by Rayya Deeb
Two stops later, Jadel got off. I silently followed, two steps behind him. He must really know this hub well to be moving around it the way he was. I definitely didn’t want him to see me now, not only because he would be mad I didn’t stick with our plan, but also because I wanted to see where he had clearly decided was the place to go. He was on a clear-cut mission.
Jadel suddenly turned around. I ducked behind someone and acted like I was tying my shoe. I looked back up— he was gone. No!
I scanned every direction. No Jadel. No time to lose. Too many directions to choose from. Against my better judgement, I activated my FlexOculi. It could cut through the walls with x-ray scope and lock onto his whereabouts. Then I could find myself back on his trail. But it just kept beeping and not doing what it should. With my frustration mounting, I began to receive flex alerts. All of the alerts were contact attempts from Dom, Reba, Ellen and my mom. There were hundreds of them. My mom had tried me seventy-six times. I couldn’t become distracted with that. I had to find Jadel. I couldn’t let the disturbances from back home squash my shot at finding my dad. I was too close. This moment was everything. Nothing could mess me up! But I couldn’t control the inundation of flexes and FigureFlex requests.
My FigureFlex mom stood in front of me, holding Killer in her arms.
Doro, You are not safe! Please flex me immediately. We are all so worried about you. You have to come home. Please, Doro—
Jadel was getting farther and farther away. I smashed my hand into the air button to close out my mom’s flex. I couldn’t let incoming noise drown out my rational thought. Blocking my mom out felt horrendous, but she had it all wrong. The fact that she was being manipulated to say those things killed me. Because of that I was forced to keep her away. I couldn’t tell her that they were doing this to us. Why couldn’t they just let us be? Especially my mom. She’d been through a never-ending emotional hurricane and I just wanted it to end.
I knew my state. I was fine. I shed the dead weight, turned off flex alerts, and got down to business, knowing very well they could potentially be on to me now, tracing me through my flexer that was now connected back to the grid. I had to find cover stat and then handle that vulnerability. I booked it down the hall, peering in every direction, trying to go incognito as my FlexOculi scanned every single face. Finally, as I passed a closed golden door, the sensor went off: Jadel was on the other side. I stopped, made my way to lean up against the wall right next to it.
I activated a new flex device I had installed before we left: The X-scope. It could see and hear through up to two feet of any sort of matter with the exception of lead. A 3D geogram of Jadel and two other people appeared on my FlexOculi monitor, letting me see them in graphic lines that were constructed by heat sensors. But the audio was shoddy. I moved along the door to try for better reception but I couldn’t make out what they were saying— there was way too much static for some reason. It was like someone he was with had blockers running on their flexers. That was the only explanation. I’d tested this stuff with Reba before I left. This made me suspicious. Oh my gosh. It suddenly hit me, was it Jadel? Did Jadel have an implant? That would be nuts, but it would explain so much. He had known I should deactivate mine and he didn’t even react to the fact that I had one. But why wouldn’t he have told me he had one when I told him? Who were these people, how did he know them, and why didn’t he tell me he’d be in contact with people he knew down here? Jadel had people inside Seneca. Was he secretly a traverser? Who was this guy?
I could tell by their geogram body language that they were about to leave the room. I ducked behind someone just as the golden door opened and they emerged. Jadel came out first. I watched him head back in the direction he’d come from and I knew I had to think quick, but first I had to see the two people that came out behind him and capture their identity. Out they came— two men in black. Oh my god: S.O.I.L. One of my legs started to shake, but I kept it together in the face of one heck of a betrayal that I did not see coming. Jadel was with S.O.I.L. This was a trap!
My game plan was null and void now. The sudden revelation that Jadel was in contact with S.O.I.L. knocked the wind out of me. What a masterful deception, posing as some pure-hearted, outdoorsy type, when in fact he had direct ties to the most untrustworthy group I’d ever come across.
There was no time to throw myself a pity party. I had to let go of my interest in Jadel and make my next move with him in my wake. I flex-grabbed the identities of the S.O.I.L. agents so that when I came across them in the future, I’d have them locked in.
