by Julia Keller
There were no iron bars in this prison. Outside, there were no high fences finished off with barbed wire. No guard towers. No guards. None of those things was necessary. Prisoners were monitored by a specialized Intercept unit up on New Earth. If trouble broke out—if a prisoner tried to escape, or even contemplated trying to escape—an intervention was initiated, and the prisoner would be instantly subdued by a stabbing, incapacitating grief. The last guard had left Old Earth in 2290, when the sixty-fifth prison was completed.
Tin Man was still talking. “You’re an arrogant SOB, you know that?” He slapped a bicep and rubbed it hard, as if he wanted to polish his latest tattoo. Skull and crossbones, Violet noted. The classic. “Couldn’t believe you followed me into that alley,” he went on. “Stupid move, you know? Almost cost you, big-time. Two more seconds and I would’ve hit you with that slab gun. Destroyed you. You’d be in pieces. Dripping, smelly pieces.” The image made him smile. “You know that, right? If it weren’t for that damned Inter—”
“Yeah,” Danny said. “I know.”
“Still waiting to find out why you showed up here,” Tin Man said. “What you’re after.”
“Information.”
“Really.” One side of Tin Man’s mouth curled up. “And just what makes you think I’ll talk? Doesn’t look like you brought any weapons.”
“I didn’t. Not the kind you mean, anyway.”
Violet was getting nervous. She tried to tamp down her nervousness, so the Intercept wouldn’t take it and tally it, but it was difficult.
The silence spread out all around Danny and Tin Man. The silence was made more ominous for Violet by her awareness of how many millions of tons of rock were pressing down on top of Danny right now, a massive steady pressure.
“You’re going to tell me,” Danny said, “exactly what I want to know.”
“Really.”
“Yeah.”
“And just why am I going to do that?”
“Because if you don’t,” Danny said, “you’ll be seeing your little sister again. And you won’t like it any better this time than you did the last time.”
Tin Man’s face crumpled. “No,” he said, in a hoarse whisper. “No, please.”
He was backing away now, cringing and crouching, his palms out in front of him. His bravado was gone. His body—and Violet knew because she’d felt it herself—still carried the invisible imprint of the Intercept, a sense memory of the power that had messed with his nerves and menaced his brain. It took weeks, sometimes months, to flush out the aftershocks of an Intercept.
Tin Man had had only a few days. He was nowhere near being over it yet. Neither was she.
Tin Man’s hands were shaking. He spoke rapidly. Fear and uncertainty sent his words slinging crazily into one another, bouncing around, out of control. “What do you want? You want slab guns? I can tell you where to get all the slab guns you could ever need. Totally untraceable. Or is it deckle? Is that what you’re after? I can get you a source for that, too,” he said in a pleading, wheedling voice. “I can. I swear. All you want. All you want! Is that it? Because I can help. I wasn’t the only dealer, you know. Hell no. I know plenty of others. I can give you names. Streets. Safe times to go. Please. Please. Or tumult, maybe? Or trekinol? I can help you get those, too. No problem.” He squinted at Danny, trying to read his face, get a sense of his desires. “Anything. Name it.”
Violet realized she hadn’t taken a breath in a while. She, too, was waiting to hear Danny’s answer. Was it drugs, after all? Was that why he was here? Had he lied to her?
She felt as if her whole future were teetering on the brink of whatever Danny said next.
“Like I told you,” Danny replied, “what I want is information. I wish I didn’t. I wish I could just leave you here, but you’ve got something I need. I wanted to get it from you in the alley that day, but it wasn’t possible. Not once they spotted me from New Earth. So I had to come back.”
Tin Man swallowed hard. “So if I cooperate, you’ll keep the memory away from me?”
“Yeah.”
Tin Man, tough guy, bad-ass drug dealer, nodded vigorously, like a kid who’d just been promised a second piece of candy. His head bobbed as the nod went on and on. Too long. He was too helpful, too obliging. That told Violet just how much pain he’d been in during the Intercept’s visit. How desperate he was to avoid a repeat.
