Aaron's Book of Secrets (Sleeping Dogs Lie, 1.5)

Chapter 1

It's the middle of the night, or maybe sometime after that.

There's a buzzing, whining alert coming from the pager I stashed in my headboard before I went to bed. I slept through its first few wails, but by now it's futile to ignore it.

Something is going on.

I toss pillows aside behind my head to reach it. Anything to stop the noise! The brief message in the pager's text box is from a guard who belongs to me.

"Ferals."

Why can't they ever come during the day?

I sit at the edge of my bed to get my bearings and rest my head in my hands for a moment. Finally, I stand and toss the pager at my bedside table. It misses by a mile and crashes into the lamp before hitting the floor. The t-shirt I wore yesterday is crumpled up near my bed, so I pull it on quickly, heading into the bathroom for a pair of pajama bottoms. A splash of cool water over my face makes me feel like a million bucks.

Wake up, Aaron.

When I get back into the bedroom, I take a quick glance at the clock over my bathroom door. It is three-fricking-thirty AM, for the love of Pete! I make the fingers of my right hand into a gun and pop off a couple of shots at the clock. There's a secured surveillance camera inside. The Hex is always watching. I know they are, and they know that I know.

I scrounge around on the floor until I find the pager, and head out to work. Thankfully, the place I sleep is also the place I work, so I don't have far to go.

Outside my door is a large round room with a high vaulted ceiling. We call it the Kernel. It's the communication and surveillance hub for the community I live in – the Hex. The community that I've never really been a part of, but you'd better believe I've gotten good at pretending. And that's why I'm in charge of the Kernel now, and not just that, I'm in charge of the entire Tech Department.

Out in the Kernel, I take a seat at my work console. At least I won't have to worry about people looking over my shoulder and asking stupid questions about what I'm doing, not at this time of the night.

Earlier, I'd stashed an earpiece on the shelf underneath my keyboard. It'll connect me with the guard who paged me. I'm not supposed to have it, so I can't take it into my room where the camera might see it. But there's no surveillance out here in the Kernel, at least, there's not supposed to be.

I slide the piece into my left ear. It's a small, spring-loaded pin that pinches down tight into my ear canal. Once it's there, the back and forth communication works through a neural chip, so I barely have to speak above a whisper in order for the person on the other end to hear me, and when we talk, the sound of the other voice is relayed directly to my brain through the chip. That way, anyone trying to listen in would only hear me talking to myself like an idiot.

I tap my ear to turn the piece on and static crackles through the center of my ear canal.

"Talk to me, Gary," I say, waking up my computer.

"Hey, man!" Gary says. The chip makes it feel like he's talking inside my head. He always forgets how loud he is. "We got Ferals. At ton of 'em. Like, a whole community."

I swear under my breath. "Where?"

"Base 2," he says, lowering his voice. He must be getting closer to the others.

I tap some keys that bring up a surveillance feed on the ground level of the building. On Sector 1, Base 2, where there's a block of detainment cambers, there are guards everywhere. There are so many of them that they're running into each other. Such a waste! The Hex likes to treat all Ferals like they're part of some huge, networked conspiracy, which is ridiculous. Most of them are poor, lost people who have been stuck out in the blizzard for so long that even those disgusting detainment chambers on Base 2 would seem cozy to them.