The Dark Intercept

by Julia Keller

  “I don’t know,” Shura said. She’d managed to stop the tears. “I don’t think my parents do, either. They’re just starting to put a few things together. Trying to figure out what’s going on. All I know for sure is that my mom’s scared. And she’s never scared. So it’s got to be really bad.” Shura’s face changed. A small smile appeared. “You know what’s funny? You’ve seen me and my mom fight, right? We argue over everything these days—all the time. Any little thing can set us off. But when I think about something happening to her, I just—I can’t—”

  Violet slung an arm around her friend’s small shoulder. She gave her a very short hug, probably one of the shortest hugs in the history of human civilization. Because Violet wasn’t a hugger. But this was an unusual occasion, and so she felt the need to break her rule. Fine: I can hug. See?

  Sitting beside Shura this way, Violet felt the same emotion she’d been feeling at various moments in the past few weeks. It was a new one for her. It was foreboding, yes—but there were other emotions mixed in with it, too.

  Like fear.

  Like sadness.

  The sadness wasn’t attached to anything specific. It just was. Yes, Violet missed her mother every day, every minute, and yes, she wished she could get closer to her father, but this kind of sadness wasn’t related to any of that. It was bigger. And somehow it was less personal, too. There was a lot more at stake than just her own mixed-up feelings.

  The world was shifting. Transforming itself from one thing into another thing. Life was becoming volatile and unsettled—not only in their own lives, as she and Shura moved ever closer to their seventeenth birthdays and to being considered adults, but on New Earth in general, too. Violet had the sense that important events were happening in hidden places these days, that vast shapes were rearranging themselves just behind the visible spectrum.

  “I know how you feel,” Violet said. “Until my mother got sick, I never thought my life was going to change. And then everything changed.”

  “I’m just so worried about her.” Shura shivered.

  “Any idea who’s threatening her?”

  “Only a hunch. You know she deals with immigrants, right?”

  “Yeah. The people from Old Earth who are allowed in, a few at a time—your mom gets them settled.” Violet’s face clouded over. “An immigrant is threatening her? But she’s helping them. Why would somebody—”

  “No. That’s not it. I think maybe it’s related to the fact that my mom is back on Old Earth a lot. Four or five times a year. Sometimes more. She meets with her clients before they get up here.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, I heard my mom and dad talking late last night in the kitchen. I came back downstairs. They thought I was asleep. They were talking about the threats my mom’s been getting. There’s some group—some secret group—that claims it’s just about figured out how to get around the Intercept. They call themselves the Rebels of Light. And they want my mom to help them.”

  “Help them how?”

  “I don’t know. But it has something to do with her trips back down to Old Earth. I tried to find out more, but they caught me listening. And they shut up. I know my parents—they don’t want me to worry about it. They’re always trying to protect me.”

  “Has your mom told the police?”

  “No.” Shura’s voice was blunt. “No, she wouldn’t do that.”

  “Why?”

  “She thinks the cops are out to get new immigrants. That they’re looking for any excuse to deport them. And so they’d use the threats against my mom as a way to justify rounding up a bunch of them to ship them back.”

  Might happen, Violet thought. A lot of the cops—not Danny, of course, because he was a recent immigrant himself—were suspicious of the new arrivals. So were many of the citizens of New Earth. They feared that the people from Old Earth were out to get the best jobs, or would refuse to work at all, straining resources.

  “So what’s your mom going to do?”

  “No idea. My dad’s been driving her to work. Sticking close to her if we’re out shopping or whatever. I didn’t even notice, can you believe it?”

  “Yeah, I can. And it’s okay. You love your mom. But you’ve got your own life. And she wants you to have your own life. She wouldn’t want you worrying about her all the time.”

  Shura nodded. Then something occurred to her. “Listen—you can’t say anything to anybody about this.”

  “Of course not. Come on. You don’t have to tell me that.”

