“Six, Min.”
I squeezed my eyelids shut, then reopened them. Ignored him.
Derrick was sitting with his back to the door, staring at nothing. He’d called out every hour we’d been locked inside the computer chamber. After a few fruitless attempts to hail Sarah over the intercom, he seemed to have given up completely.
I was circling the MegaCom for the hundredth time, examining every screw in its jet-black casing. Finally, I heaved a sigh and turned to face him. “Look, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. There has to be another way out. Some passage they used to get stuff into the silo in the first place.”
His frown deepened. “Sarah said we’re trapped. You think she doesn’t know? She’s read every scrap of paper in this tomb.”
“She doesn’t know everything,” I snapped, though I could hear the hysteria creeping into my voice. Sarah was undoubtedly inside the lab complex as we spoke. “We just have to hope the way out is hidden. If she checks in and finds us gone, she’ll think we took the . . . other way. She won’t know the truth.”
Derrick gave me a hard look. “Is the other way an option for you?”
I swallowed. Nodded. “I’m not done yet.”
He looked away. “Then we should just go ahead and . . . and do it. This room isn’t complicated. One door.” He banged a fist back against the heavy steel portal behind him. “Locked. One supercomputer. Stationary. Nothing else. Staring at the MegaCom isn’t going to change things.”
I waggled a hand at him. “Just let me think!”
He snorted, rolling his eyes. “By all means, Min. Find the magic exit.”
We hadn’t spoken much since the room was sealed. There wasn’t a lot to say, though I could feel the sullen recrimination in his eyes. I’d led Derrick into this trap, underestimating Sarah even after promising myself I wouldn’t.
She’d contacted us only once since closing the blast curtain, and then just to gloat. The intercom had abruptly hissed to life and her voice bounced off the metal walls. “Min, it is a gold mine back here. Why did you ever want to leave?”
I’d leapt to press the intercom. “Sarah, open the door. Please. We can work this out.”
Laughter like nails on a chalkboard. “Oh, it’s a bit late for that, Melinda. You had your chance. I can take it from here on my own.” The speaker went dead a moment, then she was back, undisguised giddiness fluttering her voice. “You really can access the Program from here! The source code, Min. And you won’t believe what the password is!”
My finger hovered over the button, but I had no idea what to say. The helpless panic of a caged animal ratcheted my pulse. What was she doing? How could I have been so stupid?
Sarah’s voice returned, gleefully echoing across the room. “There are so many variables to the system. I think I’ll make things more interesting. Did you guys miss wild animals much? Well, they’re back!” Her tone became mock sympathetic. “Not that you’ll see any in there.”
“Piss off!” Derrick shouted, though he knew she couldn’t hear him.
Her voice had crackled one last time. “This is amazing! I have complete control. I’m never coming out of here, Min. You really blew it. See you guys in Phase Three, though probably not!” The speaker had gone dead, and we hadn’t heard from her since.
I rounded the MegaCom yet again, a square column six feet to a side and humming with energy and purpose. I live in there. I’m part of that electricity. Repressing a shiver, I turned from the supercomputer and began examining the chamber’s metal walls.
“Why the plating?” I said aloud.
At first Derrick seemed determined not to answer, but then his hands flew up. “Magnetism. To keep the chamber clean. Because it looks scary. Who knows, man? What does it matter? It’s not like we have power drills or a bomb.”
“What if the plates were installed to plug an exit? A tunnel or something?”
Derrick pressed his forehead with his hands. “How. Does. That. Help. Us?”
I bit back a caustic reply, trying to get a feel for how the MegaCom was set up. “This thing has to have a power source. Some kind of battery, or engine, or generator. Something to keep it running.”
“Yes, Min. Computers use electricity.”
I spun to face him, irritation seeping into my voice. “Then where is it, Derrick?”
He opened his mouth, then closed it, his deep brown eyes growing squinty despite himself. “What do you mean?”
“What I mean is, where’s the plug?” I did another quick circuit around the black pillar. “It has to have wiring connecting it to a power source. And they wouldn’t build it in such a way that it couldn’t be serviced.” My hands spread from my sides. “So . . .”
