by Tracy Korn
“Take off the coats. Slowly,” Denison says to the men. They carefully slide their arms out of the white lab jackets and hold them out to us.
“What’s that door?” I ask, angling my head down the corridor to our left.
“Storage,” the doctor in front of me croaks.
Denison takes a look, then shoves the doctor with him toward it while sticking the miniature neural baton into his ribs.
“Let’s go,” I add to the one with me, catching up to Denison just as he opens the door with the doctor’s badge.
Inside are several console stations covered in plastic dust covers. Far in the corner is a clear cube like the one my sister and Lyden were in back at Phase Two.
“Open that up,” Denison says, jabbing the miniature neural baton into the doctor’s ribs. “If you don’t mind, that is, Dr. Howard.”
“You’re going to pay for this, Briggs,” the man says. Denison just jabs him in the ribs again, and the man finally punches a code into a holographic keypad that appears when he covers his hand over the door. Denison jerks his chin toward the cube.
“Both of you get in.”
Once the doctors are inside, the door seals, and Denison turns to one of the consoles behind us. He pulls the clear, plastic dust cover off and presses the badge he took from the doctor flat against the desk, then begins typing something on another holographic keypad that appears.
“What are you do—?” I start to ask but am cut off by a loud, pulsing alarm. The doctors start laughing in the cube, but Denison just keeps typing.
“We got it, we got it,” he shouts, now punching something into the miniature console unit on his arm. “All right, this whole place is going on lock down, so we need to move.”
“What? What did we get?” I ask, looking toward the door and wondering why we’re not bolting toward it.
“The arrow map for this place. We need to get the archive to the core room—flatten your palm here,” Denison says, pressing his hand against the console’s floating screen display. I do the same when he moves his hand and feel a stream of cold shoot up my arm until it stops with a tickle in my ear.
“Ugh, what the hell?”
“Relax. It’s just a navigation app. The same thing was embedded in your nanite package at Gaia Sur. You heard the arrow voices there, right?”
“Yeah, but it didn’t feel like this.”
“This schematic has Howard’s security clearances—bigger file. Let’s get to the core room.”
“Wait, no,” I protest. “We need to get to the recovery room first to get everyone out, then we need to find a ship. Calyx should know about the ships, right? Once the archive hits the core, this place is going to fry.”
Denison presses his lips into a flat line and shakes his head at me. “There’s no time now—we’ll have to split up. Keep your head down and get to the recovery room. I can give you thirty minutes. Go!”
“You’re not coming!?”
“Listen to me.” Denison grips my shoulder and gives me a steely look. His forehead wrinkles as he pushes the badge around my neck into my chest. “Get everyone out of here—get clear.”
“We’re not leaving you here!”
“I’ll find the hangar when the archive is uploaded. If you’re not there, I’ll find another ship. Now go!” he says, shoving me. “Go, before those clone guards figure out you’re coming!”
I stumble back a few steps, then rush to the door. Red lights are flashing everywhere, and there are three times as many guards running around in the same red uniform as mine. I’m not going to get very far with this stupid miniature shock stick, though, so I scan for the closest clone guard carrying a neural ray. I walk toward him facing the ground, then call to him.
“They’re in here!” I shout, waving him to me. As soon as he’s within reach, I grab his arm and press the miniature black baton behind his ear. He drops, jerking a few more times until he stops moving. Did I just kill him? Is it even killing if it’s a clone? I wonder for a second, then watch his face and neck start to cave in before it actually begins disappearing in bigger and bigger patches. A chill runs straight up my back and into my teeth.
I grab the neural ray from him and sling it over my shoulder, snag the gear belt from around his waist, and take off into the mix of red uniforms running everywhere.
CHAPTER 31
You Can Never Go Back
Jazz
We walk in silence for the next several minutes, but it feels like hours before Liddick startles me with a chuckle.
“What?” I ask, but then immediately regret it because my stomach starts to twist. Whatever he’s laughing at isn’t funny.
“You finally did it,” he says without looking at me.
“Did what?”
“Figured out how to block your thoughts from me. I’ve been trying to read you since we left, but all I get is this general…anxiety. Well, and violence toward Vox.” He chuckles again. “But I couldn’t hear your words.”
“I don’t know how I did it, if that makes you feel any better,” I say, and this time he looks at me from under a dark eyebrow.
I don’t know what to say to him. I don’t know how I’ve blocked my thoughts, unless it was just the desperate feeling for him not to know anything about my little epiphany back there. About my personal confession. But it would hurt him to know that kiss didn’t mean what I know he thought—what I let him think—and that’s all my fault.
“What’s going on with you, Rip?” he asks, slowing his pace.
“Nothing. I mean, I just…I don’t want to hurt you.” The twisting in my stomach gets worse, but I’m not sure if these are his feelings or mine. Or both of ours.
“Looks like maybe I didn’t completely misread you after all,” he says after a long pause. “I understood what Vox meant…the part about victory. That was easy to feel in you.”
“Don’t oversimplify this,” I say before he can get another breath. “Of course I was happy we found you. How could I not be?”
