I did as she asked. She touched her QComm to mine and both devices beeped.
“Now I’ve got your number, and you’ve got mine,” she said. “We can stay in touch.” She pointed to the countdown clock on her QComm and smiled. “We’ll probably only be able to stay in touch for another six hours and forty-three minutes, so it’s no big deal.”
“Thank you,” I said, staring down at her name on my own QComm’s display, and then at the countdown timer next to it.
“Wow, you’re a popular guy,” Lex said, staring down at her QComm screen. She tapped it a few times, then tilted it toward me again, and I saw the three names listed on my own contact list mirrored there: Arjang Dagh, Alexis Larkin, and Ray Habashaw. Then she tapped the music icon, and I saw that she had somehow pulled all of the music off of my device, too.
“Hey, how did you do that?” I said, making a halfhearted grab for her QComm. She snatched it out of my reach.
“I was pissed when they hacked into my old phone, so I decided to try hacking theirs. It was shockingly easy.” She smiled. “They may have used alien technology in these things,” she said. “But the software they installed to run it all was clearly created by humans—overworked, underpaid programmers like me who take all kinds of shortcuts. The security protocols on the file-sharing system are a total joke. It only took me about five minutes to jailbreak this thing.”
She tossed her QComm behind her back with one hand, then caught it effortlessly with the other, keeping her eyes on me the whole time. Then she held it back up in front of me.
“Access to the public phone network is still disabled, so I wasn’t able to call my grandma,” she said. “However, I did figure out how to enable admin privileges on the QComm network. Now I can pull private data stored on another QComm, just by calling it or touching it with mine. Contacts, text messages, emails, everything.”
“But why would those features even be included in the software?”
“Why do you think?” she said. “So Big Brother can keep on spying on each of us, right up to the bitter end.” She grabbed my phone. “Here, I’ll jailbreak yours, too.”
I handed my QComm back to her, then watched as her thumbs danced across the keyboard on its display for a moment.
“You’re kind of amazing,” I blurted out—because that was what I was thinking, and I’d recently been told the world was about to end. “Did you know that?”
She blushed, but didn’t avert her gaze from my QComm display.
“Yeah, well,” she said, playfully rolling her eyes. “That’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
I laughed and moved a step closer to her. She didn’t move away.
“Listen,” I said, as if she weren’t quite obviously already doing so, “I know we just met, but I just wanted to let you know that I wish we’d met each other a long time ago, under different circumstances. …”
She smiled. “Don’t go getting all mushy on me now, Princess,” she said, stepping back. “So long.”
She turned as if to walk away—then she abruptly turned again, spinning back around on her heel, grabbed me by my lapels, and then she kissed on me—right on the lips, with tongue and everything. When we both finally came up for air, Lex wrapped her arms around me in a fierce hug. Then she stepped back and jerked a thumb over her shoulder, toward the lone shuttle on the opposite side of the bay.
“That’s my ride over there,” I said. “I think they’re probably waiting on me.”
“Yeah, we should both get going.”
“Yes. We should.”
Neither of us moved.
“Good luck, Lex,” I said finally.
“Give ’em hell, Zack,” she replied, grinning. “Call me from the far side of the moon. Let me know if you spot any Decepticons or secret Nazi bases hidden up there.”
“Will do.”
We saluted each other again; then she hoisted her new EDA backpack and ran over to her shuttle. I watched until she disappeared inside and its doors hissed closed. A few seconds later the shuttle lifted off and ascended through the narrow gap between the armored blast doors high above, which were now too warped and damaged to open all the way.
Then Lex’s shuttle titled skyward and rocketed away, out of sight.
I took a deep breath, hoisted my own pack onto my shoulder, and turned to walk toward my own shuttle, wondering how long it would take to fly me to the moon.
As I approached the shuttle, I could hear several loud, overlapping voices coming through its open hatchway.
“Why does everyone always automatically assume that RedJive is a man?” a woman asked in a thick Southern accent. “That’s pretty damn sexist, if you ask me.”
“Yeah,” a younger female voice chimed in. “The Red Baroness might be a better nickname—for her.”