Sleeping Dogs Lie

Chapter Fourteen

One Friday afternoon when I'm watching Aaron and things are exceptionally boring up in the Kernel, I decide that I can no longer stand bouncing around in the sticky web of mystery that he is weaving, and I am determined to follow him.

Daniel always says I can be silent as death when I want to be. Well, now's my chance to prove him right. I want to be, so I'm going for the gold.

All week this week, Aaron's been spending a lot of time around a place I'm relatively familiar with – digitally, anyways. It's down in one of the more isolated areas below the Science Center's wing. When he goes there, he usually saunters out of the Kernel and along a route I can trace easily enough till he gets back into that remote basement in the way-back underneath the Med Tech area, then he performs his disappearing act. No reason to think today should be any different.

As soon as Aaron hits the bar on the door of the Kernel to open it and leave, I'm up and out of my seat. I want to be close enough behind him so I can use his Mark to slip through the opened door, but still far enough away so anyone who might be watching on a surveillance monitor might think that Aaron's door had shut fully after him and I'd had to use my own Mark to reopen it again.

I'm trying really hard not to think about how many different rules I'm breaking right now and what the punishments for them might be if I can't figure out a way to satisfactorily doctor the system up once this is all said and done.

On silent feet, I follow him down the long hallway, trying to keep far enough away that if he were to happen to glance behind himself, I could tuck up into a doorway and duck out of sight. The hallways that lead away from the hub of the Kernel are usually empty. The only people allowed in them are the people who work at the Kernel, certain guards, and the higher up muckety-mucks in the Hex's Administration. Luckily, I don't see anyone else in the hallway Aaron leads me down. I don't want to have to greet anyone while I'm tracking Aaron. Don't want him to hear my voice and catch onto my ruse. Every door he opens, I wait until just before it latches closed, and then I catch it. Let his Mark keep it open so I can slide through as him. The cameras will catch me here, but at least my Mark won't be in the system. That fact alone makes whatever footage I'm on potentially easier to doctor.

Thankfully, when Aaron goes down levels, he takes the stairs, so I don't have to worry about how I'm going to trick the scanners in the elevators. I was starting to stress myself out over that. When he reaches the basement level of the Hex, he travels around almost the whole outer ring of the Hexagon. I follow him until we enter the bowels of the Science Center, past the hallway where I always watch him disappear on the video surveillance. I follow him through a door. If I were sitting at my console up at the Kernel right now, I'm nearly positive I would have just seen us both disappear.

There's a camera just to the upper right of the door's lintel, and I glance up at it briefly. At the bottom of its lens, inside the glass housing, there should be a low, green indicator light on. There isn't. That light is red. He's done something to the cameras here. I feel a little shiver start somewhere in the middle of my spine and work its way up toward the nape of my neck. I don't know why, but that little red light on the camera creeps me out.

I shake off my shiver and hurry down the hall so I won't lose Aaron. Slip through a door that's too close to closing and depriving me of his Mark.

In this next hall, there are only emergency lights on, so it's dim and kind of spooky. There is no door at the other end of the hallway where I would expect there to be. It would appear that I've reached the end of the line. My heart begins to race. He isn't anywhere in the hallway itself, and the dim lights up and down the hallway tease out the laser scanners next to each doorknob, mocking me. He could be behind any one of those doors. I have no way of knowing which one. But it doesn't really matter anyway, because now I am trapped. Stuck between a rock and a hard place.