by C. J. Hill
Allana took a look over the side of the building and then backed up, gasping. “We can’t go over that. Are you neurocrashed? We’ll all die.”
Xavier motioned for her to come over. “The equipment will hold. We’ve tested it.”
Allana stared at the meager pole that held up the zip line and shook her head. Her silver hair swayed around her shoulders. “That thing will come loose.”
Echo took hold of Allana’s arm and tugged her forward. “We don’t have time to argue about it. It won’t take the Enforcers long to figure out where we went.”
Allana planted her feet and pulled her arm away from Echo. “You can’t trust these people. You don’t even know them.”
“You’re right,” Echo said patiently. “Joseph knows them, and I trust him.”
Allana still didn’t move. She swallowed uncomfortably and fidgeted with her crystal band.
“Don’t you trust Joseph?” Echo asked her.
Allana peered at the zip line and didn’t speak.
Honestly, it was like some sort of soap opera. It was bad enough the group had to take Allana along, readjusting things at every step and risking themselves for her. Taylor was not going to let herself be taken prisoner because Allana was having second thoughts about their escape plan.
“Do it,” Taylor said.
Allana gave her a scathing look. “I don’t take orders from you, Ms. Five Million.”
Taylor yanked her laser box from her belt. “Your two seconds are so up.”
She fired at Allana’s throat. This time, Taylor didn’t miss. Allana let out a whine, stiffened, and toppled backward.
Echo caught her shoulders before she hit the roof. He stared at Taylor incredulously. “Did you even check your laser-box setting before you shot?”
Taylor made a waving motion in Xavier’s direction. “Get her into the harness.”
Echo half dragged, half carried Allana toward the harness, all the while staring at Taylor. “You didn’t, did you?” His blue eyes swirled with anger.
Taylor clipped her laser box onto her belt. “It’s been on stun since we got to Traventon.”
Echo helped Xavier thread the harness around Allana’s arms. “Every time laser boxes turn on, they reset themselves. You’re always supposed to check the setting before you shoot. Next time you get impatient, you could kill one of us.”
“All right then, how about next time you don’t give me reason to shoot one of you.”
Echo didn’t reply to that. They were done with the harness, and Allana hung, mannequin-like, near the building’s edge. Her eyes looked blankly upward at the white opaque dome.
Xavier surveyed her, then the second harness. “I should go first; that way I can catch Allana on the other roof. After I go, push her off, then wrap the harness around you and Echo.”
“Go,” Taylor told him. “I can take care of it.”
Xavier grabbed hold of the handle he’d attached to the zip line, took a running start, and leaped off the edge. He flew through the air, zooming toward the other building. It would take him only a minute to reach it. Taylor slipped the harness over Echo’s injured shoulder. While Echo slid the other side of the harness on, Taylor took hold of Allana and towed her to the edge of the building. Taylor gave Allana a kick in the seat of her pants, which toppled her off the roof and set her swinging back and forth as she slid down the line. Silver hair streamed out behind her like a metallic flame.
Echo walked forward, holding the harness buckles out to Taylor. The straps weren’t big enough to fit around both of them. “And now?”
Taylor snapped the buckles together across Echo’s chest and held on to the strap that went over his uninjured shoulder. “Now we jump.”
Echo didn’t move toward the edge. “I don’t want you to slip. We’ll figure out—”
“We don’t have time for that.” Taylor looked over at the door they’d come through. “Go. I’ll be fine.” She gripped the strap tighter. “Unlike your last girlfriend, I know how to hold on to a guy.”
A hint of a smile lifted Echo’s lips and he wrapped his good arm around her waist. “All right. Let’s fly.” They took running steps. One, two, and the roof disappeared. Gravity jerked them downward. Taylor held her breath, then the line caught them, and they glided through the air, dangling from a line so thin it seemed to vanish along the way. The wind rushed against her face, knocking off her hood and tugging at her bun.
Allana reached the next building. Xavier grabbed her arm as she went by, yanking her to stop her. It sort of worked. She only partially hit the roof.
