AS THE HELICOPTER CRESTED THE LAST OF THE TREES AND DESCENDED slowly into the open field, a strange thrill stole through me. The last time I’d seen this place it was a smoldering wasteland—acres of charred grass and sandy earth melted into a glassy crust. Nate’s truck had been a twisted hunk of metal, and the scene had been lit by the colored, flashing lights of cop cars and fire trucks.
Now it was as if none of that had ever occurred. The field was a neatly mowed lawn of slightly yellowed summer grass. The fence around the perimeter was tall and topped with a generous swirl of razor-sharp barbed wire, but that was obviously no obstacle to the helicopter. There was a small road cutting through the pasture, which led to a single, lonely cinder-block building with a corrugated tin roof that glinted orange in the light of the setting sun. The place seemed deserted.
Next stop: Omega City.
Dani maneuvered the helicopter toward the ground, concentrating intently as we bobbed and dipped. She was aiming for a relatively flat patch of grass near the building, but clearly wary of skimming too close to the structure with our blades. I clenched my jaw as we jolted and slid into a landing.
“Sorry.” She cut off the engine and lifted her headset. “Need more than twelve flights’ worth of practice to stick the landing.”
One by one, we spilled out of the helicopter. I pulled back my hood and took a deep breath. The air smelled dusty, like old fires. Or maybe that was only my imagination. The Shepherds had long ago bulldozed the burnt remains of trees and turned over all the earth. Of course, rocket fuel was probably always hazardous to your health. I kicked at the grass.
Mom looked around, her face creased with worry. “This is more remote than I was expecting. Maybe we’d better take the children to a safe location first.”
Dani blinked at her and crossed her arms. “Where are you suggesting?”
“A police station?”
She rolled her eyes. “And again, I ask how you’re going to explain this to them. Do you really think they’re going to let me just walk out of there after I fly a stolen Guidant helicopter into their parking lot? That they aren’t going to call Guidant first thing to try to get to the bottom of this? If we go to the police, we’ve lost any chance of contacting Underberg.”
“Okay, then what about the Nolands’ house? We could leave the children there.”
“Sure,” Dani said, sarcastic. “Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Noland, can you babysit these guys for a while? We have to go rescue your son Nate from the evil scientists who shot him into space. That’ll be a quick conversation.”
“No, it won’t,” said Howard matter-of-factly.
Mom rubbed the heels of her hands over her forehead. “There has to be an option. This is madness. I can’t—they’re children. The last time they were here, they almost drowned.”
“I’d say Omega City is in much better shape now,” Dani said.
“And so are we,” Savannah pointed out. “My arm’s fine, and Eric’s teeth are fixed.”
“Yeah,” said Eric. “Besides, this time at least we’re with grown-ups. I don’t want you to leave us with people who don’t know what’s going on, Mom.”
I chimed in, too. “Remember what they did to you and Nate at Guidant? At least if the Shepherds come back, we’re prepared for whatever they want to do to us. The Nolands wouldn’t be.”
Dani sighed, and slung a bulky bag over her shoulder. “We’re wasting time. The longer we stand here talking, the less chance we have to do anything before Guidant figures out where we’ve gone.”
Mom turned to us and took a deep breath. “I’m saying this now, because I might not have the opportunity later. If the Shepherds come back, if anyone comes after us, you guys run and hide. Understand?”
I didn’t really want to point this out to Mom, but that’s what we always did. That’s how we’d ended up in Omega City to start with. That’s what we’d done at every juncture on the island at Eureka Cove. At a certain point, running and hiding wasn’t going to solve anything. But we all nodded anyway. It was the only way to move along.
Dani started toward the building. “Follow me.”
The building ahead of us was about the size of an ice-cream stand. No power or telephone cables ran to it, and though small windows were spaced evenly around the exterior, I couldn’t see anything inside. The door featured a keypad and one of those tablet-sized panels I recognized from Eureka Cove. Dani paused here, dropped her bag to the ground, and unzipped it. Inside, I could see what looked like some electronic equipment, and even the corner of one of her own photo albums. I leaned in for a better look and she glared at me and snatched the edges closed. She pulled out a small gray box with a port at one end, opened the panel near the bottom of the tablet, and inserted the plug.
