Uncaged Read Free Page A

facility. She went back for more folders, shaking out the thumb drives.
    “Rachel!” A thin, awkward teen stepped in, banging his hip on the desk but holding fast to a maimed rat. His voice was cool, but the anger clawed through. “Look at this! Look what they’re doing. They cut off her legs! How could they do that?”
    The woman barely looked up. “Not
how
—
why
?” she said, and dumped four more drives onto the desk. “Put that thing down and stick these drives in your pockets.”
    The boy tipped the rat gently onto one hand and started picking up drives with the other. “It’s pointless—they’re gonna be encrypted.”
    She paused in her search. “You couldn’t decrypt them?”
    “The CIA couldn’t decrypt them if the encryption is strong.” He unconsciously scratched the rat between the ears and glanced around the room. “The thing is … you don’t want to jump through your butt when you need the files, either. The decryption software is probably on one of these machines.”
    She looked around, waved at the enclosed space at the back of the office. “That’s gotta be Janes’s working space. See what you can do in two minutes.”
    “All right.” The boy walked away with the rat and came back fifteen seconds later with a compact tower computer under his arm. “If it’s on here, we got it.”
    He was still holding the rat in his other hand.
    “You can’t take the rat,” Rachel said. “Ethan loves your key card, but he doesn’t love any of us enough to change the rules. The rat’s called
evidence
.”
    She went back to rifling the last drawer. They’d gotten twelvethumb drives in all. Down the hall, the timekeeper screamed, “Ninety seconds.”
    The boy turned away.
    “Hey,” she called before he plunged back into the pandemonium. “Take this with you. Hide it.” She handed him the crowbar.
    Whatever Rachel meant to him, Odin was sorry, but he was taking the rat.
    In the weeks since she’d become his first-ever girlfriend, he’d helped her crash the systems in a couple of animal labs, but tonight was his first raid involving actual live animals. The suffering made him physically ill. The only reason he was still functioning was because he’d zeroed in on one living thing, one tortured rat, that he could save.
    When he left the containment units, he was headed for the stairs and then back to the van, to hide the rat. He pushed through two doors, to the stairs. There, just before he was about to start down, he saw a flickering reddish light coming from beneath a door farther down the hall.
    Curiosity got the best of him; he still had a minute. He walked down the hall and peered through the door’s hand-sized window. He could see racks of laboratory glass and high-tech electronic equipment, but nothing else. He tried the doorknob, but the door was locked. He’d turned away, back toward the stairs, when he heard a strangled howl.
    “What?” He said it aloud, to nobody.
    He put the computer and rat on the floor, jammed the blade of the crowbar against the door’s strike plate, and threw his weight against it. The door splintered, and after a couple of more hacks, hehad it open and stepped into the room. The flickering red light was an alarm of some kind; not a problem, since a dozen other alarms were screaming through the building.
    Off to his right, a whimper. He turned the corner.
    “Ohmigod,” Odin whispered. “Ohmigod.”
    A wolfish gray dog stared at him, its tail twitching with an almost wag. The dog had a wire-basket muzzle over its mouth and a medical patch over one eye. It was sitting on the floor outside a large steel-barred kennel, a restraining safety chain around its neck. The kennel door was wide open, as though the animal had somehow let itself out.
    “Hey, boy … I think … Are you okay?” Odin spoke softly and reached out to the dog: Odin had some social problems, but animals trusted him on sight.
    An IV drip connected to a bag overhead was spitting