Bright's Light Read Online Free PDF Page A

checked out her reflection again. Damn, she looked good. The pink helmet was bathed in the rose-tinted lightof the dressing room. Every shadow flattered. Her skin was fine. She’d been seeing things earlier.
    “Turn the light on. I want to see it!”
    Bright swivelled to look at Fon, who smiled back at her, radiating gorgeousness and good will.
    “I should probably get Pinkie to put in a temporary tooth. Can’t go out there all gappy,” said Bright. It was the best excuse she could come up with. She didn’t want to test out the helmet light. It was one thing to wear someone else’s new gear. Somehow, it seemed like a whole other dance party to activate it.
    “Come on! I’m dying to see!”
    Bright bowed her head. The light feature
was
cool.
    “I’m saving it for important occasions,” said Bright. “And really important and exclusive people.”
    “Oh,” said Fon, her face falling slightly.
    “It’s just so next-level, you know?” added Bright, starting to enjoy her moment. “Not everyone is ready for it.”
    When she saw the look of genuine disappointment on Fon’s face—a look she had never seen before—Bright relented. Her finger found the hard little nub on the side of the helmet and pushed it. Nothing happened.
    “It’s not working.”
    “Let me look,” said Fon.
    Fon came over and stood on her tiptoes to peer at the top of the helmet. “Hit the switch again,” she said.
    Bright pushed her finger against the button and left it there. “Anything?” she asked.
    “It’s kind of going on and off.”
    Bright jerked her head away and pulled off the helmet in one movement.
    She hit the button again and stared down at it. The small, round bulb flickered insistently, strangely. Strands of yellow and white and pink, with a piercing needle of light at the centre, seemed to be trying to escape the glass. It was beautiful. She bet it would be even more beautiful if the light worked properly. That combination of colours would look fabulous with a wide range of skin tones.
    Suddenly, the light blazed on, nearly blinding her.
    Bright heard a
thump
and dragged her gaze away to see Fon lying on the ground. Fon’s eyes had rolled up into her head so that only the whites showed. Her mouth was slack. It was actually a pretty good look, in a passed-out sort of way, and for a brief moment Bright wondered if she should try it sometime. Then her vision was clouded by shadows. She hit the button to turn out the light. The helmet went dark and so did she.

04.00
    Grassly’s fingers moved in a blur at the side of his temple as he hacked the feed to disable the bots’ standing order to report all unusual behaviour inside the dressing rooms. The screen showed two favours lying on the floor. What was happening? What had gone wrong? It seemed that the light hadn’t worked correctly—again. He’d been dancing the slip slide in his workshop and stopped paying close attention to the feed for a second. When he looked back, both favours had been exposed to the light, and both had collapsed. He decided to be safe and, with a couple of decisive flicks of his hand, took both bots’ feeds offline entirely.
    Lucky for him that the feed was a tangled, twisted mess of missed connections, shorts, and dead ends. There were at least a thousand satellites and drones still operating on and above Earth, and they flooded the system with information. The remote data joined the glut of information coming in from every area in the Store. At this late stage in their development, the ancestors were so incapable of independent thought and so far removed from the foundation of their technological past that none of them couldfix, troubleshoot, or even streamline their own clogged and erratic network.
    On his screen one of the favours stirred. She carefully raised a hand to her large and complicated hairstyle. “My head hurts,” she said. He couldn’t tell which one she was. Favours were difficult to differentiate from one another,