Deprecated

by Michael Karr

  Something fishy was going on. And she had a pretty good idea who was to blame.

  She turned and looked at the reason, sitting there at her kitchen table, arms folded, yawning like he hadn’t slept all night.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “So this is what peanut butter tastes like,” Grayson said, licking another spoonful. “I had no idea.”

  “Wait a minute,” Rylee said, unable to keep from acting interested, “you’ve never had peanut butter before?”

  “My father’s allergic to peanuts,” Grayson explained. “To my knowledge, I’ve never eaten a peanut in my life.”

  “That wasn’t uncommon,” her grandfather said. “Before Desolation, seemed like half the population was allergic to peanuts. Couldn’t send kids to school with peanut butter sandwiches. Or take peanuts on planes. Or have peanut breath in a hospital. Ridiculous. Everyone was afraid someone would go into anaphylactic shock, die, then sue them.”

  Grayson nodded his head knowingly. “It’s pretty serious for some people. My father always carries around an epinephrine injector, just in case. When I was about twelve, he made me super angry. So, I snuck into his bedroom, took all his injectors, and replaced the medicine inside them with water. I secretly hoped he would accidentally be exposed to peanuts, go into shock, then try to use one of the useless injectors.” Grayson shook his head, smiling. “I was that mad at him. He’d probably have died if that happened. I was scared stupid after that. So scared I never told him what I did. For all I know, he’s still walking around with those same useless injectors.”

  “Wow, that’s really awful,” Rylee said. “Even for an Elect.”

  Grayson’s dark eyes flashed on her. “Well, you already know we Elects are scum.”

  Rylee didn’t respond. The hint of irony in his voice wasn’t lost on her. What had he done? More importantly, why had he done it? She’d wait until her grandfather was gone to confront him.

  Clapping Grayson on the shoulder, her grandfather said, “None of us is perfect. Neither are we defined by being an Elect or a Norm.” He gave Rylee a stern look of disapproval. “Now, it’s time to get moving.”

  Retrieving his Bible from his bedroom, her grandfather read a verse of scripture, offered a prayer—offering gratitude to God for being spared another day—then left for work. Rylee promised that she was leaving just as soon as she put on her boots.

  And after I make Grayson talk.

  As soon as the door banged shut, Rylee pounced. “What did you do with those Regulators?”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Grayson said. “We need to work on your people skills.”

  “I don’t have people skills. Now, tell me what you did.”

  “Or you’ll…shoot me? Because that’s how you thank people here.”

  Rylee let out a sigh. Must she truly act nice to him?

  “Fine. I’m sorry. I just have to know what happened.”

  Grayson raised his eyebrows, nodding appreciatively. “That’s better. See, it’s not so hard.”

  “It would be a whole lot easier if you weren’t such a jerk.”

  “Oh, now we’re regressing a little.”

  “Stop it! Are you going to tell me or not?” Had she actually just stomped her foot like a spoiled child? Desolation, how he could infuriate her!

  The grin on Grayson’s face vanished. “I’m sorry,” he said, actually sounding sincere. “I have a bad habit of being a jerk. I often take jokes too far.”

  Rylee didn’t respond. What could she say? I still think you’re a jerk?

  “What I did with those Regulators,” he went on, “was stall them. They’ll be back again once they figure out your grandfather was not brought in. That’s why we need to work together.”

  “I don’t understand. How did you stall them? You didn’t even talk to them. Did you hack into the system?”

  He shook his head. “No, I didn’t hack into the system. Doing so without leaving a trace is…complicated. And especially risky for me. What I did, I call a Real-time Altered Reality Attack. R-A-R-A.”

  “Catchy name,” Rylee replied dryly.

  “Give me a break. I write code, not marketing copy. Anyway, it was something I was developing before I…left. As far as I know, no one but my father knows about it. It’s essentially a PNU virus. I’ll spare you the technical details. Essentially, any user who’s attacked by it, will have his PNU controlled by the attacker.”

