The Last Days of Lorien (5 page)

He just snorted as I checked myself out in the dull, tiny mirror over my dresser, trying in vain to flatten the irregular ridges of my cowlicked hair with spit.

“Dude,” he said. “You think a little primping’s gonna make any difference? All the girls in the city just stare right through us. Our tunics may as well be invisibility cloaks.”

I knew he was right, but I groaned anyway, turned from my reflection and headed out the door as he followed behind me. It was hard to be too upset. No, grid maintenance wasn’t all that exciting or anything, but still. We were going to the city.

We arrived at the transport hangar and got into the academy’s only available two-seater, a teardrop-shaped vehicle some of the other students referred to as the Egg. I watched from the passenger seat as Rapp spoke into a receiver on the dashboard, programming our journey into City Center according to the assignment that Orkun had given him. “Sector Three twenty-nine, Security nodule H, Patch Three.” He flipped through a binder, pulling up additional coordinates. “Sector Two ninety-seven, nodule J, Patch Seven.” He had a cocky little smile as he said it, like this stuff made him feel really important or something.

I didn’t get Rapp at all. How could anyone get excited about grid maintenance? It was like getting excited about brushing your teeth, except that brushing your teeth only takes two minutes, and
that’s
if you do a really good job.

At the same time, I felt sort of bad that I was always giving him a hard time. Rapp was like me, in his own weird way. I was in the LDA’s engineering program because I’d been forced to be here, but he actually
wanted
to be here. Considering there were only two of us in the whole class, that sort of made him an even bigger freak than me. And he didn’t care. Most of the time, he hardly even seemed to notice when I made fun of him. I almost had to admire the guy.

Obviously I would never tell him that, but at least, I figured, I could tell him I didn’t really think his mom looked like a chimæra’s butt, and that she was probably actually pretty hot.

But before I could even formulate my apology, he’d entered our last coordinate and the Egg took off, shooting us out of the hangar, past the cube of the academy building, and then through the pastures and mud huts and Chimæra pens of the Alwon Kabarak.

Alwon was the only Kabarak on Lorien within city limits, and thus would’ve been my first choice had I been assigned to one. I watched the early-rising Kabarakians, dressed in their red silks and ceremonial charms, busily tending to their land as our Egg whizzed past them and around them, unfazed by another routine intrusion of LDA speedcraft.

It was funny to think, only weeks ago I was in a depressed panic at the idea of working on a Kabarak. After my time at the academy, it no longer looked like such a bad way to live. Then again, maybe I was just jealous of their outfits—I looked better in red than in green.

The Egg crossed the western edge of Alwon and gained speed through the depopulated outer industrial zones of the city’s east side on its course to City Center, miles ahead. The Spires of Elkin glinted brightly from the morning suns. I realized I had never seen City Center from this particular distance and angle. Perhaps it was nostalgia, or homesickness, but it looked more beautiful than ever.

Then, beyond the spires, I saw something strange.

Off in the distance, sprouting between the spires on the horizon, was a massive column of violet light, stabbing upwards into the clouds. It was a bright morning, and yet the rays of the suns did nothing to diminish the hard-edged, almost tactile thickness of the light. It was astonishing.

“Quartermoon’s in three days,” said Rapp, barely even looking at the light.

According to our collective legend, a quartermoon hung in the sky the day the First Elders discovered the Phoenix Stones, and over the years a holiday had developed around the regular appearance of the quartermoon in the sky. In the city and out on the settlements and Kabaraks, people party into the wee hours, dancing, gathering around campfires and lighting fireworks, celebrating the miracle of our planet’s rebirth. Temporary monuments and light displays, called Heralds, were often arranged for by city government or by the Elder Council, to commemorate our history and to celebrate the quartermoon’s approach.

This was a much bigger and more elaborate Herald than I’d ever seen before, so tall and majestic it was probably visible far outside the city—if it was even coming from the city at all. It was a little weird, but I brushed it off. If there’s one thing we Loric, not to mention our Elders, are good at, it’s thinking up new ways to celebrate how great we are.

