The rifleman hadn’t been in the back lot as Tommy popped over the fence so he must have come out of the building. Unless the door locked behind the man, there was a way in.
Tommy slipped around the corner. There was an unremarkable steel door on the windowless wall. He tried the handle. The latch clicked. The guard hadn’t locked it behind him.
He opened the door.
The inside surprised him. He hadn’t considered what might be within the building but he would have never imagined what he found.
It was a huge pure white space. The walls and ceiling were all a smooth, slick whiteness. It was like being inside a massive, very clean bathtub. Lights blasted the area. A huge complicated machine was running, humming and whirling and buzzing. It had robotic arms that were placing and removing items. He couldn’t guess what it was making. The unfinished item didn’t look very boat-like.
There was a path painted on the floor, indicating where it was safe to walk and not be hit by moving machinery.
A man was talking loudly on the far side of the massive room. “I can’t tell what’s it doing. You know how complicated it is. Some of the pieces in the assembly bins were quite small; it might have been processing for hours before anyone noticed.” The man paused as if listening to someone. Tommy’s sensitive ears didn’t pick up the other person. The man continued as if in response. “No, the kid doesn’t have access to anything that can connect with it. I’ve tried that. And that. And that too.”
Moving machine parts obscured the person as Tommy threaded his way through the room. He reached out with his mind. He encountered two different knots of emotions. One person was irritated and considering violence. The other was filled with fear.
The speaker sounded angry. Was the terrified person an Undefended? Tommy’s gut feeling was that he’d found one of the missing whores. Tommy focused on locking his mind-clouding ability on the angry person.
After he dodged three massive rolling robotic arms trailing wires, he spotted his target on the opposite side of the building. A big man paced back and forth while talking on a smart phone. Knickknack sat at a table with a laptop, trying to ignore the angry man behind him. The boy was shackled to the floor by a ten-foot chain. The girls were nowhere in sight.
Tommy could cut the big man’s throat before the brute realized he was there but there was the problem of whoever was on the other end of the phone. Was the person someone close by or on the other side of town? With Knickknack chained to the floor and the girls possibly chained elsewhere, Tommy didn’t want to be dealing with reinforcements.
Tommy erased himself from the man’s mind as he stalked toward the table. The shackle on Knickknack’s ankle was jury-rigged from a heavy chain bolted to the floor and a padlock. As Tommy neared the two, he noticed that Knickknack’s eyes kept going to the key ring at the big man’s side. Did it have the key needed to free the boy?
The boy noticed Tommy. “What the—”
Tommy put a hand over Knickknack’s mouth. Tommy shook his head. He could cloud the mind of the man beside him but not the person on the other end of the telephone conversation. He reached over and plucked the key ring from the man’s side. He handed the keys to Knickknack and pointed down at the padlock.
The boy’s brows knitted together in annoyed confusion. Knickknack glanced at the man, who was clearly unconcerned by Tommy’s presence — not realizing that it was because the man was unaware of him.
Was Tommy going to have to beat the boy into unlocking himself?
Tommy’s irritation must have shown on his face. Knickknack’s eyes went wide and the boy knelt quickly to fumble with the padlock.
There was a crash in the direction of the front gate. What was that Olivia doing now?
“What the hell was that?” The big man glanced toward the table but Tommy made sure that all he saw was Knickknack still typing on the laptop. “I need to go. I’ll call you later.”
The man strode off as Knickknack carefully placed the unlocked padlock quietly on the floor.
The boy had a black eye but otherwise seemed fine. He was a hair taller than Tommy, dressed in shorts and T-shirt that read YOU MATTER, UNLESS YOU MULTIPLY YOURSELF BY THE SPEED OF LIGHT…THEN YOU ENERGY. Tommy wasn’t sure what it meant; was it supposed to be funny? Knickknack had on bright yellow tennis shoes that had Japanese lettering written on them. He smelled like he hadn’t showered or changed his clothes for days.
“Where’s the girls?” Tommy whispered.
“What are you doing here?” Knickknack whispered fiercely. “Are you working with these assholes?”
“This is a rescue, idiot. Where are the girls?”
“A rescue? Is Mokoto here?”
Tommy bounced the boy against the nearest wall. “Where are the girls?”
“They’re in the female employee locker room.” Knickknack fumbled through the key ring. “I think this key unlocks the door.”
The keys jingled softly, betraying the fact that the kid was shaking in fear. It made Tommy angry.
“We’re here to save you,” Tommy snarled as he took the keys.
“Mokoto is here?” Knickknack repeated.
Tommy bounced him again. “Take me to the locker room where the girls are.”
Knickknack indicated the door that the big man had taken. “There’s a guard on the girls.”
“I’ll take care of him,” Tommy said.
“Wait.” Knickknack started to gather up stuff on the table. “I tried to talk sense into these assholes but it was like talking to a brick wall. They don’t understand the danger. There’s multiple worlds out there. I have no idea how you key to the right world. I could have been opening a doorway to literally anywhere. There could be massive colonies of man-eating ants, or AI-driven death machines, or diseases that make the Ebola seem like the common cold, or a literal black hole that will use the doorway to tear Pittsburgh into little pieces of matter.”
“Just leave it,” Tommy said.
“No, I can’t. They set up a backdoor to all of Tinker’s files. I want to be able to block them after we get out of here — or they’ll just do this with someone else.”
“We need to hurry,” Tommy said.
“Got it!” Knickknack took off running.
A fireproof door led to a maze of hallways and offices.
Knickknack paused at one turn to whisper and point. “The guard is around the corner.”
Tommy reached out with his mind. There were lots of minds around the corner. He couldn’t tell the girls from their guard. They were too close together and they were all bored.
He signaled Knickknack to get closer to him.
“What are you going to do?” Knickknack whispered. “Shoot him? Everyone will hear the—”
Tommy shoved Knickknack out into the hallway.
Knickknack yelped in surprise, nearly falling on his face before he recovered his balance.
One mind stopped being bored. “What are you doing here, kid?”
“Hey, Zhukov! I need to use a real toilet, not just a piss jar.” Knickknack pointed back behind him. “Mulligan said I could come down here and go proper-like.”
Tommy locked his thoughts onto the guard and erased Knickknack from his vision.
“What the hell?” Zhukov said as Tommy stepped around the corner. He was a beefy man with a full beard. “Where did you go, kid?”
Knickknack looked at Tommy walking toward him, back at Zhukov who was turning in circles, and then back at Tommy. He spread his hands with a silent “What?”