Chapter 29 CLEO
CLEO
WHEN WE WALK OUT into the main greenhouse a couple of minutes later, I know my cheeks must be pink. I keep my head down and don’t make eye contact with Nico or Grace. I’m glad they didn’t send Sabrina with us – she’d read me better.
I take up my place at the control panel again, crouching down and choosing my next circuit to yank out. As I settle into position, I feel Hunter’s cuff shift where I’ve stuffed it down my cleavage.
What? My lower half is still in my pressure suit, and that doesn’t come with pockets. A girl’s gotta keep her treasures somewhere.
It’s hard not to wince as I pull another circuit out. I’m trying to preserve the heat as long as I can – some of the plants won’t make it, but if the water doesn’t freeze, I might save the fish.
Unless they do blow this whole place up. Then the fish are on their own. The oxygen levels must be pretty high by now.
In fact, I’m kind of counting on that, for what I’m about to do next.
‘I think our odds are pretty good,’ Hunter murmured as he gave me one last kiss.
‘And I have questions about what kind of math they taught you at your fancy school,’ I muttered, but I let him kiss me anyway.
‘Please,’ he said afterward, in a lordly tone. ‘I had private tutors.’
‘Rich boy.’
He laughed. ‘You know, you’re the only person in my life who seems to like me less because I could buy and sell Jerhattan.’
‘That a problem?’
He smiled, and kissed me one more time. ‘No. I like your priorities.’
Now he’s wandering over toward the tomatoes again, closer to Susanna Hirano’s desk, all covered in daisies and monitors he knows how to log in to.
I start softly singing Victoriana Lu’s finest work to myself as I yank another wire.
Gonna blast into space, baby!
Gonna hit third base, baby!
Gotta love this face, baby!
Rocket to the moon, yeah!
Nico starts to turn to track Hunter, somehow not completely entranced by my performance, and that means I’m out of time. With a quick prayer regarding the oxygen levels in my personal part of the greenhouse, I touch two wires together.
They send up a shower of sparks, and I throw myself backward with maximum drama, as if I’ve just been shocked.
Agony shoots up my spine and down my arms as I land too hard and I let myself roll around on the ground with real groans, stars dancing between me and the greenery bursting from racks on the roof. That was way more realistic than it needed to be.
‘Fire!’ Grace shouts, and I roll onto my side to see two pairs of feet charging over. She and Nico stamp out a fire that’s sprung to life where a few of the sparks landed on some mulch laid out over a garden bed.
They get it under control in just a few seconds, but that was way too much, too fast – they really have pumped up the O2 levels.
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 a couple 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’s activated the 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.
‘It’s sodium bicarb,’ someone else replies. ‘You can cook with it. It’s fine.’
This is my cue. ‘Um …’ I let reluctance ooze into my voice and pause to be sure I’ve hooked the people nearest me.
‘What?’ Marguerite snaps.
‘Too much of this stuff can cause, um, digestive issues,’ I say as delicately as I can manage. ‘Pretty intense ones.’
It’s sort of true. True enough.
‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ Grace mutters, still beside me.
‘Unfortunately not,’ I reply. ‘But we didn’t shut down the water supply yet, so the showers are still available. We should rinse it off, and maybe relocate to the bridge?’
So that’s how I end up walking through the silent base at gunpoint, covered head to toe in white powder.
Hunter rigged some of the other suppressors to go off as well, so it wouldn’t be suspicious that it only happened in the room we were in.
He didn’t have time to get them all, I guess.
Pity – it would have coated the whole station and made blowing it up that much harder.
The showers are in one big, communal room. Floor-to-ceiling walls divide each cubicle, and each one has a curtain you can pull across the front for privacy.
Hunter disappears into one straightaway, already pulling off his shirt to gratuitously show off his excellent back muscles. I absolutely do not think about the way the water will be sluicing down his body in a minute when he showers. Not even a little.
He’s left a cubicle free between us, and Marguerite heads into it, firmly drawing the curtain behind her. ‘Five minutes, people,’ she calls out, sounding cranky. Which, fair.
A pissed-off Grace, covered in white from head to toe, checks my cubicle to be sure there’s nothing useful to a prisoner in there, and then ushers me inside. She stays dressed for now, one hand on her gun.
I catch her eye and pull the curtain across experimentally, silently asking if I get privacy for this. She nods and takes one step back.
I yank the curtain the rest of the way, and waste no time.
I retrieve Hunter’s cuff from its hiding place in my cleavage, then haul off my tank and bra.
I shimmy my pressure suit down over my hips, dumping my powdery clothes on the bench just inside the cubicle’s opening.
Then I hit the control panel with my palm, and step into the glorious stream of water.
This moment is almost as good as kissing Hunter.
It’s like the warmth of the shower washes away not just the white powder and the sweat and the red dust that permanently clings to me, but the fear as well, just for a moment.
Something inside me unclenches, and I close my eyes as I tip my face up to the spray, letting myself have this. It might be my last peaceful moment.
I only have a moment, though – I have to hurry, and this next part of the plan has zero finesse.
I leave the water running, watching the white gunk drain away toward its date with the water recyc system, which probably isn’t going to love it – assuming it continues to exist long enough to form an opinion.
Then I wrap a towel around myself and stick Hunter’s cuff down my cleavage again.
Carefully I poke my head out around the curtain, ready with an excuse about the soap dispenser, but Grace is near the door now, talking to her girlfriend, Blue Braid.
Which I guess means she’s off her table in the classroom, and our enemies are almost up to full strength again.
There’s something softer in Grace’s body language as she looks up toward her lover.
I’m sure glad you didn’t get fried, I’m sure she’s saying.
Anyway, she’s distracted, which means this is my moment. I carefully lean around the divide between the cubicles and get a look at Marguerite’s clothes sitting on her little shelf.
Her cuff sits atop her clothes.
The trick in moments like this is to be quick and decisive. I slide my hand into the gap, closing it on the cuff, my heart trying to hammer its way out of my chest.
I start to pull the cuff free, my other hand lifting to pull Hunter’s from its hiding place.
Hopefully she’ll just slip on Hunter’s cuff, and not notice it’s duller than hers. That’ll give Hunter a few minutes to try to hack his way through her protections and send out our SOS and our warning.
A hand grabs my shoulder and yanks me back – then the person spins me around and I find myself looking into the furious gaze of Blue Braid.
Oh, shit.