Virgil gripped her hand and held his breath.
Standing so close to him, Avi could practically taste the metal infused in his sweat. She leaned in, letting her shoulder rest against his chest.
The sound of boots climbed to a crescendo and then passed by.
Avi let out a breath and slumped against Virgil. He wrapped an arm around her and held her tight, dropping his chin to the top of her head.
“Thank the Mother,” he whispered into her hair.
Avi pulled away and placed a hand on his chest. He looked the same as always. Bright blue eyes, close-cropped brown hair, and strong features. She’d grown up since they met, filling in and growing strong from training to work underground in the mines, but he never changed. Always kind, always steady.
Avi reached up and stood on her tiptoes and placed a soft kiss on the corner of his mouth.
Virgil backed away, slamming into the rows of data storage units.
“We’re hiding, remember?” she whispered through a smile. “Be quiet.”
“Why did you do that?” he asked, touching his mouth with the tips of the fingers on his right hand.
“I was curious.”
He stared at her, eyes wide, breath short. She’d never seen him rattled before.
“Did I do something wrong?” The idea that she’d humiliated herself in front of her only real friend terrified her. What if he stopped talking to her? What if he stopped meeting her eyes after work shifts or during events? Could she survive here without him?
She opened her mouth to apologize. She’d just turned sixteen and had never been kissed. It didn’t mean anything. But before the words came, Virgil stepped close and dipped his head down. His face hovered barely an inch from hers and her breath caught when his eyes darkened and dipped down to her lips.
He ran his hand through her hair and kissed her.
He tasted like the air before a toxstorm, metallic and dark.
When he pulled away he took her hand again and opened the door back to the main hall.
Her mind whirled. Virgil had kissed her. Well, she’d kissed him first, technically, but hers had been a peck, a trial run. His had felt so much more real.
Virgil led her through the halls, quickly navigating through the maze of the Tek dorms. All the while, he held her hand and she followed, mind spinning. Soon they arrived at the maintenance hub, where spare Tek parts and repairs were handled.
“Why are we here?” The large room echoed her whisper.
“I was here last week for a neurocheck and saw a 3hree get led in. Her eyes were white, like she’d tacked into 3Spek, but she didn’t respond to anything. The Med-teks hurried her into a back room and when I asked what happened, they ignored my question.”
“She was walking around tacked in?”
“Yeah, but not really, more like they were leading her in the right direction. Like she wasn’t even there. When I asked the Upper 9ine who does our training, she grabbed my arm so hard I bruised and told me not to bring it up again. Avi, I’ve never had a bruise before.”
The darkness in the room took on an ominous tone and Avi swore she could hear whispers from the corners. It was probably the air vents and her imagination, but she grabbed Virgil’s hand tighter and stepped closer to him, his large body providing comforting warmth.
“Definitely weird, but why are we here?”
“Nelson.”
Virgil dropped her hand and walked further into the room. He passed the series-specific bays and continued on to a door Avi had never paid much attention to. She’d written it off as a supply closet or some other useless storage area because no one ever used it.
He gripped the handle but it wouldn’t budge. Mournful eyes looked back at her before he jerked it, his arm bulging with strength.
The 9ines were strong. They were built to carry, construct, and destroy. Their very DNA was coded by the priests for that purpose, but Avi had never seen Virgil display it before. Sometimes in the distance, she’d seen other 9ines loading transport ships or felling trees that had encroached into the terraformed city, but up close, the sheer power of him shocked her.
“It’s solid,” he said.
“Then break it. Don’t hold back because of me.”
His eyes darkened and she knew he didn’t want to.
“I’m not afraid of you, Virgil.”
He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and gripped the handle with both hands.
She stepped back, unsure of what would happen if he managed to get the door to move.
Virgil closed his eyes, repositioned his hands, and in a smooth, almost liquid movement, hunched down and wrenched the door off its hinges. His body swung around, the door propelling through the air, but Virgil hung on, controlling its trajectory and using his momentum to bring it silently to the ground.
