6 Digit Passcode

by Collins, Abigail

  Flynn is the name of the Digit in charge of removing the tracking device from the back of my neck. She has tanned olive skin and brown eyes that glint gold in the light; her hair is dark brown and cut so short that at first I mistook her for a man. Her voice is pitched higher than I expected it to be, but she speaks slightly less formally than most of the other Digits I’ve encountered thus far, especially Rin.

  There is a small needle in Flynn’s hand, connected to a tube that looks vaguely similar to the syringe Tesla used to inject the microchip inside of me. It disappears behind my head, and a second later I feel a sting as it sinks into my skin. The pain is bearable, especially since I have already experienced it once and expected it this time, but it’s the burning sensation after the needle is removed that really bothers me. My neck feels hot and itchy, but I know that if I touch it the pain will only get worse.

  “Can I ask you something?” I say, uncurling my fingers as the bite from the needle begins to fade.

  “Sure, sweetheart; you can ask me anything. I might not always know the answer, though.”

  She grins and stows the needle back in the case it came from, along with several other small instruments that I recognize from the raised trays in the medical rooms at the compound. There is a scalpel, like the one Tetra sliced my neck open with, a pair of strangely angled tweezers, and a device that looks kind of like a small screwdriver. I want to assume that these items are being used for different purposes here than they were in the camp, but I can never be too cautious.

  “What… what are you feeling right now?”

  She looks at me curiously for a moment, then says, “I’m feeling a little anxious, I suppose. And I’m glad we accomplished our mission and got you out of there alive, but we lost almost half of our men, and that… that makes me a little sad, too.”

  I think back to what Tetra said, about the Digits still being able to feel some of the emotions that they could when they were human. But then I remember the cold, lifeless look in Dori’s eyes, and I can’t believe it’s true that he still had any of his humanity left in him then. He loved Holden with all of his heart, and if he could still feel that, then he would never have raised a weapon against him.

  “You’re thinking about your friends, aren’t you?” Flynn asks. I must look confused, because she explains, “Rin briefed us on what happened before we intervened. I am so sorry. We didn’t intend for anyone to get hurt, and we thought we had drawn out all of the guards.”

  “Dori wasn’t a guard,” I tell her. “He was one of my friends. And the man he shot down was the same man he was in love with when he was human. What… how could he have done that? The Dori I knew would never have…”

  “He couldn’t control himself,” Flynn interrupts me gently. “He hesitated, didn’t he? You must have seen some kind of emotion in him, even if he didn’t act on it. His mind may have been his own, but his body… You couldn’t have done anything to stop him short of deactivating him.”

  She says ‘deactivating,’ but her tone suggests she means killing.

  “But… can’t you guys turn your emotions on and off? That’s what I was told just before Rin showed up – that you have emotions, but not very many, and not all of the time.”

  The more I speak, the more stupid I sound to my own ears. I have so many questions, it doesn’t really matter if I get an answer to this one; it’ll just bring up a dozen more, and I’ll be stuck even deeper in the dark.

  Flynn opens another compartment in her carrying case and pulls out a heavy roll of gauze and some bandages. I slip my jacket off down my arms without being asked to and push the straps of my shirt down to just below the injuries Tetra gave me; there is blood on my collar, and the slash marks extend from the top of my ribcage to my neck. I wonder how much longer it would have taken Tetra to kill me if Rin and Holden hadn’t shown up when they did.

  “We can,” Flynn explains as she unrolls the gauze. “But that’s like turning off our minds as well. It’s kind of like going on autopilot – we become purely logical creatures. But it’s difficult to do it, and not all of us can. You’ve seen the chips in our foreheads, correct?”

  I nod and bite down hard on my lower lip as she begins removing the soiled bandages from my chest; they stick to my skin and tear bits of dried blood off with them, reopening the wounds and sending jolts of pain through my body. Flynn furrows her eyebrows and does her best to be gentle, but the cuts are so deep and numerous that I don’t think there’s anything she can do make them feel any less painful.

  “Well, to put it simply, those chips are what connect our human minds to our mechanical bodies. It’s a difficult process to explain, and if any one step is incorrect, the experiment will fail.”

  I understand what she’s trying to tell me, and why she won’t come right out and say it. She’s telling me that there are such great numbers of people being recruited to join the Digit army because very few of them will even survive the operation. I know I’m not smart enough to understand exactly how a person becomes a Digit, but that’s less important to me than knowing why.

  “There are certain people – high-ranking Digit officials, mostly – who have the ability to interfere with the chip and alter the emotional state of the individual. It’s likely that your friend Dori had his emotions controlled when he attacked you – they were repressed, so that his body would do whatever the person controlling him wanted, regardless of how he felt about it.”

  “So… then couldn’t you have helped Dori? Hacked into his chip and stopped him from…”

  I can’t say it. I can’t admit out loud just yet that Holden is dead; saying it makes it seem more final. I saw the blood, and I saw him fall over in his chair, but I didn’t hear his heart stop beating or his lungs stop breathing. It’s kind of like what happened to my father – I watched him fall, and I saw his blood splattered all over the room after I finally got up the courage to look for him, but his body was gone. Until I find their bodies and confirm for myself that they are dead, they’re just… missing. It hurts less to think of it that way.

