Ariane returned her attention to the sheet and the body it covered.
I held my breath, not sure if it was out of anticipation or dread at seeing a familiar face. If it was Jacobs under there, I’d celebrate as surely as Ariane. Though that would also drastically raise the odds that Emerson was beneath one of the other sheets.
But when Ariane flipped the cover back, the man was a stranger, dressed in the security team uniform. The bright red GTX logo on his sleeve identified him as one of Jacobs’s men.
She dropped the sheet in place and repeated the same process for the corpse across the hall. Another GTX guard. So was the one after that.
But the next three were Laughlin’s guys.
Six security guards dead, three from GTX and three from Laughlin.
Weirdly, though, only two of the sheets had blood on them, the men having been shot. The other guys were just…dead.
What had happened here?
Ariane frowned and left the last of the bodies to step toward the door to the Meadowlands room door.
“Get in, get in now,” I said, panting. I had no idea what her endurance was, but I knew mine, what little I had, was fading fast. A quick glance back showed movement at the far end of the hall, someone working his way loose from the hold one of us had put on him.
She paused long enough to wave her hand at the guns, still floating in the air a few feet from us, directing them into a tall green can with a recycling symbol on the other side of hall. They landed inside with a cascade of echoing clangs and thumps. Then she tugged on the silver doorknob with a finger, but it didn’t so much as budge. To my complete and utter shock, she then lifted her hand, made a fist and…
…knocked. “It’s Ariane,” she said.
“What the hell?” I spluttered.
But the door silently popped open a few inches and stayed that way, even though there was no sign of a hand.
Ariane pulled the door back just far enough to squeeze through, locking her hand around my wrist and pulling me through after her.
As if I’d want to be left behind in the hall.
But as it turned out, it wasn’t me she was worried about making that decision.
The door closed behind me with a decisive snap, leaving no alternative for escape, even if I would have wanted to.
I hadn’t actually considered what we might find inside the room. Some combination of Jacobs, Laughlin, and St. John, in states ranging from alive to dead and somewhere in between. I suspected the Committee would be long gone.
In that one aspect, I was right. There was no sign of the Committee. But everything else was pretty much beyond anything I could have imagined.
The table that had been Emerson’s this morning was flung across the room, leaning against the one that had been Jacobs’s, and broken glass and the shattered remains of laptops sprayed across the floor.
In the far right corner, I found Emerson, sitting on the floor, his knees drawn up to his chest like a kid sent to the naughty corner in kindergarten, only in this case it looked far more like a refuge than a punishment.
He saw me watching him and gave a tiny shake of his head, as if to tell me to get out or vehemently disagreeing with this version of reality.
Yeah, right there with you.
The table that had been Laughlin’s, on the right side of the room, had been upended, the legs sticking up in the air now, with more of the same kind of destruction and debris around it. It looked like a small, very specific tornado had torn through the room.
Which, from one perspective, wasn’t all that far from the truth.
In the center of the room, in what had been the open space between the tables and was just now empty space in general, Dr. Jacobs knelt on the floor, his hands bloodied as he applied pressure to a leg wound on one of his guards. The only living one left, actually.
The last Laughlin Integrated guard was dead at his employer’s feet, merely a foot away.
But no one was paying any attention to any of this.
Because Dr. Laughlin, his face a mask of effort, his hair rumpled, and blood splattered across the front his white lab coat, held a gun trained on someone else.
There in the middle of the room, her back angled to the corner so she could see anyone approaching, stood a very familiar figure.
Her white shirt was bloodied on the left side, and that arm hung slack at her side, as though it were barely connected to her body. More like something she’d picked up by brushing too close, a dead leaf or a piece of lint.
Blood dripped down her left hand, plinking into a growing puddle on the floor where the carpeting had already absorbed as much as it could hold. But her right hand was raised against Laughlin, clearly the reason for his preternatural stillness and the only thing keeping him from firing.
The room crackled with an electric tension between them, as if lightning might still strike.
“It took you long enough,” Ford said to us through gritted teeth.