Broken Wide

by Susan Kaye Quinn

  I hadn’t put those two together. “Something’s not right.”

  “Something’s very not right.”

  “Unless he’s just trying to break the whole system. Burn everything down.” I drop my voice and lean closer. “Kira, the assassination attempt on the president—the one I tried to stop—I think Torquin was behind it.”

  Kira’s eyes go wide. After everything went down, I told her all the details about my attempt to stop DARPA’s hit on President Ashton—except for my suspicions about Vice President Torquin. I haven’t breathed a word of that to anyone. My theory was tenuous at best, but DARPA wasn’t the source of the hit, that much I knew. Wright was taking orders from someone. And Ailsberg—the creepy guy at our training sessions for the hit—was also the president’s political advisor. Plus he was at Tiller’s estate during the attack. He knew. Did Torquin? I don’t know, but Ailsberg is still in the inner circle at the White House. Which could mean nothing… or maybe they orchestrated the whole thing together.

  “Do you have any proof?” Kira demanded in a hoarse whisper.

  “Absolutely none.” Which was why I hadn’t even brought it up.

  She grips my arm and pins me with a hard look. “You need to get me proof.”

  I open my mouth to object—how the hell am I supposed to do that?—but the door to one of the examination rooms suddenly pops open.

  Tessa rushes out, gripping a small screen, fury on her face. She’s about to say something to Kira, but then she sees me, and it stops her short. “Are you okay?” Her brow wrinkles up.

  “Why does everyone keep asking me that?” I run a hand over my face, checking for blood.

  Kira takes the screen from Tessa, taps it into a mirror, then holds it up. I’ve got an impressive black eye, and one whole side of my face is bruising up an ugly shade of green. I work my jaw. It’s sore, but I look far worse than I feel.

  I push the mirror away. “I’m fine.” Tessa pinches her lips together and gives me a dirty look. “I swear. I just caught a couple fists with my face.” I’m more worried about what my epic failure with the protest means for her faith in all of this—in me, in the cause, and in the possibility of peace.

  But she’s already back to the righteous fury she had before, swiping away at her tablet. To Kira, she says, “The tru-casts are, well… look.”

  The banner across the bottom says DANGEROUS JACKERS ATTACK POLICE.

  “Oh, crap,” I say.

  They both dart looks at me, but then the vid captures all our attention with its suddenly-blaring audio chants. I’m transported back to the protest, but this isn’t a straight feed from a camera drone—it’s been remixed. Maybe on the fly during the protest, maybe after. But there’s nothing that shows the Fronters using flexiglass shields as battering rams to break though the JFA front line. There are no Fronters at all unless a JFA is landing a kick or a punch… including Anna’s round-house take-down. The way the tru-cast is cut, it looks like she kicked him in the face rather than knocking the flaming torch from his hand.

  “This isn’t right,” I say, concern gnawing at my stomach.

  “You mean they’re making jackers look bad?” The sarcasm is heavy in Kira’s voice.

  “What’s this?” Hinckley emerges from the treatment room, holding onto the doorjamb for support. He looks bad—hollows under his eyes, a twitch in one eyelid, and he’s holding his stomach like the contents might evac at any moment. But he’s upright, which is more than I can say for Anna, who’s still passed out on an examination table behind him. I reach out to check her mindfield—it’s got the same rough peaks and valleys as a normal mind, same as before.

  Hinckley jabs a finger at the vid. “That’s Anna,” he growls.

  Sure enough, there’s an image of Anna being electrocuted by the CJPD’s shock device.

  Then there’s a close up of me—a black-masked man taking careful aim at police and shooting them one by one. JACKER SLAYS POLICE PROTECTION screams the red lettering scrolling across the bottom. “Slays,” I protest. “Those were tranq darts.”

  “All the same,” Hinckley says, then gives a sickly cough. He starts peeling off his tactic gear. “You’re going to need new clothes.”

  I scowl. “They’ll just think you’re the shooter instead of me.”

  “Fine by me.” He keeps working his gear off to apparently give me his clothes. Hinckley’s a little taller than I am, but we’re built about the same. I guess he’s expecting me to strip down here in the hallway.

