Falls the Shadow (28 page)

By the time I finish, his eyes are locked with mine, watching me like we're the only two people left in the world. I exhale. Slowly.

“So . . . yeah. There's that. And now I'm really wishing you would say something,” I whisper. I need to hear him say he feels the same. I want him to tell me how hard it was to watch me walk away, or how he plans on always being there for me, just like he always has been. Something. Anything.

But he doesn't say a word.

“Okay,” I breathe. “So you're not going to say any—”

He stops me with a kiss. At first it's slow—almost shy—but then he takes my face in his hands and crushes me to him, and for one beautiful moment I forget everything except for the taste of him, and the feel of his fingers pushing back into my hair, pulling me eagerly, almost greedily, into his kiss. I forget that there are people out to kill both of us. I forget about the dead city all around us. I forget
about how caught up we are in the lies this world has told us, and in this war that's building and threatening to cave in on us. Right now, the only thing I'm caught up in is him. Again and again I'm caught up in him—in his amazing scent, in the warmth of his skin against mine, over and over until we're so close, so tangled up in each other, that it's hard to tell where he ends and I begin. And when he finally pulls his lips away from mine, we stay like that, his arms wrapped tightly around me, his heart pounding against mine.

We don't have time to catch our breath before the trunk of the car slams shut. I turn my head in time to see it fading out of sight, adjusting to the opacity level of the rest of the car. Seth is walking toward us.

“Good thing we don't have anything important to be doing right now,” he says, raising an eyebrow.

I feel myself blushing. Jaxon kisses my forehead—lets his lips linger there for just a few seconds—before stepping away.

Seth clears his throat. “And I'm not only complaining because you two just took my role as third wheel to a whole new level of awkward,” he adds. “We're just on a bit of a tight schedule here.”

He hands me a weapon I've never seen before—a sleek black thing that resembles a tiny crossbow. I force my attention to it, away from the lingering taste of Jaxon's kiss. Overall, the gun's incredibly light, but in its center is a weight that helps steady it when I practice aiming it at a pillar on the far side of the garage.

“Cybow,” he says. “It's a well-balanced gun, and you should be able to shoot it with just one hand.” His eyes fall to the swollen wrist at my side; we ripped up a box that was in the car's trunk and used it and some of the medical tape and gauze Jaxon took from the clinic to make a sort of splint for it. “That's your dominant hand, isn't it?” he asks.

“Unfortunately.”

“Yeah, so you're definitely sticking with the Cybow. It's easy as crap to aim, even with your lame hand. It is, however, one of my favorite guns, so don't you dare lose it.”

“Hopefully you won't have to use it, anyway,” Jaxon says, grabbing his own weapon and starting toward the elevator.

“Always the optimist,” Seth says. But Jaxon's moving so quickly that he's already too far away to hear. We jog to catch up with him, and then the three of us keep up that pace, moving as fast as we can while still keeping an eye on our surroundings. Not that there's any need; the garage is just as empty as it was the first day I came here.

Even so, by the time we start our descent in the elevator, the back of my neck is damp with nervous sweat. Anxiety is like a fourth passenger in the cramped space, walking between us, wrapping her arms around us so tightly, it's difficult to breathe.

The elevator lurches to a stop, and Jaxon steps in front of me. “Stay close to me,” he says, and we brace ourselves as the doors slide open.

Inside, the room stretches emptily
before us—quiet and strange with no chatter, no bustle of people or clicking and beeping of computers like last time. The only noise disrupting the deathlike stillness is the sound of our own uncertain footsteps, and the occasional flicker of the fluorescent lights above. And even though I know we're all thinking it, no one asks the obvious, terrifying question:
Where did everybody go?

We draw our weapons and head for the president's office.

It's empty. Just like everywhere else. The chair at her desk is overturned, and on the floor there's a broken picture of her and Jaxon, alongside a man I can only assume is Jaxon's father; but other than that, the room looks undisturbed. I linger in the doorway while Jaxon picks up the picture, and Seth searches the room a little closer, checking recent messages on the president's computer and comcenter. A series of screens on the far wall catches my eye, and I move to Jaxon's side, motioning toward them.

“Part of a security system?” I ask.

He nods.

“Maybe we can find out what happened,” I say, joining
Seth at the computer. My fingers have already started flying across the screen, trying to navigate around the security control program, before I notice that Jaxon is still watching me silently. And I think I know why.

Because if I manage to pull up the footage of the last twenty-four hours, who knows what it's going to show.

What will he have to watch happen to his mother?

I take a step away from the computer. “Or maybe we should just go. Obviously it's not—”

“No,” Jaxon interrupts. His eyes are on the computer, not me, and they have a strange, glassy look about them. “No, it's a good idea. We should find out what we can.”

He takes my place at the door, keeping an eye out, and I reluctantly go back to work.

The system is more than a little intricate. There are over twenty-five cameras being operated by this computer, and it takes a solid minute or two for me to just work out which files represent which rooms. And even after I manage that, trying to gain access to any of their past surveillance feeds just earns me an administrator password prompt that I can't get past.

I'm starting to get frustrated, when I find a group of camera folders labeled “low profile”; they don't require administrator access, only program passwords—which are easy enough to bypass. A few more clicks and setting adjustments later, three of the monitors on the wall blur to life.

“I couldn't gain access to this room's cameras,” I explain. “I'm not sure where this one is, but it looks like this it's
a live stream, so hang on, let me adjust the date and time and see if I can—”

“Wait a second,” Seth says, “check out the bottom-left screen.”

Jaxon leaves his place by the door, and together we tread softly to the tiny display and crouch down in front of it. The scene playing out on it isn't as clear as I'd expected—but it's clear enough to see what Seth's talking about.

