The hole was big enough to crawl through. I went up first, and gave Swansong a hand. She’d been battered in being pushed through the door. Vista was last. While she climbed up, I peeked through a crack in the door.

We crossed the lobby just ten or so seconds before the guards got to the top of the stairs, a matter of feet away. We ran down the hallway, as quickly and quietly as we could, before they could walk over and look our way.

Back to the others, Kenzie’s phone and toolkit in our possession. Once she had it, she could alert Armstrong and Natalie. It was the best we could do, short of fighting our way through dozens of guards and trying to pass it off, or tearing through the building to get to them. If they needed that kind of help, we’d provide it, but it was the best we could do while staying covert.

Then it would be up to them.

Breaking 14.z

Obsequious was the word. A flurry of young men and women in very precise haircuts and outfits made absolutely sure that he and Ms. Matteson were cared for, that they had cold tea, that they had nuts, vegetable platters, and bread. One even offered a bath, which bewildered.

It made it hard to find ten straight seconds to think. That might have been the very point of it.

Kamil’s hand absently brushed against a pillow that was built into the arm of the chair he sat in, while Ms. Matteson worked her way through a conversation with a young ‘pen carrier’, a boy with hair and clothes that could only be described as a uniform.

Ms. Matteson was of a type that Kamil had seen often enough, when talking to prospective employees who were fresh out of college, traumatized by the academia to the point of perpetual anxiety, wide eyed and fidgety, twenty or thirty pounds overweight, not used to sleeping normal hours, giving evidence to faint circles under the eyes. Someone who’d had enough on their plate that they’d started and ended the journey from adolescent to adult with the shakiest of ideas what an adult was to wear. Where some clung to the ‘teenager’ look, Ms. Matteson had lunged for a more formal, adult look that she wore with what looked like perpetual discomfort. A black skirt, a formal shirt, a styled suit jacket, and large, round glasses. A boring hair cut.

It endeared him, really. He’d been almost exactly that, many years ago. It endeared him too, to see her relaxing and forgetting her anxieties as she engaged with the ‘pen carrier’. He’d worried what kind of people Sveta had near her.

The ten-year-old boy in the severe haircut and uniform spoke, “I write, I organize, I learn, I—” he made a hand motion, more like he was trying to remind himself than anything. “—am rised-up.”