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“Yeah,” Clarissa said “It seeo, and there’s what actually happens”
A warning tone sounded through the dru with the distance and the free air An artificial voice reassured theency alert Report to shelters immediately and await official instructions
“Listen,” Nao”
“Oh , haven’t we?”
Naoive her support if she needed it, and they started toward the rendezvous Clarissa’s body twitched and shuddered as she walked Once they went below, into the corridors and halls of the drum, the traffic thickened The alert sounded from every corner Businesses closed their doors Kiosks shut down Everywhere, people ry, but most with a kind of deathly focus They’d had tooaround The illusion that life was normal for any of them vanished
She and Naoap in the flow of bodies, then ducked into a public restroom Clarissa sat on the couch built into the wall She felt a little nausea haunting the back of her throat, but it wasn’t bad Naomi went to the sink and washed her hands slowly, not to make the in the place should anyone from station security come in
The plan—their part of it anyas sih Or at least it was from Clarissa’s per
spective She’d tried to walk Alex through it once, and she was pretty sure he’d only followed about half The sensor arrays on the Medina were all linked to the main syste down the poould keep Medina fro where the ships went in real time, but it wouldn’t clear the local caches in all the sensor arrays As soon as the power grid came back, the arrays would check in, reconnect, and deliver everything they’d saved
And that process right there had a vulnerability in it When the arrays checked in to reconnect, the systenostic run The arrays would take about twenty seconds to cycle through their diagnostics and return the results with a fresh check-in During those twenty seconds, no new data caot routed to a false systenostic requests, they could keep doing that until so from or else physically went out to the arrays and ran a new dedicated line
When she’d gotten to about this point in the description, Alex’s eyes had lost their focus, and she’d simplified Make a fake traffic card Put the fake traffic card in at the secondary power junction Blow the primary power junction to reset all the arrays Arrays don’t cootten a thumbs-up from him then It had been cute
It was always strange to res that other people didn’t Not just about power- and signal-routing protocols What it was like to murder someone who’d only ever been kind to you How it felt when the people you’d dedicated your life to killing took you in as fah she knew better, she always defaulted to the idea that her life wasn’t singular That whatever she’d done must not have been that odd, because after all, she’d done it
The door opened and the bo a ceramic toolbox Jordao He nodded to Clarissa and then to Naomi Between the hunch in his back and his ashy skin, he looked like a sa to pull this off, that guy’s going to have to calm the fuck down
“Hey,” Clarissa said
“Hoy,” he responded “Bist bien?”
“No problems so far,” Nao?”