working now?”
“Be patient.” He took over the keyboard.
“No.” Gently she pushed his hands away. “Let me.”
By the time they got Lockbox up and running, the sun was rising, shining through the floor-to-ceiling windows, drenching East Cambridge in liquid gold.
“Got it.” Orion basked for a moment in accomplishment. “We got it back up,” he announced to the nearly empty room.
“Cool,” somebody said faintly from across the way.
Orion extended his hand to Sorel, and she shook it. He felt joyous, masterful after the all-nighter. “I knew I’d get to the bottom of this.”
“You found the bug,” he admitted.
“And don’t forget that I created the bug too. I created a monster!” She picked up the rubber chicken and told it sweetly, “I’m going to murder you.”
“Let’s go down to the river and drown it.”
“Yes!” She hunted for the black heap that was her coat. As she turned it here and there, trying to figure out which end was up, her pack of cigarettes fell from one of the pockets. She didn’t notice.
“I can carry that….” Orion took her guitar. “What kind of …” He was about to ask her what kind of music she played, when everything faded. The lights dimmed, the computer monitors darkened. The constant whirring of machines ceased, and only the EXIT signs remained illuminated.
“The control room,” Orion said, and they sprinted downstairs to the new ISIS nerve center with its monitors covering the entire wall, illuminating the world in all its time zones. There on that map, green dots indicated servers for the ISIS global security network. At desks in the control room, as at NASA, at least two ISIS programmers monitored the ISIS network at all times.
Clarence and Anand were watching that night, and they saw the power fade, even as Sorel and Orion burst through the door. The overhead lights died, and for a moment only the wall of monitors illuminated the space in wavering blue.
“Are you still online?” Orion asked Clarence.
“The network hung.” He typed frantically.
“But what about the generators?” Sorel asked.
“Nothing,” Anand said.
For a moment ISIS went dark, and its vast network, all its points of light, disappeared. It was as if the stars themselves had vanished from the sky, the whole fabulously rich ISIS enterprise, the solar system, the galaxy, the entire Milky Way had vaporized. And then power returned. Overhead lights blazed white again. The electronic map glowed, the ISIS security network restored itself onscreen in all its particulars. The soft whirring of the building’s myriad machines resumed, replacing harsh silence to reassure the ear.
“Just a brownout,” Sorel murmured. Like all brief frights, this one was instantly forgotten.
They walked outside between the half-built laboratories and biotech offices of Kendall Square. Orion carried the guitar as they picked their way around the slushy puddles.
“Did you ever see such ugly code?” Orion asked her.
“Disgusting,” Sorel said. “I suppose Jonathan thinks there will be time to straighten out Lockbox later on, but by then everyone will be too rich to care. I know I will.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Don’t you want to be fabulously wealthy?” she asked him.
He considered a moment. “I think I’d like to buy my mom a new car. And I’d buy my dad a house. He probably wouldn’t stay in it, but …”
“Funny, I was thinking just the opposite. I’d buy Mum a car if she promised to leave my dad.”
“You don’t like your father?”
“Well, he’s just my stepdad, really. Why wouldn’t yours stay in a house?”
“Oh, my dad’s a little bit … Sometimes he falls asleep on park benches,” Orion said. “He’s a professor at Middlebury, but since he doesn’t dress that well, sometimes he looks kind of—homeless. Once he fell asleep on a bench, and when he woke up, he found two dollars in his hat.”
“Oh, no!” She laughed, and as she looked at him, sidelong, her cheeks were pink in the chilly air, her long hair spilled red-gold over her black cloth coat. She was so tall. He didn’t have to bend down to look at her. The light caught in her eyes.
“Wait, stop a minute.” They stopped walking, and right there on the sidewalk, he looked into her eyes. “Green.”
“Yes, thanks, I knew that.”
They hurried on through Central Square, with its piles of dirty snow and flattened cardboard, its closed shops and somnolent bars. The Plough & Stars, the Cantab Lounge, the Middle East.
“Coffee?” Orion asked.
“Absolutely.” They bought coffee and donuts at the Store 24 near the Central Square bus stop. Sorel devoured her donut while Orion paid. “Sorry,” she said. “They’re very small!”
Orion felt an almost overwhelming desire to kiss the corner of Sorel’s mouth. He wanted to lick the powdered sugar from her lips. The young cashier in her head scarf startled him with her question: “Anything else?”
They walked all the way down Pleasant Street to the river, icy in the middle, brackish at the edges. Sorel handed the rubber chicken to Orion, who sat on a bench with the coffee cups and guitar. He watched her fumble for her cigarettes.
“Don’t you want to throw it?” he asked her.
“I suppose.” She was a little distracted, irritated that she hadn’t found what she was looking for. Sorel walked right up to the edge of the muddy riverbank and balanced on a wobbly rock.
“You do the honors,” Orion encouraged her.
She lifted the rubber chicken like a football and then stopped. “If I get arrested, they’ll deport me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m on a student visa. And I think there’s something in there about never throwing chickens in the water.”
“I’m sure they meant live chickens,” Orion said.
“Oh, that’s all right then.”
She hurled the rubber chicken into the air, and it sailed for an instant above the water. Then it splashed down and floated, sickly yellow on the surface.
“I’m going to write about you,” she called after the chicken. She returned to Orion on the bench, opened her guitar case, and unwrapped her instrument, which she’d swaddled in soft T-shirts. “I got it at a pawnshop. Isn’t that sad? It’s a bit scarred here, but it’s a good traveling instrument.” Experimentally she tried some chords, and then launched into song.
He laughed with surprise. Her throaty voice was not English or European, but bluesy African-American. “Those Folkways records,” he said, thinking of his dad’s LPs. “You listened to them too.”
“I listen to
When he looked into her lively eyes, Orion saw the possibilities before him, each spreading outward, the branches of a decision tree. He could answer her. He could keep quiet. He could make some excuse to leave. He could kiss her. He imagined kissing her. “I don’t want to go public,” he confessed.
She shook her head at him. “Poor you! When the time comes, you’ll just have to find the strength.” She strummed out a second verse.
