The Replaced
Page 13
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And where was Team One now?
My eyes had gone wide and I was buzzing with excess energy. I knew this was what my science teacher meant when he explained fight-or-flight, which meant I was on high alert for attack. But the weird thing was, I felt numb at the same time, and that confusion was making it hard to focus on any one thing. Just when I thought my head might finally be clearing and I was about to tell Simon we should make a run for it, I saw this plume of black smoke rising from behind the building, and every light inside the facility shut off all at once as it went entirely black.
Behind the glass entrance, sirens blared to life.
“That’s our cue!” Simon shouted above the alarms as he pulled out the key card Jett had given him. But instead of using it to access the security panel beside the door, Willow pulled out a long, metal crowbar-looking thing and smashed the glass entrance to smithereens. When I didn’t follow right away, Simon asked, “You coming?”
“Wait! That was the plan? No one mentioned an explosion!” I knew I was yelling, but I couldn’t help myself. From inside my head, my voice sounded like it was coming from underwater.
Simon grinned and lifted his finger to his lips. “Don’t worry. We got this. Jett knows what he’s doing,” he said, a million times more quietly than I had.
So Jett’s part of the plan was to draw them away from the front entrance by blowing up the back one? Subtle, I thought, squeezing my eyes shut. The increasing pressure behind my ears made my skull and teeth ache. Whatever did the job, I supposed.
But even as I thought it, I could already feel my body reacting to the assault, curing whatever in my head felt . . . broken. Healing me.
I wasn’t sure whether “our cue” had been the sirens or the smoke or the brain-jarring blast itself, but I wasn’t about to be left behind, so I ducked through the hollowed-out frame. My feet crunched over broken glass as I hurried after Simon and Willow. The siren sound was louder, and there was some sort of generator or emergency lighting system that had kicked on, bathing the entry in a ghostly red pall that made everything seem super creepy.
“Which way?” Simon asked Willow.
Willow grunted and pointed down a deserted hallway. I wondered where all the people were. Scary-cute name or not, the Daylight Division was part of the NSA, after all—the dreaded Tacoma facility—shouldn’t there be an army guarding it?
As if my thoughts were being transmitted along the earsplitting sirens that cut through the air, Simon told us both, “We won’t have long before they figure out the detonation was just a diversion. We need to hurry.”
Hurrying wasn’t a problem. Now that we were in here, I felt trapped. That sledgehammer sensation in my chest was no longer from Jett’s distraction, but was exactly what it was supposed to be—my heart trying to crack a rib. Simon hadn’t explained in detail what would happen to us if we were caught, but he’d explained enough and my imagination had filled in the rest. In my mind, there was no amount of self-regeneration that could undo the damage Agent Truman and his buddies had in store for us.
We reached a doorway, and again there was an access panel, and again Simon ignored it, choosing not to use the key card he still clutched in his hand. He pulled something from his backpack, and I watched as he affixed a small piece of what looked like Silly Putty—that gooey gray stuff that came in a plastic egg and that my dad and I used to stretch and bounce and roll over the newspaper comics and then stretch some more—to the panel. Yet even without being told it wasn’t Silly Putty, because of course it wasn’t, I took a few steps back at the same time Simon and Willow did. Simultaneously we all covered our ears and ducked, and my heart continued to punch my chest.
This detonation wasn’t nearly as intense as the first one. In fact, I’d hardly heard it above the wail of the sirens, which were still screaming so loud my ears felt like they were bleeding. This explosion didn’t come with a rumbling boom or all the smoke, just a satisfying bang, followed by the even more satisfying sight of the heavy, locked door releasing.
That was when things got real, and this ordinary-looking building suddenly became so much less ordinary and so much more frightening.
“This is it, isn’t it? The central lab?” I eased past both Simon and Willow, not sure I’d have been able to stop myself even if they would have told me not to go in there.
They didn’t even have to answer because it totally was—I would have known the place anywhere. There was nothing else it could have been. If my dad had been there, I probably would have had to wipe the drool from his chin—this place was like crack for any alien conspiracy theorist.
It was like I was standing on a movie set . . . or a lot—an entire frickin’ movie lot.
The ceiling shot all the way up—two or three, maybe even four, stories. The floor of this “central lab” was made from these enormous glass tiles that, in this light—the emergency light—seemed like they were tinted red, just like everything else around us. Suspended some ten feet or so above the glass-tiled floor, along one entire wall, was what appeared to be an observation chamber of some sort that was set behind even more glass. Inside, the chamber was pitch-black, but my eyesight was better than anyone else’s and I could see past the glass. I knew there was no one in there . . . watching us.
There were too many things to look at all at once: sleek metal tables, like the gurneys that belonged in a morgue. Huge glass cylinders that were so big you could probably fit an entire grown man in them and still have room left over, which made me wonder if that wasn’t exactly what they were for: people. They had these giant tubes sticking out of them, some wide and some not, some attached and some not. There were shelves littered with bottles and beakers and rubber hosing, and things I couldn’t even make sense of because I’d never even seen anything like them before. Everything in here seemed to be made of steel or glass, and had that hospital-sterile appearance, but smelled . . . not quite hospital-y.
