The silence that came after the lights went out was worse than all the chaos that went on before it. I stood in the dark with the others for what felt like a long time before the overheads flickered back on, but even once they did, the screens on the wall stayed dark. The feeds were all dead.
“What happened?” I asked. Ai was staring into space, not moving or saying anything. At first she looked like she had a seizure or something, but when I focused on her, I saw her mind was still working; she was just in some kind of trance. None of the others at the table moved either.
The armed guards were all alert but weren’t sure what to do. One of them called on his radio to see about the power, while the noise outside rumbled off into the distance. No one approached the table or Ai.
“What happened?” I asked again.
“It was the CMC Tower,” Penny said. Her face was lit by the glow from her computer tablet. “Fawkes just destroyed it.”
“What?”
She turned the tablet toward me, and on it I could see a video feed from somewhere in the city across town. Someone was filming from the window of a building that would have looked out at the spot where the Central Media Communications Tower would have been, if it had been there.
“Oh …” It was all that came out. I stared at the image as thick black smoke billowed up from flames that had spread through the surrounding blocks. The CMC Tower was gone. It just …wasn’t there anymore. I couldn’t get my brain around it.
“That’s why we lost all the feeds,” Penny said, her voice flat. “It was all going through a hub at the CMC Tower.”
“Mr. Raphael—”
“He’s dead, Zoe.”
I just stared. I liked Mr. Raphael. He was always nice to me, and whenever we’d met face-to-face, he’d always brought me a little gift of some kind. The last thing he’d gotten me had been my little diamond solitaire. I put my hand to my throat without thinking, but I wasn’t wearing it.
“He blew up the CMC?” I asked. My voice seemed to be acting independently from my brain, which was still trying to take in the size of the wreckage I was seeing on the screen. The fire blazed as waves of smoke and dust several stories high boiled down the surrounding streets, swallowing up the cars and streetlamps as they went. Pieces of debris were still falling down through the air, raining down into the expanding cloud below. The CMC Tower had been almost as big as Alto Do Mundo, and now it was just gone.
“Zoe, snap out of it,” I heard Penny say.
I felt her hands grab my elbows as I looked around. No one else in the room was moving.
“What’s wrong with them?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Penny said. The guards had left the room to secure the floor and try to get back communications with the others. Except for the distant rumble, it was completely quiet. It was almost like Penny and I were alone together.
Penny started to get up, but I stopped her by grabbing her sleeve. She looked back at me, confused.
“Wait,” I said.
“I need to check on Ai—”
“Wait. I …”
“What?”
“Something happened,” I told her. “I saw something. Something important.”
“What did you see?”
“The Green Room,” I said. “I saw inside the void again. I think …Noelle tried to contact me there.”
Penny’s face changed when I said her name. I felt a distant spike of emotion that she stifled just as quickly, a red flare that arced up out of the aura surrounding her.
“Did she say anything to you?” she asked. I nodded.
“I think we’ve been wrong this whole time.”
“Wrong about what?”
I glanced past her at Ai. Her consciousness had taken the form of a dense, white sphere. The connections had all been withdrawn. She was experiencing an intense vision, and wasn’t watching either of us. Still, I leaned close to Penny and whispered in her ear.
“Penny, I think I’m Element Zero,” I whispered. She tried to pull away, but I held on to her sleeve.
“Fawkes is Element Zero,” she whispered back. “Fawkes drops the nukes. You stop him.”
“She’s been trying to tell me something…. I think we’re wrong.”
“We’re not.”
“What if we are? She said the blast doesn’t cause the event; it stops it. I think Noelle knew that. I think she knew Ai was wrong and that she’d have to be the one to kill all these people, to stop something worse from happening. She knew—”
“It was one vision,” Penny said, raising her voice. “That’s not enough to—”
“But it’s the only one that matters,” I said. “It came from the void after the event …isn’t that why Ai tracked us down? Maybe she is some ‘next step in evolution’ but even if it’s true she can’t see past that point—she doesn’t survive whatever happens, she knows that. We ran out of time, and even with everything she did, she wasn’t able to figure it out.”
“Zoe—”
“I’m telling you I saw something, something important. Noelle tried to reach me there…. I think she’s alive.”
“She’s not alive.”
“The database says she’s dead, but how can we really—”
“Because I killed her, Zoe.”
I felt the vibe again, like a spike. Her face didn’t change, but I felt it, and I remembered something she’d said to me a long time ago:
“This can be a good gig,” she’d said, and her voice had been serious. “It can also be a bad one …”
“I thought they had her killed,” I said.
“They did.”
“Ai made you do it?”
She shook her head. “Osterhagen,” she said. “Things were different then. Noelle was …”
“Was what?”
“She was amazing,” she said. “She was better than I ever was. Ai sent her to go get me and bring me in. She took me under her wing. She took care of me and protected me.”
One of the screens flickered, but didn’t make it back on. Ai’s consciousness pulsed, but she stayed withdrawn.
“Like you did with me,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“She had a bad vision one day,” she said, looking down. “Like the ones you’ve been having …the deformities and all that. She started talking dangerous talk.”
“Like what?”
“You’re right about one thing,” she said. “Noelle was afraid. She did think we had it all wrong. One day, she saw something she wouldn’t talk about, and she changed after that …she lost her appetite, stopped smiling. Something was really wrong, but she wouldn’t tell me what she’d seen.”
“She knew. She knew what she’d have to do.”
