Kingdom Keepers V(84)

The pillow!

Operating like a digital zoom, his 2.0-upgraded eyesight amplified and enlarged its target. The pillow grew larger, occupying the full frame of his vision.

A strand of hair. It ran diagonally across the pillow, corner to corner. As small and insignificant as it might have appeared, it was anything but. The Dream’s stewards were the best in the cruise business, selected from around the world. Although possible, it was highly unlikely a steward would make a bed and leave a long strand of hair on a pillow. An arriving guest would find the hair offensive. A single strand of hair might ruin a guest’s entire cruise.

Standing close now, Philby pinched and extracted the hair from the static electric charge that held it to the pillowcase. Black. Ten inches long. The last few inches were a different color, dyed a faded red.

Discovery of the hair drove him to conduct a more thorough search of the stateroom. He found a smudge on the plate-glass door leading out to the small balcony. The bathroom was sparkling clean; it appeared fresh and unused until he touched one of the carefully folded towels and found it damp. The occupant had showered, dried herself, and then had refolded the towel exactly as the others. He marveled that without the enhancements of 2.0 he might not have sensed the dampness, might not have been able to pick up and pocket the stray strand of hair.

He jumped to the only logical conclusion: an Overtaker recruit—an OTK—was stowed away on the ship, hiding from authorities and serving Maleficent and the Overtakers. She had long black hair dyed red in places. She was the enemy.

Two taps on the stateroom door—Storey Ming’s signal to join her in the hallway. Three taps was their signal for him to find some other way out of the stateroom.

Philby stepped through the door, but stuck, half in, half out. His left shoulder, left leg, and left side of his face were through the door, but the rest of him would not pull through.

“Hurry!” Storey said. “A steward knocking on every room!”

Philby didn’t understand what was happening to him. How could his hologram get stuck? The part of him that was Professor Philby wanted to stand there and figure out the science behind his dilemma. Philby the Keeper wanted the heck out of there—now! He stepped back into the stateroom and tried for the door once more. Stuck. Half in, half out. He was being held inside the room by some unknown force.

Again, half his face showed through the door. It was almost more than Storey Ming could stomach.

“Hurry!” she implored.

“Hm-mrgle-ovr-neggg.”

Philby rocked his head so that his lips were free of the door and tried again. “Something’s holding me.”

“Get back,” she hissed, before turning and walking away.

Philby ducked back into the stateroom, still marveling at the physics of what had just happened. Was it possible that it involved the strength of the projection of his hologram? With the original DHI program, a simple security camera or USB cam could be reverse-engineered to project the hologram. Did 2.0 require higher definition that the ship lacked on some decks? Had anyone tested the projection quality before inviting the Keepers onto the Dream?

He turned toward the water. Two kids stood facing him: a teenage boy and a girl. Not the boy Finn had described—smaller, darker, meaner. The girl looked familiar; he knew her from somewhere. Their postures—knees bent in a partial crouch, hips and shoulders square, one foot forward—a combat pose. They were here to fight him.

He spotted the telltale blue outline shimmering around their bodies. They were first-generation DHI holograms, and that meant they were OTKs, because Wayne’s volunteers were all being projected as 2.0s.

The boy, standing by the bed, calmly knocked the lampshade off a wall-mounted light and unscrewed the bulb. He broke the bulb against the wall and outstretched his arm with the sharp glass held like a weapon before him. His blue outline dimmed—he was the older version 1.6—and in order to possess the broken bulb he had had to sacrifice a percentage of his all clear. This made the boy vulnerable. The girl, at the foot of the bed, inched forward empty-handed.

Professor Philby understood well that battles were won and lost by control of space. At present he was confined to the narrow hall between the two washrooms on one side and the closet to his right. If they kept him boxed in he was at a decided disadvantage. He quickly slid open the closet and grabbed a wooden hanger, extending it as a sword. He pulled down a bright orange cube of life vest and held on to a strap, holding it as a shield in his left hand.

Despite the hanger in hand, fear was his biggest weapon. If he could dominate these two early and establish himself as superior, if he could sow the seeds of doubt into both of them, he would weaken their DHIs and gain the superiority he pretended to possess.