Inside

by Maria V. Snyder

  “Not good.” Horrible in fact.

  “No.” The clicking keys filled the silence. “Okay. I found the question.”

  “And?” I prompted.

  “I don’t know the answer,” Logan said.

  I reached out but managed to stop my hands from wrapping around his neck. “What is the question?”

  “Oh. It’s the end and the beginning. What is it?”

  Chapter 14

  “A circle?” Riley suggested. He had recovered from his shock about Gateway, and was now intrigued by the mystery question. “A circle doesn’t have an end or a beginning.”

  Logan moved his hands over the keyboard.

  “Wait,” I said. “How many other passwords have you tried?”

  “Three so we have seven guesses before the computer shuts down.”

  “A circle is good, but let’s think this through logically.” I swiped hair from my face and tucked it behind my ear. “The question has to refer to something about Inside. We know it is an object or place and not a person’s name.”

  “We do?” Logan asked.

  “Yes, the question contains the word it and what. It’s the end and the beginning. What is it? A person would be who, and a place would be where.”

  Riley sat in the remaining chair, and covered his eyes with a hand as if blocking out all distractions. “Everything in here is squares, rectangles and cubes. No circles.”

  I settled on the couch. The living room was too small to pace. Searching my memory for circles, I tried to find a connection. “If you think about it, everything in here is a circle. The air circulates throughout Inside, going through the filters and purifiers. Same with the water and sewage. Reused and recycled, nothing wasted.”

  “Should I try circle?” Logan’s fingers hovered over the keyboard.

  “Yes.” I held my breath.

  “Nope. Try again.”

  Damn. I repeated the question in my mind. It sounded familiar as if I read it or heard it before. Maybe when I was living in the care facility. But there had been so many weeks of lessons in math, biology, science.… “Water?”

  “How does it fit?” Riley asked.

  “It has a cycle. Evaporation, condensation, freezing and melting as it changes from a gas to a liquid to a solid. Water is a vital resource for Inside, without it we couldn’t exist.”

  “So is air and food.” He considered. “Air has a cycle. We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. The plants in hydroponics absorb the carbon dioxide and release oxygen. Growing food is also a circle with eating and producing. Think of the sheep.”

  “Sheepy?” I wished he were there. “Would Sheepy know the answer?” I joked.

  He removed his hand and shot me a smile. “No. Sheep eat grass and vegetables and produce manure which fertilizes the grass and plants in hydroponics. Another cycle.”

  Logan tried, water, air and food. “No. Three guesses left.”

  Thinking along those lines, I realized a hundred different aspects of our life were cycles, including people. Perhaps the answer wasn’t a representation of a circle, but more a concrete object or mathematical symbol. “Zero is circular. Isn’t the symbol for infinity a sideways eight?”

  “That’s assuming the answer is a circle of some kind,” Riley said.

  “Can you think of another answer?”

  “No, but to try and connect it to a mathematical number or concept…” He threw his hands up. “There could be a million different possibilities. I wouldn’t—”

  “Stop!” One of his words triggered a memory. I replayed the incident in my mind, searching for reasons why it wouldn’t work. Certainty bloomed in my chest. I knew the answer.

  Logan and Riley stared at me, waiting.

  “The millionth week. That’s the answer.” I remembered the assembly and the old man’s words: the millionth week isn’t the end, it’s the beginning.

  Riley groaned and the hope dimmed in Logan’s eyes.

  “That’s just a myth to scare people. Week one million will be like all the others. Its importance doesn’t exist,” Riley said.

  “People said the same thing about Gateway.” I gestured to Logan. “Yet we’re one password away from the location.”

  Logan met my gaze. “How should I type it? Week one million or the millionth week?”

  “Try both.”

  Unable to remain seated, Riley and I joined Logan at the computer. I held on to the back of his chair as he typed the millionth week and hit Enter. The words disappeared and the password prompt returned. This time he entered week one million.

  “Are you sure?” Logan’s finger was poised over the key.

  I let go of the chair and clutched Riley’s arm. “Yes.” I wanted to turn away, but I watched the screen. It turned black then lines of text raced across, matching my heart’s rhythm. I couldn’t read the words; they kept jumping up as more white lines streaked on the screen.

  “Logan?” I didn’t care if I used his name.

  “Yes! Got it!”

  I wrapped my arms around Logan’s neck and kissed him on the cheek, then turned and hugged Riley. Caught up in the excitement, he leaned back and picked me off the floor, spinning me around.

  Logan rattled off a bunch of numbers.

  “How do I find it?” I asked, still dizzy and thrilled Riley’s arms supported me.

