Link Six (completed)

Chapter 46 - Black Sheep

"Get up," Someone orders. Howie feels a nudge in his side. He rolls away from it.

"Leave me alone," He mutters, thinking it's his father. "Giving me a few more minutes won't kill you."

"No, but it might kill you." The person replies. This causes Howie to open his eyes and remember where they've been over the past few days. He sits up in his sleeping bag and sees Darren standing over him.

"Guys," He shakes the person nearest to him, Colton, awake.

"What's wrong?" Colton mutters, then see the man standing in front of the open door to the room. He sends everyone a memory of an alarm clock going off, which wakes everyone except Rhea with a start.

They quickly reorient themselves and scowl in Darren's direction.

"What do you want?" Howie demands while Emma and Rhea try to wake the still stuck in dreamland Rhea.

"This isn't about me. It's about you guys not wanting to be put back in that chair. So, get yourselves together and come. This door opens again in five minutes. Be ready." He orders and he steps outside and locks the door back.

"Rhea, wake up," Emma shakes her shoulder.

"She sleeps like a rock," Howie comments. "If we have to drag into the bathroom and soak her with cold water again..."

Colton puts his hand on Rhea's arm, sending a memory of them waking up for school to her. "It's because whoever she's patched into is still in a deep sleep, so she's fully engrossed in their dream."

Rhea stirs, then after a few moments, her eyes fly open. She sits up abruptly.

We have 4 minutes to get ready. Leeanna projects.

"For Training?" Rhea asks.

Everyone nods.

The kids slide out of their sleeping bags and waste no more time rolling them up and storing them in the bench, where Emma makes a quick switch between the fake glasses Dr. Greg had given her and her real ones. True to his word, minutes later, Darren opens the door.

"Let's go," He says. The children apprehensively follow, glancing at each other, which makes them more nervous than before because they now see the fear on even Leeanna's face, and they all can sense it as if it's palpable. They can't tell whether this fear is a magnification due to Emma's projecting or just their powers and connection heightening their emotions. Either way, they're scared. Darren's smirk tells that he notices it, too.

He leads the kids down the hallway, past the room with the chair, and directly towards the room they had been tested in yesterday. But, instead of entering the room, he turns and stops in front of an elevator.

"Where are you taking us?" Colton wants to know.

"Does it really matter, as long as it's not the chair?" Darren replies. It did, a lot, to the kids. But, they take this as a hint to not comment and get into the elevator.

Darren steps in just as the door closes and presses one on the keypad. Howie notices the numbered buttons on the elevator stop at 4, but there's an unmarked button under the one labeled B (the level they had come from). So, they must be doing something even more illegal than what they were doing to them.

The elevator stops and the kids get their first look at something other than metal in days. Colton and Leeanna's guesses turned out to be correct, they are standing in a hallway of what appears to be a normal private school. An antique drapery hangs from the ceiling at one end from the hall and a wall length window covers the other. All along the hallway is classroom doors labeled with teacher's names. They even took the time to put in a water fountain. If anyone came to this school and didn't know anything was happening underneath it, they wouldn't think anything was wrong. That is, after all, the idea.