Page 46 of Anarchy Chained: Alpha Thomas

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - THOMAS

I grab her and walk out of the room. This is just a perimeter alarm, so they’re not inside yet. I take her over to the monitors and study them.

“What’s happening?” she yells over the alarm.

I turn the alarm off. No need to broadcast what I already know. I let the buzzer ring in my ears for several seconds before I talk.

“Look,” I say, pointing to the security monitor. “They’re here.”

“Who?”

“Prodigy, most likely. Maybe Yasmine’s people. If she had those kinds of resources.”

“How will we get out?”

“Well,” I say, scratching my chin and looking around. “First I need to blow this shit up.”

“What?”

We might have an unhealthy obsession with blowing things up. I smile. “Just the hard drives. I need this fucking tower, so we’ll leave all the rest intact. They won’t blow it up. They’ll need to study it. But they’ll never figure it out. I’m the only one around here with eyes in the sky.”

I exit all the satellite programs, transfer ownership of the data to the other three towers, open the security panel, and type in the code for self-destruct.

“We’ve got five minutes before the air becomes unbreathable. If they come down here, they won’t go back up.”

“But where will we go?” Sadie asks, looking around in what might become panic if I don’t rein her in.

“Don’t worry. Do you really think I didn’t build this place with an escape hatch?”

She takes a deep breath and nods. “Fine, I’ll go with you.”

I almost snort. “Like you have a choice, sweet Sadie.”

Her whole body stiffens at my words. But I just grin and take her hand. “Come on, it’s this way.”

I lead her down a hallway, which leads to a two-foot-thick door made of reinforced steel. I key in the combination, heave it open, and wave her through.

“It’s dark,” she whispers into the blackness as I close and lock the door behind us.

“It’s this way,” I say, calmly taking the lead. She keeps hold of my hand, trips a few times over the uneven concrete below our feet, then bumps into my back when I stop at the next door.

“How can you see?” she whispers.

“No one can hear you. And I just have an excellent sense of direction, that’s all.”

There is another alarm, which makes her jump in surprise. “Why is it going off again?”

“The gas,” I say. “It’s releasing the gas now.”

“That was fast,” she says. “There wasn’t even a second warning. What if we were still in there?”

“I don’t make mistakes, Sadie. So why give the bad guys an opportunity? If you’re gonna do something, do it with winning in mind. I never half-ass my shit. If I make a security protocol, there’s no room for fuck-ups because I don’t fuck up. Here’s the car.”

“Car?”

“Train car, Sadie. Please get inside. We’re on a deadline.”

I code in the password into the security panel and the doors open, soft green lights barely illuminating the train we’ll be leaving in.