The Cray.

When I speak the words, Prisha's mouth and eyes and palms all fall open in wonder, as though she's ready to receive the Holy Spirit.

Paul, not so much.

"That thing hasn't been online in years," he says without moving from his keyboard.

"But it's operational," I say. "Right? Nobody sold off components?"

"No, it—I suppose, yes, we just stashed it upstairs," Paul says. "If memory serves, it should still be up—"

"On Twelve, yep. It's there—I just happened to be in the neighborhood earlier today."

Paul and Jared both stare mistrustfully at me. Minosh's butt is frozen a half-inch over his seat cushion, as though I've just uttered an ancient curse that could open a portal to some algorithmic bizarro world where AND is OR and XOR is NAND.

"Deb." Paul performs that full stop of his, the one that always precedes an idea squash. "We never even used the Cray. Not for a real project. Carter plugged it in to run demos for investors—that's it. I don't know that we ever installed the config files to get it onto the stinking network."

"So?" I'm standing now, flipping a pen end over end and catching it, the thing pleasantly weightless. "Five software engineers can't bootstrap one supercomputer?"

There's a bad joke in there somewhere, but I don't have time. I dash for the stairwell, groggily aware of the others following, not caring whether they do.

The east-facing lobby shows only a tinge of early morning light. Still, pounding up the pine steps, I can see crates of materials stacked near the entrance. Two Elite facilitators are wheeling hand trucks with more. A third facilitator stands at the double-doors, glancing up Second Ave.

They're prepping the getaway.

I swing around from Three to Four, Four to Five, stumbling and soaring and gripping metal twine. Minosh trails by just a step—who knew he was an athlete?—with Graham on his heels. Paul pulls up the rear, huffing a full flight below me.

At Ten, I encounter Fedor backing out of E-wing with a guarded expression. His flattop ears, viewed from below, seem like mere lobes.

He asks, "And where are you going?"

"The Cray," I pant, "supercomputer up on Twelve."

"You should be at your workstations. All software checkpoints have not been met, and—"

"You should get out of my way! I'm trying to make this Frankenstein-ware of yours dance, you oughta be kissing my feet."

The sinews of Fedor's neck stand up in their skin, but he stands aside. We rumble past up the last flights.

I rip the door open at Twelve and run down two halls to the Cray. In its small room, I come across no body—Elite must have carried off the man Graham shot—but one side of the carpet is moist, squishy blackness.

Prisha lifts her foot, examining the sole of her shoe. "What...what did I just step in—"

"Nothing," I say. "I was up in the HVAC ducts earlier, they must've sprung a leak."

The others' faces do not exactly clear—Paul and Graham are steering well clear of the blood—but my frenetic work at the Cray pulls the rest through.

I boot 'er up. The display is monochrome, a bigger version of Hedgehog Eleanor Roosevelt's screen, and the keys are chunky beige: an old-feeling rig.

When I tap commands, though, I know I'm riding a beast. Output returns in a blink. Directory changes, hardware checks, package unzips—she eats all like candy.

Paul, who knows the network architecture best, helps me bootstrap. We install drivers and enter security keys and dive around baseboards plugging in Ethernet cables.

"Time check," I say once I'm staring at the successfully linked botlet code, standing in the C-shaped cavity.

Jared looks at his watch, head wobbling on his neck. "Four thirty-two."

Blackquest 40 ends at five.

I crack my knuckles forward, fingers bending convexly. "Let's light the afterburners."

I execute the command kicking off the primary Blackquest thread. As the first botlets emerge from Jared's sandbox-jumping code, the Cray's various lights and indicators flash—a tempest of red, green, and yellow blips. Circuitry surrounds me, three hundred degrees of whizzing calculations that sound like my mechanical dragonflies zipped up in a baggie.

I don't look from the display, but know Paul has entered the cavity by smell—a fetid body odor that makes me long for McGriddle.

He says, "The value-pair file..."

"Right here."

The file is already open, digits galloping down at a dizzying pace. How dizzying, though? There is no question it's moving faster than five rows per second, but how much faster?

"Ready?" Paul says.

I nod, scratching in the spikes of my hair. We both understand what needs doing—and what the stakes are.

We have to compare snapshots of the file from, say, a minute apart, and calculate the new growth rate.

"Taking snapshot number one..." I say, as Paul squints at a the second hand of a wall clock. "...now."

I scribble the row count on a paper scrap. The Blackquest code roars along, processing botlets, catching errors from the simulator, recording good value-pairs.

