“There should really be a charge for this,” she’d said, throwing the blanket on top of us without much care. From then on, Saretha and I took care of each other—and Sam.
“You can see the satellites in the night sky, if you look very carefully,” Arturo said, looking up. “A satellite will catch the light of the sun and move slowly across the sky, like a drifting star.”
“Why doesn’t the American® government blow them out of the sky?”
“Technically they aren’t in the sky, they are above it, outside the designated limit of the Rights Holders. Plus, I think this is another example of the Patent Wars holding America® back. I think they have lost the ability to reach so high.”
The stars flicked steady in the sky. None drifted.
“I don’t see it,” I said.
“You have to be patient,” Arturo explained.
I laid myself flat on a second blanket to look up.
“Fun!” Saretha said, lying down beside me. We’d never had the chance to sleep outside. Sam had wanted to sleep on our apartment roof, but we all feared it might keep Placers away.
“Do you think Mrs. Croate might want to join us?” Saretha asked.
“I suspect she’s comfortable where she is,” I answered. She had a nice room and a warm bed and a weak hope of saving her daughter. I don’t know that she wanted anything else just now.
Arturo excused himself, but returned a short while later with two guards.
“To keep you safe,” he said before he wished us good-night. The two large Téjican officers stared off into the distance, the way Lucretia’s brutes sometimes would, although these men had softer, unaltered faces. I wondered what Arturo thought they were protecting us from.
I was so mesmerized by the glittering beauty above us that I was startled when the moon rose over the edge of one of the raised lifeboats. I watched it, still not understanding. Could I unlock its secrets if I stared long enough? It was three-quarters full, like the opposite of a crescent. The shape changed a little each night. I didn’t understand why, but I took comfort in knowing it would go on shining, changing from crescent to full, regardless of what we did down here.
Eventually I slept. The moon drifted from my thoughts into my dreams. It was a luminous dome in the sky that held the final backup of Central Data. It was full at first, then a crescent, which spread into a ring for Saretha to wear instead of a Cuff.
“It will turn my words to moonlight,” she explained. “It’s beautiful.”
Her words scrolled across the sky as she was charged for each one.
Saretha Jime—word (IT’S): $100,000,000.
Saretha Jime—word (BEAUTIFUL): $1,000,000,000.
My heart was struck with terror. We could never afford what she’d said. The dome had to be destroyed before we were all taken into Collection.
I awoke with a start. Saretha slept beside me. The boat listed to one side and then, very slowly, to the other. The moon rocked gently above, solid in a bluing sky, with a handful of stars and few streaks of cloud.
The guards still kept watch, maybe for things that came from the sea. Leaning on a rail above me, Randall Stokes looked toward the lightening half of the sky and then down at me. He motioned for me to come up.
“Sunrise should be spectacular,” he said when I’d found my way up to him. He pointed to where a pink band of light had appeared on the horizon. He had a Pad in his hand, and on the screen was the outline of the coast and a dot crawling north, representing our ship.
“I need to know about the backups for the system,” I said, dropping my voice to a very small whisper. I didn’t know if the guards could hear us, or if they would even know what to do with the information if they did. “Is what you said before true?”
“Of course,” he said.
“I need to know if it can all be destroyed.”
“Your friends don’t want it destroyed,” he whispered, nodding down at the Téjican guards and, presumably, Arturo and his team.
“It will make life harder for them,” I said with a sigh. “But—”
“It made life impossible for my son,” he said sadly. Then he shook that sadness off. “If you blew up that last center, the backups would take over,” he told me in a hushed voice.
The line of pink in the sky had turned orange, and the waves sparkled in the warm light. It made his face look brighter, but it also revealed finely broken capillaries around his nose and under his eyes. Mr. Stokes peered down at the Pad. Our progress was so slow, you couldn’t really even see the ship move.
“They said you were a Placer. Ever use one of these?” he asked, holding the Pad out to me.
“Yes,” I confirmed, trying to be patient. “But I asked about the backups.”
“You can figure it out,” he said, shaking the Pad in front of me.
“Why are you making this a puzzle?” I asked, my voice rising.
“Puzzles are good for the mind. They occupy your brain when you need it. I sure did need it, all those years. And it’s good for you. It’s good to think things through.”
“Thinking things through might not be my strongest suit,” I admitted. I’d made a lot of decisions I felt terrible about.
“No one gave you the tools,” Mr. Stokes said. “That’s why it’s important to learn.”
Orange and yellow flared on the horizon. The water seemed to churn with fire as the sun rose from the sea, its light a thousand times more intense and crisp than the videos they showed on screens.
“The backups would have to work off-line,” he said, offering a hint.
“Like the Pads?” I asked, and then it hit me. “The Pads?” I exclaimed, much too loudly. I lowered my voice. “You’re telling me the backup is the fucking Pads?”
“I didn’t tell you anything,” Mr. Stokes said with a mischievous smile that reminded me of his late son. “You figured it out on your own.”