The screen flickered on with the imprint of a palm.
Welcome, Anton Everett came from the speaker.
She yanked the box back out of the port as the door unlocked, and didn’t meet any of our eyes. We followed her inside to a small, plain room with a desk, a few chairs, and some computer monitors showing different scenes from the yard, the road, the gate near the fence, and some empty corridors. One whole wall was a large silver piece of sheet metal. Dani stopped dead in the middle of the floor and scanned the room.
“Where to, Anton Everett?” Mom drawled.
“I guess . . .” Dani frowned, staring at the wall. “Give me a minute.” She crossed to the desk and plugged her little box into a port there. Once again, Anton Everett’s log-in information came up.
“This looks like a giant elevator door,” Howard said, staring at the silver wall. “But there’s no button.”
“That must be a huge disappointment for you,” said Savannah. She had the hexaflexagon zipper pull back in her hands and was rotating it through its sides again. “I don’t get it,” she mumbled. “It was just here a second ago . . .”
“Why are you logged in as Anton?” I asked Dani as she sat at the desk and pulled up a file on the screen marked “Access Codes.”
“Because they’re supposed to think I’m still at Eureka Cove,” she said, not looking up from the monitor. “Got it.”
“But won’t Anton wonder why he’s suddenly showing up here?”
“That’s why we’re going to be quick.”
There was a rumbling behind me, and I whirled around to see the silver wall sliding away to reveal a large, concrete cargo elevator.
“Everyone in,” said Dani. “Let’s go.”
We dutifully boarded the elevator. The doors rumbled closed. There were no buttons inside, but after a moment, I could tell we were moving down.
Howard bounced up and down with excitement.
“How long does it take?” Mom asked, her hands clasped tightly in front of her.
“A while,” said Eric. “If last time is anything to go by.”
“But this is a new elevator,” I said. “Guidant built this recently. I’m sure it’s quicker . . . right, Dani?”
Dani just looked at a place above the door, where usually you’d see a floor display, and gripped the handle of her bag.
“Are you okay?” I asked her. Sometimes I got a little nervous in elevators, too. Especially since Omega City. But Dani was a pilot. She’d been in space.
“Found it,” Savannah announced. She held up the zipper pull. “See? Another side. A bumpy one.”
“Let me see.” Eric reached for the piece of metal. “How do you do it?”
“Pinch two of the triangles next to each other together, and then fold the opposite ones down. . . .” She showed him, closing her hands around his. “Wait . . . what did you do?”
He yanked his fingers back. “What? What did I do?”
“It’s another side!” She shook her head in disbelief and ran her fingertip across the uncovered surface.
“A hexahexaflexagon,” said Dani absentmindedly. “Well, never let it be said that Underberg doesn’t overdo things—”
There was a small jolt as the elevator halted. The doors slid open, and all talk of zipper pulls ceased.
Before us lay the main chamber of Omega City. But it was Omega City like I’d never seen it before. The last time I was here, the chamber was dark and flooded, with collapsed buildings and rusty, rickety walkways. Now everything was clean and repaired. Blue-white light illuminated the cavern like the inside of a sports stadium, and I could see for the first time how large the space truly was. Everything sparkled and shimmered, and the buildings had all been freshly painted. I imagined this was what it looked like when Dr. Underberg first built it, although instead of the old red omega symbol, all the doors and walls were marked with the globe and crossed crooks of the Shepherds.
“Wow,” said Mom. “This is even nicer than I expected. In Sam’s book, it sounded a little sketchy.”
“It wasn’t like this,” Savannah assured her. “Everything was broken. And wet.”
