“It’ll make too much noise. It’ll bring Oswald in here.”
“Yeah, but what if we break the window and you don’t waste any time getting your ass up the rope to the roof.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll stop Oswald.”
“You’re going to sacrifice yourself for me.”
“What the hell. My moons are for shit anyway.”
“Not gonna happen. If Melvin is here, I’m sure Ranger isn’t far behind. We’ll hunker in and wait.”
The door to the bedroom crashed open and Oswald walked into the room. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” Lula said. “We were just talking.”
Oswald spotted Melvin and went for the gun that was stuck under the waistband of his jeans. Melvin pushed off the widow, swung out on his tether, swung back, and broke through the window glass feetfirst. He lost momentum and slammed back against the wall and the smashed window.
“Nice of you to drop in,” Oswald said to Melvin, holding him at gunpoint. “I’ve been looking forward to this.”
I heard a scrambling sound on the outside wall of the building and turned in time to see Charlotte slide down the second rope like it was a fire pole. She had her arms and legs wrapped around the rope and she had a gun in her hand.
Oswald swung around, pointed his gun at Charlotte, and she shot him. There was a look of astonishment on Oswald’s face, blood spurted out of his chest, and he fell over and crashed to the floor.
No one moved or spoke. We all just stood there breathing hard. Charlotte was the first to say something. She was holding tight to the rope and her eyes were huge and glassy.
“Help,” Charlotte said.
We all rushed to the broken window and pulled Charlotte inside. She sat down hard on the floor and made a sound that was something between a giggle and a sob.
“I’m okay,” she said, stifling another sob. “I’m okay.” She looked at Melvin. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m okay.”
“I’m okay, too,” Lula said.
I joined in. “Me, too.”
We all looked at Oswald, lying on the floor. He wasn’t okay.
Lula walked over and looked down at him. “He has a hole in his chest the size of a grapefruit.”
“I was on the roof, watching the relay from Melvin’s GoPro, and I was afraid Oswald was going to shoot Melvin,” Charlotte said.
“Are you alone?” I asked. “How did you do this?”
“You asked me to hack into food delivery services, and I found several recent deliveries to this building,” Melvin said. “I tried to access the building’s security cameras, but it turned out there weren’t any, so I did some investigating and found out the building was vacant and due to be renovated.”
“We went to tell Ranger,” Charlotte said, “but he wasn’t at Rangeman. He was at a break-in somewhere. We were in the control room, wondering what we should do, when a call came in from Diesel, saying that Oswald had Stephanie and was going to start torturing her unless we were turned over to him. Hal was in charge of the control room, and he asked us to return to our rooms.”
“You’ve got cuts on you from the window glass,” Lula said to Melvin. “I’ll go to the kitchen to see if there’s Band-Aids.”
“This was all our fault,” Melvin said to me. “We were the ones whose hacking started all the killing, so we decided we were the ones who should end it. We didn’t want anyone else getting hurt.”
“It was my fault,” Charlotte said. “When the Potatoes hacked into Oswald’s system, we knew we’d accomplished our goal, and everyone instantly signed out. Except me. In the very short time we were all in, I noticed something odd. So I stayed and prowled around and didn’t like what I found. I was the one who started the killing because I was the one who installed malware in Oswald’s system. I knew he had the ability to do something terrible and I took it upon myself to stop him. I didn’t think it would come to any of this.”
“You look like a hero to me,” Lula said from the kitchen. “How’d you get out of Rangeman is what I want to know.”
“We went back to our rooms and I hacked into the control room and put a ten-minute block on Ranger’s security system. It shut down the cameras and unlocked all the doors. We ran downstairs to the shooting range and got a gun, and then we left Rangeman and walked to this building. We weren’t sure what we would do if we found Oswald, or even if Oswald was in the building. We went into the garage and saw that there was a car parked by the stairs. When I looked inside, I spotted your messenger bag.”