Page 33 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Twenty-Three

Riva

I t’s on my fifth pass through the halls that my gaze slides along the wall outside the crib rooms at just the right angle, and I notice the tiniest of seams in the otherwise smooth surface.

I stop and back up a couple of steps to confirm what it took my mind a second or two to process. There is a nearly indecipherable line of shadow down the wall, like the edge of a partition.

“Guys!” I call out, moving toward it and pressing my hand against the surface right by the seam. “I found something else.”

My prodding doesn’t shift the partition at all. Jacob and Andreas come jogging over first—Jacob frowning, naturally.

“You found the wall?” he asks with an edge of sarcasm.

I roll my eyes. “I think there’s a hidden doorway here like there was in the lab where Engel used to work. If you look at the right angle from the right spot, you can just see the edge.”

Andreas has already stepped closer, cocking his head. He lets out an awed chuckle.

“There it is. Zian must have missed that.”

“Too busy trying to play engineer,” Jacob mutters, but there’s a note of fondness alongside the exasperation that I’ve never heard when he mutters about me. “He was mostly looking in the actual rooms, not the halls.”

He lifts his voice so it’ll carry farther. “Zee, get your ass over here. We need those X-ray eyes of yours.”

His call brings not just Zian but Dominic, who wanders over from the rooms he was searching.

As Jacob motions to the area of the wall, I step farther to the side, giving Zian as much space as I can. His tirade from earlier rings in my ears.

You don’t know anything. Stay the fuck away from me.

Even the memory brings a burn into the back of my eyes. I inhale slowly and deeply in an effort to even out my emotions.

Zee has always had a volatile temper, one he has trouble keeping on a leash. He probably didn’t mean all of what he said as harshly as it sounded.

But he’s never spoken to me like that before, not even in the past week while Jacob’s been laying into me. Is he more upset with me now than he was before?

How the hell did that happen? How am I still screwing this up?

I don’t have the answers to those questions, so I do my best to focus on the conversation about the wall.

Zian must have spotted the internal mechanism to open the partition, because he’s motioning to a specific spot farther over from the seam, around chest height. Jacob positions himself there and rests his hands against the wall to help guide his talent through.

He closes his eyes. The chiseled planes of his face tighten with concentration, turning him even more starkly gorgeous than usual.

We all wait, breaths held. There’s a stretch of silence, and then a mechanical rasp within the wall.

The seam widens, pulling back to reveal not an opening but an actual door: solid, natural wood unlike the painted steel ones that fill the rest of this place. It even has a bronze doorknob.

We stare at the thing for a second as if afraid it’s going to launch some kind of killer door attack. Then Andreas shakes his head with a self-deprecating guffaw and reaches for the knob.

It turns in his grasp, this part of the entrance unlocked. As he pushes it inward, lights flicker on automatically with the movement.

We slink into the hidden room one by one. Andreas lets out a low whistle. The rest of us just gape.

Like every other room we’ve entered in the old facility, a layer of pale dust coats every surface, dulling the colors with a grayish sheen. But even so, it’s immediately obvious that this space isn’t at all like the others.

As with the door, the walls are paneled with natural wood, slightly curved as if to mimic the undulations of stacked logs. Vividly grained boards show when I swipe my foot over the dusty floor too.

The room’s been stripped down, leaving only the largest furnishings—the items I guess it’d have been most difficult to quickly and discreetly remove—but even those are totally different from anything else we’ve seen in the place.

A suede sofa, so plump my limbs twinge with the urge to sink down into it and discover how comfy it’d be, stands along one wall. It faces a stone-lined fireplace that’s empty other than streaks of black that confirm it was used at some time. Or maybe those were painted on for aesthetic effect.

Built-in bookcases line the wall to one side of the sofa. Next to us, near the door, stands a wooden chest large enough that Zian could have curled up inside and the lid would still have shut.

A strange sense of recognition quivers through my mind. I sink down in front of the chest, getting a whiff of its dry but sweet cedar scent, and brace my hands against the lid to lift it.

