The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled by Amanda Valentino, Cathleen Davitt Bell Read Free Book Online Page A

said, but he kept his arms down from then on. We walked out of the guards’ direct line of sight before crossing the road, and cutting back toward the campus through the woods.
    “Now what?” Nia said.
    “Now I don’t know. We’ll get as close as we can from here and hope we can find another way in.”
    “I know one,” Hal said. “There’s an unguarded back entrance near an old jogging trail.”
    “Did you just have another premonition?” Nia asked, sounding excited.
    “No,” he answered, a grin sneaking onto his face. “I just run here sometimes.”
    “Oh,” she said, sounding deflated.
    He added, “I don’t think I’ve seen these guards before though.”
    We walked down toward the woods, then slipped through themaround the corner of the chain-link fence. Hal was right. There was an old garage right on the fence’s edge. Next to the garage was a gate in the chain-link fence—unfortunately securely closed and locked with an intimidating iron chain. Between the cover of the woods and the large garage, the guards patrolling the front and the back of the facility couldn’t see us.
    “You sure we want to go inhere?” Nia said. “Not even the airplane hangar was this heavily guarded and we almost got caught there.”
    Hal looked at Callie. Callie looked at me. I looked at Nia. “Okay, okay.” She sighed. “We need to break in here precisely because this place is guarded so heavily.”
    “Precisely,” Hal said.
    And then, as if it were no big deal, Callie broke the lock on the chain. The gate swung open and weslipped silently inside.
    There were enough big trees on the campus that we were able to dart from one to another without the guards spotting us. We had to just pray there weren’t any cameras installed—I didn’t see any. We hid behind some overgrown bushes on the side of the first building we reached. Nia stood up and looked through a window.
    “It’s an old classroom,” she said.
    “Anything remarkableabout it?” I asked.
    “No,” she said.
    Still keeping ourselves hidden along the walls and behind trees, we made our way over to another building. From the outside, this one seemed very large—about the same size as our high school. Once we got to the windows, we could see that it seemed so big because it enclosed a large courtyard. The interior windows looked through to the classroom we were peeringinto now.
    As we leaned against the building wall to see better, Nia suddenly jumped back, pulling her hands off the wall and rubbing them together as if to erase the feel of the bricks. “Whoa,” she said.
    “Did you feel something?” I asked.
    “More like heard,” she said. “Kids’ voices. It sounded like recess at an elementary school, like kids were playing outside. I think the courtyard in thisbuilding was used as a playground.”
    “A playground at a pharmaceutical college?” Callie said. “That would be some pretty young pharmacists-in-training.”
    Nia nodded, grimly. “I don’t think they were training to be pharmacists.”
    The windows were locked, but by pushing hard enough, Callie managed to snap the lock and lift the sash. Hal hoisted himself up and over the windowsill and the rest ofus followed.
    “Do you think it’s strange,” he said, “that we aren’t hearing alarms go off?”
    “Yes,” Callie said. “If they took the trouble to encircle an abandoned campus with a chain-link fence and patrol it with guards, you’d think the least they would do was install an alarm system.”
    “Maybe they did,” Nia said. “It could be a silent alarm.”
    “Do you have a sense of anybody coming?” I askedHal.
    Hal paused for a moment, as though concentrating. He got a sort of faraway look on his face. Then he shook his head. “Not right now,” he said. “But still, we’d better hurry.”
    Walking down the empty hall, we poked our heads into one unremarkable classroom after another, but once we rounded the corner, we noticed a change. When we tried to open