18 THE WRATH OF GOD
At first, nothing happened. They all watched on their phones, alone in the hallway, still a few hours from sunrise.
Then, a low, gentle noise rippled through their phones, starting with Charlie’s. He was farthest back down the hall toward Morrissey’s office. He swung his phone up, just in time to see the papers tacked to the bulletin board by her office flap in the wind in gamespace. In reality, everything remained still and quiet.
An indoor breeze, momentary. Then the papers fell still.
At the same time, Kenny’s phone rustled as the breeze passed him, a low creaking noise like that of a rusty hinge as he looked up at the GO TIGERS! sign (FUCK TIGERS! in gamespace), which now rocked back and forth, then came to a stop.
The noise died for Kenny as Vanhi and Peter heard the wind pass and saw the dust bunnies and crumpled paper roll and slide down the hall, away from them, through their phones, as the breath of God moved past, invisible, as if they were outside not inside, a single mild breeze traveling down the hallway until it hit a dead end and, improbably, took a left turn.
One of the dust bunnies rolled to a stop at the far wall, the same place where Burklander had guided Charlie’s hand on the sign-up sheet—one among many flapping sheets—that his friends had blessedly paid no attention to. The papers rustled, then fell still, just as oddly the dust bunny began moving again, to the left, carried by the breeze out of sight.
Then everything was still.
It occurred to them, as they stared at one another for a split second, that if they lost the breath of God, they might not find it again.
“Let’s go!” Kenny said excitedly.
They took off down the hall, turned left at the corner, and saw the breeze in the distance—drifting detritus, flapping papers—disappear down the east stairwell.
In real life, the boiler room was unlabeled—lest pranksters and hookuppers identify it as a good place to break in and cause mischief. But now it had a bold sign on the blank door, as if carved into the solid metal:
“What does it mean?” Charlie asked.
“It looks like the letters on Darth Vader’s chest plate,” Alex said.
“It’s Hebrew,” Kenny answered. “Ruach elohim.” He smiled triumphantly. “‘The breath of God.’”
To the right of the door in real life was a little badge swiper, where the janitors and facilities crew could flash their IDs to tend to the heating and other climate needs of twenty-five hundred overcrowded students. But when Alex passed his phone over it, he saw something different: not just a blank of gray plastic to hold a badge against, but the digital image of a numeric keypad. The virtual numbers glowed red. All they needed was a code.
“What should we try?” Alex asked.
“Six six six?” Peter offered, smiling.
“Um, maybe let’s not summon the beast just yet,” Charlie answered.
“Right. Good call. It does say the breath of God, after all.”
“Seventy-six? The score on Alex’s last physics test?” Peter offered.
He was kidding, but Alex flinched.
Charlie wondered about that—the way Alex sometimes came to school stepping a bit gingerly after a bad grade or behavioral incident. He never spoke about it. Never admitted anything when Charlie asked.
Kenny said, “I have an idea.” He was still aiming his phone at the door, long after everyone else had stopped. Below the Hebrew words, another phrase had materialized, glowing like embers.
I WILL POUR OUT MY INDIGNATION ON YOU; I WILL BLOW ON YOU WITH THE FIRE OF MY WRATH, AND I WILL GIVE YOU INTO THE HAND OF BRUTAL MEN, SKILLED IN DESTRUCTION.
“‘Brutal men, skilled in destruction.’ Sounds like Kurt Ellers,” Vanhi said.
Charlie wondered, Did she already know about the standoff by the portables? Had he been hiding it for nothing? No one had mentioned it, aside from Vanhi fretting over his lip, but maybe that was out of courtesy for Alex. Maybe the gossip had spread far and wide.
“Maybe this time we’re the brutal men,” Peter responded. “Maybe we’ll blow on Kurt with the fire of our wrath.”
Did Peter know, too? The possibility thrilled Charlie—Peter would know Charlie was brave, and he didn’t even have to be the one to tell him. That was even cooler.
“It’s Ezekiel 21:31,” Kenny said. “He was foretelling the destruction of the Ammonites for their vanity. They thought they’d be in power forever.”
“No one ever thinks they’ll lose their power,” Peter said. “But they always do.”
“Well, that answers the question of creative or destructive,” Kenny said. “We’re talking about the wrath of God here.”
Charlie shook his head. “That’s not set in stone. It’s just a quote. We haven’t decided anything. We don’t even have to go through that door.”
“But we know how, if we want to,” Kenny said.
They all knew what he meant: Ezekiel 21:31. A four-digit code. An entry code. But no one said anything. No one touched the keypad. The unspoken agreement seemed to be that it was Kenny’s decision to make.
“Try it,” Peter said. “Twenty-one thirty-one.”
“How?” Kenny asked. “On the screen or in real life?”
“Real life. It’s a real door,” Vanhi said.
“But the buttons are only on the screen,” Kenny answered.
He passed his hand between the real badge reader and his phone, letting his fingers hover just over the blank real-life plastic. On the screen of his phone, his hand appeared, and the numbers magically overlaying the swipe box disappeared behind his fingers, as if they were there in real life, printed right there on the box, and his hand were moving over them.
“Oh, no way, that’s so meta,” Kenny said.
The illusion was perfect, as if the numbers existed not just on their AR screens, but under his own flesh-and-blood fingers, right on the swipe box.
In that way, he was able to type on the plain gray square, watching his fingers hitting the imaginary numbers.
Two one three one.
There was a pause, then a click, in real life.
The boiler room door was open.