Spinning Starlight by R.C. Lewis Read Free Book Online Page A

noise.
    Everything on the outside of the house looks completely normal. The door is on its hinges, no windows are broken, and even the flowers are tidy. I remember the noise of the attack. I expected
more destruction, but Minali must’ve had it repaired.
    “Welcome home, Liddi,” Dom says as I walk in. “Has there been a change to your schedule? I could update it if you like.”
    The tears press harder, and the pressure to cry out becomes unbearable, but the tiny extra weight at my throat reminds me I can’t. I can’t use my voice, and I can’t respond to
Dom.
    Dom figures out after three more tries that I’m not going to talk. Still achey and tired from the neural incapacitator, I curl up in bed, hoping the silence won’t suffocate me in my
sleep.

    “Liddi, do I assume correctly that you don’t wish to hear the usual messages in your queue?” Dom asks two days later.
    I tap the icon for Yes and stare at the otherwise blank screen.
    “Very well. One new message has just come in that doesn’t fit the ‘usual.’ Would you like to hear that one?”
    Yes again. Why not?
    “Liddi, it’s Garrin. I’m not buying Blake’s story about you taking some ‘quiet time.’ Something’s wrong. Holding back the truth about your
brothers’ disappearance is the wrong move—we need all the eyes possible looking for them. Get back to me. I can help.”
    A nice sentiment, but I can’t record a message back to him, and I can’t get into the city to see him without Minali knowing it. I can’t just sit and do nothing either, though,
so I don’t. Unfortunately, doing anything using just the iconographic interface takes
forever
. All the computer networks have been voice-activated for ages now, with the touchscreens
mostly for quick jumping between subroutines. Good thing Dom is such a smart system. He makes up a few new icons and tells me what they mean, hoping to help me get where I’m going. When
that’s too much, I draw pictures for him to decipher, and he uses the in-house cams to watch my gestures.
    “Your refusal to speak does make things inefficient,” he says after the fourth wrong try in a row. “And my flexibility regarding icons is limited. But I suspect the information
you seek isn’t relevant to the databases I have access to.”
    Relevant databases. There’s something Marek told me. Something he joked about.
“Those archivists on Tarix are so afraid of losing everything obscure, they don’t realize
they lost their minds centuries ago.”
    Archivists and historians and philosophers. “Useless thinkers,” Minali called them. Useless to her, maybe. But they have the collected history and knowledge of the Seven Points,
including everything ever dreamed up by the technologists on Sampati. If someone ever knew more about the portals and we forgot, the information would still be there somewhere. Maybe I could find
the connection my gut tells me I’m missing between the old portals and the way the conduits work. And even if the people on Tarix don’t have my brothers’ monitoring codes, they
might have details on the implants themselves. That would be a starting point.
    If I can figure out a way to communicate and access their systems…but maybe they’ll have something for that, too.
    Even then, what makes me think I can figure it out? Checked genes, the only non-smart Jantzen in history. A waste of all the energy put into building me up. Hopeless and pointless…
    I shake off the creeping doubts. It doesn’t matter. Trying is what matters, because my brothers have always expected my best effort. It’s
all
they’ve ever asked of me.
Besides, if my parents set control of the company to pass to Tarix if something happened to me, they must have trusted some people there. If I can find those people, if I can make them understand,
I’ll get the help I need.
    But there’s no way I can go to a conduit terminal and ask them to send me to Tarix. Even if I could talk, Minali will have all the