Impact. The word flashed in the air in front of me as the horizon lit up and began to grow brighter.
Satellites had detected the launch and tracked the missile as it entered the atmosphere, but the defense shield wasn’t designed to respond to a strike sourced from inside the net itself. There was no way to stop it. The helicopter had just begun its approach to Palos Verdes when the missile detonated above the water, past the mouth of Palm Harbor. A blinding flash lit up the night sky, and spots still swam in front of my eyes as the huge dome of light began to boil into a cloud of radioactive fire. Even at that distance, it was awe inspiring. As the signature cloud rose over the skyline, panic set in for real, and I could see mobs surge through the streets below us. Not even the Guard could control the flow of bodies as they scrambled to clear the area.
I couldn’t raise anyone on the JZI. Our people were scattered. Calls were flooding in from all over the city, jamming the switchboards, and it was about to get worse.
You will kill Fawkes—that’s what they think—but Zoe will stop him.
I thought about Van Offo’s last words as the column of smoke continued to rise above the skyline. I fished the card he’d given me with her number on it out of my jacket pocket. The way things were playing out, I might not get another chance. As we moved over the crowd that had spilled into the street, I dialed it.
It rang several times, but she didn’t pick up. When it bounced through to her voice mail, I stared at the mob below and didn’t speak.
“We’re closing in!” the pilot said.
“Zoe—”
Scrambled code streamed in the corner of my eye and then winked out as the chopper hit turbulence. My stomach rolled, and my dead right arm seized as the scene in front of me changed abruptly.
“Just tell me what you want,” I asked. I was sitting in my car, with Zoe next to me. The sign for Pleasantview Apartments shone from across the street through falling snow as I waited for her to answer.
I remember this. It had happened years ago, back before Faye had been killed.
Zoe sat in the passenger’s seat, her eyes turned down toward the floor. Her hair covered most of her face, but I saw a tear roll down her cheek.
“I want you …to like me …” she said. Her voice was so soft, I could barely hear her.
“I do like you, Zoe. I …”
She turned and stared up into my eyes. The color was gone from them, replaced with shiny black. I felt the strength drain out of my body.
“Don’t say anything,” she said. “This is hard enough.” Her eyes returned to normal.
“You really don’t get it, do you? You really don’t see it.” She shook her head. “You and me …there’s got to be a reason for it …I kept seeing you …something made me find you …we were supposed to meet. Didn’t you feel it too?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say. Zoe always seemed emotional to me, but I hadn’t realized until then just how much she kept buried.
“You mean so much to me …don’t you see it? You changed my life…. ”
“Zoe …look …”
“Am I anything to you at all?”
I realized then that she had feelings for me. More than that, she’d pinned some kind of hope on me. I’d been so caught up in what was happening that I hadn’t even noticed.
Zoe was deeply disturbed. She was a late-stage alcoholic, prone to outbursts and paranoia. I thought she might also be critical to my investigation, but she’d asked a straightforward question. Whatever it was she felt, I didn’t feel it, but I thought she deserved an answer. Even before I could frame what I was going to say, though, she knew.
“Don’t …don’t say it,” she said, shaking her head. She was crying now. “I don’t want to hear you say it.”
“Zoe—”
“Don’t!” Her pupils expanded again and her eyes turned coal black. My head began to reel. “Forget it! Just forget it! Forget this whole thing! We never had this conversation, so forget—”
The helicopter bucked, and as fast as the vision had come, it was gone. The phone was still in my hand. Zoe wasn’t there. I snapped it shut as the pilot began his descent.
I was sure that time; that was a memory. Zoe had wiped my memory, and somehow it had returned.
The dead arm ticked once, and I felt it in my shoulder. The first flash came after Fawkes took over Heinlein Industries, after he sent the transmission to alter the code of the Huma carriers. They had to be connected.
I set up a data miner to dig up instances of revivor bleed-through and memory recall. It began its search, but the networks were jammed and it was slow going. After a minute or two, it had trawled up some garbage, but nothing substantial. There was no tie between nanoblood contamination and memory, at least none on record.
“Hold on!” the pilot said as he brought us in. Maybe Deatherage would have some answers, if he was still alive.
We were closing in on the street below, and the crowd surged beneath the helicopter as people were buffeted by the wind of the rotors. We passed between the buildings and veered down Stark Street, where the traffic was jammed bumper to bumper. As the wire was flooded with warnings about the approaching radiation, people were abandoning their vehicles to escape to anywhere away from the shore. Throngs of bodies shoved their way down the sidewalks on either side. One man trudged along the side of a snowbank with a pistol clenched in his hand. Farther down, two men guarded a storefront with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders.
“It’s coming up,” the pilot said over the headset. Through the windshield, the building towered above us.
Palos Verdes was a low-rent apartment complex that dominated the block. It was closed off from the main street by a blockade of Stillwell soldiers who kept anyone from entering. On the other side of the cordon it was chaos, but so far the area behind it was clear. One of the soldiers waved the pilot in to a small lot bordered by military vehicles, and he descended into the clearing.
A shot went off down the street and I saw a figure stagger behind a row of cars, but couldn’t tell if it was human or not. People on the sidewalk shielded their eyes as the rotors kicked up sand and salt. The pilot brought us down on the icy pavement while soldiers watched from the main entrance.
I climbed out and signaled to the pilot.
Wait here.
Roger that, he said, but if that cloud blows in they’re going to have to try a mass evac. Be ready to move.
The roar of the crowd rose over the chopper. Another shot went off somewhere as I made for the front entrance. As I approached, one of the officers broke the line and came forward to meet me.
“Agent Wachalowski?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Sergeant Lansky. We heard you were on your way.”
“What’s going on here?”
“Multiple revivors were spotted inside. We isolated them to the unit you’re after.”
“Is the target alive?”
“Heat signatures show no one living inside; it looks like we’re too late. We secured the site and were waiting for you to arrive.”
I looked at the entrance. People stood outside in groups, shivering in the cold. Eyes darted nervously toward the glow out over the water.
“Is the perimeter secure?”
“Yes, sir. No one’s come in or out.”
“How many revivors?”
“At least two. My men inside can tell you more. Basement level, unit 102. Sir, the launch. Do you know any—”
“Take the rest of your men and cover the street,” I told him. “This whole place could be contaminated in an hour; this is only going to get worse.”
I climbed the front steps and looked out from the main entrance. Back at the cordon, a soldier stood on top of a truck and barked over a bullhorn while the crowd shoved their way through the street. A mass evacuation would never happen in time. If the wind changed direction, most of the people there were going to be caught in it.
Pain pulsed in my head and I felt my jaw clench, the teeth grinding together. I needed to get back to headquarters to get checked out, but there was no place left to go back to. Even if there had been, there wasn’t time.
I pushed open the door. The lobby inside had glass scattered across the floor and I saw shell casings littered in with the debris. Some of the overhead lights were out, and some flickered where the ceiling had taken a stream of gunfire. A handful of tenants sat along one wall, watched by a pair of soldiers.
I drew my weapon and headed down a stairwell with concrete walls. The door clanged shut behind me as I reached the landing and entered the hallway. Following the unit numbers, I turned right, then down a long hallway where two soldiers waited. The younger one’s name patch read JIN. The other read ANDERS. When they saw me, they waved me over.
At the door, I switched to the backscatter filter and peered through. I didn’t see anyone on the other side. The scanner LED was green; the door was unlocked.
“There’s three inside,” Jin said. “We got them on camera.”
He angled the screen so I could see. From floor level, I saw a crumpled figure, and a woman’s face dotted with blood.
“That’s your guy’s mistress, Panya Garg,” the other officer said. “She’s confirmed dead. No word yet on whether your guy is in there or not, but we’re not picking up any vitals.”
“Power’s cut,” Anders said. “But we’ve got electrical activity and some light, so they’ve got some kind of backup.”
On the camera I saw a flicker—a flashlight beam, maybe. I heard movement from somewhere on the other side of the door.
