The Firefly Code

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  A mosquito buzzed around my ear, then drifted down my body and landed on my ankle. I smacked at it, but it got away. The bugs out here were bad, and that was worrisome— insects carry many diseases—but as long as we kept moving, only a few of them landed on us.

  I leaped from the boulder and landed clumsily, but for a moment it had felt like soaring.

  “Okay, guys, so, this is the coolest, right?” Benji asked as he hopped along the tracks. “Here we are, out in the world, saving our friends. We’re superheroes!” He ran and jumped with his hands out in front of him, trying to look like a flying hero. He tripped, though, and rolled forward with a soft oof. “Benji!” I cried out.

  He held up both hands. “No biggie. I’ve taken way worse diggers on my board.”

  Ilana walked over and reached out her hand to him. “Nice tumble,” she said as she pulled him to his feet.

  “It was a pretty great flip, right? I mean, if you’re gonna fall, it’s best to do it with style.” He brushed himself off with his hands.

  We made a single-file line and started marching toward the orange-green lights of the city. The tracks were set on railroad ties: thick, square slabs of wood that had grayed in the sunlight. Some still had their original brown color, and these oozed tar the way a sugar maple oozed sap. The smell was pungent and unfamiliar and gave me a headache. Between the metal cross-tracks were stones, most no bigger than a super bounce ball, but still big enough to roll your ankle. The tracks held down the growth enough to make the walking easier.

  “The city looks close,” I said.

  “It’s an illusion,” Theo replied.

  “Twenty-four point eight miles. Just a little bit less than a marathon. People run that in like three hours,” Ilana said. Then she glanced over at me and smiled. “But don’t worry. You won’t need to run it.”

  “Well, good,” I said. “Because I would smoke you all. Even you, Julia!”

  “Watch out,” Benji said. “Mori Bloom is fired up!”

  And I was. A week before, I never would’ve believed this was possible.

  Ilana straddled tracks and walked with one foot on each rail. She stepped right over a tiny white starflower. I thought she hadn’t noticed, but then she turned around and whispered to me, “Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight.”

  She didn’t need to finish. We were all wishing for the same thing: Ilana’s safety.

  We walked on toward the glow of the city.

  “All those lights,” Julia said. “It’s like a million people. At least.”

  “Two point seven million,” Ilana said.

  I shuddered. Nothing we had ever heard about the city was good. Fortunately, we didn’t have to go into Boston proper. We were headed for Cambridge, a city just on the other side of the Charles River. Close enough to Boston. Dangerous enough. Scary enough. My mouth went dry as a garden before the rain.

  Benji brushed against me as he caught up with Ilana. “I was wondering, what do you remember about Calliope?”

  “Why?” Ilana asked.

  “She wasn’t actually there, you know,” Julia said.

  “Yeah, but she remembers it, and that’s pretty cool. I was just wondering how detailed those memories were.”

  Ilana tugged at a curl. “I remember the cafeteria at my school.”

  “Was the food good?” Benji asked.

  Theo punched him in the arm. “She didn’t eat it. She wasn’t there.”

  “I remember how it smelled. Like eggs. Fried eggs. But we never had breakfast there. Isn’t that weird?”

  “Your brain must have created a false connection,” I said. “That smell probably goes back to something at the lab where you—” I stopped myself, but Ilana looked at me expectantly, almost hopefully. “Where you were born.”

  Ilana pivoted to face me. I tilted my head back to look up into her green-blue eyes, which flashed with anger. “I wasn’t born. That’s the whole problem. That’s why we’re out here on this silly walk.”

  I rocked back, surprised by her sudden anger. Theo stepped up between us. “Hey.” His voice was low. “Mori’s just trying to help you.”

  I knew what he was thinking. We all did. The truth was, we didn’t really know what she was capable of, and whether or not something might glitch up her programming.

  Ilana looked down at her orange canvas sneakers, the toes scuffed black from the tracks. “Sure. Whatever. Sorry.”

  I bit my lip. What if Ilana’s functioning was somehow tied to Old Harmonie? We thought we’d gotten her tracker out, sure, but what if there was some deeper connection between her and the lab back at KritaCorp? It was possible, I imagined, that her whole operating system was linked to their servers and as we got farther away and the connection weakened, she might face more problems.

  Theo brushed his hand through his hair. “We just can’t do this right now, Ilana.” We all knew what he meant by this. If Ilana glitched, we were done for.

  If she was glitching, it could be related to the programming they’d given to her. They’d never seemed to get it quite right. I rubbed my arm. The bruise she had given me was mostly gone, but of course I still remembered her grip tightening around my biceps. The truth was, whoever had designed Ilana was smart. Really smart. And even they hadn’t fully understood her. How could I expect to?

