Adamant (16 page)

“I was so worried. Is Nell okay? Did Alber and Skyla get away?”

“They’re fine,” he said. “Well, Nell’s frantic of course. Skyla knew right away the Alliance must have you, but there was no way we could check.”

Trapped on all sides. I swallowed.

“What should I do?” I whispered. “I’m locked in here. I forgot I was still wearing the earpiece. They’re bound to find out soon. For all I know, they’re listening in.”

“Don’t panic. Let me think for a second. They haven’t hurt you, have they?”

“No…some of the guards are pretty rough, though.”
Not all of them. “
I’m fine.”

“You said they think
you’re
a murderer? That’s messed up.”

“They’ve no evidence otherwise. It happened while I was here. Two people have questioned me, and… this woman.” I swallowed. “She knows I’m not from Earth—they both know. I have no idea how they figured it out.” And my contacts were starting to hurt my eyes. I couldn’t keep them in forever. But removing them wasn’t an option.

“Hang tight. You had your ID with you, right?”

“Yeah. They saw through it. They know it’s fake. They have my phone. But they couldn’t get into it.”

“Good. Listen, Ada. I’ve got an idea. I’m going to need you to get hold of a communicator.”

“Huh?”

“Any communicator—you know everyone at the Alliance carries one. And
I
know how to hack into them.”

I exhaled, almost laughed. “Of course you do.”

He recited a short code, and I did my best to commit it to memory.

“Right. That’ll get you emergency access to any device. Every communicator comes fitted with an alert button. Hit that, and it’ll be like breaking the glass on a fire alarm. Everyone will panic, they’ll think they’re being attacked. If you escape then, we can meet you at the back gate. Alber already knows how to get in. Think you can manage that?”

“I’ll have to run fast,” I said. “But yes.”

This was no different from one of our usual schemes. Right? But there was a new tightness in my chest, and it was hard to suppress a shiver. Too much at risk…

“Okay. I’ll call Nell. She’ll probably send Alber, though she might come herself. We’ll have someone watching the place, anyway. Wait for your opportunity, then get hold of a communicator.”

“Right, I will.” But I didn’t know if I could wait too long. The desire to get the hell out of there burned within my very skin. Maybe it was a reaction to the antimagic cuffs…

Wait. I wasn’t wearing the cuffs anymore.

“How quickly can Alber be here?” I asked. “I think—if I use magic, I should be able to escape this room. Within an hour.”

“Perfect,” said Jeth. “Ada, I’m sorry that happened. We’ll get you out. Promise.”

“I’ll hold you to that.” I swallowed. “See you soon.”

I hoped so. God, I hoped so.

I breathed, in and out, calming myself, reaching for the magic I knew so well. It wasn’t like when I’d come out of the Passages with magic buzzing through my veins like adrenaline. I felt drained. But I
could
do this. I had to. It was the only way to escape, the only way to get back home… To get back to what I was supposed to be doing. Helping people. I couldn’t be locked up for a murder I’d had nothing to do with.

Shouts rang out from the corridor. My heart leaped in my chest. I ran for the door and pressed my forehead to the window, trying desperately to see what was happening outside. But the bars were in the way. People dashed by, panicked shouts echoed, but I couldn’t see the reason.

Like the panic had kick-started it, magic flooded my veins. I could see, as though through a veil, the faint magic present on Earth. More than there usually would be—and enough for me.

I didn’t hesitate to debate whether I was making a huge error. I pulled on the magic, hitting the floor and moving to avoid the rebound striking me. Instead, it sizzled through the lock on the door. The sound was lost in the general confusion. I rammed the door open with my shoulder. I turned left for the way out, headed for the stairs. I had to get a communicator off a guard, before everyone spotted me—they must have all left for the entrance hall.

Thud.
I slammed into someone, who grabbed my arm, tight. Damn. Of all the guards to run into, it had to be Kay Walker.

“Going somewhere?” His eyes flashed. I’d have done my best to kick him… were it not for the communicator sticking out of the inside pocket of his faux-leather guard jacket. Inches away.

I feinted a kick, fast, darted forwards and snatched the communicator. His eyes widened as I spun around and ran faster than I ever had in my life. I had the advantage—I was much shorter than most guards, and easily wove in and out of the gathering crowd. I had a decent head start before I heard the shouts of, “Stop that girl!” and “The prisoner’s escaping!”

You won’t catch me this time.

As I ran, I tapped the touch screen of the communicator and put in the key Jeth had given me. I wheeled around a corner, nearly dropping the device when it vibrated in my hand. Following Jeth’s instructions while running for my life was an obstacle I hadn’t seen coming—I was lucky not to trip on the stairs, though the narrow stairwell slowed the guards down, too. At least enough for me to locate the emergency button, and hit it. A high-pitched, siren-like noise reverberated through the air, making my ears ring. I pounded up the last few steps and out into the entrance hall of the Alliance. Too many people to count ran in all directions, came down staircases and poured out of the elevators.

Except for the one at the far end. A gleam of red caught my eyes, reflected in the glass, I couldn’t help glancing in that direction…

The world tilted under my feet. That was blood. A lot of it.

Someone else was killed.

I had to get out of here. I shot towards the exit, but someone barred my way. Kay, white-faced with fury, blocked my path. His hand caught my arm, making me skid to a halt. Cursing, I pushed down the instinct to draw on the magic buzzing under my skin, as it’d be too risky in a place with so many people. But it put me in a major dilemma. Unless…

“I’ll take that back,” he said, snatching the communicator from my outstretched hand, “and I’ll be taking
you
back downstairs.”

“Like hell,” I said, twisting to free my hand, but only getting my arm locked. I bit back a scream, but he’d already caught my other hand. When I dug my heels into the ground, he lifted me into the air.

