“What’s important, Ellie, is that you know better now.” Ahdi leans forward, his arms pressed against the table. “If you ever need help, you know where to come.”
“I honestly think she’s stopped for good.” Ellie sits back up. The chair slowly rises with her. “We’ve run out of parents for her to impress. There’s no one left for her to show how much better adaughter she is than I am. Like I said, it’s been over a month. Maybe now we can be the normal version of two sisters who don’t like each other.”
Ellie really wants to believe this. However, Chris has been Chris for as long as Ellie can remember. Once, Chris caught Ellie reading a Chinese newspaper. Chris badgered her and badgered her and badgered her, claiming Ellie was illiterate and faking it. The campaign was nonstop. She chased Ellie from room to room, forcing Ellie to admit the “truth.” Eventually, Ellie confessed just to make her stop. In retrospect, she realizes she’s done an awful lot of relenting in her life to make Chris stop. As usual, the only thing Ellie was faking was the confession. Nevertheless, she had never seen Chris so triumphant. Ellie never let herself read Chinese around Chris again. Another time, Ellie was jogging on the sidewalk when Chris’s school bus passed by. The kids on the bus made fun of the way Ellie ran and, in the guise of “watching out” for her little sister, Chris made sure Ellie knew.
Chris is the only direct relative Ellie has left. It shouldn’t matter. Ellie doesn’t want it to matter, but it does because of what Mom wanted. You have to love your sister even if you don’t like her. Mom was insistent about this and Ellie can’t deny her. That Mom’s dead is beside the point. Ellie has to leave the door open for Chris and find a way to get her to walk through. Otherwise, she doesn’t know how she gets out of bed every morning.
Ahdi looks pensive. His gaze narrows. He’s clearly weighing his options of how to react. His gaze softens and he grunts.
“If it’s not Chris, you two may want to reevaluate whether you made any other enemies then.” Ahdi pushes himself away from the table. “Your car has been booby-trapped again while we were out. They tried to hide it, but I expect you, Ellie, would have noticed when you got closer.”
He’s already done several seemingly impossible things just in the past couple of hours. Ellie’s not surprised he can sense, from the dining room, something added to Daniel’s car in the driveway. Distance doesn’t seem to be an issue for him.
“Dismantling it will be a good exercise for the two of you,” Ahdi says as he sees them out.
CHAPTER 11
Ahdi sticks around by the front door as they approach Daniel’s car. At first glance, Ellie doesn’t notice anything unusual about the car. In her defense, neither does Daniel. She gets within touching distance of the driver’s-side door and realizes this car bomb is much more sophisticated than the last one. A good exercise for the two of them is a triumph of understatement.
“Daniel, tell me you can make some sense of the mechanisms involved and can model them.”
“Already on it.” Daniel is sitting in the driveway, very focused on the ceramic disk in his hand.
Ellie manages a small sigh of relief. They need a model of the thing, if they want to test their plan to disarm the bomb before they try it out for real. Building a model isn’t generally a part of a verifier’s bailiwick. A test harness around the model, yes, but not the model itself. That’s more of an architect’s thing. Given who mentored Daniel, though, Ellie is not exactly shocked that Daniel is building the model with aplomb.
He fiddles with the wireframe that floats above the disk. With a few deft gestures, he shifts a wire here, creates a new join there. This process goes on for a while before he finally nods at it, pronouncing it good or at least good enough. It’s a model like the toy skunkworks in the Chief Architect’s basement, except vastly smaller in scale. It only has to simulate a car bomb.
“We can make it more accurate as we go.” He stands and showsEllie the model. “By the way, we have to figure this out because I refuse to die disarming anything this inelegant.”
Ellie studies the model and compares it with the bomb inside the car. Daniel has an exacting standard for elegance. Either way, the model is as faithful as it can be without any data about how the mechanism responds under stimulus. For obvious reasons, there are some responses Ellie does not want to see firsthand. They are going to be very careful with stimulus.
The extraction goes slowly. It’s past dusk and the car is lit only by light from the house and a flashlight Ahdi handed Daniel about an hour ago. They still haven’t done anything to the bomb. All they’ve done is probe it, iterate on their model, and simulate attempts to extract it.
Ahdi’s gaze presses against Ellie’s back like a gentle but unyielding wind, as it has since this ordeal began. Assuming she survives this experience, she half expects an assessment from Ahdi out to at least twelve decimal places. His gaze must press at least as hard against Daniel, but he doesn’t notice. Or if he does, it doesn’t show. Daniel both all but bounces from excitement about the job and grouses from disgust about how clumsily conceived one subsystem or another is, redesigning it on the fly.
Ellie doesn’t join in on the “we should be killed more elegantly than this” discussion, except to steer Daniel away from designing the car bomb they should have built to kill them and toward analyzing the car bomb they did build to kill them. In any case, it’s a car bomb, not a weapon known for its precision. From what little she can glean about the explosive, when it goes—if it goes—the result won’t be pretty. They will be splattered all over the driveway.
The model is more complicated now, denser with wires and cross-links. The test harness is a thin, shimmering web that surrounds the wireframe. The simulated bomb floats in the harness,exploding for the thirty-seventh time. Ellie has lost count, but Daniel has been his assiduous self.
“Any other ideas, Daniel?” Ellie sits in the driveway, surveying the simulated wreckage.
“Can you do anything to the explosive?” Daniel, sitting across from Ellie, grazes the edge of the ceramic disk, resetting the model.
“No.” She stares flatly at Daniel. “I don’t understand why it hasn’t ignited itself.”
“So, it really is a matter of ‘figure out how to trick the meta-bomb’ then.”
Nestled in the undercarriage is an infrastructure that checks that the bomb is still a bomb and blows everything up if it detects any interference. Daniel has taken to calling it the meta-bomb. Ellie has a couple of other names for it, none clean, that she’s keeping to herself.
Throughout the entire ordeal, Ahdi has remained frustratingly silent, which Ellie takes as a good sign. Anyone who would let them blow the car up and themselves in the process wouldn’t have warned them about the bomb in the first place. If they were on the wrong track, she thinks he’d give them a helpful nudge. That said, he’s kept them well supplied with pens, paper, and, eventually, snacks.
Ahdi sets exquisite, thoughtful bowls of shrimp chips and salted duck egg salmon skins next to Ellie and Daniel on the driveway. They are clearly homemade and even more irresistible than the commercial stuff. Ellie could wolf them down in handfuls, but she limits herself to one chip at a time as she watches each simulation. Daniel nibbles on the occasional chip or three, savoring each one.
As she snarfs yet another salmon skin, Ellie wastes three seconds wondering whether they should leave Daniel’s car here. She’s positive this has not occurred to Daniel. Leaving, though, wouldbe admitting defeat. She doesn’t want to admit defeat, especially if the bomber turns out to be Chris. As insufferable as Chris is already, she can always be worse.
Simulation #41 turns the car into a rhinoceros, albeit one with a bomb plastered to its underbelly. Daniel and Ellie stare at each other. Ellie is stunned, but Daniel wears a grin that screams “We should try this!”
“No, Daniel.”
