Chapter 7

“The elevator,” I said, and my voice came out raspy and dry. I cleared my throat and repeated, “The elevator.”

Jacob was busy trying to strap the frozen lasagna to Jibben’s leg with scotch tape, while on the other side of the glass wall in the elevator bay, Alisha jabbed at the dead button and said, “What’s wrong with this thing?”

“Stay calm,” Jacob told me. “The generator will kick in.”

“And if it doesn’t?” I wondered.

“We take the stairs.”

Alisha was apparently willing to let bygones be bygones with Darnell—at least for the moment—when she hauled at his arm and said, “You can’t leave Leonard in the elevator. He’ll have a panic attack! And what if it’s the paramedics in there? What then?”

“Take a breath,” Darnell told her—and she actually did. It wasn’t the words, but the way he’d said them. Calm, matter-of-fact, competent. “We’ll get those doors open. I’ve got a drop key.”

I personally wouldn’t have named anything related to a malfunctioning elevator a “drop” key. But since Leonard was stuck just above the lowest level, I supposed at least he wouldn’t have very far to fall.

Darnell unhitched a heavy keyring from his belt and quickly found what he was looking for. It wasn’t a traditional key. More like a tool—one of those specialized screwdrivers that we’ve always got in every size and configuration except the one we need. He fit the end into a little round hole on the elevator door—one that I’d never taken much notice of before—and gave it a wiggle.

“It’s stuck, ain’t it?” Alisha said, hovering.

“Just gimme a sec.” Darnell felt around with the key. “Gotta catch the release mechanism is all.” Everyone held their breath as he dug around, then gave the key a solid turn. “Right…there.”

A click.

Unfortunately, not the kind of click we’d been hoping for.

Darnell held up the drop key and the end had snapped clean off in the hole.

“Oh my God!” Alisha wailed. Tears threatened. “You broke it!”

“Take a breath,” Darnell repeated, but even his uber-calm tone was no help now that the key was busted. A rap sounded from behind the elevator doors, followed by Leonard’s muffled voice. “Alisha? Can you hear me?”

“We hear you—we’re gonna get you out of there, don’t you worry.”

“It’s dark—Alisha, help!”

I cut my eyes to Jacob as if to say, Can you believe this crap?

He met my gaze and gave his head a subtle shake. “Go get the crowbar,” he told me.

But the second I eased Jibben’s good leg off my lap, his eyelids fluttered. I grabbed the keys from my pocket, got Alisha’s attention with a wave, and lobbed them through the door. They landed by the naked machine with a jingle. “Black Crown Vic at the top of the stairs. Crowbar in the trunk.”

She grabbed up the keys and hustled through the stairwell door, which clunked heavily shut behind her.

“Hey,” I said softly, and Jacob met my eyes again. Worry etched a stark line across his brow, and the muscles in his jaw worked as he ground his teeth in frustration. “Clayton might be a little sheltered, but he’s not stupid. He’ll be okay ’till we get home.”

“Your boy might be okay,” Jibben said woozily, “but I can’t say the same for the artifacts.”

Our boy.Right. If this didn’t convince Jacob we weren’t even capable of caring for a gerbil, nothing would. But we could I-told-you-so later.

I said to Jibben, “Your precious artifacts are sealed up tight. Nothing’s gonna happen—” I’d been shifting my weight with a hand to the floor, and found my sweaty palm covered in something that felt like cotton candy and smelled like the cheap plastic packaging of cut-rate knockoff electronics. A nearby crate sat slightly cockeyed where one of the seams had split.

Of course it had.

Darnell, meanwhile, had plucked a walkie-talkie from a charger at his station and was murmuring into the handset. “Do you copy? Repeat—do you copy?”

The way things were going? I doubted it.

But then, lo and behold, the static pulsed, followed by the low murmur of a calm voice coming through from the other end. Darnell exchanged some words, then came back to us and said, “My supervisor says help is on the way, but the roads are a mess and even emergency vehicles are having a hard time getting through. Director Kim took the next flight back to Chicago, but they had to put down in Fort Wayne. For now, the best thing we can do is stay put ’till things settle down.”

Even if Laura drove the rest of the way back, it would take two, three hours on a good day. But if weather had everything at a standstill, there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot we could do but hunker down and wait. While Darnell worked on the problem of freeing Leonard from the elevator, Jacob and I took stock of the situation given the latest developments.

In a voice just a bit too calm—which let me know he must be freaking out on the inside—Jacob announced, “We’d better keep Dr. Jibben comfortable until they get here.”

“Comfortable?” Jibben scoffed. “You don’t have to sugar-coat it. I’m hardly a civilian.”

Annoyed, I said, “We need to keep you from going into shock. Happy?”