“Maybe,” Penny said. “She decided at the time that the only way out of this was for us, everyone like us, to be destroyed. Maybe that was the alternative …maybe it was one or the other. Either way, she believed it. She got this idea that we were wrong about everything. She sounded a lot like you, but she just …wouldn’t let it go.”
“How did Ai react?”
“How do you think she reacted? We’re the greatest human breakthrough the world’s ever known. Even if it was as simple as flipping a switch and getting rid of us, no one’s going to listen to that.”
“So what did she do?”
“Even back then, the model was crystal clear,” she said. “Whatever other factors might or might not be in play, Fawkes triggers the event. When she realized no one would listen to her, she pushed to take out Fawkes early, to kill him. He was just an engineer at Heinlein back then. He had no idea any of this was going to happen, but she didn’t want to wait. She wanted to cut the line there.”
“But why not? Why not do that?”
“Ai can see how all the pieces fit together in a way no one else can. She knew killing Fawkes was a mistake even if Noelle couldn’t see it. She knew he’d be more dangerous dead than alive, and she was right, but Noelle was off on her own by then, and she tried to kill him anyway. She jumped him on the street and stabbed him. He lived, but they all knew she’d done it. By that point they’d begun to think she was some kind of ‘rogue element’, and that she had the potential to cause the very outcome she’d seen …the one where the people with our abilities are wiped out. Osterhagen wanted her dead…. ”
“What about Ai?” I asked.
“She didn’t,” she said. “But Osterhagen was so sure she was going to end up causing the holocaust that even when Ai refused to authorize it, he came to me.”
“And you—”
“I was different then, Zoe,” she said. “Osterhagen convinced me it was the only way to stop things. He promised me the number-two slot if I did the right thing.”
She shook her head.
“And here I am, like he promised.”
She got quiet. The longer she talked, the deeper I could see the pain inside her went. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“It was quick,” she said. “I watched her bleed out. But I stuck around too long, and someone saw me. I could have wiped his memory, but I gave him the knife and made him believe he’d done it. He copped to the murder and went down for it.”
“You just made some random guy do life in prison?”
“He didn’t do life. He got killed in jail before his first year was up. He ended up at Heinlein.”
She smiled a bitter smile.
“The guy heard our last conversation before I wiped his memory. We didn’t know about Zhang’s Syndrome at the time …in Fawkes’s lab, his revivor remembers everything. With what he must have heard, Fawkes finds out who tried to kill him and why. He learns Ai’s identity. For all I know, that’s what sent him down the path he chose. How’s that for irony?”
I focused on her …not too hard, not enough to get her attention. Just enough to let her colors fade into view so I could see them. Under her calm exterior, her thoughts buzzed like bees in a hive. There was almost more going on in there than I could make sense of. I saw fear, like a cold, white cloth that rippled in the wind…. You’d never know it to look at her face, but she was afraid. I saw concern, confusion, and uncertainty, but underneath it all, shifting slowly like a gray mist, was guilt. When I concentrated on it, I could see how deep it ran.
“I’m not a good person, Zoe,” she said.
“That’s not true.”
“You don’t have any idea.”
“Yes, I do.” I looked deeper …there were a lot of things she carried around, but one thing in particular was tucked away. Something she’d barely admit even to herself.
What is that? I couldn’t read her mind. I couldn’t know what caused it, just that it was there, but it was something I’d never known about her. She’d never let me look that far. I looked deeper and still didn’t find an end to it.
She put one arm around me and held me to her. I kind of tensed up at first, but she was gentler than she usually was. I rested my forehead on her bony chest, and she stroked my hair. It reminded me of how my father used to be, back when I was little. I let out a big sigh into her shirt.
“You’ll get through this,” she whispered.
She put her cheek against the top of my head and squeezed me a little tighter. It was the longest we’d ever touched. It was the longest I’d ever touched anyone in years and years.
“Do you remember when we first met?” she asked. She smoothed my hair with one hand.
I didn’t. I didn’t want to admit it, but it was lost along with so many other things over the years.
“It was in the subway,” she said. “Raphael sent me to make contact with you. I caught you near one of the sake stands. You looked like you really wanted one.”
I still didn’t remember, but it sounded like me. She laughed just a little.
“You thought you dreamed me.”
“I used to get confused about that.”
“I know. Back then, I approached you because they told me to,” she said. “I didn’t want to. I didn’t want anything to do with you, Zoe, but …”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. I pulled away so I could see her face, and for the first time ever, I saw she was crying. She didn’t make any noise. Her face didn’t even really change except her eyes. Tears just came out, and the colors swirled around her head like a tiny storm, with something dark just under the surface. I saw a glimpse of it just before the halo brightened and pushed me away.
There was something else; something she wanted to say. There was something she needed to say but it wouldn’t come out.
“I threw Karen out the first time she showed up at my door,” I said. “It doesn’t matter how it started.”
She said something then, that, unlike most things, I always remembered.
“When this is over,” she said, “I’m going to save you, Zoe. If we’re both still alive, I’m going to save you.”
“What—”
“He’s going to destroy us all,” a voice whispered in the dark. I thought it was in my head, but Penny perked up too. We both turned and saw that Ai had lifted her head. Her eyes were still closed and sweat ran down her face as her mouth hung partway open.
The others at the table snapped awake as her eyes opened. Her eyes wandered for a second before they found Penny and me.
“We need to evacuate,” she told her.
Penny nodded.
“But they have the outside completely surrounded,” I said.
“Have the soldiers secure the roof, whatever it takes,” Ai said. “We’ll take the chopper.”
