “I can tell you what its next target will be.”
“What, it sat down and shared its plans with you over coffee?”
“I can see it in the logs, just like I did with the funeral home. Its attacks leave residue both forward and backward in time.”
Sandra didn’t care about the science. “Where?”
“Tomorrow morning, 5:46 AM, at the Muncy State Prison.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No. Why, what’s there?”
For a moment, Sandra couldn’t speak. She suddenly knew, beyond all shadow of a doubt, that Alex was still being held in that prison, and that at 5:46 the next morning, she would still be there. Why else would the varcolac attack at that place and time?
“You bastard,” Sandra said, and cut the connection. She lashed out, knocking a picture frame and a clay dish onto the floor.
How did the varcolac know where Alex would be? She felt like she was playing a deadly game against an opponent who kept changing the rules. Was it attacking from the present or from the future? One thing seemed clear: it was trying to track down and destroy her family. Sandra had originally assumed that the attack on Alex at her demo hadn’t been personal, just an opportunity created by the use of Higgs technology, in which Alex’s presence had been entirely coincidental. But since then, its attacks had been purely against her family, as far as she could tell. What did it have against them? Was it afraid that the people who had banished it fifteen years ago could do so again? If so, she thought it had overestimated them.
Alex was captured, her eyejack taken away. Sandra didn’t realize how much she had been relying on Alex, both intellectually and emotionally, until she was gone. She beat her fists against the bed and buried her head in her pillow, repressed tears lodging painfully in her throat. What chance did they have against such an enemy? They couldn’t kill it, and they couldn’t reason with it. Now Alex was trapped, an easy target for its next attack.