  I gesture him back into the room. Kira and Tessa stay in the hall, watching the vid play out, and Anna’s unconscious, so Hinckley and I step back from the door and engage in a slightly private exchange of clothes. I’ll have to push up the sleeves of his black t-shirt, but the camouflage pants fit reasonably well.

  While I finish dressing, he drifts back to Anna’s side. She looks even worse than he does, probably because her smaller frame sustained the same jolt of whatever the CJPD were dishing out. A square monitor clings tentatively to the wall by a single bare hook—the blip of the electric blue line says she has a pulse, but the thought-wave monitor is flatlined. It’s probably a reader-tuned device scrapped from somewhere, but even a full-scale Cerebrus 3D imager wouldn’t get readings off Anna. I know she’s fine, but Hinckley can’t sense her mindfield the way I can. He brushes her long, dark hair back from her face and rests his fingers against her neck, double checking her pulse.

  I edge up to him. “She’s okay, you know.”

  He glances at me. “I figure she’s just knocked out, not…” His eyelid twitches again.

  “She’s fine,” I rush out. “Everything’s normal in there. It’s just the shock.” I pause. “I could wake her if you’d like.” Anna’s mindbarrier is no obstacle to my ability to spin mindmaps. But waking up that way is no one’s idea of a good time. “But it would probably hurt.”

  He shakes his head and turns a pinched look back to her. “It’s better if she rests.” Probably true, given the state he’s in. And besides, that keeps Anna from doing whatever Anna’s going to do when she wakes.

  “I cannot believe this!” Tessa is stabbing at her screen in the hall. “It’s the same rants on every tru-cast.”

  Kira’s not even looking at the screen, just staring past Tessa like the hall extends for a thousand miles. I step back out of the room and close the door most of the way, giving Hinckley and Anna some privacy again.

  “There were dozens of drones,” I say. “Someone’s got to have footage that shows what really happened.”

  Anger is making Tessa sputter. “It’s nothing but propaganda!”

  “Propaganda,” Kira repeats, but it’s soft like she’s just pulling up from a deep dive into her own head. Her gaze sharpens on Tessa’s face. “That’s what we need.”

  Tessa scrunches up her brow like she thinks Kira’s losing it.

  But I get her drift. “Start your own propaganda? To counter this crap?” I flick a hand at the screen.

  Tessa’s shock couldn’t be more complete. “But we have to tell them the truth!”

  She’s such a reader—and honestly, I love her for it—but she doesn’t get what this is about. Readers are gullible in a way that’s almost comical. They don’t understand the concept of lying as something that’s necessary sometimes—whereas jackers have to do it in their sleep, just to survive. To readers, that makes us morally corrupt. Even someone like Tessa who fights for jacker rights can’t see how it’s not a lie to frame the debate to your advantage. Especially when the debate is Should jackers be allowed to exist?

  And that’s a debate we’re losing. Badly.

  “The truth is that jackers deserve to live,” Kira says to Tessa, firmly, with no room for disagreement, not that Tessa would have any. “We have families. Children. People with hopes and dreams.” Kira looks between Tessa and me. “We fall in love. It’s not just this vid, it’s the entire narrative they have about us—that we’re violent weapons who lie and terrorize and kill. That’s
the lie, Tessa.”

  Tessa’s nodding now, and I have that cool feeling again—like the truth in Kira’s words is a balm applied directly to an open wound.

  But her voice is still rising. “Readers are echoing this lie to each other in their endless chatter on the chat-casts and the tru-casts. They reassure themselves of their superiority, how they’re morally better than jackers. That we’re depraved and lawless and violent. But the violence being done here—with Purity lists and torches and words—is being done by readers. They’ve long since forgotten the day when they were the ones imprisoned in camps for being different.”

  Tessa’s eyes go wide. “You mean before everyone changed.”

  Kira nods. “We need to reacquaint readers with their own history.”

  My heart’s pounding. “How are you going to do that?” The determination in Kira’s eyes is mirrored in Tessa’s—she’s all in on this, and she doesn’t even know what it is. Neither do I, but it had better not be more demonstrations.

