Adam moves in front of the door. “No, we need more information first. It might not be safe. You can’t go out there—”
Chris takes a step toward Adam with fire in his eyes. “Get out of my way.”
Here we go again. I raise my hands to stop him. “Aether will want to know why this place is abandoned. We should look around quickly.”
I can practically see smoke coming out of Chris’s nose. But after a long, tense moment, he steps back. “Ten minutes, that’s it. Then I’m going outside.”
Adam nods. “We can split up to cover each floor faster.”
“We’ll take the top two floors.” Chris gestures for Trent to follow him. “Let’s get this over with.”
They head to the stairs while Zoe bites her fingernails. “It’s okay,” Adam says to her with a warm smile. “We can search the other rooms together.”
I’m not sure if I’m included in that “we,” but I prefer to work by myself anyway. “I’ll take the third floor. Alone.”
Before Adam can answer, I spin on my heels and pound up the stairs. The third floor is where they did the medical exams, but it’s dark and empty now. I wish I had a lighter like Trent, but there’s just enough sunshine coming through the windows for me to get by. I take a moment to look outside, but the glass is so caked with dirt and dust that it’s hard to see much. The sun hangs low at the horizon, and based on the position, I’d guess it’s just after dawn. We got in the accelerator after lunch, yet now it’s morning again. Another clue that we’re not in our time anymore.
I move quickly, darting from one room to another. Exam rooms with no tables or beds. Medical labs with no equipment. Empty offices with no desks or chairs. Nothing has been left behind, not even a scrap of paper or a stray paper clip. It’s creepy as hell, wandering these empty rooms alone. I keep imagining that at any second someone will pop out at me, like in a horror movie. But there’s no one here and no clue as to what happened. Or what year this is.
As I’m about to head back to the stairs, something flashes in the corner of my eye. Sunlight glints off an object sitting on a windowsill. I approach it cautiously, and when the sun is no longer in my eyes I see it.
An origami unicorn.
00:32
I pick the unicorn up carefully, holding my breath. It’s made of silver paper, with not even a speck of dust on it. I slide my fingers across the folds of paper, like I did with the origami unicorn from earlier today.
I know one thing for certain: Adam made this.
“Elena?” he calls from the stairway. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah!” I shove the unicorn in my backpack before he can see it. I don’t know what it means yet, and I need more time to figure it out.
Adam and Zoe wait in the stairway. She stands close to him, like she might grab his arm at any second. I doubt she’d let him out of her sight, not with her hands shaking like that. And if they were together the entire time I was on this floor, there’s no way he could have placed the unicorn there.
Not this Adam, anyway…
“Find anything?” he asks.
“No.” If the future version of Adam put that unicorn there, he did so knowing I would search the third floor alone. He wanted me to find it—and only me.
We return to the lobby, where Chris and Trent are already waiting. “Like I said, nothing here,” Chris says. “Total waste of time.”
Adam sighs, adjusting his glasses. “We need a plan.”
Chris crosses his arms. “The plan is we go out there, find shit to bring back to Aether, then we come back. Just the bare minimum so we can get paid, and nothing more.”
“We don’t know what’s out there. It could be dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Zoe asks, her eyes wide.
“What if it’s not just this building that’s been abandoned?” Adam asks. “There could be radiation or—”
Chris shakes his head. “Hell no. I’m not gonna spend the next twenty-four hours holed up in this building. And I need that money.”
“He’s right. We can’t stay in here,” I say. Someone must have been inside the building recently to leave the origami unicorn upstairs. “Maybe there’s another way out.”