The Blue Nowhere

wiring.”
    “Thanks.”
    “You missed having a soldering iron, right?”
    Gillette nodded. “I sure did.”
    “You pull something like that again and you’ll be back inside as soon as I can get a patrol car to bring you in. Got it?”
    “Got it.”
    “Nice try,” Bob Shelton whispered. “But, fuck, life’s just one big disappointment, don’t you think?”
    No, Wyatt Gillette thought. Life’s just one big hack.
    O n the eastern edge of Silicon Valley a pudgy fifteen-year-old student pounded furiously on a keyboard as he peered through thick glasses at a monitor in the computer room at St. Francis Academy, an old, private boys’ school in San Jose.
    The name of this area wasn’t quite right, though. Yeah, it had computers in it. But the “room” part was a little dicey, the students thought. Stuck away down in the basement, bars on the windows, it looked like a cell. And it may actually have been one once; this part of the building was 250 years old and the rumor was that the famous missionary in old California, Father Junípero Serra, had spread the gospel in this particular room by stripping Native Americans to the waist and flogging them until they accepted Jesus. Some of these unfortunates, the older students happily told the younger, never survived their conversion and their ghosts continued to hang out in cells, well, rooms, like this one.
    Jamie Turner, the youngster who was presently ignoring spirits and keying at the speed of light, was a gawky, dark-haired sophomore. He’d never gotten a grade below a 92 in his life and, even though there were two months to go until the end of term, he had completed the required reading—and most of the assignments—for all of his classes. He owned more books than any two students at St. Francis and had read the Harry Potter books five times each, Lord of the Rings eight times and every single word written by computer/science-fiction visionary William Gibson more often than he could remember.
    Like muted machine-gun fire the sound of his keying filled the small room. He heard a creak behind him. Looked around fast. Nothing.
    Then a snap. Silence. Now the sound of the wind.
    Damn ghosts. . . . Fuck ’em. Get back to work.
    Jamie Turner shoved his heavy glasses up on his nose and returned to his task. Gray light from the misty day was bleeding through the barred windows. Outside on the soccer field his classmates were shouting, laughing, scoring goals, racing back and forth. The 9:30 physical ed period had just started. Jamie was supposed to be outside and Booty wouldn’t like him hiding down here.
    But Booty didn’t know.
    Not that Jamie disliked the principal of the boarding school. Not at all, really. It was hard to dislike somebody who cared about you. (Unlike, say, for instance, hellll-ohhh, Jamie’s parents. “See you on the twenty-third, son. . . . Oh, wait, no. Your mother and I’ll be busy then. We’ll be here on the first or the seventh. Definitely then. Love you, bye.”) It was just that Booty’s paranoia was a major pain. It meant lockdowns at night, all those damn alarms and the security, his checking up on the students all the time.
    And, for instance, refusing to let the boys go to harmless rock concerts with their older and way responsible brothers unless their parents had signed a permission slip, when who knew where the hell your parents even were, let alone getting them to spend a few minutes to sign something and fax it back to you in time, no matter how important it was.
    Love you, bye. . . .
    But now Jamie was taking matters into his own hands. His brother, Mark, a sound engineer at an Oakland concert venue, had told Jamie that if he could escape from St. Francis that night he’d get the boy into the Santana concert and could probably get his hands on a couple of unlimited-access backstage passes. But if he wasn’t out of the school by six-thirty his brother’d have to leave to get to work on time. And meeting that deadline was a problem. Because getting out of St. Francis wasn’t like sliding down a bedsheet rope, the way kids in old movies snuck out for the night. St. Francis may have looked like an old Spanish castle but its security was totally high-tech.
    Jamie could get out of his room, of course; that wasn’t locked, even at night (St. Francis wasn’t exactly a prison). And he could get out of the building proper through the fire door—provided he could disable the fire alarm. But that would only get him