“I’m going inside,” I said.
They nodded. I pushed open the door, and they took position behind me.
The front entrance opened into a short hallway, and up ahead I could see what looked like the living area. Heavy footsteps moved in one of the rooms nearby. I scanned through the walls on either side of the hall and didn’t see anyone.
I approached the woman’s body. She was dressed to go out, and there was a suitcase next to the front door. Blood had pooled behind the body from a wound in her back that probably came from a revivor’s bayonet. It was the wrong day to be associated with Harold Deatherage.
The living room was small and crowded with old, mismatched furniture. A set of dirty boot tracks crossed the matted carpet, away from the body and through a doorway on the far end of the room. A short connecting hallway extended from there. A flashlight swept through the room on the other side.
I approached, and the soldiers followed. The doorjamb was splintered where the door had been forced, and through the doorway I could see three male figures; two were standing and one was seated. None registered any body heat.
I’ve got three revivors here.
The room had been converted into some kind of makeshift work area. Two wall racks bordered a workstation, both stacked with equipment that looked out of place in such a run-down unit. Deatherage had been doing more here than just cheating on his wife.
The air inside was hazy, and I smelled smoke. I watched for a minute as one of the revivors rooted through a desk drawer, and the other pushed a collection of data disks from a shelf mounted behind the workstation so that they scattered onto the floor. It moved off to one side, out of my line of sight.
They’re looking for something.
The third revivor was seated in a chair in front of the workbench. The monitor glowed softly, silhouetting its face.
The equipment was still running on backup power, but the computer screens were blank. Threads of smoke rose from several chassis mounted in the racks. I zoomed in and pulled any names and model numbers I could read, then handed them off to a data miner to see what it could find.
The revivor in the chair shifted, and I heard a low scrape against the floor as the workstation desk moved. It had one wrist tied to the desk frame with a plastic zip tie. Blood leaked from a gash where it had dug through the skin, but the blood was red; human. A carrier, maybe.
The first revivor gave up on the drawers and looked around the room. After a minute, something sloshed, and the second came back into view, carrying a plastic gas can. It approached the seated revivor, and I smelled fumes as it poured a stream of gasoline down on top of its head. As the liquid splashed down over the desk and floor, I spotted an unlit road flare clenched in the revivor’s other hand.
I stepped inside, Jin and Anders moving in behind me. The revivors turned as I fired at the one with the can and caught it in the forehead. Its head pitched back and the can thudded to the floor as Jin fired at the second. The first round tore through its neck, and the second was a clean headshot. It fell back against the bookshelf and crashed to the floor. The second body staggered and left a streak of blood down the wall before it slumped down against the computer table. The road flare rolled behind a chair.
“Hold your fire!” I said.
The third revivor looked up from where it sat, hair plastered to its head. There were black blotches in the whites of its eyes. The first two were dressed in old, dirty clothes, but this one had on a buttoned shirt and a tie. Jin had his gun pointed at the revivor’s head, his finger on the trigger.
“Just wait,” I said.
I moved closer to the third revivor and scanned its face. The computer pulled up a match.
“It’s him,” I said. “This is Deatherage. Stand down.”
I lowered my gun and removed a penlight from my jacket pocket. I shined it in one of the revivor’s eyes. The black hemorrhages branched through the whites.
Alice, I’ve located Harold Deatherage.
Is he alive?
No. He’s been reanimated. It looks like a Huma case. I found some kind of work area here, but it looks like most of it has been destroyed.
The chair creaked under Deatherage’s body as he strained against the plastic tie.
“Mr. Deatherage?” I said. He looked up at me, but didn’t respond. “Mr. Deatherage, can you understand me?”
I scanned his head and saw a dark blotch inside the brain pan. Revivors relied on existing brain pathways. The kill switch had caused some damage in there.
I looked around the room. The computer equipment was all dark and surrounded by smoke. Cables and wires trailed across the floor.
An icon flashed in my periphery as the data miner came back with its first round of results. Information began to scroll by in front of me. The model numbers were getting hits on some very specialized equipment used to develop and test nanotech code. A high-security clearance and a federal permit were required to obtain half the technology on the list.
Whatever he was working on here, it was something major, I told Alice. The electronics in here are worth millions.
Did he get it through Heinlein?
You need permits for this stuff; they’d never have signed off on it. This was something he didn’t want them knowing about, or he’d have done it there.
I looked around the room, waving smoke and gas fumes away from my face. The revivors had been sent by Fawkes to destroy evidence, so he knew a place like this existed. Deatherage’s main residence was hit first, though, which suggested he hadn’t known exactly where it was. Whatever they were doing, the others, Chen and Shaddrah, had to be in on it, but they hadn’t known the location either, or hadn’t told Fawkes.
Their work was tied to Chen’s, then. Was there more to it than just safeguarding against the shutdown virus?
Wachalowski, a tech team is on its way, but we’re working against the clock here, Alice said. Wind patterns could put fallout over that area in an hour; get what you can and get out of there.
Understood.
“Mr. Deatherage?”
He lunged, and the desk jumped an inch as his arm was pulled taut. Jin and Anders’s guns came up, but neither fired. Deatherage bared his teeth and reached with his free hand to grab me.
“It’s okay,” I told the two men. “I’ve got him.”
I looked through the musculature of his neck and was able to make out the nodes that had formed around the spine. The communications node was active, and I connected.
There wasn’t much contained in the memory; Deatherage hadn’t been a revivor long. He’d switched over long after the original kill code was sent, so Fawkes must have had him on a separate trigger. A safeguard, maybe. Deatherage was supposed to be in on his plan, but when Fawkes realized he’d been betrayed, he used it to make sure he didn’t talk.
“Mr. Deatherage, can you understand me?” I asked. Spittle hung from his lip as he stared at me and strained against the plastic tie. With his free hand, he thumped his palm against his stomach twice.
“Why’d they restrain him?” Anders asked.
“I think he restrained himself,” I said.
“Why?”
“Maybe so he wouldn’t hurt anyone.”
They bite.
The words appeared in front of me, floating in front of Deatherage’s face. They’d come over my connection to his revivor node. He was trying to communicate.
What happened here? I asked him. His eyes rolled in their sockets. What did you do?
They bite.
What did Fawkes have you working on?
He didn’t answer. His brain was scrambled. He used his free hand to thump his belly again.
When I moved my scan away from the revivor nodes around his spine to look down at the hand, I caught a flash of something behind the muscle wall in his abdominal cavity. He was trying to tell me something.
“Hang on. I’ve got something here,” I said. I zoomed in and peered through the soft tissue. Inside his stomach, there was a small piece of plastic with electronics inside.
A data spike.
Deatherage lunged again suddenly, his cold fingers brushing my face before grabbing a fistful of my jacket. Without thinking, I drove my dead fist into the side of his face and his head snapped to one side. A gob of blood splashed the desktop next to him as I pulled back and grabbed his wrist, peeling his fingers away from my lapel.
Do it …
I bent his fingers back until I heard a series of dull pops, then twisted his arm around so his broken hand faced the floor. I drove the heel of my palm down onto his elbow, and the bone crunched. Anders took a quick step back.
“Woah!”
Deatherage’s arm bent the wrong way, but his face didn’t change. He didn’t feel it, but I didn’t care. The same urge that came over me at the hospital was back, stronger than before, and I fought to control it.
I kicked the chair out from under him, then shoved him face-first down onto the floor. As the chair toppled, the tie twisted his wrist and I heard it snap. Before he could move again, I drew my field knife and stuck the point between two vertebrae just under the revivor nodes. Careful not to damage the nodes themselves, I drove the blade through the spinal cord, and he went limp.
Calm down. My heart rate was spiking. Just calm down. The other two officers stood a few feet away, guns still drawn as I took a deep breath and let it out.
Do it …
“Wait outside,” I said. Anders backed out of the room as I jerked the knife free again.
