The Limit (21 page)

“Come on,” I whispered to Paige as we stared at the dark work area. The two of us slipped inside Jeffery’s cubicle—just because it wasn’t the first or second one. Either of those would have been too obvious.

Please let there be only one guard on duty this late at night
. I hadn’t looked that far into the guard schedule back on my first day at the workhouse when I’d hacked into it. If an extra guard was watching our every movement, we wouldn’t be hiding long.

The door from the stair hall made a click as the guard entered the work area. Jeffery had stored a big pile of boxes in his cubicle. Paige and I silently slid some of them in front of us. We stopped breathing and ducked even closer to the ground when a shaft of light shined around the corner. The beam hit the boxes and the wall above our heads, but we remained undetected. We breathed slowly and softly as the guard moved on to Coop’s cubicle.

Seconds zoomed by. Jeffery was going to walk out here any moment now and crash right into the guard.
Come on. Hurry and finish your inspection and get off this floor!

Finally we heard the door to the elevator hall open and close. We remained hidden for several more minutes, just to make sure the guard had really left. Shoving the boxes aside, we pushed ourselves to our feet and hurried toward the stairs.

Where was Jeffery? He should have been out here ages ago. If I had to take the time to go wake him up, the guard would make it back downstairs to the monitoring room and see us before we got where we needed to go.

Jeffery came out of the boys’ hallway right as Paige and I ran past it. He must have noticed the guard and waited in his room to avoid him. I should’ve had more faith in the little guy. He was no dummy.

We gave each other knowing nods and headed in different directions.

“You can do it, Jeffery.” It was too dark to see for sure, but I could just imagine the worried look on his face. He’d been assigned the job as hacker tonight, searching the workhouse’s files and getting us the cold hard facts we needed. We hadn’t had a choice, even though both of us would have loved for me to be the one doing the online breaking and entering. The ankle monitor made the decision. We needed every adult in the building to barrel down on
me
and leave Jeffery alone to mess with the files. He was unsure, but I knew he could get in and get the info we wanted. He had some amateur hacking abilities—he’d been able to order the forbidden Chinese food—and I’d worked with him for more than two hours before lights-out, showing him tricks on some “safe” small-business and personal sites. I’d also written out what I already knew about hacking into the workhouse site from my previous break-ins. With that head start, he should be good to go—that is, if our assumption was right. Paige had said she was almost positive the computers in the cubicle room did not shut down at lights-out like our bedroom computers. If they did, we had no hope. We were also hoping that—if the guard noticed computer activity at all—he’d be much less alarmed, and slower to take a closer look, when he realized Jeffery was logged in and not me.

After setting off the smoke detector and quickly fanning away the whiffs to make it stop beeping, Paige and I took the stairs down to the fourth floor and walked into the dark, quiet cubicle area. We took a deep breath. We’d made it.
Come on up and get us, guard. Now’s the time.
I checked my ankle monitor. The normal, constant yellow light on the side had changed to a bright blue light flashing in hypertime. The longer we could distract the guard, though, the more time we gave Jeffery.

Paige and I looked at each other in the dim glow of the security lights. My heart thumped at what we were about to do. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.

“Here?” I asked Paige.

“Okay. But . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she stared at her shoes.

“But what?”

“It’s just . . .” She lifted her head and crinkled her nose. “It doesn’t seem very natural. You know?”

“Oh.” I gulped. “What would seem natural?”

“The rec room?” she said with a single-shoulder lift.

“Okay.” My voice came out with a squeak. Maybe the guard would catch us before we got there.

Whose idea had this distraction been anyway? Oh, yeah. Mine. I was excited at the time I thought it up. Stupid.

We edged our way into the rec room.

“Should we turn on the lights?” I asked.

“We could, but . . .”

“It wouldn’t seem natural,” I finished for her. “Why go to all the trouble to sneak down here and then blow it by turning on the lights? It’s too dark, though.” The rec room didn’t have safety lighting like the halls. “The guard needs to be able to see us. We have to turn on something.”

“What about the television?” asked Paige.

“That might work.” I turned on the big screen—not nearly as big or new as ours on the top floor—and flipped it to a music video channel. A television set can give off an amazing amount of light in a dark room. Should do the trick. Time to move on with the plan.

I shot Paige a glance. She looked away fast and sat down on the sofa, balancing so close to the edge of the cushion, I thought she’d slip off. Her hands made a tight knot in her lap.

I sat down next to her—but not too close.
You can come now, guard. Anytime.
We had to give him something to concentrate on when he got here.

“Okay,” I said. “Ready?”

Paige nodded, but leaned away from me.

I sucked in a deep breath. “Okay.”

I raised my arm and moved it behind her back, not exactly sure what I was supposed to do with it. I let my hand drop onto her shoulder. Her cheeks turned pink. Mine were probably a deep, dark red.

She closed her eyes and whispered, “It’s just the plan. The plan, the plan.” She didn’t seem to be talking to me. I think she was trying to pump herself up.

“He’ll be here any second,” I said in a low voice. Where was he, anyway? Had he taken a pit stop in the restroom on his way back to the monitoring room? Soon, though. The second he heard the alarm set off by my ankle monitor he’d fly up here and stop us. It just had to
look
as if we’d sneaked down to the fourth floor to make out. I didn’t know why anyone would go to a different floor to do that, but we hoped the guard would be too upset to think that part through.

I moved close, stretching out with my lips. She leaned in toward me.

Wait a minute. Wasn’t I supposed to close my eyes or something? If I did, I wouldn’t know where her mouth was. How did people do this? I’d just have to keep my eyes open.

And then our lips touched. Pop! Just like that it was over and we pulled back. Where was the guard? He hadn’t made it in time. Oh, well. I leaned toward Paige again. Guess we’d have to keep kissing.