“Wow.”
Virgil shrugged and wouldn’t meet her eyes.
Avi stepped closer again and placed a hand on his arm. The muscles beneath her touch rolled as if trying to escape her. “You’re amazing.”
He stepped away and gestured to the gaping door. “Let’s go.”
Beyond the door, a dim hallway led further into the temple than she’d been before. While Virgil didn’t frighten her, the priests did. Their absolute control and rule over the city left no room for disobedience. “Nelson’s in trouble?”
“Yes.”
She may not know what to believe about why the Mezna had created the Series Teks — if they were truly a realization of the gifts the Holy Mother had bestowed on humanity like the nuns taught, or if they were nothing more than bioTek freaks like the people of the city whispered when they walked by — but she did know that for Virgil to risk being found together at night and to rip open a door, he must be scared. And nothing scared him. Not the prospect of being sent to the satellite cities circling in space above Earth, not mining the Moon, not even being strapped down and flooded with radiation while Mezna DNA was pumped into his bloodstream. In the years she’d known him, this was the only time she’d ever seen him afraid.
That alone convinced her body to follow him into the darkness.
“Nelson’s been exploring the deep grid, trying to hack into the Tek assignments. He doesn’t get along with the other 9ines. They all treat him like he’s weak because he’s quiet. My assignment is coming up next year and he’s been constantly worried I’d be shipped out of Greenland.”
She reached for his hand and entwined her small fingers with his. It hadn’t occurred to her that Virgil might leave. The thought knocked her sideways, like a tsunami crashing to the shore, and she felt like she had to hold on to him to keep from being swept out to sea.
“I told him it didn’t matter. Even if he found out, they would still do what they wanted. They never listen to us. But he kept digging, slipping deeper and deeper. Every night he’d tack in after curfew and spend most of the night in 3Spek trying to trace the lines of the weave. But yesterday morning he didn’t get up. He’d been tacked in all night and I couldn’t wake him. He didn’t respond at all. No reactions, and the worst part was he didn’t even have reflexes at all. One of the others tried to pull him up and he fell to the floor. We called the Med-teks and they hauled him away, exactly like the 3hree, and I haven’t seen him since.”
“And you think he’s here?”
“I don’t know, but no one will tell me anything, and when I checked the infirmary he wasn’t there. I tried tacking in, but there’s no record of him at all now. It’s like he’d never been here, and I’m afraid to slip down into the grid to search...”
“You think this could happen to you?”
“I don’t know.” He stopped walking and turned to her, his body close and imposing. “But what if there are more of them? The way the Med-teks acted, it was like this wasn’t a surprise. In one week I’ve seen a 3hree and a 9ine slip into some kind of catatonia. What if that could happen to any of us?”
The gray blanket draped over his shoulders hid his body fr
om her. He melted into the shadows like a specter. Night inside the temple gave her the creeps. She wondered if the Great Mother could see them sneaking around. Was it blasphemy to disobey the priests’ rules if they did it in the pursuit of truth? Was it a sin to seek answers for a friend?
Virgil seemed to sense her hesitation. His bright blue eyes glinted in the dim light radiating from the terraformed walls around them. She imagined this was what it felt like to be underwater, to be surrounded. What kind of world had this been when people could swim in the oceans without fear of acid burns or poisonous worms? What kind of world could it be if people would stop sorting each other?
“You’re worried,” Virgil said.
“I’m scared.”
“No, not you. Not Avi the fearless, the great defier of nuns.” He smirked, but his eyes didn’t reflect the humor in his voice.
Avi took a deep breath and narrowed her eyes at him, feigning a strength she didn’t feel. “Shut up, let’s go.”
He took her hand back in his and gave it a squeeze. This time, instead of the jolt of electricity she usually felt at their touch, she felt warmth reach out and wrap around her, as if he’d pulled her close and covered her shoulders with his blanket as well. She felt protected.