“Mrs. Dr. S!” said Howard to Mom. “Mrs. Dr. S. That’s where they shot at us!” He pointed at the base of the stability springs. Each coiled round was bigger than a car. I remembered Dad explaining that the buildings were positioned on springs to help them remain stable in case of a direct nuclear attack.
“And there’s where the grain storage and the greenhouse was.” The old buildings had been razed, and a new structure in that location looked a bit like the biostation under Eureka Cove—a large, bubbly dome, glowing faintly red.
“And over there was the entrance to the missile silo.” He pointed at a door across the cavern covered in construction scaffolding.
“Where are we headed?” I asked Dani.
But she said nothing, just stared. The bag dropped from her arms and clunked on the concrete floor.
“Dani?” Mom said.
She swallowed, and her eyes glistened. “The pictures don’t do it justice. All this . . . all this.”
“Wait,” I said, suddenly realizing why she’d been so quiet. “You’ve never been here?”
She seemed to catch herself and looked away, swiping her bag off the ground. “It’s not my area. Not many computers around here. At least, not the kind that can’t be hacked by a five-year-old with a cell phone.”
“But you didn’t even come, just to see?” I asked, amazed. “Your father built this place!”
She turned left, then right, then left again. “This way, I think.”
“She thinks?” Eric echoed, incredulous. “Great, just what I need, to get lost here again.” He trotted after her.
I ran to catch up. “Why didn’t you want to see it?”
“Lots of people built this place, Gillian,” she said coldly as she marched along. “It wasn’t just Underberg down here with a hammer and some nails.” She approached a door marked Staircase 3: Training, Medical Offices, Communication. “Here we are.” She went inside and started taking the stairs two at a time.
I raced after her, heedless of whether the others were following behind or still giving my mother the tour. “Yeah, but it was his baby. His entirely after the Shepherds tried to destroy it, and him. He lived here. For ages. Weren’t you curious? Didn’t you want to find out more about what he was doing all those years?”
Dani ran faster. She had almost a foot on me, and had done all those wacky physical training regimens the Shepherds taught, but I didn’t give up, even when she got so far ahead of me I couldn’t hear her feet on the stairs.
I didn’t understand her at all. If I’d found out my father had spent years hiding out somewhere, I would definitely have wanted to see it. Plus, it was a Shepherd project. It didn’t make any sense.
I heard another door open, high above me, and sprinted up the last flight of stairs.
The corridor looked familiar, and then I remembered. This was the way to the communications room, the central nerve center of Omega City. This was where I’d fought with Fiona and refused to surrender. This was where I’d first seen the videos of Dr. Underberg arguing for the importance of saving mankind. I stood there for a moment, catching my breath and getting my bearings. I hadn’t given in the last time I was here. I wasn’t going to do it now.
The door to the communications room was ajar, and I saw Dani’s bag lying on the floor inside. I pushed the door wide and saw her seated at a desk. The video library with its neat, hand-lettered messages, which once had made the room seem crowded and cramped, was entirely gone now, replaced by large servers and other electronic equipment. The giant control panel was still there, with its map of Omega City, paths of colored lights, and millions of switches, but it was now covered with enormous pieces of plexiglass, over which was suspended a large touch-screen monitor that replicated the patterns on the analog panel below. Dani plugged her little hacking device into this monitor and got to work.
Again a palm print flashed on the screen; again the computer spoke another person’s name. “Anton Everett. Security access granted.”
All of a sudden, I understood everything. Why she was using Anton’s identity, why she didn’t know her way around Omega City . . . why she was helping us at all.
“You’ve never been here before,” I said, still panting a bit from my haste to catch her, “because you weren’t allowed.”
Silence. Dani kept working. “Yes, you’re very intelligent, Gillian. As you know.”
But not smart enough to have figured her out before she brought us this far.
“You weren’t allowed,” I went on, “because they didn’t know if they could trust you to see this place and not feel a connection to your father.”
