“Well, some people do,” Darshy said, gathering up their cauliflower and dumping it into the egg thing. “But it’s expensive. Plus it takes all the fun out of cooking.”
“There is no fun in cooking,” Tiera complained, brushing bits of cauliflower off of her fingers.
“Speak for yourself,” Byrani said, then she turned the processor on.
Of course it’s silent. Even the food processors here are better than back home. The processor opened its lid after several seconds, and Byrani lifted out a container filled with a thick slurry of ingredients. Tiera watched as she dolloped it onto a baking sheet and put it in the oven.
“I can make the sauce on my own,” Byrani said, and Tiera and Darshy took that to mean “Get out of my kitchen,” so they headed to the living room.
It wasn’t long before they were all enjoying their creation: savory, garlicky cauliflower wafers, complete with a yogurt-based dipping sauce. After eating in silence for a while, Darshy spoke.
“What if the steps were coded out of order?”
“We both triple-checked my notes against the code order. It’s definitely in order.”
“But what if your notes had it in the wrong order?”
“There are millions of lines of code, Darshy. How do you suggest we order it?”
“Well most of those lines are just for the remote WG’s normal functions—it’s just the thousands that have to do with amplification . . . ”
Tiera shoveled more cauliflower wafers into her face as their discussion turned into another argument. They’re both just cranky. We all just need sleep. It was getting harder for Tiera to think of her friends positively the longer this argument went on—but then the doorbell offered her a welcome distraction.
“I’ll get it,” Tiera told the pair, but they didn’t seem to have heard it—nor did they notice when Tiera stood up and left the room. She made her way to their front door, and she could still hear everything they were saying when she put her hand up and opened it.
It was Daven.
“Hi, Tiera.” He had his hands tucked firmly into his mousy brown coat to shield them from the cold, and his angular features were beset with a sadder look than Tiera had ever thought him capable of.
“Hi.” Tiera wasn’t sure what else to say.
“Can I come in? I was hoping to talk to you, if that’s okay.”
“Oh! Right. Sure.” Tiera moved out of his way so he could enter. “How did you know I was here?”
“Xana,” he said simply as he stepped in from the cold.
Xana told him? “You went to our apartment?”
“I tried sending her a message first, but—” Daven stopped, frowning at the noise of Darshy and Byrani’s argument. “What’s going on? Why is Darshy yelling?”
“—draw code has to go before the magnetizing code!”
“But it already has enough power on its own to magnetize! The energy draw code should go after—that’s when it needs to be amplified!” It was Byrani’s turn to shout now.
Before Tiera could stop him, Daven cut in. “If that’s true, Byrani, then it probably doesn’t matter if it comes before or after.” He took a few steps toward the living room. “What are you guys working on?”
Now Tiera was sure that Darshy and Byrani hadn’t noticed the doorbell; their surprised looks said it all. Neither of them made a sound—they just stared at Daven like they didn’t know how to handle the situation.
“You don’t want to know what they’re working on,” Tiera told Daven carefully, stepping forward till she was at his side. “You told me yourself . . . a few weeks ago.”
It took him a minute, but when Daven let out a soft “Oh” Tiera knew he understood. “I actually do want to know, though,” he said, looking around at everyone’s faces. “But that’s only part of why I’m here. Do you guys mind if I speak to Tiera privately for a moment?” He directed his question toward Darshy and Byrani, who were still standing frozen in the living room—except now Darshy was smiling.
“Go ahead! You can use my room,” Darshy said.
Daven thanked him and then led the way through the kitchen and into the apartment’s back hallway. Tiera followed, unsure of what to expect.
I hope Darshy wasn’t smiling because he thinks Daven’s going to ask me out or anything. Tiera didn’t want to hurt Daven’s feelings any further than she already had, but she was prepared to if it meant setting him straight. It made her nervous, though.
