Immunity Index by Sue Burke

Author:Sue Burke [Burke, Sue]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250317865
Google: LPb4DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2021-05-03T23:00:00+00:00

* * *

Avril and three other students tiptoed down a hall toward the building office. One stopped at a corner to act as a lookout. At the door to the office, Avril set down a dumbbell and peered through the glass door and the wide window in the wall to see if anyone was inside. No one. She tried the door handle just in case. Unlike dorm room doors, it was locked. She wasn’t surprised.

Then they waited. Avril tried not to fidget. Bessea tapped her foot, then realized she was making noise and stopped, and she flexed and unflexed her fists instead. Drew swayed from side to side and stared down the hall at the lookout.

Avril thought she heard a distant crash. She hoped she did. Other students were going to break a window, throw chairs down stairways, and send a screeching noisemaker down the elevator to draw off the centaurs. The lookout made an “okay” sign with their hands—both hands. Both centaurs had been drawn off.

She motioned for Bessea and Drew to stand back, glanced again at the lookout, and took two big steps back. She’d played a little baseball one summer. She held the dumbbell in something like a fastball grip, took her position, shifted her weight, brought her left leg up, swung her arm, strode forward, then pushed off with her back foot—and felt a twinge in her wrist as she extended her arm. She released the dumbbell. It flew straight into the window. Strike one!

The glass smashed gloriously. Even before all the pieces had tinkled to the ground, she and the other students scattered. As planned, she headed to the food-service area and ducked behind a counter. Soon, she realized that if she scooted a little along the floor, she could see a reflection of the entrance on a glass door of a refrigerated case. She tried to quiet her panting.

In the reflection, a centaur raced past the entrance toward the office. She kept still and waited. Ten minutes. The centaur reappeared, marching the other way. She kept waiting.

The lookout tiptoed into the food-service area and shrugged. “They’re not moving anymore,” they mouthed. “I’ll keep watching.”

It has to be a trick. Well, there was one way to find out.

Bessea was already in the office when Avril arrived and stepped inside through the broken window, avoiding the shattered glass. She noticed with pride that shards lay on the floor for a good twelve feet, and the dumbbell had made a dent in the far wall. Bessea motioned for Avril to follow her to a desk in an alcove.

Bessea pointed. A screen indicated security settings, such as fire emergency and access settings for doors and loading docks. “I wonder, would this bring the centaurs if I opened the doors? I don’t think so.”

Drew had climbed in and looked over her shoulder. “They left the system unsecured?”

Avril listened to their whispers as she examined some boxes stacked along a wall: they contained bottles of ultra disinfectant concentrate, the kind used in robot cleaners.

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