I flipped Deatherage over, the tie cutting his wrist deeper until the fingers of his hand turned dark and fat. I pulled his shirt open to expose the pale skin underneath, and found the outline of the data spike under the surface. I pushed the knife in below his ribs and cut open his belly.
“Jesus,” I heard Jin mutter.
“Wait outside.”
I used the backscatter to help guide the knife as I cut through the stomach wall. When the opening was big enough, I pushed my fist through and felt around until I found the edge of the plastic. I grabbed it and pulled it free.
They bite.
“I get it.”
I wiped the spike as dry as I could on his shirt before guiding it into the bay of my cell phone. It was loaded with data, some kind of specs, maybe, for the code he’d worked on, but there was a text message included with it:
Fawkes lied. He wasn’t supposed to kill them all. What I did, I did for the good of all mankind. It was only supposed to wake them up. No one was supposed to die. That’s what I was told.
Ang was just supposed to provide protection for their network, but I found his secret location and now I know what he really worked on. His lab is at Black Rock Yard. He worked on dissemination. I don’t know where she worked, but I found out Dulari was one of the Huma payload specialists. She figured out how to make them self-replicate. This kind of research is illegal for a reason. This isn’t how it was supposed to be.
None of us knew what the other was doing, or I would never have done it. Alone, any one of these traits could be explained away, but together they could prove unbelievably dangerous. This cannot get out.
If she is still alive, tell my wife I’m sorry—about Panya and everything else. Tell her that no matter what she hears in the days to come, I swear I didn’t know.
Included were some images that didn’t mean much at first glance. There were rows of photos, close-up shots of dog bites. There were also rows of X-rays, each panel showing the progress of what looked like revivor nodes growing in the skulls of different dogs. There was a satellite map as well, with The Eye and the nuclear deterrent shield called out. Another map had locations circled and connected with lines, including the Stillwell base, Black Rock train yard, Palos Verdes, and Heinlein Industries.
The last image, though, stopped me cold. I stared at it in the HUD, realization slowly sinking in.
Alice, come in.
Hsieh here.
The image was a satellite photo of the city that included a section of the coast. The image was dotted with tiny red points, and as I watched, more began to appear. As the dots began to bleed together to form clusters, a timer counted off the seconds, minutes, and hours in a fast time-lapse. As days ticked by, the red clusters began to slowly cover the map, then leak out over the bridges, out of the city. At the base of the map were two words:
Alice, I know why Fawkes went back to Heinlein.
What we found at the train yard suddenly made sense. Fawkes didn’t care about reanimating animals, and he wasn’t testing the new code on them either, not directly.
We already know that, Alice said.
We were wrong, I said. Dissemination, self-replication …the simulation wasn’t charting the spread of revivors through the city, it was charting the spread of a disease. Fawkes didn’t just switch off the ghrelin inhibitors of the people he’d converted, he’d changed them far more fundamentally than that.
No matter what else happens, Alice, we can’t allow Heinlein’s transmitter to be damaged or destroyed.
It’s how he’s controlling the satellites, Nico. It’s how he’s controlling revivors across such a wide radius.
I know, but it’s also the only way to introduce any change to their existing systems. It might be the only way to undo what Fawkes has done.
And what is that, Agent? What is it? What did you find?
I think Fawkes knows he can’t hold Heinlein forever. He wants to spread the Huma variant to the rest of the city before that happens.
How? I looked over at Deatherage as that bitter taste filled my mouth again. His body was paralyzed but his eyes pleaded as he continued to repeat his message:
They bite.
They bite.
They bite.
When I came to, I was sitting on a hard, uncomfortable chair. The room was quiet, and I could hear the soft buzz of an electric light over my head.
I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. I was sitting on a folding metal chair in front of a table near one end of a small, concrete room whose walls were painted green. A single light flickered overhead, throwing shadows in the dark.
“This place,” I whispered. A heavy metal door that led out of the room was open, and the doorway was dark. From outside, I heard footsteps echo, then disappear. My head hurt and my throat hurt. Every time my heart beat, pain went up the back of my neck.
For a long time, the Green Room was just another nightmare place I ended up in when I blacked out, but now I knew it existed, or would exist, and that I was one of only a few people to ever see it, which meant I was one of the few people who might be around to see it. It was a vision from inside the void, something from the aftermath of the event. I hadn’t seen it in a long time.
I looked at the tabletop and thought it wasn’t the same one as last time, but I wasn’t sure. It was worn, with laminate peeled up in one corner. I thought maybe it was a different shape. Certain things were always the same, like the green paint and the basic layout of the room, but sometimes the details changed. Not enough people had seen it to be sure. No one knew what the room was for.
“It’s almost time,” a voice said.
I turned around and saw the dead woman, the one with the short blond hair and the nice cheekbones, standing next to a silver metal panel that was fixed to the wall. Her skin looked thinner than the last time I’d seen her, with more of those black veins underneath. She stared at me from near the switchbox, her eyes glowing in the dark like moonlight.
“I know who you are,” I said. “Your name is Faye Dasalia.”
She was the one Nico used to be in love with. The one he was still in love with. She tried to kill me once, but instead I almost killed her—almost.
“We will meet one last time,” she said.
“When?”
She reached over to the electrical box and threw the switch. A spark flashed with a loud bang and fell down onto the floor, where it sputtered out. Two of the lights at the end of the room slowly got a little brighter, while the one in the middle stayed out. Another spark spit from the socket there.
As the lights came up, I saw two figures had appeared, one standing under each of them.
The first one was Nico, and when I saw him, I put one hand over my mouth. A few years back he’d ditched me and never tried to contact me again, so I had mixed feelings about him, but even so, he looked horrible. He was wearing slacks and a sleeveless undershirt, and the scar that covered his neck and chest ended on his left side at a neat seam where his whole shoulder and arm had turned pale and gray. Black veins stood out over the bicep and down the forearm. There were big, dark bruises on the right side of his body, especially his face. The eyelid that drooped showed only white underneath. He looked half-dead.
“You can help him,” the dead woman said, “but you can’t save him. He will destroy Fawkes forever.”
“I stop Fawkes.”
She didn’t say anything.
I got up out of the chair, and when I stood, my head pounded. It was all I could do to limp a few steps closer. I couldn’t stop shivering. I was almost sure I hated him for turning his back on me, but still, I could barely stand to see him like that.
“He will need you,” she said.
“I needed him,” I said. My voice was low and hoarse.
The dead woman didn’t answer. She pointed to the other figure, Flax, with her short hair and mean face. I felt my face get hot.
“She will bring about destruction,” the woman said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. She’s a carrier. They’re going to use her as a back door to shut down the rest of them.”
She didn’t say either way. In the quiet, I could hear the low hum from her chest.
“She will take the last thing that is dear to you,” she said.
I clenched my fists, and felt tears well up in my eyes. My hand shook as I pointed one index finger up at her face.
“Enough!” I said. “I’ve had enough! She’s not taking anything else from me! Nothing else! They’re going to kill her, like they should have done a long time ago! The next time I see you, I’ll put you down for good. Do you hear me? If I so much as see you I’ll—”
Faye moved closer to me. I backed away until I bumped against the concrete wall, and her cold hands grabbed my arms. The cool, lifeless skin of her cheek pressed against the hot red of my own, and she spoke into my ear.
“He will call to you one last time,” she said. “If you accept him, you could still—”
“Screw you!” I said, and shoved her back. She staggered into the table and caught herself before she fell, as the chair clattered to the floor. “You’re not real!”
I put my hands over my eyes and pressed. My head throbbed so bad it made me feel sick.
“I’m tired of this! All of this! Get out of my head and just leave me alone!”
I took my hands away and opened my eyes. Dark spots swam in front of me. I was still in the Green Room and the chair was still knocked over, but the dead woman was gone. It got quiet, and I could hear myself panting. I wiped my mouth and looked around. No one else was there.
My heart rate started to slow down as I took a deep breath, like Ai had shown me. There was no reason to get upset. The visions weren’t something to be afraid of; they were glimpses into a possible future. They provided valuable information, and visions that came from the place even Ai couldn’t see into were the most valuable of all. I had to try to calm down and pay attention.
