Ben did.
“What are you doing here, Lia? What are you doing with that?”
“You think he’s talking about the gun, or about me?” Jude asked.
Ben wore a set of checkered flannel pajamas. His quilt was navy, with a thick black trim. For so long he’d been this BioMax boogeyman, always one step ahead of me, ready to cajole or blackmail or smarm his way into getting whatever he wanted. But now he was just a guy. And kind of a sad, small one.
“What’s phase three?” I asked.
“What?”
“You’re going to the server ship on Sunday. What are you doing there?”
“I told you before, we’re dealing with the virus—Look, is this about Riley?” He sounded almost impatient. “Because if it is, I was just trying to help. I didn’t know about the stored file until recently, and this really isn’t necessary; I can—”
“Shut up. This isn’t about Riley. What’s phase three?”
Ben swung his legs toward the side of the bed like he was about to climb out.
“Don’t move,” I said.
He shook his head. “You’re not going to shoot me, Lia.”
“You’re so sure?”
“I know you,” he said, the same old Ben, sure he knew me better than I knew myself. “This isn’t you. Him, maybe, but not you.”
“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment,” I said. “But I’m guessing he will too.” Never taking my eyes—or the muzzle—off of Ben, I handed the gun over to Jude. Just once, I’d wanted to see how it felt to have the power over Ben, the control, to know he had to do what I wanted. But I couldn’t have pulled the trigger. I knew that, and he knew that.
For this to work we needed someone who could.
“Get back in bed,” Jude said. Ben did as he was told. “You want to tell me this isn’t me?” Jude sneered. “You want to tell me I don’t have it in me?”
Ben was a good liar, but apparently not that good. He gripped the edge of the blanket, tugging it around himself like it was bulletproof. “What do you want?”
“Phase three,” I said again.
“You keep saying that, and I’m telling you, I have no idea.”
We went back and forth several times, until it was made clear that Ben was either far more courageous or more clueless than we’d given him credit for, because even with a gun in his face—wielded by a mech who would have loved nothing more than to pull the trigger on the man who’d delivered the news of Riley’s death—he gave us nothing. I’d suspected all along that Ben wasn’t behind BioMax’s planned eradication of the mechs. He was too impassioned about the technology, too grossly sincere in his desire to help us, in his need to be liked. So maybe they’d kept him in the dark. It didn’t mean he couldn’t help us, willingly or not.
“I believe you,” I said finally.
“Really?” he asked, surprised.
“Really?” Jude echoed, equally so.
“Really. So here’s what you’re going to do.” I channeled my mother, and the imperious way she’d treated him, like he existed only to serve her purposes. I’d seen him bend to her, to M. Poulet, to anyone with enough power. If he liked to be led so much, we could accommodate him. “You’re going to take us with you when you go to the server ship. Then it’ll be easy to prove that you’re not doing anything but helping us. Because we’ll be right there with you.”
Ben laughed, but it was a sick, frightened noise. “That’s never going to happen.”
“Try again,” Jude growled.
“Do you know how much security there is on those ships?” Ben asked. “Even to get on the launch that’s going to take us out to the ship, there are massive layers of security to get through. They’re not going to just let me walk on board with a couple of mechs. And trust me, their guns are bigger than yours.”
“So you’re not going to help us,” Jude said.
“I’ve been trying to help you,” Ben said loudly, his voice climbing the register. “Why don’t you just let me? Walk out of here, and we can pretend nothing happened. Let me stop the virus, and you can all just go back to your lives.”
“All the people at Safe Haven, they can just go home?” I said.
“Of course.”
“Because they’re just being held for their own protection, right?”
“No one’s being held,” Ben said. “It’s like I tried to tell your mother: They’re not prisoners; they’re clients. We’re protecting them.”
“Have you been inside?” I asked.
He hesitated. “That’s not really my area.”
“So you can’t really say what’s going on inside.”
“It’s my corp,” Ben said. “I’ve been working there for twenty years. I’ve been working toward this, toward you, for twenty years. Why would any of us want to hurt you? We created you.”
“So you’re God,” I said. “Someone tell Savona. I hear he’s been hoping for an introduction.”
“I know BioMax took something from you, Lia.”
It was a tidy euphemism.
“But look what we gave you!” he continued. “A new life. Eternal life. A miracle. And this technology isn’t just about saving individual lives or winning wars—this is the preservation of human consciousness. Through any upheaval, through all our global crises, we now have the tools to endure. This is a new beginning for us, Lia. For humanity.”
The saddest part of all was that I believed him. At least, I believed that he believed it. He believed in BioMax.
He didn’t know.
“What’s the EMP generator for?” I asked.
“What generator?”
“In Safe Haven, behind the residence facilities, there’s an EMP bomb,” I said. “Useful for emitting a giant electromagnetic pulse that could wipe us out in one shot. And not much else.”
Ben shook his head. “You’re mistaken.”
“Or you are.”
“We’re wasting time,” Jude said. “Can you get us to the ship or not? Because if not, you’re not much use, are you?”
