“Yes.” Luka’s neutral tone gives nothing away.
The cabbie isn’t so good at neutrality. He shakes his head like we are a couple of fools and shifts the car into drive. “It’s your funeral.”
Our funeral?
What exactly are we getting ourselves into? As we wind our way through the heart of the city, a million questions ping around inside my head. How can we trust Dr. Carlyle? What if he’s leading us somewhere dangerous? Why couldn’t he tell us anything? Who is the captain and what if this whole thing is one giant trap? I pull my coat sleeves over my hands to keep from scratching the inside of my wrist raw.
My window refuses to roll up all the way. The sliver of a crack lets in cold air that sets my teeth to chattering. I want to draw nearer to Luka, snag some of his warmth. Ask him to put his arm back around me like he did when we were walking to the Java Hut. But he makes no move to join me on my side and I’m too chicken to join him on his. So I shiver while the cabbie turns down a street that looks much less like a street and much more like a war zone. My shivering stops, replaced instead by gaping.
The cabbie pulls to a stop at the start of the ramshackle strip in front of what appears to be the only shop still in business. A tattoo parlor with a giant dragon on the grimy window and a neon sign that flickers.
The Dragon Den.
Luka peers outside. “This is it?”
“It’s the address you gave me. You want me to wait here?”
I’m not even sure I want to get out at all.
“No,” Luka says, his tone still casual. “We’re good, thanks.”
“Hope the needles are clean.”
I give the cabbie a weak smile, then step out into the cold. A gust of wind pushes against my body. Luka pays the driver and the cab drives away. Neither of us move until the car turns out of sight. Luka looks down at the slip of paper and motions for me to follow him.
My teeth resume their chattering. “I’m not so sure about this.”
“It’s our only option.” He starts walking down the street. Away from civilization. I lengthen my stride to keep up. The place may have been a business district once upon a time. But now? Now it’s nothing but crumbling buildings—many only half-built—with skeletal frames and busted windows and vulgar graffiti. We stick to the shadows, avoiding the sporadic homeless man or woman warming his or her hands over a garbage can fire. Staying unseen is not difficult. The street is mostly deserted.
The closer we get, the faster Luka walks, as if propelled forward by a force I cannot see or feel. I stumble a time or two on garbage and debris, but Luka is always close by to keep me upright. Finally, he stops. “This is it.”
All I see is a large abandoned warehouse that must have suffered from a fire at one point in its existence. Black stains crawl up what little remains of the walls.
“I feel something.”
“What?”
“Some sort of energy.”
If I weren’t popping pills, perhaps I’d feel it too. It’s strange, these pills. Luka thinks they protect me, but at this moment in time, I feel vulnerable. Blind, even. “Is it good or bad?”
“I’m not sure.” He walks behind me as I maneuver through the rubble—close enough that should I fall, he will be there to catch me—until we’re standing inside a building that is all cement and debris and rows upon rows of empty shelves. Whatever the place used to store is long gone.
“Over here.” Luka leads us to an exit sign above a doorway with no door. It opens into a stairwell. I follow him down to the basement. Down, down, down. Deeper than any basement has any need to be. When we reach the last step, the air is deathly still, interrupted only by the sound of Luka’s breathing and my own heartbeat. Down here in the bowels of this warehouse, I feel like Alice falling through the rabbit hole. Or perhaps I fell down that hole a long, long time ago and I’m only just realizing it now.
The dark corridor leads one of two ways. Luka pulls out the flashlight attachment on his Swiss army knife and shines it down both. The edge of the light’s border reveals nothing but more hallway. He stands there for a moment with his eyes closed, then picks left. The hallway stretches on and on—a never-ending narrow cement prison without a door in sight. A few mice scamper near the edge of the wall, squeaking and skittering. When we finally reach the end, we stand in front of a steel door that isn’t so much red as a faded, brownish pink.
My mouth goes cotton-ball dry. This has to be it.
Luka pivots around to face me, his shoes scritching against the floor. “I need you to promise me that if I tell you to run, you will run.”
“What?”
“Before I knock on that door, I need to know that you will run if I say so.”
I narrow my eyes. “Will you run too?”
“If I can.”