  Rylee wrinkled her brow. “You mean, you took control of those two Regulators?”

  Grayson weaved his head. “Not exactly. I couldn’t control their bodies. Not directly. However, I could override the visual system of their PNUs, for example. When they looked in this room, they didn’t see me. I used my PNU to send them an altered version of the room, which excluded me. Likewise, when they scanned your grandfather’s barcode, the data returned was the correct data. However, I modified it in real-time to show him being five years younger than he is.”

  He paused. Rylee just looked at him. Stunned. The idea sounded too farfetched to be real. Then again, Rylee didn’t understand how the PNUs worked in the first place.

  “Are you still controlling those Regulators?”

  “No, I severed the link as soon as they walked out the door. The virus isn’t perfect. It puts tremendous strain on the attacker’s PNU, especially with more than one person being attacked. My PNU had to process nearly three-times the amount of data.” He yawned again. “And the longer I keep it up, the more difficult it becomes to ensure there’re no discrepancies in their reality once I sever the link.”

  “Why did you do it?” she said.

  His dark eyes looked back at her, and for the first time she didn’t feel any repulsion to look back. When he spoke, his voice was soft. “Because your grandfather didn’t deserve Deprecation. And I hoped, in some way, it might atone for my own mistakes.”

  “Thank you,” she said, surprised to hear those words coming out of her mouth.

  “You owe me no thanks. I’m glad that I could be here to help. But, you’re welcome, all the same.”

  An awkward silence fell between them after that. Rylee didn’t know what to say. It was easier to treat him like a rat, than to be civil. Now she felt like she had on her first day as a field worker when she was just a little girl; small and insecure.

  “I’d better get to work,” she finally said, moving to grab her boots from her bedroom.

  “Can we talk later?” he asked. “About what to do next, that is.”

  “We’ll see,” she said, hurriedly pulling the boots onto her feet. She needed time to think about…everything.

  “Sure,” he said, appearing in her doorway. “And one other thing: would it be possible for me to shower or something? I haven’t bathed in days, and I stink so badly, I can scarcely bear to breathe.”

  Finishing lacing up her boots, Rylee stood and walked out of her bedroom. He moved to the side to let her pass, and she pretended to take a whiff of him.

  “I’ve smelled worse,” she said. “But be my guest. There’s a basin and a hand wand in the bathroom. The water should be just above freezing. Knock yourself out.”

  “Yes, I remember seeing that in the bathroom,” he replied. “I guess I was hoping there was something…ah…different.”

  “Sorry, the Slum spas are closed weekdays.” Then she left the apartment, and closed the door behind her. To her surprise, she found that a smile was tugging at her lips.

  * * *

  Grayson stared at the closed door until his eyes grew blurry. “That is one odd girl,” he muttered to himself. He shook his head violently, trying to wake himself up. That little foray with the Regulators had sapped all his energy. He needed sleep and, regretfully, more sugar. Could psycho-girl get her more of those drinks? The peanut butter did contain sugar. That helped. Still, he would need more. Especially, now that he’d spent most of his reserves on that little stunt he just pulled.

  It was a risky thing to do. In all of his testing, he’d intentionally ignored
any scenario involving multiple simultaneous victims. It was not among his father’s specifications, and Grayson frankly didn’t think it could work. Too much of a resource drain. It had worked, though. Barely. He only hoped that those Regulators wouldn’t suspect any PNU manipulation. That would certainly compromise his current location.

  Too late to stress over that now.

  He needed to figure out what was going on. After his PNU had recharged last night, by extracting electrons from his body’s blood glucose, he’d attempted to contact Lander again. Still nothing. With every day that passed, Grayson grew exponentially alarmed.

  Had Lander been caught snooping? Could knowledge of Grayson’s RARA virus be so important that his father would feel threatened by it? The RARA virus wasn’t that dangerous. He’d already contemplated potential exploits. Nothing stood out to him as particularly egregious. Sure, the virus had the potential to cause someone to have an accident—an even fatal one. But any investigation into a death caused by it would certainly yield a discrepancy between reality and the actual cause of death. His father was too smart to do something so reckless.