“No, I get it. But there was more. And that’s what I can’t find in you now. That’s what you’re closing off from me.”
“This is stupid,” I fire back. “Why does it even matter what else I felt? You’re with us now. We can catch up with the others, and you can explain everything.”
Liddick all but stops walking now and stares straight through me in that way that is too intense. I want to keep walking, but I can’t.
“They don’t agree with you, do they?” he asks. “They think I sabotaged them,” he says.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Spaulding said they would. And when I saw you here…I knew you had to make a choice, Rip. I thought you chose me.”
Liddick searches my face for the answer he wants, but I can’t give it to him.
“We can’t do this here, Liddick. It’s too complicated.”
“Why? What’s complicated about you choosing to come after me, even when the rest of them wrote me off? I can just hear Hart now.” He chuffs another short laugh, and something about the whole way he’s pushing me makes my palms start to itch. I ball my hands into fists before the fire comes, like I know it will, if I don’t calm down. Liddick darts a glance up and down my arms, then raises his dark eyebrows at me. “Your fire is back already?” He nods to himself and lets the corner of his mouth tack to the side. “I must have really clipped you off.”
The itch subsides slowly as I feel a lightness start in my chest. I take a deep breath to reset myself.
“Tell me what happened exactly in that last cine, Liddick. Why did you throw the server reset switch? And before that, why did you rewrite the narrative to support Gaia and incriminate Arco and me?”
He sighs and starts to pick up his pace again. “That’s not what I meant to do,” he says in a low, tight voice. “I was helping someone who was supposed to find Dez after she ran away from us. A quid-pro-quo kind of thing. But once I got in there, it seemed like the cine was already propaganda. I thought they made
the characters who were like you and Hart from my head somehow,” he says, then turns to me. “Rip, I had no idea you were already in the Grid.”
My stomach starts to twist again, but this time with the weight of his guilt. He’s telling the truth, and I don’t know why that’s even something I needed to confirm.
“The Seam had been working on this subliminal messaging system to organically get the public to start questioning Gaia and their affiliates,” I explain, not sure if he even understood why we were in the Grid in the first place. “We accidentally tripped it before they were ready, and only part of the message was getting out. A pro-Gaia message. We were going in to patch the glyphs with the rest of the message when everything got shut down.”
He shakes his head and blows out a breath. “I’m so sorry, Rip. I never meant to—“
“It’s OK,” I interrupt him this time because the twist in my stomach starts to reach into my chest. “Once we get back to Admin City, you can explain to everyone that you were forced into the virtuo-cines, and things can go back to the way they were.”
“Rip…” He starts to laugh tentatively. “If there’s anything we’ve learned since we left the dock at Seaboard North, it’s that we can never go back to the way things were.”
The red firelight ahead of us weakens to a dim glow, and I realize how slowly we’ve been walking.
“We need to catch up to them,” I say.
“Something is catching up to us...” Liddick adds when a red glow spills over the walls in front of us. We both turn around and see...Veece?
He’s wearing the same style woven shirt and tactical pants as the hunting parties the Vishan send out. Kesh and Jesse round the corner just behind him, and now I know he’s not just out for a stroll.
“Are you both all right? Where are Cal and Dell?” Veece asks. His eyebrows push together, wrinkling the diamond and chevron tribal scars on his forehead.
“We’re fine—they’re just ahead. How did you find us?” Liddick asks.
“Took about three minutes for a rabble to start about who made Calliope’s drill go missing. Someone heard the scouts talking about your situation on their way back to you with the drill and told the Council. They sent me after you. We have two more teams behind us.”
“No, no, no...they need to go back to the Vishan tunnels to protect everyone. Those men are coming there,” I say. “We’re on our way back to you right now!”
“Evacuate? Who’s coming?”
“The same men who took me after we made our way out of Phase Two—er, your Motherland.”
“Their Motherland? You were there? Dell said that place doesn’t exist.” Jesse scowls.
Liddick and I exchange glances and he blows out a breath.
“OK, this is a really long story, but in short, Dell was right. About everything.” Veece’s nearly translucent blue eyes widen. “I know, I know,” Liddick continues. “But right now your people are in a lot of danger. We know a way to get them out before the topsiders find them, and we have to hurry.”
Veece takes another second, then turns to Kesh.
“Circle back to the other parties and take them to the cavern. Tell my father I said the prophecy is coming true. He’ll understand what that means. We’ll follow you.”
Kesh pushes the bandana around her neck onto her forehead and tucks the tail into a band, then nods to Veece.
Jesse cracks his neck. “Does the prophecy involve scrappin’ with folks? Been a while since I landed a good punch.”
“Not if we can help it,” Veece answers seriously. “Please, hurry.”
Kesh and Jesse start back the way they came as the rest of us jog to catch up to our group.
Cal and Veece greet each other first with a few shoulder grips, then Veece quickly looks around, confused.
“Where’s Zoe?”
Cal and Dell exchange glances, then both look to me.
“She’s topside...with her father,” I say.
Veece narrows his eyes.“Topside!?”
