“I WAS SUPPOSED TO stay with you until the others arrived,” Raiff resumed, when he felt Alex was ready. “They’re the ones behind whatever it is you don’t realize you know.”
“Because I don’t. I was an infant at the time. It’s not like they could teach me anything.”
“Since it was clear they weren’t coming,” Raiff said, not bothering to break his train of thought to respond to Alex’s assertion, “all bets were off, and you were better off with the Chins.”
“My parents, you mean,” Alex said, not bothering to hide the indignation in his voice.
Raiff took a deep breath and framed Alex in his stare, seeming to forget Sam was even there. “I reacquired you shortly after—it wasn’t hard once I had a list of facility personnel and connected the dots after learning about your mother. I counted my blessings, knowing this was the perfect scenario to keep you safe, better than any I could possibly have planned. But I never lost track of you and enlisted other refugees from our planet to serve as Watchers, keeping an eye on you as much as possible, Dancer—”
“Alex. Please call me Alex.”
“Alex,” Raiff tried. “We never let you out of our sight, knowing this day would come. Knowing the future depended on it.”
“Refugees?” Sam posed.
“I’m getting to that. Suffice it to say for now that we knew what those who control our planet were going to do to you because they’d already done it to us.”
“Get back to what you said about what I know,” Alex prompted. “About how to defeat whoever killed my parents.”
But before Raiff could, a bell began to jangle.
*
“My early detection system,” he said, leading them through the sprawl of what felt like a grand loft-style apartment, albeit one that came without windows.
“What,” Alex began, “a bunch of tin cans tied on a string?”
“The bells are just the sound I programmed. The system itself is a bit more sophisticated.”
The jangling sounded again.
“We need to get out of here,” Raiff said, leading them straight toward a wall paneled in rich, dark wood.
Some sort of sensor must have picked him up because the wall slid open. They continued on through it, finding themselves in another cavernous space, blackout dark until Raiff flipped a switch somewhere.
Sam screamed.
*
It was a dragon. Red and real and fiery with flames shooting out its mouth. As Alex clutched her, she realized it wasn’t moving and smelled vaguely of sawdust—and that the flames weren’t at all real, but carved out of wood as well.
“Sorry about that,” said Raiff. “I should have warned you.”
Sam nodded, sucking in big deep breaths to settle herself. Here she was, eighteen years old, and she’d just been scared out of her wits by a wooden dragon perched atop a carousel—called Dragon Wheel, according to the sign she could just glimpse upon a flag-topped cover—and featuring all manner of comparable creatures.
These days, though, who could tell what was real and what wasn’t?
Laboratory Z, Sam now remembered the professor had mentioned outside, had been built on the ruins of an old amusement park in the time before Bishop Ranch. Hence the Dragon Wheel and another dozen vintage carousels battling for space, each looking freshly carved and painted.
“Hobby of mine,” Raiff explained briefly. “I restore them to working order. Come on, we need to hurry.”
But before leading them on, Raiff threw a long series of switches that looked like circuit breakers. Instantly the restored carousels whirled into motion, their horses, dragons, and assorted other creatures bobbing up and down with a chorus of instrumentals dueling to be the loudest and most annoying.
“If it’s androids that are coming,” Raiff said, “this will throw off their tracking. If it’s Trackers, it’ll provide cover.”
And with that gunshots rang out, echoing amid the spinning thunder of wooden creatures gaining speed with each twirl of their respective circular homes. Raiff pushed Alex and Sam down low, even with the carousel bases, making them almost impossible to spot, as the hundreds of beautifully restored empty mounts sprang back to life.
More shots resounded as Raiff pulled them on.
“Stay low!” he ordered. “See the carousel way off to the right?”
“Painted Ponies?” Alex asked.
“No, the White Castle. There’s a door just beyond it. That’s our target, an extension of the original escape tunnel. Hope you’re not afraid of the dark.”