“You’re going in there?” Dinah asked.
“You’re going in there,” Kelly said.
Kelly had something in his hand that looked like a small block of gray metal. He pressed it up to the identity card reader and began to move it up and down. The lock disengaged with a click, and Kelly pushed open the door.
“How did you—” Dinah started to ask, but Kelly put a finger to his lips. They walked inside. One of the kids stayed out in the hallway as lookout.
“It’s magic,” Kelly said.
She had been in Dr. M’s office many times, often weekly, but never without him there. The room held four comfy chairs, a large desk, and some ugly abstract art. Every few days lately, Dr. Mephisto had been running private math tests on her that didn’t fit into her private curriculum or that of her regular class. He also had new memory and inkblot tests, and, most infuriatingly, he wanted to know how she was feeling.
Well, I’m feeling pretty good today.
“Why are we here?”
Addis went behind the large desk, pulled up a corner of the rug where Dr. Mephisto put his feet, and beckoned Dinah over. She saw the door of a floor safe underneath.
“Can you open this?” Addis asked.
“I’ve never opened one before. I wouldn’t know where to start.” But Dinah crouched down and touched the lever and ran her fingertips around the single silver dial with its indented black numbers.
The other kids just watched. There were a few nudges between them.
“What’s inside?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Addis said
The dial had one hundred tiny vertical lines. Twenty had painted numbers. The metal felt cool to the touch. The dial was set to forty-three.
Kelly leaned on the desk. “Just guessing would take quite a long time, wouldn’t it? But every time I’ve checked the dial, it’s set on a different number. He has to turn the dial after closing it to get it to lock.”
Dinah nodded as if she knew it were true. She had never seen a book on safecracking in Nineveh’s libraries.
Addis said, “I popped into his office one day. He was kneeling at the safe, and I didn’t have an appointment so he wasn’t expecting me. I was about to leave when one of the special kids out in the hall started screaming. Doctor Mephisto told me to stay put, and he ran outside to see what was going on. I took the opportunity to look at the safe’s dial. It was on number fourteen. When he came back a minute later he turned the dial one more time and opened it.”
Dinah screwed her lip to one side. “So if we know fourteen’s the last number, that takes us from one million possibilities to ten thousand.”
“Obviously,” Kelly said. “Unless we aren’t certain, and it’s actually the middle number.”
“Which it isn’t,” Addis said. “After you reach the last number, you turn it back to zero.”
“You’re assuming.”
“I looked it up.”
“So how do we get the other two numbers?” Kelly asked Dinah. “You’re in here a lot. Can you keep an eye on him and try to catch either of the other two?”
“I never even knew he had a safe here. He’s never opened it with me in the room. I can’t just ask him.”
“I thought you might actually be sneaky or something.”
“I can be,” she said defensively.
“So can you try?”
She looked down at the dial again and wiggled it ever so slightly. The dial felt loose on the fourteen, as if there was no difference between the numbers two above and two below. Mechanically speaking, she wasn’t yet sure if this was good or bad.
“How many times have you broken in here?” she asked.
“Three times.”
“Do we have a birthday for Doctor Mephisto?”
“We tried that,” Addis said. “We also tried every birthday for the rest of the faculty. The number fourteen only shows up once. And he doesn’t have any family that we know of. We even tried some parts of pi and e.”
“How about any scraps of paper? Notes? Something taped somewhere or written in a drawer? Wouldn’t he write it down somewhere in case he forgets?”
“We haven’t found anything like that,” Kelly said. “And trust me, we’ve looked.”
“He takes his tablet with him,” Addis said. “Maybe he has it in there.
As she spoke, Dinah continued to wiggle the dial. Then she spun it counterclockwise and tried to feel for some kind of clue.
She got nothing.
“We tried for his tablet,” Addis continued. “Each of us, at every appointment, but no joy. At least we got his tablet code. Six-seven-one-four. Does that number mean anything to you?”
Dinah kept spinning the dial.
Kelly and Addis looked at her, then at each other. “You know it?” Kelly asked.
“Of course not,” Dinah said. “But I want to see how it even works. The dial feels loose. And if the final number is actually fourteen but could sometimes be sixteen or thirteen, that tells us something, doesn’t it?”
“What does that tell us?”
“That the lock itself has some relaxed mechanics. What if the numbers don’t have to be spot on?”
“That would decrease the candidates for the combination.” Addis gave Dinah’s shoulder a squeeze. It was the best feeling in the world.
Kelly was looking at Dinah intently. “So can you open it?”
She wiggled her fingers. “I’ll give it a try. Of course all of this goes with the assumption that the final number is fourteen, and he didn’t move the dial when he left the office. Otherwise, this could take quite a bit longer.”
“So how long could it take?” he asked with a note of impatience.
The numbers lined up in her head. “Just over a thousand tries. That’s if fourteen is the final number. And if there is an allowance of plus or minus two. That reduces the possible candidates to thirty-three, and I can skip numbers with each attempt.”
“But that will still take forever.” Kelly looked crestfallen at the implied setback.
“It will take about four hours. And that’s if the solution waits until the end. So how much time do we have?”