“All right, then,” Danny said. “I’ll tell you what I’m here for. I need you to—”
The picture on Violet’s console faded. It flipped sideways. Then it winked out. She jiggled her wrist. The picture returned, but in another second it winked out again. Fuzzy static replaced the scene in Tin Man’s prison cell.
The chip-jack signal was gone.
Violet was so frustrated that she had a sudden impulse to jump up, rip off her console, and fling it across the room. But she resisted. No use adding a trip to the console repair shop to her to-do list.
She was out of options. She’d tried following him (check), tricking him into revealing he was a drug addict (check), and using the chip-jack (check). Nothing worked. She still didn’t know why Danny kept going down to Old Earth.
And now another mystery had been added on top of the original one: What kind of information did Danny want from Tin Man?
15
Glitch
“That’s weird.”
Reznik leaned closer to his monitor. He was squinting.
“What’s weird?” Violet said.
“This. Right here.” He pointed to his screen with a stubby finger.
Violet leaned over to look. “Okay, so the numbers are elevated. For less than a second. Got to be an anomaly.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s not important.”
She had lingered for a few minutes past shift change. To her irritation, Reznik stuck around, too. He was having trouble with the light level on his screen. Ever since the Intercept breach, a variety of glitches and ghosts had bedeviled the computers, sparking a scraggle of small, persistent annoyances. No permanent damage had been done, apparently, although the Intercept maintenance team, led by Shura’s dad, was still checking and rechecking.
And now Rez had seen something that made him curious.
Too curious.
Violet was fairly sure that the elevated levels had something to do with Danny and yet another trip to Old Earth. And she didn’t want Reznik involved. As eager as she was to figure out Danny’s agenda, it was her mystery to solve, not Reznik’s. Besides, there were plenty of other mysteries to absorb Rez’s attention.
The Intercept breach was still the primary topic of conversation around Protocol Hall. Theories as to the identities of the members of the Rebels of Light dipped and swirled around the vast space. How had anybody gotten past the Intercept long enough to pierce the mainframe? Any human presence would have been automatically detected, triggering a disabling intervention. There was no record of anything like that.
Thanks to the chip-jack, she knew Danny had made another round-trip to Old Earth. But she didn’t want Rez to know that. If he knew, he’d be obligated to report it. That meant Danny would face another confrontation with Callahan.
“Wonder what it was,” Rez murmured.
“Maybe it was a sunspot.”
“A sunspot?” He snickered. “Really?”
“I was kidding.”
“Sure you were.” His grin faded. “Seriously, though, Violet. Take a look. The pattern fluctuated right here.” Reznik pointed to the bottom right quadrant of his screen. “Unmistakable.”
She looked again. Yes. At the precise mark when their shift had expired last night, the level had risen and fallen in a tiny red spike. A wrist console had been activated. And the only way the activation would register on the Intercept—because there were, after all, millions of console activations going on all around them every second, as people communicated with one another, and none of those routine activations mattered—was if the console in question was, at that precise moment
, located outside the confines of New Earth.
And if it was located outside the confines of New Earth, there was only one other place it could be located:
Old Earth.
“Don’t worry about it, Steve,” Violet said. She said it in a low voice.
He looked at her. She never—well, almost never—called him by his first name.
“I’m supposed to report it,” he said. “You know that. Especially after what happened the other night.”
“Your screen’s acting up. You said that yourself. You’re having problems with your light level, remember? It could be a glitch.” With an effort, she kept her voice calm and even. The members of the monitor team set to relieve them were still a good distance away, talking and laughing, glad for an extra minute or two of relaxation before they had to sit down in front of their screens and focus. They paid no attention to Violet’s conversation with Reznik.
“A glitch,” he repeated dubiously.
“Yeah.”
“That’s what you really believe.”
“Well, it’s a possibility, right?”