  “Oh, right.” Furious typing and a crude schematic of Inside appeared, showing a cube with a pulsing dot near the bottom of one side. “It’s along the west wall in Quad G1. That’s hydroponics.”

  “You’d think the workers would notice it,” Riley said.

  “Maybe it’s one of those near-invisible hatches Trella found,” Logan said.

  “Near-invisible?” Riley looked down at me.

  He held me close. Tall and with his strong arms wrapped around me, I knew I should extricate myself from his embrace, but a part of me wanted to stay. “Some doors are hard to see. Perhaps the vines have grown over it,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah. Lots of vines,” Logan said.

  Annoyed, Riley’s muscles tightened. “Your friend’s a lousy liar. What are you hiding?” When I hesitated, he moved his hands to my shoulders and pushed me back so he could see me better. “Enough. The location…the existence of Gateway is huge. No. It’s way bigger than that…it’s a whole other phenomenon. The repercussions are going to be unimaginable if it is really there and it works. I need to know everything right now, or I’m going to…”

  “To what? Report me? You risk being implicated.”

  “No. I’m going to follow you. Yes, even through those vents until I know the whole story.”

  Logan eyed him. “You’ll get stuck.”

  “It’s ridiculous. He’s not going to do it,” I said.

  “Then I won’t let you leave until you tell me.” Riley straightened, trying to look bigger.

  “Two against one,” I said. “And I’m armed.” I rested my hand on my tool belt.

  He deflated and dropped his hands, but, by the gleam in his eyes, I knew he hadn’t given up.

  “How about in exchange for Sheepy?”

  “Really? You’d give me Sheepy?” I called his bluff.


  “Yes.”

  He meant it, and my reaction surprised me. I would have loved to have the little sheep. “No. Sheepy stays with his mama.” I put my hand up to stop Riley. “Just let me think.”

  As Riley had said, discovering Gateway’s existence was a whole other realm of problems and possibilities. If caught right now, Riley would be recycled just for knowing about it. Too late to save him. Remembering his lecture about choices and sacrifices didn’t make me feel any better.

  “You’d better sit down,” I said. “It’s a long story.”

  “So Gateway wouldn’t be on the wall in hydroponics, but on the real outer Wall?” Riley asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And no one knows about this except the three of us?”

  “As far as I know. I’ve never seen anyone in the Gap, but it’s possible high-ranking uppers could know or find it in the computer.”

  “Complete and detailed diagrams and blueprints of Inside have been deleted,” Logan said. He had been searching through the computer, trying to gather as much information as he could about the Controllers.

  “Are you sure? Wouldn’t the engineers need them?” Riley asked.

  “Each system—water, air, electrical and heating—has its own blueprints. Let’s see…if I put them…together.” Logan typed. “Still not showing Trella’s Gap or Gateway. Lot’s of other stuff’s missing, too. Historical records and logs have been wiped clean up until…week 132,076.”

  Almost one hundred and fifty centiweeks ago.

  “The first log is written by Admiral Peter Trava. He mentions saboteurs wielding magnets and trying to destroy Inside. He says they were stopped with no loss of life, but with major damage to the computer, causing data loss.” Logan scrolled through a few more pages. “Something’s wrong. The deletion was too clean for a magnet.”

  “Do you know when the files were deleted?” I asked.

  “The same week Admiral Pete’s entry was written, which was only fifteen centiweeks ago. Whoa! It’s bogus.”

  “What happened that week?” I asked.

  “Could have been when a few of the uppers tried to get into protected files on the system,” Riley said. “My dad told me about it. Maybe they got too close to the truth, and the Travas decided to delete all the data prior to their takeover and write the bogus entry to explain it.”

  “Not all the data,” Logan said. “There are about ten hidden and protected files in the system. I bet the Controllers don’t know about them. The location of Gateway was one of them. Maybe the dissenters buried these files. They’re all password protected.” He clucked and hummed like a child with a brand-new toy.

  “Could those be the files Domotor wanted?” Riley asked me.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Trella, what’s your birth week?” An odd tone shook Logan’s voice.

  “It’s 145,487. Why?”

  “And the hour?”

  “Why do you need to know?” I asked.

  “Humor me.”

  “Hour four point fifteen.”

  He whistled.

  “Logan, tell me.”

  “There’s a file here named with your birth week and hour.”

  “What?” I moved closer to the monitor. He pointed.

  “Why did you think it referred to me?”

  “It says, ‘For my daughter born on…’ It’s one of the ten files Domotor or whoever thought was important, so I just guessed it might have something to do with you.”

  “Can you open it?”

  “Nope. Just like the others. The password question is ‘Smile and show me your pearly teeth. How many do you have?’” He glanced at me. “Count your teeth.”

