by Julian North
“Why not let the computer do it?” I asked.
She gave me a withering look as she opened the front door to the gray sedan parked outside the Charlotte guesthouse where I’d spent the night. “Secretary Jalen told me that you would not trust me. I understand that. But let us not waste each other’s time. We aren’t going on the direct route through Washington D.C., nor do we want to make it too easy to track us. We need to blend in to traffic. It’s eight hours to New York by the computer’s route, but it will take us almost twice as long. There’s a thunderstorm heading in that’ll help us slip across the state border unnoticed, so let’s not waste any more time.” She took her place behind the wheel, while Rhett and I rode in the back seat. My pocket was heavy with a handful of silver coins Jalen had provided at my request—I would need things in the barrio once we arrived.
Within minutes, we left the spires and manicured homes of Charlotte behind. Surveyor drones, watching for approaching Northern forces, appeared in the sky even beyond the city limits, but after less than an hour of driving the sedan was speeding down sparsely trafficked roads, under drone-free skies, and through country I’d never seen before with my own eyes. Out here there were fields—great flat lands filled with stalks of perfect green as far as the eye could see. Some were covered by domes of clear plastika, others grew bare under the sky. The only sign of an occasional human presence was the glint of metal irrigation sprayers parked at various intervals.
“So much real food,” I muttered. “Where does it all go?”
Rhett grunted with displeasure. “When I was a kid, there were hills here, and forests too. They leveled it to construct these perfect fields—nice and flat for the irrigators and harvesters. As to where it goes… it feeds millions of people here, and in South America, and Africa. Those who can afford it. It’s some of the best growing land left in the world. Far more valuable than hills or forests.”
Katrina’s head turned slightly, but she didn’t speak.
I took another chance. I wanted to understand who Jalen had sent to keep an eye on me—to make sure I upheld my end of our bargain. “Are you from the South, Katrina?”
She didn’t answer at first. I didn’t expect that she was going to say anything to me at all. Then she did. “I was raised in Kansas. It used to look like this, when I was growing up. It doesn’t anymore. People need to eat; hills don’t.”
“Raised in Kansas? You’re not from there?”
“No.” She said it softly.
I decided to press my luck. “You’re not military.”
“What makes you say that?” I could tell by her tone that I’d guessed correctly.
“The way you move. Rhett does everything precisely. Eating, walking, even talking—it’s got the same military cadence. Only that smirk is his own.” I shot a glance at him, the very expression I referenced hanging on his face. “You’re something else.”
“Dancer.”
I huffed my skepticism.
“No joke, Bronx City girl. From the time I was four until I was twenty—Swan Lake, Giselle. I even performed at Lincoln Center in Manhattan.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had expected something more dangerous. Rhett provided the answer to my next question.
“A dancer, a great one, would get to travel all over the world. To all the great cities: Beijing, Moscow, Ragnar…”
Katrina was quiet again. “Yes.”
“A useful cover for a spy.”
“A girl has to pay her way to make her dreams come true.”
We drove on for another hour, mostly in silence. Katrina didn’t offer anything more, and I stopped asking. I think we both realized that no matter what she said, there was no way I was going to trust her.
The clouds above us darkened as we crossed seamlessly into Tennessee, just as Katrina had predicted. We left the corporate toll highway and entered the torn local roads. Wicked lightning flashed in the distance, birthing echoes of deep, rumbling thunder. Out here, the farms looked less pristine, and the homes had smoke coming from their roofs. There were no people, but that could’ve been because of the storm. Apart from the occasional drone, there was little sign that we were nearing the border between what were effectively two warring nations.
Katrina pulled into a desolate charging station that consisted of a signpost, two power pumps, and a bathroom that was filthy, even by Bronx City standards.
“We’re less than a mile from the Virginia state border,” Katrina told us. “We’ll wait for the heart of the storm to reach us. Shut off your visers.”
“Won’t there be checkpoints?”
