“Are these remarkable resemblances merely coincidences, or do you think these young people have had plastic surgery?”
“Well, that’s what I wondered. I’ve had my team poring over other video from Vin’s event today and we found this.”
The image cut to video of Dante. He was walking across an expanse of lawn with a young woman on his arm.
Wanda and Humphrey gasped and looked at each other in astonished horror. Summer swore. Orson just chuckled.
Rio James voice continued, “My sources tell me this young man’s name is Dante. But it does not take a genius to see that he is the spitting image of this man.” The image changed to different—older-looking—footage of Dante. “He’s quite famous in Brazil. Silvio was a playboy par excellence. We’ve contacted his people, but have gotten no answer. But clearly the young man at Vin’s event looks identical to Silvio at the age of eighteen.”
The original narrator put on a look of intent curiosity. “So we have a rash of lookalikes appearing all on the same day and on the same island.”
“We do. We do. We do!” Rio James clapped his hands with every repetition. “I have no idea what’s going on, but I guarantee you we will get to the bottom of it.”
“But that’s going to be difficult, considering the active crime scene in Vin’s mansion.”
“It’s going be even harder than difficult to track down these people.”
“Harder?”
“It turns out that the Silvio lookalike and the Jacqueline lookalike have both disappeared from Vin’s mansion, along with a super-celebrity. Just guess who.”
“I give up.”
“The one and only Meow Meow!” Rio looked to the heavens and spread his hands as if basking a moment of grace. “My sources tell me that Ms. Burnell’s massive security force is combing the island, searching for these three individuals, who are now wanted for questioning about Ping Xi’s murder!”
“What an incredible story.” The narrator looked at the camera. “Rio James will stay on this story and we’ll bring you more details as soon as we have them.”
The video disappeared, and Vaughan and Belle stood together on the holodesk, looking perplexed and worried.
Humphrey discovered his arm was around Wanda, and she clung to him. He patted her bare shoulder awkwardly, then disentangled himself from the embrace.
“We need to turn around,” he said. “We’ve got to go help her.”
“We can’t,” Summer said. “Remember. The AI Elizabeth said Captain Wilcox is there.”
Humphrey remembered, all right. Belle had gotten Vaughan to install a backup of Elizabeth Burnell on his server. She’d manifested as her younger self, who looked just like Vin. She had warned them that Captain Wilcox and all his men were based on her island.
Humphrey had never felt so useless. And now that Sensei was dead, he didn’t have the calm energy of the martial arts master to draw from for support.
Wanda sensed his doubts and frustration. She leaned into him. Summer smiled, wanly, but there was a question in her eyes. She wanted him to make a decision. And she trusted his decision.
Obu, who had been working diligently on his reader to calculate what speed Aphrodite must run north, was looking at him, too.
“You’re right, Summer,” Humphrey said. “We can’t go there.”
It killed him to say it, but he saw no other choice.
“We continue toward Mr. Justin’s Island. In the meantime, Vaughan, please continue searching for an alternative.”
“I will,” Vaughan said, his holographic form glitching momentarily. “It’s not simple. There are many unpopulated islands nearby, but most do not have the resources needed for survival.”
“Food. Water. Shelter,” Obu said. “It seems so simple when it’s all delivered for you.”
“Those were the blessings of our imprisonment on St. Vitus,” Humphrey said, giving a humorless laugh. “Everything we needed was provided, except a future.”
4
It’s Called the Flip
The pressure in Jacey’s chest increased with every turn of the vehicle Meow Meow called a limousine. They sat on the cushy leather bench at the back of the vehicle, with enough room for ten more people.
The driverless car’s wheels hissed along the crowded and chaotic streets of Casino San Juan with fearless precision. It barely slowed as it wove among other vehicles—also driverless—as they engaged in a death-defying improvised choreography.
“Don’t worry, sweetie,” Meow Meow said as Jacey sucked air through her teeth and jammed her feet onto the floor during one particularly close call with a bus loaded with gawking tourists. “The cars talk to each other.”
Jacey did not find this notion at all reassuring.
The darkened windows gave blurry views of an endless thoroughfare of blinking lights. Gaudy signs advertised: DANCERS!—AU NATURALE!—24 HOURS!—THREE LEVELS!! and $150 BUFFET ALL DAY $150. Video boards as high as the Scion School belltower. They showed scantily clad performers dancing on elaborate stages, and magicians waving their arms amidst explosions of sparks.
“Jacey’s experiencing a bit of sensory overload, I think,” Dante said. He sat next to her, even though there were two long empty benches running up and down the length of the limo. Meow Meow sat on Jacey’s other side.
Dante made a golden casino chip dance across his knuckles. Shaking his head, he nudged her. “So all those years on that island. No movies? No holos? No live entertainment?”
“We saw films. Mostly recordings of plays.” Jacey remembered Socrates mocking the term movies, which he said disrespected the cinematic art form nearly as much as the term flicks. “But nothing modern, except for productions of operas and ballets.”
“She’s a complete innocent,” he said to Meow Meow, who was also shaking her head and marveling at Jacey’s naïveté.