  Hinckley eases open the door, drawn out by our words.

  Kira straightens. “Jackers need a voice. In all of this, that’s what’s missing. Julian spoke for us, but they struck him down. Now we need to speak for ourselves. Not let this violence of words go unanswered.”

  Tessa’s nodding again. “We’ll start our own chat cast.”

  “We have the facilities back at the old HQ,” Hinckley chimes in, his voice gruff. “Still set up from when Julian ran his chat casts.”

  Kira nods then places a hand on Tessa’s shoulder. “I need the Free Thinkers there.”

  Wait, what? That puts her squarely in the Fronters’ sights—

  “You need our voices too. Reader’s voices,” Tessa says. “So the other readers will listen.”

  “We can’t force them to listen,” Kira says with a grimace, “but with you there, they won’t be able to ignore us completely. And if there’s one thing I know about readers, it’s that they believe everything they hear. Only this time, they’ll be hearing our side.”

  “You don’t have to do visuals for a chat-cast, right?” I give Tessa a desperate, pleading look—because I won’t be around to be her personal bodyguard—but her attention is entirely on Kira’s lit-up face. “I mean, no sense in putting your faces out there—”

  “People need to see our faces, Zeph.” Kira’s expression hardens, and my heart rate picks up more.

  “They need to see we’re just ordinary people,” Tessa agrees, nodding like she doesn’t even see the horror on my face.

  But Kira sees it, loud and clear, and answers it with an unblinking stare. She’s not bending on this. She’s right in every way—about jackers deserving to live, about Fronters being wrong, about jackers needing to push back—but the cool assurance of those truths is giving way to a hot panic in my chest. I can’t get past the price people will pay for that. Especially if people means Tessa.

  Kira breaks our staring contest by taking the screen from Tessa’s hand and turning the endless loop of the protest off. When she meets my gaze again, her expression is softer. “Look, I’m not offering up any more lambs for slaughter. We’re going to protect our own. The chat-cast is intended to bring pressure—non-violent pressure—but we’ll do everything we can to keep people safe.” She glances at Tessa. “That includes everyone who lands on the Purity list. We can’t allow this slaying of innocent people to continue. We have to bring those people in.”

  “Like an underground railroad.” I’m startled to hear my sister’s voice behind me—both her and my mom have materialized in the hallway when I was caught up in having heart palpitations. “You’ll need someone to meet them and escort them in,” Olivia says. “I can help with that.”

  “Um, no,” I say, drawn out like this is obvious.

  “No one asked you.” Olivia folds her arms.

  I’m surprised when my mom doesn’t jump right in. “You can’t be serious—” I say to literally everyone present.

  “She is well-known,” Kira says like she’s actually considering this. “Her face was splashed all over the tru-casts for days. People will recognize her and know she’s one of us. Plus she can surge through the helmets of anyone trying to stop her.”

  Olivia unlocks her arms and shrugs. “Or I could just knock ‘em out and drag ‘em to safety.”

  “There will be no knocking out of people.” My mom frowns. “Unless it’s necessary.”

  I can’t believe this. My mouth is just hanging open. I have to blink and refocus to realize Kira’s now talking to me.

  “—be completely safe,” she says. “You have my word on that, Zeph. Meanwhile, I need that proof we discussed.”

  I’m getting whiplash in this conversation. “Proof?”

  She arches an eyebrow. Oh, right. That the Vice President staged a coup. “Um…” I have no idea what she expects with that. “My plan was to find a way to stop Tiller from deploying his anti-jacker mind-killing tech. And that was going to be a stretch.”

  “We need that too.”

  My shoulder sag. Having my sister play Harriet Tubman all over Chicago New Metro, saving jackers with a target on their backs? Tessa staying in Jackertown and going high profile with this Jacker Voice chat cast? And I’m going to just waltz into a powerful billionaire’s estate to subvert his secret anti-jacker technology?

  Nope, absolutely nothing can go wrong with all that.

  “And someday, Zeph, I want you on the Jacker Voice too,” Kira says.

