Raven's parts fall at a range of speeds, shards of propeller blades fluttering, smoking innards knifing straight down. Heat licks my face and I pull back from the glass. Raven's greatest hits flash through my mind: her inaugural self-nav flight through a hula hoop maze at Google, the pilfering of a Confederate flag off my caveman-neighbor's pickup truck, this morning's water cooler knockout ...

I hear pattering and think for one zany instant it's applause. People are cheering Raven, remembering these same triumphs.

It's not applause.

The stairwell door is on the far side of the floor from me—a blessing. I hear two or possibly three sets of boots. Harsh voices. I grab Hedgehog Eleanor Roosevelt and bolt. First I run left, three strides toward the elevators. Then back right when the voices seem louder.

Finally I stop in my tracks. The boot-claps are coming from everywhere, through the walls and floor and air.

I dash to the copy nook. My eyes zip along baseboards and between counters and up a center beam to the ceiling.

A vent! HVAC runs straight over the top. I start patting my pockets for that letter opener before realizing that even if I have it—which I do not appear to—these pounding boots are too close. No way can I dislodge four screws, boost myself into the duct, and push the vent cover passably back into place before they arrive.

My eyes zip on. In a corner of the room is a shred cabinet: an opaque panel with a wide mouth for dropping documents through. These panels generally hide bins that catch the documents, but this one hasn't been operational for months. Four square feet of empty, gloriously hidden space. I open the panel and dive inside.

Darkness envelops me as, squatting, I pull the panel closed. The smell is stale and musty, a stamp collector's attic. My sandals crunch a loose pile of documents; I push them to one corner and hug myself small.

"I have the open spaces!" calls a voice.

"Every cubicle—every one," another says. "I have the offices!"

I hear them hunting my side of the floor, doors whipped open, drawers rammed shut. Through the wide mouth of my cabinet, I can observe a sliver of the hall—that stretch where Raven and I tried our SOS. A man in Elite yellow stops to peer through the hole in the window.

He inches closer to the spidered glass. His hair is buzzed, razor burn on his neck. His polo shirt bulges over muscle-corded shoulder blades. He looks down as though contemplating whether I followed Raven in some Romeo and Juliet nosedive.

I keep still, looking out. My eyes begin to water.

Creaaaa—

The panel! My panel is opening—I must've let go as I was concentrating and now it's drifting open. I pull it closed, but too late. The man at the window whirls and cries out to his partner.

Up the hall, running. They're coming. They know I'm somewhere in the interior. I hear them search the adjacent room, barking to each other in urgent tones.

Still hugging my knees, I rock myself to the back of my cabinet. I will myself smaller. I'm so compacted my heartbeat seems everywhere at once, pulsing in my shins and elbows.

Fedor is the first one into the nook—I glimpse those ears of his through the cabinet's mouth. I catch a flash of black too, at his shoulder and between his knuckles. A gun? I guess they're dropping all pretense now.

Fedor stalks the room's perimeter, a deliberate right-to-left sweep, pushing aside papers and manila folders.

He's going to check my cabinet. I know he is. The cabinet has a locking mechanism, but of course I don't have a key and couldn't risk reaching outside to lock it anyway.

I extend my hand and, working by feel in the dark, find the lock's metal tab. When engaged, the tab rises above the cabinet door and prevents its opening. I rotate the tab from horizontal to vertical—a faint click is lost in Fedor's boots—and hold it firm with my thumb.

In seconds, Fedor reaches the cabinet. I struggle to remain flat against the wall and yet keep pressure on the metal tab. His eyes flash through the wide mouth, quickly replaced by fingertips and five angry knuckles.

He grips the cabinet door by its mouth—nearly brushing my thumb—and yanks.

Concentrating all my strength in that one thumb, I stop the metal tab from moving. The cabinet and wall behind him rattle from the impact of Fedor's pull, but the door stays shut.

Fedor moves on. In another moment, he's onto the next space.

