“Miss English, I don’t have time for this presently. If you would like to have a discussion about your mother’s situation, I’m sure we can locate your father and he will be more than obliged to explain.”
I shake him off. “I don’t need my dad to tell me what my mother’s situation is. I know her situation. And I know yours too,” I say.
His hand slowly sinks down to his side, as if every inch it falls is challenged by its desire to grab me by the throat.
“My situation?” he says. “What would you know of such things, Miss English? Anything your mother has told you is—”
“My mother hasn’t told me anything,” I snap. “But I know what you and my father are working on. The . . . the Solossius. I know what you’re doing.”
It’s a shot in the dark, a wild stab into shadows. But as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I know I’ve hit something. The smirk leaks from his eyes, leaving the expression as hard and shiny as the metal instruments he uses in his experiments.
“You know very little,” he says in a low voice. His eyes dart over my shoulder, looking to see if anyone else is around. I hear my heartbeat in my ears as those eyes settle on mine again. “Do you want to live here forever? Do you want your children to live on this hot, vicious little planet? The key to our freedom is in their bones. If your mother is too shortsighted to see that, then we can—”
“Are you threatening Octavia?” Alma pipes up, her voice shriller than I’ve ever heard it.
“I have no need,” Dr. Albatur says. He reaches for me, but I duck away from him again. The idea of him touching me fills me with rage.
“You will come with me, English,” he says, his eyes piercing blue under the white eyebrows, glinting like a broken star. “I look forward to escorting you to the Council.”
“Get off me!” I yell, my voice bouncing off the walls. “I know what you’re doing back here! And when they find out . . .”
The word “they” hangs between us, vibrating.
His hand drops to his side, and the eyes that had before been metallic flecks are now wholly stone. Staring at those eyes staring back at me, I almost don’t notice the movement of his free hand, inching toward the waist of his lab coat. The fabric shifts, and there’s a tranq gun.
“Alma, grab him!” I scream. I don’t give my body any command but still somehow find myself lunging at him in the empty white hallway. In my periphery, Alma has found a hold on his other arm. The slate he’d been holding tumbles to the hard floor, its screen shattering on impact.
The three of us stand there, struggling awkwardly in the middle of the silent corridor. All I hear is our breathing and the rustling of our clothes against each other. He’s a heavy man: he throws his bulk against me, trying to force me toward the wall. I plant my feet as firmly as I can, using my legs to brace against his weight. Alma, on his other side, claws at his hands, trying to keep them from closing around the tranq gun.
But he frees it from the folds of his lab coat. The weapon shines in the bright white light from the ceiling, and in the struggle its nose shifts toward Alma, whose teeth are bared in exertion.
“No!” I yell, jutting my elbow into Albatur’s side, and there’s a short whuff of breath as my bone connects. I grapple with the tranq gun, can feel its cold metal against my fingertips . . .
Zip!
The gun fires. I don’t know who triggered it: all three of us have our hands on the tranq. Have I been hit? Has Alma? I feel numb. I must have been hit. I wait for the feeling of coldness to spread through my limbs, for my brain to slowly go fuzzy with sleep. It’s not until Albatur grunts and topples heavily to the floor that I realize the tranq dart is buried in his fleshy reddish neck.
Alma and I stand, breathing heavily, staring down at his body. His chest rises and falls laboriously, a rattle rising from his open mouth. On his chest, the gold Council pin winks at us.
“Damn . . . ,” Alma trails off, panting.
“He’s fine,” I say, reassuring myself as much as Alma. “He’s fine, right? He’s just . . . asleep.”
“He’s fine,” Alma repeats, her eyes wide. She bends down to pick up the tranq gun from where it clattered to the floor next to him. What have we done?
“We need to find Adombukar,” she says without taking her eyes off Dr. Albatur’s body. “Before someone finds us.”
There’s the sound of feet striking the hard artificial floor. I’ve stopped breathing. The steps are slow, unhurried. Voices accompany the footsteps, from the direction in which we came. Two whitecoats, slates in hand. They stare at us for a moment, and I know they’re looking from the body on the floor up to me and Alma, standing there holding a tranq gun. They say nothing. One slowly moves to a wall panel and keys in a code.
My ears fill with the alarm’s wail.
CHAPTER 28
For a moment the four of us only stare at one another, the alarm shrieking in our ears, Albatur’s body lying still and white on the floor. Then one of the whitecoats takes a tentative step toward us, and Alma’s arm whips up to point the tranq gun in their direction. I don’t even have time to admonish her before the whitecoat stumbles backward, running into his colleague. They both stand there, Alma pointing the gun unwaveringly, then together they shuffle until they’re out of sight. Alma lowers the gun.
“Alma!” I turn to her, my eyes huge.
“We don’t have time for this!” she yells. “And the next people to come around that corner aren’t going to be so timid.”
I force myself to focus on squeezing the muscle in my mind. It’s more difficult with the alarm blaring all around us: sifting through the noise to find the quiet place in the center of my brain is no easy task. But I find it, struggle to get a grip on it, and then slowly open the tunnel.
The noise of the alarm seems to soften as my mind widens and what feels like light seeps in. This part of the lab is quieter in terms of activity in the tunnel: the rooms that line the walls here are actually empty, with a few exceptions. Dr. Albatur had come from a wall between two of the rooms: there are secrets in these hallways that my eyes can’t see, but I find myself trusting my inner ear to uncover them.
“Anything?” Alma shouts, shifting her weight from foot to foot and looking over her shoulder where the whitecoats had disappeared.
“Not much. Come on!”