Derrick nodded slowly, rubbing his cheek as he finished my sentence. “So there must be cables, and a way to access them. You can’t just turn on this kind of hardware and never touch it again. The system must be crazy complex—it probably took years to debug.”
Derrick rose for the first time in hours. Glanced up, then down. “I don’t see a damn thing. The casing stops short of the ceiling and is built directly into the floor.”
True. The bottom of the MegaCom was screwed to a steel platform. Which, in turn, was bolted to the floor, giving the whole apparatus an appearance of self-containment.
But that isn’t possible.
“The wires must run through the floor,” I decided, then shot Derrick a level look. “Which means we have to do the same.”
A quick exhale through his nose. “How the hell do we do that? That casing is airtight. Solid steel plates, screwed together like puzzle pieces. You gonna peel this thing open with your fingernails?” Derrick’s shoulders slumped once more. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, Min, but this is still a dead end.”
A sour taste filled my mouth. Dead end. Shit. It really might be.
Derrick placed a hand against one seamless metal wall. “I bet there was another way into the silo. You’re right, they had to get all that stuff in here somehow. But there’s no reason to think they didn’t block it once they were done. These might seal the back door.”
Vitality seeped from my limbs. Derrick could be right. Why leave a way open once finished with it? They were trying to keep this place secret.
I glanced at the gun in my belt. My heart started thudding.
But if they sealed everything, the lab would have no emergency exit.
Derrick walked over and rapped the MegaCom with his knuckles. “Huh.”
“Huh, what?”
He didn’t answer, circling to the next side and knocking again. I followed him, questions forming on my lips but held at bay. Derrick tested all four sides of the monolith. His last set of knocks struck a different note. “Hello,” he whispered, running a hand along the dark panel.
My fists found my hips. “Any time you’re ready to share.”
“This sounds hollow.” Derrick’s nostrils flared as he reared back to kick the panel, only just stopping himself. “But we can’t get inside. Because we can’t rip through solid steel with our bare hands.”
“Not with our hands.” I pulled the Beretta from my waistband.
Derrick’s eyebrows nearly climbed off his forehead. “You’re gonna shoot the MegaCom? Our lifeboat? The machine we literally live inside?”
I chambered a round. “This is a virtual re-creation of the MegaCom inside the Program, not the real thing. We’ll be fine.”
Eyes wide, Derrick tapped an index finger into his open palm. “You know that? You’re one hundred percent sure of that? Because that’s a helluva gamble.”
“We either shoot this panel, or we shoot ourselves,” I said flatly, crossing my arms with the gun in my hand. “Which do you prefer?”
Derrick bit his bottom lip, blinking rapidly. Finally, he gave a tight nod. “Screw it. Light the damn thing up.”
“With pleasure.” I took aim at the center of the panel, spreading my legs and bracing like Tack had shown me so many times.
“Not down the middle!” Derrick barked, waving his hands. “You’ll hit something important, and what good is a bullet hole anyway?” He stomped over and adjusted my aim, easing me closer to the MegaCom while pointing with his finger. “Shoot the screws on the side, at an angle. There, there, and there.”
“Right. Got it.”
I rolled my neck. Measured my breathing. Lined up a shot and pulled.
The report was deafening, reverberating back at me from all sides. The acrid scent of gunpowder filled the air. But the Beretta had done its work. A corner of plating with a screw in it had been torn away.
Derrick rose from a crouch, grimacing with his hands over his ears. “Okay!” he shouted, holding up a pair of fingers. “Two more!”
The second shot was less clean. It took a third to blast the screw away. But Derrick was able to get his fingers into a crack and pull on the sheeting, bending it back a few inches. He stepped back, panting, a grin on his face. “Still can’t see behind, but one more should do it.”
I took aim. Blew a third screw to pieces, freeing up a six-foot section of casing. Derrick peeled back the dark metal like a tin can, revealing a tangle of wires inside.
