by Jenn Reese
Electra snorted quietly, but didn’t even turn her head.
Calli continued. “And if I don’t come back to this room, then you, Electra, my mother’s most trusted friend, will be the one who tells the president that her only daughter is dead.”
Electra stood, but Calli didn’t wait for her to speak. She turned and left as fast as she could. She didn’t have time for more tears — not for her mother, not for Electra, and not for herself.
She joined Niobe at the strategy table. “Niobe, I want every senator who is not engaged in maneuvers to meet me in the audience chamber within the hour. And I’ll also need three volunteers — preferably scientists or techs — to meet me in the comm room right now.”
It only took Niobe a moment to recover from her surprise. She nodded. “It will be done.”
Calli pulled her aside. “Send medics into my mother’s room every hour. Electra will undoubtedly toss them out, but keep sending them. If she doesn’t relent by dawn, start sending in warriors as well.”
She gripped Niobe’s arm, just under the scar on her shoulder. “You’ve done well,” Calli said. “I know it doesn’t seem like it, but you have. And from now on, you don’t have to do it alone.”
Niobe nodded and sighed. Calli could see some of the tension ease in the woman’s body.
Niobe turned back to the Aviars in the room. She began rattling off names and issuing orders. “You heard the acting president, get moving!”
Acting president.
Calli had never wanted to lead her people, not in any way except through scientific discovery. But sometimes life wasn’t about what you wanted; it was about what needed to be done.
Her legs trembled. Her wings rustled against her back. People were going to die because of her, because of orders she gave them. The thought made her want to vomit. She didn’t know strategy and tactics, or even all the parts of an army and what they did. She didn’t understand supply lines or know how much fresh water they had on hand. She had no idea how long the city could withstand a siege.
But Calli had paid attention during all those long conversations with Dantai khan-son. They’d talked about leadership, about what it meant to make life-and-death decisions, and about the best way to serve one’s people. She was grateful for his tutelage.
She would surround herself with smart people who knew everything that she didn’t. She would ask them for advice and she would listen to their answers. She would take responsibility for lives that were lost so that no one else had to. Her primary job was to help everyone else do theirs, and to ensure that Skyfeather’s Landing and its Aviars survived this battle and knocked Karl Strand’s army back to whatever hole they’d come from.
Electra was right: Calli had a duty to lead her people. It was time for her to stretch her wings and finally see how high she could fly.
HOKU SLURPED the last of their clams and let Zorro lick the remaining goo out of the shell. Data streamed across the largest monitor in the room: complex diagrams, maps, logs, and file names so technical that he couldn’t even begin to figure them out.
Almost a full week in Seahorse Alpha and he had yet to find a way to save the Kampii. The most obvious sources of energy were the sun, wind, and waves, all available in great supply. But sun and wind catchers would be too obvious floating on the ocean’s surface, and the Kampii didn’t have the materials to build them. Harnessing the power of the currents seemed like the smartest, most sustainable choice, but he didn’t have a turbine — the ancient tech that took flowing water and turned it into power.
He’d even looked into diverting the power from Seahorse Alpha itself, but there was precious little to spare. What had been a thriving research outpost hundreds of years ago was now barely operational. Hoku was lucky its generators found enough power to run the computer and comm system in even one building.
Rollin had been no help, with her constant wisecracks from the Shining Moon comm screen and suggestions like “Be smarter” and “Maybe if you bash it with a hammer, you noodly basic.” Now she was off arguing with the Equians about their preparations for war. He hoped it took a long time.
“Zorro, show me the turbine again.”
A complex device forged from metal rotated on the screen, a hundred different labels and formulas popping up as it spun. Working with metal required fire, so even if he could figure out how to shape something similar, it wouldn’t be a good choice for the long run. If the Kampii couldn’t fix the tech when it broke, they’d be no better off than they were now.
Hoku rubbed his eyes. He needed a break. Maybe his subconscious would figure out a solution if he worked on something else for a while. Something like finding Karl Strand. He reached over and scratched Zorro behind the ears. “Zorro, show me everything you can find that mentions Strand.”
