Allie sat still for a moment, hoping her eyes would adjust to the darkness, but apparently even immortal eyes couldn’t see in a complete absence of light. After a moment, she gave up and crawled to her feet. The pain in her head increased a bit with movement, but wasn’t killer. She could handle it, Allie told herself, and took a deep breath before moving cautiously forward in the direction of the door with her hands outstretched. It seemed to take forever to cross the room, but eventually her hand bumped into cold metal. Allie paused and ran her hands over the door until she found the inner handles. She gave them a testing tug, not expecting the chain to snap or anything, so wasn’t disappointed when nothing happened.

Releasing her breath, Allie then felt along the door to the wall on the left and followed that to the corner. Once there, she followed this new wall, walking what she thought might be several feet before stopping and beginning to tap on it.

One of the boys who had been in the foster home Allie had lived in for two years had told her a story about another foster kid named Bobby. Bobby had been a runaway artist, fleeing every foster home he was put in, only to be caught and returned or taken to a new one. Desperate to keep him from running again, one of his families had locked him in a room in the basement with no windows. But Bobby was a clever boy who wasn’t going to be kept where he didn’t want to be. He’d used a jackknife to cut a hole in both pieces of drywall between his room and the next, crawled through, and escaped yet again.

Allie didn’t have a jackknife, but she had immortal strength. The tapping was to try to figure out, or at least make an educated guess, as to where the wall studs were. When she thought she knew where to punch without hitting one, she made a fist, pulled her hand back, and then kicked the wall instead. Allie wasn’t a great fan of pain, and really she was suffering enough of it already. While her headache wasn’t as bad this last time she’d woken up, the pain was now spreading out to the rest of her body. An acidy, biting pain that she suspected might be the nanos either making their need for blood known, or actively looking for it themselves in her organs.

Unsurprisingly, her foot went right through the drywall. It would have even when she was mortal. Smiling to herself with satisfaction, Allie bent and felt around for the edges of the hole, and began to tear off the drywall. She hadn’t tried this on the wall to the hall because she had no idea where Stephen and Abaddon were holed up in the building, or if they had a direct view of the hallway. She didn’t want to risk breaking out straight into the hall and being seen and stopped. And since Abaddon had turned right as he left the room, she’d chosen the left wall. There was less worry that way that they might hear her making her escape and come to investigate. It would also give her at least a bit of a head start if she was spotted and had to run.