by K. A. Excell
There wasn’t any indication that Briggs was having that big of a problem, but I resolved to watch him all the same. If he needed help, I would be there.
Briggs was running on the track during Recreation period, so I followed him and started doing laps—just so that I was accessible if he wanted to talk. He was faster than I was, and passed me every once in a while with a wave and a pleasant, though not entirely real, smile. He was trying to be friendly still, even though he was worried.
While I ran, I tried to decide how long it would take me to be as fast as Briggs was on the track. From what he’d said earlier, and what I’d gotten from his surface thoughts, Briggs had been raised in a martial arts family. His older brother, who he’d mentioned in Tournament last semester, had gone to this school, been picked up by Mr. Mccoy and the military faction on campus, and gone straight into the military after school. Briggs had probably been training as a martial artist every day since he was three years old and, while I was getting much faster, it would take me a year with my current regimen to surpass his running speed. I could already sprint faster than he could, but stamina took consistent time and effort to build.
Halfway through the class, Briggs slowed down next to me on the track and mopped his forehead with his shirt—displaying powerful abs in the process. He really had been trained from birth to be a fighting machine.
We jogged together for half a lap before Briggs spoke. “Um, sorry about snapping at you during lunch today.” Even though he’d been running for almost twenty minutes, he wasn’t even slightly winded.
I wasn’t nearly as tireless, though. I could still talk—my extra training ensured that much—but it wasn’t easy. “I know you didn’t mean anything by it,” I managed.
His expression darkened. “That hardly excuses it.”
I shrugged, unsure of how to respond to that. He slowed just a bit more, and I adjusted to keep pace with him. We jogged in silence for another half a lap, and then Briggs just stopped. I glanced around to see if any of the Prefects had noticed us stalled on the track, but Berry was busy berating some other poor first year with a tennis racket, and Hunt was over by the side of the lap pool. I expanded my attention just slightly and focused my thoughts in a pattern Ms. King had shown me. This would redirect everyone’s thoughts to convince them we were elsewhere. If I’d gotten it correct—and there was no guarantee that was the case—Briggs and I would have some relative privacy for a few minutes.
I returned my attention to Briggs’s face, and noted the shadows in his eyes. He was worried about something. I almost pushed through his shields to find out what was bothering him, but I restrained myself. He was a friend. Briggs deserved what little privacy I could give him. I had to trust him.
“Briggs, what’s going on?”
He looked up sharply, like he hadn’t realized I was still standing next to him. A thrill of decision ran through his body, clenching his fists, squaring his shoulders, and making him stand just a bit taller. “Farina, can you keep a secret?”
I nodded.
“I want to leave.”
I nearly choked. “Leave Martial Academy?”
He nodded—that single motion every inch military, with no wasted movement. “I need your help to erase my files from the computers. That way, they can never find me.”
“Find you?” I echoed. “Briggs, is someone after you?”
“When I leave, they’re going to try to find me. The program I’m in—“ His jaw snapped closed, and he took a harsh breath. “I need my files erased, but I can’t do it by myself.”
I stepped closer to him, taking in the sight of every clenched muscle. He was leaving—that much was clear. I couldn’t stop him if I tried. “What happened? Is Mr. Mccoy that overzealous?”
His eyes stared through me, as though he was looking at something very far away. He shook his head. “It’s not about any of the classes. I just—I don’t want to do this my whole life. My great-grandfather helped found this school. My grandfather graduated and served in Vietnam. My father lost his leg in Afghanistan. My brother comes home in a year from his current tour, but I don’t want to go. This is the family legacy—what we trained from birth to do. When I graduate, I’ll go into the Marines and serve my time.”
The way he said those words made it sound like a prison sentence.
He held up a hand. “Don’t get me wrong; I love this country. I want to serve—I would do almost anything to protect the way of life we have here. I just can’t—“ A bolt of sheer terror lanced through him. He strangled it with the efficiency of practice. “I just need some space,” he finished lamely. “I won’t get that space unless I can disappear.”
He met my eyes as blinding need poured from his mind. Whatever facade of control he’d tried to hold was slipping. For a moment, I was afraid he would break down, but the moment passed.
“I’ll help,” I said. A warning sounded inside my mind. Breaking into Marital Academy’s servers would be a lot more difficult than it sounded. Security would be tight because of the Agency base below the school. Briggs had no idea what he was getting into—or maybe he did, and that was why he was asking for help. Whatever the case, Briggs was in trouble, and I seriously doubted he’d told me everything. He was being haunted by something far worse than a sudden desire to go against his family. One day it would catch up with him, and I would be there to help him when it did.
I grabbed his hand and tugged him along the track. “I’ll think about it for a while and figure out a good time to take a look at those servers. Now come on,” I tried to make my voice a little lighter. “If we don’t get going soon, Berry’s going to come over here and then we’ll both get detention.”
I just hoped he wouldn’t wonder how no one had noticed our impromptu break before now. Of course, he didn’t have a clock on the top of his vision counting the number of seconds we’d stood on the track and made the other students move around us.
