“It’s in there,” she said.
Michael didn’t hesitate. He stepped past Sarah and Bryson, directly onto a catwalk that circled the room. Below his feet he could see that he’d entered what Sarah had said looked like a silo on the map—a round room that seemed to descend for miles. The drop took his breath away for a moment, and the space itself was jarring. The pulsing light, the smell of ozone and metal. There was machinery everywhere: walls lined with circuits and buttons and switches and wires and pipes, all covered in blinking lights.
And that pulsating hum that sounded more like a heart now that he was inside and near the source.
Vwoomp.
Vwoomp.
Vwoomp.
Vwoomp.
Vwoomp.
Michael noticed Bryson and Sarah at his back and he jumped. It was as if he’d been temporarily hypnotized by the surroundings, but they hardly registered him, staring down into the humming throng of sights themselves.
“Okay,” Michael whispered, mostly to himself, as he got down to his knees and pulled the bag off his shoulder. He placed it carefully on the metal grid of the catwalk and unzipped it, opening its top wide. Then he reached in and pulled the Lance from its resting place, handling it as if one wrong move might set it off and kill them all.
It’s not real, he told himself. None of this is real. How strange was that? After all the years, after all the gaming, after everything—for the first time it hit him just how odd life in the Sleep could be. How much their world had changed, a world that wasn’t even really his.
He placed the Lance on the catwalk just as Sarah said, “Uh-oh.”
He looked up at her. “What?”
“I think our luck finally ran out,” she said, staring at her NetScreen. A bead of sweat trickled down her cheek. “I’ve got heat sigs all along the outside of the building. At least a dozen, maybe more.”
Bryson clenched his jaw and shook his head. Michael felt a roll of panic in his chest.
“Whoever it is, they’re coming inside,” Sarah said.
Michael’s mind switched off. There was no time for thought, only instinct. No chance of turning back. Only forward now.
Place and trigger the Lance.
Kill Kaine.
Whatever happened after that didn’t matter.
Settling his mind to the task, he picked up the device carefully and examined it. He found the keypad, flipped up the cover, typed in the code. His friends stood patiently beside him, knowing better than to urge him to hurry.
A glance showed him that there was a ladder on the other side of the room. It led from the catwalk into the depths of the machinery. He headed that way.
“Our visitors are spread out across the bottom floor of the building,” Sarah said, amazingly calm. Michael knew she was doing it for his benefit. She had to keep him informed, but she’d try her best to make it sound like she was giving him directions to bake cookies. “They are clearly in search mode, scattered in some kind of military formation.”
Okay, Michael thought, not so much like baking cookies. He made it to the ladder, leaned over the railing to search the maze of machines and wires and tubes. Those pulsing, blinking lights that seemed to be trying to lull him to sleep. Kaine’s central programming appeared to descend to the very depths of the Earth, a tunnel straight to hell. An apt description. And Michael was ready to blow it up.
Sarah continued her play-by-play. “They’ve started up both flights of stairs—the ones we used and a set on the other side of the building. A few are also coming up the elevator. They appear to have divided into groups of three. They’re human, though, by the looks of it—not KillSims.”
They were coming. They were coming fast.
“Do they have weapons?” Bryson asked.
“Um, I think so,” Sarah responded, her voice hard to read.
Michael had turned around, his back to his friends, and lowered his foot until he felt the first rung of the ladder. He cradled the Lance in his right arm as he gripped the railing tightly with his left hand.
Vwoomp.
Vwoomp.
Vwoomp.
The pulsating sound filled his entire body.
Vwoomp.
Vwoomp.
Vwoomp.
He climbed down another rung, and then another. He kept going, being careful to hold on tightly to the Lance. His back scraped an outcropping of circuitry behind him—the whole place was a jumble of metal and wire. He took another rung down, his palms beginning to sweat.
Sarah and Bryson had walked around the catwalk at some point and were standing directly above him.
“They’re almost to the third floor—on the stairs,” Sarah called down. “The ones on the elevator—they’re here. The doors are opening now.”
Michael had gone down a few more rungs while she spoke; he paused and looked up. Sarah was calm, Bryson a nervous wreck, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
Vwoomp.
Vwoomp.