Children of Evolution (The Gateway Series Book 2) (14 page)

Not with this guy. Whoever the mystery man on the tablet was, he was inside the wall. He was getting to see the real Ace with no barrier between them.
 

Nikki was curious. Understatement. She was practically twitching to know who this guy was, but giving in to her curiosity would be a mistake, another game buster. Whoever
 
he was, he'd captured Ace's full attention for now, and that was all that mattered.

Nikki eased away from the door and back around the corner, careful not to make a sound. Then she padded back to the door to the lower level with a steadily growing smile. Then she spotted the mag-lock.

Apparently Ace wasn't taking any chances. The heavy-duty magnetic seal she'd installed over the door lever had a palm scanner that lit up red as Nikki got close enough to trip the proximity sensor.
 

Maybe Gideon getting out was Ace's only concern, but Nikki would bet a month's worth of dish duty that she was not in the authorized user list.

She didn't bother trying the scanner to see. She was done for. Thwarted again. Unless…

Her smile started to make its way back as she leaned closer to check out the bottom of the lock. She'd known how to pick mechanical locks for years. Any family that wanted to do more than just get by in the zones needed at least one member with basic B&E skills. Since Michael, the sum of Nikki's family, wouldn't have anything to do with picking locks, pockets, or anything besides low-paying jobs, Nikki had taken up the slack. She had a knack for it too, when it came to physical locks. But electronic locks were a whole 'nother animal, one she hadn't known a thing about until Corso came along. He'd never met a lock he couldn't slide past, and he'd been more than willing to teach Nikki a thing or two.
 

Thanks to those lessons, Nikki thought she could get past this mag-lock, if not as smoothly as Corso could. She'd have to do it "the ugly way," as he called it. In other words, she'd have to break it. She just had to decide if she wanted to talk to Gideon badly enough to call down Ace's thunder.

She didn't even have to think about that one.
 

A quick trip back to the hangar gave her everything she needed. The only thing more impressive than Gram's curse bank was his tool stash—the stuff of thieves' dreams.
 

It only took her a minute to wire the hand-held quick charger to the screwdrivers. Getting the business ends of the tools in the tiny spots Corso had shown her took a little longer, but she managed between glances back at Ace's hallway. "Managed" meaning she dropped her makeshift probes a time or two, and the first time she fired up the charger she almost burned it up before she realized she had one screwdriver in the wrong spot.
 

Once she repositioned the probes, and checked one more time to make sure the coast was clear, she held her breath and cranked the charger on full.

The palm screen flickered off with a hiss and the lock popped off the door and dropped. If Nikki's reflexes had been any slower the crash would have been epic. Instead, it was just painful.
 

She dropped to her knees on the concrete floor and snagged the lock with one hand just before it hit. She jerked her other hand, the charger locked in a death grip, up over her head and as far away from the door as she could to keep the suddenly free-swinging screwdrivers from clattering into it. She froze in her awkward position and listened for any sign of Ace heading her way.

Nothing.
 

Feeling a deep sense of pride, and possibly a cracked kneecap, she eased the lock and her tools to the floor, slowly lifted the latch, and slipped through the door onto the dark spiral staircase beyond.

Nikki

Nikki’s break-in euphoria lasted almost until she reached the bottom of the steps.
 

By the time she set foot on the floor of the lower level, the weight of what she was about to dredge up had squashed the remnants of her short-lived happiness.

The look of the place didn’t help.

The lower level looked like an afterthought by the bunker's designer. It had a single, straight hallway, a little wider than those above, with four smallish rooms staggered on either side and a massive storage bay at the end behind a set of heavy blast doors. The hallway had the same arched ceiling and bare walls as the upper level, but down here they were darker, rougher, cut from bare rock without the smooth concrete and steel finishing touches. Conduits ran along the center of the arch overhead, feeding power to the orangey emergency-style lights in little cages spaced every ten meters or so. The nighttime light down here was weak, even compared to the night setting of the main lights upstairs, or maybe that was just her imagination. Combined with the irregular shadows in the craggy walls, the whole place felt like an ad for anti-depression meds, or the setting of a hinky slasher flick.

Nikki didn't know what the other three rooms down here were used for, and at the moment she didn't care. She had eyes only for the first deeper pocket of shadow ahead on the left—the vault.
 

She strode quickly from one patch of orange light to the next and stopped before the vault door to catch her breath. Her heart was suddenly pounding almost as much as it had the night before. Only this time she wasn't running hell-for-leather from a nightmare, she was walking right to it.
 

The reason for the anxiety was obvious. She didn't want to have this conversation with Gideon, not even a little bit. But it was necessary, for her own sanity as much as anything else. She had to know the true lay of the land here at the bunker so she could decide just how long she wanted to…lie in it. But getting to the truth would require opening up a room full of pain she'd walled off for a reason. Already she could feel the darkness seeping out of that room. She could feel the muscles in the back of her neck tightening, drawing her shoulders in.
 

Nikki,
Michael's faint voice spoke into that darkness.
What's going on?

His timing was just plain terrible, as usual. If she was going to do this, it had to be now or never.
 

She straightened up and forced her shoulders back with a grunt. Then she reached past the urge to bolt and grabbed the cool metal of the locking wheel. Before she could lose her nerve, she spun the wheel and pulled the door open.

Nikki, what are you doing?

He knew exactly what she was doing. He had to. Just like she knew the only way to get this done was to ignore him. Without hesitating she stepped over the lip of the door and into the dimly lit room.
 

From a metal cot in the corner of the nearly bare room, Gideon looked up at her. He was turned so his human side faced the door, and with just the pale light from the hall illuminating the room, his creature side blended into the shadows, making him look almost normal at first glance.

