“You have a way to stop the anomaly?” he asked with far more calm than I was feeling.
“Yes. It’s a theory, but there is a way.”
“How?”
A blast ricocheted through the tunnel. A bomb? Who was throwing bombs at us?
“Go,” Left Ned said, grabbing Abraham’s arm and helping him past us down the tunnel. “Domek must have blown the hatch. He’ll be on us.”
I jogged after them, caught up, and took Abraham’s other side.
This time, Abraham held more of his own weight, and his breathing was steady. He’d gotten enough water and rest back there that we could sprint for it.
So we ran.
Down to the end of the tunnel. Hard right following where Gloria had gone.
Could be a dead end.
Could be a trap.
Could be that Gloria had been captured and we were running to our doom.
Could be that none of that mattered because Domek was behind us, and he would kill us deader than dead if he caught us.
A light ahead of us descended from the ceiling. This tunnel ended in a shaft.
“Hurry!” Gloria pulled a cage door to one side and waved us in behind it. “Where’s Quinten?”
I pulled out from under Abraham’s arm, leaving him to lean against the back of the cage—maybe an elevator—and looked out into the darkness and dust behind us for Quinten.
I couldn’t see him, but the light he carried arced and then hit the ground. He’d thrown it away. I didn’t know why.
“Quinten!” I got three steps out of the elevator into the dust when a hand shot out and grabbed my wrist.
“Run, run!” Quinten said.
We hauled it into the elevator and Gloria worked the controls. It was an old freight lift, mechanics and gears, pulleys and chain. It clattered and rumbled, starting up.
“Did you see him?” I asked Quinten.
“Cover your ears,” he said.
Which was a weird answer, but then it all clicked. He had a lot of different medical compounds and chemicals in that bag he’d packed. If he didn’t have something that was already a bomb, he was sure to have packed something that could pretty quickly become a bomb.
I covered my ears.
The blast hit. Sound and impact almost simultaneous. Dust and rock smothered out the air, stung my eyes, and covered me in grit. I prayed the mechanics would withstand it. The elevator shuddered like an animal that just had its jugular cut.
But it kept rising, grinding, cranking up and up.
Quinten was saying something, but I couldn’t hear him after that blast. Gloria shook her head at him, pressing her fingers over her lips. Quinten shut up.
Neds and Abraham were covered in a thick layer of dust. I supposed we all were, but they had seen Gloria’s signal and weren’t talking.
The elevator hopped to a stop. Gloria pulled the cage door open and walked out into a concrete enclosure with a single steel door at the end of it.
She took a second to bat the dust off her shoulders, head, face, and hands.