“But the chopper will only hold—” Before I could finish, I felt a numbness seep through me. My head spun a little, and the words fizzled out.
“We’re too late,” Ai said calmly. “This city will be gone within the hour. We’re leaving. Now.”
I felt a rumble through the floor, and the map that floated in the dark warped. A band of static flicked in front of me, and the light came back. I could see.
“Shit, we lost it!”
Everything was a blur. I blinked, and saw the floor down below me. I was facedown, with my forehead pressed into a rubber pad. My body hurt, and there was pressure in the back of my skull. The floor shook again.
I looked to my left and saw Ramirez and Singh humped over a terminal. There was a window behind them, and I saw a big flash of light there. The two looked up.
“Goddamn it!” Ramirez shouted, slamming his fist on the desk. Something out there blew up. Something big.
“I told you!” a voice said. “I warned you he’d—”
“Shut your mouth, soldier!”
Everything went black again. The map blinked a few times, then came back. The points of light began to pop back up.
Synchronizing …
“It’s the shockwave,” Singh said. They were quiet for a minute. “We’ve got it back.”
“Shit! What was the target?”
“The CMC building.”
“How much dam—”
“It was completely destroyed, sir.”
The room got quiet after that. The CMC …that was one of the big three. Did he just say Fawkes had destroyed it?
The radio squawked, and I heard Ramirez pick up. A voice babbled on the other side.
“Understood.” I heard the handset click back into its cradle. “Vaggot’s team hasn’t been able to get control of the satellite back. Will the virus work or not?”
“It should have stopped them. They—”
“We are running out of options, damn it! Did it work or not?”
The shape on the map bled closer to us. A shot went off somewhere outside, then a bunch more on top of it. Another voice piped up.
“Sir, the hostiles are continuing to move. They’re definitely heading for this location.”
“It’s her,” Singh said. “She pulled something over the command spoke just before it dropped. Fawkes traced her when the link was active.”
“Then unplug her!” Ramirez snapped.
“It’s too late! He already got the location!” The arm that broke off from the main shape got closer.
“Then shoot her!”
“It won’t matter! He used her to jump into our systems! He knows about Vaggot, he knows everything!”
“Is this base secure or not?” a voice shouted. “Stop them at the perimeter, goddamn it!”
“They were overwhelmed, sir. There’s too many of them!”
“They’re in. Perimeter has been breached in sections three and four …”
“Sir, if they take this base before Vaggot’s team succeeds, that will be the end of it. Never mind her. We have to concentrate on holding them back.”
There was a loud snap, and the map cut out. The static stopped. Light flashed in the dark, and I could see again. I heard machines wind down, and pain throbbed down my arms.
“They cut the power,” someone said.
My JZI picked back up and threw up a bunch of warning messages.
Heart function ceased.
Blood-oxygen levels below threshold.
Body temperature below threshold.
It kicked off the emergency resus. I seized as the wire to my heart lit up. Oxygen and adrenaline pumped into my bloodstream.
“Where are they now?” Ramirez asked.
“I don’t know. We lost the uplink. Security’s down.”
My body seized again, and this time the vitals picked back up. My heart thumped. I clenched my fists and heard the knuckles crack.
Heart function resumed.
I grabbed the edges of the gurney and pushed myself up. Wires around my body stretched tight, and I felt pressure at my neck.
The lights were out and the room was full of guys, some in uniform, some in suits. There was equipment set up, but all the screens were blank.
Cn u rd me?
The message popped up just as the emergency lights kicked in and the computers turned over. I could make out Singh and Ramirez. Some of the rest were guys from my squad. Some I’d never seen before. They were packing shit up, getting ready to move out.
That you, kid?
Ys. I ct pwr. I c u. U c me?
I brought up the GPS and found her signal. She was in the building, to the south.
How the hell did you get on the base?
Ur dfnses r trshd. U gys r fckd.
She followed us. The little shit actually staged a rescue.
You armed?
Y.
You got a vehicle?
Y.
Then get in it and be ready. I’ll come to you.
“She’s up!” someone barked. I turned and saw Ramirez point at me.
“Singh, take care of it!”
Singh drew his gun, but he didn’t aim it.
“Singh!” Ramirez yelled.
“I took something Fawkes doesn’t want getting out,” I told Singh. “The ones in the building are here for me. I’ll draw them off.”
Ramirez stepped in and pointed his gun. I grabbed his wrist and twisted as the shot went off and metal sparked next to my face. The pressure behind my neck built as I got up, then the wires came loose and snapped away.
I twisted his wrist and he hollered. When his fingers went limp, I took the gun.
“Cal, wait!”
I bit him on the hand. I bit him so hard that for a second I felt the bones between my teeth. He screamed as salty blood filled my mouth.
I pulled back. He stood there, one hand bent the wrong way and the other one bloody. I could see the teeth marks in the meat of his palm. They were deep.
I looked at the rest. There were two grunts left; the remainder were suits. I sucked the salt off my teeth and spit a red gob onto the floor.
“Shoot her!” one of the suits ordered, but no one else would do it. The grunts ignored them and filed out. The last one to go turned back to them.
“If you’re coming, then fall in.”
He left, and they followed. I spit on the floor again, trying to get the taste out of my mouth. I’d never bitten anyone in my life, no matter how dirty the fight got. The mark on Ramirez’s hand was brutal. I don’t know why the hell I did it.
Singh was still standing there staring at me as I wiped blood off my chin.
