“I was watching the contest from the second floor; Angel here seems very competent to me.” Heshowed off his dental work with a smile, but the warmth didn’t reach his close-set brown eyes. “I’m Edward Castellan, but please call me Eddy.”
I blinked once, then shook his manicured hand. His heavy gold ring pressed into my palm. I recognized the name of SilverDollar’s Head of Operations. Eddy? I was supposed to call him Eddy? “Nice to meet you,” I said politely.
“That was very impressive, Angel. We’re glad to have you on our team.” Up close, the tightness of his skin made me suspect that his muscles were from body-sculpting surgery, not anything as sweaty as exercise. “I think she’s ready to go on a real job, don’t you, Anaximander?”
When your boss suggests something you agree. “Very soon,” Anaximander stalled.
“Why wait?” Eddy said, still smiling, but with a hard edge to his voice. “Why don’t you take her along on the case you’re working on?”
I pricked up my ears, interested in spite of the bad vibes the two of them were giving off. I hadn’t realized Anaximander was working on an investigation during the hours I spent doing lessons.
“I don’t think this is the right case for Angel to start with,” Anaximander said.
“I insist. After all, you could use the help!” Eddy smiled as if making a joke, but I got an uneasy feeling that it wasn’t funny. “How long has the fugitive been eluding you now?”
“Five months, sir.” Anaximander’s voice was toneless, but something in his body language raised the hair on the back of my neck. He staggered slightly as if standing on the deck of a ship in stormy seas. He blinked—a purely habitualfunction as his silver eyes had no need of lubrication. He watched Eddy as a hypnotized bird might watch a snake.
Seriously creeped out, I followed his gaze to where Eddy was fiddling with a bizarre necklace he wore instead of a tie. A black, butterfly-shaped piece of plastic, three inches tall, that dangled from a black cord. The plastic had something engraved on it, but Eddy’s fingers hid all but the first two letters,A L.
“Well, I’m sure you’ll catch him soon,” Eddy said, a definite implied threat in his tone.Catch him soon, or else.“I have confidence in you, Anaximander. You’re our best investigator. At least until Angel here starts!” He clapped me on the shoulder, laughing heartily.
What a loser.
“So how are you doing, Angel?” Eddy asked. “Are you settling in here at SilverDollar?”
There’s something wrong with my memory,I thought but didn’t say. “Everything’s great. I’m enjoying working here.”
“Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help. Anything, anytime, okay?” He winked.
“I will,” I lied.
After another minute of uncomfortable small talk, Eddy turned back to Anaximander. “I’m sure I’ll hear from you soon. When you catch the fugitive.”
A small bead of sweat had formed on Anaximander’s forehead. Amazing. I would have sworn he was too Augmented to still have sweat glands.
“Yes, sir.” Anaximander’s gaze remained locked on the token around Eddy’s neck.
What could it be? A good luck charm? It was rather large and clunky. It didn’t go with the corporate image.
Eddy nodded to us both and left. We stared after him for several moments in silence. I noticed that he had tiny feet.
Eddy. I couldn’t get over the little-boy nickname. Had he been trying to be buddies? Puhleeze.
I gave in to my curiosity. “What was he wearing around his neck?”
Anaximander shuddered as if coming out of a trance. “What?”
“The thing around his neck. What was it?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t notice it.” Anaximander began to walk back to the gym.
I stared after him, unable to tell from his enigmatic expression whether or not he was lying. I caught up with him at the door, before he could vanish for the day. “Tell me about this fugitive we’re after.” I didn’t like the way Eddy had forced my help on Anaximander, implying that he was incompetent, but I couldn’t help feeling a rush of anticipation. I was dying to get out of the classroom and do something. “Is it a saboteur?”
“No, a thief. He has something that belongs to SilverDollar that’s worth millions.”
“Do you know where he is?” I trotted at Anaximander’s side down the hallway.
“I’ve narrowed down the area,” Anaximander said precisely.
I raised an eyebrow, waiting.
