“Hello? Dad?” Thirteen-year-old James couldn’t believe his father had answered the phone.

The boy sat alone outside the back of his residence hall, his face hot and puffy from crying. Drawing his legs up onto the bench, James pulled his sweatshirt up to his nose to ward off the nighttime chill.

“James? Do you have any idea what time it is?” Jonathan Siles' voice was not magnanimous.

James shrank even further into his sweatshirt. “Sorry…”

“Is something wrong?”

James’ throat tightened again and he fought to choke back enough control of his voice to speak properly—as if it weren’t hard enough with the braces clogging his mouth. “Can you come get me?”

“Of course not,” his father said incredulously. “Why would you ask something like that?”

“I don’t like it here.”

“It’s only been a couple of weeks.”

“I don’t like it,” James insisted. “The classes are really hard. Everyone’s so much older and different. I think this was a mistake.” Tears began to spill down his face again, despite his best efforts to stop them. “I want to come home,” he squeaked. “Please, let me come home.”
“You'll figure it out.”

“Can't I come back and try private high school instead?” James said.

“No,” his father barked in his ear, exasperated. “You’ve been taking college coursework for three years now! You’d be bored and stifled.”

“But—”

“You got a perfect score on both the aptitude assessment and the entrance exam. You’re going to throw all our hard work away because you don’t fit in with your adult classmates?”

James rubbed the sleeve of his sweatshirt under his nose. “I—I don’t know.”

“You’re more qualified than any of them will ever be. We sent you to that school to get an education, to make something of yourself. Not to make friends.”

“Dad…"

“Look, James, I know you’re overwhelmed right now, but give it time.”

James couldn’t answer for several long moments. He slumped against the back of the bench. “Okay.”

His parents knew best. James couldn't waste his talents. He had to push himself far beyond anyone else. 

Anything less was mediocre.

Mediocrity wasn't an option. Failure wasn't an option. His stubborn instincts for capability and survival bloomed like a black hole behind his ribs. The vacuous pull burned, and he embraced its life.

His parents knew best.

They arrived at the airport.

Everything was final. Goodbyes said, possessions sent off. 

After clearing security, the Knights skirted a corner into a wide hallway. The corridor smelled pungently of carpet cleaner and greased escalator panels, marked off like a ruler with gate numbers and restrooms.

Her parents talked very little, and Heather busied herself with keeping up. She reached idly for that suffocating mix of grief, rage, and anxiety that had dogged her since finding out they were relocating, but she just felt empty now, like the bottom of her soul had dropped out.

She hadn’t been happy in Dunesborough anyway. Maybe life really would be better in Worthing. New variables fostered new outcomes, and all that.

She sleepily traced the garish pattern in the carpet as they advanced. The rumble of a jet taking off attracted her attention to the window spanning most of the far wall.

“By the way, Heather,” Richard said. “I invited another one of my colleagues to travel with us, so he’s on the same flight.” 

Heather snapped her head around to look at him. “What? Why didn’t you warn me?” She checked the elastic band haphazardly keeping her voluminous hair at bay, which she had left to do whatever feral thing it wanted. She was battling a bad acne flare from all the stress, had barely slept the night before, and had completely forgotten to consider whether her oversized comfort hoodie might need a wash before the travel day. Definitely not in a state to make a good first impression.

If her hopes were going to pan out, she needed her dad’s coworkers to like her.

“I didn’t want you to be nervous,” Richard said.

“And you were in on this?” she accosted her mom. Su only shrugged.

“Oh,” Richard said. “E17—this is us.”

Heather groaned. If her dad was going to throw her in raw with no warning, then she fully intended to ask this colleague whatever she wanted in front of him.

She trailed behind her parents into the hushed waiting area, glancing around for any overtly nerdy middle-aged men that seemed to recognize them. Instead, Richard caught the gaze of a much younger individual in a hoodie and jeans, seated by the window with a black journal balanced on his knee. Richard waved. “And there he is.” 

The man lifted a hand in return and set his journal aside as they arrived. 

“Good morning,” Richard said amiably. “Glad you could make it.”

“By the skin of my teeth,” the colleague sighed, standing up. He glanced at Su and Heather. “This must be your family? I recognize you from your photos on Richard’s desk at work.”

He was long-proportioned like a scarecrow, with short and wayward brown hair, and dark circles under astute hazel eyes. Something about him seemed restless, an urgency of spirit barely controlled, loosely tethered under the surface. 

“Yes,” Richard said. “This is my partner, Su-Wei, and my daughter, Heather.”

“Pleasure to meet you both,” the colleague said with a tired smile. He shook Su’s hand, and then he was holding his hand out for Heather. She almost jumped as his eyes flicked to hers. “I’m James.”

+++

Richard’s daughter stared at him, and he pretended not to notice her scrutiny. It was far too early in the morning, and James felt unprepared for the full course of niceties.

In the photos he’d seen of her, a bright, happy grin scrunched her pudgy face while she posed playfully with her mother, hips angled and crossed finger heart signs flying. The kid in front of him, understandably, had been dragged through a miserable month, and it showed in her subdued demeanor.

However, when she shook his pale hand, the grip was welcoming and self-assured, and the sullen, sleepy grayness he’d caught on her face moments earlier gave way to a curt but warm smile.

A kid with a filter, he thought. Interesting.

“James is a very talented engineer,” Richard said. “You two might enjoy chatting—Heather also has a knack for the sciences, top of her class. She’s been pretty frustrated with not feeling challenged enough academically, but we’re hoping her new school in Worthing will be a good fit.”

“Which one are you going with?” James asked.

“Evergreen Academy,” Richard said.

“Oh, yeah, that’s a really good one,” James said without thinking. At Richard’s evident surprise, he explained, hastily, “I grew up a couple hours north of Worthing, but took some online classes through Evergreen, and attended chess and engineering tournaments they hosted there. So I’m familiar.”

“Oh wow, I knew you were from the west coast, but I didn’t realize it was that close to where we’re headed,” Richard said. He flashed a wry smile. “How did you do at those tournaments?”

James scoffed. “Good at the engineering, bad at chess.”

Chess was something his parents had made him do. He didn’t care at all about strategy. He also hadn’t wanted to study all the neurobiology his father had made him learn while hoping to push him into his same field. James just wanted to build machines.

He hoped his parents hadn’t somehow found out about the move.

Heather looked up at him. “What do you do at Larkspur?”

Richard flinched. When he caught his daughter’s gaze, she raised her eyebrows at him, challenging, then returned her attention to James, innocently waiting for an answer.

James exchanged his own glance with Richard before he said, “I, uh, do a little of everything. Mechanical, electrical, programming…My specialty is in robotics, technically.”

“Oh, cool,” she said. “Make any robots lately?”

“Not recently, no.”

“What’s your favorite thing you’ve ever made?”

“Well I was pretty proud of that generator—” he said, then stopped himself, fumbling, loathe to bring all those memories cascading back to Richard. Reminders of James’ hazardous failures and impotent conspiracy theories. “But, uh, we’ve had to put that project away for now, as you may have heard.”

“R.I.P, Larkspur generator,” Heather said, in a laissez-faire, wistful tone. She crossed herself in a haphazard religious gesture.

