I started walking off across the room toward the heavy oak doors that led back down through the castle.

“Where are you going?” Brandon asked as I walked away from him.

“First things first,” I said, “and that’s getting my girlfriend back.”

25

Being pissed off did a lot for my clarity, or at least my sense of direction. I had no trouble finding my way out of the castle this time and back down the cobblestone trail leading out to the Gibson-Case Center. I headed off in the direction of Nicholas’s control room, stopping only long enough to grab a few cupcakes at one of the restaurants to boost my sugar back up after my battle with the book. The living statues guarding the elevators didn’t even budge as I passed them and headed up to the brains of the Gibson-Case Center.

“You have amazing cupcakes here,” I said as I walked into the main control room. None of the other vampires working there even looked away from their machines, but Nicholas Vanbrugh looked up from the console where he was working.

“Back so soon?” he asked.

“My blood is up,” I said, shoving another cupcake into my mouth, “even if my blood sugar isn’t yet. Is that a problem?”

“No, actually, it’s fine,” he said and waved me over. “I think I may have something. I think we may be just about ready.”

“Good,” I said. “Me, too.” I popped the last bite of cupcake into my mouth.

Nicholas pointed to a list of lines scrolling down his screen. “I’ve isolated several dozen nodes that have been showing erratic activity,” he said. “Flare-ups.”

“So, what?” I said. “Now that they’re isolated, what happens?”

“Well,” he said, “if the machine world is storing Jane digitally, it wants to compartmentalize her to keep her hidden. It’s what I’d do, anyway. I’ve had the system isolating all those anomalous nodes. Then we group all those nodes together and systematically reboot them until they dump Jane out. Once she’s been set back on the mainframe, Jane should be able to reassemble and all is well. In a perfect world, anyway.”

I was hesitant to ask the next question. “And what happens if it’s not so perfect a world?”

Nicholas hesitated and looked kind of sheepish. “In theory, the bonded nodes could sever their ties, tearing her apart into hundreds of tiny clusters within the machine world and self-delete her byte by byte.”

“In theory…” I repeated.

Nicholas nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Nothing like this has ever happened before, as far as I’m aware. Either way, Jane’s at risk. The longer she stays in there, the more difficult it’s going to be to retrieve her. And any way you look at it, any attempt to free her is going to be risky. I just want you to know what you’re up against. It’s your call.”

I stood there, silent. I didn’t know what to do. I had come in here all fired up, but the thought of losing Jane while in the process of saving her took me aback. I certainly didn’t want to be responsible for leaving my girlfriend stranded in Tron, but I didn’t want to kill her, either. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

“I can’t decide that for you,” Nicholas said. He fell back to working at the console where he was seated.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out. The text message icon was flashing. I flipped it open.

DO IT.

I looked up from my phone. The spastic movements of one of the surveillance cameras monitoring the control room caught my eye. The camera was twisting back and forth on its flexible neck. I couldn’t identify the movement at first, but then it hit me-the camera was waving at me.

“Let’s do this,” I said, snapping my phone shut.

Nicholas looked up, surprised. “You sure about that?”

I held my phone up and waved it at him. “Pretty sure. That was her.”

Nicholas didn’t waste any time. He stood up and called out to the room. “Everyone out… now! I need the control center cleared.”

“Sir?” a blond-haired technician said, remaining at his post.

Nicholas turned to him, glaring. “Don’t make me ask again. Everyone clear out. Now!”

Like ships jumping to light speed, the crowd of vampires stood and blurred out through the main doors of the control room.

“You think that’s necessary?” I asked.

“For the safety of my people,” Nicholas said. “Yes. Besides, if this goes badly in here, I save a little face sending them out by not making a public spectacle of myself.

“Now, then,” he continued, his spirits seeming to rally with fond memories of Beatriz dancing in his head, “let’s see what we can do to help the damsel in distress.”

“Don’t let Jane hear you call her that,” I whispered, looking around at the cameras in the room. “Your ex isn’t the only one around here willing to give someone a good kick.”

Nicholas started tapping away at the keyboard. “So noted.”

Several windows flashed up on his monitor and I leaned over to try to follow them.

“Here,” he said. “I’ll put them up on the big screen for you. I make less mistakes typing when you’re not watching over my shoulder.”

The wall monitor central to the room blacked out the security feeds to it and Nicholas’s screen now took up the entire wall instead. Even at this size, I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it.

“Let’s pretend I didn’t go to MIT,” I said, “and tell me what you’re doing.”

“Huh?” Nicholas said, looking up. His hands were flying at inhuman speed along several keyboards mounted in the console he was sitting at. “Oh. Sorry. I’m shutting down the anomalous nodes one by one, so they should end up dumping all their packets back into the mainframe. That will hopefully allow them to regroup, and well, we’ll go from there, shall we?”

I watched the wall screen as different sequences of nodes came up on it and closed down. From their color-coding and identifying markers, the nodes looked like they came from every set of building systems.

“Let’s just hope you’re finding all the pieces,” I said, nervous. I was reminded of Star Trek episodes when the Transporter would fail and some mutant creature was formed from pieced-together crew members. I pushed those thoughts out of my head as I watched and waited.

“Almost there,” Nicholas said, giving a final flourish at the keyboard. “Annnnnnd done!”

The remaining machines and consoles in the room whirred to life, drives humming up to speed. The overhead lights dimmed, leaving only the monitors to light the room. Each screen was running through series of images and machine code, all of them forming their own patterns. The sounds of the machinery were getting louder with each passing second.

“Is it working?” I asked.

Nicholas started typing at his keyboard again. “I’m not sure yet.”

After a few more seconds, the low build of Klaxon alarms started pulsing through the room in wave after wave of sound until I could feel it in the center of my brain.

“Why isn’t it working?” I asked over the noise.

“I don’t know,” Nicholas shouted back. His fingers flew like fire across first one keyboard, then another, working several machines at once. “I’m having trouble flushing her from the system. It’s as if…”

Nicholas’s eyes fixed on the screen as he read the code flying by.

“It’s as if what?” I asked. I grabbed his shoulder, feeling the cold radiating through his shirt. “Stop getting all Matrix-y on me.”

Nicholas shook his head and his face returned to normal. “Sorry. I was about to say that it’s like the building is fighting to keep her.”

“Fighting to keep her?” I said. “Jesus Christ. Is this when Skynet takes over?”

“Skynet?” Nicholas asked with a blank stare up at me.

“Never mind,” I said. “You probably were too busy moping through the Terminator years. Listen, just tell your super-smart building to let go of Jane, all right?”