style="font-size:15px;"> They stomped off toward the commotion, and we headed into the grand entrance hall, racing around the statue of the dinosaur that had spooked me so much when I’d first walked in here. The elevator in the back of the hall was empty. We piled inside and plunged downward to subbasement 7. Torquin held tight to his rifle.
The door opened directly into an enormous domed chamber, lit by a string of buzzing fluorescent lights. Torquin stepped inside, his bare feet slapping on the concrete. The room was full of abandoned workstations, their monitors glowing with the KI symbol.
“Professor?” I called out.
My voice echoed, unanswered, into the dome.
“Empty,” Torquin announced.
“I think we all see that,” Aly remarked.
“Any other suggestions where to go?” Cass said.
With a soft whoosh, the elevator door shut behind us. As I turned instinctively, the room plunged into sudden darkness.
A low, focused hissss came from the ceiling. Three emergency lights flicked on, casting everything in a sickly bluish-white glow. I felt a tickle in my throat. Cass began coughing, then Aly.
Torquin fell to his knees, his eyes red. Quickly he began ripping apart sections of his already ripped pants, then throwing the pieces to us. “Put on … nose!” he said, gasping for breath.
“What’s happening?” Aly said, doubling over with violent coughs.
Torquin jammed the fabric over his face. “Tear … gas!”
I SANK TO the floor. My knees hit the concrete with a sharp crack, my eyes began to water, and I felt as if someone had crawled into my throat with a set of knives.
Torquin was struggling with his rifle, looking toward the back of the room. There, a lab room door was swinging open to reveal a figure wearing a white coat and a gas mask. As the person came closer, Torquin took aim.
I could see a black-and-gray ponytail protruding out from under the mask. As Torquin sneezed, the person bolted to the left.
Aly was wheezing, convulsed into a ball. Cass looked dead. I tried to keep my eyes open, breathing directly into the fabric. I crawled around, following the masked figure, who was grabbing at the wall as if looking for something. I managed to close my fingers around an ankle and pulled. As the person fell to the floor, I reached up and yanked off the mask.
“No!” screamed a voice. “Don’t!”
I was face-to-face with Dr. Bradley, Professor Bhegad’s personal physician.
And traitor.
“You’re”—I gasped—“one of them, too?”
I thought my lungs would ball up and burst. As I fell back, Dr. Bradley sank beside me, red-faced and choking, grasping desperately for her mask.
With a grunt, she yanked it from my fingers. Climbing to her feet, she slipped the mask back on and steadied herself by grabbing the wall.
I blinked like crazy but I was too weak to stand. Dr. Bradley was pulling open a metal panel on the wall, flipping a switch.
She swung around toward me. My eyes were fluttering shut. Tear gas? I didn’t think so. This was some other poison. I was drifting into unconsciousness, fighting to stay alert.
The last thing I saw before blacking out was Dr. Bradley looming over me like a colossus, reaching down toward my head.
* * *
I awoke next to a corpse.
Or at least that’s what I assumed it was—a body draped under a white sheet on a slablike table. I was lying on the floor. Rows of fluorescent lights beamed overhead, buzzing softly. As I tried to sit up, my head pounded.
“Easy, Jack,” Dr. Bradley’s voice said. “We’re not quite done with Cass.”
Blinking, I turned. Her back was facing me as she leaned over another table. Her ponytail spilled over the back of her lab coat. I could see Cass’s shoes sticking out from one side.
“What happened?” I said.
“Dr. Bradley thought we were Massa,” Aly’s voice replied. I got to my feet to see her, and my head throbbed with pain. She was sitting with Torquin against the wall near the door. Both of them were red in the face. I figured I was, too, from the aftereffects of the poison gas. “That’s why she activated the gas. When she realized who we were, she turned off the jets.”
“I meant Cass,” I said. “What happened to Cass?”
“Treatment,” Torquin replied.
“But—but he’s not scheduled to need one yet,” I said.
“He’s early,” Dr. Bradley spoke up. “One possibility is that the poison gas brought it on. That’s what I’m hoping.”
“Hoping?” I asked.
Aly sighed. “Remember what Professor Bhegad told us way back when we first got here? As we get closer to age fourteen, the effects of G7W start to accelerate. The episodes are more frequent, and the effects are stronger.”
“When is Cass’s birthday?” I asked.
“He doesn’t know,” Dr. Bradley said softly. “Even the KI, with all their resources, couldn’t get hold of his birth records. They were misfiled in some city hospital and possibly destroyed.”
“So he may have less time than we do,” Aly said.
Dr. Bradley shrugged. “The good news is that the treatment worked. For now, at least, he will be functional.”
“Excellent … work,” said the corpse.
The voice startled me. It was unmistakably Professor Bhegad’s. As I took a closer look at the figure under the sheet, I saw that its head and face weren’t covered. But even so, I might not have known the old professor. He was almost unrecognizable, his face chalk white, his eyes watery and small, his hair like a tangled mass of straw. “Good to see all of you,” he said, a line of drool dribbling from his mouth as he spoke. “I don’t know … how this happened.”
As his eyes flickered and he drifted off, Dr. Bradley turned away from Cass. “Your friend should be fine for now. As for Professor Bhegad …” She took a washcloth from a nearby sink and placed it on the professor’s head. “He was thrown to the floor after an explosion. His lung collapsed, and it’s quite possible he has some internal injuries; I haven’t been able to do a full examination.”
“We have access to Slippy on the other side of the island,” I said. “Fiddle can help you get there with the professor
