Crux

by Ramez Naam

  “Welcome to the underground railroad,” Levi told Rangan quietly.

  The three women took the boys away. Bobby didn’t want to go. He hugged Rangan tight, but Rangan assured him it was OK, that these were good people. He felt it. He felt it from Laura and Janet and Steph’s minds, felt it even from Levi, though there was no Nexus there. Bobby felt it too, felt the kindness, felt Rangan’s own judgment. He loosened his grip, and Laura led him kindly away.

  Outside, the storm raged on, battering the church with a ratatatat of heavy rain.

  Levi showed him to a bathroom, put a bundle of clothes in his hands. Rangan went in, pulled off the thin soggy clothes he’d been wearing, changed into a plain cotton T-shirt and jeans Levi had given him. The jeans were too loose, but there was a belt. He pulled it tight, wondering who had gifted him with these clothes.

  He half collapsed on the sink, then, overcome with emotion. A sob ripped itself out of his chest. The kindness these people were showing him overwhelmed him. A day ago he’d been sure he was going to die in that place. Now he had something. Hope. The boys had hope. Rangan wept, racked with sobs, wishing Ilya had lived long enough for this, wishing Wats had, wishing he knew where Kade was or how to help him.

  He pulled himself together, stood up straight, forced himself to stop crying, then splashed water on his face.

  If I make it out of this… I’m gonna help people. I’m gonna pay this forward.

  Levi was there when Rangan opened the bathroom door, standing there patiently. The minister just looked at him kindly, smiled, held out a hand and took Rangan by the shoulder.

  Levi led him down a stairwell and into a basement below the small church, then through a door and into an office.

  Rangan felt her before he saw her. Felt them before he saw them. He didn’t understand what it was he sensed until the door swung open and Levi stepped out of the way. And then he could see her. Levi’s wife, Abigail. She was seated in a swiveling office chair. A pretty, petite blonde woman in a floral dress. Thirty, maybe. She had a shy smile on her face. And her hands were on her belly.

  Her giant pregnant belly.

  76

  PRIOR DAYS

  Friday November 2nd

  Rangan crouched in amazement at Abigail’s feet, reached out his hands gently.

  “May I?” he asked looking up at her.

  The petite blonde smiled down at him, nodded enthusiastically.

  Rangan’s fingers touched Abigail’s belly. His mind touched… something wondrous. Something like he’d never felt before.

  The baby was aware, alive. She felt Rangan’s mental touch – she – and she touched him back, with her mind, with her feet pressing against the inside of her mother to make contact with his hands. Her world was an ocean of sensation, of warm constraint, of her mother’s heart beating and blood pumping, of her mother’s mind, her ever-present mind.

  Rangan felt her curiosity, felt her thoughts probe his. Her mind was delicate, uncoordinated. She explored Rangan with her thoughts like his cousin’s newborn child had once explored his face with her tiny hands, flailing about, gently, trying to make sense of this shape she’d encountered. The memory made him smile, and she caught it, giggled mentally, touched on his memory of little Reina, his cousin’s child.

  This is you, he tried to show her. You’ll be like this.

  Waves of wonder and peals of mental laughter touched him in return.

  He looked up at Abigail again. He could feel her joy, radiant, inundating this room, encompassing her unborn daughter.

  “She hasn’t met many men before,” Abigail said. “Besides her daddy.”

  Rangan turned. Levi was there in the corner of the room, smiling at them.

  “But…” Rangan started. “You don’t…”

  “Have Nexus?” Levi replied.

  Rangan nodded.

  “I purge it and redose,” Levi said. “Ministers get too much attention to have it all the time.

  “Rangan,” Levi went on, “there’s something we’d like you to help us with.”

  Rangan nodded. “Anything.”

  “We help sneak Nexus children and parents down the line, to others who can get them out of the country,” Levi said. “But we want to do more, to end the persecution of these children. And to do that… we want to show people what’s going on.”