  “That’s too easy, and what if I lost one?”

  “Have you?”

  “No, but I think it’s referring to something else.” The words pearly teeth had jumped out at me. My sole possession. The comb with the pearls. The answer was the number of teeth on my comb.

  “And it would be…”

  “Something I don’t have with me, so we can’t answer the question anyway.”

  “It’s getting late. The next shift starts in an hour,” Riley said.

  I looked at the clock in surprise. So engrossed in our puzzle, I hadn’t kept track.

  “I just need a couple minutes.” Logan’s fingers danced on the keyboard. “I want to put these files where I can get to them from the lower level computers.”

  Anxious to get moving, I fidgeted behind Logan.

  Riley also had a worried look. “Are you sure all this time you spent on the computer hasn’t been recorded or traced?”

  “Yep. I’m ghosting. No port. No problem.”

  “What does that mean?” Riley asked.

  “Uh…just that I can get into the system without a port.”

  Logan was a bad liar, but his cry of alarm distracted us both.

  “What now?” I really didn’t want to know the answer.

  “Gateway’s going to suck a lot of energy when it opens. Plus it has a command to alert all of Inside’s systems. We’re going to need people in the network to cover the call,” Logan said.

  Yet another problem. Nothing was simple.

  “I can cover electrical,” Riley said, “but we’ll need to recruit other uppers to help.” He considered. “There are a number of uppers who supported Domotor and have been lying low since his capture. But if I tell them we found Gateway, they’ll probably laugh in my face.”

  “But you believed us,” I said.

  “I saw Logan using level-ten clearance, and I saw the file. This is a huge risk for the uppers. They don’t know me and they won’t trust me. But they’ll trust Domotor. Can you get him up here?”

  He would probably do all right pulling himself through the air shaft, but he couldn’t go between levels. “Only if we can use the lift.”

  “Too exposed. Domotor is too recognizable in the upper levels. His capture and punishment was discussed for weeks. He wouldn’t be able to blend in up here, and I doubt we could get him from the lift to a room without being seen.” Riley rubbed his face. “Also I’m not one hundred percent sure the people I’m thinking about are really supporters. My dad might know.”

  More problems. More people involved. To me, trusting uppers felt like the wrong thing to do, but we needed them. “Domotor would know who to trust. I can get the names from him and some kind of code word or something you can say to them to prove he’s involved.”

  “That could work. But I’ll need you here, too.”

  “Why?”

  “To prove the scrubs are serious about opening Gateway,” Riley said.

  “And if I get into these hidden files,” Logan said, “the uppers might have a way to bypass the Controllers and regain control.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Riley smiled.

  Uneasiness swirled in my stomach as I steadied the ladder for Logan. I hated having to trust uppers. I trusted Riley, but he was different. Or was he?

  “Thanks for your help,” I said to Riley as Logan climbed the table.

  “How soon can you get me those names?”

  I needed to take Logan back, then go to Domo
tor’s hideout. “Four hours give or take an hour.”

  “I’ll meet you in our room during my break.” Riley grasped my sore elbow to help me up the table.

  I yelped and he let go.

  “Sorry.” Riley watched me rub the tender spot.

  “Must have bumped it.”

  Logan called for help. His legs dangled from the vent. I pushed him into the air shaft. When his feet disappeared, I reached for the vent.

  A click slide sounded.

  “Get down,” Riley ordered.

  I didn’t hesitate. He pulled the stepladder from the table, folded it and leaned it against the wall. In two strides he sat at the computer and whispered, “Stand behind me. Follow my lead.” He rested his fingers on the keys.

  The door opened as I reached Riley’s chair. We both glanced at the man entering the room. He stopped short when he spotted us.

  “Hi, Dad,” Riley said. “You’re back early.”

  Chapter 15

  The surprise on Riley’s father’s face transformed into a smile. He had the same build as his son, but his thinning hair was brown and cut short. Riley’s blue eyes must have been inherited from his mother. His father’s brown eyes and beak nose gave him a friendly and inquisitive appearance.

  “I see we have a visitor,” he said as he stepped into the room and closed the door.

  “Dad, this is Ella, the student I’ve been training,” Riley said. “Ella, this is my father, Jacob.”

  “Hello, Ella, I’ve heard so much about you.”

  I shot Riley a look.

  His father chuckled. “Don’t worry. Nothing bad. Riley says you’re a quick learner and coming from him that’s high praise.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Something happen?” Riley asked his dad.

  “No. I had to work through my breaks, so my supervisor let me leave a little early.” He glanced at the clock. “Shouldn’t you be reporting for duty? Or are you training Ella here?” He smiled broadly with a gleam in his eyes.