He looked around at the other people in the crowd and was shocked to see that they were all locked in the same disturbing battle with the music. Their eyes were closed and their bodies immobile, and Joe was sure that the wormlike intruders hidden within Le Cadavre Exquis’s music were threading their way into each and every one of the audience members.
Then Joe saw them doing exactly the same thing that the three X-Core fans in the pub had been doing: tapping their feet and nodding their heads to a nowexistent beat.
Joe found himself absurdly grateful for whatever it was that Geoff and Greg Shuttleworth had installed in his chip’s architecture. They had pretty much saved his mind for him, preserved his sanity.
He realized that things were darker and more dangerous than any situation he had ever found himself in. There was something … bad … hidden behind the industrial noise of X-Core. Something that seemed to have a life of its own. And an agenda of its own, too.
“You listening, Abernathy?” Joe asked.
“Of course,” Abernathy replied instantly. “We’re picking up some really strange readings from your chipset. Is everything okay?”
“No. No, it’s not. This is worse than we thought.”
“Define worse.”
“Precise definition pending. But it’s bad. Really, really bad. There is something terrifying hidden within X-Core. It tried to … take control of me, I think. It’s got the whole audience.”
“Get out of there, Joe!”
“How soon can you get a team here?”
“Three minutes,” Abernathy said. “Why?”
“I think we need to grab a X-Core fan and run some tests on him.”
“Kidnapping? Experimentation?” Abernathy sounded shocked.
“They … they’re all immobile, except for heads and feet. They’re listening to music even though there’s none playing.” Joe caught movement out of the corner of his eye. A girl was heading toward the exit. “Send people,” he said. “Take a guinea pig. I’m off in pursuit of someone who seems unaffected.”
“Be careful, Joe.”
“Of course.”
Joe hurried after the girl, catching up with her just before she made it to the exit of the Warhouse. She was small, dark, part Asian. And in a complete panic. Joe reached out his hand and touched her on the shoulder.
Ani turned and looked at the stranger with equal measures suspicion and fear. He was a couple of years older than her, about a foot taller, and had one of those intense faces that looked like its wearer was carrying the whole weight of the world on his shoulders. She looked into his eyes and thought she might have made a mistake about his age: they looked older somehow. Wiser and more cynical than the eyes of a typical teenage kid.
He’s seen things that he shouldn’t have, not at his age.
She thought about photos she’d seen in history class of the war in Bosnia, and remembered being shocked by the eyes of some of the kids who had lived through the atrocities. They’d seen too much. And that was how this kid’s eyes looked to her.
He was staring at her with concern, but it quickly turned into something else.
Something that looked a lot like relief.
“It’s okay,” the stranger said with a warm hint of an American accent. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“You’d better not even try,” Ani said, bravado masking her fear. “I’m a black belt in … in some made-up martial art that isn’t fooling anyone.”
The stranger smiled, and he looked young again.
“Let’s hope you don’t have to demonstrate it,” he said. “I haven’t trained in any imaginary defense strategies. They’re my Kryptonite. We should get out of here. Before those … weirdos wake up.”
Ani felt oddly comforted by the stranger’s presence and nodded.
They left the Warhouse and stood on the pavement outside. The street was busy enough that it created an odd juxtaposition with the scene they had just left. People were walking around, oblivious and carefree. Ani and the boy both stood there for a couple of seconds, marveling at the normality and ordinariness just feet away from the extraordinary events they had just witnessed.
Finally the stranger spoke. “Hi,” he said. “My name’s Joe.”
“Ani.”
“Pleased to meet you, Ani,” Joe said, shaking his head. “Do you have any idea what on earth happened back there?”
Ani hesitated. The events of the last twenty-four hours made her feel cautious and vulnerable, and she didn’t know this kid from Adam. How could she be sure that he wasn’t … one of them, whoever they were? Adrenaline was pumping through her body, and she no longer knew who to trust.
Joe seemed to concentrate, his brow creasing for a second, and she felt herself relax, suddenly sure that Joe was actually an okay guy.
Of course she could trust him.
How could she not?
Joe reached out a hand and squeezed her arm very gently.
“Everything’s going to be all right,” he told her, and she knew that he was telling her the truth. She just didn’t know quite how she knew that.
“I’ve got to get you somewhere safe,” Joe said. “Somewhere where we can figure all this out. I need your help, Ani; maybe the whole world needs your help, if this is as bad as I think it might be. You just proved yourself to be unique in that crowd. You’re still you, while everyone else in there just went blank. Can you trust me, come with me, tell me your side of what just happened?”
Ani nodded.
“Not quite unique, though,” she said.
“Huh?”
“You were in there, too,” she said, and Joe smiled again.
He pulled out his phone, dialed, and then said to the person on the other end, “Get me a car. I’m coming back to HQ. Oh, and I’m bringing a friend.”
CHAPTER TWELVE: APHELION
Whoever this Joe kid was, Ani had to admit that he traveled in style.
