Even though Lulu was tiny—four foot ten inches compared to my six foot—she had an imposing presence. She was much too young to have that much worry etched onto her face.
“I’m okay. Did you get Roger’s message?” I asked between breaths.
“Yes,” she said. “He just messaged me again to come look for you. Did you really puke on your bracelet? Like, directly on the bracelet? Sam won’t stop talking about it.”
“Roger is okay? There was an explosion.”
“Yeah, no shit. The whole peninsula heard it. He sent video of what happened. That second ship blew up the mech and then took off back into space followed by a third, flower-shaped thing. They’re gone. Roger found Priscilla. She’s okay. She’s undamaged physically. She had a power failure. She recorded everything that happened before you two morons got there. She automatically turned on her stealth drive for the first time ever, and it fried her whole drivetrain, knocking her offline. That’s going to be a problem because we’re out of the scout-sized batteries. They’re on their way back now, but it’s going to be a bit because she’s on foot, using emergency power. He doesn’t want us to help him. Screw rule number one, I guess.”
I pulled myself into the quad, squeezing my way into the driver’s seat, but Lulu shooed me over to the passenger side. We’d always fight over who got to drive, but I didn’t feel like arguing today. She had the pedals adjusted for her height anyway.
“Do you know what’s going on?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Lulu said as she circled the vehicle back toward the ranch. “You owe Rosita an apology first off. We’re under attack.”
“Why?”
She gave me an incredulous look. “Why?Are you deliberately being dumb? We’ve been talking about this for months. You literally just broke up with your girlfriend over it last night, not that you’d remember that part.”
“But it was a mech driven by a little kid. It doesn’t make sense.”
“It’sOperation Bounce House,” she said. “It’s real, and it’s here.”
—
We turned onto the road,kicking up more dust, and we passed through the wide-open gate. To the left stood the massive corrugated-metal barn. We called it the “beehive.” I eyed the platform on the roof with the telescope and all the antennae. The large building was where we housed the honeybees and the repair stations along with the control center. Spread out to the right were the fields. The whole property was a square just under a hundred sixty acres, though some of it was undeveloped. About a hundred twenty acres of wheat, ten acres of barley, and several more off rotation for this season. I had one more for various vegetables along with several of my experimental crops, including my tobacco. The fields were crawling with the drone honeybees, all chugging along like they had no care in the world. In the far distance at the northwest boundary, I could see a single driverless hopper transport sitting idle just outside the fence, which I thought was strange until I remembered that the planetwide net was down. It wouldn’t be going anywhere until it was back online.
We pulled up to the main house. There were three other quads sitting out front. I didn’t recognize any of them.
“Why are people here?” I asked.
“The whole peninsula is going to be here in an hour or two,” Lulu said, pulling herself out of the seat. “We have the only active feed for kilometers. Maybe on the planet.”
—
I sat next to Luluand watched the commercial on the screen for the fifth time in a row. I’d seen it before, but I’d never really paid attention, because I’d had no idea it had anything to do with us. Behind us stood about fifteen people, all from surrounding farms. There were more in the kitchen preparing breakfast. Or lunch. I didn’t even know what time it was. Voices rose from the other rooms. Voices and quiet sobbing.
I rubbed my arm. I didn’t like having so many people in our house. It felt wrong. An intrusion. It made me nervous. Grandpa Lewis had never liked crowds much, either. I remembered Grandmother Yolanda used to have these laughter-filled parties, and Grandpa Lewis would always retreat to this room, his study, to read a book or he’d go out to the beehive.
That had stopped when our grandmother died. Lulu was only six at the time and barely remembered her at all. I’d been eight, almost nine, and my recollections of Grandma Yolanda mostly came in sounds and smells and memories of her warm kindness, though I could remember that day she died as if it had happened yesterday. I could recall the scent and taste of cinnamon and melted sugar. I could feel the dough in my hands.
But beyond that last day, I also remembered how Grandmother Yolanda herself smelled like the fields and grease. She worked hard, and she was always happy and smiling and hugging. When she had her parties, the house would be full of the cinnamon smell, of talking and laughter and the scent of cooking.
Now the house was full once again. I wasn’t even sure how people had known to come here. Probably because we had the only bracelet repair bay this side of Burnt Ends. Even after Grandpa Lewis died, there hadn’t been this many people. It felt wrong, especially since none of our friends were here yet. Sam and Tito and Axel. And Rosita. Without a way to contact them, I felt strangely untethered, disconnected.
The vast majority of the people here were older, in their later sixties and seventies. A smattering of people my age and younger was here, too, but nobody I knew well.
There wasn’t anyone between the ages of thirty and sixty here. I wasn’t sure if there was anyone that age left alive on the entire planet. An entire generation—my mother’s generation—had died of the Sickness, leaving a gaping wound in the population. That wound had never been more visible than it was now with so many people gathered.
After Grandpa Lewis died, Lulu had moved into his bedroom, and we’d turned this room into Lulu’s computer room. I used to keep a second drum kit in here as well back when I practiced more.
After I’d moved the drum kit out, she pretty much turned this den into her streaming studio. She offered to move to the barn, but I wouldn’t let her. Lulu spent most of her streaming time unclothed. We had heat in the house, and we didn’t have heat in the barn except in the control room.
While Lulu wasn’t ashamed of what she did online to save money for the future and she could be aggressively proud about it with people in our age group, she didn’t normally allow any of the occasional older visitors to our home into this room. If she needed to show someone something on the net, she would bring the screen and keyboard out into the kitchen.
When we’d entered the house, we found Mr.and Mrs.Gonzales and Mrs.Xalos already in the room, already on the computer, with more people arriving by the minute. Both of us had looked at each other, to Lulu’s desk, to our neighbors, to the computer screen they were staring at, back to the desk. Sitting on the desk was a wide assortment of locally printed sex toys, including a foxtail with a gleaming silver plug at the end.
Lulu made an eye movement to the toys before moving to her computer, silently telling me,Get those things out of here.
