by C. A. Gray
Nilesh knocked softly on the hard plastic outside the cockpit. “Rebecca?” He called. “Your turn to get the A.E. chip removed.”
I nodded, and stood up to follow him. Mom stood too.
“Hey,” she said, reaching out an arm to my shoulder almost shyly. “Are we okay?”
I had a lot to be angry about. A lot. But so did she. And considering we were both on the run for our lives now, and Liam was in critical condition, and Madeline was missing and possibly gone, and tomorrow really wasn’t promised to any of us… I didn’t have the energy to sustain a grudge, even if I’d wanted to.
“Yeah,” I said. “We’re okay.” She smiled and pulled me into a hug, and I murmured against her cheek, “Thanks for saving my life, Mom.”
When she let me go, I saw tears glistening in her large brown eyes. “Anytime.”
Chapter 3
I awoke from the anesthesia to Larissa’s annoyingly perky grin.
“Good morning,” she whispered, tucking her straight reddish hair behind her ear. “Except it’s not morning yet. How do you feel?”
“Like my head is stuffed with cotton,” I muttered, my mouth smacking as I spoke. She handed me a cup of water to drink and helped me to sit up. I looked around, blinking, trying to orient myself. I was in a small compartment, the same one within the hovercraft where I now remembered Hepzibah had put me under for the A.E. removal. My eyes landed on Larissa’s bandaged temple, and gingerly I touched my own to find a matching bit of gauze taped to my head. “Liam?”
“He’s stable,” she assured me. “He woke up about an hour ago. Francis is okay too,” she volunteered, as if that had ever been in question. “Hepzibah sent me to check on you since we expected you to wake up soon. We set our course for the compound as soon as your chip was destroyed, a few hours ago. M said we’re only about an hour from the compound now. Your mom, I mean,” she added, shaking her head in wide-eyed wonder, and then gushed, “That’s so cool that your mom’s a double agent! And even you didn’t know that ‘M’ really stood for MOM!”
I thought of many retorts to this, none of which Larissa actually deserved. So I rested my head against the wall, closed my eyes, and decided to change the subject. “How did you and Nilesh and Dr. Yin get here, anyway?”
“Oh! Well, Liam told us to meet him at the chateau so we could all meet Youssef together, and we got on the Quantum Track to Geneva. Liam told your mom we were coming too, though, and apparently she was already on her way by then. Francis said she must have been tracking Halpert’s assassins, so she knew how far they were behind her, and knew she’d have time to pick us up at the Quantum Track station. And by ‘pick us up,’ I mean Rick held us up at gunpoint and told us to get in, or else.” She added, making air quotes with her fingers. “Once we were on board, your mom came out and introduced herself as the head of the Renegades, and apologized for the abduction. She said they didn’t have time for explanations, and that you three were in danger—and we would have been too, if we’d met up with you any earlier.”
I sighed, closing my eyes for a long moment before opening them again. “Rick? That’s the guard?”
Larissa nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah. And he’s actually really nice, once you get past the uzi!”
A smile tugged at the corners of my mouth. I thought of the quote book my friends from Casa Linda and I used to carry around between us. Whenever someone said something unexpected, one of us would yell, ‘Quote!’ and write it down in the little book. “Quote,” I murmured, even though I knew Larissa wouldn’t get it. Saying it made me sad, though. When would I ever see them again—Jake, Julie, Emily, Rob, Elizabeth, Ivan… and Andy? I was on the run now, I wasn’t allowed to use my handheld, and I no longer had an A.E. chip. I couldn’t even tell them what had happened to me.
Would I ever see any of them again?
“What’s Mom planning to do with you three?” I managed. “Now that you’re here.”
“Oh, we’re all joining the Renegades, of course!” Larissa chirped. “Well, I was already an unofficial member, but Nilesh and Dr. Yin weren’t. We figure Nilesh can help flesh out the Commune, and Dr. Yin and you can work on—psychology stuff! If it’s even necessary anymore,” she added with a shrug.
