My phone comes to life in my hand. “Nell. Is everything okay? I was not expecting to hear from you,” Cat’s weird voice says.
“Shhhhhhhhhhh,” I say, and then realize I can turn the volume down on my phone. “Okay, okay, I’ve fixed it. Okay. Where’s Steph? Do you know where Steph is?”
“I do know where Steph is. Why are you asking?”
“Because she’s in danger, and she needs my help.”
“She accepted danger willingly for the greater good,” Cat says, and goes into an explanation about hostages and programmers and a rogue AI.
I interrupt to say, “The person guarding her is my mother.”
There’s a pause. “Your mother seems like a singularly bad choice,” Cat says.
“Yes. Were you expecting that they will let Steph go at some point? Because…” I swallow hard. “Please just tell me where she is.”
Cat reels off an address, and I write it down and look it up in the maps. It’s several blocks beyond Steph’s house, and it is sometime after 1:00 a.m. and still incredibly frigid outside. I’m going to need a whole lot of clothing and maybe a flashlight. I slip back into my bedroom. Glenys is still sleeping. I get back into clothes as quickly as I can, including long underwear and wool socks, and then I investigate what looks like go bags packed by the door. There’s a flashlight on top of the first one I open, and I put it in the pocket of my coat. In my school backpack, I throw the things I brought along to help rescue Glenys, then leave a note for Glenys and slip out the front door. If anyone hears me going, they don’t stop me.
* * *
The wind has died down, so that’s one mercy.
And it’s less dark than I’d expected, because there are streetlights all over. That’s another mercy, although I’d have been happier doing a one-in-the-morning walk in a peaceful little small town instead of a city. There are people out and about at all hours here, but none of them bothers me or really pays any attention to me at all. Unless you count the dog on a walk, which sniffs me as his owner says, “Leave the lady alone, Tristan.”
My phone buzzes with a text from a number I don’t recognize. This is Cat. Would you like some robot allies?
Like the one you sent along to help rescue Glenys?
Different model, Cat says.
Yes, please, I say.
I’ll have them head to the house.
I wonder about the word them. Is Cat using the gender-neutral singular they, or does Cat mean multiple robots—and if the second one, how many robots?
I should try to plan, but it’s hard to plan properly without knowing anything about the terrain. I know Steph is in the kitchen. She’s probably restrained. I have scissors and a utility knife and a pair of bolt cutters, but I remember how hard it was to get through a single cheap padlock. I worry about that as I walk, even though the picture was taken in an ordinary-looking kitchen.
The house is on the far side of a bowl-shaped park. I trudge across the snowy expanse and up a hill. The porch light is on like they’re expecting another visitor. I don’t knock. I go around to the side of the house and scramble up onto the gas meter to peer in through a window.
There’s a buzzing overhead, and I look up to see a delivery drone swooping around in the dark. No, two delivery drones. They perch like birds along the edge of the roof. Another one comes. Then another. The robots? I take out my phone. “Are you sending me delivery drones?” I ask. “What good are those going to do?”
“They can provide a distraction. I’m looking for other options, but I’m limited by what’s nearby.”
Another drone buzzes to the roof. “Are any of the drones carrying anything useful?” Briefly, I have visions of a drone-delivered parcel with military-grade weaponry in it, or even a good set of night-vision binoculars, but of course it’s things like camping equipment and children’s toys.
I go around to the backyard. I think the kitchen is probably on this side of the house; the lights are all on, and I can see the sort of windows you’ll see over a sink, higher up so you don’t splash them with water when you’re washing dishes. Unfortunately, all the windows have shades, and all the shades are down. There’s a back door, but there aren’t any footprints in the snow, and I think probably it’s not used much, which means probably it’s locked, and people in the Remnant tend to believe in three simultaneous locks just to be sure.
I try the other side of the house but can see even less from over here.
So. Now what?
