Immoral Code

by Lillian Clark

  Everyone was watching now. The guards stood behind their desk. Frowning. Waiting.

  I let my eyes sweep the crowd, looking for San, but he was already gone.

  “SEE ME!” I yelled. I had everyone’s full attention now, so I brought it down a notch. From “shrieking zealot” to “impassioned exhibitionist.” “You, the shills of capitalism! You, the carriers of the contagion Affluenza! You! Death Eaters feeding on consumers’ corrupted souls!”

  One of the guards stepped out from behind the desk.

  I swung the sign around my neck to hang across my back and slammed a fist into one of the blood packets I’d taped to my chest beneath my shirt.

  Fake blood splattered across my shirt. It dripped down my stomach, staining my hand.

  People screamed.

  “I bleed for Mother Nature! For the lesions you carve in her forests! Her oceans! Her plains! I ache for the workers you have made ache! I scream for the voiceless!”

  I hit my chest again, popping the second packet. Their attention, their screams, felt amazing. A pulsing electric purple.

  “You who would rape Mother Earth for a dollar! You who have shattered and auctioned off the pieces of your soul!”

  The guard who’d come out from behind the desk took another step toward me, hand on his hip. Radio, not gun, thankfully. The second one stood there, struck dumb.

  I popped the third and largest sack of blood with both hands. Taped to my stomach and filled with maybe a pint of blood, the effect was mwah! Choice.

  Shouts. Gasps. For real, I’m pretty sure someone fainted.

  “I am your heart,” I growled, lifting my blood-soaked hands to my face. “I am your future.” Smearing my cheeks with it. “I am your conscience. Your shame. Your guilt.”

  Finally, the guards came for me. And instead of running right away, which, yeah, I probably should’ve done, I stood my ground, threw my red-stained hands in the air, and shrieked. Like a siren. A banshee. A pure and incredible wail.

  Haven’t you ever wanted to do that? Just scream total, bloody murder in public? No? Well, I had.

  So, I did.

  No regrets.

  SANTIAGO

  El hábito no hace al monje.

  The clothes don’t make the man.

  I heard Reese scream, “Leeches!” and made my move, skirting the rear of the gathering crowd, aiming for the turnstiles and wide hallway beyond. Behind me, Reese’s voice echoed, “Bloodsuckers!” I glanced back, keeping my face aimed away from the camera I knew was mounted on the wall to my right as Reese yelled, “Sellouts!” The hallway was empty around me, the crowd in the lobby rapt, and a second later Nari’s voice confirmed in my ear, “It’s clear.”

  Without missing a beat, I braced my hands on either side of the turnstile and jumped the retractable plexiglass barrier.

  “Worshipers of profit!” Reese yelled behind me, voice ringing off the lobby’s marble floor and walls.

  I strode down the hall.

  “Sycophants to the almighty dollar!”

  Hit the button for the elevator.

  “See me!”

  Waiting, my anxiety felt like carbonation, a million bubbles pulsing through my blood, making my heart rate speed up and my nerve endings vibrate. I rolled my shoulders, straightened my spine, and took three deep breaths. I was Ethan Marques. And Ethan Marques belonged.

  From the lobby came Reese’s yell again, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying anymore. Then the settling of mechanics, of pulleys and winches and cables holding all that weight, followed by a ding, and the elevator doors opened onto a half-full car. I waited as the passengers filed out, each with their attention aimed toward the lobby, two with their phones already out, one saying, “Some sort of demonstrator? Not sure. Mitch texted that…,” to another as they hurried past, and zero sparing a glance at me. Once the car was empty, I stepped inside.

  I pushed the button for the twelfth floor and checked in with Nari. “In the elevator,” I said, pressing the mic’s button and ducking my head to bring my mouth closer to my tie. I let go of the button and waited for her reply.

  “Good,” she said. “Reese is rocking it. I don’t think anyone even noticed you.”

  I exhaled, long and slow, sank my hands into my pockets, and watched myself in the elevator’s stainless steel doors. Soft around the edges, a little indistinct, my reflection looked like a man people would listen to, a man who’d walk into a room knowing he could command it, knowing attention wouldn’t need to be asked for because it’d be immediately given. The breadth of my shoulders, tapered width of my waist, cut of my slacks, and shine on my shoes made me look not only older but also confident, not only confident but also ready, not only ready but certain.

  My heart rate slowed in time with the elevator. It settled, the doors opened, and I stepped out.

  “Hang on.” Nari’s voice was a tiny vibration in my ear, a breath, a whisper at full volume. I fought an urge to rub my ear and waited a step outside the elevator, its doors closing behind me. From Nari’s video and our research, I knew the camera that watched this room was mounted on the wall above my head and a little to the right, but by now she should’ve swapped the current feed, the one she still watched on her laptop, with a twenty-minute stretch she’d copied from yesterday evening’s recording.

  “Sorry,” Nari finally said. “I thought I— Never mind. Go, San. Go now.”

  So I went, crossing the small lobby, pulling open one of the frosted-glass doors, stepping through with confidence and starting right because that was the plan, a straight shot past the other offices along the corridor to Robert Foster’s back in the corner.

