The Always War (15 page)

“They’ll catch us!” Tessa panted. “They’ll call out an alarm! They’ll see us on camera!”

But the halls were deserted. They still had time. Gideon led the way, darting around one corner after the other, always seeming to know which way to go.

Maybe all the people who are supposed to be watching the security tapes are out on their coffee breaks,
Tessa thought.
Maybe the cameras aren’t spread out through the whole headquarters. Maybe the psych squad is too busy taking care of the general to call out the alarm yet.

They kept running, Gideon in the lead, Dek behind him, and Tessa bringing up the rear.

Tessa hated being at the back. She kept glancing around every time they turned, just in case someone was catching up with them.

And then she glanced down an intersecting hall as they passed, and saw a man in a light blue uniform.

He was turning toward her, and there wasn’t time to get out of the way. And then, just a second before he would have seen her, he suddenly reversed course and turned in the opposite direction.

“Coming!” he called to someone in the other hallway.

Tessa scrambled to the next corner, her heart pounding fast. Dek and Gideon were several steps ahead of her, and she should have rushed after them. But she couldn’t go on without knowing what lay around that corner. There could be dozens of officers running right toward her now.

She wanted some warning.

Very, very cautiously, she twisted her neck and peeked down the intersecting hall. She dared only to let the smallest possible portion of her face show; she looked with only one eye.

Officials were streaming down the intersecting hall, several yards away. They were obviously searching for something.
But each time they should have looked down the hall toward Tessa—would very likely have
spotted
Tessa—something drew their attention away. A shout. A crackling walkie-talkie. A command barked from further up the line.

Not a single person broke off and headed toward Tessa and Gideon and Dek.

Tessa squinted, confused. It didn’t make sense.

She pulled back out of sight, and looked toward Gideon and Dek. They were far ahead of her now. She dashed after them.

“Guys!” she hissed. “Wait! Listen—”

By the time she’d caught up to them, her brain had reexamined the sight of the stampeding men—and the sight of the blessedly empty hall she was in right now—and she had a completely different question to ask than she’d originally intended.

“What does it mean,” she began, stopping to draw in air that stabbed at her aching, exhausted lungs. She tried again. “What does it mean that they seem to be
letting
us get away?”

“What?” Gideon began. “No—”

“It can’t be,” Dek interrupted. “They wouldn’t.”

But the two of them stopped and peered at Tessa.

“People are looking for us,” Tessa said. “They’re all over the place back there.” She gestured toward the last hallway, now far, far behind them. “Why aren’t any of them looking for us here?”

“Because we outsmarted them,” Gideon said. “We—”

He stopped and looked at Dek.

“Did you come to headquarters for the tests to get into the military academy?” he asked her.

“Yeah, and there were people
everywhere,
” Dek said. “I can’t think of a single hall I walked down where someone wasn’t always bumping into me.”

“And now we’ve been running down halls for fifteen minutes and haven’t seen a single soul?” Gideon said. “Not even someone just standing around shooting the breeze?”

“Exactly,” Dek said. “Tessa’s right. They
have
to be letting us escape on purpose.”

“But why?” Tessa asked.

“Is it the easiest way to make us go away, and keep this quiet?” Gideon asked.

“Or—are they setting us up so they can shoot to kill when we’ve become dangerous criminal masterminds on the run for days?” Dek asked sharply.

Tessa had to clutch the railing that ran along the wall.

They wouldn’t even give us a chance to speak?
Tessa thought.
No chance to ask any more questions? To explain? To … to say good-bye to anyone?

Gideon stepped toward the wall, and for a moment Tessa had the wild thought that he was going to hug her—comfort her. Instead he ran his fingers along the railing.

“This is a risk, but we have to know,” he murmured.

He must have hit some sort of release, because suddenly a portion of the wall turned into a computer screen, with a keyboard sliding out of the railing. Gideon’s fingers flew over the keys, and code flashed by on the screen.

“You can’t do that!” Dek protested. She tried to pull back on his arm. “Now they’ll see exactly where we are!”

Gideon shook her off.