Within minutes of his call a chauffeur-driven, coal-black Mercedes was pulling up to the curb: latest model, latest reg, shiny and impressive. Ani narrowed her eyes and Joe shrugged before opening one of the back doors and waving her in. Then went around to the other side and got in next to her.
“Who are you again?” Ani asked, surrounded by a new car smell that didn’t come out of a can.
“Joe Dyson.”
“Heir to the vacuum cleaner empire?” Ani asked, only half jokingly.
She saw there was a moment when Joe’s face seemed guarded, as if he were making a decision, then he smiled and said: “Special agent of a secret youth task force. Investigating X-Core with an eye to, you know, saving the world.”
Ani laughed, then saw that Joe was being totally serious. “Really?” she asked.
“Really.”
The Mercedes glided away from the curb.
“Don’t spare the horses,” he told the driver. “I think we just reached DEFCON Doomed.”
The driver spun a neat turn and accelerated back the way he’d arrived.
Ani sat back in the plush upholstery and thought, I could get used to this. If life had been getting stranger and scarier with every passing hour, it had finally taken a turn that she actually approved of.
But she had a lot of questions buzzing around in her head—as well as the aftereffects of the second soundform experience—and the journey seemed like a good opportunity to get answers to at least some of them.
“So tell me, Special Agent Joe Dyson, how does an American kid become a British secret agent?”
“Just lucky,” Joe said. “I guess it helped that my mom was CIA.”
“And where are we going?” Ani asked.
“We are en route to the clandestine headquarters of the Youth Enforcement Task Initiative,” Joe said, and he seemed relaxed and controlled, as if the craziness they had just been through hadn’t even happened. “Which just so happens to be my place of work.”
“YETI?” Ani snorted as she worked out the acronym. “How old are you, anyway?”
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“Seventeen. I’ve been a YETI operative for over three years now.”
“And what does being an operative involve?”
“Kids do bad things. Or are made to do bad things. If you want to infiltrate an organization, gang, or terror cell that is using kids to do their dirty work, then you need kids to do the infiltrating. And take down the baddies when the case is made against them.”
“You’re serious?”
“Always. I have to be.”
“Isn’t it dangerous?”
“Usually.”
“Is that even ethical?”
Joe turned to look at her and his eyes looked old again. She realized that her first impression had been correct: he had seen a lot of things that a seventeen-year-old probably shouldn’t have.
“I volunteered,” Joe said gravely. “Anyway, is it ethical to use kids as suicide bombers? Or smuggling mules? Or to use them for mind-control experiments masquerading as musical fads?”
“Is that what you think X-Core is?” Ani asked.
“I can’t think of another explanation.”
“Then get me to your headquarters. I think I may have another theory that I’d love to get a second opinion on.”
Joe raised an eyebrow, but Ani just sat back in her seat.
Joe allowed himself to relax completely when the car got moving. It felt good.
He was hyped up by the events of the day, and he knew that things were probably going to get pretty hectic when he got back to HQ. In his experience, it was small moments like car journeys that provided the space to slow himself down, to recuperate mentally, and to prepare for the next storm to come.
Ani was an enigma to him: a young kid, smart and witty, but with reinforced steel somewhere in the construction of her personality. She had remained pretty much unfazed by the weirdness at the Warhouse, had accepted his revelation about YETI without so much as blinking, and then revealed that she had a theory as to what was really going on.
Who are you, Ani? he thought. Who are you, really?
He’d gone through the usual list of possibilities—bystander, perp, ally, or victim—and thought that she probably fit in category three: ally. There was just something about her that reassured him, that made him want to trust her—he’d had to use a blast of pheromones to convince her he was trustworthy—while Ani just needed her natural character to do the same thing to a cynical law enforcement agent.
He smiled.
Abernathy’s going to love her.
Okay, so “theory” might have been overstating it, Ani thought, but her mind had been churning over and over on the information that she, Uncle Alex, and Gretchen had uncovered, and she was starting to draw together the disparate strands into something that made some kind of sense.
If it could be called sense.
It sounded crazy and creepy and it was probably totally wrong, too, but something about Joe made her want to impress him. When he’d admitted that he was a teen secret agent she’d at first been skeptical, but now she accepted it without question. It just seemed true, and a pretty cool idea. The kind of opportunity she would have liked herself if she’d gone to as good a school as Joe obviously had.
A fee-paying school, obviously.
The proof of that wasn’t just in the accent he was concealing, but in his manner.
Or manners, actually.
He conducted himself entirely differently from any other kids his age that she could name. Better. More considerate. Really, he conducted himself better than most adults she could name, too. Maybe that could be a cultural thing—perhaps explained by that hint of an American accent she’d detected the first time he opened his mouth—or just something unique to himself.
He behaved as if he were an old soul in a young body: an old soul from another time, when knights roamed the kingdom righting wrongs and protecting the innocent.