“It’s all right,” Liddick says. “My brother found a way to reverse her treatment. She can go into the sun now.”
All the blood drains from Veece’s face. The muscles in his sharp jaw flex, and his chest rises with a single deep breath.
“That is for the best. That is her place.” He shifts his eyes to the ground after an awkwardly long pause, and my chest feel like the air is thinning more with each breath. He nods once to us, then ushers Cal a few yards ahead of the group as we follow.
CHAPTER 32
Recovery Rooms
Arco
The door to the recovery rooms opens with the badge I took from the doctor, but inside, all I see are empty clear holding cubes along the far wall. There must be at least five lined up in a row, but something is off. It’s too still…too quiet in here.
I move a few steps along the wall, gripping the neural ray until I hear whimpering. I stop in place and listen, just to make sure I actually heard it. It comes again, and I pick up my pace.
Around the corner are two more holding tanks, bigger than the ones near the entrance to the room. They’re partitioned off from the entryway, and I imagine there must be even more on the other side of them.
Another doctor in a long, white lab coat is typing at a console station behind the partition, and four clone guards in red uniforms stand ready outside both of the enclosures. All of them are brandishing neural rays like mine. Inside, Calyx stands with Lyden and my sister against the clear wall of the first cube, while Jax, his father, and Fraya stand close to each other in the other cube. I blow out a silent breath and try to decide how to get the guards out of the way but still keep the doctor in place so he can open the enclosures.
Calyx pounds on her enclosure, causing one of the clone guards to step toward her.
“Stand down, specimen 8796,” it says, the voice monotone and deep. All five of the other guards train their neural rays on her, but Calyx just pounds her fists on the clear wall of her enclosure again.
“Don’t bother,” the doctor says with a chuckle. “Let her knock herself silly. It won’t affect the cellular mutations.”
After another second, a blue light starts to glow at the base of her platform. A holographic grid display appears in front of the doctor’s console and starts populating with images I can’t make out this far away.
I have a clean shot at the first two guards, and I take it. They drop quickly as the other four shoot their neural rays in my direction, and things get more complicated. I dart back behind the corner and watch the blasts dissipate into the wall in front of me. When I hear their footsteps speed up, I get low and spray a continuous blast along the ground. It hits three of the guards across the shins, and they drop too. They try to stand but can’t, and though they can still shoot, their mobility is impaired. I don’t have a lot of time, I think, but that’s all I can think before I feel something hit me in the shoulder, then a heat rush down my arm and across my chest. I look down and notice a smoldering circle growing in circumference. I just got shot?
I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from yelling out, then taste blood in my mouth. My fingers start to tingle, so I instinctively close my hand into a fist. The streams of heat feel like a current pulsing up my arm, and I start to panic that they won’t stop. Without thinking, I grab the barrel of my neural ray and balance it on my hip, aiming it in the general direction of the guards in front of me, then press the trigger. It’s all I can think to do, even though I know it’s probably the last thing I’ll ever do.
It’s a strange feeling to know you’re going to die. You would think there would be screaming or begging, at the very least fighting, but I can’t find any of that in me. Everything just seems to slow down. I look up at the guard running toward me and wait for another blast to hit me in the chest or the stomach. I wait for everything to go numb and dark, but the guard suddenly drops right in front of me.
I nearly choke on my tongue, not sure what just happened. Did he trip? I wonder un
til the hollows of his cheeks start to cave in just like the other clone, and I choke again in complete astonishment. I hit him? I must have hit him? I think.
The heat in my arm starts to shoot down my leg, and my chest tightens. Blood pounds in my ears as I try to push myself forward, the neural ray still balanced on my hip and my fingers wrapped around the trigger guard.
“Open the doors!” I shout, surprised at the sound of my own voice, which is ragged and a lot lower than normal. I sound like one of the clones. “Now!”
The doctor throws his hands in the air, then abruptly turns back to the console. I move as quickly as I can to his side and push the barrel of the neural ray between his shoulder blades.
“You won’t be able to leave this facility. They have alerts on every level.” The doctor almost whimpers, holding his hands at his sides. Over his shoulder, I’m drawn to the code he just entered onto the console, and before I know how I know what he typed, I know it needs to be stopped.
“Why couldn’t you just open the doors?” I say too loudly next to his ear, then shoot him in the ribs with the neural ray. He drops to the ground in a convulsive fit, and then totally passes out. The code keeps scrolling.
Jax rushes the wall of the enclosure next to Calyx and pounds against the glass, exploding in cheers when he sees me. I scan for my sister and feel sick when I don’t see her, until she and Lyden come out from behind the others. Lyden tries to mouth something to me, but I can’t make it out.
The console starts beeping and blinking as the columns of code scroll quickly upward. Something is wrong. This is a countdown.
I sling the neural ray to my back and try to clear my head…to see something in the chaos of symbols and numbers, but the harder I push, the more chaotic it all becomes.
“Damn it!” I shout, then hear more pounding on the glass. I turn to see Lyden looking at me hard. He points his first two fingers at me, then redirects them to his eyes. Watch him? Why?