A wan, amused smile tugged at the edge of James’ mouth.

“R.I.P.” he agreed, softly.

Richard cleared his throat, uncomfortable. “Maybe you can ask James about Evergreen,” he suggested to Heather.

Heather shrugged, and angled past her dad to find a seat at the end of the row. She hugged her teal backpack to her chest and gazed turbidly out the window. She donned her headphones from around her neck.

Richard sighed softly, and it sounded unexpectedly troubled.

James glanced from father to daughter. At first, he had suspected inviting him to travel with them was Richard’s way of saying there were no hard feelings, and to make sure James still existed after he had been standoffish in the Larkspur team group chat all month. The offer of bundling airline tickets was convenient—James despised every minute sunk into moving logistics—so he had agreed. But now, he wondered if he had been pulled into something else.

James gave his boss a quizzical look, with a discrete head tilt in Heather’s direction.

Richard chuckled nervously, sighed again, and readjusted his glasses. “She’s struggling with the move. I only recently told her about Larkspur because of the accident, but disclosure has been limited.” His tone waned, becoming quiet. “It hasn’t made up for making her leave Dunesborough.”

“I hope she likes Worthing,” James said, trying to be sympathetic. He wasn’t sure what else to say.

“Me too,” Richard said. “Do you mind if we join you while we wait?” he asked.

“Not at all,” James said, and returned to his chair.

He resumed the train of thought he was following in his project journal, still pristine and not yet fully broken into like the others he had lost in the accident. He preferred to work analog in brainstorming and troubleshooting. It helped him think.

Su-Wei asked him how the moving process had been for him, and he obliged an answer that sounded as benign as possible. The finer details of the process had been boring and irritating, and he spent the short conversation trying to figure out whether she harbored any ill feelings over his unwittingly putting her partner in danger.

Heather played with her phone, brooding.

Finally, boarding began, and he was able to escape further interrogation. Some kind of frustrated back-and-forth between Heather and her parents buzzed quietly in the background, but he tried to ignore it. Incomplete formulas and technical sketches nagged at his attention as he waited in line, strode down the boarding tunnel, and finally navigated the narrow aisle on the airplane, looking for his seat.

He stowed his carryon bag and got situated, bracing himself for six hours of trying to keep his elbows and knees in check in the cramped aisle seat.

But as more people boarded, his row failed to fill with other passengers. He waited for the cabin to settle in, and once his hopes were confirmed, he moved to the window seat, king of his tiny patch of airplane.

Lucky.

Stifling a yawn, he pulled out his journal to continue working.

Then Heather appeared, planting herself in the aisle seat in his row in a bristle of oversized lavender sweatshirt, her colorful headphones nestled in a cloud of puffy, disgruntled hair. He glanced at her only subtly, but otherwise tried not to react.

Heather glanced up suddenly, as if belatedly realizing what she was doing. “Sorry, can I sit here?” She turned away from the row across the aisle and one back from his, lowering her voice. “I can’t stand my parents right now.”

“Sure,” James said.

Easy come, easy go, he thought.

He continued to work at a diagram of a revamped failsafe system for the deceased generator, his mechanical pencil scratching symmetrical borders. In his peripheral vision, the teenager sat still, hugging her backpack, her face set tiredly as she forcibly contained whatever emotional disturbance rumbled behind her eyes.

God, he knew that look.

By degrees, she went from hugging her backpack close, to gently stowing it under the seat, to buckling herself in. Finally, she pulled her headphones askew to betray an ear. It was pierced, with a small pearl-like stud.

“What are you working on?” she asked.

He handed over his notebook, without being sure why. A vague gesture of solidarity for a fellow only child angry at their parents, perhaps. Briefly, he realized this was probably a breach of Larkspur’s NDA, but who was she going to tell?

Heather studied the drawing. “Wow. Detailed.” She pinched the edge of the previous page, as if considering flipping through the rest of the notebook, but stopped herself. She handed it back instead. James found that simple act of restraint a surprisingly respectful gesture. “What is it?”

“What did Richard tell you about the generator?”

“That it exploded,” she said. “Not much else.”

He nodded. “Well, I’m trying to figure out some other mechanism we could install in a future version that could prevent a repeat of that.” He docked his elbow on the edge of the tiny airplane window and rested his temple against his fingers, frowning pensively at the sketch. “But it already had so many failsafes in it…”

“Why did it explode?”

“We’re still not sure,” he said. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to get into more detail than that. Sorry.”

Heather shrugged it off, like she hadn’t expected much anyway.

“How long have you been at Larkspur?” she asked.

“Two years,” he said.

“How do you even get hired at a place like that if nobody’s allowed to know about it?”

“One of my now colleagues gave a talk at my university,” he said. “Larkspur was recruiting for an internship position, which I applied to and was accepted my last year in college. It became a permanent position later.”

She perked up at that. “Larkspur does internships? Do you think I could intern there?”

“Maybe,” he said. It was unlikely, but he didn’t want to rain on her small spark of optimism. “You could ask your dad about it.”

“Oh, I intend to,” she said. “Been waiting for the right moment, but he’s gonna try to turn me down.” 
She huffed. “He’s full of double standards about Larkspur right now. It’s driving me crazy.”

“Best of luck.”

“Thank you.” She gave it some more thought before speaking up again, “So, if you started at Larkspur your senior year and have been there for two, that makes you…” She silently calculated on her fingers. “Twenty-three? Twenty-four? Unless you went to graduate school?”

“Yes to grad school,” James said. He hesitated, questioning why he was giving her personal details. If she couldn’t tell how old he was, he should have just let her believe whatever. “I’m twenty.”

“Oh,” she said. “You’re kind of young then.”

He tilted his head in a lazy shrug, and resumed drawing. “I guess.”

“How did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Get all your degrees that fast.”

“I went to college early and entered with prior credits.”

The wheels were turning behind her eyes. She was counting on her fingers again. “So then you must have gone to college at like…twelve?” She looked at her extended fingers, perplexed, as if shocked and appalled at the math.

James kept his gaze on his notebook, trying to be nonchalant. “Thirteen. I didn’t want to waste any time.”

“Did you do it all online, or go to a university close to home?”

“The prior credits were a mix of online and local. The rest was on campus, far from home. The university I wanted to attend wasn’t close.” He winced inwardly. More personal details.
She blinked. “Did your parents move with you, then?”

He shook his head. He supposed he was committed now. “I lived on campus.”

Her face scrunched into an incredulous expression. “Is that…allowed? To send middle-schoolers to college by themselves? That sounds terrifying.”

“I’ve—never actually asked myself that question before,” he said haltingly, surprised that she would interpret it that way.

Even after graduating and becoming a full time professional in the field, he had logged his college experience as necessary, privileged.

Back then, he called his parents or saw one of the university counselors if he needed guidance, obsessively observed his adult peers to collect data on how to be an adult and how to exhibit traits that made people tolerate him. For matters like finishing his orthodontics treatment, or needing to see a doctor when he developed bronchitis in his junior year, his parents arranged everything from afar. He only had to show up, and put in the work. To make sure his parents’ investment in him was worth it.

