Omega City (15 page)

Eric and I hugged, and then I saw him into the tunnel. I watched the shape of his body, silhouetted against the head lamp, all the way until he made his first turn. Then I returned to the Comm room to wait.

“How you doing, Gills?” came my brother's voice.

I depressed the button on the walkie-talkie handset. “Fine. Trying not to think too much.”

“How's that going?”

“Not well.”

“Want me to sing? I bet it'll be like singing in the shower. Good echoes.”

“Please,” I begged. “No.” Eric was many things, but musical was not one of them.

Ignoring me, he busted out with a truly atrocious rendition of a pop song. Then he tried “Singin' in the Rain.” When he got to “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” I turned the volume on the handset to low and went looking for a distraction.

Fortunately, the Comm room provided that in spades. There must be hundreds of videotapes, but I knew precisely where I wanted to start. On the Founder Message shelf, I picked the one marked
Monthly Message 1
and stuck it in the VCR. The machine made a few unpleasant grinding sounds and started to play.

At first it was nothing but shots of waving fields of grain and seagulls soaring over sunlit beaches, set to melancholy music, and then, a man's voice.

Earth . . . how beautiful it once was. How perfect. Able to sustain such vast quantities of life, able to recover from everything we've done to it. We shall not abandon our mother.

It was the same voice we'd heard in the elevator, and back on the entrance platform, and in the Russian box. This was the voice of Dr. Underberg himself. My mouth dropped open in awe. Dad would be going nuts, listening to this. But before I could watch any more, the singing on Eric's end stopped. I paused the video.

“Everything okay?” I asked into the walkie-talkie.

He made a terrible sound, something between a cough and a minor explosion.

“Eric!” I cried.

“Sorry,” he said. “There's—” Another exploding noise. “Dust.”

Just dust? Sneezing sounded seriously dangerous in a metal tunnel. Better him than me. “
Gesundheit
,” I said, and went back to the video. Finally I could get some answers about Omega City. This place was unbelievable and utterly secret. How could it be that my father, who
had spent years studying Underberg, didn't even know about it? He couldn't have built it single-handedly. When I pressed play, the image melted away to a scene of a middle-aged Dr. Underberg sitting on a bench in Solar Park. He addressed the camera directly:

Those of us who have chosen to remain, while so many others have left, deserve praise for our loyalty. We shall not discard our home like it's nothing more than a broken cocoon.

What was that supposed to mean? If he was talking about Mother Earth, where else were you going to go? It wasn't like there was a secret base on Mars or something.

Wait.
Was
there a secret base on Mars?

My friends, it is clear that our lust for violence and bloodshed is what is tearing our world to pieces. We must band together, as people of Earth. For now, we truly are a people . . . of Earth.

“Gillian? Calling Gillian Seagret. Respond at once.”

I paused the tape again as my blood ran cold. I knew that voice. Even through the tinny echo of the speakers, I knew.

Fiona
.

“GILLIAN, IT'S FIONA. I KNOW YOU CAN HEAR ME.”

How did she know where I was? How did she know I was alone? My gaze flew to the intercom panel, where an orange light blinked.

“Turn off the master control, Gillian. What we have to discuss is not for everyone's ears.”

I caught my breath. The master control? Did that mean that my conversation with Savannah and the Nolands had gone . . . oh, spitballs. It had gone
everywhere
. It was like the school's PA system—the office could contact individual rooms, or they could turn on every speaker in the whole school at once. And that's what Eric and I had done.

Eric! We'd sent him into the vents and then, thanks to the master control, we'd given out directions to Fiona and her friends.

“Gillian, I will not ask you again. We know where you and your friends are now.”

What choice did I have? I flipped off the switch marked Master Control. This time I could hear it, the faint, echoing blip of feedback resounding down the empty corridors. We must not have heard it before because we'd closed the door behind us. I dropped my head into my hands. We were done for.

“Very good, Gillian. Now, flip on the switch marked L1, and we can talk.”

I ground my teeth together but did as she said.

“Hello?”

“Good.” Fiona cleared her throat. “I have to say I underestimated you, Gillian. You and your brother. You're clearly much more resourceful than your foolish father.”

“Don't you talk about my dad!”

She chuckled. “You're very sweet. But, Gillian, you and I both know what he's like. He had in his possession for years the location of this place, and he never even figured out what it took a twelve-year-old girl a day to find? He's too academic. Too impractical. He doesn't deserve Omega City.”

“And you do?” I rolled over to the map to track down
a room marked L1—but I couldn't find anything like that. Where was she? If they were far enough away from us, there was a chance Eric and the others could get back here before they were caught. The good news was, Fiona's men wouldn't find it any easier to get up here than we had, and Clint and the other guy wouldn't fit in the vent as easily as my friends did.

She was silent for a second. “You don't even know where you are, do you, Gillian? What the Omega City was built for? Such a shame. Allow me to enlighten you.”

