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SUNNY HADN’T ASKED for any favors, but she’d allowed the residents of the jailhouse to move her to a larger room all the same. 62 climbed the stairs to the fourth floor and walked the noisy hallway until he reached the end of the corridor.
Several people hung outside Sunny’s closed door. The group buzzed with a nervous energy, and their attention turned to 62 as he approached them. He wasn’t sure what to say to them, so he silently walked up to the door and lifted his hand to knock.
“She’s in a meeting,” Marian, one of the farmers from Hanford, said in a quiet voice.
“There’s a line,” one of her companions said as he pointed his thumb behind him.
“Oh,” 62 said sheepishly. “Sorry.”
The door opened and the Woman who’d cleared 62 and his friends down in detox exited the room. She looked distractedly around at the people waiting in the hallway and told the person closest to the door that it was their turn to go in. As she started to leave, she caught sight of 62 and an expression of surprise passed her face. She didn’t speak to him though, just hurried on toward the stairwell.
Standing in the hallway was boring. There was just no way around it. The adults murmured quiet, excited conversations amongst themselves, but none of them talked to 62. He leaned against the wall, sliding down until he sat on the carpet with his feet stretched out in front of him. He’d tuck his knees up to his chest whenever someone needed to get past him, but he didn’t bother getting up when the line moved forward. He just scooted himself sideways a few inches each time someone exited the line until he was the only one left in the silent hall.
The Man who’d been in front of him in line came out of Sunny’s room. He pulled the door closed behind him. “Your turn’s next, but she said she needs a break first. She’ll come get you when she’s ready.”
62 folded his legs so the Man could pass by without tripping and lowered his chin to his knees with a heavy sigh. Life these days seemed to be a lot of sitting around waiting on something to happen. It had been so much better back in Hanford when Mattie was alive. There’d never been a shortage of things to do, books to read, or abandoned corners of Hanford to explore.
“62?”
He turned his head to see Sunny’s door cracked open just wide enough for her pale face to peek out. Even looking up at her from down on the floor, 62 thought she looked smaller than she should have. She was an adult, after all, but it seemed like whenever the world got to be too much for her, she rounded her shoulders, curved her back, and tried to look so small, the world wouldn’t notice her.
62 pushed himself off the floor and onto his feet. Sunny widened the door and poked her head farther out, looking behind him. A wan smile passed across her pale lips as she took in the empty hallway. She waved 62 into the room.
He hadn’t been to Sunny’s room since she’d moved floors, and 62 was surprised at Sunny’s new accommodations. The space was more than just a bedroom. This was more like a house within a house. Open doors revealed other rooms beyond the one he and Sunny stood in. He could see her bed, as unkempt as ever, through a doorway on his right. Where they stood now looked more like an office than anything, with four chairs set in a semi-circle around a desk. Sunny moved around the furniture, settling into a high-backed chair behind the desk and gesturing for 62 to take one of the empty seats across from her.
“This is nice,” 62 said, impressed as he continued to look around. The door to his left revealed a small sink and what looked like a bathtub. It was no wonder he’d not seen Sunny since he’d gotten back from Hanford. The way the place was set up, she probably never had to leave.
“I suppose,” Sunny remarked. She pulled a blanket up that had been draped over her seat, wrapping it around her shoulders. “Too many people want to talk to me these days. It was crowded in my old room.”
“What do they want?”
“Oh, everything.” Sunny’s eyes shifted away from 62. She looked like she held the weight of the world on her shoulders. “I guess they’re so used to having a council to look after things, so they want someone to be in charge here, too. I tried to pass the job off to someone else—anyone else—but nobody seemed to want the responsibility. So, here we are.”
62 could almost see Sunny sink under the weight of her newfound authority. He realized this wasn’t just Sunny’s room; it was the new epicenter of decision making for everyone who’d left Hanford. Sunny shifted her eyes back to him.
“Where is everybody else?” Her mouth lifted slightly into a smile. “I’m not used to seeing you alone.”
He was suddenly uncomfortable in his seat. 62 fidgeted, wondering if the hard chair was intended to keep Sunny’s meetings short. She watched him patiently, which didn’t set his discomfort at ease.
“00’s mad at me, and Blue was reading a giant book down in the cafeteria, last time I saw him.”
“He knows how to read?” Sunny joked. She pretended to be shocked for a moment, then shook her head and chuckled to herself. “I’ve never seen him with a book before.”
62 nodded. “He’s focused on it tough, too. He’s trying to learn how to start a war with the Oosa.”
Sunny’s eyebrows lifted on her forehead. Her mouth puckered in surprise and she leaned forward. “That’s quite a project for such a young Man.” 62 nodded as Sunny rubbed her chin in thought. Her eyes lowered to the papers scattered over the desk between them. “Although, truthfully, his studying may come in handy. A war has already started, even if it’s only in words so far.”
“It has?” 62 shoved himself back in the hard chair, surprised.