“I think I liked the sunspot theory better.”
They both knew full well what the numbers meant. They meant that Danny had done it again. He’d gone down to Old Earth. But neither one of them was willing to say it out loud.
With all the numbers swooshing and diving through their days, the spikes coinciding with Danny’s trips had not been noticed before—until, in the wake of the security breach, Rez dug in and gave extra attention to every single number on his screen. Now, though, it was clear what had happened. And Violet was slightly frantic.
“Maybe we could let it go,” she said hastily. “We don’t have to make a formal report. We could just ignore it.”
“You’re trying to protect him.”
Violet didn’t answer. The answer was obvious.
Once again she was taking advantage of Reznik’s feelings for her, just as she had done when she’d asked for the chip-jack. She sort of hated herself for doing it—again. But she had to. Her loyalty was to Danny. It always would be.
“Those glitches—they happen, right?” Violet said.
“Yeah. Sure. Sure they do.”
Three quick keystrokes later, he had logged out of his Intercept account. He wasn’t going to make the report. There had really been no chance that he would, from the moment he understood the intensity of Violet’s desire that he not do so. She sensed the emotions moving through him, all the feelings for her that she did not feel for him. And never would.
Knowing Steve Reznik as well as she did, she knew he hated this, hated the fact that love had the upper hand. Not even his magnificent brain was a match for his emotions.
“Yeah,” he said. There was sadness in his voice, the sadness that came from acknowledging a weakness he couldn’t do anything about. He might as well be trying to climb that rope in gym class again. “Sure. A glitch. Happens all the time.”
16
Lucretia Crowley, M.D.
Violet opened the door to the apartment. Ogden Crowley was in his usual spot, rooted in the big leather armchair. One leg was propped on the ottoman. It was almost midnight.
Her father looked so alone. Alone in this room. Alone in the apartment. Alone with his responsibilities.
Alone in his life.
Classical music drifted from his console. It was a Chopin waltz. A treasure from Old Earth. Light rain had started up just after midnight, tiptoeing gently across the window.
“Hey, Dad.”
Violet’s voice made him smile. It always did. He turned his torso toward where she stood, in the arched threshold that linked the foyer to the living room. Much as he would’ve liked to rise and embrace her, he didn’t get up—his right leg made that difficult, especially at the end of a long and tiring day. But he wanted her to know how glad he was to see her, so he put his welcome into his voice.
“Good evening, sweetheart,” he said.
Sweetheart. When she was a little girl Violet didn’t like it when he called her that. She didn’t like it when her mother called her that, either. She wanted to be tough. So she’d roll her eyes, make a face. Now she didn’t mind at all.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” he added.
“You never do. You get kind of preoccupied, Dad.” She grinned at him. “Anyway, I tried to be quiet. Thought you might be in bed.”
“No. No chance of that.”
She didn’t like the idea of sitting on the couch tonight. She wanted to be closer to him. And so she picked a spot on the floor next to his chair, sat down and crossed her legs. Her father touched the top of her head. He nodded knowingly at the dampness.
“You’ve been walking in the rain,” he said. “Your mother loved to do that, too.”
Violet didn’t answer right away. Sometimes, late at night, they’d stay like this for a little while, not talking, her father’s scarred hand on her head. His touch was light, trifling, barely there, but through its pressure she’d swear she could feel his sorrow. She’d told him so. It was always with him, he had explained to her, this constant pain at the loss of his wife. And the loss of other things, too. It was nothing that Violet or anybody else could do anything about. It was nothing you could grasp or fight, nothing you could get your arms around. It was like the mist rising in the wake of the rain: Even if it wasn’t with you on a particular day, you always knew it would return.
“Any luck in tracking down the Rebels?” Violet said.
He shook his head gravely. “No. And we still don’t know how they did it. How they managed to get past the Intercept itself. It’s as if they’re somehow able to resist it. Like they have temporary immunity. But that doesn’t make sense.”
