Free Zero World by Jason M. Hough

of her own from the small pack now strapped to her chest and thumbed the switch. A soft white beam flooded the interior hall. Bright, stable, and with a battery that would last until sunrise. She shook her head at the luck of the North and their genius benefactor. Would any industry be left untouched by the revolution Valix had started with their products? Semiconductors, microchips, supercapacitors…and who knew what else, lurking in underground labs out at the end of the dark tracks the rollers never took.
    She came to a closed door and toed the foot latch, gently kicking out to open it halfway. No ash here. The door at the far end remained closed as well. Moonlight filtered in from high glazed windows on the outer wall, tinged yellow by the glass, alive with dust. Marble tiles of varying, creamy colors glowed softly in the moonbeams. Along the inner wall, to her right, a row of cherrywood doors presented themselves like firstwords gifts, only instead of ribbons they had brass-plated name tags across their middles.
    Melni darted along the hall to the fifth door. Onvel’s office. Ignoring the flutter in her stomach at the sight of his name etched in brass, she toed it open and slid inside.
    The room smelled like him: spice and smokeleaf. Papers were stacked on every available surface. “Damn you, you disorganized curd,” she muttered. She studied the sheets on top and tried to picture herself as him in here, working. She stood where he would have, for there was nowhere to sit. Onvel liked to roam when he worked, so he’d specifically requested a tall bench in his office instead of the usual desk and chair. This meant that he could work anywhere in this room. “Think, think,” she whispered. There, a mug and pen. She padded over and glanced in, saw a shimmer of light reflect off the last few sips of cham, and grinned. She played her beam across the papers within arm’s reach. The smallest stack proved most recently dated. Typed lines of text and equations marked up heavily with Onvel’s neat handwriting. Were these the critical documents he’d spoken of? Were these what he’d planned to steal for her?
    Light played on the far wall. In seconds a warm, shifting glow began to flood in from the hallway outside. Then came footsteps, and voices. Four or five people at least.
    Melni plucked the top ten pages. Any more than that might be missed. She folded the crisp paper into a stiff envelope she’d packed for this purpose. Hopefully the poor researchers back at Riverswidth could make sense of what he’d been working on before the “accident.” If he’d died for this project, perhaps it had been something truly worth dying for.
    The footsteps grew closer. Melni glanced around. The office had only one door, and nothing in the way of furniture but the long U-shaped desk against the back wall. She went for the door, intent to kick it shut, but the newcomers were right outside. She did the only thing she could think to do: She let her momentum take her to the wall beside the door. There was no time to turn around. She inhaled and flattened herself as the office door swung inward.
    The footsteps outside all stopped, save for one pair. Someone came a few halting steps into the dead man’s workspace, then stopped.
    Melni felt the door bounce gently off her shoulder blades and come to a stop. She held her breath in and cursed the inability to see.
    “If only he’d been in here,” a woman said.
    A familiar voice. A famous voice, precise and hard and strangely accented. Words spoken so fast they often ran together, like “he’d” instead of “he had.” Melni bit her lip. After all this time, all her work, her cover, her sneaking about, her turning of Onvel, to have this of all moments be the first time she’d stood in the same room as
her
.
    “But then he loved the moment, didn’t he?” the woman said. Alia Valix said. Alia the genius. The finest inventor in all Gartien’s history. The most mysterious,