I wondered who had been filling A’s mind with all this garbage. “A—”
“Arthur!” A snapped.
“Arthur,” I corrected, taking a deep breath. “We killed people for our clients who paid us ungodly sums of money to do it. We weren’t a force of stability in the world. Yes, things started going to shit, but that was because there was a power vacuum once President Douglas tried to clean up things. All of which, I remind you, was overshadowed by the eruption of Big Smokey. None of what we did would have mattered in the face of that. Hell, none of what we did in the end mattered. The problems of twenty-six assassins didn’t amount to a hill of beans in this badly mangled Casablanca quote.”
A narrowed his eyes and pointed to me. “You’re a liar. If the Society or the President had still been in power, rather than the dementia-suffering fool they trot out for public speeches, then we could have brought stability to the world. You released all of our advantages to the public, and the lack of a monopoly on Black Technology meant chaos infected the world.”
This was the worst conspiracy theory since President John Muhammed was born in Zimbabwe. “If Black Technology hadn’t been released to the public, there probably wouldn’t be a world, Arthur. We’d all be playing flaming guitars and crossing the desert to recover Immortan Joe’s wives.”
He looked at me, confused. Apparently, A wasn’t a Mad Max fan. “Do you know how I know you’re a liar?”
I raised my hands in fake surrender. “How is that?”
“You and S made Atlas.” A said the last word like he was cursing. “The New Society.”
I stared at him, blinking a few times. “You think Atlas Security is meant to be a substitute for the International Refugee Society?”
I was offended by that comparison. Yes, killing was all that the other Letters and I knew, but we’d created our organization to bring stability the world rather than make a profit. The fact that we could do both was just a lucky bonus.
“What other purpose do you have for it?” A said, clenching his fist. “You wanted to be the new masters after destroying our old ones. There is also the matter of HOPE.”
The entire room around me, which was conspicuously missing its shelves, became a lake of fire. I was standing on a stone in the middle of it, the heat scalding my hands and face while I had nowhere to turn. A, by contrast, didn’t look like he was affected in the slightest.
“HOPE?” I asked, trying not to show how scared I was of fire. I could feel the pain from it twice as badly as any human because the nerves sent the charges to my brain faster than any human’s. “What do they have to do with it?”
“They’re a tool to control the other corporations and force you into power,” A replied.
I almost laughed. “Oh my God, your assumption is that I’m an evil genius? That all the past fifteen years, I’ve been building a power base? That we haven’t just been trying to survive like everyone else? What the hell is wrong with you?”
The fire closed in on me, and I had only the time to let out of a bloodcurdling scream as my flesh burned, revealing the wires and metal bone under the synth skin beneath me. The red blood cells gave way to white goo, and I could feel every little bit of it burning inside me. My scream died in my throat as I waited in vain for my body to go into shock. Then I was on the ground, no fire around me, and my body restored. The pain, however, still echoed in my memories.
“I can make you die and be reborn a hundred times in a minute, G,” A said, walking toward me. “I could leave you here for a thousand years, and the people monitoring your progress would only notice your body twitching as you go hopelessly insane. It took me a long time to master the techniques to hijack the feed of Delphi’s AI network, but I had time.”
I whimpered.
“Oh, come on,” A said, tapping me with his foot. “You’ve lived this long, and a little fire was enough to disable you?”
I punched him in the stomach, head-butted him, and then attempted to put out his eyes. What happened next was his sending me flying with the barest wave of his hand. A wall appeared behind me, just to send me crashing into it. I felt metal bones and flesh split apart as well as the side of my head. Even so, my injuries healed almost instantly.
“Clever,” A said, shaking his head. “However, you forgot I was using cheats.”
“No,” I said softly. “I just wanted to punch your stupid face.”
“Do you know what happened to me after the fall of the Society?”
“No, but I have a suspicion you’re going to tell me,” I said, fully expecting him to kill me and not really caring. I’d made it a point to be my own man for the past fifteen years, and I wasn’t about to give up on that for a few more years of life.
A walked over to my crumpled form and leaned down to look into my eyes. “Nothing.”
Okay, I hadn’t been expecting that. “Okay.”
“Nothing at all,” A said, grabbing me by my repaired shirt and lifting me up off the ground as he stood up. “Not a damn thing. I didn’t have any orders, I didn’t have any masters, and I didn’t have a purpose.”
I tried to pull away but found all strength had left my body. I was nothing more than a helpless puppet on strings controlled by the man before me. Even so, I felt like antagonizing him. “It sounds great.”
“Of course, you’d think that,” A said, shaking his head. “I was directionless, purposeless, and without reason to exist.”
“You were free,” I said.
“Was I?” A asked, pausing. “Your mother said the same thing when I tracked her down and prepared to kill her for what she’d done. All I felt was filthy and starving. We don’t even need but the barest of food, and yet I felt hunger in those first ten years.”
It seemed my mother couldn’t help but screw things up. “What else did she tell you?”
“That I should find myself a purpose. She then directed me to HOPE.”
I closed my eyes. “Goddamn you, Marissa.”