He was so frustrated that he’d made his other hand into a fist, as if he wanted to find a wall he could batter, in hopes of finding the answer behind it. Violet reached up. She gently pulled his fingers apart until the fist disappeared.
“You need your sleep, Dad. Maybe a doctor could—”
“Violet.”
“Okay. Okay.” She knew better than to push him.
He had always refused medication that would help ratchet down the terrible pain in his leg. He was afraid it would dull the edges. He needed to be completely in control at all times. He was responsible for all of New Earth. He had to be alert.
“I never got a chance to ask you about dinner over at Michelle Callahan’s,” he said. “After the breach, everything else flew out of my head. How was it?”
“The soup was great.” She wasn’t really answering his question, and she knew it.
He waited. When she didn’t add anything, he said, “She asked you about Danny Mayhew, I assume.”
“Yeah.”
“And that made you uncomfortable.”
“He’s my friend, Dad.”
“And he’s her employee.”
Her father knew that she and Danny hung out. He had a general idea about her other friends, too; he knew about Shura Lu and Reznik, and he knew her work schedule. But unless she specifically brought up her personal life, he didn’t pry. That way, he could pretend it wasn’t real. He could pretend that she was still the same little girl who used to climb up on his lap and ask him to tell her a story about Old Earth, about the place where he’d lived when he was little.
One day when she was about five years old, Violet had walked up to his chair and lifted his ugly twisted hand with her tiny ones—it took both of her hands to lift one of his, because his hand was so big and heavy. She looked at him and said, “Is that where it happened to you, Daddy? On Old Earth? Is that where your hands and your leg got hurt? I don’t like that place, Daddy. I don’t ever want to go to the place that hurt you.”
But now she was all grown up.
Sitting on the floor beside his chair, she saw the rain ooze slowly down the darkened window. The peace of this New Earth night settled in all around them. Peace: that was what the Intercept promised. The lure of that promise was what had ca
used Ogden Crowley to make his fateful trip down to Old Earth to track down a technology still only whispered about at the time.
Her father had told her the story over and over again. She always wanted to hear it just once more.
“It was raining like this, wasn’t it?” Violet said. “The day you first met Kendall Mayhew in his lab? The whole place smelled gross.” She laughed softly. “I remember you telling me that, when I was a kid.”
He nodded. A faraway look came into his bloodshot eyes. He fell easily into the familiar rhythm of the tale. “I was worried about New Earth. Worried about how we’d keep control of the citizens—so that New Earth would never, ever turn into Old Earth, with all the violence and the mayhem, all those uncollected emotions on the loose. I had heard rumors about a fantastic invention that could help me do that. Help me keep control. So I went down to Old Earth to see for myself. That was the first time I saw Kendall Mayhew.”
“What did he look like?” she asked.
“Well, I only saw half of his face. Less than half, really. He was wearing these enormous leather goggles to protect his eyes during experiments. They plainly didn’t fit—they were way too big. He told me later that he’d scrounged them out of the trash. The lenses were so scratched and cloudy that I have no idea how he saw where he was going—much less created a technology that would save humanity. Anyway, I will always remember the sight of Kendall there in his lab. Yes, you’re right—the place smelled terrible. It smelled like smoke and chemicals and something rotting behind the walls. But I could see the splendor of what he’d created, no matter the circumstances in which it had come to life. I offered him whatever price he named for this device he called the Intercept. And I told him he could come to New Earth and install it. Put on the finishing touches. Work out the last few kinks.”
“What did he say?”
“He surprised me. I thought he’d jump at the chance. He’d have a new lab with anything he needed. The best of everything. He’d have absolute creative freedom. But he said, ‘Not right away, President Crowley. You can have the Intercept—but I’ve got more experiments to do down here first. I’ll come when I’m ready. And when I do, my brother comes, too.’ Naturally I agreed. I would’ve agreed to any conditions. I wanted the Intercept. I had to have it. The future of our new civilization was at stake.