In The Afterlight (The Darkest Minds #3)(90)

An avalanche of faces, sounds, colors, landscapes streamed through my mind, thundering down over me. I searched for the relevant ones, information about how they reported in statuses, the timing of it, as Zach brought the other screaming woman down, gagged her with cloth, and zip-tied her safely away from the controls to one of the pipes running along the far-right wall.

“Done!” he called. “We have eight minutes. Erasing camera footage.” Nico had shown him how to set the footage back, to loop through already recorded images, making an educated guess about the programs they used. It must have been close to reality, because Zach punched a fist in the air when he was done.

“Get the rooms unlocked upstairs,” I told him, pointing to the nearest computer. “Password is capital P, capital S, capital F, one, three, nine, three, eight, exclamation mark, asterisk. Did you get that?”

“Affirmative.” He relayed the next part to the rest of the team who were, hopefully, already heading up the stairs. “Unlocking doors.”

I brought up the memory of the woman sitting at one of the computers, the message she’d relayed to the PSF system—exactly how I wanted her to do it now, and then again in another two hours. When I pulled back, I took away her memories of Zach and I entering. She simply nodded and went about her business, standing in front of the monitors, her eyes unseeing, her face a blank slate.

“Control is out of play, over,” I said.

“Roger that,” came Cole’s relieved reply. “Proceed upstairs with the others.”

Zach hit the button beside the door, unlocking it, and stepped out. I was right behind him when he jumped back, raised his gun and aimed—

“It’s me,” came a familiar voice. “It’s me, don’t shoot—”

Disbelief, dumb and mute disbelief, stole over me as I confirmed who was standing at the other end of Zach’s rifle.

Liam.

“What the hell, man?” Zach shouted, throwing a furious punch toward him. “Jesus, I almost shot you!”

I hadn’t moved. It didn’t make sense—it wasn’t him, he had gone to find Olivia. He wouldn’t have come in after us, he couldn’t have been so stupid, not Liam, not Liam—

I was so fixated on his face as I yanked my ski mask up and over mine that I didn’t see the red-haired woman behind him, wild curls tumbling around her long-sleeved black shirt. She wore black jeans and boots, but I didn’t get a clear image of her face until she lowered the camera that was clicking wildly, capturing everything around her.

“Who,” I heard myself say in a low, furious voice, “the hell is this?”

“Status?” Cole asked. “Gem—status?”

Liam matched my stony look with one of his own. “This is Alice, from Amplify.”

“Dude,” Zach said, shaking his head. “Dude, this is crazy—”

Alice looked young, late twenties, maybe, but a clean face free of makeup made her appear only a few years older than the rest of us. She was taller than Liam, slender, but strong enough to haul a backpack that looked like it weighed twice as much as she did.

“Nice to meet you,” she said. “Wow, this is...wild.”

Liam wasn’t looking at me for my approval, just my reaction. All at once, adrenaline kicked back into my system, throwing me into action. Accept, adapt, act. I pressed a finger to my earpiece, cutting off Cole’s request for status, and turned toward the staircase at the end of the hall.

“Liam is here,” I told him. “With a reporter from Amplify.”

Static trickled over the line. Zach shot me an uncomfortable look as we hit the stairs, as if he, too, were picturing Cole’s reaction to this.

Finally, he answered, “Say again.”

I repeated the information to him again as we rounded the corner of the stairs and came through the door that the team had left propped open.

The strange, familiar smell I’d breathed in on the way up finally had an explanation as we burst through the doors: the gagged and bound soldiers were secured against the same wall they’d been using to stencil and paint a message: OBEDIENCE CORRECTS DEVIANCE.

The Op team had been in the process of ushering the kids out of the five dark rooms lining the opposite wall, trying to coax them to come out. I saw the problem immediately.

“Take off your masks,” I told the others. “It’s all right, the cameras are off.” The kids wouldn’t come out until they saw that we were kids, too—that they weren’t being tricked or picked up by a different set of monsters in black uniforms. One of the teen boys from the first room stuck his head out, saw the gun Gav was holding, and immediately retreated back inside. He would have slammed the door shut if Josh hadn’t caught it.

Alice’s camera was clicking like an insect, trying to take in the sight from every angle. I spun on my heel and knocked the camera out of her hand, wishing like hell she hadn’t had the strap around her neck so it would have smashed against the tiled floor. “Do you mind?” I snapped. God—it was bad enough the kids were in here, but couldn’t she at least give them a second of peace to collect themselves?

“Ruby—” Liam started, but Alice waved him off.

“It’s fine, I get it.” But I saw her lift her camera again anyway, this time set to record video instead. Clearly she didn’t get it.