by Sean Platt
“What happened?” she asked.
Kate’s eyes flicked toward Nicolai. His eyes passed the buck to Sam. That was hardly fair. The ball of spikes that had killed the old man hadn’t been the only one in the house. They had to be part of Craig Braemon’s security system, but Braemon, who seemed to have vanished, wasn’t controlling them unless he was doing so from a distance. Each ball had entered the room, just to the doorway. If they’d had eyes, it was clear they’d have looked at Nicolai — and then they’d gone, having duly checked in. If the old man was this pink-haired girl’s friend or father and someone was to blame, it was Nicolai, not Sam.
But the girl’s eyes still went to Sam, waiting. So Sam swallowed and said, “He tried to kill us.” Then he nodded at Nicolai and added, “To kill him.”
The girl’s eyes were filling with moisture. She wiped them absently in a gesture of getting down to regrettable business, then pulled a handheld from her pocket and held it up, the device’s back toward Nicolai. She pushed buttons, seeming to scan.
“You were wearing a shell earlier, weren’t you?” she finally asked.
Nicolai looked at Kai and nodded.
“It looks like it really had its hooks in you. You’re resetting now, but…” She shook her head. “This is just a guess, but does the name Stephen York mean anything to you?”
Nicolai didn’t hesitate. No reason to be coy now.
“It was his shell.”
The girl looked down, found a clean spot on the dead man’s head, and ran her hand affectionately over his gray hair. “Oh, Leo,” she said, sniffing. She blinked hard and looked up. “If you give me your ID I can explain later, but it…” She shook her head regretfully. “He couldn’t help it. I think he was programmed. There’s no way he even knew this would happen, that he’d be triggered to come after…” She looked at Nicolai. “Well, after Stephen York.”
“What do you mean, he didn’t know it would happen?” Sam asked, thinking of the way Leo had stormed in with his guns blazing. It was bizarre, watching the girl comfort the dead rather than apologize to the living. But when she looked up, the girl only sniffed and waved the question away.
“Later.” She tapped her handheld’s screen, ignoring the others. It was fine with Sam. They were done here. After the York shell had pilfered what it wanted from Quark using Braemon’s credentials, it had self-destructed, and the system had reset. Braemon, if he returned now, probably wouldn’t even notice a difference. All the security was back in place. Sam couldn’t even use a calculator app on it now if he wanted.
Sam’s handheld buzzed. He pulled it out, seeing half a dozen ignored messages from n33t on his lock screen. n33t really must be coming to trust Shadow. n33t had told Shadow about the secret society with the ultra-high-level tags on their IDs, and now he was skipping Diggle to hit Shadow’s inbox directly.
The new buzz was from n33t, too. It said, where r u?
Sam, not wanting to be obvious in all this company, used his thumbs to reply. craig braemon in the city - respero fndrasr & massacre
The response came back almost immediately. It said, where tho? hiding? have to cap a un/archive. v important. will explain l8r
Sam squinted at his screen. Why did n33t care where specifically Sam was at Braemon’s horrific event? And what was this about capturing an unarchivable archive? Sam had only heard of the things, mainly on the Null forums, mainly from deep Beam hackers whose obsessive immersion into code bordered on religion. Normally, the idea of a file so enormous that it literally couldn’t be massaged, compressed, or even transmitted due its precise sensitivity and the chance of fidelity loss would have seemed like folklore to Sam — on par with digital hexes and ghost stories. But before today he hadn’t truly believed in Beam holes either, or believed anyone could be fooled so completely while inside one.
And hey, if you even wanted to attempt to contend with an un/archive, the geeks all said, you needed either a stable, protected canvas or a highly elaborate, overstabilized slip drive. The things he’d seen sold to suckers for such purposes didn’t even look like computer equipment. They looked like something from a hundred years ago. They had a self-contained, self-actualized canvas, several layers of redundant cooling centers, a mechanical drive, and the accompanying micro-motion cancellation stabilizers — on and on. Geeks called the devices “proton packs” — a reference to some old movie that Sam had never seen. They were huge. You couldn’t even carry one. You had to…
Sam looked up.
