Then a ringing alarm blared into the silence, making everyone start. The lead scientist jumped the highest of all and gazed around wildly as the shrill ringing continued to sound. I grinned at him smugly.

Hacked the fire alarm and disabled the cameras—nice job, Wes. Hopefully that will be enough of a distraction for us to sneak out unnoticed. I glanced at my companions and jerked my head at the door. “Time to go! Let’s get out of here.”

We ran, leaving the room and sprinting down the hallway to the elevators. The alarm was still blaring nonstop, and if I knew Wes, he’d probably called the fire department, too. Mist reached the doors at the end of the hall first and growled a curse.

“Elevators are down. We’ll have to take the stairs. This way!”

We followed her up the stairwell, our pounding footsteps echoing up the shaft as we climbed. Three flights later, we burst onto the ground floor and gazed around warily. From what I had pieced together, this was a private office campus, with buildings up top to act as a front, hiding the very secret, high-tech laboratories beneath. This floor was dark and empty, though the alarm still blared through the corridors, making my ears ring. It looked like most of the employees had already fled the building.

Abruptly, the fire alarm ceased, and silence throbbed in my ears.

“That’s not good,” Mist whispered, and started down a corridor that cut through various offices. No one appeared at the end of the hall, no footsteps echoed in pursuit, but my skin crawled in the sudden, disturbing stillness. “Come on,” she beckoned. “We’ll go through the loading dock where the trucks make the deliveries. No point in risking the main doors.”

Everything was quiet as we slipped through the offices, following Mist down several hallways until she opened a door that led into what looked like a storage space. The floors were cement, and boxes of varying size were stacked along the walls and in neat aisles down the center.

“Almost there,” I heard Mist say under her breath. As if she, too, was counting the steps to freedom. We trailed her along a wall of boxes, rounded the corner and froze.

A thin man stood before a line of guards, their assault rifles pointed in our direction. More than a dozen cold, silvery eyes stared at us across the cement floor as the row of vessels took aim, their faces blank. Behind them and the smiling form of Luther the Basilisk, the doors of the loading dock beckoned, tantalizingly close. But they might as well have been a million miles away.

“Well, well,” Luther said, his sibilant voice oozing with triumph. “And what have we here? Miss Anderson, haven’t you been the sneaky, sneaky agent. Going rogue? Helping Cobalt escape? I wouldn’t have expected it of you.”