Diverse Energies

by Joe Monti Tobias S. Buckell

  “No!” Aakash stepped forward. “Actually . . . you . . . umm, definitely have skills. We just . . . well, it could’ve gone either way.”

  “My dad mostly taught me computer stuff,” Joel said. “I guess he kind of overlooked the basic skills. Or maybe I was supposed to know them already. . . .”

  “Your dad?” Victor said.

  “Yeah, this is kind of a family business for us,” Joel said. “After I pass my evaluation, he and I are gonna set up shop down here and pop up at night to secretly restore the telescope. It’s a great early-twentieth-century piece, but when the lens broke, the curators just hung up a DO NOT TOUCH sign and let it fall to pieces.”

  “Why?” Victor said.

  “Money. They don’t care whether it —”

  “No . . . why do you care?”

  “That’s what we do. We keep things preserved after the sleepers abandon them. We’re doing it for you . . . so you’ll have some kind of history left.”

  “Look,” Aakash said. “About those bugs. It’s just a little thing. It won’t be a problem to reprogram the bots, right?”

  Joel’s phone buzzed. He looked at it, then grimaced.

  “What? Is it the next task?” Victor said.

  The kid looked up at them with moisture-filled eyes; it was as if he’d never seen them before in his life. “My dad saw me with you in the atrium,” Joel said. “He says that my carelessness could’ve compromised the mission.”

  Aakash cranked his mind. How could he convince this kid to pay up on the damn bet?

  Joel’s eyes widened. He tapped at his phone for a long while.

  Then Aakash got a call. His mom was shouting, “The lights turned off! And I tried to pull open the doorway, but the rope snapped! You need to come home. I don’t know what’s happened. Oh God, I knew it was wrong to stay in this country; I knew we didn’t belong here; I knew . . .”

  As Aakash talked his mom through her panic, Joel’s face became grimmer. When Aakash hung up, the stranger said, “It will be a while before my dad notices that power is out in the garage. Your family might be trapped for days.”

  “What did you do?” Aakash said.

  “I’m sorry that I had to do that,” Joel said. “My dad says that I’m not adaptable enough for front line work . . . but I’m gonna show him. And if you want your mom to get out safely, then you’re gonna help me.”

  Joel wanted to hack the observatory’s computers and insert himself into their HR database. With his finger-, voice-, and retinal-prints on file, he’d be able to go in and out whenever he wanted. Then his dad would have to come around. Joel promised that once the operation was successful, he’d restore power to the garage.

  As they walked around the building, Joel outlined a long plan that involved knocking out the lights and executing a lightning-fast, perfectly timed run. They’d memorize the floor plan, descend on wires from the ceiling, run inside in total darkness, switch the lights back on, hack the computers, and then hide until morning and leave — just like any other tourist — after the observatory opened to the public.

  Aakash’s stomach was churning. His mom was trapped . . . in the dark . . . with the bugs. “Fucking Christ!” he interjected. “Why bother with all that spy shit? The reason there’s only one guard is because no one gives a damn whether we break in or not.”

  Aakash pulled three sticks of gum out of his bag and started chewing. Then he spit out the wad, took a deep breath, and ran up to the front gate of the museum. He pressed buttons and pummeled the door with his fist. Five long minutes passed before the guard opened the door.

  Aakash held up his bag. “Hey, I’m sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if you could let me pick through your bins.”

  The guard said, “We got a guy who takes out the cans. He’s a big, bald fella.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Aakash lied. “But he only does cans. He spotted some copper coils in there, though, and tipped me off about them.”

  “Jeez, I don’t think . . .”

  “Please . . . I need this. My tooth’s been killing me for months.” Aakash opened his mouth and touched the blackened incisor he hadn’t thought about since the bugs had come. “I need a big score to pay for pulling it.”

  The guard rubbed his own jaw. “Well, all right, but I gotta watch you.” As he entered, Aakash stuck the wad of gum against the door’s locking mechanism.

  Aakash followed the guard down a set of stairs. His phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number: We’re in.

  As they walked down a corridor, Aakash’s practiced eyes could see the patch where the door that led to the exploding galaxy hallway had been sealed off entirely. Steel chains secured by a big combination lock barred a set of doors that said JAMES LICK MEMORIAL IMAX THEATER.

  “You ever catch a movie?” Aakash said.

  “No,” the guard said. “That was already locked up when I started working here. Makes sense. What we’ve got is way better than IMAX.” The guard laughed and tapped at the visual implant pasted to his temple, but then he looked at Aakash’s bare brow and said, “Well, the implants also have downsides. After you’ve got them for a while, the ordinary world starts to seem a little . . . dull.”

  It was hard to stay impassive while rooting around in the Dumpster at the loading dock. The theater was all that Aakash could think about. The theater probably still had electricity. And they wouldn’t have to stay inside it twenty-four-seven to keep it from getting snaked by someone else. The guard would keep everyone else out!