  Stop, I told myself. The way my thoughts were spiraling, that wasn’t really me, I had to remember that. That was the fear that came from being dampened. My parents had been trying to protect me, and so they’d taken away my bravery and made me afraid of everything. Just thinking about it started a red, angry feeling all over my body. I could feel it in my stomach and my head and the tight set of my lips. Who were they to change who I was? I had been bold and wild and that scared them, so they had made me fearful. I kicked at a rock. Angry was better than nervous, I decided. Anger pushed me forward.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “We’re back on track now. Let’s just keep going.”

  “Good one, Mori.” Benji laughed. “Back on track.”

  Theo grimaced. “We should be able to do it in less than twelve hours, so even with some breaks, we should get there by the afternoon. And then we find MIT and Dr. Varden.”

  “I still say that’s a pretty weak final stage of the plan,” Julia said. She was wearing a sweatshirt with reflective strips down the arms, and every once in a while they would catch the faint moonlight and gleam.

  “Dr. Varden is still listed as a member of the lab. Professor emerita, whatever that means. It’s in the Stata Center,” Theo said. “Getting there will probably be the easy part.”

  “We’ll find her,” Benji agreed.

  “She’ll know what to do,” I said. “She’ll help us. She has to.”

  “That’s the shaky part of the plan,” Ilana said.

  But I knew Ilana was wrong. Dr. Agatha Varden had founded Old Harmonie. She’d helped to design the ALANA project—the predecessor to the project that had created Ilana. But more than that, she’d been my great-grandmother’s best friend. That’s how I knew she’d help us.

  “You cold?” Ilana asked me. “You can have my sweatshirt. I’m pretty warm, actually.”

  “I just want to get you there and get you safe,” I told Ilana.

  Ilana looked up at the sky. Her jaw was set in a hard line.

  “She will help you, Ilana,” I said. “I promise.”

  “You can’t make a promise for someone else.”

  “I just know she will, that’s all.”

  “She was Mori’s baba’s best friend. That matters,” Julia told Ilana, with a bit of edge in her voice.

  Ilana stopped walking. She pushed her fingers into her temples.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  Theo and Benji turned back to look at us. “You okay, Ilana?” Benji asked.

  Ilana didn’t answer. She closed her eyes.

  I remembered the day in the pool when she had just shut down. “Ilana,” I cried. “Ilana!” I grabbed her by the a
rms. “Don’t do this again!”

  She blinked her eyes open. “It’s a headache. That’s all.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at Benji. I wished I could telegraph my question right to his brain: What if they had programmed her to stop? What if she can’t go any farther?

  “THE NICENESS OF THE OUTSIDE world is actually a little disappointing,” Benji said. “Like, I was expecting plagues of locusts and mind-sucking zombies and all that stuff.”

  “They might not be locusts, but these bugs are awful!” Julia punctuated her sentence with a hard slap against her calf. “Ha! Got you!” She held up her hand smeared with her own blood. “I am the slayer of beasts. If there were mindsucking zombies, I’d save your life.”

  “I’m sure you would,” Benji said.

  “When I was little, and I’d hear about the bogeyman or monsters or whatever, I’d think it was someone from outside,” I said.

  “I used to have nightmares my parents brought me out here and left me here,” Julia confessed. “It was like this dark, burned-down landscape. No trees, no houses, nothing.”

  “But you could see the forest from Old Harmonie,” Ilana said.

  “But we couldn’t really see beyond it,” Julia said. “I’d have one of those nightmares and I could hardly sleep for weeks.”

  “And now here it is—all big, pretty trees and cool night air,” Benji said, holding his arms wide. “Nothing scary at all.”

  “Except the bugs,” Julia said.

  “Except the bugs,” Benji agreed. “Where’s the danger? You can’t have an adventure without danger.”

  “You’d better stop talking like that, Benji,” I said.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I’m serious. If you jinx us—”

  “There’s no such thing as jinxes, Mori,” Theo said.

  “That’s true,” Ilana agreed. “If you see something as bad luck, that’s just your way of seeing it. The universe doesn’t care.”

  But not five minutes later, we ran right into our first big obstacle.

  “What is that?” Julia asked. We all stopped short.

  We’d come around a bend and then up a slight hill that had blocked our view of the city lights. We’d crested the top and now saw something hazy and pink shimmering in front of us.

  “This makes no sense,” Theo said.

  “Beautiful things usually don’t,” I heard myself reply.

  It was a lake. The rising sun was reflected across the flat surface of the water, so it seemed like we were being swallowed in a golden pink-and-red haze. I felt my breath go shallow at the beauty of the lake that appeared out of nowhere.

  “This makes no sense,” Theo said again in a low, quiet voice.

  I knew he wasn’t thinking about the sunrise or the steam off the water or the way it made me feel full of awe to the point I thought I might actually start crying. He was talking about how the train tracks ran right into the water, which lazily lapped at the rails.

