A Trick of Light by Stan Lee

Author:Stan Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

21

Caught

My fault, my fault, it’s all my fault.

Nia slips back through the narrow window, knowing she needs to be quiet and careful, yet almost too anguished to care. It seems like a miracle that she made it home at all; her grief was so overwhelming that it was nearly impossible to navigate through it, to find her way through the narrow passage to the classroom. She left her decoy avatar meditating under a tree in a forest world after telling Father she wanted to focus and not be disturbed. But after tonight, returning to the idyllic green landscape feels like a cruel joke. She lashes out, sobbing, scattering the trees and leaves and flowers into nanodust.

What happened tonight is her fault. It was her idea to expose and bring down that network, her stupid idea. She let Cameron’s eagerness infect her. The sense of purpose, of being part of something exciting and important, was intoxicating. She had allowed it to make her incautious—she had even convinced him that they didn’t need to know who was running the troll farm, that what mattered was taking it down, even as she knew better than anyone how deep and tangled its roots were. And now he’s paying the price for her stupidity, and she’s ruined everything—including her own best chance at freedom. Cameron was supposed to be her knight, her savior, the one who rescues her from this prison. Now he’s a captive himself, and how will she escape without him? She can’t. He was her only hope.

She thinks again of the way Cameron looked in that moment, knowing he was caught, trapped. The way it felt when they dragged him away—she had no idea anything could hurt so much. The emotion she feels is something that has no name, too huge and wild to be contained. Its enormity terrifies her.

He was going to save her.

Now she has to save him.

The terrifying grief fades into the background as she gets to work, concentrating, channeling all her skill and energy into the search she left unfinished. The code is like a sea, consuming her. She dives down, deeper and deeper, finding the openings she once overlooked, chasing the trail of the enemy that tried to take everything from her. She can see it now—she doesn’t understand why she didn’t see it before. Heartbreak has sharpened her insights somehow; she sees not just what’s there, but what’s not. The path to their doorstep is there in the space between spaces, like breadcrumbs scattered in the gaps between the code. Finally, it rises up in front of her, a wall of security as vast and complex as she’s ever seen. She knows that Cameron is behind it. She can feel him somehow, the same way she did on that wonderful night when they first met—when she found him setting the world on fire because he was too gifted and bored to do anything else. His mind had called to hers in that moment. It calls to her now.

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