The Second Sphere
Chapter 41

There was a holding cell on the eleventh floor, the only currently accessible point at which to store a person for a few minutes or hours, or however long they planned to keep me. The elevator rocketed toward our destination. The silence said everything.

When the doors opened, the bot guards ordered me into the brightly lit hallway. Several troops stood in front of us, pulse rifles in their hands, and icy stone mugs. My heart dropped. I let my vision drag along their shoes. The shame was so deep.

Ahead of us stretched the long hall. I felt as though headed to certain death, like my sentence had already been determined. I would be the recipient of enhanced interrogation.

If I could keep myself from putting one foot in front of the other, I could put off that dive into felony; another name in a line of traitors. But the mind order band kept me from my thoughts.

We halted in front of the cell door as Nelson punched a code into the small numerical pad to the left. Anger and a lust for Love mingled inside of me. This could not be the last chapter. Any chance to run, any chance to lash out, I would take.

The door to the cell opened. A blinding darkness made me squint. The bot guards ordered me forward. I stumbled and fell to my knees, sliding against the far wall of the tiny cell. The door closed. Suddenly, the light from the hallway was gone. Darkness enshrouded me.

I considered the events that led to that moment. Standing outside of the door at the exact moment when Cristina attacked Victor Newberry. The interview with Olga Dahlgren. The accumulation of Newberry’s materials. Government secrets. The release of the virus. Cody Beans. But even with the memory of all of those things, I felt no closer to putting them together, to tying this mess up.

All I could do was put up my defenses, a wall to keep out the pain that I knew was to come. I rolled myself into a ball on the floor, feeling the cold seep through my clothes and into my bones. After a few moments, I shifted. There I was, with my teeth chattering, staring into the blackness. The worst part was that all of the mistakes I’d made, all of the seemingly conscious choices, had brought me to a place of powerlessness.

I knew how to control the pieces. I knew the rules. But that wasn’t enough. Someone with a higher clearance than mine, someone who had better connections, pulled strings. Someone out there thought I was expendable; or worse, dangerous.

All of my experience, all of my sacrifices for the company, now had as much meaning as a bowl of cereal. They might as well not have happened. I could’ve been anyone. I was a patsy. As the pain radiated through my arm, I realized that my hand pounded the ground.

Never in my life had I felt so alone, not when I was on a Love binge or staring into the eyes of a throwaway. Those were lonely moments, but they were nothing like sitting in the darkness, believing that there was no one out there.

The world began to tumble. For a moment, I didn’t know which way was up, and the rush of air in my lungs made my head twirl.

Hope drifted.

It was at that moment that I heard the locks of the door move.

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