She glanced over her shoulder, half expecting his door to slide open and the Repurposers to charge in. She met his gaze. “I don’t have much time. I’m being chased.” She held up her PRD. “As soon as I turn this on, they’re going to know where I am.”
“Who?”
“The Repurposers.”
He stared at her, a hint of fear stealing over his face.
Then, steeling herself, she switched it on. Scrolling through the contents, she pulled up the movie she’d made of the animation, showing the collision course of the asteroid.
She handed it to him, and he watched the animation as it floated in the air above the device. When it finished, he squinted up at her. “What is this?”
“I didn’t know at first either.” She pulled up the rest of the files, the ones she’d recorded of the destruction.
He watched them in silence. “I don’t understand what this is.”
“I found something. The ruins of an old building under one of the residence structures. There’s technology down there, old tech. And a warning system.”
“Warning of what?”
“Earth’s destruction.”
He took a deep breath and ran his fingers through his hair.
She leaned forward, triggering the animation to play again. “See . . . this shows the path of three objects that are going to collide with the earth.” The display showed red across the globe. “The fourth one is the biggest threat. It’s going to destroy everything.”
Willoughby blinked, looking down at the PRD. He was frozen. Silent. His relaxed demeanor vanished.
“We have to warn people,” she urged him. “We have to stop it.”
He looked up again, incredulous. “Stop it?”
“Yes.”
“How?” He watched the animation and gestured at it. “We don’t have the ability to stop something like this.”
“What do you mean?”
He threw up a hand. “That knowledge is gone. Wiped out. So long ago it’s almost legend . . .”
“I don’t understand.”
“No one would know how to stop something like this now. This kind of scientific knowledge vanished so long ago that there’s simply nothing left of it.”
Her heart hammered. “I thought . . . I thought the PPC knew everything.”
He gave a disheartened laugh. “Hardly. We don’t know anything. Nothing useful, anyway. Just how to keep people tuned in. How to gain more power.” He gestured at the animation. “Are you sure this is right?” He frowned. “Maybe the calculations are wrong. Maybe this is old information. Maybe the person who gathered it was a crackpot.”
“That could all be true, I guess. But you should have seen the photographs of the destruction this thing caused before. They were plastered all over the walls. That was real.”
He ran his hand over his chin. He watched the movie again, studying the havoc it had wreaked. “They say on here we had eighty to two hundred years for us to figure out how to deflect the asteroid and its fragments. But there was one thing these reporters didn’t count on.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“That we wouldn’t continue to learn,” he went on.
She felt sick.
“What about these ruins you found?” he asked.
“They’re under Residence Building A-12.”
“There might be more information there. Something we could use.”
“There could be. But they didn’t know how to stop this thing either. Just a few fragments destroyed an entire city. It says these three fragments are much bigger.” She looked down at her PRD. “This time the destruction is going to be a lot bigger than parts of a single city. And that’s not even the main one that’s going to hit later.”
He fished around in a drawer. Pulling out another PRD, he quickly copied the contents of hers onto it, then handed the new one to her and powered down her old one. “Use this. They can’t track it. I need some time to think.” He hid her PRD in the same drawer and slid it shut.
Suddenly the door behind her slid open. Framed in the opening stood two Repurposers with building security. “We have orders for this one,” one of the Repurposers told Willoughby.
He stood up, hurrying around the side of his desk. “We were just discussing something very important.” He stood in front of her, blocking their way to her. “I told the guard that security wasn’t required. She has news.”
“That isn’t relevant.” The Repurposer moved forward, followed by the members of the security team.
H124’s mouth went dry. She backed up, looking for another exit. A second door stood behind Willoughby’s desk, and she ran for it. The men crashed through the furniture behind her, shouting to each other. She got to the door and wrenched it open. It was a fire door of some kind, opening to a gray utilitarian hallway. She dashed through, her boots sliding on the smooth tile floor.
“Don’t let her leave this building!” a Repurposer shouted.
Not knowing where the corridor led, she ran on, the men close behind.
Chapter 8
She raced down the hall, hurrying to the end of the next corridor. She careened around that corner before the Repurposers saw her. A steel door at the end of the hall opened to a staircase. She slipped inside, taking the stairs two at a time, heading down to the next floor. She was sure they’d cover the exits to the building. She had to think of something else.
She went down three floors, then opened the stairwell door and stepped into a quiet corridor. Maybe they’d expect her to rush toward the exit on the ground floor.
Emerging quietly into the new hallway, she glanced in both directions. It was empty. She knew they had to have an incinerator on one of the nearby floors. Most residential buildings had one on every other floor, and she had to hope this building was no different. She chose to run to the left, but a few feet down the corridor, she saw that it ended at another stairwell.
She bolted in the opposite direction, tearing past the stairwell door she’d come from. No incinerator in that direction either. She doubled back, slipping through