  “No,” Flynn says, so firmly it surprises me. “Each chip is unique. Only those who created them can control them. And we,” she gestures to the general area of the train we’re in, and I know she’s referring to the group of Digits she came here with, “are members of Division 4. We have no authority over the actions of Division 6 or its allies. We could not have stopped your friend. I’m sorry.”

  She sounds genuine, and I really want to believe that she is. She finishes wrapping the gauze around my wounds and begins placing bandages where the cloth can’t reach; my skin stings more the farther up my chest she goes, and when she reaches my neck I have to hold my breath.

  “Then, you can be controlled, too,” I say, wincing as the front of my shirt grazes across one of the unbandaged cuts on my chest. “What’s to stop you from becoming like Dori?”

  Flynn smiles softly as she sticks the last bandage to my neck and starts packing away the unused supplies. I think I see a hint of sadness in her face, but I blink and it’s gone.

  “I was a scientist when I was a human – people like that barely exist anymore, but back when I was born, they were legendary.” I’ve heard that scientists were the people responsible for creating the Digits a long time ago, but anything else they accomplished has been wiped clean from our history books. “I volunteered for the experiments because I thought that I could help make the world a better place. I made my own chip, so I’m the only one who has control over my body.”

  I pull my sweater back on and look up at her, swallowing down all but one question burning in my throat.

  “How is that even possible?”

  She chuckles lightly and says, “Division 4 was founded a long time before Division 6. You’ll find that things are run a lot differently there, but a lot better, too.”

  I press my index finger down on the burning spot on the back of my neck and hope that she’s right.

  Chapter twenty-seven
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br />   I rest for a few hours before Rin visits me in my compartment, carrying with her a large black knapsack over one shoulder. Her thin hair is twisted into a long braid down her back and she’s wearing a dark blue dress covered in frills that makes her skin look porcelain in comparison. She hands me the bag and sits down beside me on my makeshift bed, waiting silently for me to open it.

  I do, and the first thing I see is a pile of neatly folded clothes that I recognize as the remainder of my wardrobe I left behind at Crissy’s house when I left. These are the things I didn’t have the time or the space to bring along, and each article of clothing has been pressed and packed gently, like it was done with great care; I rifle through the pile and see that not a single piece has been forgotten.

  I feel down towards the bottom of the bag and my hand touches something soft that I recognize before I’ve even pulled it out from underneath my layers of clothing. It’s a teddy bear, worn and patched up in several places, but filled to the brim with memories.

  “How did you get this?” I ask Rin, cradling the bear to my chest and running my fingertips over the seam of its back.

  “Your brother wanted you to have it. He told me to tell you that he doesn’t need it anymore – his nightmares are gone. He thought it might help ease your guilt and make you feel less lonely.” She cocks her head to one side and looks at me strangely, like she’s trying to figure out what I’m thinking by my facial expression. “Does it?”

  “That means he’s alive, right? They haven’t hurt him, have they?”

  Rin shakes her head, but the look on her face doesn’t change. “No; your little brother is in perfect health. Your friend and her parents are as well, though some of the injuries they sustained will have lasting effects on their bodies.”

  An image of Crissy flashes in my head, a long cut drawn down one of her eyes, splitting the lid and most certainly leaving her at least partially blind. I don’t remember exactly how badly her parents were hurt, but it’s enough to know that they’re going to keep suffering for the rest of their lives because of me.

  “When did you speak to them? Did you tell them anything about me?”

  “The day before I initially contacted you I went to your place of residence to gather your personal items; I thought they might bring you some comfort in the days to come. And I told your family nothing more or less than the truth – that you were kidnapped by representatives from Division 6 and recruited to join their forces. I told them that I was planning on saving you.”

  I set the bear down on my lap, but I can’t bring myself to put it back in the knapsack just yet. “Why?”

  “Because it’s the truth.”

  “No, I mean, why did you save me? Why me? There were so many other people at that camp who needed help even more than I did. What is it that you know about my mother that made you choose me?”

  Rin sighs and laces her fingers together in her lap. My heart is beating so loudly I’m sure she can hear it.

  “I didn’t just know about your mother, Everly,” she begins, and my breath hitches in my throat; “I knew her personally. When she was your age, she lived in Division 4. I know I may look like a child, but by the time your mother came under my protection, I was over twice her age.”

  I had thought – from the formal way that she speaks and her elegant mannerisms – that Rin may be older than she looks, but I’ve never really given much thought to how much older she is. Was she made into a Digit when she was a little girl, and this is the form she’s chosen to retain for all of these years? Or does she have something else to gain by pretending to be the innocent child that she really isn’t?

  “She was alone, on the run and being targeted by enemies from a neighboring Division; she never told me what they wanted with her, but I knew that she was sincere in asking me for help.”

