[ ]: the employee bathroom in the Dino Institute is way too cold, and every bathroom has drains, right? some drains feed the storm sewers.

Philby grabbed hold of the DS. It was worth a try.

philitup: dhi server is in an employee bathroom close 2 the south wall.

mybest: on our way.

philitup: wayne and i will try 2 cut the cables, u try 2 find server.

Philby looked back at the VMK screen and, as he did, the screen popped and sparkled. It occurred to him that someone could be monitoring them. The Overtakers could know that he and Wayne were online. Could they trace their locations? If so, both he and Wayne were at great risk.

philitup: hurry up! we have to cut the cables.

Wayne’s avatar rushed to keep up with Philby. It forced Wayne to keep his hands on the mouse and off the keyboard: he couldn’t type a message as long as Philby kept him moving.

They traveled around the corner of the institute and back to the catwalk that carried the data cables. Philby struck the purple cables with his sword. Once…twice…three times. All the cables were cut. They immediately turned gray—the data stream was dead.

Why wasn’t Wayne helping? Philby turned his avatar to look.

Wayne’s avatar wasn’t moving.

philitup: come on! hurry!

The white-haired avatar just stood there not doing anything.

Philby wished he could scream at Wayne, instead of just typing. Why wasn’t the old guy following him?

Then the impossible happened: Wayne’s avatar dissolved.

60

MAYBECK AND WILLA occupied the backseat of one of the exploration vehicles inside the Dino Institute. The front seat stood empty, and given the size of the crowd lined up for the ride, this should have told them something; but they’d been too preoccupied with Philby’s instructions to pay much attention to anything beyond looking for doors offering employees backstage access.

The ride was dark and very cold, with stunningly real dinosaurs appearing at every turn. Asteroids fell to Earth in a shower of fiber optics. The vehicle rounded a long turn. The prehistoric creatures looked up and turned toward the truck.

“How are we going to do this?” Willa asked Maybeck in a whisper. “We can’t jump from the car without setting off the alarms.”

“We’ll find a way backstage,” Maybeck promised. “The trick is to know where we’re going.” He indicated the part of the ride to their right. “This section is all interior to the track. Philby said a workshop or bathroom. Those rooms are going to be in spaces between the ride and the exterior walls—or currently to our left.”

“Are you sure about that?” she asked.

“I’m not sure about anything,” he conceded.

The next scene showed a tyrannosaurus eating a lizard.

“It’s creepy the way their eyes move,” Willa hissed. “It feels like they’re looking right at—”

But her words were cut off as the dinosaur’s giant tail swiped over the engine of the open-topped vehicle. Maybeck reached out and pulled Willa down onto him a fraction of a second before the massive tail nearly beheaded her. The tail broke some equipment off the vehicle, and it tumbled to the track.

Maybeck dared to sneak a look and pushed Willa back up.

“Was that…supposed to happen?” she gasped.

Maybeck pulled at a lap belt at his waist; then he tried Willa’s. The belts wouldn’t release—they were locked shut. The kids couldn’t jump out of the vehicle even if they’d wanted to.

“I don’t think so. No,” Maybeck answered. “I think that was intended for us. Heads up!”

He glanced back. No vehicles in sight in either direction.

The ride was designed so that no car ever saw another. There was no use calling out for help.

“You remember Small World?” he asked her.

“I was on Winnie the Pooh with Charlene,” Willa answered. “We nearly drowned, don’t forget.”

“I haven’t forgotten. My point is: I think this is like that.”

“I think you’re right.”

If they could have jumped from the car, the sensors would have stopped the ride, but the locked seat belts prevented their escape.

Suddenly, a pterodactyl shot down at them from out of the pitch-black ceiling. It was dark and angular, with a wingspan of over six feet. With its sharp talons extended, it descended too quickly for Maybeck to react, catching him by the wrist as he shielded his face from the attack. At the moment the talon grabbed hold of him, his seat belt released, the timing too perfect to be coincidental. The bird locked on to his forearm and dragged him up and out of the vehicle.

Willa screamed, spun, and grabbed him by the boots. Maybeck was now stretched between the overhead bird and Willa, still locked in her seat. Neither was willing to let go. He groaned in agony—it felt like every joint was separating simultaneously.

He twisted his forearm to the left then quickly to the right, breaking the bird’s grip on him. The pterdoactyl’s long beak bent back to peck at Maybeck, but too late. Maybeck reached out and snapped the bird’s leg at the knee. The creature cried out, flapped its wings, and was absorbed into the darkness of the ceiling.

Was it alive?

Willa pulled him down into the backseat, but he avoided the seat belt.

The pterodcactyl’s broken leg in hand, Maybeck studied it. An electrical wire extended from the broken knee.

“You’re bleeding,” she said.

He studied the three holes in his skin. “It doesn’t hurt much. I’m fine.”

“It got you.”

“Dang right it did.” Only Maybeck didn’t say ‘dang.’

“This ride is trying to hurt us!”

“You think?” he snapped sarcastically. “You’re not surprised by that, are you? There are sensors on every ride. Probably cameras, too. Throw in a little artificial intelligence, and how hard can it be to program a server to defend itself?”

“You think the server is doing this?”

“I think it knows we mean business. It has every right to be scared. I’m going to fry its innards if—no, when!—we find it.”

“But how—?” Willa began. She cut herself off as Maybeck stood up in the seat, grabbed a light, and turned it to show them something of the track in front of them.

Back behind the jungle plants, he illuminated a black door and a disguised device protruding from beside it.

“Ten-to-one that’s a card reader,” Maybeck said. “That’s our way in.”

“But I’m stuck,” Willa reminded him, indicating the locked seat belt. She pulled and squirmed, but there wasn’t any way she was going to slip out of its grip.

Maybeck glanced around sharply. The car had already moved them past the black door. They were rounding a turn toward the end of the ride. They would be caught and—at a minimum—thrown out of the Park. If the Overtakers got hold of them, then things were about to get a lot worse.

“There has to be an emergency release,” Maybeck said, trying to think like Philby. What would Philby do?

“If a car stops,” she said. “Like a fire or something…”

“The belts would release!” Maybeck nearly shouted, agreeing with her.

“We’re going to have to move fast,” he said. A rhinoceroslike dinosaur stepped out of the scene up ahead and lowered its head. It was going to head-butt them.

Maybeck jumped from the vehicle.

Nothing happened.

He’d expected flashing lights and sirens and for the vehicle to stop. But the car continued forward, aimed directly at the armor-clad beast with its head lowered.

Maybeck tore loose a branch from a tree. He hurried to the front of the research vehicle and swung the branch repeatedly at the vehicle’s bumper and grille.

“Terry!” Willa shouted, calling Maybeck by his first name.

“There has to be…” Maybeck muttered to himself as he continued to bash the vehicle while he backed up toward the waiting dinosaur. His pants belt snagged on something on the front grille. If the beast charged now, it would crush him against the car.