…to wear them on your back like a backpack. Or maybe like a groundskeeper’s leaf blower.
Sam typed into his handheld, hey, n33t.
The response came back: ???
And Sam typed, look straight ahead.
Across the room, the girl with the pink hair had shifted her attention from the dead man to the holographic girl — a digital presence too strange to be anything but an unarchivable archive, now that Sam thought about it.
The girl with the pink hair and the mechanical backpack looked up then met Sam’s eyes.
“Shadow?” she said.
It was probably important to protect the integrity of Kate’s cover, but after all that had happened, Kai found herself unable to care. So when Kate had fallen into step between Kai and Nicolai, Kai had said nothing. The three of them shouldn’t be together. Kai and Nicolai weren’t supposed to know this strange blonde vixen, with her reputation for moon inspector killing and dust smuggling. But Kai was tired. Nicolai, too. And Kate, who was walking the line between protecting herself and trying not to admit that she may have undergone ID refurbishment for nothing, seemed both exhausted and beaten.
They’d left Nicolai’s reporter friend, Sam, behind with the pink-haired girl. Leaving the party hadn’t even been tricky. Kai, Kate, and Nicolai had simply left through the front door. There was no security. The police — possibly due to whatever the York shell had done to Braemon’s canvas and possibly due to a still-glitching Beam sector — hadn’t so much as shown their faces. Kate had said she’d been working with the captain, but he was nowhere to be seen, either.
The partygoers who’d survived were gone.
The people who’d invaded the party were gone.
The police, Quark officers, City Surveillance, even the fucking media (which normally swarmed events that were even remotely interesting) were all no-shows, at least for now.
To Kate, it almost seemed as if something was keeping them away. Allowing them to flee without question. Maybe protecting Nicolai from his casual, I’m-too-tired-to-be-careful association with Kate. Or maybe protecting the girl the nation had once watched die in Respero — before reappearing tonight as a digital ghost.
Thoughts of that last piece dogged Kai as the trio found Kate’s hover — as Kate finally, with a sense of merely paying lip service, turned on her spoof to anonymize and disguise their uneventful escape. Only now that the threat of peril had passed did she allow herself to admit what she’d seen: The girl who’d shown up to warn them had been Violet James. Unless someone had cracked The Beam’s deepest security and manufactured an avatar in the image of a real person (which was significantly more impossible than the many other impossible things Kai had seen lately, according to consensus), it was actually her. And everyone knew Violet James had been dead for years.
“Want to hear something funny?” Nicolai said from the passenger seat beside Kate.
“Hit me, chuckles,” Kate replied.
“I spent the last six years preparing Isaac Ryan for Shift. Then it looked like I might end up getting roped into spending the last weeks before Shift helping Micah whether I liked it or not.” Nicolai turned his head enough to meet Kai’s eyes, unspoken animosities passing between them without comment. “And now it’s two days until Shift, and Directorate is going to win just like they were supposed to all along, before the bullshit over beem currency, before Carter Vale’s Mindbender trick at the Primes. All those machinations. All that worry and plotting meant to steer the Senate a few points
in one direction or another.” He sighed. “But now, I can’t imagine even caring about Shift. At all.”
There was a beat of silence in the hover. Then Kate said, “I was promised something funny.”
“Isaac and Micah can both go fuck themselves. I’m sure this won’t even rock them a little. They’ll wake up tomorrow, and one will call the other, and they’ll start bitching and yelling and plotting and scheming. Bet you anything one of them will use what happened tonight as a leverage point.” Kai watched Nicolai’s head begin to bob. “Yes. Micah. Micah will probably call a press conference. Say that this time, Enterprise do-gooders were only trying to help a good cause, and the raff still wasn’t happy. You saw that guy who came at us.”
“Who came at you,” Kate corrected.