“I’ll draw them off,” I told him. He nodded.
Vika, which way?
Sth ext.
My shirt was folded next to the gurney. I slipped it back on and buttoned up as I ran after them. From the sound of it, they were headed for the main lot at the north side of the building. Before I lost the feed, it looked like the revivors were moving in from the south.
You’re about to get a shitload of company. Keep the engine running; this might be tight.
Rgr.
Down the hall, I saw the last of the suits peel off and head toward the main entrance. I got a fix on Vika and tracked her as she made a beeline for the back lot.
Wachalowski, pick up. It took him a few seconds, but he answered.
Cal, where are you?
Long story. What the fuck is going on out there?
Fawkes just took out the CMC building. Where are you?
I’m on the base. Look, never mind how, but I was just on Fawkes’s command spoke. Not for long, but long enough to dump his buffers. I’m sending them to you now.
I compressed everything I got and fired it over the JZI.
Got it. I’m coming in by air now. I’ll meet you—
Don’t come after me. Go to the command center. I’ll get back to you.
I cut the line as something crashed through a window down the hall. Back behind me, a couple shots went off.
As I passed an open door, I caught a flash of moonlit eyes and heard the crunch of feet as they shuffled through broken glass up ahead.
At the end of a remote corridor, I pushed open a heavy steel door and felt cold air pass over me. The other side was dark, but when I adjusted my optical filters I could make out a heavy sheet of plastic with a slit in the middle hanging from the ceiling ahead. The flaps rippled gently as fog swirled around my ankles, carrying a smell that seemed vaguely familiar. I slipped through as the door thumped shut behind me.
As I moved through the dark, an encrypted call came in from somewhere inside the building. Someone who wasn’t MacReady was attempting to contact me in secret. I accepted the key and opened the link.
Faye, you escaped. It was Dulari.
Yes.
Don’t tell me where you are. Fawkes got an approximate location on you during his last communication. He’s sent Ang to find you.
I stood at one end of a room whose other side I couldn’t see. It was lit from above by some kind of very dim, pale green glow. The room was a maze of tubes, pipes and wires. Wires trailed from somewhere overhead to connections in steel trays that were assembled in stacks. Slick, creviced gray membrane covered each one, and I sensed electric current humming through it.
I recognized the smell then. It was the greasy, bitter tar smell of heated revivor blood.
Faye, Dulari said. Fawkes dropped one of the nukes. He used The Eye to destroy the CMC Tower. I didn’t realize. I didn’t know how far he’d go.
The route that MacReady had laid out for me took me through the strange room, and as I began to make my way though, other details began to jump out at me: long needles and hairless flesh, miles of squiggling black veins pulsing under thin, wet sheets of gelatin. The low hum of air circulators and liquid coursing through pipes filled my ears, stirring memories from deep, deep inside.
Faye, he’s not finished. He’s going to destroy everything. I don’t think we can stop him.
We can’t, I told her. Be very careful around Fawkes.
Believe me, I am.
Thank you for the warning. Keep off this line, or he’ll catch you.
Faye—
I cut off the connection, and her words faded as I breathed in the smell of the room through my nose.
It was one of the few times that a physical place had affected me since my reanimation. For some reason, standing there in that strange place was comforting. I’d never been there, but it reminded me somehow of my return back into this world. The sound and the smells were imprinted on my brain, like I’d felt them before during my long sleep after my life was taken. In a way, I found difficult to explain that it felt safe and familiar, like being home.
Something was being born, there. I caught myself wishing Lev was with me so that we could compare that strange perception. I wondered what he would have made of it.
Follow the path, MacReady interrupted. Hurry.
What is this?
The future, he said. The next step. Revivors without human limitations, that don’t require second-tier benefits. No human can get through there without requisitioning a biohazard suit. It will buy you some extra time, but you have to move quickly.
I continued on, picking out organic shapes in the dark. I saw fat squiggles of tissue I didn’t recognize, bones that seemed almost but not quite human, and then eventually muscles, joints, fingers and toes. At the opposite end of the chamber was a door, and I pushed it open, leaving the web of disconnected pieces behind me.
It’s just up ahead, MacReady said. Ahead was a single, gray metal door.
I see it.
I turned the handle and pulled open the door. The room was in the shape of a large circle, the curves of its wall covered ceiling to floor with microthin display screens. The center of the circle was dominated by a large, round table, six workstations arranged around its circumference. Only one of the stations was occupied. A man in a suit sat there. He didn’t turn when I stepped into the room, and the door clicked shut behind me. He just stared at the screen closest to where he sat, while it displayed footage of a large explosion.
“Mr. MacReady?” He nodded.
The electronic screens that covered the wall displayed a dizzying amount of data. I scanned it, picking out code mixed with complex mathematical equations littered between more familiar items: media clips, handwritten notes, and photos. On the screen he was watching, a large structure was collapsing into flames.
“That’s the CMC Tower,” he said quietly. He rubbed at his brow, and I saw his hand shake. “That was the CMC Tower.”
I realized the feed was live. That hole was forming in the skyline right now. Over MacReady’s shoulder, I watched the last of the Central Media Communications Tower crumble into the cloud of smoke and fire.
Memories were rising out of the darkness, points of light expanding to display visions of that structure as it loomed in the distance. The morning it all started, as I rode the monorail on my way to the scene of Mae Zhu’s murder, I’d watched the tower’s shadow loom off in the distance through the haze of snow. I’d seen it nearly every day of my life.