  Because all that wasn’t enough? “Someday, I want this to all be over.” I don’t want a revolution—I just want to live my life, with Tessa, in peace. But her eyes are bright with hope again, and she’s jacking my heart with that look. Maybe it’s wishful thinking—or maybe it’s Tessa’s soft brown eyes—but I can feel the tendrils of hope working their way in. Maybe Kira can talk the readers out of their hate.

  Kira’s voice goes soft. “We need to show them, Zeph. That readers and jackers are the same. That we’re not an alien species, and they’re not genetically superior.”

  She’s talking about my ability to flip people from jacker to reader and back. Which DARPA used to help set up the presidential coup. And which I can only take public by completely and thoroughly outing myself as a jacker—and I can’t do that while trying to bring down Tiller. Or somehow magicking up proof that the Vice President staged a coup.

  “One thing at a time,” I say with a sigh.

  That gets me a nod from Kira. “Go get me the proof I need to shut all this down.”

  I realize a beat too late that I’ve agreed to everything. I just grimace.

  The door at the front swings open, and Major John Scott strides in at a full military clip. “Zeph.” He stops short once he spots the small crowd. “I need a word with you.” The urgency in his voice winds my stomach tight.

  “Yeah, okay.” I swing back to Tessa, but she’s already at my side.

  “I need to stay and help Kira,” she says, breathlessly, like I don’t already know. A tiny frown inhabits her face. “And you need to go.”

  And then, all of a sudden, I realize this is goodbye. I search for words, but there aren’t any.

  She takes hold of my shirt—Hinckley’s shirt—and hauls me down to kiss her. Which I do, but it’s more of a desperate hug because suddenly we’re out of time. She pulls back, her cheeks pinked up from the embarrassment of touching in public, and her lips a little swollen with the fierceness of our kiss.

  “I’ll see you. Later.” Her deep brown eyes capture me for a moment—it’s a promise—and then she turns back to Kira.

  I should go, but my body refuses to move.

  Scott taps my arm. “Come on, kid.”

  I’m moored to the spot, transfixed by a dark sense that if I turn away, Tessa will disappear. If not in reality, then somehow from my life. It shouldn’t be like this. Something deep inside me is screaming. But Tessa and I can’t run away like Ava and Sasha. We can’t fight side-by-side like Anna and Hinckley. We’ll never
truly be together, not until the pieces of the world are put back in place.

  I turn and march out with Scott. I wait until we’re out of the clinic before I ask, roughly, “What is it?”

  “My friends back in the intelligence business,” he replies, “the ones who will still talk to me, anyway… they say this protest is setting things in motion. That Wright’s up to something, and it’s not good.”

  My stomach coils tighter. “Is it ever?”

  Scott shakes his head. “This is going to get worse before it gets better, Zeph. If it gets better. Whatever you’re planning with Tiller, you need to make it happen now. Or forget that avenue completely. You know what I think of your odds there.”

  I nod. But Juliette’s going back whether I come along or not. And it’s my one chance to get that proof Kira wants. Needs. To set everything right.

  Scott scowls. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  I have no idea what I’m doing. “Me too.”

  “You sure you’re ready for this?” I ask the super-cute blond girl sitting next to me.

  “I’m not the one he’s going to kill.” Juliette means her father, tech-mogul and bigot-against-jackers Jeffrey Tiller, the guy I supposedly want for a father-in-law.

  “True.” Tiller will definitely kill me—not Juliette—if he discovers any fraction of the elaborate plan we’ve hatched. We’re supposedly in love, but that’s about as fake as the bruises on her cheek.

  She’s checking them out using the window of the autocab, which she’s dialed into a mirror. Outside, the wooded forests of the North Shore slip by as we whisk toward Tiller’s estate. Home for Juliette. Possibly the last location anyone will see me alive.

  Juliette scowls and taps away the mirror, then draws out a small wand from her shorts pocket. It buzzes with an electric burst when she drags it across her wrist—another bruise blossoms in the wake.

  “Hang on.” I frown. “I thought those were just makeup.”

  “Can’t take any chances.” She draws another line encircling the other wrist.