Page 107 of Retribution

He barely shows his face and his voice sounds croaky, like he doesn’t use it much. He presses his hat and the light turns on.

Without a word, Mav and Blake take out their phones and put on the flashlights. I watch as they disappear behind a door with a keypad on it into a dark hallway beyond that slants downward.

Going by Mav’s directions, I locate the open hatch that I assume leads to the lab. I go down, finding myself in a kind of square, concrete pit with an open door on one side. Light pours from it and I squint as I approach and peer into the lab.

I see Daisy immediately. She’s sitting at the small table in the middle of the white room going through some numbers on a screen. Her long hair is in a messy bun on top of her head.

She looks tired even after the hours she slept last night. She’s thinner too. With a frown, I notice that she doesn’t have anything to eat or drink in the lab with her. Knowing how she forgets that stuff when she’s in the zone, I quickly message the guys to tell them to bring some of her favorite snacks while they’re topside. Then, I message Sauvage himself. He said she’d have whatever she needed, after all.

I watch her for about ten minutes, cataloging her movements, noticing that her body seems almost stiff as she walks slowly around the lab.

I turn at a noise behind me to see a young woman in black dress pants coming down the ladder behind me. At the bottom, she freezes when she notices me. Her nametag says ‘Anne’ and ‘Senior Manager’.

‘Oh, sorry, sir,’ she says. ‘I didn’t expect anyone else to be here.’

I open my mouth to ask her what she’sdoing down here, but before I can, she walks under the ladder to the wall, where I hear something slide, and she comes back into view with a tray in her hands. There’s a bottle of water, a small teapot, and some dry pretzels in a bowl.

I glance past her curiously, and she follows my gaze.

‘It’s a dumbwaiter,’ she says as she goes past me.

At the lab threshold, she knocks on the door. I hear Daisy murmur a ‘yes?’ and Anne takes the tray inside.

‘If you need anything, all you need to do is use that phone on the wall to call room service and use that code there,’ I hear her say. ‘Something will be brought within ten minutes. Day or night.’

She exits a moment later and goes back to the ladder without a word.

‘Wait,’ I say.

She looks back. ‘Would you like me to bring you something, sir?’

I shake my head. ‘No thanks. I just… Isn’t this weird to you at all?’

She looks around the concrete pit and shrugs. ‘I get paidnotto be weirded out,’ she says and disappears up the ladder.

I stare after her for a second, half wondering if she’s loyal to Sauvage, or if he just pays her that well, before going back to the door to find Daisy sipping at a cup of tea while looking thoughtfully at the numbers on the screen.

‘Everything okay?’ I ask from the doorway.

Her body jerks in surprise at my voice, her tea sloshing from the cup to splash down onto the table. I wince.

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.’

She gives me a small, reserved smile. ‘You didn’t. I was…just thinking, I guess.’

I step into the lab.

‘You need a new white coat,’ I murmur and she gives me another smile.

‘It’s not really a necessity,’ she answers, wiping up the tea from the table with a paper napkin from the tray. ‘Where are the others?’

‘One of Sauvage’s guys is showing them how to get in and out of the hotel without being seen. They’ll be back a little later.’

She nods and we stand there for a moment in silence, just staring at each other awkwardly.

‘I’m sorry,’ I blurt.

She looks confused. ‘For what?’