“Alex!” Adanne's voice came again. “Alex! I'm over here! Alex!”

I turned my head to look for her. The heel of a shoe came down on my cheek and temple. But I saw her anyway. The police were dragging her away. Past a standard cruiser-to an unmarked black sedan.

Going where?

“She's with the Guardlan!” I yelled at the top of my voice. “She's with the Guardian! She's press!”

Adanne kicked and twisted, and I tried to roll the two cops off my back.

But it was too little too late. Adanne was still shouting when they stuffed her into the black sedan, slammed the door, and drove off in a hurry.

Chapter 109

A FEVERED VOICE inside my head was screaming for me to help Adanne, but I knew I should think things through before I tried anything.

I had no idea, and no way to find out, if the car they had put me in was following Adanne's. I was in a police unit, though. Small and cramped by DC standards. Smelling strongly of tobacco and sweat and somebody's urine. Were these men policemen?

I sat sideways on a ripped vinyl seat in back. My hands were cuffed, and a rusted metal security grate was a few inches from my face. My shoulder throbbed and I was afraid it was broken. But that was the least of my worries right now. What I cared about most was Adanne and what was happening to her.

“Where did they take her?” I asked. The two uniforms in front wouldn't even turn to look at me. I couldn't provoke them.

“Talk to me. Tell me where we're going,” I demanded to know.

Then I saw for myself, and it couldn't have been any worse.

The first thing I recognized was the signpost at the turn-off for Kirikiri. Then the familiar concrete walls and razor wire crisscrossing the top.

Oh hell, no.

I felt like I'd fallen into some kind of hell on earth. Going in here the first time had been bad enough, but heading back when I knew what to expect?

It took the two cops and two more prison guards to get me out of the car and inside the jail.

I thought they would drag me up to the wards-but we went down instead. Down couldn't be good. Where was Adanne? Was she here too?

My feet bumped over stone steps, then onto the compacted dirt floor of a barely lit corridor. It looked and smelled like the cell block upstairs, but when we passed through one of the reinforced steel doors, I saw they all opened onto the same enormous space.

There was a low ceiling that dripped some kind of sludge, and a row of retrofitted support columns ran right down the middle of the room. They extended into deep shadows on either side.

A blank space. For torture? Interrogation? Execution?

Everything was left to the imagination-on purpose, I was sure.