Havoc (18 page)

A fist banged against the door. “Guys, it's me. Open the door.”

Dalton.

I let out a breath, then ran to the door. It opened with another loud thunk as I pushed down the handle—revealing Dalton on the other side, gripping Tracie Townsend by the wrist.

“Let me go!” Tracie shouted. With a yank, she pulled herself free from Dalton's grasp. Furious, she put her hands on her hips and glared at me. “And
you
. Of course it's you, too. I never should have come here. I told you this morning and I'm telling you now”—she pointed a finger between me and Dalton—“the
both
of you: Leave. Me. Alone.” With a curt sigh, she brushed her purple skirt smooth, then adjusted her matching headband. “I'm going to make my rounds here, put in the face time that's expected of me. And then I'm going home. I want nothing to do with this.”

Without waiting for a response, she turned and stormed off down the dark hallway.

I looked up at Dalton. “What was
that
?”

He shrugged and looked down at his shoes, sheepish. “Sorry. You said you talked to her. I thought she'd be—She'd want to work with us.”

I sighed. “She'll come around. I hope. Come in, though, before someone sees us.”

Dalton brushed past me, and I quietly shut the door once more. I turned to find him looking aimlessly about the dimly lit room while Spencer absentmindedly spun in the office chair.

I rounded the desk, crouched on my knees next to Spencer, and leaned onto the desk. “So, start with the computer, right?”

“Yes!” Spencer said, stopping his spinning. He scooted the chair closer to the desk and waved the wireless mouse. The computer monitor, previously blank, clicked on, casting our faces in a glow of blue. The computer's desktop background was plain black and sparse of icons, the task bars a steely gray. Mr. McKinney definitely had a specific aesthetic.

Dalton came to the other side of Spencer, and the two of us watched as Spencer clicked open folders and files, looking for anything that had anything to do with BioZenith. There were tax documents, letters to family members, a schedule much like the one I'd seen on Dalton's computer. No matter what he clicked, though, it proved to be completely … normal. The same boring stuff anyone's dad would keep on his computer. The most recent program opened was solitaire.

“So there's nothing, then?” I said after many minutes of this, exasperated. “Dalton stole his dad's keycard and we snuck in here for nothing?”

Dalton stood up, peering around the room. “He comes in here to work all the time, though. He says he does, anyway. He has to have work files here.”

“Unless he has them on an external drive,” Spencer said, still clicking through the files. “That's what I'd do if—” He stopped midsentence, breaking into laughter.

“What is it?” I said, leaning forward to look at the screen.

“Man, I totally found your dad's porn file!” Spencer said. “Oh wow, he must really like his alone time if he put a keycard lock on his door just for that.” The mouse icon hovered over a video file, as though Spencer intended to double-click.

Blushing, I leaned forward and pressed the power button on the monitor. “Um, no. We're not here for that.”

Spencer laughed again. “Can you imagine Mr. McKinney all—”

“Dude!” Dalton said.

Ducking his head, Spencer said, “Sorry.”

I refused to believe that steely Mr. McKinney spent all his free time locked in his office, playing solitaire and … well,
playing solitaire
. Of course he wouldn't leave super-top-secret files about his shady company lying on the desktop of his password-less computer, labeled, “Werewolf mysteries solved! Click here!” Either he had those hidden somewhere deep in his regular PC, or we were looking in the wrong place. Or maybe everything was on an external drive, but wouldn't we see some of those files in his recent history, even if they obviously couldn't be opened?

I stood up and began to pace behind Spencer and the desk chair. I scanned the shelves again, then the top of Mr. McKinney's desk, wondering if maybe he had books with hidden compartments like something out of an “old lady solving mysteries with her cat, Snookums Smith-Plasse” type book.

And as I paced again and again behind the chair, I heard a faint buzzing. At first I thought it was one of the pale fluorescents, but there was no light next to me. I stopped and looked at the wall—or, more specifically, at the abstract painting in front of me.

I couldn't help but smile. “Oh, I hope this is what I think it is.”

