Strangelets by Michelle Gagnon Read Free Book Online Page A

being psychopaths. Worse, they were staring at her like
she
was the freak. At least they weren’t threatening to shove her through the vents. “Right,” she said weakly. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation.”
    Anat snorted.
    Declan gestured to the vents. “So we’re thinking Yosh and Zain can get up there and crawl through, maybe find a way out.”
    “Us?” Yosh said in a small voice. Sophie didn’t blame her—nothing like having strangers volunteer you for a cramped, dangerous mission.
    The tall blond boy—
Nico
, she reminded herself—looked skeptical. “Well,” he said, gazing upward. “It might work.”
    “What if they don’t come back?” Anat demanded.
    “Of course we’ll come back,” Zain said indignantly.
    “I wouldn’t,” Anat scoffed.
    “You have my word,” he said stiffly. Turning to Yosh, he offered, “Would you like to go first?”
    She eyed the narrow opening nervously. “No.”
    “All right.” Zain tugged off his shirt and turned to Nico. “Give me a hand?”
    Anat paced beneath the hole where Yosh and Zain had disappeared. Occasionally they could hear rattles and clanks from above, followed by muted conversation. “It’s been too long,” she finally said.
    “It’s barely been ten minutes,” Declan snorted. “Relax and take a load off, bird.”
    “I’m not a bird,” she grumbled.
    He waved a hand. “It’s not an insult. Go on, then. Sit.”
    Anat remained standing. She found Declan’s equanimity maddening. He and Nico had settled down on the floor beside each other, leaning against the wall outside Sophie’s room. The American girl had gone back to bed, claiming to be tired. Anat still suspected that somehow Sophie was behind all this. Although in all honesty, she did appear to be ill. Or at least, much weaker than the rest of them.
    She took another small sip from the water bottle. Hard to say if the tap water was potable—she’d guess not, since there were pallets of mineral water stacked in the hallway on the boys’ side. Odd that they hadn’t been given any.
But then, all of this was odd
, she reminded herself.
    And despite what everyone else seemed to think, she seriously doubted that Yosh and Zain would return for them. If the situation had been reversed, she wouldn’t.
    Silence from above. Anat tried to picture the pathway carved by the vent: based on the clanks and groans emitted by Zain and Yosh’s passage, it snaked across the hall and down to the boys’ section. But did it really lead up from there? Whatever this place was, it appeared to be some sort of underground bunker. Much as she hated to admit it, the American girl was right: the vents were probably the only way out.
    “What’s the last thing you remember?” Declan asked suddenly.
    “Me?” Anat said.
    “Yes, you. I’ve already heard from nearly everyone else. Nico here was hiking, right?”
    “With my father,” Nico said, sounding bored.
    “Aye. Zain was in some sort of earthquake, and Sophie was about to die of cancer. I was about to be shot,” he said matter-of-factly.
    “Shot? By who?” Anat asked, suddenly interested.
    “Russian bastard,” he said, waving dismissively. “But what I’m thinking is that we all seemed to be in some sort of danger, yeah?”
    “I suppose,” Anat said slowly, remembering the tunnel. They suffered from cave-ins all the time, she’d known that going in.
    “So maybe we were all about to die,” Declan said. “Maybe that’s the link.”
    “And what?” She snorted. “This is hell?”
    “Purgatory, more likely,” Declan said.
    “You’re serious?” Anat said, stupefied.
    “How would you explain it, then?”
    “I’m Jewish. We don’t believe in Purgatory.”
    “Which doesn’t mean it can’t exist, right?”
    “I’m not dead,” Nico said with a yawn.
    “Last thing you remember is slipping on a rock in the middle of a hike, though.”
    “So?”
    “So, maybe you went over a cliff.”
    “There were no