Wired (31 page)

“Thanks,” I replied. I turned around and put my back into pushing. The rack moved. I cleared away some grime on the wall, looking for anything, a crack even, that would indicate a vent.

Nothing.

I shifted my weight, and there came the strange groan of unsupported wood beneath me. I tapped my foot lightly, and a hollow sound confirmed the truth.

“This is so Nancy Drew,” Kitty said.

Just as she said that, I saw what I was hoping for: the lines of a trapdoor half covered by the rack. The good news was, they probably weren't even using
this air duct for its purpose anymore. The bad news would be if it ended up being completely blocked on the other side.

“Cellars make me think of slasher movies,” Kitty said nervously. “Trapdoors make me think of theater deaths.”

“Help me push this all the way off,” I said, ignoring her and getting into position.

Kitty dug her shoulder in and we managed to push the shelving back off the square.

Unfortunately, the trapdoor had a different-looking locking mechanism from the grate I'd opened with Leo.

“Bummer,” Kitty said, summing it up just about perfectly.

I pulled Leo's smartie from my pocket and studied the gizmo, wondering if there was anything in the device that might be helpful. I tried not to think about the outcome of my last foray into this exciting world of security breaches. How would my new equipment help? Could it?

Crack!

Kitty had tired of waiting. She'd taken a long piece of metal and pried the lock off the trapdoor. Along with the sound of straining wood had come a strange electronic beep. She spread her hands out and looked at me like,
Whatever
. “Well, it's unlocked now, I guess.”

I stared at the door.

“Well?” Kitty asked.

“What if we open this door and it blows?” I hissed. “What was that beep?”

Kitty eyed me, picked up a foreign-looking piece
of equipment from a box beside us and peered down, perhaps wondering if it could be used to test the trapdoor's safety. A shower of brown dust sprinkled everywhere. “Ew.” She put the object back and apparently noticed I still hadn't done anything. “Then it blows,” she whispered back, letting her hands fall loosely to her sides. “Look, I didn't expect to be gone this long. I've got a shift this afternoon.”

Right. In a parallel dimension
. If she was lucky, she'd end up back home independently wealthy.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Here goes. I'm ready now.” I grasped the trapdoor's handle. “If it's going to blow, it's going to blow.”

“Roxanne, do what you have to do and let's get on with it. I think this dust is affecting my asthma.”

Huh
? “Since when do you have asthma?”

“I don't. It just sounded dramatic. Look, if you don't do this, I'm going to do it for you.”

I elbowed her out of the way. This was the new me, the take-charge me. “I'll do it.”

I pulled gingerly on the handle; a small hiss signaled a release of pressure. The door raised slightly on its own. I pulled the lid back and we both poked our heads into the space. My breathed hitched when I saw them lying there, covered in dust: my high-heeled shoes.

“Hey! Aren't these the same as the shoes we picked out for your party?” Kitty cocked her head, processing the implication of their presence here in the duct in the future. After a moment, she let out a low, “Whoaaaa. That's heavy.”

I held my breath, waiting for security warnings and sirens and scurrying personnel, but all was
silent. “Here's how it's going to go down,” I said, secretly taking great pleasure in being able to use that phrase. “You're going to follow me. And when we get to the end of the duct, I'm going to go into that room and you're going to stay up so you can pull me back when I'm done.”

“What should we use to reach?”

I looked around and pulled a giant, tangled handful of old USB, LAN, and long extension cords out of the box. “MacGyver it.”

Kitty interrupted a close examination of the fatal scuffing on her suede boots to shake her head in weary resignation. “You've been waiting to say that all your life, haven't you?”

I gave her a huge smile. “Absolutely. So, you ready to be stealthy?”

“No problem.”

“It's important that we remain completely silent,” I pressed.

“No problem.” Kitty exuded such calm confidence that I immediately worried she'd mess up.

“Okay, then. You take this and stick it in your pocket.”

