Page 80 of Escaping Wonderland

When she finally—reluctantly—pulled back from him, she returned her attention to the tablet and navigated to the main menu. Within a few moments, she’d managed to discern their location—the Liddell Psychiatric Hospital, only twenty miles outside Apex Reach, the city in which she’d spent most of her life.

That discovery settled her even further; her father had been well-connected in Apex Reach, and she’d met many of his friends and acquaintances over the years—including the chief of police.

A search on the net turned up the contact information for the police headquarters. She didn’t waste a moment in making the call.

“I need to speak with Chief Farland,” she said to the operator who answered.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but the Chief is very busy. I can take a message?—”

“Tell him it’s Alice Claybourne, Daniel Claybourne’s daughter. And it’s an emergency.”

“Claybourne?” the operator asked. There was a muted conversation in the background, none of which Alice could make out, before the operator said, “I’m transferring the call now. Please hold for just a moment.”

The line went silent; Alice counted her heartbeats as she waited.

There was a faint crackling sound on the other end of the call.

“Alice?” Chief Farland said in a raised, worried voice.

She could’ve just called the police, could’ve just called emergency services, but their best chance was with the chief—with anyone else, they risked being mistaken as a couple of disturbed patients who’d broken out of their pods and killed the facility’s director, and that had too much of a chance of going bad before they could tell their story. But she knew Chief Farland; he’d been one of her father’s closest friends and had been like family to Alice while she was growing up.

“Uncle Sean, I need your help.”

“Alice, what’s going on? Tabitha wouldn’t tell me a damned thing. Whereareyou?”

Alice met Shadow’s eyes and smiled. “The Liddell Psychiatric Hospital.”

CHAPTER 22

Blue-white energy bursts pulsed through the thick gray clouds surrounding Shadow’s dropship, occasionally silhouetting one of the other ships in his wing. Apart from those flashes, he couldn’t see anything—he had to rely upon the scanner alone to avoid collision.

The ship jolted and rattled as a nearby blast disrupted the air, but the shields held.

“The fleet was supposed to soften them up before we made entry,” said the lieutenant over the comm system.

Their pre-mission briefing had mentioned an orbital bombardment of the landing zone; had the fleet screwed up, or had the strike simply been ineffective? Shadow had made dozens of drops on almost as many planets during his career, most of which had been under enemy fire, but he’d never seen the sky so lit by anti-aircraft bursts. His heart beat steadily but loudly; he felt as though he were teetering on the edge of a precipice, and he’d be plunged into mindless terror if he fell.

The ship broke through the cloud cover, and Shadow’s eyes widened as the world opened up below—a world that was all wrong.

Massive trees, each at least two hundred feet tall, surrounded a large clearing which was crisscrossed with purple pathways that followed winding, nonsensical courses and intersected one another at random without any discernable reason or pattern. A large building stood in the center of that clearing, none of its angles or parts quite matching the rest.

“This is all wrong, sir,” Shadow called. “Wrong landing zone, wrong planet.”

“Get us on the ground,” the lieutenant replied.

Shadow turned his head to look at his co-pilot, but—despite the light of energy bursts in the air all around and the glow of the instrument panels in front of him—the other seat was shrouded in an impenetrable patch of darkness.

An explosion shook the ship violently. Alarms blared and beeped, and the ship pitched to the right. One of the engines died, and the stabilizer failed. The ship whipped into a rapid spin.

Shadow’s muscles strained as he wrestled the controls. The world below spun wildly, but one focal point remained oddly, impossibly stationary—the building at the center of the clearing.

And the dropship was hurtling toward that building.

The cacophony around him—soldiers shouting, the dropship shaking, alarms blaring—made it difficult to hear his own thoughts. All he could do was fight his losing battle against the controls.

With a deafening crash, the drop ship hit the building. Wood snapped, splintered, and shattered against the hull, and metal groaned and whined. The initial strike was followed by an immense impact so powerful that Shadow’s world went black.

He opened his eyes sometime later—it could’ve been seconds or hours, he couldn’t guess—to find himself still strapped intohis seat, bathed in the glow and heat of a nearby fire. Dazed but feeling no pain, he unbuckled his harness and stumbled to his feet, placing a hand on the control console to balance himself against the drastic tilt of the floor. He looked to his co-pilot first, and froze as terror—sudden, confusing, and consuming—spread outward from his gut to ice his veins.

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