  REESE

  Flickering between electric purple and blue. Happy panic.

  I screamed. And screamed. Because this was total bucket-list material, like one step below flinging a gallon of milk as high as I could in a grocery store just to watch it fall and explode on the floor. I shrieked until my voice cracked. Until the first guard got within arm’s reach.

  Then I ran.

  Twirled on my toe and bolted. Straight for the doors. Where I reached for the handles with my bloodied hands, leaving magnificent prints. One lovely one smeared in an arc across the glass. Another wrapped around the brass-plated handle. Like the last brushstrokes on a painting. A swish here. A swipe there. A quick splatter and Masterpiece. Then the guard, the one who wasn’t supposed to chase me because I was nothing but a spectacle, a nuisance, here and gone, caught up to me and grabbed me around the waist.

  I fought. I squirmed.

  I writhed.

  Arms and legs pumping. Twisting, bucking, flailing.

  He lifted me off the floor and carried my thrashing self across the lobby.

  SANTIAGO

  Entre la espada y la pared.

  Between a rock and a hard place.

  “Stop!”

  I stopped.

  “Left.” Nari’s voice was thin, strained, calm over panic, silk over fire. “Go left.”

  I spun on my heel and went left. A few seconds later, half a breath after I’d shifted course, circumnavigating the airy common space, I heard voices, two of them, a man and a woman speaking casually, then laughing as they passed through the glass doors to the lobby. I took a deep, calming breath.

  The light in the common space was bright like daylight, clean like sunshine, making the plants strung about the central atrium, a living art installation, pulse with an almost preternatural green. I focused on that color, glancing between it and the blond wood floor in front of me as I followed the path past offices closed up for the weekend toward Robert Foster’s in the opposite corner. The green, the light, the furniture so white it nearly glowed, was calming, like the gurgling of pool drains, the creak of the board bending beneath my weight, the shush of the air moving past my ears as I performed my approach and push
ed off into a dive.

  Then, in my ear: “Fuck.”

  Slowing as I rounded the last corner, I lifted my hand to my tie, ready to push the button, when I saw what she meant. At the end of the hall, the door to Robert Foster’s office, being the very place I was headed to commence deeply illegal activity, opened.

  “Fuck, fuckfuckfuckfuck.”

  I stopped.

  The seconds stretched. A bead of water growing heavier, heavier, heavier, waiting to drop.

  I pushed the mic’s button and whispered, “Not helping.”

  Robert Foster paused in his doorway, holding open the door with one hand and looking at his phone in his other.

  “Shit. Okay,” Nari said in my ear.

  He tucked his phone into his pocket.

  “Two doors up. Conference room next to his office.”

  Looked down the hall in front of him.

  “San!”

  Turned toward me.

  “GO!”

  And I moved.

  Three smooth paces forward to the door, and I grabbed the handle, slipped inside, and closed it behind me. Heart in my throat, I huddled against the wall in the corner beside the door, away from the room’s huge windows looking out onto the common space.

  “Hang tight, Santiago,” Nari said. “Foster didn’t see you. He went back into his office. I’ll keep watch and let you know. But for now, just—” A pause. “Just…wait.”

  I know when a dive is going to go wrong. Long before I hit the water, before an ill-executed approach, before an unbalanced takeoff, before I over- or underrotate, I can feel it, deep in my gut. Bells would tell me that feeling is a consequence of brain signals and body chemistry, that we call it a “gut feeling” because of whatever cocktail of hormones and neurological twitches makes us feel unease in our abdomen.

  But this is bone-deep, marrow-deep, intuition, not thought.

  Maybe they’re the same thing told differently, but in that instant, when I know I won’t make my revolutions, that I’m going to smack the water so hard it’ll feel like solid ground or that my head is going to pass far too closely to the end of the board, I know it in more than my hormones and nerve endings. I know it in my self, my soul.

  Back pressed against the conference room’s wall, watching for a figure in the window or the depression of the door’s handle, I searched myself for that feeling, waiting for the exact moment I’d know this had gone too wrong to correct. I felt for the fake employee ID and the flash drive in my pocket, then brought my hand to the mic at the back of my tie. “Nari,” I whispered, “what should I…”

  There was a slight click in my ear.

  A click, then silence.

  BELLAMY

  Epinephrine (adrenaline).

  Molecular formula: C9H13NO3.

  Effects: increases heart rate and blood pressure, expands air passages of the lungs, enlarges pupils, redistributes blood to the muscles to maximize blood glucose levels.

  Nari clicked off her headset, and Keagan asked, “Why hasn’t he left yet?” He was kinetic, shifting in the driver’s seat, drumming his fingers on the wheel, eyes darting between Nari’s computer screen and the rearview mirror. “Why didn’t we make sure he was gone?”

  “I don’t know!” Nari shouted. Frantic, she switched between two windows on her laptop’s screen: the first the view of the lobby, now empty of everyone but a few reeling observers, and the second Foster’s closed office door. “He has dinner across the bay at seven. An email from his wife at four confirmed it. He should be gone by now.”

  I leaned back. I was going to be sick.

  They were going to be caught. Both of them. All of us.