At the end of the hall they turned left and found the door to a brightly-lit room. The door was closed, but white light shone out from below the door and through a small window.
“They must have everything turned on high,” Virgil said.
“That’s not high, that’s solar flare high.”
He reached out for the door but a spark arced between his hand and the knob. Blue light snapped in the air and singed his skin.
Avi grabbed his hand and inspected it, leaning close. She could smell his flesh, and the skin on his hand had a black mark. It looked like a branch of a tree or a bolt of lightning. She traced it with her finger and Virgil’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t pull away. “It hurts?”
He nodded, mouth set hard.
“It’s kind of beautiful though.”
He let out a breath and tilted his head. “You never stop saying things that surprise me.”
“That’s why you like me so much.”
“One of the many reasons.” His smile heated its way through her and she looked away. The memory of their stolen kiss warmed her lips and she wished, not for the first time, that they had met out in the city, as normal people instead of in the temple, sorted and coded to spec.
She dropped his hand and reached for the door.
“Wait.” He reached for her, but she placed her hand on the knob without issue.
“It must be the metal in your skin,” she said, and if Virgil could blush under all those layers of woven iron, she was sure he was doing it now.
She opened the door and stopped, unable to step inside the room. The glare blinded her for a moment, but as she adjusted, the white on white features of the room came into focus. The room was circular. Tack stations and tekmods were lined up around the edge. In the middle, a thick column of white and translucent wires with blue light racing through them hung from the ceiling. At the base of the column was a ring of chairs.
Virgil stepped close behind her as she took in the faces of the Teks seated around the column of wire and tek. They had ports connected to the cog implants on the sides of their heads, the black veins exposed thanks to the careful shaving of the hair around them.
A 6ix sat in front of them, his metallic ocular implant pulsing with deep blue light as the wires connected to his head mirrored the syncopated rhythm.
Virgil dropped the blanket covering his shoulders and stepped into the room. His white tunic blended into the glaring light and his skin seemed to shimmer, the light so strong it picked up on the weave of metal running through his flesh.
He moved as if in a daze, his feet floating forward, carrying him closer.
She wanted to stop him, to call him back, but the room stole her voice just as it had stolen the souls of those sitting before them.
Virgil walked through the room, his eyes resting on each Tek as he approached them. A 6ix, a 3hree, an 8ight, another 3hree. Directly across from where Avi stood transfixed, he stopped. A noise choked out from him, not a cry, not a word. Something else more horrible than anything she had ever heard.
Her feet moved her forward. She raced toward him, wanting to take away whatever pain raced through his body. As she neared, she realized what he was looking at.
Nelson sat rigid in a metal chair, his head shaved, wires attached to the black veins running along the right side. More wires were attached at the base of his skull. His already pale flesh shone in the pulsing blue light running along the conduits connecting him to the other Teks and the tree of wires and technology running up to the ceiling.
“What is this?” she whispered. There was no reason to be quiet, no one else would be here at this time of night, but she couldn’t bring herself to speak any louder. It seemed disrespectful, like screaming at the dead.
“This is 3Spek.” Virgil pointed to Nelson’s open eyes. The blue irises had rolled back in his head; only the very edge showed beneath his eyelid. The white vacancy of his gaze filled her with dread.
“That’s not 3Spek. It’s on servers. Storage Tek.”
Virgil shook his head and placed one large hand on Nelson’s shoulder. “Let’s get him out of here.”
She thought she heard him sniff, but didn’t say anything. She bit the inside of her cheek and stepped toward Nelson’s slack face. She ran one hand over his head, searching for other wires. Around the back, the thick conduit was attached to a port at the top of his spine. The flesh around it was red and swollen.
“This is new. Someone just put this in.”
Virgil kept one hand on Nelson’s shoulder and peered around at where she pointed. “Can you unplug it?”