I made this possible.
The blocks around the blast lost power, the buildings and neon lights going dark to form a black hole in the bright cityscape. A smaller building nearby began to fall. I’d always known this was part of Fawkes’ plan. I knew he would destroy the three towers, but it seemed that knowing it and seeing it with my own eyes were two different things, even now. For the first time in a long time, I wondered if I hadn’t placed my trust in the wrong man.
“You may not have much time, Mr. MacReady.”
He turned then, and looked at me. He was an older man with thick, wavy hair that had turned completely gray. He smiled, showing unnaturally white teeth, but he couldn’t maintain it. He stood and approached me.
“You’ve held up remarkably well,” he said.
“That isn’t Fawkes’ only target.”
“I know. Did Fawkes remove the Leichenesser seed, or was it Agent Wachalowski?”
“It was Nico.” My eyes moved over the screens, following the trees of data mapped out there. On some level, the patterns were familiar. I saw profiles of individuals, lines tracing associations between them.
“It reminds me of the precinct,” I told him. “When we’d try to chart organized crime or gang associations.”
That caused him to grin weakly. He followed me as I passed by him and stepped toward the screens.
“That’s not too far off,” he said.
A high-pitched whine filled my head as something cold pierced the skin behind my ear. Immediately, I felt my muscles seize. I opened my mouth to speak, but before I could, my jaw locked in place.
“I’m sorry, Faye,” he said. He guided me down into the chair he’d been sitting in, and reflected in the screen I saw that he had some sort of handheld tool pressed near the base of my skull. He disconnected something at its tip and moved it away, placing it on the table behind him. A long, metallic rod was left behind, sticking several inches out of the back of my head. He guided a wire into the rod and fastened it there.
I tried to move, but I was completely paralyzed. When I tried to access my communications node, I found I was cut off. He moved back around to where I could see him and tapped a stylus to an electronic pad he held in one hand. My jaw unlocked.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I’ve frozen your primary systems. I’ve cut off most of your motor functions, and outgoing communications will be monitored and controlled from here on out.”
I triggered the injector, but my arm didn’t respond. In my system tree, everything was locked down. My core functions still ran, but electrical impulses had been cut off at the C3 vertebrae.
“I will need to disable your control shunt as well,” he said.
“If you do, Fawkes will reestablish his command spoke.”
“I know, but he won’t be able to do much with you now.”
“He’ll be able to track me and come here.”
“I know,” MacReady said, “but there’s no other option; Fawkes has to be stopped. Your friend needs your help, and I can’t leave this to chance.”
“My friend?”
“Agent Wachalowski,” he said. “He needs your help, and so do I.”
He pointed to the screens of data.
“This is where we continued Fawkes’s work,” he said, “after he was gone. This is where we continued his work studying Zhang’s Syndrome. There were six of us at first. Heinser, Cross, Deatherage, Dulari, Chen …and myself. We kept it quiet, but believe me, I understand, and I know what Fawkes is trying to do.”
“You may not know as much as you think,” I told him.
“Every second-tier citizen who dies comes through here,” he said. “We’ve had access to all of them, along with every scrapped generation-seven model we’ve been able to get back in here. As you saw on your way in, reclaiming their memories has gotten much more efficient since Fawkes’s day. That’s a lot of data points. These people manipulate things in a very-well-thought-out way to influence policy and politics on governmental, corporate, and even social levels. Right now, their most powerful organization is based in the UAC, and the UAC dominates the globe both militarily and economically. But there are others like them, and over time other seats of power will rise in other parts of the world, if they haven’t already. What we will ultimately end up with is a group of powerful countries that follow the UAC model.”
What he said surprised me. I’d heard this before, but I didn’t expect to hear it from him.
“You sound like Fawkes,” I said.
“Fawkes’s data was irrefutable,” he said quietly, looking back to the destruction on the screen. “When I realized what we had, I knew no one could know. When your friend Wachalowski came sniffing around, I threw him a bone, hoping he’d track down Fawkes on his own without leading anyone back to us. But it was a mistake. Both sides figured out someone was watching them from here. Cross was killed and Heinser disappeared overseas after the Second Chance incident. Two years ago someone—Ang, I think—took matters into his own hands and used a rail-gun sniper to try to assassinate their leader, Motoko Ai, when she came out into the open to meet with Agent Wachalowski. I should have known then. I should have kept a closer eye on him. When Ang and Dulari truly understood what was at stake, data gathering wasn’t enough. They wanted action.”
“They were right,” I said. “Fawkes has a plan to stop them, not study them.”
“There are things Fawkes doesn’t know,” he said, “things he never bothered to learn. He was obsessed with proving their existence and eliminating them. He never dug into those lost memories to understand what drove these people. They are afraid of something, Faye. Something much bigger than Fawkes himself.”
His words triggered something inside. Memories swirled over the void below them, and one small cluster disengaged from the rest. As one ember broke orbit, a portal opened to the contents inside.
“What you did was attempted murder, Noelle,” I said. “You’re going to jail.”
In the memory, I sat in an interrogation room. A gaunt, wasted woman sat across the table from me. This was the memory Fawkes didn’t want to hear.
“I wish I was,” she said. “They might not be able to get to me there. That’s why I’ll never go.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“I was supposed to stop him,” she said. “I just wanted to stop him. Samuel Fawkes is a dangerous man.”
“He’s some engineer at Heinlein Industries. The man is not dangerous.”
“Things change,” she whispered.
