I had never expected to be here again. Dr. Cale was waiting for her people to get Carrie out of the car, so I walked through the familiar, purposefully decrepit antechamber alone, until I reached the door that would take me to the main lab. I hesitated in reaching for the doorknob. Was I ready for what was waiting on the other side? What if we had lost people? What if we had lost Nathan? A lot could have changed since I’d been taken into custody by Colonel Mitchell. There was only one way I was going to find out. I closed my eyes for a moment, taking comfort in the distant sound of drums and the increasingly familiar weight of Juniper clinging to my neck. Then I opened them, and grasped the knob, and turned it. My first impression of the lab was that nothing had changed. The workstations were where they had always been; the lights were bright where they needed to be but otherwise dim, keeping the power profile low and the chances of detection even lower. People in lab coats moved like ghosts through the gloom, some carrying clipboards or tablet computers, others transporting biological samples from one place to another.
