I’m tagged. I feel like she’s hung a twenty-pound rock around my neck. Time for the last test, she tells me. A program seized from the enemy.
They call it Wonderland.
I grab Bear from his seat and follow her into the next room. White walls. White floor. White ceiling. White dentist chair, straps hanging from the arms and the leg rests. A keyboard and monitor. She tells me to have a seat and steps over to the computer.
“What does Wonderland do?” I ask.
“Well, that’s kind of complicated, Lizbeth, but essentially Wonderland records a virtual map of your cognitive functions.”
“A brain map?”
“Something like that, yes. Have a seat in the chair, honey. It won’t take long, and I promise it doesn’t hurt.”
I sit down, hugging Bear to my chest.
“Oh no, honey, Sammy can’t be in the chair with you.”
“Why not?”
“Here, give him to me. I’ll put him right over here by my computer.”
I give her a suspicious look. But she’s smiling and she has been so kind. I should trust her. After all, she completely trusts me.
But I’m so nervous, Bear slips out of my hand when I hold him out for her. He falls beside the chair onto his fat, fluffy head. I twist around to scoop him up, but Dr. Pam says to sit still, she’ll get him, and then she bends over.
I grab her head with both hands and bring it straight down into the arm of the chair. The impact makes my forearms sing with pain. She falls, stunned by the blow, but doesn’t collapse completely. By the time her knees hit the white floor, I’m out of the chair and swinging around behind her. The plan was a karate punch to her throat, but her back is to me, so I improvise. I grab the strap hanging from the chair arm and wrap it twice around her neck. Her hands come up, too late. I yank the strap tight, putting my foot against the chair for leverage, and pull.
Those seconds waiting for her to pass out are the longest of my life.
She goes limp. I immediately let go of the strap, and she falls face-first onto the floor. I check her pulse.
I know it’ll be tempting, but you can’t kill her. She and everyone else running the base is linked to a monitoring system located in the command center. If she goes down, all hell breaks loose.
I roll Dr. Pam onto her back. Blood runs from both nostrils. Probably broken. I reach up behind my head. This is the squishy part. But I’m jacked up on adrenaline and euphoria. So far everything has gone perfectly. I can do this.
I rip off the bandage and pull hard on either side of the incision, and it feels like a hot match pressing down as the wound comes open. A pair of tweezers and a mirror would come in handy right about now, but I don’t have either one of those, so I use my fingernail to dig out the tracker. The technique works better than I expected: After three tries, the device jams beneath my nail and I bring it cleanly out.
It only takes ninety seconds to run the download. That give you three, maybe four minutes. No more than five.
How many minutes in? Two? Three? I kneel beside Dr. Pam and shove the tracker as far as I can up her nose. Ugh.
No, you can’t shove it down her throat. It has to be near her brain. Sorry about that.
You’re sorry, Evan?
Blood on my finger, my blood, her blood, mixed together.
I step over to the keyboard. Now the truly scary part.
You don’t have Sammy’s number, but it should be cross-referenced to his name. If one variation doesn’t work, try a different one. There should be a search function.
Blood is trickling down the back of my neck, trailing down between my shoulder blades. I’m shivering uncontrollably, which makes it hard to type. In the blinking blue box I tap out the word search. It take two tries to spell it correctly.
ENTER NUMBER.
I don’t have a number, damn it. I have a name. How do I get back to the blue box? I hit the enter button.
ENTER NUMBER.
Oh, I get it now. It wants a number!
I key in Sullivan.
DATA ENTRY ERROR.
I’m wavering between throwing the monitor across the room and kicking Dr. Pam until she’s dead. Neither will help me find Sam, but both would make me feel better. I hit the escape button and get the blue box and type search by name.
The words vanish. Vaporized by Wonderland. The blue box blinks, blank again.
I fight back a scream. I’m out of time.
If you can’t find him in the system, we’ll have to go to Plan B.
I’m not crazy about Plan B. I like Plan A, where his location pops up on a map and I run right to him. Plan A is simple and clean. Plan B is complicated and messy.
One more try. Five more seconds can’t make that big a difference.
I type Sullivan into the blue box.
The display goes haywire. Numbers begin to race across the gray background, filling the screen, like I just gave it a command to calculate the value of pi. I panic and start hitting random buttons, but the scroll doesn’t stop. I’m well past five minutes. Plan B sucks, but B it is.
I duck into the adjoining room, where I find the white jumpsuits. I grab one off the shelf and wisely attempt to dress without taking off the robe first. With a grunt of frustration, I shrug out of it, and for a second I’m totally naked, the second in which that door beside me will fly open and a battalion of Silencers will flood into the room. That’s the way things happen in all Plan Bs. The suit is way too big, but better too big than too small, I think, and I’m quickly zipped up and back in the Wonderland room.
If you can’t find him through the main interface, there’s a good possibility she has a handheld unit somewhere on her. It works on the same principle, but you have to be very careful. One function is a locator, the other is a detonator. Key in the wrong command and you won’t find him, you’ll fry him.
When I burst back in, she’s sitting up, holding Bear in one hand and a small silver thing that looks like a cell phone in the other.
Like I said, Plan B sucks.
HER NECK IS FLAMING RED where I choked her. Her face is covered in blood. But her hands are steady, and her eyes have lost all their warmth. Her thumb hovers over a green button below a numeric display.
“Don’t press it,” I say. “I’m not going to hurt you.” I squat down, hands open, palms toward her. “Seriously, you really do not want to press that button.”
She presses the button.
Her head snaps back, and she flops down. Her legs kick twice, and she’s gone.
I leap forward, snatch Bear out of her dead fingers, and race back through the jumpsuit room and into the hallway beyond. Evan never bothered to tell me how long after the alarm sounds before the Stormtroopers are mobilized, the base is locked down, and the interloper captured, tortured, and put to a slow and agonizing death. Probably not that long.
So much for Plan B. Hated it anyway. The only downside is Evan and I never drew up a Plan C.
He’ll be in a squad with older kids, so your best bet is the barracks that ring the parade grounds.
Barracks that ring the parade grounds. Wherever that is. Maybe I should stop someone and ask for directions, because I only know one way out of this building, and that’s the way I came in, past the dead body and the old fat mean nurse and the young thin nice nurse and right into the loving arms of Major Bob.
There’s an elevator at the end of the hall with a single call button: It’s a one-way express ride to the underground complex, where Evan says Sammy and the other “recruits” are shown the phony creatures “attached” to real human brains. Festooned with security cameras. Crawling with Silencers. Only two other ways out of this hallway: the door just to the right of the elevator and the door I came out of.