Page 131 of Hidden

He looks over at Cain, then back to me. "They took her."

Three words. I hear them, but they just sit there in the room like something someone else said about someone else.

“Desk,” I manage.

“You need…”

“Desk, Mason.”

He gets me there. I drop into the chair and plant both hands flat on the surface, breathing hard, waiting for the world to stop spinning. Mason stays right beside me, his hand softly on my shoulder, almost as if he’s waiting for me to fall and is ready to catch me.

The room swings hard. I hear a sound come out of me that I don't recognize, it’s low and wrong.

I turn to my other side and look up at Cain.

“Nice to see you awake.” He smiles.

“Th…thanks,” I choke out.

The room finally steadies, and when I open the laptop, my hands are shaking. In however long I’ve been doing this, I know the work demands my absolute control, my hands have never betrayed me like this. I stare at the tremor for a second.

“It will pass; Doc will give you something.” I hear Cain, but I still can’t take my eyes off my hands.

I nod, then lock it down and start typing. I’m working slower, but I’ll still be faster than anyone else, if I have to explain everything to them. I stop typing for a moment and take a deep breath in.

“Mason, did…did you…get the…”

“In the basement. I had some fun, but he’s not saying a word yet.” I nod at his words and continue to type. The feed comes up.

It’s an empty room. It has cinderblock walls and a single bare bulb. The metal ring on the wall has rope hanging slack through it. There’s no one there. Something in my chest twists hard. The timestamp is live; it’s in real time.

I got into the system, they knew I would and that's why they attacked me, that’s why they took her, warning me to stop, but it only makes me want to bring them down more.

I pull up the entire building camera network. Every angle. Every feed. It takes four minutes. Four minutes of the doctor saying things I don’t hear and Mason talking somewhere behind me while the only thing that exists for me is the screen. This is my world. In here I can block everything out around me when I’m in this world.

It’s when I get to the fourth camera, on the upper level using the wide angle, I see her.

There she is. She’s standing, her hands are bound behind her back. Her chin is lifted up. She has that same quiet refusal to break that I’ve watched on the beam, in the library, and in every hard moment she’s ever faced. She’s in a larger room now, and she’s looking at someone else.

Another girl sits against the far wall, her knees are pulled to her chest. She looks like she’s been held for a long time.

I zoom in. I know that face.

Renee Park.

She’s alive. The breath leaves me in a rough exhale.

“Is that her?” Mason asks, I nod. “Is that Sadie?”

“Yes.”

“Can you find the location?” Cain asks, and I notice Lincoln is here too.

I’m already working on it. The camera system is old, commercial, and tied to a building management network that still carries its original installation records. Which I think is a little sloppy for this group because everything else has been top security. So why is this so easy?

***

The doctor has been working on me while I work. He’s asking questions, and Mason responds to some of them, the others are met with silence. At one point something shifts deep in the wound.