I thought briefly of Zane and then pushed him from my head, the ache in my chest too distracting right now.
The doors rolled back, revealing nothing more sinister than a swath of pristine white carpet. A few feet beyond that, the main part of the floor was open in the center, making it like a balcony that overlooked the floor below. A glass half wall encircled the opening to the lower level.
I stepped out cautiously and looked down. A few people still scurried among the cubicles, not even stopping to chat. Of course, it must have felt like the boss was standing over them, watching.
And, in effect, he was. Directly across from me was a giant glass box filled with black leather and steel furniture. Laughlin’s office. Had to be.
And it was empty. Even the two desks in front of the door—belonging to the twin assistants who’d been following him around, probably—had been abandoned. The chairs were pushed in, the computers dark.
Closing my eyes, I focused, listening for thoughts and emotions near me. But with all the people a level below, it was difficult to hear anything.
The elevator doors closed behind me with a thunk that sounded horribly loud. No one appeared to be on this floor right now, but it would take only one person on the third floor looking up at just the wrong moment. Ford hadn’t mentioned that part of this gig. Then again, it occurred to me right now that perhaps she’d never actually been in Laughlin’s office. That all of her information had been gleaned secondhand, from the minds of humans around her or even schematics pulled from somewhere.
Great.
Wishing I’d found a lab coat lying around to throw over my distinctly nonoffice clothes, I inched forward, keeping away from the glass half wall and moving as smoothly as possible.
Running would draw attention. And so would looking sneaky.
Head up, shoulders straight. Don’t look down. Funny that the instructions sounded pretty much like I was crossing a rope bridge over a bottomless gorge. Felt that way too. One wrong move and the end would rush up quickly.
I’d never seen the inside of Dr. Jacobs’s office, but Laughlin’s screamed arrogant male. Everything was stark contrasts and sharp lines.
Choking on the overwhelming scent of new leather, something I’d associated with positive things—new shoes, bags, and car interiors—until today, I pushed forward into the office.
I was halfway into the room before I realized the obvious problem, something I should have picked up on much faster.
Glass walls. On all four sides. No wall safe. It wasn’t possible.
My stomach sinking, I turned in a small circle, checking for other obvious options. A floor safe was always a possibility, I supposed. Or maybe something built into the desk.
I skirted the chrome and leather sofa that looked more like Mars landing equipment than someplace to sit, and stepped behind the desk.
In the second drawer, I scored. The drawer was a front that pulled away revealing a safe. Digital code with thumbprint authorization.
Uh-oh. Nobody’d mentioned that. Not that it was a problem. I could get through both of them, but it would take more time.
Unless…if the thumbprint scanner was a redundant system, more like a secondary lock than an alarm, then maybe I could bypass it.
I focused on the tumblers I knew had to be within the door. I hadn’t ever seen this model of safe, so I had to hope that the ones I’d practiced on during my years with my father would be close enough. (Apparently cat burglar was a backup career plan if “normal human” didn’t work out.)
After several long sweaty moments on my part, the tumblers clicked into place.
Success!
I pulled the heavy safe door open hurriedly, the hinges moving without so much as a squeak.
There was a sudden blur of motion and what felt like a bite on my skin.
I fumbled, lifting a rapidly numbing arm, to find something sticking out of my neck. Something I recognized by feel, if nothing else.
With shaking fingers, I pulled the dart out.
I twisted around to look for a guard, even as my already slowing thought process reminded me the dart had come from the front.
My center of gravity shifted abruptly, and I fell sideways with no ability to stop myself. It was like being trapped in an oversize bag of sand, my body the sand and my consciousness a speck within it.
As I toppled, I caught a glimpse of the safe’s interior. No bottles or packets of pills. The safe was, in fact, empty but for a device similar to the tranquilizer guns I’d seen Dr. Jacobs’s security team use.
It was a trap. Laughlin had somehow known I was coming. The desertion of this floor and no one challenging my approach had not just been luck.
Ford. I felt a hot spark of fury and fought to hold on to it, to breathe life into it, but it slipped away from me, growing dimmer under the onslaught of the drugs.
Seconds later—or perhaps minutes, it was hard to tell—I heard the soft shush of footsteps on the carpet.
Laughlin stood over me. His sharply angled face, upside down, appeared an odd collection of parts, triangles, lines, and squares rather than a whole.
“I thought one of them would figure out a way to try for it someday,” he mused, as if this was an academic dilemma finally resolved. “Of course, I wasn’t expecting it be you, 107. That’s what they call you, isn’t it?” He leaned down closer to me, his gaze cold and calculating.
“When the school called earlier, I wasn’t sure. It did strike me as a large coincidence that my Ford would begin associating with humans on the same day we learned you were missing, but unlike the others, Ford can be…unpredictable. One of her finer qualities, actually. I wanted to see what she was up to.”
He reached down and tapped the end of my nose in what would have been an affectionate gesture from almost anyone else but instead felt like a creepy signal of ownership, a dismissal of my right to exist as an independent entity. “But you, my darling, made a mistake,” he said in a gentle scolding tone. “I could, perhaps, believe that Ford had chosen this point to make her final stand against me. I might even have been willing to believe that she’d found a way to fracture the bond with the others that she seems to hold so dear. But Ford knows there’s only one way this can end. And she wouldn’t have bothered with coming here for the Quorosene in that case. She would have simply destroyed herself and the others. The ultimate power play.” He shook his head, twisted affection and reluctant admiration playing across his handsome face.
“But don’t worry,” he added, patting my shoulder. “Operations are already under way to recover Ford from whatever hole she’s scampered into.”
So Ford had betrayed us? Or…had I simply messed up and revealed myself? I couldn’t tell for sure from what Laughlin had said, and, frankly, at the moment I didn’t actually care.
I wanted to scream, to choke Laughlin, to stop his heart. For the first time in my life, I was certain I could have killed without regret. But I couldn’t gather the focus; it was like falling downhill. I couldn’t stop the momentum of the drugs or their effects.
White sparkles mixed with dark spots in my vision. I was disappearing down a long, dark tunnel.
But I wasn’t so far gone that I missed the slow smile that slid across his face. “In the meantime, you and I will have a chance to spend some quality time together,” he said softly.
I would have shivered if I could.
“The pictures really don’t do you justice, you know.” He touched my cheek, smoothed my hair, and every nerve in my body shrieked in muted outrage. “I’ve wanted to do a true comparison, to really understand the differences between you and Ford. What a happy opportunity this is for me.”