The Island

13.3. Stealing

Ezra

Riku and Sarah exit the elevator first, and I bustle out behind them. They check the long hallway before moving. Sarah walks in front, holding her stun gun against her chest, and Riku creeps behind her.

Sometimes, I wonder if he is quieter than Jordyn. No one has the exact same skills as she did, but the two of them could easily disappear if they tried hard enough. Riku's dark hair helps him blend in when they guard the door, and his silent breathing adds to his stealth. Jordyn was faster than him, just as silent on her feet as he is, and she was shorter. What she lacked in height, she made up for in attitude- when we could get her to talk, that is.

The strange thing about our leader and his daughter is that they aren't from the city. They showed up after Jordyn's mother died, and neither of them will talk about the place they came from. With her skillset, though, it's always been obvious that they didn't have the luxuries of city civilians.

"Ez," Sarah whispers, breaking me out of my thoughts. "Where are we going?"

I glance up at the long hallway. Doors line each side, solid metal with electronic keypads on the side. Some require a code; others take a card to swipe. At the end, there's a set of double doors guarded by a retinal scanner.

"I bet you ten food rations that's the place," Riku groans as he notices the double doors.

"I'm not taking that. I can't risk losing ten packs of food."

"It's all dried nastiness anyway," Sarah says. "I'll take it."

The two of them shake on it, and I push my way around them towards the heavy doors.

Sure enough, the plaque on the side of the door says 'Manufactured Prison Records.'

"You owe me some food," Riku boasts in a singsong voice from behind me. I roll my eyes, but the next sound I hear is a loud crunch and him hissing in pain. "You took the bid, idiot," he growls, and a glance over my shoulder plus him rubbing his head tells me Sarah hit him.

I kneel down to dig through my bag, and the two of them stand guard behind me. First, I pull out the dried food packets I've stashed in there, the Superman comic, the never-used gun, and the keycard, and then, I carefully remove the laptop. Then, I cram all the stuff back in.

"I'm always amazed at the stuff you pull out of that bag," Riku whispers as he nudges the gun with his shoe. "Have you ever actually used that?"

I shake my head, powering up the computer.

"I don't need to when I have you guys," I mumble without looking up.

Sarah snorts.

"Plus, it's a real gun, Riku, not a stun," I say. "Aiming that at someone could land me on the stage, and you might remember I had a birthday a few weeks ago."

"Oh, yeah. I forgot you were eighteen."

"Of course you did," Sarah says. "It's not like he looks like he's the oldest."

"You'll be jealous when we're fifty and I look like I'm twenty," I say. The computer beeps loudly to tell me it's ready, and I begin to type. My fingers seem to move on their own, keying in numbers and code I've memorized over the course of time. Passwords roll out of my memory with ease equatable only to how it feels to slide across a damp, oil stained street. I bypass the password-protected wifi and connect to the building's system with ease.

"Ezra, we aren't going to live till we're fifty," Sarah whispers in a dry voice. Her words gnaw through my concentration as I try to remember the password into the employee database.