I handed her Leo's reader, then began tying the various extra cords end to end in a mass of knots it would have taken an entire troop of Boy Scouts hours to loosen. I fixed them around my body just the way I'd seen it done on TV, then looked over at Kitty, who was studying the bags under her eyes in the reflection of Leo's smartie. “You ready?”

“Mmm.”

I swung my legs over the side of the trapdoor and eased my body down until I felt the bottom of the
passage. Bending down to my knees, I studied the dark, narrow vent, then popped back up. “Maybe you wait until I get to the end of the cord. When I wiggle it, that means you should follow. If the cord is taut, and I wiggle it, start lowering me down very slowly. Very slowly, got that?”

Kitty nodded.

“I'll pull once sharply on the cord when I want to come back. Got it?”

“No problem,” she said serenely.

“You're in your Zen happy place, aren't you?”

“Why, yes, I am.”

“Fabulous,” I muttered. In college, when Kitty went to her Zen happy place it usually meant she was nervous beyond functioning. But we'd done okay so far. “You ready?”

“Ready.”

I got on my hands and knees in the duct, then turned back to look over my shoulder. “From here on out, we are completely silent.”

“Completely silent.”

I crawled forward, then looked back. “You know what you need to do? A wiggle means you start lowering me. Do a kind of . . . I dunno . . . a sort of creep-lower, creep-lower, creep-lower.” I used my hands to demonstrate how she was to slowly follow me in, allowing slack as she moved.

Kitty nodded vigorously. “Creep-lower. No problem.”

The more I crept along the duct, the more I loosened up. This wasn't hard; this wasn't scary. This totally rocked. I was Rox. I was living the me I wanted to be. Here I was, orchestrating my very own mission.
I was team leader and I had a . . . a squad. Sort of. Well, I had an underling. At least I had an underling. And here I was, already nearing the light. I was past the point where things had gone horribly awry the first time, and there was no collapsing tunnel. And here I was at the opening. And it all had gone so smoothly and simply.

I carefully unhooked the vent cover and laid it flat on the surface behind me, then peered into the room. I was in luck: it was laid out precisely in the manner I'd seen before, with the exception of some minor equipment and several locking mechanisms. But I was pretty sure the slot I needed was unlocked, because I'd unlocked it during my trip here with Leo. I prayed our realities were working the way I believed.

So, I had to get down. It was just a matter of wiggling once.

I did so, and I heard a slight squeak and then a small, “Oops.” But then a tiny amount of slack allowed me to swing my legs through the vent opening and lean slightly forward. Another small amount of slack followed, this time without the squeak.

Creep-lower, creep-lower. I began to sink slowly into the pristine air of the white room.
Nice, Kitty
.

And then . . .

Ring!

Ring! Ring!

Oh, shit. Turn it off, Kitty. You're too close to the room. The sound!

A huge amount of slack sent me careening toward the floor. I stopped short, spinning in midair.

“Hello? Oh, hi, Mason!” Kitty said loudly.

After another huge lurch, Kitty's head appeared, framed by the square sides of the vent opening. “Mason wants to talk to you.”

I swallowed as I swayed gently above the glossy white floor and shook my head.

“What? Don't you want to take it?”

Goddamn Zen happy place
. I craned my head sideways and glared at her.

“Oh.” She put the phone back up to her ear. “This is not a good time. We're in the silent room.”

“Not anymore,” I muttered.

“He says no is not an option.”

“Ask him what he wants,” I hissed, trying to focus on the bank of drives along the wall in a desperate attempt to avoid motion sickness.

“He wants to know what the fuck we're doing in the lion's den.”

I grabbed the cords binding me, signaled to Kitty to pull me back up, and waited for her to retreat so she'd have better leverage. After a few moments when nothing happened, I climbed hand over hand back into the duct where Kitty handed me the phone.

“For God's sake, what is she doing here?” was the first thing Mason said to me.

I looked at Kitty. Behind the mellow facade she was clearly scared out of her mind. It had to be a huge change of dynamic for her.

“You still using her as a security blanket?” Mason asked. “Send her back before she totally loses her shit.”

