“They all agreed, back in 1987, on a panic option. They figured if the hammer came down, it’d be some huge simultaneous move against all of them. Their thinking was, if some of them survived, they might have time to call in hired muscle and try to free the others. So they agreed on a timeline. If any were taken alive, they’d endure torture for exactly twenty-four hours, and then kill themselves. They have hydrogen cyanide caplets sewn into their tongues.”
“Christ,” Bethany whispered.
“Six hours from now,” Dyer said, “Garner will bite out the caplet and swallow it. Whoever’s being held with him will do the same. That’ll be it.”
The metallic tapping stopped.
Nothing replaced it.
The minutes drew out.
Travis watched the others try to keep their nerves steady. Paige, sitting next to him, took his hand.
They waited.
He found himself going back to the message from the Breach. The understanding that it was about him, and always had been. Even when he was ten years old.
He couldn’t grasp the concept. Couldn’t get within a mile of it. After a while his mind settled on a more material problem. He understood he was only thinking about it for the distraction it offered. He thought of it anyway:
Even if everything went perfectly in the next few minutes, how would he get inside Border Town in 2016? It would be the best-defended military outpost in the world by then. He’d infiltrated the place once before while it was under someone else’s control, but only with the help of an entity—one of the most useful ever to emerge from the Breach.
His stream of thought came to a dead stop.
He stared at the tunnel wall straight across from him, and then at nothing.
“Holy shit,” he said softly.
The others looked at him, but he said no more. He just let go of Paige’s hand and scrambled to his feet and ran for the stairs.
Chapter Thirty-Six
“What are you doing?” Paige shouted.
Travis was two flights up already. Paige’s voice echoed crazily after him, rebounding off the walls.
Travis looked down as he climbed, sprinting, taking the treads three at a time. Paige was just emerging from the tunnel, Bethany and Dyer behind her.
“Follow me!” Travis yelled. “But not all the way. Stay a hundred feet below the top.”
“They’re going to blow the door anytime!” Dyer yelled.
“I know,” Travis said.
In rough shouts as he lunged upward, he explained the idea. The hope. He glanced down again as he finished, and saw that Paige’s eyes had gone wide. She thought it all through for another two seconds.
“Oh my God,” she said.
Travis turned his attention back to the stairs, and after a moment he heard the others’ footsteps following.
He passed the dark tunnel Dyer had emerged from. Two thirds of the shaft’s height still soared above him. The bright square of Raines’s residence chamber appeared very small yet. He kept running, climbing. His lungs already felt like they were submerged in acid. His thighs and ankles were going numb from the shock of repetitive impacts.
He lost his sense of time going by. Even his sense of steps and flights going by. There was only the top of the shaft, the open square full of halogen light, turning and turning above him, growing by imperceptible degrees.
He thought of the little girl at the Third Notch, insisting her mother tell the story of the ghost.
He thought of Jeannie’s inability to dismiss what the kid was saying. The woman had believed, against all her logic, that there really was something haunting the mine entrances.
They say anyone who goes near starts to hear voices, she’d said, whispering right behind them in the trees. Pine boughs around you start to move like the wind’s blowing, even when it isn’t.
He thought of his own words to Paige, regarding the power players her father had allied with. The notion that Peter might’ve given them Breach technology.
Maybe even things he kept off the books in Border Town.
Travis looked up. The top of the shaft was huge now, filling his vision. Three flights left. Two. One.
He vaulted up over the lip into the chamber without slowing, and crossed the room in a burst, blurring past the wall of monitors. He crashed to a stop against the red metal locker mounted waist high on the wall, lifted the drop-latch and tore open the door.
The locker looked empty.
He reached in at the bottom and found that it wasn’t.
There were very rare entities—kinds that’d shown up only two or three times in all the years the Breach had been open. A few had emerged only once. Travis had always believed—was sure every current member of Tangent had always believed—that the transparency suit was in the latter group.
The feel of nearly weightless fabric bunching in his fist, where only thin air was visible, told him otherwise.