I thought back to Sententia and how we’d turned our back on the people who’d lived here. I wondered how long after we cut ourselves off, they gave up and moved on or died? Who were the primitives and why did they seem so behind the technology in the city around them? Where had the raiders come from, and why did they take the men, women, and children running around in the ruins captive?
Aside from the overgrown vegetation and rotted contents of the homes, the quarantined area of the city could be reclaimed and habitable. It would take little cleanup to put it back together. I closed my eyes and thought about the primitives who could relocate in this area, take shelter in the vacant homes, and use the abandoned technology to create a life they’d forgotten.
I’d never spoken to people who lived in the ruins and didn’t know for certain they weren’t friendly. But if they’d wanted me dead, they could’ve made a move to do it months before. They watched. I never saw them, but I’d felt their eyes upon me as I went about building up my fortifications and collecting domesticated animals who’d become wild through the generations.
Every time I’d left the quarantine area, they’d followed and observed. The raiders would not be so nice. I’d seen them in action. If I survived this, perhaps I could help the primitives to defeat them.
So much rested on me convincing the bad guys the quarantine area was still dangerous and not a good place to visit. If I failed, I had nowhere to go, nothing to eat. I’d already been homeless one time too many in my life.
I stopped outside the projection room about five hundred yards from the raiders and hurried inside. From my tiny window, I watched about one hundred men scramble, trample each other in order to get the hell out of there. I turned and pressed my back to the wall, sliding down to sit on my heels.
And then I cried.
15
Sententia, two days until departure from the islands
“Why are we walking in the opposite direction?”
“Because we’re going back to the caves and planning an alternate route to the towers.”
“I thought the plan was to jam the cameras and go to the station?”
Eli grunted.
“Eli, we are jamming the cameras, right?”
“Yes, but unless you can find a means to become invisible, we can’t do it now. I don’t know how the bees locked onto you without your chip, but they did. Until we know how and fix it, we’ve got to lie low and remain invisible. So, back to the caves for now.”
I stopped in my tracks. “No.”
Eli glanced back. “Come on. We can’t hang out here.” He started down the sewer access tunnel in the basement of one of the lesser used academy buildings.
“I can do that.”
“Then come on, we need to move.”
“I can make us invisible, Eli.”
He stopped, his shoulders stiffened, and he exhaled, slowly turning to face me. “Even if you can do what you can say, how are you going to manage to build the tech without any equipment, or parts, or access to your chip?”
I resisted rolling my eyes. All through my academy years I’d gotten reactions like this. I could do so much more than keep bees and program hives.
But…
Eli hadn’t said I couldn’t do it, only that I didn’t have access to the equipment and parts to build it, which I did, in spades at the moment. “You forget what sits over our heads. This is the academy of science and technology, S&T. They have it all up there.” I pointed at the ceiling. “We only have to go and get it.”
Eli snorted and shook his head. “Not a good idea.”
“What?”
“You know what else is up there.”
“Yes, but the bees can’t get us down here, and they’ll have to find a way into the building before we go back underground.”
“But we still have no idea how they managed to find you. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you had some kind of homing beacon on you. The bees could be waiting for us up there. They might already be in the building. Plus, there are soldiers up there too—and innocent civilians who could get caught in the middle of the swarm if things go wrong.”
“Given what just happened, the soldiers might be inclined to help us. Their lives are in danger also, regardless if I’m in the basement or above. And if I can get the parts I need, I can jam the signal and the cameras.”
Eli reached up and rubbed his forehead, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath but not saying a word.
“Did you hear me?”
“I heard you.” He opened his eyes, fixing me with an intense stare. “Can you really make us invisible? You’re positive—certain you can do it?”
“To both mechanical and human eyes, but to keep the technology portable we won’t be able to remain undetected for long stretches of time. We’ll have a narrow window before we have to cut the power and allow the wave-modifier to cool. I might have an endless power source, but the generator required for long-term camouflage would have to be as big as one of these buildings to pull it off for longer than the ten minutes without melting down.”
“Ten minutes isn’t enough time. It will go by in a flash, and the last thing you want is to be out in the open when our shields go down.”
“Not if we leap-frog to our location. We could build two of the smaller units. One holds the shield up while the other moves forward into position and prepares to activate when the other shield goes down. We should be able to travel for twenty minutes in any direction. Enough time to find a place to take cover while the units cool and come back online fifteen minutes after they go offline. We will have about five minutes where we are exposed between trips.”
“Five minutes is a long time when you’re being hunted.”
“Better than nothing.” I sighed. “Look, it’s the best I can give you. The bees know we went underground, and they will be monitoring every exit from the sewers. So you can scratch off getting to the towers or caves by traveling underground. We have to navigate above and outside to get anywhere off this campus. They know what we want to do and will calculate every logical scenario, except the one they aren’t programmed to think of. Anything unpredictable or crazy isn’t in their vocabulary, and as long as we stay away from expected protocol, build illegal devices and act outside the law as though we’ve lost our minds, they won’t be able to calculate our next move. They can’t process crazy.