  The guard’s phone rang. Red lights flashed. A raucous alarm echoed from wall-mounted speakers. Aakash tensed up.

  But the guard just waved his hand. “Oh man, this happens all the time,” the guard said. “Some bird probably hit a window, and now I gotta go disable the alarm.” The guard looked over Aakash’s shoulder. “Damn . . . you haven’t found the coils yet, have you?”

  Aakash winced and rubbed the side of his face. “No . . . I . . . I guess I’ll go,” he said. “Thanks for everything you’ve done. He said it was pretty far down at the bottom . . . but if you’ve gotta . . .”

  The guard said, “Look. You don’t mind if I lock you down here, do you? I’ll be back in just a second.”

  When the guard left, the electronic lock clicked behind him. And why shouldn’t the guard feel safe? There was no way that some street kid could break a top-of-the-line cryptographic lock.

  But Aakash wasn’t going in through that door. Instead, he took a slab of plywood from the Dumpster and manually levered up the vehicle gate a few inches so he could reach inside with a stretched-out wire hanger and hit the button to open the gate.

  The lock barring the theater was idiotically simple. It must’ve been put in before they replaced everything with electronic locks. He pulled down on the lock to put pressure on the internal mechanism and slowly rotated the numbers until the tumblers clicked into place.

  The theater was a paradise. A tall ceiling. A long silver screen. Hundreds of padded chairs. The lone glow of an emergency light meant readily available power. The dust was thick and undisturbed. Aakash was the first person to step inside here in years. And no people meant no bugs.

  Footsteps echoed outside. Aakash gasped. The alarms had just gone silent. Was he going to be trapped in here? He forced himself to calm down. He listened. There were two sets of footsteps. He opened the door. Joel and Victor were running down the corridor.

  “In here, you idiots.”

  “Alarms, cops, caught,” Joel gasped.

  Victor pulled Joel inside. Aakash stepped out, closed the doors, slapped the padlock back on, and forced himself to walk, briskly but quietly, back to the loading dock.

  When the guard returned, he said, “Yeah . . . some kind of bird or something. Oh . . . you haven’t gotten the coils yet? Look, I’m sorry, but . . . I think I gotta take you back.”

  As they passed the theater door, Aakash smiled. He and Victor had finally found their new home.

  Over the next day, Joel sent
him a stream of increasingly frantic texts:

  What the FUCK are you waiting for?

  Get me out of here or your mom’s fucking going to jail!

  Don’t THINK about ratting me out. My dad knows people. He can get me off, no prob.

  Aakash’s mother called a few times, too, and he had to soothe her as well. He was being torn in a dozen directions. Even after he saved Joel, how could he leave his family under the teen’s thumb? How was he going to placate that kid?

  But he wasn’t going to screw this up by acting rashly. He texted with Victor, and they both agreed to wait. Night fell, and still Aakash waited. He felt guilty when he lined up at a dispensary for his meal. Victor and Joel had to be getting pretty hungry right now. He knew he could probably run inside and rescue them, but he’d looked for that place for years . . . for his whole life. He couldn’t risk setting off the alarm again and making the guard suspicious.

  When morning came, he was cold, damp, and hungry. But he was the first person in the ticket line. The guard had changed, so no one recognized him. He sauntered down that corridor and picked the padlock unhurriedly.

  Victor embraced him, and Joel clawed for the door. Aakash restrained Joel. “Wait a second. I saved your ass here. You gotta admit that you owe —”

  The doors reopened. Two strangers — Joel’s father and some woman — walked in.

  “Congratulations,” the father said. “This will be a fine base of operations.”

  “We’ll be moving in our equipment throughout the day,” said the woman.

  Joel was shaking. “Then . . . I passed?”

  The father said, “Your method of handling these street people was unorthodox, but it got results. I’ve never been prouder.” He embraced his son.

  “I . . . I also put you and me into the staff database,” Joel said. “We can come and go whenever we want.”

  “What the fuck?” Victor said. “You guys can have the telescope, but this theater is ours.”

  “You can stay in the garage,” Joel said. “I’ll reprogram the bots. It’s no problem.”

  Aakash groaned. He’d known this was gonna fall apart somehow.

  “No!” Victor said. “We need this place. We want to live here, do you understand? We’re not just pulling some kind of guerrilla art stunt . . . we’re talking about staying alive.”

  His father glanced at Joel. Aakash wondered if that hug could be taken back.

  “No, wait!” Joel said. “These two, they’re good. They want to join us.”

  “Fuck you guys,” Victor said. “You’re really going to snake this from us? We have nothing at all, and you’re really gonna . . .”

  “Calm down,” Aakash said. “Let’s just get out of here.”

  Joel said, “Come on. What’s wrong with letting them live here and help us? Aren’t they the ones who’ll inherit all our work?”

  His father said, “You don’t need to placate them. They’re probably illegal. I’ll arrange to have them deported.”