There are no fewer than a half-dozen people on the screen in front of us. And I recognize every single one of them from school. Lacey Cartwright is front and center, her smile tight and menacing as she points to something offscreen. They're in what looks like some sort of storage room, surrounded by steel racks stacked high with computer equipment and crates of old discs. Most of them are sifting through the crates, but it's hard to tell if they're looking for something, or just trying to make as big of a mess as possible.

Suddenly, almost as if Lacey can feel us watching her, she turns and looks directly up at the camera. Her smile widens. I stumble away from the screen, trying to catch my breath; but it feels like the air's been punched straight from my lungs.

“They're CCA, right?” I ask, glancing back at Jaxon. “Please tell me all of them are CCA, and that's why they're here.”

He shakes his head, and I look back at the screen just as a petite brown-haired girl—a sophomore whose name is Brittany, I think—grips the edge of one of the steel racks
and lifts it, single-handedly, into the air. Her strength is obviously inhuman, but it's nothing compared with how quickly she moves, how her entire body blurs with speed and grace as she flings the rack aside. An instant later we hear the crash—not over the video feed, but reverberating down the hall outside.

My gaze snaps toward the door.

How close is that room, exactly?

There's another crash, followed by shouting and loud peals of laughter. When everything grows quiet again, it's Seth who finally moves; he goes straight to the door without a word, then shuts and secures it. It slides closed with a painfully loud metallic
thump
that echoes around the room. I want to think that it only seems so loud, that it only makes me jump because of the panic settling over us.

But when I finally feel brave enough to look back at the screen, most of the people—the clones—are gone.

Seth turns off the lights and slowly makes his way back to us, his face illuminated by the soft glow of the monitors. No one interrupts the silence; we're all too busy listening, and probably wondering the same things: Did they hear the door shut? Do they know we're in here? And where did they go now?

The seconds crawl by. I take Jaxon's hand, focus on the warmth and weight of it, and slowly, slowly force my breathing back to something like normal. Seth starts to speak several times—probably to try and break the tension with a joke—but stops. He settles instead for just passing the minutes by tap, tap, tapping them out with
his fingers against the desk. The computer fans kick on, whirring faintly in the darkness.

Someone pounds on the door.

I bite back a scream. I don't know why I bother, though—because there are so many voices talking and laughing outside now that they probably wouldn't have heard me anyway.

It sounds like there are even more than I counted on the screen.

I rush to turn off those screens now, unplugging them along with the computer—trying to hide every sign that anyone is in here. Without them on, the room is almost pitch black. The three of us scramble blindly for some sort of cover; Jaxon and I end up underneath his mother's desk just as there's another pound against the door and the ear-splitting sound of steel peeling away from steel. A jagged ribbon of light appears on the back wall, and with a sick twist in my gut I realize: they're punching a hole through the solid metal door.

“Knock, knock . . . anybody home?” Lacey's voice is as sickeningly sweet as ever, and crystal clear now that there's less and less door separating us. Someone punches the door again, and the spot of light against the back wall grows wider.

Jaxon's arm brushes mine, and I glance over and see him swiping the safety off the gun in his hands. Wherever Seth ended up hiding, I imagine he's doing the same thing. So I do too, even though I can't help feeling that it's pointless now.

There's another slam against the door; it sounds like someone threw their whole body against it this time, judging by the way the steel screeches and groans under the weight. I shut my eyes and try to imagine I'm anywhere else, but open them a second later when I feel Jaxon move past me. He's inching his way out from underneath the desk, getting dangerously close to the light flooding in from the hole in the door. I grab his arm just as he lifts his gun.

“What are you doing?” I whisper, jerking him back.

“They just know that someone's in here,” he says. “They don't know how many. So if they find me—”

“Don't be stupid.”

He turns and presses me into the back corner of the desk. “They don't know you're here,” he whispers, a forced calmness in his voice that terrifies me. “And you are going to stay right here, and you are not going to make a sound, or do
anything
that lets them know otherwise.”

I want to argue. But I don't want to make any more noise—because he's right; it would be stupid to let them all know we're
both
in here. I can't seem to find my voice, anyway, so instead I just stare at him and silently shake my head. He gently pries my hand, finger by finger, from his arm and starts to pull away again.

He freezes at the edge of the desk, at the exact moment I think we both notice how quiet it's suddenly become. No one's pounding on the door. The voices outside have stopped. We hold our breath and listen for a minute, two minutes. . . .

The footsteps that break the silence are impossibly close. A shadow blots out the light on the wall a second later, and Jaxon dives around the corner of the desk, gun raised, in the same instant Seth says, “They're gone.”

I let out the breath I've been holding and crawl out from underneath the desk to find Seth with his hands in the air and Jaxon slowly lowering the gun.

“I almost shot you, idiot.”

“I know,” Seth says, still eying the gun nervously, “I was there. Saw the whole thing, complete with my life flashing before my eyes.”

“Why would they just leave?” I ask, my voice still not rising above a whisper.

“Because they want us to follow them for some reason?” Jaxon says. “I'm pretty sure this is a trap.”

It's obvious now that he says it. And it's also obvious that we don't have any choice but to walk straight into that trap—because it's not like we can stay in this room forever.

The closest exit, Jaxon and Seth decide after a bit of arguing, is a set of elevators on the other side of the main meeting room. It's a straight-enough shot from here to there, but it's still not exactly close.

Every hallway we have to turn and walk down seems narrower than the last. Soon it starts to feel as if the building itself is closing in on us, but there's nothing to do but keep moving. I hold my breath around every corner, expecting each one to be the last we ever turn, and Lacey's terrible smile to be among the last things I ever see.

We make it to the main room without encountering anyone.

I'm about to sigh with relief when I notice the first body.