For him, this was normal. Everything—his childhood, his mental and physical health, his social life—had been faithfully surrendered in the name of progress. If he was capable of it, he had a duty to walk that path.

Didn’t he?

“I turned out all right,” James said.

Thankfully, she didn’t push. “Oh, okay. So do you have a doctorate?” she asked. “They say that’s the new bachelor’s degree.”

He looked at her, surprised. “You’re a…high school freshman, right?”

“Sophomore in the fall,” she said.

“And you’re already researching college?” He’d gleaned over the years that high schoolers typically didn’t even take a practice test for the college aptitude exams until junior year.

Heather shrugged.

A sideways smile tugged at his mouth, despite himself. “God…” he said quietly.

“What?” Heather said, caught off guard by his reaction.

“Just—” James searched for words, embarrassed. “Try not to grow up too quickly.” A memory intruded on his senses, though he tried to push it away—of a gangly young teenager curled up on a bench behind the university dorms, weeping in hushed tones into the collar of his sweatshirt after his father had hung up the phone. Hating himself for being weak. Unworthy of his own intelligence. “You don’t get this time back, so I hope you can enjoy it.”

+++

After the safety demonstration, the breathy, high-pitched whine of the jet’s engines ramped up, filling Heather with giddy expectation. She hadn't been on a plane in ages, and she looked past James out the oblong window on his left as the aircraft taxied to the runway.

“So why are you in a hurry to get to college?” his voice broke her distraction.

Heather tried to push away a stab of self-consciousness. Whenever she mentioned college hopes or her advanced placement classes, her teachers and family members were always impressed. Heather was the overachiever of the family, the grandkid that never got into trouble and always got the best grades. She was going places. But James, the apparent poster child for an unhinged level of prodigious achievement, seemed to have taken it as a red flag.

“Because high school is boring and horrible.” She sat back, crossing her arms and staring dismally at the seat in front of her. “My best friend moved away as soon as everyone else’s friend groups solidified freshman year, so I’m just kind of around and no one cares. I can barely even get my best friend to talk to me long distance, and when she does, she only wants to talk about her stupid shiny new city friends or whatever. And now because of Larkspur, I’m moving somewhere completely unfamiliar where no one knows me at all.” She fidgeted with a section of her short hair, gathering it from a frizzy puff into a more deliberate coil. She couldn’t stop wondering how Angela had made new friends so quickly, while Heather continued to flounder. What was wrong with Heather that she couldn’t move on so easily too? “I know I should look at this move as a fresh start, and I’m trying. But it still hurts to be left behind all the time. It feels like a curse that will follow me my whole life.”

James was silent for a moment. Heather inwardly berated herself for confiding in him. First impression officially ruined.

“I’m sorry,” James said finally. “For what it’s worth, you and I have met, at least.”

“Thanks,” Heather said, softly. “But when we get to Worthing, you’ll get to go work at Larkspur while I rot at home alone all summer. I’ll probably never see you again. And it’s not like we can see each other socially anyway.”

“I definitely don’t want to cross any boundaries,” James said. His tone was matter-of-fact, despite his efforts to be sympathetic. “Your parents know you too, so you won’t be totally alone until you can make new friends.”

“Ugh,” Heather said. “At the rate everything is going, they’ll forget I exist too.”

Their conversation was interrupted by the plane preparing to take off. As it sped down the runway, faster and faster, Heather gripped the armrests.

Possibilities of botched takeoffs and aerial explosions rocketed through her head. The thought occurred to her that if she died in the next few minutes, she would just have to accept it. She didn’t know if she could.

Fortunately, no forced acquiescence of her own demise occurred. After a little turbulence, they were safely in the air. She hugged herself, and from her peripheral vision, she watched James scribbling away, unbothered. She wished she had work she could sink into like that. To be able to drown everything out, to have a sense of purpose that grounded her wherever she happened to be. Maybe the move across the country didn’t feel so life ending for him because of that.

“Are you leaving friends behind in Dunesborough?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I don’t really have time to make friends.”

“Oh,” she said. “Does that get lonely?”

“I see my coworkers every day. That’s enough social interaction for me.”

She reached under the seat in front of her and retrieved her handheld video game console from her backpack.

Belatedly, he said, “Being stuck at home all summer does sound like hell. Maybe there’s some kind of hobbyist group you can join to help tide you over until school starts.”

She nodded. “I’ll have to look into it.” She switched on her console and slipped her headphones back over both ears. “I should let you get back to what you were doing. Thank you for talking with me.”

“No worries,” James said, and his attention slid away from her and back into his sketches.

It wasn’t his fault, but the ease of the switch stung a little. She knew her father’s coworkers weren’t going to change her life or anything, unless one of them got her into Larkspur, or wrote her a letter of recommendation to a prestigious college or something. After countless nights feeling like a ghost in her own life, she was starving for the smallest sign that this move would indeed change things for the better.

Do I exist?

Do I matter?

Do you see me?

She didn’t think she’d be able to take it if the west coast, too, answered these questions with a resounding “No.”

+++

As soon as Heather stepped through the front door, her mother asked her to take a seat in the living room. A bad sign.

At school, she’d read what the news was saying about Larkspur’s demise: Homeroom’s gossip had about summarized it, and by lunch period, the urgency of the event had been smothered. Just a non-radioactive industrial accident, local police said. A little embarrassing, but nothing to worry about.

A hard knot sat in the pit of her stomach as her parents settled down on the adjacent couch.

“I had a meeting with my team and my boss today,” Richard began quietly. “There’s no way to recover anything from the remains of the facility, and we don’t want to kick up any more dust. It’s looking like it would just be better to relocate, instead of trying to rebuild.” He adjusted his broken glasses, and met her gaze. “We’ll be moving operations to the west coast.”

Heather straightened up, indignant. “No way we’re making that move.”

“We’re leaving in a month,” Richard said. “I’m sorry.”

“There have to be other buildings around here that would work,” Heather pleaded.

“The situation is too precarious. Discretion is safer right now.”

“The government can cover for you better if you’re closer to them, you mean,” Heather snapped.

“What?” Richard said. “No—I mean, sure Larkspur is federally funded, but it’s just we already own that other facility. There would be no property hunt, no paperwork, no down payments and fees on top of replacing all our equipment—”

“Oh, yeah, it’s cheaper to just destroy my whole life,” Heather scoffed bitterly. “Didn’t anyone else on your ‘team’ protest? Did you?”

Richard just looked at her, troubled, at a loss for words.

“You just do everything they tell you, then,” Heather said. “Why won’t you tell me what’s really going on?” Her life was here. If they took that, she would have nothing but old secrets and a whole new barrier of alienation to suffocate behind. “Did the Conxence destroy Larkspur?” Her question startled him. “You can tell me. Dad, this isn’t protecting me from anything.” 

“We’re not in danger,” he insisted. “What happened at the lab last night was just an accident. Nothing more.” His tone slowed, as if wanting to make sure she heard and understood every word, 
“My job requires secrecy. That’s why I haven’t been forthcoming. No political conspiracies. Please, believe me.”

Heather glanced aside, glaring at the far arm of the couch.

