In The Afterlight

Nico shook his head. “We’ve been leaving the computers on overnight to transfer everything to remote backup servers in case ours fail. There would have been huge spikes of activity—but look.”

The huge spikes of activity were there, beginning at eleven o’clock in the evening, but abruptly cutting off at two in the morning, only to resume four hours later, right around the time Nico or another Green would first roll in to start the day’s work.

“Is there really no way to tell who did it?” I asked, squinting at the screen.

“It was a Green,” Nico said.

“It might have been a Green,” Cole said.

“No,” Nico insisted, “it had to have been a Green. How many kids actually know how to erase server activity?”

“Okay,” I said. That made sense, unfortunately. “But if they went to such great lengths to hide the other instances, would they have left this blip for someone to find?”

Nico shrugged. “Maybe they were interrupted? Or they were in such a hurry they didn’t have time?”

Cole asked another question that disappeared beneath the rush of blood in my ears as I stared at the screen, blinking to clear the blurriness that turned it into nothing more than a glowing square.

“...think?” Cole touched my shoulder to get my attention, making me jump.

“Sorry,” I said quickly, avoiding their stares. “I’m tired. What did you just ask?”

“My theory is one of the computers just glitched, or there’s a problem with the server,” Cole said, his eyes soft with concern.

“Occam’s razor,” Nico said. “Make the fewest assumptions. The simplest solution is usually the right one.”

“I don’t know anything about a razor, but who the hell would kids be sending the intel to?” Cole asked. “Who’d be stupid enough to try to sell information at the risk of getting their asses caught and hauled into a camp?”

“Could it be someone from Kansas HQ accessing files remotely?” I asked Nico.

He shook his head. “It’s someone here.”

Damn. I shared a look with Cole.

“I want to believe it’s a one-off thing,” he said, “but keep digging. Let me know if they try anything again, okay?”

There was a knock on the windows running along the side of the room—Kylie, dressed in all black, her hair tied into a poofy bun. “Ah,” Cole said. “That’ll be the groups leaving this morning to try to track down those tribes in Montana. You two figure the camera situation out, okay?”

“Wait,” I said, “They’re leaving this morning? Where did the cars come from?”

“They’re taking the SUVs Lee rounded up for yesterday’s haul,” he said, stretching as he stood. I followed him to the door, listening to him rattle off instructions about training and which weapons to pull from the locker for training the next day, but when I reached the door, I didn’t follow him out into the hall.

I stepped back into the computer room and caught sight of the white board out of the corner of my eye. Someone, likely Cole, had started scribbling information on it—coordinates, camp populations, number of PSFs assigned, anything and everything the League might have had in its files. Peppered through were details from Clancy’s documents—I saw tidbits about the camp controllers tossed in like afterthoughts.

The basic outline of the Oasis plan was there, too. I found my name written next to influence camp controller in charge of communications.

“You don’t have to stay,” Nico said. “I can do this myself.”

“I know.” I picked up the dry erase marker from the ledge, and started to fill in additional information about Thurmond, fleshing out sections of the plan where I could.

“It was your strategy,” Nico said over the warm purring of the machines around us. “Right? It seemed like you.”

“What do you mean?”

“A little reckless. Smart, but not giving attention to the details.”

“Really,” I said dryly, turning back to face him.

He kept his back to me the whole time, shoulders bunched up with tension. I’d really been a monster to him, hadn’t I? There seemed to be a five-foot radius around me that Nico was too frightened to cross. I fought to keep from cringing at the thought of how badly I’d mistreated him.

“How would you do it?” I jerked my chin in the direction of the blank space under the word Thurmond, trying to ignore the way it seemed to be taunting the both of us.

He stared at me and sixty full seconds of awkwardness passed before he took a tentative step closer. “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

“You said I wasn’t paying attention to the details,” I prompted. “What did you mean by that?”

Nico looked down at the floor, running his shoes over the tile. I had a fleeting thought of how Vida used to call the Greens “squeakers” because of the way they all seemed to shuffle their feet as they walked. “The Oasis plan is okay,” he said finally. “The way we have it now makes sense. Based on the size of the camp, there’ll only be two or three camp controllers, and it’ll be easy for you to figure out who is in charge of security and sending the status updates to their network. It won’t work that way at Thurmond.”

I watched him wring his hands, still unable to look at me. “There’s going to be, what, two dozen camp controllers in the Control Tower? That was the estimate in...in Clancy’s files. Its position at the center of the camp means that anyone forcing their way in through the gate is going to have to fight through all of the rings of cabins to get to it to subdue the PSFs and controllers inside, and by then the camp controllers will have called for reinforcements. Even if you found a way to subdue all of them, it would still be too late. All they’d have to do is turn on the White Noise and we’d be done. The power generator and backup generator are all on the camp premises, and I have a feeling cutting the power would automatically trigger an alarm on the military’s network.”