The teeners shared sober nods.

“What’s Captain’s Blog?” I whispered to Poppy.

“New to me.”

Jenn glanced over. “That’s Aitch’s site. Used to piggyback on other sites. Lately, she’s had her own, and it looks like they’re down and she’s not.” She turned back to the screen. “How’s she doing that?”

The dreadlocked girl said, “One day she’s Mainland, next day here. Her drones got cosmic range.”

“Look!” A boy pointed toward the top of the screen. An angular tracery of trusswork collapsed and folded into the smoke with an explosion of flame. “Ain’t that a cell tower?”

“Which one? Can you tell where?” Jenn was dancing on tiptoe.

“Must be why no signal,” said the boy.

“Oh, that’s bad!”

I moved in beside her. “What’s the big deal?”

“More equipment destroyed that we can’t replace! Could be transmitters in there. Or servers! Whole banks of them!”

“The Empires use phones, you know.”

Jenn’s nod was weary. “I know.”

Everyone but me, apparently. “You never said . . .”

“Don’t get all huffy.” She beetled slim brows at me. “You never want to hear anything against Rousseau’s rules.”

True, once upon a time, as long ago as last week. “If everyone knew, why go along with the ban? Phones would make our lives so much easier, and safer.”

“Or maybe they wouldn’t.” Jenn put her back to the on-screen mayhem. “You don’t remember life before, how everyone lived on their phones, relied on them for everything.”

Recall slid into my head just by thinking about it. I’d lived on mine, too. When it worked.

“No backup systems. Every time a storm took the phones down, the city was crippled. With the signal so unreliable, Rousseau didn’t want us dependent on it. It makes sense.”

Poppy let out a gasp, and we turned back to the fiery screen in time to see the top floors of the building collapse in a shower of pyrotechnics. The blaze dropped into the lower floors, devouring the building from the inside. The drone circled, drew away, and the screen went blank.

“Thing about Aitch,” Jenn mused, “You’re never sure why she’s showing you something. Never any voiceover. Her only commentary is her choice of subject.”

“Whatever catches her interest?”

“More like, what she thinks is important.”

“Important to who?”

“Well, that’s a good question. But she always seems to know when something’s happening, in time to get her drones there.” She gazed at the dark screen wistfully.

“You’re envious.”

“Aren’t you? She can do things. Make a difference.”