There’s an image in the back of my head, a sense of what I should see when I push it open. I can’t quite get a firm grasp on the impression, but when I shove upward and reveal only an empty hollow inside, inexplicable disappointment sweeps through me.

No. There was, before?—

“We’ve been in here,” I say slowly, testing out the words to make sure I agree with them before I continue. “There used to be—I feel like this chest should have something in it.”

“That’s what chests are usually for,” Jacob snarks. “Holding things.” But his tone is milder than usual, a hint of uncertainty and confusion touching his face as he scans the room.

“That’s not what I mean. Something specific.”

I shut the lid and stand up, gesturing for the guys to come over. Only Dominic responds.

He gazes down at the chest with an oddly dreamy expression and kneels down in front of it like I did. As he pushes the lid up with a squeak of its hinges, his eyes flicker.

“Yeah,” he says, almost a whisper. “I can almost see—I think there were toys in here.”

The second he says the word, the impressions floating in my mind sharpen. “Yes! A stuffed blue bear. And a wooden helicopter with a metal propeller that spun.”

Dom runs his hands over the rim of the chest, his gaze going even more distant. “A set of puzzle blocks you could fit together into different shapes.”

The other guys have gathered around us. “You remember all that?” Andreas asks.

I bite my lip. “It’s not like remembering. I don’t have a clear image of it. Just kind of a hazy sense of what’s missing.”

I turn and walk deeper into the room. Other tingles of recognition and dissonance ripple through me.

The sensations guide me to the dusty floor near the fireplace. I sit down and rest my hands on either side of me, opening myself to the fragments of memory tickling at the edges of my awareness.

“I think there used to be a fur rug here. I can almost feel it, coarse but soft—running my fingers into it…”

Zian crouches down next to me and runs his hands tentatively over the space. “Yeah,” he murmurs.

Jacob crosses his arms over his chest. “The guardians would bring us in here, then? Run some of their tests in this room?”

“Maybe.” That doesn’t sound quite right.

I scoot backward and lean against the sofa, still trying to sort through the jumble of hazy impressions. “I don’t get the sense that we did anything I didn’t like in here. It was somewhere just to relax. I looked forward to those times.”

Dominic nods. “It was just us. Us and… her, I think. Like it was a special thing when she’d bring us in here to play.”

Andreas’s eyes light up. “Yeah. I can almost catch that feeling. Holy shit.”

Looking around the space, I realize that while it’s furnished very differently from most of the facility, there is one room it resembles a little.

“She had wooden and leather furniture like this in her personal office. And she had that picture of the cabin in the woods at her old office. Maybe this is what makes her feel at home.”

“And she wanted to share that with us,” Dominic says softly.

I ignore Jacob’s light scoff. Dom is right. She brought us in here, her little charges, and watched us simply play and soak up the warmer atmosphere.

It’s hard for me to wrap my head around that kind of motherliness compared to all the interactions with the guardians I recall so much more clearly.

Where did Engel go afterward? Why did she step back from our lives and let them transform into all cool detachment and rigid schedules?

I frown at the room around me. “Do you think she wanted to leave the facility, or did the others force her out?”

“From the things I heard, it didn’t sound like her time with them ended well there,” Zian offers.

Andreas nods. “Yeah, there was a lot of tension in the few memories I caught.”

And part of the path to those answers could be right here in front of us.

I glance back at the guys. “If these are the sort of surroundings she liked most, where she felt most at home, then if she left the guardians and went off someplace even the hacker couldn’t track her down… maybe she got herself a cabin in the woods just like that picture.”

Andreas hums to himself. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Jacob’s mouth twists. “There are a lot of woods with a lot of cabins in them all over the world,” he says. “Even if you’re right, that information doesn’t get us very far.”

Dominic gets up and treads lightly in a circuit around the room. “It’s a start, something to narrow things down.”

“Maybe we could find another, better hacker—” Zian begins, and halts with a stiffening of his stance. His head jerks to the side, tipping one ear toward the ceiling. “I think I hear a car. Coming close.”

We all tense up. Jacob moves first, waving us toward the door. “Come on. We’d better see what we’re dealing with.”