The Limit (13 page)

A memory popped into my head from a few days ago when Coop and I had looked into the rec room and seen Madeline and Paige painting their toenails. The girls had set up a dozen of those scented candles around them on the floor. The candles had been lit.

Doubling back, I ran toward the rec room. I did a quick search of the cupboards lining one wall. After several shelves full of board games, I hit pay dirt. I found the candles and a pink butane candle lighter. I clicked on the flame. Beautiful. But not very smoky.

I had to work fast. A gorilla guard could catch sight of me at any moment. I hustled to my cubicle, snatched up a piece of scratch paper, and crumpled it in my fist. When I touched the flame to a corner of the paper it caught but died out almost immediately.
Dang.
No, wait. The edges of the burned corner glowed bright orange as smoke drifted into the air.
Yes!
Smoke was what I was really after. I stuck the lighter into one of
my desk drawers. Now, where was a smoke detector? I really should have thought this through more carefully.

A quick look up confirmed my suspicions that even if there had been a detector in this room, the ceiling was too high for my smoke to have reached it. I raced back to the elevator hall. There it was, right inside the door. Stretching as tall as I could, I held my smoky paper under the detector.
Come on.
Was I too low? Maybe the smoke needed to be closer. I’d have to run and get a chair. A gorilla guard was going to spot me before long for sure.

Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!

Click.

My head snapped toward the emergency stairs door. I’d done it!

The noise from the smoke detector stopped as suddenly as it started. My small whiffs of smoke had dissipated fast. I hoped that didn’t mean the door would immediately lock. I didn’t hear anything. I raced to the door, hoping the system needed to be reset manually and I’d have time to get down to the third floor.

Yes!
It was open. A smile tugged on the corners of my mouth as I smothered out the smoldering edge of the paper, shoved it in my pocket, and got my first look at the stairs. They went up one more floor—to the roof, I supposed—but that wasn’t where I was headed. I ran down one set of stairs, turned, down another. Fourth
floor. Down, turn . . . Footsteps. Pounding up. I practically jumped the entire last set of stairs to land me on the third floor. Another couple of steps got me out of the stairwell. The third-floor elevator hallway was identical to the one on the top floor. I sped through it and burst into what I expected to be a room the exact double of the top-floor cubicle room.

It wasn’t.

I felt as if I’d stepped into a cave, from the contrast of the bright top floor with this dark, closed-in one. No skylights here—duh. Much lower ceilings, fluorescent lighting. No cubicles, either. Dozens of computers sat on long rows of sturdy wooden tables with a jumbled mess of power cords and cables spilling off the edges and pooling on the floor.

And the kids. They were all over the place. Lots of them. Groups of twos or threes stood together, talking and going in and out of doors. I would have just stood there staring for hours if I hadn’t heard a clattering from the door behind me. I sprinted, straight across the floor.

“Lauren!” I called as I ran. “Lauren Dunston!” Two girls right in front of me stopped gabbing and stared at me with bugged-out eyes. “Do you know Lauren Dunston?”

One girl shook her head.

The other girl’s eyebrows shot up. “Wait. She’s new,
right?” Leaning to her friend, she said, “She’s the one with major texting withdrawal. I think she’s in her room. Do you want me to . . . hey! You’re not allowed in there.”

High, frantic girl voices tattling to one of the gorilla guards carried loud and clear to me. “Some weird boy just ran in here and went into the girls’ hallway!”

I threw open the first door. “Lauren?”

No answer. Two bunk beds lined the walls of the room, which was the same size as mine. It took me a quarter of a second to calculate that the third floor could hold forty-eight kids. Man, that’s a lot. Their rooms had no flat-screen TVs or—I glanced into the opening to the bathroom—nope, no heated towel racks or jetted tubs.

A low moan came from deep inside the room. I saw the form of a girl on a bottom bunk rise up to look at me. She had her hands pressed tightly to the sides of her head.

Headache.

“Sorry,” I said, ducking out. I had to move faster. Next room. “Lauren?”

