Saving Thanehaven (27 page)

“What about that one?” Noble interrupts, waving at the door next to it. “What does that say?”

“Umm …” Yestin cautiously advances for a better look. “Cookie jar,” he reads aloud.

Noble blinks.
“Cookie jar?”

“For storing Web cookies.
That’s
no good.”

“And this one?” asks Lorellina. She squints at another door. “What is a … a spooler?”

“It’s for putting things in queues. We don’t want to get stuck in a queue.”

“We have to decide! Right now!” Noble insists. “If we’re still in this passage when they break through—”

“That one!” Lorellina exclaims. She surges forward, jabbing at the third door on the right with an outstretched finger. But Yestin grabs her gown.

“Wait,” he says.

“We have to keep moving!” she snaps.

“Yes, but where to? What’s our destination?”
Yestin turns to address Noble as Lorellina yanks her skirt out of his hand. “Do we still want to post that message?”

“Of course,” Noble confirms. “And go home afterward.”

“Then we can’t just run around like faulty robots.” Yestin’s voice is high and unsteady. “We have to find out if Rufus is using this computer right now. And if he is, we have to find out what he’s doing on it.”

“So we can make contact,” Noble finishes, thinking hard.

“Exactly.” Yestin nods. “If Rufus is playing a game, and we get into it, we can maybe—I dunno—write our message on a wall? Or make one of the avatars repeat it to him?”

Thump-thump-thump
. The double doors strain against an unseen pressure. Even if the hinges don’t break, someone’s bound to find another key soon.

Lorellina is dancing impatiently from foot to foot. “Wherever we go, we have to do it now!” she warns.

“We need to find some sort of directory.” Yestin is chewing at a thumbnail, his eyes flitting about, his tone distracted. “An instruction address register would be good. Or even a task list …”

“Come on, then.” Noble begins to move down the corridor, glancing from left to right. “We have a key. We just have to find a good lock.”

“What about this one?” Lorellina suggests, indicating a random door.

“Nuh,” says Yestin, after a quick glance at it. “That’s a spam trap.”

She tries again. “This one?”

Yestin shakes his head. “Flag storage,” he replies breathlessly. “And that one’s full of packet sniffers. We don’t want that, either.” He’s struggling to match Noble’s long, vigorous stride. “These doors are all security related. It figures. We’re still too close to the firewall.”

“Then let’s keep going,” Noble declares. With one hand clamped around his stolen key and the other around his swipe card, he hurries along, his ears pricked for the
CRASH
of a door giving way behind him.

Lorellina manages to keep up, despite her trailing skirts. It’s Yestin who lags behind.

“How are we going to get home?” the princess asks.

“We have to work that out,” Noble replies shortly.

“Maybe we should ask Rufus to help us,” she remarks. “Not
our
Rufus. I mean the other one.”

Noble pauses, struck by the cleverness of this idea. “We could,” he agrees. “We could do that, couldn’t we, Yestin? We could ask Rufus to send us home.”

But Yestin isn’t paying attention. He’s more interested in the surrounding doors. “This is good,” he says. “We’ve reached the device drivers. There’s the local bus. And there’s a scanner. And a network card …”

“Yestin?” Noble prods the boy with his key. “What do you think?”

“Huh?”

“Do you think we should ask Rufus to send us home?”

Before Yestin can respond, the princess lifts her hand. “Shh!” she says. “Do you hear that?”

Noble listens. Sure enough, mingling with the thump of heavy bodies behind them is a distant rumble from somewhere up ahead.

He identifies it instantly.

“That’s an engine!” Yestin squeaks.

“And it’s getting closer,” growls Noble.

“There it is!” Lorellina clutches his wrist, pointing. “Can you see?”

Noble can see. It’s just a pale dot in the distance. But it grows bigger as he tries to judge its speed.

“Which door?” the princess cries. “Which one?”

“Um … uh …”

“Hurry, Yestin.” Noble shoots a glance over his shoulder. No escape there. And when he checks the advancing vehicle again, his heart sinks.

It’s another white van.

“Oh!” Yestin exclaims. “Is that … does that say
WEBCAM
?” He takes a step forward. “It does! It’s the webcam!”

“You have to choose!” Lorellina wails. “Right now!”

“This one!” Yestin seizes a door handle, but it won’t budge.

