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“Try living with it cubed,” Oliver said. I grinned, which made my cheek hurt.

Oliver considered my bruise, wiped his jaw with his hand, and crossed the space between us. Placing two fingers under my chin, he turned my face a few degrees. “I can see the imprint of his knuckles in the bruise, even under the makeup.” No question as to who dealt the blow, he knew from long experience dealing with the temperamental Helsing family.

“That’s impressive,” I said, cracking open my can. “Did my father leave the Helsing cross stamped in my skin, too?”

“You’re not okay.” It wasn’t a question.

“I’m still breathing.”

“Better than the alternative.” He hugged me, a brotherly squeeze about the shoulders. “Ibuprofen will help with the swelling, I’ll get you some.”

“Thanks.” I took a swig of the energy drink. They hadn’t fixed the sugar-vomit flavor, but the caffeine, taurine, and
et ceterines
hit my brain fast enough to make me a believer. When Oliver returned with a couple of pills, I knocked them back with another swallow. “So how are we getting off this island?” I asked.

“We’ll have to be creative,” Oliver said, carrying his duffel to the door and setting it by two other bags. “While my father can postpone an alert, he can’t erase security camera footage—”

“Wait,” I said, holding up a hand. “You told your dad we’re leaving the island?”

“Of course,” Oliver said. “He’s a very logical man, and recognizes that my best chance for survival lies with you, not with Helsing’s tetro crews. We have until sundown before he reports us missing, which gives us some time. He’s even deactivated the tracking devices in our phones and other electronics, so HQ will be blind to our movements. However, my father can’t arrange for our escape, not without arousing suspicion.”

The chasm between my father’s and Dr. Stoker’s parenting styles had never been more apparent; Dad was all about control, while Dr. Stoker empowered Oliver to succeed. Guess who had the better relationship? “Let’s just hope my father doesn’t wake up from his drunken coma too early,” I said.

“Drunken coma?”

“Don’t ask. What are our options?”

“We have three routes off the island, not including the ferries,” Oliver said. “I would recommend hot-wiring a speedboat from the southern harbor, as it would be the most … palatable mode of travel.”

I cocked my hip and crossed my arms over my chest. “And the unpalatable modes of travel?”

“Well, the trash barges depart at roughly three o’clock every afternoon—”

“What’d we miss, kids?” Jude walked back into the room, smoothing the crinkles in his shirt, his blond curls askew, grinning like he’d won. Ryder came in, too, shaking the impact out of his right hand, his knuckles flushed from slamming into Jude’s gut, no doubt.

“Micheline didn’t put me in a headlock,” Oliver said, refusing to look at either of them.

“Worth it.” Jude collected his energy drink off the kitchen floor. “But I’d avoid the Ninth Circle for a little while if I were you, Outback, unless you want to take some claws to the chest.” He waggled his brows at me and cracked open his drink.

Make that twenty-three deaths he’d seen for Ryder. The visions Jude wicked off people’s skin weren’t certainties, but possibilities that flexed with the choices we made. Warnings, really.

Jude constantly teased the invisible bonds between Ryder and me; it was one thing to do it here, in the safety of their apartment. But if Jude ever said anything in front of Dad, well, that could be disastrous. I could only hope he understood why. After all, my father didn’t sit me down for that you’re-off-limits-to-everyone-your-age talk until he heard my little brothers singing
Micheline and Ryder sittin’ in a tree …

“We need to get off the island,” Oliver said. He’d picked up his tablet, tapping here, swiping there, and frowning. “I’m quite sure we can sneak onto one of the trash barges—”

“Nice try, Einstein,” Jude said. “I’m not taking a trash boat out of here.”

“Then I suggest we take one of the boats from the southern harbor,” Oliver said.

“You mean steal a boat from the harbor,” Ryder said, shaking his head no.

“Those boats are corps property, so it’s not stealing,” I said, my logic withering in the silence that followed. “Well, not exactly stealing.”

“We’d have to hot-wire the boat,” Ryder said. “We’d be up for destruction of corps property, at least—theft at worst—and nobody here can afford another demerit.”

We can’t afford to stay, either.
“Oliver, you said you had three options, what’s the third?”

Oliver pinched the bridge of his nose, like he was trying to stop himself from saying the words aloud: “The tunnels.”

Jude laughed, but the sound flatlined when he saw the gravity on Oliver’s face. “Wait, there are tunnels? For real?”

“Where?” I asked.