The limo screeched to a stop, throwing Jacey against the shoulder restraints. Just as suddenly, it accelerated, snapping her head against the cushions.
And then the world went dark and quiet.
“Whew,” said Meow Meow, making a motion of wiping her brow. “Now we can relax for a moment.”
Jacey twisted in her seat to look out the back window. The lights were quickly fading behind her. The world beyond the window had gone black. A few dim lights in the distance to either side spoke of lonely homes. Ahead, the vehicle’s headlights carved a tunnel in the blackness, showing the trunks of trees on either side of a perfectly straight road. The beams were filled with swirling insects that clicked against the windshield as the limo tore through their swarms.
Meow Meow dug something from her duffle and handed it to Jacey. A small tablet device.
Jacey took it. It was smaller than a Scion School reader, but the same basic idea. “I’m not interested in watching a motion picture right now.”
“Call your friends,” Meow Meow said, for once exasperated by Jacey’s complete stupidity about the world.
“From this? I thought I had to have a holodesk.”
“Um, no.”
“Why didn’t you let me try before now?”
“Because the tablet is traceable. But since we’re about to leave Puerto Rico, who cares?”
Jacey turned it on and said, “Dr. Carlhagen’s desk.”
Dante made a spitting noise and looked pointedly out the side window. Meow Meow tilted her head. “Are you serious?”
The sickly feeling of humiliation rose in Jacey’s throat. “What? Isn’t that how it works?”
“Um, double no. Maybe for a point-to-point call between two units that have already had calls placed between them. But the network doesn’t know asteroids about Dr. Carlhagen’s desk. Gimme that.” The girl snatched the tablet from Jacey’s fingers.
She tapped and swiped at the screen, then showed a list to Jacey. “There are exactly five thousand, six hundred, fifty-three Dr. Carlhagen’s in the directory. And it’s not even a common name.”
“So what do I need?”
“An address. It’s a series of numbers and letters unique to that desk. I take it you don’t have such an address?”
Without warning, the limo careened to the right and jounced through a gated fence. Ahead was a long, low building walled with tall windows. They were lit up from inside. More cars were pulling up alongside it.
“That’s the main terminal,” Dante said. “That’s for regular people. Frankly, I don’t think I’ve ever been in one.”
Meow Meow made a discontented grumble and mumbled something about spoiled rich men.
The limo skirted past the terminal and continued to another gate. It stopped at a guard shack. The window next to Dante lowered and the guard peered in.
“We’re here for a private sub-orb.” Dante looked at a slip of paper in his hand. “Hanger fifteen.”
The guard’s mustache was trimmed into a pencil-thin line that paralleled his upper lip. It quirked into a fake smile. “Name?”
“Dante Adams.”
The guard went back to his shack and looked at a monitor. Without so much as a nod, he pressed a button. The limo slid forward, almost noiseless now that it was going slowly.
“Dante Adams?” Meow Meow said. “Is that really your name?”
“No. I had to give the charter company a name, and that’s what came to mind.”
The skinny girl giggled and kept mouthing “Dante Adams” at Jacey, as if she’d get the joke. But Jacey didn’t get it.
She didn’t get anything that was happening. In the past half-hour she had seen such a chaos of lights and sound and smells that her mind couldn’t hold it all. The limo itself was a marvel. How did it know where to turn? What made it go? It didn’t seem to be fueled by the smelly petrol that the Jeep used.
And now she was about to fly for the second time in her life. And this wouldn’t be a short hop between islands. She was going to Chicago. To North America. She was going to a place she’d thought her whole life was a wasteland of sickness and destruction.
And she didn’t have an address for Dr. Carlhagen’s holodesk, so she couldn’t contact Humphrey.
The limo arrived at a metal-sided building not unlike the garage back at the Scion School. Except this was many times that size. The whole front face of the building was reserved for a single, gigantic door. It stood open, showing the aircraft crouching inside like an enormous metallic bird.
“Veils, girls,” Dante said.
Sighing, Jacey reattached the slip of lace to her ears. Meow Meow seemed resigned to it, but Jacey gathered the girl used them frequently to conceal her identity from throngs of admirers.
The limo’s doors oozed open and they climbed out into a humid night air. The heavy smell of exhaust stung Jacey’s nose. A distant rumble, like thunder, curled across the flat expanse of paved taxiways.
The roar built and increased right above them. Jacey ducked and covered her head. An aircraft the size of the entire medical ward swooped down, lights on its wings flashing. Wheels hung beneath it like a monster’s claws. It glided toward a runway and screeched onto its wheels, sending up puffs of smoke behind it.
She felt a tug on her sleeve. Meow Meow guided her into the hanger and toward a ramp leading into the side of the aircraft. The surface of the sub-orb was gray with a white logo on one side that read, in a bored script, GENERAL SUB-ORB.
The wings on the aircraft weren’t as broad as the giant that had just landed. Almost stubby, they bulged out on either side and slanted toward the tail. The nose was a blunt dome, windowless, giving the impression of blindness.
“A discount carrier,” Meow Meow said, voice slightly plaintive. “We had enough chips for better than this.”
Dante made a shushing motion and leaned toward Jacey and Meow Meow. “This one didn’t require our IDs.” He made a chip bounce across his knuckles again.
