Catastrophic translocation must have been the name that went along with the exploding/teleporting house trick. I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Dad, did you know there was a door?”
He nodded. “Yeah, but they keep it locked at night, and during the day they have a guard.”
“Please tell me the guard is at least armed,” I said.
Dad scratched at his beard in thought. “Well, he’s got a stick. I mean, he usually has a stick, but not always. Brian’s a pretty forgetful guy.”
I wasn’t 100 percent sure I’d understood everything correctly. “So what you’re saying is that you’re on a first-name basis with an unarmed man who guards a door you could use to leave, and the best escape plan you’ve cooked up so far involves a portable pulsar?”
Dad was quickly losing the thread. “That? Oh, the pulsar isn’t an escape plan; I just think it’s fascinating. Besides, we can’t leave by the door—I already asked. Brian would get in trouble.”
“If we don’t leave, they’re going to take my brain out and run experiments on it. So Brian might have to take the heat for this one. Is he a scientist?”
Dad laughed heartily. “Goodness, no! He’s a victim, like . . . like the gentleman drinking expired soda over there.”
Gus looked up, taking a deep breath after a rather athletic gulp.
“Is that even safe to drink?” I said.
Gus held the can aloft and shook his head. “I pray you pardon me.”
That caught everyone off guard. “Did . . . he just make sense?” I asked nobody in particular.
“Piglet!” Gus cried in delight, and all was right with the world once again.
A second later I remembered what we had been talking about. “So, there’s a person who has been zombified like Gus guarding the door?”
“Yes, but he won’t let me leave. When I asked, he threatened to hit me with his stick and call for help.”
Darleeen shrugged. “Should have just killed him.”
Hypatia was appalled. “No! He’s brainwashed; it’s not his decision. Can you reprogram him?”
She shook her head. “He’s not mine. I can’t take control of someone who is already that heavily manipulated by someone else. How did y’all convince him?” she said, indicating Gus.
“We promised to bring him along. He doesn’t like Jakki, and her last instruction to him was vague enough that he just has to keep an eye on us,” I said.
“That won’t work on the doorman. I offered to bring him along, too,” Dad said.
Suddenly Warner was struck with inspiration. “I’ve got it! We each get a costume and dress up to look like—”
Darleeen interrupted him. “Or we could go now. Nobody is guarding it at the moment, and I’m pretty sure I can unlock it.”
There was a moment when everyone tried to remember why this solution hadn’t been considered yet. “Well, that’s embarrassingly obvious,” I finally said.
18
EMERGENCY EXIT
How’d you know he was my dad?” I asked Darleeen. “You knew we were related right away. Is it that obvious?”
“Beg pardon?” she asked.
“Before, when you said you were about ready to murder my dad, how did you know he was my dad?”
We were riding in the back of my dad’s personal golf cart across the black expanse of the cave, bound for the door. Warner sat alongside my dad in the front seat, where he held the magnetic jammer and kept trying to talk shop about things he didn’t quite understand. Hypatia and Gus rode in a backward-facing jump seat. He was asking her if various things were cats, and so far, none of them had been.
“You and him, you’re connected. It’s one of the things we Old Ones can do. We can see connections between people. It’s as real as a rope tied to both of you. Family connections are the most obvious.”
“Interesting. You could make serious money doing paternity testing.”
She scrunched her face. “Yeah, if ‘that girl said so’ was legally binding. Plus you and your pop have the same eyes.”
“I’m not sure about that . . . ,” I said, picturing his face in my memory. “Dad’s eyes are green, and mine are brown.”
“I meant crazy. You both have a serious case of crazy eyes.”
I might have debated that point, but at that moment the golf cart ground to a halt on a dry patch of gravel. We had arrived at the edge of the cave dome.
It was like standing alongside a major city street where people only put up buildings on one side of the road. Before us stood a random collection of shabby brick and industrial buildings, arranged so the backs of each were against the vertical wall of the dome. The line of buildings was well lit, but it was clear most were not occupied at this time of night. In another life the structures might have been tire shops, fast-food restaurants, veterinary hospitals, unremarkable office buildings, and what looked like at least one medieval castle, but in the cave, they had all become laboratories, factories, testing facilities, and research libraries. Each one was decked out with fat electrical and data cables, and many bore signs alerting fellow residents of things like radioactive hazards or toxic chemicals.
“Are we there?” I asked, looking for the door.
“No, but I wanted to show you something. See over there?” Dad said. “That strip mall with the frozen yogurt sign out front? That’s my lab. It’s actually a pretty useful space. As you know, I’m fond of repurposed retail establishments. When we get out of here, I might invest in an abandoned mall somewhere.”
I could be wrong, but I detected a certain wistfulness in his voice. He was going to miss his lab, even if he was supposed to be using it to undermine humanity.
“Is the door close by?” Hypatia asked.
“Not far,” he said, starting the cart again.
“You ever been through a wormhole door?” Darleeen asked. “You might want to prepare yourself. It can be a bit of a weird feeling. You can point it at any location you choose, and it calculates—”
“I know,” I said. “We have one in the kitchen at home.”
