The alarm went off, again.

Dammit!

He made the first left, a hallway into the interior of the tower, away from the coveted outside offices. He passed the bathrooms, a coffee station with an espresso machine, and smaller offices, mostly empty. Then a far door opened abruptly and two men in identical blue blazers came out.

This time they did not think he belonged there.

They already had weapons in their hands but they weren't guns. They were bright yellow plastic pistol shapes, blocky and wide. Doubled laser spots danced across the carpet, then raced toward him as they lifted their hands.

Tasers!

Davy jumped past them and, before they could turn, stepped quietly into their office.

From the hallway, someone said emphatically "Fuck! It's him!"

The door was unmarked but it clearly was the security office. Two desks before a bank of flat video monitors that showed the hallways and the elevators.

Davy slid between the door and the wall, holding his breath.

He heard the guards move in the hall, one set of footsteps receding, the other coming closer. Through the gap between the door and the frame, he saw a slice of blue blazer frozen in the doorway.

Then the man in the doorway turned away and called down the hall. "He's not on any of the cameras! Check the south and west offices. I'll check the restrooms, and then north and east."

"He could jump in behind us."

"Right. I'll reset the alarm first. So we'll know."

Davy sucked back into the corner as the guard stepped into the room, but the guard didn't go toward the monitors, where he might have seen Davy. Davy heard keyboarding from the far side of the room, and the alarm in the background stopped. Then the man left, swinging the door shut behind him and rattling it, to make sure it was fully closed and locked.

What kind of alarm will discriminate between all the people coming into the office and me?

For a horrible moment he wondered if every one on the premises had an implant, and that anyone who didn't set off an alarm. It wouldn't have to be an implant. It could just be a key card every one carried.

No. They said "jump."

He looked over at the end of the room where he'd "reset" the alarm.

There was a rack of equipment, around waist high, with a monitor and keyboard pulled out of the top rack position. There were various modules below, the most prominent of which was labeled, Power Module and Micro g LaCoste. He folded the monitor over the keyboard and slid the unit back into the rack. This revealed a manual on the top of the machine: TAGS Air III Gravity Meter, Turnkey Airborne Gravity System with Aerograv Data Processing Software.

Ah.

He remembered a test done when he was held captive so long ago. They'd used a gravitational survey aircraft to monitor some controlled jumps. What had their pet physicist said? Oh, yeah: The gravitational signature actually overlapped for two hundred milliseconds. He'd also said, seventeen years ago, that the device was sensitive enough to measure the gravity of a three-year-old child at one meter. How much more sensitive was this device, almost two decades later? Apparently sensitive enough to measure that doubled gravitational signal on this floor at least. Probably the adjoining floors, too.

They'd set this up just for jumpers.

This must definitely be the place.

Part of him really wanted more information. Part of him wanted to leave and never return.

He wondered what would happen if he just turned it off. He did so, listening for the distant alarm, but nothing happened.

They probably jury-rigged it into their existing system, so it didn't fail-safe to an alarmed state.

Good.

He left the keyboard/monitor and it slid into the unit.

He looked up. The ceiling was concrete with a small ventilation duct distributing A/C, and square and round conduits running across it and down the walls to the equipment. The lines for the computers, monitors, and phones all ran into the next room through a square opening high on the wall.

There was a connecting door in the same wall, and he opened it. Cold air and white noise pushed out, at least fifteen degrees cooler than the security room. The ceiling light was off but hundreds of LEDs blinked at him. He hit the light switch. It was the firm's wiring and server closet, with Ethernet switches, patch boards, phone equipment, and wiring patch boards, as well as a head-high stack of rack-mounted servers. It also had a suspended ceiling, though a third of the panels had been removed so wires could run up into that space. A small stepladder leaned against the wall, and he climbed it to peer into one of openings. There was two feet of clearance, but the framework was light aluminum supported by wire, and the lightweight panels were clearly fragile, as the broken pieces of one were leaning against a wall.

There was, however, a three-inch water pipe running through the space, just above the panels, feeding the sprinkler heads. It was suspended from heavy metal straps anchored in the concrete above. He climbed back down the stepladder and put it back against the wall.

Using a wall bracket he carefully climbed atop the server rack, then lifted the panel above and shifted it to the side. The pipe ran down the middle of the space and it was very dusty.