Personally, it seemed to me like the Elders could think of better ways to use their time and powers, but who was I to question their ancient wisdom?

When the Egg finally whirred to a stop at a corner on the edge of Eilon Park, I felt a pang of surprise.

“Wait a minute,” I said, turning slowly to Rapp. “
This
is where we’re doing our grid maintenance?”

Rapp looked at me like I was crazy. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “I told you we were going to City Center. Why?”

“Because,” I said. “This is Kora.” I pointed to a nondescript door on the side of a big nondescript building. “That’s the rear entrance.”

“That’s the club you’ve been talking about all this time?” Rapp pushed the door open and climbed out of the Egg, his feet hitting the pavement with a thud. “I have to say, man, I was picturing something—I don’t know—like, fancier or whatever. That just looks like a big, dirty warehouse.”

I frowned as I climbed out after him. “It’s the
back
door,” I said. “Anyway, it’s not supposed to look like anything on the outside. That makes it seem special when you see the
inside.
”

Rapp cocked his head curiously and gave me a shrug like,
whatever you say
, and headed to a pole towering above the bottom slope of Eilon’s Hill.

In the days before I’d learned how to manipulate my ID band, it was practically the only place in town where I could go to dance and hang out at night when my parents were out of town. It wasn’t anywhere near as cool as the Chimæra, and the music was actually pretty bad most of the time, plus it always sort of smelled. But because they didn’t serve ampules, there was no age restriction for getting in. I took what I could get.

Now, though, I would have given just about anything to be back at Kora, even with the bad music and the awful smell. Suddenly I missed that smell.

Now I was standing outside, in a wrinkled, ugly green tunic, and well, there was nothing I could do about it. I shuffled over to Rapp, who had already used a harness to elevate himself a third of the way up the pole towards the grid point’s control panel, and prepared to hoist myself up with him. At least up there, no one would recognize me in my tunic.

Before I could begin my ascent, Rapp called down at me. “This one’s actually not in such bad shape—looks like a one-man job. I
told
Orkun I’d be able to handle it on my own, but she still doesn’t trust me.”

I was annoyed. It wasn’t like I was that into the idea of hauling myself all the way up there just to fiddle with a bunch of wires for hours, but at least it was something to do. “So what? I’m just supposed to stand here and watch you work?”

Rapp, already engrossed in running diagnostics on the control panel, sighed and looked back at me. “If you want to help, go check on the next patch on our list. Sector Two ninety-seven’s walkable, but if you’re feeling lazy you can program the Egg and I can meet you there.” Rapp turned back to his work.

It was like Rapp was
trying
to get to me. He knew I had never done a maintenance run before and wouldn’t have a clue how to start. He was forcing me to ask for help. Maybe he knew me better than I’d figured—if there’s one thing I hate, it’s asking for help.

“Rapp. You know I’ve never done it before.”

“Orkun ran through every last step just two days ago in class.”

Had she?
I honestly had no recollection of it. “Guess I missed that,” I said.

“It was on the homework too. Oh, wait . . . you never do the homework.”

For a second I thought he was actually mad, but then he started to chuckle, and tossed the key to the Egg down to me. “The spare kit’s behind the passenger seat. The equipment is mostly self-explanatory, and if you get confused you can always hit the Prompt button for an explanation.”

He turned back to his work. “Trust me, it’s not that hard. If you can trick the door scanners at the Chimæra, you’ll be able to figure it out in no time.”

I walked up Eilon’s Hill with my kit on my back and an info-mod in my hand—it was a small square device that could pinpoint my exact location in the city, and would also allow me to communicate with Rapp, or even with the other Cêpan back at the academy if necessary.

Even though I knew this area like the back of my hand, I’d never bothered to learn the city’s official coordinate system. As I crossed over the hill and entered the commercial district north of Eilon Park, the info-mod indicated I had entered Sector 302, which most people called the Crescent because of the way the main street curved in on itself like a sliver of a moon.

