Sunlight 24

by Merritt Graves

  “It’s like we can’t help ourselves from digging a hole,” said the guy one person over from me in French.

  “Yeah, I don’t know if I can take another dramatic comeback,” said someone else. “One time I just want us to come out hot.”

  “Saving that for state, baby.”

  The other team made their extra point and sent the subsequent kick-off soaring over the goal posts. Place kicking was probably the lowest hanging problem the tech teams had to deal with, after all, since there was only a fixed, narrow set of motions required and none of the complicated decision-making processes of the other positions. The physics were relatively straightforward, too; it was just a matter of nailing the engineering. And starting two years ago, the nets were unsurprisingly heightened to keep the balls from flying into the parking lots.

  Even though Lena had gotten the offensive tackle drone fixed in time, Lawrence’s drive started poorly. Being only mid-tier in their league in speed and strength, they used a crafty hook-and-ladder offense and a lot of trick plays to make up the gap. Unfortunately, since it was the first game of the postseason, Cadmier had ten days to prepare and their drones and linebackers were clogging all the lateral lanes. On a long third down, Lawrence’s fourth wideout caught a pass in a crowd five yards short of the first down and, desperate to make something happen, tried to pitch it to the running back who was sprinting up from the backfield. A drone anticipated it, though, and knocked it into the hands of a free safety who returned it all the way back for a touchdown.

  It just kept getting worse from there. Lawrence’s offense had some promising drives, but kept turning it over. And their defense got carved up nearly every series. By halftime it was twenty-four to zero.

  “Our weak side corner runs a two-and-a-half-second forty-meter dash and’s up against three blue-chip receivers,” said one of my neighbors, still in French. “It’s a terrible draw for us. All their line has to do is give Garrett time for a check or two and they’ll shred us every time.”

  “Then just keep blitzing on D. Especially with Tyler Samitz out at guard. Gatley can scramble, but he’s not a scrambler.”

  I mostly tuned them out, though, instead focusing on Lena. She was rushing to repair the damage sustained by the receiver model in the first half, scanning it with a blue diagnostic light and then moving in with wire strippers and a welding torch. When that didn’t appear enough, she unhooked its left arm and battery packs and attached them to a reserve frame that had been carried over by a couple other techs. It was becoming clear as she moved around the sensory screens, making last second adjustments and fielding questions from coaches, that she wasn’t just a tech like she’d said at the park, but she was the lead. She was the star of the team. And as if to prove it, just as the last trombone player was leaving the field at half-time, she had the new receiver swinging its robotic arms to warm up.

  The third quarter was a sea change. The Cadmier quarterback had started taking these five-step drops and just punishing the secondary for sitting back in a loose zone, but Lawrence shifted into a 4-4 and started blitzing the aerial drones. The QB shook them off and found secondary receivers the first couple of times, but he was flustered and out of rhythm at the change-up and definitely didn’t see the Lawrence cornerback coming a few plays later on a weak-side blitz. The ball flew out, bouncing right into the hands of one of Lawrence’s linebackers, who returned it all the way for a touchdown.

  Then Lawrence did an onside kick where a drone swooped in and, after the first bounce, batted the ball back toward its line. The stands started going freaking nuts. Despite not talking to the people around me the whole first half, we were high fiving and joking, all stomping our feet on the bleachers in the manner of the Lawrence “Thundering Herd.”

  “See, isn’t it more fun this way?” asked the guy one over from me in the bleachers.

  “Say that in an hour,” said his girlfriend.

  But Lawrence didn’t need that long; the next play was a double flee flicker thrown deep for a touchdown. Then they got the ball back after a three and out and, since the Cadmier drones were having to cover the lateral lanes tighter, seams were opening for the ground game. And when Lawrence started pounding the ball between the tackles and Cadmier brought the aerial drones and linebackers up to cover that, they started throwing hooks and ladders again. I’d never seen a game turn so completely at a half before.

  Late in the fourth quarter, just when it looked like we were going to tie the score, though, the Lawrence QB was chased out of the pocket and buried by an outside linebacker, coughing up the ball.

  “Oh, fuck no,” said the guy one seat over.

  “It’s okay, Pfaller pounced on it,” said his girlfriend.

  “But it’s fourth and forever.” He sighed. “And uh-oh—Gatley’s not getting up. Did you see him go down hard like that on his shoulder? Oh God.”

  “It was because of the play-action,” said one of their friends a little farther over. “There’s a minute thirty left; they know we’re not running. You’re just giving away the short routes and wasting a perfectly good blocking back.”

  “I . . . just can’t believe it’s going to come down to Mark freaking Lytham. There’s a reason why he’s a senior and he’s never started a game. He’s one of those . . . wait, that’s not him. No, it’s a freakin’ . . . it’s a freakin’ robo.”

  “At quarterback?”

  “Yeah, look where he’s at in the huddle.”

  “What a time for amateur hour, huh?”

  “Maybe it’s a trick. Maybe they’ll direct snap it to Baizer. He’s got a got a good arm and . . .”