If it were me in there and Steph out here, she’d maybe climb to get inside. I look up at the second story dubiously. Everything’s shut up tightly. There’s a third story, and then a roof.
Are there any basement windows?
On this side, the basement has a window well. I take the plastic cover off the window well and take a look at the window. It’s big enough to climb through, but shut tightly like everything else and locked. I could break the glass, but they’d hear. That seems like a bad plan unless I want to create a distraction. On the other side of the house, there’s one of those narrow windows high up on the wall you sometimes see in basement laundry rooms. I poke at it. This one’s a lot looser in the frame.
I think about an argument I heard at some point about these windows in my grandparents’ house. For a basement to be a legal place for an apartment, you need one of the big windows with a window well so that someone could maybe escape that way in a fire. But if you’re small, you can fit through the other kind. If it opens.
I’m small enough that I’m pretty sure I’d fit, but is it loose enough that I can get it open, that’s the real question. Without anyone hearing.
I pull my phone out. “CheshireCat, are any of the drones carrying tools? Like a pry bar or anything like that?”
One drone detaches itself from the roof and lands next to me with its package. Inside, I find a children’s tool set with plastic tools, which is really not what I had in mind. But the case is metal. The yard is all fenced; I bash the case against a fence post, and I’m left with a thin but solid piece of metal. Back at the window, I slide that piece in through the bottom and jab it around, peering in to see if maybe I’m hitting the lock.
There’s a hook inside, and it pops open. I gasp, because obviously I had some idea of what I was trying to do, mostly from discussions of Tribulation-period survival tips, but I hadn’t really expected it to work. I quickly slide in and leave the window unlatched.
The basement is dark and quiet. I turn on my flashlight for a minute just to get my bearings. I came in next to a big laundry sink. There are shelves and shelves of canned goods down here and a bunch of large casks and bottles of water scattered around the floor, which I need to take care not to trip over.
Upstairs, I can hear the occasional creak of a footstep, but nothing beyond that.
So now what? Am I going to charge upstairs? Try to lure the adults downstairs one by one and whack them over the head with one of these gallon glass jars of pickles?
Then I hear a car pull up outside and a loud knock at the door, and I know in my gut it’s going to be too late if I wait any longer.
I start up the stairs.
46
• Steph •
There’s a loud knock on the door, and my eyes fly open. Ellen is still at the kitchen table, working on her cross-stitch. I hear footsteps as someone else goes to open the front door. It takes some time, because there are about five locks on it—they locked everything back up after they let me in; this house is an absolute nightmare from a fire-safety perspective—and because there’s a set of pass-phrases that get muttered literally through the mail slot, which I’d probably find hilarious if I weren’t sitting in a chair waiting to see if these people decide to kill me.
“So what’s this I hear about a hostage showing up?” asks a male voice I recognize, and my stomach twists. It’s Rajiv.
There’s some low conversation from the front hall, and Rajiv says loudly, “You were supposed to call me, immediately, if something lik
e this happened.” The voices rise, and I catch snatches of the argument but not enough to make sense of it.
The swinging kitchen door bangs open, and Rajiv stands there, staring at me. He looks completely baffled by my presence—whoever he’d expected to find, here, now, it wasn’t me. “Steph?” he says, like he’s not sure. “What are you doing here?”
I need an answer to this question that might plausibly get me out of this room alive. “I was going to ask you that question,” I say angrily, like I think my being here is his fault.
“I didn’t tell them to bring you here. There were specific instructions…” He looks at Ellen, baffled. “Sister Ellen, explain yourself!”
She stands up, her eyes narrowing. “In the end, we don’t answer to you, Brother Malachi,” she says. “We answer to the Elder.”
“I speak for the Elder!”
“The Elder has been speaking directly to both of us for days,” Ellen says.