I picked the chair back up and put it in front of the table. I could be pulled back at any time, and with things going the way they were, I might never be back in this place. This might be my last chance to learn something, anything, that could help us. I smoothed down my hair and leaned back against the cool concrete wall, breathing slowly.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay …pull it together …”
As I let my eyes lose focus, the hard lines at the corners of the room seemed to vibrate and hum, like a tuning fork. I forgot about what the dead woman had said and about what was happening back in the real world. I relaxed and let the light get brighter.
Show me …
Slowly, an outline, like a ghost, appeared in the room with me. Three more appeared around it, but I couldn’t tell who they were. As the color bled away, the outlines of the ghosts got sharper. There were three men….
I brought them into focus. They weren’t like my visions of the dead woman or Karen or the others who tried to pass me information…. These people had really been here, or would be here, someday. Prior to then, it had been just a location, a staging ground for psionic feedback that I couldn’t control. Now I saw the room as it really was and its true occupants. Somewhere, in someone’s future, this was happening.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. The ghosts flickered, and I was afraid I might lose them.
Not now …
The phone buzzed again. I took it from my pocket but stayed focused on the figures who had appeared in the room. Two of the men were part of a group. They were older, and wore some kind of uniform I didn’t recognize, with their names stitched over the front pocket. The first man was a big, blocky guy named Gein. The second guy had very pale skin and an angular face. He had a scar under one eye. He looked different from when I’d last seen him, skinnier and more tired, but I recognized him right away; it was Hans Vaggot. The expression in the men’s eyes scared me.
The two of them half dragged a third man to the back of the Green Room and shoved him against the wall.
“Don’t move,” Gein said. The man looked scared. He stood against the wall under the middle light with his hands held up in front of him.
“I’m okay,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “I’m telling you I’m—”
“Shut up,” Vaggot said, and right then a woman walked through the door. My eyes widened. The phone buzzed again in my pocket, then stopped, but I barely noticed.
The woman wore the same uniform as the men, with leather jackboots and a pistol that hung from one bony hip. Her red hair was cut short, and I saw the scar from a bite wound on one side of her neck. Her beaky nose had been broken at some point.
It’s me, I thought. I checked the name patch to be sure. It read OTT.
I stared, stunned, as she crossed the room to the table and dropped an electronic pad down in front of her. She turned it on and started opening programs with a stylus. Her face looked mean, and unlike me, she was stone cold sober. Her eyes were hard, and focused.
“Hit the lights,” she said. Gein went over to the switchbox and threw the switch.
The room got dark except for the single light over the man against the wall. It shone dimly, and made shadows under his brow.
“Starting the scan,” she said.
A bright red line flickered across the far wall, near the ceiling. I followed it back and saw a small lens mounted in the cinder block that I’d never noticed before. A light fixed on one side began to flash.
The line began to move down the wall, tracing contours over the man’s face and neck before traveling down the rest of his body.
“I have a kid,” the man wheezed, as the laser moved down his body. Next to him, I could see divots where bullets had punched into the concrete. I hadn’t noticed them before.
“Shut up,” she said.
I looked at the screen and saw an outline of the man displayed there. Information was being called out, but the text was too small for me to read. I moved closer and leaned in; then the screen turned red and flashed.
“You’ve made a mistake,” the man said. He looked terrified. The red laser went out. The other me tapped the screen in front of her, and it went dark too.
“I said shut up,” she said. She turned to the uniformed men. “Cover him.”
Their guns came out and they aimed at the man from halfway down the room. He held up his hands feebly.
“What are we looking at?” Gein asked.
“It changed again,” she said. “Goddamn it, it changed again.” She crossed to the silver panel on the wall and swiveled it around to reveal a handset. She picked it up and spoke into it.
“We need a containment team down here,” she said.
“You’ve made a mistake,” the man whimpered. “You’ve made a terrible mistake…. ”
“If he says another word, shoot him,” the other me said. Gein and Vaggot glanced at each other nervously.
“You can’t stop this,” the man said. The other me slammed down the handset.
“Gein, shoot—”
The man seized up all of a sudden, and the cords in his neck stood out. It happened really fast; in a second, the back of his skull melted away under his skin. His neck shriveled and his eye sockets sank until his eyes bugged out of shadows.
“Shit!” Vaggot shouted. He looked ready to piss himself, but stood his ground. The two men stood there, weapons aimed, but not shooting for some reason.
The man’s deformed head bobbed at the end of his chicken neck while his clothes draped over a body that wasted away beneath them. He looked around the room like he didn’t recognize anything he saw.
“You can’t stop this,” he gurgled. It looked like his tongue had split down the middle.
“Hold him,” the other me said. “The team is on their—”
“You can’t stop this!” the man shrieked, and shambled forward, toward the two men. He held out his hands and they were like spindly claws.
The man stumbled, and when the soldiers moved out of the way, he just kept going like they weren’t even there. They followed him with their guns as he reached the table and shoved it aside. It flipped and crashed into the wall as he kicked past the folding chair and came right toward me, the real me. It was like he could see me. I backed away, into the wall, and dropped my phone. It clattered to the floor, and I saw the screen light up as a voice came over its speaker.
“If anyone is receiving this message, listen carefully,” a woman shouted through the phone, as the thing stopped a few feet from me.
“Wh-what?” I asked. The men in the room were taking aim, ready to fire. When I looked down at the phone, I could just make out the caller’s name on the LCD.
“If any of this gets through, then listen. The nukes may be your last chance…. ”
“What?”
“ …were wrong …the missiles don’t cause the event; they stop it,” she said, her voice rising in pitch. “You have to launch …”
My heart skipped a beat and I felt the strength go out of my legs as the guns came up in slow motion behind the man. His mouth stretched open, drooling gray spit, and I saw his teeth were stained red around that horrible, divided tongue.
“ …the detonation overshadowed the rest,” the voice shouted from the phone. “It was all we could see, and we missed the cause behind it…. The lines that die out aren’t the ones that can’t stop the launch; they’re the ones that do stop it…. ”
Words appeared on the green concrete wall across from me, wet black lines creeping down from the hastily painted letters.
The deformed thing’s hands grabbed my shoulders, and as the first shot went off behind it, I screamed. The next thing I knew, all I could see was fire swirling all around, throwing hot orange embers up into the night sky like stars. The world was one fire. Everything was burning, and as dark figures lurched blindly through the flames, I heard her voice, low and hoarse, in the back of my head.
“They were wrong,” she whispered.
“It was us all along…. ”
My eyes snapped open and I sat up on the sofa where I’d been lying, knocking something over and sending a metal pan down onto the floor. Penny was there, kneeling next to me, and she reached out to grab me as I started to flail.
“Easy,” she said. “Take it easy.”
I looked around and saw two armed men and a man in a bloodstained white shirt standing nearby.
“He just stitched you up,” Penny said. “You’re okay. Take it easy.”
Something smelled funny. I looked past them and saw that the sofa I was on was arranged in a big lounge in the middle of a huge condo. Two other sofas and a big love seat all faced in toward a big, heavy wooden table with a thick surface of smoked glass. A bunch of different kinds of glasses, some still half-full, were sitting on the table. There were silver platters of fancy food lined up, half-eaten. Lobster tails and raw oysters on the half shell sat in a crystal serving dish, floating in melted ice. Caviar, pâtés, and leftover hors d’oeuvres were all still sitting out, and it smelled.
“Sorry,” one of the men said. “There hasn’t been time to clean it up.”
“We’re all set,” Penny said. “Thanks, guys.”
My head pounded and my mouth tasted sour. I waited until the nausea passed, then stood up while Penny hovered near me. The room spun a little as I wobbled over to a big serving table where a bunch of food was left out in chafing dishes and serving bowls. I saw ends of rare meat on carving blocks, the edges crusted. Stray flowers of sashimi had shriveled, and raw shrimp lay drowned in a glass bowl of wine. The smell of it all made my stomach turn, but I needed a drink. A bottle of cognac was sitting on the marble tabletop, and I picked it up. I grabbed an empty crystal shot glass from the stack next to it and filled it, my hands shaking so bad I sloshed half of it onto the floor. I gulped it down and poured another one.
