Child of the Fall

by D Scott Johnson

  “All readings are nominal,” Silas said.

  “Confirmed,” Shonda replied. “No responses are out of known parameters.”

  Tonya got sick of their attitude. She stepped between them, consciously getting in their way.

  “Ma’am,” Silas said with a huff, “you’re interfering with our scans.”

  She got out her glare, the one that taught baby doctors to sit down so she could keep them from killing someone. Every nurse knew how to do it.

  Silas wilted and backed off.

  Tonya turned around.

  Will’s arms were still wrapped tightly around Kim’s waist. “How do you feel?” Tonya asked.

  Aside from lowering her arms, Kim hadn’t moved a muscle this whole time. Her hands barely touched Will, as if he would burn her as well. “I don’t know. It doesn’t hurt.” She held a hand out. “Test me.”

  Tonya made the same move Emily did with Will and got a similar reaction.

  “It figures,” she said. It was hard to watch the hope die in her. “That would be asking too much.”

  “Ms. Ramirez,” Silas said. It took Tonya a second to remember that was Emily’s married name. She wasn’t on a first-name basis with her medical advisers. Strange.

  Silas moved closer. “We must chronicle this extraordinary event properly.”

  Mike moved toward Silas in that unnaturally silent way he had. “Not now,” he said, dropping the temperature of the room ten degrees.

  “No,” Kim said. “It’s okay. They’re right. We need to record this.” She pried Will’s arms away from her. The awkwardness was striking. Kim didn’t know how to extricate herself from someone else’s grasp. She’d never done it before in her life. “We’ll sit down. Let’s sit down right here.” They sort of fell onto an overstuffed couch in the main area of the room. They both moved awkwardly around each other, with the bonus of Kim’s injured arm making it that much more complicated.

  Tonya knew the look on Kim’s face. She was getting frustrated. “Kim, calm down.”

  “He’s so,” they tried to arrange themselves again, “lumpy.” Eventually they settled with Will across her lap, arms around her neck.

  The scientists—that’s how Tonya chose to think of them since they were piss-poor nurses—fluttered around talking gibberish. Mike brooded in a corner and watched them, almost vibrating from the stress.

  Emily sat down next to Kim and Will, wrecked. “Is he…are you…is everything okay?”

  Kim began gently prodding and squeezing Will. “I don’t know how to answer that.” He burst out laughing. Kim looked like a bomb had gone off in her lap.

  Tonya smiled. Kim wouldn’t know what tickling really was. Then she noticed how freely her friend was moving. “How’s your arm?”

  Kim pulled the sling over her head, “it’s fine.” She wriggled her fingers, which caught Will’s attention.

  Everyone went still, including the scientists. It was the first time Tonya had seen his eyes. He had Kim’s eyes.

  “Will,” Emily said, “that’s a hand. Can you say hand?”

  He stared, entranced.

  Kim gathered him close and kept moving her fingers.

  Emily got the duster she used on Kim out and brushed his hand. He focused on that, staring as it went back and forth.

  They both got the kind of expression Tonya saw a lot when she was in nursing school, rotating through the critical care unit: a hopeful surprise, quickly crushed. Will didn’t understand what was going on. Couldn’t understand.

  “He’s not unlocked,” Kim said. “Damn it.”

  Tears dripped out of Emily’s eyes, but she wore a huge grin. “No, I could tell. But…” She wiped her face and then a sob escaped. “I’ve never seen him at peace before.”

  Shonda wheeled up to Tonya. “We can’t find anything unusual, which is unexpected.”

  Tonya tried to figure out what to look at, still bothered that there was a body nestled inside the thing. She settled on the big sensor in the middle of the dome. “I don’t understand.”

  Silas said very softly, “We had several models for what might happen if they met in person.”

  “Walk with me,” Tonya said. She motioned to Mike, who followed behind them.

  She ushered them all into a side room. After checking to make sure Kim and Emily were still working with Will, she shut the door.

  “Explain that.”