Briggs freed his hand with a tug, and started to jog beside me again. He cracked a smile. “Thanks, Farina. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
I couldn’t help but smile back as I removed the suggestion from around us and we became fully visible to the school once more.
Chapter seven
I sat in Social History that day, trying to work up the nerve to ask Ms. King about the Instance while I toyed with a problem Ms. King had highlighted. The problem was something about how to obtain funds without it being tracked by a hostile organization—like any one of the governmental agencies that might love to take a neurodivergent apart to see what made us tick. My thoughts kept going back to Mom, though, and the voice I’d heard in her head.
Ms. King leveled a quelling stare my way.
::What is it, Farina?::
I flushed. Ms. King must have noticed that I was working on a problem that wasn’t class related. ::It’s just a word I heard the other day. It bothers me.::
::A word is bothering you?:: The disbelief in her thoughts was clear.
I bit the inside of my lip. ::Yeah. Instance.::
Ms. King’s thoughts sharpened abruptly. ::That’s a very advanced technique, Farina. Agency Projectors can use it to protect people who have seen things they shouldn’t have. Their minds are typically very fragile after that, though. They need to avoid places where they might encounter neurodivergent operations…Where did you say you heard the word?::
I started to answer when my phone buzzed. I looked at it, and was surprised to see an alert from a new secure messaging app Steele had put on my phone. It was from Tolden. “Get down here now. We’re deploying.”
::Go,:: Ms. King said. I sprinted for the elevator.
When I reached the helipad, the rotors were already up to speed. I ducked under them and caught Black’s hand as we lifted. Stray strands of black hair whipped at my cheeks, and I was suddenly glad I had braided my hair this morning. If it had
been loose—or even secured in a ponytail—it would have made the chopper ride nearly impossible. I’d done it before, but it wasn’t pleasant. Black pulled me inside, then tossed me a tactical suit. I stripped while Tolden started the mission brief.
“InDep spotted a female neurodivergent believed to work for the Company in a building downtown. Sensors in orbit have tagged her as Nola Copper, the Company’s lead Intrastate bomb maker. Only moments after we received positive confirmation, an Agent on the ground reported the location of a possible bomb. He went offline two minutes later. We don’t know whether he is dead, incapacitated, or merely had tech issues, but we’re assuming the worst.”
Tolden nodded to Black, who took up the narration. “The explosive device is thought to be a C32 Intrastate device.”
It wasn’t a surprise to Tolden or Steele—though they weren’t happy about it. Tabitha was blank.
“What’s a—” she tried, but then a wave of anxiety crashed in around her and she stopped as her ears began to scream. She tucked her head down and held the headphones with her hands, as if that could block out more of the sound.
I could hear the rest of the question still burning in her mind. “What’s a C32 Intrastate device?” I shouted above the mass of sounds. I pulled up a video of Tabitha’s reaction the last time we mentioned a helicopter, and nodded to myself. For her, a place like this had to be the equivalent of sending me into a room lined with mirrors, and eight dozen flashing neon lights.
“It’s a bomb made of super dense materials that are unstable under normal conditions forced into all three states of matter at the same time. If it goes off, we’ll have nuclear fallout throughout the state, and a blast that will level three-quarters of the city.” Steele explained. “It’s the kind of technology designed by neurodivergent minds that we try to keep out of circulation, but occasionally one slips through.”
“Our first priority is to stop the bomb from going off. Farina, Steele, you’re the best analysts for a situation like this. Keep the bomb stable until the Intrastate diffusion team gets here. Smith, Black, you’re with me to track down and subdue that Company operative. Medina’s given us strict orders to capture her alive, if at all possible. The woman’s a genuine mind. There’s no sense wasting all that precious knowledge.”
The watch on Tolden’s wrist blinked, and he looked down. “Update: Ms. Green wants the operative alive, too, and she wants it badly enough that she’s placing a Strike team on standby to reinforce us. We’re to hand the bomb maker over to Ms. King the moment we return to base.” He looked up again. “Don’t take any stupid chances, people, but stop that bomb. We don’t know how long until it goes off, and we don’t know if the Company agent has any reinforcements. We’re running this one at Alert 3: stun first, ask questions later. That said, Black drew both electromagnetic and plasma weapons from the armory. You have permission to use deadly force if required.”
I looked at Black who shook his head. “You ain’t cleared for that, kid.”
I bit my tongue. Hit someone with an electric pulse, and they would act like they’d stuck a metal fork in the electrical socket—twitch around a lot, need medical attention, and then probably be just fine. The gun at my side was better than being defenseless, sure, but I didn’t want to kill anyone if I could avoid it. Electromagnetic weapons could take someone out of a fight for hours without killing them.
I wanted one.
“Not now, kid,” Black said, like he could read my mind. I frowned at him. We’d been working our way through everything in the standard-ammo armory. I’d practiced everything from assault rifles to shotguns, to sniper rifles, and I’d spent time designing electromagnetic weaponry. If I could make one, I should be allowed to shoot one.