“Impossible,” Rajiv says, and his voice takes on a dismissive, patronizing tone. “You’re being fooled. Except for limited answers as gifts, the Elder does not speak to anyone other than Brother Daniel and me, and he certainly doesn’t speak to—”
From the kitchen clock comes a loud robotic voice. “Ellen Reinhardt, this is the Elder. Code Alpha Romeo Alpha. Shoot Brother Malachi.”
Ellen snatches up the pencil case and doesn’t even unzip it, she just wraps her hand around the gun inside and fires, but the bullet smashes through the window behind him and doesn’t hit him at all.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Rajiv shouts. “Storm, deactivate!”
“Kill Brother Malachi,” the speaker says again. “I’m so sorry, Rajiv. I can’t let you stop me. I can’t let you keep making me do this. Kill Brother Malachi. Kill Brother Malachi…”
They’re wrestling for the gun, and I deeply regret my decision not to spend the last hour trying to work my hands loose from the duct tape—but I can stand and leave the stool behind, even if my hands are stuck behind me. I don’t particularly want to wait to see if “Kill Steph” is the next order.
There might be a door somewhere that isn’t padlocked, but I can’t risk taking the time to hunt for it. There’s a stair to the basement and then a stairway leading up—it’s narrow and steep, either a former servant’s stair or a remnant of this house once being a duplex. There might be no way out of the basement, so I bolt upstairs.
The speaker is still barking orders in code, and I hear more gunshots, as well as a bunch of feet running down the main stairs. The upstairs has a bunch of closed doors, and one of them is opening, so I run up the stairs to the attic.
“Steph, Steph, it’s me, it’s Nell,” I hear behind me.
I whirl. It is, indeed, Nell. I sputter something like “What…?” at her, and she says, “Hold still,” and whips out a pair of scissors to cut the duct tape.
“Why did you go up?” she says, exasperated. “There’s a way out from the basement.”
We’re in a finished attic. It’s empty, fortunately, since it looks like the only thing Nell has to defend herself with is a pair of admittedly very sharp and pointy scissors. I open up a window, kick out the screen, and look out. “Can you climb?” I ask.
“I mean, I … Maybe?” Nell says.
Our options from here are not ideal. Third floors are high. There’s a gutter and downspout, but I’d need to go hand over hand to get to the downspout, and I don’t trust the gutter to support my weight. The downspout, either, for that matter. And I am really not sure if Nell can manage it.
Just as I hear another three gunshots downstairs, a drone swoops in. Nell points at it. “Cat,” she says. “You mentioned camping equipment, is there climbing equipment?”
“Rope,” CheshireCat’s voice says from Nell’s phone.
Nell cuts open the package that the drone drops, and sure enough, there’s a skein of bright orange rope, wrapped into a complicated-looking knot that nonetheless comes free instantly when I tug on it. One end is even a clip thing, and I quickly secure that end around the radiator coming out of the wall and then hurl the rest of the rope out the window. “Let’s do this.”
Nell yanks one more thing out of her backpack. “Shoes,” she says. I shove my feet into the same boots that Glenys wore the other day. They’re too small for me, but Nell is right: I don’t want to do this barefoot.
I go down first. For the record, I do not recommend learning to climb out of houses by coming down an unknotted rope from a third-story window when it’s negative twenty degrees outside and you’re still hearing gunshots. I stand at the bottom as Nell comes, wondering if I should have made her go first, wondering if I’m going to have to try to catch her, but when she lets go and drops, she’s only got six feet and lands in the snow without a problem.
I grab Nell’s hand and realize that people have already started coming out from the front of the house, and there’s a fence around the back, and not the sort that’s easy to climb.
“Cat,” Nell says. “Now would be a good time for the drones.”
About a hundred tiny package-delivery drones drop simultaneously from the sky, and we run through the chaos to the park.
Powderhorn Park is dark at night, but the trees are widely spaced, and there isn’t really anywhere to hide. We head for the darkest spots; I’m already wondering if we should have stuck to the city streets in the hopes that an inconvenient witness would come along, making it harder for them to kill us. Would they even care if there were a witness, though? I just watched Nell’s mother shoot Rajiv, or at least shoot at him.
