The Right to Die | ✓ Amby Winner 2023

14. Mushroom Cakes

The lock screen faded away, and M'yu scrambled back to his stall. He was in. Rotting Caps, he was in. He secured the bathroom lock again and started combing through Ruslan's security.

First up was the locator. A few lines of code disabled that. Next was a lockout alarm, in case someone tried to hack the password. M'yu quickly turned that off too.

That done, M'yu ran through the system's abilities. Like the engineer's card, M'yu could connect it to local buildings and control their lights and security. There was a locked program on the card, but M'yu mentally flicked through his favorite programming book to remember the sequence that would let him get beneath the user-friendly face of the linkcard and into its mathematical guts. He did the calculations in his head, composing dense, machine-level lines of code. His numbers unfroze the system like fire melts snow; everything that had been read-only suddenly shook free, and he navigated back to the interface to see what exactly he was working with.

The previously locked program opened up to show a network of glowing dots moving in real time. As he clicked one dot, his eyes went wide, and he closed that to click another. A low whistle escaped his lips. Each dot represented a linkcard, a person, moving through the area. Their names and photographs displayed in a bubble above as he clicked through each one.

Running a new command from the security application, he made a diagram of door locks and building lights display beneath the people-tracker. There might not be any walls marked, but M'yu had been studying security displays like these for a long time. It might look like a mess of data to most people, but to M'yu?

To M'yu, it looked like the perfect map.

His breath shook, and he steadied his hands against his knees. He could break into the Prav'sudja with this. Aevryn's hover could get him through the gates, Ruslan's linkcard could give him a real-time map, and he could knock out locks and sensors as he pleased. It was ridiculous, dangerous, deadly—but he could.

If he just knew what he was looking for.

M'yu tucked Ruslan's card back into the hidden pocket. He only had so much time until Ruslan realized it was missing, and only so much more before the boy figured out a way to blame M'yu. The linkcard shuffle he'd played with the other students would help—it had always confused the Magnate's goons before, at least—but it wouldn't last forever.

All it has to last is today, he promised himself. Today, and it'll never be on my person at school again.

His hands still shook, and he couldn't figure out why. His stomach growled, but he'd gone without eating for longer. Weariness weighed at his frame, but he pushed out of the bathroom, splashing his face with water. He could make it through the day. He could be the perfect student no one would ever dare accuse. He could wear a lie with a smile and bow and scrape to Ruslan.

He could do whatever it took so long as everything went down in flames at the end.

Drying his face, he pushed out of the bathroom and forced himself to face the rest of the day. Ruslan spotted him as soon as he entered the cafeteria and beckoned. Head down, both to play his part and to hide his smirk, he made his way through the circle of lesser tables to stop at the Mercury House's. Its surface was made of glass, a silver resin beneath. As M'yu stared at it, though, the resin swirled and moved. Quicksilver, he realized. Moving just beneath the surface, so subtle that if you weren't careful, you would assume nothing was changing at all. If that glass ever cracked, though, the liquid mercury would be a tide spreading all over the floor, and there'd be no stopping it. And so as Ruslan paraded M'yu around to the older housemates as 'his student,' he kept his head down.