Once in the hallway, Daven opened the first door on the right. And I thought their living room was messy, Tiera thought, struggling to take in the catastrophe that was Darshy’s bedroom. She couldn’t avoid stepping on the clothes and mechanical junk that coated the bedroom floor, so she tiptoed across the room, heading for a desk chair covered by a mound of what she hoped were clean clothes. After pushing the pile off, Tiera sat, and Daven sat across from her on Darshy’s large, purple bed.
“Um. I like your tattoos,” Daven said with a sheepish smile.
“Thanks.” Tiera looked down at the stars on her arms and back up at Daven expectantly. “So . . . ?”
“Right. Tiera,” Daven began, his hands clasped together in front of him and his elbows on his knees, “I just want to tell you that I’m sorry.”
“Oh good,” Tiera breathed, and a flood of relief washed over her nerves.
“What?”
“Sorry—keep going.” She sat up and smiled.
“Okay,” he said uncertainly, but then he continued. “I’m sorry it took me this long to really consider your point of view.” He looked down at his hands. “I mean, I tried to learn a lot about Earth and your old life, but I just assumed that what you had here was better. I thought you’d be happy to leave Earth behind—that’s not to say you’d be happy it’s being destroyed,” he clarified quickly, pulling his head up to look at Tiera again. “I just didn’t realize how much your old life still mattered to you. How much you wanted it back. And how lonely you must feel to have so few people here that care enough to help you get it back.”
“Or who care enough that billions of lives are about to be lost, but yeah,” Tiera added, her tone light.
“That too.” Daven made a poor attempt to smile at her. “I’m sorry. Can we . . . well, can we just go back to the way things were?”
Tiera considered him for a moment, then smiled back. “We’ll make it better than the way things were,” she said, and she stood up, opening her arms for a hug.
Daven smiled for real this time, standing up and he shuffling through Darshy’s garbage to accept Tiera’s hug. He squeezed her tight, and an unexpected ray of happiness hit Tiera in the depths of that cluttered basement apartment.
It’s all working out.
When they rejoined Darshy and Byrani in the living room, they found the pair was arguing again, but much more civilly this time.
“That part of the code has to be right—Yematoro gave me full credit when he graded it.”
“I’m just trying to be thorough, Byrani. All of the code for a regular remote WG is right, so the problem must have something to do with the amplification.”
“You’re sure it isn’t a hardware issue?” Byrani complained as she poured over the code on the mounted smart glass monitor.
“I received full credit on that portion of the assignment,” Darshy said. “Programming is always more complicated than building.”
Byrani sighed. “Usually I’d say the opposite, but this amplifier has me questioning everything I know.”
“Do you mind if I take a look at it?” Daven asked, crossing the room and putting a casual arm around Darshy’s shoulders. “Maybe you just need a fresh pair of eyes.”
Both Byrani and Darshy looked to Tiera, who nodded, then Byrani told him, “Sure, go ahead.”
“Can you highlight the portions that code for the amplifier?”
“Yeah, just a minute.”
Daven and Byrani spent the next few hours comparing Daven’s lab notes to Byrani’s code, but they mi
ght as well have been speaking a different language in Tiera’s opinion. Since she wasn’t following any of it—and she definitely didn’t want to study—she started teaching Darshy some Earth games.
“Why does paper beat rock? That makes no sense.”
“The universe requires balance, and the rock was too powerful,” Tiera told him. “You’re just upset you lost.” She counted down again, and this time Darshy won with scissors.
“And why paper and scissors? I’ve never used scissors on paper before. Just wires and plastics.” Darshy let out a small laugh as he beat Tiera again.
“Really?” Tiera frowned. The pupil is surpassing the master. “Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve seen paper used for anything but wrapping food around here. And your posters.” Tiera gestured toward the apartment’s messily decorated walls.
“What’s it used for on Earth?”
Tiera threw scissors and won. “Writing and books mostly.”
“You mean that isn’t all digital? Weird.”