  “I know. I know. I’m just kind of nervous these days. About getting my parents in some kind of trouble. And your dad is—well, you know. He’s Ogden Crowley.”

  “Like I could ever forget.” Violet made a grunting sound. “People think it’s so great to be the president’s daughter.” She packed as much sarcasm into her voice as it could hold. “Right. So cool. So many special privileges. But you and I both know what it really means—it means that people are always nervous around me. They think they have to watch everything they say and do. Every minute. Or they’re going to get in big trouble.”

  Darkness had completed its takeover of the park. Only a few streetlights were still left on, to guide people on their way home. Yet it was not a menacing darkness. It was not a hard darkness that had fallen all at once, but a gradual and tender one. The darkness had a soft texture to it. The park was transformed, its edges blurred. The fountain in the middle was no longer visible and thus it existed now only as sound, as the timed jets of water plashed back into it, one by one by one.

  The sound caused a sudden sweet memory to rise in Violet’s mind:

  When she was five years old, her mother had taken her to this park almost every day. One afternoon, Violet leaned over the low lip of the fountain and touched the water. She heard the soft slap of each jumping curve of water as it struck the surface. One, two, three, four, five, six. Violet recalled counting them in her mind, and being very proud of herself for knowing her numbers. And then the pride melted into something else. Another feeling. She turned to her mother and asked, “Do you know what that sound is, Mommy?”

  Lucretia Crowley said, “Tell me, sweetheart.”

  And Violet replied, “It’s what happiness sounds like.”

  She didn’t tell Shura about this memory. It was a special one, a private one, one that belonged only to her. It had belonged to her mother, too, of course, but now that her mother was gone, Violet had the total responsibility for keeping it.

  Another thought flared in her mind, an irksome one: The memory really wasn’t private at all. Even though the Intercept had not been installed until Violet was eleven, the memory lived in her. And once the Intercept was online, it had grabbed that moment of happiness straight out of her brain, just like a shoplifter, and carried it off to Protocol Hall and jammed it into her file. It knew.

  Her best friend didn’t know about that day and the emotion it had kindled in her—but the Intercept did.

  It also, as of now, had a record of how annoyed this realization had just made her. She didn’t need to check for a small blue flash to have that verified.

  Violet had had such an epiphany before. She knew that no emotion was truly private on New Earth—it couldn’t be, her father had explained to her, because private thoughts led to conspiracies and crimes—but usually that dismay had accompanied the momentous times, the swelling of the big emotions: love, hate, joy, despair. Her sometimes-out-of-control crush on Danny.

  This, though, was a small thing—a small, perfect moment between her and her mother. And the Intercept had come along and put its hands all over that one, too.

  “Do you think it could be true?” Shura said. “Do you think somebody could really have figured out a way to outsmart the Intercept?”

  “I don’t know. It sounds pretty far-fetched,” Violet replied. “Then again, the Intercept itself probably seemed unlikely, too. When they first installed it, I mean. Like—impossible. And it’s here.” She realized that wasn’t
very reassuring. “But hey—listen, okay? If somebody has found a way to get around it, that doesn’t mean they’ll get away with it. They won’t. They’re going to be in for a fight.”

  Violet visualized her father’s face. The grim set of his jaw. The hard knots he made of his fists. The flinty look in his eyes. He had devoted his life to creating New Earth, and then to hooking up the Intercept to preserve it. Nobody wanted to cross Ogden Crowley. No one dared stand between him and his desires.

  She cared deeply for her father. But she was also a little bit afraid of him—and not because he’d ever hurt her, or ever would hurt her. She was afraid of his dreams and what he would do to protect them. To keep everyone safe.

  Violet gazed out across the darkness of Perey Park. There was now a chill in the air. Only a slight one, but Violet felt as if she could almost see its arrival, as it moved across the tops of the trees and settled onto New Earth in a clinging mist.

