Falling Read Online Free PDF

inside,” Lionel says. “You’re here, and you should have the chance to get your bearings before anything else happens.”
    He leads the way, and I follow, not knowing what else to do. The inside of the manor house is odd. There are rooms there that don’t feel like they’ve been touched for a hundred years, while others have a very modern look to them, with plenty of glass and brushed steel mixed in with the rest of the furniture. It reminds me a lot of the apartment Jack had to blow up shortly after meeting me.
    “This is an interesting place you have here,” I manage to say.
    “Oh, I do my best with it,” Lionel returns. “I have to keep some of the older stuff for the look of an old English manor house, but it isn’t really to my taste.”
    No, it’s Jack’s, and it’s hard to understand until I remember the comment about Lionel training him. Jack has obviously picked up a lot from the man who was once his mentor, even down to his taste in decorating.
    Grayson and I follow Lionel as he shows us around the various rooms on the ground floor. They are fairly typical of what I would have expected from a manor house like this. There’s a library, a large kitchen, a gallery. It’s only when Lionel leads us down a flight of stairs that I start to realize there’s more to the place.
    “This used to be a wine cellar, until we made a few alterations and… well, extended things a bit.”
    That’s an understatement. The stairs lead down to a corridor almost identical to those back at the Underground’s main base. There are doors leading off it, and Lionel pushes them open as we pass. In the first, there are people working, huddled over screens as they tap away at keyboards. The second door features what appears to be a shooting range, where a couple of people are practicing with pistols. A third features a large, matted area, where a couple of Faders are going back and forth, exchanging blows and trying to throw one another. Lionel pauses there, going over to correct one of the combatants, and tripping him casually when he isn’t expecting it.
    “There. Maybe now you’ll remember that this isn’t a game, young man.” He comes back and apologizes. “Sorry about that. People these days never seem to understand that there aren’t any rules in a real fight until you demonstrate it to them first hand.”
    Lionel seems satisfied enough to move on then, taking us into an elevator, which leads us down to a lower floor. There, he spends several seconds getting us through voice print and retinal scan based locks, which let us into what appears to be a control room, where we are surrounded by screens. Those screens show all kinds of things, from news feeds to satellite imagery of distant locations. There are pictures of people, along with information about them, as well as graphs that make no sense without being told what they are about. There is even some footage that looks like it is being taken directly from security cameras and overhead drones.
    One of the screens shows the hangar I had thought of as the Underground’s only base until recently. It’s in ruins, the fires having burned themselves out. It’s eerily quiet, and there’s no sign of anyone still being there. There aren’t even any bodies on the ground from where the battle occurred. It’s just deserted.
    “What happened to everyone?” I ask. “Did the Others kill them all?”
    Lionel shakes his head. “We were able to evacuate the majority of the personnel from Location Six, along with the files and equipment that were most sensitive. It looks like Sebastian was also able to activate the self-destruction sequence, eliminating anything that could have been used by the Others.”
    “But that doesn’t make sense,” I say. “How could they have evacuated before the explosion? I was there. There were a few Faders fighting the Others, and Sebastian was there, but I didn’t see anyone else come out of the place.”
    “That’s because they left