The Rendering (20 page)

We came out the other side in a tunnel. Not a regular tunnel—this tunnel slithered and spun around us. Imagine
being inside a garden hose and shooting toward the nozzle … while someone used the hose as a jump rope.

“I’ve got to stay inside the conduit,” Jamie said, jerking the joystick back and forth. “Or we’ll get kicked out of the system.”

Let me just say this: if I play
Smash and Grab III
with Jamie, I absolutely destroy her. Same with
HARP
and
Arsenal Five
. I bury her deep and feast on her bones.

Still, as far as staying in the conduit goes, she completely kicks butt. I felt a little jealous. All I was doing was watching, and here she was playing a video game for real.

Of course, she couldn’t shoot anything, so I didn’t care
that
much.

Anyway, she guided the dragonfly through the garden hose—or the conduit—for what seemed like forever but was probably only a minute or two. Then the dragonfly burst into a huge room, crisscrossed with energy pulses and direwire.

Oh, and the far side of the room was a wall of fire.

Coming closer. Fast.

“The firewall,” Jamie said. “This is where it gets interesting.”

Geez, silly me. Here I thought it already
was
interesting.

Cosmo leapt behind a cable car thing for cover, switching his gun to full automatic. But the second cyberdroid was smart. As Cosmo took aim, it oozed into the floor and disappeared. Cosmo heard a slithering and popping underground but couldn’t get a shot on the droid.

Meanwhile, the first droid—the one attacking Poppy—looked in pretty rough shape. Cosmo’s red beanbag had slammed its shoulder, split open, and poured tiny white beads all over.

Those were no ordinary beads. They were software irritants, like virtual poison ivy. They burrowed under the droid’s skin and itched like crazy.

The droid stopped attacking Poppy to scratch. Not for long—just one brief second.

Which was all Poppy needed.

She cartwheeled to a ledge above the droid, lashed her chain around its neck, and squeezed. The droid bucked beneath her and fled in a panic, with Poppy still attached and pulling the chain tighter and tighter.

The droid zoomed past the other end of the virtual block, where Cosmo had bounded onto the cable car to buy a little time in case his droid erupted at him from underground.

That was exactly what the droid was waiting for: a pulse of
electricity surged through the cable and blasted Cosmo to the ground.

Then the droid rose in front of him, fifteen feet high, looking like a cross between a mutant octopus and a food processor. Its eight arms were covered with sucking pores and spinning blades, and its beak was huge and razor-sharp.

“Polly wanna cracker?” Cosmo flipped onto his feet and pulled the trigger.

A stream of balls poured from his gun, blasting a tentacle to shreds, exploding against the droid’s leathery midsection. The droid staggered backward, then shimmered, code streaming inside its vacant white eyes.

Decoding Cosmo’s ammo. Absorbing the ammo and gaining power. Growing larger and stronger.

“No more crackers for you,” Cosmo said, spinning the dial on his gun again.

The droid slithered forward, as fast as a cobra and twice as venomous.

Cosmo aimed, a grin tugging at his muzzle. When the droid absorbed
these
, it’d be in for a shock. And then—

He dropped his gun and clutched his stomach.

At the spot where the jagged shape had slammed him earlier, his body froze solid. First his stomach, then his legs, then his shoulders and arms.

Completely motionless. Completely defenseless.

“Well,
this
is embarrassing,” he said.

So there we were. All that remained between us and the firewall—an avalanche of digital flames—was fifteen layers of virtual vectors and security schematics.

Sounds neat, right?

Wrong.

Jamie linked the positive and negative ports, aligned the modulators, assembled the sequential ports, and blah blah blah.

I’d enjoyed all the flying around but this part was
boooooring
. I mean, I guess
Jamie
was interested, but I’d rather watch televised bowling.

Anyway, the firewall approached.

Jamie typed.

I twiddled my thumbs.

Then we slipped past the firewall, into Roach’s real-world server.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Now get me a soda from downstairs.”

“Or I could ask you another hundred times.”

She sighed. “Now I find the Resloc address and track the routing to a real-world origination point.”

“You mean you search for Roach’s address?”

She nodded. “Which will be a lot easier without you looking over my shoulder, complaining about how bored you are.”

