He wakes quickly but groggily, barely a silhouette in the dark. “Mmph?” he asks, starting to sit up.
“Does anyone else use this building?” I whisper.
Gideon finds his voice, but thankfully keeps it low to match mine. “No, it’s just me.”
“There’s someone outside. Listen.” For a few seconds there’s only silence, but then the high-pitched whirring starts up once more.
Gideon’s forearm goes rigid under my hand. “It can’t be,” he murmurs. He waits one second more before scrambling abruptly out of bed, still in what he wore when he came to my rescue. He stumbles over to his screens, waving a hand at them to wake them up. There’s a soft chime, and a synthetic female voice speaks calmly. “Intruder alert. Security breach in process.”
“Now you tell me?” he snaps. A few flicks of his fingers summon up the display from his security camera. “Oh, God.”
I move off the bed and over to the screens, where the centermost one shows a trio of people, difficult to make out through the fuzziness of the footage. But I can see enough to tell one of them is crouched in front of the door, using some sort of device on Gideon’s locking mechanisms.
My heart seizes, fear banishing the last vestiges of sleepiness and warmth from Gideon’s body. “What’re they—”
“They’re drilling into the door.” Gideon’s voice is tight and cold, and without wasting another second he’s moving, throwing open cabinets to reveal banks of computer drives, shelves of equipment for breaking and entering, and a host of other things I can’t identify.
“How did they find us?” I gasp—I don’t waste time asking who “they” are. This has to be LaRoux’s doing.
“It doesn’t matter,” Gideon replies. “We’ve got to run. There’s a back exit. Here, take this and pack anything useful you see.” He tosses an empty bag at me, then grabs a bag himself, the same one he wore when he came into LaRoux Headquarters after me. He shoves in a couple of handfuls of electronics, then reaches for the bottom drawer of his desk to pull out an old, battered, antiquated paper book. He carefully, gingerly tucks it into his bag to nestle against his lapscreen. He takes a precious moment to seal the bag, then dumps it on the ground.
I get to work, shoving gear and protein gel packets into the bag. Abruptly there’s a scream from outside the door, audible even through the layers of steel, and when my gaze flies up to the security screens, one of the fuzzy figures is lying on the ground.
“Defense measures won’t hold them forever,” Gideon says tightly. “Gas should release in a minute, but if they’re smart they’ll have masks.” He grabs for a handheld device that, once he clicks it on, emits a drone so high-pitched it’s nearly silent, while at the same time making my jaw ache. He starts swiping it up and down the banks of drives—the screen showing the security feed flickers, striated by white and black lines, then goes blank. A paper clip lying on one of the drives zips over and clings to the device—an electromagnet. He’s erasing his tracks.
“These here,” he commands, gesturing at a cabinet, and I dutifully empty a box of thumb drives into my pack. Then Gideon’s pressing tiny bricks of what looks like thick clay against the interior of the computer drive cabinet. I’m moving to add a bigger, heavier external drive to the others in my bag when he jerks to his feet and takes it from me. “No—that goes in here.” He slips the drive into his own bag, giving it an affectionate pat. “This one’s aluminized, keeps it from being wiped. That drive’s too important to risk.” As he speaks, he’s moving—a few steps and he’s at my side, stooping to grab at the edge of the faded rug on the floor and fling it aside.
“Oh, for the love of—” For a moment I forget the people trying to break into our sanctuary, staring at the trapdoor that the rug had been hiding. “You’re like a villain out of an old movie. I should’ve known the only homey touch here was to hide your getaway.”
“Can’t go wrong with the classics,” Gideon replies, and though the joke sounds like him, his voice doesn’t. It’s still tight with distress, and I can see panic starting to seep into his gaze, despite what must be a well-rehearsed contingency plan.
He’s not used to people finding him, I realize. He hasn’t lived the life I have over the past year, always only a step or two ahead of the Knave, always waiting for him to find me and drive me to move on again.
“Let’s go,” I say, and he stops staring at the trapdoor and instead hauls it open. I start down the ladder it reveals, then pause. “We need to get the rug back over the trapdoor somehow, or they’ll just figure out where we went.”