“I don't care what you have to say.” Okay, that was a lie.

Fiona sighed into her mic, and it echoed loudly around the room. “I think we've gotten off on the wrong foot. Whatever you may think, I'm not your enemy.”

“Oh no?” I started ticking off reasons on my fingers. “You're lying to my dad to steal his stuff. You have Dr. Underberg's diary, which means you must have been one of the people who broke into our cottage and flooded everything to destroy my father's research. And you've been chasing me and my friends. With guns!”

“I apologize for that last one,” Fiona said. “Had I known that it was you in the woods, I never would have told my men to use their weapons. You're just children.”

Except the way she said it, it wasn't like she was being kind to kids. It was more like she didn't think she needed guns to stop us.

“Clint shouldn't have threatened you like that, back on the entrance platform. No wonder you ran. Really, Gillian, this is all a misunderstanding.”

“It was a misunderstanding when you flooded our house?”

Fiona seemed to hesitate for a moment. “How perceptive you are. And yes, in a way it was. I was following orders from my boss.”

“I don't think that's an excuse.”

“Neither do I,” she replied. “That's why I quit.”

“Hey, Gills,” Eric's voice came through the walkie-talkie. “You still there?”

I swallowed, flicked L1 off, and depressed the button on the handset. “Yep.”

“Okay. You just went quiet. I was worried you got caught.”

I hesitated. Should I warn him? Would it make him panic? “I did. Kinda. Fiona contacted me through the intercom.”

“What?” I heard a thump, as if Eric had jumped up and hit his head on the inside of the vent. “I'm coming back!”

“No!” I cried. “Go get the others. They're coming for all of us.”

“Gillian,” said Fiona calmly. Dangerously. “It's important that you're listening to me.”

“Leave her alone!” Eric yelled. Oh, no. He needed to get
to Savannah and the others. He couldn't do anything to help me from there—and more important, Fiona could do nothing to hurt me while I was still up in the Comm room.

“Eric,” I said firmly. “She's just a voice. But those men coming for Savannah and the Nolands are real. Now hurry!” I put down the walkie-talkie and turned the microphone back on. “I'm listening, Fiona.”

“I don't deny that I was part of the team who raided your father's office and sabotaged his research two years ago,” she confessed. “I was . . . working somewhere else then, and my bosses thought it was a good idea.”

It was like she'd punched me in the stomach. How could Fiona—how could anyone—just sit there and say something like that! She'd ruined our lives, and she was talking about it like it was some vacation she took one time. “Who are they?”

“People you don't want to mess with, kid. Trust me. Actual bad guys.”

“Who?”

She ignored that. “That's why I left them. That's why Dr. Underberg did, too, long ago. I don't want to hurt anyone, Gillian, don't you see?”

“No,” I admitted. “I don't see. I see guns and lies.”

“I'm not lying to you. I don't want to hurt you or your father. I don't want to hurt anyone. That's why I don't work for the Arkadia Group anymore.”

Arkadia Group? I looked down at my silver suit. “The Arkadia Group are the people who hurt my father?”

She sighed. “You're wasting my time, Gillian. I'd be happy to explain everything to you once we're safely out of the city.”

“Explain now,” I snapped. “Why are you people after my dad?”

She hesitated again. “They didn't want him snooping.”

That was only half an answer. “And you?”

“Oh, darling, I don't care what some little historian does,” she replied simply. “I just wanted the directions to the Omega City.”

A lot of pieces clicked into place for me then. Like how Fiona had been waiting for us at the diner when the owner suddenly changed his mind about talking to us. Maybe she'd threatened him before we'd arrived. And how Fiona had gotten so frustrated at the granite slab in Solar Park. She knew she'd been looking for some kind of rock connected to Dr. Underberg, but she had no idea which rock it was, and Dad couldn't help her. She'd acted like she was Dad's only friend, but she'd been working against him all along.

There was a huge racket on the walkie-talkie. “Gillian!” I heard Savannah's voice. “We're here!”

“Great!” I said. “Hurry back!” I needed a plan. I needed to know exactly where we were going the second
they got here. And I needed to make the plan without Fiona knowing.

Fiona was still talking on her end. “What do you see in this city, Gillian? I see the life's work of a great man.”

“You plan to ruin that, too?” I started tracing lines on the map to the exit. It looked pretty straightforward.

“No. I plan to celebrate it. Do you know why Dr. Underberg built this place?”

“Because he was afraid we'd start a nuclear war and blow everyone to pieces?”

“Yes . . . that. But more than that. He was afraid that there was no place for survivors to go. During the Cold War, sometimes people built backyard bunkers. Little spaces the size of schoolbuses that could protect one or two people for a month or so. And at the same time, the government was building massive ones—Greenbrier in West Virginia was meant to hold Congress. The NORAD facility in Colorado was built for the military.”

