by Anthology
Lizzie’s mind splintered, distracted and snagging on his words. “Lactose intolerance wouldn’t cause death. It’s an intolerance, not an allergy. But that’s not what I meant. Mer, I can’t. I can’t. There’s probably nothing left to fix. They hit the power grid. Nothing I can do will help that.”
“Intolerance might not cause death, but the Central Alliance sure will,” said Ros. “Six Inner Loop planets against us? We don’t stand a chance. Not sure why the power’s out, though. I passed six of the eight power towers on my way here, and all of them seemed fine. Just quiet. Usually there’s that hum.”
“Yes,” Lizzie said faintly. “Electromagnetism interferes with human hearing and neural functioning. We mitigated that.”
“How?” asked Ros, the humor fading from his voice, replaced by a keen curiosity. “I’ve always wanted to know how you built that thing. Just you and Dr. Sha.”
Lizzie closed her eyes. “I didn’t build it. I wrote the code.”
“That’s building,” Ros said.
“Code is engineering,” Mer said offhandedly, her tone more fierce than she likely intended it to be when quoting Lizzie’s own words from a year ago back to her.
“I don’t know where anything is,” Lizzie protested. “And Sha, Dr. Sha, they’d be in Mergstar, and if Mergstar was hit…”
“Wait,” said Ros. “Can you … can you fix the shield? By yourself?”
“No,” said Lizzie at the same time that Mer said, “Yes.”
The woman and the girl glared at each other. Mer said, “You don’t know if you haven’t tried.”
“I have,” Lizzie cried. “I know you think it isn’t real. I know you don’t know what this is like. But it is real, and I can’t.”
Above her, the city’s loudspeakers crackled. Galistar. The tower with the elementary schools.
Lizzie’s veins were ice and fire. She spun toward the nearest wall, desperate to feel anything other than the sheer panic and wildness screaming in her head, in her bones, in her muscles, in her veins, in the spaces between her lungs and her heart, in—
“Bennett,” she whispered. “Darcy.”
“You know someone at Galistar?” Ros said, paling.
“Yes,” Lizzie whispered. “My siblings.”
She closed her eyes, knuckles pressed against her forehead until the bone against bone brought some clarity to her mind. She could not help anyone at Galistar. She couldn’t think straight in a crowd. And chaos would only send her over the edge. She wasn’t useful. She couldn’t help her siblings. She couldn’t help her father. She couldn’t help her mother. She was so useless.
But if the power grid wasn’t down. If they’d shut off the main power for some other reason. To protect Lo in the attack. Then the shield could be restored. She didn’t know why it’d gone down, not yet, but maybe she could fix that. And if the shield went back up, she could buy Lo some time. It wasn’t much, but it wasn’t nothing.
She spun toward Ros. “I need a ride.”
Ros straightened. “To Galistar?”
“No,” Lizzie said, swallowing hard. “I’m no help there if there’s fighting. But I can help LOFOR. If you can get me to Polestar.”
“You’re going to try,” breathed Mer.
Everything in Lizzie fought against the feeling. She shoved the fear for her brother’s and sister’s safety at her anxiety, holding it like a wall inside her. She found a little space to breathe and seized it, drawing in a deep breath. “Yes.”
Ros nodded. “Let’s go. If they’ve held the line that I saw coming in, we can get in around the back. I have a friend by those gates. He’ll let us through.”
Lizzie nodded, dazed, stepping toward him. He caught her by an elbow. “You going to be okay?”
“Yes,” she said. “Just … promise me something.”
“Sure,” he said, like they’d always been friends. Perhaps that was how Ros made friends. By trusting them immediately and offering his trustworthiness in return.
“Don’t laugh at me, and don’t let me run away,” she said.
His dark eyes were serious, but his mouth tilted up, amused. “Those are not encouraging last words. Try to think of better ones on our ride.”
“You’re already laughing at me,” Lizzie said sharply, feeling heat rising to her cheeks.