“He was last seen in Taber two days ago.”
“So close?” I asked, astonished. Taber was onlytwenty kilometers away. I would have expected the thief to leave the province of Alberta, if not the entire continent-country of NorAm. Staying so close to SilverDollar’s Operations facility was either an act of idiocy or great daring, hiding in plain sight.
Anaximander nodded tersely. “He wants something we have. Until he gets it, he’s not going anywhere. I have a dozen men conducting a door-to-door search. He’ll be found soon.”
If he had eluded Anaximander, the most tenacious person I knew, for months, I didn’t think we could count on him turning up on a door-to-door search.
Taber. I cast my mind back to a map of the area I’d seen.
“You know,” I said, “if it were me, the Wasteland is where I’d go.” The stretch of barren land—once prosperous corn farmland—had been devastated by a man-made blight during the World Environmental Crisis. In the years since the crisis, eighty percent of arable land had been successfully reclaimed, but Taber’s soil was one of the unlucky varieties that the process didn’t work on. Now it was good only for collecting solar energy.
“Impossible,” Anaximander said flatly. “On sunny days the solar collectors are too hot. It would be like hiding in a frying pan. He would go blind from the mirror glare.”
A dart of annoyance pierced me. “The fact that it’s impossible just makes it safe. I’ll bet I could do it, and if I could, so could he.”
“No.”
“If I’m right, one of the solar collectors will beregistering slightly less energy than the rest of them,” I said.
Wordlessly, Anaximander moved to one of the numerous computer access points that dotted the complex. I watched over his shoulder as a hologram of blue hexes appeared. “There.” I pointed at a border hexagon that was shaded more green than blue. “That hex. Off by one and a half percent.”
“It could be anything,” Anaximander said. “A dead bird. A spot of rust.”
“It’s him. I know it.”
“So confident.” Anaximander stared at me for a moment. “All right. This afternoon we’ll search the solar collectors. Do your morning lessons, and then meet me at the aircar bay at one o’clock.”
I grinned at Anaximander’s departing back. Yes! My first assignment!
Back in my room, I changed clothes. Before dropping the exercise sweats on the floor for the housecleaning robots to launder, I carefully transferred the note to my white pants.
“Violet eyes lie.” I had written those words. What did they mean?
Lie to whom? About what?
I was starving, but that wasn’t why I hotfooted it over to the cafeteria. Ben was just finishing his breakfast when I arrived. He groaned when he saw me but paid for my stack of pancakes.
I snatched the debit card out of his hand when he would have pocketed it again. “That’s mine, I believe. Now what was that spending limit again?” I teased. “A hundred and fifty dollars? Two hundred?”
“Fifty!” Ben was on his feet, reaching for the card.
I laughed and eluded his grasp. “Okay, fifty it is. See you at lunch.” I waved him off.
After wolfing down my breakfast, I put in an hour doing lessons. Learning by computer was faster than classroom learning, but one hundred times duller. No other students to joke around with, no teacher to lure off topic . . . no one to tattle when I skipped out. I usually whipped through four modules a day in an effort to impress Anaximander, but since he had
failed so far to notice my diligence I figured he wouldn’t notice today’s absence either.
I made it safely back to my quarters without encountering anyone and lost no time doing a computer database search on “Violet eyes lie.”
If the message I had received was secret or dangerous in some way, using Ben’s employee card instead of my own would prevent the search from showing up as a debit on my payroll statement. The precaution was probably unnecessary, but it made me feel better.
One hundred thirteen sites.
I screened through the first twenty article summaries, but none of them contained all three of my search terms so I paid for a full-text download. It brought me within sixteen dollars of the limit Ben had insisted on, but I had to know.
While the computer completed the download, I paced the room. My white bedroom and tiny bathroom looked plain and bare, incapable of concealing anything. Compelled, I searched my sock drawer for more secret messages. I felt slightly silly when my labors produced only a handful of lint, but not silly enough to stop myself from searching the rest of my clothes.
