Wired (32 page)

We ran to the spot under the air duct vent and stared up at it. Kitty turned her head and glared at me. “What now, MacGyver?”

The cords were with us, and we were down here. There was no way we'd be able to get back up.
Nice going, Rox
. I unknotted an extension cord and put it in my bag. Then I pulled out Leo's smartie. I was aware that I was surrendering my team-leader status by doing this, but I had to call. Mason would help. Except . . . I didn't know how to reach him. This was Leo's smartie, and he didn't seem to have Mason's number programmed into it. I was on my own. And I was responsible for Kitty to boot.

Flash-flash-flash
. Kitty flinched from the strobing blue light on the wall, her lips moving silently.

“Everything's under control,” I said. “The best way to avoid detection is to do everything calmly. Like we're supposed to be here. We're just going to step out the door and walk to the exit. I have a reasonable memory of the floor plan, and whoever stops you from leaving a place?” I didn't look too closely at my logic.

Kitty followed me without a word. I stuck my hand out and slowly wrapped my fingers around the door handle. “If it blows up, it blows up,” Kitty whispered.

I yanked the door open. “Aaaaiiiigh!” Kitty and I yelled simultaneously. A woman dressed like a flight attendant in a light blue uniform with a perky floral blouse stood in the archway. I looked right. I looked left. No troops, no guns, no handcuffs. The only thing that came close to being that scary were the thick, flesh-colored stockings the woman wore, which looked like they'd come out of a bin marked
CIRCA
1974.

“Mr. Kaysar will see you now,” she said, super-friendly.

I tried to act as casual as possible. “We don't have an appointment. We'll come back another time.”

“Mr. Kaysar will see you now,” the woman repeated.

“I'm so sorry, but we need to go.”

The woman blinked rapidly. It was odd. Then I realized:
She's not real
. Did they have robots here?

“Mr. Kaysar will see you now,” the woman repeated a third time, now with a noticeable edge in her voice. Her hand swept out before her, indicating the hallway deeper into the heart of the building.

“Um . . .” I looked at Kitty. She shook her head, a frightened, helpless look on her face, of no help at all.

If this woman was a robot of some kind, she'd maybe respond better to a direct order. “Take us to the exit,” I said, indicating the opposite direction. “We want to leave this place.”

She cocked her head, smiling, probably processing. “Please follow me. Mr. Kaysar is expecting you.”

“You said Leonardo Kaysar was a bad man,” Kitty hissed. “A bad man, that's what you said.”

“Mr. Kaysar will see you now.”

Kitty turned on the robot, and I thought she might smack her. I wouldn't have blamed her. However, we had to focus; Leonardo Kaysar knew where we were—
exactly
where we were—and he was reeling us in the way he'd done that very first time in the agency.

In short, if I didn't come up with something, we were totally screwed.

“What are we doing, Roxy?” Kitty was definitely losing it. “We need a plan. Maybe it was okay before, when we didn't have a plan because the plan was to get here, but now we need one.” She moistened her lips, eyes like saucers. “We need a plan, Roxanne.”

I stared at her for a moment, then turned to the robot. “Take us to the bathroom.”

The robot's face brightened. Apparently bathroom trips did not go against her directive. “Right this way,” she said, hand waving to the right.

Kitty gave a quiet thumbs-up as we veered away from the direction of “Mr. Kaysar is expecting you.”

We reached the restroom, and our robot clasped her hands in front of her. “At your convenience,” she said. Which I guess was a polite way to say, “Take as much time as you need, because even if you have the stomach flu, I'll still be here when you come out.”

We really needed her to go away. “Uh . . . bring us
coffee,” I said, then quickly amended it to the most complicated version of that old standby I could muster. “Make that a half-caff, part half-and-half, part skim, one shot of vanilla syrup, one shot of hazelnut syrup, grande latte. Please let it cool to room temperature.”

“And I'll have an iced tea,” Kitty said.

I elbowed her.

