“Hey, you guys are stealing all my thunder,” Bryson complained. “This is my plan, don’t forget. You guys wanted to run like chickens with their heads cut off.”

Sarah snorted, a sound Michael hoped she never repeated. “Yeah, and maybe then we’d be at a coffee shop right now, watching the action from across the street.”

Bryson stopped at the fifty-fourth floor. “This ought to do.” He reached down to twist the leverlike door handle, but it didn’t move.

Locked.

Michael heard someone shouting, but he could barely make out the words. Something about heading to the top floor.

“Locked?” Bryson huffed in frustration. “Seriously? It’s locked?”

“They probably did it from the main controls,” Sarah said, surprisingly calm. “We just need to crack their system.” She had already squeezed her EarCuff, and her NetScreen opened up, hovering in front of her.

“You better do some serious renetworking, then,” Michael said. His nerves were twisting tighter by the second. “Hurry!”

Sarah was focused. She typed furiously at her projected keyboard, swiping fingers at her NetScreen wildly. Michael wanted to say “hurry” again, maybe scream it a few times. It was all he could do to stop himself from joining her on his own NetScreen, but opening just one link was dangerous enough. Kaine seemed to lurk around every corner, both virtual and real.

A woman shouted from below, the words a haunting echo that filled the air. “Three of them! Up there! Heat sensors caught—” She was drowned out by an uptick in the thumping drumbeat of footsteps, the squeak of shoes on the cement.

“Anything?” Bryson asked Sarah.

She frowned but didn’t answer. Michael looked over her shoulder, but it was hard to tell what was going on. All he saw were words and schematics and flashing firewall screens, moving too quickly for him to make sense of it. But he trusted Sarah.

The noises from below got louder. They had to be only a few stories away now. Michael thought he could actually hear them breathing. And their pace had quickened, if anything, the impact of their steps rattling in his brain.

Sarah finally spoke, her voice tight and clipped. “Almost there. One of you has to get into the system. I need help attacking their sensors. Michael, click on!” She hadn’t paused in the slightest working at her controls.

“They’re almost—” he started.

“Do it!” she yelled.

Even as he pinched his EarCuff, he knew the people rushing toward them had heard her. They paused, just for a few seconds, probably motioning to each other for silence. But then they thundered once more up the stairs, maybe two levels below them now.

Michael looked at his screen, hoping they’d finally figured out how to enter the Net without Kaine latching on to them. Sarah had already sent over a series of codes, and he pushed them into action. Just as he was swept into the systems of the building security—a barrage of words and images—he heard the distinct, mechanical click of the door unlocking. The cops, security guards, whoever was coming, were right below them, almost within sight by how close they sounded. Manipulating the system would amount to nothing if there was actual visual confirmation.

Bryson opened the door and stepped through, Sarah right on his heels, barely glancing up from her screen. Michael followed, eyes fixed to his own screen, knowing Bryson would close the door for them. It was dark inside, the light from the stairwell cut off with the click of the door closing. The lock engaged immediately, Sarah working it from her end. From what he’d seen in the system so far, Michael could tell that everything in the building was centrally controlled. That was to their advantage.

He jumped when someone started pounding on the door, working at the door handle.

“I guess they saw us,” Bryson said with a deflated voice.

“I took over the system,” Sarah responded, sounding for all the world like she’d done something as simple as flushing a toilet. “It’ll hold them off for a little while.”

“It won’t stop them from breaking the stupid door down,” Bryson replied.

“Good point.” Lit by the glow of her NetScreen, she turned and ran down the dark hallway. Bryson followed, as did Michael, barely looking up from his work, trying to get a feel for the building’s security programs.

Behind him, their pursuers started ramming the door with something very heavy.

Sarah wound her way through the labyrinth of hallways like someone who’d worked there for years, following the floor plans on her screen. She stopped in front of the elevators, red emergency lights glowing from the ceiling like demonic eyes. The booming impact of the battering ram seemed to shake the entire building.

“What’re those people using?” Bryson asked as Sarah worked away on her screen. “Did they bring a freaking tree up the stairs?”

Michael didn’t answer, waiting patiently for Sarah to tell him what to do. She finally did.

“Okay, here’s the plan,” she said. Michael had no idea how she could be so calm, as if she were about to lay out the next few plays in a backyard football game. “Bryson, push the down button. Michael, I’ll focus on the heat sensors, make them think we got on and went down a few floors. We can’t go all the way down or we’ll blow our only advantage when they see that no one’s on the elevator when it opens up.”

“What should I do?” Michael asked.

“You need to shut down the camera system. Destroy it completely. I can mess with where they’re seeing heat signatures, but there’s no way we can fake the video. Just wipe the whole thing out, every camera in the building.”

“Will do,” he answered, already digging through the system to find the location of those controls. Sweat trickled down his face, and the constant thump against the door in the distance felt like a hammer in his head.

The elevator dinged and the middle car opened.

“We all need to step inside for a sec,” Sarah said, doing it first. “Bryson, hold the doors open until I’m ready. I think I’ve almost got it figured out.” Michael had never seen her fingers fly at such a lightning-fast speed. Her whole face glistened from the effort, and the tendons in her neck stood out against her skin like straws, as if every one of them were about to snap from stress.

“Got it!” Sarah yelled, realizing too late that yelling wasn’t the best idea right then. “Push the thirtieth-floor button,” she said quietly.