Tether (12 page)

Selene changed, then handed her dress and my old clothes to Thomas. “Burn these,” she said. Thomas tossed them into the darkness.

“Later. When you’re good and gone.” He pulled me in by my waist and his lips collided with mine, but the kiss was over too quickly. I stumbled a bit when he released me, and he caught my elbow with a gentle hand.

“Be careful. I’ll see you soon.” He gestured for us to hide, and we slunk back into the shadows as he pressed his finger to his ear and said, “Subjects spotted going north in the southeast corridor of the basement level, headed toward the back exit.” He took off running in the direction opposite the one the other agents had gone in, and a minute later they all ran after him. When everything was quiet and the hallway seemed clear, we made our way to the secret tunnel and found it behind an unmarked door ten feet away.

“Come on,” Selene said. “Let’s go.”

The tunnel was so small we had to crouch. We walked until we spotted a metal ladder leading up to a hatch. I climbed up first, but when I tried to unlock the hatch and push it open, I couldn’t get it to budge.

“It’s too heavy,” I said. “There’s no way one of us by ourselves can lift it.” And there wasn’t space for two people to stand side by side on the ladder. The edge of the hatch was puckered, as if someone had taken to it with a blowtorch.

“I think they sealed it off.” I landed on the dirt floor with a muffled thump.

Selene frowned; frustration rolled along the tether in big, choppy waves. She hadn’t planned for this.

“What do we do now?” I looked around, as if I expected the answer to be written on the walls of the tunnel like ancient hieroglyphics. In a brief moment of lunacy, I became convinced we were going to have to dig ourselves out.

“There’s another way,” Selene said, but a shudder of uncertainty along the tether told me she wasn’t excited to try it. “You’re going to have to be very brave, Sasha. There’s no turning back now.”

“I know.” I couldn’t think of a single thing I was more afraid of than what the General would do to us if he caught us trying to escape.

“Come on,” she said, starting back down the tunnel. She stood in front of the door and closed her eyes, dropping her head and breathing deeply. The tether tightened and swayed as she listened. I closed my own eyes, trying to figure out how she did it, how she read the inaudible vibrations of the universe like a text. I began to see, through her eyes, white lines of light bursting past me like threads on a loom. They spun and looped and crossed over each other, fusing and separating, and as I watched, patterns started to emerge. I couldn’t make sense of them, not as Selene could, but I knew they were there.

“All clear.” Selene yanked the door open and we spilled out into the Labyrinth’s basement, right back where we started. She pointed down a hall that shot off to the right. “That way.”

“It’s really cool that you can do that,” I said as we hurried down one corridor after another. Selene’s confidence was a relief; after all the switchbacks and reversals, I was so turned around I didn’t think I could find anything, let alone another exit.

“I could teach you,” she said, charging through another door. We were standing at the foot of a winding spiral staircase. I craned my neck to see how far it went. “If you want to learn.”

“We’re going up?” That didn’t seem right, unless there was somebody coming to rescue us with a helicopter, which I doubted. “Is jumping out of a window your plan B?”

“Something like that.” She started up the staircase. It creaked and groaned beneath her weight—like much of the basement, it seemed far older than the rest of the Labyrinth.

What?
I shouted over the tether.
I was joking!

We don’t have time for this, Sasha,
Selene said, pausing on a step and glaring down at me.
Come on!

I absolutely did not want to climb that rickety, endless staircase, but I had zero other options. I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other; my hands shook harder with every step I took, and my face felt as if it were on fire. By the third turn, my breathing was so shallow I thought I wouldn’t be able to keep going; black sparks wiggled on the outskirts of my vision. I was going to pass out. I knew the signs. I used to have a reasonable fear of heights, but since my first trip to Aurora, it had blossomed into full-blown acrophobia.

I balled up my fists and forced myself to keep moving, even as my vision blurred and a heavy darkness began to pull at my mind.

“No.” Selene grabbed my hand and yanked me up so we were standing face to face. I could barely see her in the blackness, but the tether was wide open and beating like a heart. “Look at me, Sasha. I know you’re afraid of high places, but you have to control your fear.” Strength and serenity poured through the tether like a balm. I took a deep breath.

“Better?” I nodded. She gave me a tight smile, and we
continued on. I still felt as if I were going to throw up, but at least I managed not to faint.

At the top of the staircase there was a concrete landing and yet another door. I almost didn’t want to know what it was going to lead to. There was no stopping Selene, but even she took a sharp breath when she saw what was behind that door.

It was a town. A normal, average suburban town … at the top of a staircase. Which made absolutely no sense. About twenty feet to our left there was an elevator, and I realized we had to be on the roof of the Labyrinth. But if that was true, then why did it seem as if I’d just stepped onto the set of a classic TV show?

The town was deserted. Once my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I was able to make out shapes, then actual buildings. A road stretched out in front of us. There were no lights, though I could see streetlamps towering in the distance like overgrown shepherd’s crooks. The night thinned further, and I noticed trees swaying in the distance. Fences swam into view, white slats set slightly apart like rows of teeth. From where I was standing, everything seemed eerily perfect. The aurora universalis bent and twirled in the sky above, and in spite of the circumstances, I felt a gust of calm blow through me. It was good to see it again.