MacReady’s brow creased as he watched the tablet in front of him. He tapped at it with his stylus, and memory addresses began to appear in the HUD in front of me.
“That’s a suppressed segment you’re replaying,” he said. “Reclaimed information.”
“A woman,” I told him, “long ago. Fawkes was still alive, but she was afraid of him even then. Afraid enough that she had tried to kill him.”
“Did she say why?”
“No,” I said. “She never did, not directly, but I got the impression it was to avoid something much larger.”
“Did you relate these memories to Fawkes?”
“I tried. He didn’t agree.”
”Well, your instincts were right, I’m afraid. What they fear is much larger than anything we’ve seen so far, and it begins with the destruction of this city.”
“Fawkes has specific targets. He won’t destroy the city. He’s trying to save it.”
“Fawkes will destroy the city,” MacReady said. “He knows that killing hundreds or even thousands of them is futile. If you remove the human equation, then the only efficient way to stop this is genocide. He’s been lying to you, Faye. He plans to wipe the slate clean, and start fresh. These people, these mutations, they don’t just envision the city’s destruction; they’ve seen a nuclear annihilation specifically. They foresee eleven nuclear devices—specifically eleven—that will cause it, and after dropping one in the bay as a warning, that is exactly the number Fawkes currently has pointed at the city from the orbiting missile shield. Fawkes will destroy this city and with control of the nuclear defense shield I don’t think he’ll stop there. These people have foreseen a world-ending event, Faye. Total annihilation of society as we know it.”
He stepped closer, and I could see the bands of orange heat that ran up either side of his neck beneath the skin. The core in his chest pulsed. He believed it too.
“Fawkes will strike another target, probably soon, and I think you know that,” he said. “You’ve been dead a long time, but I don’t think you’re ready to write off the world you knew as an acceptable loss, not yet. Please. Help your friend.”
Orange flickered behind MacReady’s pupils. Shortly after, he forwarded a link to my communications node. It was him. It was Nico.
“I’m putting him through,” MacReady said.
The channel opened, and Nico was there.
Faye, he said. It’s me.
Hello, Nico.
It’s been a long time.
Yes.
I know a lot has happened, but I need you now, Faye. Will you help me?
Do I have a choice?
You know me well enough to know the answer to that. There’s too much at stake.
Fawkes could be the only chance we ever have to stop them, I told him.
I know. And they might be the only chance we have to stop Fawkes. That’s what I’m left with. That’s what we’re all left with.
So you’ve chosen them?
I’m not looking out for either side. I’m trying to look out for the people stuck in the middle of all this. No matter what you think of his motives, Fawkes set something in motion today. He killed thousands of people who aren’t even part of the thing he’s trying to stop, and he’s used Heinlein to alter the revivor technology inside them.
That stopped me. He was referring to Fawkes’ transmission.
Alter it? Alter it how?
It’s spreading on its own. Jumping from host to host.
That’s impossible, I said, but even as I said it I began to wonder. It would explain why he needed to occupy Heinlein Industries. It would explain how he intended to keep up his resistance, even after he was gone.
It’s happening, Faye. It’s already out of his control.
A virus. An engineered virus. Was this what the woman, Noelle Hyde, feared all those years ago when she’d sat across from me in the interrogation room? Had her abilities allowed her to see what Fawkes would someday unleash on the world?
If it was true, and she had, then had she witnessed the end of humankind? Or only the end of her kind?
Faye?
I’m here.
Something has to be done. I’ve made my choice. You have to make yours. Who will you trust? Me, or Fawkes?
In my mind, I could almost picture Nico’s eyes. I could almost see the ruthlessness in them, and that certainty in his soul that he was right. I remembered the way he was, long ago, when he put everything he knew on the line because of that certainty. I had envied him that, but in some ways, to truly see in terms of pure right and wrong—Fawkes’s way—was what he railed against hardest.
I’m reactivating your command spoke, he said. I felt him intrude into my systems, and begin some kind of transfer.
When you do, he’ll track me down, I said.
I know. This is going to be close. You know Fawkes better than me at this point. You could make the difference.
Nico—
I know you don’t love me, he said. I know you can’t, not anymore, but you can still trust me. You can still do that.
The locks I’d placed on the command connection began to break down, and fall away. Immediately I could feel Fawkes there, finding footholds in those new openings, and forcing his way in.
We’re out of time, Nico said. Make your choice.
Stillwell soldiers flanked us, escorting us down the hall after an armed garrison unit met us on the helipad. The northern section of the base, where we were, was still secure, but the numbers outside were rising.
The connection to Faye flashed on the HUD. Through her, I would be able to direct a team of five revivors to move a payload of Leichenesser from the processing plant into the atmosphere control center for the Pratsky Building. It was a total distance of roughly a quarter mile, and the clock would begin ticking the second I reactivated her command spoke.
“It’s down!” someone shouted in a room as we passed. “The entire structure is down. Communications are out all over the city—”
Military channels were still functioning, though, and the footage coming in from the street was devastating. Smoke drifted between the buildings below like a gray fog. The Central Media Communications Tower, the second-tallest structure in the city, had been razed in less than a minute. A hollow pit formed in my gut. Not even anger had filled it yet.
“I need to talk to Osterhagen,” I said to one of the guards. “Is he here?”
“He’d just arrived back at the UTTC when the attack began,” he said. “We can put you in touch with him.”
