He was on a bench. He was with Sarah and Bryson in a dimly lit room with iron bars all around—a prison cell. There was no one else in sight. Had they been Lifted?

“Dude,” Bryson said. “That lady must’ve knocked half of your brains out of your ears with that blow. I saw it. You’ve been out for a while.”

“What …” Michael groaned. It hurt to speak.

Sarah was next to him. Holding his hand.

“Everything was a lie,” she said. “They won’t tell us much. Just that we’re under arrest. The cops here are terrible.”

“What …” Michael said again. Maybe he’d suffered some serious brain damage and that was the only word he’d ever utter for the rest of his life. “Did you see Gabby?”

He turned to Bryson, who didn’t seem to have heard him. His friend was fuming, rubbing his hands together as he stared at the wall of metal bars. “Weber. She set us up. Set the whole thing up, top to bottom. I just hope I get a chance someday … Just five minutes. That’s all I need.”

Michael wanted to ask what in the world he was talking about but had to focus on breathing.

“We don’t know it was her,” Sarah said. “In fact, it doesn’t even make sense if it was her. After she Sunk us into the Sleep, someone else must’ve charged in and taken over operations.”

Bryson just scoffed at that.

Michael was becoming more convinced by the second that he had been hit too hard to recover. “Wait … what’s going on? What do you guys know?”

Sarah kept talking, but she didn’t seem to be talking to Michael. “They must’ve done it right after Weber gave us the Lance device. It was somehow linked to the Squeeze. I mean, we all passed out. Slept for who knows how long. They had plenty of time to do it.”

“I’m telling you, it was Weber,” Bryson said. He sat back against the cement wall behind the bench. “You can’t tell me she gave us that Lance thing and Lifted out of the Sleep, and then suddenly other people took over. That’s too convenient. She set us up.”

“But why?” Sarah asked. “We already had tons of reasons to be arrested. Michael’s supposedly a terrorist, and everyone on the planet thinks I did something to my … parents.” She faltered but quickly recovered. “Not to mention the umpteen times we’ve broken laws in the Sleep. It doesn’t add up. If Weber—or anyone else—wanted us in jail, all they had to do was turn us in. Call the cops.”

Michael just kept looking back and forth between his friends, trying to connect the dots. Bryson was slowly nodding, considering.

“Huh,” he said. And then he repeated it. “Huh.”

“Guys.” Michael shifted in his seat, wincing from the pain that lingered. “Call me slow. But what in the world are you talking about? What did Gabby mean back there? Have they even Lifted us out of the Deep yet? Where are we? What happened? Is this a real jail or—”

“Michael,” Sarah said softly, but firm enough to cut him off. “Michael. They tricked us. Someone did.”

“How?” he asked. “What did they do?”

Sarah looked terribly, terribly sad.

“We were never in Lifeblood Deep,” she said. “They had to have drugged us at some point—knocked us out after we got in the Coffins, I don’t know—and then Lifted us and dropped us in the Wake, in the real Atlanta. It’s the only explanation.”

Michael’s head started spinning again.

Sarah gave his hand a hard squeeze. “Whatever was in that building, we really did destroy it. In the Wake, Michael. And I don’t know if it had anything to do with Kaine.”

Chapter 22: Two Visitors

Michael lay on a tiny cot in a cramped room. The floor, ceiling, and three walls were made of stone blocks. A line of thick bars made up the fourth wall. The only light was a single lonely lightbulb, which buzzed and flared every few minutes. Michael stared at the ceiling, overwhelmed by a deep grief like he’d never known. He wished he were dead.

He didn’t know exactly why he felt so despairingly sad. Things had been bad going on worse for a long time now. But being locked away—and worse, separated from his friends, which the guard had done a couple of hours earlier—gave him all the silence and time in the world to think about his problems.

And think he did.

About his Tangent parents, gone forever. About Helga, his loving Tangent nanny, gone as well. Sarah, her parents still missing, accused of being behind their disappearance. Bryson, accused of helping her. Kaine, on the loose and taking over more bodies by the second, for all Michael knew. Agent Weber, the only person he’d trusted besides Sarah and Bryson, betraying him.

He thought about Jackson Porter. The boy’s life, stolen.

Michael, a murderer, whether he’d meant to be or not.

And Gabby. He’d dragged her into this. And all he could see was her crumpled, injured body lying on the pavement.

It was all too much.

Michael had always prided himself on not being the crying sort. That had changed recently. The lights above looked blurry, and when he reached up to scratch his cheek, his fingers came away wet.

He rolled over and faced the wall, curled up into a ball.

And then Michael cried. The kind of crying where his chest hitched and his throat closed up and his shoulders shook. The kind where snot flowed and the sound of sobs and sniffles broke the gloomy silence.

Michael wept.

At some point, he fell asleep. He only realized this when a clanging on the bars ripped him from empty dreams. Disoriented, he sat up on the cot.

A guard stood there, chewing gum lazily, his gun out—that was what he’d used to drag across the metal bars. When Michael was awake and attentive, the man put the gun back into its holster.

“You have a visitor,” the guard said, bored. “Two, actually. A man and a woman. Which one you wanna see first?”

This woke Michael completely. He stood up. “Who … who are they?”

“Don’t know and don’t care. Which will it be?”

Michael thought hard. The whole situation was odd. Who could it possibly be? Finally he just said, “The man, I guess.”

The guard gave a bored nod, then walked away. Michael stayed where he was, heard a clang, a few whispers, then footsteps. Soon a different man came into view, alone, wearing jeans and a black shirt; brown hair, chin stubble, watery blue eyes.