“I won't have an iced tea. I'll have—”

“An Italian dark roast, one-percent milk, extra foam, shot of . . . almond syrup . . . cappuccino. And please let it cool to room temperature,” I interrupted.

“Of course!” the robot said . . . and she left.

“She left,” I said.

“She left,” Kitty echoed a little curtly, probably annoyed that I hadn't actually let her have an iced tea.

“Let's go.” I pushed into the restroom, Kitty right on my heels. We both froze. Inside, a glass wall divided into lateral segments provided an excellent view of the city. Trouble was, I'd forgotten how high up we were. It's not like we could climb out a window and into an alley.

Both of us stood there, looking down, our noses making unsightly splotches on the glass. I pulled away and studied the glass more carefully, noticing a pair of red levers on the bottom of one segment.

Kitty squeaked. I groaned. I immediately thought of vertigo, which probably made vertigo more likely. This was where one of the boys usually came in. This was where Mason should say, “Let me take care of this.” Or Leo could say something to the effect of,
“Just follow me, Roxanne.” Except the boys weren't here, and I refused to succumb to the goddamn desire to be saved. Basically, all I had was my friend Kitty, who depended on me. And what she said was, “I'm gonna barf. Do something.”

“You're not going to barf.”

“If you make us go out there, I will.”

It looked pretty slick. Even if we popped out through the window, there was nothing to hold on to.

“May I help you?”

I looked over my shoulder. The robot was standing there with a tray, apparently one hell of a barista.

“No, thank you.”

“Please enjoy your coffee.” She held out the tray. Kitty and I each took a cup. “Please follow me. Mr. Kaysar is expecting you.”

I stared at the robot; then I took the cup out of Kitty's hand and dumped both hers and mine in the sink. The robot's expression switched abruptly from happy to concerned. I chose to ignore her displeasure and, instead, wheeled around and unhooked the red levers in the window. I rammed the panel with my shoulder, then bounced back as it easily withstood my assault.

Kitty stood looking between me and the robot. “She's not happy,” she reported. I kept shouldering the wall, trying not to look.

Wham! Ouch
.

Wham! Ouch
.

“She's doing something. She's doing something!”

Wham! Ouch
. “What's she doing?”

“I don't know! Contacting her planet or something.”

Wham! Wham!
“You want to give me a hand here, Kitty?” I said, beginning to get pissy.

“What, like this?” She pulled a third lever on the top that I'd missed.

Wham!
This time I nearly went flying outside after the panel. We watched the transparent slice catch the wind, twist horizontally. Of course, once we were standing there in an open escape route, I didn't know what came next.

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

“Um.”

“What are you staring at?”

“The blue light that's flashing on your face.”

We wheeled around, and the robot was gone. So odd, the way the future was silent. No alarms sounded. The robot hadn't yelled. The pedestrians had kept at a murmur. But silence didn't make circumstances any less deadly; it fooled you into thinking there was no urgency.

I wasn't fooled. “We need to get out of here. Now.”

The blue light was flashing on Kitty's gaping face. Wind blew her hair, and I knew she had frozen up. That's what I wanted to do, but someone had to talk us through, and Kitty couldn't even talk.

I took her hand and pulled her over to the escape hole and pointed at the ledge that was just beside us. “My friend,” I said. “This is going to be really hard. And really fucking scary. But we can do it.”

She made a gargling sound. I grabbed her face in my hands and made her focus. “You
have
to.”

She blinked back frightened tears and said, “Okay, Roxy.”

I took another look outside. To the left, heavy cables
linked decorative transparent slats that ran down the length of the building. I stepped onto the ledge, reached out, and grabbed the closest cable, trying not to let Kitty's whimpering psych me out. The metal was cold and prickly. Someone tell me what to do, I thought.

With my hand gripping the wire, the slats moved easily closer. I took the extension cord from my bag, leaned back inside, and rigged a loop around Kitty's waist. “It's a really good knot, Kitty. It's a really good knot. You'll be safe.”

She didn't even try. She didn't drop her frozen stare from my eyes. I moved forward along the ledge. Kitty gasped as the cord between us tugged her forward.