Fair enough.

“You want something to eat, too?” I asked.

She didn’t answer, too busy with
CircuitBoard
.

I went downstairs to the kitchen and popped a frozen pizza into the oven, sat at the table for a second, then wandered into the living room. Felt strange, knowing her parents weren’t coming home. Worse than strange.

The same with my house, I guessed. My aunt was gone. Where was I going to live? Tucked into a hard drive with my cyber aunt?

Maybe I wasn’t bored, not really. Maybe I was just grieving—and scared. For as long as I could remember, Auntie M had been there: the most reliable person in my world. And now she’d turned herself into a stranger. Into something that wasn’t even completely human.

And it wasn’t just her I was grieving for. I needed to say good-bye to everything I’d ever known. My house, my street, my school. And we couldn’t stay in town, obviously. “Town” didn’t really exist anymore, and I wasn’t gonna stick around and wait for Hund to knock on my front door.

But I didn’t have any relatives. Jamie did, though. Her uncle Charlie and aunt Simone were probably the closest to her. I’d met them a couple of times. They weren’t her mom and dad or anything, but they seemed okay.

They lived a thousand miles away, though. What if she moved in with them, and I … I dunno. Got left behind?

Flopping onto the couch, I turned on the TV and clicked through some soap operas, then paused at the news. They were talking about the explosion, but of course they didn’t mention Roach or Hund or even the Center, and they kept saying a juvenile delinquent caused the whole mess.

And you know exactly who they were calling a juvie, don’t you?

They had cops and ministers and psychologists all diagnosing me, explaining exactly what had gone wrong: my family and my brain and my morals, apparently. I couldn’t wait to hear what they’d say once they learned how much I played video games.

I reached for the remote when I heard: “Tragedy at a local school.” The newscaster looked solemn. “Hundreds are missing in what authorities are calling the most puzzling mass disappearance they’ve ever encountered.”

The TV flashed to a reporter outside my school.

“This morning, in the auditorium you see behind me,” the reporter said, “hundreds of people attended a town meeting
about yesterday’s explosion at a nearby medical research agency. But they never came out.”

The cameras showed the inside of the auditorium. Empty. Trashed.

“How did these people vanish? Is this related to yesterday’s explosion? As of now, only one person connects the two events.” She frowned. “Authorities believe that Douglas Solomon, the only suspect in yesterday’s explosion, was in this auditorium today—and now he is missing, presumably with the hundreds of other people.”

Wonderful. I guess Roach fed the media that story so nobody would come looking once Hund got his hands on me.

Double wonderful.

I wondered if Roach and Hund knew about Jamie. If they’d identified her back in the auditorium. I hoped not. If she was lucky, she could still settle down to a semi-normal life with her aunt and uncle.

Which reminded me: I hadn’t brought her that soda yet. I grabbed one and headed upstairs. On the way, I glanced out the window—and my heart nearly stopped.

Three army jeeps were speeding down the street toward Jamie’s house! They leapt the curb and drove onto her front lawn.

I raced upstairs and burst into Jamie’s room. “They’re outside! They found us.”

Jamie didn’t even flinch. “That cyberdroid tracked us through
the dragonfly.” She snapped her laptop closed. “Where are they?”

Right then, the soldiers smashed through the front door.

“Does that answer your question?” I grabbed Jamie’s hand and pulled her into the hallway.

Poppy rode the cyberdroid like a bronco, using her motorcycle chain as reins.

The droid spun and shuddered but she stayed mounted, pulling the chain chokingly tight. The droid grew new arms to pluck her off its back, but couldn’t reach. It grew a new tail. Still couldn’t reach.

So it ran.

Imagine a roller coaster blasting full speed ahead—too fast to even breathe. Pulling loop-de-loops, rising high, then plunging down, whipping from left to right. Now imagine that the roller coaster is alive and trying to scrape you off its back, crashing through walls, slamming you into sharp edges and overhangs.

The ride of a lifetime. And Poppy shouted … in glee. This was her kind of fight: no rules, no tricky weapons. Just one-on-one with a creature three times her size.

