I didn’t even know what that meant. “Fine.”

She went back to Trev to tell him he’d gotten his way, then said good-bye. To me she said, “He’s coming to pick you up right now.”

“He doesn’t even know where I’m staying.”

“It’s Trev,” she said. “Of course he knows.”

Trev and I didn’t talk much on the way out to the lab. Fine by me. It took us nearly twenty minutes to reach it. It was an old dairy farm, stuck in the middle of nowhere. There was a run-down house on the property, the windows boarded shut. The barn was in good shape though, and had clearly been kept up.

That must have been where the lab was hidden.

Trev parked just outside the double barn doors with the Jag pointed outward, for a quick escape.

“Did you go in the other night?” I asked him. “After you dumped me on the side of the road?”

“No.” He shut the car off. “I just drove past, then parked about a half mile away and walked back. I wanted to do some surveillance before I broke in.”

“And?” I asked.

“Nothing. No activity. None whatsoever.”

At least I hadn’t missed any fun.

There was a chain on the barn doors, padlocked with a commercial-grade lock. Thankfully, Trev had thought to bring bolt cutters, and we were through in less than a minute.

The doors shuddered as we opened them, the tracks corroded from neglect. Inside, the place was pitch-black and smelled faintly of hay and wet animals.

Trev clicked on a flashlight and shot the beam across the space. There were several rooms on the left where the horses would have been kept. Another room on the right, probably for supplies. There was a hayloft fully intact above us. Bats flickered in the beam of light.

“So how do we get in?” I said.

“Good question.”

I was the first one inside, and I used the light cast from Trev’s flashlight to guide me. I checked the horse stalls and didn’t find anything suspicious. Trev checked the supply room. Nothing there, either. There was one more room, on the right, in the way back. That, too, was empty.

“Shit,” I muttered. “Why do they have to hide their hidden lab so well?”

“It’s gotta be here somewhere.” Trev returned to the main part of the barn. “I’ll check the hayloft just in case.”

Seemed unlikely they’d hide a lab in a hayloft, but whatever. Gave me a chance to snoop alone.

Using my boot, I cleared away dry hay from the concrete floor of the back room. No embedded door handles. No obvious seams in the concrete. I went back out to the main room and did a circle as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.

Something wasn’t right about this place. I just couldn’t tell what yet. I went to the back wall of the barn and ran my hand along it, feeling for anything that stuck out from the raw wood. There was another door there, but it led straight to the outside.

I glanced at the empty back room again. Then at the back wall.

“Trev,” I called.

He hung his head over the edge of the loft. “Yeah?”

“Get down here.”

He joined me a few seconds later.

“Look,” I said, and pointed at the back room. “If that room met the back wall of the barn, its square footage should be one hundred or so. Maybe a hundred and twenty.”

He looked at me in the gloom, and his eyes flashed. “That room is too narrow for that. It’s sixty square feet at the most.”

I nodded. “Exactly.”

We hurried into the room again and examined the wall that should have met up with the barn’s back wall. Ten seconds in, I found a loose board, and when I gave it a tug it swung out, revealing a door handle.

“Bingo,” Trev said.

I tried it, but it didn’t budge. There was a keypad, like all the labs had, embedded in the wall.

“Move over,” Trev said. Since I was playing nice, I did. He punched in a series of numbers, and the door hissed open, finishing with a pop.

I narrowed my eyes. “How’d you know the code?”

“All the labs have an override code. Most likely they were changed after I blew up several of the buildings, but I bet this one hadn’t been, since it looks like no one has been here in years.”

Stairs appeared beyond the door, leading down into total darkness.

When Trev didn’t make a move to go, I snorted and went down first, but not before pilfering the flashlight from his pussy hands.

The stairs seemed to go on forever, winding around on themselves, until finally we reached a steel door. It opened without complaint.

This lab was nothing like the farmhouse lab.

For one, we’d entered onto a metal stairwell that looked down on one wide-open space, like a factory, and two, it went on and on as far as our flashlight would reach.

Trev felt along the wall, grunted, and flipped an old power switch. Fluorescent lights flickered on by rows with a whir and click.

“Holy shit,” Trev said, his voice echoing.

Definitely a lot bigger than the farmhouse lab.

This place was easily the length of a football field, and the width of two. There were sectioned-off labs, some with nothing more than cubicle walls, others fully enclosed.

“I’ve been here before,” I said. Trev gave me a look, so I elaborated because I was still feeling nice. “I had a flashback about this place. Someone had escaped, and I was hunting them down.”

“Par for the course when it comes to the Branch. They’re always holding people prisoner, and people are always trying to break free.”