Jaden must’ve had the volume way up because as soon as the match started I heard gunshots through Mr. Bosworth’s bug.
“Thatta kid. Thatta kid, Spencer. You’re getting the hang of this. That douche you just iced had 3,200 ex points.”
I’d almost forgotten about Spencer. That little prick.
“Oooh, dang. Did anyone see that guy’s jaw explode on the head shot?’
After a while I minimized the screen and pulled up Syd’s footage for the day. When I finished studying it, I took out my calculus homework. About forty-five minutes later Jaden said goodbye to his guys and signed off Counter Insurgency. But it wasn’t until fifteen minutes after that when Mr. Bosworth woke up from a nap that I saw the screen. One half was footage from one of Mr. Jefferson’s walks, zoomed on a back door lock, and other showed different carved-up angles of the house’s own security footage.
Chapter 29
I’d snuck out and gone over to Ethan’s house, where after a few minutes he’d grudgingly agreed about what we needed to do next. There was no time to waste. From what I’d seen, Jaden had blueprints of houses, hacked schematics from lock and camera manufacturers, and GPS data from residents, all more sophisticated than anything we’d acquired. That meant he was hitting bigger houses, which meant he was probably ahead of us in Revision, too. Our only saving grace was that since he was trying to frame me, he couldn’t do anything suspicious himself. No extra firewalls on his workstation. No security cams in his room. Not too many alterations to Mr. Jefferson’s code. At least for now he had to look just like a normal teenager and we needed to clip him while we still could.
The next morning, while Jaden was in the shower and Mr. Jefferson was helping Dad with breakfast, I slipped into his room and installed a hidden backdoor to Syd’s control software on Jaden’s workstation, along with all the notes we had on the Moores, Van de Kamps, and Hoffmans. Then, I added files about Revision, lock-picking, and networked camera hacking and hid those in the innocuous-sounding folder “old papers” with a light layer of encryption. I knew he’d deleted the files I saw him looking at last night, keeping them on his film and portable hard drive, but he couldn’t delete what he didn’t know was there.
I had the backdoor to Syd eighty percent loaded when I noticed that the uplink cord for his film’s hard drive was dangling off the side of the desk—the other end hooked up to his workstation’s cy-bay. Even though he deleted it each night, it wasn’t like he did it every time he had to go to the bathroom or jump in the shower. That would be too disruptive.
I found the cy-bay drive called “Programs” and opened it. He had funny names for the files, but it was still clear what some of them were. “Castles.” “Walls.” “Treasure.” “The Royal Kennel.” “His Majesty’s Program.” I opened up “His Majesty’s Program” and saw a list of names: Fowler, Brynard, Miles, Cripshotz, Selenas, Gruenstein. Frank and Margo Gruenstein. Those were the people he was casing last night. I clicked on their name and the SyncHarmony app opened, the same one we used for our school schedules. Usually when you overlaid it with someone else’s, there were red boxes showing where you both had plans, orange when one of you had plans, and green when you were both free, but Jaden had adjusted his settings so the boxes were green when the Gruensteins were busy and he wasn’t. The whole grid was either orange or red except for one cell. Tonight.
The water stopped running in the bathroom next door and I heard the sound of the shower curtains sliding across the pole. I clicked on “Castles,” then “Walls” and “The Royal Kennel.” There obviously wasn’t time to comb through everything now, but since my film was recording I could go back over all the footage later. “Treasure.” “Fountain of Youth.” “The Apothecary.” “The Road to Camelot.” I’d been surprisingly calm, but now my heart was leaping around as I opened and closed folders. Fortunately, they were all loading really quickly and I imagined that Jaden had probably souped up his workstation.
It was making the install fly, too. Ninety-eight percent. Ninety-nine percent. When it finished, I re-titled it Tonebelt, the name of a popular maintenance app, and started slipping the accompanying casing and Syd data into folders that the entry log said he’d never opened before. System data. Core files. Stuff that was just there, running in the background, places you’d never even think about looking. Normally this would’ve taken longer to find and filter through, but since I had enough footage of Mr. Bosworth looking up at the screen from last night, I already knew where most everything was.
There were still some uplink files I wanted to check out, but footsteps sounded on the tile and I started closing out folders, knowing I was out of time. I exited out the last one and put his workstation back into power-saving mode; but, unable to remember everything else’s exact position, I had to recall the film footage of the room five minutes ago. Chair halfway pushed in. Mouse in the top right of the pad. Screen saver on. Just as I was about to go out Jaden’s door to the hallway, a knock sounded.
“Jaden, are you in there?”
It was Mr. Jefferson, a foot away on the other side of the door.
“Yeah. Did you come to towel me off or something?” called Jaden from inside the bathroom. “I didn’t know that was in your codebase.”
“I was just seeing how you wanted your eggs done. You prefer sunny-side up eighty-seven percent of the time, though—”
“That’s fine, but I’m glad you asked because I was thinking today I’d do raspberry on half the second slice of toast and blueberry on the other half,” said Jaden, loudly, as I heard what sounded like the medicine cabinet shut.
My eyes fixed on the bathroom door handle.
