SUNDAY, MAY 31
74 DAYS
I tore up the path to Luke’s house and hit the doorbell.
He’d found something. And whatever it was, he’d been too excited to type a coherent sentence about it.
After escaping Ketterley’s office yesterday afternoon, we’d gone back to my place to start trawling through the stuff on the memory stick.
All 8714 files of it.
Invoices and maintenance request forms and photos of Ketterley and a couple of kids who had to be his grandchildren. Kids he’d left behind on the outside.
The longer we searched, the more convinced I became that there was nothing worth finding.
When the 7 p.m. curfew rolled around, we still hadn’t found anything useful.
We split the rest of the files up three ways and agreed to email each other as soon as anything turned up.
And we kept looking. And still nothing.
Until about fifteen minutes ago, when Luke had finally struck gold.
At least, I thought that’s what his email had said.
guys i fund s/thing! coem ovr here rigt now!1
I punched the bell a few more times and Luke’s mum finally answered.
She was tired and angry, but trying not to look it.
‘Hey, Ms Hunter,’ I said. ‘Is Luke around?’
‘He’s in his room,’ she sighed, like this was a strange and frustrating place for him to be.
‘Uh, thanks,’ I said, brushing past her and heading upstairs.
I knocked on Luke’s door.
‘What?’ Luke grumbled from inside.
‘Mate, it’s me,’ I said, pushing the door open. Luke was sitting on his bed, staring blankly at the TV.
150 Satellite Channels COMING SOON!
Right.
I walked in and sat down in his desk chair. ‘Jordan not here yet?’
‘On her way,’ said Luke.
I grabbed the remote from the desk and switched the TV off. ‘So … yesterday arvo,’ I said. ‘You and her just happened to both get there early, did you?’
Luke shot me an exasperated look. ‘Do we have to talk about this right now?’
‘Is there something to talk about?’ I asked, skin prickling.
‘I already told you there wasn’t.’
‘So she was crying for no reason, was she?’
Luke opened his mouth to answer, then hesitated. ‘She’s been having … headaches,’ he said after a minute.
‘Headaches,’ I repeated.
Was that seriously the best he could come up with? Jordan did not go to pieces over a sore head.
‘Fine, don’t believe me,’ said Luke. ‘You know, for someone who took forever to believe all this Tabitha stuff was real, you’re pretty quick to jump to conspiracy theories about your own friends.’
I was on my feet and charging at him before I even knew it, sick of his lies, sick of him taking what wasn’t his.
‘You reckon I’m stupid?’ I said, grabbing at his shirt. ‘You think I don’t –?’
‘Wh – Peter, what is this?’ Luke held up his hands to block me.
I stumbled back and hit the carpet.
‘Peter, c’mon,’ he said, getting up, ‘just settle down for a minute, okay? You’re acting like –’
‘Screw you, mate!’ I grunted, aiming a foot up at his stomach.
He jumped back and grabbed my leg out of the air.
‘Should I give you boys a minute?’
Jordan was standing in the doorway. She stared down at me, then up at Luke.
He dropped my foot and sat back on the bed, glaring at me like I was the unreasonable one.
‘Hi,’ I said, getting up and straightening my shirt.
‘Yeah, hi,’ she said, like she didn’t know whether to laugh or give us both a time out. She turned to Luke and said, ‘Your mum’s in a great mood. I take it you talked to her about Montag?’
‘He was here last night,’ Luke spat. ‘I got back from Peter’s and found him talking to Mum on the doorstep.’
‘What did she say?’ Jordan asked, sitting down on the end of the bed.
‘She tried to deny it all,’ said Luke. ‘She told me Montag was here for “work reasons”. I asked her if sucking his face off outside the medical centre was for work reasons as well, and she went off at me for not respecting her privacy.’
‘Because she was being so private about it,’ said Jordan.
Luke shrugged. ‘So, yeah, we’re not talking a whole lot at the moment.’
Jordan frowned.
Right. Of course. Instant sympathy for all of Luke’s problems.
‘So do you want to show us what you found?’ I asked, wanting to see it and get out of here.
‘Right,’ said Luke, getting up, apparently putting the fight behind him. Easy enough when you’re the one getting everything you want.
He opened his laptop and the screen flashed on.
‘I can’t believe it took me so long to find this,’ he said, clicking through a bunch of folders until he got to a slide show file labelled Network Schematic, last modified sometime last year.
The first slide was a map of Phoenix.
‘That’s the map they gave us all when we got here,’ said Jordan. ‘The one that came in the welcome pack.’
‘Yeah,’ said Luke. ‘Well, here’s what they don’t show you in the welcome pack …’
He clicked to the next slide. A bunch of grey boxes appeared on the map. Rooms. One in every major building in town.
‘That’s Pryor’s office,’ I said, pointing to one of the boxes.
‘Right,’ said Luke, tapping the screen. ‘Pryor’s office, Ketterley’s office, that room in the Shackleton Building …’
‘Montag’s too,’ said Jordan. ‘All the rooms with the security doors.’
‘Yeah,’ said Luke. ‘And check this out.’
He clicked again.
A thin grey line stretched out from each of the boxes, shooting across the map, towards the centre of town. The lines all came together in one place.
The Shackleton Building.
‘Tunnels,’ I said.
‘Uh-huh,’ said Luke. ‘Look.’
The next slide was a computer-generated side-view of the Shackleton Building, with all the different departments and offices labelled.
There was a grey section marked out underneath the building, below ground level. An underground room where all the tunnels met up.
‘What do you reckon it’s for?’ I wondered out loud. ‘What are they keeping down there that’s so –’
‘Not down there,’ said Luke. ‘Up here.’
He pointed to a tunnel leading out of the room. A tunnel that went straight up.
Luke traced along the path of the tunnel with his finger. It rose into the air, up through the middle of the Shackleton Building, and came out at the top floor.
‘But we’ve already been up there,’ said Jordan.
Luke had a weird look on his face. ‘No, we haven’t.’
‘Mate, what are you talking about?’ I said, exasperated. ‘Where do you think we were last Sun –?’
And then it clicked.
The top floor of the Shackleton Building that Dad had shown us last weekend was actually not the top floor at all.
There was another floor above it.
A floor you could only reach by coming in through one of those underground tunnels.
‘We have to get up there,’ said Jordan.
‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘I mean, that’s not just your average, run-of-the-mill suicide mission. We get caught up there and we are all kinds of dead. Unless we’ve got a really good reason to –’
‘Are you blind?’ snapped Luke. ‘There’s our reason!’
He stabbed a finger at a room on the top floor.
A room marked External Communications.