“You look like you saw a ghost,” Penny said. “What happened?”
I shook my head. Through the cobwebs, I checked my phone to see if Noelle’s name was there, but it wasn’t. The LCD read WACHALOWSKI.
All at once, my throat burned and my eyes were filled with tears. I half laughed and half cried, spraying spit.
“Now he calls,” I sniffed. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and took another long pull off the bottle.
“You probably shouldn’t—” the doctor said, but his voice dribbled off.
“We’re good,” Penny said again, staring at him. “Thanks. You can go.” She stepped closer, carefully. She wanted to touch me, I could tell, but she didn’t.
“Zoe, what did you see?”
“Nothing,” I said. I could barely form the word.
“That wasn’t nothing,” she said.
The men left the room, though I noticed the guards stayed outside the door. Penny followed me as I limped over to the wall of glass that looked out over the city below. Off in the distance, a big cloud had risen behind the buildings and begun to lean away from the rush of snow.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Fawkes dropped one of the nukes,” she said. “It might have triggered what you saw.”
“What?”
“Fawkes’s army surrounded the three towers: the CMC, TransTech, and here. Osterhagen ordered a Leichenesser charge dropped in the middle of the blockade outside to try to clear a path out.”
She held up a computer tablet so I could see the screen. A feed from somewhere outside looked out onto the front steps of Alto Do Mundo. From where the camera watched, I could see hundreds of people out there, surging shoulder to shoulder. They all had dirty hair and dirty faces. A lot of them bared bad teeth, and their clothes looked like they came from garbage bins. They were all facing up the huge marble stairs at the entrance to our building, staring with wide eyes that were stained black.
“That’s when Fawkes dropped the nuke,” she said. “It was a warning, I guess.”
“There’s so many of them,” I said. There was only one spot that was clear, right down the main steps where sets of clothes and shoes were strewn, deflated and empty. They flapped in the wind, and when it blew, it stirred traces of white smoke that lingered around the remains. It looked like hundreds had been wiped out, but hundreds more were taking their places even while I watched. “We’re in trouble, Zoe.”
“Something’s wrong,” I said, still staring. The cloud outside was huge. “How long was I out?”
“Not long,” Penny said. “They’ll have Flax soon if they don’t already. With any luck, we can stop him from dropping the rest.”
You have to do it. Make sure they launch …
My head was still spinning. I took my next swig straight from the bottle and swallowed three big mouthfuls before gasping in a breath.
“What’s the matter?” Penny asked.
“What if we’re wrong?” I said, looking down at the lights below. Off in the distance, I could see the flashing lights from one of the helicopters as it circled the building.
“Wrong about what?” Her expression changed then. It turned a little hard, and I thought I sensed suspicion coming from her.
“Nothing.”
“No, tell me.”
“Nothing,” I said. “Never mind.”
The bottle clinked against the rim of the glass as I poured myself another one and drank it. The hard look in Penny’s eyes softened again.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s okay.”
“Thanks, Penny.”
On shaky legs I stepped away from her, and turned the cell phone over in my hand as I watched that big, deadly cloud lean closer and closer to the shore. At the window, I looked out onto the city below.
“It was us all along…. ”
I reached out around me, sensing the others in the room. They had begun to focus on me as something unspoken was passed around between them.
I took one last drink, then returned Nico’s call. I held the phone to my ear, my breath fogging the window in front of me as it rang. After three rings, he picked up.
“Wachalowski,” he said. And in spite of myself, I began to cry.
“It’s me,” I said, soft enough so no one else would hear.
“Zoe,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“No.” I tried to keep the slur and the shaking out of my voice as I spoke. “I’m not supposed to be talking to you.”
“But you are.”
“She told me you’d call,” I said. I felt dizzy and had to put one hand on the window to steady myself. I leaned forward so that my forehead was on the cool glass, and I was staring down into the sea of lights below.
“Who told you?”
I wasn’t sure why, but somehow I knew what Noelle had said to me in the Green Room was true. I knew too that no one would listen to me at this point, no matter what I said. As important as I supposedly was, none of them would ever listen to me say that there was no way to get out of this and still stay on top. I knew all that, and I knew that Noelle was right too. She’d been right all along, right from the start. This whole thing was a big, cosmic joke. The city was going to burn. One way or the other, it was all going to burn.
“I want you to get out of the city,” I said, wiping my eyes.
“I can’t, Zoe.”
“Promise me you’ll leave. Leave tonight. Right now.”
“I can’t.”
More attention was focusing my way. Any second now, Ai would snap out of it and realize what I’d done. When she did, she’d make me hang up.
“This is the last time we’ll talk,” I said.
“Zoe—”
“You tried to help me,” I whispered. “Please save yourself.”
“Why, Zoe?” he asked. “What are they going to do?”
“Nothing,” I told him. “But I think I am.”
He was still talking when I felt the presence worm its way into my head, gentle but firm. Some small shard of Ai’s consciousness had turned its attention to me. I wanted to keep talking to Nico. There were things I wanted to tell him but the presence wouldn’t let me.
That’s enough, Zoe.
My arm dropped and the phone slid away from my face. I watched his name on the LCD as the phone spun end over end and clattered to the floor.
I woke up to the sound of static, louder than usual. I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t see.
“She’s prepped,” a voice said. “Are you ready to deploy?”
“Yes, sir.”
I tried to move, but I couldn’t. The last thing I remembered, they’d rushed me.
“What was that before?” the first voice asked.
“You mean why didn’t she respond to the push?”
“A ten-year-old could control her. Why didn’t she stay under?”
“I don’t know.”
The static in my head cracked. I tried to move again, but my muscles wouldn’t respond. I opened my eyes, but it stayed dark. I tried to call Nico, but my JZI’s comm link was down.
“It doesn’t matter. Let’s just do this. Stop her heart,” a voice said.
A needle pricked the back of my neck. I felt a cold metal ring push down on my bare back.
“What are you waiting for?”
“Maybe this isn’t a good idea,” another voice said.
“Fawkes eighty-sixed the test subjects, and every time we grab one off the street, he cuts it loose. It’s got to be during the sync-up. She’s our last shot at this.”
“He just dropped a nuke in the middle of the bay. When he sees what we’ve done—”
“If this works, he won’t be doing anything.”
“But if it doesn’t—”
“Osterhagen says, ‘Risk it.’ Now stop her fucking heart; that’s an order.”
“She can still hear us,” I heard Singh say under his breath.
“I don’t give a shit. Is the virus ready to go?”
Singh sighed. “Yes, sir.”
“Then do it. Now.”
A hand touched my face. I felt warm breath in my ear.
“Sorry, Cal.”
A circuit lit up on my JZI then. I still couldn’t call out, but someone on the outside was calling in. It was Singh.
Singh, get me the fuck out of here, or I swear I will—
Don’t be afraid, Cal, he said.
I’m not afraid, asshole.
You need to die just long enough for the Huma nodes to finish forming, but I’ll make sure you can be resuscitated.
Fuck you. Get me the hell out—
Pay attention. There’s no time to get into it, Cal, but we have to do this. If we can get you onto the carriers’ network, we can deploy a virus that will shut them all down. This is happening. It might be our only chance, and we have to stop those things. I know you understand that. Do you trust me?
I didn’t, but he was right about one thing: I did understand. I was fucked; they knew I was a carrier, and they had me. If there was a way out, Singh was it.
You’re a fucking asshole, Singh.
I know. Do you trust me?
What do I have to do?
You don’t have to do anything. You’re already part of the mesh; that’s why you can sense them, but you’re not fully synced up. We’re hoping Fawkes won’t interpret this as a new node joining, just an update of an existing one…. If we’re right, then you’ll be off his radar. When the nodes finish forming, the first thing they’ll do is transmit a sync request giving your stats, uptime, location, and so forth. The virus will be attached to the request and propagated. Understand?
