More and more people start arriving in the square. I swallow down my surprise and the tears that threaten to spring up in my eyes—I thought that maybe our class group would come along, the ones who knew Zora and me personally, but there are kids from all grades here and from different schools too. No one knows how to get the word out like teenagers.

And today, we have rallied.

Because of the cold, there’s not a lot of chitchat. But our plan isn’t to stay for long. One by one, in the courtyard of City Hall, the students unleash their bakus, power them down so they can no longer move, and leave them in the snow. Animals great and small—from beetles and birds and tiny mammals like Linus—all of that expensive technology, immobile and frozen like statues—litter the ground so that it is impossible to walk into the building without taking notice.

Because we love our bakus. We love the technology.

But we are not going to be ruled by it.

We’re not going to let them take away our future.

Moncha Corp got one thing right—we want to build the future. Not have it taken from us.

There’s a screech of tires, as a van branded with a local news network logo pulls up outside City Hall. Zora puts her hand on my shoulder. “I’ll organize things here and make sure the media gets the message. You better hurry along to Moncha HQ. Put my brilliant code into action.”

“You bet. You’ve done an incredible job,” I say, giving her a quick hug, muffled by our respective down jackets. She’s right; I don’t have a lot of time. I have to join Carter at Moncha HQ. But I feel buoyed by what I’m seeing at City Hall. If St. Agnes students have shown up, maybe Profectus and other schools will too.

This is something that affects all of us.

A rideshare car takes me down to the east side of the city, where Moncha HQ is located. This is going to be a much trickier part of the plan, where I’m going to need every inch of my skill to make it happen. I don’t have Slick with me to check what’s happening and to see if I have any messages. I have my old phone, the one with the broken screen, but not many people have the number. I just have to trust in the people who are leading this with me. Zora over at City Hall. Carter at Moncha HQ. Jake on his app. And Kai, River, and Ashley, who’ve taken the lead on rallying Profectus teens. I have confidence in all their abilities.

But I’ve heard nothing from Tobias. I kept expecting a message, half-hoping it was him whenever Slick buzzed.