The Last Days of Lorien
allow me to communicate with Rapp, or even with the other Cêpan back at the academy if necessary.
    Even though I knew this area like the back of my hand, I’d never bothered to learn the city’s official coordinate system. As I crossed over the hill and entered the commercial district north of Eilon Park, the info-mod indicated I had entered Sector 302, which most people called the Crescent because of the way the main street curved in on itself like a sliver of a moon.
    I watched the module with strange fascination as all my old favorite neighborhood haunts—the Pit, Arcadia—were converted to their Munis numbers on my tab. 282, 304, 299.
    I finally arrived at 297. Looking up from the locator, I realized with a start that I was standing just outside the Chimæra. I sighed to myself, trying not to think too much about it. It didn’t matter what building I was outside. I wasn’t here to go inside—I couldn’t go inside.
    I was here to climb a pole.
    So I threw the harness on and made my way up. When I reached the top, I looked out onto the horizon. From up here, the column of light Rapp and I had seen earlier looked even more impressive. Well, maybe impressive is the wrong word. Actually, it was sort of creepy. It was vibrating and pulsing in a way that was almost otherworldly. And it was hard to tell where it was coming from—it could have been a few blocks away, or a hundred miles. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen for a Quartermoon celebration before.
    It wasn’t my business though. I was here to work on the grid. So I unlocked the front of the control panel and flipped it open to find the keypad tucked within a dense nest of overlapping multicolored wires.
    I sighed again, a longer, deeper sigh than before.
    This was going to take a while.
    It was still the tail end of the morning, pretty much the only time of day the club wasn’t hopping. The entrance to the Chimæra was still quiet. But I knew the crowd would pick up within a few hours. I wondered for a second what my old friends would think if any of them stumbled by. Then I realized that they probably wouldn’t even recognize me. To them, now, I was just another guy in a green tunic.
    The work was surprisingly absorbing. I started running automated diagnostics on individual wires to determine if they were in need of replacement. The only tricky part was figuring out which wires were which. They were all numbered, and the degraded wires had to be removed and replaced within a correct sequence lest I damage this entire piece of the grid. But as Rapp had promised, the Prompt system that came with the kit provided pretty helpful instructions when I got confused or when I had trouble identifying one of the degraded wires by sight.
    It had been weeks since I’d messed around with my ID band tech, and I had forgotten how much I missed this kind of tinkering. In my brief time at the LDA, I’d already forgotten that I was actually pretty good at it. I liked the way you could take it one step at a time, the way all the different pieces fit together like a puzzle. How even if you had no idea what you were doing, you could pretty much figure it out as long as you had a handle on the basic principles of it.
    Before too long I’d stopped relying on the Prompt module at all. I was identifying the wire sequences with no trouble and was adjusting them easily, going mostly on instinct.
    I had never really given much thought to the grid, or what a vital function it provided to the city. In addition to using sophisticated sensors to monitor and register the goings-on of Capital City, compiling information for Munis about the flow of people and goods—keeping everything running smoothly, perfectly— the grid’s lesser-known function was a protective one. The nondescript poles that were so omnipresent that I barely noticed them actually stretched an invisible latticework of defensive shields and counterattack systems above the skyline. The reasoning behind the

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