by Julia Keller
Why did she find herself wanting to jump up, hop on a tram to L’Engletown, and tackle the problem single-handedly?
When she looked up again, Evie was still standing there.
“Yeah?”
“I—I was just wondering.”
Violet waited.
“I was just wondering,” Evie said, starting again, “if maybe…”
The second delay was too much. Violet was desperate to get out of here. She spent as little time as possible in this stuffy beige box of an office, and her assistant was prolonging it. “I’ve got a lot going on today, Evie. Could we move this along?”
The young woman flinched, even though Violet’s words had been delivered gently.
“Oh! Sure, yeah. Sorry, Senator.” She gulped some air. “You asked me to help you find your father’s console, right?”
“Right.” Ogden Crowley’s personal console had vanished after his death. Violet had scoured his apartment in Starbridge, the assisted living community where New Earth’s older citizens ended up, but couldn’t find it. She had asked Evie to interview the Starbridge staff. If someone had taken it, she didn’t want to get them in trouble, but she wanted it back. She had very few keepsakes from her parents’ lives.
From her mother, she had only Lucretia Crowley’s black leather medical bag. Violet had given that to Shura when Shura graduated from medical school. Her mother would have approved, Violet knew. But from her father’s life, she had very little except for his books.
“Well,” Evie continued, “we’ve been going on the presumption that the console was either misplaced or that somebody took it.”
“Yeah.”
“What if President Crowley deliberately hid it? What if he didn’t want you to find his console? I mean, that would be a different kind of search.”
Violet was stunned. And then embarrassed. It had never occurred to her that her father might have had something to hide on his console. But why hadn’t it?
Because she loved him. And trusted him.
She nodded. “Maybe. Good point. I’ll take it from here.”
Evie gave a little wave as she backed out of the doorway, her HoverUp making its usual shhhhh sound as millions of air currents were pushed through an equal number of tiny coils, coils which in turn shifted and manipulated her limbs in response to her brain’s commands, enabling her to walk upright despite a spinal cord injury suffered when she was twelve years old. After many experiments, Shura had vastly improved upon the original design of HoverUps. Nowadays, the movements were so natural that you could occasionally miss the fact that someone was using a HoverUp; only a faint murmur revealed its presence.
Violet massaged the back of her neck. She’d been at work for an hour now, and all she’d managed to do was sign a few papers and reply to outraged messages from New Earth residents who wanted something. Because everybody wanted something, and they wanted it now. No wonder her father had always been so tired when he came home at night.
Why had President Shabir stuck her in this job? It wasn’t her style at all.
But wait—she’d sought it out. She had asked him. Not the other way around.
Because being a senator is what a daughter of Ogden Crowley ought to do.
And so here she sat.
She yearned to be back in Rez’s lab while he tried to discover the origin of the chip’s signal. Not here in the Central Administration Building, surrounded by other senators and their assistants—instead of being surrounded by stars.
She signed a few more papers. She answered a few more console messages.
A colleague popped up in the doorway, a woman named Amber Chandler, who wore a shimmery-green, gold-trimmed tunic that fell to her ankles. Her jewelry was the noisy kind: clanking bracelets, clicking earrings, a necklace whose many facets scraped and rang as they met and mingled. Her skin was trimmed with wrinkles.
She asked Violet if she’d heard about the rumor about the Graygrunge attack.
“The what?” Violet said. She tried to look surprised.
“A virus. There’s some gossip about unauthorized activity in the tunnels yesterday. Might’ve been a virus. One of the jumpers,” said Chandler. She was ancient—at least forty years old, Violet speculated. Impossible to imagine being that old.
“Haven’t heard a thing,” Violet replied. She felt guilty about the lie, but only for a second, because it was for the greater good: preventing a mass panic.
She gestured toward the stack of documents on her desk so Chandler would get the hint: I’m busy.
As soon as her visitor left, Violet put in a console call to the best detective she knew: Jonetta Loring. She told her about the missing console.
“I’m sure you searched his apartment thoroughly, right?” Jonetta asked.
“Four times. No, wait—five.”
“Okay, so if your father did hide it, he didn’t hide it there.” Jonetta paused. “I’ll check some other places and get back to you, okay?”
“Thanks.”
“Least I can do. You taught me everything I know.”
Violet was tempted to murmur, Not exactly a ringing endorsement, girl, but she didn’t. Truth was, Jonetta had hauled the detective agency up out of all-but-certain doom. Crowley & Associates—she’d kept the name so she wouldn’t have to buy a new sign, she’d told Violet, who suspected there was a little more to it than that—was thriving.
But swamped or not, Jonetta always found time to help her mentor and former boss.
More bills to sign. More reports to read. More console calls. More and more and more and …
Finally, it was noon. Violet had made plans to have lunch with Shura. She jumped up from her chair and looped around her desk, heading for the door. Once again she was desperately hungry, but this time it wasn’t for food.
She was hungry for freedom.