  Silas glanced nervously at Mike. Without looking at him, Tonya gripped Mike’s arm. He needed to calm the hell down. When he didn’t relax, she shot him a look. “They have information we need.”

  “Indeed,” Shonda said as diagrams drew themselves into existence in the house’s shared virtual channel. “Our latest models predicted that an interaction between Subject One and—”

  She’d read Mike’s files and knew exactly who they were talking about. “Stop.”

  They both turned.

  “That is not Subject One. That is Kimberly Trayne. Do you understand?”

  Silas cleared his throat. “My apologies. Our models predicted that if Ms. Trayne and…”

  “And Will?” Mike asked in a low growl.

  He hadn’t calmed down yet, but now Tonya didn’t feel like calling him on it. They were starting to piss her off, too.

  Silas shot an alarmed glance at Mike and then looked away. “Yes. Our models predicted that if Ms. Trayne and Will ever met, there would be measurable consequences.”

  “A second order field interaction?” Mike asked, only a moment before Tonya did.

  Their startled look made Tonya grin inside. Didn’t expect that to come from a thug and sister, didja?

  “Yes,” Shonda said. “Exactly.”

  “But,” Tonya said, “that involves spontaneous symmetry breaking. I thought you guys were psychologists.”

  They did a not-quite-looking-at-each-other thing. These two were definitely an odd couple.

  “We are,” Shonda said. “The physics team departed when the money ran out. They left us with scanner profiles in case,” she spun her dome head toward the living room, “that ever happened.”

  These two were part of a team who had spent the past five years analyzing data Kim had generated. Of course they’d know more than she and Mike did. “What else did they leave you? Can you share it with us?”

  “Guys?” Emily said softly as she opened the door. “We have a problem.” She stepped inside and shut it quietly. “Kim wants us all to leave. Now.”

  Tonya said, “Okay” at the same time as Mike, and Shonda and Silas both said, “Absolutely not.”

  Emily shook her head. Her child was being raised by a team, a small team, and not a particularly charming one. And now there were strangers. Tonya wouldn’t be handling it as well as Emily was if she were in her place.

  “Right,” Emily said, then faced her and Mike. “You guys don’t understand this part. Kim is stuck on the couch. Will won’t let her up and won’t let go. I don’t know how it’ll work if she has to go to the bathroom. Will is all about habits and slow changes. He is wedded to routine.”

  Silas said, “He becomes impossible if we try to break it. He never leaves the house when it’s dark outside. Ever.”

  “We could sedate him,” Shonda said, “but only as a last resort.”

  If it’d come from anyone else, Tonya would’ve agreed. She knew dozens of sedation methods that were perfectly safe. Many were realm based and used no drugs at all. But Shonda’s tone set Tonya’s teeth on edge. She wasn’t thinking about patient care, but convenience. Tonya knew lots of doctors who acted this way. They never got along well with nurses, for good reason.

  “I don’t want him sedated,” Emily said. “He’s a nightmare when he wakes up from that. We can wait.” And that was that. Mom’s kid, Mom’s rules. “But I need you to talk to Kim.”

  Tonya shared a look with Mike. When it came to Kim, it wasn’t deviating from a routine that would set her off. It was disobeying orders.

  “Do you need help?” she as
ked him.

  He put away the scary assassin look he’d been wearing this whole time. Thank God.

  “I’ll signal you if I do.”

  When Mike left, the other three deflated like they’d been stuck with a pin.

  “Come on, guys,” Tonya said. “He’s not that bad.”

  Shonda wheeled toward her. “Who is he? And who are you?”

  With all the craziness happening, Tonya had forgotten only Emily knew their names. “Tonya Brinks.” She shook Silas’s hand and tried hard not to cringe when she took the claw Shonda extended from her case. It was covered with a rubberized coating of some sort. The grip was mechanical but delicate. “And that was Mike Sellars.”

  Silas’s Adam’s apple bounced in his throat, upping his nerd quotient. “Has she reconstituted her group? Are you new members?”