The Explorer's Heart: $57.97
Beecher Stokes had been impish before his Last Day came. He was curious and funny and clever with words. But once he had to pay to speak, his life drained away. I never understood why I let him kiss me after that, when I hadn’t before. I don’t think I ever truly wanted to be more than friends, but he seemed so hopeless that I wanted him to have something to hold on to. It was twisted—I knew that now. Until that day on the ship, talking to his father, I hadn’t really understood how important that hope had been for him. He didn’t know I’d go silent, but he knew we would probably never be able to afford to speak to each other again. He made my last day of freedom his last day in the world.
Now his father stood in front of me with the same sort of impish glee, like a part of Beecher still survived in his dad, even though I knew it should have been the other way around.
“Everyone knows they’re special,” he went on about the Pads. “Work off-line. That off-line storage is awful handy.”
“But they’re everywhere,” I said. “Placers. Overseers. Even real estate agents have them.”
“But not anyone in the Onzième. Right? And they have to be everywhere. They update in staggered intervals, once every fifteen minutes. Discovered that about two years into my Indenture. Damn overseers aren’t nearly careful enough. And they’re lazy. So lazy, they had me do my work and theirs, too.
“If the Pads don’t find Central Data, they look for other Pads instead. You blow up that last major node in Delphi™, and all the Pads will go into fail-safe mode. They’ll become a distributed backup network, communicating with each other like a swarm. There’ll be tens of thousands of them. Like a hydra.”
“A what?”
“Doesn’t matter. Point is, blowing up that data center would be worse than leaving it be.”
“Wait, that doesn’t make any sense,” I said, trying to keep up. “How can everything in Central Data be stored on a Pad? The information couldn’t possibly
fit. If it did, why wouldn’t they just make the Pads the Central Data system in the first place?”
“Each Pad doesn’t store all of it. Central Data stores all data. Movies, 3-D scans, history, news, every piece of surveillance footage ever gathered from an Ad screen—you get the picture. But the Pads don’t. They each store a bit, which is clever, because the whole thing doesn’t end up in any one person’s hands.
“They all store an index of which Pads store what. And, most important, they all store the important stuff. They all carry the lists of debts and debtors. Lists of property and owners. The prices of all the words. All the nation’s Laws. For all their apparent verbosity, these bits of data require very little storage space. Even the entire Word$ Market™, with its definitions for every word, hardly amounts to any kind of data. It’s easily stored.”
“That’s all saved on here?” I asked, tapping the Pad.
“This? No. This Pad is Téjican. It isn’t part of the backups. Set up very differently. Nicer screen, too,” he said, admiring it.
“So if all those Pads store the data, there’s no way to destroy it,” I said, confirming my worst fears.
“Anything that can be made can be unmade. There’s some way to destroy it.” He dropped his voice down even lower. “I wouldn’t have come on this trip if I didn’t think so.”
“But how?” I asked.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“You don’t have a plan?”
“You didn’t have a plan when you went silent. So I’ve heard.”
“Are you trying to needle me, or encourage me?” I asked.
He laughed. “Can I do both?”
I thought for a moment. “Maybe we could make all the NanoLion™ batteries in the Pads explode at the same time.”
“Again with the exploding! That won’t work,” he said. “They care about those Pads too much to use NanoLion™. There must be something we can do with that last center—besides explode it.”
“But that’s the plan,” I whispered. “My Placer friends want me to buy time for them with this trial so they can destroy the center at Delphi™.”
“You know what?” His face suddenly lit up, his sagging posture straightening. “You can do something less dramatic. You could destroy all their records, sort of like what you did with the batteries, but without exploding anything.”
“How?” I asked.
He had a gleam in his eye now. “The Pads store what Central Data tells them. When things change, they have to erase a few old things to make room for more. I might be able to instruct the system to wipe out everything instead.”
My heart started pounding again. Could this work after all? If we could shut down the system, I might be able to go back with Saretha. I might just survive.
“It’d cause the same chaos, though,” Mr. Stokes went on. “There’d be no Laws. No communication. No nothing. Everything would have to start over.” The gleam faded as he realized what this would mean. “Printers wouldn’t work. People would starve. People in need of medical care... Even with a cracked DRM, you’d have no way to get word out.”
“People could talk,” I said, wanting this to work. “They could travel and explain. We had a plan for this.” Kiely had even made me feel a little hopeful about it.
Mr. Stokes seemed to do some calculations in his mind. “There’s a lot to that. I understand why our friends down there don’t want it to happen. Some folks aren’t going to make it. Could get really bad.”
“It’s already really bad,” I said. “Bad enough that...” I didn’t want to speak about the Jumpers. That was too cruel. “Did you worry about how bad it would get when you escaped?”
He smiled at this, the sun shining in his eyes. “I see your point.”
“Do you think we could manage it? Could you explain to my friends how to do it?”
Mr. Stokes put a hand on the back of his neck. “That would be hard. It’d be better if I could do it myself.”
“Could you do it with that?” I pointed to his Pad.