Zorro’s eyes glowed green. The screen flickered and a list appeared on the monitor. Hoku groaned as the names of thousands of files slid down the screen. And the first few items weren’t even about Karl Strand at all, but something called DNA.
He sighed. “Zorro, pick a random file containing the words Karl Strand and enable audio playback.” Zorro’s eyes glowed. Soon a sleek voice began reading a report titled “Effects of Seawater on Human Digestive Processes.”
Hoku flopped onto the smooth plastic floor and tucked his hands under his head for a pillow. The computer droned on about “sodium chloride” and test subjects. He studied the room again, begging his brain to take mountains of overwhelming data and distill it into the answers he needed.
From the floor, he could see the undersides of the workstations that ringed the room. They looked as smooth as the surfaces, except for a few long scratches starting at the edge and going back to the wall. Only . . . the scratches weren’t random. They were spaced evenly under each station in pairs.
Hoku crawled over to the nearest work space for a closer look. The marks weren’t scratches, they were grooves. And there. In the middle. A button.
He pressed it. With a soft hiss, the smooth white drawer slid out.
“Barnacles!”
Hoku scrambled to his feet and examined the drawer’s contents. Sheets of yellowed paper, some with doodles of fish in the margins, a piece of desiccated food in a shiny wrapper, a photograph of a handsome Human man somewhere in the Above World.
“Zorro, stop playback,” he said. The computer voice cut off in mid-sentence.
Hoku hopped from one workstation to the next, pressing buttons and hearing the exhalation of a dozen new places to explore. All these secrets just waiting to be found, and he’d almost missed them!
One drawer slid open revealing row after row of what looked like tiny sets of goggles. He stopped to examine them. They weren’t goggles at all, but little cases clearly meant to hold eye lenses of some kind. The first ten he opened were empty, but the last two . . . the last two still held their prizes.
Hoku brought the case closer to his face and studied the lenses up close. The first set was orange and glittery, like scales. At certain angles, he could just make out a reflective matrix of dots. The second set was clear with ghostly blue swirls.
Upgrades.
But what did they do? He closed the lid on the orange pair and turned the case over in his hands. There, on the back, almost too small to see, was a strange pattern of dots and lines.
“Zorro, come here and scan this code.”
His faithful little buddy unplugged his tail from the computer interface and bounded over, leaping the distance between workstations and scrabbling against the plastic with his black claws. Zorro paused in front of the lens case. His eyes emitted a slender green beam that the animal dragged over the strange code.
Zorro edged backward and plugged his tail into the nearest workstation interface. Words appeared on the monitor.
CONDUIT 5000.1: DATASTREAMERS™ —
OPTICAL NEURAL INTERFACE DEVICE
Screen after screen of legal and medical disclaimers followed. Hoku saw the words, but didn’t actually read a
ny of them.
Optical neural interface. He wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but he wanted it. Needed it. Wasn’t sure how he had ever survived so long without it.
He picked up the case containing the blue lenses. “Zorro, scan.”
This time the words confused him.
VISIONWORLD RECREATIONAL
OVERLAYS 7101A-6: OTHERLANDS LENS
SUPRA™
A similar jumble of jargon followed, but Hoku understood even less of it. Clearly the swirly blue lenses did something wonderful; he just couldn’t figure out what. He snapped the lid closed and placed the lenses back in the drawer.
“Zorro, show me instructions for inserting the Datastreamers,” Hoku said. Datastreamers. It sounded even better when he said it out loud.
A series of diagrams appeared on the screen. Apparently he was supposed to wash his hands in clean water first. Except he had no clean water, so seawater would have to do. Maybe the instructions were written by Humans who couldn’t handle salt in their eyes.
He dragged a chair over and sat. The instructions didn’t look difficult. The worst part would be touching the lens to his eye. Eyes were too mushy. Too much like the gooey insides of oysters. He didn’t look forward to poking his finger into one.
