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  “Right there.” Frost pointed across the parking lot just as three people emerged from a side door of the building and got into a car. I recognized my mom’s green jacket.

  “Okay.” We watched the other car carry my parents out of the parking lot and down the road.

  I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to them.

  “Miss Zhao.” Frost nodded at the building and I followed him inside, past another sleepy old man at the guard’s desk, and into the elevators. We got out on three and went down a long, shadowy corridor past a lot of empty meeting rooms to a row of little offices. Light spilled out of one of the open doorways. We went inside.

  Brian sat behind the desk. Not his desk, obviously. We were at least half an hour away from his building at Cygnus West. Plus, this desk wasn’t covered in stacks of papers and tablets covered in fingerprints. The computer was off. He had his phone in his hand when I walked in.

  “Have a seat.” He nodded at the chair.

  I sat.

  Frost stood in the doorway behind me.

  Brian glanced at Frost. “Give us a few minutes.”

  Frost nodded and left.

  “Carmen.” Brian set his phone on the desk. I couldn’t quite see the screen, but I assumed it was recording us.

  “Brian.”

  “You know why you’re here. Four clause violations of your non-compete.” He sighed and shook his head. “This is serious.”

  “Is it?” I winced. I didn’t mean to sound glib, but I was genuinely confused. “I mean, Cygnus shut down my holography project when you fired me, right? So how did I violate my non-compete agreement if you don’t have a holography program for me to compete with?”

  “Cygnus owns your on-site research from before your termination, which includes all future developments from that research.”

  “Really?” That didn’t sound fair.

  “Really. Which is why this is so serious.”

  “Uhm, okay.” I moved forward to the edge of the chair and touched the desk. “But you know I wasn’t trying to hurt the company, right? I was just trying to… to prove that I could do it, you know? And to have something to show a new boss, or to get a contract. I wasn’t trying to hurt Cygnus. I was just trying to pay the rent and put some food on the table, and help my parents.”

  A part of me was mad that I was trying to justify myself to the man who had just arranged for my parents to be kidnapped, but he had all the power. All I had was a pair of gloves that wouldn’t do me much good unless I was willing to slice his head off with a laser sword. And I was pretty sure he would call that bluff.

  “Intentions don’t really matter right now, Carmen.” He pointed at his phone. “I saw the clips. The sword, the shield. Frost told me what happened at your apartment. It’s very impressive. It really is.”

  “Thanks.” I saw my chance. “Listen, maybe there’s a way for everyone to win here. I mean, you saw the gloves, you know they work, you know this is big. How about a trade? I give Cygnus the patents for the holo-gloves, and Cygnus hires me back to run the program. I mean, I know you want the tech, and you’ll need an expert to, you know, productize it.”

  I hate made-up words like productize.

  He started to talk, but I interrupted, I kept going, I felt like this might be my one chance to make my case. “And besides, think of the marketing. I’m already the face of this thing. You’ve seen the clips. Everyone has. It went viral today. We could announce tomorrow that the whole thing was a publicity stunt done by Cygnus to drum up hype for the holo-system. So I’m not just the lead engineer, I’m also the, the, what’s it called, the spokesmodel.”

  Brian smiled, but only for a second. “Well, there are a couple problems with that. First off, due to the language of your non-compete, Cygnus already owns the patents for your technology, or it will as soon as the lawyers get in to the office in the morning.”

  My heart sank.

  “Second off, Cygnus does not want this technology, except to keep it off the street.” Brian played with his phone, spinning it on the desk. “I’ve been talking to people all afternoon, and the consensus is that this holo-system of yours could put our printer business, well, out of business. So we’ll be boxing your tech in cold storage for the foreseeable future.”

  “What about the clips online?”

  Brian shrugged. “We’ll ignore it, and it’ll go away. If anyone asks, we’ll just say it was a fake video that you made to try to impress people and get a new job. Easy. Gone.”