Sunny nodded. “Everyone who left Hanford has a reason, you know. It’s not like they came up here for the view.” She smiled again at her own joke. “They’re ready to fight. They just haven’t decided who they’re fighting yet. Some of them want to get rid of the council and move back to Hanford. Others want to start a campaign to keep anyone else from volunteering when the Oosa show up in the fall.”
“There’s some people who want to go back to Adaline for more refugees,” 62 said. He wasn’t sure how Sunny would respond, and didn’t want to get Clovis into any trouble, so he didn’t mention that his information came from the cook.
“Yes, there’s that, too.” Sunny nodded. “A lot of ideas bouncing around. We’ve got people who want to be put to work making things better. We just need to figure out which work is best for everybody.”
“Have you asked N302 about what it thinks?” 62 asked.
Sunny clenched her jaw, the skin around her eyes crinkling as she squinted. Her voice carried a note of suspicion when she asked, “Did Parker send you up here?”
“No. I haven’t seen him today. Hasn’t he been up to see you?” 62 looked around the room again as if he must have missed Parker standing in a corner.
“He’s been wandering between the radio room and the charging stations. Treating that blasted bot like it’s his baby.” Sunny rolled her eyes. “When he does come up to visit, all he does is talk about how N302 could help prioritize our problems. How the bot could find solutions I might not have thought about.”
“It does know a lot,” 62 ventured carefully. “I mean, it was programmed to take care of us.”
“If I do talk to it, what’s to stop it from making a decision and forcing us follow it? I can’t have that bot looming over us like some sort of overlord.” Sunny let go of her blanket, reaching forward to pluck one of the papers off her desk. The blanket slipped off her shoulder as she held the paper up. “As an example, if I tell it that I’ve got six people demanding pardons for everyone so we can move back to Hanford as if nothing happened, what would the bot do? Go charging in and scare the living daylights out of everyone?”
62 thought about his ride on N302 to see Mattie. They hadn’t asked the bot to stay hidden, but it had stopped beyond the town’s borders all the same. “I don’t think it’d do that. It didn’t go anywhere close enough for the guards at the gate to see it. I think it knows how badly they’d take it.”
“Well, I can’t risk it. Not after what that box of bolts did with the radio.” Sunny shook her head and the knot of hair atop her head worked itself loose. 62 had just enough time to think of how pretty she looked with it framing her face before she swept it back up again, tying it firmly with a piece of string.
“What if we have 00 program it to not do things on its own?” 62 asked, thinking aloud. “It is a bot, after all. Just a bunch of wires and programming. If 00 could shut off the part of N302 that lets it make its own decisions, wouldn’t that make it so you could talk to it without worrying about what it’d do?”
Sunny considered 62’s proposal in silence. From the faint glimmer in her eyes, he couldn’t tell if she liked the idea, or if she was going to yell at him. She laid the paper back down on the desk and leaned back in her chair. She pulled the blanket back over her shoulders. She scrunched her nose as she asked, “You think he can do that?”
62 lifted his shoulders to his ears. He wasn’t sure what 00 was capable of, or what kind of changes N302 would even allow. It had once been programmed to the rules of the Head Machine, but 42 had changed that by altering the bot’s programming. 62 thought if they could crack the bot’s coding, they could make it listen to a new set of rules. “00’s smart. I don’t know if he could do it without N302’s permission, though.”
Sunny’s eyes rolled again and she breathed deep, flaring her nostrils. “Asking a bot permission to do anything goes against everything Hanford stands for.”
62 looked at the room around them. “But we aren’t in Hanford.”
“Well, it’s not Adaline, either,” Sunny snapped. She got up from her chair, taking the blanket with her as she walked toward the window. She leaned against the window’s frame. The light caused a faint glow to hover over the edges of her skin. She looked stronger in the glowing light, as if she’d become more than simply a Woman on the run.
She didn’t turn to look at 62 when she said, “Talk to 00. Ask him if it’s possible. Then come back to see me.” 62 rose from his chair, its legs scraping noisily against the floor. “Bring Blue and his war book with you when you come back.”
“Yes Ma’am,” 62 answered meekly. He let himself out of the room, letting the darkness of the hallway consume him. He hadn’t realized how hot and bright Sunny’s room had been until he’d left it. But was it really the light of the sun that made her room so uncomfortable? Or was it that Sunny herself had changed into something he couldn’t understand?
62 shook his head. There wasn’t time to ponder Sunny’s promotion to all-knowing leader right now. The truth was, if the other adults were taking her advice, that might make it easier for 62 and his friends to get away with doing whatever they wanted. He let the sound of the echoing steps in the stairwell push the thoughts from his mind. All the worries about Pi, and Blue, and Clovis disappeared under the loud thud-thud-thud of his feet on the stairs.
When he reached the last step, the multitude of worries were gone, except one. He had to find 00 and apologize. He wasn’t sure what would be the right thing to do to help Sunny, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to figure it out without his brother.