The door swung open, admitting a gust of wind full of moisture and the scent of greenery. Wanda strode in, unruly hair pulled back into a ponytail, Scion uniform blotched with gray paint.
“Do you realize you’re picking from a bunch of kids?” Orson said around his cigar. “I say you’re crazy to consider this mission at all.”
“I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I agree with Orson,” Wanda said as she plopped next to Humphrey. She cast a disinterested glance at the map. “Athena is ready. Summer just stenciled her name on the hull.”
Orson groaned. “Poor old Aphrodite.”
“We were just discussing the crew,” Humphrey said to Wanda. “I’ve got too many volunteers, and I don’t want to take more than necessary into this . . . situation.”
“How considerate of you.” Her tone was ice. They had already endured one fight over this, but despite helping to prepare Athena, her opinion on the mission hadn’t changed. “You’re doing the exact thing that Jacey does, you know. The thing that makes you—makes everyone—so mad at her. You’re not thinking. What about all the other Scions here?”
“What is there to think about? We know where Dr. Carlhagen is. This is our chance to stop him and save Livy at the same time. We won’t be safe until he’s dead.”
Her head tilted, slowly, and her mouth dropped in awe. “I thought you were smart.”
“I am. This is purely logical.”
“Logical? Going into a situation with no idea what you’ll face is logical?” She raised a finger and cut off his retort. “This is not logical. It’s personal.” She jabbed his chest. “You’re so embarrassed or guilty about Carlhagen being your Progenitor that you can’t let it go. You can’t think about the good of everyone else. And now you’re planning on risking your own life and the lives of several others—and the long-term safety of all the Scions—for a personal grudge.”
“So we should just let him keep Livy? We should just let him keep making Scions and overwriting a whole new generation?”
Orson kept his eyes on the map, though he chewed his cigar with great agitation.
Wanda took several deep breaths, barely reining in her fury. Her eyes glistened, her voice quavered. “Livy is . . . one person. I love her. Everyone who knows her loves her. That’s why you got so many volunteers. But that doesn’t make this ridiculous mission the right thing to do. You will risk multiple lives to save one? And the risk is . . .” She shook her head and looked away.
Orson pocketed his cigar, the chewed end wicking out a wet blob on his shirt. “She has a point, lad. You could hunker down here, hide out for a while, for years. Let the world go by you. Let big people do the schemes they do. They’re going to do it anyway. There ain’t any right or wrong, not the way you think there is.”
It was the most passion Orson had shown for anything besides his cigars. It was clear from the earnestness on his face he meant what he said.
But he was all wrong. Wanda was wrong, too.
“I have to live with it,” Humphrey said quietly. “If I don’t go, the regret will kill me.” He patted his cheeks. “In seventy years I’m going to look just like Dr. Carlhagen looked right before he transferred into Vaughan. That’s how I remember him. All the hate I feel for him is in that image of his face. If I don’t act now to end him, some day I’ll look in the mirror and he’ll be laughing at me. He’ll have won.”
“That’s just wrong thinking,” Wanda said. “If you make the right decision now, you’ll know it in time. When you see all these Scions grow up and remember you didn’t sacrifice them and all their potential, you’ll look in the mirror and know that you won.”
This was how Jacey felt, he realized. Those times he’d tried to talk her out of a headlong rush into danger, she’d thought the same thing he was thinking about Wanda. She just doesn’t get it.
“I’ll keep the crew small,” he said. “I assume you won’t be going?”
She shook her head. “I can hardly tell you not to and then go with you. Though it will kill me to watch you leave, knowing you’ll probably never come back.” A tear slipped down her cheek, she wiped it away. “I suppose I can’t actually lose you. Never had you, did I?”
He thought about Jacey. “I don’t think we ever have someone else. They are with us for a while. And then they aren’t.”
Wanda swallowed hard and stood. Sniffing, she squared her shoulders. “You are more like Dr. Carlhagen than I thought.” She marched away, leaving Humphrey feeling small and angry.
