Chapter 21

We barged back into containment and found the others sorting through one of the shipment boxes. Jacob glanced up at me and said, “There’s a hand-crank emergency radio on the manifest.”

Jibben added, “Keep in mind that there’s still battery power involved, so after all this time, it may not be operational.”

Maybe not—I’ve had remote control batteries go crusty after just a couple of months—but we owed it to ourselves to at least take a look. “Okay. Good. But where’s the leak coming from?”

“What leak?” Jacob asked.

I gestured toward the hall with my flashlight. It dutifully flickered…and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. “Did either of you leave this room while we were gone?”

“No,” Jacob said cautiously.

It was tempting to say, Are you sure? But I figured at least one of them would have remembered, given that Alisha and I were gone for all of ten minutes—fifteen, tops.

“Oh my god,” she said under her breath.

Jacob and Jibben both stopped what they were doing and looked to me for an explanation.

I nodded toward the hall. “There’s something out there you’d both better see.”

Things had turned so weird, I half-expected it to be gone in the ten seconds it took to get back there. But when we trooped out to see it, there it was, in all its wet, shoe-shaped glory. “Male,” Jacob said. “A plain, leather-soled dress shoe.” As my shoe was the only one that matched, I put my foot down next to the print, figuring I’d somehow managed to track water in the opposite direction.

The sole was a smidge shorter than mine, and a lot wider.

“It’s a ghost,” Alisha said.

“It’s not a ghost,” I said…but I almost wished it was. Because I had a fully stocked exorcism kit on hand, but no sidearm. And if somebody was lurking around the basement lab with us—somebody in the physical plane—a spritz of Florida Water wouldn’t do us a whole hell of a lot of good.

Maybe Jibben had thought he was the only one in the lab when I first showed up—but someone else could have very well been down here this whole time. It’s not as if we’d asked Darnell to see the sign-in roster. I’m sure plenty of folks had lab clearance, not just the researchers or the important so-and-sos like Jacob, but the folks who sweep the floors and squeegee the glass.

The lab was a big place with plenty of nooks and crannies. So the thought of another person being down here with us was no big stretch.

It was the fact that they hadn’t come forward yet that made it weird.

Then again, anyone who’d gotten past Darnell would’ve had to surrender their gun and go through the naked machine, just like the rest of us. That just left all the various chemicals and drugs that could be used as a potential weapon. At least the butter knives in the break room were off-limits now. Though who’s to say the lurker didn’t get there before the sink overflowed….

Jacob leaned in and murmured, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Unless he was hoping that the butterknives around here were really dull, probably not. He said, “We should go check on Agent Thompson.”

“Absolutely,” Jibben agreed. “In case our initial assessment was wrong and he simply lost consciousness from that shock. A small possibility. But if so, he’d need medical attention.”

That hadn’t been what Jacob was thinking either—he knew damn well Darnell was dead—but it seemed a lot less panic-inducing than announcing we had to make sure Darnell’s corpse wasn’t making the rounds.

My flashlight beam danced ahead of us as we made our way down the dark hall toward the lobby. I tried to listen for any footsteps besides our own, but with three pairs of feet and one office chair struggling along, I couldn’t hear squat.

As we drew closer to the lobby, I swept my flashlight across the scene. Darnell lay where we left him, face up on the floor on the other side of the glass. The divided room was so still and quiet, I could hear the blood rushing in my ears. And on his side of the door, Darnell’s repeater flickered to life, came at the door, blew back and blinked out again.

Jibben wheeled forward to get a closer look through the glass at Darnell’s body. “I truly thought he might be—” and then he cut his eyes to me, as if realizing that all this time, I’d known damn well the guard was dead. But at least Jibben wasn’t tactless enough to blurt it out in front of Alisha.

We were all standing there staring out into the elevator bay when a crash rang through the hallway, echoing all around us. I spun, flashlight lashing through the dark. The beam caught a supply cabinet swinging on its hinges near the far wall.

“Vibrations from the storm must have worked it loose,” Jacob said, but a muscle in his jaw leapt.

I nodded mutely, drinking down white light. Though if someone physical was down here with us, it wasn’t as if the white balloon trick would stop them.

Alisha turned back to the safety glass, looking forlornly at Darnell’s body. “Are y’all sure he’s not just unconscious? Maybe he’s in a coma. I think his arm wasn’t in that exact same position before.”

Unfortunately, she was probably right about his arm. With the ventilation down, it was stiflingly warm. The perfect atmosphere for bloat to set in early.

Hopefully she wouldn’t see the worst of it in the dark.

A muted burst of static from Darnell’s walkie made us all jump. Its screen lit up, casting a green glow in the dark elevator bay. Words came through, distorted and nearly inaudible through the barrier of the safety glass. We all strained our ears to listen, but the sounds remained frustratingly unintelligible.

Alisha plastered herself against the glass, thumping it with her fists. “Hey—help! You got hurt people down here!”

Gently, Jacob settled a hand on her shoulder and eased her away from the glass. “Alisha…they can’t hear you. Not unless you press the button.”

She jerked away. “I know how it works—but it can’t hurt to try. It’s more than anyone else is doing.”

The last thing we needed was to piss each other off. Briskly changing the subject, I said, “Okay, what about that emergency radio on the manifest? Maybe we’ll find out when we can expect the storm to blow over instead of just sitting here in the dark imagining the worst.”

