Prompt from @littlestartopaz: Max and Lessa role reversal? (Reminder that Max and Lessa are the main characters of my novel Polaris, explained in more detail here.)
Okay so, in this world, Max grows up Margaret Stone, with long hair and makeup and heels and money. She wants to strip off her skin. Lessa, full name unknown, on the other hand, is on the street at eleven and picked up by Sebastian McCoy, MD, on his way to Polaris’ newest base. She’s a little too timid to be a revolutionary, at first, but she takes to it like a duck to water after a little bit of an adjustment period.
Lessa never joins Mercury squad, she’s not cut out for life as a spy and she has no talent for hacking. Instead, when she’s fifteen she joins Mars squad, the strike team, and starts taking point on their operations, throwing bolts of electricity rather than bullets. She’s promoted to Mars Prime at nineteen, and she has a reputation for being the gentlest professional soldier anyone’s ever met.
There’s also a couple of stories about her blowing the power for whole city grids, or turning on the sprinklers in a building and using the water as a conductor to kill everyone on the floor.
Under Lessa, Ursa Major’s Mars squad gets a new nickname. Blitzkrieg. It means lightning war.
On the one hand, Polaris does a lot worse in this universe. Having a technopath to network a continent-spanning rebellion is invaluable, and without such an advantage, they lose lives, they lose bases, more than once they almost lose everything. There is no secure intranet linking their family of thousands, there is no safe way to smuggle those who don’t want to fight out of the country. Fight or die is the unspoken option given to every new recruit, and those few who are desperate enough to attempt to leave the country on their own learn how true it is. Polaris is harder, every base dependent on only itself, with no safe way to reach out for help, and its people are angrier, with an ever-growing ‘missing’ list of those who can neither be contacted nor confirmed dead.
On the other, Polaris does a lot better in this universe, because when Margaret is nine, she discovers that she can make any computer do anything she tells it to, just by touching it. When she’s twelve, and Lessa is still years from getting kicked out, Margaret starts funneling information from her father’s system onto a private hard drive so encrypted the NSA couldn’t crack it with their best men. She does research, lots of research, and hunts down a boy at her school whose family is on one of the lists. She tells him, warns him, and says, “Polaris. Go to Polaris. Take them this.” The moment the hard drive is connected to a Polaris system, their database is flooded with more national secrets than they’ve been able to get in a decade, every block of code signed with a simple MAX. Marshal North has to sit down, and she laughs and laughs until she’s breathless.
Margaret is twenty-two and ferocious with being trapped like an animal in a cage when she’s caught up in a Polaris operation. She gets taken hostage by a girl with long blonde hair and a grim look in her eye, one hand wrapped around her throat as the girl says, “Sorry, Miss Stone, but it is what it is. Tell your bodyguards to drop their guns, or I’ll put so much electricity through you you’ll wish you’d just been struck by lightning.”
Margaret bares her teeth and looks as wild as any of the rebels when she says, “If you take me with you, I can get you another load of my father’s data before we leave, and more that I’ve hidden around the city. it’ll make the hard drive look like nothing.”
The blonde girl is so startled she almost drops her hostage in a pile on the ground. “How did you–”
“I sent the first one.”
“Max,” Lessa breathes, and gives a feral grin of her own. “You’ve got a deal.”