“I know asking you to give up your life here for something I’ve kept from you is incredibly unfair,” Richard went on. “But this is how things are right now, and I need you to trust us that things will be okay. Maybe things will even change for the better…” 
Heather sank further into the couch, hunching her shoulders, refusing to look at him. He sounded like he was trying to convince himself too.

“We can find a nice house in a quiet area, maybe out in the country,” Su offered, attempting a reassuring smile. “You can choose whatever school you want. What about private school? The west coast has some really great schools, and we know how bored you’ve been this year.”
Heather glanced at her, warily.

Academia she could get behind was tempting. She didn’t have close friends here anyway. But this wasn’t just about moving away. Dunesborough was what she knew. For so long, Heather had ached to be a part of her parents’ world, but they had refused to let her in. They had created this one for her instead. And now, as soon as it was convenient, they were ripping this from her too. 

Her dad looked exhausted, gently kneading his pulled shoulder.

Heather stood up and grabbed her backpack from by the door. She hoisted it over her shoulder as she headed for her room. “If you’re going to leave me out of this, just leave me all the way out of it.”

+++

The night was far too warm. James opened every window in his apartment, intending to spend most of the night under the largest of the four. Glaring at the broken air conditioner on his way through the living room—its revival waiting for a part in the mail—he planted a box fan in the window next to his desk.

Bombarded by its raucous hum, James set to work on his desktop computer sifting through the files on his backup external hard drive. He was relieved to find he’d kept it up to date with data related to their errant generator. He combed through endless lines of code having to do with the project’s regulation systems and failsafes, searching for typos, faulty logic pathways, anything.

He heaved an exasperated sigh, and cradled his head in his hands. They’d tested and re-tested the system’s integrity before building it to scale and employing it to power the facility. It had been functional in the shorter tests in the two weeks leading up to the night it perished.

He could still picture every detail of Larkspur’s last few minutes. Checkup, rise in temperature, malfunctioning screen…

There was nothing wrong with his and Chelo’s program.

The investigation into the accident had turned up nothing helpful, as expected. Nothing salvageable remained. No trace of an explanation. James knew he was alone in thinking it was anything other than an accident.

Trying to convince them any more would only work against him. Sabotage or not, the facility’s destruction was senseless, and they were already going to increase security just in case.

He wasn’t at Larkspur to defend its interests, anyway. He was only there to create, to manufacture progress.

So, James could let it go, he told himself. He had to. He already had a certain reputation for being overzealous about his work, so he might as well keep that from bleeding into straight up neurosis. He was beginning to doubt himself about the generator, anyway. Gut senses could be wrong. He had too many unresolved feelings about losing his work. That was probably corrupting his ability to reason. Immaturity rearing its head yet again.

But, painfully, accepting it also meant accepting his colleagues still wondered if it was his fault.

And considering what Eve and Richard must think of him in that light made James sick to his stomach.

+++

Heather knew this was a peacemaking gesture.

She peered out the car window at the yellow, two-story house and the looming cherry trees. A large white storage pod blocked the driveway at the edge of the verdant yard.

“Are you sure about this?” Heather asked as Richard killed the engine. “This seems like a breach of code to me.”

“Eve and Jida are excited to see you.” Richard opened the driver’s side door.

“Please put the attitude away, Heather,” Su said. “Your dad’s trying to include you, like you asked.”

Heather sighed and got out of the car. “Fine.”

Arms crossed, she followed her parents up the driveway, and past the pod. Helping strangers move two days after final exams ended felt like the most unpleasant version of “being included.” But as they climbed the porch steps, she tried to tell herself she had to take what she could get.

She was meeting one of her dad’s colleagues, so maybe he had taken her feelings seriously.

The door opened to reveal a woman old enough to be her grandmother, with dark brown skin and salt-and-pepper coiled hair. She wore roomie, cuffed jeans and a short-sleeved collared shirt, and her brown eyes smiled from behind square glasses.

“Hello there, Knights!” she greeted. Her warm, husky voice sounded like it came straight from an old radio show. A petite woman wearing roomy overalls and a bright pink shirt appeared in the doorway beside her as Eve extended a hand to Heather's mother. “Nice to see you again, Su.”

Su shook it, and then Eve’s smile rested on Heather. “And you must be Heather! It’s great to meet you in person. I’m Eve, and this is Jida, my wife.”

Heather put on a smile and shook hands. They both had firm handshakes. She tried to imagine her dad working with Eve, building the generator that had exploded, and doing whatever else it was that engineers at secret government labs did. The pair of them were surprisingly warm and sociable, given Eve’s clandestine occupation.

“Thanks for coming over,” Jida said, glancing back into the house. “We can definitely use the extra elbow grease.”

“Our pleasure,” Richard said, as Eve waved them inside.

The jovial camaraderie grated on Heather’s nerves. She had occasionally caught her parents actively stressing over the particulars, but for the most part, it felt like all the adults had tidily moved on, laughing and socializing over helping each other prepare to explode their lives.

Despite her telling them to just continue making all their stupid selfish adult decisions without her, her parents had still showed her houses and tried to get her input, showed her digital brochures for high schools, talked about fun things they could do on the west coast that were less available in her hometown. And though she shut them down most of the time, at the end of another horrible day of studying for final exams while preparing to leave her home, she had crept into the office after her parents went to bed and reopened tabs on the family computer, clicking through high school class lists and images of house interiors, urban skylines, and foggy hills covered in evergreen trees. Of the ocean beaches she had never seen in person.

She hadn’t told anyone at school she was leaving. She didn’t think they’d care. She had tried to text her best friend about it, and while she got an occasional belated text back, her friend’s responses were just a written equivalent of acknowledgement noises. Moving to the west coast was going to be like moving to a different planet, and apparently, none of it mattered to anyone. She felt utterly alone.

Now, with five days between her and their one-way flight to Worthing, she just wanted to get the transition over with.

Heather’s gaze wandered the emptied walls of Eve and Jida’s entryway. They passed a pile of boxes stacked in the living room as Jida headed toward a sunny doorway at the back of the house.

“I’ve been packing up the kitchen,” Jida said, “if Su and Heather would like to help me with that.” She glanced at her spouse. “Did you and Richard want to start hauling furniture to the pod?”

“Yes ma’am,” Eve said. Richard nodded.

Heather wordlessly followed her mom through the city of boxes to the kitchen, pulling the top half of her thick, curly hair back into a tiny puff of ponytail with a hairband around her wrist.

While Heather helped Jida and Su wrap dishes in newspaper, pack them into boxes, and label them, Richard and Eve launched into moving furniture outside. The engineers filtered in and out of the main room with dressers and bookshelves, having jumped to a completely different subject every time Heather saw them from the doorway.

She was taping up a box when they came back in for the eighth time.

“I guess the others are leaving too, in a few days,” Eve said. She and Richard disappeared down the hallway. “Haven’t heard much from James, though.”
Heather strained to hear, trying to keep the tape in her hands as soundless as possible. Her mom was talking with Jida, which made the engineers’ conversation in the other room even more difficult to make out.

“I talked to him yesterday,” Richard said. “He hasn’t started packing yet.”

Eve scoffed. “That so?”

