SHE LED US TO THE TOWER that anchored the main building, rising above the rest of the office park. I had thought it was decorative, and in fact the top of it probably was, with its tall arched windows. But there was a floor below that I hadn’t noticed from outside, and that was where Dr. Grace took us.
The room was octagonal, windowless and ringed with large monitors. As Dr. Grace had promised, the resolution was remarkable. At first glance I saw the cafeteria, empty now except for a lone custodian moving the tables out of the way to vacuum, displayed on a four-foot-wide screen, and the courtyard out front, where a gardener in coveralls tended a row of small trees. Four people wearing headsets were seated at workstations, watching the dozen monitors, making notes on their laptops. They glanced up as Dr. Grace walked in, and one of them moved his earpiece out of the way and looked at her questioningly.
“It’s all right, Chetan,” she said. “They’re here to observe with me.”
The man shrugged and adjusted his earpiece.
There was an empty area in the middle of the room, behind the bank of workstations, and Dr. Grace led us there. We had an unobstructed view over the heads of the other viewers. “You have five minutes,” she whispered. “Look at the screen over there.”
I spotted Anna immediately. She was standing at a window of her bedroom, already dressed for work in her nursing scrubs. She had her back to the camera, her long, wavy chestnut hair pulled into a low ponytail, her sharp-angled shoulders sloped in defeat. Next to me, Kaz sucked in his breath.
“She’s all right,” I said softly.
“She doesn’t know that I am, though,” he muttered. “That must be killing her…”
Almost as though she could hear us speaking, Anna turned away from the window and regarded the rest of her room bleakly. The bed was neatly made, a stack of folded laundry waiting to be put away.
She touched the edge of the bed, smoothing out the spread, and then she slowly lowered herself to the floor. For a moment I thought she had collapsed, but when she folded her hands together under her chin, I realized she had knelt to pray.
Kaz squeezed my hand, and my heart constricted with pain for him. I had seen Kaz fearless in the face of incredible odds, even death-but watching his mother struggle seemed like more than he could bear.
I turned away to give him privacy. Dr. Grace was conferring quietly with one of the technicians, going over something he was showing her on a log sheet. I looked at the other banks of monitors, which displayed every corner of the facility. There were bedrooms like Chub’s, but with real windows and more personal details-staff quarters, I assumed. There were views of the parking garage, the courtyard, the research facilities. Some were empty, and in others people worked at computers and banks of equipment.
There was the specimen room; I saw that the zombies were lined up in their chairs, where we’d left them. The one that had nearly fallen on us had been removed, but there was a stain on the floor where it had lain. I glanced quickly away from that screen.
There was a hospital bed with a lumpy, still form under a white sheet. Another zombie? But something wasn’t right…
It took me a moment to absorb what I was seeing.
Sensors blinked and tubes protruded from the body’s throat and extremities. As I watched, the body shifted slightly, its arm skittering a few inches on the sheet. Clawed fingers scrabbled at nothing. But what was wrong with them? They were hideously deformed, mere stumps, crusted with…
What was that?
I squinted at the face exposed at the head of the bed and felt my stomach turn. The skin had melted from the bone, a mask of peeling, bandaged shreds attached to a skull. A lipless mouth pulled back from leering teeth. Its eyes stared piteously at the ceiling, its lashes and eyebrows gone. There was no hair on its skull, and its ears were mere knobs of flesh-
And that was when I knew: this tortured body had been horribly burned, and then saved by extraordinary measures, the best medical care money could buy. It would have been far kinder to let it die; its every moment was screaming torture, but its lungs had been too badly damaged to produce a scream.
It was Bryce Safian.
The man we had left for dead. The man who’d been pulled from the inferno of his laboratory, carried out on a stretcher, one charred foot dangling free. From what I could see, most of his body had been burned beyond recognition.
But Prentiss had contacts everywhere, sources I could only imagine. If there was a way, he would buy or steal it. He would pay people to perform miracles on Bryce, and pay others to look the other way.
In the old lab, the one we had destroyed, Bryce had been in charge, and I had feared him. He tried to imprison me, to use me and Prairie to learn how to turn ordinary people into Healers. Had he succeeded, he could have produced the seeds of World War III, giving every army that could afford to pay access to zombies who would carry out their acts of war.
We had destroyed Bryce’s lab, his data-but we hadn’t destroyed his backups. We didn’t think it mattered: with him dead, the passwords and locations were lost forever. But with him alive…
That was why he was here. Even if all he could do was scrawl on a pad of paper-even if all he could do was blink yes or no-with enough patience and enough time, they could make him tell everything. First would be the passwords; then they would force him to explain the data. By keeping him alive, they had round-the-clock access to a consultant whose every moment was clearly agony.
My heart sank. If they had already got the passwords from him, everything was lost. There was no way we would be able to pull off burning down a lab a second time. I had no doubt they’d redoubled the security here. They would be on high alert for any kind of invasion.
But…
Bryce was still alive, and there had to be a reason. As much as I hated Prentiss, I didn’t believe he was deliberately cruel. Bryce held the key to the work being done here.
So we had to get to Bryce.
I glanced at Dr. Grace again, but she was engrossed in the report she was reading, tracing a column of numbers with her fingernail. Next to me Kaz watched his mother pray and held my hand tightly in his.
After a moment Dr. Grace summoned us. “Time’s up, I’m afraid,” she said. “We need to get you two to your rooms so you can get some rest. If you’ll follow me?”
As he turned to go, Kaz traced a fleeting sign of the cross on his forehead, chest and shoulders and mouthed the words I love you to his mother. She continued to pray, her lips moving steadily, her back straight.
As we left the lab, I-who had never set foot in a church-said the most desperate prayer of my life.
Keep us safe, and help us do what must be done.