“I know about them.” What did she take me for? Dad had taken us on tours of them, way back when we were a whole family. Before Fiona and whoever she worked for had wrecked our lives.

I scanned the space for a backpack or a tote bag or something. I could collect all these videotapes and carry them with me. I could bring them home to my dad. We
might not get our hands on the battery, but we could finally have proof again that he'd been telling the truth all along.

“But where were the normal people supposed to go, Gillian? People who weren't military or government, who didn't have top secret clearance? Dr. Underberg wanted to save them.”

I stopped what I was doing as her words sunk in. I'd been right all along. Those hundreds of empty seats in the movie theater . . . those classrooms and the gym and the parking lot filled with empty vehicles. He was making a place for the normal people, the people like me and my family and friends.

I thought of his writing in the diary, his “last and lasting gift to mankind.” I looked at the tape and its grainy image of sunlit seashores and misty forest-covered mountains Dr. Underberg probably put in there because he thought anyone watching these tapes had seen them nuked out of existence. The only weapon I'd seen in this whole place was that trap for Russian spies on the entrance platform.
Enemy combatants and firearms are not permitted
, as the recording in the elevator had said. The same one that said
Welcome, survivors
.

That's what Dr. Underberg had always been focused on. Survival. Survival for soldiers in war, for sailors at the bottom of the sea, for astronauts in space . . . and for
normal people who needed shelter when things went really, really bad up top.

But there was one thing I was absolutely sure of: office-flooding Fiona and her gun-toting goons were
not
normal people. They were . . . well,
them
.

“I want to help people, too,” Fiona insisted. “All those amazing inventions of Underberg's—they disappeared along with him, and that's not right. But”—her voice dropped—“they're here. His wonderful battery? What if it's hidden right here?”

Yeah, what if? But I'd been all over this city and the only stuff I'd seen was out-of-date gym equipment and old computers. If the prototype was here, Underberg had hidden it well.

“Think about what the discovery of his battery would do for the energy crisis. What his nonperishable food could do for millions of starving children around the world. What his smart fabric could accomplish in hospitals, or for sports. The list goes on and on.”

Smart fabric? I brushed my hands over the sleeves of my silver suit as a chill shivered my skin. I was sure if I could see my arms, they'd be covered with goose bumps. This suit said it had been made by the Arkadia Group. But was it still Dr. Underberg's invention?

“And that's what you're trying to do?” I asked. “Bring Underberg back into the world?”

“Yes!” She sounded relieved. “We're on the same side, don't you see?”

I remembered what she'd said, back at dinner with my dad, about what a great man Dr. Underberg was. At the time, I just thought she was buttering him up, but maybe she'd been telling the truth. But if that was the case . . .

“Then why didn't you just tell my father what you were looking for?”

“Well . . . I wasn't sure how he'd react, was I? He's been so burned by the whole situation. I wasn't sure he'd take kindly to my search.”

Something about this didn't make sense, but I couldn't be sure what it was. And then it hit me—she had been very clear about wanting to know everything Dad knew about Underberg. She'd wanted to see all his research. And Dad had been excited about every morsel of attention. He'd been thrilled to see a young, attractive woman with a steady job and no trace of an aluminum-foil hat interested in his work again. He would have handed her whatever she wanted, had she asked him. But instead, she'd kept secrets. She'd even sneaked into his files. And she'd never let him know that her goal was to bring Underberg's celebrated technologies back into the world.

“You don't want to rediscover his inventions,” I realized aloud. “You want to steal them.”

She was quiet for a very long time. “Aren't you clever.”

“Yeah, I am. And you're not going to do it. Underberg has, like . . . patents or whatever on his work. That means you can't claim it.”

She laughed. “Are you seriously trying to tell me what patents are? Little girl, I do this for a living.”

I scowled at the speaker, flicked the microphone switch off, then turned the walkie-talkie back on. “Eric?”

“Coming,” he said, sounding out of breath. “Gills, there's someone behind us. We can hear them in the tunnel. Get ready to run.”

It must be Clint and the other guy. And they knew at least the first half of the directions. They probably even knew Savannah's little jingle.

“Hurry!” I gave up looking for a backpack and started shoving tapes into the pockets of my suit. I could only fit a few, though. I rushed over to the desk with the lighted maps, scanning the surface for a hard-copy version of the detailed schematics on the screen, but found nothing.

That's when I realized Fiona was still talking to me.

“—not like they will let anything patented by Dr. Underberg come to market. They'd prefer that he and everything he stood for be completely forgotten.”

As Eric would say, who are
they
?

“And,” she went on, “since he's not around to make any money off his inventions anymore—well, isn't it better that people be able to have these things than not? I can bring
them to the market, and Underberg can't. It's as simple as that.” She paused. “Gillian? You're still there, aren't you?”

I lunged at the switchboard and turned on L1. “Yep. Right here.” And still very busy thinking Fiona was a big, stinking liar.