  “We want to record what you’ve seen,” Abigail said. “What you’ve been through.”

  Rangan went silent. There was so much he wanted to forget. The torture, the drugs, the mind games where he’d thought he was about to die. The boys, and what he’d seen in their memories, what they’d been through…

  He swallowed hard, then nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s show ’em.”

  Levi brought him coffee while Abigail set up the equipment. The recorder was an innocuous device, just a phone-sized black rectangle plugged into a terminal. Abigail did something to shield the baby’s mind, and the baby faded in Rangan’s senses.

  It took hours. The storm battered the little church as they recorded, sent a keen wailing sound through the building.

  Rangan showed them all of it. The bust of the party at Simonyi field. The blackmail. Being threatened with prison for them and dozens of their friends if they didn’t cooperate, if they didn’t give the feds Nexus 5, if Kade didn’t go to Bangkok to spy for them. And later, after something had gone wrong on that mission, jackbooted thugs kicking down the door of his apartment, pointing their guns at him. The restraints and interrogation. The lectures where they told him he had no rights, that they could kill him and no one would care, no one would know. The electrical shocks. The waterboarding. The twisted mind games.

  The day they broke him. They day he gave up, and gave them what they wanted.

  And the boys’ memories. Bobby watching his dad get shot and killed. Tim being torn out of his mother’s hands. Alfonso being clubbed across the face when he tried to bite one of them. More. The beatings. The experiments. Bobby’s last session, the one where they’d tried to force the Nexus out of him.

  And the faces. Every face he’d seen in custody. Every face the boys had shared with him, the one who’d tortured Bobby, the ones who’d beaten them, stuck needles into them.

  Rangan had to stop over and over again, overcome with emotion, tears streaming down his face, his body trembling in anger or remembered terror. Each time they offered to end the session. Each time he refused. People needed to know this. They needed to know.

  When it was over they hugged him, both of them. Rangan held on for dear life, held onto them for what seemed like an eternity.

  And after, he felt lighter. Abigail led him to another room. She peeled back a carpet, and there was a door in the floor there. She opened it, led him down a set of stairs, to a hallway, then a darkened room. The boys were there, on cots, already asleep. She led him to a cot of his own, hugged him again, and left.

  Rangan lay there in a daze. It was over. It was really over. He was free again.

  The sleeping minds of the boys surrounded him, engulfed him in hope, in a tranquility he hadn’t felt in months.

  Rangan closed his eyes, breathed that hope in, and drifted off to a peaceful sleep.

  Holtzmann’s first task was to send the underground railroad the rest of the files he’d promise them. He waited for the guard to leave. Then he closed his eyes, opened a control panel, paired his Nexus OS to his phone, used it to get online.

  The signal quality was terrible. Zoe had been battering cell towers across the DC metro area. He had one bar of service, hardly any bandwidth at all.

  He punched in the address of the anonymization service, waited, waited, waited, and finally it loaded. From there he went to the Nexus board, waited again for it to load, waited to put in his username and password, and for his inbox to load up.

  Holtzmann pulled up the message in his inbox, started a reply to it, attached the already uploaded file, and hit Send.

  Nothing happened. He had a moment of fearing that the
connection had been lost. Then finally the screen updated as the packets got through.

  He thought for a moment, then wrote another message to the underground railroad ID that had contacted him, this time with locations of other groups of Nexus children. The labs in Virginia, in Texas, in California.

  Send.

  Holtzmann waited, waited for confirmation that the short message had sent. The connection dropped out for a moment, then came back, then finally: Message Sent.

  Holtzmann smiled grimly, nodded in satisfaction of having done something right, then turned to the other task at hand. The data from Warren Becker’s memory foil.

  There were dozens of files here. He hunted through them, trying to understand what he was looking at. One caught his eye.

  diary

  That sounded like a good place to start.

  He opened the file, started scanning for information about the PLF, anything that might confirm or dispel his fears.

