“It’s worth a shot.” Noor sat in the swivel chair and bellied up to the keyboard, which looked like it had been sawed off an old fax machine. “How do I turn it on?”
“No idea.”
She blew on the keyboard, puffing dust into the air, then punched a random key. The monitor stayed dark. She reached around the back of it, groped blindly, and flipped a switch. The monitor made a staticky pop, and a moment later an amber cursor blinked to life.
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “It works.”
A word appeared. A single word on a single line at the top of an otherwise black screen.
Command: ___
Noor whistled. “This thing is old.”
“Told you.”
“Where’s the mouse?”
“I don’t think they were invented yet. It wants you to type something.”
Noor typed Warn.
The machine bleeped unhappily.
Command not recognized.
Noor scowled. She typed Mail.
Command not recognized.
“Try ‘directory,’” I said.
She did. “Nothing.” And then she tried message, root, help, and loop. None of those worked, either.
Noor sat back in the chair. “I don’t suppose your grandpa kept the instructions.”
I went to the supply locker and poked through the books. Most were spiral-bound, softcover, homemade-looking. A few were old mission logs belonging to my grandfather, and I promised myself to one day read them all. Between a worn-looking pamphlet titled So You Want to Build a Hollowgast Shelter and a couple of the spy novels my grandfather liked to read was a laminated volume with a little bird insignia on the cover and four letters in red: FPEO.
I had seen the same letters inside certain editions of the Tales. For peculiar eyes only.
I flipped it open. The inner title page read:
Syndrisoft pneumatic teleprinter OS 1.5 operating instructions
“Noor! I got it!” I shouted so loudly that I startled her, though with half a second’s reflection I didn’t know what I’d gotten so excited about. The thing was almost certainly disconnected from whatever network it had once been a part of.
We pushed back the heavy keyboard to make room on the desk and opened the manual. From over our heads came a roar and another crash, the sound muted only slightly by twenty feet of dirt and reinforced concrete. I wondered how much of the house would be left standing after the hollow had finished with it.
We attempted to ignore the apocalyptic noises and thumbed through the manual. In the table of contents was a chapter labeled “Communications and Connectivity.” I flipped pages and read aloud while Noor typed.
“Try typing this,” I said. “Outgoing CC.”
She did. The cursor typed a reply: Outgoing communications unavailable.
I read more commands to Noor. She tried Query outgoing CC. The cursor blinked fast for a few seconds, then came back with CC lines cut.
“Dammit,” she said.
“It was a long shot, anyway,” I said. “This thing probably hasn’t been used in decades.”
She slapped the desk and got up from the chair. “We can’t wait down here much longer. That hollow isn’t going to just leave voluntarily.”
I was starting to think she was right: that the beast would never leave; that eventually whoever had sent the yellow-jacketed man would notice he hadn’t returned and come to check on him; that every minute we hid down here was a minute stolen from our allies in the Acre, who could’ve been making plans for escape from, or defense against, whatever onslaught Caul was no doubt preparing. If I protected Noor only to let my friends be slaughtered in a surprise attack, was that any victory at all?
Maybe. Maybe it was, in the coldest possible calculus, because Caul was a threat not just to the peculiars I loved, but all peculiarkind. And really, to the world.
Then again, my friends were my world.
I was about to say screw it, let’s go when I heard Noor mutter, “Holy shit.”
She had returned to the desk and was bent over the ancient monitor. The cursor had typed something of its own volition. Two lines of amber text.
Threat detected.
Activate home defense: Y/N ___
Noor did not wait, did not ask my opinion. Her index finger stabbed the Y button.
The screen blanked. I thought for a moment it had shut down—had just been teasing us—but then the cursor reappeared and drew a new screen.
It was a map of the house crudely drawn in keyboard characters. The map was divided into twelve zones, marked F1–F12, eight zones for the house and four for the yard. There were twelve function keys on the keyboard. A cursor blinked, waiting, at the bottom of the screen.
“What do you think they do?” Noor said. “Shoot fireballs? Open trapdoors?”
“In a suburban retirement community?”
She shrugged. “Let’s find out.” Her finger hovered over the function keys. “Think it’s still above us?”
I felt the hollow’s proximity, but couldn’t sense exactly where he was. I went to the periscope—what was left of it—and pulled it down again. Through the viewer’s cracked glass I saw a distorted rendering of the yard. The hollow had stomped down the grass enough for me to glimpse the house and the street beyond, but there was no sign of him. I rotated in a circle. My view raked the yard, past a fallen tree and a downed power line sparking on the sidewalk, to the neighbor’s roofless house. And then I felt my inner compass needle flicker and heard the beast howl, sharp and loud, as the periscope yanked violently upward, knocking me to the ground before it smashed against the ceiling again.
Noor leapt out of the chair and rushed to me. “Oh my God, are you okay?”
“It’s right above us!” I shouted.
She helped me up and we stumbled to the computer together.
“What part of the yard is that?” she said, peering at the monitor.
I tapped the screen. “I think . . . it’s that side.”
Noor rested her finger on the corresponding key. F10. “Mind if I do the honors?”
“Yes! I mean, no! Just push it!”
She pushed it.
At first nothing happened. Then the walls around us began to rattle, and there was a sound like the creak of some giant old radiator, and a moment later there was a deafening boom and the room shook. The bunk bed fell over and everything we hadn’t taken out of the supply cabinet went flying onto the floor.