Page 180 of Victorious

Victor veered around the accident and kept driving.

But less than a minute later, they passed another one. A car had scraped itself along a metal rail.

Further along, a moving van had clipped an eighteen-wheeler. And so on.

Each time, it looked as if the driver had briefly lost control of the vehicle. Or more accurately, of their senses. Plunged momentarily into a fog. A dream.

“Well,” said June, gesturing to the breadcrumb trail of damage that lined the road to EON. “I guess we know where Serena is going.”

Victor slipped one hand into his pocket, fingers finding the cold metal disc.

Great, he thought, slowing to avoid another crash.

One more person in my way.

As the pickup surged toward EON, Mitch’s hands flew across the keys.

Victor met his gaze in the rearview mirror, and he was once again confronted with that uncanny flash of violet. His cellmate had always been a man of few words. But there was a whole story behind those eyes, one he wasn’t sharing.

“Well?” demanded Victor.

Mitch blinked. “Well, what?”

“How’s it going?”

Mitch said nothing, because the only answer he could give was badly. Despite the EON-issued hardware he’d stripped from the van, the system on the other side still refused to grant him access.

The miles between them and EON were rapidly collapsing. He was running out of time. And no matter how many ways he tried to get behind the system’s defenses, he was met with the same two words.

ACCESS DENIED.

ACCESS DENIED.

ACCESS DENIED.

Mitch stifled a groan. It shouldn’t be this hard.

You had one job and you failed.

Syd is trapped in there because of you.

Dol lay on the bench beside him, muzzle pressed against his leg, body still and breathing slow. Mitch laid a palm on the dog’s side, and tried to absorb his medicated calm while he racked his brain for what to do.

He was still trying when a new message flashed up in the coding window.

TRY. HARDER.

Mitch paused, studying the message.

It was hardly the first time the system had goaded Mitch, but it was the first time he read the message less as smug, and more frustrated. It took Mitch a second to realize why.

It was that single period between the words.

The kind of personal inflection a program would never implement. For the first time, Mitch wondered if there was a chance he was talking to someone instead of something. A person instead of a program. He’d never met a programmer who could code so well, so fast, who could defend such a massive mainframe from every possible angle of attack, but maybe the coder wasn’t human, or machine.

Maybe they were an EO.

A light went off inside his head, and for the first time, instead of fighting with the system, Mitch tried speaking to it.