Wow. “I didn’t know you felt that way about him. I thought you didn’t like him.”
Dad laughed. “I don’t like him. But I trust him.”
Jane leaned in to her dad. “Then I trust him, too. So let me get this straight. I tell him that you’re my dad and skip the part where I sent him to juvie.”
“You tell him I’m your dad, and that will make the other easier for him to forgive. Because, as I’ve told you a thousand times, you did nothing wrong. He’ll see that.”
Oh. Not what she had hoped to hear. “When do I tell him?”
“You’ll know when the time is right.”
Chapter Seventeen
Zach
Zach held his breath as the hovervator shot toward the penthouse. Images of the Blackbody spun through his mind. Panic bubbled to the surface as he waited for the clicking to begin. He scanned the Complex for drones, but none were coming his way.
“No-drone zone,” Nolan said. “Mike fixed it.”
Zach turned to his brothers. “Thanks.”
“Me and my babe LYDIA,” Mike said. “You know how Robby the Drinkbot has facial recognition? Well, so does just about every piece of tech in the Complex. So I reprogrammed the drones to stay away from any hovervator that has you in it. Hopefully it won’t overheat while we’re inside.”
Zach relaxed. “It’s nice that they gave you full access.”
“I’m running algorithms in the background to find out who set you up. It’ll take a few days, but I’ll have it.” Mikey held out a fist.
“That’s good.” Zach bumped it. “But first, we have a weapon to find and five days to do it.”
“What about clearing your name?” Nolan frowned. “And revenge.”
“Believe me, I’m still all about taking down whoever set me up. But it’s funny how vengeance takes a backseat to saving the world. Haven’t even thought about it in the last few days. I’m really getting into this mission.”
“As predicted,” Nolan said to Mike.
“That’s not all he’s into,” Mike said back.
“Jane,” they said in unison.
“Am not.” Zach grinned.
“Liar.”
Maybe. “What if I am? Not saying I am, but what if?”
“Do you think she likes you, too?” Nolan asked.
Zach shrugged. “Can’t tell.”
“Does she even know you’re into her?” Mike scowled. “Because, dude, you suck with letting people know your feelings.”
“I don’t know. I’ve been trying to hint.”
“Work on it, dude,” Mike said. “Work hard.”
“Can we talk about something else?”
“No, I like when you squirm.”
“Then by all means, let’s keep taking about it,” Zach deadpanned. “Nothing gives me greater joy than squirming for your entertainment.”
“As it should be,” Mike said.
“Maybe we should discuss the Astronomy Building.” Nolan to the rescue.
“What about it?” Zach asked.
A huge smile popped across Mike’s face. “Good idea using wiring diagrams to map it. Wait till you see what Anna and I found.”
“Why don’t you just tell me before we get to the War Room?” Zach said.
Mike grinned as the hovervator port opened. “Because we’re here.”
They stepped off and made their way to the War Room. Mike was right. During the simulation, he had definitely felt a spark for Jane. But he was terrible at letting people know how he felt. Was he even on her radar in that way? Probably not. All he did was make stupid jokes. Maybe if he concentrated harder on kicking her butt, she’d get the hint. Or maybe he should just stick to physics and geomagnetic forces. Much easier to understand.
The first thing Zach noticed when he walked into the War Room was Jane, Anna, Mina, and Parker seated at the huge conference table with the lights lower than usual and the window blinds pulled down. Anna and Mina wore street clothes like when they were in class. Parker had on his usual boring suit. Jane was in her lab coat. He preferred her sports bra and yoga pants.
The next thing Zach noticed was that Jane sat next to Parker, and they were talking like old friends. That was a first. They were usually so formal. Parker actually seemed relaxed now. Also a first.
Zach plopped down beside Jane. She smiled, and he had a hard time taking his eyes off her. What was she thinking?
“Let’s get started,” Parker said when Zach’s brothers had taken their seats. “Where are we with the extraction plan?”
Extraction plan? Zach turned toward Parker. “We need an infiltration plan first. I blew it with Piper.”
“You didn’t expect her to invite you right in on the day you met, did you?”
“Actually, I did.”
Parker took off his glasses and turned to Mina. “Extraction plan?”
Okay. Parker was back to normal.
“Stealth Hovercraft,” Mina said. Her bright eyes glistened. “That’s our main option. Y’know? But we’re still looking at Plan B. If the tests are successful, Plan B will become our go-to extraction for all ops, because it is so much more versatile.”
“Not enough time.” Jane shook her head. “Plan B hasn’t been fully tested. We’ll use it only as a last resort.”
“What’s Plan B?” Zach asked.
“A classified experiment,” Parker said. “Jane’s right, until it’s fully proven, I’m not approving it to use in a mission. Keep working on it.”
Mina pulled the scrunchy off her hair and shook out her bun. “Will do.”
Parker looked to Anna. “What have we learned about HAVOC’s operations?”
“Bunches.” A huge smile broke across Anna’s face as she tapped the tabletop controls in front of her. “Michael and I used LYDIA to find architectural drawings of Quantum City University’s Astronomy Building. They were totally encrypted on known HAVOC servers, but LYDIA’s extraction capabilities are powerful. We pulled the wiring diagrams to augment data we already had on the Astronomy Building. We still don’t know as much about the fourth floor as we do about the other floors, but Zach’s idea was definitely worthwhile. It led us to something else. Something significant.”