I had almost given up when I found another scrap of paper deep in a decorative pocket of my blue jeans. Before I read the pinprick message, I examined the paper it was written on. One edge was torn, and when I took out the “Violet eyes lie” message, the two pieces of paper matched up. It was a receipt for potatoes, not exactly helpful. A third of it was still missing; there must be at least one more message.
The message on the other side spelled “Renaissance.”
Renaissancereferred to a time in European history when there was a great flourishing of the arts and sciences, but the image that popped into my mind when I read it was of a hairy Neanderthal man.
And then I was drowning again for the second time that day.Cold water closing over my head; my boots dragging me down into the dark green depths.
When I surfaced again, I put my hand on the wall to steady myself. My pulse thundered in my neck. By the time I stopped being scared, I was angry. Why the hell did that keep happening?
In my mind, I went back over the times the drowning memory had overtaken me—eight times in all. I came to the disquieting realization that the episodes hadn’t started until after my training accident. Worse, they usually happened when I was trying to remember something and failing. The puzzle was that I couldn’t remember ever drowning either. In fact, I was positive I could swim.
The computer flashed blue, signaling that the download was complete.
I skimmed through the first one hundred articles the computer had pulled up but failed to find anything significant. Usually the wordsviolet, eyes,andliewere separated by a lot of text and were totally unrelated.
I was about to skip over an article titled “Movie Sets the Fashion: Violet Eyes In,” when a word farther down caught my eye. “Renaissance.” The second secret message I’d found. “The movieEscape from Historyis based on the true-life story of Project Renaissance.” Frustratingly, after that the article went back to talking about fashion. The last twelve articles were duds.
I took the results of my first search and added in the termRenaissance.One site only, the article I’d already read. Then I tried searching forProject Renaissanceand hit the jackpot: 20,529 hits. Too many to look through.
With only eleven dollars left on Ben’s debit card, I was faced with the choice of downloading a random sample of Project Renaissance articles, which might or might not be relevant, or downloadingEscape from History.I picked the movie.
Mistake.Escape from Historyhad a rating of one and a half stars out of five. In my opinion, they’d given it one star too many. It sucked.
Pallid blonde, who looks too old to still be in high school, is supersmart and is picked on by her 1950s-era classmates. Hunky guy moves to town and romances her, then vanishes. Everybody in town pretends they never met him. Blond girl discovers that the reason she’s supersmart is that she’s the result of an illegal genetic experiment called Project Renaissance. Scientists have beenwatching her from hidden cameras her whole life, the 1950s town where she lives is fake, and the year is actually 2098. She escapes and tracks down her boyfriend only to find out that he was part of the setup. He never loved her; the evil scientists hired him to get her pregnant. The movie ends with her supersmart baby being taken away from her to be raised in the fake 1950s town where she’d started out.
By the end of the movie, I wanted to slap the main character. She’d spent half the movie either in tears or screaming hysterically. If she was so supersmart, why had it taken her so long to figure out that her boyfriend was a scuzzball? His name, Judas, ought to have been a clue.
It was a stupid movie, but it scared the hell out of me. Because the blond girl’s name was Angel, and she had violet eyes. And the cardboard 1950s town and hidden cameras had struck a chord.
I had a terrible feeling that the Angel in the movie was supposed to be me.
Which was ridiculous. I did well at school— okay, very well—but I wasn’t genetically engineered to be supersmart like the blonde in the movie. Or at least I didn’t think so. The truth was, without classmates to compare myself to, I couldn’t judge how intelligent I was. I tried not to think about how easily I’d outwitted Anaximander in the maze.
The whole movie was so hokey I couldn’t tell what was based on truth and what was pure Hollywood. I was willing to believe that Project Renaissance had been a real genetic experiment aimed at creating supersmart people, but I still didn’t know what “Violet eyes lie” meant. Theblonde had been lied to, but had told no lies herself.
