The Bloodlight Chronicles: Reconciliation Read Free

bureaucrat.
    Pastor Ed sighed. “He may remember some things, memories with strong emotive content particularly. Love never dies, Mia.”
    â€œAm I allowed to go after him?”
    â€œYou?”
    â€œHe may need me.”
    â€œIt really wouldn’t be feasible. You don’t have the experience for field operations. Any Eternal is at risk outside the compound.”
    â€œC’mon Ed, I’m a tai chi master with kick-box training. I can subdue a grown man without breaking a sweat. You can’t expect me to sit around like a war bride making bandages. There must be something I can do. Rix is almost an adult now. I could drop out for awhile.”
    Pastor Ed picked up a pencil and tapped it on his desk a few times. The sound seemed amplified in the sterile little cubicle, a judge’s gavel in a dusty courtroom. “I’ll look into it,” he said.
    Rix scanned his flatscreen lazily, online but unplugged, just hanging out with his friends. Ostensibly, he was toying with today’s homework module, but he found it difficult to concentrate on schoolwork before breakfast. A text message scrolled across the lower portion of his screen. It looked like a hostile pop-up that should have been blocked automatically. He pointed at it with a finger diode and tapped delete in his palm. It scrolled by again.
    Your community has been compromised. Take evasive action.
    Rix stared at it thoughtfully. This looked like fun. He highlighted the message and tapped the mike on his pinkie finger.
    â€œAre you the doom and gloom girl?” he asked, translated to text only, no video.
    What makes you think I’m a girl?
    He chuckled. “The lack of profanity gives you away.”
    :-}
Fair enough.
    â€œYou jumped my firewall, you hacker.”
    Plug up and meet me?
    â€œI’ve already got a girlfriend.”
    Liar.
    Rix’s smile faded fractionally. He tapped for a tracer. “Who are you, anyway?”
    A distant relative. I’m just trying to help.
    â€œI don’t have any relatives.”
    Is that what your parents told you?
    â€œMy parents told me never to trust anyone online.”
    Good. Then my message is complete. Bye for now.
    His flatscreen returned to normal, a brewing maelstrom of information. He checked his chats but could find no references to the doom and gloom girl. He had been singled out for a private communication. His tracer came back with an IP address that turned out to be a vagabond. Typical hacker protocol. A breakfast icon chimed from the cafeteria.
    His community had been compromised. Again. He wondered where his parents would drag him this time. They always seemed to be on the move, always running just one step away from trouble. He never seemed to catch up in realtime. How was he ever going to make friends or get a steady girl? He never knew what to say to people in person, how to act, what to wear. All he had was his online gang and he didn’t even know where most of them lived. They used names like nightshade and bestboy and swapped source code like candy. Half of them were probably informants for the government gestapo. Oh well.
    He snapped his fingers to exit his programs and began packing his duffel bag.
    A wooden door creaked on rusty hinges as Zakariah pushed it open and stepped from a dirty back alley into an antique computer-repair shop. Fluorescent tubes overhead glimmered dimly with the last dregs of ballast energy. A couple of dead monitors stood on the scratched and chipped countertop before him, with coloured wires hanging out the back like ponytails. Coils of white fiberoptic cable hung from a pegboard wall on short metal poles.
    The trip downtown had been uneventful. Zakariah had not risked public transit with a telltale burnt wire hanging behind his ear and had talked to no one. The streets were relatively quiet after the nighttime ban on combustible fuel, the pedestrian traffic minimal and the trolley-bikes sporadic. A promise of morning