WATT STOOD AROUND the corner from the New York Police Department headquarters, trying not to look conspicuous, but he needn’t have worried. This was a busy midTower intersection, people shuffling past on their way to dinner or parties or wherever else they were headed this late at night. None of them even looked twice at him. Their eyes dilated and contracted as they shuffled through messages on their contacts, sleepwalking down the streets in little clouds of personal oblivion. At an intersection like this, it was easy to be invisible.
We’re doing the right thing, aren’t we, Nadia?
“What is the right thing, exactly?” she mused, the words echoing in his eartennas. “It seems like every human has a slightly different version of right and wrong.”
Her words were oddly unsettling. Before Watt could reply, she went on, “You already know that I disapprove of this plan. It has too many risks, and far too little potential reward.”
It might save all of us!
“Or it might result with you in prison. The only person in danger right now is Leda. You wouldn’t even be involved, except for the fact that you’re voluntarily involving yourself!”
I was questioned this morning!
“It’s not worth putting yourself in unnecessary danger.”
Watt shouldn’t have been surprised. Nadia had been programmed to protect him, and thus always tried to lead him toward situations she could control, situations that were in his best interest. But Nadia didn’t understand what it was like to love someone so much that their own safety became paramount to your own. Watt would do anything to keep Leda safe.
When he got home after the interrogation this morning, Watt had assured his parents that it was nothing of importance. To his relief, they believed him. He’d spent the rest of the day in a state of feverish anxiety: formulating his plan and building the zip-byte he would need to make it work.
He was going to hack the police station—tonight.
Watt felt a flash of regret that he wasn’t able to go with Leda to the inauguration ball. But he couldn’t pass up a chance like this. The NYPD was working on a skeleton crew right now, since the entire police department had been invited to tonight’s gala as guests of the new mayor. Only the most junior officers were stuck here, working.
“You look absurd, you know,” Nadia informed him, in a tone that implied an eyeroll.
Watt was wearing dark sweatpants and shoes, and a black long-sleeved T-shirt. This is what people always wear in holos when they’re about to do some kind of covert operation.
“I hate to be the one to tell you, Watt, but you aren’t a superhero. You’re just a normal teenager!”
You know that nothing about me is normal, he reminded her, and rolled up the sleeve of his right arm. He was almost ready.
“Your heart is already racing, you don’t need more stimulation!” Nadia argued, but Watt ignored her, slapping two caffeine patches on the skin of his inner arm, near his elbow. He felt an instant jolt of energy, as if his nervous system were an engine revving violently to life.
I hate when you do that, Nadia snapped, switching to transcranial mode. It’s like you hit me with a tidal wave.
But Watt needed a tidal wave right now, needed every last shred of heart-pounding adrenaline he could muster up. Because his “plan” consisted largely of winging it. Nadia couldn’t hack the police station until he’d infiltrated their system—which meant that she had no idea how many police officers were stationed inside or where they would be. The only thing she’d been able to find was an old map of the station from the Tower’s original blueprints.
Here goes nothing, he thought, and strode to the back of the station with bold, confident purpose. There was a small entrance terminus back here, used primarily for delivery bots, with enormous tracks for the wheels of freight containers. Watt took a deep breath and crouched down to crawl through it.
I can’t believe no one has tried this before.
I think the police station isn’t usually worried about people sneaking in. Their bigger problem is people attempting to sneak out.
She had a point.
This way, Nadia urged, as Watt emerged into a hallway. He took off running, following the arrows that she laid over his vision. Down another hall, turn, through a suite of rooms; and suddenly he was dashing into the hot, stale closet where the police kept their tech servers. It was all alternating light and dark, no sign of life anywhere, as if he had emerged into some lunar landscape. The air smelled like daylight that had been trapped for decades.
The data storage room was just as Watt had hoped—backed up on hard drives, which were impossible to crack remotely, but doable if you were on-site and came prepared. Which Watt had.
