Chapter 128
“Looking for a seam!” she replied. Glancing back over her shoulder at the way they’d come, she wondered if they could escape back into the incubator room. The pop pop of the guns, bullets whizzing by her face, and the occasional sting of a bullet hitting her uniform made Rain search more frantically. Maybe she was wasting her time and would’ve been better off shooting their attackers rather than searching for something that wasn’t there.
Just when she was about to give up, the wall in front of her opened. But it wasn’t a doorway, it was a trap door of some sort. When she pushed on the crease in the panel, it folded in on her, throwing her off balance and forcing her to take a step forward into nothingness. The next thing Rain knew, she was falling down a shaft.
Her arms shot out in an effort to stop herself from falling, but the shaft was made of slick metal, and she couldn’t stop herself from careening toward the darkness below her. Over her shoulder, she saw the panel closing up again. She heard Adam screaming her name but couldn’t suck in a deep enough breath to shout back to him.
She was falling at a slant, not very far, and not very fast, and when she came to a stop, she found herself in a dark, cold room on the floor.
Rain leaped to her feet and looked around. She had no idea where she was. She was aware of the rooms in the center of the building accessed by panels through rumors she’d overheard in class, but no one had ever mentioned this. She spun around a few times, and then stopped breathing for a moment so that she could listen.
Not a sound hit her ears, which was almost as disconcerting as it would’ve been to hear the stomping of boots coming near her or someone shouting at her to get down on her knees.
Rain was just about to take a few cautious steps forward into the dark when something hit her leg, hard, knocking her back onto the ground. Her rifle went flying out of her hand, the strap somehow working its way loose from her neck.
She caught herself against the concrete floor with her hands, keeping her face from hitting the ground, but her hands were stinging, and her leg hurt where whatever had hit her made contact. She tried not to make a sound. For all she knew, this was a Mother who’d come down here just to kill her.
“Rain? Are you here?”
Adam’s voice had Rain letting out the breath she’d sucked in. A heavy weight lifted from her shoulders as she realized she wouldn’t have to figure this out on her own. Then, panic set in as she thought he might die right alongside her.
“I’m here,” she said, getting up and feeling for him. He was still on the ground, and when she reached him, his head hit her in the stomach, but she didn't even care. “Are you all right?” she asked him.
“I’m fine.” Adam got to his feet. “How are you?”
“Fine,” she assured him. “I lost my weapon, though.”
“We’ll find it.”
Rain took a few steps forward, feeling for the gun with her boot, but she had no idea where it had gone to.
A light from behind her illuminated the floor. Rain spun to see that Adam had a light wand in his hand. It wasn’t as powerful as the ones the Mothers used, but it worked enough that she could see her rifle lying a few feet in front of her on the concrete floor. She hustled over to get it and slung it over her shoulder.
The light revealed where they were standing. It reminded her of the cellar beneath the house in the woods that Mist had found. She’d never seen concrete until then. They had a lot of it in Quebec, but this was only the second time she’d seen this sort of building material in Michaelanburg.
‘Where are we?” Adam asked, swinging the light around slowly.
“I don’t know,” Rain said. “It doesn’t make any sense.” She turned to look at him. “Why would they want to escape from the hallway to… here? This room seems to be nothing.”
It was about a hundred feet long and maybe fifty feet across. Other silver tubes were coming down from the ceiling like the one behind them that they’d just come flying down.
“Maybe there used to be something else here?” Adam asked. “Maybe it’s something they moved because they knew we were coming.”
Rain thought that was a possibility, but it didn’t make sense to her that there were so many ways to get into the space, but there was no way to get out. It might be possible to crawl up those tubes, but she doubted it.
“Maybe there’s another secret door?” Adam asked. “Should we feel around?”
“I guess so,” Rain said. “But I don’t want to fall anywhere else.” Another thought entered her mind. “Adam, can you shine the light around the ceiling?”
He did as she asked. Up above them, there were a couple of cameras and several sprinkler heads that looked like they might be there to put out a fire. But that made no sense in a room with no wood and no cloth.
“What are those?” Adam asked.
“I’m not sure I want to know,” Rain admitted. She took the light from Adam’s hand and shined it along the floor again.
“What are you looking for?” he asked.
“I’m not sure.” She wanted to see if there was anything else, any evidence that anyone else had been down there.
Rain got closer to the walls. From a distance, they looked smooth, but as she bent down on her knees and really studied them, she could see that wasn’t the case, not down low nearer the floor.
“What do you see?” Adam asked, walking over behind her.
Rain didn’t answer him right away. Instead, she ran her hand over the concrete and felt divots in the smooth surface, scratch marks, some of them deeper than others, none of them uniform. “It’s so strange,” Rain said, dragging her fingers along the gashes.
“What do you think it is?” Adam asked. “Do you think there was some machinery or something down here that scratched up the walls?”
The longer Rain ran her fingers over the marks, the more clear it became to her how they had been formed. She looked up at the sprinkler heads, and the answer to Adam’s question about what these were became clear to her.
Turning to look at him, she said, “Not machines, Adam. People.”
“What?” He shook his head, not understanding.
Rain exhaled the breath she’d been holding. “They’re human claw marks.”
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