  “Anyway,” Shura said. “I guess there’s nothing we can do about it. I just want my mom to be safe. In fact, I want everybody I care about to be safe—and happy. Including you.” She gave Violet a sideways glance. “You won’t follow Danny again, right? Because that could backfire on you. Big-time. Promise me right now that you’ll quit playing detective.”

  “Um—sure.”

  “Violet. Come on.”

  “I said I would.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you mean it.”

  Shura knew her well. Sometimes, she knew her too well.

  “I solemnly swear,” Violet said, drawing out the words so that they sounded grand and extra-dramatic, “that I won’t follow Danny anymore.”

  “Good.”

  “Satisfied?”

  “Yeah.”

  Violet wasn’t really lying to her friend. That’s what she told herself, anyway, when the guilt started to trickle in. She didn’t have any plans to follow Danny again. Following him had been stupid. Impulsive. And it hadn’t worked, anyway.

  So she wouldn’t follow him.

  But she might do other things.

  Because she couldn’t give up. Not yet. Not while she felt the mystery moving through her blood, haunting her thoughts. She didn’t want Shura to worry about her—but Violet knew, as surely as she knew anything, that the first chance that came along, she’d find another way.

  She had another plan. And if that one didn’t work, she had one more idea left for getting to the bottom of Danny’s secret.

  The only downside was that she’d need Reznik’s help to pull off Option Number Three. And that, in turn, would mean she’d have to take advantage of Reznik’s crush on her—which made Violet feel even sneakier and shadier than she did already.

  5

  Over the Edge

  No lights were visible in the living room. That didn’t matter. Violet didn’t need any lights to know her father was there. She could hear his breathing: raspy, heavy, clotted. He was sitting in the massive leather armchair. That was where he always sat.

  She switched on the floor lamp. His big head didn’t move. He wasn’t asleep—his eyes were open—but he didn’t react.

  “Dad?”

  Her voice seemed to reanimate him, in a way that neither the opening and closing of the front door nor the sudden light had. He lifted his gnarled, scarred hands from the armrests, stretched out his fingers, and then gripped the armrests once again.

  “Hi, sweetheart.” Ogden Crowley shifted his legs.

  Well, one leg: the left. The right was a hollow husk. If he wanted to move it, he had to pick it up and place it in the new position. “How was work?”

  “Good.”

  Violet watched as he rearranged himself in the chair. She liked the ruggedness of his face, its deep lines and crevices. Ogden Crowley was a broad, solid man with a crown of unruly white hair.

  His damaged hands and his bad leg were the result of wounds suffered long ago, when he was a young boy on Old Earth. He had described their origin to Violet, once he thought she was old enough to hear it and not be upset by it.

  Thirteen-year-old Ogden Crowley had been trapped in the crossfire during the Second Mineral War. He was the sole survivor of an attack that killed his parents and their friends when their hiding place was discovered. His lungs had been injured by all the smoke, which was why his breathing, to this day, was loud and rattling. Radiation burns had short-circuited the nerves in his right leg, leaving those nerves useless and dangling, like the strings of a broken harp. The flesh on his leg, lacking its living nets of infrastructure, had shriveled.

  The best doctors on New Earth had proposed ways to fix his dead leg—but those remedies involved replacing what was left of it with a prosthetic made of thermoplastic polymer. And Ogden said no. He wanted to keep the last remnants of his real leg. He wanted to remind the people of New Earth of what happened when a world was allowed to disintegrate. His dead leg was a symbol of the worst-case scenario. If he replaced it with a shiny new leg, the lesson would be lost.

  When he put even the slightest bit of pressure on his leg, he told Violet, it felt as if a million or so supernova suns were exploding underneath his skin, each one instantly triggering the one right next to it, snapping and rippling, until he wondered how such a worn, flimsy flap of skin could possibly contain all that pain, all those repeated scalding surges.

  He rejected medication, because he needed to be sharp and alert. And he never acted as if he felt the pain. All Violet ever saw was a slight tightening of his jaw. Or a tremor in his hands, when he gripped the armrests a bit more firmly.