As we walked, I cycled through the data Cal had sent just moments before the explosion—the only lead I had on Fawkes. In it I found lot numbers and stats for the units under his control, circuit information for the revivor network …even override codes for the sixth-genand-up revivors on his command spokes.
Good work, Cal.
He’d flushed his visual data regularly, but the last segment was still in there. In the playback window, I watched as he addressed an Asian man and a dark-skinned woman that I recognized from the FBI records as Chen and Shaddrah.
There was no audio, but after a minute Shaddrah nodded and left the room. Chen began to follow her, then turned back as what must have been a private message to him flashed on the screen.
Watch her.
Chen nodded.
The next strike will come soon. If she becomes a problem, you know what to do.
The soldiers led me into a war room where engineers were hunched over terminals in rows. Mounted on one wall was a screen that lit up as we entered, and I recognized the face that appeared as Osterhagen’s.
“You’re on,” the soldier said.
“General, my name is Agent Wachalowski,” I said.
His face was calm, but fury brewed behind his eyes. “I know who you are,” he said. “I’m told you’re recommending we leave Heinlein’s transmitter intact.”
“Yes, sir. Hear me out. I think I know what’s going on.”
“Motoko puts a lot of faith in you,” he said, “but there are millions of lives at stake here, and a preliminary analysis of the data you recovered from Palos Verdes doesn’t prove your suspicions that we’re dealing with some kind of outbreak. The threat of the nukes is real and immediate.”
“With respect, sir, we’ll never be able to analyze that data in the time frame we have.”
Osterhagen thought for a minute, then turned to the men in the room.
“Mr. Vaggot?” One of the engineers glanced up at the screen. His eyes were wide but focused. His fingers moved over a keypad like they acted on their own. “Can you retake control of the satellites or not?”
“I can, sir.”
“In the time frame we discussed?”
Vaggot hesitated. “I can, but not in that time frame.”
“And if we destroy the transmitter?” he asked.
“If Mr. Fawkes had rigged the satellite to launch already,” he said, “meaning, if it was set to launch at a preset time, then the launch sequence would be, in effect, already active. If that were true and we destroyed the transmitter currently controlling it, then it would assume an enemy infiltration, and the launch sequence would be locked down; we wouldn’t be able to stop it. If the launch sequence was not active, then the satellite will be receptive to our control, as long as the proper security codes are presented. At this point, we are confident that the launch code is not currently active.”
“You’re sure?”
“We won’t know with one-hundred percent accuracy until the ’bot reasserts full control, but we’ve got hooks into most of its systems now. I’m sure.”
“Agent Wachalowski,” Osterhagen said. “Fawkes is no doubt gearing up The Eye to fire again.”
“I know.”
“Without that transmitter, he’ll lose control of both satellites, and his ground forces too.”
“I know,” I said, “but I’m telling you—Fawkes used contacts inside Heinlein Industries to develop a Huma variant off the grid. The transmission that halted the revivors earlier fundamentally changed the behavior of the nanotech. He repurposed it.”
“Repurposed it for what?”
“With the help of Heinlein’s engineers, he’s found a way to administer the Huma payload without an injection. They’re spreading it through saliva, through bites.” The Stillwell engineers were listening now. Even Osterhagen’s face changed.
“You think he’s trying to create more revivors?”
“No,” I said. “The dogs we recovered at the train yard had standard M10 revivor nodes, but the engineers worked on different components of Fawkes’s variant. At Black Rock, they were testing the ability to disseminate it through bite wounds. Another engineer designed it to self-replicate so it could be transmitted over and over, but I think the experiment in the Mother of Mercy’s basement was the key. We found evidence of nanotech in their brains, but no revivor nodes. When Van Offo tried to influence the prisoners down there, to calm them down, he couldn’t. Fawkes has been experimenting in secret for years now, trying to figure out what makes you guys tick, and I think he finally did it. He’s repurposed Huma not to make more revivors, but to switch off your influence. To trigger Zhang’s Syndrome in the general population and give them their memories back. That’s what this is about. He is trying to wipe you out, but not in the way you think.”
“How can you—” Osterhagen started, but I cut him off.
“I can’t prove it, but I’m telling you I’m right. It’s affected me as well. I know it’s true. At this rate it will spread beyond the city in hours and we have no idea what it will do. If you destroy that transmitter, you’ll never—”
On Cal’s recording I saw Chen nod, then turn and leave the room. The angle of the feed changed as Fawkes returned his attention to a console in front of him. Data streamed across the screen. His hands, almost skeletal now, moved quickly over the keypad. An image I recognized as a map of satellite positions hung at the top of the screen. He was inputting coordinates.
“What is it?” Osterhagen asked. I checked the time stamp on Cal’s recording.
“Sir, how long would it take The Eye to spool up for another shot?” I asked.
“We predict thirty minutes,” Vaggot said.
According to the time stamp on Cal’s footage, the satellite had to have already been aimed at the CMC Tower and was preparing to fire when it was recorded. That meant that on the recording he was entering in the data for a different target; his next target.
While I watched, a list appeared in Fawkes’s HUD, mapping over the recording. There were several more sets of coordinates there in a column. When I ran them through the GPS, I found the location of the target he’d just entered.
“General, I know what Fawkes’s next target is. He’s going to fire on the UTTC.”
“How—”
“I’m forwarding the data to you now, but get out of that building.”
“Sir,” Vaggot said. “In a worst-case scenario, you have maybe twenty minutes. We will not have control of the satellite by then.”
“The UTTC is under siege at the moment,” Osterhagen said. “We can push our way out but it will be a bloodbath, and it will take hours.”