“Give him a chance,” I said. It was a little late to try good cop, bad cop, but I figured it couldn’t hurt. “I’m sure he’ll think of something.”
A bead of sweat trickled down Ben’s cheek. His hands had turned white with the pressure of gripping the blanket. “I will,” he said quickly. “I’ll think of something.”
But he didn’t. Jude was getting impatient.
“Walk us through it,” I suggested. “How do you get to the servers?”
“I have coordinates for the launch ship,” he said. “We meet and set off from there—”
“Slow down,” I said. “More details. When do you go. What do you do when you get there. You get the idea.”
“I’m due at dawn. The rest of my team will arrive by two p.m.”
“Who’s on the team?”
“Just my staff, other techs.”
“You get to decide who goes?”
He nodded. “I give the list to security; they screen us and let us onto the launch ship.”
“And why do you have to get there before everyone else?”
“There’s equipment to load,” Ben said. “This is a scheduled monthly maintenance check, so we’re replenishing equipment and supplies. I have to supervise that it’s all accounted for and loaded—”
“That’s it,” I said.
“What’s it?”
“The equipment,” Jude said. He got it too. “Shipping crates, right? Anything could be inside them.”
“Well, they screen them—”
“But you’re in charge,” I said. “You say what goes and what doesn’t. You could get around the screening.”
“Maybe.” Ben looked like he was almost as afraid of that prospect as he was of Jude shooting him down in his bed. It occurred to me that if he got caught trying to help us stow away, his ending wouldn’t be any more pleasant.
I hadn’t asked for this, I reminded myself. And I hadn’t started it. BioMax had. Call-me-B
en had chosen his side. It wasn’t my fault this was where he ended up.
Still, I was glad Jude was the one holding the gun.
“So we stow away in the crates,” Jude said. “Just one problem—what’s to stop him from screwing us over as soon as we’re inside?”
“Don’t suppose you’d just take my word for it?” Ben asked weakly.
“One of us needs to get on board with him,” I said. “To watch him.”
“That brings us right back where we started,” Jude said, disgusted. “Nowhere.”
“Not quite.”
It couldn’t be Jude, and it couldn’t be me. No one would ever believe two mechs had business on a server ship, especially under these circumstances. Auden’s face was too well known. Which left only one option.
And maybe I’d been thinking about it all along.
“Come in here, Zo,” I called.
Ben’s eyes widened as she came into the room.
“You recognize her?” I asked Ben.
“I don’t think we’ve met, but I know the name.”
Zo rolled her eyes. “Typical,” she said. “We’ve met about ten times. Don’t feel bad. No one ever notices me when big sister’s in the room.”
I didn’t argue with her, because when it came to BioMax she was right. Which was what I was hoping. “No one knows her,” I said. “She could be anyone. Even Halley.”
What little color was left in Ben’s face drained away. “What did you say?”
“Your daughter. Halley. Don’t you think she and Zo look a bit alike? I know you haven’t seen her in years, so maybe you should just trust me on this—”
“Do not bring her into this,” he said, with cold fury. So he did care about something beyond his corp and his cause. Who knew?
“No one knows Zo,” I said. “No one knows Halley. A little hair dye, some new clothes, a fake ID … There’s no reason to think that your crew would be able to tell one from the other.”
“You want—” He swallowed, hard. “You want me to pretend she’s my daughter? And convince my team—and ship security—that for some reason I need to bring her along on a maintenance trip to a highly secure server farm?”
I shrugged. “Tell them it’s a field trip. Or punishment. Or you’re trying to buy her love with a vacation on the high seas. I don’t care—you’ll think of something.”
Zo looked as uncertain as he did. “Lia, I don’t know—”
“And I suppose she’s going to, what? Hide the gun under her shirt? Or you want me to come up with an excuse for that one too? And have you thought about what happens to her if she tries anything? Surrounded by security?”
“We won’t have to worry about that,” Jude said, unexpectedly, and approached the bed. Ben pressed himself against the wall, eyes wild.
“Turn over,” Jude said.
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
“No. No, you want to shoot me, you look me in the eye.”
“I don’t want to shoot you,” Jude said. “But I will if I have to. Turn over.”
Very slowly, Ben turned over, and lay facedown on the mattress. He was shaking. Jude bent over him. Something silver flashed in his palm as he brought his hand toward Ben’s neck. Ben yelped with pain and jerked away.
“You can sit up now,” Jude said, backing away. Ben rubbed his hand against the back of his neck, frowning as he felt something that shouldn’t be there.
“What did you do?” he asked.
“Just a little fail-safe,” Jude said. “Riley designed it. You remember how good he was with explosives.”
Ben looked like he was remembering exactly how good Riley had been with explosives, at least when it came to wiring the Brotherhood laboratory for demolition. He looked like he was also remembering that the explosion in that case had happened somewhat prematurely.
Jude lowered the gun. In his left hand he held a slim cylinder with a button at the end. “There’s a miniaturized explosive embedded beneath your skin, where your spinal cord meets your brain stem. I press this button, you go boom. Elegant, don’t you think?”