“Sixty seconds to drop,” Steele said. He started shifting things in the cockpit around. “The Remote Link Pilot is engaged, sir. CIS has the chopper. Permission to drop?”
Tolden grinned. “See why we need you in the chopper?”
Steele stuck his tongue out. “I’d rather sit in CIS any day. Thirty seconds,”
I jabbed the BYE-BYE module into place next to the PREP module to force my thoughts back to the present. I yanked the last strap on my Tac suit and jammed my weapon into its holster as we began our descent. The front pocket of my suit held the other required pieces of my plasma pulser. I slid the rings on and let Black hook the wire up to the back of my suit. I looked down at the ground as Steele hit hover distance. My blue lines presented me with the equations I would need to avoid breaking my legs when I jumped, and I swallowed. This was the sort of thing we were supposed to practice before we had to do it in the field! Then the timer hit zero. I took another look at the instructions written on my vision, and jumped.
I landed in one piece—partially thanks to the wire that had controlled my fall, and partially thanks to my equations—and released the wire.
Steele handed me a tablet as we ran for the entrance to the building. I scanned over the images he told me to look at and then secured the tablet to my suit. Information started filtering through as we descended the stairs, into a hotel—of all places. What could the Company possibly gain by blowing up a hotel?
I reviewed the blast pattern Tolden had seen in his mind while he was describing the bomb’s capabilities, and bit my lip. The blast would level roughly eighty-six percent of the city. Any one of the impacted buildings could be the true target. There was no way for me to tell what they hoped to gain from this.
“Which way?” Steele asked.
I pulled up the plans I’d scanned over. “One moment, they’re still processing.” one-point-two seconds later I had plotted the least-time path to the bomb in the building’s basement.
“Remind me why we landed on the top when the bomb is at the bottom?”
Steele gave me a dry look. “Do you want to be in charge of mopping up the mess when two dozen Turnip civilians see us landing on the street? Trust me, rooftops are better.” Then he looked down at the thirty flights of stairs that led to the bottom and sighed. “Except for the stairs part.”
It took twelve minutes to find the bomb stashed inside a motorcycle helmet in the water heater room. Steele pulled out a laptop and started typing furiously. “You know I could be doing all this from a comfy chair in CIS, right?”
I ignored his comment. It wasn’t a mission with Steele unless he could find a way to point that out.
He rolled his eyes. “Hey, I’m just trying to make sure you know I’m only here for the thrilling terror of trying not to be blown up. Now do what you can to analyze it. I’m accessing the Agency to see if I can find a match. Bomb squad’s scrambling, but they’re still a ways out.”
I shut down the BYE-BYE module and activated its counterpart, the WATCH module. Suddenly, all my lines were in analysis mode. I scanned and sorted the data as it came in. The bomb was a sphere with ninety-eight percent external similarity to a hematite sphere.
I pulled the tablet off my tac suit and held it eleven inches above the sphere. I could feel the pull of the magnet on it, and started to move it away when the magnetic force suddenly spiked, jerking the tablet from my hand and slamming it into the sphere. The motorcycle helmet capsized, and the sphere rolled out—hobbled in part by the tablet. A moment later, it came to rest on top of my screen, like it was mocking me.
Steele’s head snapped up from what he was doing. “What was that?”
I didn’t have time to answer, though. I pulled the video of it snapping out of my hand and started to draw out the magnetic field right up to the flare. After I was ninety percent sure I had the model correct, I added mass and density from the way it had rolled out of the motorcycle helmet.
“Hey!” Steele said without looking up. “Try to be gentle with the giant ticking death machine?”
Data Incomplete flashed red on my vision. I held a hand out to Steele. “I need another magnet.” He looked from me to the phone
on his belt. “No way! Go grab your tablet. It’s already fried.”
I looked dubiously at the bomb that was still sitting on top of my tablet. “What do you want me to do, kick it?”
“You’re an analyst, figure it out. This phone is mine.”
He pulled his phone off his belt and scanned its contents. I couldn’t tell if he did it merely to demonstrate his point, or because someone really had sent something sensitive to his phone.
Finally, I bit my lip.
“Do you want the bomb to go off?” I asked.
“Why do you need it?” Steele said.
I motioned to the sphere. “There’s something about the magnetic field that’s important. I need to measure it, and the only reliable way to do that is with a magnet—Well, I could probably electrocute the thing, too.” I half closed my eyes as those computations started.
Steele waved his hands. “No. Electrocuting a bomb is a bad idea. Much worse than kicking it, understand? No electrocution.”
I halted the computations and held my hand out for the phone.
“Fine. But next time they bring cookies down CIS, I’m not sharing.”
“They bring cookies down to CIS?”
“Why do you think I want to be there, not here?” Steele asked.
“Focus, people!” Someone’s voice crackled over comms. I didn’t have enough processing space to assign it a name, though. I re-focused on the data coming through the WATCH module.
I held the phone thirteen inches away from the sphere, but, if anything, the pulse that grabbed it was stronger than the last. The force of the phone slapping the surface of the sphere spiderwebbed cracks down the screen. The lights fizzled out.
