She raked fingers through her hair and stepped back a little, waving a hand at Diego. “Dad, this is Diego Marquez. Diego, my dad—”

  Diego practically shot out of his chair, staring at Caleb with a look of excitement and maybe even relief spreading over his face. “Mister Machert?” He glanced at Lana. “You didn’t tell me—wait, so you’re Lana Machert!”

  Lana frowned. “Are we famous?”

  Her father gave a good-natured laugh as he crossed the room toward the table and pulled Diego into a fierce hug. “Holy crap, kid. I can’t believe it. What the heck are you doing here?”

  “Came out this way when I left. I just meant to get on the other side of the Rockies, but… I got held up a little in Kansas, and then the impact, and the storms, you know? I ended up right as they were trying to get the walls put together once the riot settled down.”

  Lana shook her head slowly, peering at her dad. “You know Diego?”

  As if just noticing she and Derek were there, Caleb dipped his head and put a hand on Diego’s shoulder. “We worked together. Back at StarLink. Diego was my IT guy.”

  The rush of emotion coursing through Lana’s stomach and chest surprised her. She’d never met Diego, and didn't know where he was from. Lots of people in Springfield liked to talk about their stories, but Lana didn’t, so she avoided asking. Diego hadn’t volunteered.

  But he was from their old life. Or her father’s old life, anyway, but that was just about the same thing. Her eyes burned, but she blinked it away. “Wow…wait, so, how’d you get all the way out here?”

  Caleb exhaled and gave Diego a long look as he answered for him. “He left early. He… he warned me, too. I didn’t listen. I’m sorry, Diego. I should have. I’m glad you’re still around. Glad you made it out.”

  Diego pushed his glasses up his nose and cleared his throat before scuffling back to his seat at the table with the laptop. Lana got the impression he didn’t particularly enjoy emotional displays, either. “We were just getting into this.” He turned the screen toward Caleb. “I got it cracked earlier this morning. Don’t worry, it’s not online.”

  For a moment, Lana’s father studied the screen, his brow slowly knitting. “What the heck am I seeing here? Is this right?”

  Lana snorted softly as she came up behind him. “We asked the same thing. Best we can figure, he started all this way before now. Which sort of makes sense. Look—that first team that was deployed? Boulder, Colorado. That’s where Trusk rolled out the Dimension ID thing.”

  Her father shook his head, bewildered. “The thing they wanted to register us for?”

  Derek leaned against the side of the shed’s wall in the one place that wasn’t covered with hooks or shelves holding scraps of old tech, arms folded, eyes narrowed. “Didn’t I hear something about that on the news? He was trying to do something about centralizing social media and commerce or… something, right?”

  Right, of course. Lana remembered now. Jasper had been particularly alarmed over it. He’d never been a fan of Trusk’s. One of his rants came back to her in pieces.

  She dug at the memory. “Boulder was supposed to be a test case, if I remember right. They made a big show about the first few people registering, and how easy it was. Dimension was the network, and it was already up and running with an invite campaign. The idea was something about tying your social media, resume, job training, even your bank account all to one place.”

  “I remember.” Diego picked up his phone and swiped through photos until he held one up. “I screenshotted some of the ads on social media. Thought they were creepy.”

  Caleb swiped through some of the screenshots before handing the phone back. He looked confused. “So Dimension was like, what, Facebook? Or Twitter? But with money?”

  “Not just banks.” Diego swiped to another photo. He glanced up. “The idea was that Dimension was going to be a kind of crypto bank. You had to get an account, and the more you interacted, the more data you gave the app, the more connected you were allowed to be. Interactions would earn fractions of a new crypto—Apexi—and you could spend it anywhere that was hooked up to the Dimension network. You just swipe your Dimension ID.

  “But the long-term plan was to hook it up to all sorts of other stuff, too. So… say you’re looking for a job. You go on Dimension, mark yourself as needing work, and the system was supposed to match you directly with employers that you’re a perfect fit for. Well, in theory, anyway. It never rolled out all the way. It was still a year out when the asteroid hit.”