“Relax. I’m using a decoy ID,” he said.

Screenfuls of information flashed by so rapidly Tessa barely got a glimpse of any of it. She didn’t know how Gideon could
read it and judge it and dismiss it all so quickly. But then a map appeared, and Gideon lingered on this sight.

It took Tessa a moment to realize that the map showed the entire military headquarters, each hallway laid out in exact detail.

No wonder I thought it looked like a maze,
Tessa thought.
It is one!

Hundreds of halls lay in concentric circles, intersected by diagonals and the occasional trace of a straight-line grid. Everything seemed to be circling a large dark space in the center. Tessa looked toward the outer portions of the halls, hoping to spot their exact location. Surely they’d been moving toward the exits.

“One minute ago,” Gideon said, changing the scene. “Two minutes ago. Three minutes ago.”

He’d coded the view somehow so they could see the masses of people moving through the halls. The people were indeed in huge crowds throughout the building—throughout the building except for certain narrow hallways left open and free and clear. The open hallways kept changing.

Tessa guessed that those were the hallways that she and Gideon and Dek were moving down, the hallways they’d moved down only moments ago.

“They aren’t letting us go,” Gideon said, squinting at the computer screen. “Not necessarily. They’re just herding everybody else away from us. And keeping us away from …”

He let his voice trail off.

“What are we going to do?” Tessa asked.

“We’re going exactly where they don’t want us,” Gideon said. “There.”

He pointed to the darkened area in the center of the map. Tessa looked for some identifying label, but if one existed, it didn’t show up against the black.

“What is that?” Tessa asked.

Gideon turned and faced her directly. He was looking right into her eyes.

“That,” he said, “is the control room for the entire war. Where all the answers are.”

“And you want to go there? You’re nuts,” Dek said. “Completely insane.”

She started to turn away from him.

Panic surged through Tessa’s brain.

They’re going to split up!
She thought.
I’m going to have to choose! Should I go with Dek or Gideon? Which one’s more likely to survive? Which one am I most likely to survive with?
But there was another thought behind that one:

Which one needs me more?

“Listen,” Gideon said. “I know it sounds counterintuitive. But I’ve been competing in military maneuvers against this computer system ever since I was a little kid. This setup”—he gestured toward the schematic glowing on the wall—“it’s like an invitation personally engraved to me. I always went
for the challenges. Always. The computer’s trying to tell me something. It knows I would see this pattern.”

“But … the people,” Tessa protested. “Won’t the control room be crawling with people? More than anywhere else?”

“No,” Gideon said, shaking his head. “The control room has nothing but computers in it. It’s off-limits to everyone. Except maybe General Kantoff.”

“Then how do you think you can even get in?” Dek asked. She seemed to be making an attempt to humor him.

Gideon raised an eyebrow.

“Because,” he said, “I did it once before.”

Tessa stared at him.

“The video,” she said. “That’s how you found a way to get access to the video of your bombing.”

Gideon nodded and looked down.

Tessa opened her mouth. What could she say?
That’s okay—I forgive you?
Did she? Could she?

While Tessa was still sorting through her choices, Dek stepped forward.

“Are you leaving Tessa somewhere safe or taking her into the control room with you?” Dek asked Gideon.

Gideon looked from one girl to the other.

“She’s safest if she goes with me,” Gideon said.

“Then I’m going too,” Dek said. Under her breath she muttered, “Because I just love being the third wheel!”

Gideon began concentrating on closing out the computer screen on the wall, restoring it to its previous appearance as a blank surface above an ordinary rail. But Tessa pulled Dek aside.

“Why’d you say that about me?” Tessa asked. “Don’t you think I can decide for myself what I’m going to do?”

“Tessa,” Dek said. “Just about every single time Gideon’s had to make a choice, he’s picked the option that he’s thought was safest for
you,
and most likely to keep you alive. I just want a little of that protection for myself!”

Tessa reeled backward. Was that true? Did Gideon care at all?
Why
would he care? Just because he didn’t want another death on his conscience?