He shook his head. “Central Data can rewrite Pads, not the other way around. If it worked both ways, I’d have taken the system down long ago! I’d have to be inside, with your friends.”
“Inside the Central Data node at Delphi™?” I asked, a bit too loudly. The two guards below us looked up. “I don’t even know if my friends can get in,” I continued in a whisper. “I don’t know what their plan is. I haven’t heard from Kel in days.”
I scrutinized the map again. The Dome of Delphi™ was maybe ten hours away, and everything was falling apart. “Could you do it alone?” I asked quietly.
“I know how to break into printers, not buildings. I’m no Placer. I’d need your friends’ help as much as they’d need mine. Plus, how am I supposed to get to Delphi™? We can’t exactly ask Arturo to make a quick stop.”
“No,” I said. “We can’t. But I have another idea.” I looked up to where the lifeboats hung and gave him the same kind of grin he’d given me. “I’ll bet you can puzzle it out.”
The Dome of Delphi™: $58.96
We passed the Dome of Delphi™ at midday. It was nearly as large as the Dome of DC. We saw it looming over the horizon well before we saw the coast it hugged. I didn’t know if Kel was inside yet. She still hadn’t contacted me, and time was running out. I couldn’t let Mr. Stokes leave without a place to rendezvous, though he had grown so eager, I was concerned he might bolt off on his own, anyway.
“I really love the idea of these boats,” he said to Arturo, which made me uneasy. I didn’t want Arturo to guess at our plans. “I suppose because I feel as if I invented the idea—even if it had been invented before I’d ever been born.”
Arturo looked at him with interest. “I’ve wondered how they taught you the history of the world if they could not even mention boats on the water.”
“They didn’t teach us any history like that,” Saretha said. “Was there something we missed?”
I didn’t understand how she could ask that. Of course we’d missed something. We’d missed nearly everything.
“Much of human history consists of men sailing,” Arturo explained. “Exploring, conquering lands they found, sending their plunder back to their ancestral homes—and, sadly, bringing back slaves to work those lands.”
“We knew none of this,” I said, feeling bitter at the idea that slaves had been part of history for so long—even if they called it something else. “I didn’t even know what the word slave meant until I escaped.”
“Maybe I don’t want to lay claim to this boat idea,” Randall said, then shifted subjects. “How fast do these lifeboats go? How far?”
“I should have known,” Arturo responded, making my heart seize for a moment, fearing he’d caught on to our plan. I breathed a bit easier when he said, “You have an explorer’s heart. With all your curiosity, I should have seen it before. Alas, these lifeboats wouldn’t suit exploring. They are meant for emergencies, to get passengers quickly to shore. Bad weather can come on suddenly.”
Randall nodded. “Which is the fastest?” he asked. I shot him a look that begged him to stop.
“They are all exactly the same,” Arturo answered, amused.
“Sir,” one of the officers called from the deck door. Arturo turned. “You should come to the bridge. We’ve got news from America®.”
We all raced to follow him down into a wide room near the level of the sea. Every once in a while, a wave would swell high enough to roll over the thick window and show the murkiness beneath the surface.
On-screen, a news report sputtered, showing the Portland dome. Silas Rog was talking, but the sound was broken up too much for us to catch anything but a few scattered words. His face was blocked again, his bodyguards were behind him and he was free.
“What happened?” Saretha asked before I could.
My body went icy, thinking of my friends there. What would become of them now?
The scene changed to show smoking wreckage in a tunnel somewhere between domes. Crane Mathers was on the scene. Though his voice was obscured by static, the words Téjican Attack labeled the image.
“That is our decoy,” Arturo said. “They will have discovered the trucks were empty by now.”
“They meant for that to be us,” Saretha said, stunned.
“I don’t know why this horrifies me so much,” I commented, laughing nervously. “We knew this is what they were going to do.”
“It horrifies you because it is horrible,” Randall said, his eyes glued to the scene.
“I wish I could get in touch with Kiely or Kel,” I said. “They could tell us what is going on. Are you sure they can reach us at sea?” I asked Arturo.
The communications officer looked at him with discomfort.
“They can.” He swallowed, shifting his weight from one leg to the other.
“What is it?” Saretha asked, looking worried. There was something he wasn’t telling us.
His cheeks darkened. “They can reach you, but we have been blocking any incoming signals broadcast to X0562.1.1,” he said. “For your protection.”
“What?” I yelled. “But you knew I needed to talk to them! They’re on the inside. Do you have any idea who Kel and Kiely are? They can help us.”
“Or harm us,” Arturo said. “We have reason to be concerned. You discussed blowing up the last data center. You know that would be a disaster.”
“Yes,” I said, realizing I needed to be careful now. “They are planning to blow up that last data center at Delphi™. I need to tell them to stop.”
Arturo looked stunned. Randall threw his hands in the air.
“Unblock her signal,” Arturo said quietly. The communications officer obeyed.
I waited. The screen sputtered an Ad for a new Carol Amanda Harving movie. When had Rog found the time to put that together?
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