SAGE
“Let’s go.” Jack lifted me upward, toward the hole, as if I were as light as a toddler. This hole was smaller than the other, and I guided myself halfway in. Jack took hold of my feet and pressed them up, giving me leverage to scoot all the way inside.
I scrambled out of the way, and in the next instant, Jack was right by me, the heat between us as strong as ever. Without speaking, he slid past me and crawled ten feet down the vent where he stood up in a vertical tunnel. “We go up again. You have to straddle it. Use your feet and hands to push off. Move quickly.”
Jack pushed his way into the vent, and I started climbing right behind him. Above me, Jack reached the top, and I heard the vent grate open. Light shined in from the room above.
“Come on,” Jack urged.
Finally, I reached the top and climbed out into the old medical wing where we’d watched Beckett arrive. Was that only earlier today? It felt like lifetimes ago.
Jack helped me to standing. We sprinted across the room and down the hall into the room with Finn’s cage.
“Can you hear anyone?” I said as we ran.
“Yes,” Jack said.
“How much time?”
“Thirty seconds. Maybe.”
Jack flung the door open, and Finn jolted to sitting. I could tell he’d been hard asleep. I’d expected this to be different. I needed more time. We weren’t supposed to be so rushed. My throat tightened.
Finn rubbed his eyes and yawned. In that moment, I knew without a doubt that leaving him would have been wrong.
Jack moved to the button that would open Finn’s cage as he pulled the dart gun from his belt.
“Do what you can,” he said. “Let me know when you’re ready.”
“Open it. We don’t have time to try to calm him down or anything else.”
I strode up to the cage as the door slid open, the time for caution long gone. “Finn, we’ve got to go—they’re coming, we need to hurry, get up, get up—”
“They’re in the lobby,” Jack said.
“How many?”
“A lot.”
My heart dropped to the floor. I reached for a cage bar, the fog in my head swelling up. “You knew we weren’t going to make it, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“What’s our backup plan?”
“You leave with me right now and maybe we make it out the same way as Imogen and Beckett. They’re waiting for us in the woods …”
“You know that’s not happening. What’s your other backup plan?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Then why’d you let me come?”
Something softened in Jack’s face. “I didn’t know I had a choice.”
A half-smile pulled at my lips. “I guess you didn’t.”
Finn stretched his arms overhead.
“They’re in the modwrog hall,” Jack said.
Jack’s words snapped me to my senses. “Jack, go! They can’t find you. Go!” I heard the stairwell door open below and the corresponding shouts. Jack tensed.
“Come with me,” he pleaded again. “Beckett’s waiting for you … and Imogen.”
I shook my head. “You know I won’t. I can’t. And if you don’t go now, you won’t be able to save me later.”
Jack clenched his jaw and held my gaze for one more tormented moment.
“Go,” I ordered.
Jack ducked into the hall as the stairwell door burst open, and the room flooded with six guards.
Two immediately went to the door where Jack had just disappeared. If he’d planned on turning around and coming back, there was no chance for that now. Guards spread across the room.
Sirens began to wail. Beckett and Imogen must have exited the building.
I pushed away from the bars, feeling Finn tense behind me. Close his cage door.
But I couldn’t react in time. Finn leapt from his cell and loped toward the guards.
Shouts erupted. One of the guards in the front lifted his dart gun and shot. Finn kept coming. Three more darts hit him, but he was almost across the room now, almost to the guards.
“Finn!” I shouted.
And then, over the sound of the wailing sirens, a blast echoed through the room. In slow motion, I watched Finn sink to the ground.
A real bullet.
“Nooooo!” I screamed.
They’d shot him. In the arm, I think, by the way Finn grabbed it and howled. I watched as blood pooled over his sleeve. My brain went numb. I moved to help him but stopped short when the guards trained their guns on me. Real guns.
A strange ringing noise poured into my ears from somewhere inside my own head. The ringing muted out the rest of the world, even the wailing sirens. The guards shouted words I couldn’t hear, my hands lifted into the air in surrender. I remained frozen in place, too afraid, too shocked to move at all.
I watched the scene unfold like a silent movie. Either Finn was dead or the tranquilizers did their work. He no longer moved. One of the guards tied a cloth just above the wound in his arm, shouting orders to some of the others. Another guard yelled at me. The dull ringing in my ears drowned him out.
I’d done this. It was my fault Finn was shot. He’d be safe in his cell right now if it weren’t for me. This was my fault.
They dragged Finn down the stairs. A trail of blood streaked across the floor behind him. I began to shake. Someone took my arm and shoved me toward the stairwell. I stumbled down them to the main floor.
The trail of Finn’s blood traced to the end of the modwrog hall, to an empty cell, the last in the row. They pushed me into a cell eight doors down from Finn, into one of the other two open cages.
The guard yelled at me, pointing at my ears. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I stared at him. He shoved his fingers in my ears, and then I knew what he was doing. By the time he’d pulled out my ear bud, it was too late. But what could I have done anyway?
The guard stepped out of the cage. The door slid shut behind him.
A group of guards ran out the exit at the end of the modwrog hall. I slumped against the back concrete wall. A sharp, metal taste coated my mouth. I licked my lips, tasting blood, not knowing how it got there. The sirens still blared, thrumming throughout the concrete cells. I felt it in the walls, in the floor.
Across the hall, a modwrog—Billy—sat in the corner and pounded his head over and over against the concrete wall. Madness. I felt it, too. Something about the way he hit his skull made sense. Like it fit.
Eventually, the ringing in my ears faded. The wailing sirens stopped. Complete silence followed.
Billy stopped hammering his head.
I curled into a ball and dropped my head to my knees.