  Lana stared at the laptop, showing that hundreds upon hundreds of Apex teams had been deployed over the last half year. “Looks to me like it’s still rolling out. But someone would have been reporting it if Trusk was sending armed groups out to force people into signing up for Dimension. So… are most of the units unarmed promoters? Or were they always paramilitary and just posing as promoters?”

  Diego shrugged. “I… don’t see anything here that would say one way or the other.” He scanned the spreadsheet of raw data. “But there is a classification code. I can dig around, see if there’s a key for it? It’s not this other list, the codes don’t match. So, that’s got to be for something else.”

  “What list?” Caleb asked. Diego directed his attention to it, and Caleb spent a moment examining it before he straightened and rubbed his jaw. “That’s got to be the classification system they’re assigning people to. Classes F through S, organized along a one-through-five scale.”

  “That’s right,” Lana said. “That woman, Victoria—the one who tried to drag me off to ‘Central’—she said I was categorized as a class S-something. I don’t remember exactly. Got distracted by taking her hostage and everything. But it was a big deal. Any idea what the classification system means?”

  Diego frowned and turned back to the list of files that had been fully or partially decrypted. There weren’t many that were ready to be opened yet, but he clicked through a few of them, looking, before finally giving up. “I don’t know yet. Need more files. And there’s no telling what else is on here. But I mean… it’s probably safe to say that it’s not a good thing, whatever it is. Trusk is a bad guy. Here, look.”

  Back on his phone, he scrolled through folders of screenshots, all labeled. One of them was just called THE MONSTER, and as far as Lana could tell at a glance, they were all shots of things Trusk had said either on social media or in interviews. Diego had clearly been obsessed, and not just with Trusk but lots of influential people. She shot her father a questioning look.

  He only smiled with surprising fondness, as if to say, It’s just who he is.

  “Here it is,” Diego pointed to a screenshot from an interview article on Trusk. “Everyone in the world has worth, Trusk explains, but it’s naive to suggest that everyone has the same worth. The governments of every nation, police officers, firemen, the military, all of them have an intrinsic sense of this. They have to make choices about who to save and who to let slip through the cracks, and they make those choices, and then pretend they didn’t.

  “I’m just being more honest than any of those institutions. The problem, as I see it, is that a lot of people don’t know what their worth is. If we had a way to find out for them, to really understand where each person in society fits, then no one would be left behind. Everyone would have a place. Think of that for just a second. No more homeless people. No more unwanted children. Everyone has a place. Everyone belongs. Isn’t that a good thing?”

  With a disgusted snort, Diego swiped through a few other snippets, reading them out. They all told pretty much the same story.

  Trusk believed that technology could run everything. That the right algorithm, using the right data, could figure out where everyone belonged and then put them there. It was exactly the approach that was all over Apex now. And these articles went back years. The man hadn’t made a secret of his plans.

  “Oh, hey,” Diego said as something on the laptop’s screen flashed a message. “New file. Let’s see what we got…”

  He opened it, and another spreadsheet appeared. This one, though, didn’t have strings of coded terms or data classification markers. Instead, it was plain text with some markup symbols scattered throughout. “It’s messages. Look at the subject lines. Priority one. Response required immediately. Serious stuff. A whole lot of them, though. Thousands. Some of them look sort of… weird. Maybe sent from some automated system.”

  “Can you search through them?” Caleb asked. “Look for keywords or something?”

  Diego nodded, and Lana leaned in, curious what her father had in mind.

  “Anything in particular you’re looking for?” Diego asked.

  “Search for us, first. Look for ‘Machert’.”

  Though Diego raised an eyebrow at that, he went to it. Only two messages came up, outgoing. It wasn’t new information, but a log from when Caleb had first been registered at the chicken farm when they encountered Victoria and her team and stole this very laptop. The other was a priority alert about Lana.

