East River. The security programming showed as a tight-fitting silvery-blue bubble around the structure.
Matt stretched his hand forward and made contact with the security programming. Wintry chill raced along his arm. In the next instant he was sucked into the building, actually stumbling a bit when the holoprojector programming set up in Leif’s room returned the sensation of gravity to him.
Leif’s bedroom was huge. His father, Magnus Anderson, owned and ran one of the most prestigious financial investment firms on Wall Street. Leif’s mom, Natalya, was a former New York City Ballet dancer and had founded her own studio.
Leif sat on the edge of the bed, far from sartorially perfect. His red hair stuck up rebelliously, and his eyes were bloodshot. His complexion was fair and freckled. He wore a well-worn dark green robe and furry slippers. He covered a yawn with one hand just a microsecond too late to be anywhere near elegant.
“Have a seat.” Leif turned a hand over and offered the recliner across from the bed.
“No time,” Matt said. “I’ve got an IM out for Mark, too.”
Leif cocked an eyebrow in speculative interest. “What exactly have you run afoul of?”
Matt shook his head. “I have no idea, but I know that somebody slipped a virus into my system that shut down communication between Maj and me.”
“Considering the Squirt designed a lot of the protective software in your system, that’s impressive. Which brings me to the question of, what can I do?”
“Maj uploaded an auditory file she wanted you to take a look at.” Matt tossed the silver ear icon across.
Leif caught it, pushed up from the bed, and walked toward the inline chair. “What am I looking for?”
“The language,” Matt said. “We couldn’t understand it.”
Both Leif’s eyebrows shot up. “On the Net?”
“Yeah. Something showed up in our world that wasn’t supposed to be there — or maybe we showed up in its world. I don’t know.”
Leif lay down in the implant chair, making himself comfortable and pulling the robe over his body. He wiggled his toes. “You’ll be on the Net?”
“Yes. Catie’s my next contact.”
Leif closed his eyes. “I’ll be in touch if I find out anything.”
Matt stepped back through the bedroom wall and hurled himself out over the cityscape below. He sailed along the grid crisscrossing Manhattan, took a bounce off a comm-sat, and arrived back in Maryland almost instantly.
Once more in his veeyar, he called up his address book again and looked for Catie Murray’s room number in the Bessel Mid-Town Hotel. Before he found it, a window opened up to his right.
“Knock knock,” Mark Gridley said.
Matt reached up and tapped the window with a forefinger, removing the protective programming. Mark Gridley appeared instantly in the rectangular opening. The Squirt was barely fourteen years old. His Thai-American heritage showed in his brown eyes, black hair, and olive complexion. He wore a red T-shirt depicting a popular Japanimation robot in battle stance with a sword that threw off green energy spikes.
Mark reached through the window and took Matt’s hand, then allowed himself to be pulled through. “What’s up?”
Briefly Matt sketched out the trip into the other veeyar.
“You don’t know if the other veeyar is at the hotel?” Mark asked when Matt finished.
“No.”
“Where’s Maj?”
“Online. Looking for the veeyar.”
“Let’s see if we can contact her first,” Mark said, accepting the compass-shaped icon Matt gave him that Maj had sent along.
Matt pulled up the Net address for Maj’s room again, then punched the icon to connect.
“I’m sorry,” the computer voice intoned. “That address is no longer valid. Would you like to try another?”
Cold dread filled Matt, but he punched in Catie Murray’s hotel number.
Looking around, Gaspar saw that Madeline Green kept a really well-organized veeyar. He was deep in the veeyar’s sysops, using a masking utility that was barely holding its own with the security programming integrated into the system. At present, Madeline Green’s system was reading his presence like he was a routine diagnostics check coming from the hotel’s security system. If she’d been operating from home, without having to go through the hotel’s systems for access, Gaspar didn’t know if he could have gotten through so quickly.
The security programs were interpreted as an aquarium by his own veeyar’s perception. If he’d been tied in with Madeline Green’s systems, he’d have had the same perception of it as she did.
His own system currently modified him so that he perceived himself as a heavily cybered fish. His gills resembled grills and his fins were angled metal that would have looked at home on the experimental jet Madeline Green had piloted through Peter’s world.
He glided through aquamarine water, scanning the various clumps of brain coral on the black and red aquarium rocks below that represented various folders where files were stored. He darted around a sunken tree stripped of leaves and bark by various scavengers.
Without warning, a section of the sunken tree exploded outward, swinging on hidden hinges. A ropy octopus arm erupted from the hollow space inside and wrapped around Gaspar’s rear fins.
Automatically he squelched the impulse to run. He peered into the lavender translucent eyes in the wedge- shaped head inside the tree hollow. He accessed his hacking utilities, knowing he wasn’t going to completely escape the tentacled arm holding him.
Smooth as a spider sliding down a web, he opened his fishy mouth and exploded through it in a smaller version of the fish body, leaving the husk behind him. As he swam off toward another clump of orange and turquoise brain coral, he glanced behind him.
Three other tentacled arms shot out of the hollow tree and wrapped around the husk he’d left. With all the programming carried inside his new body, it would take nearly a minute for the security program to process the husk and realize the veeyar’s security had been breached.
He popped a timer into his peripheral vision and set it for forty-five seconds. Then he swam, going with the currents inside the aquarium when he could.
The brain coral in front of him set off a vibration that thrummed along the lateral line in his fish body. Just as in a real fish, the lateral line ran the length of his body and was particularly sensitive to pressure changes and movement in the water. Fish used their lateral lines for direction and also as a warning system announcing the arrival of threats.
Gaspar had set his own lateral line to detect the files relating to Peter’s veeyar. The timer had dropped below thirty seconds.
Concentrating, he focused on the task ahead of him. Three-fingered hands attached to multijointed arms sprang out from the sides of his face. The appendages calmly searched the surface of the brain coral, ferreting out its secrets.
Seventeen seconds remained on the clock when Gaspar succeeded in cracking the brain coral file. The brain coral opened like wedges in an orange, exposing gleaming lines of data that circled inside.
Gaspar reached into the brain coral with his new hands. Their heavy talons raked the datastreams. One hand drew the existing datastreams in while his other pumped data back into the brain coral.
With four seconds left, Gaspar pulled out of Madeline Green’s veeyar, popping back into the Net just outside the Bessel Mid-Town. He floated freely eight stories above the street.
Holding his hand out, he focused on the file he’d retrieved from the Net Force Explorer’s veeyar. Immediately a miniature holo player appeared on his palm, the small case gleaming bright cobalt blue. He opened it and pressed the Play icon. Images of Madeline Green’s encounter with Peter and his dragon flashed across the three-inch screen.
Gaspar closed the holo player and made it disappear. Accessing the feeds he’d kept open to the girl’s room, he took a quick peek back inside. So far Heavener’s ground unit hadn’t arrived.
Suddenly a bright yellow sash snaked out in front of him, then wrapped around his right wrist. The sash had all the strength of cotton candy, but what it signified reminded him of how much he could lose.
