The Replaced(16)

I leaned close to Simon’s ear so he could hear me, and I still had to shout. “What now?”

“Keep going!” Simon yelled back. “And if I give you the word, then whatever happens, don’t breathe!” He said the last two words super slow, making sure I knew this part was extra important.

Like instructions: Don’t breathe.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. “What word?”

He just repeated himself. “The word.” And before I could ask again, he shoved me. “Go, Kyra. We don’t have time for this.”

Yes. Right. No time. The throbbing noise of the fans had me rattled, but I didn’t need to be reminded why we were running: I was sure that the others—not the good-guy others of our team, but the bad-guy ones—would be right behind us any second, and I hurried to get past the next vent.

The tunnels felt endless, and there were several places where we had to make a decision to go left or right. I was the one who could see, but it was Simon who made the call. I got the sense that he understood this place, and the layout of it, far better than I’d realized. As if he’d not only studied the schematics, but that he’d committed them to memory.

The ceiling never got lower, but the passageways definitely got narrower, and it was the narrow part I wasn’t thrilled with. I wasn’t crazy about narrow. It wasn’t that I was claustrophobic per se, at least not in the sense that I was going to have a full-on panic attack or anything, but I definitely wasn’t in love with confined spaces.

I guess you could say I was claustrophobic-light.

Just knowing that Simon was already blocking my escape route going back made my heart trip over itself whenever I spent too much time thinking about it. And the farther we went, the more reckless it beat as this awful feeling that these tunnels might never, ever end became something heavy and solid and real.

Then something snared me, strong fingers seizing me, pinching the bones of my wrist, and I jolted backward. My breath caught hard in my throat. If Simon hadn’t been there, still blocking my exit, I would have fallen over for sure.

“GO!” I shouted, trying to shove Simon out of my path, but I was already being dragged toward whoever had ahold of me.

The man appeared then, coming out from where he’d been hiding, waiting for us, I was sure, in an opening in the passageways. I could see him as clearly as if it were daylight, and it was my second polar-bear moment of the day.

“Gotcha,” he growled, looking more military than Agent Truman ever had, right down to the black grease paint smeared across his sharp features. He wasn’t suited up, which was a scary thought, because if this guy wasn’t one of Truman’s best, then I definitely didn’t want to run into one of the suited-up dudes!

His eyes were a shade of blue so pale they were virtually colorless and downright chilling. I could almost imagine that even his teeth, if he were to show them to me, would be polar-bear sharp. He raised his hand and before I realized what was happening, there was a flashlight shining directly into my face.

He might as well have set off a nuclear blast. I winced, taking several seconds to adjust to the sudden flare, and then I watched as behind that light, he cocked his head to the side, studying me with those frigid eyes of his. “It’s you . . . ,” he exhaled, forcing me to taste the sour combination of coffee and tobacco on his breath.

“Simon, run!” I kicked at the guy, but the hand clamped around my wrist was strong, and the arm behind it was thick and muscular. The guy jerked me back before I could figure out a way to stop him. I pitched backward, my head slamming against the metal wall as I tried to find something to grip on to. Everywhere around me—the walls, the floor, and the ceiling of the ducts—was sheer and smooth. There was nothing I could grasp.

“Kyra!” Simon called out to me, his voice filtering through my hysteria. He should be trying to run, I thought, but instead he said calmly, “The word,” and somehow, even above all that fan noise, I heard him.

I knew he was saying something vitally-critically-majorly important, but for a split second I couldn’t quite grasp it. He’d just explained this, hadn’t he? “If I say the word . . . ,” he’d told me, then . . . what?

I was supposed to do something . . . but no . . . I was supposed to not do something.

Yes! That was it.

I clamped my mouth closed and stopped breathing altogether, and at the exact same moment, that key card—the very same one Jett had given Simon earlier, the one Simon had made Jett assure him would work—landed with a clank on the metal duct floor right at my feet. It was plain and plastic, and it just sat there, doing what looked like a whole lot of nothing.

I glanced up at the guy, the one with the death grip on my wrist. He looked blankly back at me and then down at the useless-looking key card. Only he didn’t have the instructions for “the word” and he was still breathing.

I didn’t even know if anything was happening at first, or what was going to happen, but after a few seconds of looking back and forth between the card and the guy, I started to notice something: the guy—this giant behemoth of a man—was getting woozy.

Even if I hadn’t been able to hold my breath for as long as I could—which was way longer than everyone else—what happened next happened crazy fast. Within seconds, milliseconds even. First there was just a whole lotta blinking, something the poor guy probably wasn’t even aware he was doing. And then I felt his hold on my wrist slipping, his fingers sliding.