Spencer spun the chair to face me, and Dalton leaned back against the desk.

“What is it?” Dalton asked.

I studied the edges of the black frame, looking for some sort of button to press. I didn't see or feel anything, so instead I grabbed the frame by either end and gently pulled forward.

With a hiss, the painting pulled free from the wall. I let go and, of its own accord, it lowered itself to rest against the wall below, opening like some futuristic panel from the deck of the
Enterprise
. Behind it, embedded in the wall, was a glass screen.

“No way,” Spencer said.

“I can't believe that worked,” I said, shaking my head. “We really are trapped inside a movie right now, aren't we?”

“I wonder if we can get those realistic-looking masks Tom Cruise wore, too?” Spencer asked me.

Dalton didn't say anything. He leaned in close to the blank screen, then raised a finger and touched the corner.

And the screen buzzed to life.

It was like a giant version of Mr. McKinney's desktop background—plain black, with giant steel-colored icons hovering in the center of the screen. One appeared to be for companywide communications, another for collected information on Mr. McKinney's current project at work, one for archives, and others that weren't labeled at all.

We all gaped for a moment before Spencer got to his feet and tried to tap an icon. Immediately everything on-screen faded, as though a shadow had been cast in front of it. A password box appeared, followed by letter and number keys beneath it.

“Oh, this is sweet,” Spencer said. “It's like a giant iPad. I have got to get me one of these.”

“A password,” I said. “Okay, so this is getting somewhere.” I turned to Dalton. “You, uh, wouldn't happen to know your dad's password, would you?”

Dalton scratched his head, right next to the bandage. He shrugged, then tapped the screen, typing in some letters. He hit enter, and the screen beeped at us. The password field went blank.

“Nope, that's not it.”

“What did you put in?” Spencer asked.

“I tried ‘password.'”

Spencer laughed at that, then began digging in the pockets of his jacket, first the right and then the left, as though he couldn't remember where he'd put whatever he was searching for. “That actually isn't a bad guess. You'd be surprised how many people actually do put that as their password. They're the ones who get their identities stolen.” He unzipped his jacket and reached into a pocket inside. “Here we go.”

Producing a thumb drive, he bent forward and studied the wall just beneath the screen. I could see faint lines that would have been hidden by the painting. Spencer pressed against the wall and a little panel clicked open, revealing a bunch of computer ports.

“Exactly where I would have put 'em,” he said, mostly to himself. He scanned the various ports, then found the little rectangle USB one. He stuck his thumb drive in.

“What's that going to do?” Dalton asked. “Don't destroy my father's computer, man. He can't know we were in here.”

“No worries at all, my friend,” Spencer said. “This is just a little program I like to use when there's a password in the way. Watch.”

He pressed a button on the top of the thumb drive. It flashed a light—and the giant screen went blank. A prompt blinked in the top corner, and then plain computery white text started to scroll on the screen, just like when you boot up a PC. I had absolutely no idea what was going on, just that the words flashed by so fast I couldn't read them.

Then, the main screen appeared once more, icons and all. We didn't have to touch the screen this time for the password prompt to appear. Without typing a single thing, it populated itself with a string of fifteen little asterisks, then disappeared.

I reached forward and touched the nearest icon—the interoffice mailbox—and dragged it with my finger to the bottom of the screen. I let go and it flew back into its original position. We were in.

I could help but smile at Spencer. “You really are a programmer, aren't you?”

Dalton was shaking his head, similarly grinning. “I had no idea you were into all this stuff, man.”

Spencer didn't look at either of us. He pressed on the far right icon, opening up what looked to be a contact list of employees. Nothing much to see there, so he closed it.

“Yeah, it's been my hobby forever,” he said. “When I can focus myself, anyway. I usually have a bunch of different programs I'm working on at once that I jump between. I—”

He reached out and grabbed another icon, this one about Mr. McKinney's current project. It opened up a new screen with more icons. Spencer began to touch them, his eyes flicking back and forth over the screen.