  “What’s that saying?” Lana asked, nudging Diego a little aside to get a better look at the small text.

  Machert, Lana: ccid S3. Action Recommendation: Immediate relocation to Apex Central for processing. Priority 2. Contingency Alert: Code 24T. RFID 0098778-436 assigned and authorized.

  Lana’s hand rose to her upper arm where Victoria had jabbed her with a needle. A Band-Aid covered up a small patch of foil she’d kept in place. “RFID. She did put a chip in me. What’s Code 24T?”

  Diego scrolled through the list of procedural codes open in another file. “Uh… here we go. 24T… uh, it’s just referencing another policy code. I’ll have to look it up when I get access to those files, if they’re on here. But I think you’re right. Contingency Alert sounds like… hm…”

  “Like they had data on you.” Derek pushed away from the wall to join them at the table. “Knew you wouldn’t go willingly, maybe, based on… I don’t know, something. So they figured, chip you and make sure they can hunt you down.”

  It made her stomach uneasy to think about that. They still hadn’t gotten the chip out. At first glance, no one had been able to find anything. It wasn’t clear that the chip actually allowed Apex to track her, but she’d been unwilling to take the chance. “I’ve got to have someone take a look at this thing,” she growled. “What could they know about me? About any of us?”

  Diego gave a whistle and a mirthless laugh, looking up at the three of them as if Lana had made an inside joke. When no one else reacted in kind, his eyebrows shot up. “What, seriously?” he asked. “None of you followed any of this before?”

  Caleb cleared his throat. “Just… What's your theory?”

  “No theory. Plain fact. Look, about five years ago, Trusk bought up like six of the biggest data-mining firms in the world, across three countries. Two right here in the US. They shut down overnight, it was a huge deal—he spent over a hundred billion on them, and then just closed the doors, fired everyone.”

  Derek stared, expression blank but attentive. Waiting, just like Lana and Caleb did. “And?” Lana pressed. “Then what?”

  Diego turned his hands palms up. “And then… no one really knows for sure,” he admitted. “But the theory is that he wanted the data and the algorithms those companies were using to sort it. I mean, they had data from all over. Every social media platform, every online sales platform, school databases, voter registration and engagement history, credit usage and purchase history—like, literally everything.

  “Supposedly, he was trying to curb the use of that data, and it was all ‘anonymous’ to begin with, but it only takes three to five data points from any ID’s information to figure out exactly who it belongs to, and then cross reference that across multiple databases. Automate that process with the right AI, and you could churn out hundreds of millions, even billions, of IDs with names, aliases, addresses and compile a profile on anyone.”

  Diego shook his head. “Seriously, unless you lived entirely off the grid and were completely unbanked—no cards, no account, no crypto, even—fact is, just about your entire life is in a database somewhere. Or at least spread out between a bunch of them. Or, it was, anyway. Now I’m pretty sure it’s just the one, and Trusk owns it.”

  The implications of that were, honestly, so far above Lana’s head that for a moment she missed Jasper desperately. She had a feeling he could somehow make sense of all of it, of what it would mean. It gave her a knot of awful guilt in her gut, or maybe just reminded her that it was still there. That she’d lost him. And, worse, that she was finally letting herself almost move on and connect with Derek.

  “Search for Springfield,” Caleb said grimly. “We need to know if they’ve targeted this place for one of their hubs or something.”

  Diego licked his lips and did that, and a moment later had a short series of priority one messages pulled up. It didn’t look like Victoria’s unit was meant to be on any direct mission related to Springfield—but she’d at least been apprised of some of the facts as Apex saw them.

  “There.” Lana caught a snippet of text as Diego scrolled slowly through the messages. “What’s that about?”

  He scrolled back up and enlarged the window, reading. “Um… it’s a profile? Yield potentials for cultivation of produce and animal products… some stuff about the local climate… oh, here, look: Represents the optimal conditions in the current environment for the mass production of food and clean water. Acquisition priority one-alpha. Unit assignments to follow for… Oh. Crap.”

