THE top floor of North Tower was also the topmost of the block of floors assigned to the LM4 residences, but there were no living spaces there. The rooms were, judging by the amount of space between doors, large and differentiated only by block numbers on classy metal plates.
Seven stood beside one of the doors, holding it open.
“Meeting rooms of some kind is my best guess. A few on the far end look equipped for medical use.” Val stood in the hall and waved Gid and Daria toward the open door. Gid and Daria hurried through.
The walls inside were a stark, clean white. That was how the air smelled, too—stark and clean. The only furniture was a sleek black and chrome table flanked on two sides by a handful of matching chairs. A second door on the far side of the room lined up with the one they’d come through.
Alex stood in front of that door, in his typical crossed-arms and cocked-hip pose. Kaiden paced along the nearer side, scowling heartily with every step. Jager and Nunes stood side by side on the far side of the table, not touching but close enough that they could have been. Apparently they’d decided the time for subterfuge was over, because they’d reassembled their previously-concealed rifles.
As Gid and Daria walked in, they all looked up.
Val and Seven stepped inside, too, and closed that door behind them. Seven leaned against the door while Val produced the palm pad he’d been using to navigate the Ancestry residence floors. He skimmed it open and flipped it toward Daria.
“The device is two rooms down from this one.” Val tapped the floor plan he’d just opened. “We were able to use the passcode and look inside. The device is there, inside a smaller glass enclosure within the room.”
Daria spent a few seconds studying Val’s pad. On Gid’s lens monitor, she located the room Val was describing and zoomed in on the floor plan.
“Nice of you to wait on us,” Gid said. “But the code should have no problem opening the enclosure, either.”
From the corner of her eye, Gid saw Seven tip his head forward and noted the rueful curl of his mouth. Gid turned to look at him.
“…but that’s not the problem. So what is?”
Val’s lip curled, too. “There are Kept inside with it. We managed to avoid being seen, but we didn’t get close enough to do more than note the device’s location.”
Gid minimized the iteration of the floor plan on her lens monitor and pulled up the Ancestry’s info hub that she’d left running in the background. Teddy’s passcodes had gotten her the floor plans and security system access—including the security cameras. She hadn’t needed to override any cameras yet—those were mostly only in the halls and spotty even then. Plus, the idea had been to blend in, not override. But the cameras had seemed like a good thing to keep handy.
“Damn it.” Daria looked up from Val’s palm pad. “Gid, I know you said there weren’t many cameras to work with, but can you—”
“Halfway there already. Give me another minute.”
Alex chuckled, a soft and approving sound. Gid started to grin in response, caught herself, and then gave up and let it slide. No time for petty shit right now.
A bank of camera view thumbnails stabilized on Gid’s lens. She took a few seconds to find a pattern in their labeling and narrowed down what she was looking for. A few false starts later, Gid discovered there was a camera in the room Val had indicated.
She zoomed in. A trio of Kept huddled around the device they’d first glimpsed on the massacre footage.
“Three of them,” Gid reported. “One’s at some kind of control panel. The other two are… working? Whatever you call it. Eyes all glazed, slack-jawed. Classic signs they’re drawing ghost energy.”
Kaiden stopped pacing and tilted his head. “I don’t hear anything.”
Daria tipped her head in an eerily similar fashion to her brother. She glanced toward Val.
Val stood as still as a curly-headed statue. Eventually, he nodded.
“They’re not pulling them all the way through,” Daria said. “It’s faint, and it’s like the massacre in the shuttle bay. The ghosts drift in but then they cut off before they come all the way through. What else do you see?”
Gid spoke slowly, trying to decide which details were important. “The two who are drawing, one’s got his hands on the device. Some kind of panel. Big touchscreen, maybe? The other one has her hands on a different panel, but that one’s just hanging there on the—”
Wall. Except it wasn’t a wall, not now that Gid looked closer. Or not just a regular wall.
“Well, shit.”
“Gid?”
“I think they’re killing people again.” The words stuck but Gid forced them out. “Lots of people. And not planning to stop anytime soon, I bet.”
Daria was suddenly in front of Gid, leaning in so that her face filled Gid’s vision beyond the semi-transparency of the camera feed on Gid’s lens monitor. “Talk to me, Gid.”
Gid tried to put what she was seeing into words. “It’s a tank of some kind. The touch panel is connected to rows of collection tubes. They take up the whole wall.”
“A collection array.” Val’s face swam into view beyond Daria’s shoulder. “The receiver is small enough to transport between here and the shuttle bay. Or wherever they’re using it these days. But they just use it to extract the ghosts. They don’t leave the energy inside it.”
Extract the ghosts. Gid fought down a surge of nausea.
Gid blinked windows around on her lens monitor so she could look at the floor plan again. She found exactly what she was afraid she’d find. “If those tubes fill the entire space behind that wall, then they have room for… for a whole fucking lot of ghosts.”
That is a shit-ton of energy. That’s what Gid had said about the collector. What might actually be in storage was that times ten, at the least.
For several long seconds, no one said anything. Gid’s stomach turned in on itself. In her head, she heard rifle fire and phantom screams and smelled the bitter, almond-like scent of poison gas.
“What the hell are they doing with all that energy?” Kaiden’s voice wobbled.
“Nothing that we won’t put a stop to.” Val’s voice wobbled not at all. His face hardened into a familiar expression of blazing, determined calm.
Gid re-maximized the window with the camera feed. The three LM4s in the other room had moved from their previous positions. All of them surrounded the device, now. It slid, slowly but steadily, floating above the floor. Gid finally caught sight of the hover-sled beneath it.
