The Limit (6 page)

“You don’t need a parental permission card here,” said Honey Lady.

No way. Kids always had to present a card, or slide one into a computer slot, before they could get an eye scan to buy anything. Otherwise, what was to stop us from going out and buying a new game room full of gadgets every time we felt like it?

She stood up. “Don’t forget pajamas and underwear when you’re ordering your clothes.” She winked at me
and pulled out the chair for me to sit down. “Would you like me to wait here with you until your dinner arrives?”

“No. I’ll just surf the Web or watch TV.”

“All right, then. I’ll be in my office for another hour or so. If you need anything, pick up that phone by the bed and ask to be connected to me. Do you remember my name?”

“Yes.” No, wait. They’d think I was nuts if I asked for Honey Lady. “I guess not.”

“Sharlene Smoot,” she said as she ruffled the hair on the top of my head. I twitched away to let her know I didn’t like it. The hands lifted from my head and settled on my shoulders.

I shrugged them off of there, too. “You can leave now.” I fixed my eyes on the monitor as my fingers started going at the keyboard.

“All right. If that’s what you want. Listen, go to bed soon after dinner, and make sure you get a good night’s sleep. The testing will last all day tomorrow, and it’s important for you to do your best. Good night. And Matt, I can tell you’re going to love being a member of our FDRA family.”

THE MEAT LOAF I’D ORDERED FOR
dinner didn’t taste right. Mom made a killer meat loaf. It’s what I asked for anytime she gave me a choice.

The gravy-drenched bite of meat turned to glue in my mouth as I pictured eating at home with my family. Dinnertime had come and gone ages ago, but everyone in my family had probably been too upset to eat anything. At least they’d better have lost their appetites. Abbie should be in bed by now. I bet she’d been too scared to sleep alone in her room. Lauren would let her sleep with her. What were Mom and Dad doing? Making phone calls, doing Internet searches, and examining every single cent in their account, I hoped.

I shoved the plate of food away and jumped to my feet. Why weren’t there any windows in this room? The other floors had windows. I’d seen the light glowing through them from the outside.

I paced a nervous circle around the room, like a rat
in a cage, trapped and cut off from the world I knew, not knowing what the people in control had in store for me.

Wait a minute,
I thought as I dug my cell phone out of my front pocket. I wasn’t completely cut off. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of my phone earlier. I stared at the buttons for a few seconds, deciding who to call first. Two questions burned in my brain. One, what was my family doing? And two, what was everyone at school saying about me—would I ever be able to show my face there again?

Duh, idiot.
Although I felt as if a week had gone by since Honey Lady showed up at my house, only hours, not days, had passed. No one at school was saying anything about me, because no one had been to school since I’d been taken. I’d wait and call Brennan or Lester tomorrow.

I pulled up my home phone number and anxiously waited to hear a familiar voice. Instead I heard nothing. I looked at my screen.
No signal.
Oh, come on. Wait a minute. A landline phone sat right by the bed. I picked it up and punched a few buttons.

Crab Woman’s voice came on, making me wince. “You need something?”

“I was . . . just trying to call someone,” I said.

“This is an in-house line only.” She hung up, the loud
click
making my eardrum ring.

Sweet dreams to you, too, Crab Woman.

Well, I knew the computer worked at least. If Abbie hadn’t forced Lauren to come to bed when she did, chances were good that Lauren was online. I sent her a message, just asking if she was there.

Ten seconds went by. Then twenty.
Come on, Lauren. Be online.
Shoot. Maybe Brennan was online. A knock at my door pulled me away from the computer. It ended up being a delivery person who handed over several wrapped paper packages in shiny blue-and-white-striped shopping bags. The new clothes I’d ordered—pajamas for tonight and jeans and a T-shirt for tomorrow. Socks and boxers too. And a toothbrush and toothpaste.

After I closed the door and tossed the packages onto my bed, I walked back to the door. I opened it again—just a couple of inches. And closed it. Huh. I opened it and closed it again.

My mind started calculating. Distance equals rate times time—one of the most basic math formulas in the world.
The distance between this door and the end of the hallway—about fifteen feet. Plus another fifty feet to get to the front sliding glass doors equals sixty-five feet.
I could do an eight-second fifty-yard dash. Converting to feet made a rate of 18.75 feet per second. Dividing the distance by the rate gave me a time of 3.47 seconds. I figured I should round up to five or six seconds to allow for the
fact that I’d have to turn a corner and dodge a chair or two. Would that be fast enough to make it outside before Crab Woman caught up with me? If she wore high heels like Honey Lady, I’d make it out no problem. Now, Gorilla Man—if he happened to be in the lobby, I’d be toast.

I slid into the chair in front of the computer and cracked my knuckles. Time to do one of the things I did best: in-depth online snooping—okay, call it hacking, if you must. I just needed to break into this workhouse’s files, and I was sure to find some sort of Gorilla Man guard-duty schedule that would let me know if I was home free or shut down.

It took longer than I’d anticipated to get in, but I found it—not the minute-by-minute breakdown of Gorilla Man’s location I was hoping for, but a schedule that listed guard A’s assigned duty in the monitoring room for this evening along with guard B’s duties today in backup monitoring and retrieval. “Retrieval,” a polite way to say “kidnapping.” So guard B would be Gorilla Man. If I understood this schedule correctly, both guards should be safely stashed away in a monitoring room right now.
Well, workhouse, it’s been real, but the time has come for me to make my exit.

