Meanwhile, Colonel Peterson slams the telephone receiver down on its cradle. “There’s no dial tone.” He pulls a cell phone out of his Army uniform and fumbles at its keys. “And no cell signal either.” He heads for the door. “Wait here, Tom. I’ll get help.”
But when Peterson grabs the knob on the steel door, it doesn’t open. And when he tries to unlock the door, the lever doesn’t turn. He jiggles the lever and gives it a firm twist, but the thing won’t budge. “The door’s locked! The security system must’ve automatically locked it.” He looks over his shoulder at my dad. “And now it’s stuck!”
Dad stops the chest compressions, which aren’t doing much good anyway. He gazes first at Peterson, then at the flickering LEDs on the servers. Then he lifts his head and wrinkles his nose, as if he just caught a whiff of something unusual. A second later I catch it too, the unmistakable odor of a lit stove.
I start to panic, trembling in my wheelchair. Natural gas is leaking from the lab’s heating system and wafting into the office through the ventilation grates.
“Out!” Dad yells, jumping to his feet. “We have to get out!”
He hurtles toward the door and pushes Peterson aside. Grasping the doorknob with both hands, he pulls with all his might. When that doesn’t work, he beats his fists on the door and shouts for help. Peterson shouts too, but there’s no response. I don’t hear any voices or footsteps in the corridor now. Everyone else has fled the building. We’re trapped and no one can help us.
Then another explosion shakes the walls and ceiling. The second blast is closer, twice as loud as the first. Belatedly, I figure out what’s going on. It’s pretty easy to ignite a room full of natural gas. The smallest of electric sparks would do the trick. Someone is pumping gas into the laboratory’s offices and blowing them up.
Dad rushes back to his desk and grabs a hammer from one of the drawers. He starts pounding on the lock, trying to smash the dead bolt. But it’s no use. The lock’s made of hardened steel. Unicorp spent millions of dollars to protect its top-secret research from spies and thieves. The lab’s security is impregnable.
The scent of gas gets stronger, making me nauseous. All I can think of is the explosion that’s going to happen any second now, the flames leaping across the room, the blast crushing all of us to pulp. Oh God, oh God! We’re going to die here!
Dad drops the hammer and leans against the door, his chest heaving. He looks straight at me with an anguished grimace. I remember seeing this expression on his face once before, years ago, when I asked him to describe what Duchenne muscular dystrophy will eventually do to my body. Now I see it again, his lips pulled back from his teeth, his eyes wide with grief and despair. He doesn’t care about himself or Peterson. He’s thinking only of me.
I have to turn away. I can’t look at him; it’s too painful. And as I stare in the opposite direction, I happen to glance at the tank of liquid nitrogen sitting beside the server rack. Attached to the tank is the spray canister Dad uses to cool the circuits of his experimental computers. The nitrogen, I remember, is super-cold, more than three hundred degrees below zero. Then I remember something else, something I learned in my tenth-grade physics class at Yorktown High: Steel becomes brittle at very low temperatures.
“The nitrogen!” I yell at Dad. “Spray nitrogen on the lock!”
For a second he just stares at me in surprise. Then he dashes to the nitrogen tank, detaches the spray canister, and slips its long nozzle into the gap between the door and the door frame.
Dad presses the canister’s trigger and sprays liquid nitrogen on the dead bolt. The liquid is so cold it evaporates as soon as it hits the steel. A small cloud of nitrogen and water vapor billows around Dad’s head, and a sheen of frost appears on the edge of the door. The steel groans as its temperature drops. Dad keeps spraying until he empties the canister. Then he takes a step backward, braces himself, and slams his shoulder into the door.
I hear a high-pitched snap. The dead bolt, made fragile by the extreme cold, breaks into pieces. Pulling his shirt cuffs over his hands, Dad grasps the frigid knob and wrenches the door open. The frost-covered shards of the lock fall to the floor.
“Go!” Dad yells. “Head for the lobby!”
Peterson is already running down the corridor. While I flick my joystick forward and steer the wheelchair through the doorway, Dad goes back to get Steve. He grabs both of the guy’s arms and drags his limp body out of the office.
The corridor is littered with debris from the gas explosions. I have to maneuver my wheelchair around fallen pipes and ceiling panels. I’m lucky, though, that Dad’s office is on the ground floor and fairly close to the lobby. I see the lobby’s glass doors, just fifty feet ahead, and my heart starts thumping. We’re going to make it!
But then I look up and glimpse something moving. A surveillance camera on the ceiling is turning its lens toward me, tracking my progress as I cruise down the corridor. I think of my VR program and how the virtual Brittany observed me through the camera in Dad’s office. She called herself Sigma. And she said she would kill me.
Then there’s a third explosion, in an office on the left side of the corridor. The blast knocks down my wheelchair, and everything goes black.
My face is cold. Without opening my eyes, I bend my right arm, trying to raise my good hand. I touch my chin, then slide my trembling fingers across my cheek. The left side of my face is wet. I stretch my hand a little farther and feel a gash under my eye. Then the pain hits me and I let out a moan.
“Adam? Are you awake?”
It’s my father’s voice. All at once I realize he’s carrying me. My shoulders are cradled in the crook of his right arm and my legs are draped over his left. Ordinarily it would be pretty difficult to carry a seventeen-year-old this way, but my wasted body weighs less than ninety pounds. I’m like an oversized baby resting in his arms, and I feel so comfortable there I just want to go back to sleep.
“Adam! Wake up!”
Reluctantly, I open my eyes. We’re on the sloping lawn in front of the Unicorp lab, which I can see over Dad’s shoulder. The building’s glass doors have shattered, and thick plumes of smoke are pouring out of the windows. Dozens of people stand beside us on the lawn, all staring at the ruined lab in disbelief.
I know I haven’t been unconscious for very long because Dad’s still breathing fast. His face is blackened with soot, but otherwise he looks unhurt. “Can you hear me?” he shouts. “Say something!”
My chest feels crushed, empty of air. My ribs ache as I inhale. “What about…Steve?”
Dad shakes his head. I look past him and see a body sprawled on the lawn. Steve’s red-and-yellow Superman shirt stands out against the grass, which is vividly green in the March sunshine.
“Adam, listen to me. You’re going to be all right. As soon as the ambulance gets here, we’ll take you to the hospital. But before we go, I need to ask you something.” Dad bends his head closer to mine. “You remember what we were talking about before all this happened? About the hacker?”
I nod.
“You said he threatened to kill you, right? But did he say he was going to attack the lab?”
I draw another breath. “No. But he…could see me. He had access…to the lab’s cameras.”
Dad frowns. “Did he say he worked for Unicorp?”
“He said…his name was Sigma.”
A tremor runs through Dad’s body. He almost drops me.