Nope, but another headache girl. She was kneeling on the sofa—much more shabby than the one in my room—with her head burrowed deep in the cushions, rocking herself back and forth.

“Hey!” The gorilla guard stood at the top of the hallway. He was the shortest of all the guards
I’d seen, but his muscles were still intimidating. I took off in the opposite direction, to a dead end, but what choice did I have?

“Lauren!” I yelled as I ran. I’d almost reached the end of the hall when the last door opened. And there she was.
Of course, idiot.
She was the newest Third Floor. She’d be assigned the last room.

“Matt? Matt!” She rushed to me, about to smother me in a hug, but I had to keep moving. Gorilla Guard was closing in. I’d spied another door at the end of the hall. This door didn’t exist in the back of the boys’ hall on the top floor.

Grabbing Lauren by the wrist, I pulled her through the door. We stopped for two seconds to catch our breath and figure out where we were. It was another set of emergency stairs, situated in the opposite corner of the building from the set of stairs by the elevator; I was sure fire code required it. I figured my smoking paper had unlocked every emergency exit in the building. Good to know none of us would be trapped in a fire, but right now I was happy to use the stairs as a gorilla-guard escape route.

“Come on.” I took the stairs up two at a time.

“Where are we going?” Lauren asked, stumbling behind me.

I tripped over a step. Good question.

“Matt. Stop. Why are we running?”

The door below us on the third floor exploded open, and Gorilla Twin stood there, huffing out loud breaths of air.

“We’re running because he’s chasing.”

“Did you do something wrong?” she asked, wrenching her arm loose and stepping down one stair. “Because I didn’t. I don’t want to get into trouble.”

“We’re not doing anything wrong.”

Gorilla Twin thundered up the few steps toward us.

“Leave us alone!” I yelled.

Gorilla Twin’s giant hand clamped down on Lauren’s shoulder. She shrugged him off as if he were a feather, lifting both hands up in a don’t-touch-me pose.

“I don’t want trouble. I’ll go back to my floor.”

He moved aside to let her pass back down the stairs. She opened the door, but before she stepped into the girls’ hallway, she frowned up the stairs at me. “And, just so you know, Matt, I think you’ve been
very
rude. I
always
answer e-mails within a day at the most. Do you know how awful you’re making Mom and Dad feel?” Right before she pranced through the doorway, she stuck her nose in the air and flipped her long hair. Mid-flip she froze, wincing. One hand lifted to the side of her head and pressed as she squeezed her eyes against the pain.

Lauren had a headache.

Long seconds passed as she moved in slo-mo through the door. The
ka-clunk
of its latches clamping together as it closed echoed up through the stairwell. Short Gorilla Twin and I locked eyes for an instant, and then I sprang into motion, turning and scrambling up the stairs.

“I’ll go to my floor. I promise!”

The pounding footsteps kept coming, so I kept running. Survival instinct drove me through the first door I saw, which landed me on the fourth floor. Stupid. I don’t know where I thought I could run or hide. I stood at the end of the fourth-floor girls’ hallway and was met with shrieks and the slamming of doors. As I ran out of the hall, I did catch a glimpse inside one room. No bunk beds on this floor, but there were two beds to a room here.

A big group of kids stood at the end of the first row of cubicles, blocking the easy route I’d decided to take to the set of stairs by the elevator. Since there was no area in the workhouse I could really escape to, and since Lauren was finished talking to me for the day, I’d realized the only place for me to go was back to the top floor. Maybe if I locked myself in my room, Short Gorilla Twin wouldn’t tear my arms off.

I took a quick left and ran down the row of girls’ cubicles, circling the big room. I stumbled, but didn’t stop, when I noticed that there were two rows
of double cubicles on this floor and that, logically, they were each about half the size of ours on the top floor. No pool room here, either, which made sense if you thought about it. Our pool hung down and took up the space on this floor as well as on our own.

I turned the last cubicle corner, ready for a long straight sprint to the hallway, when I practically crashed into a group of girls. They didn’t give me a second glance, but the sight of one of them made me slam on the brakes instead of zooming around them.