But the idea taunted him: Datastreamers. Streaming data. All for him. Imagine what he could do! Surely he’d be able to save the Kampii and find Karl Strand when data was literally streaming to his brain.
The instructions were as easy to follow as they seemed, and soon an orange lens was perched on the tip of his newly cleaned finger. He stole one more glance at the diagram on the screen. Using his other hand, he kept both his inner and outer eyelids open and gently touched the lens to his eyeball.
He blinked instinctively, but the lens was in and stuck to his eye. It burned, like grit stuck inside his inner lid, but he forced himself not to rub it. The instructions told him to keep blinking, to let the lens naturally find its way to the curve of his eye. So he blinked, and blinked, and cursed a few times, and blinked some more.
Was this how an oyster felt when some stupid bit of dirt found its way into its shell? No wonder the oyster wrapped up the grit in a pearl coating! Hoku wished he could do that now. He gritted his teeth and put his palm over his eye to stop himself from rubbing. Or digging. Or scratching. The ancient Humans were tough if they did things like this all the time. Eventually, the blinking felt less and less like he was dragging his eyes over a sandbank. And then, miraculously, the irritation disappeared entirely. His eye felt puffy and red, but it didn’t hurt.
“Zorro, do you need to wear both lenses for them to work?”
Zorro’s nose twitched while he searched the information about the lenses. When the raccoon’s eyes glowed green, as Hoku had secretly known they would, he sighed and prepared the other lens.
The second one went more smoothly. Or maybe Hoku was just expecting the pain and suffering this time and was mentally prepared. But within a few flashes, the second lens found its rightful place on his eye.
Hoku’s head tingled. He thought he heard a click and a whir, but no. Those noises were inside his head — little feedback impulses telling him the lenses were messing with his brain.
His insides lurched and the room spun sideways. He tried to right himself and landed with a thud on the floor. Except it was the ceiling. Or was it a wall?
Stupid, stupid, stupid! The lenses were old tech intended for Humans, not for Kampii. Did his eyes and his brain even work the same? What if the lenses made him blind? Here he was, out in the middle of nowhere by himself.
Not by himself.
“Zorro!” he croaked.
A thud, and then tiny licks covered his face. Licks that smelled like clams. His vision blurred into gray and white streaks. He reached out his hand and grasped Zorro’s fur, focusing on the soft tufts caught between his fingers. “Good boy. You’re the best raccoon ever. Do I tell you that enough? Because you are.”
Slowly, his vision began to clear . . . but not entirely. Tiny words now hovered in the air. Words describing what he was seeing. LOCATION: SEAHORSE ALPHA. A string of coordinates followed. Hoku pushed himself up, now fairly certain he understood what direction that was. Words continued to scroll by, indicating chairs and workstations and even an arrow pointing at Zorro with ZORRO™ - WILD BUDDIES PROGRAMMABLE PETS, SERIAL NUMBER SF01081962.
It was too much. There were words everywhere, constantly moving, and he couldn’t even begin to process them all. He didn’t need to see Zorro’s name every time he looked at the little guy.
And just like that, the words hovering around Zorro disappeared. He’d made them go away just by thinking about it!
He changed the color of the text to green, then to white, then only some of the data to blue. He turned off most of the location alerts. Did he really need to know the type of chair he was sitting on? No, he did not.
Hoku looked at the closest computer monitor and the word PASSWORD? floated in front of him. He remembered the password from a few days ago, when Zorro had helped him access the system. The prompt changed to CONNECTED, which blinked twice, then disappeared.
Connected. To Seahorse Alpha. He now had a direct link to every last bit of data Sarah Jennings and the other Human ancients had ever known.
HOKU SHOULD HAVE let his eyes rest and adjust to the new implants. The instructions recommended six to twelve hours of nonuse and relaxation. But that was time he and the Kampii didn’t have.
“Hey, basic! You there?” Rollin’s voice called from the comm screen.
