Ridley Pearson - Power Play

“Okay,” he said. “Thank you.”

“ One night . And I’ll tell you something: this is going to be the longest night of my life.”

Tears ran down her cheeks. Her lips trembled. She looked so afraid.

“For what it’s worth, she’s gonna be okay.”

The woman sobbed.

“Go to lunch,” she said, in her motherly way.

Lunch ? Finn thought. “Right,” he said, knowing he would head straight to his locker and start sending texts.

Wlla=SBS Return her asap

Phones weren’t allowed in class, but you could use them outside once school was dismissed. The workaround for the students was to keep their phones on vibrate in their lockers, where they would check them between classes without being seen. For the ten minutes between classes, the hallways were now less crowded. Instead of mass confusion, a hundred kids had their faces planted inside their lockers as they sent and received texts. Bullies and jocks would take plastic rulers and run down the hallway slapping bottoms, an unpleasant but tolerated punishment for the right to communicate. If a teacher approached, the phone was replaced by a textbook, and the locker was closed. It was almost impossible for them to bust a kid.

When Philby read Finn’s text, he believed it a mistake, or worse, a prank sent by one of the green-eyes. He’d double checked the number: it was Finn.

Willa couldn’t be stuck in the Syndrome because, like Charlene, he’d never crossed her over. More to the point: he’d been monitoring the server’s bandwidth. He had an alarm set. There had been no alarm last night-therefore, Willa had not crossed into the Parks as her hologram. But then he remembered finding Elvis asleep on his laptop. Late for the bus, he’d pushed Elvis off and had shut the laptop’s lid, scooped it off his desk, and stuffed it into his backpack without a second thought.

He felt sick to his stomach. When he’d reopened the laptop at school had the DHI monitoring program been open? He couldn’t remember. He was the last line of defense against the Overtakers. Had he messed up? Had he failed Willa, of all people?

He raced down the hall to Hugo’s locker, his head ready to explode. Willa?

“I’ve gotta borrow your laptop,” he said. He wasn’t asking.

“No, you don’t,” Hugo said. “I need it for science.” Hugo didn’t even look like Hugo. Something was different about him. But everything looked different: The school hallway seemed about two feet wide. Philby’s world was all backward.

“I’ll trade you. You can use mine,” he offered. “You have a data card. I don’t. I need Internet access. I can’t be on the school server. Please!”

“What’s up?”

“Keepers stuff.”

“Such as?”

“Later. I gotta do this now. I’ve got a class. Please.”

Hugo exchanged laptops.

Philby hurried into the boys’ room, locked himself in a stall, and set up Hugo’s computer on his lap while sitting on a toilet seat. He used Hugo’s wireless data card to connect to the Internet, entered the URL for the back door into the DHI server, and typed his log-in password.

He navigated to the page where he could manually cause a Return-the same set of instructions that were used for the fob when inside the Parks-and typed from memory Willa’s twenty-six-character ID string.

The window flashed. He’d lost the handshake.

He double-checked the data card connection-all was good-and reentered the URL, ready to start over. He reached the log-on page and reentered his password.

INCORRECT PASSWORD: ACCESS DENIED

Believing he must have typed too fast, he tried again.

INCORRECT PASSWORD: ACCESS DENIED

Now he had real problems: a third failure in a row would mean he’d be blocked from trying to enter a password for twenty-four hours. Willa didn’t have twenty-four hours. Wondering if it might be a problem with Hugo’s data card, Philby decided that the only thing to do was to get to the DHI server in person and make an attempt at the password from there.

He texted Finn:

major problems. password not workin. call emergency meeting

The rest of the school day dragged on impossibly slowly. Several times Philby debated skipping, but he’d never done that in his life and he had no desire to be caught and grounded for eternity. That would make matters even worse for everyone. Especially him. He traded back computers with Hugo before seventh period, thanking him.

He and Finn, Maybeck, and Charlene met at the Marble Slab ice cream shop. Charlene told them about the confrontation with Sally Ringwald. She’d been too hyper to catch every last word, but she gave them all she could remember. “Amanda will have the full four-one-one,” she said, “but what’s important is that Sally is definitely under some kind of spell, there’s lots more where she came from, and something big is going down on Saturday. For what it’s worth.”

“We’ve got to move on,” an anxious Philby said. “Willa…” It came out as a moan. “The point is, the server password’s not taking,” he explained. “Basically, I’m going to be locked out of the server if I try it remotely again, so I’ve got to make it count.”

“Why wouldn’t your password take?” Maybeck asked.

He was met with three blank faces-one of them with strawberry ice cream on both corners of her lips.

“If it’s the Imagineers’ security kicking in,” Philby said, “it’s not so bad-maybe someone would help us. But somehow I doubt it with everything that’s been happening. I’ve been thinking about it all day. I lost the connection after I first logged on. I thought it was the data card-you know, like a cell phone dropping out. Happens all the time. But it’s possible…maybe not probable, but possible…that my keystrokes were captured. It’s possible that the system was reset right after I’d logged on in order to break my connection. By the time I was back on, my password had been removed, my back door closed.”

“The OTs,” Charlene said.

“Yeah. They could have been waiting for me.”

Finn quoted the Kim Possible mission: “‘Everyone needs a server now and then.’ You think Wayne was trying to tell us the OTs had hacked the server?”

“They didn’t like that you came and got me,” Charlene said. “They aren’t about to allow that to happen again.”

“So they ambushed us,” Maybeck said.

“Without access, without control of the server, we can’t cross over,” Philby said. “The only way we can help Willa is to Return her. We’ve got two choices: we can either hack back into the server, or we can go into the Parks, try to find her, and then use the fob to Return her.”

“Good luck,” Maybeck said. “We don’t know which Park. We don’t know where she is in whatever Park she’s in. That could take years.”

Maybeck’s DHI had been locked up in a maintenance cage inside Space Mountain. He might never have been found there.

“If I hack the server, we’ll know which Park she’s in,” Philby reminded. “The activity log will tell us.”

“But,” Finn said, “in order to see the activity log we- you -have to hack the server. So we have to get to the server as us. Not DHIs. Right? I mean, we can’t cross over because we’ve lost access to the server, which is the whole point.”

“Right,” Philby confirmed. “We go in as us. Hopefully, I get us back online. After that we can cross over, if that’s what we have to do.”

Maybeck cursed and pushed away from the table, disgusted. “This rots,” he said. “We’ve got to get her back. What are we waiting for? We can use our employee passes. We get Philbo into the server room and let him do his thing. If the Return doesn’t work from there, we go into whatever Park and we get her back. I’ve been there-in the Syndrome. So have you, Philbo. It sucks. We’ve got to do this.”