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CHAPTER TWELVE

I wasn’t able to open Sam’s cell from the inside, so I had to brain-walk back through the door, leaving him behind. Back in the corridor, the others had all fled, except for Nikolai and Tennyson, and even they were cowering. The alarms were so loud, they seemed to incapacitate us. I supposed they were designed specifically to work against supernatural creatures, like the lights in the corridor had been. The lights of the alarm were something else as well, flashing red and blue at a seizure-inducing rate. I knew I was probably less susceptible than the others, due to not being particularly one thing or the other, and even I wanted to curl up into a little ball at the assault on my senses.

“His sister,” Nikolai croaked, tugging my arm to follow Tennyson.

Tennyson loped along, hunched over and almost walking on all fours. It was so strange to see him act in such an animalistic way, nothing like my Tennyson at all, really. And yet, at the core he was the same, still valuing the people he cared about over anything else.

We hadn’t gotten far before we heard footsteps behind us. It was impossible to tell if it was guards or the other prisoners who had fled when the alarm sounded, and we couldn’t risk stopping to find out. At the sound of them, we ran faster, racing through the corridors so fast I thought my lungs would burst. Finally, Tennyson stopped, resting his clawed hand against a door.

I didn’t hesitate before closing my eyes and walking through the solid door and into Althea’s cell.

“You!” she said, shrinking back into the corner of the room when she saw me. She was so unlike my Althea that if I hadn’t known it was her, I wouldn’t have guessed. Her hair was chopped short, close to her scalp and patchy. My Althea was willowy, this one was gaunt, her cheeks so hollow she almost looked like a skeleton. She was wearing oversized sweatpants and a t-shirt, both so dirty I couldn’t tell the color, and she had clearly not washed in a long, long time. Even more than seeing Tennyson in the state he was in, this made my heart ache. She looked absolutely defeated.

“Nope,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. “Different me. I don’t have time to explain but I’m here with Tennyson.”

She gasped. “He’s alive?” A tiny spark seemed to return to her eyes.

I nodded. “Do you know how I can get this door open?”

She got up and walked over to the sensor by the door, smashing it with one swift punch. She pulled the cover off and took out a bunch of different colored wires and started stripping them and twisting different ones together.

“You could do that this whole time?” I asked, wondering why she hadn’t already escaped.

She shrugged. “What would be the point?”

The door beeped and slid open before I could even think of a suitable comment to that.

Tennyson pounced on Althea as soon as the door opened enough for him to get at her.

“Come on, you big idiot,” she said, pulling away from him with a tiny smile. “We have to get out of here.”

“I want to open all the cells,” I told her, figuring if she knew how to disable her cell door, she might be able to disable all the other doors too. “Can you help me?”

I wasn’t sure we were heading the right way down the hall. I was completely turned around, and had no clue where I was aiming to go anyway. Tennyson was non-verbal and Nikolai hadn’t been to this part of my not-dad’s evil lair before, so I was banking on Althea having some clue. She gave me a long, inscrutable stare.

“We need to get to the main building,” she said. “There’s a tunnel that connects to there but we’ll never make it through, it’s under heavy surveillance.”

“Um, we’ve kind of already taken care of that,” said Nikolai.

I glared at his use of “we” when he’d done diddly squat, but my glare was nothing to the look Althea turned on him.

“Don’t speak to me, traitor,” she said, and then took off running.

It was all I could do to keep up with her. Tennyson kept to her side but Nikolai and I soon began to lag behind. I was too out of breath to question him about what Althea had said but I could guess enough anyway. They were pack in my world, so it wasn’t a stretch to assume they had been here too, before whatever my not-dad had done to him. For him to be walking around freely while she and Tennyson had been locked up like lab rats, that in itself would seem like a betrayal, let alone anything else that might have happened.

I was worried we’d lose sight of the two of them when they finally stopped at a doorway. It looked the same as any of the others to me.

“This is the tunnel,” said Althea. “If you can get through this door, you should be able to open it from the other side.”

I had no reason to question it, so I did as she suggested and opened the door. The tunnel led us steeply downward, and it was even darker than inside the building had been, but at least the alarms weren’t so loud as we got farther along. Parts of the tunnel were unfinished, packed dirt rather than concrete, with exposed pipes and wires running alongside and overhead. Pretty soon the siren faded out completely and all we could hear over our own footsteps was a loud dripping sound.

Althea stopped running super abruptly, so we all piled into each other. I thought we’d come to a dead end but she turned to our right. There was a rusty ladder that looked like it would give you tetanus if you even thought about climbing it, but that was exactly what Althea started to do.