My head begins to shake—slowly at first, then growing in fervor. If Luka is asking me to leave him behind, that is a promise I can’t make. Never.
“Tess.” He takes my hand between both of his and clutches my palm over his chest, dipping his chin so his gaze is more level with mine. “I can’t knock on that door unless I know that you are safe.”
I could never run away from him. Not in a million years. If Luka goes down, I will go down with him. If he refuses to leave me, then I refuse to leave him. But we cannot stand here forever, especially not when our answers might be on the other side of the door. I give him a small nod. Call me Tess, the liar.
Luka makes himself a shield between me and whatever potentially dangerous thing lies before us. He raises his fist and knocks in the way Dr. Carlyle instructed.
Knock, knock … knock, knock … knock, knock …
Nothing happens. No sound. No movement.
Luka knocks again.
More nothing.
My breath escapes like a squeak. All of a sudden, in a moment of stunning clarity, I am overwhelmingly positive that we have lost it. Our marbles have gone and rolled away. We’re standing in the basement of an abandoned warehouse in Detroit, Michigan facing a door that has nothing but empty space on the other side.
Luka wipes his palms against his jeans then raps his knuckles against the steel for the third time.
Knock, knock … knock, knock … knock, knock …
One second, two seconds, three seconds, four seconds pass us by.
I shift my weight, dread sinking into the very soles of my feet. “Luka.”
But he holds up his finger.
A loud click echoes into the hallway. It’s followed by a groan, like rusty metal hinges. And amazingly, miraculously, the door opens. A somber-faced man with impossibly broad shoulders stands on the other side. His wide nose, bald head, and dark eyes are vaguely familiar.
Luka shifts so I am more decidedly behind him. “We’re here to see the captain.”
If the request comes as a surprise, it doesn’t show on the man’s face. His lack of expression reminds me of the sentries that stand guard outside the Queen’s palace in London. It’s the kind of stillness that makes me want to poke him in the ribs, just to see if he’ll respond. “Who sent you?” he finally asks in a voice that is deeply baritone.
“Dr. Carlyle.”
He looks from Luka to me, tells us to wait here, then closes the door in our faces.
I gape at the steel, unable to believe what just happened. I didn’t actually expect that we’d find life on the other side. Yet there it was, in the form of a formidable-looking man who I can’t seem to place, even though I’m positive I’ve seen him before. The rabbit hole just got deeper. What, exactly, have we found? Was that man one of
the others
Dr. Roth told us about? And if he—so foreboding in stature—isn’t the captain, then what can Luka and I expect when we meet the man presumably in charge?
Seconds tick into eternity.
So much time passes that I begin to think I imagined the entire thing. Perhaps I’m experiencing a long, drawn-out hallucination, and when it goes away, I’ll be in that white box of a room at the Edward Brooks Facility with that annoyingly sweet nurse smiling down at me, ready to feed me my medicine. How can I possibly trust a life that’s morphed into something so bizarre?
The door groans open again.
I expect a man larger, more intimidating than the one we met first. I look up and see nothing. Confused, my attention travels down, until it lands on a man sitting in a wheelchair. He has salt-and-pepper hair buzzed short like Luka’s and strange skin—leathery in texture, yet deathly pale in color, as though he hasn’t seen the sun in years. And his legs? The muscle has atrophied. He looks shrunken in his chair—a man with no strength at all. But his eyes tell a different story. They are every bit as captivating as Luka’s, only instead of grass green, they are a silvery blue.
I’ve seen them before. In a picture I’ve been staring at on and off now for several days. I step around Luka, coming into full view. I can’t help myself. It’s not every day you encounter a ghost. “You’re Josiah Aaronson.”
His steely eyes remain steady and unyielding. “Down here, people call me Cap.”
The Hub
J
osiah—or Cap—leads us inside a large common room with high ceilings. My shock gives way to wonder, because there’s electricity. And the vague impression of heat. And people. They stare at Luka and me with faces mirroring my own startled curiosity. Apparently, visitors are not a common occurrence here, wherever
here
is.
Cap wheels further inside the room, then pivots his chair around and spreads his arms wide. “Welcome to the hub.”
I take in the arrangement of shabby couches and beaten-up desks shoved against the walls, a foosball table off in the back and a sizeable television attached to more wires than any television ought to require near the front. I feel like a five-year-old in a gadget store. My fingers tingle with the need to touch and explore. “What do you do here?”
