The Limit (23 page)

An even harder slap. “Now!”

“Sheesh! You’re the one who knocked me out!” Pulling the pillow down, I gave it a good punch. She was lucky I didn’t throw it at her.

“You were subdued for your own protection, as well as the protection of the other children in the room. No one is to blame for that except you.”

“Right,” I drawled. “The only thing you care about is protecting us little kids.”

The clicking of her heels started up again as she paced back and forth at the foot of my bed. But wait, I wasn’t really lying on a bed. Struggling, I sat up, unable to find a firm surface underneath me to push against. I was on a soggy cot, and four more cots were lined up to the side of mine. Where was I? The ceiling stretched high above me, unfinished, with pipes and ducts showing. A long folding screen, about seven feet high and I don’t know how many feet long, ran behind Honey Lady, pretending to be a wall making a real room out of this space the cots occupied.

“What is this place?”

“You are on the first floor. This is our holding room for First Floors before they’re taken away to their labor-oriented workhouses.”

“You sure spent the big bucks on this floor, didn’t you? And now you stuck me here. Hmm, wonder what that means.”

Her eyes went wild. I braced myself for the feel of her nails scraping down the sides of my face. They didn’t come, but I wouldn’t have been surprised. “You will not speak to me in that tone.
I
am the head of this workhouse. It will be run in the manner I think best. Workhouse residents will do as
I
say. Do you have any idea the chaos you’ve created on the top floor?”

I pushed my back up against the wall behind
me. I’d never seen this side of Honey Lady before: a furious, on-the-brink-of-losing-control woman.

“How dare you upset those other children like that!”

How dare I
? Who did she think she was? Let the fingernail scraping come. I didn’t even care. “Oh, no. We can’t have upset Top Floors, now, can we.” Sarcasm gushed from me like water from the end of a hose. “If we upset the Top Floors, they’re not going to be able to concentrate on their work. They’re not going to be able to make as much money for the FDRA. We can’t have that. If that goes on too long, we’ll have to drop them down to the fourth floor, where we can start making money with them by performing dangerous experiments on their brains.”

“Mr. Dunston, I don’t know what you think you discovered when you
illegally
rifled through my computer files, but I assure you, you’ve misunderstood the information. I will not tolerate the insubordinate behavior you’ve displayed.”

“Hang on, what I
think
I discovered? Listen, lady, I know exactly what I found, and I’m not going to let you get away with what you’re doing to us kids in here anymore.”

One last click and she stopped, square at the end of my cot, arms folded, chin high, narrowed eyes glaring down on me.

“Get up.” Turning on her heel, she walked out of the folding-screen fake room. I swung my legs over the side of the cot and followed. We stepped into a wide, open area. One other long folding screen ran down the adjacent wall, which I assumed partitioned off the girls’ cots. One First Floor guy sat in the far corner, watching TV. A girl sat drawing at one of the picnic-style tables in the middle of the room.

“Jessica, will you please go watch the television for a while?” Honey Lady asked, her voice momentarily reverting to its normal sugar-overdose tone. It turned back to all-business when she pulled out her cell phone. “Bring me the laptop.”

“Interesting,” I said, as I slid sideways onto a bench of the picnic table. “
Your
cell phone works fine in this building. It was all part of cutting us off, wasn’t it? Fill our lives with never-ending fun and distractions. Eliminate or change any contact from former family and friends. Soon enough we’ll forget about life off the top floor. We’ll forget we didn’t want to come here in the first place.”

“Sit.”

Crab Woman pushed through the metal industrial doors with a loud clang. Honey Lady snatched the laptop from her and dismissed her without saying a word.

“Now, Matthew, why don’t you show me exactly
what it was you found that got you so riled up?” She lowered herself onto the bench next to me and scooted up close. She wasn’t back to sticky-sweet, but she wasn’t foaming at the mouth anymore either. “I’ll see if I can explain the files to you, so you’ll understand the truth of how we operate in this workhouse and can forget about the silly make-believe horror story you think you discovered.”

“Fine.” I tugged the computer in front of me. “I’d like to see what you come up with to explain away the
facts
I found.”

