Griffin opens his mouth, but Zoey cuts him off.
“It’s a good idea.” Zoey looks at me. “You sure you’re up for it?”
“Yes.” I don’t hesitate. I need to do something.
Griffin unshoulders the dish towel, wringing it between his hands. “Nico wouldn’t like this.”
“Nico’s not here,” Zoey counters.
Benji comes down the stairs, rubbing his eyes under his glasses. “Technically, DJ is in command after Nico,” he says. “You should ask her.”
DJ says yes, on the condition that I turn around if I start feeling like crap. I feel like crap anyway, so I might as well feel like crap in the field.
We go in the morning. I bring Bob for emotional support. If he starts coming on missions, I’m going to have DJ teach me how to sew him a doggy jumpsuit.
The first location is forty minutes away, an old psychiatric facility in West Virginia that closed in 1987 after a patient abuse controversy. Griffin and Benji disappear inside while Zoey pulls up the body cam feed from the passenger seat. I get the delayed realization that Benji is going into the field without Nico. I wonder if he changed his mind about only shadowing Nico after Donny died, or after Nico and I were almost killed. If I were Benji, I’d want to make sure I was as prepared as I could be, in case I could stop anyone else from getting hurt.
I watch with my heart in my throat as Benji and Griffin move through hallways that look like they have the right tile. It all looks different during the day and, you know, when I’m notrunning for my life. But as soon as they go to the lower level, I know immediately it’s wrong.
“It’s too cramped,” I say, pointing over Zoey’s shoulder at the image of the hallway.
We move on to the next location, but it’s not right either. By the third building, I’m starting to worry that my memory isn’t reliable. The panic and fear could have muddied everything until I invented details that don’t exist.
The fourth location is an old state hospital in Maryland, near the highway. Five stories of red brick and broken windows, surrounded by a chain-link fence. Even though it’s winter, it’s easy to tell how overgrown the grass is and that it’s been matted down. There are a couple of speed bumps in the parking lot.
Griffin and Benji push through a gate in the fence while I watch the feed, pressing my lips absentmindedly to Bob’s neck.
Griffin uses a pry bar to break the lock on the door. The camera feed bounces as Griffin walks, showing glimpses of graffitied walls and old tiles that crunch under their boots. They find a stairwell, and a cold rush comes over me when I glimpse faded red lettering on the door.
Griffin’s voice comes through tinny over the comms speaker. “Going down.”
Just because it has faded lettering on the door doesn’t mean it’s the same place. They turn on their flashlights as they descend the staircase, Benji mumbling something too quiet for me to make out as each step takes them deeper. The paint on the walls is peeling in places. The camera pans down the wide corridor lined with empty door frames on both sides. They round a corner past an old circulation desk.
I grip Zoey’s arm. She straightens in her chair as she reports into the comms mic.
Morrow abandoned all his trial locations after he was done. He never reused them. But all the unpredictable things he’s donesince he died keep flashing through my mind, and every part of me wants to scream at them to get out of there.
One flashlight pans across a dark hallway. Light scatters back like stars in a night sky. Shards of glass litter the floor. The flashlight pauses on the streaks of dried blood on the concrete.
Benji pushes open the door into the main playing area. Tile covers the floor in that light gray and white checkerboard pattern. Square columns stand at regular intervals. The pole stands in the center with its chains coiled on the ground. In the corner of the screen, barely visible in the sweep of the body camera, a tiny red light blinks.
I scramble over the center console, pulling the mic down from over Zoey’s head and pressing the button. “Griffin, Benji, get out of there.”
What if Morrow is watching right now? What if he’s in there, waiting in some corner for Griffin and Benji to walk past? The hospital is huge. There are a million places to hide.
“Eden, don’t look at this,” Griffin says.
Why aren’t they running out?
I go to yell at them again, but Zoey calmly takes the mic out of my hand and tells me to sit down. I feel stupid for forgetting the cameras, especially when Nico told me he guessed there were more outside the playing area.
Griffin and Benji leave the playing area. My eyes are glued to the screen as the world gets hazy at the edges. They find the control room. Morrow had one computer screen on a table in front of a cushioned rolling chair. The screens are off. An empty bag of chips is crumpled in the corner.
Griffin uses a residue scanner across the chair. The LED flashes an angry red.
“He was here recently,” Griffin says.
“Considering this ectoplasm has begun to crust over, I’d wager it was within ten and twelve hours,” Benji adds.