“Continue,” Parker said.
“There’s an entire underground city beneath the campus,” Anna whispered as a holo of the Astronomy Building appeared above the War Room table. This time the fourth floor wasn’t dark. But beneath the building, a maze of tunnels stretched across the length of the table.
“How did you get that?” Zach asked. He couldn’t believe the size of the underground.
“The wiring diagrams showed circuits running deeper than normal, beyond the level needed for connecting to the city’s power supply. So we tapped into seismology plots that LYDIA discovered on the Quantum City U mainframe. We found layouts of underground bunkers built in the caves. According to records at the Quantum City Courthouse, they were supposedly demolished fifty years ago. But there they are.”
“What did you find out about the fourth floor?” Jane asked. “Can you zoom?”
Anna nodded and tapped her controls. The fourth floor came into focus and grew to fill the table.
Zach immediately noticed something wrong. “Look at the wiring pattern. There are no classrooms. No offices. Do you see that, Mike?”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “Anna and I both thought the wiring diagrams were unusual. So we went deeper, and guess what we found.”
“Not sure,” Zach said. But he could guess.
“The fourth floor is a nest of hacking machines. Cyber defender’s nightmare come to life.”
Zach grimaced.
“A nest of hacking machines?” Parker leaned forward and folded his arms.
“Cyber science,” Mike said. “Hacking machines are supercomputers whose only
job is to find vulnerabilities in cyber-secure systems. The people who are trained to protect against them are called Cyber defenders.”
“I know what they are, Michael. My question is—”
“Are they hacking LYDIA?” Jane broke in. She sounded terrified.
“Trying.” Anna shook her head. “LYDIA can shut out any hacker. Even me.”
“And that’s saying a lot,” Mike said. He smiled at Anna.
“They’ll never breach LYDIA,” Anna said. “But hacking machines are relentless. They don’t give up.”
“Say they do breach LYDIA,” Jane said. “What happens?”
Anna shot her an over-the-glasses eyebrow raise. “LYDIA will throw up so many layers of security that the entire nest will get lost. She’ll pull them into an infinite maze of dead ends, then back-hack and corrupt them until they’re totally useless.”
“But if they do get in?” Zach immediately saw where Jane was headed. “Does that make it easier for us to hack them? Get some new intel?”
Jane glanced over and smiled at him. “Are you into mind-reading?”
“Maybe.” Zach smiled back and turned to Mikey.
“That’s what Anna is saying,” Mike said. “If they hack LYDIA, she can trace the back feed right into the brain and shut down the entire nest.”
Parker cleared his throat. “The nest isn’t the problem. If HAVOC is attempting to hack LYDIA, Mamont may suspect that we are on the other end.”
“I thought nobody knows about ORDER,” Zach said. “How could he suspect us?”
“He’s known for a long time that someone is watching him,” Jane said. “He doesn’t know who, and we have to keep it that way. So we’re going to play nice and let them break through LYDIA’s defenses. I want to know what Mamont knows.”
“Surreptitious firewall crack,” Anna said. “You got it. Virtual LYDIA with dummy files, and a stealth trace backward with full capture.”
“English, please?” Jane said.
“You want me to set a trap for the hacking machines so I can take control of them and steal everything they have.”
“Yes.”
“Cyberspeak sounds so much cooler.”
“Maybe one day I’ll learn it.” Jane pointed to the hologram. “Once you’re in, find anything you can on their weapon. That underground city is connected to it somehow and the clock is ticking. What do they do with all that space?”
Zach was impressed. Jane questioned the same thing that he questioned. What do they do with all that space? A sick feeling came over him as he studied the holo. “I think we found our Large Hadron Collider. If they’re really building a proton cannon, it’s underground.”
“Are they that big?” Jane asked.
“Enormous,” Mina said. “But that space is totally adequate. With a high luminosity upgrade and the right pre-injector system, it would be considerably smaller than Geneva’s.”
“Also more powerful.” Nolan glanced at her. “Considering the advances in Super Neutrino Synchrotrons.”
Mina shook her head. “But who can build a beam-compression system capable of handling a beam that intense? Or a quark generator that could concentrate one?”
“Zachary can,” Jane said. She turned to him.
Zach’s eyes met hers. She read his paper? Wow, she was thorough. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I can.”
“All the more reason to get inside,” Parker said. “We’re running out of time.”
Chapter Eighteen
Jane
Jane sank into the simulator chair, but her mind wasn’t on Zachary’s self-defense lesson. She really wanted to lead him into the virtual world created from the new data that Anna and Michael had loaded into the simulator. The information was incomplete, she knew that. They had nothing on any tech that might be in the underground city, but data on the structure of the tunnels seemed to be valid. They would get a very good understanding of the layout.
And a chance to just hang out and talk.
“I noticed you and Parker were pretty cozy before the meeting.” Zachary’s voice jarred her from her thoughts. “What made him decide to become human?”
