He’s much taller than me, but I’m still tall. I have to stand on my tiptoes but I can just about graze the smooth metal with my fingertips.
“Press it,” he says.
When I was kid, my favorite thing to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon once we got home from church was to watch Indiana Jones with my father. I have awful images of some terrible booby trap springing into action if I do what I’m told and hit this switch, but I know that’s ridiculous. Rebel wouldn’t be telling me to do it if it would be bad for me. My nerve endings still crackle when I press my fingers against the catch, though. A loud clicking noise cuts through the tense silence, making me jump. I jump even more when the wall—what I thought was the wall—swings back to reveal yet another door. This one is made of steel, looks reinforced, and has no visible handle or keyhole. To the left, a narrow keypad sits on the wall, glowing softly in the darkness.
“Watch,” Rebel tells me. “The code is One Seven Six Three.” He punches the code into the keypad as I observe, my arms wrapped around my body. I’m starting to feel really shaky. Maria Rosa’s arrival and Raphael’s presence is catching up with me. I feel like the world is crashing down on my head and I have no means of stopping it, of holding back the tide.
The keypad is silent as Rebel presses the keys. He hits the green enter button and the door chunks and releases. Rebel doesn’t allow it to open properly, though. He closes it and holds his hand palm-up to the keypad, giving me a tight-lipped smile that holds absolutely no humor. “Now you,” he says. “Show me you remember the code. I need to know you can open this door.”
He’s incredibly intense. He’s clearly so stressed he’s not really functioning, and yet at the same time there’s an eerie calm resting over him. It’s way more frightening than if he were simply raging mad. I slowly punch in the access code to the door and hit the green button afterward, just as he did, and the door swings open.
“Okay. Good. Follow me.” Rebel moves through the door into the pitch-black darkness beyond. I hesitate a second, but then follow behind him, unwilling to push him even a little while he’s in this state. The heavy steel door closes behind us, and suddenly I feel like I’m trapped in a tomb. A dark, impenetrable tomb that I have no way out of. My chest tightens ever so slightly, the first strains of panic setting in, my heartbeat noticeably quickening.
“Rebel?”
His arms are immediately around me, his chest up against mine, his lips pressing against my forehead. He holds me in the dark and breathes. I can feel the impossible speed of his own heart beating against mine, and I know he’s having trouble holding himself together. So strange. He always seems so unflappable, like a bomb could go off right next to his head and he’d still be able to think straight.
“Fuck, Soph,” he whispers. “Just…I can’t…”
My cheeks burn, my head swimming as he draws me even tighter and crushes me against his body. Is…is he this freaked out because of me? Surely not. Despite Maria Rosa, Raphael, Hector, dead Bron and dead Rico, I’m selfish enough to enjoy this fleeting moment in the dark. My fear has completely vanished. With his arms around me, it feels as though nothing bad could ever reach me here. Such a bizarre feeling.
“If something like this happens again, Sophia, this is where you come. You hear me? You come straight here. Promise me.”
“But where—”
“Promise me!”
“Okay, yes. I swear it. I promise.”
Rebel draws back, pulling in a deep breath. He lets me go then, and the fear returns with the force of a freight train. It’s amazing to me that I can be this terrified as soon as his presence is gone, and yet no more than a second ago I felt so safe.
Rebel moves around in the dark, not fumbling, apparently sure of his surroundings, and then the blackness vanishes as a strip light flickers on over head, casting a stark white light over everything inside…inside the huge office we’re now standing in. It’s immediately obvious whose office this is. On all four walls, white board material has been scribbled over from the floor to the ceiling; nearly ninety percent of the scribble is mathematical in nature, and absolutely none of it makes sense. Well, not to me, anyway.
Two large desks, one at either end of the room, are piled with papers, and some seriously expensive looking computers sit among the madness, apparently gathering dust. In between them on the far wall, a huge server stands like a tall, dormant monolith, all dark metal and LEDs that remain unlit.
Rebel watches me as I walk around, taking in the weirdness of the place. He leans against the tidier of the desks—I assume it’s his—observing me like I’m some sort of endangered zoo exhibit. “What is this place?” I ask him.
“This place is bomb proof. This place can withstand all hell breaking out around it, and no one will be able to get in. This is where you’re safest if something bad goes down.”