Rod realized, slowly, that he was awake. Then he discovered just how hideously uncomfortable he was. His arms were twisted back behind him and awkwardly stretched out and up, secured by what had to be one of those chains you use for big dogs. His legs were also pulled back at a weird angle that didn’t allow him to touch his knees to the ground. Whoever had chained him had been clever about it, twisting him up so that he couldn’t get the purchase to use his full strength. All he could do was twitch.

He was outside, on concrete, chained to some kind of metal pole—that basketball goal behind Sammy Lecker’s cabin. Light came from the moon, which was half full, and from some of the windows in the dark cabin wall.

He twitched for a while to see what good it would do. It did no good. He finally relaxed and let himself hang.

That’s when white outdoor lights switched on and Lorraine came out.

With the backyard lit up, Rod saw the wire for the first time. It ran from the concrete several feet away from him, where it was pinned by a rock, to somewhere up above his head. Craning his neck, he saw that the wire hooked through one of the loops of the basketball net and then ran down along the post. Now that he knew it was there, he could feel it. A thin, flimsy circle of some cool metal wrapping around his wrists, a weight so slight he hadn’t noticed it before.

Lorraine kicked away the rock and picked up the wire. The black insulating outer layer had been scraped away from the end, revealing shiny brown strands of copper. Lorraine twisted the copper around one of her silver fingertips.

Meeting Rod’s eyes for the first time, she smiled.

#

“You stay back,” Elias whispered. “There’s a scanner, and it only opens the door for Grays.”

Kess stayed back. Elias stepped into the dark doorway at the corner of one of the buildings. Whatever scanner examined him there didn’t produce visible light, and Kess didn’t bother to check other parts of the spectrum.

She worried that Elias didn’t really want to do this, that he was breaking into Holifeld Co. because of momentum, because the plan was already planned. She was worried he didn’t want anything much at all. It was absurd how much she wanted him to want things, and to get what he wanted. She felt that desire more powerfully than she feared getting caught by the Grays. She felt it stronger than anything she could remember feeling.

The door in front of Elias opened and he disappeared inside. He didn’t look back at Kess, and she had to hurry to follow him before the door swung closed. She stood in darkness for a moment before Elias switched on a dim, discrete little light—it was clipped to his sleeve, and she supposed he’d waited to turn it on until he absolutely had to. He spoke, then, in a low voice. “Can you look though the walls? Check for Grays?”

“Only if they have cell phones,” she said back to him, making sure to speak just as quietly. “There’s no radiation that goes through walls and bounces off people, not at night, so it has to—”

“Alright,” he cut her off. “Check for cell phones.”

There were no cell phones except Kess’s own and Elias’s secure communicator thing. Not close enough for Kess to see. So they started to move. Holifeld had, apparently, sent the floor plans to Elias, who had, apparently, memorized them. (Kess was beginning to get seriously annoyed that she hadn’t gotten a communicator of her own.) Elias’s faint light showed hallways, open areas with desks. The Holifeld Company offices appeared to be standard office drab, the sort of place where Kess might end up working someday if she didn’t die first.

Kess followed Elias down a hallway, farther into the dull gray belly of the beast. Up a dark concrete staircase. Down another hall. Through a door. And suddenly Kess recognized where they were. This was the lab she’d seen in the grainy security footage back at Holifeld’s place. This was where Natalie Silver hid the Nox.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

Kess ran to the closet and threw the door open. Inside was boring storage. Not chemicals—notebooks and markers and sticky notes. She felt a rush of singing hope at the same time as a surge of nauseating doubt. What if the Nox wasn’t there? What if it was? She shoved aside office supplies.

And there—there was a glint of glass. She grabbed the vial and spun to face Elias. “Here. It’s here. Take it now. Drink it.”

He was insufferably calm. “Kess, it’s probably not meant to be taken orally. It’s probably injectable, like the Gray virus itself.”

“But it might work. I became Blue by petting a cat. Come on, try.”

“If we waste it there will be no more. If we take it to Holifeld now he may be able to duplicate it.”

“But Elias…” She held the vial to her chest. “You’re almost gone.”

“Yes,” he said, and walked out of the lab.

Kess was so shocked she didn’t follow him for a moment. But then she saw something, a sickly greenish signal shining from some other room, but close. Not a cell phone, a different frequency—a walky talky? And the center of the green light, the source of the signal was moving. It was headed in Elias’s direction.

Kess stuffed the vial of Nox into her pocket and ran out of the lab. Elias was already a good ways down the hall—he hadn’t waited for her. She ran to him and grabbed him by the arm. “They’re coming that way.” But when she looked the other direction down the hall another green signal had come into view.

She pulled him back into the lab. He broke away from her and headed towards the back of the room on the other side of the various counters. There was a second door there, Kess realized, going out the other way. They burst through into another dark hall. And there was another signal. Three of them, all moving, criss-crossing, converging. Running down the hall would get them caught. She opened another door at random and ducked inside, Elias right behind her.

He switched off the light on his sleeve and they waited in darkness.

The green signal came closer. Kess felt as if her heart was about to explode. When she couldn’t stand it anymore she fumbled for Elias’s hand in the dark. It was cool and perfectly still. She wanted his skin to be warm and trembling, she wanted to feel his heartbeat pounding through his palm. She wanted him to be scared, for the two of them to be scared together.

The green light came closer, closer. There were soft footsteps, almost no sound at all. The signal was outside the door.

It moved on. Kess’s heart cooled and slowed.

“They don’t know we’re here,” said Elias. “They’re not looking for us. They’d check every door.”

“Could you turn on your light please?” Kess whispered. “They’re gone. They’re so far away I can barely see them. I’m not sure we can leave yet, though. The others are still in our way to the stairs.”

Elias switched his light on to show a small, cluttered room, a bit larger than a closet but with most of the space taken up by a desk. It seemed as if the room hadn’t been used in a long time—there was dust and cobwebs and gray grime everywhere.

Kess picked up one of the photos on the desk and wiped the dust off the glass. The fine-boned face of Christopher Stone smiled back at her. He was on a snowy mountainside, dressed warm and holding a pair of those stick things you use for skiing. Another smiling skier stood next to him, a man with blonde hair sticking out of his knit hat. And here was another picture, Stone at a wedding, a best man with a carnation stuck to his tux and his arms flung around the other groomsmen.

This must have been Stone’s office before he became a Gray. Tiny, with no place for anyone else to sit, no computer, lots of photographs, it must have been a spot for him to take a few minutes away from work, to relax and be himself. He must not have used it in a long, long time.

Kess opened one of the drawers.

“What are you doing?” asked Elias.

“I’m curious.”

“Why?”

“Because he was a person.”

And as she pushed the drawer back in, her hand brushed something—an unseen button—and speakers hidden somewhere spit out a crackling sound. Kess jumped back. What had she pressed? Had she called every Gray in the building to them?

But no, someone was talking.

“How close are they?” asked the someone, a male voice.

“Minutes,” said the other voice, female.

There was a connection between this office and somewhere else in the building (a wire running down through the desk and into the floor, probably.) Perhaps the Grays had forgotten about it when the purge wiped years of their memories away. Perhaps they had no idea someone might be listening in.

“And all precautions have been taken?” said the male voice on the other side of the line.

Elias pressed his mouth to Kess’s ear and whispered, his warm breath moving her hair: “Jonathan Akiyama.”

Jonathan Akiyama? The former Holifeld Company science director? But how did Elias recognize his voice?

The female voice fuzzed through the speakers once more. “The Betas will be in custody within the hour.”