I watched the module with strange fascination as all my old favorite neighborhood haunts—the Pit, Arcadia—were converted to their Munis numbers on my tab. 282, 304, 299.

I finally arrived at 297. Looking up from the locator, I realized with a start that I was standing just outside the Chimæra. I sighed to myself, trying not to think too much about it. It didn’t matter what building I was outside. I wasn’t here to go inside—I
couldn’t
go inside.

I was here to climb a pole.

So I threw the harness on and made my way up. When I reached the top, I looked out onto the horizon. From up here, the column of light Rapp and I had seen earlier looked even more impressive. Well, maybe
impressive
is the wrong word. Actually, it was sort of creepy. It was vibrating and pulsing in a way that was almost otherworldly. And it was hard to tell where it was coming from—it could have been a few blocks away, or a hundred miles. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen for a Quartermoon celebration before.

It wasn’t my business though. I was here to work on the grid. So I unlocked the front of the control panel and flipped it open to find the keypad tucked within a dense nest of overlapping multicolored wires.

I sighed again, a longer, deeper sigh than before.

This was going to take a while.

It was still the tail end of the morning, pretty much the only time of day the club wasn’t hopping. The entrance to the Chimæra was still quiet. But I knew the crowd would pick up within a few hours. I wondered for a second what my old friends would think if any of them stumbled by. Then I realized that they probably wouldn’t even recognize me. To them, now, I was just another guy in a green tunic.

The work was surprisingly absorbing. I started running automated diagnostics on individual wires to determine if they were in need of replacement. The only tricky part was figuring out which wires were which. They were all numbered, and the degraded wires had to be removed and replaced within a correct sequence lest I damage this entire piece of the grid. But as Rapp had promised, the Prompt system that came with the kit provided pretty helpful instructions when I got confused or when I had trouble identifying one of the degraded wires by sight.

It had been weeks since I’d messed around with my ID band tech, and I had forgotten how much I missed this kind of tinkering. In my brief time at the LDA, I’d already forgotten that I was actually pretty good at it. I liked the way you could take it one step at a time, the way all the different pieces fit together like a puzzle. How even if you had no idea what you were doing, you could pretty much figure it out as long as you had a handle on the basic principles of it.

Before too long I’d stopped relying on the Prompt module at all. I was identifying the wire sequences with no trouble and was adjusting them easily, going mostly on instinct.

I had never really given much thought to the grid, or what a vital function it provided to the city. In addition to using sophisticated sensors to monitor and register the goings-on of Capital City, compiling information for Munis about the flow of people and goods—keeping everything running smoothly,
perfectly—
the grid’s lesser-known function was a protective one. The nondescript poles that were so omnipresent that I barely noticed them actually stretched an invisible latticework of defensive shields and counterattack systems above the skyline. The reasoning behind the installation of the grid some hundreds of years ago was that the city had by far the highest population density of any part of the planet and was home to most of the important members of the Lorien government, along with being the central hub for our most important information and communications systems. Any enemy planning an attack on Lorien would likely strike the city first.

I still didn’t believe that was going to happen, but I also had to grudgingly admit that the whole thing was pretty cool. Too bad it was also basically useless.

As I worked with almost unconscious ease, I contemplated the grid with new interest. One out of every four wires I ran diagnostics on needed replacement, which seemed strange. I reached back into my kit to check the date of this pole’s last maintenance check, and was surprised to discover it was only a couple weeks ago. These wires were burning out at a pretty fast clip.

Of all the wires I was servicing there were very few backups or redundancies—almost every wire served a unique function—and a bunch of them were messed up, which meant that this pole was probably pretty much broken. If I understood the nature of the grid’s defense shield well enough, that meant the entire area around here was vulnerable to attack. Why would that be, if it had just been repaired? I wondered if the control panel had a special glitch that was shorting out wires at a faster rate.

My curiosity stoked, I hurried through my work, eager to get back to Rapp and ask him if he’d seen anything similar in the poles he’d serviced. I wanted to know if this one was a fluke or if there was a bigger problem.