NICK AND KAYLIE HUNG BACK WHEN THE ELEVATOR OPENED to Research and Development at last, more than six hundred feet below the surface. A pair of guards was waiting, of course, but when no one came out, the guards went to investigate. The two Dreamtreaders waited until the guards inevitably looked inside. Nick dropped the first one with a quick boomerang blow to the back of the head, and then dragged him inside the elevator. When he turned to inspect the opposite side of the elevator, he found the other guard sitting cross-legged, wide-awake, and with the goofiest look on his face Nick had ever seen.
Nick whispered, “What did you do to him?”
Kaylie shrugged. “I happified him.”
“Glad you’re on my team, mate.” Nick shook his head and slid outside.
Before Kaylie followed, she quickly hit each and every button inside the elevator. “I love doing that,” she said.
Research and Development was a world of brushed steel. There were massive curving pipes overhead, spider webs of cables running up the weight-bearing pillars and shrouded in the eaves, and approximately every ten feet was an immense bank of winking and blinking fiber-optic servers.
Nick and Kaylie slid in and out of corridors, ducked around corners to avoid the lab-coated scientists who seemed to roam everywhere, and came at last to a pair of pressure-sealed, smoked glass doors. There were four guards there: two seated at matching computer stations across from each other and one on either side of the doors. All were dressed in spotless white uniforms and wore a strange silvery sidearm.
Kaylie ripped a door into reality and passed inside, with Nick right behind her. When Kaylie sealed the false reality behind them, she bent over at the waist. “Just a second,” she whispered, breathing heavily. “Doing that takes a ton . . . of will.”
“I don’t think there’s any other way,” Nick said. “For this part, anyways. Sealed up tight. At least the Rift helps us recharge, eh?”
They waited in silence until Kaylie finally sighed. “I’m good.” They walked right past the two seated guards, who didn’t stir an inch. Neither did the two guards at the doors. Nick reached for the brushed metal handle on the door and pulled, but nothing moved.
“I don’t think I can hide us for much longer,” Kaylie whispered, sweat trickling down her forehead. “Hurry.”
Nick tried the other handle, but the door was shut tight. He looked right and left. Just past the guard to the right, there was a keypad and some kind of optical scanner. “Hmm,” Nick whispered. He snagged the ID badge from the guard and swiped it across the scanner. There was a hiss of air, the doors parted, and the two Dreamtreaders slipped inside. “That was just in time,” Kaylie whispered. She peeled open the reality door, and they rushed beyond its threshold. Kaylie swayed a little.
Nick picked her up and carried her behind a bank of servers. “You going to be okay?” he whispered.
“Yeah,” she said, clutching Patches. “I think so . . . it’s exhausting.” The lab they’d stepped into was flush with noise: muted buzzing, regularly spaced tones, and a warbling beep that sounded like an alarm clock going off underwater. On top of all that, there was a constant pressurized hissing sound.
Nick leaned around the bank of servers to get a better look. Through a panel of crisscrossed wires, he saw what appeared to be a kind of command station. It was composed of wide rectangular tables arranged like the top half of an octagon, and upon those were strange pyramid-shaped white pods—each with a single, blinking red light and at least a dozen large flat screens. “We’ve got to get a better look,” Nick whispered.
“Let’s go up,” Kaylie replied. She flexed a little of her will and began to rise.
Nick followed suit and said, “Oh, I see. That’s genius, Kaylie.”
Kaylie winked. The ceiling was an absolute labyrinth of pipes, cables, cords, filters, and scaffolding amidst the computer monitors. They found crevices to fit into and, though they trusted none of it to support their weight, they could hold themselves there by force of will.
“My view is blocked here,” Kaylie whispered. “What do you see?”
“I dunno what I’m lookin’ at,” he said. “There’s a wicked strange series of graphics on one screen. Trying to make out the data here. It looks like 1900 MHz in one corner of the screen, but then a series of different colored bars are moving up and down like a stereo equalizer.”
“Are there any numbers beneath the colored bars?” Kaylie asked.
“Dooley, there are!” he replied. “Beneath each bar is the word cell followed by a number. One is 65°; the next 92°; and the next 37°. Temperature? Is Dream Inc. monitoring climate for some reason?”
“Possibly,” she replied. “Anything else?”
“Yeah, but the rest of the screen makes even less sense . . . to me anyway. I see some abbreviations: MHz, GHz, and Rf quotients, whatever those are. Still, I’ll wager it’s important to Dream Inc.”
“I’d better look,” Kaylie said. “Let’s switch.” Like astronauts in zero gravity, the two Dreamtreaders floated out of hiding but only as long as it took to exchange spots.
“Much better,” Kaylie said. She saw all the numbers, graphs, and figures Nick had described but instantly became spellbound by a graphic representation of the earth. She’d seen the type before. There was the globe and a pulsing line plunged north to south, showing the spin axis, and springing out east and west from that were concentric circles of differing colors. These circles, she knew, were magnetic field lines, estimates based on the earth’s rotation.
What Kaylie didn’t understand was why there was a second throbbing line forming a perfect cross through the center of the earth. It was as if there was a second axis. Another entirely different set of magnetic field lines extended out from this horizontal pivot, these circles radiating outward to the north and south. Strange, blinking pulses showed up intermittently as the graphical globe rotated to show North America. It reminded Kaylie of a deep-sea submarine’s sonar making contact. At that moment, another little blip showed up in the northeastern United States.
Next to that display was another, but this one was filled with a single, bright, white point that bounced and danced across the screen, much like the pulse of a heartbeat monitor. Beneath the ever-gliding blip was a numerical interface. It read 138.42.15.07, but it was counting down.
Some of this began to crystallize in Kaylie’s mind. “Nick,” she whispered. “I think we’d better go.”
He hovered over to join her by a huge duct. “I don’t understand any of that,” he said.
“I think I do,” she said. “And it’s not good. We need to get back. We need to talk to Master Gabriel again.”
They left the same way they’d come in, and once more Kaylie was nearly tapped of her will. Nick had to carry her back around the corner to the elevator.
“I can stand,” she said, and he put her down gently.
Nick hit the elevator button, and they waited for what seemed like an eternity. “You had to hit all the buttons,” he said, “didn’t you?”
“Yeah, sorry,” she replied. “Not my best plan.”
When the elevator doors finally parted, the guards were gone. In their place stood two people: Rigby Thames and his uncle, Doc Scoville.