  My heart sank even more. He was right. It would all go away. Cygnus would make sure it all went away, and by the end of the week it would be totally gone. Who would vouch for me, those two mouth-breathers from the market? Dom? I did the whole project completely on my own, and now there was no one who could prove it was real.

  Except me.

  I stared at the desk, trying to think of something else to say, something that would save my ass, but my mind was a blank.

  “So here’s what’s going to happen,” Brian said. “Frost texted me that you hid the gloves to make sure your parents were released. Where are the gloves now?”

  In my pockets.

  I didn’t know whether to feel better or worse about the fact that the gloves were right there. So I stalled. “What’s going to happen to me?”

  He looked at me, and for a minute there I thought he really felt bad for me, I thought that maybe he was thinking it over, trying to help me, putting himself in my position and realizing the company was too corrupt, too dangerous—

  “You’ll be arrested and formally charged,” he said calmly. “There’ll be an arraignment, and a trial. Assuming you can’t afford a lawyer, the city will give you one, and he’ll be useless, and Cygnus will win, and you’ll go to federal prison.”

  I stared at him. After a moment I found my voice. “For how long?”

  “Twenty-five years, give or take.”

  Twenty-five… I knew I’d be in trouble, real trouble, but twenty-five years in federal prison? I’d be in my forties by the time I got out. My parents would probably be dead. I’d be too old to use my degree to get a new job because everything I knew would be out of date, and I’d go right back to the south side, to the Reclamation Center, old… alone…

  “Hey Brian,” I said slowly. “Tonight you kidnapped my parents, two totally innocent people, just because I invented something. I didn’t even hurt anyone, and you kidnapped them.”

  “Well, I didn’t, the company did. And your parents were only being detained. It’s all perfectly legal, per the Corporate Espionage Act.”

  “I know it’s legal. But it’s not right.”

  Brian shrugged. “It’s late, Carmen, and I’m not going to debate law, or ethics, or politics with you.”

  “Have you done this before to other people? Or am I the first?”

  “As far as I know, no one has ever invented solid holograms before. You are the first.”

  Petty as it might sound, that did make me feel a little better. Just a little. “What about other inventions, other things that Cygnus didn’t want out there?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s late, and I think we’re done here.”

  “Okay.” I nodded at him, but all I could see were my parents standing on their front steps, and getting shot full of drugs, and being carried away in a car. “Just don’t ever go near my parents again, all right?”

  “Why would we?” He frowned. “Is that a threat?”

  “No.” I slid my hands into my jacket pockets and began wriggling my fingers into the gloves, which was really hard to do and took much longer than I wanted it to. “But this is all wrong, and you know it. My holo-gloves could help people. Instead of expensive feedstock, all they would need would be free energy from the sun to make all sorts of tools. Every farmer, carpenter, mechanic, cook, artist, and even doctors could use them, anywhere in the world. But now you’re going to lock it away so the Cygnus stockholders can get just a little bit richer.”


  Brian sighed and picked up his phone. “Yeah, I’m afraid so. Look, I wish I could do something for you. I liked having you here on the team, and I was sorry I had to let you go, but this… this is out of my hands. You broke the law, you broke your contract. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Yeah.” I finally got the gloves on. “I guess it’s pretty simple.”

  I should point out that I still didn’t have a plan at this point, but it didn’t matter. Plan or no plan, I had to do something. I was out of time and out of ideas.

  “Lux…”

  Brian frowned as he put phone back down. “What?”

  “…hammer.” I whipped my hand out of my pocket as the black, glowing hammer materialized in my grip and I smashed the phone. The screen shattered into a pile of glinting splinters and sparkling sand, surrounded by plastic shards and hints of the crushed circuit sheet underneath.

  Brian shoved back from the desk as I swung a second time at the wreckage of his phone, just to make sure he couldn’t call for help, and then I bolted out the door.

  Frost was standing in the hall just a few feet away, staring at me. Then he dashed toward me and I spun around and ran the other way.