“Under the bay,” Oliver said.

“And they haven’t bloody told anyone?” Ryder asked, looking at me to see if I’d known about them. I shook my head. “Tunnels mean the island isn’t secure.”

“Not as secure as we thought,” Jude said.

Tunnels also meant my father kept secrets from me. Secrets Oliver knew, secrets
his
father shared with him. I wasn’t quick enough to douse the matchstick jealousy flaring in my chest. I wished my father still loved me the way Dr. Stoker so obviously loved Oliver, and couldn’t help wondering what intelligence I wasn’t privy to, what loops I’d been left out of, what secrets I hadn’t been told.

Oliver sighed. “Grab your bags and follow me, I’ll explain everything on the way.”

FRIDAY, 4:40 P.M.

“T
HE TUNNELS ARE A
fail-safe.” Oliver led us into the dorms’ fire escape stairwell. We headed downstairs, carrying our bags. “It’s a large evacuation route running from our southern harbor to Pier 50, with connections to all the island’s buildings.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “How did they build tunnels without anyone noticing?”

“They built the tunnels before they announced the new Angel Island compound,” Oliver said. “Remember the ‘federally funded’ project to supposedly redistribute the bay’s seafloor sediment? Subterfuge. Helsing went to great lengths to ensure the tunnels would remain one of our best-kept secrets. They didn’t want the island’s security compromised.”

“You’d think people would notice a freaking tunnel being built out in the bay,” Jude said.

“Most people swallow the stories they’re fed,” Oliver said. “My father says we paid the observant ones for their silence, including several news stations and reporters.”

We followed him down twenty-one stories, until the stairwell deposited us into the building’s subbasement. Oliver approached a set of nondescript doors, painted gray, with no knobs or handles. He ripped the lid off a stainless steel card reader, pulled a fuse out, and shook the sparks off his hand.

The doors clunked.

“Abracadabra,” Oliver said, pushing one of the doors open. The tunnel beyond swallowed the basement’s crumbs of light. No sound emanated from its gullet. Inside, the air smelled rubbery, like fresh paint and stale air. I dug my Maglite out of my pack and flicked it on, taking in the concrete tunnel and the Helsing insignia spray-painted on the wall.

“Smile,” Jude said, motioning to a small onyx dome plugged into the ceiling. “We’re on candid camera, people.”

“Who monitors this area?” Ryder asked, tugging the door closed behind the four of us. “Campus security or the corps police?”

“Neither, I hope,” Oliver said, motioning us forward. “The area’s classified and supposed to be sealed, but they may notice one of the card readers blew a fuse.”

“And if they do notice?” I asked.

“Then we’d better be gone before they get here,” Ryder said.

We headed into the darkness, Oliver in the lead, Jude at my side, Ryder bringing up the rear in a diamond-shaped formation reapers used while traversing unfamiliar territory. Nobody spoke. Our footsteps made no sounds. Only the swish of clothing or the intake of breath ruffled the tunnel’s silence.

After about a half mile, our tributary tunnel fed into a massive pipe—the main tunnel’s girth shocked me, because we could’ve driven three or four Humvees abreast down the avenue. I pointed my flashlight at walls piped with ductwork guts and cables, light fixtures, and the occasional siren.

“Holy…,” Jude said, craning his head back. “Will you look at this place? It’s practically made for an after-hours party.”

“Don’t even think about it, mate,” Ryder said.

“Too late,” Jude said, grinning.

Large sprinklers dotted the ceiling like daisies with razor-sharp petals, the same apparatuses I’d seen on the ceilings of Seward Memorial’s Ninth Circle. Those devices sprouted nerve gas in case the necros escaped their pens … but why would they be needed in an evacuation tunnel?

“They’re in place to contain outbreaks,” Oliver said, noticing my interest and pointing his flashlight at one of the sprinklers. “Blast shields have been placed every few hundred yards, too—this tunnel can be sectioned off and locked down in thirty seconds.”

I wrinkled my nose. “We wouldn’t gas the living.”

“No,” Oliver said. “We wouldn’t. They aren’t a proactive measure, but a reactive one—”

Something clattered in the darkness behind us. We froze the way a wolf pack might—turning our heads all at once, ears pricked, everyone attuned to the potential threat.

“What was that?” Oliver whispered. Ryder made a violent slice across his throat with a finger, then pointed in the direction we’d come.

They know we’re here
, he mouthed.