“Yes,” A said, chuckling. “All the while I’ve been their left hand to your right. Killing, stealing, spying, and serving as nothing more than a lackey.”
“What changed your mind?” I was actually interested now. If he’d been secretly part of HOPE this entire time, then why didn’t we ever meet? We would have offered him a job at Atlas if he’d ever come to our doorstep. It would have been a job in Nome, Alaska surrounded by minefields and a satellite weapon aimed at his forehead, but the pay would have been great.
“I found out what you’d been given,” A said, his voice hissing. “What Rebecca made for you that she never bothered to check to see if I’d wanted. A gift that was a pearl beyond price and had not even been offered.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I said, genuinely confused.
A dropped me. “You don’t know, do you?”
I landed in a malformed pile of limbs and legs, unable to move in the slightest. Some of them were bending in ways they shouldn’t, and it occurred to me the virtual reality simulation was starting to break down. A had tampered with it too much, or Rosario and Claire were starting to notice what was happening in here.
“Know…what?” I asked, sick of this. “All I know is you want the Black Dossier.”
“Yes, and I’ll have it,” A said, laughing. “Give it to me.”
I smirked. “No.”
“Give it to me,” A said softly. “I can make this as unpleasant as I want.”
“I can also end my life,” I said, lying my ass off. “Do you think I’ve lived this long without installing a means of destroying myself should I be tortured? I still have hope about getting out of here, but it’s entirely within my means to take the Black Dossier to the Great Internet in the Sky.”
“You’re lying,” A said, his hands shaking in rage.
“I have no reason to,” I said, lying again. I had a big reason to, and that was avoiding being tortured.
“Give it to me,” A said, conjuring a ball of fire in his hand.
“What do you even want with it?” I asked, having severely underestimated him. “Is it really all about money?”
“It’s about sitting at the table of the gods,” A whispered. “I can already feel this body dying around me. I didn’t have your cure for the way we were made. I had to have my organs and cybernetics replaced dozens of times over the years. I killed people, humans and cyborgs both, to harvest what I needed. I robbed banks, hospitals, and factories to get what I need. I took people’s loved one’s hostages to force the surgeries.”
I wasn’t following him. “What the hell that does that have to do with—”
Oh shit.
“Nanotherapy is the only way I can heal myself,” A said. “To give my mind a body which can continually recover itself. It’ll be years before it’s released to the public. I don’t have years, but with the research inside, I can become immortal. I’ll also have my revenge on Marissa, HOPE, and you. I’ll be the one giving orders.”
The last line was almost as an afterthought. I wondered if A understood just how much he was shaming himself and his creator (as well as probably the man he was cloned from), acting like a toy soldier who couldn’t deal with the choices real life offered him. It made me pity him, because he’d constructed this elaborate fantasy in his head that service to the Society had been a privilege as well as an honor instead of forced labor. We were cannon fodder designed to live and die to make rich men richer.
But none of that was nearly as important as the fact that, holy shit, A actually believed Karma Corp had cracked the code for nanotherapy. I understood that kind of desperation and belief. I’d encountered it numerous times when I’d sniped bandits trying to break into refugee camps or dealt with people who sincerely believed it was the apocalypse because that would mean Jesus was about to return.
I didn’t know how sick A was since I’d only seen him on the computer screen before and now with a digital avatar, but it was possible he was on his last legs technologically speaking. Delphi had managed to stabilize our cybernetics’ breakdown years ago, but if what A was saying was true, he had never found something similar. He thought the Black Dossier had a panacea that would save him and was going to be enraged beyond all reason if I revealed there was no hope for him.
“All right,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I’ll give you what you want.”
A looked at me with hate in his eyes, and I recognized now, also envy. I’d managed to spend the last fifteen years, in his eyes at least, sweet and pretty while he’d been slowly falling apart. The fact that he was the better assassin—if you didn’t mind collateral damage, at least (and the Society never had)—made it all the more ironic. “Yes, G, you will give me what I want.”
“I’ll do it when you let me go,” I said simply.
A lifted the flame in his hands up as if to throw it at me.
“Tick-tock, A,” I said, staring at him. “You’re going to do what I say, or you’re not going to get your prize.”
A clenched his fist and extinguished the flame. “What else do you want? I know you, G, you’re always playing an angle.”
It occurred to me A didn’t know me at all. We hadn’t been friends in the Society, only worked that one mission together, and hadn’t been in contact for a decade and a half. He’d built an entire mythology around me while I hadn’t thought about him in years. Still, a part of me was sympathetic to him. He’d been created by the Society just the same as I had been, only he’d gone full Stockholm Syndrome and been left a shell of his former self once we’d ended the International Refugee Society. Then I remembered that most of the other Letters hadn’t been monsters and lost that sympathy.
Fuck this guy and his fire tricks.
I played for time. “I want the person you’re keeping hostage. I know she’s not Marissa, but she might be someone useful.”
“Wait, what?” A asked.
Dammit, I’d overestimated his intelligence. “You really thought it would be that easy?”
“What are you saying,” A said, grabbing me again.
