“Would the group be willing to help us if you actually find Gateway?” I asked.

“No.” Broken Man fiddled with the computer. “The consequences of getting caught are too great for the uppers.”

It had been a hypothetical question. I planned to prove there was no Gateway. Prove to Cog that the people of Inside had been sealed off from Outside.

Besides the Pop Cops’ insistence of a purely spiritual final resting place for the good people, the rumors surrounding Outside ranged from wild guesses to tales of horror. I knew something had to be beyond our walls. And whether this place was Outside or something else, speculation ran rampant.

A few scrubs claimed it was a vast wasteland, others a magical kingdom where fairies flew through the air, a number declared water surrounded us and a couple maintenance scrubs thought our own garbage was piled around us. We reused and recycled everything, but a small portion of pure waste disappeared through a flushing system the Controllers maintained. Cog had tried to use that fact in his argument about Gateway.

All the rumors didn’t sway me. I didn’t care. Why worry or speculate about an inaccessible place? We were trapped in Inside until we ceased to exist and Chomper turned our bodies into fertilizer. End of story.

I concentrated on Broken Man’s statement about getting no help from the upper families. It fit—uppers wouldn’t risk themselves and their cushy life for a bunch of scrubs. Although, I couldn’t help thinking about Riley in his hideout on level four.

His family names seemed important to him—a source of pride. How did he feel about the Travas controlling our world? Maybe Riley and a few uppers would like to see life altered? I grimaced. Sappy bull. I was getting soft, letting hope grow a centimeter. Snip. Snip. I mentally cut it back.

“If the computer works, all I need to do is retrieve your disks and you can access them? Right?” I asked.

Broken Man bit his lip and said nothing.

“What’s wrong? I thought you have a gap in your mouth for the port.”

“I have the gap.” He paused. “Problem is…I don’t have my teeth.”

“What?”

“They’re not real teeth. We just call them that. They’re needed to access the internal computer network. They’re designed so the Pop Cops can keep track of who is in the network and restrict access to the computer system by pulling an upper’s port.”

I sank to the floor. Rubbing my face in my hands, I said, “Now you tell me.”

7

NOTHING MORE I COULD DO. THE END. THE POP COPS had Broken Man’s port. Without his port, he couldn’t access his disks and the information. No information meant no proof or disproof of Gateway’s existence.

“Lieutenant Commander Karla has my port,” Broken Man said.

I stared at him. Was he serious? “You want me to ask her for it back?”

“Think, Trella. She doesn’t know about the disks. Pulling my teeth is standard procedure. She would have sent it to computer ops to check what I’ve been accessing in the system, and they would have returned it with their report.” Sudden understanding lit his gray eyes. “The report! I should have known. A few of the files I’d viewed probably made Karla suspicious and she set a trap in my room. If only I heard about you before she rigged my quarters.”