inDIVISIBLE (12 page)

T dropped his hands from my shoulders. “
Anyone associated with the men killed in this building is under suspicion. Don’t you think Cray talked to his father like you talked to yours?”

“I hope not, but we can’t know for sure.”

“Then I think there’s a pretty good reason to believe his life is in danger too.”

I let go of his shoulders and threw my hands in the air in surrender.
“Then let’s go,” I said. “I don’t want the Alliance to get their hands on anyone else if I can help it.”

T placed his fingers under my chin and brushed the tip of his thumb over my bottom lip.
His eyes softened, and his lips parted to speak. I waited but instead of speaking, he slipped his thumb away and turned toward the window. The building looked like concrete from where I stood, the window nearly chest high for me—not so much for T as he stood at least eight inches taller. His long sprinter’s legs made me feel a bit stubby as he opened the window and lifted himself on the sill. He worked his legs around, sliding feet first. As he disappeared inside, his feet made a slight pat on the floor.

His hand reappeared, motioning me to follow.
I took one more look around, placed my hand on the sill and lifted. Pain surged through my right hand, and I fell back to the ground. I’d forgotten how painful it would be to put pressure on that hand. I searched the parking lot for something to use as a step, a pallet near a garbage bin was my only option. I grabbed the pallet, and scurried back to the window. I propped it up like a ladder and climbed. I slipped my feet inside the window and heard nothing. I rolled onto my stomach as I’d seen T do and braced my left hand against the sill as I lowered myself to the floor.

My heart pounded so hard I didn’t hear my feet hit the floor
, and I took several deep breaths to calm the thundering, fully encased now in darkness. I stood still, afraid I’d bump something and draw attention from the guard. T’s feet slid like whispers across the floor, and I waited, hoping for some sort of light source. Seconds turned to minutes, my heartbeat the only sound above T’s occasional brush of clothing or shoes as he searched for a way out.

I breathed in through my nose, held it three counts before exhaling to keep from hyperventilati
ng. Forty breaths in—a sliver of dim light appeared along one wall. T had found and opened the door. I shuffled toward the light, bumping into him as I neared. He placed a steady hand on my arm and pressed his eye up to the crack, searching the hallway before we left this room, whatever it was. He opened the door further, and I looked around to see shelves with stacks of PCAs. A few more inches and the broken screens of several machines became evident.

             
A table along one wall held tools, and a large recycling bin brimmed with broken PCAs.
My father had probably recorded the data from some of these.
I moved closer when one of the PCAs toppled from a shelf, crashing to the ground in a deafening explosion against the concrete floor.

Cold tremors cascaded from my fingertips to
my toes before T grabbed my hand and bolted from the room. We sprinted down a long, white corridor before we found a second hallway toward the center of the building. Rounding the corner, we found doors on either side of the hallway, windows in all the doors displaying computers and servers. I slowed and tried one of the doorknobs, unsurprised to find it locked.

“Do you think they’re coming for us?” I whispered.

T ran back to the corner and peered down the long hallway. He made it back to me in under a second, his hand already ripping into his backpack for a rock he’d gathered in the alley. “They’re coming—three of them.”

He drew back his hand
before smashing the rock through the glass. An alarm peeled, echoing down the vacant hallways, the hard tile and plain walls leaving nothing to absorb the sound. He turned to the door opposite and smashed out another window and another.

             
If we get into trouble we create a distraction
, he’d said.

Some distraction
. I wondered now how we’d ever get out of it.

A camera in the hallway recorded us
so the guards could track us. T hurled the rock at it, breaking the black dome into little pieces.

T reached in
to a few of the rooms and opened the doors as footsteps grew louder down the corridor we’d just navigated. I opened doors opposite, before I fell into step beside him, rounding the corner just before the first guard saw our mess and began screaming into his security radio. We had little time but with the guards searching each of the rooms behind us, we gained a little space.

Another hallway jutted toward the fr
ont of the building and we slid as we rounded the corner, sprinting forward until T grabbed my arm. We slid to a stop in front of a steel door with a tiny window in one corner. He jerked open the door to the stairs and we took them two at a time to the second floor. At the top we stopped, peaked out the window. Nothing moved in the hallway, at least that we could see through the narrow window.

If anything moved out there, we couldn’t hear it over the whining alarm. T opened the door
, and I put my hand on his arm. “Wait—which way is the front of the building?”

T pointed left. I took a deep breath and bolted after him, running to the end of the hallway before cutting right. We made it to the front corner of the building where T took out another camera.

“Ready?” he asked.

I nodded and counted back ten doors until we stood outside my father’s office. The door looked just like all the others, a glowing panel on the wall to swipe for entry. T tried the handle before he retrieved a thin piece of plastic from his pocket and worked it between the frame and the door. Seconds later the door p
opped open. We rushed inside and closed the door gently behind us.

A
cleaning cart stood near his desk, an assortment of cleaning products scattered atop the cart. A box of rubber gloves was half-empty, and a bin labeled biohazard sat next to the garbage on the bottom tier of the cart.

My father’s office
smelled like ammonia bleach. I moved in further, a blue light from the computer screen lighting the room enough to see the window, our reflections flickering in the glass next to the bullet hole I’d seen from the street.

I touched the hole, wondering
if the bullet that had killed my father had also made this hole ... or if the officer assigned to killing my father had shot twice. I pulled my hand back and stepped away as security officers pulled up to the building on the street just below the window.