“Out here on the country roads, they rely on drones and occasional ground patrols. This is the North’s newly conquered territory, so they haven’t got that quite right yet. I’ve got a jammer. Normally that would be too risky, but with the storm, we should get away with it. Anyway, our friends in Charlotte are planning an air raid in the next few minutes, which should give the authorities more important things to worry about. Once we’re across and back on the corporate highways, there’s no way to distinguish us from any other Yankee sedan as long as we don’t get pulled over. We can even turn it over to the autodriver for a while.”
The storm came with its full fury a few minutes later. Torrential rain hammered the windshield. It was as if the glass was melting. Thunder rocked the vehicle. I wasn’t sure if Katrina could see through the downpour. But even if she couldn’t, she didn’t stop. I couldn’t tell when we crossed from Southern-sworn Tennessee, into the Northern-declared Commonwealth of Virginia, into the domain of Virginia Timber-Night.. The storm dwindled to a drizzle. It seemed like it was going to be easy. Until we saw the lights.
“Jackin-A,” Katrina cursed.
Rhett and I spun in every direction, peering through windows, trying to spot the source of her distress. I finally spotted the problem out the rear window, about five feet above the deserted rural road.
“It’s a skimmer,” she said. “Local police wouldn’t have one of those babies. Has to be military. Maximum crew of three. Play it cool. Keep your weapons powered off and out of sight. They’ll have proximity scanners.”
I watched the circular flying machine as it closed in on us. It moved almost as fast as a v-copter, blowing crops and trees as it moved across open country and roadways with equal ease. They didn’t allow hovercraft in Manhattan—too noisy, too disruptive to pedestrians and street traffic. But out here, I could see how they were the ideal patrol vehicle. The transport’s exterior was an olive green camouflage pattern and a small force cannon was mounted on the side. There was no question about trying to outrun it—that thing would catch up and mow us down easily.
Katrina slowed the sedan but didn’t stop until she found a location that suited her. I understood why. She brought us to a stop beside an enormous oak tree large enough to provide a bit of cover if we had to run from the vehicle. There was also an old irrigation ditch no more than five feet from the edge of the roadway—not much cover, but it was something. I hoped we wouldn’t need her precautions. If it came to a fight, Rhett and I each had force pistols, and there were rifles beneath our seats. I didn’t know what armament Katrina carried, but I guessed something formidable. Jalen would have chosen our minder and guardian carefully, however, this might come down to my trilling. But if the soldiers were highborn, our lives would depend on Katrina.
The hovercraft set down in front of us, the vibration of the engine beneath its belly shaking our sedan as the machine settled onto its quadrupedal landing legs. The cockpit was a duraglass dome set on top of the vehicle. There were three occupants, all outfitted in military garb. Two climbed down onto the ground while the third kept vigil aboard. Their force cannon was trained on our vehicle. I closed my eyes, reaching for that place where I could access the cold force of my will. I extended my mind, searching, and found nothing. I opened my eyes, panicked. The soldiers were approaching; one had his rifle trained on us, providing cover for the other. I had no idea if they were highbor
n or not. What was wrong with me? I tried again, willing the cold to come, longing for the strength I desperately wanted and needed. Again, nothing. Deuces. It must have been something they did to me on the platform—the chipping. Havelock had failed to collar me, but perhaps some damage had been done in the attempt. The power had been there back on the extraction platform, but I’d been angry, barely myself. I had acted on instinct. Now, I was just desperate.
The first soldier came to the side of the vehicle. “Everyone out, please.” He had a thick neck and a grizzle on his bulldog face. A shining golden viser adorned his left hand—apparently, the military was purchasing Tyrell’s new prismPulse devices too. Commerce never stopped.
Katrina and Rhett got out of the vehicle. Rhett left his pistol behind, but that wouldn’t do any good if they searched the vehicle, which now seemed likely. I noticed Katrina eyeing the hovercraft, her cat-like eyes appraising the duraglass protecting its occupant. I wondered if she had anything that could penetrate that armor. Presumably the military shield would be formidable. I needed to trill. I gritted my teeth. Where was it? It couldn’t be gone. The cold was as much a part of me as my arm—it wasn’t something that could be removed easily. And I quickly realized it wasn’t gone, at least not completely. I remembered my waking dream in the hospital. When I had been experiencing Kristolan’s memories, the chill of my will had been with me then. I could still trill. I just needed to find the path back to it.
