Chapter 4 #3
“All at once, same as it went. No stutter, no partial restore, no sections coming up one at a time.” She snaps her fingers.
“Just, on. Like nothing had happened. And by then—” She stops.
And the flush that comes over her face is a whole different story, and she waves a hand at it, laughing.
“By then a great many other things had happened in that lift, and that’s how I ended up married to a Xylan, and I am not telling you the rest of it while you’re eating. ”
“Oh, you absolutely are.”
“Later. With wine…Now let me ask you a question. Do you like it here?”
“Yes, I’m liking it a lot. I thought Omega 9 was the dream placement,” I admit.
“The whole reason I take the big contracts nowadays is to save for a downpayment on one of those apartments that overlooks the central park.” I set down my fork.
“But I’ve been here for less than a week and I keep thinking, there’s something special about being this close to all this Illibrium.
I’ve worked on grids all over the sectors, but always from the outside, always the network.
I’ve never been inside it like this, so close to the crystals that initiate the power.
It’s thrilling. It’s the most alive job I’ve ever had. ”
“Right?” Leah looks delighted, like I’ve passed some test she didn’t tell me I was taking. “See. It’s got you already. Give it a month and you’ll be married to a miner and arguing with me about whose turn it is to organize the rest-day thing.”
My eyes widen.
She grins. “Speaking of. Tell me more about what you’ve learned about the grid.”
So I tell her how I think the problem is with the old network.
“At first, I was worried that they’d deleted the old records, which would make the fault impossible to really find.
But I’ve learned the records aren’t actually lost, though.
That’s the wild part. A miner kept all of them, apparently, going back to the first shaft.
He keeps everything on his personal system.
I’ve been working with him. Sort of. Well, I’m going to be working with him on this, when he gives me access to these records, sometime today, I think. ”
“A miner keeps years of grid records on his personal system?” Leah’s eyebrows go up. “What is his name?”
“His crew name is Scar…”
Leah sets her coffee down. “Scar? My brother-in-law, Scar? A Fever Brother?”
“Your brother-in-law? Really?”
“Yep. There’s only one miner on Timbur with the crew name, Scar. You met him?”
“Uh huh. He’s always watching me, every single diurnal. He’s some kind of security?”
A smile twitches at the corners of her lips.
“I guess you could call him security.” She glances over my shoulder.
“Don’t look right now, but your very helpful security friend is sitting against the far wall, all by himself.
He has not touched his food, and he has been staring at the back of your head this entire meal. ”
I look.
Scar is exactly where she said, huge and alone, a tray in front of him, and he’s watching me with that dark, steady attention.
Heat spreads down the back of my neck, and I whip back around so fast I nearly knock my tray.
Leah is delighted. She looks like it’s her birthday. “Oh, I’m going to have a great story to tell everyone at dinner tonight.”
Minutes later, Leah leaves to return to work. Scar has disappeared. And my brother drops into the empty seat across from me, stealing a chip off my tray without asking, the way he’s done since we were kids.
“Where were you earlier, just before lunch?” I ask. “I pinged you twice at the last junction.”
“Sensor level. Making friends.” He grins. “You know the Security crew runs their whole comms backbone off the same network we’re auditing? Same infrastructure, top to bottom. I got the full tour — panels, relays, the works. Fascinating stuff.”
My brow furrows. “But you already got a tour of Security.”
“This time I got a tour of everything, Mar. I’m charming. It’s my one marketable skill.” He pops the chip in his mouth, grinning, and it’s such a pure Andrew thing to say, my brother the human golden retriever who makes friends with every room he walks into.
I laugh and let it go.
He pulls out his tablet and we get back to work, figuring out what to fix next.
By fourteen hundred hours the exhaustion catches up with me the way it does now, sudden and total, like someone reached over and turned my power down.
I make an excuse for leaving early and head back to my quarters.
I take off my boots, set my discreet little alarm, and lie down on top of the covers. I’m asleep in moments.
The knock wakes me.
I surface slow and grainy-eyed, alarm not yet gone off, disoriented…and for a second I think it’s Andrew, come to drag me to dinner and tell me a story about whichever crew adopted him today. I roll off the bed, scrub a hand over my face, pad over, and open the door mid-yawn, entirely unprepared.
It’s not Andrew.
It’s Scar.
Filling my whole doorway and then some, ducked slightly under the frame, one enormous, gloved hand wrapped around a data drive that looks absurdly small in his grip.
He’s so big he blocks the hallway light.
He looks down at me with those dark unreadable eyes, and for one long beat neither of us says anything at all.
“You said tomorrow,” he says finally, in that low rumble that causes butterflies to take flight in my belly. “And it’s tomorrow.”