The generator must’ve kicked in, because lights popped on as we passed them, as if by some spell, which was a nice touch. I almost believed the fake village capable of magic; it looked and felt like a place straight out of a fairy tale in which a wicked sorceress had condemned everyone to eternal slumber.

“Is this place real?”

“It’s a façade,” Selene said. “Part of the KES Academy. They use it to run training simulations.”

“Did you learn that from another of your scouts’ reports?”

Selene didn’t bother to respond, and I let the matter rest. I was too far in it with her now.

We made our way down the main street, which was lined by full-grown, picturesque oaks. I glanced at the storefronts as we strolled past them. There was a butcher, a baker, and a grocery store; a shoe store and a boutique; a few restaurants; an Irish pub; a hardware store; an antiques shop. There were houses that would never be lived in, cars—or motos, as they called them here—in the driveways, never to be driven. Somewhere in the distance I heard the sound of rushing water.

I was awestruck by how detailed the town was. We passed the office for the
King’s Town Gazette;
there was a bicycle leaning against the tree out front, and its basket held stacks of folded bundles tied with string, waiting patiently for the town’s invisible paperboy.

Eventually, the Stepfordesque landscape gave way to something much grittier and more industrial. All around us, warehouses and office buildings loomed; some were brand-new, and others looked like the kind of places where you might find squatters huddled over trash-can bonfires—broken windows, cracked sidewalks, walls covered with graffiti. I tried to imagine Thomas in this strange, not-quite-real place. I kept forgetting he had been a student at the Labyrinth; for a while, at least, this compound had been his home.

“There it is,” Selene said.

“There what is?”

“The edge of the roof.” She pointed straight ahead, and sure enough, the path we were on dead-ended at a concrete parapet.

“Crap,” I said. “Now what?”

“Now we jump.”

“You cannot be serious,” I said in a low voice. It was too quiet up there on the roof, and there were so many places someone could hide. At any moment I expected a group of KES agents to swoop down on us like a flock of crows. “We’ll be killed!”

“No, we won’t.” She climbed up onto the parapet; it made me so crazy nervous, I had to turn away. “Come and look.”

“No thanks.” I hid my face in my hands. “There has to be another option.”

“Look,” Selene commanded. I gritted my teeth and inched forward to glance over the edge. Directly below us, a river flowed. “We’ll hit the water, not the ground. We’ll be fine.”

“It’s like fifty feet!” I protested. “At this height, it could be water or Jell-O—it’s still going to hurt.”

“What’s Jell-O?”

“Forget it,” I said. “And forget jumping.”

“Then forget everything else,” Selene said. “This is your path out of the Labyrinth; this is your opportunity to do what you came here to do.”

“You don’t care what I came here to do,” I replied hotly. “You care what
you
came here to do.”

“I promise you, Sasha, they’re the same thing,” Selene said. “You know I’m not lying to you. The tether would tell you if I was.”

“How can I be sure of that?” Selene was much better at controlling the tether than I was. She could’ve been using it to trick me.

“You can’t be,” she said. “But you are. The sooner you admit it to yourself, the sooner we can both get what we want.” I thought of Juliana—what did she want now? Whatever it was, it was probably the opposite of what either Selene or I was hoping to achieve. We would have to force her to help
us, which made me a little sick to my stomach. But when the time came, I wasn’t sure that I’d care.

Selene held out her hand. “Do you trust me?”

I hesitated.
To trust other people is to surrender yourself to their will.

“I guess so.” I put my hand in hers. What other option did I have?

“Okay.” She helped me up onto the wall. My stomach swooped as I stared down at the black water.

“We’ll be all right if we do it correctly. The water is very deep here. We need to go in feet first, with our bodies as straight as possible. Can you remember that?”

“Yes,” I said in a small voice. What the hell was I doing? I felt the darkness closing in again, but Selene fed me calm and confidence through the tether. I clutched her hand, squeezing it gratefully. At least if I had to do this, I wasn’t alone.

“Ready?”

“Not at all.”

“Too bad. It’s time.”

Before I could react, before I could pull back or rip my hand out of hers, we were in free fall. My entire body was paralyzed with fear. I closed my eyes as the water rushed up to greet me; just as I crashed into the river and got swallowed up by the waves, a thought fluttered through my brain, but it wasn’t my own.

I’m dying.

The room was cold and damp. It smelled like dirt and mold and something fried, because it wasn’t very far away from the place where they did all the cooking—if you could call it that. She had sampled plenty of Libertas cuisine over the past sixty days, and there was nothing she ached for more from her old life than the wonders of the Castle kitchen and its army of exemplary chefs. She kept wishing someone might come with a bit of soup for her aching throat, but it had been hours since anyone had last checked on her, and she doubted that they cared very much how she was faring.