J e n n i f e r E s t e p

over my shoulder. The door followed three seconds later. Darkness spilled out from the interior, and I stepped inside. I made my way through a series of abandoned offices that lined the front of the building. Moonlight shimmered in through the broken windows, painting the square, empty rooms with an eerie gray glow. The usual assortment of crushed cigarettes, empty beer bottles, and used condoms covered the floor. How romantic.

I found a set of metal doors that led into the factory and peered through the grimy windows on them. The doors opened up into one enormous room. Assembly lines, pipes, and more snaked through the open space. I couldn’t see the back wall for all the metal zigzagging everywhere. I couldn’t see very far into the factory at all.

“Anything, guys?” I whispered.

“Nothing so far, Fiera. We’re at the back door ready to come inside,” Hermit said in my ear.

“Lulu?” I asked.

“Everything’s fine, as far as I can tell.”

“All right. Here I go.”

I tried the metal knob. Locked. Not for long. I gave it a good tug, pulled the knob off, yanked the door open, and stepped through. I paused. Waiting. Watching. Listening. Everything was still and quiet and hushed inside. I moved slowly, staying in the shadows, and trying to keep my chunky boots from clacking too loudly on the hard floor. I went a hundred feet, then two hundred, then three. Pipes, pipes, and more pipes. The place seemed endless. I stumbled and almost cracked my head on a metal support beam. I muttered a curse and looked down. A power cable curled around my feet. Unlike everything else in the building, it wasn’t coated with a layer of gray dust and cobwebs. It looked brand-spanking-new. At last. A clue.

H o t M a m a

91

Keeping one eye on the black cable, I moved farther into the factory. I realized it was getting brighter. There was a light up ahead.

“I think I’ve got something,” I whispered. “Lights in the factory.”

“Then go with your hot self,” Lulu replied. I rolled my eyes and kept moving. I rounded the edge of one of the assembly lines and stopped. I’d finally gotten to the belly of the beast, as it were. Halogen bulbs illuminated the scene. Computers, power cables, and more clustered together. Bits and pieces of metal littered the floor and a couple of steel tables. Soldering irons, wire cutters, and other tools crouched on wooden stools and plastic milk crates. Blueprints and schematics and weird diagrams hung on a cork board. It was your usual ubervillain–mad scientist lab. Intelligal was hard at work on something. Some sort of giant, radio-karaoke-like thing stood in the middle of the makeshift workshop. I spotted a cordless microphone, a bunch of wires, and what looked like a flatscreen plasma monitor. I squinted. Were those diamonds lining the thin screen?