C James - Dome Six

But her immediate priority was Hideki. Elle said he was holed up in his unit during the Epoch, which would only have confirmed Downing’s suspicions. She’d planned on going to see him after the shutdown but couldn’t have left Byron’s side until she knew he was okay.

Maybe Owen could shed some light on what her brother was up to, but the bigger question now was whether she could verify what Dek told her about Downing. If he was really in the Stores during the Exchanger failure, IDA’s backup location data would show it. She’d also know if Hideki was really just passed out on a shelf like he said.

She entered the time and region parameters from the O 2emergency, limiting her search to the Stores to save a few processing cycles. Shortly before the alarm sounded, the red dot representing Hideki was making long trips back and forth down one of the main corridors, presumably sweeping.

But at 2:24 p.m. a green dot — Downing — came down the service elevator and made a beeline to an unlabeled room. A mass of dots flowed out around him as the alarm sounded, but he remained there for the entire duration of the O 2emergency, only going back up in the elevator once people started flowing back out of the Towers.

Going back through the timeline, she could see that Hideki went into the bioprinting lab for the better part of an hour before parking himself in the shelves. Both he and Downing spent the entire time in the Stores, oblivious to each other’s presence until Hideki spotted him from around the corner and hid.

There was no way to prove that Downing intentionally shut down the Exchangers, but the data supported it. Hideki was innocent, at least of this. But the only way to exonerate him was to bring the evidence to Elle, and that meant revealing she’d hacked IDA.

A knock at her door interrupted her thoughts. She shut down the tablet and glanced up nervously at the screen she’d cracked when she threw her bottle at it. Would that come back to haunt her now?

To her great relief, it was Byron. She hadn’t seen him since the Epoch, when he and Owen practically tackled her in order to cover her up. Before that she got a glimpse of blue sky along with something even more novel.

The tree.

She hadn’t told him yet because she wasn’t convinced it was real. Plus, with Hideki in trouble it wasn’t her focus anymore. Byron could only be there to verify her sanity.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey. Haven’t seen you since the Epoch. Everything okay?”

“Yeah, sorry. I’ve had a lot on my mind.” She looked behind him and saw he was alone. “Where’s Dee?”

“At home. I thought we might take a walk,” he said. “Out to the perimeter.”

Byron was as guileless as they came, but a walk along the perimeter implied secret information. Maybe a little air would do her some good, but she realized she hadn’t been much of a companion lately. She feared what he might have to tell her.

The perimeter arc had the usual smattering of young lovers and Elders. She stayed within an arm’s length of the outer wall as they strolled along. Ordinarily they would’ve held hands, but this was no romantic outing. Though they couldn’t possibly be heard by anyone, passerby included, he still leaned in close when he spoke.

“Are we going to talk about what happened at the Epoch?” he asked.

“Okay,” she replied.

He paused for a few seconds as though waiting for her to say something. “You’re really gonna make me ask?”

She sighed and said, “Art lived his whole life in here but never saw the real sky. That got lodged in my brain. When the shield went down, I guess… I guess I didn’t want to hide from whatever I might see, even if it blinded me. It’s not more complicated than that.”

“So, seeing the sky was important enough to put the rest of us at risk?” he asked.

She knew what the right answer was, but it wouldn’t have been the truth. “Maybe.”

“I’m sorry?”

Since no one was nearby, she stopped walking and turned to him. “I saw a tree, Byron.”

He wouldn’t have looked more incredulous if she’d said she saw a hot air balloon. “A tree.”

“It was only a second or two, but yeah. I saw a tree.”

“Tosh, you know that’s not possible, right?”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m crazy. I’m not Dek.”

“I wasn’t implying—”

“Look, I get it. My family has a reputation. If you really think I’m on the crazy train, then hop off. This is your stop right here.”

He took her hands. “I’m sorry. If you say you saw a tree, I believe you. But so what? It’s probably just some old bare thing that’s too short for the cameras to pick up.”

“I know you don’t believe me, but I just wanted to say that. Anyway, we have bigger problems. The Authority has Hideki.”

“My god, Tosh. When did this happen? Why?”

“Just yesterday. He’s charged with sabotage. The hearing is tomorrow.”

He stepped back and searched her eyes. “You don’t think he did it.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Do you?”

He hesitated a moment then said, “I don’t know any of the facts.”

That pleased her. Knowing facts before forming a judgment wasn’t a highly valued skill in the Dome. If the simplest explanation didn’t fit, the most convenient one usually carried the day. “Well I do. And no, I don’t think he did it.”

“Then you have to tell them,” he said, pulling closer. “If you have evidence, bring it forward.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

She averted her eyes but he put himself in front of them, saying, “Tosh, I want to help you, but you’ve gotta let me in here. Why can’t you say anything?”

“Because in the process of doing a favor for Downing, I opened a connection to IDA’s primary backup system.”

“You what? ” he asked.

“The evidence that exonerates him is there. I can’t take it to them without exposing what I did.”

His eyes darted nervously. He spoke in an urgent whisper. “Tosh, that’s treason.”

She shook her head. “Real answers are hard to come by in here, Byron. To find them, I need to look in some places where people like us aren’t supposed to look. I’m not asking you to be a part of it.”

“That’s actually why I wanted to talk to you out here,” he said. “Not about the Epoch. Well, partly that but… “He trailed off, whatever he wanted to say next making him very uncomfortable. “After what happened in the crawlers, me and some of the other maintenance guys got to talking. What’s broken, what’s about to break — that sort of thing. Anyway, it turns out that the maintenance logs in IDA are incomplete.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean almost none of the stuff we’ve been doing is actually in the logs. It’s like 90 percent of the shit we’re doing winds up with no record at all while some stuff is logged that never happened.”

This was getting very interesting. “Like what?” Tosh asked.

“Well after all our safety gear failed, we were like, ‘Who did the last inspection?’, figuring no one’s looked at any of it in 20 years. But the logs said all the crawlers had full inspections just a week before the shutdown. The names attached to the inspections didn’t match any of our names, nor anyone any of us had even heard of.”

“Then who are they?”

“Other citizens, supposedly. They have profiles and addresses and everything according to IDA, but—”

“–but now you don’t know if you can trust IDA, either.”

“Exactly.”

Byron was a straight shooter who generally kept his head down and did his job. But if he had his doubts about IDA, maybe it was all right to share what she’d learned about Downing’s whereabouts — and how.