by Anthology
She pulled the sweater of her school uniform over her head, tugged her long dark hair out of the collar. She slid into the seat at her desk and swallowed hard. Take a deep breath, her therapist always said. You can’t fight anxiety without oxygen.
Lizzie took one, then another. It helped enough to see her school’s screen pop up after she pressed her palm against the log-in pad.
Seven minutes.
She could still turn in her homework before class started. She closed her eyes, and the shape of the bright screen burned beneath her eyelids. She just needed to hit send. That was all. It was such a basic set of assignments. Explain the historical precedent set by Amula’s independence from the Central Alliance after the Midas Belt War; defend or argue against (choose one) Amula’s position of neutrality for ongoing wars between Inner Loop planets.
They hadn’t been difficult essays to write. After all, she’d grown up hearing the story of Amula’s independence, from her parents at the dinner table, told in bits and pieces but chronologically, every night, until they’d start again, the way some people read religious texts over and over.
Hit send, she thought. But her stomach twisted into a knot like her fingers used to twine together behind her back at social events, and her heart swelled. Maybe it’d burst, and then she wouldn’t have to deal with any of this. Maybe it’d just stop, and that would be much easier. She wouldn’t have to spend the next ten days waiting for the essays to come back, sleepless and anxious over them while her therapist said let it go, let it go, it’s out of your control, let go of the things you can’t control, but wasn’t it within her control? Wasn’t this all within her control?
The fifteen minutes of light that would start at the top of the hour came through her blinds, cutting a harsh white line across her bookcase.
Five minutes.
She did not hit send.
She spun in her chair to face the window and scooted until she could reach the windowsill and the button that turned the window from opaque to translucent. She watched the family shuttle pull out of their dock and fly toward the tower in the middle of Lo, the capital city of Amula. Above Lo pulsed the green-blue sheen of the shield that protected the city and surrounding areas from extraplanetary attacks. Incoming ships passed through a series of gates at the inbound and outbound ports on the outskirts of the city. Lizzie ran her eyes over the shield, instinctively looking for places where the code had allowed for a gap in the magnetic waves. But there were none, like usual.
The shield was her finest piece of work.
And the last thing she ever worked on.
The shield before this one had collapsed multiple times, chronically failing. And as the Midas Belt War spread and the six most powerful planets formed the violent Central Alliance, the pressure had been on the government, the consul and the vice consul—her father—to find a solution.
Simultaneously, Lizzie had begun an internship with Dr. Sha, the electromagnetic physicist in charge of the new shield project. They’d met at one of her father’s parties, and the grumpy old scientist had been one of the first people who put Lizzie at ease outside the confines of her home. They’d talked science until they were the last people there, Lizzie in her fancy dress on the stairs, a glass of fruit juice dangling between her fingers while Dr. Sha sat cross-legged on a chair, hands flying through the air as they talked, the wine in the glass they held sloshing all over them, but they hadn’t noticed.
“You and I,” they said. “We’re the next Babbage and Lovelace.”
She laughed. “I’m no Lovelace.”
Sha had looked pleased she knew of Ada Lovelace. But they shouldn’t have been surprised. Lizzie’s parents were fans of the Terran classics. She and her siblings, after all, were named after their favorite Terran book. She’d left the party with an internship, a mentor, and a friend.
Sometimes Lizzie could sense Sha’s frustration that she wasn’t the Lovelace they thought she should be. Lizzie knew of Lovelace, and she knew that Ada’s world wasn’t her world, and Ada’s struggles weren’t her struggles. She wasn’t confined by society or her mother’s expectations. She wasn’t a prisoner of society’s constraints on her gender, or that society simply didn’t have the technology she dreamed of. Instead, she was a prisoner of her own mind.
Her entire body ached with the fatigue of carrying around her anxiety, this twisting, mutating monster inside her. It was barely manageable inside her bedroom. Outside was too much. The monster inside her had grown too large, too heavy, too much.
