“I think you’re right.” Now that the adrenaline of the fight had faded, she could feel exhaustion dragging at her. “Let’s sleep. At least until light?”
“Move out!” Govorn called.
“Dammit,” she muttered. “Tell me they have coffee in this world.”
“Probably not.” Jamie hopped into a cart and pulled her up. “But you could go into the other world and get some.”
And so, as the cavalcade trundled off in the darkness, the twins sat with Styrofoam cups of hazelnut coffee and sipped companionably in silence.
Chapter Fifteen
Having set out before dawn, the caravan reached the branch in the road well before they expected to. Govorn declared that they would break for breakfast, which was a good reminder to Taigan’s stomach. They had sipped their coffee but had decided not to chance the smell of egg mcmuffins and now, her stomach growled loudly.
Breakfast might only have been wild rice porridge with dried fruit but to her, it was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted.
The twins were surprised to see Esak approach them as breakfast came to an end. The boy had a full pack and his expression was guarded but not unfriendly.
“Are you ready to leave?” he asked them.
She raised her eyebrows and swallowed her mouthful of porridge. Her thought was that she would have to learn to finish sometime soon. To him, she said, “We’re coming with you?”
“Don’t ask too many questions,” he advised. “Or I might regret my choice.” He gave her what was very evidently a mock-glare before he headed off to speak to Govorn, who proceeded to give directions.
Taigan looked around. With the element of surprise, the bandits had managed to kill four of the caravan members. Their bodies had been loaded in one of the carriages, and she didn’t know what the leader intended to do with them.
In all honesty, she was afraid to ask. To her surprise, however, she found that her feet took her to the carriage with the corpses. She didn’t know the names, only the faces. One man had warned her to stay out from under the horses’ hooves and another had cooked their dinner the night before.
Govorn joined her there. “Are you paying your respects to the dead?” He sounded curious.
She did not answer immediately. Yes seemed to be the most logical and easiest answer, but it seemed disrespectful to lie about something like this. Finally, she said, “Why did they do it? Come to try to kill us?”
“It wasn’t their goal,” he said. “They wanted to take the caravan. The element of surprise and a few dead will often make the rest surrender, so that’s what they try. I was a fool. They push farther east every year and I should have put watches on the caravan every night.”
Taigan said nothing. She hugged her arms around her body.
“Go now,” he said softly. “We’ll give them a proper burial. You keep yourself and the others safe.”
She nodded to him in silence and went to pick her pack up. Jamie frowned at her and she only shook her head. She was chewing her lip as they set out, and she left the other two to make the goodbyes.
The two young men let her walk ahead for a while, and she made it a point to not think at all. It was difficult. By nature, she was someone whose mind liked to churn and tumble issues repeatedly like pressing on a bruise.
It was only that she wanted to make sense of the world. The thing was, though, there was often no sense to be found.
Eventually, Esak caught up with her. He looked at her and she spared him a smile.
“You should know the truth if you’re traveling with me,” he said finally.
She stopped, surprised.
“I already told Jamie,” he said.
Behind him, her brother confirmed this with a nod. He looked thoughtful, not angry, which made her curious.
“Okay.” She started walking again. “What’s the truth, then?”
“I’m not going to the other world for me,” Esak said. “It makes sense for it to be me as I’d be someone the town wouldn’t miss, but I’m not doing it to get away—well, not permanently.”
“Did your parents know this?” Taigan asked suspiciously. She would be deeply angry if it turned out that the mayor and his wife had known the lie and had perpetuated it.
“No! They don’t know any of it. It’s a secret.” He cleared his throat awkwardly. “The one way I did fit there—my home—was Ella. I know I don’t know what it’s like to have a twin but it felt…like I imagine it feels for you. She’s my other half. When she’s there, it’s like I think better, I have more strength, all of that. And the same for her.” He sounded wondering.
“And you’re not staying to marry her?” she asked.
“You, too?” He shook his head. “Remember what I said? That it was like being a twin. We don’t want to marry. It’s not like that. Everyone thinks it is but it’s not.”
“Oh. Right.” She considered this in silence for a moment.
“She’s sick,” Esak said bluntly. “In the town, they think of it as pain and faintness and believe it comes and goes, but it’s worse than that. It’s killing her. She can feel a mass in her belly when she presses on it.”
Taigan’s blood ran cold. Cancer. What would the people in this world know about how to cure cancer? Was there anything in this world that could cure it? She’d seen bandages and ointments but nothing that remotely resembled a sterile hospital.
“I think the town healer suspects,” he said, “but she won’t admit it. Ella’s parents always say it’s fine, that she’ll be well and should marry and have children. The widow Lorenz has headaches all the time—the kind where you can’t see any light—and she has children. Everyone knows Richard and how his bones ache. They’re both old and they’ve survived it. But she knows this is different and I trust her.”
