No Safety in Numbers by Dayna Lorentz Read Free Book Online Page B

wireless purgatory on a cheap iKnockoff.) She turned off its security settings, opened the app store, and searched for WebPhone. She typed that yes, she wanted to try WebPhone for free, confirmed that she was over eighteen, got a login under her father’s name, and downloaded the program.
    When the icon appeared on the screen, she opened the program and dialed in Darren’s home phone number. His mom picked up. Lexi guessed that she didn’t know about her being trapped in the mall, because she simply screamed to Darren that he had a call.
    “Lexi?” Darren said when he got on the line.
    “Like anyone else knows your number,” Lexi said. A flood of relief poured through her body talking to him. She felt like crying.
    “What is going on over there?” he said. Lexi could hear him shuffling back to his room. “Every news station keeps showing the same stock footage of the mall. There’s no live coverage.”
    “I don’t know,” Lexi said. “Some people in hazmat suits said something about triage.”
    “Some people in
what
?” Darren yelped.
    “Hey!” a saleswoman yelled from the back of the store. “Put that tablet down! There’s no public Internet use!” She began to make her way toward Lexi.
    “I’ll call back later,” she said to Darren, then tapped the icon, ending the call, and trashed the program, deleting it from the tablet.
    The woman reached her. “I saw you talking. You downloaded a program.”
    “No, I didn’t,” Lexi said calmly, casually, like lying and hacking were part of her daily routine. She walked out of the store as if she hadn’t a care in the world, then, upon reaching a bench, crumpled onto the seat.
    Alone again. A hacker, a criminal. A bad daughter. And threatened by something in this mall that required the employment of hazmat suits.
    A hand dropped onto her shoulder.
    “Couldn’t find Ginger?” Her dad sat beside her.
    Tears amassed along the borders of Lexi’s eyes. She looked at her father’s blithe, smiling face.
    “Do you know what Mom’s doing in the PaperClips?”
    Her father swore under his breath; the man who yelled at her for taking the Lord’s name in vain had just muttered “shit.”
    “If you saw that place, you know how serious this situation is,” he said.
    She had no idea about anything, but it felt good to lean against her dad. Even if he clearly didn’t plan to tell her anything about what was really going on.
    “Are we gonna be okay?” she asked him.
    “Your mom is taking care of things.”
    And this is supposed to be a comfort?
    He hugged her to him. “You want to get something to eat?” he asked. Dad was a big believer in the healing power of food, as one could tell from the slight paunch hanging over his belt.
    “I could really use some pancakes,” Lexi admitted.
    “I know just the place,” he said.
    They stood, two Rosses against the insane horror show that the CommerceDome had become, and strolled toward the massive line streaming into the Pancake Palace.



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    I t took Ryan an hour and a half to get through the line to go to the bathroom. By the time he reached the stall, he had composed his apology to Shay for being such a coward yesterday afternoon. All night, he had replayed their good-bye through his mind, run through various heroic scenarios in which he tackled the one cop while toppling the vending machine onto the other cop, creating an opening for her to bust out of the mall. Or he took her hand and dashed with her up the escalator and she kissed him and said he was awesome. Anything but him pretending she didn’t exist and shuffling, head down, into the PaperClips.
    While constructing these scenarios, he flipped through the book Shay had given him—normally, if he read anything, he read magazines, and then mostly just the tags under the pictures, but last night was far from normal. Shay’s book was full of weird, long poems, a bunch ofthem love poems. Some of the love stuff was kind of, well, how else could he put