Game Over

Chapter 18





I PULLED DOWN the brim of my security cap and stepped into the empty express elevator. There was no sign of Kildare, but the panel made it pretty clear where he’d gone. The lobby and the penthouse each had a button, but there was another button to select. It was labeled with the Japanese character for “service,” and, based on its position in the panel, it seemed to be the floor directly below the penthouse. I hit the button.

The elevator rose quickly—so quickly my ears popped—and opened into a space quite different than the one occupied by Number 7 and Number 8. No polished obsidian floors or exotic furnishings here. This was a filthy, fluorescently lit, windowless room filled with all kinds of Dumpsters, washers and dryers, cleaning supplies, and a very tired-looking, stooped old woman in a crisp white cleaning uniform. She immediately put down her mop and bowed at me as I stepped out of the elevator.

“Did you see a kid come through here?” I asked in Japanese.

“No, sir,” she replied.

I could tell she was lying. Maybe the kid had threatened her? Maybe his parents had?

Just then, a large chute dropped down from the ceiling, and a load of dirty pots and revolting soup bones rained into the middle of the floor. The old woman picked up her mop.

“You have to clean this entire place yourself?”

“Whenever the masters are home, yes, of course,” she said, moving toward the fresh mountain of filth.

My heart went out to her. Getting this place passably clean would have taken a team of professional cleaners a week… or an Alpar Nokian cleaning robot approximately ten minutes.

I quickly materialized one of the compact white machines I’d known from my childhood.

“How did you—?”

“Make a cleaning machine out of thin air?”

She nodded.

“I’m not going to tell you so that you have plausible deniability, okay?”

“What?”

“Somebody comes in here and asks you where that machine came from, and you can honestly say, ‘I don’t know.’ Right?”

“I don’t know how to thank you,” she said, bowing to me over and over again as the white machine zipped around the room obliterating every piece of trash it encountered.

“Can you please tell me where that kid went? I promise I’m not here to hurt him.”

She looked me in the eyes. “Well, if you promise not to harm him…. Sometimes he goes through there.”

She was pointing at a metal grate—an air vent—in the wall. Judging by the worn hinges, it had been opened and closed many times.

“He’s a nice boy,” she said. “Not at all like his parents.”

I nodded, popped the cover, and climbed down into the dark metal duct.

When I put my mind to it, I can make my nose more sensitive than a bloodhound’s. I’m talking the ability to detect parts per trillion. It’s a weird sensation, being able to smell things that strongly—and it can cause some serious nausea if you come across a bad odor like, you know, brussels sprouts—but it can be a huge help in cases like this where you’re climbing around a skyscraper’s branching ductwork in pitch dark.

I followed Kildare’s scent, which was definitely not human, to a small room that was clearly his lair. I knew it was his, because I’m pretty well acquainted with the living habits of my race—not of Alpar Nokians but Teenage Boyians.

The small custodian’s closet was dominated by a dangerous-looking mountain of clothing, shoes, and Snickers wrappers. To one side, a metal locker plastered with Linkin Park and other rock-band stickers had been turned on its side to support an Xbox 360 console, a flat-screen television, a broken remote control, and a pile of papers and school books.

I picked up one of the books and looked it over. It was a textbook with a close-up of a moth’s face on the cover. I managed to translate the Japanese characters to “Zoology: A Complete Survey.” “Kildare Gygax” was written inside the cover—both in Japanese characters and our more familiar Roman alphabet. Below that was the name and address of a local secondary school.

As I returned the book to the makeshift desk, I noticed that the overturned locker was completely blocking the only door to the room. Did that mean that Kildare came and left only through the vent?

I understood the need for privacy—especially with parents like his—but it seemed like it would be pretty inconvenient to forever be clambering around in those dark, cramped vents to get in and out of here.

And why were there two sleeping bags, not one? And why was one so much smaller than the other?

I quickly examined them. They’d each been slept in, and recently. The bigger one smelled exactly like the trail in the vents and must have been Kildare’s. But the little one—it could have been an infant’s sleeping bag, and it smelled like nothing I’d ever come across. I mean, I don’t even know what to compare it to. It was kind of sweet, but not like perfume and not like candy. It just smelled good somehow, if that makes any sense.

But there weren’t any other clues, at least that I could find. If the big bag was Kildare’s, whose was the little one? A little brother’s?

I didn’t have any idea what was going on. And what about Number 1? Had he just been checking in on Number 7 and Number 8, or was he here for something else? If he were to join forces with those two, the scales wouldn’t just tip the wrong way; they’d fall right off the counter.

A chill ran down my spine, and I spun around, but no one was there.

Strange. Usually when I have the feeling that I’m being watched, I’m right.