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Jacob nodded, but his furrowed brows and sullen look told me he was worried. I followed him through the lobby, past the elevators, and made a right turn to the emergency stairwell. Jacob opened the door.

“The NIT Lab is on the third floor,” he said as he started taking the stairs, two at a time. We hustled, climbing fast. And with each step we climbed, the sense that we were already too late grew.

Coming onto the third floor, Jacob snagged the door handle, yanked it open, and made a sharp left down the hall. I followed, feeling my heart beat like the wings of a hummingbird as I pursued him. A small part of me was worried that we would run into someone, but the place was completely deserted. Office doors left wide open, computers, purses, bags, coats—all left behind as people fled the building in a panic.

I wonder what they were told? Was a mandatory viewing held, warning the people that the rebels had attacked the city and they needed to flee for their lives? Or perhaps Raúl told them that the evacuation was a mere precaution, and they had nothing to fear? I suppose it depended on which one served him better, which story helped to further the narrative he needed to maintain power and control.

Jacob made another sharp turn, this one to the right, and then slowed as he approached a massive wooden door with a sign that readNeural Technology Laboratoryon it. Finally, he stopped,the frown bigger than it had been downstairs. But he placed his hand on the handle, tested to see if it was locked, and closed his eyes with a grimace. The door opened easily under the weight of his hand.

Oh no…

It swung out, creaking on its hinges, revealing a large lab filled with white desks, cabinets with glass doors, and empty glass tables. We both stepped into the dimly lit room, little sun coming in through the heavily tinted windows, and looked across the space. Not one person was in the room, and neither were their computers or prototypes, oranything, for that matter. Except for the furniture, everything else was completely gone.

I stepped further into the room, eyes searching each desk, each shelf, each cabinet for any sign ofanything, but I found none. “I don’t understand,” I whispered, the hairs on the back of my neck rising.

“What don’t you get?” Jacob snapped. “We’re too late.” He let out a disheartened growl as he kicked over a wastebasket, sending it rocketing across the floor. Not a single piece of trash fell out. Jacob banged his fist on a table as he cried out in frustration.

“We’re too late!” He slipped off his bag and chucked it across the room, causing me to jump as it collided with a lamp on a desk and then went falling to the ground. He kicked another wastebasket, then knocked over another lamp as an anguished cry came from the depths of him.

“Jacob!” I admonished him. “Someone will—”

“What?” he snapped back, his tone acidic. “Hear me? Don’t you get it? Can’t you see?” I opened my mouth to respond, but he just barreled over me. “Nobody’shere! They evacuated and tookeverything!” He reached forward, grabbed a desk chair, and threw it across the room.

“Stop it!” I snapped back at him. “I get you’re pissed off, but that’s not going to help us right now. We’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do.”

“There’s nothing wecando, Mara! Wefailed!”

“Stop! Just stop it! Something doesn’t make sense. Something’s off.” My mind was whirling with the details of the space, and something just didn’t add up.

Jacob laughed sardonically. “It doesn’t matter. We’re all fucked now.”

“Listen to me. Take a good look at this place,” I said as I held my hand out at the room. “It’s all gone.Everything. There’snothinghere. Every other office we passed on the way up had purses or briefcases, computers, files…stuff. Every other office had stuff in it. Doesn’t it seem weird that this lab is the only one that is completely empty?” I walked over to another wastebasket, picked it up, and turned it over. Nothing came out.

“Look at this,” I said. I dropped it and then grabbed another and turned it over, too. Nothing spilled out of it either. “You’re going to tell me that absolutely no one in this lab had trash to throw out today? They’re all empty.” Jacob’s eyes flickered, calculating, absorbing.

I walked over to one of the glass cabinets lined up against the wall. “Look at these.” I pointed at the empty shelves. Then I walked over to a desk, opening the drawers and finding them empty too. “Everything is gone. There’s not even a freaking paperclip in here. It’s all just gone.”

This time, he moved, walking toward a desk and opening it. Then he shifted to another and opened that one too, then a third. Finally, he slowed and looked at me. “The lab was never evacuated,” he mumbled. “They moved the lab before today.”

“Why?” I asked.

“They had to have known we were coming.”

“That’s impossible.”

Then I froze. Because I heard the last sound I ever expected to hear. I heard clapping. We both whirled around to face the opposite end of the room. But there was nothing. Nothing but empty desks and chairs, until my eyes came to rest on the only chair that was turned away from us. And slowly—ever so slowly—it spun around. And there, sitting quite relaxed as he leisurely clapped, was Raúl.

80: The Red Button

With a cynical smile, Raúl stood up, placing both his hands in the pockets of his slacks. His salt and peppered beard was neatly groomed, and his hair finely combed back. The dark gray suit allowed for his crimson-red tie to pop dramatically.

“But how—” I couldn’t even finish the sentence. I was in too much shock. We’d come all this way, done all of this, to be in an empty room with Raúl calmly waiting for us. What went wrong?

He sighed. “Oh, my dear Mara, you never learn, do you? If there was one thing I tried to teach you, it was that you never know who you can trust. And as such, you should trust no one…includingfamily,” he concluded, swiftly shifting his gaze onto Jacob, cocking a brow at him.

My body went cold.No. It couldn’t be. I turned to face my brother, who was glaring at Raúl, but then slowly shifted to face me.

“You…you tricked me?” I whispered, each syllable feeling like a knife in the chest. “You betrayed me?”