“Backup just arrived,” I whispered.

T sat at the desk, his fingers hovering over the keyboard—reluctant to push the wrong ones. A sensor reader glowed on the keyboard and a small box flashed on the screen over the glowing background, waiting for a swipe to log us in, but without a sensor, how could we access the files? Even with a sensor it would have to be programmed with the right clearance.

“There has to be an override,” T said, clicking a few keys to produce dots in the box.
I pushed his hands away and bent over the screen.

“
Don’t—you’ll lock us out,” I whispered.

T stood and scooted the chair behind me until I sat, focused on the screen—the blank box.

Security searched for us at this
very moment, and I sat without a clue as how to access my father’s computer …

             
My father had an override key. But what would he have used?
I closed my eyes and remembered the times in the woods, the talks, the cryptic messages.

The alarm made it hard to concentrate and I planted my palms over my ears to dim it.
Eight keys, I needed eight keys … Nothing would fit except—I prayed T was right about Sofi—and punched in eight keys.

I didn’t dare look until T squeezed my shoulder.
The blue screen barely eased beyond dozens of files, each stacked atop the other. I touched one, dragged the file open and fanned the pages. T leaned over my shoulder, stiffening at the same moment as I did. We looked at each other, opened another file and flipped through the pages, catching the same phrases, same ideas. One more confirmed that my father had not only captured the information from the old PCAs, he’d recorded it in his personal files, just as I’d suspected from the notebooks in my backpack.

             
“There’s one common in all these files,” T said. He touched the screen and the name
Oliver
jumped out at me.

“Who do you think he is?” I asked.

T mouthed the name over and over as he closed out each file.

             
An icon blinked when we got to the desktop, and I clicked it, opening a file I’d never expected to see—anywhere. My father had labeled it:
securitymissions/ questionable,
a collection of top clearance files my father had hacked from the Alliance computers. I fell back in my chair and looked at T. He scrolled through the files and the titles alone started chills between my shoulder blades that emanated to every nerve ending in my body.

The alarm ceased and we froze. Seconds passed before either of us moved again, the sudden silence disconcerting.

“What was he planning, T?”

              He tapped the screen and the page expanded, the files with pictures showing thumbnails of Citizens, others of Alliance officials. One title caught me and I tapped it,
Terrorist Watch List – Section Seven.

My father’s name was highlighted
in red, right below mine.

“No wonder they wanted him dead,” T whispered.
“He hacked their system, threatened to expose it to the world.”

“There are thousands of names on here, T.”

He closed the file and pulled up the main directory. “He’s got lists from every section along with files that contain information they’d kill us for just knowing it existed.”

“Nobody else can see this,” I whispered, closing
the files. With a swipe of my hand, I moved them to the recycle bin.

“
What are you doing?” T asked. “I think this is what he wanted you to find.”

“So I take the whole computer or what?”

Footsteps echoed in the hallway, men speaking in low tones—abrupt—guttural.

“All we need is the hard drive,” T said.

I grabbed the computer tower and dug through the trash until I found a hard piece of plastic. I started to unscrew the tower and T jumped in beside me, prying at the tower  until we removed the top, the hard drive just inside with a quick release mechanism. My father had told me about that one day—but I couldn’t remember why. I released the hard drive and yanked it from the computer. Nothing changed on the computer screen, and I nearly panicked until T said, “We’re seeing the backup files on the main server.”

“
We have to destroy them. They’ll use them against us if we don’t—say my father fabricated lies—something worse than they’ve already done.”

T swiped his hand across the screen and everything piled into the recycle bin. I punched in a series of commands until the bin emptied and the files were destroyed, just like my father had taught me.

Seconds later we browsed his personal data—address books, contacts and private files.

Talking turned s
houting in the hallway and my heartbeat tripled. T silently cursed and began pacing, his eyes never leaving the screen.

In one last attempt, I opened his
backup picture file—three photos illuminated—one of Sofi, one of me, and one of a woman I assumed was my real mother. She had my eyes, my complexion. T reached over my shoulder and closed the photo gallery, dragging it to the recycle bin to duplicate the deletion process the way he’d seen me do. My heart begged me to stop him but I knew we could leave nothing behind, not even the photo of the woman I couldn’t remember. I turned the hard drive over in my hand and prayed the pictures were there and more so that I’d be able to open them again one day.

T
clicked an icon I didn’t recognize and a list in tiny font scrolled up the screen. One tap and he brought it to a stop. I recognized the letters as names, the numbers as addresses. I tapped the letter C on the right hand side and all the Alliance employees with corresponding last names filed into view, fourth on the list, Brennan Carmichal.

Yelling resumed outside the door, and the
doorknob rattled. I jumped from the seat and spun. We had nowhere to go. I read the address over and over—began mouthing it to keep it fresh in my mind as T permanently deleted the file.

The history—
I knew we had to do something with the history or they’d know what we found. I handed the hard drive off to T and he packed it away in his bag while I touched the keyboard—memory failing.
How do I delete our history?
I unplugged the tower and motioned toward it. T picked it up and smiled. He turned toward the window as the officer yelled for a key.

“Ready to make some noise?” he asked.

I stood back as T raised the tower above his head and sent it crashing through the glass. The computer fell through, crinkling the hood of a security car where it landed. Glass rained down behind it. I climbed into the empty window frame beside T—and my stomach did flips as I stared the two stories to the asphalt below.