“Yeah, it does,” she agreed with a smirk.
Her face had healed well, but half her hair was burned off, and she was definitely leaning into the look. Punk jacket, torn jeans, glowing fishnets—every rebel boy’s wet dream. But the neural implant behind her ear flickered with an unhealthy rhythm, pulsing with pain signals it couldn’t keep up with.
“You look like shit,” I said, my Vector-dulled voice sounding strange even to me.
She scoffed. “Always the charmer, E.” She glanced at my dilated pupils. “You’re high.”
I traced patterns in the electric field surrounding her—beautiful fractals that normal vision couldn’t perceive. “Job requires focus. This helps.”
Deacon’s voice cut through the room. “This is an extraction operation,” he announced, his voice echoing strangely. “We get in, we secure the evidence of POM’s illegal research, we get out. Clean and precise.”
But something in his eyes didn’t match his words. I caught a subtle exchange of glances between him and Vex—a micro-expression of understanding that triggered my instincts, despite the Vector blanket muffling my emotional responses. Vex’s duffel bag contained more than just extraction equipment; the weight and density of it suggested something else entirely.
I looked at Taos, her face a strange kaleidoscope of color from the hologram lights, her expression melting into a chemical distortion.
My vision snagged on the crystal necklace she always wore as she toyed with it. Unbidden, DITA captured an image and zoomed in on my Vysor. I tried to swipe it away, but DITA wouldn’t let me.
DITA’s analysis splashed across my Vysor. Geometric patterns inside the crystal, shifting and reforming, like living code. The crystal’s internals pulsed with familiar glyph formations—the same structures Hiromi had translated for me. My pulse quickened, adrenaline slicing through the Vector haze for one crystalline moment of recognition.
“That crystal,” I said, nodding toward her necklace. “You never told me what it is.”
Taos’ fingers stilled on the pendant, her expression shifting. The carefree rebel queen vanished for just a heartbeat, replaced by something softer.
“Gift from my mom. Said it was a piece of the original meteor that fell to Earth in ’53.”
Now Stellarium was grown in labs, easily and cheaply mass-produced to power the world before its crystalline structure was dissolved and piped through the city. I’d thought her necklace was just one of the many reproductions, trendy a few years ago. But a piece of the original…something like that would be almost priceless. And it was just hanging around her neck.
Electricity crackled across my skin, and she flinched.
“I never thanked you,” she said quietly.
My Flux died. “You don’t need to.”
“I still don’t understand how we ended up…there…or what you had to do, but I’d be dead without you.” She let out a huff. “And it’s not the first time.”
“Look, I know you believe in this whole rebel cause, but you’ve had too many close calls. A normal person would’ve given this up. What’s this really about?”
She twisted that priceless artifact in her fingers again. “It’s about freedom, E.” She flicked her fingers, and the code I’d already seen—translated by Hiromi—flashed in my mind. The glyphs plastered all over Renard’s apartment matched her crystal. Pieces of a puzzle I used to care about tried to form a picture, but the Vector tossed them aside. They were torn away like iridescent butterflies in a hurricane.
I was distracted as Deacon and Vex stepped aside, speaking in low tones as Vex patted his heavy duffel.
“He says we’re just extracting the data on POM’s experiments, exposing what they’re hiding.” Taos muttered, her eyes following Vex with a darkness I rarely saw.
“And you believe him?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why wouldn’t I? This was my operation. My intel got us the data center blueprints, the security protocols.”
I watched Deacon’s micro-expressions as he addressed the group again, the patterns of tension in his facial muscles revealing what his words tried to conceal. The Vector let me perceive these subtleties with crystalline clarity, while numbing me to their implications.
I knew what they’d done in Green. There were no plans for an explosion here, none they were admitting, anyway. But I saw it: data systems failing, neighborhoods plunging into darkness. Hospitals without power. Civilians caught in the crossfire—at least until services could be restored. But the Vector made it seem so…distant. Unreal. Like a painting I was staring at from the other side of a gallery.
I should’ve cared. I knew that. My mother’s image flashed in my mind—her fragile body hooked up to all those machines. She was just one of them. One of the people who would suffer.
But she was hidden. She was safe. Everything else didn’t matter. It never had.
Deacon called us all to the central planning table, the holographic display showing the data center layout with designated tasks for each team member.
“Eon and Taos will handle the primary data extraction here,” he said, highlighting a central node. “Marco and Spike will secure our exit route. Vex, Lin, and I will handle…contingencies.”