She pulled her chain tighter, straining to sever the droid’s neural network, her muzzle drawn back in a fierce smile.

And somehow, she won. Still, she was bruised and limping when she turned the corner and saw Cosmo frozen in place, with an even bigger cyberdroid poised to suck his digital guts out.

She moved her hands so fast they blurred. Her throwing stars sliced through the air, and in a microsecond, the droid was down to five tentacles.

“Ever consider a career as a sushi chef?” Cosmo asked. Then he yelled, “Watch out!”

Poppy dodged as two jagged shapes—the same things that had gotten Cosmo earlier—darted overhead.

“Those’re nasty,” Cosmo said. “They locked up my processing core.”

Before Poppy could answer, the droid shot a barrage of blades at her. She spun away, but the droid anticipated her movements and body-slammed her into Cosmo. She knocked him onto his side, then sprang at the droid, crowbar flashing.

Behind her, Cosmo looked like a mannequin toppled on a department store floor, his body paralyzed and only his mouth able to move. And to complain: “Larkspur chose a great time to go researching with Dr. Solomon.”

Then one of his ears perked. There, an inch in front of his muzzle: his gun!

He couldn’t quite reach the grip with his mouth. So he stuck his tongue out and licked the gun closer, a centimeter at a time.

Meanwhile, the droid grew tentacles until nothing was visible but a writhing mass of limbs. Poppy sliced and kicked, and one last jagged shape flew at her from the depths of cyberspace.

Direct hit. Right between her shoulder blades.

“You’ve been hit!” Cosmo called. “Get to a datalink and jack us out before you get statuefied.”

“Statuefied?”

“Jack out! You’re already freezing up.”

Between Poppy’s shoulder blades, a small inertial field started rapidly growing. She cocked her head, then grabbed a nearby datalink and raced toward Cosmo.

She’d almost reached him when the cyberdroid leapt in front of her.

Poppy hesitated. She couldn’t fight the droid and jack out at the same time.

And in a few seconds, she’d be frozen solid, too!

“Great plan,” Jamie whispered.

“Shh,” I said.

“What do we do now?”

“Shh,” I said again.

My plan wasn’t
that
bad. Just a little … incomplete.

When the soldiers burst in downstairs, we needed a place to hide. So I’d grabbed Jamie’s hand and dragged her into the bathroom.

To the laundry chute. We didn’t have one in my house, but at Jamie’s, this chute ran from the upstairs bathroom to the washer and dryer in the basement. Toss your dirty socks into the hamper upstairs and find them waiting in a basket beside the washing machine.

So we squeezed in, slid down fifteen feet, then stopped, wedged inside.

Kinda wrapped around each other. A little too close for comfort.

I mean, Jamie and I are like brother and sister. When we text, she sometimes signs off with
LYLAB, Love You Like a Brother
. And I never
start
that, but I always answer
LYLAS
.

Except, um, she’s not
actually
my sister. And, um … well. We were kinda smooshed together, like we were slow-dancing in a sleeping bag. So. Anyway. Um.

Where was I?

Oh, right: my plan was incomplete, but being stuck in the laundry chute kinda worked. The soldiers searched upstairs and didn’t find us, then searched through the house and in the basement and still didn’t find us.

“Kids don’t disappear that easy,” one said below us.

“These kids do.”

“We should smoke ’em out.”

The second soldier grunted. “Get the thermal scope.”

“Yeah. If they still have body temperature, that’ll find them.”

Then we heard them clumping upstairs to the first floor.

“The thermal scope?” Jamie whispered.

“Quick!” I said. “Think cold thoughts.”

She gave me a dirty look.

“Okay,” I said. “They’re gone. We’ll slip into the basement and sneak out the window.”

So we wiggled and squirmed but couldn’t get unstuck. One problem was Jamie’s laptop. The other problems were her elbow and her butt.

“Drop the laptop,” I said, because expecting her to drop her butt seemed unrealistic.

“No.”

“It’s not gonna do us any good if those soldiers catch us. Drop it.”

“No.”

We squirmed some more. Somehow Jamie’s forehead ended up whacking my nose. Probably on purpose.

“Ow! Drop it!”

“No!”

“You’re crazy. Why not?”