The Limit (12 page)

Sure we all knew that. We just didn’t think about it much. It was kind of cool living here, on our own for the most part, our every wish granted with just the click of the mouse. Home would come . . . later.

“Neela has completed her time on the top floor,” said Miss Smoot. “It’s as simple as that. It just took you by surprise because this workhouse is only six months old. Neela is the first Top Floor to leave us.”

Madeline untangled herself from Honey Lady, wearing a matching gushy smile. “Wow, she finished? Her family really got back under their limit? I mean, it just happened so fast.”

“We don’t feel the need to waste a lot of time here at the FDRA. Numbers are numbers. If you’re over your
limit, you’re over. As soon as you go under—even by a penny—you’re under.”

“Yeah, they sure didn’t waste any time snatching me up after my mom went over the limit at the store,” I grumbled under my breath to Coop. “And taking Neela like that in the middle of the night, without even letting her say good-bye . . .”

“I don’t . . .”

The rest of us shut up, straining to hear the soft words coming from Paige. Words from her were an anomaly, so we all felt a compulsion to listen intently to the few she let slip out.

At everyone’s rapt attention, the rest of her sentence got stuck in her throat.

“Yes, Paige?” Honey Lady nodded in a more subdued cheerleader mode. “Go on.”

“I’m just surprised,” Paige said, staring at her hand rubbing up and down the edge of the cubicle wall. “Neela told me why she had to come here—her parents develop real estate, and they sank millions into a project that went under. I mean . . . I guess I don’t understand how her family could recover from that much debt so fast.”

“A year and a half,” Honey Lady said, staring into her handheld computer device. “Neela was one of the very first children to participate
in FDO 169-D when it started one and a half years ago. She spent her first year at the northeast workhouse before being transferred to this one six months ago when we opened. I understand your confusion, Paige, but it just tells me that you don’t fully comprehend the complexities of family debt limits or the volatile business of real estate development. You said yourself that her parents lost millions overnight. Doesn’t it stand to reason that in their business it is also possible to
make
millions overnight?”

Pinching her lips together tightly, Paige nodded, looking away from Honey Lady. Paige wasn’t convinced. Or maybe she just felt bad about losing a friend. I was bummed too. My chance to get to know the Indian princess had disappeared forever. Leave it to me to never have a conversation with a girl I kind of liked even when we were locked up on the top floor together.

I guess I should be glad for Neela, getting out of here and away from whatever it was that was giving kids headaches—if something in the workhouse really
was
giving kids headaches. Logically, I’d think more of us would be sick if some noxious cleaning product were floating around the air ducts. One kid—Neela—out of all nine of us on the top floor had started getting them. That didn’t seem statistically significant. I needed more data—all of it, on the entire workhouse.

But how was it the one top-floor headache kid came
from a family who just happened to get under their limit first?

I don’t like coincidences. Give me facts—some solid numbers I can analyze.

Tonight, for sure, I’d get that data and find out what—if anything—was going on around here.

“
NO, COOP, I GOTTA DO THIS. MAYBE
if I get lucky and can get in fast, I’ll meet up with you and Jeffery in the gym later.”

“Bro, come on.” I’d never heard Coop whine before. Turned out he was a pro.

“Later.” I shut my bedroom door in his face.

Now to get hacking.

My fingers hung above the keyboard, unmoving. They used to just take off on their own. A thought would come to me of what I wanted to do, and then I’d set my fingers loose to take care of the details on their own. I think I was out of practice.

Closing my eyes, I imagined myself back in the computer room at home. I’d be sitting at the computer on the left side of the room, Lauren would be chatting online while texting or talking on her phone at the middle computer, and either Mom or Abbie would be at the computer against the right wall, shopping or playing.

Brennan, Lester, you guys there?

Yeah, we’re here.

Ready to start hacking. What about you, Matt? You up for a tough one tonight? What should we try?

The school. I want to check my grades.

Lame, Lester. You can do that legally through the front door.

But it’s fun to check them when you hack in. Come on, guys.

No. Too easy.

Shut it down for a minute, you two. I’ve got a big one to try. A government agency.

Ooooh, I’m shaking in my shoes. Let me at it.

I don’t know. If we get caught, we could be in really big trouble.

It isn’t a game this time. It’s important. You guys with me?

With the imagined rousing cheers of my buddies thundering in my brain, I charged in. The world slipped away around me as I became absorbed in my work. My mind clicked and calculated, strategized and maneuvered. Slowly, steadily, I chipped away at the site’s defenses. Besides the fluff files, like the guard-duty schedule and the cleaning-crew supply order forms, the workhouse’s files were proving to be tough to crack into. It took me a while before I realized the meaty files were stored on a completely different site. The guys and I had never tried a government agency before. Security seemed to be their middle name. The lights started dimming around me.

What the heck?

I glanced at the clock in the bottom corner of the screen. How could it be so late already? Dang. My computer gave me a five-minute warning, and I worked furiously until it started closing itself down for the night.

The longest Brennan, Lester, and I had taken to hack in and retrieve any info we’d ever wanted was . . . what, a couple of days? But we’d never tried anything
really
tough. We used to race to see which of us could hack into some moderately secure place—like the school or one of our parents’ computers at work or something—just for the fun of it. It wasn’t for fun this time. It was for real. And I was going to do this, no matter how much Coop whined that he needed a paddle-wall-ball partner.

