Kill Switch: Chapter 46
The Silence Between
I rip off the headset. Yide does the same.
“Well,” I say. “It’s working. Should we get out of here?”
“Yes,” she says. “Let’s go.”
We leave the tank plugged into the blue server and exit through the kicked down door.
The complex is still eerily quiet.
“We need to find X,” I say, “before we meet Cosmo at the rendezvous.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Vonn.”
I swing around. “You can’t actually mean that?”
Yide throws up her arms, exasperated. “I mean, what are the odds he actually escaped the guards?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “but we can’t just leave him.” I start walking back toward the elevator.
Yide grabs my arm. “Vonn, stop. I know that X is, like, your best colleague, but if the roles were reversed, wouldn’t you want X to save himself?”
I put my hands in the labcoat. “It doesn’t matter what I would want. I’m not leaving behind my best colleague.” I try to escape Yide’s grasp, but her grip is strong, and I end up just kind of dragging us forward a couple feet.
“Listen,” Yide pleads. “In all likelihood X is at the rendezvous point waiting for us. He knew that we didn’t need him to install the device, so it makes sense that he would run in a different direction from the mainframe, and then, once he lost the guards, doubleback to the rendezvous.”
“I’m not sure,” I say, but I can feel my defenses crumbling. Unable to hide anything from Yide, I say, “I see what you’re doing, you know.” And then I add: “And it’s kind of working.”
Silence hangs between us for a long second.
“You have to admit,” Yide says, “there’s at least a fifty-fifty shot he’s at the rendezvous, so why not commit to the scenario with the most upside?”
I stare into her beautiful brown eyes, losing myself in their luster.
“Or we could split the difference,” I say. “You go to the rendezvous, I go looking for X. And if I don’t find him, I’ll meet you two at the rendezvous.”
“That literally makes no sense,” Yide says. “You’re complicating things. We don’t have much time. If you run off looking for X, and X is actually at the rendezvous, then you’re putting all of our lives in danger, because now we all have to wait for you. Don’t you see that the cleanest solution is to go to the rendezvous point and hope for the best?”
Of course, I know she’s right, and the thought of her dying because of my stupidity is too much for me to stomach, so, in the end, I fold beneath the weight of her common sense.
We curve around the mainframe, heading toward the northside of headquarters, up by the mansion, where Cosmo said he’d be waiting for us in his hella rad hovercraft.