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I stopped short at the sixth one with a gasp of horror. The floor of the cell was strewn with bodies.
Halliwell’s children. My hell-siblings. Six of them on the ground, twisted and contorted, eyes bulging, faces dark. It did not look like they had been there very long.
Jana was not there, but of the faces turned my way, I saw Haley’s body. I glanced up at the gas canister loaded into the mechanism. It was red.
I forced myself to keep moving, but I knew what I would find when I looked into the next cell. My hand was clamped over my mouth. I was making a sound, high pitched, barely human. I recognized Dean, Sybil, Jared and George, because their faces were turned toward me, but once again, I didn’t see Jana’s pale blond hair.
Tears were running from my eyes. It surprised me. I had barely known these people, and I had not bonded with them, or liked them at all. They were cold, emotionally dead, unreachable. Like zombies. Whatever Halliwell had done had destroyed them inside.
But it hadn’t been their fault. They were victims, like Reggie. Even Nicole and Vincent had been victims, from what I understood. It was sad and cruel. And it could so easily have been me. Used and discarded like garbage.
The last cell was the one Shane had occupied, and it had only one body sprawled on the floor. Blond hair. She lay right next to the glass. Face down. Jana. Her canister was red, too, like the other two cells. Oh no, no, no. That … fucking…bastard.
I pounded on the glass. Sprang up and hit the button to open the microphone. “Jana?” My voice wobbled, high and desperate. “Jana? Are you still there?”
I waited, not breathing, but I was sure that she was dead.
And amazingly… she moved.
Slowly, at first. Her hand clenched, then opened, pushing against the glass to roll herself over.
She was wearing a gas mask, like the one I’d seen on the day of Shane’s execution. It covered her nose and mouth. She had an oxygen tank on the ground, hidden inside her coat. I heard it rattle and clank against the tile floor as she forced herself to sit up.
She looked at me with bleared, confused eyes. “Girl. What the fuck are you doing here?” she said thickly. “Didn’t I go to a lot of trouble to get rid of you? And here you are again, like a bad penny. This is not a healthy place for you. Don’t you get that?”
“Jana!” I yelled. “How do I open this door?”
She shook her head and pushed herself up onto her knees. “Only Halliwell has the codes, Cass,” she said. “There’s no way out of here unless he inputs the code himself, using his own unique biometrics. No way at all. He was careful about that.”
“But… but how did you get a gas mask and oxygen?”
She shook with silent, feeble laughter. “I put it in there myself, just in case,” she said. “He ordered me to switch out the canisters. To make cells six, seven and eight death cells. It felt like an end game move to me, so I hid a gas mask and an oxygen tank inside all of the meal drawers. In every single cell. He didn’t bother to watch our death throes, so he probably didn’t even notice that I’m still alive. He wouldn’t care if he did.”
“Jana, I have to get you out of there!”
“You can’t,” she repeated. “Face it, and let it go. Funny, how the others never knew the oxygen was there. Just as well, since there was only one mask. Can you imagine the carnage? Those buttheads, fighting over it? That would have been some true Halliwellian entertainment. He lured the others down here on false pretenses, but he had his thugs drag me down by force. I guess he figured I was onto him, after telling me to load the poison gas. He knows I’m broken, but he also knows that I’m not stupid.”
“You are not broken! Far from it! There has to be a way to reprogram this damn thing. I have to get you out, Jana! You need to live!”
Jana shook her head. “My oxygen is almost out. I’m not sure how many minutes I have. Not many. But if suffocating is too uncomfortable, I can always just take off the mask. Nasty, but quicker.”
“No! Don’t! I’m good at jerry-rigging code. Maybe I can find a way. But please. Could you tell me what he did to make Reggie sick? Halliwell said you found the file.”
She waved her hand. “Yeah,” she said, her voice vague and faraway. “Um, let me think. My brain’s not working too well. It’s the oxygen. It’s almost gone. Makes you stupid.”
“Please, try,” I pleaded. “Before he tells his man to kill her.”
Jana blinked rapidly. “It’s… an implant,” she said slowly.
“That can’t be!” I wailed. “She was scanned up the wazoo for implants! There are none!”
“They would never find this one,” she said. “It’s cutting edge. Made of a new kind of biological material. An extremely thin membrane. It wouldn’t show up on any scan. It has nano-bots on it that attack her cell metabolism and her immune system whenever a certain range of frequencies activate them.”
“Where?” I begged. “Where did they put it?”
“It’s, ah…” She frowned, tapping her forehead as if to stimulate the memory. “Under her scalp. Yeah. I saw the diagram. They put it in a week or so before she got sick. In the park. They knocked her down some steps, stuck a needle in her, and in the implant went, and any pain and swelling was chalked up to a bump on the head from the fall. Back right quadrant, ear level. A vertical slit about a centimeter long. The membrane under her scalp is a flat square. Six by six millimeters. I tried to contact you to let you know. I got busted, though. Then he had me dragged down here. Sorry.”
“No. I’m the one who’s sorry.” Tears were running down my face again. “I’m so sorry, Jana. I’ll tell them about the implant right away.”
