Guild Boss by Jayne Castle

Author:Jayne Castle [Castle, Jayne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2021-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Lucy rezzed the lock of her front door, walked into the hall, and rezzed the lights. With a cheerful chortle, Otis bounced down to the floor and zipped into the living room. He stopped in front of the sliding glass doors that opened onto the balcony and chortled again.

Lucy opened the door for him. He bounded across the small balcony, hopped up onto the railing, and then disappeared over the side.

“Where is he going?” Gabriel said.

“Sometimes he takes off at night for a few hours. He often returns with a little chunk of quartz or amber. I think he hangs out with other dust bunnies in the ruins. When he’s finished partying, he’ll come home.”

“How does he get back inside your apartment? It’s two stories above the street. Please don’t tell me you leave the balcony doors open at night.”

“No, of course not. When he gets back he’ll show up on the balcony and let me know he’s home. Trust me, he’s not subtle about it.”

Gabriel looked around, contemplating her warmly lit apartment with a speculative expression. It wasn’t hard to guess what he was thinking.

“It’s kind of scary to realize that everything can suddenly stop functioning in a heartbeat, isn’t it?” she said.

“It’s an eye-opener, that’s for sure,” Gabriel said. “Makes me think about what it must have been like for the First Generation when they realized the Curtain had closed and they were stranded with Old World technology that was crumbling in front of them.”

She shivered. “Yes.”

She went back into the entry hall, set her pack on the floor, and slipped off her leather jacket.

Gabriel followed her and took off his own pack. His grim expression worried her.

“What?” she asked.

“I’m thinking that what happened tonight makes you realize we may have become too dependent on rez amber to operate everything from our cars to our refrigerators.” He shrugged out of his jacket. “The city-states need to consider developing alternative sources of power.”

Lucy sat down on the hall bench and went through the process of removing her boots. “Resonating amber has always been cheap, available, and nonpolluting. Pretty much the perfect energy source.”

“It’s also been extremely reliable. I’ve never heard of an incident like the one we witnessed tonight. Rez amber has to be tuned periodically. It can melt if you push enough energy through it, but a city’s power grid is fueled by thousands of expertly tuned amber bars. They’re designed and installed in an alternating sequence on a chain that makes it impossible for a large number of them to fail simultaneously.”

“You know what they say—there’s no such thing as impossible.”

“True.” He sat down beside her and unbuckled his scarred and scuffed boots.

“Are you wondering if this might be a problem that will require the Guild’s attention?” she asked.

He set one boot neatly under the bench and went to work on the other. “Yes.”

“Seems like a problem for engineers, not the Guild.”

“You said it yourself, Lucy. Something destroyed the Dead City eons ago. What if the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.