  Because of me.

  Why hadn’t I tried calling again? I could’ve begged and yelled. I could’ve, should’ve—I’d been impatient. And selfish. I’d wanted to hurt Robert Foster for hurting me, for ignoring me. I’d wanted revenge. So I’d sat back and looked the other way while the wrongness of this stared me straight in the face, all while letting Nari and Keag and Reese and San risk everything. Everything.

  I’d done this.

  I’d done it.

  I’d—

  I blinked and focused back on Nari’s computer screen. I’d swear it had been minutes. Whole minutes since the guard hauled Reese, kicking and flailing, across the lobby, since San ducked into the conference room. But when I glanced at the clock in the screen’s header, the time hadn’t changed.

  Nari scanned through the other camera angles, watching in real time while the false loops she’d spliced into FI’s security footage still played on their feed. But she couldn’t find one that showed Santiago or even a better view of the room he’d hidden in. She looked at Keagan, then back at me, eyes wide. “What do we do?”

  We both stared back, silent.

  For one beat…two…three.

  I reached for the door handle. “Get San out,” I said. “I’ll go get Reese.” And before Nari or Keagan could protest, I’d climbed from the car and was walking down the sidewalk toward the main doors to FI.

  I didn’t know what I was going to do, what I was going to say. With each step, I grew incrementally and inevitably closer, yet I still didn’t know.

  What I did know was that I wanted to travel to other planets someday. I wanted to float through the silent weightlessness of space. I wanted to walk on Mars, watch the rings of Saturn through the window of a spacecraft I’d helped design. And I knew that all that was possible. In the incredible expanse of human ingenuity there were answers to questions we hadn’t even thought to ask yet.

  And if I meant to summon the bravery to leave my planet behind someday, I could damn well save my friend from the consequences of a risk she’d taken to help me eventually do that.

  SANTIAGO

  La necesidad agudiza el ingenio.

  Necessity is the mother of invention.

  Silence.

  Nari was gone. I was alone.

  I pulled the earpiece out of my ear, letting it dangle from my shirt collar, and rested my head back against the wall. The conference room’s exterior windows looked out on the neighboring buildings, the angle of the sun low and casting their shadows in stark relief. The long conference table reflected the view like a mirror on its polished black surface. The temperature of the room was perfect, completely ignorable and kept that way by the gentle whir of air flowing out of a large vent in the ceiling in an easy, artificial breeze.

  I tried to rationalize. I hadn’t done anything yet. Was I even technically trespassing? I hadn’t broken in, only slipped past the building’s rather lax security. Couldn’t I, simply, leave? Walk out right now? But then, what about Bells?

  What about me?

  Giving up now, this close, literally down the hall from the last step in this grand scheme, this plan I’d decided was a metaphor for my own ambitions, was too much metaphor even for me.

  I stared at the ceiling, waiting for the door to open or not, sifting through my existential crisis, deciding whether to stay or bail, when my attention settled back on the air-conditioning vent.

  “San?” Nari’s voice asked, small in the earpiece still hanging down by my collarbone.

  I tucked it back in my ear, held the mic’s button, and answered, “I’m here.”

  “Thank God.”

  I held the button again. “Foster?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “Great,” I said, looking through the conference room’s window to make sure I was alone. “See anyone?”

  Nari answered, “No. It’s clear.”

  I inhaled deeply, let go a long, controlled breath, and left the room.

  Standing at Foster’s door, tapping the code into the keypad, I was a filament. Bright and hot, buzzing and visible. I typed the code in: 1-7-9-8-5. A light in the pad’s top right corner blinked red o
nce. I tried the handle.

  Nothing.

  I keyed the number in a second time.

  Another red blink, and the door stayed locked.

  This was the number Foster had used yesterday. I was sure of it. I’d watched him key it in once myself. Bellamy had checked it again this morning.

  Yet.

  I stood there, staring at it, for one second, two, three. Did I try it again and risk hitting my limit, like messing up your pass code too many times and getting locked out of your phone? Would it sound an alarm? Send an alert to an app on Foster’s phone?

  What did we miss?

  “Uh,” I said into my mic, taking quick strides back to the conference room, “we have a problem. The door code is wrong.”

  A pause. Then Nari’s voice, inflectionless: “What do you mean, ‘wrong.’ ”

  “ ‘Wrong’ as in wrong.” I closed the conference room’s door and leaned back against it. “Or it was right; then he changed it. Doesn’t matter. ’Cause the code I have won’t unlock the door, and I’m not going to stand out there trying it till I get caught.”

  “Um,” Nari said, and I pictured her sitting in Keag’s car, slack-jawed and stumped. “I don’t—”

  “Wait.” My eyes rested on the air-conditioning vent in the ceiling. The rather large air-conditioning vent. Maybe even large enough to fit my shoulders. “I have an idea.”

  REESE

  Maroon. No, mauve. Because I hate mauve. Stupid, dread-filled, muddied, might-get-arrested mauve.

  The security guard hauled me bodily around the corner behind the info desk, following the other one into a small room. I stopped fighting the moment the guard carrying me stepped inside. “You good?” he asked.