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“Let’s hope so.” He stands in front of it, but nothing happens. He waves his card again. “That’s strange.”

He looks up. “Doc?”

“Yes, Lucas.”

“Can you tell me why the doors to the Hall of Records, South Wing, won’t open?”

“Yes, Lucas.”

We stand there and wait. Lucas looks annoyed. “Any minute now, Doc.”

“I am sorry. Would you like me to tell you? It is a slightly different query. Not to quibble.”

“Please.”

“Your plastic is no longer cleared for Classified access. According to the Wik, the restriction was added when you returned from the Tracks.”

With me. The day he found me.

I remember Ro, with a slight blush.

Us.

“Are you serious?” Lucas leans his head against the door in disbelief.

“This is not a joke. Would you like to hear a joke? I have downloaded approximately two million seven hundred forty-two thousand jokes to the Wik.”

“Another time, Doc.”

Lucas looks at Tima. “You want to try your plastic?”

She shakes her head. “I wasn’t cleared even when you were.”

Ro shrugs and pulls a sharpened piece of shale out of his pocket. One of his boyhood Grass weapons, a rock honed so razor-thin it could slit a man’s throat. Before anyone can say anything, he’s wedged it into the doors, trying the bottom, then the top. “If I can just find where the sensors are.”

“A rock? You’re going to circumvent the Embassy Security system with a rock?” Lucas snorts.

Ro glares at him, over his shoulder. “A sharp rock.”

Just then, it breaks off in his hands, and he is left holding a crumbled bit of stone.

“Not anymore,” says Lucas, looking at it.

Tima sighs. “There’s no point. There’s no successful scenario here. We can’t short the doors, we need power to open them. We can’t override the restriction, or they’ll know. We can’t do anything. We might as well give up.”

She’s getting hysterical.

“We can’t give up.” I look at them. “It’s not an option. We have to find out what’s going on.” I hear the Ambassador’s voice echoing inside my head.

You lived so you could pay the debt.

The Ambassador was right about something. I can’t walk away. I owe too many things to too many people.

“If you have a better idea, let me know. Because as far as I can tell, nobody’s opening this door without a Classified plastic.” Lucas stands with his back to the door. He’s giving up, I feel it.

The librarian walks by, poking her head down our aisle. We flatten ourselves against the doors.

Caught. I brace myself for the inevitable questions.

But she’s not suspicious. She’s too busy smiling at Lucas. They’re always smiling at him, everyone.

That’s when it comes to me. Lucas doesn’t need an access pass. Lucas
is
an access pass.

“I’ve got a better idea,” I say.

He didn’t want to do it. But there he is.

Lucas stands, casually, at the front desk of the main library. The librarian, the Director of Archive Services, actually, according to her nameplate, is still smiling at him. Lilias Green.

She inclines her head into the space between them. Her hands begin to slide across the smooth wood of the counter.

“Lilias. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me.” He drapes his long, lean form across the edge of the wood.

“Of course, Mr. Amare.”

“Lucas, please. Call me Lucas.”

She smiles again, nodding.

“You see, there’s something wrong with my plastic. You know I’m cleared for Classified, I mean, the Ambassador is the most Classified thing in this whole place, and she’s my mom.”

Mom.
I’ve never heard Lucas use the word. It makes him sound soft and young, which is I guess the point.

Her neck arches, stretching closer.

“Of course. It must be an oversight. How unfortunate.” Her smile wobbles, and I can tell she is waiting for him to ask.

Her eyes grow thick-lidded. Her pupils dilate.

“I can’t bear to watch,” mutters Tima, next to me.

“Shh.” I scroll through a digi-text, a few tables away, but I’m not reading. I can feel it, every beat, while they speak.

Ro stands at the terminal next to Tima. “You think he’s got it? Dol?”

I close my eyes, reaching toward them. The warmth coming from Lucas is blazing and bright. The girl curls around it; she can’t help herself. She leans toward him, pulling closer into the heady buzz of intoxicating brain waves that are uniquely, distinctly Lucas.

“Oh yeah.”
That poor girl
, I think. It’s a jarring thought. Is there ever a girl who isn’t like that, to Lucas?

Is any of it real at all?

My cheeks flush pink. I’m embarrassed to admit I am thinking about it. Him.

It’s only a matter of seconds before they walk by us. Lucas doesn’t so much as look our way as they go.

“Man, you’re a piece of work.” Ro shakes his head but even he can’t deny it. The doors to the Hall of Records are open in front of us.

“She really didn’t want to do it, either.” Lucas looks sad. Pale, and exhausted. Utterly drained—I know the feeling all too well.
He’s sorry for Lilias
, I think.
Using her like that.

Tima nods. “Which means she must know she’s not supposed to help you. Which means, in turn, they must have sent out some kind of departmental notice. That’s the reasonable assumption.”

Lucas nods. “We’re screwed.”

Ro and I look at each other as the doors slide shut behind us. In every direction, all I see now are walls of metal shelving, digi-files labeled with numbers. It’s like staring at a cave full of sleeping silver bats; they hang in rows like small boxed creatures.

“The Embassy stores the most confidential records here, and keeps all this sensitive information isolated from the rest of the network.” Tima sounds proud. “The only way to access the data is to get inside and use a direct connection. Cumbersome, but also very secure.”

“Cumbersome?” Ro laughs.

Tima looks confused. “That’s what I said.”

“Who talks like that?” Ro shakes his head.

Tima smiles, though I don’t know why. Cumbersome connections only make her job harder.

Like jokes. And friends.

I look closer and see that each file is a day, a week, a month, a year. It’s strange to imagine the monumental events and birthdays and weddings and disasters, all boiled down into rows of numbered metal boxes.

My birthday.

My parents. My brothers. The—the opposite of their birthday.

