Quake (18 page)

Wade looked as if he was ready to take the bait, jaw clenching against those high cheekbones, and Faith worried for Jade.

“You could just let us have Jade and we could leave. We'd do that,” Faith said, turning to Clara. “We'd leave and never come back.”

This was a lie, of course. Faith had no intention of allowing Hotspur Chance to go ahead with any kind of plan that involved mass murder on a global scale.

Clara moved a little closer, the four of them now all in a gang near the entrance to the elevator.

“I really wish you wouldn't have sent my Tablet halfway to the ocean,” Clara said, inching closer to Faith. “Always with the annoying gestures, Faith. One day you're going to push me too far.”

Faith did some stepping forward of her own, coming face-to-face with the person she hated most in the world.

“You kill Jade, I kill you. She better stay alive.”

Clara flinched for a split second, overcome by the supremacy in Faith's voice, but then she turned to the elevator and rested a hand on a revolver Faith knew was loaded with titanium bullets.

“After you, Princess. Hotspur Chance wants to see you, so he's going to see you. After that all bets are off.”

Faith had thought it was impossible to hate two people this much, but looking back and forth between Wade and Clara nearly took her breath away. The heat of her frustration very nearly made her forget all about Jade and pick these two up off the ground, slam their heads together, and bury them in the forest outside the zoo. She turned to Dylan for the briefest of seconds and saw that he was staring at her.

“Don't give them any power over you,” he said, and she knew exactly what he meant. She had to keep her cool. She couldn't become like them, vengeful and mean.

Wade demanded both the backpacks and Dylan and Faith had no choice but to give them up. There went the Vulcan and the Tablets and the Mike and Ikes.

“You know putting us both down there is like trying to hold a couple of nukes, right?” Dylan asked as Wade used his mind to force the elevator doors open. “If things get crazy, you're going to wish you weren't trapped underground with me. With
her
.”

When Dylan said “with her” he was looking at Faith and his meaning was crystal clear:
I can't control Faith Daniels. No one can.

“Down the shaft, pretty boy,” Wade said. “You don't keep the old man waiting. It makes him unpredictable in the worst possible way.”

A few seconds later, they were all four floating down into the side of a mountain, 260 feet into the earth in a shaft lit by the light of Wade's Tablet. The elevator was missing, but the slack cables remained, dancing slowly back and forth as they brushed past. Clara was above them, flying down last, but Wade was floating down at the same level as Faith and Dylan.

“He's a single pulse, you guys know that,” Wade said. “So we can't let you in the same room with him. Too risky. He's got questions, you've got answers. Just remember: we've got the girl, and she's one thought away from a broken neck.”

Wade let the cold efficiency of those words sink in as he stared at Faith and Dylan.

“When this is done, we're finishing our business. The four of us. No running, no backing down. Right, Clara?”

Clara drifted down into Faith's line of sight and tapped her hand on the gun in its holster.

“I'm up for that.”

So that was how it was going to be, Faith thought. Regardless of how things played out with Jade and Hotspur, these two idiots wanted a fight to the death in the service of their own egos. With the entire Western State at stake, hundreds of millions of people, all they could think about was being the two top dogs in whatever rubble remained.

They continued on, farther under the surface of the earth, landing on a platform where a sleek train sat under a row of yellow lights. Faith thought again about whether it would be worth it to end it all right here, right now. She could pick up the train with her mind, bash it over and over again into the ceiling overhead, send a million pounds of dirt down on top of them all. Jade, if she was down here, would perish. Hotspur Chance, Wade, Clara, Dylan. They'd all be gone. But the threat, whatever it might be, would also be gone. And Meredith had made the threat sound as if it was bound to take a lot more than a few lives.

“You mind telling us where we're going?” Dylan asked.

They boarded the train, and Clara talked.

“Long before we arrived on the scene, he built this place. It's kind of insane. You'll see.”

Faith thought about saying Hotspur Chance had also made sure everyone who knew about it was dead, but that might have revealed too much. How would Faith know a thing like that? Because Hawk was on the inside, gathering data.

The train pulled away, gliding on a track as if it was still in service and always had been. A moment later the train stopped abruptly, lurching everyone forward.

“What the hell?” Wade asked. He tapped something into his Tablet. “Train stopped. What's up?”

Faith looked at Dylan.
Hawk did that. He stopped the train. He's getting closer.

A pause, and then a voice as the train started moving again.

“Talk like an adult and people will treat you like one,” Hotspur said, his slithery voice echoing through the nearly empty train.

Wade obviously couldn't stand Hotspur Chance.

“Moving again. There soon. Hang tight.”

Wade looked at the rest of the group as if he was really sticking it to the man.

“What are you, nine?” Clara asked. “It serves no purpose to piss him off like that.”

“Oh, there's a purpose. It makes me feel better.”

Clara rolled her bright blue eyes as the train came again to a stop and the doors opened. It appeared to have stopped in a location that was not a regular destination, but instead a ladder leading down to a service point.

Wade went first, then Dylan, Faith, and finally Clara.

“Looks like Wade's running the show,” Faith shouted up to Clara, hoping to get further under Clara's skin and drive a wedge between her and Wade. Clara responded by putting her boot into Faith's head. Faith's neck snapped sideways then back again. The narrow way down was dark and full of shadows, so she couldn't see whether Clara was smiling.

“Cheap shot,” Faith said.

“How about you shut your mouth and keep moving?” Clara said.

