While You Were Gone (27 page)

Keeping teenagers confined in tight quarters should be a crime.

Music drones through the walls of Warren's dorm room, loud enough to be heard even over the hum of his dampening field. Out in the hallways, students mill around, talking and laughing, throwing a ball, playing a guitar. Classes are still on hold, but they've lifted more restrictions. We're allowed to mingle in the dorms and dining hall, but we can only move between locations when the bell rings. Everyone is going stir-crazy.

Especially Warren.

There's a loud thud against his door. He looks up from the projected keyboard and yells, “Keep it down! Don't you know I'm doing important stuff in here?” He turns back to the monitor and groans. “This is never going to work. The modulating cryptography alone is making it impossible to hack, and that's just the first of several layers. It's like Dante's hell for hackers.”

“If anyone can do it,” Danny says, “it's you.” He swivels in his chair to face me again. “Seriously. This guy must be a genius in every universe.”

Every universe. I still don't understand it. Other worlds like ours. Same people but different lives. Part of me thinks, Yes, of course. Another wonders how it could possibly be real.

“So if the theory they came up with on the other side is right,” he says, adding two wavy lines between the two horizontal ones he's already drawn on the paper, “then the opening occurs when the electromagnetic waves in both worlds collide. It's gravity, though, that actually pulls us through.”

“And the whole thing was set off by—”

“The EMP the morning of the parade,” he says. “The big bang, so to speak.”

“Which everyone thinks was detonated by Red December, but Red December doesn't actually exist.” I rub my forehead. Thinking about this has scrambled my brain.

Beside the diagram is the letter Danny—my Danny—wrote before he left. I read it again, imagining his hand forming each letter. On the back, he outlined our plan to take down Skylar. It's not much different from the alternate plan we're trying to get off the ground now.

Warren growls and pounds his fist on the desk. Danny mouths,
He'll get it,
but I'm not so sure.

I turn the letter back over and look at Danny's signed name. “What do you think he's doing now?”

“Missing you.” He says it so matter-of-factly. “He doesn't have many good things going on for him there. I can only imagine how much it sucks to suddenly be back.”

“What about you?” I ask, pushing the stories of the foster home from my mind. “Do you miss her?”

He doesn't hesitate: “I would give up all the good I have here to see her again.”

I would do the same for him.

The knock at the door makes us all jump. “Did you invite someone?” Warren asks me accusingly, then turns to Danny. “You?”

Danny and I both shake our heads. Warren walks to the door and peers through the peephole. He turns around, a look of surprise on his begoggled face, then scrambles to transform the room back to normal. The lights change, monitors disappear, and suddenly it's just a regular—albeit
pristine
—dorm room.

He cracks the door and exchanges a few words, and in walks Dr. McAllister. I scoot the diagram and letter toward Danny, hoping he gets the hint to hide them away.

“Eevee,” Dr. McAllister says, shaking my hand as I stand, “I wasn't expecting to see you here. I, uh…recently spoke with your father.” He reaches past me. “Good to see you, too, Danny.”

“You
know
me?”

“Of course.” Dr. McAllister gives him a confused look. “You visited DART, remember? We tested the system?”

“DART?” Danny says. “But you don't work there—”

I can tell from his expression that he's mixed up his worlds. It's something I saw my Danny do often, though I didn't get it at the time.

Dr. McAllister clears his throat. “That's true. I don't work there anymore. I didn't realize it had become public knowledge so soon.”

Warren moves his goggles up onto his forehead. “What do you mean?”

“I mean they didn't take kindly to my request to postpone the Skylar rollout in order to conduct further safety trials. When I told the governor I couldn't continue to work on the project knowing it could cause harm to people”—he motions at Danny—“Solomon let me go.” He looks at me. “Sorry, Eevee. I think your dad is a good man, but on this he's very misguided.”

Good man? I don't even know that. I hold up my hands and shake my head. “No need to apologize to me. I'm no fan of Skylar.”

“That's good,” he says. “Because I want to take the damned thing down.”

A half hour later, the room is transformed back into a Temple for the Paranoid, and Mac is up to speed on our plan to fry Skylar.

“Those chips are brilliant,” he says to Warren. “Remind me to give you an A.”

“Thanks.” The smile on his face spreads from ear to ear. “There are fourteen left to install, which shouldn't be too difficult a task if we get Germ involved. Eevee's got access to a car with executive privileges. The problem is getting everyone off Skylar's sights.”

“Turning Knowns back into Unknowns,” Mac says. “With most of the city registered now, a red
X
is going to show up like a big neon sign reading
CRIMINALS HERE.
”

“Then there's no point,” Warren says. “We're too late to even try.”

“Not necessarily. There might be a way.” Mac leans forward. “We could create false identities. Fake accounts linked to real signatures.”

Warren's face lights up. Then Mac adds, “But to do that, we'll have to hack into the system. My access has been revoked.” He gives Warren a stern look. “They'll revoke yours, too, if they catch you. Or worse.”

He stands up and paces as he talks. The high-tech lighting makes crazy color shadows across his face. “Plus, if we are able to get in and change everyone's status, we'll suddenly be facing a ticking clock. I'd say twenty-four hours max before they figure out who hacked their system. I'm going to level with you. We're talking prison if we get caught.”

“We've already risked that a couple of times,” I say, joking.

Well, almost joking.

“I say we get started.” Warren claps his hands. He sits again at the keyboard and his fingers make a dull tapping on the desk.

Mac pulls his chair up beside him. “Finding a way through their armor is going to be the hard part,” he says. “Thankfully, I built that armor myself.”

Despite Mac's knowledge of the system, it takes them
two days
to hack into DART. Warren's voice on the phone Thursday afternoon is a mix of excitement and exhaustion. “Your twenty-four hours start now,” he says. Then he yawns and adds, “If you need me, don't. I'm off to sleep like the—”

“Oh no you don't,” I say. “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty. That was only phase one.”

An hour and a call to Jonas later, we arrive at the first station.

During those two days of waiting, Danny, Germ and I created a map of the way stations and figured out the most time-efficient route for hitting them all in a twenty-four-hour period. With three of us—not counting Jonas, who said it wasn't in his job description—we decided that if we started in the southeast and worked our way northwest, we'd be able to get the chips installed before DART realized we'd pried off their back door.

Assuming it takes them twenty-four hours to discover us. Any less and we'll suddenly turn into red
X
s on those huge DART screens.

Warren guzzles coffee while keeping virtual watch over our progress, checking Skylar stats and security bulletins and alerting us of danger. Meanwhile, Germ, Danny and I work quickly, moving through the city like ghosts, wearing the identities of people who don't exist.

Twice Warren calls us off moments from a drop because DPC has dispatched patrols. Each time, Jonas keeps his cool, rerouting us through neighborhoods until we get the go-ahead to try again. It's nerve-racking and costs us a lot of time, but somehow we swap thirteen chips before rush-hour traffic gets in our way.