Read Lifespan of Starlight for Free Online Page A

with this woman, I saw it happen.

F OR MOST OF the night I lie with my eyes closed, replaying the night I found that woman. The way her frame flickered in front of me …
    At the time I thought I’d lost concentration for a moment, blinked, perhaps, but
now I realise that I saw something very weird. Something impossible.
    When Mum’s alarm sounds I’m immediately awake, but I lie still and listen to the
faint rustle of fabric as she dresses and leaves. As soon as the front door engages,
I’m up and clicking the comscreen on.
    It takes me three minutes to hack into the computer in Mason’s basement. Maybe I’ll
be able to uncover a clue that will help me work out what’s going on.
    There’s a heap of noise to get past – internet searches, news updates, messages between
friends and family. I don’t know what I’m trying to find, exactly, so it’s hard knowing
what to search for.
    I skim through some day-to-day messages and filter out basics like ration points,
then I search for ‘gap’ or even ‘history map’. Nothing interesting comes up. I try
a few more key words, and then type in certain dates and grid references. No luck.
    I think for a bit, and come up blank.
    So then I just go browsing, trying to find clues in their daily lives. It feels somehow
wrong trawling through their private stuff, but the slight guilt isn’t enough to
make me stop. Whatever’s going on, whatever that woman was doing, I need to find
out what it was. From watching how well Mason knew his way around the grid, I can
tell that he knows how to hack other stuff too.
    A lot of the time I just sift through boring stuff in case it uncovers some sort
of clue. Mason’s school reports are littered with national academic awards. The guy
clearly has a seriously high mega-IQ.
    Boc’s reports are okay, but I can tell that school isn’t exactly a priority. Most
weekends it looks like he heads out of the city to go mountain biking. I spend ages
squinting at the screen to make sure I’m reading the map contours right because when
he’s coming down the side of a mountain, the terrain he covers is insane.
    When he isn’t flying down a mountainside, Boc trains with a climbing group that calls
itself ‘The Spiderboys’ because they scale city buildings rather than heading out
to cliff faces. He was even arrested once, but from the way it was written up in
the news, it seemed like a slap on the wrist more than anything else. The headline is: F UTURE E LITES A IM FOR THE S KY . There’s a picture of Boc next to some guy with pale skin and black hair called Amon Lang. I roll my eyes. If anyone on F-level
rations had been caught climbing the Macquarie Bank building, they’d have been hit
with a permanent crim stamp.
    Just from pulling up their history maps over the past six months, I actually get
a pretty clear idea of who these guys are. Mason’s map is neat and contained, travelling
the same path to school and back, with most of his spare time spent in his basement.
Boc’s looks like a crazy scribble flower, looping all over the city and spiking out
to mountain areas every few weeks. He’s always seeing people, always doing stuff.
    As my eyes travel over Boc’s crazy scribble, though, I realise there’s a constant,
in the centre of his flower. Mason. Every few days, Boc always returns to his centre.
----
    The next morning, I’m searching through Boc’s computer when I find a document – a
letter from Boc addressed to the school principal. It’s an apology after Boc was
suspended for triggering lockdown in the middle of exam week. In it, he says he’s
sorry for the trouble he caused but then goes on to say that the school should be
aware how easy it is to hack its security, as if he did them a favour.
    Sort of interesting, but it still has nothing to do with gaps in anyone’s history map.
    I’m sifting through messages between Mason and Boc from around that time, when I
realise that the identity tags are out of sequence. My eyes