Insomnia

45

Devoe screamed as she tore through the torso of one bot with a single sweep of her arm. It fell into a sparking heap. Another took its place.

"Go!" she yelled at Esme. The two of them had taken refuge in the stairwell. The bots only seemed able to access the ground floor, and Esme stood behind Devoe on the second part of the landing. She'd already tried using Halfsleep to deactivate them but the force commanding the bots on the other end was too powerful for her to stop.

"What about you?" Esme yelled back. She shrieked as one of the bots shot Devoe with a blue pulse of electricity. The cyborg grunted in pain before backhanding it into one of its comrades.

"My arm wasn't the only enhancement I got," she groaned. "Go! Try and shut these things off!"

Esme nodded before racing up the stairs.

"Ah, hell," muttered Oz, his voice still beaming through the speaker system. "This was never supposed to happen. "

"What's going on?" Esme yelled as she reached the second floor. Normal offices, next to a cluster of cubicles. An administrative level . "Where are you? Why are you here? What is this place?"

"Right," Oz murmured, "right, right, um... Esme. I'm trapped on the top floor. It turned the power back on to enable the security protocols, but I'm still locked out of my terminal. And all the doors on this floor are locked so I can't get to another one. Restore my access, and I might be able to get it out of the system."

"Why should I trust you?!" Esme yelled.

"Because if you don't, the Knightmare is going to murder all of us." His voice broke off for a moment. "I promise, I will tell you everything. But right now we just don't have time."

A flicker of indecision. Another chorus of crushed metal rose from below.

"I don't like it either," Devoe called out. The rest of her words trailed off into a loud groan and an even louder impact. A hiss followed by an explosion. " I can't hold them off forever! If he's got a way out, I think we need to listen!"

Esme sighed with reluctant agreement.

"You've still got a lot of explaining to do," she grumbled. "But you're off the hook for now. What do I need to do?"

"Get to the R&D wing. That's where the central server is. The building operates on its own network, and I figure if you go into Halfsleep there, you should be able to unblock my user. It's the only one with admin privileges, and can shut this place down if needed."

"And how do I get there?" Esme asked.

"You need a special key card for the elevators. Which are..."

"Probably compromised. Okay. Other ideas?"

"Um... Oh! The ventilation shaft. Get to the fifth floor men's bathroom. There's a duct in there that connects to a janitor's closet in R&D."

"How do you know that?" Esme asked, as she started running up the next flight of stairs.

"If you yell really loudly in the bathroom, you can hear it from the lowest floor in the R&D wing."

Esme slowed down slightly as she passed the fourth floor.

"Why were you yelling in a bathroom?"

"Um..."

"Never mind. I don't want to know."

She reached the fifth floor and flung open the door to the bathroom. A fluorescent light flickered unsteadily above the sink. White linoleum tiles. A ventilation duct.