“Get out, girl,” the soldier barked at me.
“She’s not feeling well,” Rhett offered.
“She will feel much worse if she isn’t lined up with the both of you on the roadside in the next ten seconds.”
The soldier with the rifle shuffled his feet anxiously. I forced myself out of the vehicle onto the road. Katrina studied me, evaluating me as she had the hovercraft’s defenses. I wondered how much Jalen had told her about my abilities. Most likely everything, if he expected her to do the job. She must be wondering what I was waiting for.
Katrina fixed her eyes on the lead soldier’s insignia. “Identify yourself, Captain.”
“Captain Alford Trinity-Briggs, U.S. Border Enforcement. By order of the president, we have special jurisdiction in this area while hostilities against the rebels continue. Present your visers to confirm identity.”
Hyphenated name. A highborn. Deuces.
“That isn’t a U.S. army uniform,” Rhett noted.
Captain Trinity-Briggs frowned. “Commonwealth of Virginia National Guard, but we’ve been absorbed into army command. Now it’s my turn for a question, citizens, because it's mighty strange to find a manually driven vehicle this close to the border during a storm that knocked out the local surveillance drone.”
Katrina's eyes hardened as the captain spoke. I was certain the national guardsman had sealed his fate with his last statement. He and his subordinate were easy targets. The problem was the man in the hovercraft cockpit. If I couldn’t trill him, that cannon would end all of us.
I stopped trying to reach for the reservoir of cold; I stopped trying to do all the things I used to do. Instead, I thought about Kristolan. Memories that weren’t mine flooded into me—images of people and places I’d never known, desires I’d never contemplated. Kristolan’s mind was vast—a dark ocean of shifting experiences and ambitions. But survival was foremost among them. In that moment, the men in uniform with their guns were not men at all—they were obstacles. My mind focused on what needed to be done. I made the calculations that Kristolan would have made in my place: they needed to be destroyed, or I would be. There was no choice in the matter. I was power, and I could do as I pleased. The cold flowed through me. I was ready to do battle.
I probed the mind closest to me—that of Captain Trinity-Briggs. I expected the fiery resistance of a highborn mind. Instead, I found a void. There was nothing to attack, nothing to control, only a vortex of chaos, ugly and painful. I recoiled from the inhuman stillness, the emptiness that should not have been there. The sensation of that twisted, blotted mind horrified me. The screeching burst of a force rifle brought me back to the present. The soldier with the force rifle had fired into the air as Rhett plowed into him. Rhett was faster, stronger, and had surprised the young soldier. It wasn’t much of a fight. Katrina had Captain Trinity-Briggs in a headlock, a blade’s edge held to his throat. The soldier inside the hovercraft stared at his commanding officer, his mouth twisted in confusion, his eyes frozen open with terror. At least for a moment.
“Out here in three seconds, soldier, or this man is dead,” Katrina barked to the remaining guardsman. She was no triller, but there was an expectation of obedience in her sharp, unwavering command.
It was a desperate gamble: rush the inexperienced soldier into disregarding protocol so that he would make the stupid mistake of coming outside. But the man inside the hovercraft wasn’t that young or that stupid. The shock melted from his eyes even as Katrina began her count. It wasn’t going to work. It was up to me.
I struck with cold strength worthy of Kristolan Foster-Rose-Hart. The soldier’s defense was a pillbox of sand and rock and barbed wire—more formidable than most. I came at him hard, my mind a ball of iron, fast and unstoppable. The barbed wire barrier was useless, and rock crumbled before me. I trilled: “Get out and surrender to save everyone, including yourself.” His terror faded as he understood what he had to do, that everything would be okay if he obeyed. The soldier opened the hovercraft’s shield and got out.