I shook my head incredulously, more at her manner than her words, “Would you stop being so ‘happy-happy’?” I blurted before I could stop myself. “Life as we know it is over, you know. Everything changes now. We’re on the run. Do you get that? Are you in denial or something?”
She bit her lip and looked away. “I know,” she said—and for a brief flash, I saw the facade crumble. “I’m just… I’m… I’m…” I was afraid she might cry before she finally finished, bright and cheerful through glistening eyes, “I’m pretending I’m in that Abraham Chiefton film, actually, ‘Necessary Evils’. You remember, the one starring Gillian Reynolds where she’s a spy, and she and Jeff Thompson take down the Syndicate—that evil criminal empire that’s spreading lies about the government?”
“Abraham Chiefton is a bot, and he’s on Halpert’s board,” I said dully, resting my head against the back wall again. “The Syndicate represents the Renegades. All his films are basically just propaganda pieces against us.”
“Oh.” Larissa’s brow furrowed, and we fell into silence. I felt a stab of regret, like I’d just stolen a blanket from a shivering child.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured, and meant it, reaching out a hand to her.
She shrugged, still shaken. “S’okay.” Then she clamped her jaw down with sheer force of will, and fixed a smile on me, full blast. “It’s not like dwelling on our problems helps anything, though, right? Might as well look on the bright side!”
“So… what’s the bright side exactly? Just curious.” Francis appeared in the doorway, bandaged arm in a sling, also sporting a gauze bandage on his temple.
“None of us are dead?” Larissa thrust one finger in the air. “That’s one! Even though you guys easily could have been!”
“Liam could still die,” Francis said matter-of-factly.
I looked up sharply. “What?” Jumping to my feet and rounding on Larissa, I demanded, “I thought you said he was stable!”
“That got her attention,” Francis commented, just as Larissa stood too and soothed, “He is stable. Francis just means—”
“That he could still reject your blood at any minute,” Francis cut in. “Theoretically that could happen anytime in the next few days, so seeming stable right now doesn’t mean all that much—he’s in the compartment right next door!” Francis called this last bit after me as I pushed past him.
I found Liam stripped to the waist, heavily bandaged, and apparently sleeping on the flat, hard floor. He was still unnaturally pale and clammy, I noticed when I knelt down and took his hand. But beads of sweat dotted his forehead all around the gauze bandage where his A.E. chip once was. I should have let him sleep, probably. But I needed to see him look at me.
“Liam?” I whispered. His eyes fluttered a bit, then opened, blue as sea glass. He blinked up at me, turning his head very slowly.
“Hey,” I whispered, my voice catching in my throat.
“Hey,” he croaked.
“How do you feel?”
“Like I got shot in the chest, and then had a giant needle jabbed into my lungs.” At least that’s what I think he said. I could only piece together about every third word. His voice was weak, and he slurred.
I pursed my lips, resting my shoulder against the wall beside him. “Well,” I murmured. “That’s… accurate, at least.”
He looked me over as much as he could without moving his head. “You okay?”
I shrugged. “A little woozy, that’s all.”
His eyes dropped to the bandage on my arm. “You saved my life.”
I started to shake my head that I hadn’t, really, before I realized that shaking my head was a bad idea: the room began to swim. “Hepzibah saved your life,” I corrected. �
��I just happened to have the right kind of blood.” At least we’re hoping it was, I added silently.
I saw his hand groping on the ground for something, and realized he was trying to find mine. I slipped my fingers beneath his and he closed his eyes again. I assumed he was going to sleep, but then he rasped, “Everything’s going to be different from now on.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry I got you caught up in all this.”
“You didn’t get me caught up in all this—my dad was one of your founding members, and my mom is M, for heaven’s sake. Apparently this is my freaking birthright.” I noticed he didn’t react to the announcement about Mom, so someone must have told him already since he awoke. Either that, or he was too weak to be surprised about anything.
“You should have gone back to Dublin when you had the chance.”
“And then I’d be there without you, or Dr. Yin, Larissa, or Nilesh. Plus Mom would have disappeared too, and I’d be going crazy not knowing where anybody was or if they were okay…”
“But you’d be safe. You’d have a normal life.”