Hoku started to roll his chair over to the monitor, then stopped. He told his eyes to connect to the comm system and bring up the Shining Moon feed, and there it was: Rollin floating in midair, looking sun worn and crotchety as ever. She’d cut her hair short and done something to her wild eyebrows. If he’d met her now, he might have assumed she was male.
“Rollin,” he said, telling his new computer eyes to transmit his voice back to her.
But Rollin only squinted. “Where are you? Shark finally get you? Or maybe that raccoon? Told you the little thief was up to no good, but did you listen? No. Basic knows best.”
Of course! He was too far away from the input devices — the camera and the microphone. His Datastreamers could tap into the feed and redirect it to his lenses, but they had no way of transmitting his voice or a picture of his face back to Rollin. He’d need a mobile input device for that.
He stayed in his chair and pushed himself over to the comm wall.
“There you are! What took you so —” One of Rollin’s eyebrows arched, her mouth cracked into a toothy grin. “Ooh, not so basic anymore, are you, boy?”
Hoku tried to smile, but moving his face hurt his eyes. He settled for a tiny grimace.
“Not good,” Rollin said. “Bad tech?”
“The tech is fine, but it hurts and I can’t seem to take it out,” Hoku said. “The lenses are stuck behind my second eyelids.”
Rollin’s shaggy brow furrowed. “Second eyelids?”
“That’s what I said,” Hoku grumbled. “What went wrong?”
Rollin scratched her cheek. “Well, off the top of my brain, I’m thinking that most of us only have one set of eyelids. Second pair must be a fish thing.”
“You only have one . . . ?” Hoku repeated.
She nodded. “Only need one.”
Hoku sighed. “I used tech that wasn’t intended for Kampii eyes. Barnacles! Does that make me the dumbest Upgrader ever?”
“Saw someone try to cut off his own head once, when he found a better one,” Rollin said. “Hard to beat that on the idiot scale.”
“Will it ever stop hurting?” Hoku asked. He dropped his head into his hands and closed his eyes. Glowing words flickered through his vision anyway. There was no escape from the Datastreamers unless he consciously closed every feed.
“We got good medteks among our folk,” Rollin said gently. “When this war business is over, we’ll get you righted.”<
br />
The fact that she was being so nice only made Hoku feel worse. She was never nice — not even back when Calli got poisoned. He must be doomed.
“Oh, back to feeling sorry for yourself,” Rollin grumbled. “Your default setting is ‘Poor me.’ ‘I give up.’ ‘I stuck something in my eye and can’t get it out.’ Well, we have more to worry about than a silly mistake made by some wrangly basic!”
Hoku opened his eyes and forced a smile.
“Good,” Rollin said. “Any sign of Strand’s hideout? Figures, that coward holing up someplace in the darkness, not showing his face. Just like him. Now we have armies — big armies full of Equians and Serpenti — and nowhere to send them.”
“No word from Dash, and I haven’t found anything in the Seahorse Alpha data yet,” Hoku said. “I’m hoping the Datastreamers will make it easier to search. No offense, boy.” He paused to scruffle Zorro’s head. “I did find something interesting, though. A letter from Sarah Jennings — she’s the founder of the Coral Kampii — to Karl Strand. They used to be a family, if you can believe that.”
He used his eye tech to pull up the letter from storage. It floated in front of him, invisible to Rollin, and he read it aloud.
“My dearest Karl,
We’re both grieving. I’m running away from the world, from my memories of Tomias and of our life together. That’s not fair to you, but it’s what I need. I have to put my energy into building something new. Into hope. It’s not brave, but it’s honest, and it’s the best I can do right now.
But you, Karl, you need help. Your friends have been calling and e-mailing me about your wild experiments. Don’t be angry; they’re just worried about you. You’ve declared war on death, but it’s not a battle you can win. Don’t let your brilliant mind and your good heart be casualties of your grief. None of this will bring Tomias — or me — back. Our hearts were broken when we lost our son, but they still work. I still love you.
Your Sarah”
Rollin whistled. “Isn’t that a pretty bunch of words. Did Strand respond?”