Though I’m sure this is all in my head, somehow, it doesn’t make the pain—or the panic—any less real. Mind over circumstances, Eden, I imagine Lonan coaching me. Throw them off.
One by one, I peel them from my limbs, my torso. I grab just under their heads, squeeze as hard as I can, and throw them as far from me as I can manage. There is an invisible barrier at the edge of the platform: when I try to throw them in the water, they stop in midair and slide back to the stony ground.
I am three-quarters of the way across when they begin to strike.
Their fangs pierce deeply, and yet there are no holes and no blood.
Their venom is acid in my veins—fire—and yet my body has not seized up on me.
They kill me, over and over again. And yet I live.
I live, and I fight. There is an invisible barrier on the side closest to the grand entrance, too. When I cross it, I shed my snake skin: they fall in a heap behind me, and I collapse right after them. I am so close. I’ve lived my worst nightmare. But this has been the longest, longest day, and I am famished, and I cannot take a single step more without first catching my breath.
As I meet the cold white tile—a mosaic of tiny jagged pieces—I am vaguely aware of glass breaking. A maroon stain spreads around the two teeth that have clanked against the vial in my pocket for so many months now. I am always careful to keep it in the deepest, most secure part of my pocket, cushioned by a thin strip of leather I stole from my bunkmate at barracks. But the vial has slipped out of the leather, out of my pocket. Onto the unforgiving tile. The vipers must have shifted it.
The image of my father’s teeth in a pool of his blood is more chilling than everything I’ve just experienced. And then I realize.
The floor isn’t tile after all: it’s teeth. Human teeth.
The grand glass door opens. I see a pair of black, polished boots.
“Hello, Eden,” a deep voice says. It echoes from the glass. “I’m going to need you to come with me.”
SIXTY-FOUR
A BLAST OF frigid air-conditioning hits me as soon as we’re through the door, and it is like being transported to the past. Zero Day, when they sorted and branded us, was the last time I felt artificial air. We had only oscillating fans in barracks—during all six infernal months of Texas summer—and quilts in the winter. The ice-cold air makes me realize how much I’ve come to appreciate the natural fluctuations of the weather. What I associate with air-conditioning now are the things I used to have, and the people who took them away.
The man in black boots doesn’t introduce himself. He is definitely the sort who could crush me with little effort. Luckily, he doesn’t. But he does confiscate my knife—I’m surprised at how naked I feel without it.
He carries on a coded, one-sided conversation with someone in his ear who I can’t hear. He guides me through the door, his grip tight on my upper arm. I don’t resist, but only because getting inside has been part of my plan all along. After the viper pit, there’s no way I’m turning down an invitation—even if it is the complicated, mandatory sort. Lonan is in here somewhere. Finnley, too, I assume. Cass and Phoenix? More than likely. I don’t know how I’ll slip away to find them, let alone get to the lab, but I will find a way. I have to.
For all its one-with-the-island exterior, the inside of the lodge is pure sophistication. The stained-concrete floors are the color of warm caramel, with a border made of dark fudge. Everything shines, everything is polished, everything is clean. Even the teeth just outside the front door.
A gleaming copper balcony hugs all three of the foyer’s non-glass walls. There is a second balcony, but it is much smaller, stretching only partially along the wall to my left. Three floors, I note, not two like I previously assumed: the lab must be on the second floor, not the tiny tier at the top. Only the second floor spans the entire building—the third wasn’t visible from the canal.
“This way,” the man says. He pulls me hard to the right, toward an opaque, green-tinted glass door. A wolf-face emblem is etched into its center, the only feature that is completely transparent. The door slides open automatically as we approach it.
Everything I can think to ask, or say, seems too risky to let out. I don’t know how much he knows about what I’m up to—I should probably assume he knows everything. But just in case he doesn’t, I don’t want to give anything away.
“Where are you taking me?” I finally manage. Anyone would ask that, given the circumstances.
“Below,” he simply says. As if this sloping, claustrophobic hallway wasn’t enough to clue me in that we’re headed underground.
The pieces aren’t lining up. The lab is upstairs. As are, I assume, all the ingredients necessary to create their HoloWolf spies. Assuming they want to turn me into a spy, too, wouldn’t they take me upstairs, not underground?
Perhaps I am making too many assumptions.
This hallway is endless. Or maybe, by below, Black Shoes meant he was taking me to the center of the earth. Or the Underworld. The hallway doesn’t turn, and there are no doors. The lighting is comfortable enough, in the way that a doctor’s waiting room is comfortable enough. Unlike a doctor’s office, however, there is no pretense of warmth. No stock-art prints of lilies in gilded frames, no faux plants in need of a good feather-dusting, no bowls full of mints or even handrails to hold on to. It is merely soft white light and cold gray concrete. And it never ends.
Black Shoes touches his tiny earpiece. “Aries, we’re headed your way.” His voice is incredibly deep, and it startles me every time he speaks.
Finally, we come to another sliding glass door, set flush into the right wall. It doesn’t open automatically, and there is no keypad, or any other visible means of gaining access to the room behind it. The transparent image on the glass is not of a wolf this time, but of a ram with giant, spiraling horns.
“This is Gray, requesting entry,” Black Shoes says, pressing at his ear again. Gray.
I hope I won’t have to know his name for long.
We wait. Our hallway doesn’t dead-end here, but it does level out, no end in sight for as far as I can see in either direction. And if this hallway exists, what’s to say it’s the only one? There could be an entire network of hallways.
They’ve been underneath us the whole time. It’s no wonder Finnley vanished from our beach, and from the net—they probably have escape hatches all over the place. People-stealing hatches, rather.
Wherever I am, it does not look like a quick, under-the-radar escape back to the lab is in my future. I make a silent apology to Lonan.
Gray calls in a second, more urgent request. His deep voice is even but intimidating. A fault line waiting to rip.
The green door doesn’t budge.