"Well," said Paige, "at least we know where the main demon is."
"Where?" asked Piper. "We never even got a look at it."
"No, we didn't," said Paige. "But we were only encountering one or two demons at a time. And they didn't seem to be working together. Then suddenly we run into nearly a dozen of them. And they were definitely working together then. I'm willing to bet most of them are near the main one. To protect the container until it opens."
"Smart girl," said Marcus. "And it makes sense. Once we bring the elevator up you'll be able to get back to the fourth level quickly."
"No," said Piper. "If you move the elevator, it will warn them. Paige can orb us back to where we were. That might give us some surprise."
"I've started another batch of the potion," said Amy. "We don't know how many of those things there are. I want to make sure we have enough to stop them."
"Good," said Piper.
Suddenly an alarm began to sound throughout the complex. The red emergency lights started flashing.
"Oh my God," gasped Amy.
"What's that?" asked Paige, putting her hands over her ears.
"It's the alarm," said Marcus. "It's set to go off if the demons reach a particular level. If it's going off on this level that means one of them has made it up here. The self-destruct will arm automatically."
He pulled out a key from his pocket and hurried over to a control panel in one corner of the room. He put the key into a slot and turned it. Then he hurriedly began punching numbers into a keypad on the control panel.
Piper stepped to the doorway of the room and looked down the hall. A demon stood in front of the open elevator doors looking around as if it were trying to figure out where the noise was coming from. Two more demons were climbing out of the shaft.
"They've come up the elevator shaft," she called back into the room.
"We have bigger problems," said Marcus. "The computer won't accept my override code. The demons must have damaged the main computer processor. I can't shut off the auto-destruct. In," he looked at a clock on the control panel, "four minutes thirty seven seconds an atomic bomb is going to detonate. And there's nothing I can do to stop it."
"What do you mean there's nothing you can do?" asked Paige. "Didn't someone say something about three places it can be shut down?"
"The other two are on the fourth and sixth levels," said Marcus. "But they won't work either. This control panel isn't damaged. I have to enter a special code into the computer to shut down the self-destruct. Only the computer won't accept the code. The problem is at the main processor. It's on the sixth level. But it won't accept my override code. It won't accept it from any of the other terminals either."
"Isn't there any other way to shut it down?" asked Piper, watching the demons climb out of the elevator shaft.
"There's a manual shutoff," said Marcus. "But that's on the sixth level. Even with your orbing, you can't fight demons and try to shut it down."
"We have to do something," said Piper.
"We can," said Marcus. "Leo, you can orb them out of here. There's no reason for them to die here. And take Amy with you."
'No," protested Amy. "I won't desert you now."
"Amy," began Marcus.
"We don't have time for this," said Piper. "We have to figure something out. That bomb might destroy the demons, but there are innocents here we have to worry about."
"Maybe not," said Leo. "If the main demon has White Lighter DNA in it, it might not be destroyed by even an atomic blast."
"What do you mean?" asked Marcus.
"White Lighters can only be killed by the bolt from a Dark Lighters crossbow," said Leo. "Even if they're vaporized, it's quite likely they'll eventually reconstitute themselves. If that demon has that ability, it's only a matter of time before it reforms. And from what you've told me about it, it would eventually free itself even from the rubble here."