  But they didn’t. They snapped it to the robo and it rolled out just like a normal pass play. It planted itself and let one sail over the middle of the field where it was caught by the robo wide receiver on a crossing pattern. It shook one tackler, cut back, and it was into the end zone.

  “Robo to robo baby!”

  Everyone was screaming so loud and celebrating so much that people barely noticed that they were lining up for a two-point conversion.

  “Wait, woah. Are you shitting me? They didn’t even—”

  The ball was snapped and the QB robo took one long stride back before lofting a fade to the other robo again who caught it with one leg down in the back of the end zone.

  “Holy Mother of God!”

  “The balls to throw a freaking fade on a two-point! I can’t even . . .”

  “Hell, yeah mofos!”

  It was electric. I’d never seen anything like it. And the roar of the crowd only expanded as Lawrence’s defense smothered Cadmier on the ensuing series, making it so their offense only had to kneel once to run out the clock.

  While I was happy they won, somewhere in the midst of the jubilation and rushing the field, a sadness broke over me again. I wanted so badly to share the moment with the players and coaches storming onto the grass, to share it with Lena, but I couldn’t. Not as a peer. Not unless I became the person she’d talked about at the park.

  A new sense of determination arose as I filed outside. I was going to meet her. And when I did I was going to be thoughtful, considerate, and brave. I was going to read that book by Floriet I saw her reading (thankfully, she’d moved on from string theory). And then I was going to read everything else Floriet wrote, too, and then read everything her predecessors wrote. And her contemporaries, treeing off into any topic she might be interested in. Just like Lena was the person I always hoped to meet, I was going to be the same for her.

  As I walked to my car, I read the first sentence of Floriet’s Magnus Ratus on my film: “A true empire of the mind requires not a single drop of someone else’s blood.”

  Chapter 23

  “You know how those glass cutters take so long that we have to pick houses based on foliage cover?” asked Ethan.

  “Sometimes, yeah.”

  “Wanna hear what I’ve been thinking as a workaround?”

  Given what had happened in the cafeteria last we
ek, this was the last thing I wanted to be hearing, but Ethan hadn’t been able to stomach the idea of “waiting around for them to come and get us.” He’d kept going on and on about needing to Revise again. Needing to stay one step ahead. I understood where he was coming from, I didn’t want to wait around either, but everyone was on the lookout now. “You’re going to tell me anyways, so might as well just get it out.”

  Ethan glanced below us to make sure there wasn’t anyone underneath the bleachers we were sitting on before starting, “Last time at Uncle Richard’s I noticed an old printer that makes dental molds and got to thinking . . . why not use it on a scanned key. And you know where there are a lot of house keys?”

  I shrugged.

  “Valet parking stands for non-autonomous cars,” he said. “And do you know what the best part is?”

  “No.”

  “Since Chris works at the Maple Lodge as the weekend night janitor, we could show up when he’s cleaning near the stand and say we want to check out the vintage cars. One of us gets him going about maintenance or paint jobs or something, and the other slips over and scans the keys. And the beauty is that the makes and models do all your profiling for you.”

  “I don’t think Chris would appreciate that very much,” I said.

  Ethan shrugged.

  “Chris is a hard work—”

  “But what’s he working hard at? Huh, Dorian? It’s not about that anymore. He’s like a hard-working woolly mammoth. Or a hard-working dodo bird or whatever.”

  Ethan removed the science fair tractor beam from his pocket and began directing it at coins under the bleachers. We were sitting alone in the middle of our school’s shoddy (non-hybrid) football stands after track practice, watching a robot re-bolden the lines with an aerosol paint cart, and the words rang out into the open. I enjoyed deserted high-capacity places like this because it made the solitude conspicuous. You could feel the warmth without words, the love without the pettiness. Only picturing the Lenas and the Michaels and even the Christophers, and imagining that you could pick them without having to pick everybody else.

  “And the problem is your respect lends credibility. Deference.” He put down the tractor beam and started rubbing his face with his hands, the thing he always did when he was anxious. “Keeping you from letting Chris do the most useful thing Chris has ever done.”

  Ethan enjoyed speaking cerebrally, but it was so self-serving that I had a hard time taking him seriously. Instead of starting at the beginning and trying to figure something out, he started from the place where he wanted to end up and tried drawing some reasonable-sounding path to get there. Everything was just some form of justification. “And how’s this different from what we’ve already done? You didn’t have any problem using Michael to help with Syd.”

  “That’s beside the point. Come on, Eth!” I snapped. “There’s no fucking way I’m going to rob another house right now. Just look at what’s happening.”

  “Which is exactly why we need to keep going. They keep calling more people in for questioning. They called in Spencer, for fuck’s sake, and—”

  “What? They called who in?”

  “Didn’t you hear? That’s the whole reason I brought up this key thing.” Ethan looked at me wild-eyed with disbelief. “Yeah, Spencer was called into Frank’s office and said those two cops were there wanting to ask questions—that they didn’t really have an angle, just trying to find things out—but still.”

  “What things?” I asked, my voice rising to Ethan’s level.

