Then I think of Luc.
He has always called this world the Old World. Our globe is not his home, and it wasn’t his father’s home. His true home is . . .
The coliseum.
I slide the pieces faster, rearranging them to the vision I’ve grabbed hold of until they finally form a hollowed oval. An Arena. I slide the last piece into place.
Something clicks in a way that sounds like completion. I try the handle. It resists enough that when I press down, something thunks within the door. I push, and it opens. I breathe fully for the first time and check my watch.
One hour until I enter Tenebra. One hour already used.
I enter the room, propping the door open with the crowbar. The candle illuminates the space enough for me to see the old man beneath the glass. He’s identical to the man I saw in Tenebra and just as sickly. He faces the wall of the LifeSuPod, almost as though looking for a visitor or someone to sit at his bedside. Maybe even looking for Luc.
“You’ll see him soon,” I whisper.
A small circular porthole is open above his face—probably a safety feature once the battery died to make sure the occupant could still breathe. I find the sturdy latches that keep the LifeSuPod sealed and pop them open. The coffin-like lid lifts without a sound and stays open with hydraulic hinges.
Even though he’s alive, I feel uncomfortably like I’m about to search a dead body. In one of his suit pockets is the folded handkerchief Luc told me about.
Nothing is within. No address, no note.
A chill sweeps my skin. I check around his shoulders, gently lifting his head from the foam support insert to see if the paper got dislodged and fell underneath. Nothing out of the ordinary except a huge diamond stud of an earring. Like he’s a rich pirate or something.
Luc has a diamond tooth. His dad has a diamond earring. To each his own, I suppose.
Then I see a corner of white poking from beneath his left palm. I fish it out and unfold it. There’s a scribbled address above a cutout of a map with a blue circle marking the place where my LifeSuPod should be.
“Road 813 Northwest.” I read the address aloud, knowing vocalizing it will make it stick in my mind should I lose the paper. “Where’s that?” I consult the map in my pocket and find the spot off an old rickety freeway that’s not in regular use anymore.
It’s a fifteen-minute drive.
I don’t have much time.
I could leave now and get the LifeSuPod for myself, abandoning Galilei, but then what? Luc would watch his father die in the Nightmare, and then he’d take out his wrath on me and the Adelphoi.
And no one would have the cure.
I’ll have to race the clock. I stuff the paper into my pocket with the map and set my mind to figuring out how to disconnect and then move this huge thing.
I inspect the plugs, which are all still secured to the outlets and wall. An enormous battery pack connects at the head, but even it is dead. This guy is living on whatever sustenance was last pumped into his body, which was most likely days ago.
I locate a stamp of a cup, plate, and vitamin pill on the side of the LifeSuPod next to an oval button. I press the button and out of the bottom pops a chamber like a long drawer the size of a piano keyboard. I pull on it, and it slides out even farther, revealing bags sucked clean of their contents—about a half dozen of them. Forty or so more remain with unbroken plastic tops. The machine must rotate through these to get the nutrients Galilei’s body needs to survive. I pull out one bag. Ten-day supply.
Wow. He’s been in this thing for sixty days? That’s almost a full year in Tenebra. The remaining food packs will sustain his body for another two hundred days in real life, which is almost three years in the Nightmare.
It’s only then that I notice a secondary tray beneath this first one. I push the top one back in, pull out the other, and see several more lines of sealed food bags. If this LifeSuPod gets plugged back in, Galilei will live in Tenebra for well over a decade.
Will my LifeSuPod be stocked like this? It’s supposedly sitting in the new location, waiting for me. Is it stocked at all? I wonder if I’m supposed to locate food packs for myself. Why didn’t I think to ask more specific details? Like how the thing works. How do I plug myself in? Galilei has tubes all around his head and one snaking down into a vein in his arm. I’ve never put an earring into my skin let alone an IV. And where does all the waste go?
I look under the LifeSuPod to see a solid gray tube curve away into a space in the wall. Does this guy have a catheter? Will I need a catheter? I’m not about to install one on myself, thank you very much. I shudder at the thought.
My candle flickers and burns below the tin rim, dimming the room a bit. The Nightmare is coming. It’s hungry. I’m so close. I can’t fail now. Focus and get going, Cain.
The underside of the LifeSuPod has tracks like an army tank. I double-check to make sure everything is unplugged, then give it a small shove.
It moves surprisingly easily. I slide items out of the way to clear a path toward the door.
A scraping sound from the hallway jolts my nerves. I spin toward it.
A human silhouette crouches in the doorway, hood up and darkened by shadows . . . Before I have any time to react, the crowbar is yanked into the hall.
The door slams closed, snuffing out the candle and trapping me in darkness.
I run to the bulletproof glass and try to peer through but can see nothing without light. I pound the glass.
“Hey!”
Whoever did this is gone.
Who followed me only to trap me in here? It has to be Stranna or one of the Adelphoi. The timing adds up, as well as the motivation.
But to trap me in here? That seems low. Stranna said they don’t kill—they die. And yet they attacked Galilei—set to drain him of life. She lied to me. And now the Adelphoi are willing to kill me. Or, at the very least, doom me to a deteriorating death in Tenebra.
But the form I saw seemed taller and more built—not feminine. Erik? But he’s searching for Heidi. Did Jules and Stranna send him after me?
I fish in my pocket for the lighter and reignite the little bathroom candle.