A thump interrupted their conversation.

“Watch that corner—” Eve said.

Heather pushed a box aside and pulled another in front of her, a dull flutter of amusement behind her ribs. At least it sounded like there was one other person in this situation that wasn’t happy to uproot.
She knew she was being uncharitable. She knew her parents would have preferred to stay. But, they had also decided to nuke their lives in favor of her dad’s job. Sometimes, her parents made it sound like she would understand when she was older, but Heather remained convinced that even as an adult, she would not make the same choice.

“So Heather,” Jida spoke up, making Heather jump. “Your mom tells me you just finished the ninth grade?”

Heather nodded, still listening for further mention of James or others, but they weren’t talking much anymore.

“How are you liking high school so far?”

“It’s okay.” Heather took a plate from a stack on the table and wrapped it in newspaper.

She wanted to ask Jida about Larkspur to see if she would offer any more details, but Su was there and might shut it down. And Eve was near her dad. Heather didn’t dare broach the subject with her parents within earshot.

But as she continued packing, an idea took shape. Her dad wouldn’t like it, but if everyone else was trying to make the most of the situation, then maybe she would too.

A short stack of printed pages slapped down on the table in front of James, over top of where he sketched cartoon robots on loose paper. The eight-year-old halted and picked up the foreign pages, reading over the impossibly long title. “What’s this?”

“Scholarly journal article,” his father said, planting himself at the table across from James with a mug of black coffee.

The boy perused the excruciatingly small print. “What’s it for?”
 “It’s a primary document. I’ve told you about them,” came the curt reply. “You remember what they are, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“I mean yes,” James amended. He rattled off a definition, “A primary document is a report from research someone did themselves.”

His father nodded, reclining back with an air of indifference. “Very good. We’re going to go over one of these every day.”

Dread prickled through James’ insides. “Why?”

“Because you need to learn about my field. And you need intellectual stimulation worthy of your gifts.”

James flipped a page over and scanned the thick, unintelligible columns. Even the graphs of the results made no sense to him. “What is—” He paused as he silently tried to sound out the word, 

“Ace-till-cho-line?”

“It’s pronounced ‘uh-seetul-koh-leen,’” his father snapped. “Acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter.”

“Oh.” James had heard about neurotransmitters.

“It seems we have our work cut out for us,” his father sighed, looking at his watch. He stood, washed the rest of his coffee down the sink, and strode to the door. He donned his coat and shouldered his black briefcase.“We’ll go through that when I get back. Concentrate on your studies today.”

“Yes, sir.” James watched him go, then got up and pulled the schoolwork list off the refrigerator. Words overwhelmed the strip of paper, as usual. Luckily, his mother had written this one.

She had better handwriting.

James sat pinned between the wall and the conference table, sullen and withdrawn.

“Now, let’s sort all this out, then.” Vihaan Dhar, a middle-aged history professor type, with sturdy posture and a well-kept black mustache, let his gaze wander around the table. “What happened?”

The engineers exchanged uncertain glances, seated across from Dhar, Richard, and Eve.
Dhar’s attention rested squarely on James. “Siles, care to start us off? Since you were most directly involved?”

“I’d love to,” James sighed. The particulars of the event had kept him awake most of the night.

“With as much detail as you can,” Eve added, pushing her square glasses higher on the bridge of her nose.

Evangeline Fabienne Pérez Delva was an anomaly in every circle she entered. Large-boned and athletic in her early seventies, she and her wife were nutrition buffs and avid hikers, and while she was something of a giant in the tech world thirty years running, she actively thumbed her nose at what she called the “shiny corporate bullshit” that often went with the territory. She was a brilliant civil engineer, with a rare talent for both science and people.

The first time James had ever seen her was when she gave a guest lecture at his university, easygoing and extroverted in an auditorium full of unkempt, socially terrified engineering students. 
She’d had a thick cloud of STEM majors around her the whole weekend.

James had just about died when Larkspur accepted his internship application two years ago, an arrangement that had since turned into a permanent position. But he would never admit that to Eve.

James laced his fingers together on the table, wondering if they were discussing a fireable offense that morning. “Okay…Well, I went in the generator room to make the last checkup of the night, and I noticed the room was warmer than it was supposed to be. I only had time to pull up the status screen for the generator and thermoregulatory system and see it had frozen up before the alarms activated.”


“What time was this?” Dhar asked.

“10:46pm.” Every feature of that glitched had been etched in his memory.

“So there were no prior warnings that something was malfunctioning?” Eve asked.

“Everything was fine when I’d checked it just an hour before, and none of the sensors went off,” Addie Matthews spoke up to James’ left. He had worked with her for the entirety of his time at Larkspur, and still knew little about her personal life. Though once, he’d heard her mention that she grew up in an ultra right-wing religious cult and seemed to have since renounced it.

“The core’s temperature should have easily triggered the automatic failsafe, but that doesn’t appear to have happened,” James said. “Nothing was going through the pipes by the time I got to them, so I’m thinking the cooling system was either damaged, or had been disconnected. I tried to flood the system with the emergency water valve, but even that was jammed.” He gestured to Richard. “That’s when Richard found me and made me evacuate.”

Richard glanced at him.

James couldn’t meet his gaze. Never in his life would he have expected his boss to have to all but drag him off the machinery platform. James should have had more maturity, more self-restraint, even though he hadn't realized at the time that this particular evacuation was a matter of life or death.

“I’m told you think it’s sabotage,” Eve said.

James felt like a bullseye as all attentions trained on him again. “Nothing about the generator’s design or the scope of its safeguards suggested it would behave the way it did,” he said. He pushed aside a memory of the unresponsive valve under his desperate hands, alarms screaming in his ears, Richard’s voice nearly failing to clear the din. “Someone had to have tampered with it. Blocked the pressure outlets, fed it an unstable source material for conversion. Something.”

“Could there have been a problem with the irrigated water supply?” Richard asked.

“Still waiting to hear back on that,” said Dhar. He looked around the table. “And where were the rest of you while this was going on?”

Greg Harper, a tree of a person with a heavily freckled face and an overbearing personality to match, spoke up, “We were all in the main lab working up blueprints for that android project commissioned last week. It was James’ turn to check the generator, so he stepped away for a bit.”

“How long was he gone?”

“A few minutes?”

“Did any of you see anything out of place before this point?”

“No,” Chelo Fernandez said. A fellow graduate from James’ alma mater, her direct demeanor and formidable creative prowess had greatly intimidated him during his internship, but she had gradually earned his trust with positive reinforcement and offerings of mandarin oranges. She glanced around at her colleagues. “It was just the five of us out there, wasn’t it? Nobody was on security duty?”

“The last shift of the night had ended over half an hour before,” said Addie, reaching behind her head to gather her long blond braid and pull it over one shoulder. She cracked a thwarted smile. “I would suggest we check the video surveillance recordings for anything suspicious, but of course we can’t.”

“And our remote backups of the footage from that night don’t show anything out of the ordinary,” Richard said.

“Seriously?” James said. His mind turned immediately to video tampering, but it would take particular skill or very high access to edit the user log as well. He guessed even Richard didn’t have that kind of clearance.

