Omega City by Diana Peterfreund

glared at me. “And who dragged us out here in the first place?”
    I looked away.
    â€œOkay, that’s it,” Nate said. “We’re getting out of here before that thing decides we’re ready for our delousing.”
    â€œWhat,” asked Eric, “is delousing ?”
    â€œYou don’t want to know,” said Nate, and turned back toward the elevator.
    Savannah was holding her sopping pink hoodie awayfrom her body, but she scurried after Nate. “Come on, Gillian. We found . . . well, whatever it was Underberg was talking about in his diary. Now let’s go home.”
    â€œHow?” Eric asked. “Aren’t Fiona and those guys just waiting up there for us?”
    Nate looked at the endless elevator shaft. “Okay. We’ll take one of the other ones. There have to be a good half dozen, see?” He started striding toward the next one, across the damp cement floor, with Savannah hot on his heels. Eric shrugged and jogged a few steps to catch up. The floodlights, I noticed, followed their every move. Just as the cannon had.
    â€œUm . . . guys?” I said, my eyes on the lights. Why were they watching us?
    And who were they ?
    Despite my recent steam bath, a full-body shiver started in my toes and went all the way to the tip of my ponytail.
    â€œHoward,” Nate barked, marching along. “Let’s go.”
    Howard was standing where they’d left him, on the very edge of the platform, where the floodlights didn’t reach. “The lights in the ceiling,” he said softly, almost to himself, “are constellations. It’s like a planetarium.”
    â€œIsn’t that nice,” his brother said. “Now it’s time for you to keep your promise. I said we’re done here. We’re going home.”
    Eric turned and looked at me, and I saw the same sentiment echoed in his eyes. “You made your point, Gillian. There’s something here, okay? Now let’s go and tell Dad about it.”
    Something, sure, but . . . Omega City ? This was light years away from a prototype on a dusty old shelf. I turned around, looking from platform to elevator shafts to dark lake. It was too much to take in. I should have brought a camera. But I wasn’t even sure I could photograph what I was seeing, let alone try to explain it to Dad.
    And the elevator message— Greetings, survivors —and all that other stuff about plagues and attacks. We were back in Cold War, they’re-going-to-nuke-us-all territory. Was this the treasure the riddle was leading us to? It sure didn’t look like a city. Underberg’s last gift to mankind—was it a bunker of some sort? A refuge from the nuclear disaster he’d been so certain was going to befall humanity?
    And if so, maybe he could have thought about putting a few cots in for sleeping? Or how about a couple of shelves for canned food? I hugged myself and toed the cement floor. Decontamination showers but no towels? Lights but no people?
    Or at least, no people we could see.
    I squeezed the water from my ponytail and hurried after the others. The first few shafts Nate approached were empty of elevators, and there was no call button oranything to get them down there. But on the far side of the platform, next to the wall of the cave, he found another type of elevator. Unlike the one that had brought us down, this elevator wasn’t connected to a solid tubelike shaft. Instead, the elevator itself was a solid metal box affixed to a rail along the rock wall. I paused at the entrance.
    â€œWe have no idea where this goes,” I said, pointing up at where the metal rail and its accompanying service ladder vanished into the gloom.
    â€œIt goes,” Nate stated as he ushered the others inside, “to the surface of the Earth . After that, I don’t care. Now get in.”
    I got in, and saw the others frowning at what looked like a control panel.
    â€œIt’s in