“Do we think she is down there?” Tomasz asks.
“Where else?” Seth says.
Tomasz nods. “Then I will ask you to go in and get her while I try to locate the vehicle.”
“What?” Seth asks after a startled moment. “Are you crazy?”
“It must be around here. This is clearly where it parks.”
“And you’ll do what with it?”
“I do not know! But now we have nothing. It might be something.”
Seth tries to answer but can’t think of anything to say.
“Just keep the Driver away from her,” Tomasz says. “I will try to find something to help. And if I cannot . . .” He shrugs. “Then I will come back and we will both go down fighting.”
Seth frowns. “We aren’t going to go down.”
“I know you are trying to be brave for me, but we might. That is a risk when you are fighting with death. You do not always win.”
“But we’re going to today,” Seth says firmly. “There’s no way we’re going to let that thing take Regine. Just no way at all.”
Tomasz grins. “She would very much like to be hearing you talk this way. Yes, she would be very much liking this indeed.”
“Tomasz, I can’t let you –”
But Tomasz is already backing away, still grinning. “How funny that you continue to believe I am in need of your permission.”
“Tomasz –”
“Go find her, Mr. Seth. I will not be far behind.”
Seth makes an exasperated sound. “Well, don’t take any unnecessary risks.”
“I think we are in a place where all risks are necessary,” Tomasz says, and takes off running.
Seth watches him go, his stumpy little legs crossing the square and disappearing around the far corner of the building opposite, where the van emerged the last time they were here.
“Stay safe,” Seth murmurs. “Oh, stay safe.”
He takes a deep breath for courage, then takes another, and runs across the square himself. He’s half expecting the Driver to leap out from somewhere, but the sun is shining down on every corner and he sees nothing. He reaches the prison door and listens. There’s no buzz of an engine, no sound of footsteps.
No sound of Regine arguing or fighting or struggling.
He opens the door. The milky-glass inner door and stairs are the same, glowing with light. He steps through the first doorway and edges to the second.
Still nothing but the electric hum coming from downstairs.
He crouches low as he takes a few steps down. Then a few more. He reaches the turn in the stairway. His heart is thumping away in his chest, so hard he wonders for a crazy moment if the Driver will be able to hear it too.
And then there’s a scream.
Regine.
He runs down the rest of the stairs before he can even think to stop.
67
He pounds through the lower corridor, tearing around the final corner and into the vast room, his blood rushing, his fists actually up, ready to fight.
Go in swinging, he thinks.
But he can’t see her. From this little platform, it’s just rows and rows of coffins, like before. He sees the one he opened, now closed and sealed like nothing ever happened. The vast room stretches before him, and he remembers the cameras on the display flashing through endless farther distant rooms.
She could be anywhere.
“Regine?” he calls out, his voice swallowed by the huge empty space.
There’s nothing. No response. No further screaming.
He turns to the milky panel on the wall to see if he can get it working again. It lights up under his touch, smaller screens within the larger one, scrolling rapidly through information that makes no sense and is often too fast to read anyway, plus changing pictures from the cameras, too, taken from all through the complex.
But at the very center of the screen, one image is remaining steady. An open coffin, somewhere out there in the vastness.
Regine lying inside.
The Driver standing over her, wrapping her in bandages.
“No!” Seth says, pressing the screen wildly, trying to find any information that’ll tell him where she is. There’s a grid map next to her, like the ones he saw before, but it could be anywhere and the coordinates are written in a way he can’t understand. 2.03.881, it says, which could mean anything. Room two, row three, coffin 881? But what does that tell him?
He looks out at the room, thinking he’ll just have to chance it, he’ll have to run until he finds her and do whatever he can to stop –
She screams again.
He whirls back to the display. Regine doesn’t seem to be resisting the Driver or even know that it’s there. Seth watches as she screams once more, the sound reaching his ears separate from the image, coming from deep within the recesses of the huge building.
“You son of a bitch!” he shouts at the image, the Driver going about its business, ignoring Regine’s fear, ignoring whatever it is that’s happening to her. “I will kill you. Do you hear me? I’ll kill you!”
He slams his fist on the screen.
And it changes.
Her name pops up in a box. REGINE FRANÇOISE EMERIC, it says, atop a list of facts. Height, weight, her birthday, then a date that could be when she was put online.
And one more date, listing itself as DISCONNECT.
The date she was thrown down the stairs. It has to be. The date there was a mistake and, instead of dying, she woke up here.
ORIGINAL CHAMBER OUTSIDE PROTECTED GRID, he reads. That must be why the Driver brought her here instead of her house. Years too late, it was bringing her inside with everyone else.
Another line pops up, blinking red: LETHE CONNECTION PENDING.
“Lethe?” Seth says. “Why would it . . . ?”
He scans the screen again. There’s so much data surrounding Regine’s screen it’s hard to figure out what any of it means. He presses LETHE CONNECTION PENDING and another screen pops up.
The disconnect date is there and below it, RECONNECTION TIMECODE.
Seth reads it.
Then he reads it again.
“No way,” he whispers.
The reconnection date, the time she’s being put back online –
It’s before her disconnection date.
The Driver is placing her back in time. It’s putting her back before she died. Only a few minutes, but definitely before.
“How?” Seth says, pressing more and more buttons, trying to find some answer. “How is that possible?”
It’s a program, he thinks. That’s all it is. A program everyone’s agreeing to, a program everyone’s a part of –