“But peach on the first?”
“Right. And could you cut them into triangle slices?”
“Of course.”
I waited a few moments for Mr. Jefferson to pad back down the hallway. When I heard Jaden’s footsteps nearing, I opened the outside door and stepped out, closing it just as Jaden was opening the inside bathroom one. Mr. Jefferson stopped in the hallway. He started turning his head, but I’d disappeared into my room before it could make it all the way around.
“Don’t you want breakfast?” Mom asked, after I’d grabbed my bag out of my room and headed out the door.
My stomach was sloshing around too much to eat anything and I didn’t trust myself not to give off some kind of tell around Jaden. But maybe that in itself was telling since I usually ate breakfast. Regardless, there wasn’t time. I had to talk to Ethan. We had to figure out what we were going to do. “I’m good, Mom.”
Chapter 30
“Ethan, we’ve gotta finish the blue morphos right now,” I said, pulling him aside in the cafeteria.
“What about school?”
“We’re out of time. He’s going to do it tonight. He’s hacked their schedules and tonight’s the only night when they’re gone.”
“Wait, what? Who’s gone?”
“The Gruensteins, these two Austrian ex-pats on 17th Street. But I’ll tell you all that when we get to the yard. We just have to get the drones done.”
“Wait, I get that they’ll be gone, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to rob them,” Ethan said.
“Yes, it actually freaking does.”
“Okay . . . what’s our excuse, then?” asked Ethan, stiffening. “You were just sick yesterday.”
“Well, I’m sick again today, and so are you. Come on.”
“Hey guys, what’s going on? Who’s sick?” asked Michael, walking up to us.
“I am. He is. I think a lot of people are,” I said as casually as I could. “Must be a bug going around—you should keep your distance.”
“I think I heard about that. That won’t be too hard, though—keeping my distance,” said Michael.
“Dude, what are you talking about? We see each other every day at track practice.”
“But we’re in different events, so we don’t—”
“You’re right, we should hang out. It’s just been crazy lately .
. .” I rolled my eyes up as if looking at the top of my film where people usually kept clocks. “And I actually need to run now.”
“To class? I thought you said you were sick.”
“Michael just . . . let’s hang out soon, okay?”
“Well, Chris and I are having a veggie brat barbeque next week at the park. You want to come to that?”
“Yeah, sure, sure. I’ll be there.”
“Really?”
“I promise, but I gotta go.”
Ethan gave him a half salute and joined me walking down the hall toward the nursing station.
Uncle Richard was passed out in a lawn chair, sunburned, when we got there, so we moved one of the plastic tropical palm trees from his Jamaican Christmas collection next to him before heading over to the shed.
We’d already cut the butterfly wings out of aluminum oxide honeycomb plates and 3D printed tetracarbonate heads, thoraxes, and abdomens, which doubled as shells for the electronic flight controller, receiver module, and power management units. The aluminum oxide honeycomb was too thin to bolt to the rest of the airframe, so we used a fine-tip hot gun to fasten them together with ResinWorks, a powerful adhesive that connected the joints but still let them flex.
Next up was the wiring, which was tedious because of how small the nested pipe was and how thin the strips of copper were. We used precision tweezers we found on XchangeX to do the inline splices, held in place with mini alligator clips, but the problem was Richard’s soldering iron was way too big. The smaller one I’d ordered hadn’t arrived yet, so we constantly had to flick away big globs of solder and redo botched linking jobs.
“What’s with the goggles?” I asked Ethan, who was wearing these neon green, bug-eye safety glasses. “These aren’t exactly welding torches here, brah.”
He took off his pair and pointed to a thin film of spattered grease. “No, but I don’t want to damage these brand new baby blues. Supposedly I can see better than a peregrine falcon now.”
“That certainly hasn’t helped you make the cuts any cleaner,” I said, looking down at his butterfly.
“Jesus, get off my back for a second. It’s not like we’re entering this in a freaking pageant . . . or a science fair. Let’s just get it done.”
I was about to fire something back, but stopped short and sighed. “I’m sorry. You’re right, it doesn’t matter. I’m just . . .”
“Stressed the fuck out? I know, same here. This is nuts.”
“Yeah.” I put the soldering iron down and reached over and patted him on the back. “It is.”
He sighed, too, as he brought his hand to his mouth, his body loosening. “I have to keep reminding myself that this is happening, because it’s so far from anything that’s happened before, you know? I just . . . I just can’t get my head around it.”
I nodded.
“I keep thinking there’s got to be another way. And then I think that the fact that the way’s not coming to me after all this Revision is a sign that maybe there isn’t. And that’s even scarier. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah, man. I know.”
For a while we just stood there, not knowing what else to say and, finally, as if forced by the silence, turned back to the work.
I studied the frame, grateful I had something to keep my mind occupied but worried about how long it was taking. We had to have them finished by eight or nine tonight—the latest that my parents would expect me back. The handy thing was that butterflies had tubular veins visible on their wings, looking exactly like the weathering tape we’d put on the wires going out from the micro-actuators. That saved us a couple hours. They, along with the electroactive coating, saved on our power draw, too, by converting the actuator movements to biomimetic wing motions so we didn’t need to install so many batteries.