  “Would you like some dinner?” he asked her. “We could go out. Or perhaps—”

  “I’m good, Dad. Really.” Violet collapsed onto the couch. She unstrapped her orange wrist console and dropped it on the end table. She tucked her legs up under herself. “What’s going on? You’re hardly ever home this early.”

  “My office was too busy to get any thinking done. I have a lot on my mind.”

  She waited for him to elaborate. It was unlikely, but she waited anyway, just in case.

  Sometimes she wished her father would tell her more about his work. When she thought about it for any length of time, though, she was glad he didn’t. His job was always complicated and usually depressing. He had too much responsibility for too many things on New Earth. Violet had figured out that when he kept her on the outside of his problems, it was just his way of protecting her.

  Which was basically fine, because she had her own problems to think about.

  Her father smiled. He was trying to be cordial, even though his mind, Violet knew, was struggling with something massive and vexing. It always was. “How’s Shura?” he asked. “And your colleague—Reznik, isn’t it? Steve Reznik?”

  “Fine, Dad. Everybody’s fine.” Once a parent knew the names of your friends, you were doomed; they used the names in a nightly Q and A to show they were paying attention to your life. Even though they really weren’t. Names made it too easy for them.

  “It should be coming up soon, right?” he said. “Your Intercept intervention?”

  “Yeah. Although you never know for sure just when it will be.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’ll do well. I’m sure your friends—the ones who’ve already been through it—have told you that.”

  Not really, she wanted to answer. Nobody wanted to discuss it, to talk about how it felt to have a pungent memory stuffed back into your consciousness against your will.

  “Sure,” Violet said. She didn’t want her dad to worry about her and how nervous she was. There was nothing wrong with a little fib.

  “In any case, it’s important for you and the rest of the Intercept monitoring team to understand what you’re dealing with,” he said. “The strength of it. The awesome power. It’ll be something to keep in mind when you initiate an intervention.”

  She nodded. She was just about to confess that she was kind of nervous about having an emotion loaded back into her brain.

  But she never got the chanc
e. Her father’s face changed. Something had occurred to him.

  He raised a pale twisted hand to his forehead and rubbed at a spot an inch above his right eyebrow. Violet had seen him do that many times, especially after her mother died.

  “I just remembered,” he said. “Chief Callahan asked if we’d join her and her husband for dinner this week. I can’t possibly accept—there’s simply too much work to do. Too much going on. I thought you might be willing to go. In my stead.”

  Violet liked Michelle Callahan. But she had a suspicion that, whether her father was present or not, the conversation would quickly settle on one topic and stay there:

  Danny.

  The police chief knew that Violet and Danny were friends. She’d seen Violet come by the station to walk him home sometimes when his shift was over. And so even though it was a social occasion, Callahan would probably put Violet on the spot and ask her to talk some sense into him. Get him to stop violating direct orders by sneaking down to Old Earth. The chief had tried threats and even a brief suspension. Nothing seemed to work. And because of Danny’s special status—he was Kendall Mayhew’s brother—Callahan would never be able to kick him off the force for good. Not that she wanted to: He was her best officer.

  Violet’s first impulse was to tell her father she couldn’t attend the dinner. It wasn’t convenient. She had other plans.

  But then she took a long look at his haggard, care-creased features. Weariness seemed to tug at his face, dragging it down. He worked very hard and he didn’t really ask a lot of her. And there was, Violet reminded herself, a special responsibility to being the daughter of Ogden Crowley, founder and president of New Earth. Her mother was dead; now there was only Violet. Her father needed her to take care of things sometimes. To deal with social obligations when he couldn’t.

  “Okay,” she said. She’d go to the stupid dinner. And when Chief Callahan brought up the fact that Danny was making his supervisors mad, and maybe even imperiling his life, Violet would let her know right away that nobody—nobody—told Danny Mayhew what to do.

  Just like nobody told Violet Crowley what to do.