Katrina stared at me as she would a spider in her bed. “It’s true, then.”
“It’s true.”
“If they don’t report back, we’ll be swarmed by military craft. We need to create another explanation for what happened here. Can you do that?”
“Yes. The illusion won’t last indefinitely, but I can do it. But not for the captain.”
“Jalen told me as much. It doesn’t work on highborn.” Katrina sighed. Her arm tensed, and the captain twitched, then flailed. She jabbed his back, and the captain twisted in agony. His face turned blue, his legs and arms spasmed as Katrina squeezed. He was a big man, bigger than her, but she had leverage and position. I looked away, but that didn’t stop me from hearing his last, desperate noises. Finally, she released him. The captain crumpled at her feet.
“Can you convince these two that he had a heart attack? With luck, it’ll take days before he’s sent to a military hospital and the autopsy identifies the true cause of death. There will be an investigation, but by the time they figure it out, we’ll be long gone.”
“I can do it.” I stared at the captain’s body as I spoke. It wasn’t just having another death on my shoulders that bothered me. There had been something else wrong about him.
“Get to it, then,” Katrina ordered. “I need to do some work on their computer. We need to make it look like this encounter never happened.”
I looked at Katrina—calm and cold and efficient. My eyes were drawn to the elegance of her movements. “Were you a good dancer?”
A hint of something mournful crept into her eyes, just for a fleeting moment. “I was the best.”
Chapter 7
I spent the next five hours waiting anxiously for something else to go wrong. The corporate interstate highway leading up the eastern seaboard was smooth, clean, modestly trafficked, and very expensive. I expected a hovercraft to appear at any moment, or a roadblock staffed by black boots to halt the well-ordered traffic. Katrina was apprehensive as well; she just hid it better. Only Rhett seemed unconcerned. He napped against the far side of the sedan.
Skyscreens floating above the highway flashed the fifty-star American flag and pristine images of lush fields and well-kept homes, along with appeals for unity and patience. Virginia Timber-Night’s likeness appeared occasionally in the background—always looking serious and radiant, but there was still a glint in her eyes that reminded me of cracked glass.
We ditched our car for another one in Pennsylvania. It was waiting for us in the garage of a dilapidat
ed house in a tattered Philadelphia suburb. We left our weapons with the original car.
“The Manhattan weapon scanners are too good to risk bringing this equipment through,” Katrina explained. “They’ve established upgraded checkpoints at all crossings since the fighting broke out. We’ll have help waiting for us in Bronx City, but security in Manhattan is too tight.”
I didn’t care about the guns. Rifles and pistols were never going to be the answer to this. I also didn’t doubt that Katrina was still armed, just not with force weapons.
We didn’t stay long in the house. Katrina hurried us out after a quick meal of protein bars. Suspicious eyes watched from boarded windows and cluttered street corners as we made our way from the safe house to the corporate highway. There were no skyscreens here, and the streets bore no resemblance to the idealized images on the toll roads. A haggard young man stumbled into the street, his eyes drawn, his skin fallow. Katrina swerved to avoid him. She avoided a collision, but the boy didn’t even flinch. There was an emptiness in his gaze I knew all too well. I shivered.
“Frakkin’ crazies,” she muttered.
“Not crazy. He’s got the Waste.” Just like Mateo.
She kept driving. I wondered who that boy could’ve grown up to be if he hadn’t been murdered by Landrew Foster-Rose-Hart, if he hadn’t possessed a superior genetic trait that the former Orderist chairman considered a possible threat to highborn rule.
I stared out the window at these men and women and children with skin of various colors. I studied their forlorn houses that could just as easily have been in Bronx City. I wondered if it mattered to these people which faction of the elite ruled them.
“You look… anguished,” Rhett said.
I turned my head away from the morbid reality outside. “Bronx City, Philly, wherever… this is all over. The people here think this war has nothing to do with them. Same as me. They just want to survive, maybe have an easier tomorrow.”
“You believe neither side cares about them. That highborn don’t care.”