Read Online The Limit by Kristen Landon - Free Book Online Page B

ever catch sight of him, let me know. I’ll hustle over and give him an interview.”
    “No way. You’re saying you’ve never seen him? In two whole months?”
    “I’m saying.”
    “Surely someone . . .”
    Slumping back in his chair, he shook his head, flipping out his shaggy blond hair.
    “I’ll be the first, then.”
    “Go for it, dude. Hey, how about going to my room and playing some vids while we wait for your gym clothes?” Coop scooped up the remainder of his cheese-smothered piece of pizza.
    “Sure.” I was always up for video games. Sitting back in my chair, I pulled out my cell again and fiddled with it. Nothing. “Do you
ever
get a signal here?”
    “Haven’t yet.”
    “Doesn’t that seem really weird?”
    “No. Isaac thinks there’s a huge alien spaceship hovering over the workhouse that blocks the signal. I just think there’s a glitch that could be fixed easy enough if Miss Smoot wanted it to get fixed. I’m guessing she thinks our work quota would go down if we could talk and text all we wanted.”
    “Huh,” I said, sticking the phone back in my pocket.
    Coop scarfed down the rest of his huge piece in about two bites. That guy could eat.
    “You want any more?” he asked.
    “Nope. Three pieces does it for me. You?”
    “Naw. Let’s go.”
    “What should we do with the rest?” Half a pizza sat in the box on the table.
    “Just leave it,” he said. “They’ll come clean it up.”
    “They?” I asked. “Who?”
    “I dunno. The cleaning people.” He wiggled his fingers and made a
Twilight Zone
sound. “They’re like Reginald. You never see them. They wait till you’re out of a room before they come in. You never have to make your bed or pick your clothes off the floor. It’s like—bing—magic. Everything’s done for you.”
    “Oh,” I said. This was weird. Nice, though. No chores. I could live with that. “How do they know when you’re out of a room?”
    “Big Brother, cuz. Big Brother.”
    “Huh?”
    His light blue eyes crinkled along with the rest of his face as he smiled. “Cameras, my man. They’re all over the place, taking in our every move.”
    Wait a minute. Our
every
move?
    “There are cameras in here? Watching us right now?” I picked up a paper napkin and wiped it across my mouth.
    “You catch on quick.” He gave me a playful shove on the arm. “Maybe you really are smart enough to be a Top Floor.”
    “There isn’t . . . there can’t be cameras in the bathroom. And the closet? Do they watch us change our clothes . . . and do other things?”
    “Don’t sweat it,” said Coop, picking a piece of pepperoni off the leftover pizza and shoving it into his mouth. “I freaked when I first found out too, but Miss Smoot told me they only monitor the bathroom and closet with audio equipment. It’s one or the other—the video monitoring doesn’t have audio and the audio monitoring doesn’t have video. It’s just to make sure we’re safe. And they can’t watch us twenty-four seven. There’s like just a couple of dudes watching all five floors. They’re not going to fixate on one dopey kid changing his socks.”
    “They better not.”
    “They won’t.”
    A high-pitched electronic ring sent a few notes through my room. I sat up straight, clutching the arms of my chair.
    “Doorbell,” said Coop. “Must be your gym clothes.” He got a wild, excited look in his eyes. “Ready for some paddle-wall-ball?”

“ WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T STEP FOOT in that room there.”
    Coop and I had just emerged from the gym, and he pointed straight down the wide space between the wall and the girls’ cubicles to the room on the other side of the building.
    I wiped sweat from my forehead with the back of my arm. The top floor was perfectly climate controlled, but Coop had given me a workout. I hadn’t made it easy on him, either. Both of us had gone full-out for almost two hours; the only break was when we stopped to say, “No, we’re not done with the