“Like I said,” I leaned over and smoothed away the dark hair matted to his brow, “this was my birthright. It was inevitable.”
His eyes met mine. I couldn’t readily identify the expression—perhaps because it was a blend, of tenderness and pain. “I guess I’m really selfish,” he croaked. “Because… I’m glad you’re here.”
Chapter 4
The hovercraft descended for a landing in the middle of a vast plain of flat land beneath a newly breaking dawn. I helped prop Liam up, so that he could see out the window in our compartment.
“Back in North America, then?” he murmured.
“I guess,” I shrugged. “Looks like the midwest to me. Mom said we were going to some underground compound connected to abandoned corn silos, so I’d imagine it is somewhere in the midwest.”
Liam gave me a sidelong glance. “You know I didn’t know about your mom. Right?”
I nodded, running a hand through my hair. “Yeah. She told me.” I glanced at him and added pointedly, “She also told me she’d been the one giving you orders about how to direct my research, and you let me believe it was all coming from you or from Dr. Yin, though.”
“Well, some of it did come from us,” he protested, squirming to find a more comfortable position. “If you’d been a Renegade I’d have told you long ago, but since you weren’t until recently, I figured that would just raise unnecessary questions.”
“You could have told me in San Jose when you first mentioned M,” I muttered. “Or really, anytime since then. Like when we made a deal to have ‘no more secrets,’ for instance.”
He sighed. “I guess I didn’t think it mattered that much. If I’d known she was your mom, obviously that would have changed things.” He touched my hand, forcing me to meet his wide-eyed, melodramatic puppy dog expression. “Forgive me?”
My lips twitched involuntarily, answering for me. I couldn’t stay mad at him—not now, when he was still so newly delivered from death. He smiled in response, and squeezed my hand.
He still held my hand as the hovercraft touched down beneath pink clouds and just beside an enormous silo. A man with white hair emerged from the building and approached the makeshift tarmac, his hair buffeted by the wind produced by the craft. It was John Doe, the informant who had met me in dark alleys and warned me, begged me, to leave San Jose. Ironically, he was also the reason I did not go back to Dublin when Liam had urged me to, because I’d been so sure he was my father’s longtime and disappeared friend Randall Loomis. I was certain that he could tell me why my father had been killed, and if I left before he did, I’d never find out the truth.
And he had known, as much as anyone knew before Francis put together that the Silver Six were bots… but he wasn’t Loomis. And he wasn’t on Halpert’s side as Liam had feared, either.
No. Instead, he was my mom’s freaking boyfriend.
“What?” Liam looked at me, and I realized I’d groaned. He followed my eyes to the man, and then looked back at me. “You know him?” I met Liam’s eyes, and Liam looked back at the man, before he put it together. “That isn’t—John Doe? Is it?”
I nodded, an exaggerated motion at first until once again, I remembered my recent brain surgery and reined it in. “It gets better. He’s dating my mom.”
No sooner had I said this, Mom hopped onto the ground, pulling her arms around herself against the apparent early morning briskness, and greeted him with a kiss. My stomach turned over, and I had to look away. I met Liam’s eyes on accident, and he squeezed my hand again in sympathy.
“You want to go out there and get it over with?” he asked. “I’ll be right behind you.”
I let out a dry staccato laugh, appraising him: he was only sitting up by resting against the wall. “Sure you will.”
Rick and Nilesh ducked in just then, bearing a stretcher with a blanket on top. I saw Nilesh’s significant glance at our entwined hands, and I quickly let go.
“I can walk,” Liam asserted, though he looked limp as a ragdoll.
“Hepzibah’s orders,” said Rick, directing Nilesh to lay the stretcher down beside Liam. “The patient is not to overexert himself.” The two of them scooted him onto it, covering his partial nudity with a blanket against the chill outside.
Mom had already disappeared inside the silo, but John Doe—Mack—still waited, presumably for me. I trailed behind the stretcher, not eager to make his official acquaintance. But it couldn’t be helped; he approached me as soon as I stepped off the hovercraft onto the soft earth, extending a hand.