“Whatever we’re going to do, we need to do it now,” Gid said. “They’re moving the device.”
Daria turned away from Gid and toward Alex. He held out one hand.
The gray plastic disk on Alex’s upturned palm was no more than an inch in diameter. “Directional blast. Should be just enough to do the job without blowing the whole room.” With his other hand he displayed the detonator, a nondescript black box barely bigger than the explosives disk.
Daria’s jaw tightened. “We’ll just have to intercept and deal with the Kept. Are we clear, Gid?”
It took less than a second to zoom out to the thumbnail view camera bank and find the feed for the hallway outside. Gid zoomed in and angled the camera toward the section of hall two doors down, catching a glimpse of the one they currently stood in as the feed shifted.
The hall outside that room was not empty. Gid inhaled, sharp and sudden.
“Seven!” It was all she could get out.
It was all she had to get out. Maybe Seven read Gid’s voice or her face. Maybe he just read her mind. But as Gid turned toward where he’d been lounging with deceptive inattention against the door, he was already reaching for the door’s controls. He popped the door open and reached through with both arms. By the time Gid finished turning, he’d dragged the person outside into the room.
She was gorgeous. Her skin was ebony, her eyes impossibly darker yet, and everything about her was perfectly-formed, from her thick eyelashes to her button nose to her cupid’s bow of a mouth. Even off balance from being yanked through the door, she was all graceful and willowy. Gid wasted half a second instinctively annoyed that Seven had his hands on her slender arms, bared by the rose-colored sundress she wore.
Then Gid noticed the bracelets and torq, gleaming silver against the night of her wrists and neck.
The chapel. She followed us from the chapel. There was someone inside. Damn it!
Seven let go and stepped back from the Kept, planting his back against the door he’d just hauled her through. He lifted his hands defensively. His jaw clenched and the cords in his neck stood out.
The room filled with the faint hum of three guns being taken off safety—Kaiden on the near side of the table and Jager and Nunes on the far side stood in identical stances, weapons trained on the newcomer.
The Kept regained her balance and turned her head back and forth like she was trying to see the whole room all at once. Simultaneously, Val and Daria brushed past Gid and stepped toward her. Gid couldn’t hear ghosts, but she could tell by their stiff postures and the odd tense-but-slack lines of their faces that they were reaching.
Their guest noticed, too. She straightened and held her hands palm-out in front of her. “No need for that.”
Her voice was like smoke and birdsong. If Gid hadn’t been too busy worrying how fast the Kept could set them on fire or freeze them or whatever her particular thing was, she’d have hated her. As it was, Gid edged toward Seven and the door. No way either of them could take the Kept, but if there was a stand to be made, Gid wasn’t letting Seven make it alone.
The Kept settled into a confident stance and held steady, her gaze fixed on Daria. “You know I’m not reaching.” She tilted her wrists, flashing the bracelets. “I can’t. Full lock-out.”
Daria darted a glance at Val.
“The restraints,” Val replied to Daria’s unspoken question. “Their level of control can be adjusted. Only the most cooperative work with APS. Those who are less compliant are more restricted.”
As Val was speaking, the Kept shifted her attention from Daria to him. Her eyes widened. She visibly inhaled before breathing his name. “Valens Paquet.”
“Introductions could probably wait.” Alex straightened from his cocked-hip stance and strolled up beside Daria. “We had plans?”
Alex still held the explosive in his hand. The Kept dragged her gaze from Val’s face and stared at the disk.
On Gid’s lens monitor, the camera feeds showed the device with its trio of guardians still in the room two doors down, but it wouldn’t be long before they were in the hall with it. Gid blinked back to the floor plan.
“The interior doors—” Gid started.
“—all link together,” the Kept finished before Gid could. “You can get to the transfer room from that way. No cameras in that hall, either.”
Daria looked from the Kept to Gid and raised her eyebrows.
“Yeah. That,” Gid conceded. Still annoyed. More annoyed, even. But there was no time.
“We’ll need to go in from both doors at once.” Daria continued staring at the Kept and frowning, although Gid wasn’t sure she was frowning at the Kept. “Val and I will go from the outer hall. Wait for us to take down the other LM4s, and the rest of you come in from the interior hall with the explosive.”
“No.” The Kept stepped forward. Both Daria and Val tensed. “If you do that, the whole residence hall will hear you. Not to mention the outer hall camera—no disguises will matter once you start channeling. Security will be on you in a matter of minutes.”
“Running out of options.” Daria motioned at Jager. “Tie her up. And gag her. We can’t have—”
“I can lure them away.” The Kept’s voice rose, revealing the tiniest bit of urgency.
“And we should trust you because…?” Kaiden gave the question all his usual derisive attitude. Jager was halfway around the table already, hand thrust into her carrypack.
The Kept turned her doe eyes on Val. There was absolutely no pleading in her voice, just a weird calm. “You know that not all of us want to be here. You should know that you have followers in here as much as outside.”
Val stared at her. The Kept leaned toward him
“My name is Fareeda Goel. I’m one of those followers.”
“I did say they’d be handy,” Gid muttered. But it would’ve been more handy to know the Kept they had in their pocket was one they could actually trust.
“One of your rumors?” Daria spoke mildly, but doubt raged across her face.
Val stared Fareeda down a second longer and then lifted his hand at the approaching Jager. “She can lure them away.”
When Daria scowled, she really did look a lot like Kaiden. The two of them aimed identical dark looks at Val.
“We don’t really have time to argue about this.” The bemused smirk had faded from Alex’s mouth. “Make a call, Daria, and let’s move.”
On the camera feed, the device was nearly to the door.