I clicked. I searched. The files that Jeffery had downloaded, the files that had taken me less than a second to pull up in the rec room . . . were gone. I searched all over the place. They were nowhere. Deleted.

“You erased them.”

Wrapping one arm softly around my shoulder, she leaned right up in my face and said, with as much innocence as a grandmother, “I erased what, sweetie?”

Shoving her arm away, I sprang to my feet. “The files! All the important files. The files with anything on them that mattered. You did it on purpose!” Stepping on the bench seat, I moved away from the picnic table. “You knew if I had a copy of them, you could be in trouble.”

She opened her eyes extra wide, trying to look naive and innocent. “I really don’t have any idea what you are talking about.”

“You’re doing things at this workhouse that are plain wrong, and you don’t want anyone to find out. I’ll bet none of the other workhouses hire out their kids as lab rats. They don’t suck their Top Floors’ accounts of every penny and then a whole lot more!”

“You have quite an imagination, you know. Maybe I should move you to a project that’s based more on creativity.”

“You can’t erase my mind. I know what I saw! The other kids do too—Jeffery, Coop, and Paige. We’ll tell. You won’t get away with this!”

“Get away with what? As you can see, I have nothing to hide.” She gestured to the laptop with a flat hand. “You could search every computer file in this entire building. You won’t be able to find anything that would raise an eyebrow.”

I kicked the curving metal tube that served as the table leg. “You’ve been busy while I was knocked out. You cleaned up all your files. Everywhere.” I gave it another kick. “I don’t care. I know. I have witnesses to back me up.”

“Really? And just who are you going to tell?”

“Everyone! Our parents. The police. The FBI.”

Smirking a little, she twitched her eyebrows.

“The news! TV reporters. They’d love a story like this.”

“Sure they would, if you had the facts to back it up.”

“The other kids will back me up.”

Her smile grew more confident. “Why don’t you go ahead and try to get your story out.”

Shoot. No cell phone. Screened e-mail. I kicked out with my monitored ankle. No running away. There had to be some way. Eventually, I could hack through something and get word out. I
knew
I could. Unless they kept me locked down here on the no-tech first floor. I doubted that playing along, acting as if I were flowing happily with the program, would work again.

“Listen, Matt. Even if by some miracle you were able to get your
story
out, who’s going to believe it? What reputable news company would publish a story that accuses a powerful government agency of such heinous crimes . . . without a single shred of proof other than the say-so of four kids? Add to that the fact that these kids are extremely bright, with records of causing trouble because they are bored with the humdrum life going on around them?”

Proof.
I needed some solid, hard facts. Man!
If only we’d made another . . . copy.
Quickly, I turned my back on Honey Lady, so she couldn’t read my expression. I didn’t want to give anything away. My right hand slid casually into my front pocket. The files on the laptop had been the second copy. My fingers curled around the
flash drive in my pocket—the first copy. Releasing it, I pulled out my hand and turned back around.

Don’t give anything away.
“Someone would believe us! I know it.”

One side of her mouth lifted in a smirking smile. “Go ahead and try.”

I let all the air gush out of my lungs, and slumped back down on the picnic table bench, hunched and defeated. At least that was the look I was going for. She seemed to buy it and snuggled up close to me again with that arm around my shoulder.

“Life can be very good here at the workhouse for a boy as smart as you. Why don’t you just decide to enjoy it?”

With my head hanging low, I shrugged. My mind raced. Somehow I had to get that flash drive out of the workhouse. It had to get into the hands of someone who could do something about it—who could expose what Honey Lady was doing to the world.

“You really don’t have any other choice, you know,” she said.

I sniffed, hoping it sounded as if I were trying not to cry. “I know.”

“Are you willing to give it another try? Will you leave your imagined stories alone and not talk about them to the other children?” An implied threat lay hidden in her
words. I knew she was saying that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t get another chance. It would be a lower floor and electro brain experiments for me.

I nodded, the perfect picture of compliance. I couldn’t sneak the flash drive out myself. I couldn’t mail it.

