“It couldn’t have been many years,” Dominic points out in his typical contemplative way. “If we were here when we were much older than three, we’d definitely remember the move.”
“I wonderwhythey moved us,” I murmur, as much to myself as to the other guys. It’s hard to pay attention to their conversation while I focus in on the console wall in front of me.
With a faint fizzing sensation in my eye sockets, I direct my vision through the thin plastic surface to the nest of cables and circuit boards I find behind it. Sliding my gaze across those features feels like dragging my eyes through mud rather than air.
My eyeballs are already kind of tired from scanning so much of the ground overhead. Hopefully I can figure this problem out fast.
My attention homes in on a cluster of cables off to one side. The coating around the wires has melted together into a lump.
The connection there must be broken. Maybe if I cut out the melted part and twist the wires back together, that will get the juice flowing through the system properly.
It can’t be that hard, right? Just match up the wires by the color of their coatings. A toddler could handle that.
“I think I might see how to fix it,” I say, glancing up for a second, and realize I’m alone in the room. The other guys must have gone off to investigate more of the building.
They probably either told me they were leaving and I was too zoned out to hear, or they didn’t want to interrupt my concentration. No big deal. I’ll patch things up and call them back in once I’ve saved the day.
Or the computer system, or whatever.
I can’t see any proper way to open up the base of the console, but I can take care of that easily enough. With a few well-placed smacks of the side of my hand, I create a rectangle of cracks in the plastic and then snap out the chunk I’ve outlined.
The fused ball of wiring is right in front of me. Scissors would be nice, but my hands will work just fine for that too.
It doesn’t even take that much of my strength to snap the cables at either end of the mess. I chuck the melted ball into the far corner of the room and get to work peeling back the coating so I can twist the wire ends together.
A couple of sparks shoot from one of the wires and zap my fingers.
“Shit,” I sputter, smacking them against my thigh to stop the stinging.
“Are you okay?”
My head jerks around. Riva’s standing in the doorway, the color back in her cheeks—a welcome sight after she got so sickly pale for a minute when we first trooped in here.
I don’t welcome an audience now, though, especially when the first part of the show was me looking like an idiot.
“I’m good,” I mutter. “It’d take more than a little wire to hurt me.”
Riva walks over and crouches a few feet away from where I’m sitting to consider the severed cables. “I could probably hook them up faster.” She waggles her slim fingers. “One of the few benefits of being tiny.”
She’s poised that close to me, her coolly sweet scent wafting into my nose. All at once, a whole lot of me wants to tell her that even if it would still make total sense for me to call her “Shrimp” like I always used to, she’s absolutely perfect exactly the way she is.
The perfect size for tucking into my arms and carrying to safety. The perfect size for shielding if danger descends on us.
But I’m not supposed to be worrying abouthersafety. We still don’t know for sure that she isn’t going to put the rest of us in danger.
The guys are the ones who stuck with me. She’s the one who left.
My irrational impulses need to remember that.
“It means there’s less of you to spread out a zap, so you might get totally fried,” I retort. “I’m managing.”
She doesn’t argue, just watches as I attach a couple more wires. “You figure getting those connected will be enough to get the full console running?”
“Not sure yet, but it seemed worth a try.”
Riva hums in apparent agreement. “It’d be pretty amazing to get into the records they’ll have stored in that thing. If they didn’t wipe the hard drive before they left.”
Somehow I hadn’t even considered that possibility, I was so intent on simply getting the damn thing up and running. I scowl more at myself than her and push onward, grasping the next cable.