He'd been sitting in total darkness, but not as some kind of punishment, at least not doled out by anyone else. The light controls for this room were right inside the door. The darkness had been his choice.

There was no surprise in his eye when he looked up at Nikki, but plenty of resignation.

"Nikki." His low voice seemed smaller in the heavy confines of the vault. "I wondered when you'd come."

Nikki, you don't need to do this.

Nikki ignored Michael as her gaze slid to the chains in the center of the back wall and just as quickly snapped away. A tremor rippled through her belly that she struggled to suppress. The heavy manacles were nothing like what Savior's lab coats had used on her, but their position—one set on the floor for ankles, another hanging through rings high on the wall for wrists—was enough to push her over the edge into memories of that day. Which was inevitable, she supposed, considering why she was here.

"Did your fortune telling warn you?" she asked, the edge to her voice obvious to her ears. She stepped to the side just inside the door so she wasn't blocking all the light and crossed her arms tightly across her chest.
 

Gideon's mouth twitched slightly, but his expression remained hard to read, despite Nikki's efforts. She was good at reading people, world-class maybe, but Gideon had never been an easy subject. Regardless of the situation, he always seemed to look the same—guarded and haunted. Tonight was no exception.

"No," he said simply. Then he waited. He was going to make her do all the heavy lifting it seemed.

A thousand ways to ask the question ran through her head, but none of them stayed still long enough for her to grab one. This question had been bugging her for so long she'd built it up into a thing, a monster of its own. Now that its time had come, she realized she didn't know how to give it voice.
 

Nikki, please…

Walking into a confrontation with all this emotional confusion snarling her up inside was new territory for Nikki. She didn't know what to do next because everything felt so unfamiliar. Faced with a situation she didn't understand, she saw only one way to proceed—charge in.

"Did you know?"

On the cryptic scale, her question rated a solid ten, out of a possible five, but Gideon's eyes betrayed no confusion, just a deepening of the haunted look.

What do you hope to accomplish with this, Nikki?
Michael's voice was stronger, and a little desperate sounding.

"Shut up," she snapped. When Gideon narrowed his eyes and stayed silent, she realized her mistake. She could almost feel Michael thinking,
I told you so,
despite his silence. He had, after all, told her at least a hundred times not to answer him out loud.
 

"You told Michael you see the future," she said, hating the break in her voice at his name. Hate led to frustration. Frustration led to anger. And anger, somehow, and possibly for the first time in her life, led to eloquence.

"He believed you. Michael believed you could see the future. Everybody here believes it. That's why they all trust you to lead them away from what you claim to see and toward something better."

Gideon watched her silently.

"Or
trusted
you, I should say. Some of them don't trust your powers anymore. They try to hide it, but I can tell. They think your fortune telling let you down, that it didn't tell you what was going to happen when you came to get me."

Gideon said nothing. Michael went another way.

Nikki, you don't want to do this. You don't
need
to do this. Not for me.

"Except Elias. See, I think that's why you two are on the rocks. He thinks your power still works just fine. He thinks you knew what was going to happen that day."

Michael stayed quiet as she paused for breath and a hard swallow, but she could feel the tension in his silence. She hadn't felt him this off-balance in a long time, which meant he was probably thinking the same thing.
 

"I think Elias has it right," she finished.

They stared at each other in the dim light—Nikki holding on to the challenge to hide her pain, Gideon using the silence to express his.

"Tell me I'm wrong." Nikki could feel herself rising toward the crest of an anger wave, but a strange ache building in her chest was making it feel more like a cliff's edge, and a crumbly one at that. Whether that ache came from her or Michael, she didn't know.

Michael was holding his tongue, so to speak. As much as he'd argued against this for months, he was on the edge of the cliff right alongside her, hanging just as much as she on Gideon's response. Their emotional spikes, as different as they were, were feeding each other, threatening to push them both over the edge.

Gideon blinked and looked down. When he looked back up, he seemed even thinner, weaker. He looked almost vulnerable. "You're not wrong," he said evenly.

The cliff crumbled underneath her, but Nikki didn't fall into the dark water below that she knew was just a sea of weepy uselessness. The anger wouldn't let her. It was swelling around and inside her in a roiling wave, building its strength to hurl her at the man in front of her.
 

"Say it," she grated, her voice shaky with adrenaline begging to be put to use. This was more like it. This territory she knew like the back of her hand.

Gideon stood slowly, like he knew what was coming and wanted to face his beatdown on his feet. He turned to face her fully, his red right eye blazing out of the shadows.

"I knew."

Nikki's world went cold.
 

She'd imagined those words coming out of his mouth a thousand times, but hearing them froze her in place. The rage was still there, a rumbling tidal wave, but it was being held back by a wall she couldn't see.
 

Michael.

He didn't share her anger, she realized. That's not why he had been on the emotional cliff. He'd been battling some other feeling just as powerful. And now his cold wall of serenity was holding back her hot wave of fury. Even without a body, he'd found a way to stand between her and what she wanted to destroy, the way he always had.

"I knew Michael was going to die." Gideon repeated.

The anger surged. It should have crushed Michael's thin wall—but it didn't.
 

Something more was holding it back, something coming from her. She was holding back, she realized with a shock, because of the fear coming from her brother. He was afraid, but not of what Gideon was saying. He was afraid of something he wasn't.
 

As soon as she processed that thought, she felt Michael's resolve harden. She knew that feeling from him. She'd felt it so many times over the years that it came with a clear image of an all too familiar look in his eyes. He'd just made a decision to do something he felt he had to do, and nothing in the world would make him change his mind.

Nikki,
he said at last.
You can't blame him.
It wasn't his fault.
Gideon did know I was going to die—but so did I.