Mr Hook's Big Black Box

Dwayne Carlisle: Shades of Truth

I flinched, but didn't yelp at the hot coffee splashing on the back of my hand. Some guys in my classes had been teasing me for ages about being too sensitive to heat, so I'd been trying to not notice it as much when it was just a little spill.

Ferrari had dropped her phone in a mug of steaming java, and I was pretty sure that had to be intentional. Something about tracking, she'd spoken so quickly that I didn't quite catch it, but then I had more important things on my mind. Still, if someone was tracking her (the fake CIA, maybe?) it was a decent way to stop their trace. And a good way to let them know she was onto them. I nodded, and headed for the door.

Marco and Monty were outside, looking down at each other's feet like they were both too embarrassed to speak. The separate conversations wasn't just a tactical thing to give us the best chance of getting the Box open in time; she really did have something she felt she couldn't share with anyone but Marco, and I had no idea what that could be.

"We're going to take a walk," I said as we passed, "You should probably find somewhere else to chat."

"Crap," Marco gasped, "We're gonna be buried under men-in-black in five minutes, aren't we?" He took Monty's hand and strode off in the opposite direction. She just followed, as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

"Call my phone if you need to meet up again," I called after him. With the destruction of Ferrari's, we were down to one phone for each pair of us now.

I guess Marco must have known something about why someone could be tracking Ferrari, for him to have got it so quickly, but I didn't stop to ask. I just walked along, with no idea where we were going to go. I'd been shot at enough for one day.

"This way," I jerked a thumb at the doorway as we were passing. This building was mostly filled with computer rooms, where students who didn't have a machine of their own could get work done. I wasn't actually signed up with the computer science department, my major was in electrical engineering, but looking over Kris's exercises had intrigued me enough to take a few comp sci modules this year. So I had a swipe card that would open a few of the rooms round here, in a building where the sheer value of equipment meant it was locked more often than just about anywhere else on campus.

I also knew the twisting, turning passages like the back of my hand. The department was spread over four floors, in what had once been three separate buildings before extensions slowly connected them together, and what had been a sensible layout when they first expanded a building became a nuisance when you wanted to extend a corridor to an area that had formerly been an outside wall. The place was a warren before the computing department took it over, Dr Schofield had been keen to tell us when he showed off his own pet project, a digital mapping system that could schedule lectures so as to minimise the walking time for all the students and staff signed up to them.

I muttered something about the difficulty of creating an electronic map as I led Ferrari to an area that had once been part of the languages building, before computing grew too large. I'd actually looked at the bodges in the lecturer's code, which closely mirrored the bodges in the building itself. The ground floor was about two feet lower than the building next door, but the whole place had low ceilings and many, many little staircases, meaning that the fifth floor here was level with the fourth above the main part of computing. It was easy to get lost here if you hadn't memorised the location of every room number. It probably didn't make that much difference in our current situation, but when I thought about trying to evade pursuit, my first instinct was to head for an area where the freshmen got lost every single year.

"Is there somewhere around here we could hide?" Ferrari asked as I stopped to swipe through yet another doorway, "Great to lose pursuit, but if you've got something to say we need a safe place to talk. We probably can't go back to our rooms, either."