“No,” Finn said.
They agreed to preset their Wave Phones to text the other with a call for help and to keep their phones in hand so they could fire off the text as quickly as they spotted trouble. Finn held up his phone as if it were a pact between them, a common bond, the thing that linked them.
She held up hers, and Finn thought of swords and knights and epic battles and how in their own way, now as holograms and with Wave Phones, they weren’t so very different.
“Be safe,” he said.
She nodded. She looked sad and close to tears.
A few minutes later, having stepped through the emergency door into the next section of the engine deck, his head began to clear. Or maybe it was that his memory took hold. Or it was even possible that something visual triggered the clarity. But whatever the case, the haze slowly lifted. And he remembered.
It wasn’t that he knew this place, was simply familiar with it, but that he’d been here. Right here. Right where he was standing.
Which was impossible, but nonetheless, somehow true.
He felt a tingle sweep through him. Reached out to touch a nearby pipe, and his hand made contact. Tried his hand again. This time, he swiped through the pipe. He still had full control of 2.0.
His eyes staying with the telltale blue Ethernet cables neatly strung to his right, he moved toward the stern, the sounds of machinery growing so loud that he felt it in his ankles, shins, and even his jawbone.
His Wave Phone buzzed. A text from Philby.
75’ from stern, starboard side
There was yet another bulkhead thirty feet in front of him. Yet another safety door. He estimated Philby’s location point just beyond that door.
Confident that Philby had texted them both, Finn nonetheless resent it to Willa along with the words:
going in
He stepped through to the final section. Up ahead, an eighteen-inch-diameter steel driveshaft spun on bushings. It looked to be fifty feet long, mounted into a monstrous motor the size of a small house.
Finn saw the spot now, along the starboard hull: a narrow steel box like the electrical transformer outside his house, but much bigger. A steel room with a single door and a hundred fat wires running into it—including blue Ethernet cables. Its location fit Philby’s description.
Making it even more likely as a hiding place for Tia Dalma was how difficult it was to reach. Finn followed a catwalk to his right, then squeezed between two warm humming blocks of metal, ducked under a pipe with gauges, under a second pipe, and back onto a section of catwalk, now facing the door. He spun around once, quickly, like a practiced ballerina.
He’d been sure he would have faced crash-test dummies or rescue dummies or hyenas or OTKs.
Nothing. No one.
He inched toward the door.
Arriving, heart thumping wildly in his chest, he paused to collect himself. “Let the DHI lead the way,” he reminded himself. “You are nothing but light, so nothing can harm you. If nothing can harm you, nothing should frighten you.” A lot of nothing, but it had worked in the past.
Gone was concern about Amanda, or Storey. Gone was thought of his mother’s curse. Gone was the anxiety over needing to solve the cryptic puzzles in the journal. Gone was worry about leadership and whether he was doing a good job. Gone was the thought of failure or that anything or anyone could contaminate him. He was light, the product of pure power; he had no equal.
He turned the handle.
Tia Dalma sat on a makeshift throne. The power center—for it was some kind of humming collection of all things electric—was insanely hot and dimly lit. It smelled of incense, and birds, and of things earthy and dark and nasty.
Her rich brown skin shimmered with sweat, her eye sockets charcoal pools. She had two gold teeth, a nose ring, myriad loops in her ears. She held a black wooden staff, its carving reminding him of Jafar’s, and he warned himself not to let whatever happened next frighten him in any way. It was just another Disney attraction, this experience. It all came down to perspective.
She clapped lifelessly. “Well done!” She exhaled slowly. “Quite surprised. Quite surprised, indeed.”
Behind her, encased in a Plexiglas box with a cooling compressor on top, were four rack-mounted Sun computers and a like number of Cisco boxes, lights flashing. The OT server.
“You’ll excuse me, please.” Finn walked straight toward where she sat in a chair high atop a bank of large batteries that formed an elevated platform. He saw her astonishment at his brazenness as he reached her. He passed through her. She turned in her chair, climbed half out of it in order to observe him.
“You come back here, boy!”
Finn studied the four interconnected servers. An oversize USB thumb drive was plugged into the bottom Sun console. “Nice gear,” he said, opening the box’s door.