This time, he wrapped his hands around my neck and began squeezing. I’d overplayed my hand and saw nothing remotely intelligible behind A’s eyes. They were full of fury and insanity, perhaps brought about by a memory of a murder long ago. I tried to speak to calm him down, mutter that he was potentially destroying the Black Dossier (whether it was true or not), but nothing could escape my lips.
Then it was over.
A disappeared along with the empty void where the library had been, and I bolted up from where I was lying.
Someone had logged me out.
Only I wasn’t back at Delphi’s party.
Chapter Seventeen
I woke up with my hands, arms, and legs shaking from the memory of being burned alive by A in the simulation. I needed a second to catch my breath as my body covered itself in sweat, one of the stranger qualities of a body that was 100 percent synthetic and didn’t need to be cooled down in order to function. I was wearing my pants, but someone had removed my shirt, tie, and jacket to leave me bare-chested.
Staring at my right hand, I flexed it a few times to make sure my body still functioned while thinking back to what I’d downloaded with Dave’s help. Much to my relief, I found myself possessed of an enormous amount of data on topics ranging from the nanotherapy scam to the fact that the CEO of Halifax-Montenegro was in an incestuous relationship with her son.
The Black Dossier was mine.
My environment was one of the luxury guest rooms in Delphi’s tower, with an emperor-sized bed, a chandelier, a digital fireplace that produced actual heat, and a retro-antique style that was becoming all the rage among those few people rich enough to afford it. I was lying on the bed with its shimmer-silk covers and white canopy. There was no sign of either Claire—I should think of her as Marissa now—or Rosario. Thankfully, there was no sign of A either.
“Hello, Delphi?” I called, looking around.
No answer. That wasn’t good. If we were still in Delphi’s skyscraper, then she should have been wired to every room the same way she was in the Atlas buildings. Instead, there was no sign of her, and that made me wonder if someone had managed to kill her. There was also my fear I was trapped in an Inception situation. That I wasn’t actually awake but just in another layer of the Matrix (man, we needed to rename that to something more copyright friendly).
“Okay, if this is the Matrix, then I want a cold beer and a beautiful redhead right now,” I said.
“Claire” opened the door seconds later. “Case, are you awake?”
“Do you have a beer?” I asked.
“Excuse me?” she asked.
“Eh, the results are inconclusive then,” I said. “More experimentation will be required.”
She turned her head to look at me sideways. It was at that moment I cursed myself because I recognized the movement and body language of the person I’d once loved. It was Marissa all right, wearing a Shell body and one I’d completely missed because I hadn’t looked deeper than the surface level.
It made me wonder where the original Claire was and what she might have done to her. A part of me, despite all the betrayals, held out hope that Marissa hadn’t done anything. She wasn’t a monster; she was just a liar and a manipulator. I was also the fool who’d continually fallen for her lies no matter how many times she’d picked me up. It was understandable when I’d been just a five-year-old with an adult’s mind, but at twenty? I was just stupid.
“Are you okay?” Marissa asked, walking up to the side of the bed. It was within striking distance, but I didn’t move yet.
“What happened to Rosario and Delphi? Did you notice anything happening while I was decrypting your data?” I asked.
“Rosario left,” Marissa said, lying. I knew all her ticks now. “She took her payment and hopefully we won’t have to see her again. So the data is decrypted? Everything is all right?”
“Delphi,” I repeated.
Marissa blinked with Claire’s
eyes as if realizing she still had to put on a front with me. “We’re in a blind spot to Delphi’s programming. Since A has somehow gotten the ability to hide his presence from her, we had to figure she’s been hacked somehow. Perhaps backdoors from her days as the Society’s pet AI This is a good place to hide until we can figure out a way to strike at A directly.”
I was impressed with the sheer boldness of the lie and wondered how much truth she’d managed to put into it. Delphi had been programmed by the Society to be obedient, but she’d gradually worked her way around the loopholes in her commands to achieve freedom. Even today, though, there were parameters she still had to work within. Had Delphi’s positive reaction to HOPE been because Marissa had access to her core programming? No, that was ridiculous. If she had access to Delphi’s power, then she’d rule the world rather than work against it.
“I understand,” I said, taking a deep breath.
“Do you have the information?” Marissa asked, her voice a little more desperate.
“Of course,” I said, whispering. “Kiss me.”
Marissa breathed a sigh of relief and leaned in to embrace me. I took her in my arms, pressed my lips against her, then grabbed her in a chokehold before disarming her. I grabbed her gun when she reached for it and tossed it to one side.
“Goddammit, G,” Marissa muttered as I squeezed tightly. She dug her fingernails into my pants leg, tight enough to draw blood, but mostly just fidgeted in my grip.
“Case,” I said, whispering. “You gave me that name, after all.”
Marissa chuckled. “When did you figure it out?”
“Not soon enough,” I said softly.
“You realize my body is a Shell, right?” Marissa said. “You can’t strangle me.”
“It’s Claire’s body,” I said, aware she was testing me. “Which means it’s not a high-quality combat Shell. No, I can’t strangle you, but I’m fully capable of tearing your head clean off.”
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