A bright light flashed in my eyes. I sprang at least three feet down the sofa away from Paige.

“Whoa, dude! What are you . . . ? Oh, man, bro, oh, man!” Bursts of laughter came out with Coop’s words.

I jumped to my feet. “What are you doing here?”

“Me? Bro, I think you’re the one who should answer that question.” Coop walked closer, holding the lantern he used at night right in my face.

“Did you follow me?” I asked, shielding my eyes.

“Every step of the way, and I must say I’m disappointed. A girl? Is she why you abandoned me in my room, injured and possibly dying?”

“No, of course not. You weren’t dying, and I don’t even like her.”

A little
erp
came out of Paige.

I turned toward her. “I mean, I like you fine. I just don’t . . .”

She slid her head forward until her hair covered her face. Man, I screwed up big-time. Why did I always say such stupid things to her? I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings.

“I like you,” I said, lowering my voice. “I really do. You’re cool. It’s just that before today I didn’t even know you, really. You know?”

“I know,” she said in a barely recognizable whisper. “It was all part of the plan. I know.”

I knew too, but for some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about that kiss.

Before any of us could say anything else, the dark space behind Coop got a lot darker. Goatee Gorilla Guard had come into the room, hulking and breathing hard.

“Don’t yell,” I said fast. “The Fourth Floors are all asleep down here. You don’t want to wake them up.”

“Get . . . back . . . to . . . your . . . rooms.” His voice was low and controlled. Barely controlled. We bolted.

A piece of paper had been slipped under my bedroom door. I snatched it up fast and took it into the closet to read with a flashlight. It was from Jeffery.

Got it. We’ll take a look tomorrow.

THE INSTANT LUNCH BREAK BEGAN, we sprinted to the rec room. Forget about eating; we had more important things to do.

“Where’d the machine come from?” Coop asked.

“I’ve got half a dozen of them in my room,” said Jeffery.

“You didn’t have any problem getting them through package screening?” asked Paige. “Sometimes the guards can be stinkers about electronic devices.”

“Why would they care about blank laptops?” asked Jeffery. “They don’t have anything dangerous on them. There’s no wireless Internet in the building, so I can’t download anything they don’t want me to. It’s a totally unconnected machine—which is one of the reasons I’ve never pulled it out of its box before.”

“And why we’re using it instead of one of our other computers. We can’t let any of the monitors know what we’re doing. Jeffery turned this laptop into a lethal weapon. It now holds all the files full of incriminating
evidence he copied onto a flash drive last night. Coop, every few minutes jump out of your chair and yell, so the guards will think we’re playing a video game if they happen to see us on the monitor.”

He jumped into the air immediately, pumping his fist. “Wa-hoo!”

“Uh, Coop, it might be better if we were actually looking at the computer first. Matt, here’s the flash drive I used.” Jeffery handed me the black plastic rectangle, and I stuck it deep inside my front pocket.

“Thanks, Jeffery.”

The four of us scrunched around the laptop at a table. Paige sat off to one side while Coop, Jeffery, and I huddled in front of it. No one else was in the rec room. We needed the privacy. Meeting in one of our bedrooms would’ve eliminated the chances of another Top Floor walking in on us, but then Paige wouldn’t have been able to come. She deserved to see what Jeffery had copied as much as anyone. More than Coop, actually.

“What exactly are we looking for, bro?” Coop asked.

“Anything that has to do with headaches or seizures—I’ll do a search using one of those words in a minute.” My eyes scanned the names of the displayed files. “We’ve also got to find something about how they’re beaming information into our brains through the computer.”

“I don’t like the idea of getting my brain zapped every day.” Coop shook out his shaggy hair. “It’s zapped enough as it is.”

I had to smile as my eyes flicked across the screen. “I won’t argue with you on that one.” I clicked on a folder labeled
Outside Communication
. If the information being fed into our brains came from outside the workhouse, the folder seemed likely to be the one we wanted. We found files on each kid in the workhouse. I clicked Jeffery’s first, but it was blank inside.

“Always knew there was nothing going on inside you, bro,” Coop said, reaching around me to nudge Jeffery on the back of his head. “Try me next.”

Coop’s file was full of messages, copies of e-mails to and from his parents.

“Hey,” he said, leaning close. “Hey!”

We were all realizing the same thing at the same time. This file contained original e-mail messages followed by edited, altered, or completely rewritten drafts.

“I knew it!” Coop said, almost happy. “I told you the messages from my parents sounded stiff, didn’t I? See, read here. They’re cool. They’ve got a sense of humor.” His voice suddenly got cold. “Those FDRA jerks were trying to cut me off, weren’t they?”

“They don’t want us to care about any life other than what we have on the top floor.”
My teeth ground together so hard I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d cracked. I opened my own file. The first line read,
Technical Difficulties Simulated
. The next line said,
Block Lifted
and a date—the date I escaped and went home. I found a concerned message from my dad that he had sent that very night, explaining the family’s financial situation and apologizing for the mistakes he and Mom had made and his plans to fix the situation. His plans weren’t much better than Mom’s, but I could tell that both my parents loved me and were doing the best they could. The rewritten FDRA version of Dad’s e-mail, the one that I’d received, was also in the file.

“This makes me so mad I can hardly think,” I said, closing down the folder. “Let’s move on to something else.”

“Right,” said Coop, dragging out his words. “Because we know everything else we find is going to make us so-o-o happy.”

“Hey! Look in that one,” yelled Jeffery. His finger pointed to a folder labeled simply
Profit
. I clicked on it. “It was really hard to get. But I did what you told me to, Matt, and I got it. You said the hardest files to get to are the ones you want. What’s that document you’re reading? What does it say?”