Jibben blinked. “It’s that bad?” He then proceeded to try levering up on his elbow to get a better look at his leg, despite Jacob’s best efforts to keep him down. Then he ended up in a lightheaded collapse, murmuring, “Oh, I suppose you’re right….”

Fortunately, I knew the lab layout pretty well from all the times I’d walked the grid. I told Jacob, “There’s a couch in that break room where you found the lasagna. Grab the cushions and we’ll prop him up better.”

With a quick nod, he hurried off to snag them.

“The shipment,” Jibben said weakly.

“Extenuating circumstances,” I said. “It’ll have to wait.”

“But you don’t understand. This is the find of a lifetime. The sort of rarity that can unlock decades of inconclusive research.”

“What sort of…rarity?” I asked cautiously as the hairs raised on the back of my neck. With everything else going on, I hadn’t given much actual thought to the shipment itself. But now I had to wonder if I should have been more concerned.

“It’s everything that’s left of the Argus Institute.”

Relief flooded me faster than a clogged storm drain in a downpour. Between the flickering lights and the awareness of her nearby cadaver, I’d subconsciously convinced myself that it was Jennifer Chance’s research in those crates, the guts of a dozen prototype GhosTVs, and a file chock full of my innermost secrets. But the Argus Institute was about as threatening as Captain Kangaroo.

Back when I was a kid—before psychic powers had been unequivocally proven—there were plenty of folks hard at work investigating various psychic phenomena. But half of them were misguided, and the other half were frauds. I wasn’t sure which camp the Argus Institute was in. They’d been a TV staple back then, from morning talk shows to late night specials. Whenever something unexplained happened, Luther Hinman, the head of Argus, would show up under the bright studio lights. He (and his massive sideburns) would sit there in orange pancake makeup, with a lapel mike clipped to his tweed jacket, attempting to make himself sound Very Scientific.

But mostly he’d sound like a kook. Especially when he wrapped everything up with his cheesy tagline: Exploring the frontier of human potential.

The line itself was godawful enough, but when it wrapped up one of Argus’s late-night info reels, it was overlaid with the graphic of a covered wagon going into space, augmented by the crack of a whip. Despite the fact that a popular dog food had a similar commercial at the time, Argus insisted on using it. Which no doubt caused pets all across America to become unduly excited every time Hinman lit up the TV screen to spew his unfounded psychic theories.

Jibben plucked at his collar. Even flat on his back, he was still squirmy. “You think their work is a sham,” he said. I didn’t disagree. “The front-facing aspect of the institute…maybe. Research is costly. They had to appease the public to try and keep the funding money flowing in. Of course they’d need to play up the most sensationalistic findings. But their methodology purported to be sound. And their work held a lot of promise. Particularly where it related to telekinetics.”

Jacob was back with a couch cushion tucked under each arm and a pillow in either hand…which he promptly fumbled at the sound of that final, fateful word: telekinetics. TKs are exceedingly rare, though not for lack of trying. And the specific eugenics regimen performed by the late, unlamented Dr. Kamal was the only reason Jacob came to be.

Come to think of it…Clayton, too.

Which made me even more desperate to get back home.

It was a relief to get Jibben propped up well enough for me to squeeze out from under his legs. My knees hurt from the hard floor and my quads were cramping up, but given how the massive blunt trauma wound on Jibben’s thigh must feel, I wasn’t about to complain.

I was stomping out pins and needles when the heavy stairwell door opened and Alisha came busting out with a tire iron in one hand and a box of granola bars in the other.

“You went through my luggage?” Jacob asked, baffled.

“Well, it was right there—and I figured there might be something we could use.”

“Never mind.” Jacob was clearly picking his battles. “Did you get through to 911?”

“Help is on the way.” With that, Alisha lobbed the keys back to me, then strode toward the elevator doors. But Darnell cut her off at the pass and grabbed the crowbar out of her hands. “Finally,” she said. “Somebody actually doin’ something.”

Oh, Darnell was doing something, all right. He walked the crowbar over to his station and stashed it in the locker.

“What the hell?” Alisha cried.

“I don’t care what’s going on outside—I won’t just let a civilian loose in here with a potential weapon.”

“But what about Leonard?”

“Help is on the way. You said so yourself.”

“He might suffocate by the time they finally show up!”

“I’m okay,” called a muffled voice behind the elevator doors.

Up to this point, Jacob had displayed the patience of a saint. But even he had his limit, and when that weapons locker slammed shut, he’d reached that limit. “I’ll take my sidearm now,” he told Darnell.

“But my supervisor said—”

“I am the ranking agent here.” Jacob’s tone wasn’t just clipped—it was utterly badass. “There’s a child at home who needs us. And I say we’re leaving. Now.”