Noble inserts his key into the lock and turns it; when the door swings open, he feels almost dizzy with relief.

There’s a solid stone floor across the threshold, as well as a flight of stairs. The space is dim but unoccupied. It looks safe.

“Come on!” Noble snaps. “Quickly!”

He can hear brakes squealing as he bangs the door shut behind Yestin and Lorellina.

N
oble hastily relocks the thick steel door, which is painted red on the inside. He then twists and jerks at the door handle until it breaks, trying his best to damage the lock. He knows that whoever is on the other side of the door probably has a key that’s identical to the one in his hand.

“Where are we?” Lorellina asks.

“It—it’s supposed to be the webcam …,” stammers Yestin.

“The webcam?” she echoes.

“It must be here
somewhere
.” Yestin peers around eagerly, but there’s nothing much to see. He and his friends are standing at the bottom of a round tower, which contains a circular staircase winding around a central core. The only visible window is a
mere slit in the wall, admitting a narrow finger of light.

Noble heads for the stairs. “Come on,” he says. “Hurry.”

“Where are we going?” asks the princess.

“I don’t know. But there’s no other way out.”

“There should be a camera!” Yestin wails. “This can’t be right!”

Noble doesn’t comment. He simply grits his teeth and starts to climb, acutely conscious that every turn in the stairs could bring him face-to-face with an armed guard, or a dragon, or an AV. He can’t see what lies ahead. And Yestin is babbling away hysterically three or four steps below him, making it very hard to concentrate.

“The sign said
WEBCAM
! There
must
be a camera! And if it’s turned on, we should be able to see Rufus!” When no one responds, Yestin adds shrilly, “I’m talking about the
real
Rufus! The one we need to talk to! If he’s on the computer, he’ll be facing his webcam. So we might be able to figure out what program he’s running.…”

“Shh.”
Noble says. “Can you hear anything? Are they following us?”

“I don’t think so.” Lorellina already sounds winded. She’s bringing up the rear, hidden from Noble’s view by the curve of the staircase.

“It has to be at the top,” Yestin insists, panting. “It
has
to be.”

Noble is beginning to wonder if the staircase will
ever
end. It goes up and up, around and around, making his head spin and his knees tremble. The ascent is so punishing that it finally defeats Yestin; Noble has to lift the boy onto his back. Then Lorellina flags, slowing their pace even more. Noble is concerned that the AV might catch up with them.

“Come on,” he pleads. “We can’t stop. Not here.”

“How much longer?” the princess wheezes.

“I don’t know.”

“We must be close,” she says, gasping. And she’s right. When Noble rounds the next curve in the stair, his head suddenly pops through a large hole cut in a steel-plate floor. The floor belongs to a kind of glass-walled turret, or dome. And framed in every enormous window surrounding him is a dazzling glimpse of infinite space.

There’s also an open door, but Noble doesn’t throw himself through that. Not at first, anyway. Instead, he allows Yestin to slide off his shoulders, before they both peer around, trying to get their bearings. The first thing Noble sees is an enormous machine made of glass and steel sitting on a platform in the middle of the circular room. There are also several smaller machines sprouting cables and microphones and switches, none of them especially dangerous-looking.

It’s not the machines that worry Noble. It’s the endless void outside.

“Stay here,” he tells Lorellina. Then he advances
a few more steps until he reaches the door. From there, he can see only wheeling hawks against a cloudless sky, but as he emerges into the sunlight—drawing closer to the low white parapet in front of him—he spots the darker line of the sea against the horizon.

Soon, he finds himself peering over a balustrade, down to a distant shoreline at the foot of a cliff.

To Noble, the cliff looks as high as a mountain. The tower looks even higher than that. He feels as if he’s miles up in the air. All around him lies a spreading vista of bays and hills and islands. Colored specks on the water appear to be boats. Gulls drift past below his feet. Shorelines and mountain ranges recede into a shining haze.

“Noble?” says Lorellina. Wrenching his gaze away from the view, Noble turns to see her huddled in the doorway with Yestin. “Where are we?” she inquires. “Is it safe?”

Noble opens his mouth, but no sound emerges. Safe? The top of the tower is just a narrow walkway encircling the turret. There’s only one staircase. There’s only one door. The entire circumference of the area can’t be more than twenty paces.

