Book Two of the Travelers Read Free Page B

don’t mind, I’d like to stay and watch.”
    He cleared his throat. “Um—no, I think—no, I think you need to go home. Right now Lifelight’s saying your clearance has been revoked.” An alarm began to chime. Everybody in the core control room looked up to see what was going on. Even the drooling guy woke up and looked around.
    â€œRevoked! Why?” Aja felt outraged. Everybody knew she was trustworthy. Everybody!
    â€œSeriously. You need to go.” All of a sudden Dal was not his usual relaxed self.
    â€œBut—”
    â€œLook, there’s been a protocol breach here. The Lifelight directors are very strict about this kind of thing.”
    â€œYeah, but—”
    â€œDo you want me to have to call Lifelight Services?”
    Aja’s eyes widened. Lifelight Services ran the securityforce that protected everything connected to Lifelight. “What!”
    â€œSorry, Aja. You of all people should understand. It’s procedure. If Lifelight shuts down an ID…” He spread his hands helplessly.
    He was right. Security was important. Keeping the core safe was critical. If Lifelight said she needed to go, she needed to go.
    Still, it stung.
    â€œI understand,” she said softly. She stood and walked to the door. Everyone in the room was looking at her. Her face burned. She knew there had been some talk among them—especially among the old-school senior phaders who felt that letting a kid into the core control room was wrong. Much less letting her fiddle with security protocols.
    â€œI’ll be back!” she said forcefully. Then she looked at the locked door, and remembered her useless card.
    â€œUh…can somebody help me get out of here?” she said.
    Aja wanted to crawl into a hole and die.
    F OUR
    T he thing she couldn’t figure out was, why had this happened? Somebody had put up a security firewall around her Lifelight identity. Who? Why? How?
    There was no conceivable reason why any of this would happen. Maybe during her work with the security protocols she had triggered some kind of automatic security precaution. She’d never heard of anything like that happening. But maybe it was possible.
    No, she didn’t want to admit it, but everything pointed in the same direction: Nak Adyms.
    The first indication of trouble had been inside his game. First the silver control bracelet malfunction. Then when she invoked termination with an audible, passworded command—still nothing.
    But unless Nak had made some kind of very strange mistake in the programming of his game, then it was hard to see any possible answer.
    Except one: Nak had hacked the origin code.
    Lifelight’s origin code—the basic program that ran Lifelight—had been written by the founder of Lifelight, Dr. Zetlin, years and years ago. He had written every line of it. And since then, the origin code had never been touched. Never.
    Sometimes phaders joked about hacking the origin code. But it was just a joke. Everybody knew that Dr. Zetlin had installed a maze of security features that made it impossible to—Wait! A maze!
    That was it.
    Nak’s game was a maze. It was a puzzle. It was—
    As she walked through the great glass Lifelight pyramid, Aja rapidly thought through the many possible implications of her conclusion. If Nak really had hacked the origin code, then he would have done it for a reason. And what could that reason be?
    To show her up, to make her look foolish? No…not just that. He was trying to prove that the security innovations she was testing were fundamentally flawed. That’s what he was doing. He was trying to wreck her senior project. If he could poke a hole in it, expose it as flawed, her grade for the project would inevitably suffer. In which case—theoretically—he might be able to edge her out for valedictorian.
    At that moment a young man with floppy brown hair bounced around the corner. Nak Adyms.