“Do not tell me what my daughter wants,” she said, though he could see her processing everything he’d told her. She appraised him with a searching, skeptical eye. She said, “You have one night. Understand? After that, it’s the police, the Imagineers, and the doctors.”
“Okay,” he said. “Thank you.”
“One night. And I’ll tell you something: this is going to be the longest night of my life.”
Tears ran down her cheeks. Her lips trembled. She looked so afraid.
“For what it’s worth, she’s gonna be okay.”
The woman sobbed.
“Go to lunch,” she said, in her motherly way.
Lunch? Finn thought. “Right,” he said, knowing he would head straight to his locker and start sending texts.
* * *
Wlla=SBS Return her asap
Phones weren’t allowed in class, but you could use them outside once school was dismissed. The workaround for the students was to keep their phones on vibrate in their lockers, where they would check them between classes without being seen. For the ten minutes between classes, the hallways were now less crowded. Instead of mass confusion, a hundred kids had their faces planted inside their lockers as they sent and received texts. Bullies and jocks would take plastic rulers and run down the hallway slapping bottoms, an unpleasant but tolerated punishment for the right to communicate. If a teacher approached, the phone was replaced by a textbook, and the locker was closed. It was almost impossible for them to bust a kid.
When Philby read Finn’s text, he believed it a mistake, or worse, a prank sent by one of the green-eyes. He’d double checked the number: it was Finn.
Willa couldn’t be stuck in the Syndrome because, like Charlene, he’d never crossed her over. More to the point: he’d been monitoring the server’s bandwidth. He had an alarm set. There had been no alarm last night—therefore, Willa had not crossed into the Parks as her hologram. But then he remembered finding Elvis asleep on his laptop. Late for the bus, he’d pushed Elvis off and had shut the laptop’s lid, scooped it off his desk, and stuffed it into his backpack without a second thought.
He felt sick to his stomach. When he’d reopened the laptop at school had the DHI monitoring program been open? He couldn’t remember. He was the last line of defense against the Overtakers. Had he messed up? Had he failed Willa, of all people?
He raced down the hall to Hugo’s locker, his head ready to explode. Willa?
“I’ve gotta borrow your laptop,” he said. He wasn’t asking.
“No, you don’t,” Hugo said. “I need it for science.” Hugo didn’t even look like Hugo. Something was different about him. But everything looked different: The school hallway seemed about two feet wide. Philby’s world was all backward.
“I’ll trade you. You can use mine,” he offered. “You have a data card. I don’t. I need Internet access. I can’t be on the school server. Please!”
“What’s up?”
“Keepers stuff.”
“Such as?”
“Later. I gotta do this now. I’ve got a class. Please.”
Hugo exchanged laptops.
Philby hurried into the boys’ room, locked himself in a stall, and set up Hugo’s computer on his lap while sitting on a toilet seat. He used Hugo’s wireless data card to connect to the Internet, entered the URL for the back door into the DHI server, and typed his log-in password.
He navigated to the page where he could manually cause a Return—the same set of instructions that were used for the fob when inside the Parks—and typed from memory Willa’s twenty-six-character ID string.
The window flashed. He’d lost the handshake.
He double-checked the data card connection—all was good—and reentered the URL, ready to start over. He reached the log-on page and reentered his password.
INCORRECT PASSWORD: ACCESS DENIED
Believing he must have typed too fast, he tried again.
INCORRECT PASSWORD: ACCESS DENIED
Now he had real problems: a third failure in a row would mean he’d be blocked from trying to enter a password for twenty-four hours. Willa didn’t have twenty-four hours. Wondering if it might be a problem with Hugo’s data card, Philby decided that the only thing to do was to get to the DHI server in person and make an attempt at the password from there.
He texted Finn:
major problems. password not workin. call emergency meeting
The rest of the school day dragged on impossibly slowly. Several times Philby debated skipping, but he’d never done that in his life and he had no desire to be caught and grounded for eternity. That would make matters even worse for everyone. Especially him. He traded back computers with Hugo before seventh period, thanking him.