  Caleb squinted at the screen and cursed quietly under his breath. “A hostile acquisition operation,” he read, at least in part. “Son of a… they’re planning on attacking Springfield.”

  Lana read to the end of the message, and the timestamp attached. “They were planning on it,” she corrected her father, her jaw tightening until she spoke through gritted teeth. “A week and a half ago. The planned operation is in three days.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CALEB

  Springfield, CO

  Monday July 30th, 11:00 am MST

  “So, that’s what we’ve got so far.” Caleb tossed a beat-up notepad filled with his scribbled notes about the laptop on the fold-out wood table. “Three days until Apex’s operation is set to go into motion. Unfortunately, this field marshal wasn’t intended to be a part of it, so there’s no more specific information.”

  He ran a hand through his hair. “She was meant to be part of a supply line for units closer in, keeping transportation corridors cleared and providing support as needed for some units coming down from the Great Lakes region. That’s likely why we encountered that unit. It was a checkpoint.”

  Clustered around the table were the five people closest to being the leaders of the Springfield community. Officially speaking, none of them were strictly in charge. They were a kind of committee, which had alarmed Caleb when he first heard about it. Committees were no way to operate in the middle of an armed conflict. From what he could gather, though, no one in Springfield considered this an armed conflict.

  Not until now.

  Warren Samuels was the closest thing Springfield had to a military leader. He was an old man, long retired from the police force in Fort Collins before the impact and now scraggly and wan, but with sharp, dark eyes that made him look permanently irritated at the world. His makeshift uniform was a blazer with a few patches sewn onto the shoulders, similar to the men who made up his security force.

  Beside him was a woman with chocolate skin and a bundle of near-white dreadlocks piled at the crown of her head and bound with a strip of red cloth—Amelie Jefferson, the town’s civic organizer. Caleb hadn’t spoken to her before this meeting, but Mateo had worked with her since he arrived. She organized everything from the public cafeteria to a series of public art projects meant to keep the kids occupied and the people hopeful.

  On her left, further around the table, Doctor Belinda Herndon acted as Springfield’s chief medical officer, after a fashion. The only proper doctor in town, she’d been training nurses and in charge of managing medical supplies, including cultivating a small collection of plants and molds to try and shore up the pharmaceutical cache that couldn’t possibly last forever. She looked like a woman already older than she should have been, with dark circles under her amber eyes, and streaks of gray creeping into her hairline.

  The remaining two at the table were Roger Thurmond, who Caleb knew better than any of the other four here—which wasn’t much—and, some small distance from him and the others, looking as if he were half-embarrassed to be at the table, was President Thomas Daniels. Who, Caleb learned when he first shook the man’s hand, already apparently knew Elizabeth.

  At the moment, all of them except President Daniels and Captain Samuels looked as though Caleb had just told them they all had stage four terminal cancer and were expected to die in the next hour or so.

  “That’s not much time to mount any kind of meaningful defense.” Samuels leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table, glowering into some thousand-yard distance. “Not if Apex has the kind of fire power it sounds like they do.”

  “We could request assistance from the new administration,” Herndon offered, though with the kind of caution that suggested this was a tense topic.

  Samuels made a disgusted noise and shot the doctor a borderline nasty look. “Right, and then when Apex doesn’t move in, the Army can occupy us instead. You know there’s a draft on, right? Half the town’ll be pressed into service, and you can bet your behind Welcher will take everyone she can and move them far enough away that there'll be a fraction of our people left here. I’m telling you, Belinda, we can’t trust that woman.”

  Caleb held his tongue for the moment. Standing, rather than sitting, made him acutely aware that he wasn’t much more than a messenger just now. His leg ached, but there wasn’t an extra chair for him. It was almost military, and he had a feeling it was Samuels’ idea not to provide a chair.