While White zipped through the floor to see who or what might be around, I shoved this newest wrinkle away, hard, and ran through our past experiences. The first time the Science Center had been under siege everyone other than Jeff and a few others had been herded to the top level. But when Al Dejahl had taken over he’d done it in the Research area, in the library, in fact, which was below us.
I truly had no clear idea of how wide the Science Center actually was, but I was pretty sure it was much wider on all four sides than the ground level would indicate. I always related to rats in a maze whenever I had to find my own way around here.
However, hyperspeed meant White could search it, vast or not, in under thirty seconds. “All clear,” he said when he rejoined us.
“Up or down?” Gower asked.
“That’s the hundred thousand dollar question, isn’t it? A part of me thinks Ronaldo will go for the library again, but another part says he’ll try somewhere else. So, up, I guess? It’s one floor to search if no one’s there and then back down.”
White nodded. “I’d hate to discover they were on the top floor after we’d searched all the way down.” He took my hand, Gower took Adriana’s; we headed for the stairwell, and went up.
We reached the stairwell door. Nothing and no one. We zipped through. This stairwell was back off the main floor, so we were actually hidden by a wall. White stopped walking and shoved us against said wall “We’re not alone,” he said in whisper.
We slunk up to the doorway in the wall. As with the first time I’d found people up here who shouldn’t be, there were a lot of folks in camouflage. They weren’t doing anything much, just standing around with assault rifles.
“Do we round them up or kill them?” Gower asked, keeping his voice low.
“There are too many,” Adriana replied. “We would need to use explosives.”
“We can get those easily enough,” White said.
“Wait.” There was something wrong with these people. They were literally just standing there. Sure, they could be on duty, but they weren’t at attention or even seeming to be paying attention. “Wait a second.”
Scanned the terrorist crowd. Based on the body structures, there were a lot of women in this group. Sure there were women terrorists—Mahin was one, after all—but this many in this particular organization didn’t seem statistically likely.
Searched for a face, any face. Was finally rewarded to see a couple people who were more or less facing us. They were both incredibly attractive, ill-fitting military garb or not.
Pulled everyone a few steps back. “I’m pretty sure those are our people, as in, A-Cs, and probably humans who work with us.”
“Why?” Gower asked.
“Presumably so that if anyone breaches through the shielding somehow they’ll either kill our own or our own will kill them.” This was a rather impressive bad guy maneuver. After all, if we could have gotten in when we were dealing with Mahin, we would probably have shot first and asked questions later.
“So what do we do?” Gower asked.
“We still have to find Ronaldo and everyone else. The people on this level don’t account for even a tenth of those who are missing.”
“Library again?” White asked.
Was about to reply when the song changed to “Just Another Psycho.” Should probably nominate it to be our official Bad Guy Theme Song.
But none of the Megalomaniac League thought they were ordinary. So, would Ronaldo do a repeat? And if he was, why? He’d wanted Jamie last time, and this was the last place where she’d be. She’d lived all but about a week of her life in the Embassy.
It dawned on me that Algar had told me that he watched every TV show and movie, read every book. Probably read every magazine, too, and listened to our music. So, he could have used any pop culture reference when telling me what we were about to face. But he’d picked The Mummy. Why?
There was only one reason I could come up with—to give me a clue.
There were different versions of the movie, but I’d really only seen the one starring Brendan Fraser. I’d seen it a lot. The heroine was a librarian, so maybe that indicated everything was once again happening in the library.
But if that was the case, why not use Groundhog Day as the clue? Why specifically choose The Mummy? Sure we were trapped in an underground building in the middle of the desert that contained a lot of valuable stuff along with a lot of people who wanted to kill us. And we had two teams inside. Okay, so The Mummy made sense. But not enough sense. At least, not yet.
“Why The Mummy?” I asked aloud, being sure to keep my voice low. All three of them looked at me blankly. “Really? No one’s seen that movie?”
Gower shrugged. “Why go see a movie about someone in a sarcophagus? I’d rather visit a museum and see the real thing.”
Stared at Gower for a long moment. “I know what level we need to go to next.”
CHAPTER 35
“YOU’RE SURE?” Gower asked, as we approached my least favorite area in any Centaurion Division facility.
“Yes.” I was nervous because I hated this area and was already expecting something to jump out at me. Switched my music to my Action Rock mix and put it on random. Proving that we were really one with the Crüe, “Primal Scream” came on.
“It makes sense,” White agreed. “This is where everything changed for my half brother the last time.”
“Mister White, why do you call him your half brother? I mean, I know he is, but it’s not like you were raised together, clearly, and he’s not exactly brimming over with brotherly love.”
“I say it to remind myself that even though he’s my enemy, he’s still my blood. He’s not a random individual—he’s someone who, if we’d known about him, found him when he was young, might be a very different person today.”
It was never confusing to me, how White had kept the A-Cs on the path of right, why Algar would choose to tell White of his existence, or why our enemies always somehow had White in their sights—he was, quite frankly, the moral ideal, and that meant that he was a target.
Gower, by having worked and learned under White for years and now being the current Pontifex, was also a target. The wisdom of storming the Science Center with two of the most likely Bad Guy Targets Du Jour was in question. However, presumably everyone was a target right now. So, better to storm with two guys who knew what the situation really was than not.
Minor leadership dilemma over, we reached what I thought of as The Chambers O’ Doom but was commonly referred to as the Isolation Area.
The isolation wing was large, in part because we had a lot of empaths, and Jeff wasn’t the only one who would push too far and then basically collapse. Also, while the empaths and imageers both used blocks—mental and medical—to keep from being inundated by the reality of their powers, the onslaught of human emotions was a lot harder to deal with than the information gleaned from an image. An imageer could choose not to touch a picture. An empath couldn’t choose to not feel the people around them.
The Science Center being the size it was meant it housed well over a hundred isolation chambers. The empaths, and sometimes the imageers and others, were put into the chambers to regenerate in a safe place.
According to Jeff, who spent more time than anyone in isolation, the isolation chambers were wonderful safe havens. To me, who usually spent my time in an isolation area on the outside looking in, they looked like a cross between an Iron Maiden and a sarcophagus, with a lot of extra tubes and needles added in just for fun. The Science Center’s isolation area always reminded me of a cross between Frankenstein’s lab and a haunted Egyptian tomb.