Sha had sent her a few emails, then a few messages, then they’d shown up at the house. Lizzie hadn’t spoken to them. Sha had never ended her internship, but it’d been months since the shield went up, and thus months since she had gone to work. She didn’t do anything these days. Her mind no longer itched for coding. Instead, she sat near her window, admired the shield, and knew that she’d never accomplish anything like it again, nor did she want to.
Behind her, the desk screen beeped twice, softly.
School. Zero minutes.
It was too late to hit send on those papers. She gripped the edges of her shirtsleeves in her hands, the sweat gathering in the creases of her palms. She needed to roll the chair back in front of the screen. She needed to get a grip. She needed to breathe. She needed to get away. She needed to hide. She needed—
“Welcome, class!” said Mr. Daniels, in a classroom across the city Lizzie hadn’t seen in months.
“Good morning,” replied her classmates.
Go back to your screen, she told herself. Tears pricked her eyes. This was so simple. So easy, and yet, she hadn’t moved.
“May you have as many opportunities as there are stars in the sky,” Daniels said.
“May you have as many blessings as there are asteroids in the belt,” the class said back.
Before he could start taking attendance, Lizzie heard a loud crack, like the noise Darcy’s arm had made when she’d broken it skateboarding in their hallway two years ago. Then a boom, like thunder but a thousand times closer. It reverberated inside Lizzie’s chest, and her first thought was a solar storm. But at the second boom, the house shook. She’d never felt the house shake before.
She ducked instinctively and grabbed the windowsill with both of her hands. The blinds closed at her touch and then opened again, just in time for a lightning strike of bright purple to collide with the shield. The shield shuddered, and behind her, on the screen, students screamed. Lizzie’s mind roared with panic, but her eyes stayed wide and trained on the shield.
* * *
“It’ll hold,” Sha said proudly, demonstrating their model for her father. They gestured to Lizzie. “She did most of the coding. I just told her what it needed to do.”
“That was the hard part,” Lizzie protested. “The angles, velocity, strength, current, charge … I didn’t do that. I just helped connect the dots.”
“Don’t downplay your strengths, Lizzie Lovelace,” Sha said sternly. “You built a shield, and it’ll keep this city safe. And if Lo and the power grid stay safe, then Amula will be safe. We’ll stay out of this war through self-sufficiency.”
“And luck,” said her father, studying the small model. He looked up in the silence that followed. His eyes moved from Sha to Lizzie as he said, “You may not be able to quantify or study luck, but it exists. We rely too much upon it, in my opinion.”
Lizzie didn’t often hear her father’s opinions. She heard the opinions of the government and long-held historical beliefs, but not of her father. Just a man, facing the inevitability of a war. And though Sha told him that he wouldn’t need to rely on luck any longer, Lizzie wanted to tell him she believed in luck, too. It’d brought her to Sha, and Sha to the person who could help them build the shield.
* * *
Another crack of purple lightning. The shield vibrated and then burst where the second bolt had struck. Somewhere in the city, Lizzie knew Sha was swearing up a solar storm in a multitude of languages. But there in her
room, for a moment, everything seemed quiet and slow. The green-blue sheen over the city rippled and fell like a wave to the ground.
Then everything went dark. For a brief moment, Lizzie thought she was panicking, that she just hadn’t registered any other part of the panic attack. Then she took a deep breath and exhaled, and the world remained dark. Another boom, and another spike of purple lashed through the sky, striking the Mergstar, home of the parliament and consul’s offices. The vice consul’s office. Her father. And all the top scientific labs. Her mother.
The explosion’s light blinded her.
Lizzie screamed, shoving herself beneath the bed.
The shield was gone. And a strike on the Mergstar. This was no accident.
Her mind began to reach out for the code, to problem solve and push against the question, to demand answers. But another part of her, a part she couldn’t control, held back her mind. She pressed her forehead into her knees, gritting her teeth. The shield was gone. She didn’t know what happened next. Which of the Inner Loop planets was attacking them? Why breach the neutrality? Why not try to reach out to the consul and vice consul?
