They get it under control in just a few seconds, but that was way too much, too fast – they really have pumped up the O2levels.
One pair of boots turns toward me, and I groan again, to make sure their attention stays on me. A boot nudges me in the ribs.
‘You okay?’ Nico asks, and I flop over onto my back.
‘Ow,’ I moan. ‘Give me a minute.’
‘What happened?’ he asks, frowning.
‘She electrocuted herself,’ Grace chips in, from somewhere up by my head.
‘I shocked myself,’ I correct her. ‘Electrocution is what you call it if it kills you. Well, I guess other people call it that. You’re not calling it anything, you’re dead.’
‘What happened, though?’ Nico insists. ‘To the system.’
‘This isn’t an exact science,’ I reply, allowing myself to inject my tone with some extra snark as I carefully lever myself up to sit.
Nico offers me a hand, and I let him pull me to my feet.I limp back over to my station, dragging things out as best I can, and start in on a too-detailed explanation of what I’m going to try next. A minute later I become aware of a third body standing behind me and watching my progress.
Hunter’s back. I hope I gave him enough time.
‘Those sparks caught quickly,’ he says to Nico and Grace, conversational.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I offer, right on cue. ‘If the fire got big enough, the suppressors would have turned on and caught it.’
‘The suppressors,’ Grace murmurs behind me. ‘Right.’
A shiver runs down my spine, and I don’t know if I manage to hide it. Maybe it’s just getting cold in here.
Ten minutes later we’re all back at the engineering offices.
Nico strides over to Marguerite for a quiet conversation, and Grace takes me by the shoulder, steering me to a display where we can start looking for more places to reduce power.
Mr Chin-Up walks by briefly – taking a break from chiseling the Boxer free of his prison, I guess – and shoots me a look that’s pure poison. He could crack my head like a walnut, and he wants me to know it.
‘What about this whole wing of living quarters?’ I suggest unhelpfully, pointing to an area they’ll have to move through if they want to plant charges for their explosions later.
‘Mmm, what else you got?’ Grace asks, looking up as Marguerite walks over to join us, Hunter a few steps behind her. He’s doing well – his body language says he’s on her team. He’s giving her a hint of deference. Not too much, but following her lead.
Grace steps aside and lets Marguerite lean in to start working her way through our menus. She doesn’t pull out the virtual keyboard we’ve been using – instead she taps her cuff, and it brute-forces a link to the station we’ve been working at, projecting a larger, more complex screen in the air in front of us. She has menus and submenus available that we couldn’t see a moment ago.
I sit back, ignoring the bruises from my performance in the greenhouse, and study Hunter’s twin as she works. There’s so much about her that’s familiar – the line between her eyebrows as she concentrates, just like his. The green of her eyes, flecked with a golden brown, reflecting the bright light of the displays in front of her as she stares at them, unblinking. They have the same jaw, the same hint of a dimple at one corner of their mouth. And yet they’re nothing alike.
She flips efficiently through a few screens, her hands shifting subtly through the air like she’s conducting a very tiny orchestra, and I fold my own hands in my lap to prevent any outward sign of my inward celebration. This was the reason Nico beelined for her when we came back here – he picked up the hint we laid down about the fire suppressors. She’s realized they need to shut all the fire-protection systems down, to be completely sure their blasts take hold when they set them off.
I desperately fight the urge to look at Hunter, and instead focus on sitting silently, looking defeated as Marguerite wrestles with the code. It’s hard to turn off major safety features, for obvious reasons. But the system gives up and rolls over after acouple of minutes. I carefully duck my head as she reaches in to execute the final command …
… and the world turns white.
Massive amounts of sodium bicarbonate powder are dumped from the ceiling vent, ready to put out the electrical fire the system thinks we’re caught up in right now. All around me I hear coughing and cursing, see the dark shapes of others moving around me.
She’sactivatedthe system, not turned it off.Well done, Hunter Graves.
I can practically feel his pain, that he can’t take credit for that bit of on-the-fly hacking, jammed in at Susanna’s greenhouse workstation, while I rolled around on the floor after my shock. I don’t think either of us was sure until this moment that he’d successfully reversed the commands.
I can’t see a thing except for swirls and puffs of white right now, and someone’s hand claps down on my shoulder to keep me in my seat. All around us I hear people coughing, and after a moment I see Marguerite’s screen, projected onto the white cloud. Above us, the fans whir as they start to work overtime.
‘Is this stuff toxic?’ someone calls out.