“Among other things, we live.” Cap nods at the man who greeted us. He stands off to the side of the door with his feet shoulder-length apart, muscular arms crossed in front of his muscular chest. “That’s Gabe.”
“Wait—Gabe? As in Gabriel Myers?”
If my knowledge of his full name comes as a surprise, Gabe hides it well. His face doesn’t even twitch. Luka takes my hand and gives it a short squeeze, as if to silence my disbelief. But I can’t help myself. The discovery has my pulse racing. This is Josiah and Gabriel, two of the three we’ve been looking for. Two of the files marked with TG.
I glance again at the others—their faces every bit as pale as the moon, wearing clothes every bit as worn as the furniture—each one still standing in place as though they froze as soon as they heard the knock on the door and have yet to thaw. Is the third file—a teenage girl named Claire with a mother all too desperate to find her—somewhere among them?
“We seem to be at a disadvantage,” Cap says. “You know us. We don’t know you.”
Luka steps forward and shakes the captain’s hand. “I’m Luka. This is Tess.”
“We met your wife,” I say.
Cap’s eyebrows creep up his forehead.
“She thinks you’re dead.”
“Tess,” Luka mutters.
Josiah’s face tics—with regret, maybe? It comes and goes so quickly I can’t tell. All the questions that have been gathering over the past several days expand in my brain like soda in a shaken can. The growing pressure has busted apart my self-control, and my shyness too. “We went to your house.”
Cap narrows his eyes. “Why?”
“We’re looking for answers.”
“And protection,” Luka adds.
He scratches the whiskers beneath his chin, studying Luka first, then me. I catch myself pulling my shoulders back, as if to make my body taller, more impressive-looking. “I can sense the gifting strongly in you,” he says to Luka. “But I sense nothing in you.”
The gifting.
I mouth the two words in silent awe. It’s official. These are the others Dr. Roth was talking about. Against impossible odds, we found them. I feel like a kid who just reached base in a game of tag, temporarily safe from the chaser. Only multiply the relief by a thousand. I want to melt into a puddle of it at the captain’s wheels.
“She’s taking medicine that masks it,” Luka says. “It was the only way I knew how to protect her.”
Cap cocks his head. For some reason, he looks very intrigued by Luka’s confession.
“We were clients of Dr. Roth.”
Movement in the periphery of my vision has me looking away from the captain’s reaction. One of the onlookers slips closer, either braver or more curious than the others. A baby-faced girl with obsidian eyes and dusky skin and black, shiny hair cropped short to her chin, like mine. Besides Gabe, she’s the only other person in the room with some color.
Cap spots the girl, too, and waves her closer. “Rosie, this is Luka and Tess. Luka and Tess, this is Rosie, in case you don’t already know her. She’s the hub’s youngest resident.”
Rosie lifts her chin. “I’ll be twelve in five months.”
Cap chuckles, then calls the others over to join us. There are three besides Rosie. Two of them—a man and a woman—are old enough to sport a fair share of gray in their hair, but don’t look quite as old as Cap. The man is NBA tall and gives new meaning to the phrase
as skinny as a beanpole
. The woman has a pointy head and bushy hair that seems to grow at a thirty-degree angle. The two features together give her a triangular silhouette. I recognize them. Not from any files of Dr. Roth’s, but from a news report from last night. According to the police, they are highly deranged and dangerous criminals at large in the city. If I hadn’t seen the news back in California, claiming me to be the very same thing, I might be afraid. The news reporter referred to them as Mr. and Mrs. Scott and Winona Jamison, but Cap introduces them as Sticks and Non. The third is a boy who looks to be a year or two older than me. The fluorescent lighting gives his shaggy hair a ginger-like hue. He looks at us with a healthy dose of amusement, like our unexpected drop-in has brightened his day.
“And this is Link,” Cap says.
“
Link
?”
My reaction to the name makes the boy smile. Seriously though, the name’s are weird down here. Non, I get. It’s short for Winona. Sticks, I’m assuming, has something to do with the stork-like stickiness of his legs. Link, though, I can’t figure out, unless it’s the kid’s last name.