The Receiver

2 8 - R U T H L E S S

The tech room in the east wing of this random skyrise in Upper has been stripped to the bones. There are no comfortable chairs or workstations, no windows to see out to know whether it's night or day, and no laserscreens besides one on a single wall.

But it comes with one perk: privacy.

I knew the Zephyr building would be too monitored and predictable a place to bring a dozen techbots writing countercodes against the engineers who made them; luckily, Zander did too. This room is where he's spent countless hours, he said, working on his own codes when conjuring up new ideas for The Trials.

I could laugh out loud, remembering that now; this room is in every way the opposite of the game he created, so clean and shiny. But the bots are by far the shiniest objects in the room. They look comatose, gathered behind me and the single laserscreen in a semicircle, sleeping on their feet with their eyes open. They're the ones doing the heavy lifting, working furiously with ones and zeros, intertwining them in different combinations inside their heads, making strings of code long enough to wrap around this entire room, if we had enough screens to prove it. Apparently, Zander's had them working on countercodes since the night he had the conversation about Lower with his father. If these droids were human, they'd have gone mad by now, or starved to death if nothing else.

I glance up at the pale gray ceiling and around the whole edge of the circular room. I can't help it, can't stop my paranoia. I tell myself there are no eyes here besides the bots, no hidden cameras, no microscopic pores in the walls listening. At least none I can see.

I turn back to the laserscreen and focus.

I've split the already miniature panel into sections, keeping one eye on Milo and Katzan, one on Iris, Jin, and Keiko, one on Zander, one on La Señora and the gangs, and one on Lyath.

The section trained on Iris shows them in the same position they've been in for hours. I imagine her whole body is aching, her muscles straining where she's hunkered down behind a thick curtain of tangled vines.

Crouching in a similar fashion behind another vine curtain on the opposite side of the wide metal doors are Jin and her little sister Keiko, who, despite being no older than nine or ten, is armed with two miniature blades about half the length of Jin's katana. Each of them grips her weapon, Jin with her precious sword and Iris with The Raven's kukri blades.

Through the thorny partition, Iris watches Keiko slowly fall asleep from boredom inside her homemade armored suit most likely made from bot scraps. What had probably started as a project to play dress up to look more like her sister was now being used in a potentially deadly situation and the worry of that is apparent on Jin's pale face.

I tune into the audio feed from the same cameras I'm getting the visual from—the mounts on their suits—and hear Iris speak for the first time in a long time, barely above a whisper.

"I would've done the same," she says. "I would've brought Rhododendron too."

Brought me? I think she means she wouldn't've been able to keep me from coming along.

Jin nods, her eyes trained intensely on the doors. The doors themselves are wider than our old apartment had been from wall to wall.

I do my best to prevent myself from imagining what might lie on the other side.

On another panel, my friends stand near the southeast corner of Central Park, busy handing out protective gear they must have ordered late last night before they left to hordes of children. They're all gathered outside a derelict building I recognize. I think it was a famous hotel, before. Now, it must serve as one of the Scrappers' home bases. For years, no one really knew where they stayed; we thought maybe they'd found a system of tunnels that had somehow miraculously never flooded, or the waters had receded from.