I breath again. My head flops to one shoulder, and, realizing Hedgehog Eleanor Roosevelt's quills are in my fist, I release her. My palm is bloodless white.

I haven't actually bought that much time. I'm still trapped. My SOS didn't go—unless Raven sneaked her second transmission through in the nick of time, then got blasted before transmitting confirmation back to me.

Possible?

Sure.

Likely?

I'd sooner put my money on a gay president coming out of the next election.

After several minutes searching the floor's interior, the pair of Elite thugs return to the broken window.

A walkie-talkie crackles. "Nyet. But she is here. She cannot escape."

A blip, then more crackling. Then another blip.

"Holding position, yes," Fedor says. "We have chained the door on Eight, but call when you are here—Piotr will let you in."

Then nothing. No receding footsteps, or popping pulltabs accompanied by sighs of, "Ahhh, it's Miller time."

They are staying.

This shred cabinet—my new home—seems to shrink by the second. This scrunched way I'm sitting forces my sandal strap into my blister, and the cumulative effect of all these bruises and lacerations is a kind of all-over ache. My skin is scratchy, over-sensitive everywhere.

Soon there is another crackle. Fedor dispatches his second, Piotr, presumably to unchain the stairwell door.

To let more in.

They're going to re-sweep. They're going to turn over every stapler and mouse pad and rip up carpet if that's what it takes to find me. Fedor gave the cabinet door a single yank. Whoever covers this print nook next time won't stop at a yank. He'll insist on seeing inside.

My options? With Piotr gone, I have a window of time here where Fedor and I are one-versus-one. Could I sneak up on him? Overpower him? With the three-hole punch maybe?

Maybe not.

I need a distraction, but my go-to distraction maker was just blown to smithereens. Could one of my other little pals rise to the occasion? My droid-Hot Wheels are quick and clever, but they're sitting in a bin at my cubicle. It's possible if I revved a bunch simultaneously, they could generate enough force to topple the bin.

So ... let's say half land with wheels down, such that they could drive ... maybe they path-find to the elevators or stairwell ... but even then, assuming all these successes, a Hot Wheel can't physically board an elevator or climb steps.

You know who could, though?

My dragonflies. My buggy dragonflies, who're bad at flying.

Loathe as I am to count on those stinkers for anything mission-critical, I know they're my only chance. I hole up in a corner with Hedgehog Eleanor Roosevelt, obscuring her screen light with my body as best I can, and confirm the dragonflies are online. I navigate through networked devices to the /DEBS_STUFF folder.

Yep. BAILEYS_BUZZY_HIVEMIND is available. I touch the icon and type out "Activate" into a command window. After a three-second delay, during which my guys should be waking and running diagnostic checks, the screen returns "43 BAILEYS BUZZY DRAGONFLIES AVAILABLE."

Me likes.

At rustling outside, I hunch tighter around Hedgehog Eleanor Roosevelt. I start writing the dragonflies' logic script, babying each keystroke down to the circuitboard, then keeping fingertip pressure back up to avoid clacks.

Challenge #1: getting them to the eighth floor. They could take the stairs. People should be awake, and after the ruckus of Raven exploding, I wouldn't sweat the noise of activating the handicap button. But could they? Physically?

Those push buttons are firm, and the dragonflies are light. 2.7 ounces, to be precise. I might need fifteen or twenty striking simultaneously, which means coordination logic, which is non-trivial code. Even if I pull it off, the plan could fail anyway if the dragonflies' impacts are too diffuse, too spread across the button's face.

The other option is elevator. Elevator might be better. I play the scenario forward in my head. The dragonflies call the elevator from Two ... ride it up to Eight ... at the ding, the yellow shirts rush to the elevator bank, assuming I summoned it to escape ... they scour the surrounding areas looking for me ... the elevator doors split and a swarm of freaky mechanical crazoids go at them.

By the time they figure out what's what, I'm long gone to the stairwell.

It's perfect. If my dragonflies had brains, they could do it.

But they don't have brains—yet.