He pointed at her, his eyebrows shooting up, his grin growing. “I didn’t hear laughter, and I don’t like being accused of such heinous crimes. Come on.”
How he could joke at a time like this, she didn’t know. But Lizzie didn’t have much of a choice other than to follow him.
Outside, she could see the edge of their sun on the horizon, splitting beams of white light through the streets. Five minutes until the top of the hour. An entire hour had passed since the shield fell. Everything was moving so fast, too fast. It was too much all at once. They were under attack, and the shield was down, and Polestar, which housed the power-grid computers and the shield computers, was damaged, and Mergstar, which housed the government and the university, was damaged, and Galistar, which housed the public primary school, was damaged, and everything—
Ros touched her elbow. “Ever ridden a hoverbike before?”
She shook her head, and he handed her a helmet. He settled on the black motorbike, and she carefully swung a leg over, sliding in behind him. He turned his face toward hers just enough so she could hear him over the sound of guns and pod-cannons firing in the distance. “Hold on. It’s kind of a piece of junk. I was going to fix the stabilizer tomorrow. That’ll teach me to procrastinate.”
She wrapped her arms around him tightly, and he kicked the bike to life. It lurched into the air, tilting wildly as Ros grunted, his arms tightening as he tried to straighten it. It wobbled and he leaned, pulling Lizzie with him. They shot out of the back alley that led to the kitchen of Lizzie’s house and swerved onto the main street, the spinning tires slamming into the side of a house. Ros shoved off the wall with a foot, and they arced to the other side of the street.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Lizzie shouted at him.
“Probably should have asked that question before you got on!” he shouted back.
“That’s not funny!” she yelled, clinging to him.
“Are you sure?” he said, and pressed the bike forward. They spun and wobbled and careened around the city, ducking between LOFOR forces and the platinum ships of the Central Alliance. LOFOR pods and ships were black, with no visible lights on their exterior shells, deliberately making them nearly impossible to see in the forty-five minutes of darkness every hour. But the sun was rising now, so their advantage would be lost for the next fifteen minutes. The sleek ships of the CA, built with slave labor, broke through the darkness with infrared lights lining the hulls. They didn’t seem to need spotlights, or sunlight, to maneuver easily through Lo’s towers, despite their size.
Ros sat up, slowing the bike, and then coming to a stop. He put his foot down to catch the bike before it landed and turned his head to stare down a street. Lizzie followed his line of sight. CA forces. On the other side, LOFOR.
“After we’re done here,” he said, “I want to eat some of that Swiss cheese back in your kitchen. I don’t want to look like Swiss cheese.”
“Then you should probably go,” she said shakily.
He kicked the bike into gear just as shots started to fire up and down the street. He swerved down an alley, ducking through the underbelly of Amula, a part of it Lizzie had never seen or really known about. They passed homes with thin walls and without windows, homes that wouldn’t stand up to a war like the one raging on the streets above. They whizzed by people sitting in their doorways despite the warning, and then Ros drove up stairs on the other side, back onto a main street, behind the LOFOR lines and with a clear view of Polestar.
“How’d you know that shortcut?” Lizzie gasped.
“I grew up down there,” Ros said.
How’d you get into the Academy? she wanted to ask. Why did you come back?
But he didn’t elaborate, and she couldn’t make the words of her questions come to her tongue.
They parked the hoverbike by the side gate, and Lizzie slid off it onto shaking legs. She took a deep breath, and then the enormity of everything began to press down on her. She tried to take another deep breath while she watched Ros reach for the gate. No, wait, she nearly said, but it came too late. He shook the gate, and the alarm at the top went off, loud and clear.
No time for this, she told herself. She shoved away her feelings, fears, memories, everything, put it in a tiny box in her head and sat down on the lid. She didn’t have a lock, but that’d hold for now. She ran to the gate controls. Feeling around at the base of the control panel, she yanked it free and bent, examining the wires. The alarm screamed incessantly above them.
“Goddamn space trash,” swore Ros, covering his ears and wincing. “Where’s the guard?”
