48
FEED AND FIRE
THE SUBTLE VIBRATION of my buzz screen pulls me out of a deep sleep. I’m disoriented at first to find myself on SSL’s cold, hard floor, in shadows except for the sliver of light where my skin is kissed by the bright white glow of the nearest pillar.
“Hello?” My voice echoes in this cave of a room.
“Zesi figured it out,” Leo says. “He figured out some way to adapt the connection, and it’s genius, Linds—he fixed it, and it works!” His words fly past, light-years per minute.
“Leo—Leo. Slow down.” Finally, he falls silent on the other end. “What’sit?”
“The filter,” he says. “He successfully installed it and we won’t have to ration like we thought we would! Not as much, anyway.”
NowI’m awake. “Wait, seriously?” I’m sitting straight up now. “This is huge.”
“Right? He turned the mech room upside down, ended up finding some spare odds and ends in one of the drawers.” Leo’s energy is palpable, contagious. I’m on my feet in an instant,pacing the length of the panoramic window full of stars.
It’s almost unbelievable, to have a crisis just be... solved. Nothing else has gone the way it should, so this news is an enormous relief. Not just for the station, what this means for us, but for the state of my own parched hope—we are not terrifyingly low on clean water, and we may not have to reach out for Vonn’s help after all! Things have spiraled for so long now it’s like I started believingwrongwas the only way things could go.
“This is... this is incredible.”
“Yeah, at least that’s one thing we don’t have to worry about,” he says.
“My thoughts, too.” And just like that, my joy deflates. One crisis averted, a thousand other things still spinning out of control. “Did you have any luck searching the vid-feeds?”
Leo is dead silent on the other end of the line.
“Leo? You still there?”
“I’m still here,” he says, his voice heavy, a complete one-eighty from just two seconds ago. “Trying to figure out how to tell you there’s absolutely nothing we can use on the feeds, and in fact, there are a few very significant and suspicious gaps in the footage.”
I stop pacing. I am a still shadow against infinite starlight. “I’m sorry, what did you just say?”
He’s speaking again now, but all I hear in my head is a blur of panic—he said there’s nothing we can use on the feeds, but he’s wrong. The fact that there are gaps in the footageissomething we can use.
But it is the exact opposite of what I wanted to hear.
It is what I’ve dreaded most, what I didn’t want to believe was possible: it’s simply too much of a stretch to believe that Yuki or Grace would have been able to sneak into Control without any of us noticing, too much of a stretch that they’d know how to access the vid-feeds in the first place, let alonealterthem.
The killer was one of us.
The killer
is
one ofus.
“I, um—I need a minute, okay, Leo? I’ll talk to you later.” I cut the call short before he can get a single word in.
To his credit, he gives me the space I need. And I do need it—this changes everything. There are only two people who could have altered the feeds in plain sight, and I was just on a call with one of them. Surely Leo wouldn’t—couldn’thave—
Right?
I trustedhimto go through the feeds, checking for anything suspicious—but what if he spent all this time cutting himself out of the footage so we wouldn’t have any incriminating evidence? He was alone up there, too, since Zesi apparently spent the last stretch of time working on fixing our filter.
And speaking of Zesi: this drastically shifts my perspective on his miraculous water filter fix. What if the filter was never a poor fit at all, but he made itlooklike a problem just so he couldcome in and save the day by “fixing” it? He could have altered the vid-feeds at any time prior to now. I do think he would’ve been more careful about it, though—he’s usually pretty precise at everything he does—but perhaps there’s just no elegant way to avoid an obvious splice when removing bits of timestamped footage. Add to that, whoever did it was probably in a hurry.
This isn’t to say it couldonlybe Zesi or Leo—all of us have had a primer on the vid-feeds, and all of us are decent with the tech in general, thanks to an involved tour of Control Zesi gave us when we first stepped up to lead. Again, though, that points me back to Zesi: Could he have been preparing, even then, tomurderour people? Could he have been laying groundwork that early to cover his tracks, so it wouldn’t be a giant neon arrow over his head when we began to investigate? And—and—if he had it in him to poison three of our population, what’s to say he wouldn’t eventually move on to a much larger scale: we’ve entrusted him with our water supply, but what if this “fix” was also an excuse to tamper with the water itself? What if our station-wide water supply is laced with belladonna now—what then?