  The diary was huge, an entry for almost every day of the last fifteen years. It took him hours just to skim them all. Zoe beat and pounded and drummed against the outside window of his office as he worked. More than once he looked up, wondered if he should go somewhere more physically secure, somewhere without windows.

  But no. These were armored glass, impregnated with layers of carbon mesh. They’d stop high-powered bullets. Surely they’d keep the storm at bay?

  He stayed and toiled as Zoe raged just feet from where he sat. And bit by bit, Holtzmann distilled entries from 2032 – eight years ago – into a story. A story that terrified him.

  March 9th – discussed formation of red cell again, under false flag. bad idea.

  March 18th – false flag discussed again as means to entrap potential terrorists. CP killed idea.

  June 12th – false flag raised again. twin goals: entrap terrorists, generate public support for ERD mission.

  June 16th – false flag moving forward. PLF as name. will claim credit for some incidents, launch plots that fail.

  August 23rd – false flag on hold pending prez election.

  November 18th – false flag happening. lead agent MB, code name zara. see . i’ve protested as much as is safe – maybe more. time I forget and keep head down.

  Holtzmann stared at the pieces he’d put together. He opened the linked file. And there it was. A classified memo detailing the creation of the PLF. An undercover operation that would take credit for terrorist activities, would lure in potential transhuman terrorists, send them off on missions that were sure to fail, letting the FBI and ERD foil most of those missions… Letting others missions “succeed” in a controlled manner, with no loss of life…

  A false flag indeed. One that would capture transhuman terrorists. And keep the public afraid.

  So what happened?

  He scanned back, and an entry caught his eye again.

  false flag happening. lead agent MB, code name zara.

  MB.

  Maximilian Barnes.

  Special Policy Advisor to two presidents.

  And now Acting Director of the ERD.

  Holtzmann’s heart was pounding hard now. This was too much. Too much. He’d had his fears, but this… This?

  He needed to get these files to the right people. Anonymously. Not from his workstation.

  He moved to copy the files to his phone instead, found that his workstation couldn’t see the phone.

  Fear crept up Holtzmann’s spine. He turned to the workstation again, pulled up a random site on the net.

  Network failure. System offline.

  Oh no. Oh no. Holtzmann stood as calmly as he could. He had a bad feeling about this.

  He opened his briefcase, unplugged the kludgy foil reader he’d constructed, the foil still in it, and shoved the whole mess in. Then he picked up his cane and limped to the door. He had the data. He could finish this from home. From anywhere. Not here.

  He shifted his cane to the briefcase hand, and put his free hand on the door knob.

  It was locked.

  What? He hadn’t locked it.

  He reached into his jacket for his badge, but of course the badge wasn’t there. Rangan Shankari had it.

  He slid open the backup authentication panel next to the door, swiped his thumb across the pad, held his eye steady where the retinal scanner could see him.

  ACCESS DENIED flashed across the small screen.

  Just a mistake, he told himself. A glitch from the lockdown. Or the storm.

  Stay calm. Stay calm.

  He turned back to his desk, limped to it on his cane.

  He picked up the secure line on his desk. He’d call security, have them unlock his office.

  Nothing. The line was dead.

  He was trapped here.

  77

  END OF THE ROAD

  Saturday November 3rd

  Rangan woke to minds in turmoil. There were people on the other side of this wall, talking quietly, intensely. Something was wrong.

  Outside the storm sounded louder and angrier than ever, a raging maelstrom of wind and water pummeling them, trying to beat them down.

  Rangan crept off the cot and out into the hallway. There he found Levi, an exhausted-looking Abigail, and someone he didn’t know – a boy, sixteen maybe, soaked to the bone, his long black hair plastered to his face, dripping water onto the tile floor.

  “What’s going on?” Rangan asked.

  Levi looked at him, unhappily.

  “Police are out,” Levi said. “They’re going door to door. Jordan here says they came to his house. They have a picture of the van.” He shook his head. “We must have passed a camera I didn’t know about.”