S.O.I.L. knew I was in Hub 48, and I was back to rolling solo. I needed to hop on the grid with Brittany’s identity and download the maps to this foreign hub. Then I could locate and search the research labs and ask around to some of the real science types that I could envision working with my dad.
Although S.O.I.L. was obviously onto the fact that I was maneuvering through the Senecan city as Brittany, I couldn’t imagine they’d have shut down her grid access. I’d bet they were still using it to try and find me. First things first, I had to re-code Brittany’s location settings to scramble across the entire hub. So I cloned her recognition data and attached it to dozens of people around me that headed in every direction. S.O.I.L. would know I was here, but not exactly where, because as far as data was concerned, Brittany was all over the place now. To err on the side of caution, I had to be ready to make it as far away as possible from this spot within milliseconds of completing this operation.
13
THE MAP OF Hub 48 hovered in front of my face. I had a bird’s-eye view of the city sector that contained all the leisure spots like the shopping, restaurant, and fitness districts. This is where I was located, which was indicated by a blinking white light. I concentrated hard and pulled out even further to surf across the other sectors. It was a lot to take in, but getting my bearings straight had to happen immediately because I was on borrowed time and the only weapon I had was my mind.
Hub 48 was a giant hexagon with an entrance to each of the six sectors on every one it’s six sides. Hub 48 was also connected to two other hexagons— one was the agriculture zone and the other was called the dynamo zone. I had no clue what the dynamo zone was, but I absolutely wanted to know. Regardless, it appeared that Hub 48 was much more expansive than Hub144. The acoustic carrier encircled the Hub 48 hexagon with a stop at each sector entrance (City, S.E.R.C., Residences, Facilities & Operations, S.O.I.L., and X) and direct lines from each one into the center of the hexagon, where there was a square. The square was one hundred thousand acres and labeled S.I.C.E. I honed in to read: Seneca Inner Core Exploration. Working population: 80,000.
Knowing that my dad had been collaborating with the world’s largest particle research lab in Switzerland in the years before his disappearance, it made sense that he'd be one of the eighty thousand inside S.I.C.E. He'd often said that everything we needed to make the planet function optimally was just below our feet, but somehow that type of research never scored anywhere near the same kind of funding or attention that space exploration got. Well, it was pretty obvious to me that right here and right now in Hub 48 there was an insane amount of money spent and effort made to explore what was right beneath us.
The clues were just too obvious to ignore. Knowing what I did about my dad’s life passion, there was no doubt in my mind that he was here, doing the work he loved. I felt punched in the gut to think that he had given up on me and my mom for this… that he’d rather spend his days in the headiest of science experiments than in the little ones we used to do in our own backyard. I shook off the feeling of abandonment and pulled myself together. There was a reason I was here. I reminded myself that nothing was as it seemed. Assumptions did not equate to truth. My dad loved me. I loved him. That was the only truth I had to go on, and the fact of the matter was I didn’t know my dad’s truth. It could very well be that he thought he would eventually be able to bring my mom and me here, just as I thought I would find a way to get my mom
inside when I made the decision to join The Seneca Society.
With my head down, eyes up, I slid along with the crowd, taking in the expression on every face in my path. There was no telling who would try and grab my facial recognition. There was a pretty calm vibe in this city center at dinnertime. I was running on empty, however. The smells emanating from the restaurant district reached my nose. My stomach grumbled, pleading with me to make a pit stop, but I’d have to move forward on fumes. Some sort of power bar would do the trick once I knew I was out of the red zone, where I was prey being hunted in S.O.I.L.’s wide open field. The reality was there was no telling when I would be safe again, I just had to keep moving.
I walked several blocks to the entrance point through which I had come into this hub with Jadel. I hopped on the acoustic carrier and took a seat in the corner for a ride to the center of the hexagon. I kept my head down with a heightened awareness of any movement around me. I thought about Jadel on that ride, and wondered what he had planned for me. What would have become of me if I had waited back in that pod for him?
