The Dark Intercept by Julia Keller

Author:Julia Keller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

17

Death in the Rain

The next day Shura came by the lobby of Protocol Hall to meet Violet for lunch. Violet had decided to tell Shura what she’d discovered in her mother’s journal about Danny and Kendall.

But as they left the glass-walled monolith and headed for the food kiosks lining the plaza, Violet changed her mind. She still hadn’t decided what the journal entries meant. Before she told anyone, she first wanted to do what she always did when she faced a daunting problem: think about it. Her brain, Violet had found when dealing with past challenges, was her best ally.

“Burritos okay?” Shura said.

“Absolutely.”

Each kiosk featured a cuisine from a lost culture of Old Earth, a culture that had vanished in the terrible melting pot of global disaster: nations and their distinctive foods slid into one another like objects rolling together on a listing ship. The keen specificity of flavors, the details of preparation, had been lost in the amalgamation. When planning New Earth, Ogden Crowley had hired a cultural historian to research these long-forgotten foods and re-create them here. Thus Violet and her friends often ate tacos or pasta or chow mein, but only knew Mexico, Italy, and China as strange, ancient names in the history lectures on their consoles.

There was a long line in front of the kiosk. By the time they paid for their burritos, Violet had only about fifteen minutes left on her lunch break. Shura found an empty spot along the stone retaining wall that circled the plaza. Other people were perched along the wall, too, eating foods that had not been part of an actual family dinner for well over a century but had found a second life here on New Earth, like animals extinct in the wild that still manage to survive in zoos.

“You’ve heard, right?” Shura said. “There was another breach. After the one the other night. Just for a few seconds. It’s getting pretty scary, right? I mean—who are these people?”

“Yeah, I heard.” It was all anyone was talking about in Protocol Hall. And everywhere else, for that matter. No wonder her father wasn’t sleeping at night.

Lowering her voice, Shura said, “My mom thinks they must have the original source code for the Intercept.” She’d also looked carefully around the plaza before speaking, to make sure no one was eavesdropping. “That’s the only way they’d be able to get around it. Without the Intercept knowing they’re there.”

Violet had seen other people do that—give a quick, nervous look around their immediate surroundings. She wondered why. The entity that was actually spying on them—and doing it 100 percent of the time—had nothing to do with anyone sitting within earshot. You couldn’t lower your voice enough to escape the Intercept. The cleverest safeguards and best evasive maneuvers were irrelevant.

How, then, did the group calling itself the Rebels of Light pull it off?

“Any more threats to your mom?” Violet asked.

Shura nodded. “Yeah.” She set down her food. Violet could tell that she’d suddenly lost her taste for it.

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