I guess that’s what hostages wore.

Kate looked good in the yellow jumpsuit.

Coop and I not so much.

They made us take showers before they escorted us to the holding area, which was a transparent cube on the third level. By transparent I mean see-through on all four sides. People walking on the balcony could see us. People walking to their apartments on the back side could see us. People down the short hallways on the left and right side could see us.

The cube was twenty by twenty feet. Twenty feet tall. Cement floor with a four-inch drain in the center. Two sets of bunk beds made out of stainless steel bolted to the floor. A square stainless-steel table with four stools around it — all bolted to the floor. A stainless-steel toilet and a tiny stainless-steel sink in the corner. A flat-screen TV hung down from the ceiling, showing live surveillance video of the Deep 2.0, including the inside of private apartments, and the shower room (men’s and women’s) where we had just taken showers.

I’m not sure they showed us taking showers, but about every twenty minutes Coop, Kate, and I showed up on the screen sitting around the little stainless-steel table. I’m not sure why, because anyone could go up to the third level and see us live, which three kids had done five minutes after we arrived to stick their tongues out at us.

Kate was glued to the surveillance monitor as if she had never seen one before. “Everyone appears to be color-coded,” she said. “The Originals are all wearing red jumpsuits. But these video feeds are bogus. They’re showing people only what they want them to see. No video of the infirmary where they allegedly took Alex. No Guard and Watcher barracks. No Originals’ apartments, at least I haven’t seen any red jumpsuits in any of the apartments. No surveillance control room, where all these feeds are coming from. Lod is blocking things he doesn’t want people to see. He’s only showing things that suit his purpose.”

“What is his purpose?” I asked.

“Only Lod knows,” Kate said.

“I suspect that Alex knows,” Coop whispered almost inaudibly.

I’d forgotten they were listening as well as watching us.

“Did they take the flash drive from you?” Coop whispered.

“I have it,” I whispered back. I’d managed to palm Alex’s silver bullet when they took our clothes. I hoped the little box it was stored in was waterproof.

Kate got under the stainless-steel table.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Looking for bugs. Found it! Well, them.” She emerged with four tiny microphones trailing severed wires in the palm of her hand. “I’m sure they’ll replace them, but for the time being we should be able to talk at the table without being overheard if we keep our voices down.” She looked at Coop. “Are you wearing tap shoes?”

Coop grinned. “Didn’t have time to change them before we got kidnapped.”

“Are you really as calm as you appear?”

“Did you ever read An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson?”

“No.”

I had, and I knew what was coming. Coop’s favorite sentence in English literature.

“There’s a line in the novel, and it goes: ‘Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.’”

“So, you’re a clock?” Kate asked.

“Ticktock, ticktock.”

“And you understand what’s going on here? Lod is going to kill us.”

“I think he wants to kill us,” Coop said. “We’ll see if it works out for him. Hope it doesn’t. In the meantime, I’m not going to get upset about it, which doesn’t mean I’m not going try to get out of this situation. Trust me, I’d do anything to save you and Pat and myself. It’s just that I think a lot better when I’m not angry, or frightened. How about you?”

Kate was smiling, shaking her head in wonder.

“Welcome to Cooplandia,” I said. “It’s kind of a combination of the Land of Oz and Hogwarts.”

Coop laughed. “I haven’t heard Cooplandia in years. We had these twin sisters, the Floreses, who used to look after us. Poor women. Felt sorry for them. They said that they lived in the United States but that I lived in Cooplandia with a population of one.”

Something changed on the monitor.

Lod was on the screen. He was stepping from the bat cavern into the first passageway. In front of him a group of people was heading toward the second steel door. He looked up at the camera and gave it a thumbs-up.

“Last group,” he said. “We are all safe.”

A cheer went up from the commons.

“Seal it!” he said.

The doors began to close.

The cameras followed him down the passageway through the second door.

“Seal it!”

The second set of doors began to close.

He stepped through the third set of doors.

“Seal it!”

A thousand-foot elevator ride and one more set of doors.

Agent Ryan was too late.

She probably didn’t even know where we were.

“Watch,” Kate said. “There will be plenty of room in the elevator, but Lod won’t join the last group. He’ll wait for the empty elevator to come back up for him and make his grand entrance all by himself.”

Kate was right. The elevator doors closed with the last group aboard as Lod made his way slowly down the passageway.

“So, quickly, what’s the story with this flash drive and the computer Bella gave to Bob Jonas?” Kate asked.

It didn’t take us more than a minute to tell her about the laptop and the drive because neither of us had any idea how Alex had intended to use them.

Up on the monitor Lod was stepping into the elevator. The camera zoomed in on his finger pushing the down button, then back to his somber thoughtful face. He had a Bluetooth device in his left ear and a keycard hanging from a lanyard around his neck.

The cheering for the final group died down and a hush fell over the crowded commons. I walked over to the balcony and looked down. Everyone was staring through the open steel doors down the passageway. They had wheeled in a small stage with a microphone stand on this side of the massive doors. As soon as they saw Lod, they began to cheer again.

Lod smiled, nodded, and waved, pausing to shake the hands of the Originals dressed in red. He mounted the steps to the stage.

Kate and Coop joined me.

“I remember this,” Kate said.

Coop and I looked at her.

“My grandfather’s notebooks,” she said. “I saw a sketch of this stage with the steel door behind it. He’s been planning this moment for years. It’s unfolding just as he imagined it.”

She went on to tell us about Lod’s notebooks as the crowd continued to cheer.

Lod held his hands up in the air.

The crowd quieted.

“Seal it!”

“It’s like remembering bits of a story I read long ago,” Kate said.

The doors began to close.

This was a horror story.