“I'm going to,” I said, all huffy because I knew I
should never have brought her. It was always easier to do the hard things with someone else. Then again, I'd been literally lost without help before. But now things were different. I was handling this. No, I was
rocking
this, and it was totally selfish not to send her back.

“Good. Listen, I'm less than ten minutes away. I'll be there as soon as I can. Don't move. Or if you must move . . . hell, I don't know, go hide somewhere.”

Hide somewhere? Was he joking? We both knew that if Leonardo didn't already know I was in his building, he'd know soon. “It's not real convenient at the moment. I'm in the supersecure room about to steal that code back.”

Mason swore so loudly I almost dropped the phone.

“Isn't that what you want?” I asked.

“I also want you not dead,” he said. “Listen, Rox. You touch that code, you're going to throw things off the wire. It's a paradox that we can't possibly predict the outcome of. You're not supposed to be here. You're the freaking Major. The idea of you purposely messing with reality across these layers is totally—”

I hung up on him and turned off the phone. “Okay, Kitty? We're changing plans. Here's what's going to happen. Fuck the silence. Fuck creep-lower.”

“Fuck creep-lower?” she repeated in a small voice.

“Right. We're going to get down there fast, we're going to take the code, and we're going to get the hell out of here. Got it?”

Her eyes were so big I thought her head might explode.
But she nodded. I unwound the cord from myself and tied it around Kitty. Then I pointed to the vent opening. “Go.”

No Zen happy place now.

“Go.”

“Blurgh.”

“Yeah, I know. But if you don't go, I'm going to push you through without the rope.”

She went. I gave her the creep-lower treatment at high speed, and she hit the ground lightly. I grabbed onto the side of the vent opening, lowered my body until I was hanging off the side, and let go, praying I wouldn't break something. I didn't.

Kitty stood in the middle of the room, totally paralyzed. I moved quickly to the storage bank, aware that this all seemed too easy. Still, what could I do?

My fingers searched the row of drives until I hit the box that matched the one I recalled. I popped the eject button, and my flash drive fell right into the palm of my hand. I had my code back, and if I figured things right, I had it back before Leo could make use of it.

Uh-oh
.

I felt the air tremble a bit, and I knew what was coming. I threw myself at Kitty, taking her down under me, but my heroic rescue was negated by the intense blast of heat that followed, sending us flying. When cool air finally touched our sweaty skin moments later, Kitty and I were sprawled on the other side of the room in a mass of tangled limbs and cords.

“This is not good,” I said, fixating on a blue light
suddenly strobing silently from some sort of fiber-optic tubing that ran around the edge of the ceiling. “We just did something.”

Kitty disentangled herself from me, muttering something about not needing to be a rocket scientist to figure that out; we were fucked. But it wasn't like we'd suddenly woken up in a version of reality that resembled the bowels of hell or something. Everything in this room minus the unnerving light was the same. At least, I thought it was. Maybe this had just been a brilliant move on my part and . . . Hey. Maybe I was getting good at this. I'd have to seriously consider a career change if I never got back home.

Or . . . Mason was right. I was a wire crosser's worst nightmare: a Major changing reality by taking action in the future on a directly connected wire. Pretty unsettling for everybody involved.

I looked at the tiny drive in my hand, just stared at it. Had I fixed things? Was this over? I looked around the room. Had I finally hit the sweet spot just right?

I didn't think so. It didn't
feel
over. It just didn't feel over, which was probably because I'd changed only one thing. And whatever I'd changed, that wasn't the point. It was still uncertain whether Mason would get my code and turn it over to the government, out of reach of Leonardo's plans to rewrite history for his benefit alone, or whether Leonardo would get it and have his way. It would be over only when I gave it to one of them.

But there wasn't much wire left now. The case was already closing; the door was open only a crack.

“Did whatever you needed to have work, work?” Kitty asked, looking wildly around.

I don't think so
did not seem like an appropriate answer under the circumstances. “We need to go,” I said, pulling so hard on Kitty's arm that I almost pulled it out of the socket.