  To this day, what had happened to Rage + The Machine wasn’t well known. Her best friend was a sole survivor. “No. We’re just trying to help.”

  “They say we’re in danger,” Emily said.

  “And you are.” Tonya filled them in on the basics. “That’s why Kim wants us to move as soon as possible.”

  Whatever Mike and Kim were discussing had been too quiet to make out until it ended with an explosive Fine! from Kim. Will’s whimper was equally audible. Emily was out the door in a second, with the rest of them close behind.

  Mike wasn’t heading for the car, and Kim wasn’t preaching fire and brimstone at him as he went. All in all, not a bad result.

  “Will? Is everything okay?” Emily asked.

  Kim was rigid, but she held Will tenderly in her lap. “We need,” she said in a low voice, “to leave.”

  “We can’t,” Emily replied. “You don’t know what he’s like if we break his routine.”

  Kim cocked her jaw to one side, a thing she did when she realized she couldn’t win an argument. Will shifted then, and she squirmed under his weight. “People are so damned heavy,” she grumbled. “And hot.”

  A loud pop sounded out from the kitchen, and after a moment Silas and Shonda came around the corner, him with a Champaign bottle and her with a tray on her head that held glasses. “We have made a discovery,” he said. “I think that calls for a small celebration.”

  It took Kim a bit of wrestling to free one of her arms so she could hold a glass.

  ***

  Tonya woke to a keening wail and a splitting headache. She was on the floor but couldn’t remember who it belonged to, or why she was lying on it. It wasn’t night anymore, but she could’ve sworn it was only a moment ago. The noise was loud.

  “Shut him up now,” a woman’s voice said.

  Tonya’s arms wouldn’t work properly and neither would her head. Her vision swam into focus. Mike and Kim were asleep together on the couch, leaning on each other, mouths open. Emily was collapsed in front of the chair next to them. That wasn’t sleep.

  They had been drugged.

  There was a snap, and the keening stopped.

  “They were supposed to be here by now,” a man’s voice said.

  Silas. That was Silas talking. And Shonda too. Tonya had to move.

  “They’re at the main gate,” Shonda said. “Now come on.”

  Tonya got her hands under her and pushed up as the door slammed shut. Through the window, she saw Silas carrying a sleeping Will in his arms as they quickly walked—and rolled—down the driveway. The flat light of dawn made everything gray.

  Each movement either spun her head or her stomach, and the pounding behind her eyes wouldn’t let up. Tonya had to stop them.

  She fell twice getting to the door but managed to open it on her first try. A vehicle came charging up the street, screeching to a halt in front of Silas and Shonda. It was a big black van. Men poured out of it.

  Tonya had to run, but she couldn’t fall again. The best she could manage was a lurching stumble across the yard. This was a neighborhood, not a back alley. There were people all around them who could help if they knew what was going on. She shouted but couldn’t form words. The noise was only loud enough to get the attention of the men taking Will.

  “I thought you said it would be hours before they got up,” Shonda said.

  “It varies, okay?” Silas said as he walked purposefully toward Tonya. “I’ll take care of it.”

  She tried to take a stance but couldn’t hold her balance steady and landed on her butt in the grass. Things wouldn’t stop spinning.

  “At least it makes you easier to hit. Guys? We’ll need to put her back in the house before we go.”

  There was another snap that stung the center of her chest, then darkness.

  Chapter 30

  June

  Cyril was nowhere to be found when she got home last night, but when June woke up the next morning, he was standing in her living room, looking through a window. It was early, with only enough light to see him in shades of gray. It made him seem even less human than usual.

  “They’re here,” he said flatly. “It’s started.”

  June’s bungalow was on the edge of the campus off the main entry road. It should’ve been deserted this time of the morning, but it was bumper to bumper with cars. It was a mash-up of cheap old wrecks and shiny self-drivers that you got with any diverse group of young people, but they all had one thing in common.

  None of them were supposed to be here.

