My shoulders were beginning to ache when I finally came to a stop, and I whirled us close to the wall, and then took a moment to stretch out my shoulders, trusting my weight entirely to the harness and winch.
I looked over a few feet to where the hatch was, and watched Quess connect something to its side. Another interactive keyboard was then projected holographically against the hatch. He managed to pull the pad out of his satchel without dropping it, and then tapped a few keys before tucking it back into his bag.
I held my breath as he performed all of this, certain at any moment he would drop the pad, but he didn’t, and the hatch came open.
Maddox and Quess went in first, moving quickly. I gave them a second to give me some space, then followed right behind, eager to get away from the blistering heat at our backsides. I detached the lash end as I landed, my knees flexing to bear the brunt of Grey’s weight.
I noticed the chill in the room immediately, the bitter bite of cold contrasting with the heat that now seemed to be coming off me in waves. I moaned in relief as Grey detached from me, quickly crossing the small, narrow space and pressing his back against an exposed part of the wall, groaning in relief too. I could only imagine how he felt—his body had helped to protect most of mine, which meant he had to be in even worse shape than I was.
I let everyone take a moment to catch their breaths, shaking out my arms to help ease some of the muscle burn, and stepped deeper down the narrow hall and toward the open doorway a few feet away. I paused at the threshold and cocked my head, my eyebrows drawing together.
Rows and rows of boxes were stacked from floor to ceiling behind metal cages. Each box was constructed of some sort of black material, with small green lights shining from them, tracing along the seams with a dull throb. The entire room glowed green—bright enough to see, but eerie enough to make the hairs on my arms stand on end, in spite of the sleeves covering them.
“What is this place?” I asked over my shoulder, keeping my voice pitched low. We couldn’t be sure anyone was in here right now, but if they were, we had to be ready to knock them out. If anyone managed to get an alarm up before we were long gone, then we’d only be two steps from the Citadel, the gas chamber, and death.
“Server farm,” Quess replied automatically, the pad already back in his hands. “There’s hundreds of them in the Core, all of them networked together to handle Scipio’s massive load.”
“It’s huge,” I said, staring down the path in front of us and already beginning to shiver.
“Here,” Maddox said, holding out a small bottle in her hands. I blinked at her, and she gestured to my face. “For your eyes.”
She was referring to the lenses she had gotten for me. I took the bottle and tilted my head back to place a few drops in, almost sighing in relief as the dry burn that had started with the beam of light faded somewhat. I blinked away the residual wetness and handed the bottle back to her.
“Thanks,” I said, then looked at Quess for our next step.
“Hundred feet,” he said, moving forward down the aisle. Maddox and Grey followed quickly, the gray uniforms that Maddox had pilfered reflecting green as they passed down the row. I checked my watch to see how much time we had left. It took me three tries before I could believe twenty minutes had already passed. That meant we had only forty minutes—and that was not a lot of time. I glanced back over my shoulder. The hatch we had come through was now closed, but a part of me wanted to stop everyone and open it and go back the way we came, before the laser cutters turned back on and killed us while we were still inside.
“That’s loser thinking, Liana,” I whispered to myself, taking a firm mental grip of my anxiety and casting it aside. “This is a good plan. Your brother put it together for you.”
I closed my eyes and exhaled, believing in my brother, and then nodded to myself. We could do this.
15
The hall was straight and gray, with harsh overhead lights that burned like beacons. Breaks in the wall came at regular intervals, as did intersections—three doors every ten feet, followed by a hall running across the one we were in. Every door had a plaque over it with a description and room number. Most of the doors led to server farms like the one we had just emerged from, with three separate entrances, presumably to help workers access damaged areas quickly.
Then suddenly the doors just stopped, as did the intersections.
“What is this?” I asked softly, as we passed by the smooth, uninterrupted wall.
“The mineral farms must start here,” Quess replied. “I’ve never been inside, but I’ve heard they’re huge.”
“This isn’t good. There’s nowhere to go if someone recognizes us through these disguises,” Grey pointed out, and I looked back at him. His hair had been modified to black, and his eyes were now a muddled blue, their original brown too rich to block out entirely. But his strong jawline and features were remarkable—possibly still enough to identify him. We just had to pray our transformations were extreme enough for no one to really notice.
We continued forward… and then suddenly heard the noise of someone’s footsteps coming from ahead. My heartbeat increasing, I took a chance and glanced over Quess’s shoulder. A man carrying a large flat pad was walking toward us, the gray of his uniform stark under the harsh lighting.
He looked up at us, and I ducked behind Quess, my heart trembling in my chest. It looked like our disguises were going to be tested a lot more quickly than I had hoped.
I tried to shake off the anxiety that was suddenly threating to tear apart my calm façade, and just focused my eyes on Quess’s back. We had our plan, and it was a good one.
Yet the logical side of my brain was at odds with my heart, which began to beat even harder, using the inside of my ribcage like the drums at a harvest celebration. The steps were loud, clicking rhythmically in a way that made my eye start twitching and my hands ball up into fists.