When they reached the bottom Wade flung open a white door and motioned everyone inside. A long corridor awaited them with openings along the sides. Faith saw cameras moving near the ceiling.

He's watching us
, she thought.

Hotspur's voice emerged from unseen speakers. He seemed to be everywhere and nowhere all at once.

“Almost there, just a little farther and we're finally going to have a chance to meet. I've been looking forward to this, haven't you?”

The thing about having a pulse or a second pulse was that it didn't protect you from being moved or attacked. It was for this reason that Faith and Dylan both found themselves being hurled with all the power Clara and Wade had between their two minds. Faith went one way, Dylan the other, pushed through two opposite openings in the walls. As soon as she regained her balance, ready to retaliate, a door slammed down from the ceiling, locking Faith inside. A small opening, maybe four inches square, was the only view of the outside world.

Faith sensed something bigger was wrong almost immediately. She felt dizzy and weak and, most of all, as if a spear was being thrust through her forehead. She buckled over in pain.

“I hope you like the accommodations,” Clara said. “It was nice of you to give us a few weeks before finding this place. Gave us time to do some modifications and upgrades. Titanium walls, very expensive. Somehow I doubt you appreciate it, though.”

The feel of so much titanium, the one physical weakness Faith had, was overpowering. She felt feeble in the knees and the pain in her forehead felt like a vise clamping down tighter and tighter.

“Dylan, you okay?” Faith's eyes had become light sensitive and she felt as if she were staring into the sun. “Dylan? Answer me!”

“We've got things to do,” Wade said from outside Faith's cell. “Afraid we have to be going now. But we'll see you both again. You can definitely count on that.”

Clara didn't say anything; she just dragged the gun filled with titanium bullets along the wall as she walked away.

When their footsteps had dissolved into a distant echo, Faith slumped down onto the floor and closed her eyes.

We need a miracle.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

The cold titanium wall felt like something prehistoric and evil against the small of Faith's back. Like an ancient voodoo, it sucked at her bones and her muscles, drawing energy away into a humming metal death machine. That's what the titanium felt like, most of all: a death machine. She could hear it vibrating into her mind, loosening the screws, working its way up and down her vertebrae. She felt the room moving, as if she were on a boat at sea, and decided she might do better floating in the open air of the cell. As soon as she was no longer touching the walls Faith felt less as if she was going to throw up, a little more herself, and yet she knew already:
If I stay in here too long, it will end me
.

“Dylan, are you okay?”

There was no answer, so Faith floated closer to the small square in the door.

“Dylan?”

His Dylan's face appeared in the small window opposite the hall, and a wave of emotion crashed into Faith.

“I'm here.”

She wanted so badly to hold it together, to show how strong she could be in the most difficult of all situations. But something about the possibility of losing her soul mate, her one and only, her anchor—it cut through Faith like a band saw ripping into a two-by-four.

“I think we might have messed up here,” Faith said, not so much dejected as perplexed by the swift turn of events. “I thought it would be different. I thought we'd overpower them if we had to or . . . I don't know what I thought. Clooger is probably turning over in his grave.”

“It's not over until it's over,” Dylan said, his voice showing more optimism than Faith thought the situation called for. “Although I am having a little bit of concern about the floor in here.”

Faith squinted, peering across the darkened hall.

“Are you . . . not standing?”

Dylan looked down, then back at Faith, and they locked eyes.

“Can't stand. The cell is filling up with liquid concrete. Looks like it's going pretty fast, too.”

Faith thought of what Clara had said—
modifications and upgrades
—and realized it wasn't just her cell that had been altered from whatever it had once been. She thought of how it would feel to find herself up to her neck in liquid titanium, every part of her body encased in the one thing that could undo her. The idea terrified her. It made her wonder how Dylan was holding it together.

“Clara!” Faith yelled without thinking. “Answer me!”

God, how she hated that girl, and Wade, too, hated how they were so powerful and how they loved to hold it over everyone who stood in their way. If these two ever ruled the world, the world was going to be pinned under the heels of their cruel boots. For some reason she couldn't stop blaming it all on Clara, because she knew it was her twisted mind that would have come up with cages like these. She would have wanted Faith to watch helplessly as Dylan drowned in a lake of stone. She would want Faith to watch when the door of the cell was pried open and Dylan was encased in solid rock, his head the only thing sticking out at the top, eyes vacant and frozen.

“Take it easy, Faith,” Dylan chided. “Save your energy. It's a big cell. We've got time to figure something out before I'm in any real danger. And try not to say anything if this turns into a Cold War interrogation scenario. Hold firm. We've got allies.”

“Do you now?”

The voice came from the hallway just outside the angle where Faith could have seen who it was. But she knew. She'd heard that voice before, sandpapery and a little on the low side, like a smoker twenty years into a good long nicotine run. It was a slippery, conniving, soothing, terrible voice.

It was the voice of a devil.

“I would very much like to hear about
that
,” Hotspur Chance went on. He appeared then, right there in the hallway, unarmed and alone.

Faith didn't hesitate, not this time. She still didn't know exactly what this monster was planning, but she knew how many lives were at risk. She had made the mistake of not striking when she could one too many times. She put the power of her mind into one thought:
Put this guy's head through a wall
.

Suddenly the vision of Hotspur Chance glitched, like the VHS tape of
The Shining
back home when the tracking went out of whack and lines danced across the old TV. Hotspur's lips curled into an unfriendly smile and he lowered his chin. His eyes narrowed and darkened and he stared at Faith.