  I think back to the letter my mother left for me – the one that Tesla had planted on her body as a way to threaten me into joining her cause. The note never actually said who was after my mother, just that she left home when she was a young girl and came to Division 6 to start her life over. But Tesla once told me that my mother passed her training – the very same training I was undergoing until Rin came for me. If my mother was training to become a Digit, then why didn’t she ever actually become one?

  Her letter said she’d made mistakes in her past that she regretted, and that eventually resulted in her death. Maybe she was like Holden, or even like Dori; perhaps she chose to join the Digits, and realized her mistake just a little too late.

  Every bit of information I’ve learned since my parents died has become like a puzzle piece in my head, and I am only now beginning to put them together. But there are still a lot of things missing, and one in particular that I feel may help answer all of the other questions I have: who was my mother running away from? Who is the enemy – my enemy?

  I take a deep breath and try to speak without saying too much; I don’t want to risk losing Rin’s trust now that she’s finally decided to divulge her information to me.

  “My mother told me that she ran away to Division 6 when she was about the same age I am now, but she never told me why. All she told me was that she made a lot of mistakes when she was younger, and that’s why she died and the Digits came after me. But if Division 6 is so awful, why would she have chosen to start her new life there?”

  Rin’s eyes glaze over like she’s stuck in a memory, and I wonder how clearly she can visualize things that happened to her so long ago. Maybe it’s like being in a simulation, where the pictures are clear and the feelings are real, but nothing is tangible enough to touch. If she really cared about my mother as much as she claims to have, it must hurt her to think about things like that.

  “I don’t… know for certain why she left us. We offered her protection, and she became like family to us. She snuck across the border between our two Divisions before we could stop her, but she wasn’t alone; she had a man with her, though I never learned his name. It wasn’t until much later that I found out that she was pregnant when she ran away.”

  “Pregnant?” I shiver runs down my spine, and I silently count the age gap between my mother and I. “With me? But my father was born in Division 6 – at least, that’s what I always thought.”

  Rin nods tersely. “I don’t know the name of the man your mother left with, but I do know that he wasn’t the same man who raised you. He was your birth father, but he died before he even made it past the border into Division 6.”

  “My birth father is dead?” I ask, my head swimming with so much information it aches. “Why? Who killed him? Why…?”

  I am grateful to Rin for telling me as much as she has, but a part of me wishes she would stop. I don’t know how many more secrets I can carry before I burst, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to pick through them well enough to tell the lies apart from the truths.

  “It is illegal to pass between Divisions without special permissions from the Councils. You’ve learned that much in school, haven’t you?”

  I incline my head and pray she doesn’t say what I know she’s about to.

  “Your birth father was caught doing just that. I do not know which side took his life, but I had no part in it; his body was never found, but I can assure you that he was an entirely different man than the one who raised you. I regret that any of it ever happened.”

  Her voice breaks off at the end, and for a moment I forget again that she is the same kind of machine that killed my parents – even if she claims to have loved my mother. There is an important piece missing from the puzzle inside of my brain, and until I find it, I can’t trust anyone. Rin could be lying to me – she may even have murdered my mother herself. I have no way of knowing who is telling me the truth anymore.

  “So, then, I… I’m…”

  “A member of Division 4, technically, yes. You may not have been born there, but that is where you were conceived, and where both of your parents were born. That is likely why the Digits of Division 6 wanted
your parents dead so badly, and why they chose to punish you as well. You may not have committed treason, but in their eyes, you are guilty of the same crime as your mother.”

  I understand now, though I almost wish I didn’t. Tesla must have hated me because of what my mother did – how she got away with her crime for so long, without Tesla or any of the other Digits even noticing. But, then, why would Tesla choose to recruit me to join her army when she could just as easily have killed me outright?

  “We think they may have been declaring a war,” Rin says suddenly, as though she’s reading my mind. “By having you fight for them, they are betraying their alliance with Division 4 immensely. But I’m sure they think the same of us, now, for having taken you back.”

  So I was right all along. There really is a war coming, and at least part of it is my fault. I wasn’t even supposed to be born, and if I hadn’t been, none of this would be happening right now. Crissy and her family would be healthy and safe, and Fray wouldn’t have to bear the burdens he has had to at such a young age; Holden may still be alive, and Dori may never have become the monster he was turned into.

  But I can’t know any of that for certain. Maybe my mother would have run away whether she was pregnant or not – with the same results when her betrayal was eventually discovered. I was a baby – I couldn’t have done anything to help. But a part of me still feels like if I’d never even existed, my mother would have stayed in Division 4 and might still be alive.

  “Then… how are you going to stop them? If a war really does break out, what are you going to do? They’re building an army. Can you really stand up against something like that?”

  “We really have no choice but to try,” Rin says. “They are not immortal; you saw that yourself. Their bodies can be destroyed just as easily as humans’.”

  I really doubt that – I’ve seen firsthand how many shots it takes to bring down a Digit, and how few wounds can kill a human – but I don’t respond. The train careens around a sharp turn that sends me sideways against the wall of the compartment, and I wince as I feel the injuries on my neck pull open again; Rin doesn’t even move.