Suddenly Quess veered off to one side, and I got a flash of the man walking toward us. His eyes passed right through me, and then he was gone, moving past us.
I twisted my head and peered over my shoulder, watching him go. He didn’t so much as pause or look back, and then he was gone.
But it didn’t feel like he was. My hands were shaking and slightly sweaty, while my muscles seemed to twitch and jerk under my skin. I kept expecting something to happen, the other shoe to drop, and the farther we moved away from the man, the worse it started to feel. Like the second half of a sentence that was slow in coming, and the anticipation was killing you, because you knew that whatever was said was going to hurt no matter what.
It took everything I had to assure myself the man was not suspicious of us at all, and that was the reason for the lack of attack. But it took a minute.
By the time the minute had passed, I became aware that we had come to a stop, and looked around. The hall we had been in had dead-ended at another door. A sign overhead read Net Fabrication—15A.
Quess had already gotten out another one of the gizmos Mercury had provided, affixing it to the door. This one was a flat black box that he stuck right over where the door’s handle would have been if it’d had one. He pressed a few buttons on the box, and there was a slight hum and click, the door springing free.
Quess was the first inside, but I was right behind him, eager to get out of the hall and accomplish the next stage. I stopped when I saw three faces looking up at me from various positions inside the room.
No one is supposed to be here, I thought, my mind already racing through ways to get out of this. It was too late to back out now. If we did, it could draw a lot of attention. We were pretending to be Bits—the IT’s name for its initiates—but even I knew (from Alex’s griping during his initiation) that they got into a lot of trouble if they wandered into rooms they weren’t supposed to have access to. Unless they had permission to do so from their superior.
“Hello,” said a middle-aged woman, her eyebrow rising. “What are you doing here?”
The pressure built, and I continued to think, needing an answer twenty seconds ago. After a moment of pure tension, I recalled something Alex had once told me, and went for it. It was insane, but hopefully it would work.
“I’m here for the nets?” I said, looking expectantly around the room. “There was a memo?” Alex had done something similar after he had screwed up and forgotten to put in a request for his supervisor, and wound up going down there and bluffing his way through the entire thing. But through that story, I had learned, for one thing, that periodically there were surprise inspections of nets to be performed by every lead programmer’s section, to ensure that the nets were operating correctly and could withstand prolonged usage—and, for another, that you could lie without getting caught.
And he wasn’t even the liar in the family.
As I expected, the woman’s brow furrowed. “A memo for nets? I didn’t get it. Tilda, did you get it?”
“Not at all,” a woman on my right said. “Hank?”
“Not me,” the only man said, scratching his chin. “Who’s your Lead?”
I had no idea what they were talking about, but I tried very hard not to show it. Luckily, Quess seemed to sense my ignorance, and began speaking.
“I don’t know about them, but my Lead Programmer is Harkness. And he got the same memo and told me to get down here before you closed. I was worried I wouldn’t make it.”
“Yes, but we haven’t gotten the memo,” the first woman said. I looked down at her desk and saw her name inscribed on a plaque at the front of it: Delores Winters.
“Oh,” I said, feigning a fidget. “Really? I mean… Well… What does that mean?”
“Oh, she’s green,” said Hank with a laugh. “Who do you work with, sweetheart?”
I didn’t like the way he called me ‘sweetheart,’ but kept my mouth shut and my mind focused on the task. Now that I knew they were looking for a Lead Programmer, I knew what they meant. There was only one that I knew of, though, and it was Alex’s. Using it would put him at risk. But not using it meant immediate discovery.
“Johnson,” I told them.
Hank whistled and leaned forward, his eyes sparkling. “Intelli-programming, huh? That’s fascinating.”
I nodded. “I’m so glad that I qualified for his department. He only takes the best of the best.”
“I’ll bet you were. So, when were you selected?”
I paused. The easy answer was just to say age fifteen—the age at which almost everyone else was selected by IT—but I already looked ignorant. And since I was considerably older than fifteen, it meant that I had to go with a riskier answer.
“Transfer,” I said. “From Medica. I was just assigned to Lead Programmer Johnson’s section a week ago.”
My heart pounded as I lied. I was trying to keep everything simple, and to my never-ending surprise, they nodded in complete understanding. Our disguises—and made-up stories—were working.
Now we just had to get the nets without tipping off anyone in the room that we most decidedly did not actually belong.
“There’s no record of this requisition of nets,” Delores said, craning her neck up from her pad and staring at us. “But you’re all here for some?”
“If I may,” Maddox said. “I saw the orders on my Lead’s pad. It’s a surprise inspection.”
I held my breath, waiting and watching. There were only three of them, and they didn’t look like they could take us in a fight, but I had no idea what kind of sensors were in this room. Perhaps the individuals monitoring the cameras would miss a fight happening amid all of the other cameras they were monitoring—but not for long. It was better to handle things diplomatically.
But lie after lie was only going to get us caught.
“Is it? Did the memo happen to mention why?” Hank stared at us expectantly as he asked the question, resting his chin on the backs of his hands.
“Quality control,” Quess replied with a shrug. “That’s really all I know.”