“Can we destroy The Eye?” I asked.
“Fawkes has threatened to launch if we try.” He looked thoughtful for a minute.
“Sir, I have a contact inside Heinlein Industries,” I told him. “I may be able to take Fawkes out from the inside.”
“We can have a short-range missile in the air in five minutes,” one of the soldiers said, “and destroy that transmitter in seven.”
Osterhagen nodded. He didn’t say anything for several seconds.
“Sir, what do you want us to do?” the soldier asked.
“Ready the missiles,” Osterhagen said, “but don’t launch without my order.”
“Yes, sir.”
“No matter what, you do not fire those missiles without a direct order from me.”
Two men snapped a salute and rushed out of the room.
“Alto Do Mundo is next on the list after the UTTC,” Vaggot said, looking at Cal’s data. “Then a list of major utilities; water, power, and transportation.”
Osterhagen nodded again and met my eye.
“She believes in you,” he said.
“I know.”
“You’ve got five minutes,” he said, and his image winked out.
MacReady, we need to go now.
I understand.
Faye, will you help me?
She didn’t answer right away, but she did answer.
Yes.
I cycled through the list of override codes that Cal pulled from Fawkes’s memory, and queued up Faye’s, just in case.
We’ll have one chance, Faye.
I have shared Fawkes’ security information with Mr. MacReady. He’s found five revivors that can form a chain without leaving their individual security zones, but it won’t take Fawkes long to realize something is wrong.
Understood. Get ready.
I hope you’re doing the right thing, Nico.
Me too.
I pushed down the packages that Calliope had given me over the circuit, and they began to install themselves. Her command spoke back to Fawkes went live, and I saw him try to take control. He tried to issue her override code, but it wasn’t accepted. After that, he began to run a trace on her physical location. It wouldn’t take them long to reach her.
Calliope’s shunt initialized and created the virtual command hub inside Faye’s system. Stealth connections began to open, riding on an unused portion of the command matrix. They made the five connections, and five remote feeds appeared on my JZI. I was inside Heinlein.
The five units I selected form a relay starting in the processing plant and ending in Central Atmosphere Control, MacReady said. Use them to move the Leichenesser payload between zones.
Two of the feeds came from the processing plant; through a set of doors, I could make out rows of bodies that hung from the ceiling. The other three waited outside in different parts of the campus, staring through the snow at the plant in the distance.
I sent the virus, and it replicated over each channel. It dropped into the primary node of each revivor and began to worm its way into their systems. In less than a minute, the mirror-spoke endpoints went active.
I’m taking control of them now.
One by one, I issued the overrides and took remote control of the revivors. Their systems were reflected back, giving me full access.
“Four minutes, Agent,” a voice said.
I scanned the layout of the processing plant and located the Leichenesser stores that MacReady had called out. I sent one unit to retrieve the payload from storage. The automated system responded and retrieved a single crate containing a series of pressurized metal tanks.
One will be enough, MacReady said. The Leichenesser is in liquid form, and highly concentrated.
Understood.
I sent the target revivor the route to take, making sure to keep it inside its designated security zone. I kept the feeds open to monitor them, and waited as the first revivor moved to the storage locker.
None of the others seemed to pay it any notice as its black hand gripped the handle and pulled open the heavy steel door. Mist drifted out of the gap as it slipped through the fog and into the freezer chamber.
The rows were filled with stores of chemicals. The revivor passed by them as it followed the location on the manifest and found a single rack of thin, glossy black canisters. Each one was labeled with multiple warnings and marked with a biohazard trefoil.
The revivor removed a single tank from the container and headed back through the mist toward the freezer door. It pushed it open, and kept an even pace as it headed for the plant’s western exit.
How long will it take the gas to saturate the sublevels? I asked MacReady.
Not long, he said. I’ve shut off the blowers to the lab, but they don’t need to stay that way. The gas won’t affect me.
On the feed, the revivor’s optics isolated a figure through the snow. It waited near a fence at the processing plant’s perimeter. The feed bobbled rhythmically as the revivor began to run the canister over to it.
Agent Wachalowski, I understand your feelings in this matter, MacReady said, but I think it’s time to let her go.
My fingers curled into a fist, tendons crackling.
I know.
It would be safer to—
I know. We still might need her.
Is that the reason?
This has to work, no matter what the cost. But do what you can to save her.
I will.
The revivor on the feed reached the second one in the chain and handed off the canister. I switched over the active feed and watched through its eyes as it turned back to the metal door behind it, where a sign was mounted:
PRATSKY WEST
Over the feed, I saw an incoming call request appear on Faye’s system. It was flagged urgent.
Faye?
That’s Fawkes, she said. He’s looking for me.
Stall him. The payload will be positioned soon. How long will it take once you start the air circulators?
Five minutes to get the Leichenesser into position; another ten for the saturation to reach critical.
MacReady’s estimate would put me past Osterhagen’s deadline, but still inside the window before The Eye could fire a second shot. If the Leichenesser was already released, I might be able to convince Osterhagen to wait.
The revivor on the tarmac moved quickly as it clutched the canister to its chest. Up ahead, through the snow, the third revivor in the chain waited.
Let me know the second the reaction starts. If we can retake control of the facility and the transmitter, we might still be able to stop this.
Faye’s connection turned from green to red. It went out. The link dropped.
Faye?
“Three minutes, Agent.”
On the tarmac, I saw the revivor stop short in the snow. A second later, the feed went dark.