I swallowed. Time to be a l
eader, Max.
“Okay, everybody,” I said, coughing against the thick air. “Search everything.”
There was a huge crash then, as part of the floor above us gave way and a large piece of lab equipment fell through near to where we stood. Gazzy giggled nervously, at home in the destruction despite the underlying worry on his face.
“But be careful,” I continued. “The roof could collapse at any second. Pay special attention to the part that wasn’t destroyed—the eastern side. Angel could be in there.”
Maybe. Hopefully. God, if she was in the section of buildings we were standing in… Well, I would still want to find her, I thought grimly. Still want to take her body home.
Carefully we picked our way toward the far side—the eastern side—through a doorway that had been stripped of its actual door.
I nearly threw up when I stepped over a partially melted plastic Kanine Kamper. Were we too late? Had we come this close only to miss saving Angel from a horrible death by—what, minutes?
My heart was shriveling, but I kept picking my way through the demolished building, opening every door, trudging down passages that led to the smell of fire and combustibles and sickening chemicals.
And fear. It hung in the air, thicker than smoke.
I don’t want to describe the sick things we saw, experiments on… some kind of life-form… that had clearly failed. Everything that might have been alive was now dead from smoke inhalation, including a couple of whitecoats.
“How did the whole thing go up so quickly?” Dylan asked me. We were in the process of searching a lab that was filled with large machinery and operating tables. The sights made me physically ill. “I’ve been trying to work it out. It ate through the brick in, what? Ten minutes? And it was a scientific laboratory. Didn’t they have some kind of fire-safety procedure?”
“Maybe they didn’t want to stop it,” Fang answered from across the room. He gestured at a utility closet, at a pile of overturned metal jugs inside. They reeked of gas fumes.
I heard Nudge gasp from another doorway and ran to her side, my adrenaline rushing.
“Max, why are they in a circle like that?” she whispered, her bottom lip quivering.
A strangled moan escaped my lips when I saw what she had found: the still smoking bodies in the lab, dozens of them, slumped against one another, arranged in a circle, just like Nudge had said. Like they’d been sitting down to tea, or a game of telephone. Like they’d died en masse.
My throat was dry and my mind was whirring.
We’d tried to get inside when we’d first seen the smoke, but the doors had all been bolted.
What had seemed like an abandoned building had been packed with people.
What had seemed like an accident reeked of purposeful destruction.
We’d been there for the fire. We’d watched the whole thing happen. No one had run outside.
I shivered, understanding the horrific implications. They’d wanted to die like this. This place was making my soul hurt.
“Max.”
It was Dylan who’d spoken. He was down the hall.
“Yeah?” I forced the word out of my mouth, peeled my gaze away from the awful sight of the bodies before me. “Did you find something?”
“I… I think so.” His tone was hollow.
I swallowed. I couldn’t bear to find definitive evidence that we’d lost Angel. Not again. Not after we’d had so much hope.
Reluctantly, I came up beside Dylan. My eyes followed his gaze to the slick metal operating table in front of him. There were four clamps on it, in the corners, for restraining limbs.
Caught in one of the clamps were two soft, downy, white feathers.
“No,” I choked out, my knees buckling.