Origin (Book 2)

Chapter 22

I hated having to wait.

We were now a couple of hours away from "the raid," as everyone was now calling it. I think it's safe to say that we're all a little nervous- if the agents were right, we would finally have something on them. If not, though, and this was a trap, then they were farther ahead than even I could imagine.

Brady left the facility a couple of minutes earlier, but he didn't elaborate on where he was going when I asked. I was left to ponder what was so important for him attend that caused him to miss this.

I was checking on everyone's activities while I was waiting, with the exception of the professor, who I didn't eat to drag me in on something else, and Cassie, who I just wasn't comfortable talking to.

When I came to the tech room, where I assumed Blink would be, I heard random mumbling coming from inside. I opened the door.

The inside was bigger than I thought it would be. Tools and construction parts were lying on every table, and there were eight very long ones that took much of the available room. Banks of computer monitors lined the walls, and wire was sticking out everywhere.

I tried to tread to Blink, but ended up just floating over the mess in the floor-after almost hitting the ceiling. He had cleared off a table and was now looking through a magnifying glass at the gloves I gave him.

"Hey, Jay, come in," he said.

"This isn't your room," I said.

"Might as well be. Come over here for a sec."

I was already gliding over to him, and touched down on the small empty space where he was standing.

"Touch it," he said. "That small glass orb in the center."

I reached my hand out to touch it. What harm could it do?

"Get away from that thing!" the voice exclaimed in my head.

I stumbled back as his words crashed inside of my head like a tow truck, crashing into the table behind me and knocking over various equipment.

"What just happened?" Blink asked.

"I don't know," I said. I tried to think in my head, "Could you have said that any louder?"

"Sorry, but you don't want to touch that," it said more calmly.

"I'll pass on touching it," I said slowly. "Do you know what it's for?"

"Really? I have no idea. BUT I do think it has something to do with the way the government...or Afterlight...whoever made that device that trapped our town in our dimension," he said.

"How do you know?" I asked.

Before I could stop him, he was already holding a hammer and three the end down on the glove. But when he removed it, the only thing broken was head of the hammer.

"I dropped it, originally, and it didn't break," he explained. "It was probably stupid to try to destroy it, but I was right in thinking I couldn't."

"That's interesting. Can it do anything else?"

"Well, I turned it on in the room, and, well, that was a mistake," he admitted.

"You turned them on?"

"Yeah. They have buttons," he said. "You didn't know that?"

I shook my head. "What did they do?"

"Well, there's more than one button, but the one I pressed made everything start floating. I decided not to see what the other one did. They make the area some sort of gravity neutralizer," he said. "Though, how did you manage to find these things in an antique shop?"