Michael paced back and forth in the small area. All he had to do was get a message to Kaine somehow. He just needed ten seconds, with any kind of computing device linked to the VirtNet. Michael remembered an old cartoon: a lightbulb would appear over a character’s head when he got an idea. That was what he needed right—

He stopped pacing. The lights. A huge building like this, with all that fancy technology…the tech had to be centralized and operated via a VirtNet connection. Had to be.

A guard beat on the door. “Come on, hurry it up in there!”

Michael jumped. “Yeah! Sorry!” His mind spun. “Sorry, my stomach’s all messed up from the stress you guys put me through!” He winced at his lame attempt to stall.

“You’ve got two minutes!” the soldier yelled through the door. Michael was surprised they didn’t just come barreling in, though he figured not even a guard would have the stomach for what he might walk into.

He ran to the lighting panel, a black plate of glass on the wall. It was a simple interface—the lights operated automatically based on movement, but there were also images on the glass for turning them off and on manually, and to dim them in different quadrants of the room. Michael’s mind worked. He knew he could figure out how to hack into the network; he just needed time. Time he didn’t have.

“One minute!” the soldier shouted, banging on the door again. Michael jumped and accidentally turned the lights off. He quickly flipped them on again, hoping they hadn’t noticed out in the hallway.

He could do this. He took a deep breath and gripped the edges of the glass screen, digging his fingers into the crevices. Then he pulled. It took three tries to slide the unit a half inch from the wall. With more leverage, he was able to yank it out all the way. Michael carefully let it dangle from the optic fiber that connected it to the main system. When he was sure it wouldn’t snap, he took a look at the back of the console. There was a button to switch the interface on the glass from symbols to raw code. He quickly made the change, then shoved the console back into the wall. The black glass now displayed several lines of code that would look like absolute gibberish to most people.

Not to him.

He went to work, tapping and swiping at the code to dig down several layers, reaching past the simple lighting communications and diving into the actual systems of the building itself.

“What’s wrong with you, kid!” one of the men shouted from the hallway. “I’m coming in.”

Without thinking, Michael reached over and engaged the lock on the door, something he hadn’t done earlier to limit suspicion. As soon as it clicked, both soldiers started pounding on the door.