“In which matter,” she replied, as calmly as ever, “they were clearly correct.” She stopped working for a second, and her lips pursed. “You know what this place is. What it meant to him. He built this for humanity. He built it for my mother, and for me, and for everyone he ever loved. He disagreed with the Arkadia Group that it should be kept secret from humanity, that everything they did should be kept secret—and they retaliated.”
Then, just as now, it was more important for the Shepherds to keep their secrets than to do right by the human race. They might talk about looking to the stars, but their corporate arms seemed to have their eyes on the bottom line. First the Arkadia Group, then Guidant Technologies. They weren’t afraid to destroy what they’d built, destroy Dr. Underberg, to protect themselves.
I remembered what Elana had said on the phone.
We have to protect Guidant, even if that means sacrificing Infinity Base.
And I still had questions.
“They’ve been working on Omega City for ten months. You’ve read my father’s book and seen what Dr. Underberg was trying to do here. If you can hack into Shepherd security and come here whenever you want, why didn’t you?”
She swiveled around in her seat and met my eyes. “I never had a reason to risk my place with the Shepherds before. Right or wrong, they’re my family, not Dr. Underberg.”
I shook my head. “But you don’t think they’re wrong, do you? You never did.”
She turned back to her machines, all business again. “Of course I did. I told you so.”
She did. But Shepherds lie.
“When did you decide they were wrong?” I pressed. “It wasn’t when Anton genetically engineered bees to die. It wasn’t when the Shepherds tried to ruin the career of an innocent history professor. It wasn’t even when they kidnapped Mom and Dad and Nate. I saw you that afternoon, on the cliff. You told me to run, but you didn’t try to help.” I heard the others in the corridor behind me.
“I think this is where they went,” Eric was saying.
“You’d know better than me” came Savannah’s voice. “I only got here through the air vents.”
“Right,” said Mom. She sounded overwhelmed.
I only had a few seconds to get this out. “You weren’t interested in helping us or saving us then. That wasn’t enough to risk your position with the Shepherds.”
“You’re right. It wasn’t.”
“And what was?” I went on, although I thought I already knew.
“When Elana told me she planned to kill my father.”
This was the answer I was waiting for, but it still felt as if a big metal hand was squeezing my heart.
She swiveled around and fixed me with a glare. “I’d do anything to stop that. I’m sure you understand.” Then she went back to work.
Yes, I did understand. I didn’t like it one little bit, but I understood it perfectly. I was doing the same thing. Elana had threatened my father, and I’d let Dani tranquilize me and stick me in a pod. I’d talked my mother into letting us come to Omega City. I’d followed Dani no matter how worried I got that she had no idea what she was doing, no matter how strange or untrustworthy she acted. Because she was the only one who was willing to tell me that we could save Dad.
“Hey, guys,” Eric said, when the four of them reached the threshold. “What’s up? Did you guys get hold of Dr. Underberg yet?”
“No,” I said without taking my eyes off Dani. She didn’t look up from her work to greet them, either.
Honestly, I wasn’t even sure if we could get in touch with Dr. Underberg from here. Because if all Dani had to do was pick up a phone from Omega City and call him, why go to the trouble of sending out her stupid number codes? She said she hadn’t been willing to risk her job until the Shepherds threatened to kill him, but if she could just hack into the system and pretend to be someone else whenever she wanted, why hadn’t she done so a long time ago?
Had she brought us all here—had I brought us all here—only to get smacked in the face with more lies?
“How long will this take?” Mom asked. “I’m beginning to get worried about staying here. It’s too dangerous.”
“You’re right, Mom.” It was dangerous. I just wanted to find out how much danger we were in. I realized now that though Dani had promised to contact Dr. Underberg, she hadn’t exactly told us how.
“I’m right?” Mom laughed. “Never thought I’d hear that from you, honey.”
Dani frowned, looking at the screen. “Well, that’s going to be trouble.”
“What?” Mom asked.
Dani tapped the screen, where an orange alert flashed. Personnel: Security Check Required.
“What is it?” I asked.
“They want us to call in and verify our identities,” Dani said. “They’re onto us.”