There was a knock at the door from the lookout. They heard a teacher’s voice talking, and their lookout was escorted away down the hall.
“None,” Addis said.
20. Safe
The redoubt stank. Although her memories of the place were less than grand, at least the toilets had always worked. The smell hit her once the elevator opened. Her sinuses burned. She thought her eyes would start watering.
“You get used to it,” Ruben said.
She suppressed a cough and breathed through the crook of her arm.
It couldn’t have been this bad before.
They stepped out into one of the service intersections behind the kitchen and pantry. This had always been an off-limits area with its own elevator. The food prep zone was the most tightly guarded part of the redoubt, not because of any advanced door tech or roaming bots with laser turrets and flashing eyes, but because there was always staff present cooking, cleaning after meals, or preparing for the next onslaught of diners.
They walked down a hallway that passed the kitchen. The kitchen was silent. No tilapia baked in the oven. No chicken à la king simmered in the giant vats. Dinah didn’t see anyone through the swinging doors’ rectangular windows. No voices echoed from the cafeteria beyond.
“Where is everyone?”
She received no answer. Ruben limped on and passed through an open sliding door. She followed with the hunter escort right behind. A dinginess permeated the outer hallways. She saw trash: a spent wrapper here, some paper there, dust, and stains, as if someone had gotten sick and the janitor hadn’t been by for a mopping in months.
Half the lights were out. Even reading would be a challenge in the gloom. When he noticed that she was looking up at the dimmed fluorescent bulbs, her brother said, “We keep some switched off to save power.”
They passed through the faculty halls of the school wing where Dr. M had once roamed. Here they took the central elevator down another level. A few of the redoubt’s citizens avoided their party, quick to retreat around a corner or into the nearest room. No one challenged their transit as she followed her brother to the first security door to the research wing. This door was propped open with a rubber wedge. A key card had been required to get through when Dinah had lived there. The White Room lay beyond, a place Dinah knew well.
“Is everyone dead?”
Her brother paused and gestured for her to go first. She hesitated.
I’ve come this far.
Hadn’t he emerged from the hospital, both resurrected and half a man? What could this place do to her that she couldn’t recover from? She just had to learn the rules. All of them.
She heard vibrations begin to rattle through the walls as if a far-off machine was awaking from some long slumber.
Is it me that it’s waking for?
The hunter put a hand on her shoulder.
“It’s okay,” Ruben said. “She knows where to go.”
She did indeed. She headed down the longest of the corridors toward the White Room.
More lights were on in the hallway ahead. Whatever power-saving scheme they had going on wasn’t happening here. Maybe someone had just bothered to change out the dead bulbs. Both sides of the corridor were lined with vacant hospital beds. Most were bare down to the plastic-wrapped mattress, but a few had loosely piled sheets, as if their patients had gotten up and hadn’t yet returned. Had the hospital wing expanded to take over this entire floor?
Twin doors were open to the White Room. Six men and women in white smocks and procedure masks waited therein. Dinah didn’t miss the prepped steel surgical table behind them. All attention was on her.
Then the six began to applaud. Her brother stepped in front of her and spun on his heels. He raised his arms as if to show her this grand reception.
“Welcome home, Dinah,” one of the masked staffers said. It was Doctor Hel, her one-time teacher and a constant presence during White Room research. She had gone completely gray in the time since Dinah’s leaving, and her hair appeared thin and carefully combed to conceal sections of nearly bare scalp.
Dinah looked at each of them in turn. If they were going to jump her, she was hoping they’d get it over with. She made fists.
“Okay, back off,” Ruben said. “You’re creeping her out. Come, Dinah, let me show you what we’ve done. This way all the cards will be on the table.”
“All the cards? I doubt that.”
He kept walking as if he hadn’t heard her. He pushed through one of three doors. A breeze shushed past him, as if the space beyond had increased air pressure. Seeing Dr. Hel and the White Room nearly overwhelmed her. She had been in this suite of exam rooms so many times, with its endless shots and tests, yet she had never come here without a fair amount of goading.
“Are you coming?”
She moved to catch up. The hunter and the doctors and nurses didn’t follow. With a whoosh, the doors closed automatically behind her, and she was alone with her brother inside a vast room. Strange green lights shined down from the ceiling. Everything she remembered about the redoubt was suddenly uncertain. She questioned whether she had ever been there, and perhaps she hadn’t. But could she have missed a room so large? She saw doors leading in every direction and added them to her new mental layout of the place.
The air in the room felt humid and warm, as if they had just entered the greenhouse. Ruben walked in between twenty-two beds that crowded what had once been a large operating chamber. Lying in each of the beds were what could only be the boys and girls of the redoubt, now several years older. They looked like they were sleeping. Tubes ran into their arms and wires were attached to their shaved heads. Each bed had a stand with a set of small plastic bags hanging from it and a peristaltic pump that occasionally turned with a high-pitched whine. One bag held clear liquid. The bags attached to the pumps held what looked like some sort of thick paste. Underneath the beds were more bags coming from each of the sleepers, slowly filling with their excretions. The last time she had seen her brother before leaving, he had been connected to similar machines and tubes. Food went in one way and the waste out another while the patient remained comatose.