Vaughan’s face reappeared on the reader. “I’ve hacked into a network of land-based radio receivers and tuned them to monitor surface ship radio chatter. So far no one has identified the fleet within a 100 kilometer range of this island. I suggest you leave immediately, while the coast is—literally—clear.”
Humphrey glanced at Orson, heart full of trepidation. “Are you ready?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“No.”
“Then being ready has nothing to do with it.”
They stood, Orson groaning with the effort. He winced and flexed his hands. The ordeal of the past few days had really worn on the man.
Humphrey lifted a walkie-talkie to his lips. “Summer, prepare Athena for departure.”
Her answer was not long in coming. A burst of static, then her voice, clear and cheerful. “Ship is ready, Captain. Just point her where you want her to go.”
Orson chuckled. “Remarkable girl, that one is. Remarkable. Who else we taking?”
“Elias.”
The boy was attached to Summer, and he’d help keep an eye on Orson.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
24
A Rogue Tear
Meow Meow stopped the truck under a crumbling overpass along the highway. The bridge-like stretch of road overhead was supported by thick concrete pillars soaring thirty meters above. The surrounding land was awash with silky grass that rippled in the wind like waves. A pale blue sky capped the world.
“That used to be the Auto-Auto El,” Meow Meow said, pointing to the span of highway protecting them, as if the name explained anything. Jacey’s hearing was slowly coming back, though her friends’ voices had to cut through a high-pitched ringing.
“Why are we stopping at all?” Jacey said.
Meow Meow motioned for her to lower her voice, not from fear of being overhead, but because Jacey’s deafness was making her shout.
“If that was the IPA, we’d already be caught. They’d have sent twenty choppers.”
Dante had found a pair of high-powered binoculars in a storage compartment next to the front passenger seat, one of many such storage holds. The truck had room for seven people and a payload bed in back full of supplies. The seats were soft black leather, and Meow Meow couldn’t hide her enthusiasm for the electric motor’s torque. Whatever that meant.
Dante lowered his window and stuck his head out, scanning behind them with the binoculars. “No. That is definitely not an IPA chopper.”
“I didn’t think it would be,” Meow Meow said. She grabbed Siggy’s pistol from where she’d thrown it onto the dash. With practiced movements, she popped a clip of bullets from it, examined them, then returned it with a snap of her fingers.
“Let me see.” Jacey prodded Dante until he relinquished the binoculars. Though her head still spun a bit, she managed to get the lenses focused in the right direction.
The helicopter hovered a kilometer behind them. Jacey had the skin-crawly feeling that someone on board was looking right back at her through magnification. “Why don’t they come closer?”
“They’re outnumbered. Three of us and two of them. And they don’t know what weapons we might have.”
The chopper did not look anything like the helicopters Jacey had seen. Captain Wilcox and Senator Bentilius flew on large ones that carried eight to ten fully armed soldiers. This one was small and cobbled together. The entire cockpit was a glass bubble, the tail a steel lattice with
no aluminum skin over it. Instead of landing wheels, it had two skids mounted on the bottom.
“It looks like someone made it from parts,” she said, thinking how Summer would love to get her hands on the machine.
Dante grabbed the binoculars from Jacey’s hands and inspected the chopper again.
“Scavs. And these drones are scav work, too,” Meow Meow said, holding one of the little machines that had blown into the truck’s open window when Lily’s van exploded.
“That’s a scav chopper for sure,” Dante said, upper lip curled back in the peculiar way people do when squinting through binoculars. “Two-seater. Right out of a documentary. Never thought I’d see one in real life. Never wanted to, to be honest.”
Meow Meow had six small, dead drones arrayed on the seat next to her. Jacey remembered the girl’s lecture at the Chinese restaurant, how the police used a much larger variety.
