“I go by Mike these days,” Juniper says.
The air trembles with his words. “You think that makes you a new man? You think that beard or that muscle makes you any different? I see the same lying selfish weakling as before.”
A deep-bellied growl rolls off Hemingway. Lela tries to grab his collar, but it’s too late. He springs toward Cloven, and the hounds leap to meet him midway. Hemingway rises up on his haunches and captures one of them in a snarling embrace. They drop almost immediately when Hemingway clamps his jaws around its neck and shakes. The other hound scratches and snaps at his hindquarters until Juniper knocks its flat with a bullet to the ribs.
Hemingway readjusts his grip, drawing the neck deeper into his mouth, when Cloven takes two steps forward and kicks the dog in the belly. Hemingway yips and flops through the air and comes to a rolling stop. Lela calls out to him, and he struggles to stand and then limps back to her with his ears flattened and his tail tucked.
The hounds begin to dry out and crack and sink, and when a wind rushes through the buildings, a few flakes of their skin peel away.
“You’re supposed to be dead, Timothy.”
“Decided to stick around.”
“I always knew you were a threat. That’s why I wanted to end you. But I never would have dreamed you’d grow into such a ridiculous do-gooder, a toxic pain in my ass.”
Juniper realizes he is slumping, as if ready to curl in on himself, and makes an effort to square his shoulders. “We’re going to stop you.”
“Me?” Cloven crouches and punches through the shell of one of the hounds and scoops out the ash to filter through his fingers. The air flecks black, like a staticky screen. “Don’t you remember what I told you before? I’m one of many. And we’re all around you.”
Lela clutches Hemingway. The dog trembles in her arms. “Who is he?” she says to Juniper. “Why is he calling you Timothy?”
Juniper can’t answer. The man is smiling at him, and he feels reduced by his red gaze. Brackish water bubbles in his mouth, lily pads and frogs and mud choke his throat. He feels like he is shrinking, like he is becoming that boy in the lake again, as if the body and the life he has built for himself are all merely a costume, easily removed. “Go,” he says to his friends. “Run.”
Derek starts immediately for the data center, but Lela hesitates and Juniper says, “You’ve got to go. Hurry. I’ll hold him off as long as I can.”
?
The inside of the building is as plain and anonymous as the outside. There is a reception desk with a phone and a mug of pens and a dish of mints and a Far Side day calendar. Its chair lies on its side. The tiled foyer opens up into a carpeted office area segmented into cubicles. She takes one last look at the street—where the two men remain footed in place—before following Derek, dragging Hemingway along by the collar.
Among the cubicles, they find two bodies, one of them the security guard. Derek kneels beside him. At first she thinks he is retrieving the gun, but he is not. It’s a keycard bound to a spiral cord. He holds it up with a smile. “Phew.”
She asks why he is relieved, and he says that without the card, they’d never get into the vault, not without a jackhammer. The database is protected by a two-challenge system. The keycard and a key code that swings open the steel door. “I was betting on us being able to find one. We got lucky.”
They will need to be luckier. Once they get through the vault door, they will need a twenty-two digit password to access the system. For this, he has a password generator program—that should take five minutes or less. “Should?” Lela had said earlier, and Derek firmed his chin and said, “Will.”
The program is stored on the same thumb drive as Hannah. Or Hannah’s consciousness. Lela isn’t sure how to refer to her niece anymore. Even before she vanished into some trapdoor of the Internet, she seemed to have exceeded her body. Lela keeps the dongle in her pocket and every now and then touches it to reassure herself it’s still there.
They head down a hall, past a water cooler, a potted fern, the restrooms, to a windowless door with a scanner and a keypad housed on the wall beside it. “Let’s see if we get lucky again.” Derek explains that every keypad—on elevators, routers, gated communities, even ATMs—comes with the same factory default setting—0911—which most administrators are too lazy to change. “Given the lackadaisical security of this place, I’m hoping we’re in business.”
Derek slides the card and then blows on his hand as if it held a set of dice. He punches the four-digit passcode and says, “Come on, baby.” The light blinks red three times. He tries the door and it clunks, locked in its frame. He pinches the bridge of his nose. “We might be here for a very long time.” He wears a backpack and swings it off now to remove his laptop.
Lela peers at the keypad and he says, “Don’t touch that. Leave this to the experts.”
The security card lies on the floor, and she snatches it up and runs it through the slot and punches in four digits, and Derek says, “What are you doing, you idiot? You only get three tries on these things before they lock down for—”
But he never finishes the sentence because the light blinks red twice before turning over to green. The lock thunks open, and she twists the handle and yanks open the door and makes an underhanded motion with her arm as if to say voilà.
Hemingway trots inside the room and she follows him, and Derek lingers in the doorway. The storage center is about the size of a low-ceilinged basketball court. Before her is a cross connect that reminds her of an old operator’s booth, with different colored wires yarning into different ports. And then there are the cabinets—taller than her, winking with lights, a mess of inputs, jacks, cords, USB connectors. Each cabinet is labeled odd or even. Alleys run between them. Fans whir.
Derek remains in the doorway as if he can’t quite believe they’ve made it inside. “But how?” he says, and she says, “An old Luddite hack. You just check to see which keys are smudged from repeated use. I got lucky on the order.”
Derek gives her an appraising smile and wags a finger. “After this is all over, you and me are doing some kamikaze shots. You are my lucky charm!”