Excerpt

There was a scuffling sound behind us, and we both turned at once toward the elevator door.

It dinged open and a man in a sand-colored camo jacket sprinted out, looked, saw us, and tore down the stairs like a rabid dog with an eerily blank face.

Dead Eyes.

I instinctively jerked back just as it became clear that Dead Eyes wasn't going for me at all. In fact, his shoulder slammed me out the way as his hands grabbed Lena's right arm and yanked her back against him.

Dead Eyes' left arm snaked under her arm around her chest. His right hand was up against her throat with a short, gleaming knife. Shorter than Cutter's knife had been that long-ago afternoon. This one was maybe one and a half inches. Still deadly.

I felt faint. The violence. Life attacking. My nightmares in the flesh. It was happening all over again.

"Stop it!" I yelled, shifting from foot to foot, wishing I sounded stronger than a pathetic seal.

"Just don't move, man," Dead Eyes said and sniffed. "In fact, sit down. Right there. Like a good little hipster."

My face flushed at the wildly inaccurate characterization as I sat, shamed by my hopelessness, my lack of manliness. Except the insanity of it was almost too much, pushing to the edge of panic, then past it to where there was only… Fuck it all. He'll cut her throat if I just sit here.

I can't. Just. Sit here.

"SIT BACK DOWN, MOTHERFUCKER!" Dead Eyes yelled as I climbed back to my feet and his knife drew blood so that Lena cried out, too.

My eyes found Lena's and saw her terror. I couldn't even feel my own legs and wondered if I'd pissed myself, but I made myself growl at Dead Eyes, "What do you want?"

"Fuck it. Okay. Good," he said, sniffing and grinning. "You and her, you're both coming with me."

"Where and why?"

He barked a laugh at me. "Not your fucking business, dipshit!"

"It is if you want our cooperation." It sounded fake even to my ears, so I spoke louder, almost shouting. "Otherwise, what? You stab her? Then me? Then drag us both up the stairs to the elevator one at a time? That's not a good plan!"

Dead Eyes frowned, shaking his head, his energy making his arm around Lena tighten and his knife hand shake. My eyes never left him, but my peripheral vision saw Lena's eyes shift from terror to determination. Despite Dead Eyes' arms around her chest and throat, her left arm was free. She reached it back behind her, waving her fingers around. For what?

Her fingers brushed the chest-high box with all the screens and switches. They start up the accelerator, she'd said. A distraction. Yes! Anything!

Dead Eyes bared his teeth and spoke with a frightening intensity. "Okay. Okay. Here's what happens, you piece of shit. You do what I say, or I slit your Mooslim girlfriend's throat. Yah! Then I cut off your fucking nose and drag just you up the stairs. So put your fucking hands on top of your head before I count to three, or—"

Lena grunted and twisted. Her left hand hit the switch. A loud clanging hammered down on us from overhead. Then it got lost under the thrumming whine that rose around us like a giant electric monster had just woken up. The metal boxes that circled the room hummed and lit up with a growing rush of lights until it seemed an electric sun god was rushing around the ring—THRUMMM!—trying to break out but condemned only to fly so fast in circles that only a god at its level could even see the movement.

Dead Eyes looked around him crazily, his knife jerking away from Lena's neck, his grip shifting on her torso.

I leapt at him.

I managed to grab his knife hand and drove him backward, away from Lena, until we both thumped hard against a set of man-tall metal boxes that were bolted to the floor.

Lena was running for the rolling toolbox, but I shouted at her, "No! Get out! Get help!"

She froze, unsure what to do.

Dead Eyes took advantage of my distraction to rip his knife hand free and swipe at me, gashing my right shoulder as I stumbled sideways toward the humming ring of metal boxes. I smelled the blood from my shoulder but felt nothing through my rush of adrenaline.

I kept my feet as Dead Eyes advanced on me, waving his knife, his dilated, flat eyes focused now like they were seeing me stabbed over and over and bleeding out on the floor. Oops, sorry, he'd tell his boss. The prof didn't make it.

He leapt at me with his knife out, and I jumped backward, tripping and falling hard, with my hands behind me, against the thrumming cage of the electric sun god. My hands convulsed into talons against the steel as I felt an overwhelming force rip through me, battering my mind, my chest, my belly and groin, my jerking legs.

Death. Death. From the moment I walked in here, I was …

***

I stood on the gray metal catwalk, momentarily disoriented.

"Come on down here," said Lena's voice.

I looked past the red metal guardrail with DO NOT CROSS painted on it and saw her. She was in her dark blue jumper, with her curly auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail, that smudge across her cheek, no blood on her neck. I looked to my own right shoulder. No gash. No blood.

Lena was pointing to the stairs to the right of the door. They led down from the catwalk.

"Well?" she said.

In a daze, I slowly walked to the stairs, gripped the red handrail hard, and descended to the concrete floor below. Like the boiler room of a futuristic battleship. And the ring around them…

I looked at that metal ring now. Silent. Just cold metal. No electric sun god thrumming inside it.

Lena had been returning her crescent wrench to the rolling toolbox. Now she walked back toward me and waved her arms around to indicate the metal ring with all the wires that ran around the room. "You know what this all is?" asked Lena.

"Particle accelerator," I mumbled.

She raised her eyebrows. "Very good. For a boy who doesn't know his Seattle tech companies, I'm impressed."