The Rendering (6 page)

No.

I don’t want to sound like a baby, but I needed my aunt.

So I slipped downstairs and through another door, then trotted along the corridor until I came to a console on the wall. I pressed Locate. Those things would find any authorized person in the building. Then I said, “Dr. Solomon.”

“Dr. Solomon is in processing lab three,” the computer voice said. “Vital signs negligible. Have a nice day.”

Vital signs negligible?

I started running.

I’d never seen the processing labs—too highly classified—but I knew they were in one of the subbasements. And after that explosion had blasted the security systems, every corner of the Center was wide open.

So I took the stairs five at a time, until halfway down, a shadow fell across the landing below me.

A mercenary. I saw his uniform and his rifle, and my heart clenched.

He took a step into the stairwell. I stood there, in plain
view: I couldn’t move; I couldn’t think. I just … froze.

Let me tell you something. Maybe you have daydreams where something bad happens and you’re the hero. You’re smooth and quick and fearless. Maybe you foil a robber or stop a sniper attack.

The kind of thing that happens in movies and video games.

Well, in real life, you’re not smooth and quick and tough; instead, your body shuts down. You think that
you
are in charge, but suddenly your legs turn into string cheese, and your brain takes a nap.

So you stand there in the open, gaping at an armed mercenary with orders to kill you on sight. You don’t run or jump or plan a clever counterattack.

You just stand there.

In the open.

Like you
want
to be used for target practice.

And despite all that, despite doing everything wrong, maybe you get lucky. Maybe the merc turns without looking toward you, and heads back down the hallway on his patrol.

I slumped against the wall in relief, my head spinning and my hands shaking. Until I heard the footsteps. A dozen mercenaries thundering downstairs from above me.

That time I moved.

I darted through a door and heard someone shout, “There he is!”

I fled from the stairwell to the hallway, hearing boots pound behind me, and ran blindly through some smoldering wreckage from the explosion—just in time to see a patrol rounding the corner.

One of the mercs raised his rifle and I screamed and flung myself through a hole blasted in the opposite wall.

I tumbled into a vast cubicle farm two levels beneath the ground, as big as a football field: hundreds of cubicles, each with a computer and telephone and file cabinet.

Some had houseplants and family photos, but they
all
had cubicle dividers that transformed the room into the world’s biggest maze.

I dove in like a rat.

I can describe the next four minutes in one word:
terror
.

They stalked me through the maze, and I scurried away. I crawled around cubicles and hid beneath desks. Once, a merc stopped three feet from me, on the other side of a divider, and I heard him sniffing. Like he could
smell
me.

He started into the cubicle, and suddenly, all the phones in the room rang at the same time—and abruptly cut off.

The merc stopped, spun, and headed away.

I thought,
Saved by the bell
.

And almost laughed hysterically. Good thing I didn’t, or they’d have shot me.

After a blur of fear, I found myself in a big cubicle with five workstations, crouched underneath a table holding a coffeemaker and doughnuts. Listening to the ominous silence. Waiting for them to find me, scared and alone.

Beep

Beep-beep

I trembled in my hiding spot. What was
that?

Gurgle

The coffeemaker, set on automatic drip, had just started brewing. And making a racket: the coffeemaker was gonna lead them right to me!

I listened but didn’t hear anyone close. So I crawled over to turn the coffeemaker off, and the digital display said:

Like everything else in the Center, the coffeemaker was pretty futuristic: the programmable keypad looked like an iPhone.

I tapped out
Here
.

Yeah, I got that much. Thanks for the wise advice
.

I typed
Help my aunt!

“I’m not leaving without her,” I whispered to the display.

Which was just great. Now I was talking to coffeepots.

I breathed and typed
How?

Blueprints scrolled past on the little display. Because that was me, the guy who could memorize blueprints. Sure, and I could leap tall buildings in a single bound, too.

“Are you crazy?” I muttered. Then I typed
Are you crazy?

So I told whoever was on the other end of this coffeemaker display that I couldn’t read blueprints, I couldn’t do any of this. I could handle
Arsenal Five
and
Street Gang
and pizza … but escaping from a top secret weapons lab with mercenaries stalking me?

Not really my strength.

A second later, I heard a loud hum. All around the room, printers suddenly sprang to life and spit out sheets of paper. Everywhere except in the big cubicle where I was hiding, which must’ve been the only place in the entire cubicle farm without a printer.

Then I heard beeping: loud at first, though getting fainter.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said.

That was a lot of exclamation points for a coffeemaker, so I went. Well, first I checked that none of the mercenaries were nearby. Then I breathed.

Then I breathed some more.

Then I stopped trembling and stood from my hiding spot and darted across the big cubicle to the nearest monitor. I don’t really know why. It wasn’t like having blueprints on a bigger screen was gonna help; I still didn’t know how to read them.

