Silent Symmetry (The Embodied trilogy) by JB Dutton Read Free Book Online Page B

gloom. Just as I was about to call the cat again, I felt a wave of shuddering overtake my whole body. The movement had come from a person’s legs. Maybe twenty feet away (the room was pretty big) the flashlight’s beam was wider, but fainter. And it wasn’t just one person’s legs. There were half a dozen people seated around an oval dining room table, eyes closed. In the pitch dark.
    This was beyond freaky. It made my blood run cold. There were three men and three women, old and young, all holding hands like they were participating in the world’s spookiest séance.
    None of them seemed to have noticed my presence behind the grille. This was a good thing. All thoughts of Flash had vanished as surely as he had vanished from our apartment. What on earth was going on here?
    I swept the room with my flashlight, peering into the dimness. Something on the wall caught my attention. What was it? A symbol ... something I’d seen before. WTF – it was the logo of the Temple of Truth! Is this what they did to get to the truth? Sit around in the dark holding hands?!
    One of the men at the table suddenly turned toward me and opened his eyes. I hadn’t made a sound but he looked right at the grille. I turned the flashlight quickly away , then switched it off. The man broke the circle of hands and got up from his chair. He padded softly but deliberately toward me. I recoiled instinctively. Even though it was as dark as a coalmine in the room I could tell that he was getting closer. I shuffled backward as quietly as I could. But I hadn’t realized that I couldn’t turn around in the tunnel. When I’d crawled into it the first time I only changed direction when Flash jumped down on me at the intersection, and it must have been wider than the regular width of the passageway. Now I was stuck going backward and trying not to make any noise.
    The man was at the grille. I held my breath. He was only about six feet away but for some reason hadn’t thought of turning on the light in the room. It was almost as though he was sniffing the air in the tunnel.
    And then I heard it. A single word. Spoken by one of the women in the room.
    “ Noon?”
    I knew it was him. I knew that the man at the grille was Noon.
    He moved away and replied gravely to the woman: “We should have known.”
    My brain was speeding at a thousand miles an hour. What did all this mean? Noon lived in my building? And he was somehow involved in the Temple of Truth that Mom worked for?
    Then the light did go on in the room. It pierced the grille, casting a shadow of sinewy leaves and stalks on the walls of the tunnel. There was the sound of chairs being pushed back and people murmuring. They were going to find me.
    I shuffled back as fast as I could, unconcerned by the swooshing of sweatpants and the click of the flashlight on the wooden tunnel floor. I caught a glimpse of a face pressing against the grille as I started to slide back down the incline. It was a woman. It might have been the woman I’d seen outside The Warrington holding hands with the other one in the doorway, but I lost sight of her as gravity took over.
    I let myself go and in a few seconds was down at the bottom of the slope, heart pounding and sweat pouring from my forehead. I still couldn’t turn around, so I carried on edging backward as fast as I could. I don’t know why, but I felt like puking. This was too much to process. I was tired, scared and confused.
    After a couple of minutes I reached an intersection and found that I was able to turn around. The search for Flash had suddenly become secondary. I sped back to the flap and into the kitchen.
    I stood there panting, looking down at the cupboard, thoughts careening through my brain. None of it made any sense. I turned on the faucet and took out a glass. The water gushed into the sink. Somehow it calmed me and I stayed there watching the stream and the splashes. It was as though all my confusion was being washed down the drain.
    I must have