With Klein's jacket still dirty with blood, Layton walked out the door first, taking great care to pull the hidden handle with his hand covered in the rag, rubbing the area well and repeating the same operation outside the door.
When he and Faith were out, their gaze immediately fell on the cameras at the end of the hallway, whose little red lights were still off.
"Well, no one noticed the cameras... come with me" Layton continued, advancing towards the curve of the corridor as if he was a thief, keeping both the murder objects in his arms, careful not to drop them.
Once the curve was over and the two cameras at the top of the C sector front door were also turned off, something vibrated in Faith's pocket.
*bzzz*bzzz*
The girl pulled her palmtop out of her pants and the bright screen illuminated her face in the darkness of that corridor.
"It's a message from Sam... he asked how it's going... I think he's worried because of the time" she said, reading the message on the small screen and pointing out to Layton that it was 2.37 am.
"I'm so surprised that old Sam is still awake at this hour..." Layton commented, who meanwhile began to think about his boss, trying to guess what he was doing at the time.
"I write to him that we have just risked being killed and that we absolutely must tell him that..."
"No!" Layton interrupted, suddenly touching Faith's hand near her the palmtop, blocking her fingers from typing the message.
"Why not? We said we'd stay in touch, so if anything bad happened to us, he'd know our position and he could help us out!" the girl replied, looking at Layton with a dispassionate air and trying to convince him to do as they promised Sam.
"Well, we talked without thinking... these palmtops use an operating system tuned to Voyager's general common server... in a nutshell, each message can be tracked and the location cannot be disabled. As this is a time slot in which more than 90% of crew members are asleep, if anyone were to notice that there was an exchange of messages at 2 a.m., they would become suspicious and could check the location detected by our GPS at that time, going back to our illicit activity" Layton explained, leaving Faith speechless.
"But how do you know all these things? I had no idea about all this, good thing you stopped me in time! I risked ruining everything once again, damn me!" Faith replied, who without thinking twice put her handheld on standby and fit it back in her pocket, pretending nothing had happened.
"The thorough cleaning of the room that we have done so diligently would lose sense and the security men who monitor the operating systems of the palmtops would find us in a matter of seconds. Hiding aboard a spaceship, however large it can be, is practically impossible" Layton replied, explaining the true reason for his perplexity, as Faith's torchlight illuminated the path and the two pieces of the globe ornament occupied both of his hands.
Upon arriving at Klein's private office door, Faith lowered the handle and entered smoothly, avoiding turning on the light and hoping that the torch's batteries would not discharge, being turned on uninterruptedly for more than an hour and a half.
Careful not to dirty anything with the blood, Layton leaned on the two objects he was carefully carrying on the floor near the entrance, wiping his hands with the disinfectant and reaching his colleague near the desk.
Before the young janitor pulled the key out of his pocket, Faith pointed the torch towards the wall to their left and then toward the right wall, illuminating the air duct, tightly closed with iron bolts, as in every room.
"That strange being won't come here, Faith. It knows we can defend ourselves against it, so it's gone as far away from here as possible..." Layton said, suggesting the girl not to worry too much and to stay focused on their next goal.
"I hope it hasn't already infected someone else... in theory, it could get anywhere, even to the captain's room if it wanted to, right?"
"Fortunately not. I remember I read somewhere that the Voyager's ventilation duct follows that of the electricity grid, so it is divided into three parts: one in common for Sector A and part of Sector C, one for the other part of C and the whole of sector B, and finally another which connects sector D to the whole front of the ship, i.e. the one that includes the captain's room and the cockpit."
"So... this means that starting from where it entered the wall, the alien can move freely between half of sector C and the whole of sector A, which is our own!" Faith exclaimed, who for a moment had hoped not to have to fear that disgusting monster once she returned to the dorm.
"Yes, I think so... I read that manual months ago, I don't remember exactly the subdivision... I should have it somewhere in my room, I'll be able to see it when we get back to sector A. But now, though, we have more urgent things to do..." Layton replied, looking with interest at the desk drawer they had failed to open on their last visit to Klein's office.
The young janitor, flanked by Faith, who like a trusted assistant made light before him, pulled the golden key out of his pocket, approaching it to the lock of the drawer, of the same color and with the same decoration engraved on the metal.
Hoping that that mysterious key would open that specific drawer, Layton stuck it in the lock and it made a 'click' sound.
"Yes, that's the key!" Faith said, opening her eyes well ready to find out what was in that inexplicably closed drawer.
The key turned three times inside the small recess, as if that drawer, unlike the others, was armored or with some strange additional security system.