“He didn’t try to keep me safe when we were in the field and thought there might be land mines,” Tessa said. “He let me take the risk then!”

“Because you asked him to,” Dek said. “It would have been more dangerous to stand there in the open arguing about it. But every other time, he’s gone out of his way to protect you. Didn’t you notice?”

“No, I—”

“Well, don’t let it go to your head,” Dek said, rolling her eyes. “Just because Gideon thinks this is the safest way, that doesn’t mean any of us are going to get out of here alive.”

Tessa wanted to think about this some more, but there wasn’t time. She had to concentrate on looking around, watching Gideon and Dek for cues as the three of them started off toward the control room. They crept forward slowly now; stealth seemed more important than speed. A couple of times Gideon tapped into other wall computers to see updated maps of the entire headquarters. Tessa could tell by the way the empty hallways changed that they were getting closer and closer to the control room.

Each time, though, the number of people massed around the control room seemed to grow.

“How are we going to get past them all?” Tessa asked in despair as she stared over Gideon’s shoulder at the latest map. “What good is it going to do to get close to the control room if there are fifty people guarding the door?”

“They’re not going to be there when we arrive,” Gideon muttered, as he typed code on the keyboard. “Just wait a second …”

Sure enough, a second later a computerized voice echoed through the building.

“All hands in sector one report to sector three for emergency ongoing search,” the voice said. “Repeat, all sector one guards report to sector three.”

The huge group near the control room began to move away.

Even Dek was looking at Gideon with respect now.

“I guess I could have learned something at the academy after all,” she said.

“This was
not
on the syllabus,” Gideon said.

Dek watched him.

“Not officially,” she muttered.

Gideon waited until all the symbols on the map had moved away from the control room door. Then he shut down the wall computer and beckoned Tessa and Dek along.

“Now,” he whispered. “We’ve got two and a half minutes. If we’re lucky.”

He peeked around a corner, and then the three of them tiptoed forward. The hallway was so completely empty now that every step seemed to echo.

Tessa noticed that, just as the hallways had grown more luxurious near General Kantoff’s office, the hallways near the control room changed too. But they became even more utilitarian, more stripped down. The floor and the walls were a bland rubbery substance. Even the ceiling seemed to be lined with sound-absorbing, dust-killing mats.

They reached a door with a keypad beside the knob.

“Do
not
interrupt,” Gideon said. “I’ll only get one shot at this.”

He took a deep breath, and began coding in numbers. Did he punch in fifty digits? Sixty? Tessa lost track.

And then the door clicked open.

“Quick,” Gideon said, pulling the other two into a dark room. He shut and locked the door behind them, and let out a sigh of relief.

Suddenly a bright light shone in Tessa’s eyes.

“Welcome, Gideon, Tessa, and Dekaterina!” a loud voice boomed out.

Tessa whirled around and reached for the doorknob, but Gideon put a steadying hand on her arm.

“I see you’ve added a retinal scan to your defenses,” he said mildly, speaking to someone beyond her. “It’s lucky that I anticipated that possibility.”

“It’s Dek,” Dek said in a surly tone. “
Not
Dekaterina.”

Tessa decided that if Gideon could talk so calmly about retinal scans—and if Dek could focus on her name, above all else—then the three of them couldn’t be in immediate danger of death. She let go of the doorknob, blinked a couple of times to clear her vision, and looked around.

She expected to see a man standing there—er, maybe a woman? It was a little hard to tell from just the voice.

All she saw were blank white walls. She couldn’t even see a speaker as the source of the voice.

“Who’s talking?” she hissed at Gideon.

“The master computer for the entire military,” Gideon said. “The one that controls everything else.”

“Oh, I’m just the backup,” the voice said in a humble tone. “A repository for lots of useless information that’s also stored elsewhere.”

“Lie number one,” Gideon said in a tight voice. “Or is it just the first lie that I’m sure of?”

“You know there was a time when people debated whether computers would even be capable of telling a lie?” the voice asked. “When that was the hot controversy in AI? That’s ‘artificial intelligence,’ Tessa. You’re looking a bit confused.”