  “I don’t know. He said that they said that they were going to be talking to a lot of people over the next week and that it would be best to report anything suspicious as soon as possible. And if they heard something later that they should’ve heard sooner, it wouldn’t look good for the later person. You know, coercive shit like that. About what you’d expect, really.”

  “Fucking God.” All the hours I counted thinking that they were putting distance between me and the robberies caved in on each other and I was left back inches away from the face of it. I could hear teeth. I could feel hot breath on my neck. And no matter how far away I got, it would always be like this; there would always be some trapdoor that would lead right back to here. Right back to this elemental dread.

  “They’re not giving up, dude. It’s not if, it’s when,” said Ethan. His tone was desperate, his face the color it had been in the cafeteria when the cops came. “Eventually, someone’s going to say something or turn in film footage that implicates us. Hell, they could talk to someone in our study hall who saw us slip out—that’s as suspicious as fuck, since most of the other robberies have been happening at the same time as ours. Which is such rotten luck, by the way. It would’ve been—”

  “Maybe that’s it, then,” I said.

  “What?”

  “If they catch the other robbers, they’ll stop looking.”

  “That’s quite the if.”

  “That’s a reason not to do something stupid. Maybe we can even help. We could send Syd out on patrols while we’re finishing up the blue morphos,” I said, knowing there’d been a reason I’d kept Syd around, the prospect of doing something momentarily calming me. “You never know, she might notice something and then we could leave an anonymous tip or point them in the right direction.”

  “We’re not going to catch them with Syd,” said Ethan, bringing his hands to his forehead.

  “When did you get so fatalistic? We’re Revised. We can—”

  “Not Revised enough! Don’t you get it?”

  His hands moved into a steeple over his nose and mouth. His head tilted farther away from me, seeming to follow the robo-painter, who’d finished with the left hash marks and now was working his way across the letters in the end zone. The silence, which had grown as the students remaining from extra curriculars were picked up or drove away, emerged out of the background, making the sound of the breeze channeling through the leaves noticeable for the first time. “Here’s the thing. You probably know this already, but . . . but you remember how I used to occasionally sell stamps to students here?”

  I nodded, looking puzzled.

  “Well, it wasn’t so occasional. And . . . and I think I may have sold to some of those underclassmen face-to-face.”

  “You think?”

  “I did. I just—”

  “You just didn’t think to tell me? Or at least not until you had to.”

  “I thought you knew!”

  “What? How? You just assumed that I’d know you’d been lying? That’s rich. That’s really, really rich, Ethan.”

  “No, because your brother’s the one who made the intro! I wanted to do a cold drop, but they’re freaking kids—and kids buy from people they know. It was just this low-key thing.”

  I shook my head, even more exasperated than before.

  “But I didn’t sell to the one who got busted. And I stopped like a month ago. Seriously. So, I didn’t think it was going to be a big deal, except that the police kept at it and at it, trying to get everyone to rat each other out, and then when they brought Spencer in . . .” He took a deep breath and hunched down on the bench. “Well, you know when you told me to get rid of all the stamps we wouldn’t need for my uncle? There were still some left over after I closed everything out—and it’s not like I could leave them around for my dad to find. He’s always coming into my room and—”

  “You sold them to Spencer, didn’t you?”

  “It wasn’t like there were that many, and he’s like, you know, quiet about it and—”

  “Jesus fucking Christ. This is going to get back to us,” I shouted, feeling my grip on things loosen. I wanted to be done with him. I wanted so badly to walk away and pretend like none of this had happened.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to say.”

  “No, no, no. You’ve been saying whatever it is you thought you needed to say. And the only reason you’re leveling with me now is that we’re fucked and you don’t think you have a choice.�
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  “That’s not fair. You know it’s not fair. You knew I dealt. Maybe you didn’t know every little detail, but you knew the gist and you still asked me to rob houses with you, so shut the fuck up. And definitely don’t get all wronged on me. Especially when it was my fucking uncle and my fucking stamp money that got us everything we needed for the device.”

  I was about to yell again, but there were two kids walking across the grass behind the track, approaching hearing distance. There was a long silence as we waited for them to pass, not looking at each other, letting the breeze fill in all the spaces between us. I wanted to disappear. Melt into the tree line. Or be reborn as one of the kids as they each got into their parents’ car, without a real care in the world.

  Finally, I asked, “But you said Spencer didn’t say anything?”

  “Yeah . . . though it’s not like he’d tell if he did, either. He’s a coward. A real baby, if you ask me, so I couldn’t really say. But it doesn’t matter, at some point they’re going to question us. And yeah, we’ve Revised some, but look at me. I look guilty. I’m sweating like a fucking pig. They’re gonna see that. So it’s not so crazy what I’m saying: We do a big enough job that’ll let us Revise circles around them. Two, three steps ahead. Even keel. Biotransmitter regulation that’ll fool their sensors. All that. And it won’t matter who accuses me of selling drugs; I’ll convince the cops they’re lying. We’ll fabricate all the evidence we need to corroborate the story and hack all the metadata of anyone who has us on facial rec. We’ll know exactly what to do, because we’ll be that smart. That slick.”