“Come on,” she called down over her shoulder to us. “If you’re serious about getting everyone out, start moving before they find us.”

It wasn’t as if there were other options, so we followed her up the ladder. Tennyson after Althea. I went last, because I didn’t want Nikolai staring up at my butt like a creeper, and because I figured I’d have the best chance to fight off anyone who came after us. The bad part about that though, was that I couldn’t see how far we had left to climb. If I looked up, all I could see was Nikolai’s butt, and that wasn’t exactly an appealing view. More like appalling.

We climbed so long, it started to feel like meditation – so boring that eventually your brain shut down. I didn’t think of Sam or how things were in this other world, or even in my own. I didn’t think of anything, only the dripping.

The dripping seemed insanely loud. How could some dripping water even be heard over all the noise we made while we’d been running, and now climbing? I was pretty puffed out, so my breathing sounded super loud, and yet the dripping was even louder. And the more I concentrated on it, the more it seemed like a pattern. It wasn’t just a steady drip, drip, drip. It was almost like it was trying to make a tune, but it wasn’t one I recognized. Maybe it was Morse code? I only knew SOS, and it wasn’t that. It almost felt as if the drips were trying to speak but that was impossible.

It was impossible, right?

I might have actually lost it completely and tried to talk back to it, only at that moment, I headbutted Nikolai. Literally. My head smacked into his butt. We’d stopped climbing and I hadn’t realized, and so my cheek had smooshed all up against his cheek. And that was when I knew I was in a parallel universe, because Nikolai didn’t say a single thing about that.

We climbed up and out of some sort of hatch and emerged in a room that looked all too familiar to me. It looked just like the room where my father, my real father, had looked down on me from an identical viewing platform to the one above us now, and where he had severed my connection with my pack members. Involuntarily, I let out a little sob. I don’t think he even realized what he was doing, but Tennyson pushed himself in front of me, as if to shield me.

“Quick, this way,” Althea hissed.

We kept to the shadows and crept around the edge of the room until we got to a stairwell that took us out of sight.

“The main control panel is up there,” Althea whispered, once we were all huddled in the stairwell, pointing up the stairs. “Tennyson and I can take care of the guards. From the control panel, you can disable the locking mechanisms on all the doors, as well as all the traps hidden around the forest. There’s some sort of speaker system into the cells, so if you have time, try to let them know they need to get out while they can.”

She completely ignored Nikolai.

It wasn’t the best plan ever but it was better than what I had. I figured after that was done, we could deal with getting to Sam and then our own escape.

As we climbed the stairs, I half expected the stairwell to get flooded with guards, trapping us halfway up, but we made it to the top without seeing anyone. To my surprise, when we did enter the viewing room, my not-father stood there, alone.

It was definitely a trap. I didn’t know how, but I was sure we were playing right into his hands.

“I’m surprised,” he said, not looking up from the control panel he stood at. “I knew you were working up to a power play but this is not quite what I expected.” He glanced up at me. “Bravo.”

I had no idea what to say in response to that, but luckily, I didn’t need to say anything. Althea and Tennyson flew at him. As soon as they moved, I rushed to the control panel. I had no idea what any of it meant, there was no big button that said “prisoner release”, so I figured I was safer to go directly through the computer system.

It was easy enough to access the security system. First, I turned off all the lights in the dungeons and the alarms. It would be easier for anyone escaping to see with no light at all than the light from either the alarms or the normal hallways. Then I clicked the little speaker icon in the security program and crossed my fingers.

“I’m about to unlock your doors,” I said. “Get as far away from here as you can, as quickly as you can. I don’t know how long I can keep them open for.” It wasn’t much help. Because I’d corrupted a lot of the security settings already, I couldn’t see any of them on the monitors to help guide them outside, and once they were out, I didn’t know how to get them out of that forest. “Sam, if you can hear me…” I took a deep breath. “Please. Please get out of here. I came all this way to find you, I need for you to be safe.”

There was a lot of smashing and yelling on the other side of the room, but I couldn’t look up to see what was happening, I had no time to get distracted. I poked around in the security program until I figured out how to unlock the doors.

Then I opened a browser window, thinking that if I could see where we were on a map, at the very least I could tell them which direction to head to find civilization. I had no clue where we were, and it was the only other thing I could do to help, but I didn’t even finish typing into the search bar, when something slammed into me, knocking me off the chair.

I hit my head on the side of the desk. There was a blinding flash of pain, then nothing.