She frantically scrabbled her fingers across the glass wall, trying to get a grip, but not yet stepping out. “I can't hold on,” she finally said, stricken. She'd figured out what I knew: if she pulled back, if she moved away from the window, she'd take me with her. And it'd be a much trickier negotiation back through the window. I might not make it. And if I plunged, she'd plunge.

“You go, I go,” I whispered urgently. “I go, you go. Let's get out of this together.” I held out my hand and wriggled my fingers. “Just take my hand, Kitty. Take my hand.”

Through the transparent glass I couldn't see any distinct movement, but I wondered how long it would be before Leo called in the troops. He would eventually get tired of waiting for us.

“Take my hand, Kitty.”

Her tears finally spilled over. I'd never seen her this undone. She couldn't bring herself to take my hand and step out, and I had to force her. I leaned forward, grabbed her hand, and pulled. She came out, teetered, saw what would happen if she continued to resist, and jumped, landing on the strip. I jumped too. We went sailing off to the side, seesawing back and forth as we held on to the cables for dear life.

When the swaying settled, we started moving from one slat down to the next. They were close enough to reach between, but not easily. We'd made it down only a small distance before my palms were cut from gripping the metal so hard, my knees were killing me from balancing on the slats, and my brain was aching from the amount of psychology required to keep Kitty from just giving up and pitching us over the side.

I looked down. A man wearing a suit was actually on the side of the building, ascending along a maintenance ladder. Looking down below us, I recognized a second figure hanging off the same ladder. He flapped his arms and waved up at me. Mason Merrick.

Leo chasing; Mason below. A redux of that first and fateful day when I walked out to the 7-Eleven. Me in the middle, Leonardo and Mason after me.

It occurred to me again that Mason and Leo had only so much control over the wires of fate, no matter what they were able to do. They had only so much control. I'd always wondered, but probably the only reason that they hadn't killed each other
was because their own lives were so intertwined; there was a lot of history between them to unravel. Leo wouldn't dare sacrifice his ability to fix his family legacy.

Kitty wasn't making a sound. Scratch that; she wasn't forming actual words, but there was a kind of a strange humming that came out of her mouth with every exhalation of breath. This
so
wasn't her fight. I looked down at the undulating waves of motoway, roller coaster–like tracks threading through one another above the pedestrian clogged city below, and hooked one arm around the cable. “Hang in there, Kitty,” I said, using bent knees to brace myself as I searched Leo's smartie. There was a preset I liked—

ROXY'S APARTMENT-MASON
's—along with other variations. Giving a sigh of relief, I pulled the punch from my bag.

“Still hanging on. Literally,” Kitty whispered.

“That's good. Keep joking. Whatever you feel you need to do.”

“Shut up, Roxanne.”

“Okay.”

I looked up. I looked down. I looked back; I looked out. “Well. We could continue down this way, try to crash back into the building through one of these other windows, or climb back up. Any of those strike your fancy?” I asked.

“Would this be the wrong time to ask if I can just go home?” Kitty whispered.

I managed a shaky laugh. “I'm working on it.”

Crouched on her knees and holding on to her cable
with both hands as we swayed, she said, “I don't think either of us will be in the mood to cook when we get home. I'll order a pizza—an extra large if you think you and . . . whoever is still alive and not stalking you at the end of all of this is going to be back in time.”

Hilarious. Would I be back from the future in time for dinner?

“Thanks, Kitty. Thanks for everything.”

“You don't need me anymore.”

I know
. I smiled.

“We hate good-byes,” Kitty said.

We stood there swaying high above the city, and, after a moment, I untied the knot linking us together, reached out with the punch and sent her home. It was time.

As she disappeared, everything bled to gray. The world shuddered around me. I blinked once, and everything went black. I turned my head away from the force of the hot wind that slammed into my body, but I couldn't dodge it.

The slat on which I stood went careening sideways, and as it started to arc back toward the building, I saw that I would have an opportunity to get back on solid ground. Well, on solid ladder. I double-checked the strap on the messenger bag and inched to a better position.