Security(61)

Brian shoves his right side against the window frame and pulls upward, using his legs. Forked tongues of glass lick the right side of his neck and nick him. Tessa leans back farther, still farther, so she can walk up that flat vertical surface like a full--sized middle finger to the universe’s notions of what is possible. They’re all but silent, both of them, even at the most impossible point of the whole operation, when Tessa’s essentially horizontal and she takes a final step, her heel poised above the gone window, and Brian yanks backward with the full force of his weight, and she straightens and plants her foot on the stage like she did nothing less mundane than mount a sidewalk. If the ballroom were full of dinner guests, they would all stand up and applaud. If I could, I would, too. Tessa’s shaking so badly, her knees fail. Brian catches her and rights her, and they speed away more quietly than any phantom. This has taken eight seconds.

The Thinker hasn’t been watching. He’s been purposely walking at a sedate pace toward his dropped weapon, to prolong Brian and Tessa’s fear, their suffering. He arrives at the gun. He kicks a flap of napkin off its snout. He bends, picks it up, and turns with it raised. He assumes his prey are still hanging over the ledge.

Except they’re gone.

I laugh out loud. A real guffaw. It hurts my throat, but I can’t not, he’s so pissed. He roars at the carefree, silent swing of the kitchen door. He wastes time, standing there and bellowing at the ceiling, where the cherubim look down on him, uninterested. He plods into the stairwell. The Thinker is taking it for granted that Tessa and Brian have boarded the secret elevator, and he’s correct (I managed to use my controller twice more, to open the juice concentrate shelf and to close it behind them; they’re passing the fourteenth floor). He’s taking it for granted that the secret elevator and the hollow wall in Franklin’s office will open for them when they get to the first floor, and damn it, goddamn it, he’s going to be correct about that, too.

We’re only three more inches from this ludicrous pencil.

We’re holding each other in the secret elevator, careful not to look at Vivica.

“We’re almost there,” he says, I say. She holds us. She worries over our injuries and asks, “How bad?” and we tell her.

Camera 64

“Well, I’m paralyzed, Tessa, so I’d say slightly worse than average, wouldn’t you?”

Camera X

“Not as bad as that time I landed a jump on an old seat and a spring hit my balls.”



I laugh. I turn my head with infinite caution, stick out my tongue, and taste the acrid point of sharpened graphite. Suck it to me. Sink my teeth in. It tastes like the birch bark I chew on long hikes. Brian and Tessa are passing the fourth floor.

The Thinker has mustered a jog past the sixteenth floor.

The pencil point pokes the inside of my lower lip. The taste of blood is welcome. An eraser covers a larger surface area, and more accurately simulates a fingertip. I move a last few inches, stop gratefully at the override screen, but my head is at the wrong angle to reach it. The pencil eraser clicks on the screen’s Formica border. I pull a Brian, taking a deep breath and letting it out as I turn, turn. Come on now. The point of the knife in my neck sticks into the security counter like a tent stake. I feel the blade pierce new skin, but not much of it. I stop a squeal at the feeling, because then I might drop the pencil that now juts proudly over the control panel. The black screen turns blue when I tap it. The eraser floats into my pass code numbers—01311984, Tessa’s birthday—like a round, pink, incandescent fantasy. The screen asks for a command. I override all systems. It asks for another code, because this is an emergency measure, so: Tessa’s birthday backward.

The override system beeps, and the screen fast--motion etches a schematic of Manderley—a transparent blueprint of the hotel’s bones, in pixels, building from the foyer to the twentieth floor, where we perch on the roof. Then we plunge inside, where the walls appear, even the furnishings, in a rendering as faithful to reality as current technology allows. My bloody teeth bare themselves. I look a bit mad, and I like it.

The Thinker is passing the twelfth floor. He’s walking. He pulls a syringe from his coveralls pocket and jabs it into his thigh. Probably an amphetamine and painkiller cocktail. I blow through a memory of injecting one of those. Burma, I think. I had the flu but was running an op. I don’t recall the op—that particular narcotic mixture effaces events nearly as well as it jacks up energy and pain tolerance—but my men called me “Ahnold” after that. Predator was doing big box office at the time. I snort rudely as the Thinker’s pace starts to quicken. Great.

The secret elevator settles on the first floor. Brian and Tessa stand waiting. And waiting.

“No,” Brian says, panic rising up in him for the first time. He can handle a fight to the death in an open space but not passive entrapment in a tiny box, and “Oh no, oh shit,” and “Bri, we’ll get it,” and don’t lose your cool now, you Tantric whippet--bodied woman--stealer. We’re going as fast as we can here.

The digital override program works a lot like a first--person video game. I don’t like video games, but I’m no fool: my team loves them, plays them all the time. It sets the programmer in Manderley’s driveway to start. There is no police cruiser, no patrolman; my new virtual world is as empty and tranquil as paradise. I enter the front doors by tracing my path with the pencil. Through the foyer, to Franklin’s office. Tap on the secret elevator.