No way.
Jude shook his head, stilling when watery voices drifted down the tunnel.

Go dark
, Ryder mouthed, motioning to the wall. My stomach rolled as I understood what he wanted us to do—turn off our flashlights and follow the wall. We’d move slower, but have the advantage of seeing our pursuers before they saw us.

Putting my back to the wall, I shut my flashlight off, stowed it in my pack, and took Dad’s Colt out. It had a barrel-mounted Xenon flashlight, and I wanted to have more to bargain with than empty palms. Since I wasn’t wearing a holster, I checked the handgun’s safety and shoved it in my belt.

I reached out and put my hand on the sandpaper concrete. Ryder took the lead, dousing his flashlight. Oliver and Jude fell in behind me, and when the last flashlight clicked off, the darkness was absolute—not midnight dark, not even camping dark, but black as used motor oil poured into my eyes. Oliver reached out and grabbed the back of my pack.
Smart
. I fisted my hand in Ryder’s pack, too, so we moved forward like a centipede. Slow, silent, and totally blind.

The tunnel slanted down. Fifty feet deep, then a hundred. The temperature dove with the incline, making me wish I hadn’t given up my hunting jacket at the hospital. Another fifty feet and my teeth chattered. As we walked, I tried not to think about the bay squeezing us on all sides, or how pressure could split a concrete-and-steel tunnel like a plastic straw. Focusing on the chains growing under my skin didn’t help, nor did thinking about Dad’s half-open eyes and worrying whether he’d shaken off the alcohol. Danger and death always stood a few steps away from me. Down here, where claustrophobia beaded my brow with sweat, where pressure popped my ears, where the tunnel groaned from the weight placed on its back, I almost believed in curses and centuries-old vengeance.

Instead, I tried to remember what it was like to be a kid, when every activity felt like a no-holds-barred adventure; the boys and I used to climb into the drainage ditches and old wells on the Presidio property. When we got older, we started exploring the city’s big tunnels, the secret ones. Every teen knew about the Prohibition-era tunnels under Nob Hill and Chinatown—places Helsing swept clean once a night. But few knew about the labyrinth beneath Ghirardelli Square, or the spidery corridors under Coit Tower, the places you needed to pack heat if you meant to walk out alive. And one of Oliver’s pet projects was to find San Francisco’s fabled underground military base, which he believed to be hidden under Golden Gate Park, or on an odd day, the Marin Headlands. He’d already tried to convince the last surviving members of San Francisco’s old Suicide Club to tell him—twice.

My other senses became hyperactive in the blackness. I saw with my hand, fingers catching on boxes or pipes, or sliding over slick, painted surfaces. Our boots’ rubber soles made no sound on the floor, so the only noise we made was the faint scrape of skin on concrete.

Sounds tailed us, an echoey voice here, a clank there. Creeping closer. We’d gone over two miles before the first clear, masculine voice grazed my skin:

“The place’s empty. You sure you saw someone on the cameras, Antonio?”

“Yeah, a bunch’a kids.”

The words pushed us forward, faster.
Just give up
, I begged them. I chanced a look backward—four or five bright spots chewed through the darkness. The men closed the gap fast, and it wouldn’t be long before their lights got close enough to touch us. I nudged Ryder’s pack with my hand, urging him on faster.

After a few hundred yards more, the tunnel bent upward. Ryder’s pace shifted and slowed with the steep incline, and Oliver’s hand pulled harder on my pack, his breath ragged. Physical exertion wasn’t good for a boy with twenty stitches in his chest.

We’d gone up about fifty feet when Jude cursed under his breath—

A clang, a clatter. A flash of light rolled down the incline, bright as a here-I-am flare, a wreck of shouts breaking out of its wake. I watched Jude’s flashlight rock at the incline’s base, mouth agape.

“Move,” Ryder shouted, grabbing me by the hand and plunging up the hill. He lit the way with his Maglite, making the tunnel bounce and bob like a shaky-cam movie. We ran flat-out—Ryder taking one stride for my two and half dragging me—as orders to
Stop!
and
Halt!
slugged into our backs.

By the time we made it to the top, my heart felt like a punching bag and my lungs burned. The lights from our pursuers’ flashlights ricocheted off the ceiling as Ryder and I scrambled over the ridge. I stopped to glance back; Oliver ran with a hand pressed into his chest, and as he crossed to flat ground, he slumped over and put his hands on his knees. A smear of blood edged his palm.