“It’s moving that way, but people just like the way paper books smell too much. And that’s cheating.” Daven had just waited to see what Tiera was about to throw before deciding on his own move.
“Like I said: weird.” Daven dropped his hands and sat up in his squishy chair. “Let’s play something else. I’ll pick this time.” He pulled out his smart glass and unfolded it to the size of a tablet, then started teaching Tiera how to play a game that was somehow a mix of Scrabble and Sudoku. Tiera had already lost count of how many times they had played when Byrani suddenly shouted.
“Holy crap! That’s it!”
Nearly everyone else in the room said “What?” and then scrambled to get a closer look at the screen Byrani was studying. Daven was the first to look, since he had been sitting closest.
“This wasn’t in your notes?” he asked with a frown.
“What wasn’t in her notes?” Darshy rested his chin on Daven’s head to get a better look.
“Professor Yematoro had told us about a section of the remote WG’s code that we were supposed to delete, but I never did it,” Byrani said quickly. “I must have forgotten to write that step down!” She sounded unusually excited for someone who was admitting she made a mistake. “It was the field limit—we had kept it set to a 4-foot radius, which overrode my adjustment to 150,000 miles.”
Tiera laughed. “That’s a pretty big difference!” She sat down again once she realized that, even if she did push through to look at the screen, she wouldn’t understand anything on it. But she still felt excited. Renewed hope bubbled through her, making her feel light for the first time in months.
It’s not lost yet.
Darshy and Byrani ran to the back to grab the remote WG, and soon they were toting it to the living room, each one huffing as they balanced the spherical piece of equipment between them. It was certainly large, but it looked so simple: just a steel-plated sphere almost a yard in diameter.
“You guys better make sure I get it right this time,” Byrani said, pulling out her smart glass and syncing it to the piece of interstellar equipment. It only took her seconds to change the field limit, and everything seemed so easy that Darshy started complaining that they should go through Daven’s notes again to make sure they didn’t miss anything else.
It’s really going to happen. We’re going to save Earth. Tiera could hardly believe it. She had always hoped for this, but everything was always so stacked against her. Soon, though, Tiera began to think about their next step, and her excitement became polluted with a sickly cloud of nervous fear.
“You guys,” Tiera said, interrupting Darshy midsentence, “we have a lot of planning to do.”
Chapter 27
“Are you sure I can’t help?” Xana asked as she watched Tiera complete another lap around the living room. “I could still hack surveillance; I just don’t have the best encryption yet.”
“No—sorry, Xana. And it won’t really matter if we’re caught on their surveillance systems this time,” Tiera explained. She couldn’t figure out what to do with her hands, so she alternated between putting them in her coat pockets and trying to wring the nervousness out of them. “By the time anyone figures out what we’re doing, it’ll be too late. And they wouldn’t need surveillance footage to prove that we were the ones who did it.”
Xana slumped back into the couch. “I just feel so useless.”
Tiera turned around so suddenly she almost fell over. “Xana, there’s no way we could have built the remote WG without you! You’ve already done more than enough to help.”
Smiling weakly at the compliment, Xana fell silent again, and Tiera pulled out her smart glass for the umpteenth time in the last 20 minutes. They were all going to arrive separately, but she was still waiting on Darshy’s signal—which he was supposed to give any second now. He and Byrani were probably still loading the remote WG onto the private truck Daven had ordered.
Tiera sighed as she looked at her smart glass again—she had been dressed and ready to go for the past two hours. All she had been doing since then was waiting for Darshy’s message.
And finally, that message came.
“Oh my gosh! Gotta go!” Tiera hugged Xana and darted for the door.
“Good luck!” Xana called from behind her.
“Thanks!” Tiera shouted, already out on their floor’s walkway and headed for the stairwell. The crisp morning air made her even jitterier than before, so she had trouble pacing herself as she walked the few blocks that separated her from the Technological University. It was going to take Darshy and Byrani’s magnet truck about as long to drive to the university as it would take her to walk, and Tiera really didn’t want to have to stand around waiting when she got there.