I'm going to ruin this suit.

He pulled himself up onto the pipe and perched there, one hand bracing against the concrete above. He lifted his feet up and pulled the panel back into place, then gingerly set his feet wide apart on the aluminum frame, each near a support wire.

The opening into the security room was three feet away. He shifted his butt along the pipe and his feet along the frame until he was near it.

And without putting my foot through a panel.

And now I wait.

It seemed like an eternity but his watch told him it was only twelve minutes before the guards returned and made a phone call. He could only hear one side, but it sounded like one of them was calling and the other was operating the monitor console.

"This is Larson, Mr. Gilead."

Pause.

"No, sir. We definitely had an alpha-class event. Both McGinnis and I saw him teleport away."

Pause.

"We reset the alarm and checked the premises. We didn't find him anywhere, and the alarm hasn't gone off again."

Pause.

"Like last time, the cameras show he came out of Liebowitz's office, but then he cut back through the central hallway right toward our office and we saw him almost immediately. That's it."

Pause.

"No sir. Not a janitor this time. Still male. Business suit. Glasses. No beard. I'll compare the video with the file."

Pause.

"Are you sure that's necessary, sir?"

Davy heard a raised voice from the phone, but couldn't make out the words.

"Yes, sir! Sorry, sir."

Larson hung up the phone.

"The executive committee is going to the Retreat. They won't come back to the offices until we've caught or killed the bastard. Probably not even then."

The other guard-McGinnis?-said, "The Retreat? I thought that was just a rumor. Where is it?"

"No idea."

"Oh, shit. I just bought a condo. Are they going to move operations again? Any chance it will still be the city?"

"I have no fucking idea. Pull up the Rice file and compare today's images. See if it's him."

"Well, it sure as hell wasn't his wife."

Davy had been amused up to this point. Now he had a sudden urge to jump into the security office and take both men far, far away.

At least they didn't know about Cent.

He wondered how long it would take them to figure out the gravity unit was off.

He jumped away.

TWENTY-FOUR.

"Going ballistic"

After school, at the coffee shop, Tara and Jade filled me in on the gossip. "Tony's still not talking. They had Hector in to confront him about the hoodie but he says he left it in the hall and Tony must've bled on it after his 'accident.'"

These were confidential interviews, so of course the whole school knew about it by the end of the day. I thought about talking to Tony myself, but I decided to let it go for now.

At supper Dad chewed me out for agreeing with him about not working on their relief projects anymore, then said the only relief projects I could work on were theirs.

Mom, behind him, bit her lip and looked at the ceiling.

I was sorely tempted to just jump away again, but instead I said "Yes, Daddy."

Then he apologized for his statements that morning and I was so surprised I hugged him.

"Did you check on Anika and the other girls?"

He and Mom exchanged glances.

Mom said, "They made it to the village. I think they're going to be all right." She frowned, though.

"What?" I said.

Dad said, "We can't find Ramachandra. He saw the girls to the village Imam and when last seen, he headed upstream in the police boat."

I said, "I told you he was going to get rid of it back in Bhangura. That's where it was from. Do you think the mastaans got him? Or the police?"

Mom and Dad exchanged glances.

I looked at Dad. "You think it's them."

He looked away.

Mom raised her shoulders, spread her hands. "We don't know. But we also don't know it's not."

"If it is them, Rama could have a pretty bad time of it," Dad said. "Remember what I said about witnesses?"

He opened his mouth to say it, but I beat him to it. "When the lemon gets squeezed, it's hard on the lemon?"

Dad nodded. "That."

Mom exhaled. "He has nothing to hide. If it's them, they'll interrogate and release, really."

I shook my head to clear it. Interrogate and release. Like wildlife biologists? Tag and release.

"Hopefully," Dad said. "If it's them, then this is their first indication that there are three of us."

"I've been other places with you before this," I protested. "All over the world."

"But you didn't jump, then," Dad said. "This is their first indication that there are now three of us that can jump."

The next day, Dakota fell down and broke his left forefinger.

There were no witnesses. Not even himself, apparently. "Don't know what happened," he'd said.

Right.

When I saw Hector and Caffeine leave the cafeteria ten minutes before the bell, Jade, seated across from me, flinched.

"What did I do?" she said.