“Dead,” she said. “Or inside. I don’t know. Do you have a pocketknife?”
He brandished it. “Don’t cut yourself on it.”
She snorted and snapped the blade free. She cut through the blue wire with a single motion. The alarm stopped. She cut the green one, then the yellow one, and then crossed them, stripping the rubber from around the wires. She twisted the bare copper ends together tightly and then hit the green button. The gate alarm sounded, but only once, shortly, before the gate swung open.
Lizzie took a deep breath and looked at Ros. “Let’s go. I don’t have time to shut the gate from the inside, so we’ll have visitors eventually. I don’t want to find out who they are.”
“Agreed,” Ros said. “Lead on. Do you know the way?”
She did. And she wished she didn’t. At least her nightmares that replayed arriving to her internship and finding “someone better able to handle the pressure” standing at her desk would serve her well. They ran through the empty hallways, abandoned by those assisting LOFOR or going higher in the tower for more sensitive assets. They didn’t know what was down here. Ros and Lizzie took only one or two wrong turns, then retraced their steps to find the correct path to the central command station.
“Central command,” said Ros, stopping, breathless, in the hall. “We did it.”
Lizzie kept walking. “It’s back here.”
Ros coughed. “Uh, you’ve walked past all the control rooms. They’re this way.”
“I didn’t forget, if that’s what you’re thinking. We didn’t put the computer that hosts the shield up there, or any of its servers. That’s too obvious a target.” She pressed her hand against the door pad of the supply closet, hoping, praying that Sha hadn’t removed her from the security system.
“Welcome, Miss Abernathy,” said the computer. “It has been one hundred thirty-seven days since your last entrance. Should I inform Dr. Sha that you have arrived?”
Lizzie opened her mouth to say no, and then a thought occurred to her. “Yes. Please.”
If they were alive, wherever they were—they alternated between Mergstar and Polestar—then they’d come help her. They wouldn’t let Lo, and thus Amula, fall without a fight.
The door swung open, and Lizzie stepped through. The emergency lights were on in here, too, casting low eerie shadows of their legs and feet. But the computer for the shield was hooked up to the emergency generators, too, for all the obvious reasons, and so the screen glowed bright blue in the middle of the room.
ERROR: 202-PT ERROR FOUND
“That looks bad,” Ros whispered, coming up behind Lizzie.
“It is,” Lizzie said. She shook her head. “I can’t do this. I can’t do this.”
“You can. You did it before,” Ros pointed out.
Lizzie closed her eyes, because if she kept looking at the screen, she was going to cry. “I know, I know, but that was probably just luck before. There’s just no way I’m going to be able to find the problem in time.”
“In time for what? They’ve already attacked.”
Lizzie opened her eyes and cried out, “I don’t know, Ros! Before they kill the emergency generators or blow up Galistar! This could take ten minutes or ten days or a year—I don’t know! How am I even supposed to search that fast? I’m just one person. I only have two hands.”
“I’m here,” he said, meeting her gaze. “What do you need me to do?”
“Nothing. You can’t do anything. You don’t know how to do any of this,” Lizzie snapped.
Ros’s hand closed around her elbow. She swayed and leaned against his shoulder. The room spun, she was sure of it, even though she had no horizon for it and couldn’t see anything but the blue error message in front of her. His voice was quiet and steady. “Take a deep breath.”
She took a deep breath. She exhaled it slowly. “I know it sounds ridiculous.”
“It doesn’t,” he said, and even if he was lying, Lizzie was grateful for the small kindness. He added, “You’re one person. But I’ll stay here the whole time, and it’s better than not trying at all. I promise you.”
“What’d you study at the Academy?” she asked him, because she needed to buy herself some time to get a grip on her mind again.
“Architecture,” he said. “Lo’s growing.”
“Oh,” she said softly, taking another deep breath. “That’s smart.”
“I know,” he said simply. She couldn’t think of anything else to say for a long moment, but Ros didn’t seem to mind. Then he said gently, “No one’s asking you to fight the whole war, Lizzie Abernathy. Just do this one thing because it is something you can do.”
