Michael didn’t answer, waiting patiently for Sarah to tell him what to do. She finally did.
“Okay, here’s the plan,” she said. Michael had no idea how she could be so calm, as if she were about to lay out the next few plays in a backyard football game. “Bryson, push the down button. Michael, I’ll focus on the heat sensors, make them think we got on and went down a few floors. We can’t go all the way down or we’ll blow our only advantage when they see that no one’s on the elevator when it opens up.”
“What should I do?” Michael asked.
“You need to shut down the camera system. Destroy it completely. I can mess with where they’re seeing heat signatures, but there’s no way we can fake the video. Just wipe the whole thing out, every camera in the building.”
“Will do,” he answered, already digging through the system to find the location of those controls. Sweat trickled down his face, and the constant thump against the door in the distance felt like a hammer in his head.
The elevator dinged and the middle car opened.
“We all need to step inside for a sec,” Sarah said, doing it first. “Bryson, hold the doors open until I’m ready. I think I’ve almost got it figured out.” Michael had never seen her fingers fly at such a lightning-fast speed. Her whole face glistened from the effort, and the tendons in her neck stood out against her skin like straws, as if every one of them were about to snap from stress.
“Got it!” Sarah yelled, realizing too late that yelling wasn’t the best idea right then. “Push the thirtieth-floor button,” she said quietly.
Bryson pushed it and it lit up. Michael had been working at his screen and finally slipped past the firewall protecting the camera controls. He shut it down so that anyone looking would think it’d been caused by a power malfunction, maybe spurred by the crash of the police hovercar.
“Cameras are down,” he said, filled with relief as he clicked off his NetScreen. They didn’t know where the cameras were or if they’d been spotted by them yet, but it was good to have one less thing to worry about. A loud crack sounded with the latest impact of the battering ram.
“Now let’s go hide,” Sarah whispered, already on the move. Michael and Bryson followed her into the hallway, turning right into the red-tinted darkness. The elevator doors closed behind them. “I faked the heat sig on that car, and then I’m gonna wipe it out completely once it stops on thirty. With that and the cameras shot, they won’t have a clue where we are.”
Michael was just about to ask her how long she planned for them to hide when a ringing, metallic crash shook the air, followed by shouts and a rush of footsteps.
“We need to hurry,” Sarah said flatly, an understatement if Michael had ever heard one.
The green glow of Sarah’s NetScreen lit the way as they scurried through a spooky world of cubicles and desks and potted plants—the employees had long since evacuated. The sounds of pursuit echoed throughout the floor, shouted directions and the rustle of footsteps on carpet. People were spreading out until it became impossible to tell what noise was coming from where. Michael could feel every thump of his escalated heartbeat in his throat and ears, the blood pumping. Finally, Sarah stopped at a large breakroom, where a full kitchen and several tables had been set up. Michael knew they couldn’t risk going any farther—there were too many people following them, and they were too spread out.
“Under those cabinets,” Bryson whispered, pointing at some wide doors under the long kitchen counter, where a toaster and coffee machine were tucked away.
“Perfect,” Sarah replied. “I’ll keep throwing them off.” She opened a cabinet in the middle and dropped to her knees.
Michael went to her right, crouched down, and opened one of the wooden doors. There was plenty of space, just a few paper plates and plastic utensils scattered along the bottom. He pushed them all to the side and crawled in, turning to sit and face the door. He pulled his knees as close to his chest as he could and reached out and closed the cabinet. The sudden darkness tempted him to squeeze his EarCuff and bring up his NetScreen again, just for the comfort of it, but he resisted. He waited blindly, concentrating on slowing his breath and heartbeat and listening for activity.
Soon there was silence. Michael didn’t know when it had happened, but at some point the alarms had stopped clanging. It showed how anxious he’d been that he hadn’t noticed. Besides the soft sound of his own small breaths, everything was quiet and still. And dark.