After three days of hacking, Coop was ready to burst a major artery. I couldn’t stop, though, not for anything. I didn’t even take the time to bother Honey Lady with reminders about my e-mail problem—which still hadn’t been fixed.

My floating inflatable island had arrived. It sat—still in the box—in the bottom of my closet. At least Jeffery wasn’t pounding on me to spend time with him jousting yet. Every day he showed Coop and me pencil sketches of his paddle-jousting-pole designs. He said he was on a quest to find the perfect design. Instead of wearing
swimming trunks, Jeffery’s warriors often had on full armor. One even sat on a horse. Jeffery had gone over the edge.

One of my hands left the keyboard for a minute to snatch a baby carrot out of the takeout container that held my dinner. I’d gone my whole first week on the top floor without eating a single vegetable—unless you count the onions on the hamburgers and pizzas. I’d actually started to miss the crunch. I’d been eating my veggies daily for a week and a half now. Mom and Nana would be proud.

Popping the entire carrot into my mouth, I looked up at my monitor.

“Hey!” The carrot slid to the back of my throat, making me cough it back up. “I got it! I got in!” Beaming and chewing, I half turned in my chair, expecting praise from . . . I don’t know who. I turned back to the screen. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

It didn’t turn out to be much. Not the headache data I was looking for, anyway. I started exploring and found the info about the people on each floor. I clicked the top floor icon. Yep. There we were. Henry Cooper, Matthew Dunston. Everyone. Check it out—Brock Reginald. Reginald was his last name, not his first. And Brock—that made me think of a big linebacker or a heavyweight wrestler. Talk about a name that didn’t
match the person—or at least my imagined image of the person.

I also found info about our school curriculum and our current grades. I didn’t see anything less than an A-minus for any of the Top Floor grades I checked—even for those of us working on some college-level classes. I found the current work assignments for each of us and—whoa—our pay scale. We were all pulling in pretty hefty hourly wages. And bonuses. I got one when I completed that math-modeling project for a traffic-flow analysis two days early. Cool. Poor Neela, though. I bet she never got any bonuses. And then I saw Reginald’s numbers. Man, oh man. That brainiac was raking it in. I took a second look at what type of work he was doing to justify the big bucks. I couldn’t even pronounce it. All I could tell was that it was something very scientific, complex, and advanced. They needed a whole new level of the top floor just for Reginald’s brains.

I clicked on a marker under my name, and all my personal data popped up. Age, weight, health concerns—none, thanks—home address, parents’ names, siblings, schools attended.

Back up. What was that under the siblings category, next to Lauren’s name? It said
FDRA WH#MW 3rd Floor
.

My blood pulsed fast in my veins as I clicked on Lauren’s name.

The information sent me and my chair sliding back from the desk, as if someone had punched me right in the chest. I grabbed the front of my shirt, my fingers making a tight fist around the handful of cloth.

Lauren Dunston

Age: 12

Parents: William and Rebecca Dunston

Assignment: 3rd Floor

Lauren was here. She’d arrived four days ago.

SLAMMING MY FISTS AGAINST THE
armrests of my chair, I jumped up. I paced a full circle around my sofa and back to the desk. How could Lauren be here? What was going on at home? I shoved my computer chair and then kicked it. What was wrong with my parents that they could allow this to happen to Lauren?

She’s right here, in this building. So close. I’ve got to find her. I’ve got to get off this floor!

Bursting out of my room, I bumped into Coop, pacing the hall.

“Bro, you’re done! Let’s hit the gym.”

I pushed past him. “Not now.”

“Where are you going?”

“Third floor.”

“No way, dude.”

Waving him off, I raced toward the hallway to the elevators. “Later, Coop.”

“Dude, wait. When I say, ‘no way you’re going down there,’ I mean there’s
no way
you’re going to be able to
get
down there.”

My hand clamped around the metal bar to the elevator hall door. “Why? Because I didn’t fill out a stupid form? What are they going to do to stop me?”

With a loopy cock of his head and half a smile, he shrugged. “Go ahead, fool. Find out for yourself.”

“Okay. Fine. I will.” I slammed through that door and ran toward the elevator. “Matthew Dunston!” Not a ding or a swoosh of the doors sliding open. My palm slapped the bare wall next to the elevator. How did this thing work when I needed to go down?

With a final punch to the wall, I turned to the emergency stairs. The third floor was only two flights down. Probably faster than the elevator anyway. I pushed on the metal bar across the middle of the door, but nothing happened. Leaning my shoulder into the door, I pushed harder. What kind of emergency exit didn’t let you into the stairwell? What did they expect us to do if the building caught on fire? We’d be trapped.

Or would we? I couldn’t believe there was no emergency release system. Only one way to find out for sure. I ran out of the hall.

“We’ve got to start a fire, Coop.” He’d vanished. I could just see him warming up with a few practice swings while he waited for me in the gym, thinking
the elevator and locked door would make me give up. If so, he’d underestimated me.

I didn’t really need his help anyway. As I headed to my room, my mind sorted through all the different ways to spark a flame. Flint and steel. Rubbing two sticks together. Focusing sunlight through a magnifying glass. I’d bet anything Jeffery owned a magnifying glass, but the sky was clouded over today. If only I had a packet of matches.