The Countdown (The Taking #3)(61)

She wasn’t wrong. My feelings might be jumbled, but I couldn’t exactly pretend they weren’t there. And she was making it damn hard to avoid looking at her, standing her ground the way she was.

Simon came up beside her. “She’s wrong, by the way. It wasn’t nothing,” he insisted in a way that made me want to strangle the jerk. “If you hadn’t come back she’d’ve gotten over you eventually.” He glanced down at the back of her head, and I recognized the look; it was familiar and possessive. “Maybe she already had and she just can’t admit it.”

Kyra grumbled, a sound like disbelief.

She would have stormed away from both of us then if Jett hadn’t come running up. He was shouting even before he’d reached us. “Something’s happening. Dr. Clarke sent me to find you.” He jerked his head down the corridor he’d just come from. “We need to go.”

Kyra was already running after him, leaving both Simon and me in the dust.

I scowled at Simon, who was watching her with the same confused expression I was. I got the sense if we’d been friends he might’ve grunted something like, “Girls,” all Neanderthal-like.

But the thing was, I couldn’t blame him, because . . . Girls . . .





CHAPTER FOURTEEN


EVEN BEFORE THE GLASS DOORS OF THE ELEVATOR slid open to the main level, it was obvious something serious was going down.

This was not the same tranquil operation we’d toured just two days earlier with Dr. Clarke.

Bedlam had erupted.

Jett strolled right into the strictly off-limits, you-need-high-level-clearance, heart of the operation. There were more people now—some wearing ordinary lab gear or uniforms, some dressed in regular street clothes, and a few fully suited in biohazard gear.

But it was the pace that was unsettling. Frenzied. Hectic. It was the only way to describe the nervous energy—everyone scurrying from one place to the next, almost as if no one was quite sure where they should be. Just that they needed to be somewhere. Furtive whispers and agitated shouts filled the air.

The chaos triggered my claustrophobia and, as if I hadn’t considered it before, all at once I was keenly aware of our location: beneath about a million or so tons of rock-solid mountain. If this mountain caved in on us, we were dead meat for sure. There’d be no coming back from that.

Dr. Clarke spotted us and waved eagerly from above the turmoil. Whatever she’d been doing before was momentarily forgotten as she sprinted—no kidding, she sprinted!—across the lab to meet us.

The entire way up here, I’d been aggressively ignoring both Simon and Tyler. I was annoyed that they’d made me feel like the rope in their stupid tug-of-war.

Tyler wasn’t the only one who could play the “I need time” card, and if neither of them could understand that, then it was their loss.

I’d kept as much distance between us as I could manage, even while we’d been crammed into the tiny glass elevator. I went out of my way to avoid looking at them, and when they talked to each other, which, apparently, was a thing they did now, I pretended I was deaf to them.

But Simon was Simon, which meant he couldn’t help himself. So he kept up a steady, one-way stream of rambling conversation the entire way. He wasn’t the leave-well-enough-alone type. Instead, he mentioned how awkward things were, like it was all one big joke, and he told Tyler if he’d only waited a few seconds longer, he might actually have walked in on something interesting.

Then he elbowed him with a wink.

Awesome.

But Simon also hadn’t stopped watching me, and I knew he was worried I might double over again. Him and me both.

Having Jett there had been kind of a relief. His presence eased some of the uncomfortable tension eating away at our small group.

“Where are the others?” Simon asked Jett, when he realized it was just the four of us.

Jett nodded toward Dr. Clarke, who was eyeing Simon as she got closer. “They weren’t invited,” Jett answered. “Technically, neither were you or I, though. Dr. Clarke asked if she could get a look at the equipment we’d lifted from the asylum, so we were doing a kind of you-show-me-yours . . . That’s when the alert went up.”

But I had to question Jett’s objective in his little sharing game with Dr. Clarke. I’d never been sure which of his assets made him more indispensable to Simon’s team, his love of technology or his sticky fingers. Both meant they never lacked for spare computer parts.

“What kind of alert? And what does it have to do with me and Tyler?” I asked Dr. Clarke, glancing at the mayhem.

Dr. Clarke gestured to a nook away from the bustle, where hopefully we could talk in peace. “How certain are you,” she asked, “of your countdown?”

From the side of the room I looked around at all the people huddled over complex computer screens, analyzing what looked like graphs and data that went way over my head.

I thought about what Blondie had told me, about me being a countdown, and considered the numbers that continually replayed through my head. Then I thought about the pain I’d felt downstairs, in the hallway with Simon.

Was that what I’d felt? A change in the timeline?

“I . . . I don’t know. I thought I knew how long, but . . .” I shook my head, frowning. “I could have been wrong. Why?”