“Not unless there used to be Jedis and robots running around in the jungle outside Wells Town. For hundreds of years.”

Sam shut his eyes and thought about it. There had to be at least a few other directors named George, but for the moment nothing was coming to him.

They stepped back out of the room and proceeded to the next one—the second of the three doorways in the big first room.

Beyond that doorway, they found a short corridor that ran twenty feet to a heavy glass door, which stood wide open. The glass door was two inches thick, and its edges were lined with dense black rubber; if you closed it, it would form an airtight seal. The two of them stepped through it, and Sam felt his breath catch. He heard Dani’s do the same.

The room beyond was probably the strangest one he’d ever seen. Stranger than the vast open space of Station 14. At floor level, this room was normal enough: it was big and square—about the size of the entry room with the cages—and its floor and walls were concrete like the rest of the place.

But not the ceiling.

There was no ceiling—at least not in any usual sense.

Instead the tops of the walls flared outward to an empty space above the room. A colossal empty space. It was fifty feet across and maybe a couple hundred feet tall, reaching above their heads almost all the way back up to the floor of the pine forest. Dozens of orange lights, like the one out in the ladder shaft, lit the space at regular intervals. Staring up into it, Sam had to concentrate on his balance to keep from falling. The sensation was surreal—like looking up at the opposite of a skyscraper. An emptiness with the dimensions of a high-rise.

After a moment Sam let his gaze drop to the floor space around them. It was littered with more broken machinery, along with the wooden crates it’d all been packed in. No doubt the bad guys had carefully destroyed this stuff, but Sam could see telltale signs that the baboon had been in here, too. Every broken panel of wood had been marred by blood splatters and scratches.

On the right-side wall there was another block of stencil text:

MC3—CLOUD CHAMBER