The feeling of helplessness seemed to burn under Sam’s skin. Shame and fear and anger, all mixed together. He felt it right down to the bone.

He just wasn’t ready. His opponent was bigger and smarter, and he was coming any second now.

Sam clenched his teeth and held the gun steady on the door, and waited.

We’ll just see, I guess.

How long had it been, now? Twenty seconds since they’d come in here? Thirty?

He was thinking about that when Dani’s hand slapped his shoulder, fast and urgent.

Sam turned his head, keeping the gun leveled at the door. He saw Dani pointing somewhere straight behind him, and craned his neck to look.

There was another door, on the far wall of the room. It was shut, but it had only a simple lever-knob, no keypad lock. Maybe its keypad was on the other side.

There was no telling where the door led—somewhere deeper in this complex, anyway.

“He’ll just follow us,” Sam said, loud over the sound of the chimps. “We have to deal with him somewhere.”

“I wasn’t pointing at the door,” Dani said.

Sam stared at her, confused, then followed her gaze again to the far side of the room.

There was a big metal panel on the wall right next to that door. It had a familiar, stylized logo across the top of it: ELECTROBOLT. Lower down, there were rows of buttons with paper labels on them, just like the setup in Station 9.

And above those was a big red button all by itself—covered by a clear plastic dome, so nobody would accidentally push it.

Also just like Station 9.

Sam turned and moved his gaze along the rows of cages on each side of the room. Every lock bore the ElectroBolt logo.

He met Dani’s eyes—they were still bloodshot and wet and miserable, but at the moment they also looked hard.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

SEPTEMBER 2018

To Dryden, Ellis Pierce’s expression looked like Russell Moss’s, staring across that campfire in Somber Valley. The face of a man trying to compare memory with the present.

Pierce stood there, just inside the storage room, flanked by his gunmen and the woman who wasn’t Lauren Coleman.

“You couldn’t have planned this,” Dryden said. “I don’t care how smart you are. Too many variables. Too much left to chance, for a plan.”

“For a plan,” Pierce said. His tone was soft, matter-of-fact. “But if you’re smart, you make twenty plans. Abducting both of you the other day would have suited me fine, if it’d worked.”

Pierce turned to the man with the black hair. “Bring the cart.”

The man nodded and disappeared out the door. Dryden heard his boots on the concrete, running footsteps fading away into the next room.

“What are you going to do with us?” Danica asked.