No.
All you need to know is that your body will die for about a minute, but I’ll bring you back, Cal, I swear. As a human, not a revivor. Are you ready?
I wasn’t, but they had me. There was nothing I could do, and even though Singh was a prick, he was a smart prick. If he thought this could work, it might work.
If you fuck up, I told him, and I turn—
You won’t.
Don’t leave me like that.
I won’t.
I heard a thud, and pain slammed through my chest. It pulsed down my arms and up my neck, but I couldn’t move. The air died in my lungs and every muscle in my body went slack. I heard my vitals tone go flat, then fade out like I’d fallen down a deep tunnel. Everything got quiet. I couldn’t move or see or hear. There was just a big, black nothing.
Is this it? Am I dead? I never got to say bye to Nico. I didn’t even know where the fuck I was.
Node formation previously interrupted. Continuing…
The words popped up in the dark. They came from a JZ implant, so my brain still worked.
Is it alive, though? Was I alive or dead?
I got an itch at the back of my neck, like bugs under the skin. I could at least sense my body again. Just barely, I felt my fingers and toes prick with pins and needles.
Node formation successful. Reinitializing communications network.
In the back of my skull, the white noise streamed in like TV snow. The inhibitor usually stopped it, but not today.
All units clear zone H1B, a message said. As it faded, a shit-ton of them connected all at once and started blasting me with info. The node count kept climbing: a hundred, a thousand, two thousand …
Shit …
The count passed six thousand. I’d linked with revivors before, but never more than nine. Back in the field, I’d get a feed for each one on my JZI so I could keep an eye on them, but this time there were so many there was no way to show them all. Each feed came up as a point of light on a grid at the bottom of my periphery. They looked like stars.
We are fucked.
I focused on one of those points of light and my receiver called it out. I couldn’t control the revivor on the other end, but when I homed in, I could see what it saw. It was looking down at a concrete wall that was covered in graffiti. It was female; I could make out a pair of tits. Strapped between them was some kind of metal casing. A display was fixed there, with an LCD that flashed blue.
It didn’t move. It just stared. The display jumped, and the feed fell back on the pile with the rest.
This is what the static was. All this time, I had a link to all of them. At first they must have been dormant, then the inhibitor kept them back, but now I was in it. I was in there with them, up to my neck.
Mesh established. Synchronizing …
“The virus is embedded in the synchronization package,” Singh said. His voice was muddy, like I was underwater. “It’s going out …now.”
The last link lit up, and my node puked data over every one of them. Shit flew back and forth as we all synced up. In seconds, they knew who and where I was. A map of the network formed on the grid in front of me and formed a kind of shape.
“Did it work?” Ramirez asked.
“It’s converging,” a voice said. That was Singh. He was close by. “Hold on.”
The Huma node took all the data that came in and used it to make a picture; a map of the city blinked on and an electric inkblot spread over it. Blotches of light spread and bled together.
Synchronization complete. The pattern covered everything; they were all through the city. The light was brightest in shitholes like Pyt-Yahk, and they were clustered around the three towers, but they’d spread all over. They were moving through the whole city, heading out.
All units clear zone H1B. The message popped up again. With the connection to the rest, I saw an area outlined on the city map; the zone surrounded the CMC Tower.
“What’s that there?” a voice asked. Ramirez.
“Looks like he’s moving them away from Central Media Communications.” On the map, the cluster around the tower was thinning out.
“Why?”
I heard fingers tap at a keypad.
“I don’t like it. Contact them and let them know.”
All units clear zone H—
One signal whined from out of the static, coming through loud and strong.
Initializing command spoke …
The link lit up under the rest of them. I knew what that was. Usually I was on the other side of it, but I knew what it was. Whoever was on the other end started to pull data from me. I watched the data stream by; my heart rate and body temp had bottomed, but no revivor signature had formed. Not yet.
“The command spoke is active,” a voice said. I barely heard it.
“He’s going to cut her off. Did the virus go out?”
“Yes, sir.”
Node 5948. Report in. The message came over the command spoke. It was him; it was Fawkes.
“There.”
“Are you sure?”
“We’ve got activity from a remote source. It’s trying to assert control. He’s seen her.”
“Did the virus work?”
“No change in activity yet.”
“What about her?”
Commands dropped in. Fawkes had kicked off some kind of diag from the other end. It triggered my systems and code flicked by as my JZI came back online. He connected to it and started to dump its memory.
“He’s got her. If she drops off now, it will tip him. Let him have her.”
He was pulling data from me. Along with the rest of the shit he was pulling, I packaged up a little something else for him.
A handy ’bot we’d passed around the grinder got pulled back over the link with the rest of it and stuck itself in Fawkes’s memory. He might be a smart jack, but he was still a jack, and an old one too.
Respond, Fawkes said. I decided to try to bluff him.
Node 5948. Reporting in.
There was some corruption detected during the synchronization. Stand by.
Understood.
He went idle for a few seconds, then: You’re on the private military base.
Before I could think of a response, Fawkes tried to pull my signature and didn’t find one.
You’re not a revivor, he said. He’d started some kind of scan. Who are you?
The game was up.
The one who’s going to fuck your dead ass.
The goddamned spoke let him pry through into my JZI and before I could stop him, he’d tapped into my systems. In seconds he’d found my communication node and broke in, branching out over every connection he could find.
“He’s in our system!” I heard a voice shout. “Shit! He’s in our system!”
“How is that possible?”
“Cut the link!”
Whatever you’re attempting, Calliope T. Flax, it won’t work.
Don’t be so sure.
As you can see, my army is still online, so whatever you’re trying to do, it hasn’t worked. The people behind this are going to pay for that, and so will you. My next strike won’t be a warning.
Yeah, well none of my strikes are ever warnings. If Nico doesn’t get to you first, then you’re mine.
That shut him up for a second.
Who are you? he asked. The son of a bitch didn’t even remember me.
I set off the remote ’bot, and it started to dump everything in his memory buffers back to my JZI.
You never should have brought me on that boat, fucker.
I found his Leichenesser seed and popped it, but the link stayed up, so he must have had it taken out at some point. I tapped his visual feed, and a window popped up in the dark. Through it, I saw what he saw.
He was at a desk. He looked down at a console that showed a bunch of security feeds, while a figure off to his right reached in front of him and touched one window. It came to the front, and I saw a woman walk through the frame.
I’ve seen her…. It was that creepy revivor bitch, the one Nico locked lips with on the tanker that night.
The image went blank.
“Damn it!” Right behind the visuals, the command spoke went dark.
“He just killed the spoke.”
“The virus went out; he’s too late.”
“She’s still tied to the mesh. He still can’t trigger the kill switch with the inhibitor in place, but—”
Fawkes was inside Heinlein. I pulled up the stuff I’d grabbed from his buffers. I didn’t get it all, but I got enough. I couldn’t tell the assholes in the room with me what I had because I couldn’t fucking talk, but if Singh came through and got my JZI back online, I might be able to get it to Nico.
“Shit,” someone said.
Ramirez answered, “What?”
“We just got a surge of activity out there. A lot of it. Look.”
On the map, the large blotch changed shape while I watched. It was close to where we were. Slowly, part of the shape began to branch out and move.
It began to creep in our direction.
By the time Penny and I got back to the war room, it was the closest thing to chaos I’d ever seen in front of Ai. She sat there, calm, while voices on the video screens and in the room all tried to talk at the same time.
“ …confirmed, it was one of the ICBMs from the defense satellite,” a voice said.
“You get that?” Osterhagen asked.
Ai nodded. “Mr. Vaggot,” she asked, “how long until we regain control of those missiles?”
A window with the man’s face appeared in one corner of Osterhagen’s screen. He looked a little less collected than the last time he’d appeared, but his voice was still strong and confident.