Not that she was sure that such a time ever existed beyond TV and books. But Joe struck her as a sort of modern-day knight errant. She realized again that she kind of envied him. Sure, she was a hacker and a technology freak, but she always saw what she did as a kind of inherently decent act.
Even the Facebook hack had been born out of a frustration—an anger—at people who spent real money on digital livestock and crops for farms that didn’t even exist in the real world. Jack and Ani had bonded over a shared hatred of people deciding that their meaningless entertainment was somehow more important than making the world a better place. With all the world’s problems—with all the poverty, social inequality, starvation, and needless deaths in the world—people still chose to squander their time, money, and energy on digital geegaws that served no purpose but to feed some insane need to develop nonexistent farms. Paying money for imaginary food while the rest of the world starved.
A world like that needed heroes.
If she could help him, then maybe she’d feel less ineffectual in this crazy world they existed in.
She guessed that that was one of the things that she’d always felt: ineffectual. It was probably the result of being born into a poor family, of being raised in public housing, and—of course—of being half Vietnamese. It was a perfect storm of social factors, and society’s reduced expectations were leading Ani on a narrow path toward social immobility—a societal version of the Red Queen’s race from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, where it took all the running a person could do just to keep in the same stupid place.
She was starting to feel a little angry, but knew that she was traveling down that particular thread of thought so she could crowd out the other thread that wanted examining. The one that was practically demanding her attention. The one that made her feel sick with fear.
The one that was built out of scraps—the things she had learned and experienced—and conjecture: the only frame that she could put everything into that explained it all.
When she got to wherever it was they were going she would have quite the tale to tell.
They pulled up to the barrier and the guy on the gate raised it and waved them through without asking for ID. His hand didn’t stray anywhere near his weapon. Joe thought about every time he’d come through the entrance with Abernathy, when you’d have been forgiven for thinking the whole place was on security alert, and wondered if the guards only put Abernathy through more thorough scrutiny because they were afraid not to, or whether they just liked making Abernathy wait.
They pulled into the parking lot and Joe led Ani inside. When the guard refused to let Ani through the inner doors, Joe got him to call Abernathy who, judging by the distance the guard held the phone away from his ear, wasn’t happy to be kept waiting.
The place had an atmosphere of suppressed hysteria, with people working off multiple screens and multiple phones as the urgency of the investigation was suddenly becoming apparent. He received fewer nods, but didn’t take it personally.
Ani followed at his heel.
For a random kid walking in after the weird events at the Warhouse, she seemed to be taking things pretty well. As they made their way toward Abernathy’s sanctum sanctorum, her eyes darted about, curious, and Joe wondered if the expression on her face was a mirror of the expression he’d worn when he’d made the walk through the offices for the first time.
“You work here?” she asked him, in genuine wonderment.
He nodded.
“Well, mostly I work undercover. But this is my base of operations.”
“That’s so cool. Have you got a number?”
“A number?”
“You know, like James Bond.”
“No number. That would be like admitting we existed.”
“Top top secret.” Ani smiled. “More like Ethan Hunt.”
“I don’t know who that is. But yeah, we’re pretty hush-hush. You’ll have to sign the Official Secrets Act.”
“No way!”
Joe nodded.
He realized that he liked having Ani around.
He approached the door to the contr
ol center, flashed his card at it, and the door opened.
“You think you’ve seen cool? Ani, you really ain’t seen nothing yet.”
They stepped over the threshold.
If the building had impressed her, the inner area took her breath away.
Literally.
She stood on the edge of a room that was like a hacker’s dream. The computer setup was beyond amazing, like an exhibit from a tech expo five years in the future, and it made even Gretchen’s computer look a little out of date. Three huge 4K displays collated text data, photos, video, and sound from the multiple individual workstations, giving—she thought—a clear overall picture of a few different situations.
Or cases, she supposed.
In one window there was camera footage of people entering the Warhouse that must have been mounted upon the photographer’s head from the angle it was taken.
She was following the action when her attention was suddenly drawn to the main screen and she was alarmed to see a photo of herself, taken from a hidden surveillance camera, on her and Joe’s way in to the building. She could see databases being accessed next to the picture, and facial recognition software results that gave her name, address, and other pieces of information that someone must have pressed hide on, because they disappeared from the screen just as she was about to read them.
A door at the side of the room opened and a tall, gray-haired man who looked about fifty stepped out and gestured for them to join him.
“The boss,” Joe whispered, and they made their way over to him. “His name’s Abernathy, and he can be a cold fish but he’ll warm to you, I’m sure.”
“Good to see you, Joe,” Abernathy said. “And Ms. Lee, it is a rare and wonderful pleasure to meet you.”
He offered her his hand and she realized that he wanted to shake. She offered hers up, awkwardly, and he gave it a soft squeeze.
“It really is a great pleasure,” he said. “I’m a big fan of your work.”
Joe looked at her oddly and she gave him a look that hopefully said she had no idea what he was talking about.
They went into the room, and Abernathy waved at a couple of chairs and then sat down behind his desk.
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