“So you’re going to the other world,” she said slowly, “to find something to cure her.”
He nodded.
“That’s why you were so frightened the other night,” Taigan said in a flash of understanding. “I said you would never be able to come back, and that frightened you because you hadn’t ever thought about getting back. You only wanted to go to get her the medicine.”
“Yes,” Esak whispered. “So now you see. It has to be me. I can’t live without her and no one will miss me. I have to try.”
“Esak, there must be someone in this world who can—”
“There isn’t,” he said bluntly. “Elves in Heffog have spent a king’s ransom on the best healers and still died of a mass in their stomach or their head. No one in this world can cure her. I didn’t have any hope at all until I heard the story from Insea about the man going to another world. If there’s no hope for Ella here, maybe I can bring some back.”
Taigan pressed her lips together. His pain was palpable and somehow made all the worse by the fact that he could never leave this place. He was a program and had no body to wake up to in her world.
Unless he did. Maybe all of this was merely another simulation. The thought made her eyes cross.
No. He was a program. He lived inside Prima in this world. The thing was, she didn’t think that made him fake. He—and his pain—were real.
“I merely thought you should know,” he said finally.
She simply nodded because she didn’t trust herself to speak—not until he turned to go, and the words pushed out of her. “You’re wrong, you know.” Her voice was scratchy and broke on the words.
He looked at her in surprise.
“You would be missed,” she said. “There’s a story in our world and we watch it every—well, hear it every winter. It’s about a man who gets to see how the world would have been if he hadn’t existed. He sees the lives he’s touched and the good he’s done and realizes that he is worthy of remaining. You can’t be the kind of person who would risk your life and everything you know to help a friend and also be someone who wouldn’t be missed.”
Esak considered this. Finally, he shook his head. “I have to try,”
he said simply.
“I know.” She smiled at him. “Do you…want to talk?”
He shook his head.
“You go ahead,” Taigan said. “We’ll stay close but give you space.”
He forged ahead and left the twins to walk together. With the wind in their faces, they didn’t need to worry that he would hear them, but it was still a long time before either of them spoke.
“What do we do with this?” she asked finally.
“What can we do?” Jamie asked practically. “He can’t use the key. He doesn’t exist in our world.”
“Who says the door always goes to the same place?” she asked him. “Maybe he goes into some other world Prima has created and he finds the medicine for Ella.”
“You know he won’t. She needs surgery or chemotherapy. And what if she dies before he gets back?”
“I don’t know!” Taigan threw her hands up. “But he’s doing this for a good reason, and if there’s a chance this could work, I don’t want to…I mean…”
“You don’t want to take the key and get out of here?” he demanded. There was something new in his voice now.
“I do! But I think maybe we’re meant to sacrifice so—”
“No.” Now, her brother was openly angry. “You merely want another excuse to stay here. You’ve looked for them over and over again. You wanted to set out with no plan when we had to look for the key. You wanted to help Ben and the creatures in the forest.”
“Because I was warned that unless I fought for something, I would get better and not have anything to live for!” Taigan countered.
“You don’t want to go back,” he accused. His face was pale now. “Emmy and I went through hell to get you here. We fought with Mom and Dad simply for the chance, and then I came here and you weren’t here yet, and… I’m staying here for you, and I’m beginning to think that waiting for you to decide to come home will…well, you never will.”
She stared at him, her mouth hanging open. Ahead of them, Esak had stopped and made a show of not listening.
“How can you say that?” she asked finally. “After all the memories I’ve missed, after the times you’ve seen me cry about sleeping through things, after hearing me say that I never thought I’d even get to go to college or anything like that?”
“Yeah, and also watching while you got to chicken out of everything,” Jamie retorted. “You never had to ask anyone out because what was the point if you would only be in a coma again? And college? Well, it’s not like you worked on your applications while you were awake. You didn’t have to worry about not getting into places. You didn’t have to worry about getting a job or finding a place. I think now, you’re worried. I think you’ve realized that everything will change if you get better and you’re scared of it changing.”
“I—”
“Don’t.” He strode down the road while she stared after him with her lip trembling.
Was he right?
Part of her thought he was.
Chapter Sixteen
Gary Brooks had barely fallen asleep when the phone rang. It wasn’t his phone, of course, but the phones he had bugged while he was in the woman’s apartment. And, at three AM, it wasn’t likely to be anything normal. Either he’d have an urgent piece of information to shelve for later or he would learn more about what she was up to.
She truly had been a chump. He’d chuckled all the way to his hotel room at the way she’d welcomed him in, even after the mix-up. People liked to think of themselves as being polite to maintenance workers, which meant they forgave all kinds of discrepancies.
He’d had unfettered access to everything for days, which had been mostly good.
With a massive yawn, he struggled awake. He was running on far too little sleep these days and had finally turned the bathroom feed off. The noises coming out of that place were unreal. Some of them didn’t even sound human. And the search history that went along with them was unsettling, to say the least.