“Not long,” he said. “It’s taking time for the ’bots to chisel through the defenses he set up, but once they do, control will be transferred here through the Stillwell Corps satellite-communications array. I think we can shunt him out in thirty or forty minutes, maybe less.”
“That was a warning shot,” Osterhagen said. “He’s telling us to stand down.”
“A warning shot?” a woman asked, her voice breaking.
“Initial data confirmed all twelve ICBMs were aimed across an even spread of twelve sectors through the city,” he said. “In order for him to drop one out in the bay like that, he’d have to have programmed it with a new target. He intentionally fired it outside the city, where it wouldn’t cause any structural damage, but where we’d see it. It was a warning shot.”
“What about the radiation?” someone asked.
“The explosion created a radioactive cloud of steam and smoke that right now is moving along the shoreline at a distance of ten miles,” Mr. Raphael said. “That could change.”
“The next launch won’t be a warning,” Osterhagen said. “What is the situation at Alto Do Mundo?”
“The detonation of a Leichenesser charge cleared a hole,” someone said. “But he’s streamed in more of them. I’d say we put a weak link in the chain, but it’s reforming.”
Osterhagen looked offscreen for a second, then nodded and cut back in.
“We just got a report that the revivors in the street are being ordered away from the CMC Tower,” he said.
“Why?” Raphael asked. “Moved to where?”
“Outside a five block perimeter around the tower,” Osterhagen said. “We have to assume it’s to protect them, and that it’s a precursor to some kind of strike. Start getting your people out of there.”
“How? We’re surrounded from the ground and the air—”
“Any way you can, Robin!”
“What about the virus?” Ai asked. “Has it been deployed?”
“Yes,” Osterhagen said. “That’s how this information was obtained. Ott was right about Flax. We seeded her revivor matrix and transitioned her onto their network. Fawkes cut her off, but not in time. She received the alert along with the rest to clear the CMC Tower.”
“How long before the virus will take effect?” she asked.
“It should have worked by now,” he said. “It might be taking longer than expected to propagate, but we have to consider the possibility that it failed.”
For the first time that day, I saw something like confusion appear on Ai’s face before it went back to its drugged-out expression.
“Failed how?” she asked. “The tests were successful.”
“Yes,” Osterhagen said. “Assuming the Huma version of Fawkes’s revivors matches the ones we had in custody, then it should have worked. But as of this morning, that version changed. It could have invalidated the virus partially, or even completely.”
“But the virus affects them,” she said. “It reaches them, I’ve seen it.”
I closed my eyes and tried to cut through the anxiousness and pressure that emanated from every consciousness in the room, even those piped through remotely. I took a deep breath and focused on Ai.
She was the elephant in the room; her consciousness hung over her tiny body like a small, broken planet whose pieces were carefully held together by gravity. Tentacles of light stretched out from the fragments and connected to the men and women at the table. More tentacles wove through the room to touch Penny and even me. They floated through the walls, ceiling, and floor, across the city, I figured, to reach Raphael, Osterhagen, and the rest. She was amazingly calm in the face of what was going on, her thoughts ticking away beneath the colors of her mind like the tiny pieces of an incredibly complicated clockwork machine. She was tied into the future model that was displayed on the wall, tuned to the smallest change, and looking for some clue, any clue that might tell her what to do as time ran out.
She didn’t know, though, and that scared me. Underneath it all, she was confused. Things weren’t happening like she expected anymore. With all of her knowledge, she wasn’t sure what to do.
Penny was calm, but was ready to physically act. She spent a lot of time like that, and she almost never relaxed, even when she was drunk, but I’d never felt her so alert before. Part of her mind was turned toward me and I sensed a bond there, a protectiveness I’d never quite noticed before. I’d always known she would kill for me, but somehow I’d never seen the devotion that drove it until that moment.
I reached out, following the connections Ai kept with the others at their remote locations, and found Osterhagen and Raphael. Raphael was worried. He was worried for himself and us, but mostly he was worried for the people on the ground; he was afraid for them, and not just our people but the innocent bystanders about to be caught in Fawkes’s attack. Osterhagen was angry and frustrated. He was confident he could defeat Fawkes—in fact, he was certain of it—but the nukes had tied his hands, and, yes …there …buried away deep inside, he was scared too.
The people in the room continued to talk in restrained, clipped tones, and as I took the pulse of their thoughts as a whole, I realized that fear had begun to creep into the entire network. It was fear of the unknown. It was the fear that despite all the manipulation and information tracking and careful planning, they were delving into an unknown where they couldn’t see clearly. That scared the hell out of them, all of them.
Even Ai.
They don’t know what to do, I thought, and even though I felt like that should make me scared too, it didn’t. I thought maybe I knew what they didn’t.
There was someone I needed to communicate with. The person who had stood next to me in my vision and the only one in the room I knew would survive along with me if we failed.
“ …the lines that die out aren’t the ones that can’t stop the launch; they’re the ones that do stop it …”
Hans Vaggot was isolated, and I could tell that although Ai was watching him, she wouldn’t touch him. He was being left alone to retake the satellite, and as soon as I entered his mind, I knew he was getting close. There was a relief there, like a cool undercurrent beneath the hot colors of his mind. He’d recently made some kind of breakthrough and was closing in. I couldn’t tell how long it would be, but although he was still focused like a laser, I could sense his hope—he knew he would succeed; he was only worried about the timing. If he knew it and I knew it, then at least Ai and Osterhagen knew it too. Despite their misgivings, they had begun to think that in spite of everything, they still might stop the event from happening.
Except they were wrong.
Mr. Vaggot, I whispered into the back of his mind. I felt the flow of his thoughts hiccup, and I knew he’d sensed me. In a second, Ai would sense me too, and when she did she’d shut me out again. I only had a short time to communicate with him, to plant, maybe, an idea in his mind. It was an idea that I didn’t totally understand myself yet, but somehow I knew it was the answer. When I thought back to what I’d learned about Noelle, who came before me and before Penny, it suddenly seemed clear. She’d known. She’d known all along; she just couldn’t handle it.
I took a long swallow off the bottle in my hand and wormed my way further into his mind.
When you retake the satellite, don’t shut down the launch, I told him. I felt anxiousness in him from somewhere deep inside as the command took root. Don’t shut it down. Wait for my signal….
I felt Ai then, and my eyes snapped open as the connection was broken. When I looked over at her, her large eyes had narrowed and there was a hard glint in them.
“I told you to leave him,” she said in a low voice. “I—”
She stopped short and perked up, as if she’d heard something. The anger went out of her eyes and I felt a spike of alarm from her, licking out of her consciousness like a solar flare.
“Robin, wait,” she said.
“Hold on,” Mr. Raphael said. He checked something offscreen.
In all the activity, no one else saw Ai sit up straight suddenly. Her eyes looked startled as they opened wide and stared into space. The others around the table jerked in their trances, sitting up straight along with her.
“Mr. Raphael,” Ai said, and the voices quieted.
“Yes, Motoko?”
“Abandon the CMC Tower immediately.”
“We’re organizing the evacuation now—”
“Forget the rest,” she snapped. “Use the helipad.”
“Motoko, there are sixteen thousand people in this building,” he said. “Tell me what you saw…. ”
On Mr. Raphael’s screen, he turned toward a window behind him where something outside had started to glow in the sky above the electric city lights.
“What is that?” he muttered.
The screen flickered and went out. A second later, all of the screens went out and the room went dark.
From the helicopter, I could see fire in the streets below. A car burned in an intersection, flames spraying cinders as the wind howled through the street. Two blocks down, smoke was pouring from the broken window of a residential building.
Alice, we need to start tracking the bites that occurred since the activation code was sent.
We’ll coordinate with local hospitals. If this is true, though, Wachalowski, our best bet is going to be stemming it at its source, not chasing thousands of leads.
We need to contain the city. No one in or out.
We’re working on it.
The snow began to pick up as the helicopter took us back toward the Stillwell Corps base. Visibility was down and the ride was choppy. The windshield turned black, and a computerized view appeared in its place as the pilot passed between two buildings.