“Put me down, you bastard!”

My shout drew attention, and I cursed myself for stupidity. Within seconds, several other guards descended on me. Conflicting orders bounced around the entrance hall, but Kay didn’t let go of me once, no matter how I twisted and kicked. Finally, they agreed that locking me back downstairs was the best option.

I screamed at them, dignity going clean out the window. “I’m not a murderer!” I yelled. “I didn’t
kill
anyone, I haven’t even committed a crime. You people are a bunch of blind fucking
morons!”

“That’s very flattering,” said Kay, tugging on my hands, “but you’re creating a scene. I did tell my supervisor you were innocent, you know. You’re not helping your own case.”

“Screw you!”

I screamed my throat raw, but he still managed to get me out of the hall and downstairs. Again. There was no chance I was getting that communicator off him now. But he hadn’t zapped me with a stunner. There was a surprise. Wait—was he even armed at the moment? Not that it’d help if he wasn’t, seeing as I wasn’t either.

“You’re locking up the wrong person!”

“Stealing an Alliance member’s communicator is a crime,” he said. “As is breaking out of your room.”

And he shut the door on me. Again.

Helpless tears threatened to intrude, but I furiously blinked them away. Damn him. Damn them all.

***

KAY

I shut the door on the girl, noticing that there was a smoking hole where the lock used to be.
Hellfire.
She’d used magic to break out, all right. I positioned myself in case I needed to hold the door. If I’d had some of those cuffs, I’d have had to use them. But I was unarmed. I’d handed my weapons in. The Alliance really needed to look into that. If employees had been allowed to carry weapons inside Central… then Alan Gregory might not be in bloody pieces all over the inside of an elevator.

What the hell was I supposed to do about Ada? My mind was blank, everything I knew about how to deal with emergencies wiped out by the horror of Alan’s death. I didn’t know him, only that he was one rank above me, from the office next to ours, but whatever attacked him had torn him to pieces. Inside freaking
Central.
A human couldn’t have done it.

Ada had been running from this corridor when I’d caught her—she definitely wouldn’t have had time to get all the way over to the elevators. She wasn’t the killer, but to have melted the lock off the door like that was second level magic. There either had to be a small crater in that room which I’d missed, or she’d somehow absorbed some of the backlash herself. Which was another matter entirely.

I couldn’t stand guard here forever. But neither could I let her get away again. I studied the lock. She must have used something else to absorb the backlash. The problem with magic was that it was damned impossible to use it safely even if you did know what you were doing. The odds of accidentally hurting or killing another person were too high.

I glanced up at the sound of footsteps on the stairs, and my gaze fell on a clipboard discarded on the floor, like someone had dropped it. Ada’s name leaped out from the top of the page, and there were notes clipped underneath. Pages of notes. Whose were these, Ms Weston’s?

Another word leaped out: ENZAR.

Of course.
No wonder I hadn’t been able to tell which world she was from—Enzar was listed as out of bounds, and no contact with other worlds was allowed. As far as I knew, the Alliance had started out trying to reach a peace treaty between the two warring sides, but it became clear it’d only get even more people killed, so the council had issued a blanket noninterference statement and closed it off. Plainly, this girl had been smuggled out.

Why? Because she was valuable? She must be mageblood, a magic-wielder, which explained the way she could use magic here on Earth. Not that she’d be able to go above second level—at least, I thought not.

The Alliance wasn’t out to imprison magic-wielders, especially from places like that, despite the council’s statement—hell, it contradicted the Alliance’s first principle, for a start. There had to be a way around it, if I could convince Ms Weston she wasn’t a killer. And convince Ada herself that we weren’t
blind fucking morons.
I had to smile at that. The public might view our headquarters as a flashy nuisance, but I’d always had the impression there was a general agreement that the Alliance was a force for good, even if most people didn’t know the extent of it. Ada, though, had clearly been brought up in an environment that had taught her they were something to be feared.

That didn’t have to be the case. Not at all.

I hid the file behind my back as someone came downstairs. Carl.

“There you are. You’re needed upstairs.”

“The prisoner’s in there,” I said, in a low voice. “She melted the lock.” I moved closer to the door again in case I had to brace it shut.

“Damn. Okay.” He paused, glanced up and down the corridor. “Do not tell anyone you witnessed this.”

And he pulled a stunner from his pocket, jamming it into the hole where the lock used to be. Magic sparked from the tip, but it remained in place.

“She won’t be able to touch it without getting zapped,” he said. “It’s too strong to break through. You can’t unlock it now, but I’ll tell Ms Weston. She’ll have the girl relocated soon as we sort out this mess.” His face was grim. “Alan dead… I’ve never seen anything like it.” He glanced at the lock on the door.

“It wasn’t her,” I said. “She ran into me back there in the main corridor. She was coming from this direction. She wouldn’t have had time to get to the lifts. There’s no other way there apart from the stairs.”

“No,” he said. “Her room was guarded right up until the alert went out, after they found him. I’ll wager she took advantage of the confusion.” He gave the stunner a tap. To be authorised to seal the door like that meant he must be a magic-wielder. Well, shit.

He noticed me looking. “You can use it, too?” he asked.

I nodded. Aric was bound to tell everyone sooner or later, and besides, it was an advantage here, even if I didn’t have any intention of ever using magic again.

“I’ll put that on record. Might get you a promotion.”

That was unexpected. “Cheers,” I said, following him upstairs, all too conscious that we were leaving Ada locked in her room, with no way out.

We have to be certain,
I reminded myself. But that didn’t make me feel any better about it.

ADA

That night was the longest of my life. I could almost feel the oxygen draining from the room, now that the lock was stuck. Permanently. It was so hard to breathe, I had to sit and put my head between my legs for a good five minutes.