“Rainbow headband. Braids. Some sort of borderline malcontent. That’s what Micah will say. Even though it won’t be remotely enough to move the needle on Shift, he’ll try anyway. And he’ll throw Isaac under the bus. Because that’s how he is.”
The car fell silent. Then Kai said, “That girl. The hologram.” She looked at the backs of Nicolai and Kate’s heads. “That was Violet James. The real Violet James.”
Nicolai, who of all people should have appreciated the hideous revelation that logically followed, merely sighed. Respero was a sham. Dead people’s minds were being harvested and bulk-saved, probably for use as Mindbender guinea pigs, based on what the Vale hologram had implied. So what? It was too much to think about now. And Kai, in the quiet that followed, found herself having to agree.
Kai jumped as her heads-up display activated without permission.
“Gettin’ excited back there?” said Kate, apparently noticing Kai’s start.
“Just got mail.”
Kai blinked and took a slow breath before responding.
“It’s from Rachel Ryan.”
Nicolai turned fully around. The hover swerved as the autodrive snatched control back from manual. They all lurched sideways in their seats.
“I thought you killed Rachel,” Nicolai said.
“Based on the timestamp, she sent it this morning. It’s on a delayed send.” Kai swallowed. “Meant to arrive after she knew she’d be dead.”
Still turned, his arm across the seat, Nicolai said, “A message in a bottle. What’s it say, Kai?”
Kai opened the message then read the text on her display’s semitransparent screen, watching Nicolai’s serious face as he waited.
Kai blinked the display away.
“It’s a gift. For all of us.”
“All of us?” Kate said.
“Even you. Apparently, your secret isn’t as safe as you’d thought. It’s for all three of us, plus Omar Jones, if you ever care to see him again.”
Kate scoffed at that, but Nicolai was still watching Kai’s eyes.
“What is it, Kai? What did Rachel give us?”
Kai looked out the window then back at Nicolai.
“The Beau Monde,” Kai said. “We’re all a part of it now.”
“You’ll be pleased to hear,” Clive said, “that your request was granted.”
Micah looked up. He didn’t want to be in Clive’s office right now. He didn’t want to be waiting for the Shift results to come in — not just right now, but possibly ever. And he definitely didn’t want Clive thinking he’d done Micah a solid, and might be owed a favor in return. Because what could Clive do right now that Micah could possibly appreciate? Had he brought Isaac back from the dead? Had he somehow managed to get Carter Vale killed after all? Finding out that Vale survived Braemon’s fundraiser as cleanly as Micah (and, appropriately, Braemon himself) had been baffling. He’d assumed his mother had been behind what had happened — not just the little rug-pull at the end of Jameson’s trick, but the ensuing melee — but had likewise assumed the reason was to cover an assassination on Vale.
No such luck. Not that Micah cared about Shift anymore. It was just nice to have company when things fell to shit.
“What request?” Micah didn’t even try to keep the annoyance from his voice.
“Beau Monde for your friends, Costa and Dreyfus.”
“I thought it was out of your hands?”
Clive sat opposite Micah, a drink in his hand as usual.
“It wasn’t out of your mother’s.”
“Rachel?”
Clive nodded. “The morning before she died. She didn’t hold all of the aces, but she did pluck those four.”
“Four?”
“Your two, plus two more. Omar Jones and Kate Rigby.”
“Who’s Kate Rigby?”
“You aren’t curious about Jones?”
Micah sighed then picked up his own glass from the end table. Maybe alcohol would make it better.
“No. Omar’s slimy as hell. I’m surprised it took him this long.”
Clive crossed his legs. “You aren’t pleased? You came to me asking about it, and now it’s done.”
Micah lifted his eyes without raising his head. His tongue found the corner of his cheek, and he felt his brow stiffen.
“Don’t pretend you had anything to do with this, Clive. It was all Rachel. She knew what I was planning, and yet again she was ten steps ahead of me. She was probably behind those cyborg intruders, though I can’t imagine why…or maybe that was Purcell?”
“You can ask him yourself if you want.”