Unless Lo had tried to prevent an attack. She wasn’t, after all, privy to her father’s communications. She’d helped to build the shield, but that didn’t make her an adviser.
She did not know what came next.
The emergency lights around the baseboards of her room sparked and then hummed to life, a distant glow peeking through her windows. The desk screen said, “This is a message from the emergency beacon system. Emergency personnel, please proceed to Polestar and Mergstar. This is a message from the emergency beacon system…”
It’d repeat until it, too, failed, or until full power was restored.
Lizzie inhaled and exhaled faster than her heart pounded. They’d lost power. The planet with only fifteen minutes of light once an hour was cloaked in darkness again. The generators were down. Deliberate or a side effect of the shield’s collapse, it didn’t matter. Without power and without the shield, Lo was vulnerable.
She swallowed. She was trapped. The world was terrifying, but staying inside had been safe because it had been her choice. Now she wasn’t sure if that was still true. If she was still safe.
She reached up from beneath the bed to the small drawer on her bedside stand. She pulled it open and fumbled around inside until her fingers collided with a cool metallic container. She gripped it and slipped back under the bed, pressing herself against the wall for something stable and reassuring. She opened the flat metal box. Inside were her just in case of emergency pills. Her don’t use these unless you have no other choice pills—like she was making it up, like she was trying to let it get this bad so she could take pills that made her feel slow and off-kilter. She didn’t care how she’d feel in three minutes, she wanted to feel better now. Slow and off-kilter was always better than a mind spinning so fast that inertia kept the panic going. She pressed a pill beneath her tongue and felt it dissolve there. She closed her eyes against the onslaught of her heart.
Breathe, she told herself. But she couldn’t make herself take the deep five-second breaths.
Tell yourself a story, she heard her doctor say in some distant memory of a therapy session. Lizzie began, Once upon a time. But then her mind tripped and fell to its knees. A planet lost its power and its shield and found itself at the mercy of luck in a galaxy that had used up all its luck a generation ago. She almost laughed at her own ridiculousness.
“Code, don’t write,” she told herself.
But she wasn’t even coding. She was on the floor while her city was in crisis. She was on the floor after the building where both of her parents worked had been struck by a bolt of energy from an unknown source. She was on the floor. Worthless, her mind whispered. Knew it, hissed her bones. Waste of space, murmured the blood in her veins. She shuddered.
“Lizzie?” a voice called hesitantly. “Lizzie, we must go downstairs.”
Mer. She scooted out from beneath her bed, hands clammy and ears ringing. Whether that was from the explosion or her own thoughts, it was hard to tell.
“Lizzie!” Mer exclaimed, stepping into her room with a flashlight in hand. It bobbed across the ceiling wildly as Mer dropped it onto Lizzie’s bed, and Lizzie wanted to tell her to turn it off, to preserve the batteries, but her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth.
“Liz,” said Mer, pressing her palms to Lizzie’s cheeks. “We need to go to the shelter.”
Ah yes, her father had told her about this. Drilled this, even. It wasn’t that they were more or less important than anyone else on the planet. It was simply that he didn’t trust his own children not to get in the way of rescue and response efforts if the war came to Lo.
Lizzie blinked.
The war had come to Lo. Maybe to all of Amula. That’s what an attack like this began. It was not a singular event. It would keep going.
She inhaled. Exhaled. Her mind vibrated, but at a low hum. No screech of panic. No alarm bells. No room spinning, no nausea.
The medicine was kicking in.
Mer took her hand. “Come.”
Lizzie balked. “No. I’m not leaving the room.”
Mer turned, face ashen. “Elizabeth Abernathy. We do not have time for your games.”
Games washed over her like a bucket of cold water, rinsing the effects of the medicine from her system. This was how everyone saw her all the time. A faker. A drama queen. Someone who could turn off her anxiety and her panic but chose not to. Lazy. Ineffectual. Cowardly.
Mer tugged her hand, and Lizzie’s mind switched back in the other direction dizzyingly fast. How could she be worrying about that when her planet was under attack? What kind of terrible person was she?