"Ten seconds left..." Paul watches the second hand. "Seven seconds...three, two...and...stop!"

I tap the key to capture a copy of the file, then examine this copy's row count.

It's got more digits than the first row count I scribbled.

A lot more.

I do the division. "We're there! Zooks, we're right there!"

I show him the rate, which implies the full range of value-pairs shaking out in roughly half an hour.

I click into the engine diagnostics and find our botlets are succeeding more, crapping out after an average of nine tries rather than the previous two and change.

They're getting smarter.

The building-wide PA crackles.

"Your attention, please." The voice is Oleg's—hoarse, a little peeved. "This training exercise concludes in twenty minutes. Please commit final work to your manager or the appropriate source-code repository. Facilitators have begun circulating with recycle bins. Please dispose of all materials bearing the Elite name or logo."

I prance out of the Cray, nearly landing in blood-carpet. I take Graham's sleeve.

"Tell him! Go tell him we beat it, it'll be ready!"

But Graham's face has none of its usual rakish glow.

"You can't," he says. "Twenty minutes—you heard him."

"We. Have. The. Software!" I feel my eyes protruding from their sockets. "We can take over your nuclear power plant—the botlets work! Oleg's not going to sweat ten more minutes."

"The timeframe is not his. He is powerless to extend it."

"What?" I'm whipping around, checking walls and faces and fixtures for some shred of common sense. "We're giving you what you need! You can't keep the van running another ten minutes to get what you came for? What you crossed the Pacific and violated multiple parts of the Geneva Convention for?"

Graham says nothing.

I press, "Does he just wanna take the money back, is that it?"

"Ask him, if you like."

"I will!"

I swivel to tell Paul to mind the store, but he's already taken my place at the Cray's keyboard. He tips his head, the half-donut of hair sticking out like cotton candy.

I sprint downstairs. From the eighth floor, I peer down into the lobby and make out the top of Oleg's head. He is overseeing the exit operation, telling which crates go where, passing off his box of phones to Security Kyle.

I'm winded by the time I reach him at the foot of Semperinity.

"Need an extension," I say. "Tiny one—ten minutes, possibly less."

He is marking up a sheet held by the claw of a clipboard. "There is no provision for extensions in Blackquest 40"

"Right, but the software—I can get you the software!"

"The timeframe is not mine to—"

"Yeah, I head, it's not your timeframe. But you can't let ten minutes foil you." I pull him a step farther from Security Kyle and whisper, "Who cares if you hack your power plant at 5:05 or 5:15, right? As long as it's hacked?"

Oleg continues marking—short, firm pencil checks. "The agreement becomes void in"—he consults a clock— "sixteen minutes. These are the terms of the contract, and I will abide by those terms."

I'm speechless. We have done the impossible, we've split the damn atom, and it goes for naught? How can the Russians turn away this code—which they were willing to pay many millions of dollars for—because of ten paltry minutes?

"I—I mean...it might speed up. The botlets keep improving, maybe they will finish in sixteen minutes. But...I just don't get why in the world you guys wouldn't wait."

Oleg gives no further explanation, continuing his methodical preparation to leave.

Where did all his anger go? His rage? Has he so acclimated himself to the idea of failure that he can't summon up that former obsession?

Did it vanish when he punctured his stressball, like some shaman's power disappearing when his voodoo doll gets tossed in a river?

I head back upstairs. I don't know what's up with Oleg, but it seems he's checked out of the logic game.

I sit with Graham on the Cray's burnt-orange ottoman seat. I dismiss the others.

"Go. They're giving back phones in the lobby, hurry."

Jared doesn't need to be told twice, securing his trucker hat and hitting the road.

Prisha says, "How can I help?"

You can't," I say. "You can leave. You can go get your phone and wait there in the lobby, and the second Elite takes off? Beat it outside. Don't look back."

She hesitantly agrees. I extend the same advice to Minosh and Paul.

Minosh scampers off.

Paul takes a wistful look at the Cray, which is still chugging away. "Li Wei was worried, and the kids...I-I just haven't been home in a while."

"Sure," I say. "Of course, go. Get outta here."

So he does, leaving just Graham and me. We set a chime to alert us when all value-pairs have been found, then return to the burnt-orange bench.

I yawn. He pulls one foot—clad a regular tennis shoe—up onto the opposite knee.

"Deb Bollinger, you're amazing," he says.

I plunk my head back against the supercomputer. "Thanks. But I am still gay."

He taps his chin with a sage air. "Good to know. And I write left-handed, though handle a fork better with my right."