“Oh, how nice for you and Goldilocks. I bet you have an indoor toilet, too,” Darleeen said.
Was that jealousy? I suppose our humble home would seem a bit extravagant to someone who lived in a literal woodland shack. “So . . . why do you need to leave via the door? Can’t you just teleport wherever you want to go? Slip between dimensions or whatever?”
She shook her head. “It’s hard to explain, but the gist of it is no. This place is locked up tight. The only reason I was able to get here is that they got it set up to allow us girls to come home whenever we want. I don’t even know where we are, really. Just that we’re deep.”
I remembered something. “I thought if you want to establish a wormhole you have to know exactly where you are and where you’re going. That’s why my dad couldn’t make—”
“The door is preprogrammed. It knows where it is; we just have to tell it where to take us. Otherwise they’d have to tell everyone where we are, and that’s a big secret,” she said.
Something else was bothering me. “Did we blow your cover? Will it be safe for you to go home?” I asked.
“I think so, as long as I don’t go performing any really elaborate tricks. From what I can tell, nobody down here has gotten my scent yet. But do me a favor and keep any rubberneckers away from the door while we’re getting it unlocked and turned on.”
“You really think anyone is out wandering around the cave at this hour?” I asked.
“There’s sure to be a few lost souls wandering out there,” she said. “It’s not healthy for people down here, and anyone who stays too long loses their minds completely sooner or later. Once people forget who they are, they just wander out in the dark and babble nonsense till they die. They’re harmless, but if a random lost person sees us, that could be trouble. Jakki could g
et in their memories later and see that I was with you. I’m not sure I could hide from her again if she got that close.”
I might have asked more, but the cart had stopped again.
The area around us was flat and only slightly damp. Roughly ten feet from the wall of the cavern was a long folding table situated next to a solitary wooden door, which stood on its own like someone had forgotten to put a wall around it. The table had a plastic placard about the size of a notebook standing on it that read PLEASE HAVE ID READY. Below that was a picture of a silly-looking cartoon squid making a thumbs-up gesture. A word bubble next to the happy squid said, DON’T GET EXECUTED! The door and its frame appeared to be made of dark, solid wood. It looked twice as sturdy as our home wormhole for sure. A single streetlamp stood above the area, casting a weak light in a wide circle. We moved the cart outside the lit area so it wouldn’t stand out too much if someone glanced our way.
Instantly, Dad was handing out orders. “Nikola, I want you and Warner to move my battery case over by the door and make sure all the cables are laid out and untangled. We’re going to need to power the door ourselves, so we don’t alert anyone. That . . . girl over there and I will get the door unlocked. Once we get it open, we need to be ready to charge and target it ASAP. Hypatia, you get my laptop booted and ready to go. I understand you’ve targeted a wormhole before so do this one the same way. Set the destination for downtown at your school—”
“I’m no expert on the security there, but I’m pretty sure we can’t just wormhole directly into the School Town from an Old One hive,” Warner said.
“Of course we can’t,” Dad said. “That’s just the target. The goal is to alert the School that we’re coming through and to have them reroute us to a safe room at the Wormport.”
“I’m not sure that will work,” I said.
“You are incorrect in your assumption. It’s our best—”
There wasn’t time for a lecture. “That place is supposed to be set up to kill any Old Ones who come through, and we’ll have Darleeen with us. She IS one of them, remember?”
Dad stopped to think this over. He nodded. “I’ll make sure the Chaperone leaves her alone.”
“What about the bees?” I asked.
My dad hated being questioned and was getting flustered. “The bees are the Chaperone, Nikola. Well, that’s not entirely accurate, but they share common resources and operate under her command structure. Don’t worry. I’ll make sure she doesn’t hurt . . . your friend there.”
Darleeen was skeptical. “You will, huh? You can’t even remember my name.”
“You’re the one who made him think you aren’t interesting. That’s on you,” I said.
“I designed the Chaperone, so leave it to me,” Dad said. I supposed this was true. The School’s intelligent security system was probably on good terms with the person who programmed her.
Seconds later the battery was connected and the door was ready to run on 100 percent local power. After that, I helped Hypatia yank Dad’s laptop bag from where it had gotten caught in a bunch of random wires in the middle of the cart before going back to help Warner and my dad find a location regulator that worked with imperial units from a box of about a quarter-million metric location regulators.
Dad was the one who finally found it. As soon as he discovered it, he held the penny-sized gadget above his head in triumph and immediately dropped it, right back into the pile. The mistake would surely have delayed us had Gus not snapped his hand under the gadget and caught it just before it disappeared back into the jumble. Dad tried snatching it back, but this time Darleeen was faster. Before Dad could argue, she’d already attached it to the door and was at work on the lock.
Ten minutes later, Darleeen had given up on the lock, which appeared to be nothing more than a standard dead bolt. “It used to just open for me. Probably has something to do with my exintegration.”
I tried to use my agar bracelet to pick it, but I couldn’t budge it. Dad attempted traditional lock-picking, but that didn’t work, either. After that, we tried hacking the lock with a computer, but nothing in the door’s programming appeared to control the lock.
