The Rule of Thoughts (21 page)

The office building was a big one, as the numbers on the doors indicating the floor illustrated all too well. Twenty. Twenty-five. Thirty. With no end in sight as Michael paused to catch his breath, looking up through the rectangular spiral of the railings, rising and rising. His chest heaved with the effort of climbing, and sweat dripped from his face onto the floor.

“Gotta … keep … moving,” Sarah said through her own huffs.

“Gotta … keep … breathing,” he mocked in reply.

He could suddenly hear distant shouts and footsteps, but the acoustics of the stairwell made it impossible to make out words or to know how close those responsible for the noise were. Fear rattled in his chest along with the ragged breaths.

“What’s the plan, anyway?” Sarah asked.

For some reason Bryson looked like he’d just taken a rest
instead of having sprinted up fifteen flights of stairs. He pointed up. “Hide.”

“Hide,” Michael repeated.

“Yes, hide,” Bryson responded smugly. “You think I would lead you two wonderful people on a wild-goose chase that ends with us in the slammer? No way.”

“I think cops are really good at hide-and-seek,” Sarah said. “Especially when they have dogs that can smell humans from a mile away, infrared sensors, all that good stuff.”

“Have faith in Bryson,” Michael said. “He is all-knowing.” He didn’t even mean to be a smart aleck—something told him that his friend could get them out of this.

“Yeah,” Bryson replied. “Have faith. And no offense, Mike the Spike, but you were dead wrong.”

“I was? About what?”

“When you said we couldn’t hack our way out of here.”

Bryson tried to hide a grin as he turned and continued up the stairs, his feet pounding as he jumped the steps two or three at a time. Michael and Sarah exchanged a look, part amused, part curious, then followed him.

The sounds below—shouting, footsteps, doors opening and slamming—were definitely getting closer. Michael vaulted up the stairs, his heart a jackhammer in his chest.

Bryson didn’t stop, keeping a relentless pace as they passed floor after floor. Forty. Forty-five. Fifty. The muscles in Michael’s
legs felt like acid had been injected in them, growing more painful by the second. And his lungs burned, fighting for oxygen. He tried to tell Bryson to slow down, but he couldn’t get the words out. Sarah looked just as miserable, but she kept climbing, staying right in front of Michael.

The building stopped at the sixtieth floor. Mercifully. There was a swinging gate blocking off the last flight of stairs, which ended at a door marked with a sign that said, simply,
ROOF
. Michael’s vision pulsed along with his heartbeat, making everything jitter. The number 60 printed on the door to the top floor shook as if laughing, as if it were mocking him, saying,
Why didn’t you take the elevator, you idiot
?

Which was a good question, actually. He spit it out to Bryson between pulls of air into his lungs.

“Because they’re watching those puppies with cameras. The cops might even have someone in each elevator car. Plus”—he took a deep breath—“I had no idea this stupid building was so tall!”

Sarah was bent over, hands on knees, but she pulled herself up straight. “Well, they’re coming.” Even as she said it, Michael noticed over the rushing in his ears the footsteps echoing up the chamber of the stairwell. “They’re probably searching floor by floor, which will take some time, but they’ll be here soon enough.”

“So what do we do?” Michael asked, waiting for Bryson to finally reveal his plan.

His friend took charge in a way Michael had never seen before, not even in the worst of times inside the Sleep.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Bryson said. “Come on.”
He started walking back down the stairs, a thing that seemed so absurd to Michael that he didn’t even bother asking. “I just wanted to see how far up this place went, but we can’t hide on the top floor, too obvious. Let’s go down a few and find a good spot.”

Their steps echoed as they descended. Michael’s legs had cooled off too much and felt weak as he followed.

“So is that really your plan?” Sarah asked. “We’re just going to hide and hope no one finds us?”

Bryson gave her a hurt look over his shoulder—genuine, as if she’d really offended him. But then he hid it with a grin. “Give me some credit, lady. Remember what I said about hacking?”

“Yes.”

Suddenly it hit Michael what his friend had planned. “We’ll break into their computer system, watch their feeds, listen to their scanners. Then we can move around and keep avoiding them.”

“Yep,” Bryson replied.

Sarah responded as if she’d known the plan all along. “We can break into the schematics of the building, too. Maybe there’s a way out that we’re not thinking of.”

“Hey, you guys are stealing all my thunder,” Bryson complained. “This is my plan, don’t forget. You guys wanted to run like chickens with their heads cut off.”

Sarah snorted, a sound Michael hoped she never repeated. “Yeah, and maybe then we’d be at a coffee shop right now, watching the action from across the street.”

Bryson stopped at the fifty-fourth floor. “This ought to
do.” He reached down to twist the leverlike door handle, but it didn’t move.

Locked.

Michael heard someone shouting, but he could barely make out the words. Something about heading to the top floor.

“Locked?” Bryson huffed in frustration. “Seriously? It’s locked?”