As we turned to go, I took one last look at Darnell’s repeater, a flicker of motion as he came at the door, so damn determined to save us all—only to get blown back, dead before he even hit the ground. And I checked once more for his ghost, just in case there was something more than just the residue of a sudden death lurking in the shadows. But as far as I could tell, he’d left no spirit behind.

We all trooped back to containment. The dark hallways were just as long and forbidding as ever, only now with the added threat of a mysterious stowaway creeping around down there with us. The wet footprint was still there, mostly. Though it was smaller now thanks to evaporation, and a tire track led away from it where Jibben’s chair wheel had caught the very edge of the print.

It bothered me. Not that Jibben had driven over it—he could hardly help it—but the whole fact of it being there to begin with. Who left it, where did it come from, and where did it lead? And why was there only one?

I supposed someone could have materialized out of the astral, taken a single step, changed their mind, and disappeared. (And I supposed I could also win the lottery on a snowy day in August. Chicago weather might be notoriously weird, but since certified psychs are disqualified from gambling, that wasn’t gonna happen.)

Besides, if someone was shifting planes, it wouldn’t be water they’d leave behind, but ectoplasm. And that would’ve evaporated the second our backs were turned.

I was none too fond of containment. With the big shipment of boxes in the middle and not much else, it felt both sparse and crowded at the same time. And with no ventilation, when we closed the door, it got stuffy, quick. But there was only one door in—and four of us to keep an eye on it. I liked those odds better than roaming up and down a warren of pitch black hallways where anything at all could jump out at any time.

Great, now I was feeling even more paranoid than before.

Damn footprint.

Once we sealed ourselves back into the airless containment room, Jacob told Alisha, “As much as we all want to pitch in and help, the less you see of this shipment, the better.”

Alisha’s resulting eye-roll spoke volumes.

“I’m only trying to look out for you,” Jacob said earnestly.

Alisha plunked down on one of the break room chairs, crossed her arms, and said, “I didn’t wanna have to paw through that old pile of junk anyhow. You’ll probably get stuck with a rusty nail.”

Or, at the very least, pick up a hell of a splinter from all that sixties dark walnut veneer. Everything was covered in it, from the pencil holders to the waste paper baskets. The weather radio was all the way at the bottom of the pile—of course it was—and it, too, was wood veneer.

A very crusty wood veneer.

“I’d be surprised if the battery was still intact,” Jibben said as he took the radio gingerly from Jacob’s outstretched hand. “But we’re in luck—there’s a servo bypass.”

Whatever those last couple of words meant, I gathered they were encouraging.

A crank folded out from the veneered cube that would provide power, even with the battery juice long ago leaked away. But the radio didn’t seem to be tuned to anything in particular. In other words, between cranking, tuning, and holding the thing steady, it was at least a three-handed operation. So I let Jacob and Jibben get to it and joined Alisha by the far wall.

“What about your purse?” she said. “The ‘specialized equipment’ you nearly got yourself electrocuted for?”

Good idea—I’d much rather futz with my compass without Jibben know-it-all-ing over my shoulder. But when I snapped open the kit, I realized that aside from the salt and Florida Water (which is typically all I use) there was a spare pocket flashlight, a charcoal puck and a small baggie of incense, a plastic lighter, and half a dozen votive candles.

By the stuttering light of my flashlight, Alisha and I both looked at the candles, then locked eyes.

“Flames use oxygen,” I reminded her.

“But what if we opened the door a crack? Let in more air?”

I glanced at the door. If not for that damn footprint…. Though if we had a rescue ETA, maybe we could afford a bit more light. “Say, Jibben—exactly how long would it take for a flame to use up the air in here?”

Preoccupied with cranking, he spared me just a fraction of his attention. “Taking into account the volume of the room, the amount of oxygen consumed per hour, and of course, the size of the flame—”

That sounded like way more math than I was prepared to deal with. But luckily Alisha didn’t panic when someone whipped out a formula. “What would use up more air—a bunsen burner, or a candle?”

“Oh. Well, certainly, a gas burner exhibits a considerably higher rate of oxygen consumption than a standard candle flame. The magnitude of this difference would vary depending on several factors, of course—the specific design of the Bunsen burner, the type of fuel used, the flame settings.”

My flashlight beam flickered. “Guesstimate,” I said.

Jibben gave a frustrated huff. “Again, it depends—”

“How many hours ’till a candle burns through all the air?” Alisha asked.

“Ten thousand?” he said doubtfully.

We all frowned, and Jacob said, “More than a year.”

So much math.

Jibben said, “But keep in mind, that doesn’t even take into account four people breathing—”

I pulled out a match and struck it. “Worse comes to worse, we’ll crack the door.”

When the wick caught the flame, the shift in the room was palpable. My flashlight was still flickering away, but by the steady glow of the candle, it was nowhere near as strobey.

Funny how something as basic as a reliable light source can turn the whole mood around. The flickering LEDs had been making me tense up, but now I felt my shoulders unhitch. As Jacob and Jibben futzed with the radio, I did my best to just sit there and breathe. I might never consider myself an optimist. But it felt a lot better to believe that we were on the brink of getting back to our normal lives.

Static burst from the radio. It cut out when Jibben’s crank paused, then picked up again as soon as the cranking resumed.

—severe weather warning for the Chicago area.

Tell us something we don’t know.