7
Rescuing Rez
The door to Shura’s lab was wide open, which was highly unusual. Violet spotted the gap the moment she turned the corner in the hall and made for the threshold. As she came even closer, she suddenly understood the reason the door had been summarily flung open:
Shura was trying to air out the space, which meant the world at large was now forced to suffer right along with the room’s sole occupant.
An epic stink barreled out of the lab. It was caustic enough to clear a sinus passage or scour a sink or eliminate the rust from a rocket hull. The smell was a blend of rotten eggs and rancid meat and hairy armpit and infected toenail, topped off with singed tennis shoes and rat droppings, with a rich bottom note of swamp goo. It was the kind of odor that seemed to have recently solidified, achieving a critical mass of nastiness that could not be contained by scent alone. It had a shape, a weight, a density.
“Shura?” Violet said, adding a gasp as she thrust her head in the door. She assumed her friend was in there somewhere, even though she hadn’t seen her yet.
“Sorry about the smell!” Shura called out.
At least it sounded like Shura. There was no immediate evidence of the speaker’s identity. The lab was drastically crammed with her friend’s ongoing experiments—with, that is, oily engine parts, metal vats whose contents heaved and popped, quasi-assembled robots, gizmo-choked shelves, stacks of solar energy panels in assorted shapes and thicknesses that awaited testing, rows of partially disassembled wind turbines, boxes rattling with test tubes and beakers all packed tightly in straw, glass tubes, thick bundles of copper wire, curling strips of steel cladding, spectrometers and chronometers and scales of every size and variety, broken-off antennae and ruptured replicators and water-damaged oscilloscopes—as well as Shura’s art equipment, from easels to canvases to jars that sprouted with old brushes to rolled-up, crinkled-ended tubes of paint.
“Come on in!” called the still-invisible Shura from somewhere within the conglomeration.
Violet fit a hand over her nose and mouth, bent almost double at the waist, and plunged into the laboratory. The obnoxious odors seemed to pull b
ack just the slightest bit, allowing her to take several steps forward without collapsing in a gagging heap.
Just as Violet breached the first barricade of outsized odds and ends, Shura stepped out from behind a mountain of mismatched computer parts. She wore goggles, a head scarf, and a lab apron covering her tunic. In her right hand, she held a clamp that was attached to a cloudy test tube from which purple smoke rippled and seethed.
“What the hell’s going on?” Violet asked. She coughed, rubbed her eyes with her knuckles, and coughed again. “Does this have something to do with your experiments for that new vaccine?”
“Um … no,” Shura replied. She pushed up her goggles and blinked several times. “The smell is actually … Well, I’m trying to find an antibiotic to use against a jumping virus like Graygrunge. Which means it’s got to work in both humans and computers. A retardant is one thing, but I’d like to stop it before it has a chance to get going. I think I know the answer—I need to come up with some lines of code instead of a regular antibiotic. The code will function as an antibiotic. But I was taking a chance with this last mixture. Unfortunately, it caught fire. There’s no immediate danger, other than the stink. The trouble started when it spread to a nearby vat and the chemical reaction was just the worst—”
“So it’s settled. We’re going to a café.”
“Yeah.”
* * *
“What do you think? I mean, really.” Shura took a bite of her sandwich. They sat at a green metal table in the giant plaza outside her lab.
“Rez is under a lot of pressure.” Violet looked at the salad on her plate with zero interest. The smell from the lab had done a number on her usually robust appetite. “He’s worried about the orbital decay, and he doesn’t want to make a general announcement about it. So it’s all on his shoulders. Plus there’s the threat of Graygrunge and the other jumping viruses.”
“So he might be mistaken about the signal? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I just don’t know, Shura. He’s brilliant. You know that.”
“I do. And I also know that everybody needs a break now and again.” Shura sat back in her chair. “That’s one of the reasons I paint. I mean, yeah, there are things I want to say that I can only say through art. But it does other things for me, too. When I’m working on something really intense in my medical practice or my lab experiments, and I feel like my head’s going to explode, that’s when I pick up a paintbrush. Works wonders.”
“I don’t think Rez has anything like that in his life.” There was a touch of sorrow in Violet’s voice.
Shura peered at her friend. “You really care about him, don’t you?”
“Of course. We all do.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
Violet gave her a look. “I don’t want to talk about it right now, okay?”
They had been friends for so long that they knew every nuance, every detail, every wrinkle of each other’s emotional histories. Violet had helped Shura get over Samantha Bolivar, a medical school classmate and her first major crush; Shura had been there when Violet was obsessed with Kendall Mayhew. Finding out Kendall’s secret had changed Violet’s feelings toward him, and Shura had been there for that ordeal, too, as Violet had to deal with the opposite of a crush:
What to do when you aren’t in love with somebody anymore, but he’s still in love with you. In some ways, that was even harder than the other way around, when you were the one who cared more.
Emotions, Violet thought, can be a pain in the ass sometimes.
Emotions had taken on an exaggerated importance for them because of the Intercept. They had grown up with it as a daily part of their lives. Their feelings from moment to moment had been monitored, collected, tagged, archived, sliced, and diced a thousand different ways, and then, suddenly, the Intercept was gone. They were free to feel whatever they wanted to feel without the Intercept looking over their shoulder. That freedom brought its own problems.
