“Straight.” I picked a direction at random. We needed to search every one of these halls, every wing, every stretch of darkness.
“Right.” Stella took a step forward, then stopped. “Do you smell or hear anything? I’m desperate for any sort of clue.”
Marni scanned our immediate surroundings. “This space is, what, three feet wide? We can’t even walk in a row. How is he curled up in here?”
Alone. Cold. Hungry. Injured. The list of horrors kept spinning in my head.
“Straight.” I shouted the word this time to block out their questions and their doubts.
Their comments made sense. They were right to wonder and assess and try to dissect every clue, but I needed not to think.
Marni and Stella followed in silence. I saw their quick glances in each other’s direction when I yelled. I got it. My bossiness and trying to control the situation hadn’t gotten us anywhere so far. Days had passed since the fire. If he was hurt or...
“He has to be here.” I would have heard him or sensed him if he waited in the walls at Xavier’s house.
“Agree.” Stella whispered the response from behind me.
We walked and I dragged that stick and listened to the unbroken melody of wood against wall. Every weighted step filled with danger and pounding anxiety. The scenery never changed. Gray walls. High ceilings. No way out.
I stopped. “I don’t know...”
“Keep going.” Stella put her arm around my shoulders and dragged me forward. “This leads somewhere, Hanna. It’s illogical for this to be a dead end.”
Logic. The argument made sense when nothing else did. My muddled brain couldn’t form a response or a reaction. I let her pull me along. Deeper into the waiting darkness.
The stick clipped along. The clicking song echoed in my head.
Thunk.
Stella stopped walking. “What was that?”
“Wait,” Marni said at the same time.
I tapped the stick against the wall in a circle. Believing, hoping, felt too perilous. The downfall and disappointment might knock me over. Still, I tapped. The outline of a door. I traced it, then did it again.
“An exit.” I jammed the end of the stick against what felt like a seam.
Marni sighed. “Thank God.”
Stella pressed her hands against the wall. Brushed over the concrete. “Here.”
I wedged my shoulder against the hidden door and it shifted. The thick, unforgiving wall turned into an opening. Fresh, cold air slipped through the crack.
We didn’t need words. We all pushed and shoved and searched for a magical switch to let us in or out.
The heavy wall swung. We stumbled into a room. My eyes fought against focusing. The flashlights only provided a narrow beam in which to operate and mine had started to blink in and out.
That smell. So familiar. Musty yet not. A mix of soil and trees. Rain.
I felt around the wall just inside the door. My fingers hit the switch and then a sound. The click of a light turning on. The buzz and glare from the fluorescent light hanging in the middle of the room.
No, not a room. The garage. The back half of the tandem space.
Jeremy’s car. It sat there, in its own space, cut off from the front of the garage bay by a wall of boxes, half covered by a tarp that had fallen off the front.
I blinked but the vision didn’t move.
Marni walked around the front of the car with slow steps. “Is this—”
