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I glared at him, but he could be right, as far as he knew. He guessed who I was, but did he really know?
“Maybe that’s what they want,” I said. “Get us all confused. Start talking to each other. Start giving up information between each other.”
He breathed deeply and nodded, inching closer to the wall and looking toward the door. “You’re right. You were right…we shouldn’t talk.”
Good idea. Maybe he was innocent. Maybe he was one of them. I wasn’t going to snitch about anything.
But they had us. They had me, Axel was probably somewhere, and then there was Raven here. They had all of us now.
So what was next? Why were we waiting? Why were they guarding us together like this in the abandoned floor of the building?
And something wasn’t right with Buble. I couldn’t pinpoint it at the moment, but I had nothing to do now but wait and see how this played out.
??????
We spent a while in silence as Raven slept on the floor between us. It was hard to tell time, but I was tempted to sprawl out on the floor next to Raven and sleep for a while, too, if I could.
Rest, like Axel had said. Even if I wasn’t sleeping, to conserve energy. No water, no food, how long did starving to death take? My mouth was dry but I wasn’t too bad yet. Hungry, but that’d only get worse the longer this went on.
Buble often had his eyes closed but then kept looking at the camera, usually not at me or Raven.
Waiting wasn’t working for me. My stomach was hurting from being hungry. No noises, no answers.
I got up on my knees. “Hey,” I said to Buble.
He picked his head up, looking over at me, and then quickly looking away. “What?”
“Help me out?” I pushed myself against a wall until I was standing up. They’d tied our arms but my legs weren’t tied tightly. I could walk but an inch at a time. If they weren’t going to come talk to us, then I’d give them a reason to come in here to hopefully get more information.
Buble seemed confused but knee crawled over to where I stopped, just underneath the camera.
I motioned with an elbow. “Can you get me up to where I can kind of reach it?”
“What are you going to do?”
“Why give them time to figure out how to kill us?”
“They’ll just knock you out. Like him.”
“Sure,” I said, “but I’ll take the damn camera out first.”
If someone was paying attention or listening, they’d be in here in a second. I moved my tied arms until they were down below my feet and shifted them in front of me. I helped him get into the same position with his hands in front of himself and motioned to Buble to get on his knees. I stepped on his back.
It was enough for me to reach up. The camera was hanging on the wall close to the ceiling.
I simply hung on to it with the plastic bonds around my wrist, placing it on the neck of the metal. “Get out of the way.”
He rolled out front under me. Our door opened just as the weight of my body was too much for the camera. It broke and I dropped to the ground. The camera slapped against the wall, dangling by a couple of wires, snapped out of place by a break in the metal.
At the door was the tired guy, looking frustrated. “Cut that out,” he said. He pushed me away from the wall until I was on my butt on the floor. He picked up the dangling camera, checking out the damage.
He wore jeans and a simple black T-shirt. He wasn’t carrying anything, no weapons in his pockets. Cell phone in the butt pocket but that was about it. Beyond him the door was open, but it only revealed the rest of this apartment we were in, an empty wall. Whoever had spoken to him before didn’t show himself. “They left you alone here with us?”
He didn’t seem too worried about me and focused on the camera, trying to reattach it to a wall but the metal had broken and there wasn’t a way to repair it. “Don’t think of running out. There’s guards posted in the hallway. Everyone else is in the other apartments, but they’ll hear if you try anything.”
“What are we waiting on?” I asked. He didn’t seem too peeved about the camera, which said a lot. “We’re not staying?”
He dropped the camera, letting it dangle against the wall, causing a couple of scratches in the paint. “Naw,” he said. “We’re not staying. Just waiting until dark.” He looked over at me, his tired eyes blinking. “Look, I’m under orders not to hurt you all, but if you keep breaking stuff, they’ll come in here and do to you what they did to him,” he pointed to Raven. “He was causing so much trouble. That wasn’t us beating him, that was self-defense. The tranq was the only way to keep him from killing us.”
Trying to be nice guys when he’d hit me before for attempting to untie my bonds? “I just don’t know why I’m here,” I said. “What do they want? Why hold us?”
He seemed confused. “They want your boss.”
I lifted a brow. “Boss?”
“Yeah,” he said. “We get someone hired you all. A group doesn’t work without a leader. Someone is in charge. We just want to talk to that guy.” He moved to me, crouching about two feet away. “We’re really trying not to hurt anyone here, because dead bodies just make things worse, you know?”
“You all tried to kill me before,” I said. “Poisoned us, remember?”
He seemed confused by this. “Poison? What?” He rubbed a palm over his face and shook his head. “No, nope. I get it. Alice.”
“She’s yours,” I said.
“No.” He lifted a thick finger, blackened with grease around the nail. “Not us. We got her, too.” He stood up. “Listen, someone called in a favor. We came, we got everyone, but we need to find the boss. Okay? You’re only in here like this until we can move everyone safely to somewhere that we can keep everyone secure until this is sorted out.”
“What if it doesn’t get sorted?” I asked.
He smirked. “I don’t know. I’m just looking out for you right here, right now. What happens after that, it’s not my business.” He stood up again. “The camera is down, but I can still listen. Just don’t do anything funny or I have to move you, and I don’t want to have to carry you out, okay?” He backed up and left us, closing the door.
Really relaxed security. One overtired guy and now a broken camera he wasn’t even worried about?
Buble hadn’t even bothered to talk.
I turned to Buble, but he was looking at the door. “Do you have a boss?”
He rolled his eyes. “Doesn’t everyone? But I’m not talking.”
I didn’t know if that was accurate for someone in the Academy. I was trying to remember things that Axel and the others told me. I often asked them who paid them, but they always told me I just didn’t understand, it didn’t work like I thought it did. I’d not realized there could be someone at the head of it all…I thought maybe Dr. Roberts, but he didn’t seem to be the one, as he often said things were out of his hands, talking about committees and such.
I flexed my hands, a little swollen after having the circulation cut off for so long.
That’s when I realized the ring was still on my finger. They took my clothes off but didn’t think to remove it.
It was stuck on my finger while it was swollen, but I hid it from Buble and worked on my circulation. “So now we know. They’ll wait until dark and then move us.”
“Sure, if you believe that,” he said. “And if you believe everything else, they’ll just let us go whenever they get who they are looking for.” He shook his head, and his tongue moved over his dry lips.
“I thought it was him,” I said, motioning to the still sleeping Raven. “I thought he was the last one. I don’t know anyone else they’d be looking for.” While I was talking and listening to him, I worked the ring off and held it in my fingers in my lap. I was trying to figure out how to use it to get through the plastic holding my wrists together.
“Again, if you believe them, they clearly think we’re working for someone and there’s someone else in cha
rge. They don’t think it’s anyone they’ve caught.”
“How would they know? No one knows me.”
He shrugged. “They got some photo IDs from most of us, probably searched through some databases. Not that hard.”
“I didn’t have an ID.”
He lifted a brow. “Nothing?”
“I don’t even have a cell phone. And the only one I was trying to get away from was Alice. She’s the one who was part of kidnapping me before this. If they really have her prisoner, if you believe them, then I don’t know who they are or who they’re working for.”
He blinked rapidly. “I don’t know if I believe you.”