“Ouch,” Taylor said.
Echo made a grumbling sound in his throat. “I still can’t believe you shot her.” He turned his head to consider her. “There weren’t laser boxes in your time. Who taught you to use one?”
“Joseph.”
“Joseph? When did he learn to use one?”
“After you were killed.”
Echo didn’t reply to that because they reached the other building. Both concentrated on the approaching roof. “Lift your feet up,” Echo said.
She did, and Echo landed on the roof, running to slow his momentum. He didn’t stumble, didn’t even jar much. He set her down carefully.
“You’re pretty good at this,” she said.
“It’s like a VR adventure program—well, except for the threat of actual death. That’s new.”
Xavier had already unhooked Allana’s harness from the zip line. Taylor unhooked Echo’s, then Xavier pushed a button at the base of the zip line, which sent a heated pulse through the rope. A white flash went along its length and it disintegrated. Bits of ash fluttered downward. When the Enforcers found the stand on the roof, at least they wouldn’t be able to use the zip line to follow.
Fast paced, Xavier, Taylor, and Echo carried Allana toward the other side of the building. When they reached the edge, Xavier shot a zip line to the next building, tied it to a rod, and cut the line from his shooter. Taylor helped him attach Allana’s and Echo’s harnesses to the line. Xavier went first, Taylor pushed Allana off, and then she and Echo stood on the side of the building. “You still know how to hold on to a guy?” he asked.
She grabbed on to his harness strap. “I won’t let you go.”
He leaped and they sailed through the air. Now that she knew what to expect, there was something exhilarating about flying through the air this way. “This would be fun,” she said, “except for, you know, that threat-of-death thing.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You’d be surprised at how many activities that ruins.”
She laughed, and then she felt bad for laughing, for enjoying this moment. She shouldn’t enjoy anything until Sheridan was free. And depending on what Reilly had done to Sheridan, maybe not even then.
Chapter 20
Sheridan paced the length of her gray metal cell. Six steps forward took her past the bed that lay against one side of the room and the sink and toilet that stood on the other. She pivoted at the door and took six steps back to the wall. She did this exercise without thinking now, hours on end sometimes, so that her muscles wouldn’t atrophy. She would need to be in shape when she escaped. When, she kept telling herself, not if. She wouldn’t let go of when.
Two things were constants in her life now. The first was the piped-in propaganda that played all day long. A velvety-voiced woman extolled the virtues of Traventon and expounded on the roles of citizens. Sometimes the voice even got philosophical about how to best achieve happiness. Happiness always had something to do with being loyal to the city.
Still, Sheridan appreciated the voice. Listening to it gave her a chance to practice her accent. Sheridan repeated sentences to get the rhythm of the language, the cadence of words that only resembled the words she used to speak.
“Traventon’s policies,” the voice purred, “have made our people the most elite group in the world. The governing committee will continue to achieve this excellence—by choosing the best genes to generate our society, by delet
ing anyone who poses a threat, and by controlling information to ensure everyone is educated in the area they’re most fit for.”
Sheridan repeated the words like an acolyte in prayer. When she escaped from here, she needed to speak like everyone else so that she could blend in. When, not if.
The second constant in Sheridan’s life was hunger. Her guards weren’t starving her. They gave her three nourishment bars a day. The bars didn’t even taste that bad, at least not after you got used to them. But Sheridan still ate sparingly.
At first, she didn’t eat because she was afraid the food might be drugged. She reasoned that if she ate only a little of each bar, she could judge if it had any ill effects on her before she consumed the whole thing. Later she kept herself hungry on purpose as a way to gauge whether she was in a virtual reality program or not. Reilly liked to do that—switch around her reality in an attempt to get information from her.
After Sheridan practiced her accent each morning, she picked one of the novels she’d read in her English classes and tried to recall each event, chapter by chapter. She wasn’t sure how many of the classics still existed here in the twenty-fifth century. Maybe none. Jeth and Echo had told her that only the literary committee was allowed to write novels now. If Sheridan remembered the stories she’d read, she could rewrite them once she got out of here. That way they wouldn’t be completely lost, even if her writing would be a sorry substitute for Dickens, Shakespeare, or Cervantes.