“Our shields will hide us long enough to slip past the larger swarms and hopefully avoid detection. I don’t have my chip, so I have no way to tap into their mainframe and see what they are doing and get ahead of them. I’m limited without connecting to the inter-band.”
“If we do this, we have lost our minds.”
“If we don’t, we’ll be dead along with everyone else on the islands. The bees will kill anyone who goes outside. People will starve. The entos have an inexhaustible power source to wait out the siege. Forever, if necessary.”
“Okay.” Eli took my hand in his. “Let’s do this.”
* * *
As it turned out, we didn’t have to go far to find students and soldiers. Many were in the basement as we made our way down the corridor to the stairs. We’d gone past several students and had just rounded a corner when we ran head on into our first military.
We ducked our heads and walked by them, or tried to, as though we were part of the group milling about. It could’ve been Eli’s uniform, or his lack of a weapon which gave us away, or my eyes, when I made the mistake of looking up and right into the face of a passing soldier.
“You there.” A hand came down on my arm. “You’re Iia Danner,” the man said, studying my face.
I dodged to the side, broke his hold on my arm, and lifted my fists, ready to put up the fight of my life if I had to, and it would be mine and every person’s life on this island. I didn’t have the luxury of letting them take me into custody. “You’re making a mistake if you kill me.”
“I know. That’s why I won’t.” The soldier raised his hands and backed u
p a step, showing me he hadn’t drawn the weapon resting on his hip. “I don’t want to arrest you, or even shoot you. We need your help getting out of this building. We’re trapped. We tried to escape through the sewers, but they were waiting for us when we got there.” He had rich chocolate eyes the kind which said, trust me. He didn’t look like the enemy, or what I’d expected the enemy to look like. “Is it true you can shut the power grid down and the bees?”
I didn’t lower my hands, but glanced toward Eli who dropped his and nodded. He wasn’t our enemy, none of them were. The soldiers were controlled by the government as much as any of us. “I think I can.”
“Think?” he asked, cocking his head. “They have the entire Sententian military out there looking for you, and you say you think?”
“I’m not one hundred percent certain.” I shrugged. “I believe my great-great-grandfather left me some kind of code to shut the satellite down, but I have no idea what it is or where to find it.”
“What do you require to take the towers down, outside of the codes?”
“Time and some fancy generators I have to build.”
The soldier nodded. “Give us a list of the parts, and we’ll get them for you.”
I’d expected resistance, but not what we’d got when the students and soldiers joined me in building the EM generators and refractors. Young men and women scrambled around the building, bringing in parts, wire, every component I’d listed.
This was treason, and they all knew it. Every one of them could get the death penalty for helping me to create the devices to bring down the towers, but they didn’t seem to care, and after what happened outside, I didn’t blame them.
The attack had changed the point of view they had on the world. It had woken them up to how we’d been controlled and used, what they’d chosen to turn their shoulder to and ignore before.
One student dumped a motherboard on the table before me. One component I hadn’t asked for and even if I’d had, it would do little good without a chip. I shut my hand torch off and looked up from where I’d been soldering, using my pointer finger to shove my goggles back up on the bridge of my nose. This group of kids, ranging from ten to sixteen, hadn’t developed the skills for building the kind of technology we planned to create, but something in the eyes of the kid who stood before me told me he had.
“Bad idea.” I eyed the technology, knowing the bees could use it to see as we did with our eyes. Code was as much a visual to them as images. I pushed it to the side. Beside the fact it would be bad to build anything tied into the Net, I couldn’t operate it after I left the academy.
The young man, approximately sixteen, shoved his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “Not from my point of view.”
Okay, let’s see where he’s going with this. I sat back and crossed my arms over my chest. “You speak like you’ve done this before.” I eyed him up and down, knowing exactly the type of kid he was, one who took risks, played with forbidden technology, and got himself executed.
“Yeah.” He pushed it back in front of me.
“We don’t want to link to the Net. Like I said, bad idea.” I shoved it away again.
He lifted it and set it back in front of me. “They already know we are here.”
“Yes, but if we linked to the Net, they could watch us in here, something they can’t do right now, at least as long as we stay off the computers. This device would give them eyes in this room.”
“Not if we build a virus and use their collective mind to spread confusion.”
Now I listened. I hadn’t thought about infecting the bees, only hiding from them. Still, they were advanced enough to shake the bug within minutes. It would be of little use to us once we started moving. By then, they’d have neutralized the virus and adapted the technology to their benefit. Not a chance I wanted to take. “These bees are more advanced than that.”
“Well, these bees haven’t met Max.”
I looked into the kid’s eyes. “And you would be Max?”
“Hacker extraordinaire. Who do you think stripped all the clothes off the chicks on the billboards last summer and had them standing proud in all their glory before the masses?”