  The office was totally unfamiliar to me, but the layout was pretty open once I got away from the little offices and meeting rooms, so I quickly spotted the elevators and stairs, but they were pretty far away, and Frost was right behind me.

  And he had a gun.

  “Lux, shield!”

  My big round shield materialized in a blaze of purple lasers and I held it over my shoulder like before to cover my back as I ran. And just like before, the edges of the shield sliced through everything I bumped into, including the little gray walls of the workstations, chairs, monitors, a water cooler, and a hand sanitizer dispenser mounted on a wall.

  “Freeze or I’ll fire!” Frost yelled.

  I nearly stopped, but instead I dove around a corner and found myself in an office kitchen. Dead end. All I saw were a sink, a fridge, a few cabinets, and a very dirty-looking coffee maker.

  And a window.

  I froze.

  Of course I froze. I had a man with a gun chasing me and my only escape was a third-floor window. And if guns were new and scary to me, jumping out windows wasn’t much more familiar. Or attractive.

  I glanced at my gloves and realized I still had the hammer and shield on. I tried to think of something that would help me escape from a third-floor window, but everything I had programmed was either a household tool or a medieval fantasy weapon. So I improvised.

  “Lux, hammer off. Lux, shield, increase diameter by five hundred percent and extend projection two yards from origin.”

  The circular shield quickly grew in size, slicing into the floor and ceiling as I ran toward the window. It was your usual office window with no hope of actually sliding it open, so I just ran at it and let the edge of my giant shield smash it out, along with a chunk of the wall. I stood there at the edge, looking down at the distant grass, thinking about how I really didn’t want to jump, when Frost got to the doorway behind me. I saw the gun in his hand.

  So I jumped.

  I held my left arm over my head, and grabbed my left hand with my right hand so the huge round shield was up over my head like an umbrella and I was dangling two yards below it, hoping against hope that it would prove to be a decent parachute.

  It wasn’t.

  Turns out, big flat shields work more like bad wings than good parachutes. So I floated away from the window for about one second, and then quickly sliced forward through the air, tilting crazily to the left as I flew toward the ground, zooming forward as fast as I was falling.

  The ground rushed up to meet me and at the last moment I lost my nerve and shouted, “Lux, off!”

  My disastrous parachute vanished and I dropped to the strip of grass next to the building, falling the last few feet and just crashing to the ground. Nothing graceful, nothing smooth, just a pile of arms and legs smacking the earth.

  It hurt. I couldn’t even breathe for the first minute, it hurt so bad. But I started crawling and pushing myself up to my feet.

  Nothing was broken. I could walk. So I walked out across the dark parking lot, and then I started jogging, and then I ran. I ran into the woods at the edge of the lot, and then across two more parking lots, and then through a dozen back yards in a residential neighborhood, and then I ran some more.

  I really hate running.

  Chapter 4

  Pitch

  I’d like to think I ran a long way before stopping to rest, but I’m pretty sure it was only a mile or two. I leaned against a tree behind an old house and stared up at the stars as I tried to catch my breath and massage away the pain in my left side.

  I checked the time. Nine forty-two. Still early.

  I called my dad. He answered on the first ring.

  “Carmen, are you all right? Where are you?”

  “Hi dad, I’m fine. Everything’s fine.” I winced. Of course everything wasn’t fine. “I mean, sorry. Look, I know what happened tonight, to you and mom. At Cygnus. Are you two all right?”

  “We’re fine. Your mother’s still a little tired from the tranquilizer, but we’re fine. What is going on? They refused to tell me anything.”

  “Yeah, I know. Listen, dad, it’s all my fault. I broke my contract with Cygnus.”

  “What are you talking about? You don’t even work there anymore.”

  “It’s about my non-compete agreement.”

  “What? What did you do?”

  “I invented something. Something big.” I looked at my gloved hand. “Something that could put Cygnus out of business.”

