Renegade

Chapter three

The light emanating from the computer's screen illuminated the two figures otherwise shrouded in darkness. The one sitting in front of the device was female, while the one leaning over her shoulder was male.

"How much longer?" the man asked impatiently, his eyes scanning the stream of letters and numbers on the screen. "We're going to miss our window."

"I know. Can you be quiet for a minute? I'm trying to concentrate," the woman answered, voice laced with annoyance. "It's not like I'm a Technopath, so it'll take time."

"Time we don't have," the man hissed, his hand nervously clenching around the back of her chair.

"Quiet," the woman grumbled, eyes scanning the screen as her fingers danced over the keyboard.

"If you don't get him out of there, you'll be stuck doing his job. You know that, right?" he commented, leaning in closer.

She swiveled around in her seat, pinning him with a glare so deadly he took an involuntary step back. A chill ran down his spine.

"Shut. Up." she ground out, turning her attention back to her work.

The man didn't return to her side until the unusual crackling in the room abated and even then, he didn't lean over her anymore. They were in a hurry, true, but it wasn't worth invoking her wrath, so he stiffly stood beside her, swallowing down his impatience.

"Shit," she exhaled the word a couple of minutes later.

The man's eyes snapped to the screen, but the jumble of words and letters made no sense to him.

"Shit?" he repeated.

"Yes, shit," she said, nervously twisting her fingers.

"Shit what? What's wrong? What did you do?" he asked in the same breath, an edge to his voice as he scanned the faintly illuminated side of her face.

"I shut down the whole grid." her fingers were hovering above the keyboard now, unsure of what to do next.

"The whole grid as in the whole building? Not just sub-level 2?" he asked, visibly paling.

"Yes," she whispered, glancing at him over her shoulder.

"Shit," he said in the same tone she'd used before. "Brad's gonna kill us."

"Not if he doesn't find out..."

His eyes snapped over to hers but she was resolutely staring at the two other screens she'd been ignoring up to this point. One showed a floor map, the annotation in the upper right corner reading "sub-level 2", while the second was divided into multiple small squares, all of them dark.

"Not if... dammit, woman, are you crazy? We can't not tell him! Oh, we're so screwed," the man moaned, dropping his face in his palms.

"He doesn't need to know. We had to get the idiot out and we did. Mission accomplished," she insisted, fingers nervously drumming against the desk. "And if some other poor souls manage to escape in the meantime, well who cares? Not like they deserved to be locked up."

"You're joking. The lower levels have some seriously dangerous ones locked away," the man's voice was filled with disbelief as he stared at the back of her head. "If they get out, it could jeopardize everything! Everything we built, all down the drain..."

"I know, okay, I was there too," she interrupted, hands clenching on the wooden surface. "They won't escape. Everyone in there knows security's been shut down and the guards are going to head for the lower levels first. They want those people out even less than we do."