I almost burst out laughing. I’d never thought a kid could’ve pulled the hack off, but it had seemed like something a teenage boy would do at the time. It had stumped the authorities, and they’d searched for months for the culprit—most likely in the wrong spot and not at the tech school. I’d found it amusing, but those kind of stunts got people killed, and I really didn’t want to be responsible for his death if I could help it. “So you say, along with every other hacker in the city.”
“I did it and can prove it.”
“If I were you, I’d dump all the evidence and not keep it around like a trophy. Stuff like that can get you killed.”
He rolled his eyes. “Stuff like the bees can get me killed. Besides, you are overthinking this. Who says we want to keep what we are doing a secret from the bees? Maybe we want them to see one thing and think it’s what we’re doing.” He lifted one of the components. “Maybe direct them to a different conclusion? We give them the flu, let them overcome it and patch into our computer here. They’ll come to the conclusion we don’t have a clue they are watching, and then we feed them exactly what we want them to see—or think.”
A smile crept onto my face, and I pointed my finger at him. “You give your teachers a lot of trouble, don’t you?”
“Maybe.” His eyes sparkled with excitement. “I can do this, send them on a wild goose chase and buy you a little time.” His smile fell. “Please. I lost a lot of friends today. We have to stop this.”
I handed him the motherboard and nodded at a group of students by the door. “Yes, we do. Well, what are you waiting for? Put together a team and get on it. Make sure you protect yourselves so none of the code leads back to the programmers. I don’t want you to have to look over your shoulders after this is over.” This kid brought back a lot of memories of my old friend. Thing was, I didn’t want him to end up like Tyler, dead and haunting me.
“That won’t be a problem. I’ve been building illegal devices for months and sending the authorities on dead ends. You could say I’m an expert at it, which brings me to your hair.”
I blinked. “My hair?”
“You don’t think it’s strange your hair is the only hair on any of the islands which has been enhanced and doesn’t behave? You have a serious case of signal interference.”
“Signal interference?”
“The nanites in your scalp are getting their signals scrambled by another source—nearby, or on you. I overheard you telling that soldier you didn’t have the codes, but maybe you have had them on your person this whole time. It would explain your freaky hair. Just saying.”
“I…” The codes. My heart skipped. “You’re brilliant, Max. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it. Now I have an idea where to find the codes, I just need a lab where I can extract.” I frowned. “Which leaves me out of luck. The Medical Institute is on Kauai.”
He shook his head and grinned. “Been a while since you were here at this school, huh? I can tell. I’d head over to the Nano-Cosmetology Department in the new buildings on campus. All the equipment is segregated from the internet so hackers can’t play with people’s physical appearance or use the nanites to cause medical emergencies. The bonus is the bees won’t be able to tap in while you dig for answers.”
“I’ll do that while you work on your device.” I eyed him, thinking again of my friend who’d believed he’d never get caught. “Just be careful.”
“The way I see it, you’re the one who’s got to watch her back. Don’t trust anyone, especially the rebels. Rumor has it they don’t want to shut the power net down, but seize control. Once you lock in those satellite codes to disengage the Net from the control center, you have thirty seconds it will be susceptible to hack. If they intercept while you are shutting down, they can change the codes and take control of the sa
tellites.”
I leaned in, lowering my voice. “Where did you hear this?”
He shrugged. “I hack into more than the government channels. I jack data from the rebel networks too.” He jerked his chin toward Eli who stood on the other side of the room. “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Trojan horse—outlawed literature—never mind.” He sighed like I should know what the hell a Trojan horse was. “It means, don’t trust someone because they might act like they have good intentions—and believe me when I say this, his intentions are anything but.”
He couldn’t be talking about Eli. I had only escaped the police because of him. And survived the swarm. He’d even told me about his orders to terminate me and his plan not to carry them out. Never once did he mention assuming control of the Net, only shutting it down. The kid might have heard something, but I doubted it was true. “Eli’s not going to double-cross me.”
“You’ve known him what, a few days?”
I nodded, my gaze drifting to the left and landing on the rebel. Eli stopped talking and made eye contact. My heart thumped. Was Eli my friend as he’d claimed, or did he have an ulterior motive? I rubbed the goosebumps rising across my arms, unable to erase them.
“Just watch your back. Even if you think you can trust someone, don’t.” Max tucked the motherboard under his arm and turned to walk toward the group of students, calling out to them, “Who wants to be a part of making history?”
* * *
It didn’t take Eli long to cross the room to inquire about my conversation with Max. “What was that about?”
“Max is building a special device to distract the bees.”
“But he looked at me, and then you did. What did he say about me?”
“Nothing important.” Did I tell him what the kid told me? Or I’d been talking to Tyler’s ghost since I’d left the sewers and it wasn’t hallucination brought on by the drug the rebels used to knock me out?
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