  No, Grayson’s RARA virus wasn’t behind the murders. Was it?

  What if there was another part to the virus? A part that Lander had been working on? It would be smart of his father to divide up a potentially lethal virus into two apparently innocuous ones. If Lander and Grayson were ignorant of each other’s work, it would eliminate suspicion. If only he knew what Lander had been working on…

  There were two ways to find out: squeeze it out of Lander or hack into Lander’s secure server. As much as it concerned him, option one was out. That only left hacking into Lander’s server, which required directly connecting to his father’s network. That was something he couldn’t do, even if he was willing to risk detection. He’d need to get into his father’s building for that. First, though, he needed closure on Lander. And he intended to use Rylee to do it. He knew she was going to hate it.

  * * *

  Rylee shook her head violently. Focus, Rylee! Or you’ll get yourself electrocuted.

  She’d seen it happen once before. A careless journeyman who thought the wires he was handling weren’t hot. He didn’t bother to test them with his multimeter—the simplest of tasks. One that would have saved his life. That would have saved Rylee from having to watch helplessly as his body convulsed violently on the floor.

  That image helped to refocus her mind on the task at hand. Still, when she wasn’t actively handling wires, her mind drifted back to the events of that morning. What was she going to tell the others? Serghei knew that her grandfather was supposed to be Deprecated. Now, she wished she hadn’t thrown her earpiece across the room. She hoped it still functioned. And Preston? If Serghei told him, he would be sick with worry over her.

  Her stomach twisted. More lies.

  On their break, Sophie prattled on about the usual gossip. Rylee only half heard anything. The sorts of topics Sophie usually went on about didn’t interest Rylee. Then Sophie said something that caught her attention.

  “From what I heard, no one has seen him for over several days,” Sophie was saying.

  A group of four other workers was huddled around Sophie, rapped by this new piece of gossip. Rylee sat alone, on the perimeter.

  “Where do you think he is?” a girl named Veronica said.

  “Maybe he’s dead,” Sophie said with a wicked smile. “It’s too bad, I’ve heard he’s kind of cute.”

  “Please!” an older worker named Jay exclaimed. “He’s an Elect. A pampered prince. Not a bit of man in ‘em.”

  “Says the twenty-five-year-old who still can’t grow a decent beard,” Sophie said.

  The others laughed, while Jay rubbed his patchy stubbled chin, pretending to not be embarrassed.

  “Who are you talking about?” Rylee said, once the laughter died down. “The one who’s missing.”

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Sophie replied. “The CA’s son, that’s who.”

  The CA’s son? “What’s his name?”

  “William, I think.”

  “See?” Jay replied. “That’s a wussy name right there.”

  The group continued to joke, but Rylee zoned out again. William. Well, at least the names were different. But…could Grayson have lied about his name? Was he the CA’s son? The idea seemed ludicrous. Of all the people in the city, surely the CA’s own son wouldn’t need a place to stay, need to hide from…whatever Grayson was hiding from.

  That evening, she rode home on her Harley with her brain saturated with questions. Questions only Grayson could answer.

  Outside, it was as dark as night, the sun having retreated below the horizon before she got out of work. Perhaps more than anything else about this time of year, she hated that the most. Between the perpetual gray clouds and shortened daylight hours, it felt like the night never ended. Just like her own life; she wondered if she would ever see the sunrise again.

  At her housing unit, she found the door unlocked. Alarmed, she reached for her pistol. Curse it! Still confiscated. Loud voices sounded from the other side of the door.

  Throwing the door open, Rylee found Grayson standing in the kitchen, hands raised defensively as Preston leveled a pistol to his head.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Stop, Preston!” Rylee’s shout filled the small kitchen.

  Grayson turned to her. “Hey,” he said. “I thought you two might be friends. You share the same meeting ritual.”

  “Shut up!” Preston demanded.

