“Ready?” Cami asks once her boots are zipped.

“Let’s hustle,” I say, using her word, and a flash of her white teeth is all I see before she leads the way from the room.

The corridor is hardly lighter than the darkness we just left, with flaming torches spaced infrequently enough to cast eerie shadows along the path. I cancel the glow emanating from my palm but then change my mind and whisper it back into existence, this time as a floating orb bobbing in the air before us. Even with the path now somewhat brighter, my skin still crawls as I hurry after Cami, certain that there could be anything lurking in the bowels of the earth where we are— spiders, snakes, rats, cockroaches … We’re underneath a zoo, after all. It’s not a huge stretch of the imagination to wonder if any of the carnivores ever escape their enclosures and find their way down—

“What are you thinking about that has you looking so pale?”

Cami is peering curiously at me as we approach the spacious cavern leading to what I’ve mentally dubbed the command center—the room with all the monitors where Kael and his Remnant friends first told me the truth about Lengard. The light is much more concentrated here than in the tunnels, with the large catacomb chamber acting as the central hub of the underground labyrinth. Even with the rest of the inhabitants fast asleep in their various quarters, the torches burn brightly here, illuminating the ancient archaeological wonder before us like a massive pillared cave hewn into the earth.

“Nothing important,” I reply to Cami, banishing the floating orb and watching my step as we hasten down the spiral path and through the cavern. Before she can press, I ask, “When I was unconscious, did they go after any new breakouts? Or is this the first since we’ve arrived?”

“None that I know of.” A sour note creeps into Cami’s voice as she adds, “Not that anyone would have told me.”

I feel for my friend. Six days is a long time to have been kept in the dark, waiting for any scrap of information. I’m not sure why Kael wasn’t more communicative with her during my recovery, especially since they have history, having lived together at Lengard until his family left ten years ago. It almost seems like he’s been avoiding both of us. Hopefully tonight we’ll finally be able to corner him and start getting some answers.

We leave the cavern behind and continue along a narrow path as we press on toward where we assume Kael and the others must have headed. But when we round a bend in the tunnel, Cami comes to a jarring halt, and I lurch backward to avoid running into her.

“Cam, what—”

An unfamiliar—and irritated—voice cuts me off. “Not you again. I told you I’d let you know if I found him.”

I peer around my friend’s shoulder and see that we stopped to avoid colliding with a boy coming from the opposite direction. He’s tall and lanky and around our age, with messy ginger hair and bright gray eyes hidden behind glasses. Burn scars cover most of his visible skin, including one entire side of his face.