She closed her eyes, swallowing back the tears, and when she opened them, the error message crystallized in her vision. “Okay. The system’s detecting a virus. Whatever that purple light was, it must have been carrying a virus that they injected straight into the electromagnetic waves that would have carried it back into their drivers hosted on each of the towers. If I debug it here and then push the updated code to the towers, that should prompt the shield to upload again.”
“I understood all of those words as separate words but not in that particular order,” said Ros. “I trust you. Get to work, Abernathy.”
Lizzie slid into her old chair in front of the blue screen and put her fingers on the keys. She took a deep breath and thought about Darcy and Bennett in Galistar, about her father and mother in Mergstar, about Mer back at the house, about Ros, who didn’t need to help her, but was. She hit enter and brought up the code. Her vision swam, and Ros touched her shoulder again. She blinked, and the screen sharpened back into focus. She could do this. She couldn’t do everything, but this was one thing, and she could do this one thing right then. It was all she needed to worry about until it was done.
So she got to work.
Ros talked to her as she typed, deleted, corrected, and chased a virus through 480,000 lines of code. She cracked her neck, barely listening to him, but finding his voice soothing as he told her about how he grew up poor, went to the Academy, and graduated by the skin of his teeth. He’d never liked school. He didn’t learn from books, but rather from putting his hands on things directly and figuring out how they worked.
Lizzie deleted a line, rewrote it, letting her fingers guide her, listening.
He’d fought tooth and nail not to fail out, and it was only because of his recommendation letters that he got into university. Then he dropped out of university to take care of his mother. He told her about making deliveries all over the city, about the people he got to meet, about everyone who told him that now that his mom was better, he should go back to university.
“Why?” she heard herself ask in a daze. She stretched her hands and looked up at him.
“Why go back?” he asked. When she nodded, he shrugged. “I want to build new towers and think about Lo’s future. Cities are like organisms. We’re growing rapidly. We’ll need better mines and bridges, get food and energy out to neighborhoods farther from Lo’s center. They only let you do that if you go to university.”
“Talk to my father,”
Lizzie said, drawing her shoulders up and rolling them to get the knots of tension out of them. “When this is over, talk to my father.”
“I like how you said that.”
“How I said what?”
“Talk to my father. You’re basically a princess of Amula. Or at least of Lo.”
“We don’t have a monarchy,” she replied automatically.
“Okay, princess,” Ros agreed cheerfully. “How’s it going?”
“Almost done,” she murmured. Her mind and fingers slowed as she found code she knew she hadn’t written, a digital signature she didn’t recognize. Ha, she thought, fighting the urge to smile.
“Is that it?” Ros asked.
She could feel the panic creeping in, dark and shadowy, on the edges of her mind when she slowed down, when her fingers stopped moving. So she didn’t answer him. She couldn’t. This was only the first piece of the puzzle.
She moved the corrected file to the central hard drive and dropped it there. It uploaded quickly, and then she opened the software they’d built for the towers. She pushed the update to them. The progress bar inched across her screen. She sat back, letting her hands fall into her lap. Ros didn’t move from her shoulder, and she knew she was crushing his fingers between her back and the chair. But he didn’t flinch, and neither did she.
UPLOAD FAIL
Lizzie didn’t know she had burst into tears until Ros was kneeling next to her, gripping her hands hard in his. “Hey. Hey. Focus. I know. You’ve been working really hard. Look at me, Lizzie.”
She lifted her head, meeting his gaze. He wobbled in her vision; then the tears spilled and he steadied. He raised an eyebrow. “We did not come all the way across this city, and I did not tell you my life story, for some faulty interweb connection to fail us. Let’s figure it out.”
Pressing her palm against her chest, Lizzie whispered, “I’m just so tired of trying so hard all the time and failing every time, even at things I know I can do.”
“I know,” he said quietly, taking her hands and holding them tightly. “But this isn’t one of those times.”