  The term wasn’t scheduled to start for another two weeks. A couple of die-hards had shown up yesterday, but they were turned away. The dorms hadn’t been prepped yet.

  Except that wasn’t the case anymore. A cursory glance at the main calendar revealed most of the staff—robot and human—had been reassigned in an all-hands effort to prep the living spaces and process the arrivals.

  “Did you cause this?” June asked.

  He looked up at her. “Not at all. It was much more difficult than it should’ve been to come back here without being seen because of it.”

  “Where were you?”

  He paused for a moment. “Sending a note to myself.”

  Cyril had a difficult relationship with clarity. “Do you ever stop speaking in riddles?”

  He laughed. “You are not the first person to complain about that. This is a delicate time. Unprecedented, as far as I know. Carelessness could lead to ruin.”

  “Well then why are they here?” He said it had started, after all.

  Cyril turned back to the window. “I have my suspicions. What are yours?”

  June checked her message queue. “Anna’s giving anyone who can get here in the next two days a full scholarship. She wants to see how well they respond to sudden changes in circumstance.”

  “I’m sure that’s popular with anyone who has a prior commitment.”

  June looked up the subreddit the students used to communicate with each other. “It seems to have made them happy.”

  “The benefits of cherry-picking your student body, I’m sure.”

  The comment was casual, but it added another weight to her already heavy load of suspicions. “Anna’s school is one of the most selective in the country. We get criticized about it all the time.” There were the standard right-wing gripes of political indoctrination enforcing groupthink, but also protests over their official favoring of young people, those with few or no family ties. June hadn’t paid it a lot of attention. She’d been busy with her own work.

  The oupa on her shoulder woke up and pointed out that the policies provided a dedicated, highly mobile group of people who could drop what they were doing and move on a moment’s notice. “This is worse than the Trilogy incident,” she said.

  “Indeed. They only want to send themselves to heaven. Speaking of Trilogy, has Spencer arrived yet?”

  One of the cars bumped another, which in turn ran into a third. It would take hours to process all this. “Yesterday afternoon. I need to…wait, how do you know about Spencer?”

  Cyril was a member of the device team. He knew secret routes into and out of the power plant.
All the glitches started when he appeared. He knew the name of the Trilogy contact. By rights, she should’ve turned him in the moment he showed up.

  Oupa-on-her-shoulder nudged at her insides. June knew exactly why she hadn’t turned him in, and wouldn’t.

  He might be telling the truth. She was awake, but the nightmare kept getting darker.

  “It’s not important how I know,” he said. “You must listen to him.”

  “He’s a fanatic.” Which was an ironic dismissal, considering the tableau unfolding outside her window. There were thousands of people flooding into the site just because the leader asked them to do it. She swallowed. “What can he tell me?”

  “The next steps that need to be taken.”

  She’d already given Spencer access to the inner network. But the scanners had cleared his tool kit. She sat down heavily. She couldn’t deal with all these contradictions. June looked up at Cyril, inscrutable and unknown behind his breathing mask and helmet. Against all evidence and even common sense, she wanted to trust this odd man. But she couldn’t. It was the end of a dream if she did. The end of her dream, that she’d overcome Oupa’s pessimism to become her own person, on her own, doing things that would change the world.

  The oupa on her shoulder pointed out that Anna’s promises could never have been all that they seemed if they could be shattered by this secretive stranger. She had been fooling herself, willfully ignoring warning signs, but still cataloging them somewhere in her head.

  And now Anna was gathering her people together as fast as she could.

  June stood up, grabbed her purse, and headed out the door.

  “June,” Cyril said.

  She turned, halfway out the door. Time seemed to hold still, stopped in a balance.

  “Trust Spencer. Help him if you can. We must stop Anna, and we need your help to do it.” He straightened up a bit. “No matter what else happens, know that I appreciate all you’ve done for me.

  “Goodbye, June.”

  She somehow knew she would never see him again. This was it. The man who had shattered beliefs she thought underpinned her entire being, and in the process revealed much deeper foundations underneath, was going back to wherever he came from.