Page 81 of Never Lost

Without even knowing it, I’d drilled all the way down. Down to fear. Fear for the power of the one thing she couldn’t twist, couldn’t mock, couldn’t crucify. She’d tried. She’d tried with Max, she’d tried with the girls, and now she’d tried withme. And somewhere along the line, she’d lost them all because she couldn’t destroy what she couldn’t understand.

“Deep down, somewhere,” I remarked thoughtfully, “you wanted to believe it.”

“Stop it,” she whined, almost to herself, her knees bending minutely. But that slight bend revealed a universe.

She was in pain. But not the same kindIwas in. The bad kind of pain. And it was almost enough to make me feel sorry for her.

Almost.

Mostly, I just wished I’d realized it earlier. “It’s all right, Resi,” I continued.

“Stop.” Her shoulders moved up and down.

I even tried to force a twisted smile. Showmanship, you know. “We all want something to believe in.”

“Muzzle him,” she screeched to Obadiah. “And get the acid.”

HER

“It should be here,” Max muttered, shoving aside a long-empty water cooler and a broken swivel chair, and kicked an old desk nameplate readingGerald Langerinto the wall with a certain amount of pent-up aggression. We searched the cramped space, raising little clouds of dust that floated in the slivers of fluorescent light piercing the gloom.

Once the slumbering beast of the mine elevator had groaned to a halt at the bottom of the shaft with a cacophony of creaks and clunks, Max had immediately led me to a dilapidated shed at the mine’s base, its door hanging off one rusted hinge. Inside,old office equipment lay corroded and scattered, file cabinets vomiting their moldy contents over the floor. All the while, the smell of oxidizing copper coated my throat, hampering my breathing.

Yeah, I was definitely going to die down here.But God, just let me find him first.That was all I asked.

“What should be here?” I asked, resting my exhausted body against a warped desk chair, my voice echoing in the claustrophobic space. I was about to collapse, and I also knew every minute we wasted here was a minute we couldn’t waste. And thathecouldn’t spare.

Max sensed it, undoubtedly. “Well, let me put it this way. Resi isn’t keeping your boy here through the subtle art of persuasion. She’s got him locked down somehow. So I was thinking?—”

“A master key.”

He nodded.

“And your dad told you that he kept ithere?”

He rifled through a pile of yellowed architectural renderings. “Well, that would have required him not to have been an unimaginable prick, so no, he did not. I was kind of just hoping.”

I sighed.

“Anyway, we don’t need it. We’re armed. What I do suspect is that our boy is likely in one of two places.”

“Go on.”

“One, the slave barracks, but I don’t know where they are.”

“What? But they’re right here on the blueprints,” I protested.

“These are the old blueprints.”

I groaned.

“Sorry. Two, my dad kept a safe room somewhere, in case the slaves ever rioted. He called it his ‘whisper room.’ But he didn’t tell me wherethatwas, either, and for obvious reasons, he keptit off the blueprints. You know, in casetheyever got a hold of them.”

“Did he ever have to use it?”

“He was starting to worry,” Max said with a heavy sigh. “There was an economic slowdown and he was cutting corners everywhere. The slaves were basically being starved to death. They had nothing to lose, and at that point, some of them had managed to survive here long enough that they knew the layout of the mine intimately and taught the others. The plan got pretty far along. Until somebody tipped him off.”

“Oh, God.”