“They probably did it from the main controls,” Sarah said, surprisingly calm. “We just need to crack their system.” She had already squeezed her EarCuff, and her NetScreen opened up, hovering in front of her.

“You better do some serious renetworking, then,” Michael said. His nerves were twisting tighter by the second. “Hurry!”

Sarah was focused. She typed furiously at her projected keyboard, swiping fingers at her NetScreen wildly. Michael wanted to say “hurry” again, maybe scream it a few times. It was all he could do to stop himself from joining her on his own NetScreen, but opening just one link was dangerous enough. Kaine seemed to lurk around every corner, both virtual and real.

A woman shouted from below, the words a haunting echo that filled the air. “Three of them! Up there! Heat sensors caught—” She was drowned out by an uptick in the thumping drumbeat of footsteps, the squeak of shoes on the cement.

“Anything?” Bryson asked Sarah.

She frowned but didn’t answer. Michael looked over her shoulder, but it was hard to tell what was going on. All he saw were words and schematics and flashing firewall screens, moving too quickly for him to make sense of it. But he trusted Sarah.

The noises from below got louder. They had to be only a few stories away now. Michael thought he could actually hear them
breathing
. And their pace had quickened, if anything, the impact of their steps rattling in his brain.

Sarah finally spoke, her voice tight and clipped. “Almost there. One of you has to get into the system. I need help attacking their sensors. Michael, click on!” She hadn’t paused in the slightest working at her controls.

“They’re almost—” he started.

“Do it!” she yelled.

Even as he pinched his EarCuff, he knew the people rushing toward them had heard her. They paused, just for a few seconds, probably motioning to each other for silence. But then they thundered once more up the stairs, maybe two levels below them now.

Michael looked at his screen, hoping they’d finally figured out how to enter the Net without Kaine latching on to them. Sarah had already sent over a series of codes, and he pushed them into action. Just as he was swept into the systems of the building security—a barrage of words and images—he heard the distinct, mechanical click of the door unlocking. The cops, security guards, whoever was coming, were right below them, almost within sight by how close they sounded. Manipulating
the system would amount to nothing if there was actual visual confirmation.

Bryson opened the door and stepped through, Sarah right on his heels, barely glancing up from her screen. Michael followed, eyes fixed to his own screen, knowing Bryson would close the door for them. It was dark inside, the light from the stairwell cut off with the click of the door closing. The lock engaged immediately, Sarah working it from her end. From what he’d seen in the system so far, Michael could tell that everything in the building was centrally controlled. That was to their advantage.

He jumped when someone started pounding on the door, working at the door handle.

“I guess they saw us,” Bryson said with a deflated voice.

“I took over the system,” Sarah responded, sounding for all the world like she’d done something as simple as flushing a toilet. “It’ll hold them off for a little while.”

“It won’t stop them from breaking the stupid door down,” Bryson replied.

“Good point.” Lit by the glow of her NetScreen, she turned and ran down the dark hallway. Bryson followed, as did Michael, barely looking up from his work, trying to get a feel for the building’s security programs.

Behind him, their pursuers started ramming the door with something very heavy.

Sarah wound her way through the labyrinth of hallways like someone who’d worked there for years, following the floor plans on her screen. She stopped in front of the elevators, red emergency lights glowing from the ceiling like demonic eyes. The booming impact of the battering ram seemed to shake the entire building.

“What’re those people using?” Bryson asked as Sarah worked away on her screen. “Did they bring a freaking tree up the stairs?”

Michael didn’t answer, waiting patiently for Sarah to tell him what to do. She finally did.

“Okay, here’s the plan,” she said. Michael had no idea how she could be so calm, as if she were about to lay out the next few plays in a backyard football game. “Bryson, push the down button. Michael, I’ll focus on the heat sensors, make them think we got on and went down a few floors. We can’t go all the way down or we’ll blow our only advantage when they see that no one’s on the elevator when it opens up.”

“What should I do?” Michael asked.

“You need to shut down the camera system. Destroy it completely. I can mess with where they’re seeing heat signatures, but there’s no way we can fake the video. Just wipe the whole thing out, every camera in the building.”

“Will do,” he answered, already digging through the system to find the location of those controls. Sweat trickled down his face, and the constant thump against the door in the distance felt like a hammer in his head.

The elevator dinged and the middle car opened.

“We all need to step inside for a sec,” Sarah said, doing it first. “Bryson, hold the doors open until I’m ready. I think I’ve almost got it figured out.” Michael had never seen her fingers fly at such a lightning-fast speed. Her whole face glistened from the effort, and the tendons in her neck stood out against her skin like straws, as if every one of them were about to snap from stress.

“Got it!” Sarah yelled, realizing too late that yelling wasn’t the best idea right then. “Push the thirtieth-floor button,” she said quietly.

Bryson pushed it and it lit up. Michael had been working at his screen and finally slipped past the firewall protecting the camera controls. He shut it down so that anyone looking would think it’d been caused by a power malfunction, maybe spurred by the crash of the police hovercar.