“I … what?” I asked him.

He blinked, then looked at me. “Oh, I was just going to say I didn't make my password breaker until last week, when I changed at night. It was pretty sweet having so much focus. Too bad it leads to being a werewolf and I have to make myself sleep.”

“I'm better at night, too,” Dalton said, peering close to the screen and reading the heavily science-talk captions of each icon. “That's what I told Emily and why I said not to take sleeping pills.”

“What?” Spencer said. He looked between me and Dalton, then back to me. “What does he mean, Emily? Have you guys not been taking the sleeping pills?”

“I, uh…” I stammered.

Dalton stiffened. “Oh. Oops. Sorry, Emily.”

“Man, I knew it,” Spencer said. He plopped back down in the leather chair and crossed his arms. “I could just
tell
you guys had some secret. What, did you change and go clubbing or something?”

“There was a drag race,” Dalton muttered.

I sighed. “No, last night we went to look at BioZenith. It wasn't planned, it just happened. I meant to tell you, but…”

“So I was making myself go to bed at eight p.m. like a five-year-old, and you guys went to find out more without me,” Spencer grumbled. “Yeah, that's fair.”

“I didn't want you to get hurt,” I said.

Grimacing, Spencer looked up at me. “You didn't want me to get hurt? You do know I have the same superpowers you do, right? Why do you get to decide what's too dangerous for me, and not dangerous to you or jock boy here?”

Because I'm your alpha
, a voice inside me snarled. Whether the voice was nighttime or werewolf me, I couldn't be sure.

Obviously I couldn't say that. I'm not sure how they'd take me telling them I was, indeed, their boss. Or at least that's what my wolf side told me.

I kneeled down beside the chair and placed my hands on Spencer's arms. “You're right,” I said. “I should have told you. It's just, we didn't really get much done, and I didn't want you to be…”

He arched an eyebrow. “Jealous? You didn't want me to be jealous, huh?” And though he tried to hide it, his lips cracked into a tiny smile.

Dalton groaned. “So fine, neither of you take sleeping pills. I'm not. Let's go back to BioZenith again or something. If Spence can hack this computer, he probably can do it there, too.”

“BioZenith or not, I'm not taking the sleeping pills again, Em Dub,” Spencer said. “I don't like waking up all woozy from those pills, and I don't like not being the nighttime version of me. If you guys get to run around and do crazy stuff, I… Well, I want to, too.”

I stood up. “Fine,” I said. “Fine, none of us is taking sleeping pills today. But only because we're going to go to BioZenith and finally get inside.” I met Dalton's eyes. “No detours.”

“Fine with me,” Dalton said.

Spencer popped back up to his feet. “Sweet.” Producing another thumb drive from his pocket, this one on a lanyard, he went back to stand before the screen. “I'm going to start transferring stuff onto this,” he said as he plugged it into another USB port. “Then we can go over it tomorrow.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

I took Spencer's place in the leather chair, semi-watching as he went about moving the files. But I wasn't entirely focused on our little break-in anymore. This was nothing compared to BioZenith, with its armed guards and who knew what else. I thought about Megan at the party, the shadowmen looming around every corner, my uncertainty about how all my changes worked. I shoved those thoughts down, though, focusing: This was it. No more playing around. I wanted to find out all there was to know about BioZenith and about why I was created. Only then could any of this begin to make sense.

I watched the clock tick in the corner of the giant screen, ever closer to eight o'clock. Just as Spencer finished the file transfer and removed both his thumb drives, a shudder rushed through me and I closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, I was back. I took off my glasses and shoved them in my pocket, because I didn't need them anymore. And I turned to Spencer and Dalton and said, “Let's go get some answers, boys.”

Internal Document #4
The Vesper Company

“Envisioning the brightest stars, to lead our way.”

- Internal Document, Do Not Reproduce -

Details of Video Footage Recorded Oct. 31, 2010,

Part 4

21:10:29 PST—Detention Block, Sublevel Sector D