Page 22 of Last Chance to Save the World

Subvocal isn’t great for detailed messages; the artificial intelligence built into the chip relies on context and guesses to form complicated sentences, but for a few words—especially when we need to give each other warnings—this will work well.

“You have all you need?” Rian asks.

I touch my right ear and the silver stud earring. My other earring, the one I left at the gala, was a code scanner, receiving whatever code I needed.

This one is the opposite: it replaces code.

I wrote the program myself, and I spent the past week in the portal on the voyage from Rigel-Earth to here checking and rechecking it. I built the code like a virus—all I have to do is upload it into the nanobot program, and it will overwrite the malware Strom Fetor had added in.

“I’ll need an hour,” I remind Rian.

He scowls. “I’ll buy you all the time I can.”

An hour is going to be tight for the plan to work. “I can’t help how long it takes for code to get uploaded. It’s not instantaneous.”

“I know,” he grumbles. He’s a nervous ball of energy, fiddling with the plastic backing of the comm stickers.

I reach over and touch his hand. He looks up, eyes locking on mine.

“It’s going to be fine,” I say.

He smiles ruefully. “You’re a good liar.”

“I am.”

“At least one of us has confidence.”

“Before you go,” Mom calls from the stairs, announcing her presence. She bursts through the door, a box in her hands.

“What’s that?” I ask.

Mom shrugs, setting it down on the table in front of me. “I have no idea. You told me weeks ago you were having a package delivered here; don’t you remember?”

If only Rian knew I learned how to lie from my mother. Whatever is in this box must be the reason why she made sure Bruna sent me here and insisted on being here when Rian and I arrived.

I brush aside the pigeon feather stuck to the box. The gray feather loops and swirls as it drifts down, and I glance at Mom, who’s staring at me. Hard. That feather was part of the message.

I rip into the package, withdrawing . . .

“A sun shield?” Rian asks. “Why did you buy a new one?”

Clever, clever Mother. “This is not just any sun shield,” I say.

Mom heads downstairs to make another pot of coffee. And give me a chance to pretend to Rian like I planned for this all along.

“Hold your scanner up to it,” I say as I take my shirt off, slip the sun shield over my head, and smooth it against my body. The paper-thin material blends into my skin, almost unnoticeable—and anyone who did notice it would think nothing of it, given our location. I pull my shirt back on over it. Only the hood dangling over the collar behind my neck stands out, but my hair covers most of that.

Rian lifts his cuff up, looking at me through the recorder lens built into it. I pull the hood over my hair, obscuring part of my face.

“Smart,” Rian says in an appreciative tone.

All sun shields block radiation from contributing to skin cancer or climate sickness. This one also blocks camera lenses. It’s woven with tiny reflective threads from Gliese-Earth that cast light flares and sparkles, making it hard to capture a clean shot, especially one that could be used for identification. The brighter the area, the worse the image captured.

And Fetor Tech’s headquarters areverybright.

“But...” Rian’s voice trails off.

“What?” I demand.

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