“Larkspur doesn’t have any enemies, does it?” Richard glanced at Eve. James perked up.

“Not that I’m aware of,” Eve replied. “Most everyone who still remembers Larkspur thought we went under almost twenty years ago.”

“This is the worst kind of thing to happen if we wanted to stay behind the scenes,” Greg mused. “The whole county is buzzing. I agree it seems out of left field, but we have no apparent perpetrator. James, are you absolutely sure it wasn’t just an accident, because it’s perfectly fine if—”

“It wasn’t an accident,” James said. “We’re smarter than that.”

“Mistakes can be made by any of us,” Greg said. “Even you.”

James bristled. “I didn’t do anything to it.”
 “He didn’t say you did,” Richard said gently, pushing up on the bridge of his broken glasses. “We just have to consider every possibility.”

“You can safely consider that possibility a dead end,” James said, avoiding looking too long at Richard’s glasses.

“But you do actually believe it was sabotage?” Greg pressed. “Despite a deafening lack of evidence?”

James threw up his hands.

After a beat of charged silence, Dhar checked his phone and pushed his chair back. “Well, I’ve received word about where we’ll set up shop next. I’ve had my assistant making phone calls and looking into the Bureau’s assets still invested in this little engineering lab of ours. Seems like the outlook is promising. Talk amongst yourselves until I get back.” He paused at the door. “I know you’re all shaken by this, but let's try to work together, all right?”

Richard studied the friction between James and Greg in concern. Chelo and Addie exchanged a glance. James crossed his arms and Eve sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose.

“Thanks, Greg,” James muttered as soon as the door closed behind Dhar. “I can always count on you to make me look bad in front of the head of the Bureau.”

“You’re the one who got defensive,” Greg said, failing nonchalance. “I haven’t gotten a rise out of you like that in quite a while. Is there something you aren’t telling us?”

James frowned at him from the corner of his eye. “Like how I’m aware that, since I largely designed that monitoring system, this could, actually, be my fault? And that there’s no way to recover the tech to get some sort of readout of what exactly happened to it, so we’re all just going to blame me for being the last guy in the room?”

“You said it, not me,” Greg retorted over Chelo and Addie’s heads.

Chelo dealt Greg a sharp elbow to the arm. “Stop bickering.”
 “Sorry,” Greg mumbled, shifting away. He massaged his affronted arm, redirecting his attention to the brooding James. “All I’m getting at, Surly, is there’s really no evidence for or against you. I don’t doubt your confidence, or the quality of your work. But accidents do happen, so you can be as adamant as you want but we’ll still never know for sure. At any rate, crying ‘sabotage’ isn’t helping you.”

“So we’re just going to ignore the possibility,” James muttered. “How responsible.”

“You’re being paranoid.”

He hated making mistakes, especially ones that impacted others’ work. But things going sideways was part of the job, and although it was sometimes a gut punch, he had always been honest with his coworkers. Hadn’t he?

Had he really given them reason to doubt his integrity?

“James…” Addie said softly as Chelo gave Greg another warning expression. “I know what it looks like, but nobody had reason—”

“I collaborated on those designs and signed off on them,” Chelo said. “For all we know this could be my fault.”

“There was nothing wrong with that system.” James leaned forward so he could see her better, his hazel eyes hard and stubborn. “You of all people should be backing me up here.”

Chelo looked at the table.

“Will we receive results of the investigation?” Addie addressed their superiors across the table.

“Yes,” Richard said. “But it doesn’t seem like they’ll find anything. The site’s too dangerous to pick through with that sinkhole.”

James crossed his arms again and sat back, morose.

In the ensuing silence, Eve said, “It’s only the first day. Things will start looking up soon.”

Dhar entered with several sheets of paper in hand and said, “Looks like you’ll be moving back to the old facility near Worthing.”

He was met with blank stares.

“Worthing?” Greg said, worried. “Like west coast Worthing?”

“Afraid so,” Dhar said.

“That’s a good facility,” Eve said. “And above ground too, which sounds better to me after recent events.”

“Agreed,” Richard said. “Though I think we’re all worried about the distance…”

“It’ll be better to have you back near the Bureau’s main office again.” Dhar handed James copies of the location information, who received them wordlessly, took one sheet, and passed on the rest.

“The original facility’s been closed down for years.” Eve scanned the page. “How much renovation will it need?”

“I’ll take care of that.” Dhar returned to his seat next to her. “How much time will you need to relocate?”
 Again, silence closed in on the narrow room. Worthing was on the opposite side of the country. Over a thousand miles away.

James decided to let the others figure out what they wanted to do. By the end of the week, he’d have already gone through work withdrawal and taken up tinkering with other projects on his kitchen table. He didn’t have anyone else to move but himself. It wasn’t his call.

He didn’t feel like arguing anymore, anyway.

“Heather will be out of school for the summer in about three weeks,” Richard said, thinking. “I’d hate to pull her out that close. Would a month be too long?”

“A month should be fine.” Dhar jotted notes on his phone. “The danger of complete exposure isn’t particularly high. If the Dunesborough Police Department isn't releasing information—which they have express federal orders not to—people can speculate, but nothing will be able to be traced back to us.” He considered everyone around the table. “Would a month work for the rest of you? We’ll compensate you for moving expenses and any lease breaking fees.”

James nodded. The remaining engineers confirmed, numbly.

“Great.” The head of the Federal Bureau of Science and Innovation swiped into a different app on his phone. “Mark your calendars, then, for Monday, June fifteenth as the date to report to the new facility. Let me know if you have any questions.”

The engineers clutched their handouts, exchanging uneasy glances.

“I know it’s a lot to ask of you,” Dhar said. “But I do think this will be a good move. Nineteen years is a long time under the table. Maybe after relocating, Larkspur can start expanding again, resurfacing. We’ll shelve the generator for now until we have more information, but with this work safety android project you’re moving into, I think you’ll soon find some more resources coming your way, if I have any say in it. I’m pretty partial to this group, to be honest.”

“Thank you, Vihaan,” Eve said.

James stared at the table, pensive. He hadn’t been at Larkspur that long, so he knew nothing about its origins, or what resurfacing meant.

He guessed he would find out soon enough.

Heather sat at the empty kitchen table with her legs propped on the opposite chair, waiting for her parents to reemerge. The longer they took to emerge from the back of the house, the more her hopes began to sour that this long awaited conversation would actually happen.

She had tried to be understanding of their reasons for keeping it from her. She had tried to prove she was trustworthy and responsible, that she could participate in the family secret, instead of being the only one outside the fold. Nothing worked. 

Heather was fifteen now. She could handle whatever it was her parents were trying to shelter her from, and tonight, more than ever, she had a right to know.
She didn’t look up as the door to her parents’ bedroom opened down the hallway.

“Okay, Heather,” Richard sighed, pulling out the chair across from her. She rescinded her legs, and her dad eased himself into the seat. “Tonight, the secret ends.”

She glanced at her mom, then back to him. “Really?” 

Richard nodded. “It’s unfair to keep you in the dark anymore, especially if what happened tonight changes anything.” He folded his arms on the table. Before Heather could ask what that meant, he continued, “So—to be brief, I’m a mechanical engineer, which you already know.”