By 5 p.m. we were on to painting, using a blown-up picture from a botany book as a guide. We were originally going to make the twins monarch butterflies because they were a native species that would blend in with the drones as well as the few biological ones still left around. But their size was a problem, having three-and-a-half-to four-inch wingspans, too small for the kind of powerful sensors we wanted to equip them with. We almost said “fuck it” and scaled back, but a few weeks ago the USDA had approved the introduction of blue morpho drones in the area, replicas of one of the largest species on the planet. With their turquoise to dark purple grading and five- to six-inch wingspsans, they weren’t subtle, but over fifty thousand of these things were released just last week so they’d fit right in.
“What are you going to name yours?”
“Scorpius,” said Ethan.
I was about to ask why, but my film pulled up that the Butterfly Cluster was in the constellation of Scorpius, deriving its name from the vague resemblance of its star pattern.
“Michael would like that.”
“Is he still taking his NASA class?” asked Ethan, removing a pack of cigarettes from the back pocket of his jeans and lighting one.
I nodded.
“It’s going to be awfully hard to get into NASA without Revising,” he said between puffs, “but I suppose a kid’s gotta dream.”
“Speaking of kids, you’re becoming quite the role model there, aren’t you? What are your little cousins going to think?”
“Dunno. Maybe the same thing your brother thought when he saw you robbing houses.”
I made a face. “He didn’t see me—he was already . . . he’d been . . . you know what, hell. Give me one. I suppose you can’t even call it a vice anymore if the nanobots fish the toxins out faster than you can put ’em in.”
“I sure hope it still is,” said Ethan, reaching back into his jeans. “Otherwise I’m going to have to switch to crack or something. Gotta keep one step ahead of regenerative medicine. Or else you’re not doing the end of the world right.”
“That’s pretty funny.” Putting the cigarette up to my lips after Ethan lit it, I took the kind of slow, regulated exhale I’d seen people take countless times in the movies. I’d always thought smoking was so dumb and I still did, but—in the moment—it made sense. It was like a controlled forest fire for stress, killing a little of yourself slowly so something big wouldn’t come along and kill you all at once. Or just a way to say “fuck everything.” Acknowledging that the world and people, yourself included, weren’t so great after all—maybe not this exalted prize that needed to be fearfully defended at every turn.
“What about you? Picked a name yet?” asked Ethan.
“Taurus. It’s your boy Scorpius here’s sister constellation. Now they can be proper twins.”
“That’s nice,” said Ethan, taking off his goggles again and watching the butterflies as they landed on a burned-out skeleton of a car. “Do you think they’re ready for tonight?”
“I’m more worried about you.”
“I’m worried about me, too. I mean shit, do you really think we’ll be smooth enough to talk to the police without the neuro enhancements?”
“We’ll have to be,” I said, trying to convince myself just as much as him. We’d obviously be called in for a statement after they arrested Jaden and it’d be suspicious if we didn’t cooperate. “Because he’s got us boxed in here. Yes, he’s my brother. I love him in a way. But I also know him. He’s a predator. And predators don’t let what they’re hunting off. Do you get that?”
“I get that.”
“Good.” I was so mad at myself for letting Jaden help me. I was mad at Ethan, too, for giving me the idea, though I’d been the one who brought him in. It had saved us a few weeks, but there were other ways I could’ve slipped out of the GPS and drug testing. I just wished I’d been smart enough to know about them.
“But you don’t think he loves you at the same time? At least in a way?”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m saying that even though I don’t have the answer, maybe it’s not this. Just think what it’s going to be like afterwards. What it’s going to do to your par
ents.”
“Oh, so you care about my parents now,” I said in my dumb Ethan voice. “Of course it’ll be hard on them. But it already is. They would never admit it—even to themselves—but just watch how careful they are around Jaden. It’s like they’re handling a biohazard. I think they’ll be really sad, but part of them will be relieved, too.”
“So we’d be doing them a favor, then?”
“What the fuck is your problem, Ethan? You’ve been the one pushing me to do something.”
“Yeah, to get away from the police, not to bring them in.”
“Well they’re in. I think that’s pretty obvious now. And what exactly would Jaden have to do—what would he have to plant in Rich’s yard—for you to see we’re being set up? A CNC machine? Forklift? An industrial laser?”
“No, I know. I’m just . . . I want to make sure.”
“Do you want to see the files from his computer again?”
“No. No. I guess I just needed to . . . to talk it through.”
I took another drag from the cigarette. The worst part was I agreed with him. It was nuclear. It was permanent. It was an all-around shitty option. So shitty that a few hours ago at school I’d almost gone up to Jaden and tried to de-escalate, because part of me didn’t actually think he’d go that far. But the problem was he’d already gone that far; he’d already put us in a terrible spot with Spencer and the tools. And by talking to Jaden and letting him know what I knew, I’d be giving up the one advantage I still had.
So I had to be strong. I couldn’t show how scared I was or else Ethan would lose his nerve, which was looking increasingly likely by the hour. “I hear you, man. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”
Chapter 31
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