He reached into his pocket to pull out the tiny, innocuous-looking malware he and Nadia had spent the afternoon working on: a zip-byte, he called it, because of its row of teeth. He clamped it directly onto a server box. It would dive into the police system, copy the file about Mariel, then disengage without leaving a trace that it had ever been there.
Come on, come on, he thought, as the zip-byte began to spin its code out into the NYPD system.
Watt, someone’s coming.
Adrenaline spiked through his system. Already?
I’m watching them on the security cams!
Watt stabbed desperately at the server. “Come on!” he muttered, aloud this time, just as the zip-byte glowed the bright amber color that meant the upload was finished.
In a single motion Watt swiped it back into his pocket. He took a trembling breath, his heart hammering in his chest. Sweat dampened the armpits of his T-shirt. Which way?
I’m sorry; this is my only option, Nadia replied as the fire alarm went off.
Watt stumbled out into the corridor, which was flashing an angry red. The siren screamed overhead. He glanced left and right, his head pounding—there was a flash of heels coming from the left, which was enough to send him in the other direction. He hurried back toward the small freight door, realizing a moment too late that it might be locked during an emergency, but of course it wasn’t. Several levels up, he thought he heard fire-bots scrambling to deal with the nonexistent blaze.
Watt crawled through the freight entrance and emerged running onto the street, melting seamlessly into the surging midTower crowd, his ragged breathing and gleaming forehead the only indication that he wasn’t just another commuter.
Thank god for Nadia, his own personal guardian angel.
He walked as fast as he could down the block, hands shoved into his pockets. Fear had lodged in his throat like a shard of ice. He couldn’t believe that they had actually pulled it off.
There was an open plaza at the corner of the street, where people lounged around a cluster of benches: Saturday-evening shoppers holding hands, parents tugging their babies on magnetically tethered hoverstrollers. Watt sank onto a bench and clipped the zip-byte into his tablet.
It was a massive file, an aggregation of dozens of documents related to the death of Mariel Valconsuelo. The death certificate and coroner’s report; transcripts of interviews with Mariel’s parents and friends, and with Leda, Watt, Rylin, and Avery. Watt swallowed. He hadn’t realized that Rylin and Avery were questioned too, though that made sense.
How bad is it? How much do they know? he asked Nadia.
Watt was going to read it himself too, eventually. Probably. But by now Nadia would have already scanned and analyzed the full contents of the file. After all, she could consume the entire dictionary in under half a second.
“Watt,” she replied heavily. “I’m so sorry. It doesn’t look good.”
What do you mean?
“It seems the police have connected Mariel’s death with Eris’s. They know that something happened that night on the roof, that there was some kind of cover-up. Right now they’re still trying to figure out why you all lied.”
Watt felt cold and clammy all over. He ripped the caffeine patches from his arm, and his head instantly erupted into a splitting headache. He winced. If they realize that Leda was blackmailing us, the next logical step is to find out what she had on us—why she was able to force us to hide the truth, and then we’ll really be in trouble . . . Leda most of all.
“Watt, you need to talk to them. To warn them.”
Nadia was right. He had to talk to the others right away: to Avery and Rylin, and especially to Leda. They had to confer about what they would do next. The only way they could possibly emerge from this unscathed was together. If they all stuck to their stories, if they all guarded one another’s backs, they might possibly have a shot.
Where are they right now? Watt demanded.
They’re all at Pierson Fuller’s inauguration ball.
Oh, right. Watt felt an odd sense of disbelief that events like that were still going on—that the world was still churning forward, when it felt as if it were tilting furiously off-kilter.
He stood up, took a deep breath and began to run, ignoring the alarmed stares of passersby. Thank god he’d bought that tux last year, in a ridiculous attempt to impress Avery. He was getting far more wears out of it than he had ever expected.
As he sprinted toward the downTower elevator, Watt had a curious and unwelcome sense of déjà-vu. This felt too much like last year, when he’d lost Leda at the Dubai party and found her precariously near death—or worse, like the night he’d raced up to Avery’s roof, only to arrive just as Eris fell off the edge.
He could only hope that, this time, he wouldn’t be too late.