  Joel’s mouth opened. “C’mon, Dad . . . that’s not funny.”

  “You know that I’m in favor of helping the street people whenever we can, but these two have already proven themselves to be dangerous and untrustworthy,” his father said. “From the beginning, they threatened to compromise you. Finally, you had to extort them into helping you. If we let them go, they’ll sell us out for a quick payday.”

  “No, I’m not backing down,” Victor said. He held up the can of Chinese pesticide. “You can all eat bug spray.” He pulled the tab, and gas billowed from the top of the can. The strangers’ eyes got big and their shirts flashed and bots swarmed out of their hair. What were their informational overlays telling them about this gas? The smoke enveloped Victor.

  “Crazy bastards, that stuff is —” Joel’s father said.

  “We need to go!” the woman said.

  Joel took one last backward look before he followed them. The doors slammed behind them, and the padlock clicked. Joel’s father probably thought he was locking them in to face a fatal poison. Aakash fell to his knees, took off his shirt, wetted it with a water bottle, and shoved it against the door to stop the smoke from seeping out and setting off god-knows-what alarms.

  From within the smoke cloud, Victor laughed. “What a bunch of posers,” he said.

  The smoke reached Aakash. He tried not to breathe it in, but it was everywhere. He reached for Victor. “Is this really happening?” Aakash said. “Have we really done it?”

  “They won’t bother us again. I’ll send out a few messages and tie them up in knots, thinking we got killed by this stuff. They won’t want to come within five miles of this place.”

  “But . . . what about . . .”

  “That kid isn’t going to mess with your family . . . not after what he’s already done to you.”

  “But he won’t help them either. The bugs . . .”

  “We could be alone: here, together, forever. No one would ever bother us. If we bring our families, we’ll be in danger every day. Who knows who might try to take it from us? Or whether someone would attract the guards? Are your brothers really gonna be quiet for weeks, months, years? We’ll have to think about their food and their water. We’ll have to make dispensary trips every day; each trip means another chance of getting caught. And we’ll have to —”

  Victor’s speech was broken up by a long fit of coughing. Aakash’s throat and lungs were also feeling ill-used by the pesticide, but hopefully the pain would fade soon enough.

  Victor continued, “We’ll have to build toilets and find some way to get running water. And what if they bring more bugs? Do you really think we can live like that? Do you really think that’ll work?”

  “Not really,” Aakash said. “But . . . we have to try. I can’t be happy here knowing Rishi and Chandresh are growing up in that place.”

  Victor was silent for a long moment. Aakash could feel his boyfriend giving up that old dream and trying to orient himself to the new one. Could he do it? Or would he leave?

  “Fine,” Victor said. “We’ll open this place up to everyone and your mother.”

  After they kissed, Aakash turned and spit out the toxic dust he’d picked up from Victor’s lips.

  “You’re amazing,” Aakash said. “I’ll text my mom and —”

  “Wait,” Victor said. “Do it tomorrow. Can’t we have it to ourselves for at least one day?”

  The ceiling was so high and dark that it looked like the night sky. The pesticidal dust on the carpet was so white that it looked like frost. And the two lovers lay down next to each other so tenderly that, for a moment, they looked carefree.

  Good Girl

  by Malinda Lo

  “You look like a good girl. Aren’t you a little far from home?”

  Those were the first words she said to me. That was the day I finally got up the nerve to squeeze through the crack in the wall near Lucky Grocery that everybody knew about but nobody admitted to. Inside, the gray afternoon light shone faintly over a flight of half-broken stairs. I waited until my eyes adjusted to head down into the dark, because, like an idiot, I hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight.

  Her words came at me through the murky half-light like a gunshot, and I actually ducked. “Who’s there?” I heard my voice quivering.

  A dim, yellowish bulb hung from the ceiling about ten feet away from the bottom of the stairs, revealing dirty, chipped tiles on the walls and a grimy concrete floor. I heard footsteps, and a few seconds later a figure stepped out from the shadows and into the cone of light. I knew she was a girl from her voice, but she didn’t look like any of the girls I knew. Her head was shaved clean, and her scalp was tattooed with strange symbols. Her left eyebrow was pierced twice, rings ran up both of her ears, and I saw the traces of tattoos on her throat, too. She held a knife in one hand, and the other was balled up in her jacket pocket. She was dressed in army-green cargo pants tucked into beat-up combat boots, and she didn’t look friendly.

  “What do
you want?” she asked.

  “I —” The words stuck in my throat as she glared at me. Heat crept up my neck.

  “Can’t hear you,” she said in a low, singsong voice, and took a step closer.

  I reached into my pocket, and quicker than I could take another breath she had her knife at my throat, twisting me around so that her other arm was wrapped tightly across my body. My heartbeat pounded in my ears, and I gasped against the sharp blade. I smelled the metallic tang of sweat on her skin.

  “What’re you reaching for?” she muttered.