“This is where the magic happens,” he said.
She walked from bed to bed. She found Stevie. Next to him was Shannon. Both were older, alive, yet catatonic. She recognized many more faces, all of them in an identical state. Stevie’s limp body and sleeping bristled face held none of the threat it had once carried, and she felt little but disgust at seeing him in this state. Other children that she didn’t know well prompted a similar reaction. But when she found Addis, her throat caught. Her eyes were slightly open: dull dark orbs that stared at nothing. She touched her hand. It felt hot and pasty. They hadn’t been particularly close, but she had been kinder than the rest. And Addis had warned her…
“I keep it warm like this so their core temperature never drops. We lost a couple to pneumonia before we keyed in on the right temperature. It might be easier for all involved to just put them on ventilators and give each a tracheotomy. Less mouth maintenance that way.”
Dinah brushed a few strands of Addis’s hair from her face.
“Can they be woken up?”
He didn’t answer. Addis had a paper chart hooked on her bed with handwritten dates and initials, but in the dim light it was difficult to read. There were many entries in several columns with marks made by different hands. Whatever maintenance she received appeared regular. It was surprising that this room held only a fraction of the foul odors Dinah had detected in the other parts of the redoubt. She gave Addis’s hand a squeeze and let go.
“So am I to be another cog in your machine?”
Ruben snorted. “Hardly. I wouldn’t have bothered making such a fuss in getting you back if that was all I needed you for. Sure, I need you here, but if it was just to be another spoke in the architecture, you could have easily been replaced with any other brain. I need you to be the hub.”
***
Dinah was taken to what amounted to a cell in a neighboring lab. A metal door closed behind her. She had a collapsible cot for furniture along with a sink and a portable toilet that stank of disinfectant. At least the light was on, not that there was much to see. She tried the door. It didn’t even rattle and the knob didn’t turn. Without much enthusiasm, she kicked the door.
“Full circle,” she muttered.
The walls held bright areas in the faded white paint where cabinets had been removed. Had the walls been cleared to turn the room into a cell? She counted a perfect dozen unspackled holes where cabinet anchors had once been. There were two outlets for power and a third for a data feed or phone. Just the notion of having electricity again filled her with a weird thrill, as she had been without it for years…not that she had anything to plug in.
Then one of the outlets spoke to her.
“Dinah.”
It came as a hard stage whisper.
“Dinah, is that you?”
For the briefest nanosecond she thought she was going bonkers. But the voice was Rosalyn’s. The sound didn’t quite come from the outlet but from somewhere above her. She ran a hand up the wall.
“Rosalyn? Where are you?”
“A small room. A cell. You?”
“The same.”
Even Dinah’s own whispers felt too loud. Her heart thumped hard. Then she saw a small air vent on the ceiling, identical to one she’d had in her old room. If she could hear Rosalyn, anyone else nearby would be able to listen in. Dinah pulled the cot over and got up on it. The vent was still out of reach. But even if the grating could be removed, it was smaller than her head.
“Are you okay?” she whispered.
“Yeah. They haven’t told me anything, they just run tests every day. You just get here?”
Soft footsteps approached her door. Di
nah got down from the cot but didn’t have time to put it back. Dr. Hel came in. She carried a small leather bag.
“Have a seat, Dinah.”
Dinah sat on the cot. Dr. Hel sat next to her and opened the bag. Inside was an assortment of medical supplies. Dr. Hel rolled up Dinah’s sleeve and applied a pressure cuff. She took her temperature and then drew a blood sample. Dinah watched this with some alarm, as Dr. Hel’s hands had a tremble to them, but she found Dinah’s vein on the first try. She scraped her skin in a dozen locations, each sample going into a small plastic container which she labeled. There was little else to do but allow her to poke and prod. She wore a dumb half-smile the whole time but said little, just basic instructions. When she finished, she left and closed the door.
About an hour later, supper came. Dr. Hel carried it in. Seeing the same bland tray with a bowl of brown and gray food was a surreal experience. Dinah let out a small laugh. The plastic flatware looked so quaint.
“I’m happy your spirits are improving,” Dr. Hel said. “You need to eat. You’ll feel even better.”
No drugs were on the tray, only a small cup of water, along with what appeared to be mystery stew. The Week Four, Day Two menu item. Kitchen crew must be back in action.
She gave the stew a sniff.
“This looks awful.”
“It’s fine, it’s edible, and it will nourish you.”
Upon further examination, the stew looked worse than anything ever produced in the cafeteria. The lumps were the same unidentifiable chunks of vegetable and meat matter, probably made of leftovers from previous meals, but a strange powdery residue lined one edge of the bowl.
“Was this made from the dehydrated supplies?”
“Just eat it.”
Dr. Hel stood over her and watched. The smile was gone.
Dinah took the cup and examined the water. It appeared clear. She took a sip. Brackish, like the bottom dregs from the fog collection tank. She didn’t want to let on how thirsty she was, but she drank it down in three gulps. Dr. Hel lingered.
“I’m not hungry.”
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