But if I wanted to find my aunt, I needed a map, so I checked the screen. This is what I saw:

Gingerbread muffins

Whisk flour, baking soda, ginger, cinnamon, and cloves in a bowl.

“Gingerbread,” I muttered.

“The other monitor,” a mechanized voice said from the computer. “Turn clockwise approximately eighty-two degrees.”

I looked both ways and saw the other computer. Then I almost smiled. Not quite, but almost, because you know what I saw on
that
screen?

The entire floor plan of the Biodigital Research Center, displayed as
Arsenal Five
levels, rotating slowly in 3-D.

That was what the Center had meant by “reformatting”—converting the blueprints into game levels. I crouched at the computer and flicked through the five floors and the duct systems and sublevels. And let me just say one thing: I
rock
at
Arsenal Five
.

So that messy little scribble might not mean anything to you, but to me? Better than my own personal tour guide with a GPS attached.

I traced a path to an exit. The patrols were flashing red dots, and if I thought of this as a game, I knew exactly how to escape.

Probably without even losing a single life.

On second thought, I didn’t want to think about how many lives I had in this game. Still, I knew I could escape, except for one thing. My aunt was in there somewhere. Processing lab three.

And I wasn’t gonna leave her behind.

First step: get across the room and into the janitor’s closet.

I crept and slithered and finally sprinted the last twenty feet into the closet and slammed the door behind me. I heard gunfire as I locked the heavy metal door.

It would take them at least three minutes to batter through that. The Center was built like a battleship.

I found the grate behind the shelves and wriggled inside—and into the next room. A bathroom. At least I emerged under the sinks, not the toilets.

Then I dashed across the hall and into processing lab one, which shared an emergency ventilation shaft with processing lab two. I dragged myself through the shaft, into PL2.

Closer and closer. One last step.

I opened the door, looked both ways down the corridor, and dashed into the open. Nobody shouted; nobody fired. I just slipped quietly into processing lab three.

Only one tiny problem: I wasn’t alone.

I crossed into the center of the lab, surrounded by a zillion dollars in hardware. Huge brushed-aluminum sheds hummed softly on the static-resistant rubberized floor, and triple-wrapped cables wove through glowing boxes.

I found my aunt in a heap. I took five steps toward her and heard something behind me.

Commander Hund. All seven feet of muscle, weapons, and gunmetal eyes. Standing twenty feet away, staring at me.

“Figured you’d come here,” he growled.

I didn’t answer, didn’t move. The whole “frozen in terror” thing again.

“Give me that Memory Cube, kid,” Hund said. “Unless you want to join her.”

He pointed at my aunt, sprawled limply on the floor, like a doll tossed to the ground.

I tried to swallow, but couldn’t. I tightened my grip on the cube and focused on not fainting. And on not looking at my aunt, because I didn’t want to start crying.

“Is she—” I swallowed. “Is she …”

“As a doornail,” Hund said.

A numbness crept over me. “You killed her.”

“Right now, kid,” Hund said, sneering, “you oughtta worry more about who I’m gonna kill next.”

I nodded slowly. “Yeah.”

“So give.”

“No.”

He lifted his gun and I felt my knees weaken. I couldn’t handle this. I couldn’t stand up to Hund. He was too big, too scary.

And my aunt was in a heap on the ground. My aunt, who’d always been there for me—not just when my parents died, but every day, in all the little ways. She’d nagged me about chores and not about video games. She’d taught me to ride a bike,
and expected me to keep trying after I’d shredded my knees. She’d driven me to the skate park and trusted that I wouldn’t break my neck.

I thought about that, and I stood my ground. For her. Plus, once Hund got the cube, he’d shoot me. If I wanted to stay alive, I needed to keep that cube.

“I’ve got my finger on the auto-erase,” I said, my voice wavering. “Anything happens to me, say good-bye to the Protocol.”

“I want that data, Hund,” Roach’s scratchy voice said from Hund’s communicator. “Now!”

I had to think. I had to clamp down on my fear, block out the sight of my aunt on the floor, and think. I replayed the
Arsenal Five
levels in my mind; if I could get out of sight for a minute, I might have a chance. Computer cables ran under the floor, in insulated ducts. Too small for Hund, but I might squeeze through the ducts from one room to the next.

“You can have the cube,” I said. “Just give me a minute alone with my aunt.”

Hund pulled a knife from a sheath on his leg. “You see this?”

“It’s a—a knife.”

“My favorite blade.” He bared his teeth. “You delete the cube and I’ll show you why.”

Then he took a step toward me.

And another.

He was only four steps away, his knife glinting in the light.

“Give me the cube, kid.”

At the same time my aunt died, new lives were being born. Deep in the Center’s holographic patterns and artificial intelligence modules, things were happening.