I am drawn to one box in particular.

My hand lingers on one of the digi-files for The Day. There are whole rows of them, because there were so many people who died on The Day. You couldn’t possibly put that much information into one drive. It’s too big, even if it was just the four of them.

My family. My world.

The Silent Cities.

You can’t fit that into anything.

I feel the others behind me now, staring at the impossible wall of metal. My vision blurs; my heart starts to rattle against my ribs. I am overwhelmed by a sadness so powerful I could explode, or erupt into the kind of tears that never stop coming.

Ro takes my hand in his, bringing me back from the brink. Back into my own body, this room. His hand
burns but I don’t let go. His anger is staggering.

I feel Tima receding, overpowered by terror, wanting to disappear. Only the presence of Lucas steadies her, just as somehow, I steady him.

The four of us stand together and for the first time I feel as though we are united, connected to each other whether we like it or not.

And so we stare at the tragedy in front of us.

Until Ro breaks the spell.

“This isn’t just cumbersome. It’s mental. There’s too much here. If we don’t know what we’re looking for, how do we know where to look?” Ro slams his hand against the nearest row of metal digis.

“We’re not looking for everything that’s happened. We’re looking for one thing that’s happened.”

It’s Tima who speaks, and in the feel of the words I sense she is recovering. “Or four things.” I follow her gaze through the years. Seventeen years.

We spend the better part of an hour trying to turn back the clock. One digi after another, all full of secrets. Records of thousands of hours, of days—of births and deaths and all the more ordinary transmissions that lie in between.

I return to the files and detach the last metal digi from the tracking. The final digi from the day I was born. The day three of us were born, if Tima and Lucas are right about our shared birthday. Maybe four, since Ro doesn’t know or couldn’t remember enough to tell us, either way.

“That has to be it.” Ro sounds excited. Tima shrugs, and I carry the digi over to the research table in the center of the room. I let it bang to the surface.

“Open it,” says Lucas. I just stand there looking at it. I don’t know what I’m thinking—if I’m afraid I’ll find something, or afraid I won’t.

Tima loses her patience, and snaps open the magnetized file. It unfolds like a flower, five screens surrounding a row of drives.

At least, that’s what’s supposed to be there, judging from the others we’ve opened in the past hour. But this one is different.

It’s empty.

“That can’t be right,” she says, looking at Lucas, stricken. “There has to be some kind of mistake.”

“No, there doesn’t.” I feel how painful this is for Lucas to admit. “The Embassy doesn’t make mistakes. It just means we’re on to something.”

Ro is exultant. “It means Fortis is right. There’s something they don’t want us to know. Something that’s supposed to be in that digi.”

The implications fill me with unease.
Am I really just a bullet? A secret weapon?

“Something so important she’d kill my plastic to keep us away, and then destroy the file.” Lucas is bleak. The pronoun cuts right to the point.

“Who?” Ro asks, though he heard it, just like I did.

“Who else,” Lucas says, glumly.

I slide myself between them before Ro can start. “We need to find out. What did you do with Doc?”

“He’s tracking Colonel Catallus. I told him it was a game. Hide-and-seek.”

“Bring him back.”

Lucas looks up at the nearest ceiling grating. “Hey Doc. Where are you? Are you winning?”

There is a pause, and then the familiar voice reappears. “I believe I am, Lucas. As I am everywhere, and Colonel Catallus seems to be unaware that we are playing. It is in fact more challenging to
not follow
you, Lucas. Is your hiding complete yet?”

“Just about, Doc. But this is kind of a time-out.”

“Orwell,” interrupts Tima, looking up at the ceiling. “We’re in the Hall of Records. Are you getting this?”

“Yes, Tima,” Doc says. “Would you like to play, too?”

“What do you make of a day missing from the year and the month we were born, seventeen years ago?” Tima stares toward the grating, as if she were studying Doc’s own face.

“It would appear that the Embassy is suffering from some organizational or clerical error.” Doc’s tone remains uninflected.

“Do you find it typical, Orwell, for the Embassy to suffer from either an organizational or a clerical error?”

“No, Timora.”

“Me, neither.”

“Doc,” says Lucas. “What do you really think is happening?”

There is a pause, and I hear the comforting whir of machine life. “I think, Lucas, that certain pieces of information relating to that date have been removed from the Hall of Records.”

“I think so too, Doc.”

Doc takes another moment to respond. “Is it, possibly, a joke? Jokes can be surprising.”

“No, Doc. It’s not a joke.”

More silence. Then Doc tries again. “And it is not a game.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Then it’s very serious, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Doc, I imagine it is. Do you know who would do something like this? Delete information from the Hall of Records?”

“Yes, Lucas.”

“Who?”

“Someone of high stature. Someone with clear access. Someone with a detailed understanding of the situation pertaining to those dates.”

“Who, Doc?”

He waits as Doc resets his thinking.

“Your mother, the Ambassador, Lucas.”

The warmth that came from him when he was talking
to Lilias seems impossible, now. I wonder if he is going to argue with the Ambassador.

If they ever argue.

If she ever acts like his mother, rather than the one point of contact between the Hole and the House of Lords.

He may not have a mother any more than I do
, I think.

Maybe less.

At least I had one, once. I try to hold on to that.

It’s more than Lucas has.

I watch as his mouth slides into a tight line. “Do you know if she did?”

Another machine pause.

“I do not. I am, however, checking the feed now. Please give me a moment.”

“Of course.”

“Lucas?”

“Yes, Doc?”

“That feed has been re-Classified with a
Private Digi
designation, and moved to the Ambassador’s own office. And Colonel Catallus has asked me to contact you from the classroom. Apparently he is not in the mood for gaming. You are sixty-seven minutes and twenty-nine seconds late to class. Thirty. Thirty-one.”