“It’s Mr. Parker,” Jane said. “And if you can’t show respect, don’t beg for mercy when I put you in a choke hold.”
“You haven’t shown any mercy so far.” Zachary gave her a sideways grin. “My skeleton still hurts from landing on it so many times. Can we just jump right to the part where we make up?”
Jane smiled at the thought, leaned back in the chair, and became her hologram. As many times as she had been in the simulator, it still amazed her how real it seemed. She could actually feel the shift of her sports bra and yoga pants against her skin when she moved.
Zachary materialized in front of her, wearing the new workout suit she’d picked for him. Black compression shirt and formfitting tech pants. Impressive abs.
She picked well.
“What did this machine dress me in?” Zachary held his arms out to his side and looked up and down his outfit. “These are too tight. Can I get something different?”
“If you beat me, I’ll see what I can do.”
“Do you still think you can distract me?”
“Absolutely.” Jane pursed her lips.
“I’m not so sure. I’m on to you now.”
“Then get in your fighting stance.”
“I have a better idea.” Zachary looked around the workout room. “Why don’t we explore the underground instead? You know you’d sooner do that than practice self-defense.”
Jane chuckled. “What did you do, read my mind again?”
“I’m starting to understand the way you think. In the meeting, you seemed more interested in the tunnels under the Astronomy Building than you were in the fourth floor. I assume you had the data uploaded to the simulator. Am I wrong?”
“Maybe. No.” Jane realized that her heart had sped up just a bit. Zachary was actually trying to understand her. “Okay, give me a minute.”
She broke out of the simulation and was instantly back in her chair. Zachary sat beside her, eyes closed, as his hologram looked around for her. She resisted the urge to touch his hand. Instead, she tapped the controls on the arm of her chair, leaned back, and relaxed. When she opened her eyes, she was in the crowded lobby of the Quantum City University Astronomy Building, wearing jeans and a loose, comfy top. Holos of students streamed past her on their way to classrooms, to hovervators, to the cafe. The solar system revolved around the ceiling, and animated murals of the Milky Way moved along the walls. Every so often, a rocket ship zoomed across the galaxy. Zachary gazed in awe, silhouetted against a meteor shower, and Jane also gazed in awe, but not at the sky.
“This is amazing,” he said when he noticed she had returned.
Yes, you are.
Zachary turned to Jane, and his eyes widened. “Hey, why do you get to change outfits and I’m still in retro spandex?”
“I’m sorry, I forgot to reprogram you.” She didn’t. “Well, we’d better get moving if we’re going to stay on schedule.”
“Who are all these people, and why are they staring at me?”
Probably for the same reason Jane was. His lean, muscular body drew attention. Jane mentally patted herself on the back for her choice of his attire. “Simulated Quantum City U students reproduced from the live-feed data. Let’s get to the underground.”
Zachary looked around. “How? I don’t see a sign that says secret entrance.”
“That’s the nice thing about the simulator,” Jane said. “We don’t need to know where the real entrance is. It’s set to take us directly to the underground. Right now.”
Suddenly the room changed. The stars faded, the planets vanished, and the walls became polished granite. Jane and Zachary were alone in a long tunnel carved into the bedrock.
“This place
is huge.” Zachary turned in a circle, looking up and down the corridor. “Can we get lost?”
“No. Anna and Michael analyzed the seismology plots and learned the underground is a network of tunnels running off a central corridor. I asked Anna to start us here in the main passage. I thought it would be the best way for you and your eidetic memory to learn the layout. If we get stuck, we’ll just come out of the simulation.” She paused. “We can hold hands if you’re scared.”
“Um, about that.” Zachary acted like he suddenly didn’t want to be there.
“Is anything wrong?” Jane asked, wishing she hadn’t made the hand-holding crack.
“I just want to clear something up.” Zachary began to fidget, folding and unfolding his hands. He stared down at the floor. He quickly looked up at Jane, then back to his hands. When he finally held still, he was gazing right into her eyes. “My brothers told me I’m not good at this. They’re right.”
The serious look on his face gave Jane a sinking feeling in her stomach. Had she been too forward, joking about holding hands? She had obviously misread Zachary. His jokes about making up without fighting—he was teasing her. He didn’t mean any of it. The connection she thought she saw forming between them was only wishful thinking. When would she learn? “It’s okay. Don’t sugarcoat. Just let me have it.”
Zachary took a deep breath, turned bright red, then blurted out, “Do you know the difference between an ionic bond and a covalent bond?”
Science?
Seriously? He wanted to talk about science? Wow, had she gone down the wrong road. “Not…really.”
“Okay, see, it’s like this.” The color slowly drained from Zachary’s face. “A covalent bond is formed when two atoms share electrons, but the atoms remain apart. The bond is weak. You see where I’m going?”
She shook her head very slowly. Not only did she not see where he was going, she wasn’t even sure where he was starting.
“No.” He rubbed his chin and said, “Let’s try this. If atom A has a covalent bond with atom B, it’s like they’re having lunch together, and it’s no big deal, right? Because a covalent bond shares electrons, just for stability. Like a crutch. Like someone to lean on. Like a buddy.”
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