I reached the stop at one of the six entrance points to S.I.C.E. I took a mega breath and prepared myself for the next phase of my search. An adrenaline rush kicked in the second my foot hit the ground inside S.I.C.E., but I also instantly had the sensation that I was being followed. I could have easily chalked it up to paranoia, but this was no time to snooze on my intuition. It was hard to dialogue with my body’s warning signs at this particular point in time because I was transfixed by the magnificent, endless vortex of metal and lights in front of me. Stainless steel pipes, intricate tubing that went on and on, walkways stacked on top of more and more gray metal walkways, and systems of yellow ladders built in a perfect architectural pattern. There were men in blue, but also black, and all white, masked, behind clear-coated walls. Rooms ablaze in blasts of polar white steam. Tanks of glowing magenta liquids, flowing, bubbling, gushing. A group working in one room engulfed in blue lights wore what looked like space gear. This was excruciatingly beautiful in a totally geeked-out kind of way and the acoustics were a calming bath of sound.
We humans have come a long way from the Bunsen burners that my dad used when he was a kid. I bounced between feasting my eyes on this place, watching my back, and making justifications for the choices my dad had made— well, the choices I wasn’t even sure that he actually made. It was impossible to stifle the assumptions. It was impossible to ignore my twice— no— thrice— shattered heart.
I made my way inside and blended in to become another mouse in a functional maze. My sights were set on finding a relaxed, unassuming type of individual, and asking them to locate my dad based on his Senecan ID, which I had secretly locked in my Veil during Operation Crystal. This meant I’d have to hop back on the grid to access it, and of course I’d have to deal with any of the noise that would come with that. In the midst of my thought processing I had been spotted. Ten feet in front of me stood four masked men in black.
Uh-oh: S.O.I.L.
“Don’t move!”
Screw that— time to move at lightning speed. I darted for the closest yellow ladder and scrambled up it. It shot fifty feet up to a walkway. I hauled it, not looking back.
“Stop!” a young guy shouted. His voice hit me hard. It sounded almost familiar. I hesitated, gulped, but kept moving. I heard their storming feet right behind me. Climbing the ladder, I felt the vibration in the metal. Heart pounding, I was almost at the top.
“You don’t want to do this!” the guy yelled again. Then a woman yelled, too, “Doro!”
I kept my eyes on the steps in front of me. I didn’t want to look back and trip up. I couldn’t let them gain footing on me, but hearing my name like that made me instinctively turn around. Why was she calling my name?
I was so high up now. The scene below me was terrifying. Some people in lab coats looked on, but cleared out of my way as I got up onto the hanging footpath and sprinted across at full speed.
The electricity surging through my blood compounded in one millisecond when I saw Jadel and two men in black coming from the other direction down the footpath. Jadel himself was in black. Jadel wasn’t just in cahoots with S.O.I.L., Jadel was S.O.I.L.! I didn’t know which way to turn. S.O.I.L. was after me from both directions. I looked up and jumped to hang on to the wall above me. I scaled it and climbed up another level. Then I started back in the direction I’d come from, faster than I’d ever run in my life, when BAM— my feet were grabbed. I hit the floor hard, my chin took the brunt of the fall. Blood started gushing from my tongue that was almost bitten off at the tip.
“Ahhh!” I shouted. I looked down at my feet locked in by a leg cuff drone. I had to keep moving, but I couldn’t use my legs. The four masked S.O.I.L. agents rushed up on me—
“Get away!” I screamed, even though I knew they wouldn’t, but it just came out of my mouth.
“Relax!” one guy said, and another one chimed in, “We’re on the same side!”
“The hell we are!”
I saw Jadel climb up onto the path we were on.
“Doro!” he shouted.
“Jadel, you—”
The masked S.O.I.L. agent threw a gag in my mouth so I couldn’t speak! I gasped through my nose, pushed out moans of anger from my gut.