“Oh. I guess that’s okay.”
Inside they found a dozen rows of leather seats. A slim young man in a maroon-and-black uniform greeted them. He told them to take whichever seats they wanted, as they would be the only passengers.
Jacey found herself wedged between Dante and Meow Meow. She wasn’t sure if they were positioning themselves around her to protect and comfort her or keep her from leaving their sight. Maybe it was both.
Jacey’s voice cracked. “No windows.”
The attendant hit a button near the entry door. It shushed closed. A sharp thump followed.
“He’ll open the skyview once we flip,” Meow Meow said, yawning into a dainty hand. “I might just sleep through it, the way I feel right now.”
“Boarding door closed,” the attendant said.
“Where is the pilot?” she asked.
Dante patted her knee, then let his hand rest there. “No pilot on sub-orbs. Computer-controlled. Like the limo.”
Jacey sensed vibration in her body and heard a squeak and rattle behind her. The sensation grew and grew, until they were all jostling and bouncing in their seats.
Neither of Jacey’s companions seemed the least bit alarmed by this.
“Are we flying?”
“Not yet. We’re rolling to our launch platform.”
“Launch?” The word came out weak and sickly. In fact, she did feel queasy.
“No worries. It’s a horizontal runway. At first.”
The vibrations and sounds ceased as the sub-orb jerked to a stop. A portentous quiet filled the almost empty passenger cabin. Ceiling lights dimmed.
Jacey gripped the armrests and swallowed. She would not scream. She would not scream. She. Would. Not.
Her heart pounded out ponderous beats. Palms clammy, chest rising and falling in short jerks, she started speaking before she knew what she was going to say. “I want off. I want off. I want off. I want off.”
“Maybe we should give her a prixie,” Meow Meow said to Dante.
He raised the hand from Jacey’s knee and made a shrugging motion with it. “I don’t have any. But that reminds me . . .” He produced a pill bottle from his front pocket. A tiny little capsule went into his mouth. He dry swallowed it. “ATR. Remember?”
“Oh,” Jacey said. That was the Anti-Transfer Rejection pill Dante needed every day. It was the key part of Dr. Carlhagen’s plan to control every Progenitor who transferred to a Scion. They were all dependent on the pills, each one designed specifically for them and available only from Dr. Carlhagen.
Meow Meow dug in her duffle bag, muttering about having to think of everything. With a sudden giggle of delight she produced a plain white pill bottle.
“Ladies and gentleman,” the attendant said with false cheer, “we’ll be in Chicago in roughly thirty minutes. Enjoy your flight!”
Meow Meow popped the lid and tilted the bottle toward her open palm.
The world compressed into a single musical note.
It hummed in Jacey’s chest, pressed her head against the back of her seat, and forcibly pushed the breath from her lungs.
The interior of the aircraft shuddered and warped, then narrowed toward midnight darkness.
Meow Meow let out a cry. The bottle disappeared behind them, trailing tiny white dots.
Jacey tried to turn her head, but it was glued to the seat back as the gees of launch built.
Her vision narrowed until all that existed of the world was the faintest light at the end of a long tunnel.
Her body fought for air, pulsing her diaphragm down and up in quick jerks to keep oxygen flowing to her brain. But not enough. Not nearly enough.
But even panic couldn’t overpower the sheer weight of the acceleration that had already thrust Jacey and her friends a kilometer above the surface of the Earth.
Consciousness slipped away.
Then it snapped back. Jacey’s eyes fluttered open. The press of acceleration lessened. “Did that attendant say something just now?” She seemed to remember the words “flip” and “harness” slipping into her mind.
Meow Meow was about to answer, but the floor dropped from beneath them and the sub-
orb fell silent.
And then they started to fall.
Jacey did scream then. The fingers of her left hand grabbed something soft, which made Dante groan. She was clutching his forearm and her skeletal-white fingertips were gouging into his skin. She couldn’t make herself let go.
They were falling. Falling.
“Look!” Meow Meow said, pointing straight up.
Jacey looked and gasped and screamed.
A slender rectangle on the ceiling had gone transparent, giving a view of curving blue ocean, white swirls of clouds, and vast green and brown landmasses below.
“We’re upside down!” Jacey rasped.
“Yes. It’s called the flip.”
“We’re falling.”
“Yes. But it’s okay. Have fun.”
Suddenly Meow Meow was out of her seat and tumbling head over heels across the seat tops in front of her. She struck the far bulkhead, then thrust off and flew with her arms out to her sides, laughing like a Dolphin at the beach.
The attendant’s voice blared out from the P.A. “Please return to your seat. This flight has not been cleared by the FSA for free-fall entertainments.”
But Dante had already unbuckled Jacey. With a jerk of his arm, he sent her tumbling free.
Jacey’s panicked cries took form then. They focused into arias of swearing, punctuated by Dante’s name. She bounced into something solid, tried to grab hold, but then drifted away.
The attendant continued to make the same announcement, but Jacey caught a glimpse of him strapped into his seat near the front of the sub-orb. His white teeth were flashing with genuine amusement now.
Scions of Sacrifice Page 3