“I don’t know. What if it ports into his nervous system? I mean, what happens if we unplug him without knowing what we’re doing?” Her voice rose as the possible ramifications washed over her. “He could end up braindead, or worse.”
“What’s worse than this?” Virgil wrapped his fist around the collection of wires running into Nelson’s spine and pulled. One by one they slipped out with a squelch, wires moving through muscle and flesh.
Nelson’s back arched, his head tilted back, and when the last wire unplugged, he gave out a loud sigh.
“Nelson?” Virgil hunched in front of his friend, searching the white eyes for a response.
Avi checked his pulse and peered into the now oozing port. Translucent yellow liquid globbed around the opening, thickening as it dripped down Nelson’s back, staining his white tunic.
Virgil grabbed the wires hooked into Nelson’s cog implants.
“Wait, that’s his brain. You can’t rip that out.”
“Why not? If it kills him, at least we know he’s really gone, not sitting here like this.”
One of Nelson’s arms twitched.
Then the other.
He took in a deep breath, followed by another.
And then the rest of the room’s occupants joined him. The collection of ported Teks gasped in unison. Their speed increased and the blue lights from the wires flickered so quickly they appeared to be flying through the air.
“Nelson? Can you hear me?” she asked.
“We have to do this now.”
“Nelson?” His irises flickered into view. Sad blue eyes stared at her and his mouth opened and closed without a sound.
Virgil pulled the wires connected to his cog implant and pulled.
Nelson’s body slumped forward.
Virgil stared, the wires still dangling from his hand. “Nelson?”
Avi reached for their friend, but when she touched him, he fell to the side, his body limp against Virgil.
On cue, the rest of the group stopped their synchronized breathing and slumped forward in their chairs, the blue lights dimmed, leaving only black and translucent wires hanging in the now silent room.
“No.” Virgil dropped the evidence of what he’d done, leaving it to dangle from the ceiling, swinging from side to side without purpose.
“We have to leave.” She grabbed Virgil and pulled on his arm.
“No!” he roared, jerking away from her and grabbing Nelson’s body. “Nelson! Come on, come on! You have to get up. We can get you out of here.”
“Virgil...” The lights in the room dimmed slightly and the Tek consoles on the perimeter of the room pinged as they booted up. The sound of old-fashioned gears turning filled the room and soon an alarm shrieked overhead. “We have to go.”
Virgil knelt and held Nelson in his arms. Two oversized boys without family.
Avi pulled Nelson away, letting his body slump to the ground.
“What are you doing?” Virgil lashed out, hate and pain filling his eyes with tears.
“I don’t want you to join him. Get up, now.”
“I can’t leave him. This is wrong. All of this. How could they?”
“Who? The priests? The Mezna? The other Teks? You don’t even know who did this or why. You don’t know anything. But I do. I know that if you don’t haul your ass out of here, you’re going to get plugged into that monstrosity or sent to mine on the lunar surface or some other punishment that’s going to take you away from me. And I hate seeing Nelson like this, but I can’t survive it here if I lose you too.”
“I can’t.”
“I need you, Virgil. I need you to get up, because I’m not leaving without you.”
He tilted his head up so she could see the blue beneath his watery eyes.
“Come on,” she soothed. “Come with me. I’ll take care of you.”
He sniffed and nodded.
Together they ran down the halls, hiding in plain sight as chaos erupted in the temple.
At the door of his dorm, she kissed both his eyes and then his mouth. Not the passion-filled intermingling of desires from earlier in the night, but the kiss of someone who knows your darkest secret, and loves you anyway.
Now
“I have to go back down tomorrow. My medical leave and begged delays are over,” Avi forced herself to say into the smooth skin on Virgil’s chest. She lay next to him on the floor of the med-sensor closet. Years ago, they’d pushed the shelves away from the back wall and made themselves a hiding place.
The Cyborg Chronicles (The Future Chronicles) Page 17