I slipped into the hall and eased the door silently closed behind me. Instead of breaking into a sprint right
away, I realized a better idea would be to sneak down this hall and then make a break for it once I emerged into the lobby. That would cut the response time Crab Woman had to chase me down or call for a guard.

Hugging the wall, I crept nearly noiselessly toward the wide arching opening at the end of the hall that led to the lobby. I paused in the shadows out of reach of the lobby light, near the opening. Holding my breath, I listened. I couldn’t hear anything other than Crab Woman barking some instructions to someone over her intercom system. Good. If she was distracted, that gave me just that much more of an edge. Stepping forward, I took a quick peek. No Gorilla Man in sight.

A nagging thought nudged at one corner of my brain. Where, exactly, did I think I was going to go once I burst through those glass doors? What harm was going to happen to my family if I didn’t stay here? I shoved those thoughts aside. I’d make it home somehow. Mom and Dad would want me there. They’d take care of the rest of the mess.

Another step, another look around. Crab Woman had stopped talking, but she’d shifted her attention to her computer. No one else in sight. This was it. The best chance I was going to get. I took another second to pump myself up.
Go. Go now!
My leg muscles tensed, ready to spring.

The heavy thumps of big feet moving fast threw me back into my shadowy hiding spot like a punch in the chest. I froze, not even breathing—waiting for those gorilla hands to reach around the corner and grab me. The blood pounding in my ears obscured the sound of the footsteps. It took me a second to realize they’d disappeared, replaced by the sound of clicking high heels across the tile.

“What’s the big emergency now?” Crab Woman’s gravelly voice asked.

“A Third Floor.” It was Honey Lady. “Fourteen-year-old boy. Seizure.”

“Another one? It was easier when they just got headaches. You going to have to dump this one too?”

“I’m not sure yet. We’ll bring him down to a holding room tonight and keep a close watch on him. If worse comes to worst, we’ll have to demote him to the first floor.”

“Too bad.”

I didn’t hear anything else—no more talking. No Honey Lady heels walking away. Guess she wasn’t going anywhere for a while. I’d have to wait until later and try again. Maybe in the middle of the night—that probably would have been the smarter move to begin with. Sliding my feet, I inched backward to my room. When I felt the door handle behind me I eased it open. Whoops.
Wrong room. This one was small, with only a desk and a computer. The door closed with a clunk that brought my shoulders to my ears. The sound seemed to echo through the long, empty hallway forever.

Crab Woman appeared in the opening to the lobby so fast she nearly scared the eyebrows off my face. I yanked my hand away from the incorrect door handle and thrust it behind my back, as if I held something I needed to hide. She stood with her hands on her hips and her elbows sticking out at her sides.

Her voice came out harsh and cold. “Going somewhere?”

I shook my head.

“Then get back in your room!” She threw out an arm to point me to the correct door. She didn’t have to tell me twice. My feet couldn’t get me behind my closed bedroom door fast enough.

So much for trying to make another escape later. Now they’d be watching me too closely.
Idiot! Way to blow your perfect chance.

Half an hour later I heard a scuffling in the hall. It slowly made its way past my room. Pausing my video game I slid my door open an inch, just enough to get a glimpse into the hall.

Gorilla Man led a teenager down the hall to the
room just past mine. The kid was groaning. Both his hands were pressing tightly against the sides of his head. Honey Lady followed close behind them.

“You’re going to be fine now, Tyson. The medication we gave you should be kicking in soon. A good night’s sleep is all you need.” I could just imagine that overly enthusiastic cheerleader smile of hers, even though all I could see was the back of her head.
Go, team!
As soon as Gorilla Man took the kid inside the room, Honey Lady turned on her heel and walked away. My door had eased open to a couple of inches, and I jerked it back to a crack. I still could see Honey Lady’s face as she briskly walked by. Her frown was deep, and her lips were pinched tightly. She looked like she wanted to punch someone. I slid my door silently shut. I sure as heck didn’t want it to be me.

YOUR TEST IS NOW COMPLETE
.

I sat back in the chair, stretching my arms out on either side of me, my eyes remaining on the bright red words flashing across the middle of the screen. Finally, after hours stuck in this bland little room with nothing but a computer, I’d finished. It hadn’t been as bad as I’d expected.

When Honey Lady had led me into this room right after breakfast, she’d explained that the test became increasingly difficult as it progressed and that I’d eventually come up against some tasks that I wouldn’t be able to complete. Yeah, a test that’s designed to make you fail. What kid doesn’t dream about that? In his nightmares, maybe.

I did get stuck a couple of times, but not until late in the afternoon. Any task that required me to do something artsy or creative—like graphic design or computer animation—had me stymied. It was never long before Honey Lady—or whoever it was monitoring my work through a computer link in another
room—would send me a message saying they were moving me on to my next task—something logical, like programming, or manipulating software so I could compute a super-hard math problem, which I’d zip right through.

My fingers tapped the armrests of my chair.
So what happens now? How long before Honey Lady comes in and tells me the results—and just what exactly will those results mean?
Part of me wished for more problems to appear on the screen. Those I could deal with. How well I did on this test had been totally up to me. I had no say in our family money issues. I hadn’t been able to prevent Gorilla Man from shoving me into the back of the limo.