“Can we talk about this somewhere else? We’ve still got ages until we need to head to school, and I’m freezing.”

>>There’s an old public library not far away.

“Okay great, let’s go there.” Anything to get warm. Jinx leads me further uptown, to a pretty building that once belonged to the university. It’s now one of the public libraries in Toronto—and they’re open twenty-four hours a day. There are way more libraries in the city now than ever before. That was a Monica Chan initiative. She thought it was important for people to have a place to go where they could be with their bakus but also read books.

“One thing I’ve learned is you can have access to all the information in the world—as bakus do—but if you don’t know how to research, then that information is useless. You have to know the right questions to ask. And libraries can teach you how to ask those questions,” Monica Chan had said in one of her television interviews.

Thankfully the heat works inside the library, and it’s lovely and cozy, furnished with plenty of comfortable sofas. There are stacks with a constantly shifting rotation of books out front, and huge numbers of other books behind, accessible by baku only.

We find a secluded corner and huddle together. The disappointment of not being able to find Mr. Baird sinks into my bones. He was the only person who had been willing to help us before. “I don’t understand why he would have to go into hiding. BRIGHTSPRK were the ones who made him go undercover. Shouldn’t they be protecting him?”

>>Maybe putting him into hiding is part of their plan. Have him lay low until the storm passes.

“Well, are there any other BRIGHTSPRK offices nearby where we can leave him a message?”

>>According to my research, there’s one north of Bloor Street. But there’s no Mr. Baird registered as working there. And look at this.

He projects a few news stories and a complicated-looking graph.

>>This is a livestream of their latest stock price. It’s tumbling. No one is buying their Halos.

Why would they? I think. Halos are like…the anti-baku. They’re cold and uninteresting, just circles of metal that are worn around the wearer’s head from earlobe to earlobe. Some of the Halos are so thin as to be invisible, whereas others can be customized in different colors. They’re so very…functional. It was a gamble for BRIGHTSPRK to offer something so unobtrusive, and so far, it looks like they’ve failed.

>>They probably can’t afford another scandal right now.