Red Awakening (Red Zone 2)

Ignoring him, Keiko continued searching the bed base. The panic room would need a mechanical way to open it, in case using implants wasn’t possible. She felt along the edge of the base and up the end nearest the wall. At the corner, against the wall, her fingers hit a button.

Could it be that she was right?

Her heart raced as she pressed it. For a second nothing happened, and then the bed and its platform slid to the side, revealing a staircase beneath it.

“Well I’ll be damned,” Mace said.

“Probably.” Keiko climbed into the narrow stairwell. “Are you coming?”

He followed her down into a large room. One wall was covered in screens. Next to them, there was a desk with an inlaid control panel. A small kitchen area with a well-stocked pantry was off to the left, and a bed sat in the opposite corner, this one just as luxuriously decked out as the one above. Two armchairs and a table made up the rest of the furnishings in the room.

“Looks like Miriam wanted to be comfortable while she panicked,” Mace said as he found the button that sealed them into the room.

The door shut above them with an ominous thud, and Keiko couldn’t stop the thought that she was being buried alive.

“I can’t help feeling like I’m in a tomb,” she said.

“A colorless tomb. If I ever have the misfortune of being in Miriam Shepherd’s presence, I’m going to ask her what she has against color.” He pointed to the framed prints over the bed. “She even has black-and-white photos.”

With a shake of his head, he moved over to the desk. Keiko, in the meantime, opened the door in the far wall, and the most glorious sight on the planet greeted her—a bathroom. While Mace checked the screens for the position of Freedom’s team, she used the facilities to freshen up. She eyed the shower. What was the protocol for having a shower while you were running for your life? And technically, were they still running for their lives if they were locked in an impenetrable room?

She stuck her head out of the bathroom to ask Mace but got distracted when she saw that he’d turned on the screens covering the wall.

He glanced over at her with a frown. “I’m trying to get the building’s cameras, but all I’m getting is forty different versions of the same news.”

“Technology really isn’t your strong point, is it? How do you cope every day? Life must be a nightmare for you.” It wasn’t like they could avoid the latest tech—they were surrounded by it.

“Could you just get over here and do that thing with your nails to fix it?”

With a dramatic roll of her eyes, she crossed the room to stand beside him. “You don’t need my magic nails for this. You just need to bring up the command screen and choose the option you want.” She hesitated with her fingers over the screen as she realized what the wall was showing: almost every channel was rerunning the footage of her falling off the ledge. A cold chill went through her as she watched it. “I really didn’t fall that far at all, did I? It felt like it went on forever, but it was only for a few seconds.”

“You don’t need to watch this. Just show me how to change it, and I’ll do it myself.”

But her eyes were glued to the screen as she watched Mace’s instantaneous reaction to her fall. It was like she was watching it happen to someone else, and she honestly couldn’t believe what she was seeing. “You could have fallen off with me,” she said.

“Keiko, change the screens. You don’t need to watch this. You lived it.”

His words made her realize that he was worried about her reaction to the footage, not how it affected him. She was just about to bring up the control panel and change the screen to the building’s security feed when the images in front of them changed. Her breath caught in her throat as an image of the terrace appeared.

“There’s Abigail,” she said on a gasp.

Her friend was kneeling on the stage, her hands secured behind her back and a black band around her head. She’d been crying. Tear tracks ran down her cheeks, and it was clear she was shaking. Her lips moved, as though she was muttering something over and over. All the while, her eyes were scrunched tight against the carnage that surrounded her.

Keiko felt like a blade had twisted in her chest. “We need to get her out of there, Mace.” She looked up to find him standing, lips thin, glaring at the screens. “You rescued me. You know how to do stuff like this. We can’t just leave her there.”

“Fuck,” he cursed before shooting an anxious look her way. “Change the feed, Keiko. Do it now.”

Something in his tone made her realize she was missing something. And that’s when the scene around Abigail came into focus for her. Rueben Granger was on his knees beside her, his mouth open and his face scrunched tight. She didn’t need the sound to know he was wailing. On his other side, there were more scientists from his team, all kneeling, all bound with their hands behind them, all wearing bands around their heads.

A surge of realization hit her, and she knew what the bands were—EMP devices. Attached to their heads. Her eyes flew back to the left of the image, and that’s when she spotted something she hadn’t noticed before because her attention was on Abigail. But on the stage, beside her friend, just inside the camera’s frame, was someone’s outstretched hand. It lay there, limply, as though someone had been reaching for Abigail. Someone who wasn’t moving now.

“Mace?” Her hand curled into his arm.

“Turn it off,” he demanded.

But she barely heard him. Her eyes were glued to the screens as a face appeared in front of the camera. It was the Freedom leader who’d called after her when Mace had run with her under his arm. With a thought, she commanded the volume on the newsfeed to increase, forgetting that she couldn’t communicate with anything remotely while all signals were being blocked. With a shaky hand, she reached out and hit the panel, calling up the volume control.

“Damn it, Keiko, just turn the damn thing off.” He pulled her away from the control panel and started stabbing at it randomly, achieving nothing. “Make it stop,” he demanded.