Delores looked at Hank. “On top of what we’re doing already?” she practically snarled. “Our work here is good! Don’t they know how many hours it takes for us to put just one together? And now they want to destroy the ones we’ve already made in some mindless pursuit of a flaw!”
“Oh, get over it, Delores,” Tilda said waspishly. “We should be scrutinized, and so should our work. It gets installed in people’s skulls, so if they want to test it, let them look. We stand by our nets.” She turned to us and flashed a welcoming smile. “How many did the requisition form ask for?”
I hesitated, but Grey didn’t. “I was told five.” My eyes bulged; Delores had just been talking about how difficult they were to make, and he went ahead and said five. We were so sunk.
“I think you might have read it wrong,” Quess said, his eyebrows bunching, and I felt a flare of relief. Quess would know what an appropriate amount for an inspection was. “Mine said three.”
“Mine as well,” Maddox said, giving Grey a sideways look.
Grey looked around and then hunched his shoulders, managing to look slightly embarrassed. “Okay, there may have been a chance I wasn’t paying attention.”
Hank chuckled. “Don’t tell me—your Lead is Kowolski?”
“How’d you know?” Grey asked back smoothly. “Were you in the section?”
“Long time ago. Kowolski’s been there for decades. He’s practically as old as all of the machines, but with half the charm.”
Grey laughed at Hank’s quip, and I started to relax some. Tilda beckoned us over, and we all encircled her desk, watching as she got up and selected a small bin from a row sitting on a shelf behind her. She carried it back and then pulled the top off, revealing several rows of flat black squares: the nets in their inactive mode, tendrils curled in nice and neat so they looked like data chips.
It was so surreal, staring at the thing that also resided in my head. They weren’t much to look at—the box was black, the nets no bigger than my pinkie nail. I knew from our classes that a net was a rather complex network of silicone. Each would unravel once activated, and stretch its tendrils over your cerebral cortex in order to read your emotions—and from that, determine your ranking.
It was a system of control, and even though I hated it, not having one would only get me caught and killed quicker. So.
I watched as Quess signed for his, quickly exchanging a signature for a small case with three nets.
“Thanks,” he said quietly, accepting them. He stood there for a second, then turned and began heading for the door. I was glad he did; standing around would blow our whole makeshift cover story, but not everyone would have thought of it in the moment, and I was pleased that he had. Some people didn’t do well with improvisation.
Grey was next, and I couldn’t help but feel twitchy, watching Tilda use tweezers to carefully drop the small chips into a smaller container for transportation. He signed as well, and then began heading for the door, following Quess. He gave me a look as I passed, and I met it.
If he was nervous, he didn’t show it. I, on the other hand, felt like the tension in my muscles was a threat to my very skin remaining intact and whole.
“Sign here,” Tilda said to Maddox, and I turned back to see her finish signing with a flourish, setting the pen down. “Thank you, and here you go.”
“Thanks.”
She turned to leave, and I moved up to take her place, immediately picking up the stylus and signing the pad in front of me, confirming that I had received three nets. I accepted the case, which was surprisingly light for carrying something so heavy with significance, and tucked it into my pocket with a smile and a nod, turning to go.
I nearly plowed into Maddox as I did so, and frowned. She was standing with her face to the door, her body still. I peeked around her, and saw a man standing there. He had a carefully trimmed beard, and the sleeves of his uniform were rolled up to reveal strong forearms.
“Lead Programmer Johnson,” Tilda exclaimed, clearly
surprised to see him. My spine tingled in alarm as I took in my brother’s supervisor. If she mentioned my claimed connection to him, I was going to get caught. “I’m surprised to see you.”
“I’m surprised to be down here,” he said. “But it seems all of my Bits are off running around doing their own thing, instead of making themselves available to me. So here I am.”
“Not all of them,” Tilda replied sweetly, and I closed my eyes, already knowing that she was about to call me out. “This one must’ve gotten your orders.”
“My orders?”
My heart pounded in my throat as Johnson looked around the room, extremely confused. We were seconds away from finding out what happened when infiltrators got caught in the Core. I had to do something, anything, to try to salvage this.
And when in doubt, I had been told to opt for strength.
“For the nets, sir?” I said, taking a step out from behind Maddox and seizing the opportunity to strike. People tended not to question confidence, and my only hope was to use that for as long as it took us to get past him—and out the door. “I was told you wanted some?”
“I did,” he said, frowning. “You’re in my section?”
“Yes, sir,” I said with a nod. “I just started last week.”
“That would explain why I don’t quite recognize you yet. No offense, but there are a lot of people in the department.”
“I’ve noticed,” I said, forcing a smile on my lips. My heart was now shuddering, like an engine on its last legs, and I knew I was breathing too heavily to slow it down. I tried to compensate by only taking small sips of air, but it didn’t feel like enough. “Well, I can just give these to you now, sir,” I said, pulling the case out of my pocket. “I’ll go ahead and get back and let my direct supervisor know that you received them.”
I hated giving them up, but if I didn’t right then and there, they would recognize something was up. This was supposedly my mission, in their eyes. I had to finish it, if only to not give us away.