“Why are they all different designs?” Jacey asked, reaching past Meow Meow’s to grab one. She rested it on her palm. Light as a leaf. The size of a big St. Vitus dragonfly, it covered the width of her hand. The camera proboscis jutted beneath it on a multi-jointed shaft, allowing it to aim in any direction. Eight appendages sprouted from its body. At the end of each was a tiny propeller.
“We were lucky the explosion knocked them out,” Meow Meow said. “Modern ones would probably have recovered from that.”
The mid-afternoon sun slanted in from the west, glinting from the drones’ metallic skin. The girl picked up a green one between her thumb and forefinger. “I remember these,” she said, scratching her temple and biting her lip as she searched her memory. “This was from the first generation of coordinating drones. Probably 50 years old.” She flipped it upside down, studied its underbelly. “Modified power cell. Good work, too. That’s why their shock arcs pack such a punch.”
“The chopper is leaving,” Dante said.
“Low fuel,” Meow Meow said. “If it’s hard for Lily to buy gasoline, it must be ten times harder for these losers to find Avgas. It all comes out of North Dakota or Alberta. And most of that goes straight to the military.”
Jacey flopped into her seat behind Dante’s. Her wounds had been superficial, mostly scrapes on her elbows. Captain Wilcox’s first aid kit supplied all the bandages and painkillers she’d needed.
Meow Meow had a shallow gash on her temple from her fall from the van, along with abrasions on her arms. She’d popped a prixie and claimed to not be feeling much of anything. Jacey wondered if she should be driving.
Dante had dropped to the pavement before the explosion, having recognized the danger of an angry swarm of plasma-shooting drones locked inside a van laden with gasoline. He’d come away from the incident with ringing ears and a few bruises from drones thumping into his body.
“So who are these scabs you’re talking about?” Jacey asked.
“Not scabs. Scavs. Short for ‘scavengers.’” Meow Meow rubbed her arms and looked out her window, as if expecting to see one of these people sneaking toward them.
She saw Jacey’s nonplussed expression. “Between the quarantine fence and the Indie-Minnie metropolis lies the barrens.” She waved her arm around to take in the surrounding region. “The people who live here collect what they can from the ruins.”
“What do they need a drone swarm for? These little buggers shocked me.”
“Scavs are tribal. There’s a constant ebb and flow of raiding, pillaging, stealing women, truces, alliances, trading. That swarm was positioned in a disputed territory, I guess. They were stationed in those woods, waiting for a caravan to pass through. You saw what they can do.”
Jacey thought about the swarm, how it had so easily herded her and the others into immobility. The helicopter could land one or two people with weapons, and they could shoot the prisoners one by one and take their possessions.
Clever. Terrifying.
“But they know that we weren’t scavs,” Dante said. He pulled his head back into the truck and put the binoculars away. He rubbed his cheeks and shook his head. “I’m tired.” That last bit was quiet, not meant for the others.
“They saw us through those damned drones,” Meow Meow said, nodding. “I have no doubt they recognized our famous mugs. Now they’re regrouping, preparing to send out a larger mob to grab us. Two celebrities and a billionaire. They’ll put all their resources into hunting us. If I’d known Lily planned to bring us this far out, I would have put the kibosh on it.”
Jacey said, “How do you know so much about these scav people?”
“Good question,” Dante said. He gave Meow Meow a considering look, as if he were seeing her in a new light.
The skinny girl didn’t reply right away. Her jaw clenched and unclenched and she stared straight ahead.
“Meows?” Jacey pressed.
The girl lifted her eyes, met Jacey’s gaze. “I know about them because I am a scav. Or, I was, a long time ago.”
Dante whistled and grinned wanly at Jacey. He seemed to be exerting a lot of effort to be his usual flippant self. “If only I needed money. I would call Rio James and sell him the scoop of the year. Meow Meow, former scav, rises to pop stardom.”
Meow Meow didn’t see any humor in this, and rewarded Dante with a withering glare. He stopped laughing and cleared his throat. “Maybe we should get going. If you’re right about them regrouping, it would pay to get far away from where they last saw us.”