Her arm squeezed me tighter one quick last time before she let go and stood up. “Very good. You’ll be happy with your decision, Matt. I promise. Yes, the ankle monitor is going to have to stay on for quite a while now, and you will be monitored extremely closely over our security system. But there is no reason you can’t fully enjoy yourself on the top floor as long as you behave. All right?”

“Okay.” Everything I did on the computer would be monitored second by second, I bet. No sending the contents of the flash drive out electronically. Someone would have to physically carry it out. Coop, Jeffery, and Paige would be watched carefully too. Crud. How was I going to do this?

She paused for a second, her smile wavering ever so slightly. Had she noticed I was carrying something in my pocket? She was going to confiscate the flash drive and then I’d have no hope at all! Was it too late? Maybe I could cover it up with my hand. No. That would be totally obvious.

Honey Lady’s smile firmed up as she patted me
on the top of my head, like I was an obedient dog. “You just sit here for one minute while I check to make sure things are back to normal on the top floor.”

I could breathe. She hadn’t noticed.

She click-clicked over to the heavy industrial doors, pulling out her cell phone.

“Miss Smoot?” The voice of the first-floor girl surprised me. I’d forgotten other people were in the room. “Can I come back to the table now and finish my drawing? There’s nothing good on TV.”

A First Floor. Two of them actually, counting the boy at the TV.

First Floors remain in this facility only for the short time they spend waiting to be transported to their permanent assignment in a labor-oriented workhouse. A van comes by once a week to pick up any First Floors we’ve accumulated.

Both the boy and the girl would walk out of here, no questions asked, within the next week. Maybe tomorrow!

Honey Lady stopped talking into her phone to answer the girl. “Um . . . all right, Jessica. But move to that table, over there. Okay?”

With a loud clang Honey Lady walked out the door. Who knew how long she’d be out of the room. One minute? Two? I didn’t have long.

I chose the girl without hesitating.
The boy’s eyes were so glazed over he wouldn’t hear a single one of the urgent words I had to say to him.

I hurried over to the far picnic table. “Jessica?”

“Hi! Are you a new First Floor?” Her bright blue eyes sparkled up at me. She couldn’t have been more than eleven years old.

“Only for today. Listen, can I borrow your cell phone?” Honey Lady’s phone worked on the first floor. It was worth a shot.

“Sure,” said Jessica. “As soon as Miss Smoot gives it back, but I think that won’t be until I leave for my new workhouse.”

Shoot.
I should have known. Just how desperate was I to get the flash drive out? Pretty desperate.

“Jessica, I have something really important I need you to do.”

“Oh, I’m not allowed to do important things.” She bent over her pencil drawing of a horse and a cat dancing in a fountain.

“You’re allowed this time. I promise.”

Scrunching her nose, she looked up at me. “I’m not very good at things.”

Augh!
This was killing me. How could I trust such an important mission to someone like her? How did I know she wouldn’t turn the flash drive right over to Honey Lady the second I left the first floor?

What other choice did I have? This info needed to get out ASAP. The kids on the lower floors couldn’t keep being guinea pigs.

“Jessica, listen to me. This won’t be hard, I promise, but it’s a secret life-and-death mission. You can’t tell a single soul in the workhouse. You have to wait until you get out, and then mail this thing I’m going to give you to the newspaper. Do you think you can do that?”

“Mail it?”

Clang!
Honey Lady was back. The flash drive still sat in my pocket, and Jessica stared up at me with those huge, uncomprehending eyes.

“Matt, come away from Jessica please.”

Cramming both hands into my front pockets, I shrugged. “I was just looking at her picture. She’s a really good drawer.” I looked down, deep into those eyes. “I stink at drawing. You’re the only one I know who can do it.”

As Honey Lady click-clicked her way across the room toward us, I bent over the picture, extra low so she couldn’t see what I was doing. My hands slipped out of my pockets, and I flicked the flash drive into Jessica’s lap.

A hand clamped on my shoulder, nails pressing into my skin through my shirt.

“Time to go back to the top floor.”

“Okay.” I went along with her for a few steps, then turned back and waved. “Good-bye, Jessica. Keep drawing. You’re wrong, you know. You’re really good. You
can
do important things.”