Heather bobbed her head in concession. She had long suspected her father’s work had something to do with his love for all things mechanical. There was usually something around the house he was taking apart, or tinkering with. While acting as a chaperone for her fourth grade field trip to a bread factory, he had inadvertently spent the entire tour plaguing the guide with highly technical questions about the machinery.

“I’m the director of an engineering laboratory called Larkspur,” he said. “Tonight, our latest project—a prototype for a power generator—overloaded somehow, and it destroyed the entire facility. The building was underground, so evacuation was…messy.”

Heather stared at him, eyes wide.

“But everyone was okay.” He held up his palms. “Honest.”

He used to work for a construction equipment manufacturer, Heather knew. Shortly after her eighth birthday, he had started working a more reasonable number of hours, wore collared shirts and slacks to work instead of coveralls that smelled like engine grease, and he came home with energy to spare. They moved into a better neighborhood and her mom left the workforce. He’d landed a different job, and they had celebrated their good fortune, but she wasn’t allowed to know what it was he did.

“Why did you wait until something horrible happened to tell me?” she asked.

“Because we had to be sure,” Richard said, gently. “Larkspur has to be kept a secret.”

And because we don’t trust you, Heather wanted to add. “Why?”

“Government nondisclosure agreements, mostly,” he said. “To keep projects and patents secure before they’re ready to hit public, and therefore international, knowledge.”

“Okay, ominous…” Heather said.

“Larkspur works on safety and infrastructure projects,” he tried to sound reassuring, but also already tired of being interrogated. “Nothing shady, I promise.”

“But the whole company still has to be a secret just for that?”

“That’s just how it is with government stuff sometimes.”

It was hard to believe that the secrecy overshadowing the last seven years of her life had merely been the product of an overcautious technicality. Heather had watched enough history documentaries to know that governments—especially ones like theirs—did plenty of messed up stuff under the radar. 

Though, the government also funded things like the post office. She supposed Larkspur could be something like that. But it was no great secret that her aunt worked for the post office, and Auntie Yixin’s workplace had never exploded in the middle of the night.

Heather had always trusted Richard meant well, but now she couldn’t be sure her warm, geeky father was all he professed to be.

“Now that I’ve told you, can I trust that you will also keep my job a secret?” Richard asked, softly earnest.

Heather folded her arms on the table. “Only if you tell me everything.”

He hesitated, looked briefly cornered. “I can’t tell you everything.”

“I know you talk to Mom about work when I’m not around,” Heather pleaded. She had only caught benign snippets of conversations over the years, hastily cut off when she entered a room. Forever relegated to the side, excluded. “For like half my life, she’s gotten to hear about what you’ve been doing and where you’ve been when you go to work, what your life is like when you’re not here with us. But for me, all those days, all those hours, are just gone. I don’t know who you are, Dad. And this makes me feel like you want to keep it that way forever.”

Richard balked, and sadness flooded his eyes behind the lenses of his broken glasses. The scratch on his cheekbone was starting to scab, his face drawn and tired. Finally, his gaze fell.

“I’m sorry. I’m not trying to push you away,” he said finally. “I didn’t realize you felt that way.”

“Then you haven’t been paying attention.”

“Heather.” Her mom put a hand on her shoulder. “Give your dad some grace. He’s been through a lot tonight.”

Heather narrowed her eyes at the table, arms crossed and shoulders slumped. It sounded like his life had been in danger, in fact, but he was never going to tell her that. They were never going to tell her anything.

“I’ll do my best to include you from now on,” Richard said quietly. “But I really need to be able to trust that you can keep this in the family.”

“If you still don’t think you can trust me, then nothing I do will ever be good enough to change that,” Heather said. She got up from the table.

“Acknowledged.” Richard stood up too, and offered her a hug, which she accepted, dismally.

“I’m glad you’re safe,” she said, hugging him back. 

“Me too.” He kissed her head, and Su joined the embrace.

“Can I stay home from school tomorrow?” Heather asked.

“No, sorry,” Su said. “We don't know how fast this will spread. You turning up absent might raise suspicion.”

“No one will notice I’m gone,” Heather groused.

High school hadn’t been good to her so far. Her best friend had moved to another state halfway through the year, and she had been struggling along at the surface as the third wheel in other friend groups ever since.

And now her best friend barely acknowledged her texts anymore. Big city life on the east coast was apparently much more important than the bonds of junior high ride-or-dies.

“They will,” Su said. “You normally have such good attendance. It might be too much of a coincidence.”

Heather groaned.

She was sure this really was all so much worse than anyone would ever tell her, but of course she would have to go to school the next day and pretend everything was fine. What other choice did she have? Especially if something dangerous was happening.

“Okay,” she said finally. “Whatever you need, Dad. If it’ll help.”

“Thank you.” He kissed her again and the hug fragmented. “Now, bedtime for me,” he said with a weak smile, already on his way out of the kitchen. “I’m exhausted.”

+++

Word traveled quickly at school, incited by the students whose households watched the early morning news. Homeroom became an impromptu political club and Heather kept silent. Whatever was going on with her dad, she didn’t want to make it worse. At least not until she could get some kind of angle on it.

“I bet it was a secret headquarters for some government agency,” one of her classmates said, perched on the desk across from her with his feet on the chair. “My dad says President Ferrens is up to something super shady these days. We’re all gonna pay for it soon.”

“Please, Beni,” Laura groaned from the desk beside Heather. “It's too early in the morning for this.”

“We’re already in a dictatorship,” Beni insisted, “Even if he’s not calling it that.”

“You’re talking like you're gonna join the Conxence yourself or something.” Another classmate who’d just arrived cuffed his arm on his way past.

Beni straightened, suddenly. He snapped his fingers. “That’s it! Mason, I’ll bet you anything it was them! Last night.” He swiveled around to face the newcomer, throwing his arms out. “What else could it be?”

Heather glanced at the doorway, but their teacher had yet to appear.

“Conxence?” Laura droned, skeptical. “This far east? Not a chance.”

The Conxence—formerly the non-militarized “Conscience Movement”—was established by civilians with the purpose of calling the troubling political climate to accountability. Currently demonized as an uncontrollable rash of vigilantes and terrorists, the Conxence was mainly active in the nation’s capital, three time zones west.

“They do like blowing stuff up when they can,” Mason said.

“I’m sure whatever happened last night was just an industrial accident, like the news said.”

“Yeah, like the news always tells the truth,” Beni snorted.

“Didn’t you see footage of the site?” asked Mason.

“It was crazy!” Beni grinned at him. He turned it on Laura, who remained unconvinced.

As Beni proceeded to describe the video coverage of the aftermath with as many sound effects as possible, Heather tried to act like her hackles weren't raising.

A crater, he said. The facility's demise had made a crater. In a rural area. Farmland outside of town.

A charred, skeletal, crater.

One that had almost claimed her dad's life.
 Heather should have thought to watch the news that morning—but she had barely caught the bus. And maybe her dad wouldn't have let her near the TV or internet anyway. She resented more than ever that her parents wouldn’t let her have a smart phone until she was seventeen. She could be facing a full lockdown when she returned home that afternoon.