“Rebecca,” he grinned at me. “Mack George. I’m very glad to see you’re safe. No hard feelings, I hope.”
I took his hand and shook only because I didn’t know what else to do, but wouldn’t meet his eyes, and dropped the hand as quickly as I could. He either didn’t notice, or discreetly pretended not to. I couldn’t say as much for Francis, though, who emerged from the hovercraft just behind me, glancing from Mack to me and back again.
“Ha!” he uttered, pointing at Mack and looking at me. “That’s your John Doe, huh? He hooked up with your mom? Oh, that’s rich!”
A look of brief irritation flashed across Mack’s face. “Francis, I presume?” he asked dryly. “I’ve heard all about you.” His tone conveyed the nature of what he had heard more expressively than if he’d elaborated. He turned away without further comment.
There was little to unpack; it turned out Mom had done a very thorough job stocking the compound little by little over however many years she’d anticipated a situation like this one. Of course she had; Mom was nothing if not thorough.
Mom and Mack opened a large set of metal doors on the side of the silo. We all got out of the way so that the built-in hovercraft bot could guide the craft inside. I assumed this was so that it wouldn’t be visible to satellites either. When this was done, Mack strode toward a rickety old door inside the silo that looked like it might lead to a granary. But on the other side was a tunnel, just barely large enough for the Second Age golf carts that sat waiting on the other side.
Mack gestured to the carts, and cried, “All aboard!” Then he winked at me. “I’ve always wanted to say that.”
I gave him a wan smile. I wasn’t quite ready to forgive him just yet.
Mack and Mom settled in the front seat of the first cart, and Mom gestured to me to sit behind her. Larissa and Dr. Yin crowded in next to me, while Francis and Hepzibah took the last bench on the end. Rick and Nilesh lay Liam in the “backseat” of the second cart, and then Rick took the driver’s position, Nilesh beside him.
“Ready?” called Mack to Rick, and he set off.
The tunnels were lined with LED lights so that we could see where we were going, and reinforced with concrete. There was another ‘lane’ large enough for a cart going the opposite direction, but otherwise it was like being in an endless Quantum Track tunnel. I
started to feel claustrophobic, and I already missed the sun.
“How far down is this place?” Larissa yelled over the wind created by our movement.
“Five miles,” Mom shouted back.
“And the only way out is back the way we came?” Larissa persisted.
Mom shook her head. “No. There are three other silos we can use, and there are also tunnels up to several open-air caves, in case all of those are compromised.” She gestured at me. “Your father wanted to make sure we’d never be trapped.”
I smiled. That sounded like Dad. “He thought of everything.”
She nodded. “Oh yes. I found the blueprints for this place among his things after he passed, and just followed them to a T. Wait until you see it.”
At last we arrived at an enormous steel door. Mack opened it with a retinal scan, and I gasped. The entrance was like a palace: a dark red rug, vaulted ceilings, sleek modern lighting along the walls. Off to our left was a den with hardwood floors and open beams on the ceiling, with an electric fireplace that wouldn’t require a chimney but still gave the feeling of a warm stone hearth. To the right was a large kitchen, with what looked like a skylight, though I knew that it must be a sun lamp on the other side of it. The countertops were granite, and every appliance was stainless steel. Iron and copper and steel pots hung from the ceiling, twinkling under track lighting.
“Mom, how in the world?” I murmured, wide-eyed.
She grinned at me and winked. “Like I said… if Halpert is gonna force us to flee for our lives, the least he can do is put us up in style.”
“How did no one notice this much money going missing?”
She shrugged. “For the government of a global Republic? This is peanuts. A few tenths of a percent here and there of a large enough total pie, over a period of years? It definitely adds up!”
Beyond the kitchen, a door led to a lower level. I would have called the room below a basement from the looks of it, except that the entire compound was underground. But it was outfitted like a basement, with stone steps down to a concrete floor, and a bay lined with netscreens and various other equipment.