  “I ran here,” the boy said. “Phones are down. Our house is half a mile up the road.”

  Abigail spoke up. “We have to get rid of the van. Hide it.”

  Levi nodded. “I’ll go.”

  “Wait!” Rangan said. “If they catch you in the van, that’ll lead them back here.”

  They all stared at him. These people who’d saved him. This boy who’d run half a mile through a hurricane to warn them.

  “I’ll go,” Rangan said.

  “The van’s unregistered,” Levi said as he led them to the garage. “From a junkyard. Just get it a few miles from here, dump it, and come back.”

  “What about prints?” Jordan asked. “DNA?”

  They stared at him.

  “Like in the movies!” Jordan said. “You have to sanitize it. Dump it in the river. Set it on fire. Somethin’.”

  Levi cursed something not very preacher-like under his breath.

  They siphoned gas into a can. Levi gave Rangan a box of roadside flares.

  “Dump the gas in it,” Levi said. “Open the doors. Get far back, then toss the flare in. You understand?”

  Rangan nodded. “Tell the boys…” He stopped.

  Abigail put a hand on his. “They know.”

  “Just be safe,” Levi said. “Get back here if you can. If not, the Miller farm is two miles south. Use my name and they’ll hide you.”

  Then Levi threw his arms around Rangan, embracing him. Rangan hugged the man back.

  Then it was Abigail’s turn. She hugged him and he hugged back, and he felt her mind and the baby’s, felt the baby embrace him mentally, and felt tears coming to his eyes again. He pulled away, and it was time to go.

  “Thank you,” he told them. “I’ll be back soon.”

  Zoe tried to kill him as soon as he left the church.

  The wind was a monster, rocking the van to and fro. The rain sheeted the windshield in water instantly, hopelessly overpowering the wipers. Rangan turned the antiquated van in the driveway, trying to see where he was going. He put it in forward, turned onto the street, drove south, away from Jordan’s house. A terrible crack sounded and he looked up in time to see a tree falling at him. He turned the wheel hard, braking, felt the tires skid on the wet slippery pavement. Something thudded on the van’s roof, then somehow he was past, still
in one piece.

  The rain pounded like machine-gun fire against the body of the van, ratatatat, ratatatat. It drummed and battered. The wind blasted at the vehicle, tried to push it over. Rangan fought with the wheel, tried to keep the van going straight, struggled to make sense of the world outside the windshield.

  It was chaos, chaos everywhere. There was water in the street, inches of water that he drove through. Tree limbs tumbled end over end. A power line was down, throwing sparks as it jumped and skipped in the wind. Debris hurtled through the air. He winced as something large and dark slammed into the already spiderwebbed windshield with a wet thud, then bounced off and continued its flight. There were overturned cars on the road. He passed a building that made no sense, until he realized it had been a gas station, until the storm had ripped its pumps free and torn its roof away.

  He dragged his eyes back to the road, tried to make sense of it through rain and the spiderweb of cracks, tried to stay in the middle of what was fast becoming a river. Something dark came at him, hurtling through the street, skipping across the water. Rangan spun the wheel. The front windshield exploded in a shower of glass. He brought his hands up reflexively, closed his eyes as pieces of it cut him everywhere, on his forearms and brow and chest and shoulders. The van spun, skidded, and he slammed the brakes until the vehicle stopped moving. He looked to the side and saw a metal trash can half-embedded in the front passenger seat.

  The storm came in through the shattered front of the van now, pummeling him with rain like a sandblaster, with wind that tore at him. He could barely keep his eyes open. He pushed his head down low, used one hand to cover his eyes until just a slit remained between his fingers, drove with the other.

  He made it another mile that way, as the storm buffeted him, past the buildings of the tiny main street, past what was left of another gas station at the edge of town. It was farmland out here. He was looking for shelter, a copse of trees, a farmhouse, something.