Her knees buckled.
“Not today, Lizzie,” said Mer firmly. “Get downstairs and you can cry all you want.”
Guilt swarmed her like bees. “I’m trying.”
Mer’s glare softened a bit. “I know. But we don’t have time for you to try. Move.”
Lizzie followed her down the stairs and through the house to the basement. She gathered details as she went and left them like bread crumbs behind her. The art in the hall had changed. When had it changed? Darcy’s bedroom door was open. Clothes everywhere. There were still dirty dishes in the sink. The chaos of her surroundings slid its fingers around Lizzie’s throat. Everything’s falling apart, it murmured. You did this.
“No,” she muttered aloud.
“Faster,” Mer begged.
The city’s loudspeakers crackled. “This is the emergency beacon system. All citizens are commanded to shelter in place. The following locations are off-limits to civilians until further notice: Mergstar, Polestar.”
Mer pulled the kitchen door shut behind them, shaking a pile of keys from her pocket. Lizzie blinked at them, then remembered. They used keys for the safe room because keys could not be hacked. No wave, no signal. She wavered where she stood. This was real, wasn’t it? It wasn’t something that happened to someone else. This wasn’t something her mind invented in a dream. This was real.
Her whole life she’d fought a war on the inside. And now a war was coming to her from the outside.
BOOM BOOM BOOM. A hard series of knocks echoed in the kitchen, startling Lizzie. She doubled over, her vision spotting. They were here already. She didn’t know who they were, but they were here all the same. The Central Alliance. Raiders. Anyone. Anything.
Mer yanked open the door. “A delivery? Now? Are you mad?”
A boy stepped through the doorway, holding out a package. He was tall, almost but not quite as tall as Lizzie, with blond hair that kinked at the ends and the same Amulan light brown skin as she had. The dim glow of the emergency lights washed their faces out, casting an eerie orange sheen over their trio. He wiped at his face with the back of his hand like he’d driven through a rainstorm. Sweat, Lizzie realized. He’d been afraid.
“I don’t get to choose when I make deliveries, ma’am,” he sa
id to Mer, who took the package from his hands. Cheese. Like they had any use for cheese right now. “I didn’t plan on being on the streets when they came.”
“Who?” demanded Mer.
The boy glanced at Lizzie, casually, then his eyes snapped back to her before they could keep traveling. “I know you.”
She blinked. “I don’t know you.”
“Ros,” he said. “Ros Dennard. I graduated the Academy last year. Few years ahead of you, I guess.”
“And now you’re delivering groceries,” she snapped. Someone who’d gone to Lo’s top technology-focused secondary school shouldn’t have been delivering packages. He should have had an internship. He should have been fixing the shield. Or going to the city’s defense.
He didn’t miss a beat. “And you don’t leave your house, I hear. Been a year for both of us.”
Lizzie turned away, heat rising on her cheeks.
Mer growled a little bit. “I asked you a question.”
Ros wiped at his face again. “It’s the Central Alliance. There’s no power out there, just the emergency lights, and the emergency power station’s taking a strong beating right now. LOFOR is everywhere.”
Lo Forces. The city’s defense. In Lizzie’s entire life, LOFOR had never been called to the streets of Lo. The Amulan army would come, too, wouldn’t they? She couldn’t even recall the closest base. It was thought LOFOR would suffice in most crises. Was this expected? Where was her father? He’d surely send a message, even if he was busy helping at Mergstar.
“They don’t stand a chance, I figure,” Ros said quietly. “The shield’s down. A surprise attack without our strongest defense … the city will fall.” He gestured to the package. “At least you’ll have cheese.”
Mer had turned toward Lizzie, her eyes wide and meaningful. Lizzie read the look on her face. You can fix this. She shook her head and backed away, slamming into the door of the blast chamber. “I can’t.”
“Lactose intolerant?” Ros asked knowingly. “My little sister is. It’s the worst. To be fair, though, if we’re all going to die, does it really matter if the cheese will bother your stomach? I’m not sure I can think of a better way to go.”