What about you? she asked. If this really is true, wouldn’t you be affected?
I’m okay.
But have you been affected?
A notification appeared in front of me as my internal diagnostic finished. My JZI called out my new arm on the system tree with a low-level warning. The necrotic bleed-through had been identified. It was true—the altered nanoblood was leaking into my bloodstream.
No, I lied.
The chopper hit a patch of turbulence and bucked underneath me. My stomach dropped. The vectors tilted in the windshield display, and through the side window I watched the buildings below as we banked left and veered over one of the main strips. From our position, I could see the Central Media Communications Tower in the distance, and beyond that, nearly lost in the snow, the UAC TransTech Center.
Keep me informed, she said. Let me know as soon as you have something we can use against Fawkes. She broke the connection.
I pulled my collar down to check my shoulder and saw what looked like bruising there. The bleed-through was getting worse. I wondered if the filter was no longer able to screen the altered nanotech at all. I could be running out of time.
I opened a new link over the channel MacReady had provided.
MacReady, this is happening fast. Do you have a revivor I can use?
It’s on its way. I will have it shortly.
Let me know the second you do.
Understood, Agent.
In the meantime, I have a question. Something revivor related.
I’ll help if I can.
You said you continued the Zhang’s Syndrome study?
Yes.
Was the condition ever recorded in a living person?
It’s a condition that occurs during reanimation. No, it does not affect living people.
What about a person experiencing necrotic bleed-through?
It doesn’t work that way, Agent. Even with the M10 series, the synthetic blood is something wholly separate from the revivor nodes that interface with the brain. Synthetic blood leaking into an organic system does not, and cannot, cause reanimation. If the traces of synthetic blood were to make their way into the brain, they would most likely kill the affected person.
Understood.
Do you know someone who is suffering from this condition? he fished.
What if the nanoblood were altered somehow? I asked. Could it be changed to that much of a degree?
You’re referring to Fawkes’s use of the transmitter earlier.
Is it possible?
I don’t know, he said. In theory …at the molecular level, many of the components are generic. They could be recoded to perform different functions, but not easily.
So it is possible?
I would say yes. Particularly if you had high-ranking scientists like the ones you named on your team. That kind of research would, of course, be highly illegal, but I would say possible, in theory.
Understood.
Are you saying that you’re—
Just get the revivors I asked for. And hurry. There isn’t much time.
I understand. I think you should know this before the time comes, though: you have a relationship to this revivor.
What—
It’s the revivor of Faye Dasalia, he said.
Even as the storm outside caused the chopper to buck, I felt a pang in my chest. For a minute, I forgot about the rest—Fawkes, the arm, everything.
Faye is part of this, I said. She’s with Fawkes now. She’s close to him; you can’t use her.
Trust with revivors doesn’t hold the same connotation as it does for humans. I believe she was the one who compromised Heinlein’s security and allowed Fawkes access, he said. But something has happened since then and she’s no longer part of his network.
If she’s not on his network, then—
Trust me, Agent. Fawkes is trying very hard to reconnect her, and I’ll see to it that he succeeds, but only once we’re ready.
She’ll tell him—
She can’t tell him what she doesn’t know, and anyway, at the end of the day, she is a revivor. It doesn’t matter what she did before or why she did it. When I’m finished with her, you’ll have the access you need.
It was still hard for me to swallow. Everything that had happened, all those people dead and dying in the streets, all of it had happened with Faye standing at Fawkes’s side.
Agent?
I’m here, I said. Set it up.
Stand by, he said. I should have access shortly—
His message clipped off as the helicopter started to descend toward the building tops. On several of them, I could see groups of people bundled in coats and scarves that whipped in the wind. They were looking down at the city, at the streets below.
MacReady?
Down on the street, pedestrians looked up as we approached. Police blues flashed against the white of snowbanks where a group of officers waited, keeping a crowd of people from entering a strip mall whose windows had been smashed in.
The pilot chattered over the radio and was pointing down toward the street, but I didn’t hear him. In the corner of my eye, an FBI alert popped up:
The pilot and copilot looked at each other, and the pilot shouted into the radio. Before I could pull up the details, Alice cut back in.
Wachalowski, get out of the area now.
I just got an alert about an orbital strike. Is it an ICBM?
No. The DoD just detected a massive energy buildup in Heinlein’s orbital-defense satellite, The Eye. It’s going to fire in the next minute.
Fire at what? What kind of buildup?
They’re not sure what the target is, but this charge is off the charts. A spy satellite observing it saw it go into targeting mode two minutes ago. It looks like it’s focusing every lens it’s got on a common target that is outside of Heinlein’s security perimeter.
I brought up the specs for the satellite. It had more than one hundred lenses for striking multiple targets such as missiles, aircraft, or ground forces. Any one of them could generate a beam capable of incinerating a large vehicle or even a tank at only half capacity.
Can they stop it? I asked.
Not in time. A communication from Fawkes warned that if The Eye is destroyed, he’ll launch another—
The connection skipped, then cut out. A second later, the radio chatter on the helicopter cut out as well.
Something flashed and lit up the sky. A hole appeared in the clouds and a light shone there like a second sun. The hole blew out, until the clouds were gone and a huge, blinding beam of energy arced down toward the ground below.
The helicopter banked hard as I threw my hand in front of my eyes. Everything went white, and a loud thunder crack pounded in my ears. Spots danced in front of me as the white-hot light burned over the skyline and struck the Central Media Communications Tower in the distance.
The pilot screamed to the copilot, but I couldn’t hear anything over the racket outside. I stared in shock as a ball of fire engulfed the base of the tower and began to expand.
Clouds of glass blew out and rained down toward the street as the flames began to boil from the windows. The air rippled, and in seconds the base of the tower turned an angry, molten red.
The pilot was screaming to hold on. A blast of hot air rushed in as the beam writhed and arced through the night sky, setting the surrounding building tops ablaze. The helicopter began to shake violently, then fell into a slow spin.
Concrete and glass split under the waves of heat and tumbled down toward the streets below. Over everything else, I heard a low, earsplitting moan echo through the sky as the huge structure started to twist on its failing foundation.
The city reeled through the window as the helicopter’s spin got worse. As the remains of the CMC Tower whipped past the windshield, the arc of light flashed and went out, leaving a dark line to float in front of my eyes. The tower was lit up like white phosphorus, while a cloud of black smoke and fire blew out from around it in every direction.
The peak dropped down toward the other buildings it towered above, and then the mighty structure began to implode. As we spun around again, I saw it crumble, and begin a slow collapse down into the debris.
“We’re going down! I’m going to try to land her!” the pilot yelled. My stomach rolled as the deck jumped again, but he managed to stop the spin and stabilize us. The street below tilted at a steep angle as we whipped, dangerously close, past a mirrored building face.
“Hang on!”
The buildings tapered off up ahead where a large, flat area was carved out. It was the Stillwell Corps base. Security alerts began flashing as we passed into their airspace. The pilot was barking into the radio, requesting an emergency landing even as we began to drop.
“Negative! Negative!” a voice came back.
“We don’t have a choice! We’re coming in!”
A helipad was lit up on one of the buildings up ahead. At street level, I caught several bright flashes of gunfire as we banked around and began our descent.
“The security perimeter has been breached!” the voice on the radio said. “Repeat, our security perimeter has been breached!”
As we came back around toward the helipad, I saw more muzzle flashes from below, and when the helicopter’s floodlight washed over the street, I saw why: hundreds of bodies surged toward a chain-link fence whose gate had been forced open. Blood sprayed through the air as soldiers on the other side opened fire on them, but there were too many. Already they were breaking their way into the buildings on either side of the street.
The pilot veered off at the last second, struggling to keep control of the helicopter as we passed over the heads of the clawing mob. The copilot pointed out the windshield at another rooftop, farther into the base, past the fence.
The pilot switched off the radio, cutting off the screaming voice on the other end as he began to take us down.