Horizon (21 page)

Hoku crawled over to the nearest work space for a closer look. The marks weren’t scratches, they were grooves. And there. In the middle. A button.

He pressed it. With a soft hiss, the smooth white drawer slid out.

“Barnacles!”

Hoku scrambled to his feet and examined the drawer’s contents. Sheets of yellowed paper, some with doodles of fish in the margins, a piece of desiccated food in a shiny wrapper, a photograph of a handsome Human man somewhere in the Above World.

“Zorro, stop playback,” he said. The computer voice cut off in mid-sentence.

Hoku hopped from one workstation to the next, pressing buttons and hearing the exhalation of a dozen new places to explore. All these secrets just waiting to be found, and he’d almost missed them!

One drawer slid open revealing row after row of what looked like tiny sets of goggles. He stopped to examine them. They weren’t goggles at all, but little cases clearly meant to hold eye lenses of some kind. The first ten he opened were empty, but the last two . . . the last two still held their prizes.

Hoku brought the case closer to his face and studied the lenses up close. The first set was orange and glittery, like scales. At certain angles, he could just make out a reflective matrix of dots. The second set was clear with ghostly blue swirls.

Upgrades.

But what did they do? He closed the lid on the orange pair and turned the case over in his hands. There, on the back, almost too small to see, was a strange pattern of dots and lines.

“Zorro, come here and scan this code.”

His faithful little buddy unplugged his tail from the computer interface and bounded over, leaping the distance between workstations and scrabbling against the plastic with his black claws. Zorro paused in front of the lens case. His eyes emitted a slender green beam that the animal dragged over the strange code.

Zorro edged backward and plugged his tail into the nearest workstation interface. Words appeared on the monitor.

Screen after screen of legal and medical disclaimers followed. Hoku saw the words, but didn’t actually read any of them.

Optical neural interface. He wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but he wanted it.
Needed
it. Wasn’t sure how he had ever survived so long without it.

He picked up the case containing the blue lenses. “Zorro, scan.”

This time the words confused him.

A similar jumble of jargon followed, but Hoku understood even less of it. Clearly the swirly blue lenses did something wonderful; he just couldn’t figure out what. He snapped the lid closed and placed the lenses back in the drawer.

“Zorro, show me instructions for inserting the Datastreamers,” Hoku said.
Datastreamers.
It sounded even better when he said it out loud.

A series of diagrams appeared on the screen. Apparently he was supposed to wash his hands in clean water first. Except he had no clean water, so seawater would have to do. Maybe the instructions were written by Humans who couldn’t handle salt in their eyes.

He dragged a chair over and sat. The instructions didn’t look difficult. The worst part would be touching the lens to his eye. Eyes were too mushy. Too much like the gooey insides of oysters. He didn’t look forward to poking his finger into one.

But the idea taunted him:
Datastreamers.
Streaming data. All for him. Imagine what he could do! Surely he’d be able to save the Kampii and find Karl Strand when data was literally streaming to his brain.

The instructions were as easy to follow as they seemed, and soon an orange lens was perched on the tip of his newly cleaned finger. He stole one more glance at the diagram on the screen. Using his other hand, he kept both his inner and outer eyelids open and gently touched the lens to his eyeball.

He blinked instinctively, but the lens was in and stuck to his eye. It burned, like grit stuck inside his inner lid, but he forced himself not to rub it. The instructions told him to keep blinking, to let the lens naturally find its way to the curve of his eye. So he blinked, and blinked, and cursed a few times, and blinked some more.

Was this how an oyster felt when some stupid bit of dirt found its way into its shell? No wonder the oyster wrapped up the grit in a pearl coating! Hoku wished he could do that now. He gritted his teeth and put his palm over his eye to stop himself from rubbing. Or digging. Or scratching. The ancient Humans were tough if they did things like this all the time. Eventually, the blinking felt less and less like he was dragging his eyes over a sandbank. And then, miraculously, the irritation disappeared entirely. His eye felt puffy and red, but it didn’t hurt.

“Zorro, do you need to wear both lenses for them to work?”

Zorro’s nose twitched while he searched the information about the lenses. When the raccoon’s eyes glowed green, as Hoku had secretly known they would, he sighed and prepared the other lens.

The second one went more smoothly. Or maybe Hoku was just expecting the pain and suffering this time and was mentally prepared. But within a few flashes, the second lens found its rightful place on his eye.

Hoku’s head tingled. He thought he heard a click and a whir, but no. Those noises were inside his head — little feedback impulses telling him the lenses were messing with his brain.

His insides lurched and the room spun sideways. He tried to right himself and landed with a thud on the floor. Except it was the ceiling. Or was it a wall?

Stupid, stupid, stupid! The lenses were old tech intended for Humans, not for Kampii. Did his eyes and his brain even work the same? What if the lenses made him blind? Here he was, out in the middle of nowhere by himself.

Not by himself.

“Zorro!” he croaked.

A thud, and then tiny licks covered his face. Licks that smelled like clams. His vision blurred into gray and white streaks. He reached out his hand and grasped Zorro’s fur, focusing on the soft tufts caught between his fingers. “Good boy. You’re the best raccoon ever. Do I tell you that enough? Because you are.”

Slowly, his vision began to clear . . . but not entirely. Tiny words now hovered in the air. Words describing what he was seeing.
LOCATION: SEAHORSE ALPHA
. A string of coordinates followed. Hoku pushed himself up, now fairly certain he understood what direction that was. Words continued to scroll by, indicating chairs and workstations and even an arrow pointing at Zorro with
ZORRO
^™
-
WILD BUDDIES PROGRAMMABLE PETS, SERIAL NUMBER SF01081962.

