At the end of the narrow hallway, the metal door marked CELL BLOCK A was wide open. Four floors of barred doors rose above and around us. Chain-link fencing covered the walls and the ceiling, creating one enormous cage. Trash, torn strips of bedsheets, and scraps of orange fabric littered the floor.
Something flickered at the end of the room—a blurry man in a jumpsuit the same fluorescent shade of orange. He was pushing a mop along the floor, when his head jerked up like he heard a sound from above. A second later, another hazy form fell backward over the top railing. The man with the mop screamed silently and tried to shield himself, crumpling beneath the weight of the falling man.
They both disappeared, and within seconds the man was pushing the mop again, the gruesome scene repeating itself in a never-ending loop.
I squeezed Priest’s arm. “A residual haunting?”
“See, you’re a pro now.”
Even though I knew the men were nothing more than energy—handprints on a dirty window reaching out for help—the sight of the fall still made my pulse race.
Empty cigarette packs and burnt paper crunched under my boots as we followed Lukas to a door at the north end of the cell block. It opened into a hallway, part of the labyrinth of concrete tunnels burrowing through the guts of the prison.
Lukas found the northeast corner easily, a laundry room with industrial washers and dryers lining the back wall and a few wheeled laundry carts. More blood stained the floors beneath the rusted white machines.
Alara closed her eyes and ran her hand along the wall. “I don’t think the Shift is in here.”
Priest lifted an eyebrow. “Since when can you tell that from touching the wall?”
“It’s just a feeling.”
Lukas checked behind another washer. “I’d feel better if we checked the machines anyway.”
Alara rolled her eyes and opened one of the dryers. She seemed more intuitive since the mark had appeared on her wrist, the same way Priest seemed braver after he earned his.
Did the marks change them, or did they change because of the marks? I wanted to ask, but the sting of envy stopped me.
“There’s nothing here,” Jared said. “We should go up to the second floor. There was a stairwell at the end of the hall.”
Priest jumped onto the first grated-metal step. “We’re getting warmer.”
“I’m not.” My breath came out in white crystalline puffs.
The temperature continued to drop dramatically every few steps, and when we reached the second floor, I understood why. The words Death House were spray painted in red on a windowless white door directly above the laundry room.
I rubbed my hands over my arms. “What do you think it means?”
“It’s the room where they keep the electric chair,” Priest answered. “In some prisons, electrocutions were held in a separate building. They called it the Death House.”
“Look.” Alara pointed at the gray metal door next to us. Words were written on this one, too:
Darien Shears
“That must have been his cell,” Lukas said.
“Who?”
“The prison serial killer. A local war hero convicted of killing this girl who turned up dead after she left a bar with him. Shears swore he didn’t do it, but the jury didn’t believe his story and sentenced him to life. After a few weeks, prisoners started dying—stabbed in the shower, strangled on the yard, suffocated in their sleep. Shears confessed to all the murders even though there were no witnesses.”
Alara raised an eyebrow. “A serial killer with a conscience?”
“Who knows?” Lukas nodded at the white door at the end of the hallway. “But they executed him in the electric chair right there.”
Shears’ cell faced the Death House. If he looked out the tiny square window of his cell, the only thing Darien Shears could see was the room where he would take his last breath.
Jared peered through the square cut into the metal and froze. “No way.”
“What?” Alara angled for a better look.
He unbolted the door, and the hinges groaned. The room was empty, but it didn’t feel that way because every inch of the walls was covered with words, symbols, and pictures, overlapping in a dizzying pattern. In the center of the madness, one drawing stood untouched by the edges of the others.
The Shift.
It looked exactly like the one in Priest’s journal, though clearly drawn by a different hand.
Priest pushed his way past Jared and stood in front of the enormous sketch. He reached out and held his hand over it, without touching the smooth concrete on which it was rendered. “It’s not possible.”
“Maybe Shears found the casing hidden in the prison,” Lukas offered. The fifth and final piece of the Shift was the casing itself, the cylinder into which the four disks slid.
Priest wasn’t convinced. “But how did he know what the disks looked like? This sketch shows the Shift assembled.”
Lukas shook his head. “I don’t know.”
As I scanned the walls, my mind memorized the pictures and symbols automatically. My eyes rested on the words scrawled over and over above the drawing of the Shift, words I knew I’d never forget: THE SPIRIT IS NOW AT WORK IN THE SONS OF DISOBEDIENCE.