The Limit by Kristen Landon Page B

took you by surprise because this workhouse is only six months old. Neela is the first Top Floor to leave us.”
    Madeline untangled herself from Honey Lady, wearing a matching gushy smile. “Wow, she finished? Her family really got back under their limit? I mean, it just happened so fast.”
    “We don’t feel the need to waste a lot of time here at the FDRA. Numbers are numbers. If you’re over yourlimit, you’re over. As soon as you go under—even by a penny—you’re under.”
    “Yeah, they sure didn’t waste any time snatching me up after my mom went over the limit at the store,” I grumbled under my breath to Coop. “And taking Neela like that in the middle of the night, without even letting her say good-bye . . .”
    “I don’t . . .”
    The rest of us shut up, straining to hear the soft words coming from Paige. Words from her were an anomaly, so we all felt a compulsion to listen intently to the few she let slip out.
    At everyone’s rapt attention, the rest of her sentence got stuck in her throat.
    “Yes, Paige?” Honey Lady nodded in a more subdued cheerleader mode. “Go on.”
    “I’m just surprised,” Paige said, staring at her hand rubbing up and down the edge of the cubicle wall. “Neela told me why she had to come here—her parents develop real estate, and they sank millions into a project that went under. I mean . . . I guess I don’t understand how her family could recover from that much debt so fast.”
    “A year and a half,” Honey Lady said, staring into her handheld computer device. “Neela was one of the very first children to participatein FDO 169-D when it started one and a half years ago. She spent her first year at the northeast workhouse before being transferred to this one six months ago when we opened. I understand your confusion, Paige, but it just tells me that you don’t fully comprehend the complexities of family debt limits or the volatile business of real estate development. You said yourself that her parents lost millions overnight. Doesn’t it stand to reason that in their business it is also possible to
make
millions overnight?”
    Pinching her lips together tightly, Paige nodded, looking away from Honey Lady. Paige wasn’t convinced. Or maybe she just felt bad about losing a friend. I was bummed too. My chance to get to know the Indian princess had disappeared forever. Leave it to me to never have a conversation with a girl I kind of liked even when we were locked up on the top floor together.
    I guess I should be glad for Neela, getting out of here and away from whatever it was that was giving kids headaches—if something in the workhouse really
was
giving kids headaches. Logically, I’d think more of us would be sick if some noxious cleaning product were floating around the air ducts. One kid—Neela—out of all nine of us on the top floor had started getting them. That didn’t seem statistically significant. I needed more data—all of it, on the entire workhouse.
    But how was it the one top-floor headache kid camefrom a family who just happened to get under their limit first?
    I don’t like coincidences. Give me facts—some solid numbers I can analyze.
    Tonight, for sure, I’d get that data and find out what—if anything—was going on around here.

“ NO, COOP, I GOTTA DO THIS. MAYBE if I get lucky and can get in fast, I’ll meet up with you and Jeffery in the gym later.”
    “Bro, come on.” I’d never heard Coop whine before. Turned out he was a pro.
    “Later.” I shut my bedroom door in his face.
    Now to get hacking.
    My fingers hung above the keyboard, unmoving. They used to just take off on their own. A thought would come to me of what I wanted to do, and then I’d set my fingers loose to take care of the details on their own. I think I was out of practice.
    Closing my eyes, I imagined myself back in the computer room at home. I’d be sitting at the computer on the left side of the room, Lauren would be chatting online while texting or