My eyes had gone wide and I was buzzing with excess energy. I knew this was what my science teacher meant when he explained fight-or-flight, which meant I was on high alert for attack. But the weird thing was, I felt numb at the same time, and that confusion was making it hard to focus on any one thing. Just when I thought my head might finally be clearing and I was about to tell Simon we should make a run for it, I saw this plume of black smoke rising from behind the building, and every light inside the facility shut off all at once as it went entirely black.
Behind the glass entrance, sirens blared to life.
“That’s our cue!” Simon shouted above the alarms as he pulled out the key card Jett had given him. But instead of using it to access the security panel beside the door, Willow pulled out a long, metal crowbar-looking thing and smashed the glass entrance to smithereens. When I didn’t follow right away, Simon asked, “You coming?”
“Wait! That was the plan? No one mentioned an explosion!” I knew I was yelling, but I couldn’t help myself. From inside my head, my voice sounded like it was coming from underwater.
Simon grinned and lifted his finger to his lips. “Don’t worry. We got this. Jett knows what he’s doing,” he said, a million times more quietly than I had.
So Jett’s part of the plan was to draw them away from the front entrance by blowing up the back one? Subtle, I thought, squeezing my eyes shut. The increasing pressure behind my ears made my skull and teeth ache. Whatever did the job, I supposed.
But even as I thought it, I could already feel my body reacting to the assault, curing whatever in my head felt . . . broken. Healing me.
I wasn’t sure whether “our cue” had been the sirens or the smoke or the brain-jarring blast itself, but I wasn’t about to be left behind, so I ducked through the hollowed-out frame. My feet crunched over broken glass as I hurried after Simon and Willow. The siren sound was louder, and there was some sort of generator or emergency lighting system that had kicked on, bathing the entry in a ghostly red pall that made everything seem super creepy.
“Which way?” Simon asked Willow.
Willow grunted and pointed down a deserted hallway. I wondered where all the people were. Scary-cute name or not, the Daylight Division was part of the NSA, after all—the dreaded Tacoma facility—shouldn’t there be an army guarding it?
As if my thoughts were being transmitted along the earsplitting sirens that cut through the air, Simon told us both, “We won’t have long before they figure out the detonation was just a diversion. We need to hurry.”
Hurrying wasn’t a problem. Now that we were in here, I felt trapped. That sledgehammer sensation in my chest was no longer from Jett’s distraction, but was exactly what it was supposed to be—my heart trying to crack a rib. Simon hadn’t explained in detail what would happen to us if we were caught, but he’d explained enough and my imagination had filled in the rest. In my mind, there was no amount of self-regeneration that could undo the damage Agent Truman and his buddies had in store for us.
We reached a doorway, and again there was an access panel, and again Simon ignored it, choosing not to use the key card he still clutched in his hand. He pulled something from his backpack, and I watched as he affixed a small piece of what looked like Silly Putty—that gooey gray stuff that came in a plastic egg and that my dad and I used to stretch and bounce and roll over the newspaper comics and then stretch some more—to the panel. Yet even without being told it wasn’t Silly Putty, because of course it wasn’t, I took a few steps back at the same time Simon and Willow did. Simultaneously we all covered our ears and ducked, and my heart continued to punch my chest.
This detonation wasn’t nearly as intense as the first one. In fact, I’d hardly heard it above the wail of the sirens, which were still screaming so loud my ears felt like they were bleeding. This explosion didn’t come with a rumbling boom or all the smoke, just a satisfying bang, followed by the even more satisfying sight of the heavy, locked door releasing.
That was when things got real, and this ordinary-looking building suddenly became so much less ordinary and so much more frightening.
“This is it, isn’t it? The central lab?” I eased past both Simon and Willow, not sure I’d have been able to stop myself even if they would have told me not to go in there.
They didn’t even have to answer because it totally was—I would have known the place anywhere. There was nothing else it could have been. If my dad had been there, I probably would have had to wipe the drool from his chin—this place was like crack for any alien conspiracy theorist.
It was like I was standing on a movie set . . . or a lot—an entire frickin’ movie lot.
The ceiling shot all the way up—two or three, maybe even four, stories. The floor of this “central lab” was made from these enormous glass tiles that, in this light—the emergency light—seemed like they were tinted red, just like everything else around us. Suspended some ten feet or so above the glass-tiled floor, along one entire wall, was what appeared to be an observation chamber of some sort that was set behind even more glass. Inside, the chamber was pitch-black, but my eyesight was better than anyone else’s and I could see past the glass. I knew there was no one in there . . . watching us.
There were too many things to look at all at once: sleek metal tables, like the gurneys that belonged in a morgue. Huge glass cylinders that were so big you could probably fit an entire grown man in them and still have room left over, which made me wonder if that wasn’t exactly what they were for: people. They had these giant tubes sticking out of them, some wide and some not, some attached and some not. There were shelves littered with bottles and beakers and rubber hosing, and things I couldn’t even make sense of because I’d never even seen anything like them before. Everything in here seemed to be made of steel or glass, and had that hospital-sterile appearance, but smelled . . . not quite hospital-y.
