"Look out!" Bex yelled, as suddenly I broke free of the shaft. My arms felt as if they might pop out of their sockets when I squeezed the clamp and slammed to an almost instantaneous stop. I was dangling from the cable, looking down into the cavernous space of Sublevel Two.
"I can't believe that worked," I admitted, breathless.
"Cam!" Bex shouted, stopping me before I could release my hold on the cable. "Don't.
Move. A muscles."
We were suspended thirty feet above the hard stone floor of a room that, despite a semester of studying in Sublevel Two, I'd never seen before. The subs are a vast and winding maze of classrooms and offices, resources libraries and storage for some of the covert world's most highly classified secrets. And right then, Bex and I were looking through the dim glow of security lights at a massive room filled with hundreds of shelves and filing cabinets, a complex system of wiring and explosives . . .
And the most complex laser grid system I had ever seen.
"So," Bex said, smiling up at me through the pulsing glow of the emergency floodlamps,
"wanna hang out?"
A moment later, the vibrations on the cable grew stronger, and I looked up in time to see Liz hurtling toward me through the air, stopping just above me.
Macey was close behind and out of breath as she asked, "What if all this?"
Bex and I looked down at the rows of top secret information and the high-grade explosives that ran the length of the room, neither of us able to hide the awe in our voices. "It's a burn bag," we said in unison.
"What's that?" Macey asked.
"It's the stuff that can't fall into the wrong hands. Ever. It's the stuff that rigged to blow up in case . . . in case the worst happens."
Which was true. But scary. Because at that moment, technically, that worst that could happen was us.
Bex was the first to drop to the floor, nimble as a cat, landing between the red beams, then flipping and jumping through the air, navigating her way to the small panel on the side of the room. It if hadn't been so utterly terrifying, it would have been beautiful. Like ballet. But with a way higher casualty rate.
"Now, Liz," she yelled, and Liz pulled out her crossbow and took aim at the wall six inches above Bex's head.
"Uh . . . Liz . . ." Macey started.
"Sorry," Liz said, and raised her aim about a foot.
I don't think any of us could draw a breath as the arrow sailed through the air, a small cable trailing behind it, then landed perfectly just above the panel on the wall.
"Awesome," I said. "Now, just like we practiced - take the extra clip on your harness and put it on Bex's cable. Yeah. Just like that. You're doing -"
"Whoopsie daisy."
And that's when Elizabeth Sutton, supergenius, forgot that her bag was unzipped and let her Advanced Encryption textbook fall, end-over-end, into the heart of the laser field below.
"Liz!" I yelled, but it was too late. Lights began to pulse. Below us, the lasers began to move, red lines snaking over the ground, and I realized our only option.
"What do we do?" Macey yelled.
"We run!"
As we dropped to the ground, I couldn't hear my own thoughts - much less the footsteps of the girls who ran beside me. Red lights swirled. Sirens screamed. It was as if Sublevel Two were burning as Liz carried her laptop to where Bex stood waiting by the electronic nerve center that controlled all of Sublevel Two's modern defenses.
But modern . . . yeah, modern was the least of our problems.
At the far end of the room, there was a massive window made of stained glass. For a second I stood there, wondering why anyone would install a window in an underground room. It would have been far more weird and way less terrifying if the space behind the glass hadn't been quickly filling up with water.
"So that coming from . . ." Macey started.
"The lake."
"Sp if we don't stop this . . ." she started again.
"We drown," I said, but Macey was already gone - sprinting across the room.
"What do we do?" she cried. She was searching the walls, pushing on stones - frantically looking for a way to make the water stop rising. "Where's the switch? I thought Mr.
Solomon told Zach there was a way to turn it off."
As the water rose, the stained glass seemed to sparkle. The light looked different the higher the water went, and I couldn't help but remember the very first assignment Joe Solomon had ever given me: notice things.
"I've seen this before," I said, still staring at the familiar images in the glass - brightly colored shapes and lines. "Macey, have you seen it before?"
"Sorry, Cam," she said, still searching. "I'm a little busy here."
"it's like the one upstairs. You know, the big one? Except . . . it's different. It's almost like
. . ." I trailed off. My voice caught. And I knew when we had to do. "It's not a window -
it's a puzzle!"
The glass was cold to the touch when I reached for it. The device was at least a hundred years old, and when I pushed on a deep blue section of glass, at first it didn't budge, and I thought I was wrong. But I pushed harder and . . . movement. The window was like a kaleidoscope, a moving, swirling mass of glass and hidden gears as I slid the blue section smoothly into place in the center of the massive frame.
"Macey, help me," I said, and together we went to work, our eyes and hands feverishly flying over the window's hundreds of sections as quickly and deftly as we could, trying to duplicate the upstairs window that I had never truly looked at until Joe Solomon came into our school.