Micah stood. He couldn’t get comfortable. This should be a time of victory, and yet it was all so sour. He crossed to the window then looked out across the city with his hands clasped behind his back as if this were his office and he were in charge.
“You got what you wanted, Micah,” Clive said from his chair. “Your membership to Panel went through without a problem. Iggy didn’t even need to fight for you. He told the others that it’s what Rachel wanted, and he has seniority. Only Alexa seemed bothered — probably because she’s never liked it when Rachel got what she wanted. And if you ask me, we’ll be filling Alexa’s seat next.”
“How long do you think she has?”
“Forget about Alexa. Let’s talk about you.”
Micah turned. To Clive’s side were two large Beam windows that almost spanned the entire wall, one red and the other blue. Each had a large black number in the middle. Why Clive had his room set up to watch the Senate tally roll in as if it were a sporting event, Micah couldn’t imagine. They’d know before the public would, but so what? It was all so banal. It was strange to think that the entirety of the last six years came down to two numbers on a wall — and even stranger to think that either outcome could truly matter to any of Micah’s twenty new best frenemies. But for the past hour they’d been watching those numbers tick like an unsteady heartbeat. The blue Directorate wall was winning by a few Senate votes, as predicted.
“I don’t feel like being psychoanalyzed by you, Clive.”
“I’m asking as a friend.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re sure? I think I know how things were with you and Rachel, but Isaac…”
“I’d really rather not talk about it.”
Clive’s head bobbed as if to say, Fair enough. “How is Natasha handling things?”
That was a tricky question, hinging a bit on the assumption that Micah was his sister-in-law’s keeper, which he more or less had been for the past two days. Natasha had gone home with Micah on the night of the fundraiser then never left. She was an easy houseguest. All she did was immerse, sleep, and cry. She wasn’t even disturbing Micah’s food supply.
“She’s taking her time.”
“The sheets keep asking. I’ve been deflecting inquiries.”
Micah doubted that. Clive was Panel’s connection to the media just like Eli was its liaison to the hacker community, and Craig had Panel’s only inside line to the police, NPS, and Quark. But the idea that Clive was interfering personally to protect Natasha Ryan during her time of grieving? That was ludicrous.
A movement from beside Clive caught Micah’s eye. The Di
rectorate number clicked up two, to forty-four. Enterprise held fast at thirty-eight. Just nineteen Senators left to report, and then they could stick a fork in this hideous, riot-filled, murderous Shift. And good fucking riddance.
“Okay.”
“You know, Micah,” Clive said, his tone suddenly more serious, as if he’d grown tired of coddling, “you’re Panel now, but that doesn’t mean it’s smooth sailing for Micah Ryan. If you want to play ball up here, you’ll need to make friends.”
Micah’s head turned. In the corner of his eye, both numbers clicked up — Directorate by another two, Enterprise by six. The wall stood at forty-six to forty-four. That was unexpected.
“In your shoes,” Clive went on, “I’d consider respecting my elders.”
“Oh, come off it, Clive. I’m just as — ”
Clive held up a single finger. It was his way of shouting, coming from a man who’d earned the right to never shout.
“You’re not,” he said. “Don’t pretend you are. Sure, you were a rubber stamp onto Panel because your mother’s been making it clear for years that she intended for you to take her slot when she died. She was an evil bitch, Micah, but she’d earned her respect. I can only remember three people who’ve ever stood up against her and held firm. Two came up mysteriously dead, and the third is Alexa. Now, I’m not saying Rachel was behind those men’s deaths, but let’s just say she didn’t shed any tears or act the slightest bit surprised. And they weren’t lightweights, even by Panel standards. One of them, Colin Hawes, worked closely with Noah on an adaptation of my software that we all had great hopes for. Hawes was the founder of Granite Quarry.”
“I know who Colin Hawes is, Clive.”
“Hawes was using that software on a Quarry beta rollout. After Noah died, Quarry was the only system using it. But he ended up dead, and the answers about how to make that software work correctly went with him. It was an enormous loss.”