  Keeping his pistol trained on Grayson, Preston jerked his head in her direction. In his eyes, she saw that same hatred she heard in his voice the night Grayson escaped from them. Preston’s face still bore the bruises from that night. A jolt of fear momentarily paralyzed her.

  “Do you know who this is?” he growled. “He’s the Elect who broke my nose. The one who should be dead right now.”

  He returned his gaze to Grayson. Rylee could see the veins in Preston’s hands bulge as he tightened his grip on the gun. This was not the calm and collected Preston she knew so well. This was the Preston who had given way to pure anger. Anger over a ruthlessly murdered brother. Over a father who had beat him again and again because of it. The one Preston had suppressed for years.

  “I know,” Rylee said, as steadily as she could manage, as she took a few cautious steps forward.

  “You know?” Preston snapped, adjusting his grip on the pistol. The muscles in his jaw hardened. “Then what is he doing here?”

  “Please, put the gun down, Preston. I can explain.”

  “Explain what? That you have an Elect in your house? And you knew about it!”

  “He helped us.”

  “Helped you? Him?”

  Rylee moved in closer. She was halfway across the room to where Preston stood. If she could just get there before he did anything rash…

  “He kept my grandfather from getting taken by the Regulators this morning. You can’t hurt him. He’s not like the other Elects. He’s…good.” Even as the word fell from her lips, she couldn’t believe she was the one who said it.

  She moved closer. Almost there.

  “Good.” Preston spat the word. “He’s an Elect, Ry. They’re all bad. His kind killed my brother, just because they could—just for fun. And you’re trying to tell me this one’s your friend now? I found him sleeping in your bed. Is he your lover, too?”

  “No, Preston, he’s not.” A few more steps. Gently, she touched his back. “He’s just…it’s complicated. Please, just leave him alone.”

  Preston dropped the gun and turned to her. His eyes looked into hers. In them she no longer saw anger. No, the anger had been replaced by something much worse. Pain.

  “Fine,” he said, pulling away from her. “Keep your Elect boyfriend.”

  Shoving his pistol back into its holster at his waist, Preston pushed passed her toward the door. Rylee grabbed his arm to stop him, but he yanked it away.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,
” she said. Preston didn’t stop. “Don’t leave.”

  Just before he reached the door, Preston paused and spoke over his shoulder. “I thought you trusted me, Ry. We could tell each other anything.” He reached for the door handle and turned it. “I guess I was wrong.”

  “Preston, don’t…”

  But it was no use. He was gone.

  Her stomach felt sick. How had she let this happen? Had Preston discovered Grayson yesterday, she would have gladly watched him pull the trigger. Now…everything was blasted complicated.

  Rubbing her eyes, Rylee sank into one of the kitchen chairs.

  “It might help if you told him you tried to shoot me in the head the first time you found me here,” Grayson said.

  “Just be quiet,” she muttered. “You can’t understand what Preston’s suffered because of your kind.”

  “How can you say that? How can you hate someone just because they’re an Elect?”

  “You don’t get it, do you? When Preston was twelve, a group of Elects—teenage boys—broke into Preston’s bedroom, bound and gagged him and his older brother, then kidnapped them. The Elects took Preston and his brother to the top of one of the housing units. There, they untied Preston’s brother and took turns fighting him. Apparently, they had some new martial arts enhancement for their PNU they wanted to try out. Preston, still tied up, was forced to watch.

  “His older brother was strong. He fought back. But he was no match for five Elects, all with new fighting enhancements. They beat him again and again and again. Preston cried for them to stop. But they didn’t stop until his brother was dead.

  “After that, Preston’s father blamed him for not doing something to help his brother. He went a bit mad. Started spending their food rations on cheap liquor. He often gets drunk at night, and then he’ll beat Preston and tell him it’s his fault his brother’s dead.”

  Rylee sniffed, and her lips started to tremble.

  “And after all that,” she went on, “Preston is still the best person I have ever met. He is kind and considerate and—of all things he shouldn’t be—relentlessly positive.”