“Neela?”

The girl chatter died away fast as the entire group stopped and turned toward me.

“Is that you, Neela?”

“Oh, hi.” She turned to the other girls. “This is a guy from the top floor. Matt. Did you get moved down too?”

I slowly shook my head from one side to the other.

“Maybe you should try to. It’s tons of fun on the fourth floor. We’re getting ready to have a dance in the rec room. We don’t have a dance room here, but the rec room is twice as big. Fourth-floor boys aren’t afraid to dance with us.”

“Neela, what are you doing here? Miss Smoot said you went home.”

She snorted out a laugh, which seemed strange coming from her delicate Indian-princess face.
“Home? As if. My family is never getting under their limit. I had to accept that a long time ago.”

“So how come . . . why did they make you move down? And in the middle of the night.”

“Who knows why they do what they do?” Neela linked elbows with the two girls standing closest to her. “And I don’t care what any Top Floor says. I
like
it down here. So what if we don’t have a pool and our gym only converts from basketball to volleyball? I don’t even care that I get paid less. The work is
so
much easier. Nobody is snobby, either.”

One of the girls broke away. “Hey, Neela, I’m going to go to our room and call down for some meds. I want to feel better in plenty of time for the dance.”

“Hey, yeah, will you get some for me, too? Low dose today. It’s not too bad.”

The corners of my mouth tugged down. Even as I heard the heavy clomp of Short Gorilla Twin’s feet coming up behind me, I leaned in, almost whispering. “Why are you guys taking medicine? Are you . . . taking stuff you shouldn’t?”

She waved me off. “Of course not. It’s just a simple painkiller. No side effects at all. Safe enough to take every day—which I usually do—although it doesn’t always help.”

“What do you take it for?” As if I hadn’t already figured that out.

She shrugged, unconcerned. “Headaches—from sitting at the computer so much. You know, the light from the monitor plus sitting and thinking so hard all day. Lots of kids get them.”

“No one on the top floor gets headaches. Except . . . you.”

The gorilla hand clamped around the back of my neck, and my short visit to the fourth floor came to an abrupt end.

GORILLA TWIN’S GRIP ON THE BACK
of my neck had so much muscle behind it he almost lifted me off the floor as he directed me to the elevator. He used a code instead of his name, and it opened right up for him. We didn’t stop moving once we got to the top floor. He didn’t release me to let me go find Coop, and he didn’t let me save face by avoiding Paige and Madeline, who were taking a food delivery outside the rec room door.

Gorilla Twin marched me straight down the hall and into my bedroom, propelling me inside with a not-so-gentle push.

“Oh, uh, hi.” I fought to regain my balance quickly. Honey Lady sat smiling on my sofa, those long legs of hers crossed and one arm stretched across the back. With a twitch of her head, she instructed me to sit by her.

“I heard you had a little adventure today.” Her liquid-sugar voice poured out in a smooth stream.

Shrugging, I slumped into the other corner of the sofa. “Why did you lie to us about Neela?”

“What concerning Neela do you believe I lied about?”

“You said she went home.”

Honey Lady’s chin lifted in a big nod. “And you bumped into her on the fourth floor.”

“Yes!”

She leaned far across the sofa, grabbing onto my thigh. The flowery scent came along with the rest of her. “It’s tricky, you know? Neela’s case was a tough one to call, but rules are rules. Her family was barely able to duck under their limit. Because of their financial history I suspected they’d used some soft accounting practices. When I told you she’d gone home, I sincerely hoped she’d be able to. She actually spent a day in the holding room on the first floor while we investigated the situation thoroughly. Unfortunately, it turned out that a property her parents claimed as an asset was grossly overvalued, and they were still over their limit. Neela was quite embarrassed, as you can imagine, and begged me to let her move to the fourth floor, so the rest of you Top Floors wouldn’t find out about her situation. You won’t tell the others about her, will you? She’d be devastated.”