Nova Project #1 by Emma Trevayne Read Free Book Online Page A

flesh.
    The front door opens, a pair of camera lenses focus on him, aperture irises expanding in the lesser light. The mouth below them smiles, the throat behind them leading to a pair of biomech lungs.
    â€œHi, honey.”
    â€œHi, Mom.”
    He waits while she carefully sets down her bags, heavy with fragile equipment. She uses handheld cameras most of the time, but her eyes give her the ability to capture whatever she sees, the moment she sees it.
    Taking photographs for the end of the world. Miguel’s never much seen the point in it, but they’re all beautiful, in the way only dying things can be.
    Her pictures of him are good, too.
    â€œHow did it go?” she asks. As always, there is a subtle thread running through the otherwise evenly woven fabric of her voice when she asks about the game. It’s the same thread Anna has, but it’s a lot more forgivable from his mom. He knows she worries, she and his dad both do. They just can’t argue with his reasons for playing.
    â€œOkay, I think? I don’t know. We’re not allowed to talk about it.”
    â€œI know,” she says, motioning for him to follow her into the kitchen. She likes routine. Home, put bags down, make synthmint tea, no matter how hot it is outside. The paperlike substance, infused with chemical peppermint, dissolves the instant she pours boiling water into her mug. “It seems like they’re being pretty strict about that.”
    â€œOr it’s that no one’s taking the risk.” Enforcing a rule works pretty well if no one dares break it.
    â€œWhichever. I haven’t seen anything in my feed about what the level’s like.”
    â€œAnd I’m not going to tell you, either.” Miguel grins.
    His mother’s shoulders deflate a little. “Damn. I bring you into the world, and this is the thanks I get. Worth a shot, right? I’m only curious, since I’m not playing it.”
    â€œI thought that’s where you were, practicing.”
    â€œNah, just having some fun. So?”
    â€œIt’s a level.” Miguel closes his eyes and sees . . . things. Teeth and screaming mouths. Endless corridors and landscapes so vast they create their own kind of suffocating claustrophobia.
    There hadn’t been a boss at the end, just a puzzle. A damned hard puzzle. He’d had to kneel down on the sand of the beach he’d ended up on and trace all the possible answers into it with his finger for a good half hour before being halfway sure he had the right one. “It wasn’t that hard.”
    She probably knows he’s lying, but lets him get away with it. “I guess if they make it too difficult, they won’t get all the people they need,” she says. “When’s your medical?”
    â€œDay after tomorrow.”
    â€œOkay, honey. You home for dinner?”
    â€œYup.” He nods, and his mother starts pulling farmed, created, manufactured ingredients from cupboards. Nothing is wild, nothing is fresh. Once he’d spent hours on an early level stuck in a wheat field and not knowing what it was untilhe searched online when he got home. Nothing is grown like that anymore, out in the open, under the sky.
    Which is probably a good thing. No one likes to be poisoned. It makes for a bad day and maybe a last day.
    The computers in his room hum gently, making it a little warmer than the rest of the house, which is kept cold by law. His parents have an exemption because of his heart, but even that allows them only two degrees more than everyone else. He hums along with them for a second, a one-note symphony.
    His keyboard is a projection of light on his desk—or whatever flat surface he chooses. Sometimes it’s the wall, when he’s too restless to sit, or the floor if he’s bothered to clean it recently. But for now it’s on the desk, and he closes his eyes again, letting his fingers type while he loses himself in memory. He’d had