10 LAST WORDS

10 LAST WORDS Lunar day 188 After dinner Kira opened the door to her residence the moment after I knocked on it, then yanked me inside and locked it behind us. "What took you so long?" she asked suspiciously. "I came as soon as I got your message," I said. "I texted you five minutes ago." "I had to excuse myself from dinner. And... there was pie." Kira arched an eyebrow. "Pie?"

"I haven't had pie in months," I told her. "And this was apple. My favorite." I produced a plate with a slice from behind my back. "I brought you some as well. I figured you'd be hungry, seeing as you skipped dinner." "I was working on our project." Kira accepted the pie from me and eagerly took a bite. Then she made a face. "What's wrong?" I asked. "This pie isn't very good," she said. "It's not?" I was genuinely surprised. To me the pie had tasted incredible. "Wow. My taste buds must have really deteriorated up here. If you don't want the pie, I'll eat it—" "No," Kira said quickly. "You were right. I'm starving. I got all wrapped up in this and totally lost track of time." She pointed toward her SlimScreen table with her fork. I quickly sat down there. "So you found the footage of Dr. Holtz?" "I did." Kira pulled up an InflatiCube beside me, her eyes wide with excitement. "That's amazing. You must be some kind of computer genius." "Not exactly. I kind of cheated."

"What do you mean?" "Well, you told me Roddy had already figured out how to hack the system... so I tracked him down this afternoon and asked him how to do it." "And he told you? You just met him." "I just met you," Kira countered. "And you trusted me to do this investigation with you." "That's different," I said defensively, knowing it really wasn't. "You overheard me talking about this. I had no choice but to let you help." "Whatever." Kira shrugged. "Point is, Roddy told me how to do it. I didn't tell him the real reason why I wanted to, of course. I just said I didn't like NASA having control of everything I did online here." "And he bought that?" "Yeah. Although, to be honest, I think he might have a bit of a crush on me. He was a little too excited to help me hack the system. And then he kept asking if I wanted to eat dinner with him and his family tonight. Or to see his room." I considered things from Roddy's point of view. There he was, on the moon, cut off from any girls his age for months, and the first one who showed up was cute and seemed to like computers as much as he did. "He's got a crush on you all right."

"Ick. So now, by helping you with this, I could end up in trouble with Nina and I've got the virtual- reality fiend crushing on me?" "Hey, you asked to help me. And besides, you said you'd done plenty of worse things." Kira cast a wary glance at me. "Yeah. I have." I really wanted to see what Kira had found on the computer, but I couldn't help asking, "Like what?" Kira sized me up for a moment, then said, "I like going places I'm not supposed to go." "You mean, like trespassing?" "Yeah. But not like in a bad way, really." Kira now looked embarrassed that I'd brought this up. "It's just that, a lot of the time, there are rules telling you you can't go someplace for no good reason. And so I just kind of ignore them." "So where have you gone?" "All sorts of cool places. The storage area where they keep all the paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The places where they keep the animals at the zoo. The tunnels underneath the Eagles" football stadium." "Really?" I asked. "How do you get in there?" "I just walk in." "And your dad doesn't freak out?"

"Have you met my dad? He's usually not paying much attention to me. I've wandered off for an hour without him noticing." "So he's never realized?" "No, he has. And he wasn't happy, of course. But I'm not a criminal. I don't steal anything or vandalize stuff. I'm just curious. Especially about places that people think should be off-limits. Which might be why I was so interested to come up here. How much more off-limits can you get than the moon, right?" "Did you ever get caught?" "Not really. Most people didn't even seem to notice me. But if security did come, I'd just pretend to be a lost little kid and cry a bit and they'd take pity on me. Half the time they'd even give me candy. Dad told me to knock it off when NASA started vetting us, though. He didn't want them to ding us because I was a troublemaker." I started to ask something else, but before I could, Kira said, "Do you want to see what I found about Dr. Holtz or not?" "Of course I do." "Okay then. Computer, bring up the footage." "Yes, ma'am." The computer spoke in the

standard factory-setting female voice; Kira and her father obviously hadn't bothered to customize it yet. A frozen image of security footage appeared on the SlimScreen. It was the staging area for the main air lock, viewed from a high angle. Kira explained, "Even though getting into the system was easy after Roddy told me how, it still took a while to track all this down. And then, after I figured out how to access the camera feeds, I still had to figure out which ones to look at. Do you have any idea how many cameras there are at this place?" "A few hundred?" I ventured. "Two thousand and twenty six," Kira corrected. I sat back in surprise. "Really?" Kira nodded. "They're everywhere. There are at least a dozen in every room—except for our residences. Even the exterior is covered with them. They're on the roof, in the walls, out by the solar arrays..." "They're supposed to be for safety," I said. "In case a meteor takes out a solar panel or something. We can see what happened without having to go outside." "I get that," Kira told me. "But how do you explain having sixteen cameras in the bathrooms?