Stacked blade servers ran up and down the MegaCom’s guts, creating a central column that dropped through an open floor and descended into darkness. Bundles of wires surrounded it, connecting row upon row of other gleaming components I couldn’t identify. The smell of ozone was strong, the array of blinking lights almost hypnotic. But I barely noticed this massive puzzle of hardware. My eyes were locked on a slender black ladder running down the left side of the interior.
“Boom!” Derrick clapped a hand on my shoulder, eyes alight. “It’s like an iceberg. The biggest part is straight down.”
I grinned back at him. “An iceberg thoughtfully equipped with a ladder.”
“A way down.”
“A way down might be a way out.”
“After you, milady.”
I shoved the gun into my jumpsuit pocket and stepped onto a narrow rung. The way was snug, but wide enough for an average-sized person to squeeze. The chute smelled of hot wires and old dust, the only light coming from winking hardware. I passed through the floor into a cavernous chamber beneath it.
“Any lights?” Derrick called. “I can barely see these rungs.”
“Hold on.” Peering down, I could just make out a catwalk a few yards farther below my feet. I climbed down, stepped off the ladder with a clang, and spotted a metal box affixed to the railing. It had a switch. I flipped it, igniting a row of steel-caged lights along the catwalk and against the walls. This room was much larger than the one above. The catwalk hung in space roughly halfway to the floor, one end leading to a narrow tunnel cutting through the stone and disappearing from sight.
The MegaCom descended another twenty feet to the floor, its bottom third surrounded by a maze of pipes, transformers, tanks, and unfathomable machines, enough heavy equipment to fill a high school gymnasium. I spotted a sign posted at the column’s base:
U.S. NAVY NUCLEAR POWER PLANT LEVEL
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
“Looks like we found the battery pack,” Derrick said, then he glanced at me. “Should we keep going down, or try that creepy-as-hell tunnel over there?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.” I took a deep breath, surprised at how glad I was to have him with me. We might’ve been mortal enemies only hours before, but I was extremely happy not to be down in that hole alone.
“I vote murder tunnel,” Derrick said finally. “I don’t know much about nuclear power plants except that I’m not trying to get near one. Godzilla scared me to death.”
“Compelling. Lead the way.”
I followed him down the catwalk and into the tunnel, praying the dim lights along its length wouldn’t fail. We walked for what seemed like miles, twisting and turning, but always angling up. After the first dozen yards the passage became wide enough to drive a truck through. I was sure this was the route Project Nemesis had used to move things into the silo undetected. Which meant there should be a way outside.
After fifteen minutes we reached a place where the tunnel narrowed significantly, the walls creeping in on both sides until we had to walk single file. The concrete here looked newer than the passage behind us, and I got nervous, quick. Perhaps they’d sealed the way after all.
Then I spotted a tiny red light up ahead. The tunnel dead-ended into a blast door with a keypad like the ones above. It was locked.
“No no no.” I put my hands on my head, unable to accept that we were still trapped.
“Wait! What did Sarah say to you upstairs? About a password.”
Tamping down my panic, I thought back. “She said I wouldn’t believe what it was.”
Derrick skewered me with a double-barrel stare. “That means you know it, Min. Think.”
I resisted the urge to punch him. He was right. I must know it, or Sarah’s taunt made no sense. But what the hell could it be?
I chewed my thumb, mentally inventorying everything Sarah and I had in common.
Nothing. Sarah and I were as different as two people could be. We never hung out, never did anything together. The only thing we shared was a stupid quirk of . . .
Oh.
I tapped six digits into the keypad. It beeped once. Blinked green.
“Yes!” Derrick thrust both fists skyward, then winced as one struck the ceiling. Shaking out a bruised knuckle, he offered me five with his other hand. “Nice work, Wilder! What was it?”
“My birthday. Our birthday, I should say. Sarah and I share one.”
All four betas did. I still didn’t know what that meant.
Derrick shot me a quizzical glance. “But Sarah’s birthday is—”
“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you on the walk, okay? Let’s just get the hell out of here. I’ve been underground so long, I don’t even remember fresh air.”
“Gotcha.” Derrick grabbed the handle and spun. The door creaked open, frigid winter winds enveloping us in an icy fist. I breathed deep. Felt a charge course through me.
I was out. I was alive.
I had work to do.