The girl turned the wheel and stomped the accelerator. Soon they were cruising at 120 kph, blasting south on the highway, dust flying behind them.
The reality of their situation sank in to Jacey’s mind in slow drips, each one adding to her bucket of worries. “So we escaped the city, and now we are wanted by more people than ever.”
Meow Meow grinned weakly at Dante. “Our baby is growing up, darling. Innocence lost.”
Dante shrugged, for once not playing along with Meow Meow’s badinage. “Innocence is a sin, if you ask me.”
Jacey rested her head on the window and watched the grassland blur by. “All I wanted was a holodesk,” she said, more to herself than to her companions.
“I’ve got a headache,” Dante announced. He started digging through the first aid kit.
“Are you sure you didn’t smack your head on the road?” Jacey asked.
“No. I’m dehydrated and need more sleep. All this running and nearly getting killed wears on a guy. Even a young stud like me.”
The humor was half-hearted at best. He leaned his seat back and wrapped a cloth bandage over his eyes. “It’s so damn bright.”
“You awake enough to drive?” Jacey asked Meow Meow.
“I’m the only one left who can drive. I’ll stay awake.”
Jacey yawned. “I drove a truck once. It was full of rotting fruit.”
Meow Meow sniffed. “From the smell in here, so is this one.”
“That’s not nice. But it’s true.” Jacey snickered humorlessly.
The sway of Wilcox’s truck barreling down the deserted road lulled Jacey to the edge of sleep. And that’s where she stayed for the next several hours.
She kept thinking about how Dante had turned on her, had been ready to hand her over. Only the chance accident with Lily’s van had changed his calculations. Would he turn on her again?
It seemed quite likely.
She should kill him, she realized. Pure logic made that clear.
The thought horrified her. She knew why. It was his face. He inhabited Dante’s body. And—like Vaughan and Belle, currently inhabited by Dr. Carlhagen and Senator Bentilius—Jacey harbored a wish to see all her friends returned to their bodies and their Progenitors banished. Same with Dante.
It was a pure fantasy, she knew. But that didn’t change anything. Right was right. She wanted everything put back the way it was, and that couldn’t happen if the main puzzle pieces were missing. Already, her friend Sarah was irrecoverable, body smashed and dead, still frozen in a back room of the medical ward. She didn’t want to l
ose Dante in the same way.
She blinked away a rogue tear. She would never get things back to how they were. The old reality had been ripped apart, tiny bite by tiny bite, like ants harrowing the flesh of a dead bird.
There would be no resurrection. The best she and her Scion family could hope for now was a reincarnation. Rebirth into a new form. A new existence.
What that would be, she had absolutely no idea. And to get there, she saw nothing but suffering ahead.
25
No Mind at All
One of the benefits of being Belle was that nobody dared to interrupt her. Since she had been reborn as an AI, no one but Humphrey or Jacey asked to speak with her on their readers or the holodesk. Not one of the girls of her Nine had done so, until now.
Her tablet buzzed in her hand. An incoming call.
Odd.
Belle stood on the outskirts of simulated Chicago, a strange no man’s land of abandoned buildings and fenced-in industrial lots where hulking, hollow factories sat an eerie silence. Even in the simulation, weeds grew thickly in the cracks that spiderwebbed the crumbling pavement. A gray haze hung in the sky, representative of the current weather in this exact area in the real world. Socrates had begun to feed the simulation with live weather data. And now that he had access to the surveillance camera system, he also had live updates of traffic on the roadways. Cars and trucks were now traversing the streets of Belle’s Chicago in a ten kilometer radius of her current position. None of it was strictly necessary, but it gave Belle a feel for the territory. One never knew when a detail would spark an important connection in her mind.
They had spotted Captain Wilcox’s face through the windshield of a black truck, using facial recognition algorithms Socrates had borrowed from the IPA. The video was courtesy of a Schaumburg police patrol drone.
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