Luca Read Free

swarm the walls, are frozen in time, half unfolded from a tiny pocket of green on the end of the stem.
    Silently, she slides across the floor and raises the box in both hands until it is bathed in the beams of moonlight pouring down. Her upraised palms take on a silver glow.
    The tiny plant awakens.
    In her mind, she hears a quiet stirring as the leaves absorb the light. She senses a high-pitched note, fainter than a whisper, octaves above any sound she’s ever heard with her ears. As she listens, the single note cascades down, breaking into fragments that trigger images of flowing colors. A tiny symphony of light plays in her mind, mixing with the melody of the cicadas.
    Caught up in the rapture of oneness, Luca adds words to the harmony.
    “Drink in the light, little one. Someday, you’ll grow tall and strong. Like the trees outside the wall.”
    The sounds in her head pause for an instant and then explode into a chorus that brings a smile to Luca’s face.
    The light flashes red on the wall. This time, it doesn’t stop.
    Her body stiffens.
    Footsteps race down the hall on the other side of the metal door.
    A single teardrop draws a line down her cheek as she closes her eyes and stills her breathing. Her hands come down and carefully hide the plant under the corner of the futon.
    The door bursts open behind her.

3
    MOLECULE
     
    The structure doesn’t make sense.
    It’s never made sense.
    Qaara shakes her head, staring at the holographic model of a complex molecule floating at eye level. The neon colors of each atom burn in the darkness like a 3-D constellation. The general helix shape of its core is familiar enough, but something isn’t right. On a whim, she reaches out a finger to the holo and moves one of the atoms to a new location. When she lets go, the words Unstable Configuration appear above, and the molecule slides back to its original position.
    Always the same result.
    Frank Mercer, the CEO of Genesis Corporation, whom she met only once, hired her six months ago to find the weakness in the molecule, to figure out how to break it apart, stop it, destroy it, kill it.
    But the molecule cannot be tweaked, altered or reshaped. She has no idea what it does, but after months of futile experiments, one thing appears certain. The molecule’s configuration is indestructible.
    Just like the wildly successful career and life she was born to, carefully designed and nurtured by her father and then forced upon her.
    As the holo slowly rotates, she rubs her eyes, wincing at the sting, and wonders whether the sun has risen.
    Time to rest.
    The tip of her finger drops down and touches the slate in her hand. There’s a hum above her as an aperture in the ceiling opens, allowing soft light to pour down and illuminate her office. A single sheet of clear, programmable glass forms the outside window and curves across her line of vision like a massive lens, floor to ceiling. As its milky surface turns clear, it disappears from view, leaving the illusion of nothing between her and 250 floors of open space below.
    Eyelids dropping down, Qaara pulls in a deep inhale and waits for the oxygen to flood her brain. With the rush of clarity, her eyes float open, and she stares out over the Manhattan skyline, the jewel of the East Coast, the capital of the New United States, at least the ever-shrinking parts of it hugging the Atlantic coast that haven’t been abandoned yet to the encroaching chaos. As always, her gaze is drawn to the seawall that stretches around Manhattan like a massive cellular membrane, holding the City and its inhabitants together, protecting them from what lies on the other side. Two meters thick and a hundred meters high, it’s made of billions of layers of microscopic graphene.
    And it’s completely transparent. Like air.
    People come from all over the civilized world to see and study it, to run their fingers across its delicate surface and marvel at the beauty of the humpbacks that, thanks to massively rising