Today her novel was Pride and Prejudice.
She was Elizabeth playing the piano for Lady Catherine while Mr. Darcy stood by watching. Proud, silent, handsome Mr. Darcy. He kept looking like Echo. He shouldn’t. Echo had blue hair, and if he hadn’t dyed it, it would have been blond. Didn’t the story say somewhere that Darcy had brown hair? She couldn’t remember. So many details had slipped her mind.
Sheridan shut her eyes and tried to remember images from the movie. Images came, but not of the movie. Reilly had shown her so many images since she’d been here that she was beginning to have a hard time distinguishing which were real, which were dreams, and which were virtual reality programs. The only thing she was sure about were the memories. Those were easy. They were the happy ones.
She wondered, not for the first time, if Reilly wanted her to lose her sanity. Was it easier to extract information from a person after you’d broken their mind into pieces?
She didn’t want to think about Reilly. Sheridan let her thoughts center on Echo, seeing the lines of his face, remembering his smile. Echo’s features were like the words of a poem. You couldn’t exactly say why they went together so well, what made his chin or nose or cheekbones better than anyone else’s. But placed all together like they were, they created something beautiful. Something you wanted to stare at.
The light panel on the ceiling flickered and then went out, plunging the room into complete darkness.
Sheridan held her breath, waiting for the light to come on again. It couldn’t be night already. She’d been up for only a couple of hours. The propaganda was still playing. Someone down the corridor—another prisoner—yelled something. It was too muffled for her to understand what. A few seconds later someone in the opposite direction shouted something too.
Sheridan couldn’t decide whether it was comforting or not that sometimes she heard the other prisoners. It was nice to know she wasn’t alone, and it was also horrible to know she wasn’t alone.
At any rate, the prisoners should have realized by now that crying out only made things worse. It let the guards know they were getting to you. They planned these power outages, she was sure. They wanted everyone to wonder if it would ever be light again.
Sheridan stood stock-still, breathing in the darkness. Nothing is silently coming into my room, she told herself. Nothing was creeping toward her. She would have heard the door swish open. Unless it swished open while one of the prisoners was yelling.
The lights flickered back on, dimmer this time. That was another thing the guards did. Each day the light in the room seemed weaker. Or maybe that was a by-product of being here—the way things grew darker. It was enough to make her wish for a virtual reality program that took place outside somewhere in the sunshine.
About a week after Reilly had captured Sheridan, and it had become clear to him that bribery, threats, and bouts of slapping weren’t going to get her to cooperate, she was operated on. Reilly told her afterward that the surgery had only been to implant the crystal in her wrist. She had one now like every other citizen of Traventon. She should be proud of that fact, he told her. It meant she belonged.
Sheridan knew Reilly had done something else to her though, put something in her brain. A small scar had appeared on her left temple, a tiny place that felt bumpy. Whatever Reilly had put into her, it didn’t tell him her secrets. He still didn’t know Taylor built the QGP, not Sheridan.
When Sheridan had gone to bed the first night after her surgery, she found herself transported back to Knoxville. One moment she was drifting off to sleep in her cell; the next she was sitting in a twenty-first-century office.
Wooden bookcases lined two walls, filled with books with worn covers. A ceiling fan slowly spun overhead. A middle-aged man sat behind a large oak desk typing something on his computer. He was heavy-set, with graying hair at his temples and pronounced bags under his eyes. He wore a tweed jacket over a bulging stomach, and his collar was undone, as though he couldn’t be bothered to button it. He stopped typing and looked at her with mild amusement. “You fell asleep again, didn’t you?”
Sheridan straightened. “What?” Instead of the tan shapeless overalls she’d worn in prison, she wore the shirt and jeans she’d had on when she was taken from the past. “What’s happened?” she asked. “Why am I here?”