It was too much. There were words everywhere, constantly moving, and he couldn’t even begin to process them all. He didn’t need to see Zorro’s name every time he looked at the little guy.

And just like that, the words hovering around Zorro disappeared. He’d made them go away just by thinking about it!

He changed the color of the text to green, then to white, then only some of the data to blue. He turned off most of the location alerts. Did he really need to know the type of chair he was sitting on? No, he did not.

Hoku looked at the closest computer monitor and the word
PASSWORD?
floated in front of him. He remembered the password from a few days ago, when Zorro had helped him access the system. The prompt changed to
CONNECTED
, which blinked twice, then disappeared.

Connected. To Seahorse Alpha. He now had a direct link to every last bit of data Sarah Jennings and the other Human ancients had ever known.

H
OKU SHOULD HAVE
let his eyes rest and adjust to
the new implants. The instructions recommended six
to twelve hours of nonuse and relaxation. But that was time he and the Kampii didn’t have.

“Hey, basic! You there?” Rollin’s voice called from the comm screen.

Hoku started to roll his chair over to the monitor, then stopped. He told his eyes to connect to the comm system and bring up the Shining Moon feed, and there it was: Rollin floating in midair, looking sun worn and crotchety as ever. She’d cut her hair short and done something to her wild eyebrows. If he’d met her now, he might have assumed she was male.

“Rollin,” he said, telling his new computer eyes to transmit his voice back to her.

But Rollin only squinted. “Where are you? Shark finally get you? Or maybe that raccoon? Told you the little thief was up to no good, but did you listen? No. Basic knows best.”

Of course! He was too far away from the input devices — the camera and the microphone. His Datastreamers could tap into the feed and redirect it to his lenses, but they had no way of transmitting his voice or a picture of his face back to Rollin. He’d need a mobile input device for that.

He stayed in his chair and pushed himself over to the comm wall.

“There you are! What took you so —” One of Rollin’s eyebrows arched, her mouth cracked into a toothy grin. “Ooh, not so basic anymore, are you, boy?”

Hoku tried to smile, but moving his face hurt his eyes. He settled for a tiny grimace.

“Not good,” Rollin said. “Bad tech?”

“The tech is fine, but it hurts and I can’t seem to take it out,” Hoku said. “The lenses are stuck behind my second eyelids.”

Rollin’s shaggy brow furrowed. “Second eyelids?”

“That’s what I said,” Hoku grumbled. “What went wrong?”

Rollin scratched her cheek. “Well, off the top of my brain, I’m thinking that most of us only have one set of eyelids. Second pair must be a fish thing.”

“You only have one . . . ?” Hoku repeated.

She nodded. “Only
need
one.”

Hoku sighed. “I used tech that wasn’t intended for Kampii eyes. Barnacles! Does that make me the dumbest Upgrader ever?”

“Saw someone try to cut off his own head once, when he found a better one,” Rollin said. “Hard to beat that on the idiot scale.”

“Will it ever stop hurting?” Hoku asked. He dropped his head into his hands and closed his eyes. Glowing words flickered through his vision anyway. There was no escape from the Datastreamers unless he consciously closed every feed.

“We got good medteks among our folk,” Rollin said gently. “When this war business is over, we’ll get you righted.”

The fact that she was being so nice only made Hoku feel worse. She was
never
nice — not even back when Calli got poisoned. He must be doomed.

“Oh, back to feeling sorry for yourself,” Rollin grumbled. “Your default setting is ‘Poor me.’ ‘I give up.’ ‘I stuck something in my eye and can’t get it out.’ Well, we have more to worry about than a silly mistake made by some wrangly basic!”

Hoku opened his eyes and forced a smile.

“Good,” Rollin said. “Any sign of Strand’s hideout? Figures, that coward holing up someplace in the darkness, not showing his face. Just like him. Now we have armies — big armies full of Equians and Serpenti — and nowhere to send them.”

“No word from Dash, and I haven’t found anything in the Seahorse Alpha data yet,” Hoku said. “I’m hoping the Datastreamers will make it easier to search. No offense, boy.” He paused to scruffle Zorro’s head. “I did find something interesting, though. A letter from Sarah Jennings — she’s the founder of the Coral Kampii — to Karl Strand. They used to be a family, if you can believe that.”

He used his eye tech to pull up the letter from storage. It floated in front of him, invisible to Rollin, and he read it aloud.

Rollin whistled. “Isn’t that a pretty bunch of words. Did Strand respond?”

“Yes,” Hoku said, “although I’m sure Sarah Jennings wasn’t too happy with what he had to say.” He pulled up Strand’s letter even though he remembered every harsh word of it. “He wrote, ‘I have no time for cowards.’”

“Pain makes us ugly sometimes,” Rollin said, and he was surprised to hear no hint of judgment in her voice. “Losing his little one must have been bad, but losing his partner at the same time? Explains a lot. No wonder the man buried himself in obsession.”

Hoku’s mouth fell open. “You’re defending Karl Strand, after everything he’s done? After everything he wants to do?” He shook his head. “I don’t care what happened to him. There’s no excuse for his actions.”

“Maybe no excuse,” Rollin said, “but maybe understanding.” She mumbled to herself, “Yes, maybe a little understanding.”