AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The guardians tore us apart, but we found our way back to each other. And now we’re going to make sure that their legacy of pain and destruction ends completely.
Zian scowls at the door. “I could bash it open or cut out the lock.”
Dominic cocks his head. “I think it’s better if we don’t leave too obvious a sign that we were here. They might not have the resources to pay much attention to this place anymore, but better safe than sorry.”
Jacob crouches down by the doorknob. “I think I can disengage this lock too. Let me just get the feel of it…”
There’s a grating sound and a sharpsnap, and his mouth twists at a wry angle. “Well, I had to force the issue rather than leaving everything in one piece. But at least no one canseethat it’s broken.”
“I’ll keep checking for any sign of emotional responses nearby,” Griffin says. “But there’s definitely no one on the ground level.”
Jacob grasps the knob and pulls the door open. As we step into the white-washed hall on the other side, the sense of history weighs down on me even more suffocatingly.
The lights were off, but they flicker on at our arrival, provoked by the movement. Dominic lets the door thump shut behind him as he brings up the rear.
There’s nothing on the first floor except a storage room on one side and what looks like a breakroom for the guards who’d have once cycled through patrols on the other. The shelves in the former stand empty other than a few innocuous basics like a box of garbage bags and a few containers of sunscreen.
The breakroom doesn’t look as if anyone’s relaxed there in quite a while. A thick layer of dust coats the plain table and chairs. When we peek inside the cabinets, we find a couple of bags of coffee beans with a best before from years back and assorted sweetener packets.
Zian sucks in a breath. “They really just abandoned the place after they took us out.”
Dominic responds with a terse chuckle. “They must have figured that if we could almost escape, it wasn’t really secure. Better not to risk bringing any other shadowbloods here.”
The guardians wanted to imprison us forever, though. We only need to keep the rampaging shadowbloods contained for a matter of minutes.
My stomach knots tighter with each step we take down the stairs. On the next floor down, we find the door to the control room standing ajar.
The consoles Griffin and I manipulated to open the way for our escape hold just as much dust as the break-room table. I swipe my finger along the corner of one screen. “I don’t think anyone’s been in here in a long time. They figured the fence was enough to make sure they didn’t need to worry about random hikers intruding.”
Zian looks as if he’s suppressed a shudder. “Does that mean we don’t have to bother going farther down? I hate this place.”
The same resistance twines through my muscles. My nerves clang with alarm at the thought of walking down the hallway of cells where we lived for most of our lives, of stepping into the gymnasium where we spent so many days training.
But we need to do this right.
“Maybe we don’t have to right this moment,” I say. “We will need to see exactly what we’re working with eventually—what they left behind, what they might have dismantled after we were taken away.”
Andreas turns on his heel, scanning the control room with a frown. “It’s a secure building, as buildings go, with only one escape route and at least one big room we could direct the rogue shadowbloods into. But how are we going to convince them to come here—to comeinside—in the first place?”
I worry at my lower lip with my teeth. I’ve been pondering that question since I first set us on this course of action. “We need to give them a really good reason to want to come in—and to think that wewouldn’twant them to, so of course it couldn’t be a trap.”
The fact that most of the shadowkind can’t tolerate the protections around the facility—and that those who can would still be severely weakened—is part of the reason I suggested it. Cutler, Nadia, and the others wouldn’t expect us to pick an ambush spot where most of our allies can’t back us up.
Dominic drifts through the room, his tentacles swaying against his back beneath his coat. “What would they want? They’ve already got all the power they need to attack the people they’re looking to hurt. Nothing’s really been able to get in their way for long.”
I think back to our past confrontations with the rampaging shadowbloods. The things they said, the ways they reacted.
The moments when they reacted the most.
“Maybe we need to focus on what theywouldn’twant,” I say slowly. “They hate the idea of us getting in their way, stopping them from getting the revenge they think they deserve. What if they started believing that there was something down here that could stop them?”
Jacob’s eyes light up. “Some kind of weapon designed to be used against shadowbloods. That would make sense. Why wouldn’t the guardians have something like that as a defensive tactic?”
Zian rubs his chin. “But why would the guardians be keeping it here when they’re not even using the building anymore?”
“The other shadowbloods don’t know that,” Griffin puts in quietly. “We were the only ones kept in this facility. They wouldn’t recognize it or have any idea of its significance.”
“Yeah.” I step back into the hall, taking in the dust and the stillness. “We’ll have to clean it up, make it look like it’s been in use.”
