“Continue.” Her answer was quick, sharp.
“Without them?”
“We have no choice.” She prodded me, forcing me to move.
We made our way along in the complete darkness. We had nothing with us now. No night-vision goggles. And almost none of the ammunition and weapons, only what we carried in our pockets.
In a panic, my vision blurred.
Specks of fuzzy light pinpricked the darkness.
I let my eyes focus. Farther down the tunnel, tiny spots of light glinted through the wall. Without thinking, I ran to the nearest yellowish spot and pressed my eye to it. Old statues and paintings came into view. Jennifer was behind me as I turned to her. “I can see a corridor.”
She took a turn to look through. “Let’s follow it along.”
The specks of light persisted as we walked on. At times, we had to climb up and down ladders to continue, sweat trickling down my back. This place was insane—I sensed the madness of it as if it were a living thing.
The passage swung sharply to the right.
We climbed another ladder and crawled into a passage that didn’t allow us to stand upright. I twisted around, again sensing that someone was behind me.
“What’s wrong?” Ahead of me, Jennifer stopped.
“I don’t know. I think someone’s in here with us.”
“You heard someone?”
“No.”
“Then?”
“It’s nothing,” I conceded. “I thought I saw movement, but it’s so dark . . .”
“Let’s go quicker, just in case.”
We climbed down the ladder, now on the opposite side of the corridor.
“Whoever built these passageways wanted to spy on people.” I frowned as I peered through another peephole. The area outside was much wider than a corridor, a large sculpture of a bird hanging from a chain. “I think it’s the entry.”
Jennifer touched my back, and I moved to let her see. “Just where we don’t want to be. We need to get back to the centre of this place. Let’s head towards it.”
I followed Jennifer’s swift footsteps. She didn’t say it, but we were on borrowed time. The Saviours had Gray and Sethi, and they were sure to have found our backpacks, too. They’d know there were two more. This whole thing had already fallen apart. Had the Saviours killed them? That must be weighing on Jennifer’s mind. The man she loved was in the hands of people that strung people up on walls and carried out unimaginable cruelty.
My top soaked through with sweat, and my face itched under the balaclava. It seemed that we’d been travelling through this black maze for days.
Ahead, noises echoed through the air. Then voices and footsteps. Men and women.
“Where the hell could she have gone?” one of them complained. “She has to be out there somewhere on the island.”
“Brother Sage just sent a dozen of us to look outside the gates. If she’s there, they’ll find her.”
Jennifer grabbed my arm and pulled me on. We headed straight up a set of stairs.
I drew a tight breath and held it fast as the people went running past below the stairs. I was at least grateful that we’d made it inside the monastery before the Saviours had gone to find that woman. Whoever she was, I hated to think what kind of desperate state she was in, running from these people. And whoever Brother Sage was, this was the second time I’d heard his name. He must have some measure of control here. Maybe he was even the one who led the entire order of Yeqon’s Saviours.
We continued upward.
The stair landing led into a space much larger than the dormitory room had been. Lamps dimly illuminated settings of plush leather armchairs and viewing screens, the screens all dark and not showing the terrible images of the dormitory. Persian rugs partly covered the wooden floorboards. There were peepholes here too—but nothing like the tiny holes that had been drilled into the hidden passages. These were made of dark glass, about the size of a coffee table, with expensive-looking cameras pointed at them. I suspected they were two-way mirrors.
Whatever happened in the rooms below had to be of major interest. Why were these people so obsessed with watching others?
While Jennifer examined things in the room, I peered down through a mirror into a hexagonal room that had nothing in it except for a stand of the same shape in the centre of the room. What on earth did they watch in this room?
A blur of movement in my peripheral vision made me jerk my head up. Hooded figures separated themselves from the darkness on the other side of the room.
“Jennifer!” I called in desperate warning and raced back to the stairs.