In each room, Tom couldn’t help darting his eyes to the surveillance cameras and the stationary Praetorians. Tom kept waiting for Vengerov or someone else to approach him about using the virus on Medusa—Vengerov had said he wanted Tom to answer him during this visit. But no one came. He was never summoned or signaled. And the mechanized eyes followed him, always long enough for him to detect their scrutiny, never long enough for anyone else to notice—not even Vik, a foot ahead of him. Tom’s skin was crawling.
Vengerov knows somehow, Tom thought. He knows I’m going to say no.
Tom pictured Joseph Vengerov’s sharp, angular features and pale eyes and those silvery eyebrows that blended into his forehead—lurking on the other side of that surveillance system, just watching him. But how could Vengerov already know his answer? How could he be sure?
Tom hadn’t talked to anyone about it except Yuri, but he wasn’t even here.
Just to be absolutely certain he wasn’t being paranoid, Tom intentionally dropped back to the very edge of the group, so the surveillance devices would have to be very obvious about tracking him.
As their group trickled into the next room, from the corner of his eye, Tom saw a Praetorian moving toward him. He whirled around, startled. The machine was still again.
But then he heard a hiss behind him. Tom whipped around to find the door between him and the rest of the group closing with a decisive clang.
“Hey!” Tom rushed toward it, his hands meeting cold metal. There was no handle, no doorknob. He tried pushing, he tried pounding his fist on it. There wasn’t a single peep from the other side.
Soundproof. Great.
Tom drew a bracing breath and turned. The Praetorians were openly fixing their single, pinpoint camera eyes on him. His skin crawled. The hum of machinery was the only sound in the room, and it was mounting louder and louder on the air. Tom’s reflection moved across the polished black floor with him, swam against the massive window revealing the gray sky over the glacial landscape. He finally turned to see the nearest overhead surveillance camera.
“I’m locked out,” Tom told whoever was on the other side. “Open the door.”
His voice rang out in the empty air and he wondered if anyone even heard him. He willed on his net-send and tried to use a thought interface to alert Vik, but words flashed across his vision center: Error: Frequency unavailable. Message not sent.
Blackburn’s stupid jammer. Of course.
Then Tom felt a strange prickling sensation move all over his feet. The prickle turned to tiny jabs, which became stabbing needles, an electrical current carrying across the floor. Tom leaped a few steps away from the Praetorians, and got some momentary relief, but the prickle mounted into a stronger electric charge, until his legs were viciously buzzing and Tom was forced to bolt through the other door, away from the very floor that seemed to be trying to electrocute him.
He leaped right into the next open chamber, but the Praetorians in that room also homed in on him, blocking his path.
They drew so close, he had to squeeze to the side to avoid being crushed; but when he brushed one of the metal Praetorians in passing, a sharp bolt of electricity seared him, and Tom couldn’t help the shout that ripped from his lips as he stumbled away from it. He backed up, step by step, and they advanced on him, relentless. For a moment, Tom’s thoughts flickered to people in the places used as testing grounds for military tech, where small-scale insurgents were swarmed with these machines. He’d never realized how frightening such unrelenting inhumanity could be.
But there was a human being behind this. There had to be a man behind the curtain controlling the actions of these machines. Tom turned to the nearest surveillance camera, hoping his watcher knew he was talking directly to him when he said, “I am not afraid of you.”
In response, a Praetorian whirled toward him. Tom kicked at it, trying to knock it back, but it swung around pendulously, its base still advancing toward him, and a shock jolted up his leg and locked his muscles as he clumsily stumbled back again. He backed away from the others, trying to avoid more shocks, and in that manner, they herded him down a hallway until his back thumped against an icy wall.
Tom pressed against it, nowhere else to go, Praetorians advancing on him. Joseph Vengerov couldn’t kill him. He couldn’t. Even if he did know somehow that Tom was refusing his demand to use a virus on Medusa, he couldn’t simply murder him. He was trying to scare him. Tom was sure of it. Vengerov’s last words to him rang in his ears: The real question here is, will you fulfill this reasonable request, or will I have to resort to unpleasant means of persuasion?
Two metal devices shifted, curving their single, pinpoint camera eyes toward him, aligning them so for a disconcerting moment, Tom felt like he was gazing at some sort of machine man, assessing him through empty metallic eyes.
“Okay,” Tom said, “obviously you’re not pleased about something.”
The camera eyes bobbed up and down, a cold, fatal nod of a head.
And then the wall Tom was leaning back against abruptly swung open, and he realized it wasn’t a wall but a door, and it led straight to the outside. He realized this the same instant he crashed onto his back into a bank of icy snow. The door swung closed with a resounding clang, stranding Tom outside, without a coat, on the frozen Antarctica tundra.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
FOR A FLEETING moment, Tom lay there, absolute cold soaking into the back of his flimsy suit, and then a gust of tormenting wind battered him and his brain cleared enough to register that he was outside. In a thin suit. And it wasn’t freezing cold—it was painfully, agonizingly cold.
Tom bolted to his feet and charged toward the door. His hands slipped over an icy, stinging metal surface with no handles. He had never in his life imagined it was possible to feel this cold. His ears were searing hot pokers stabbing his head, his eardrums throbbed, and the wind felt like thousands of tiny prongs jabbing viciously at him. His skull began spiking with terrible pain. Tom pounded his fist on the door.
“HEY! HEY! YOU CAN’T DO THIS! OPEN UP! OPEN THE DOOR!”
He stumbled back several steps, shaking violently, his teeth chattering, the chill so much more dreadful where his suit had picked up some icy dampness from the ground, and he became aware of a surveillance camera mounted over the door, fixed on him—like Vengerov was waiting for him to get scared enough to beg or plead, to swear to do what he wanted.
No. No way. Not now. He would never do anything Vengerov wanted.
A rush of hot determination flooded Tom, and he very deliberately flipped the camera the bird even as wind stabbed its way into his lungs and tore at his gums. His nose stung, his fingers were pulsing with pain, and his mind raced frantically, looking for something to do to help himself.
Suddenly, he remembered back when he was little with his dad, when they couldn’t catch a ride one night in Nevada. The desert, so hot in the day when they were trying to thumb a ride, grew so terribly cold that night and the day’s sweat became like ice. Neil had told him to keep moving, because standing still was what killed you.
So Tom jammed his aching hands beneath his armpits and began hopping. He swept his gaze over the blank face of the massive complex that stretched off into the distance. His stinging lids scraped his eyes with every blink, and the wind bit his pupils until tears began flowing to his cheeks, only to freeze on his face like insects nipping him. But there was a window, a low one, and not too far away.