Disney at Dawn

Again, he smacked the front of the car.

It stopped.

He’d knocked out a front sensor.

Struggling to free his hooked belt, he turned and glanced over his shoulder. The dinosaur broke loose from his scene—the thing was definitely alive!—and charged.

With the stopping of the vehicle, an alarm now sounded throughout the building.

Willa’s seat belt released, freeing her.

She leaped from the backseat. “The black door!” Maybeck called out calmly. Again he wrestled with his belt. Now he fiddled to unstrap it: he was stuck.

The dinosaur snorted and charged down the track at him. Only at the last second did Maybeck spot a small pool of oil along the track—one of the vehicles ahead of him was leaking oil. As he noticed it, he elected to stay perfectly still.

“MAYBECK!” Willa cried out.

His belt still caught, Maybeck turned around and faced the charging animal.

His belt buckle came loose and slipped out of the loops on his pants.

He dropped to the floor.

The dinosaur slipped in the oil and crashed into the front of the vehicle, demolishing the rover into a twisted V of bent metal.

Maybeck was lying directly between the dinosaur’s legs.

He scrambled to his feet.

Willa held the black door open.

Maybeck ran like he’d never run. The dinosaur turned and followed, not slowed by the crushing impact with the vehicle.

Maybeck literally dove through the black door. Willa swung it shut. The wall shook as the dinosaur impacted the metal door and concrete fire wall. Willa took Maybeck by the hand and pulled him to his feet.

“You could have been killed.”

“I saw that his legs were like stumps. As long as I stayed between them…”

“That was too big a risk to take.”

“It’s not like I had forever to think about it,” he replied.

He looked around. They were in a long, curving hallway. There were no markings on the gray walls. Overhead, hundreds of wires were carried in a kind of metal ladder that hung from the ceiling; it ran in both directions and out of sight. Among the wires were dozens of blue ones.

“We follow the wires,” Maybeck said.

“But in which direction?”

“This way,” Maybeck said.

“But how do you know?” Willa asked.

“I don’t,” he said. “Some things we’ve just got to take on faith.”

“Faith? This is you speaking? What have you done with the real Maybeck?”

“Give it a rest.”

They were hurrying now, the alarm still sounding. Perhaps employees all rushed to assigned stations in emergencies—or to unload guests. Whatever the case, the hallway was empty.

Maybeck moved not with his eye down the hall, but in the tangle of wires overhead. Willa did much the same.

“There!” she said, pointing out a massive group of blue wires ru

Maybeck swung open the door.

Workbenches ran along the far wall, covered with spare parts, soldering guns, tools, and hydraulics. In the middle of the space to their left was a metal rack, floor-to-ceiling shelving holding dozens of computer servers, network hubs, and surge suppressors.

“We’ve got it!” Willa proclaimed.

“No!” Maybeck countered. “It can’t be this easy. Philby said we should look for a closet or a bathroom.”

“But these are computer servers. It could easily be—”

“No, it couldn’t be here. This ride uses all these computers. The nerds that work on them would notice a server that didn’t belong. Philby’s got to be right.”

“Then where?”

“The wires,” Maybeck said, hurrying around the back side of the rack of computers. There had to be several hundred wires—both blue and black—the blue wires interco

Maybeck looked this all over and said, “We’re not going to find it here.”

“How can you tell that?” Willa asked.

“Because the same guys that work the computers know the wires. They could spot wires that didn’t belong.”

“In this mess? I don’t think so.” Willa stepped forward and dragged her fingernail along one wire, then another.

“What are you doing?”

“Every girl knows that makeup can hide anything,” she said. “The way you fool the nerds is you paint the blue wires black. Then they don’t notice—” She cut herself off as her thumbnail flaked away some black paint, revealing the blue wire below. “Voilà!”

“If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes,” Maybeck said.

Footsteps… coming fast down the hall.

“The door!” Maybeck whispered.

Willa raced to the door and quietly spun the lock.

The people in the hall ran past. She looked at Maybeck and rolled her eyes: that had been too close.

As she rejoined Maybeck, he followed the painted network line to where it had been run along the underside of the bottom shelf. Together they traced it and three others to the interior wall, and along this wall and another set of shelves to where a small hole had been drilled through some plasterboard. A door stood immediately to Maybeck’s right where a wall jutted out. He tried the doorknob.

Locked.

Willa pointed to a small sign that identified the door: JANITOR.

“That’s perfect!” Maybeck said. “It’s certain to have a drain—which is how Philby says they run the wires around the Park.”

“I need something the size of a credit card,” Willa said.

Maybeck looked at her curiously.

“I have brothers who are constantly trying to lock me out of the bathroom. They think it’s fu

She found a metal plate on a workbench. She slid it into the crack next to the doorjamb, and the dark room popped open.

“Sometimes I hate being an only child,” Maybeck quipped.

The room was a pile of junk—a neglected storeroom. It took him a minute, but Maybeck located the server mounted beneath a photo-developing bench—a blue-and-silver Dell that looked a lot like a piece of a home stereo.

If they were right, this small box controlled all the holograms of the animals they’d battled, and it possessed the power to erase them all.

“What now?” she asked.

“We don’t just pull the plug. I know that much.”

“A magnet,” she said. “We need a magnet!”

Together, the two returned to the workshop and began searching for anything magnetic. Willa found a couple of small magnets, but they both agreed they wouldn’t be powerful enough to do any real damage. They needed to rearrange all the magnetic information on the hard disk. It was going to take something…

“There!” Maybeck said too loudly.

At that very moment, another line of footfalls had been coming down the hallway. The noise stopped just outside the door. A fist banged on the door.

“Block it!” he hissed, instructing Willa.

For what he’d spotted was currently up near the ceiling. It was a very large device with two metal plates co

Willa rolled a tool chest in front of the door and then locked the wheels.

Maybeck threw a switch and worked the hydraulic arm, attaching the magnet to the end of it. He found the power switch and tried it: a wrench and three screwdrivers jumped off a workbench and stuck to the magnet. He’d gotten it too close to the workbench, but he’d proven his point.

He flipped off the switch, and the tools dropped to the floor in a cacophony of banging metal.

Now the people on the other side of the door tried all the harder.

Maybeck wrestled with a giant cotter pin that held the magnet to the arm. He got the magnet free, extended the wire co