From there, they were met with a dizzyingly complex menu of branches. Keenly aware that the seconds were quickly ticking down, Zada navigated the architecture of Mozelle’s system.
“Hang on, what’s that?” Daphne leaned closer, the glow of the windows illuminating her face in the darkness of the library.
Zada read the file name. “Less than three.”
“Strange name for a file.”
Something about the name pinged in her memory. The display they’d passed on the way into the ballroom. Mozelle seemed to love collecting relics from the past. Zada knew what this meant.
“Emoticons in the past. You typed them out. Less than three—it’s a heart.”
“A heart for Heartsong.” Daphne shrugged. “A tad on the nose, but sure.”
Her own heart thudding through her whole body, Zada double-blinked, and there it was: the backdoor into the code for the program that dominated the lives of everyone in New Ionia.
“I’m in,” said Zada, hope blooming in her chest.
The rush of so much information at her fingertips went to Zada’s head faster than any champagne. As the administrator of Heartsong, Mozelle had access to so much more than Zada had even imagined. It was no wonder the lock on her bedroom door had been so complex.
“Daphne, we can access the Core from here,” she said, adrenaline rushing through her veins as she skimmed the code. “We can—not just my match, we can check on everything.”
“Do it. But work fast,” said Daphne. “We probably don’t have much time before Mozelle’s staff sorts out my distraction.”
It took several seconds of frantic searching before Zada uncovered what she needed. The password to the Core was a long, unwieldy string of letters and numbers—and Mozelle had it stored for quick access. Zada took a deep breath, collected herself, and activated the program.
The screens blinked out, replaced by a solid wall of codethat hovered in the air all around them. The text was a searing white against dark blue. Zada’s priority was searching for her own Heartsong, but she knew she might never get another chance to know once and for all whether those books in that secret library were telling the truth. It would likely be her only chance to learn what was truly real and what wasn’t.
She gestured, filtering for every assignment, every match, every decision made by the Core in the last six months. The Core ran autonomously, but it did require maintenance and could even, it stood to reason, be altered manually by anyone with the right permissions.
Then Zada made herself give the command. “Gem, show user-generated activity in red.”
The display smoothly refreshed, and then they were surrounded by a sea of red. Easily a third of the output she was seeing had been altered. Zada stared. There was no way Mozelle didn’t know about this.
“Gem, identify change history for—” Zada pointed to a crimson line at random. “Line four hundred eighty-two.” The code listed a name in the relevant field with a minor appointment to the cabinet as its output.
The SmartGem chimed. “Edit made by Administrator Erskine.”
“The nuns were right,” Daphne breathed. Zada felt the horror begin to wash over her, but pressed on, navigating further down.
“Wait, stop,” Daphne said. “Isn’t that—”
Zada saw it too. There was a red line of output with Quentin Collingwood in the identification field. According to the annotations, this was meant to decide whether Quentindeserved a spot at the top university in New Ionia. The variables included his grades, test scores, and deportment evaluation, all listed as top marks.
“That isn’t right,” Zada said with a sinking feeling. “Didn’t Augusta say that Venetia’s brother failed every one of his final exams?”
“She called it a clean sweep,” Daphne confirmed.
“Gem, identify change history,” Zada said.
Another chime. “Edit made by Vice Administrator Collingwood.”
Zada picked another change at random—a gate guard had been downgraded to a filter maintenance technician. It was the kind of demotion that permanently ruined lives. Briefly she wondered if this was the woman she and Daphne and the nuns had visited. Then she checked the change history.
“Edit made by Chancellor Ambrose Fallow.”
Zada scrolled through the red text, checking every change she could see. Four or five names kept popping up. All of them were high ranking officials she’d learned about in civics. Unavoidably, one of them was Daphne’s grandfather.
Zada tried not to watch Daphne’s reaction. She couldn’t imagine what Daphne was feeling. She barely knew how she felt. It was part of what they’d been looking for, but to find it, and to find it so cleanly implicating the most powerful man in New Ionia—her head swam.
