“We’ll see,” I say, then stand and walk out.

His office door is the kind that slides open into the wall, so I can’t slam it, but I wish I could. I settle for walking heavily back to the elevator. My boots are heavy desert stock, and the sound is as satisfying as punching a wall. The slapping sound reminds me I’ve been dressing more and more like Ashtown since I got back from 175. It hasn’t been a deliberate change, but I don’t care enough to fight against it.

I still love Jean like an uncle, but I can feel the rift forming between us. I sit down at my desk and shake the fob I stole from his office out of my sleeve. I didn’t want to steal it, but he couldn’t have maintained his denial and still given it to me.

I tried to do this the easy way, tried to prove the legitimacy of the discovery by following the trail of research on Eldridge’s servers. But even with Jean’s credentials I couldn’t find anything. No funds allocated to it, no scientists moved to the project. I found one reference attributing the discovery to a specific department, but all their files are locally stored. Meaning I would have to be on a terminal in their department on the seventy-eighth floor to access it.

I wait until the last person has left my area for the day, then go to the elevator and use the fob to unlock upward access. I get off on 76 and take two flights of stairs up, in case an elevator going to that floor would attract attention, but I’m still waiting for someone to stop me. When I walk out of the stairwell and onto the floor, it’s dark. Not dark like my floor is dark, meaning everyone’s gone home and there’s only ambient lights from computers and appliances, but perfect dark.

I’d expected this floor was still research and development, just working on a different project. I was going to access their computers to either see the research for the inoculation, or prove there isn’t any because the inoculation doesn’t exist. But Adam hasn’t even bothered to set up a dummy department. There are no desks, no computers. Just empty space where a miracle was supposedly manufactured. I make my way through the floor by touch. There aren’t even the required holograms pointing out the exits. Nothing.

    Jean will say this isn’t proof. Bosch might have the floor mislogged to protect the breakthrough. He might be concealing the names of the scientists to keep them from offers by poachers. But Bosch has eliminated any competitor who could make use of his staff. There are no poachers, and there is no inoculation. He just plans to kill the winning bidders’ dops. I knew it in the auditorium, I knew it when I tried to look up the department, and I knew it when I lifted the fob from Jean. I was just looking for an excuse to turn away.

Convinced, I find my way by feel back to the door to the stairwell, but when I turn the handle nothing happens. I jiggle the handle, throwing my shoulder against the door, but it doesn’t budge. So…logging the floor was a trap. Which I would have known if I’d stopped for a second to ask myself if the smartest man in the city would really let it be so easy to discredit him.

I’m wondering if I can bust open a lock in the dark, when I hear it: the high-pitched whirring of a building electrical charge. Of course. The auto-locking door is the trap’s cage, but the electrical net will be the glue.

Security nets are usually built into the floor and designed to electrocute trespassers, incapacitating them until private security or public enforcement can be summoned. Something tells me Adam Bosch doesn’t have this particular alarm set to inform city enforcement. If I go down, I’ll disappear forever. Dell would ask where I went, but Jean wouldn’t. He’d know.

I spider-climb into a corner, playing a real-life version of the floor is runners’ acid from my childhood. I’ve been climbing since I could walk, so I’m able to put yards between the ground and me. At first, I see the glow of shock go through the floor and think I’m safe. But then it begins to climb too.

    The thorough asshole has put the conductive mesh up the walls. My left side is propped on the wall with the elevator panel, and it remains dark. But the light is moving steadily toward my right. I try to outclimb it, but it follows. I move my hand at the last second, but then I slip and instinctively try to catch myself again on the wall that is the bright blue of a lightning strike.

The electricity screams through me and I shake so bad my eyes blur. The floor charge has gone out, so when I slam against it the most I get is bruises. Bruises I can’t even feel, since I’m numb on my whole right side. I should be unconscious, but my Ashtown boots have mitigated some of the damage. Some, not all.

I’m half-blind and I can’t walk. My ears must be working fine enough, because I hear steps coming. They are careful, different from a runner’s only in that they are lighter. Security has come to see what the net has caught. No, not security. I can hear the wrinkling of a plastic jumpsuit. A Maintenance worker’s coming for me.

I try to drag myself back toward the door, but I only have one working arm and leg and even those are twitching. I barely have the strength to slide my hand against the locked door, much less break it down, and the footsteps are getting closer.

I’m seventy-eight floors up, reaching where I don’t belong, and yet somehow I’m still sure I’m not going to die.

Not yet, I say to the dead in my chest. I’m not coming yet.

And I’m right. The moment I have the thought, the door at my fingertips opens and I’m hauled up. I know it’s not one of Adam’s people, because I know just what she smells like and she had to pull me up the same way last week.

Dell hooks my dead arm around her neck and closes the door to the seventy-eighth floor tight behind us. The guard will have to unlock it to follow, if he sees any reason to check the stairwell at all. Since I should be unconscious on the floor, he might convince himself the net malfunctioned. Dell isn’t taking that chance though. She drags me up the stairs and out of the building’s exit on the eightieth floor.

    When we get to her apartment, the shaking in my left side has stopped, though I’m still numb on the right.

Dell all but drops me on her couch when we enter, then begins messing with her cuff. I’m guessing she’s checking Eldridge’s security memos to see if they’ve reported a break-in. Or maybe she’s telling Bosch I’m the intruder, and that she has me. It’s impossible to tell; her face always goes blank when she’s concentrating.

“Last person who found me incapacitated made me juice. Just saying.”

My words are slurred, my tongue fat and pressed against the sides of my teeth.

“Stop fighting unconsciousness. We’ll talk in the morning,” she says, bringing a throw from another chair and draping it over me. As she tucks me in, she leans down to whisper, “And I was the last person to find you incapacitated, don’t forget.”

She’s right. I don’t remember how I got out of the hatch after landing from 175, but I do remember her finding me and telling me to stop crying. I want to smile at her scorekeeping, but my mouth only half cooperates.

“See you.”

She must nod, but my eyes are already closed. I wonder if I’ll wake up to her, or a group from Maintenance. I still manage to go to sleep, so I must not care. Or maybe I trust Dell…just a little.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The smell of food wakes me long after the beeping of my cuff should have. At first, I don’t move. I’m thinking about yesterday, about everything I’ve learned. Does knowing Adam is planning another kill campaign change things, when I’ve already agreed to ignore the ones in the past? I have never considered my own moral character. I’ve never known exactly what my limits were. I still don’t, but I know that this is too much. Glossing over murders that have already happened so I can keep collecting a paycheck? I can take that. But standing by while the next round happens, and the next round, all so I can retire a citizen? I might as well jump in the bog beside Nelline, because that will take me to a place just as dark and suffocating.

I have to do something. It’s probably the worst mistake I’ll ever make, but I’ve got to.

I’m a little shaky, but I manage to chase the smell of food until I stumble into Dell’s kitchen. The space is roughly the size of my whole apartment, minus the bedroom. She has a formal dining room, I’m sure, but there’s a table here too. Everything in sight is either clear or silver, and all the lines are sharp and clean. Dell is bringing two plates to the table when I enter.

    I take a seat at her table, rubbing at my neck, which is kinked from being pressed against the arm of the couch.

“This high up you must have at least one guest room. Afraid I’ll dirty the sheets?”

She levels a glare at me across the table. “The bedrooms are all on the second and third floors. You were in no condition.”