And they’re suspended above a drop that makes Noble cringe.

“Is there a camera?” Yestin asks. “Can you see a camera anywhere?”

Noble shrugs helplessly. As he spreads his hands,
Lorellina stumbles into the full light of day—and flinches at the sight that greets her.

“Oh …” She shades her eyes. “Oh, no.”

“I’m sorry.” Noble doesn’t know what else to say.

“Is there …?”

“No.” He shakes his head. “That was the only way out.”

“But there has to be a camera.” Yestin groans. He looks around for one as Lorellina slowly, dazedly, approaches the parapet.

Noble suddenly notices how the blazing light seems to leach the color from her hair and gown. Or is she losing some of her gloss? Noble wants to apologize for everything—for Rufus, for her lost cousin, for his bad choice of escape routes—but he has to get back to defend the staircase.

“Hey!
Hey!
” Yestin suddenly shouts. “You guys! Come here!”

He’s on the other side of the turret, hidden from view. But the excitement in his voice is so encouraging that Noble and the princess scramble to join him. They find him pressed against the parapet, clinging to a long, dark, horizontal tube attached to a vertical stand. The stand is mounted on the balustrade. The tube is mounted on a pivot.

“It’s the webcam!” Yestin squeaks. “Check it out! It’s working!”

Noble blinks. For some reason, he was expecting something larger and more elaborate, like the
steel-and-glass machine sitting inside. “
That’s
a webcam?” he asks.

“Well—no,” admits Yestin. “It’s actually a telescope. But look.…” He presses his left eye against one end of the device. “You can see Rufus!”

Noble gasps.

“
And
Mikey,” Yestin goes on. “They’re both in someone’s bedroom.”

As Noble grabs the telescope, Lorellina says, “Could it be one of those ‘recordings’?” She pronounces the last word carefully. “Are you sure this is happening right now?”

“Oh, yes.” Yestin is adamant. “Because we’re looking through a webcam. It said so, downstairs. Besides, Rufus and Mikey are both
really mad
with each other.”

He’s right. Peering through a small circle of glass, Noble finds himself watching two boys locked in furious combat. One of the boys is Rufus; the other is Mikey. The two of them are lurching around in front of an unmade bed, aiming kicks at each other. Their scuffle knocks a statue off a bookshelf. Then Rufus yanks himself free, pushes Mikey onto the floor, and retreats to one corner of the room while Mikey yells at him.

There’s no sound, though.

“I can’t hear!” Noble protests. He pulls away from the telescope, turning to Yestin. “What are they saying?”

Yestin gives an apologetic shrug.

“We have to listen! We have to know! This is
important
!” Noble gazes around wildly, but all he can see is a serene and timeless landscape rolling away in every direction. “I don’t understand—where
is
Rufus?” he demands, stepping aside to let the princess look into the telescope.

Again, Yestin shrugs. “I don’t know how it works. A telescope is supposed to give you a close-up view of a distant object, but …” He trails off.

“They seem to be arguing,” Lorellina observes. Then she adds, with a hint of satisfaction, “Rufus looks scared.”

“In that case, maybe we don’t need to post our message.” Yestin perks up suddenly. “Maybe
Mikey
will threaten Rufus, and then Rufus will fix his computer!”

“I think Mikey is threatening Rufus right now,” Lorellina declares. She’s addressing Noble, but he doesn’t answer.

He’s had a flash of inspiration.

“What about those machines in there?” he asks Yestin, pointing at the glass-walled turret. “Can we use any of
them
to hear what’s being said?”

“Um …” Yestin hesitates.

“What about the big one? What’s that?”

“That’s a light.” Yestin stares at Noble for a moment before explaining, “This is a lighthouse. Didn’t you figure that out?”

“A lighthouse?” says Lorellina. “You mean for ships?”

“I guess so—except that it’s pretty high in the air
for ships.” With a feeble attempt at humor, Yestin mumbles, “Maybe it’s for
space
ships.…”

“What about those other machines in there?” Seizing Yestin by the collar, Noble drags him over to a window. “In there! What do they do?”

Yestin narrows his eyes. “That one’s a radio,” he announces. “At least—I
think
it’s a radio.”

“You mean like the radio back in Brandi’s place?” Noble dredges up a memory of the mirror-lined closet stuffed with clothes. “The one that played music?”