He held it out to Zo, who waited a long moment before accepting the offering. I wanted to tell her she didn’t have to.
“You’re bluffing,” Ben said.
“You want a demonstration?” Jude asked. “I give Zo the word, and you’ll be smeared all over your bedroom walls. Which, admittedly, could use the decoration—but you wouldn’t be around to appreciate it, so what good would that do?”
“Lia, this is insane,” Ben said. “Tell me you know this is insane.”
“Ben, you scooped my brain out of my dead body and loaded it into a machine. Don’t talk to me about insane.”
“I want you to leave my house right now,” Ben said. “You leave, and I’m calling the secops, and we are done here. Done. You simply can’t do this. I won’t let you.”
“Ben, listen to me—”
“Right shoulder,” Jude said. “Two inches.”
Before I could ask what he was talking about, there was a loud crack. Jude barely flinched with the recoil. The bullet blasted into the wall, two inches above Ben’s right shoulder. Ben screamed.
“You understand I meant to miss,” Jude said. “Next time I won’t. Are you with me now?”
Ben nodded.
“Ready to help us?”
Ben snuck a few small glances at the hole in the wall, jerking his eyes away quickly, each time, like he preferred not to see. Then he nodded again. He was ready.
There were preparations to be made. Auden guarded Ben while we dealt with dyeing Zo’s hair and dressing her up to look as much like Ben’s daughter as possible. Zo herself took care of the fake ID—it clearly wasn’t her first attempt. While she was busy with that, I had Jude to myself, which gave me the perfect opportunity to ask why the hell he’d neglected to mention Riley’s magic mini-bomb at any point before the absolute last minute.
“Because I didn’t think of it until then?” he said.
“You just forgot?”
“No, I mean, we needed it, so I made it up.”
We were alone in the living room, with no chance of anyone overhearing us. Still, I lowered my voice to a whisper. “You were bluffing?”
“You thought I just happened to have the exact super-secret weapon that we needed in that exact moment?” Jude snorted.
“If it’s not an explosive, what the hell is it?”
“I palmed some stuff from his lab, just in case.”
“Just in case?”
He shrugged. “Bad habit. But it came in handy, right? That’s where I got the injector. The ‘explosive’ is just a random chip.”
“And the detonator?”
“Remote ignition starter for the car. Never leave home without it.”
I wanted to punch him. “And when were you planning on telling me? Or Zo?”
Jude got serious, fast. “Zo can’t find out,” he said. “The bluff works only if she believes it.”
“So you want to send her in blind and defenseless?”
“You want to give up and go home?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You know I’m right,” Jude said.
I didn’t know. But I wasn’t going to argue. I didn’t need his permission to tell Zo the truth; I just had to figure out whether I should. So I pretended he’d convinced me, and shifted the conversation to what would happen if and when we got ourselves onto the server ship. We’d have one weapon, we’d have one hostage—and we’d be extremely deep in hostile territory with admittedly no clue as to what we’d do next. Playing it by ear wasn’t exactly a comfortable option, but it wasn’t clear we had an alternative. Ben would be able to guide us to the right part of the ship, and from there it would be up to us to figure out exactly what his team was planning on doing to the servers. I was more convinced than ever that he was clueless, which we could use to our advantage—but if he turned out to be a better liar than I’d thought, if he was leading the phase three cha
rge, then we would deal with that, too. One weapon, one hostage. Worst case, we could try to alert the ship’s security team, revealing BioMax’s plans along with our presence, and probably, if the rumors were right about the on-board lawlessness, getting us all killed. But that was the thing we all understood, even if we hadn’t talked about it: There was a plan to get ourselves safely on board.
There was no plan to get off.
FALLEN
“I don’t know how to forgive you.”
By four a.m. on Sunday we were ready. We drove to the loading zone in silence. Ben sat motionless in the back seat, looking neither at us nor the gun. He’d dropped any vestige of fighting back. He did what we said, followed our orders, and every hour, seemed to turn deeper into himself. I knew what it was like to give yourself over to someone else’s decision making, following an external voice and silencing your own. But he was going to have to wake up soon, because in a few hours Jude, Auden, and I would be trapped inside a shipping crate; Ben would be on his own with only my sister and a dubious bluff to keep him in line. He was the only one who could talk us all onto the ship, and I knew he believed his life depended on it. I just didn’t know how much he cared.
The BioMax equipment crates were being warehoused in a secure facility near the docks. Ben guided us through the shadows and pressed his thumb to the security pad. A panel the size of a garage door creaked open. The interior was dark, but I could make out the dim outlines of towering stacks of crates.
“Where’s the security?” Jude asked, suspicious.
“Coordinates of this dock are on a need-to-know basis,” Ben said dully. “For something like this, the best security is no security.”
Jude shook his head. “Bureaucratic brilliance never ceases to amaze me.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off the stacks. “You’re going to hide us in a crate and get us on the ship, right?” I asked Ben.
“That’s the plan, isn’t it?”
“So what happens when we end up at the bottom of a giant stack like this? We just wait a few months for someone to get around to unpacking us?”
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