There was no movement inside the home.
Adeline walked around to the side, looking, listening. It was utterly still.
In the home next door, someone was either playing a video game or watching a movie. The window flashed like a strobe light through the thin curtain. The lot lines were tight but wide enough for her to make her way to the back, where a pool lay in the middle of beige stone decking.
Adeline moved quickly to the door that led to the living room.
Locked.
The door to the breakfast nook overlooking the backyard was locked too.
At the closest window, she put her palms on the glass and pushed up. It didn’t budge.
She tried the next one. It was locked as well.
Adeline’s heart rattled in her chest. She was heaving now, the nerves and exertion overtaking her. She planted her feet and pushed up on the window again. Her palms slid across the glass, screeching. She dried them on her pants and pushed again. This time, she heard a pop, like plastic snapping. The window shot up, jamming her fingers into the small crack where the double-hung sashes met.
She was in.
She let the window down and quickly examined her fingers. The nail under her middle finger was already filling with blood, turning purple, almost black. It throbbed with pain, all the way into her hand. The other fingers hurt, but they were only red.
She lifted the window again and high-stepped into the home, her foot landing on marble tile.
What she saw shocked her.
Nothing.
The home was completely empty. No furniture. No paintings or pictures. The floor and walls and counters were bare. Like a house waiting to be sold.
Or a trap.
Adeline’s every instinct told her to turn and run.
But she if she did, she would be right back where she began that night: with no answers.
She listened a moment. There was no sound anywhere.
The kitchen off the breakfast nook opened onto a living room with no fireplace, only two receptacles on the walclass="underline" one for data, one for power.
Adeline walked down the hall, past an empty bedroom on the right. The front door loomed ahead. To her surprise, she saw a straight-run staircase descending on the left. From the street view, this looked like a typical ranch home. But it had a basement. The open rail staircase down to it was ominous, like the mouth of a monster waiting for her.
Another secret room. It was fitting. Each of the remaining Absolom Four seemed to have one.
She had seen Constance’s secret room. Spied in Daniele’s basement. Then broken into Elliott’s lair where he hid the pictures of his dead son. What was Hiro hiding down there?
Adeline considered going right out the front door.
That was the smart move. The safe move.
Yes.
This was stupid. Dangerous.
She walked toward the front door and gripped the handle. But she didn’t turn it.
Because Daniele was right about one thing: Adeline wasn’t the quitting type.
She spun and crept back down the hall and swerved into the stairway and descended the wooden steps, conscious not to make too much noise.
The basement was pitch black except for the dim light from above, the glow of the moon and the streetlights shining into the foyer and stair hall.
This space was empty too. The walls and floor were concrete. The floor joists hung above like the ribs of a beast that had swallowed her.
With each passing second, Adeline’s eyes adjusted. As she adapted to the darkness, she realized there was one source of light down here: a panel on the right-hand wall. Beside it was a locked door. A metal door. The kind you might see in a prison.
Adeline moved to the panel. It was similar to the one in Elliott’s home, except this one had no place for a key code for the lock. Only a fingerprint and retinal scanner.
But it was the blinking message that sent a chill through Adeline:
SECURITY ALERT: PERIMETER BREACH, NOOK, WINDOW 3.
Adeline turned to run.
The door beside the panel opened.
Against her will, she whipped her head around to look.
Hiro stepped out, eyes wide, mouth open.
Adeline leaped forward, ready to run.
Hiro was faster. He lunged and wrapped his arms around her, dragging both of them down to the concrete floor.
THIRTY-FIVE
Sam reached the tree line a few seconds before the herd of charging dinosaurs and large reptiles reached him. There was no question what he had to do: climb a tree.
It was his only chance of surviving.
He jumped up on a fallen tree and walked up it, arms held out to balance, the torch still in one hand, flame dancing as he went. At the trunk it was leaning against, Sam put the bone torch in his mouth and climbed, wincing when the wind carried the fire close to his face. He considered dropping the torch, but it was too valuable. If he had to return to the ground, it was his only defense against the herd.
Below, the animals pounded the forest floor, shaking the tree and the limbs. The screeching was earsplitting. Around him, other trees wobbled. The skinnier ones fell.
Smaller animals were trampled by larger beasts as the herd passed below like a prehistoric cattle drive, the strong grinding the weak into the ground. The carnage was breathtaking. The smell gagged him, but Sam held tight to the grilled fish he had eaten at lunch. He had worked hard for that meal, and he didn’t want to give it up.
Based on what he saw, if he lived through this, food wouldn’t be a problem for a few days. There would be plenty to scavenge.
When the herd had passed, the forest fell silent. Sam was about to climb down when the ground began shaking. At first, he thought it was another herd. But this vibration was different, deeper, the force enough to move the tree trunk up and down.
Another earthquake.
Is that what the animals were running from?
Sam began shimmying down the tree. He got about halfway before the shockwave hit.
The trunk slammed Sam in the face. The last thing he saw was the torch wink out like a bedside lamp being turned off.
*
Sam woke in a bed of twigs and flesh. His nose was filled with the smell of sulfur. The forest was full of smoke.
He had no doubt about what had happened. And what he had to do: run.
He had to run for his life. As far as he could.
There was one problem. His body.
It was bruised and sore and refused to move.
He tried to sit up, but his back cried out in pain, pinning him down. It wasn’t just the impact. Whatever he had landed on had reopened the cut on his back from the fight with the prisoner. He could feel his blood seeping out through the makeshift bandage.
He promised himself he would lie there for three breaths. Then get up.
In. Out.
In. Out.
Mentally, he formed an image of himself stepping out of the Absolom machine, holding his arms wide and Adeline and Ryan rushing to him, hugging him, his daughter whispering “Welcome home, Dad.”
The imagined reunion was like a ghost taking root in Sam’s body, powering him.
He rolled onto his side, face-to-face with the open eyes of a felled dinosaur, its mouth open, backward curving white teeth just inches from his nose.
He pushed up and stumbled away. Nearby, he found his spear and used the blunt end as a walking stick.
The forest was easier to move through now. The herds had carved paths through the underbrush like a flood across a mountain range.
At the ridge, Sam stopped to catch his breath. What he saw confirmed his theory: a cloud of ash rose from the volcano. Lava seeped over the crater wall in waves. Halfway up the rise, magma was pushing through a secondary vent, dribbling down the side, joining the main lava flow.
The scientist in Sam wondered if this was the opening salvo in the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event. The survivor in him said it didn’t matter. The eruption was enough to cause his extinction, and that was all that mattered at the moment.