The door slammed shut behind them and cut off all light—and she opened her mouth to scream, but then sucked back the sound, holding it in. That feeling of the floor slipping out from under her feet happened again, a lesson on the significance of vision to things like balance and the spatial orientation of limbs and torso.
Beside her, Peyton was panting.
From out of nowhere, rough hands grabbed at her hair, latching on, yanking hard. And she screamed bloody murder as fear made her contort and spasm and fight against the hold.
“Paradise!”
They were ripped apart and something was put over her head and tied around her neck. Forced to the ground, her legs were bound and then used to pull her along on her back. Twisting and turning, trying to kick, to breathe, to stay even partially calm enough to think, she felt like she was suffocating.
She felt like she … might be dying.
Up on the scaffolding, Craeg learned the hard way that you’d better frickin’ balance yourself—the electrical shock he got each time his arms flailed into something metal sent his heart racing and shorted out his mind for a split second that he couldn’t afford to spare.
And naturally, the goddamn platform was as rickety as an old man, shifting this way and that, swinging like a baseball bat.
“Get in a rhythm!” he shouted to Novo. “Follow my steps!”
Strong hands grabbed onto his waist. “Got you.”
They fell into a walking stride that was quick but cautious, lurching from side to side, the heat from the lights and the mass of bodies down below making him sweat. Extending his arms, he counter-balanced himself and her, and began to make even better time, heading for God only knew—
All at once the scaffolding went rock-steady, and that was bad news. What had worked on an unstable surface didn’t fly at all on a stable one, and both of them careened into a series of electrical shocks that sent them reeling, their bodies slamming into each other and then hitting the metal supports, only to get reshocked. Muscles began to cramp up and refuse to loosen, his limbs unable to follow his mental commands.
“Fuck!” Craeg barked as he tried to stop his body from reacting to the stimuli.
“What the fuck!” Novo yelled.
Or some version of that.
Thin air.
Next thing he knew, he had fallen off an edge he hadn’t seen coming and gone into a free fall that left even him screaming at the top of his lungs. All around him, air rushed up, traveling through his clothes and making them flap, streaking his hair and the skin of his face and back, riddling his ears with a buffering sound. He was going to snap both of his legs if he landed feet-first, but there was no time, and no distance—and no reason to even try to broker a landing that wasn’t going to be devastating—
Sploosh!
He hit an unanticipated pool of water on his side, his body getting caught in the safe hold of cold, fresh liquid. The relief as he didn’t end up with both his femurs coming out of the tops of his shoulders was short-lived. His Tasered, tortured, overheated muscles immediately cramped on a oner, everything freezing up, his lack of body fat turning him into an anchor, not a buoy.
The shock of the unexpected bottoming-out had caused him to pull in a tremendous lungful of air, but that oxygen supply wasn’t going to last. He needed to get to the surface.
With clawed hands, and only one leg that had any mobility, he scratched and kicked in what he hoped was the way up. He had no visual orientation at all, nothing but a black abyss that was going to consume him if he didn’t save himself.
The surface of the pool, pond, lake, whatever it was rearrived with the same unexpected, unannounced surprise that he’d plunged into it with. Coughing and trying to suck in air were two mutually exclusive activities, and he had to force his primordial sense of survival to regulate his diaphragm’s spastic responses.
Chlorine. They were in a pool.
He didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about that. The pain in his cramping muscles was unbelievable, like having daggers driven into his thighs and his ass and his gut, and he started to sink back down before he’d caught his breath—and that was a no-go. He was going to die that way.
Fighting against his body’s impulses, he used his mind to override his sympathetic nervous system: Taking an enormous breath in, he stroked his arms out and down, creating an artificial current that swept his torso flat across the top of the water. Then he stopped … fucking … moving.
And let the air in his chest cavity become the life jacket he wasn’t wearing.
It wasn’t a perfect float. His legs continued to sink, and he had to kick every so often to stay on top, but it was a hell of a lot better than hitting the bottom and drowning.
From time to time, he expelled his breath and reinhaled.
He wasn’t sure how long he could last like this. But he was going to find out.
God … his cording muscles were a torture to endure, and to distract himself, he relived being up high on that catwalk. The Brothers were brilliant, he decided. Going from that heat to this cold? After the electrical shocks?
It was an engineered environment guaranteed to put someone exactly where he was: fighting against his body’s natural responses to certain stimuli and environments.
What was happening to everyone else? he wondered.
Where was the female?
Not the one he’d been on the elevation with … but the other one? Paradise?
As water clapped in his ears, it was like the light show from the gym, obscuring and then letting in sensory input. He heard splashing, both close to him and farther away … a lot of shouting and gasping from others in the pool … echoes—they must be somewhere large with a relatively low ceiling and a lot of tile.