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“We’re infiltrating the Detention Enterprises place,” I said. “We’ve breached the perimeter, but the hallways have some surveillance cameras.”
Chin chuckled softly. “You’re surprised that a group that runs prison facilities has a basic level of security?”
“He’s been reckless lately,” J.C. said. “More so than usual.”
“All right. Well, have a look at your phone, boss. You see an app called SAPE? That’s your signal analysis booster. Give it a try, and set the thing to transmit data to my laptop.”
“Done,” I said, flicking a few buttons, watching data appear on my screen.
“Hm…” Chin said. “Visible guest wi-fi … hidden internal signals not broadcasting identities … Okay, cool. They’re using AJ141 wireless cameras.”
“That’s good?”
“Kind of,” Chin said. “So those little camera nodes broadcast signals back to a central watch station, right? And the night watchperson there cycles through the cameras.”
“Can you hack it?”
“Nope,” Chin said. “Not a chance. We’d need to plug into the thing directly, which—if you hadn’t guessed—would kind of involve going into its field of view. However, watch the signal on your phone. See that little blip?”
“Yeah. What is it?”
“That’s a ping for data, which is causing the camera to reset briefly and start transmitting. Awkward. They probably configured new cameras to work with their older security setup. It means that while you can’t hack the system…”
“We can see when one of the cameras is transmitting,” I said, smiling. “Nice work, Chin.”
“Yeah, well, don’t get caught, all right? We’ve had enough bad news today.”
“Speaking of that…” Kalyani said from near Chin, her voice timid. “Mr. Steve?”
“What?” I said, feeling cold.
“Lua is gone.”
“I thought you said you had everyone!”
“We thought we had, but he ran out to grab something from his little survivor hut out back. And he didn’t come back! We sent four people out together looking for him, but he’s gone.”
I leaned back against the wall, feeling sick. No. Not again …
“Hey Achmed?” J.C. said to Kalyani, leaning down to the phone.
“Please don’t call me that.”
“Yeah. Sorry. Trying to be funny, you know…” He took a deep breath. “There’s a key hidden in a box under the third brick on the back path. Go grab it.”
“For what?” Kalyani asked.
“It opens my gun locker, the one in the main hallway, where I keep the emergency shotguns in case of home invasion. Distribute them among the others, and you guys hole up in there, okay? Stay in one room, barricade the door … and be careful. If Lua goes nightmare, he might ignore things like locks and barricades. Guns should still work though.”
“I…” Her voice trembled. “Okay. Okay, we’ll do it.”
“Good. Take care.” He looked up at me, uncharacteristically reserved, then unholstered his sidearm. “Guess you were right, Skinny. Waiting two days to get in here wasn’t an option.”
“Do you want to tell me,” Jenny said from right beside me, “how exactly this makes you feel?”
I jumped, and suddenly felt an irrational anger at her. She stood there, scribbling, like she didn’t even care what was happening to everyone else.
“Either you are going to shut up,” I said, “or we are going to come to blows.”
“False dichotomy,” she said. “There are more than two options. We could—”
“Go,” I said, pointing back at the window.
“What?” she said, lowering her pad.
“Go. Now. Or I swear, J.C. will shoot you. Break the rules, get away, vanish—I don’t care how. But go away!”
She vanished in a heartbeat.
I trembled inside, then felt sick. The other aspects stood silently. “Don’t look so betrayed,” I snarled. “I didn’t ask for her. I didn’t want her. I don’t even know what kind of specialty she was supposed to represent.”
I waited for the camera outside to go through a cycle, counting how long we had between its bursts. A minute and a half. Plenty of time.
J.C. led the way out into the hallway.
TEN
The cameras were spaced evenly through the hallways, but with my phone, I was able to pick out the closest signals. I got into a good rhythm, delaying underneath one camera while it was still offline, then quickly moving when the next one stopped transmitting. I tried doorknobs as I passed, hoping to find one unlocked that would provide computer access.
I didn’t have luck at that, but Ngozi did spot something through the window into one office: a map of the facility on the back wall. I snapped a picture, then found my way to a spot around a corner and at the landing of a stairwell where we thought we’d be out of sight of the two nearest cameras.
Here, I took a breather while my aspects gathered around the phone to inspect the map. My heart was beating quickly, and my shirt was damp with nervous sweat. But so far, no alarm.
That doesn’t mean anything, I reminded myself. Any alarm would be silent, only alerting security. Still, this entire place seemed eerily quiet. Empty, but bright, lit up white.
“There,” J.C. said, pointing at the picture of the map, with its breakdown of four floors. One larger bit of text read: Subject testing and holding cells.
“What you want to bet she’s in there?” J.C. asked.
I nodded. We went up the stairwell—dodging a camera in the middle of the next flight—and ended up on the top floor, near those holding cells. Here, unfortunately, we encountered our first live guards. I peeked around a corner, and found them right in the hallway. They leaned against the wall, tasers on their hips, chatting softly about football.
I backed away, looking down the corridor behind me, but the map said that direction only led to a dead end at a place labeled IMAGING CENTER.
I retreated to the top of the stairs, in a spot out of sight of the cameras. “Ideas?” I whispered to my aspects.
“You could take two guards,” J.C. said.
Fat chance of that.
“I doubt we can talk past them,” Ivy said, “considering the circumstances.”
“Well,” Ngozi said. “There’s an air duct over there, down that hallway to the left.”
“Not that again,” J.C. said. He squinted. “We wouldn’t fit.”
“I wasn’t thinking of going into it ourselves.…”
* * *
I waited,
nervously, hidden on the steps and barely daring to breathe as kitten sounds echoed in the hallway above.
It took only a few minutes for the two men to approach, leaving their post. Confused, they passed right near my stairwell, then continued on down the hallway, turning left. They probably shouldn’t have left their posts, but it was perfectly natural. Who wouldn’t be interested by the sounds of a lost kitten?
They’d find the sounds coming from the air duct where we’d hidden—around a corner and out of sight—Sandra’s phone, playing the meowing kitten video that Audrey had been watching earlier. It had been dangerous turning on Sandra’s phone, but we’d put it into airplane mode and used a direct Bluetooth connection between my phone and it to load the cat video.
I heard the men in the corridor nearby, calling to the kitten in the air duct. I slipped past them, around the corner. Heart pounding, I walked underneath a sign that read, SECURE AREA—SUBJECT HOLDING. Just a little farther. Sandra. I heard … I heard her voice ahead. Singing. That old lullaby that she always—
Everything flashed white.
The hallway melted into light. I stumbled, and J.C. shouted, raising his gun and spinning around. For a moment, we were blinded.
The light vanished, and I found myself in a completely different place. Instead of the hallway, I was lying on the floor in an unfamiliar room. It was a large, open chamber with concrete walls, a high ceiling, and industrial lighting.
What had happened? I’d … been teleported, somehow?
Kyle Walters stood before me: the balding, somewhat buff man in the sport coat from earlier at the fairgrounds. I blinked, looking up at him, then at the small gathering of techy types behind him. Where had they come from? What was happening?
“Welcome, Mr. Leeds,” he said, “to the future of human incarceration.”
ELEVEN
Kyle offered a hand to help me to my feet. He had a false sort of friendliness about him, the smile of a man who would be your best friend for as long as it took to sell you a very nice pre-owned vehicle.
My surroundings had gone from a sterile hallway to an older warehouse. Not dingy, but used. Concrete floors with patches covered with chunks of carpet where computer stations had been set up. The scents were no longer of cleaning fluids, but of sawdust and someone’s microwave dinner. It wasn’t messy, it was just … real?