She planned to spend her lunch hour in the library at one of the computers. Maybe it was good she was at school, where her dad couldn't interfere.

Still, if Larkspur was tied up in government secrets, that first confused local news story would be all the information to get out.

Heather fidgeted with the edge of her sea green hairband. She opened her notebook and tried to look busy.

By pushing her to the margins and rejecting her from a key part of their world, did her parents think they were protecting her? Especially now, when she had no idea what they were dealing with. Was the Conxence after her dad?

He'd probably never tell her that either.

A subterranean pulse shattered the rural quiet. Like the lag time between injury and pain, a single sleeping field nestled among a dark landscape of similar plots erupted in a fountain of flaming debris.

The giant, smoldering crater, lanced with the twisted remains of the building beneath, caused a great deal of commotion until the head of the local police received a phone call from a man named Vihaan Dhar.

No one knew the facility existed. Perhaps no one would have ever found out.

CHAPTER ONE – LARKSPUR

An hour past midnight, Heather Knight heard a car pull up the driveway.

She jolted up from the couch and climbed onto her knees, shoving the curtains back and peering out the window behind. Her dad’s car sat in front of the garage, idling. Then the engine turned off, and the silhouette of its driver sat in darkness.

Long night just got longer, read the last text her mom had received from him two hours ago. Don’t wait up.

But Su-Wei had, and Heather had woken up to see light from the living room still seeping under her bedroom door, so even though it was a school night, she had waited too.

“Is it him?” Su-Wei asked from the adjacent couch.

Heather stared, eyes narrowed. “Yeah, he’s just sitting there.” She perked up. “No, wait, he’s getting out.”

He wandered up the walk, idly kneading his shoulder. The porch lights caught the edge of his glasses, first glinting off a jagged crack in the lens and then blooming across a bloody, bruising scrape on his face.

Heather pitched back. Her foot caught in the cushions and she nearly fell off the couch in her haste to get to the door. She unlocked the bolt and threw it open. “Dad, what happened?”

Richard balked in the doorway. He ran a hand through his short black hair. Stray pieces of dirt and grass fluttered to the doormat.

He stepped into the house, tried to put his keys in his pocket, but he kept missing. He squeezed them in his hand instead. Tightly. “Su, can we talk in the bedroom?”

Su glanced from him to Heather’s growing dismay, then shifted toward the hallway with an apprehensive nod. Richard sidestepped his daughter and ducked into the hallway as well, leaving Heather standing alone, aghast and betrayed.

Heather crossed her arms and leaned back against the front door.

“You can’t keep doing this,” she muttered to the empty entryway.

She waited for the muffled voices to start up, and then crept forward. She tucked herself into the nearby doorway of her bedroom, close enough to barely make out what her parents were saying.

“Please just tell me what happened,” her mother said.

A heavy sigh. Then, her father’s voice, hoarse and frazzled, “Larkspur exploded. Can you believe that?” He was further from the door. She heard the faucet turn on in their bathroom.

“Exploded?” Su gasped. “How?”

“Something happened with our generator prototype. We didn’t get a chance to figure out what before we had to evacuate.”

“Everyone got out safely?”

“Yeah. Just a few scrapes.”

“Scrapes from what?”

“Flying debris, but it’s fine.”

“It’s not fine. Look at that wound on your face. Your glasses! You mean you were that close to—what? An explosion? Was radiation involved?”

“I wasn’t that close—”

“I swear to god, Richard, stop downplaying this.”

“Well what am I supposed to do?” Richard cried. “Be brutally honest? Worry you even more?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because it happened to you!”

Heather held her breath. Her heart pounded so hard she worried it would give her away.

Her parents never fought. Her mom swore when provoked, but Heather couldn’t remember ever seeing her dad upset. He never showed her that part of himself.

Unsettled, Heather stepped away from the doorframe. As she turned, she heard Su say, almost too quietly for her to make out, “Heather will piece this together by herself at this rate, and I don’t want her taking this into her own hands. I think our time’s run out.”

“I’ll tell her tonight.”

“She can do with a promise tonight. You need a minute to gather your nerves, at least.”

“It’ll be all over the news by morning.”

“Fuck.”

She heard movement behind the door, and Heather hastily took that as her cue to head back up the hallway and pretend she wasn’t a brazen eavesdropper. She couldn’t believe what was happening.

They were finally going to tell her.

                                                                          +++

James Siles stuck his hand into the darkness of his apartment, clumsily searching for the light switch.

Every muscle in his body hurt.

He thrust the door shut with his foot and kicked off his shoes. He smelled like smoke and earth. He was starting to feel the scrapes and bruises too, now that the panic was wearing off. His hip especially smarted.

He had never been good at running.

He dropped his lean frame onto the couch with a grunt and frowned up at the ceiling fan, watching its sluggish revolutions as he gently kneaded the pain in his upper arm.

His work was gone. His equipment, prototypes, the better portion of his most recent projects that had yet to undergo routine backups… The sketchbook he kept with him at all times had perished as well, along with his laptop, which he had been diligently upgrading and enhancing since the first day of graduate school.

Everything. Burned and buried.

James stretched his arms behind his head, wincing.

The matter-to-energy conversion generator had been electrochemically stable, and supplying ample, clean power to the entire underground building. That night was supposed to be the final vigil to see if their efforts to smooth minor snags in the design would hold true. It would have revolutionized the future of electrical infrastructure, if it had survived.

James had been calculating and recalculating the variables, but nothing about that night was adding up. The generator wasn't supposed to be explosive. The failure of the thermoregulatory system on its own was extremely unlikely, and under normal circumstances, the generator would have simply shorted itself out. Maybe a few lightbulbs and subsidiary circuits would have been blown out in the process, but certainly not anything near the annihilation of a ten thousand square foot facility.

The cooling system had to have been sabotaged, right? Along with a volatile foreign contaminant introduced to the generator's sensitive core. He had no proof, of course, but he knew it. What else could it have been?

Larkspur didn't seem to him the type of company to attract enemies. As part of his work contract, he had to keep details about his clandestine workplace to himself, but that was just protocol. Nothing about the organization or the other engineers had raised any red flags. James certainly hadn't worked there long enough to hear any dark secrets about why the lab was so far removed from the public eye—or why it was literally underground. He hadn't thought it important before.

Maybe Eve could lend some insight, as soon as Richard got a hold of her. James knew her as one of the engineering team, but she had co-founded Larkspur many years before, and had even been the director before Richard. If anyone knew if Larkspur was under fire, it would be her.

James dragged himself to his feet and stalked to the small kitchen to brew some tea. Listening to the electric kettle creak as it heated, he massaged his temple and contemplated his cache of herbs in the nearby cabinet.

Definitely peppermint.

Hey folks! I’m editing again. Something about the manuscript continued to bother me, and then I found a bunch of plot holes, so now I’m working on those.

I’ve also begun to feel paranoid about having the whole manuscript online, especially in the age of AI (even though the manuscript isn’t complete). I’ve left the first 5 chapters up. Hopefully someday, I’ll be able to publish this book properly and you all can enjoy it in its intended form.

Thanks for reading!