As she made her way down the empty white sidewalk, Tiera pulled her smart glass out to check the time again. 8:16. Just 44 minutes to go. She wasn’t very comfortable with how close this all was going to be, but it was necessary. If they gave Origin’s people any warning of what they were planning, the Galactic Defense Bill could be aborted—and Earth could be sent back to the Milky Way, just to be destroyed later. As she contemplated all this, Tiera noticed an unread reminder on her smart glass: she was supposed to meet with her physician at 8:30.
Oh no. She had been meeting with her physician every Saturday morning since she was released from prison, even though Tiera thought it was obvious she wouldn’t stop taking her regulators. But if Tiera missed an appointment, it was reported directly to the police, and she wasn’t sure how long the physician would wait for her before reporting.
Tiera spent the rest of her walk worrying about that, of course, but by the time she reached the lab building, she decided she was probably safe. The police station was about a 20-minute drive from here, and Tiera was confident they would be done with their mission by the time the police even figured out where she was.
Approaching the front entrance of the lab building, Tiera saw that Daven was already waiting there, his hands in the pockets of his brown jacket, looking up at the sky through the clear covering of the walkway.
“Good morning,” Tiera said, and he looked down at her and smiled.
“Good morning.” He took a deep breath, then let it out. “Are you ready?”
Tiera’s stomach was tight, and she tried and failed to relax her shoulders. “Nope. Are you?”
“No way.” Daven put his arm around Tiera for a quick side hug, then let it drop back to his side, and in that moment Tiera felt a little relief.
“Let’s go!” Tiera jumped, then recognized Byrani’s voice. She turned to see Darshy and Byrani coming at them with a large, hovering cart covered by what looked like the purple blanket from Darshy’s bed.
Her heart started pounding. This is it.
Daven and Tiera hurried inside the lab building, walking as quickly and inconspicuously as they could, and Darshy and Byrani followed closely behind them with the amplified WG in tow. Even hiding her face from the cameras as they navigated the ha
llways, Tiera still reached the elevator first, slapping her palm on it to get it to open—then she and Daven turned immediately and headed for the stairs as Byrani and Darshy loaded the elevator with their cargo.
After sprinting up six flights of steps, Tiera and Daven emerged, panting, into the last stretch of hallway that separated them from the lab. Darshy and Byrani were already several yards ahead of them, so they ran to catch up, passing dozens of closed doors until finally reaching them at the lab section, just as the pair was opening their lab’s door.
“Alright, let’s do this!” Darshy yelled as they poured in. He checked his smart glass. “We have 20 minutes! Somebody help me with this.” Darshy left their remote WG hovering in the middle of the room and grabbed the side of one of the lab’s many heavy, ceiling-high cabinets. Tiera ran over to help him as Byrani and Daven went for the computers by the hatch-like entrance of the room’s wormhole generator.
Together, Darshy and Tiera were barely able to move the four steel cabinets over to the lab’s entrance, but they were wide enough to hide the door completely from view, hopefully barricading any potential intruders. If it weren’t for the adrenaline in her veins, Tiera knew she’d be completely wiped, especially after running up all those stairs. She pulled out her smart glass to see how much longer they had—and she noticed a missed call from her physician.
“Okay. I’ve locked onto Earth’s light signature and I have its orbit in the system,” Byrani announced, while a rectangular patch of the white wall in front of her turned black, then showed a small display of the Earth’s trajectory. “Now I’m working on a wormhole that will move to stay centered between Earth and its moon—at 18.5 miles per second, just like last time.”
“Nice,” Darshy said. He led Tiera past the sculpture-like computers and lab equipment, heading toward a closet in the corner. When he opened it Tiera saw that it was full of jumpsuits just like the ones she had seen Kert and Daven wearing on Earth. Darshy looked over his shoulder. “Daven?”
Tiera's Earth (Andromeda 9 Book 1) Page 28