  “Oh.” There was a long silence on the other end.

  “Are you still there?”

  “Yes, I’m still here,” he said. “So are you there now, at Cygnus?”

  “I was.” I shrugged to myself. “I left.”

  “What does that mean? Did you work something out? Is everything all right?”

  “Uhm… not exactly.”

  “Not exactly? Honey, what happened?”

  “Well, they said I was going to prison for twenty-five years…”

  “Oh my God.”

  “And then I sort of smashed a window and jumped out, and ran away.”

  “What!”

  “Yeah, when I say it out loud, it sounds pretty bad. Sorry.”

  “Carmen…” The confusion and disappointment in his voice made me cringe. “Carmen, I don’t understand how this… Where are you now?”

  “I’m okay. Don’t worry about me right now. Just take care of mom, and I’ll give you a call later, okay?”

  “No, it’s not okay, we need to figure this out.”

  “I will, dad, I will figure it out. I promise. Bye dad.”

  I hung up.

  Well, that was awkward. And awful.

  I sat down on the grass and stared at my phone. I felt even more lost than I did an hour ago. At least then I had a problem to solve. Save my parents. But now… I couldn’t go home, I couldn’t go anywhere. I had no money. I was facing a quarter century in prison. The biggest company on the east coast was after me.

  And I was sitting very close to a pile of dog shit.

  I moved.

  Plan, plan, plan. Need a plan. Money? Food? Shelter?

  I couldn’t think at all. I didn’t even know where to start. I could rearrange light waves into sculptures of glowing particles with a wave of my hand, but sitting there in the dark… I had nothing.

  No. I had the gloves.

  So I got out my phone and started searching for printer specs. It didn’t take long to find a nice little scooter and download it into the gloves.

  “Lux, scooter.”

  It took both of the gloves to fully render the holo-bike, but it materialized easily enough in a blaze of white and purple lasers, all black with just a hint of that violet glow around it. I tested the seat and frame to make sure there were no sharp edges that might cut me in half
, and when everything seemed safely round, I sat in the seat. With my gloved hands on the handles, I turned the throttle, and the scooter accelerated smoothly away down the dark, empty street with only a soft hum in its black wheels.

  Riding along with the wind in my face, things seemed better. More under control. Instead of sitting in the dirt, I was riding the most advanced exotic scooter in the world, at least until the batteries ran out.

  Transportation, check.

  After a few minutes on the dark streets, I was able to find some signs to point me back toward the highway, and then I was headed back downtown, but I pulled over and stopped on the shoulder of the expressway to just stare at the city skyline for a minute. I could ride anywhere I wanted, but I still had no place to go.

  I need a way to stand up to Cygnus, but how? Change the law? Not likely. Or at least not any time soon. What then?

  Who could take on a company like that?

  I grinned.

  Another company like that.

  I got my phone out and found the website for Susquehanna Power and called their line for human resources. That was one thing I learned at Cygnus. The people in power sat in the cushy office area, usually near the really important folks in accounting, legal, and (for some reason) human resources. Not the people who actually make things, and definitely not IT. So I left a message for HR saying that I wanted an interview the next day. I was the woman with the solid light sword everyone’s been talking about.

  And I was ready to sell.

  Now that I had a new plan, I felt pretty good about things. I turned around and started heading north, riding up past the beltway into the county, and then I found the first empty field that was hidden from the road by some trees, and I went to sleep on the grass. Sure, it was a little rustic, but it was just for the night. It felt rebellious. It felt good.

  When I woke up the next morning, it didn’t feel good anymore. I was really cold and my neck hurt. The angry growl in my stomach definitely didn’t feel good either. But I was still in a good mood. I had the plan. All I needed to do was wait for Susquehanna to call.

  “Lux, scooter.”

  I buzzed up the road a little farther and found a small shopping center out among the big houses, and I went into an over-priced coffee shop to sit in a warm corner and smell the food and wait for the call.