Talent Chronicles 2 - Impulse Control Read Online Free PDF Page B

slow. I felt like I was going to be sick and made a show of checking the guard so I’d have an excuse to get closer to the ground. “He’s seen us.”
    “He saw something, maybe. He didn’t know what, so he didn’t raise an alarm, he came to check it out first?” Elle said.
    “When he came around the corner, he saw us. He probably won’t be able to identify all of us, but… What are we going to do?” Rand looked as seriously worried and scared as I felt. I didn’t know what to do. I guess if I’d let myself think about it, I would have realized something like this might happen. Rand was right, if he could identify us, we couldn’t let him make a report.
    The guard started to stir and I got ready to knock him out again, to give us more time to think. It was Anderson who grabbed my arm. “Let me handle this part. Help me sit him up.”

    Anderson and I dragged the guard up and sat him against the wall. Anderson knelt over him and took the guard’s head in his hands. For a moment, I expected to hear the guard’s neck crack, but after a few seconds Anderson just let him go and stood up. The guard fell sideways and started to crawl away from us. Rand lunged forward, but Anderson stopped him.
    “Don’t,” he whispered. “He’s just going to crawl back to the barracks, have a drink, and go to bed. He’s not going to remember anything about tonight except that drinking on the job makes him really clumsy.”
    “Are you sure about that?” I asked him.
    Anderson glared at me. “I’m sure. Anyway,” he said, shrugging, “he thought he saw something, so when he approached, he had his mental defenses up. He was blocking his thoughts, that’s why you didn’t hear him coming, Karen.
    They do train these guys you know. Just apparently not enough to overcome Mr. Fists of Death over here. I’ll remember not to try to sneak up on you.”
    “Yeah, you do that,” I said. “There’s our break. Get going.”
    Accessing the building we needed wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. We had been able to use Rand’s jumping ability to reposition some of the cameras, and Elle had been able to manipulate some of the locks. Ideally, we hoped to get through this without leaving any definitive evidence that Talents had passed this way. Even if they couldn’t pin anything on us in particular, there was always the chance that NIAC would punish any number of kids if a security breach was discovered.
    “I can’t get this one, I’m sorry,” Elle said, shaking her head at the keypad by the door.
    “It’s all right, you tried,” I told her. “What happens if I smash it?”
    “Sirens, flashing lights, guys with guns, I presume.”
    “Great.”

    “Someone’s coming,” Karen warned. Elle and I backed off and ducked into hiding with the others. A man in a lab coat came from the other direction and entered a series of numbers into the keypad. A buzzer sounded and a green light came on as the lock clicked open. The man opened the door, went through, and shut it behind him. The light went back to red.
    Karen rattled off a series of numbers. “That’s what he was thinking at the door.”
    “Don’t look so smug,” I told her. “It doesn’t suit you.”
    “I think it doesn’t suit you ,” she grinned.
    “I can’t believe this place,” Anderson almost sounded like he was complaining. “At Delta it’s all thumbprints and retina scans…”
    “Bite your tongue,” Elle hissed at him.
    “I’d rather bite yours.”
    “Hey—”
    “Children,” Karen interrupted us, “Can we do this before I forget these numbers, please?”
    “This must be the labyrinth,” Elle said once we’d all come through the door. We were in a narrow, grey corridor, and whichever way we looked, the hallways looked exactly the same.
    “I’m up,” Craig said, taking point and starting confidently down the hall. He turned this way and that, without hesitation, even though he had never been here before, and even though all the many