As the masked guy turned back to Jadel who had a stun gun lifted on us, he popped one off on Jadel— it caught him in the shoulder. He dropped. “Don’t make me stun you too!” the man with the stun gun barked at me.
Jadel’s two accomplices climbed up with their stunners, too, but POP— POP!
Jadel’s accomplices dropped just like that. My mind was blown. What the hell was happening?! S.O.I.L. versus S.O.I.L?!
The masked guy swiftly pulled a clear plastic box full of needles and syringes from inside his pocket, ran up to Jadel and the other two men on the ground and injected them. I looked at Jadel like take that sucker, but also felt a bit of guilt. We had an undeniable connection. There was no way he was one hundred percent out to get me. How could he have nursed me back to health, referred to me as his amiga, and then wished me captured by bad guys?
None of this made sense. Actually, I am certain Jadel saved my life. I wouldn’t be this close to my dad without him, even if he had something else going on. But now he was being shot up with god-knows-what and I was just watching and not doing a thing. I started praying that I wouldn’t get a shot because I knew full well what shots meant in Seneca and they certainly were not for the flu.
The other masked agent strapped me to his chest and the four of them activated the jet packs on their backs and blasted off from the footpath! We flew through the center of S.I.C.E. with literally every eye in the place on us. My mouth gagged, my feet trapped. Here we go again.
14
WE DESCENDED A wall in an upper corner of the facility. One of the men in masks knew where we were going and the other three stayed behind him, with me and my guy bringing up the rear. I use the term my guy loosely. I was going to ditch this fool as soon as I had the chance. I tried to brainstorm ways to escape, but four on one? This was going to be tough.
The man in the lead spoke with a South American accent, but I couldn’t identify where exactly he was from because, aside from Peru, I’d never been down here. If I could hop on the grid, my flexer would let me know the origin of his accent. Alas, I could not risk that right now.
His voice shook a little. “We’re in the clear for… possibly only seconds.” Then my guy said to me, “I’m really sorry about the gag.” I recognized his voice. I was instantly relieved, but shocked with myself for being so oblivious.
As we cruised through the open space he unstrapped the gag.
“Reba?!”
“I’m sorry, Campbella, we couldn’t risk you talking—”
I was instantly relieved it was him, but then I snapped back to reality, upset and confused. “You scared the crap out of me!”
“Shhh. If we get busted, this whole thing is over.”
“Who is we?!”
Reba stayed calm and quiet.
“Who, Reba?! Tell me!” My body fidgeted hardcore from the surging adrenaline and desire to break free, but I was strapped in so tight there was no way I was going anywhere, and if I broke loose, I would drop, and if I dropped, I was dead.
“Just stay chill. I’ll explain everything soon,” Reba assured me.
This whole situation was horrendous, but I obliged and stayed quiet. I felt so constrained and blown away by this sabotage inflicted by my supposed closest friend. I looked at the other guys in black. Who were they? Dom? One had to be Dom! And whoever else could be with them? Ellen?
In an unsuccessful attempt to get my nerves in check, I clamped down on my lips and tightened my jaw, almost cracking my back teeth. I was so close to finding my dad and the truth of this entire society, and now everything was thrown off track.
All this time I’d thought that my friends and I wanted the same thing: to find and expose the corruption inside Seneca, but now I just didn’t know. Why would Reba have come here after all this time? And Dom— I don’t think I knew it was possible to love and hate one person so much. He crushed my heart and he made it gush, but right I was too entangled in the chaos to pay attention to my meddling heart.
We came to a stop.
The South American S.O.I.L. agent commanded a door to open. We moved swiftly through it. The door closed behind us. We were inside a tiny, dimly lit room. There was a very slight, almost undetectable vibration in this space. Nobody spoke as we continued on through a solid stone tunnel for about twenty more yards. My ankle cuffs had wheels so I was rolled along, still strapped to Reba. I started to feel a calm settle over me, like after an intense vomit or a big cry. Then my mind came charging its way back in to remind me that I am not safe until I am in control.