Kissed by Moonlight by Shéa MacLeod Read Free Book Online

elevators. The steel doors had been painted a bland gray, no doubt in order to blend with the unpainted concrete walls. Everything looked the same; a person could get lost around here.
    Roberts waved us into the elevator and pushed a button. The doors slid shut, and the car began its smooth descent. There were no numbers to indicate which floors we were passing. I took a deep breath, trying to focus on anything but the layers of rock looming above us ready to fall on our heads at any moment.
    "How deep are we going?" I asked the young soldier.
    Roberts smiled at me, hazel eyes crinkling at the corners. "Deep."
    The car came to a stop, and the doors slid open. I took in everything around me as we stepped out of the elevator. Beyond the shriek of the alarm, I couldn't hear much but the thud of boots and the shouts of soldiers as they ran through the base searching for the prisoner. That was the downside of super hearing; one loud sound had a tendency to overwhelm everything else.
    My other senses, however, were still intact. On this level, everything had been painted white. Walls, floor, and ceiling all the same painfully bright white that made me want to pull out my sunglasses. The elevator bank had been left its natural steel color, polished to a high sheen. It was like something out of a '80s sci-fi movie.
    Roberts stopped before another gleaming steel door. It had no knob or handle, only a biometric pad on the wall next to it. Roberts placed his palm flat against the pad and waited. A few seconds later, the door slid open, and he waved us through.
    The room beyond wasn't what I expected. In fact, it wasn't a room at all, but more like an airlock. It was tiny, barely big enough for the three of us, and one wall was lined with small lockers. Opposite the door we'd just come through was a second door with a tiny portal window in it. I couldn't see what was beyond. The door behind us slid shut, cutting off the shriek of the alarm.
    "Normally, you'd have to take off all your jewelry, belts, and whatnot, but since the cell is empty... " Roberts shrugged as if to say he didn't see the point. Thank gods, he wasn't one of those stickler-for-rules types.
    There was another biometric pad next to the door with the porthole. Roberts placed his hand against the pad and then leaned forward to press his eye against what was obviously a retinal scanner. The door opened, and I caught a whiff of something astringent in the air: smoke, and under the smoke was the tang of burned plastic. My nose itched, and I covered a cough behind my hand. Wonderful. I so did not need my allergies going haywire.
    As we stepped into the space beyond, my jaw dropped. We were in a cavernous room the same blinding white as the hallway. Suspended in the center of the room, and I mean center as in top to bottom and side to side, was a clear bubble about the size of my living room.
    Well, not really a bubble. More like a dome with a flat bottom and a bubble top. It looked like it was made of unusually thick plastic, completely seamless except for small tubes attached to the top which were probably for ventilation and maybe things like food and water. I swear it was straight out of Star Trek. In the bottom of the bubble was a gaping hole, the sides blackened and melted.
    "This is where we kept the prisoner." Roberts crossed his arms over his chest and stared up at the dome with a frown. His freckles stood out starkly in the harsh white light.
    I stared up, wincing slightly at the crick in my neck. "Plastic?"
    "Impenetrable plastene," Roberts corrected. "I don't really get the science, but it's supposed to be stronger than steel. Completely impervious to any known weapon."
    "Clearly, somebody figured out a weapon that would work," Trevor said dryly, eyeing the melted sides of the hole.
    "Yeah. The science geeks are probably freaking over that one." Roberts was clearly amused by the thought.
    I stepped underneath the suspended dome and stared at the hole, my mind