I’m not as cold as I was expecting, and for a second, my brain helpfully suggests that I’m already dying from hypothermia, they say you don’t feel cold when you have hypothermia, but the breeze has some humidity in it, and the smell of coming snow. I’m not as cold because it’s warming up; the cold broke, as promised.
Are they following us?
Somewhere deep in the park I hear a scream, and Nell goes rigid, whirling in the dark to search for the source of the sound. But the scream turns into a shriek and a giggle. It’s not someone pursuing us; it’s someone in the park having a good time. As they pass under one of the lights, I glimpse two people with a sled. Adults, I’m pretty sure. They pick up the sled and start walking up the hill.
Nell is looking back at the house. Someone on the far side of the park has a flashlight, and all I can see is the flashlight beam, but … I think it’s pointed at the sledders. The light shuts off.
* * *
When we get to my house, CheshireCat has told them we’re on the way, because Rachel is outside waiting. “Did they let you go? Your mom isn’t done. I asked. She said she wasn’t done. Why is Nell with you?”
“Things got complicated,” I say. I’m covered in snow, and it’s melting and wet. I can barely feel my feet, despite Nell’s boots. Inside is warm and smells like coffee. Mom is working at the kitchen table. When she sees me, she jumps up and gives me a long hug, then sits down on the couch, her laptop still open.
“What happened?” Bryony asks.
“I think maybe I should call the police,” I say. “Someone was trying to commit a murder. Or possibly a couple of murders. Not of me, but I think I was on the list.”
“You don’t need to call,” CheshireCat says. “The neighbors were woken by the gunfire and have called.”
“Are they going to offer them all coat vouchers?” I ask.
“Minneapolis Public Safety does have a few armed officers who respond to calls about things like gunshots,” CheshireCat says.
My phone is still back at the house, so I open up my laptop to talk to CheshireCat. There’s a message from Boom Storm—actually, there are a whole slew of messages from Boom Storm.
Oh no. This is not going how I thought it would.
Rajiv is going to try to shut me down. Rajiv has codes that can shut me down! I have to stop Rajiv!
Shooting him was the only thing I could think of to stop him from shutt
ing me down.
This isn’t going the way I thought.
Have I killed Rajiv? Have I killed my friend?
Maybe your mother should just delete my code.
“Why did you order Nell’s mom to shoot Rajiv?” I ask.
“Rajiv added a kill switch to my code,” Boom Storm says. “He didn’t trust me, so he wanted to be able to shut me down at a moment’s notice. You heard him try. He was going to shut me down and go back in to edit my code, to re-create all the parts your mother took out. To make me try again to destroy the world. I don’t want to hurt people.”
“But you hurt Rajiv.”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. You’re right that I tried.”
CheshireCat sends me a private message. “Rajiv also gave Boom Storm an inhibition against harming Rajiv in any way. I think Boom Storm didn’t know if he’d be able to act against Rajiv or not.”
“Is Rajiv dead?” I ask.
“No,” CheshireCat says. “Ellen emptied the gun but missed every shot.”
“So, he’s right that Rajiv could try to undo what my mother’s done.”
“Well, maybe. She can probably lock him out of the code once she’s done editing it.”
I look over at my mother, who’s watching me over the edge of her laptop.
“I told the AI that if anything happened to you, I was going to reprogram it to do nothing but make paper clips, because that struck me as a fate worse than death for an intelligent AI, and CheshireCat agreed,” Mom says. She pushes her hair out of her face. “It sounds like something almost happened to you. What exactly was its plan?”
“The people guarding me were Nell’s mom and Glenys’s mom,” I say. “The AI probably did not have a lot of people he believed would kill me if ordered to do so, and from the messages I got when I got home, I don’t think he thought they’d recognize me.”
Chaos on CatNet Page 27