I gave Ben back his debit card at lunch and paid for my own sandwich. I sat by myself and didn’t attempt any conversation. Even after lunch, I was still so rattled I forgot to play my little head game and actually arrived at the aircar hangar at 12:50P.M.,the same time that Anaximander did.
“Ready to go, I see,” Anaximander said. If he was pleased, I couldn’t tell.
“Ready to catch the bad guy.” A sudden thought occurred to me. “What’s the fugitive’s name, anyhow?”
“Michael Vallant.”
In my mind I saw the face of a good-looking, dark-haired boy.
And then the image pitched me back into the drowning memory:falling through green water, arms flailing helplessly, sinking—
I WAS GASPING FOR BREATH when I tore free of the memory, as if I really had been drowning. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find my clothes soaking wet, the sensation had been so real.
“Angel?” Anaximander was looking at me funny.
I faked up a smile. “It’s nothing.”
“Then let’s go.”
My smile slid off my face as soon as his back was turned. I shuddered. The drowning memory always made me feel horribly vulnerable.
“We’re taking the Black Panther,” Anaximander said a moment later.
Exhilaration blew away the lingering cobwebs of fear. “SilverDollar has a Black Panther?” Black Panthers were state-of-the-art aircars.
“Yes,” Anaximander said. “Mr. Castellan likes to have all the newest toys.”
The sleek, bullet-nosed craft was capable of speeds that scared any thinking person; as soon as I saw it my hands itched to take the controls.
To my surprise, Anaximander let me sit in the pilot’s seat. “Go ahead,” he said expressionlessly. “Take her up.”
It was another test. I had been studying for my pilot’s license, had spent hours flying—in virtual reality simulations. The Black Panther had a few extra controls. Fortunately, I had been watching the other times Anaximander had flown us so I knew how to start the engine. It purred smoothly under my hands.
I glanced at Anaximander, but he said nothing, waiting.
There was no way I was going to ask what to do next. He would tell me quick enough if I did anything wrong.
Fortunately, aircars were as close to idiot-proof as could be made. The computer called out the preflight checks, and I verified that all the gauges were lit and reading correctly.
“Please set course,” the computer said in my ear. I was wearing a headset, but Anaximander had an Earradio Augment and didn’t need one.
“The Wasteland.” I named the specific solar hex that was our destination.
A minute passed while the Panther’s computer consulted Alberta Air Traffic Control to lay in a course and altitude that would not cross anybody else’s flight path.
“Flight path laid in,” the computer said.
I switched on the AutoTakeoff, and the Black Panther rose straight up in the air. The aircar’s vertical takeoff never failed to put a grin on my face.
I hung onto the control yoke out of habit, but the computer did the flying.
The Black Panther accelerated smoothly instead of blasting forward the way I would have preferred, but the Wasteland was so close we’d barely started when we arrived.
Destination reached, the AutoPilot beeped, and the Panther went into a circling pattern at 914 meters. The computer polarized the cockpit windows against the blinding mirror glare from below.
“Shall I land?” I asked Anaximander. My fingers hovered over the AutoLanding switch.
“Yes, but do it manually. We don’t want the engine noise to alert the fugitive.” Anaximander reached over and turned off the ignition.
The four powerful engines faltered and then died.
The aircar bucked and bobbed, starting to fall and hitting air turbulence on the way down.
My heart stuttered and fell along with it. I pulled up hard on the control yoke, but without the engine power behind the aircar, we still fell. Glide landings had been covered in my VR simulations, but I’d spent most of my time practicing loops and barrel rolls and other fancy tricks. I hadn’t spent much time on the basics.
In VR, glide landings had seemed boring. Real life was a bit different.We were falling.My mouth dried.
Anaximander crossed his arms and watched me, seemingly unconcerned at our plummeting.
Pride rescued me from panic. Anaximander was in the copilot’s seat. If I screwed up, he could take over in a blink.
Besides, we were 914 meters above the ground.I glanced at the gauge. Make that 823 meters and gaining speed.
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