  “It’s not on the map?” Benji asked.

  Theo shook his head.

  “How old is the map?” Ilana asked.

  Theo spread out the creased paper and we all peered at it. “See, we’re right here. There’s no water anywhere. Just that river off to the west a bit.” His voice sounded hollow.

  Julia sighed. “See the copyright? This map is decades old.”

  Theo’s face turned ashen, even in the pinkish light. “We can’t,” he began. Then he turned to Ilana, who was crouched down beside him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t even think about how it might be out-of-date. I’m just used to maps that are always updated. I wasn’t even thinking.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. She smoothed out the map with the palm of her hand.

  “But now we have no idea—”

  Ilana cut Theo off: “In a situation like this, there are always three choices: over, around, or through.”

  “Or back,” Julia said.

  I blinked. “No.”

  “Mori, just look at this lake: it’s huge. We can’t see where it ends. And without a map, we have no way of knowing how big it is. If we walk around, it could be miles and miles and who even knows where we would end up.”

  “I guess it’s over or through, then,” I said. I held my body as still and tall as I could, as if standing strong would make me feel strong.

  “Are you honestly suggesting we swim? Or, what, build a boat?”

  “We could build a raft,” Benji offered.

  “I’m saying that if we’ve come this far, we ought to at least look around before we give up entirely.”

  “Mori’s right,” Theo said. “Maybe there’s another way across. Let’s just split up and walk along the edge in each direction and see what we can find. Fifteen minutes out and back. That’s it.”

  “Then we make a decision?” Julia asked.

  “Exactly. An informed decision,” Theo replied.

  Julia twirled her braid. “Fine. But to be clear, building a raft is not actually an option.”

  “It wouldn’t be that hard,” Benji said. “We have access to plenty of wood. We’d just need to find something to hold it all together. Maybe some vines or—”

  Julia narrowed her eyes at him.

  “Mori, you can come with me,” Theo said. “Benji, Ilana, and Julia, you go that way.”

  Ilana and Julia both hesitated, but then they headed off in the southerly direction, while Theo and I went north. We had only walked about five minutes when we saw a granite post with a plaque on it:

  ALCOTT RESERVOIR

  Drinking water area.

  No swimming, boating, or fishing allowed.

  No trespassing.

  Underneath, the words “KritaCorp” were stamped in firm, capital letters.

  “This is where our water comes from,” I said.

  “Of course,” Theo said, and pushed his bangs from his forehead.

  “But if this is our reservoir—” I began.

  Theo interrupted me. “I knew the reservoir was east of Old Harmonie. What was I thinking?”

  “It’s not your fault. None of us thought of it either. None of us even thought to get a map.”

  “I’m guessing there’s a lot we didn’t think of.”

  He was right, of course. We’d barely had a shadow of a plan when we set out, so no wonder it was falling apart.

  The bright sunrise was over, but the sky was still a dusty pink. My eyes were drawn to a shape by the shore: dull brown and arched toward the water. A tree that had toppled? Or could it be a rock?

  Then the shape stood up.

  I grabbed Theo’s arm and pulled him to the ground. Perhaps it was the sheer shock of my forcefulness that kept him quiet. My glasses jostled off my face, but we were close enough, our cheeks against rough sand, that I could see his wide eyes. “Outsider,” I whispered.

  About the Author

  Megan Frazer Blakemore is the author of The Daybreak Bond, The Firefly Code, The Friendship Riddle, The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill, and The Water Castle, which was listed as a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year, a Bank Street Best Book of the Year, and a New York Public Library Best Book for Reading and Sharing. She is also the author of the young adult novels Secrets of Truth & Beauty, Very in Pieces, and Good and Gone. A part-time school librarian, Megan lives in Maine with her family.

  www.meganfrazer.com

  @meganbfrazer

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  Copyright © 2016 by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permis
sion in writing from the publisher.

  First published in the United States of America in May 2016

  by Bloomsbury Children’s Books

  E-book edition published in May 2016

  www.bloomsbury.com

  Bloomsbury is a registered trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 1385 Broadway, New York, New York 10018

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Blakemore, Megan Frazer, author.

  Title: The Firefly code / by Megan Frazer Blakemore.

  Description: New York : Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 2016.

  Summary: Mori and her friends live a normal life on Firefly Lane in Old Harmonie, a utopian community where every kid knows he or she is genetically engineered to be better and smarter, but when a strangely perfect new girl named Ilana moves in, the friends begin to question the only world they have ever known.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015037736

  ISBN 978-1-61963-636-1 (hardcover) • ISBN 978-1-61963-637-8 (e-book)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Genetic engineering—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. |

  Science fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION/Science Fiction. |

  JUVENILE FICTION/Social Issues/Friendship. | JUVENILE FICTION/Action &

  Adventure/General.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.B574 Fi 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037736

  Book design by John Candell

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