—Manny blinked and looked around. He was no longer on the landing with the rest of his friends. Somehow he found himself transported into the fake office space of the warehouse. He spun around, searching for the guard he knew had to be there, but he didn’t see anyone. He was alone.
That didn’t make any sense. He knew the guard was there somewhere. He had sensed him just a moment before. Moving as quietly as possible he crept around the space, checking each of the cubicles. There was no one else there. Then, as he passed by one of the windows looking into the warehouse, he caught a glimpse of his reflection.
But it wasn’t his reflection.
It took his stunned mind several seconds to process what he was seeing. Then it clicked and he recognized the face as that of the security guard. He even saw the bruise on his jaw where Tom had punched him. He leaned closer and saw the reflection move with him. Then he looked down at himself. He was dressed in the guard’s uniform.
What the…?
He realized that he had somehow jumped his consciousness into the guard’s body. But if he was here, did that mean the guard was in his body? And since he didn’t understand how the transfer had happened in the first place, how was he going to get back into his own body? And if the guard was in his body, were Amanda and the others in danger? And if—
Stop it!
He could drive himself crazy worrying about the possibilities. He was here now, on the other side of the hidden door. What he had to do was figure out a way to help his friends. The question was, how? They had searched the office before and hadn’t found another door. Then again, they hadn’t known the elevator was there until Dimitri pointed out the negative space in the back corner of the office.
He looked around the office, studying the arrangement of the walls. The corner where the hidden elevator was located stood out to him now as an obvious inconsistency. He let his eye wander along the back wall to the other side of the building. He noticed that there was another negative space in that corner as well. It wasn’t as big as the corner where the elevator was, but it was still a boxed off area that shouldn’t be there. And it was big enough to conceal the stairwell landing his friends were trapped on.
He walked over to the corner and starting searching. One side of the boxed off section was just a plain wall. On the other side was a large, filing cabinet. He searched the blank wall, hoping to find another hidden switch like he had before, but didn’t find anything. Next, he tried to move the filing cabinet, thinking the entrance might be hidden behind it, but the steel cabinet was too heavy to be moved. Instead, he opened the cabinet’s doors, swinging them up to search through each of the racks. He went through each one carefully but again found nothing.
Was he looking in the right place?
He stood back and studied the wall again. This corner of the room definitely had a boxed off section like the other corner. There was something hidden back there. The problem was how to open it. If he had Danny’s skill he could simply feel for the electrical field to know where the door was. If he had Reed’s skill he could feel for the door mechanism. But he couldn’t. His skill was…
“I’m an idiot,” he berated himself. He didn’t need Danny or Reed’s powers. When he had sensed the guard before, he had also felt an opaque area that he couldn’t sense through. It was the electromagnetic field set up around the door. All he had to do was search for that dead zone and he would know where the doorway was.
Closing his eyes, Manny stretched out with his sense and felt—nothing. His power was gone. In the guard’s body he was without his ability to sense and control other people. Now he started to worry.
He forced himself not to panic. There had to be a way out of this. Then he remembered something Shay had said when they first entered the office. Before they found the hidden elevator, they thought the room was a dead end. Most of them wanted to give up but Shay had told them not to dwell on what they didn’t know but to think about what they did know.
So what did he know?
He knew that the warehouse was only a cover for the underground complex. He also knew that the office area was a fortified bunker. He knew that there was an elevator into the complex hidden within a walled-off area in the far corner of the room. He knew that there was a second boxed-off space in this corner. That probably meant the door to the hidden stairwell was here. Since it wouldn’t make sense for the door to be difficult to access, there had to be some simple way to get to it. People needed to be able to move into and out of the secret base without going through a complicated routine.
He stepped back several more paces and placed his hands on his hips as he studied the boxed off section again. One side was a blank wall. The other was covered by a filing cabinet. But he already knew that. So what was he missing? As his eyes trailed down the cabinet he noticed something odd—the cabinet didn’t go all the way down to the floor. There was a tiny gap between the bottom of the cabinet and the floor. Office furniture did not defy gravity. That meant it was bolted to the wall. And that wasn’t normal.
He moved to the cabinet and ran his hand along the back edge. Halfway down he felt something sticking out. It felt like a button. He pressed it, heard a soft click, and the filing cabinet swung silently out from the wall. Behind the cabinet was a recessed doorway, and beside the door was a keypad identical to the ones they had seen throughout the underground complex.
He stared at the keypad, wondering how he could open the door. Tom had the doctor’s ID card but was on the other side of the door. But Dr. Brooks couldn’t be the only one with an ID.
Manny glanced down and saw the guard’s ID card clipped to his shirt pocket. He pulled the card loose. Could it be that simple?
He waved the card at the keypad and an amber light flashed on. He reached for the pad, trying to remember Dr. Brooks’s passcode. Manny had a pretty good memory for numbers, but a lot had happened since Matt gave them the code. 4,3…was it 7,1,5 or 1,7,5? He thought for a moment then decided it was 7,1,5.
He typed in the code and was rewarded with a green light. He heard the soft thunk of thick dead bolts retracting and moments later the door began sliding open.