The man lowered his reading glasses so that he could see her better. “Those are questions for philosophers, not physicists. Although I’ll be the first to admit that the two fields overlap quite a bit.”
When Sheridan didn’t answer, the man leaned back and laughed. “You must have had quite a dream this time. I hope you weren’t stuck on the moon again.” He slid his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. “I’ll tell Mr. Swap that due to its unpleasant side effects, we can’t endorse his pill.” The man turned to the computer on his desk and typed in something while he shook his head. “A pity too. If the pill had been able to unlock more of a person’s innate intelligence without the unfortunate side effects of temporary psychosis, it could have done the world a tremendous amount of good.”
Sheridan let her gaze sweep around the room again. The desk was cluttered with papers, mail, and pencils. A box of paper clips sat on top of his computer. A coffee mug had left a ring on a manila envelope. One of the shelves on the wall held a picture frame that showed two young boys. Grandchildren maybe. Everything looked so twenty-first century. So normal. And yet completely unfamiliar.
Sheridan regarded the man warily for a moment. “What are you talking about?”
The man turned back to her, peering over his glasses. “The genesis pill. You agreed to be one of the test subjects. It does indeed increase intelligence, but unfortunately it produces vivid paranoid episodes beforehand—waking dreams in which people believe all sorts of things are out to get them.” He smiled tolerantly. “Don’t worry. It should be mostly out of your system by now.”
Sheridan noticed diplomas hanging on one of the walls and stood up to take a closer look. The name on them read Perry Branscomb. Branscomb. He’d been Taylor’s graduate adviser at UT, the man who had gotten the funding to create the first QGP.
This wasn’t real at all. “Reilly killed you,” Sheridan said.
Dr. Branscomb raised his eyebrows in tolerant surprise. “I guess better me than you. Isn’t something bad supposed to happen to you if you die in your dreams?” He stood up and tugged his jacket into place. “Let’s go to the lab. I’m eager to see how the pill has affected your mental prowess. Perhaps we’ll even be able to finish the QGP.”
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Sheridan walked to the door without answering him. Reilly had re-created this place to trick her. If she could get away . . .
Sheridan flung the door open and ran into a hallway. She rushed past milling college students, all dressed in jeans and T-shirts. None of them tried to stop her. They just gave her curious glances as she wove around them.
She ran down a flight of stairs, saw an exit sign, and headed toward it. When she pushed open the door, she realized where she was. A perfect replica of the UT campus spread out in front of her. She’d come out of the Nielson Building. The colonial-looking Ayres Hall reigned over the quad, its flag standing at attention.
She stopped running and took in the buildings, grass, trees, the bright blue sky overhead. How had Reilly created a place this big? The answer came to her as soon as she thought of the question. The future had virtual reality centers. She was inside some sort of computer program.
Reilly had worked at UT, so he’d been able to replicate it. Sheridan doubted the ruse would have worked on Taylor, but it at least it would have had a chance. Maybe it was easier for a person to believe they’d had a psychotic, paranoid reaction to a drug than to accept they’d been snatched out of their time period by future scientists.
Sheridan had come with Taylor to campus enough times to know her way home. She headed that way at a fast pace. She wanted to see how far this virtual reality program could go. Reilly knew what the physics buildings and labs looked like, but he couldn’t have known what the inside of her house was like. He couldn’t have reproduced her family or friends. He hadn’t known Taylor back in the twenty-first century.
Dr. Branscomb caught up to Sheridan and took hold of her arm. “What’s wrong? Where are you going?”
She pulled her arm away from him. “This isn’t real. I know what you’re doing.”
His brows furrowed together in concern. “The drug might not have completely worn off yet. Let’s go back to my office so you can rest.”
She wanted to run off again, but didn’t. She couldn’t escape, not when she wasn’t in a real place to begin with. Sheridan looked around at the buildings. The detail was amazing. There was nothing like this in the computer games from her day. “You must have used old pictures or video of this place to reproduce it so well.”