Through it all, Violet and Shura had remained steadfast friends.
“The only reason I was asking,” Shura said, “is because he’s sometimes kind of rude and mean. I know it’s because he’s so focused, but I don’t like it.”
“Me neither.”
“But you’ve still got a thing for him, right?”
“Yeah. No. Maybe.” Violet put her head in her hands. “I don’t know.” She lifted her head again and grinned. “I guess.” She started to remind Shura that she’d expressed a desire not to talk about this, but whatever. “He wasn’t that way before Rachel died.”
“Well—”
“Okay,” Violet corrected herself. “Maybe he was a little bit that way before Rachel died. But not like this.”
“Agreed.”
“So we have to cut him some slack.”
“If you want my opinion,” Shura said, “it sounds like he’s one of your rescues.”
“My what?”
“You know what I mean. Your rescue projects. You like to save people.”
“Is Rez really that bad? I mean, sure, he can be pretty snippy. But he’s basically a decent guy.”
“Yeah. But you deserve more than just a decent guy, right? How about somebody totally hot who treats you well, too?”
Violet shrugged. “We can talk about my love life later. Back to the chip. If it turns out not to be Rachel’s, Rez will be devastated.”
“Not to mention embarrassed in front of all of us.”
“Everybody makes mistakes.”
“Not Rez. Just ask him.”
They laughed, and the blended laughter made both of them feel better. For a moment, Violet considered telling Shura about her father’s missing console and about the troubling possibility that it wasn’t lost at all—that he had deliberately hidden it.
But she didn’t. It might not be true. And they had enough to deal with right now, from Graygrunge to the mystery of Rachel’s chip.
Anyway, there would always be time later to bring it up with Shura. That was the thing about a best friend: Next time was a given.
Warmed by that thought, Violet felt some stirrings of appetite returning to her. Before she could get back to her salad, though, her console signaled an incoming call. The rising white jewel—in jewel-speak, the equivalent of a siren—told her it was critically urgent.
Rez’s worried face appeared in the tiny translucent pearl.
“Can you come over here right away?”
“Another attack of Graygrunge?” Violet asked.
“No.”
“What is it, then?”
“Just come to my lab as quick as you can. There’s something you have to see.” He sounded thoroughly rattled, even more so than during his last summons, when he’d told her about finding Rachel’s chip.
“I’m having lunch with Shura.”
“Bring her. That’s even better. But come now.”
“Okay, Rez, but if you could give me a hint about—”
“Please.”
In all the years that Violet had known Steven Reznik, through crises and emergencies and issues and problems and snafus and screwups aplenty, she had rarely if ever heard him say, “Please.” Or anything remotely close to “Please.”
Until right now.
8
A Cry in the Night
Rez wasn’t in his big red chair. He was standing upright, leaning over the computer keyboard. His hands were balled into fists, and those fists were balanced on either side of his computer keyboard. He stared at the screen.
“Hey,” Violet said.
She had shimmied up through the hole in the floor first and then put a hand down and helped Shura up.
Rez didn’t answer her. Violet looked over at Mickey. The AstroRob had yet to say a word to her—no bad jokes, no unbearable puns, no ridiculous riddles, no groan-worthy plays on words. He was focused on his own screen, which featured a rich orange circus of cartwheeling numbers.
The tiny room seemed to tremble with a dizzy stran
geness, trailing sparks of confusion.
What was going on?
“Rez?” Violet said. “Is it Rachel’s chip? Did you figure out where the signal’s coming from?”
“No.” His voice had a peculiar quality to it. If Violet had been forced to define it, she would have called it … haunted, maybe. As if it were caught between two worlds and didn’t quite know where it belonged.
“Then what is it?”
He slowly raised a hand and pointed to the screen. Violet and Shura moved closer so that they could see what had affected him so deeply.
And instantly, Violet understood why Rez was behaving this way. She and Shura didn’t speak—the room was silent except for the thrumming swish-swoosh swish-swoosh of machinery and the low murmur of the fans that kept the computers cool—but Violet was sure that her friend understood it, too.
On the screen was a snippet of video that repeated itself over and over again: There was a frantic sizzle of lightning, a flashing of bottomless blackness, a tumbling fall, a fierce cataclysm of water, an immense and terrible pressure that nothing as fragile as a human body could possibly withstand; and then an absolute emptiness.
Somehow, on a level of understanding that existed apart from thought, a level that involved pure instinct, they knew exactly what they were looking at:
The chip was transmitting Rachel’s view of the last few seconds of her life as she plunged from the top of a half-built roller coaster track into the swirling, churning waters of an Old Earth ocean. It repeated over and over again. The feed was terrifying to watch because as you watched, your consciousness merged with hers, Violet realized, and suddenly you knew what it felt like to be falling, falling, falling, into the heart of terror and black panic.
You knew what it felt like to be helpless.
You knew what it felt like to be doomed.
You knew what it felt like to die.
In a hushed voice, Violet asked, “How long has this been coming in?”