That said, she was indisputably involved in some shady business with Anna Price and Diatek.
This wouldn’t be the first time a company had tried to hold back on the Department of Defense when it came to leaps forward in technology. When countries bid against each other for something like AI, a company could walk away with a fortune and everyone knew it. So, instead of taking the guaranteed—and still obscenely high—payout from the US Military, some preferred to take their goods to a bidding war, often pretending to operate in other countries to avoid eminent domain.
Those were the companies Gary Brooks went after, and he did so ruthlessly.
He felt no shame about it whatsoever. The Department of Defense had a budget that eclipsed most countries, let alone most countries’ military spending, and they were generous with the money. They preferred to have people do business with them voluntarily. They treated their civilian contractors well.
It was when people didn’t play ball and tried to give vital developments to rival nations that people like him got involved. Because like hell would any other country get AI before them.
Now, he watched the recording start on the screen and listened in as the woman picked up.
“Si?” she said muzzily.
“I apologize for the late hour.” Price’s voice was crisp.
Gary closed his eyes for a moment and smiled. The CEO had laid low for a few days now, and even he had begun to think he was on the wrong track. Every time he was about to pack up and go home, though, another trickle of information came down the pipe—a patent, an email, and now a phone call.
She probably thought he had left.
“What can I do for you?” There was a rustle of blankets that sounded like someone sitting up, and a sleepy murmur in the background. The boyfriend must be over again, although they never seemed to do anything sexual.
He could understand why, given the sounds that came from the bathroom, but it would have been nice to have some blackmail material.
“Do you have time to come to the lab to talk?” Price asked.
Gary swore. He had tried to bug Diatek’s labs several times, but their cleaning crews did regular sweeps for listening devices and every one of his bugs had been removed within hours. No matter how many people he bribed, nothing seemed to stay and eventually, he gave up.
Some of the janitors were probably driving Lamborghinis by now.
“We can talk here,” the woman said. She sounded annoyed.
“I can’t be overheard,” Price said.
“Oh, for—” The woman sighed. “So call me back.”
The CEO wavered and Gary prayed. Please, let the woman think that was enough. It didn’t matter how many layers of encryption they put on when he could hear things from the other woman’s end. After all, she sometimes used speakerphone and even when she didn’t, she had the volume set high enough that he could usually hear both sides of the conversation.
Including several to her doctor about the rather explosive problems she was having.
“I’ll call you back,” Price said finally.
He pumped his fist silently in celebration and settled down to wait. It was only a couple of minutes before the phone rang again. Price worked on enough classified projects that she had easy access to encrypted lines.
She also wasn’t meant to use them for things that weren’t government projects, which meant he had yet another piece of information with which to crucify Anna Price. They were patient, he’d give them that, but they were making mistakes.
Everyone made mistakes sooner or later, and he was always around to catch them. He was one of the best in the business.
The woman picked up on the first ring. “What is it?”
“I haven’t heard anything from your team for weeks,” the CEO said and now, she sounded annoyed. “We met, you told me you had results coming soon, and…nothing. What is going on?”
“You said money and time were no object,” the woman retorted.
“I did. Which is why you should have no reason
to lie to me.” There was a flash of the Anna Price that terrified business rivals. “I do not do business with people who lie to me. You promised results and I have yet to see them. So were you lying when you told me the time frame, or are you lying about something else?”
“There are…difficulties.” The woman was wide awake now, Gary could tell.
“And these difficulties wouldn’t have anything to do with you offering the product to another client, would they?” Price’s voice was sharp.
“No! No.”
“Then tell me what the difficulties are.”
“The sequence isn’t…working.” The woman sounded halfway between dejected and scared. “They’re doing their best, but the emotional evocation is simply not working the way they wanted it to.”
“You could have told me that at dinner.”
“They thought they were on the cusp of a breakthrough.”
A pause was followed by a terse command. “I want to see progress.”
“You are paying us for the finished product, not for anything we may create that does not go with this work. Showing you incomplete results will require more funding.”
She was brave, Gary would give her that.
“I’ll consider it,” Price said, and the line went dead.
With a sigh, the woman made her way through the apartment to the bathroom, and he shut the listening devices off hastily. He didn’t want to hear what came next.
In the office at the top of Diatek’s headquarters, the sound of a truly ridiculous fart tore through the air. The initial burst of laughter died out as it went on…and on…and on. Then, the laughter started again. This was no ordinary fart. Between the trills, wheezes, and occasional wet noises, it was both a thing of extreme disgust and astonishing creativity.
Nick had his face buried in his hands and practically sobbed with laughter. Amber had always been inventive when it came to making people pay for crossing her, and she did very well at that right now. For days, the DoD spy had been treated to a catalog of noises pulled from various special effects archives and she had been increasingly creative.
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