“What kind of crappy door doesn’t have Wi-Fi?” Warner grumbled.
“They’re pretty common, actually,” I said.
Eventually, it was Gus who discovered the solution. He approached Warner, pointed to one of his shoes, said “Rabbits, George,” and gestured like he wanted it. Not knowing what else to do, Warner kicked it off and handed it to him.
Gus gingerly extracted the shoelace and returned the shoe. He then took the shoelace and wrapped it tightly around the doorknob three times, spacing the shoelace carefully so that each time he wound it around the shaft, more of the doorknob’s stem was covered by fabric. Then he licked the end of the string, tied it in a careful bow, found a rock the size of a watermelon, and smashed the door with it as hard as he could several dozen times until it was nothing but splinters and sawdust. After that, he removed the shoelace and gave it back to Warner, who thanked him and somehow resisted asking why he’d needed it in the first place.
That done, Gus strode triumphantly through the open but inactive door and said, “Warm pole?”
“Soon,” Dad said. “We have to power it up first.” He was rolling his eyes in the way he does when he knows something should irritate him but does not.
After this, Gus sat cross-legged on the ground near Darleeen and Warner, where he observed Dad’s activities with great interest.
The door had about a thousand wires of every size and color running up and down the back of the frame, and each had to be checked and rechecked while the batteries charged it for departure.
“Do you need to check them ALL?” I said.
Dad chuckled. “Funny thing, if this door gets ninety-nine-point-nine percent of your body to your destination, you still die. This kind of thing is perfection or death, which means at least one complete check before go time. Make sure Hypatia has the targeting ready, if you’re bored. We should be ready in about five minutes.”
I jogged the fifty or so feet back to the cart to check on Hypatia, who was sitting in the front passenger seat watching about a hundred applications load themselves on Dad’s pizza box–sized laptop. Despite the computer’s staggeringly powerful design, it was clearly working hard to keep up with the programs he’d set it to run. Just in case the battery wasn’t fully charged, I found the adapter and plugged it in, which seemed to make it run faster. The magnetic scrambler had also come unplugged at some point, probably when I had wrenched the laptop bag out, and I made sure to plug it back in immediately.
Finally, Hypatia entered her coordinates, and the laptop announced it was “ready to run transport protocol one,” which I supposed was what it was meant to do. We sat it on the floorboard and stood leaning on the cart, gazing out over the cavern.
Off in the distance, a few lights winked out in the Tentacular Arms, and a brilliant blue-white arc of electricity climbed the wall on the opposite end of the cavern. Headlights from golf carts drifted across the expanse silently. The faintest of breezes ruffled a few strands of my hair. Around us, the almost complete darkness and silence were broken only by sounds from my dad testing the door and wisps of their mumbled conversation.
“It’s kind of pretty down here,” Hypatia said. “I mean, as far as prisons go, this probably isn’t the worst.”
I had to agree it was something to behold, but as someone whose brain had been scheduled for removal, I believed it was a strong contender for the worst.
And that was when I saw the boy. I didn’t believe my eyes at first, but a second later, it was pretty clear: a small person was walking toward us from the direction of the hotel. I blinked and squinted, trying to make out the figure, forcing my eyes to adjust further to the gloom and confirming over my shoulder that Darleeen, Warner, Dad, and Gus were still accounted for.
/> He was walking unhurriedly, almost cautiously. I tapped Hypatia on the arm and gestured at the figure, who was still about fifty yards away but clearly walking in our direction.
“What?” she asked.
“Is that . . . a kid?”
“No, it’s . . .” She squinted along with me. “Yeah. It’s a little kid. What the—”
“Where did he come from? Never mind, you don’t know, either. Go get my dad.”
The boy stumbled a bit, and I caught a glimpse of his clothing silhouetted by distant lights across the dome. He was dressed in nothing more than rags. “Hold up. It’s one of those lost people Darleeen was talking about. We don’t need this slowing Dad down. He’s got to get the door working. Maybe we can get rid of him.”
“Okay. It’s a plan,” Hypatia said.
The kid waved, and I waved back. He was still moving slowly, so Hypatia and I went out to meet him (and to obscure his view of what we were up to). It wasn’t until we were about ten yards away that it became obvious the boy had seen some pretty rough times.
His clothes were worse than rags. His shirt looked about a hundred years old and hung down to his knees. What was left of his pants fluttered as he moved through the air. Thick, muddy soil caked his arms and legs as if he’d been rolling around in a damp spot. An unruly, almost dreadlocked thatch of black hair stood up in every direction, and a dark bruise adorned one cheek. I’d have felt instantly sorry for him had he not been smiling as brightly as anyone I’d ever seen.
“Hi,” he said quietly. He wasn’t whispering, but he wasn’t speaking loud enough to be heard across a room, either.
“Hey,” I replied. “Did you come from the hotel?”
“No. Who are you?”
I didn’t want to tell him our names in case someone searched his memories later. “We’re doing an experiment with my father for the Old Ones. Where are your parents?”
“They died,” he said simply, without sadness.
The Unspeakable Unknown Page 22