The Dark Intercept

by Julia Keller

  “It’s not his fault,” Shura said. “You have to make Danny see that.” One of the things that made their friendship so great, Violet had thought for a long time, was this: They took turns being strong. If one of them was distraught, the other one held them together. And then they’d switch.

  Right now, it was Shura’s turn. “In each of us, there’s a different kind of darkness,” she said. “And you have to let other people deal with theirs. In their own way. That’s what Danny needs to understand. I mean, yeah, sure—Kendall Mayhew was a genius and he changed the world. But maybe he couldn’t change his own world, you know? He just wasn’t able to turn his world into a place that was okay for him. A place he wanted to stay.”

  Violet nodded. Shura sometimes surprised her with her way of looking at things. But Violet really shouldn’t have been surprised. Shura was an artist. Her life was all about looking. And seeing things that most people didn’t see.

  It was time for Violet to return to Protocol Hall. She said good-bye to Shura and then joined the crowd as it bumped and surged its way back into the building, back to the place where the floor shivered more insistently than it did anywhere else, as if it, too, sensed that a change was coming.

  The change might be good. Or it might be bad. But clearly there was no way to stop it.

  18

  Cats and Rats

  Violet was just stepping out of the shower that night when her console went crazy.

  It rocked and it buzzed with a hectic variety of strange beeping and whistling sounds. It almost bounced off the blue tile countertop. Violet yanked a T-shirt over her head and hopped into a pair of sweats and moved into her room, settling on her bed cross-legged so she could figure out what was going on. The hair across the back of her neck was still wet from the shower, but she didn’t notice.

  The screen was fuzzy and gray, with tiny white streamers cascading down from the corners. Violet had never seen anything like it before.

  It took her another few seconds to realize what was going on. She had not erased the coordinates Reznik had given her to access the chip-jack. There was a chance—just a small one, but a chance all the same—that Danny’s feed would return for a few minutes now and again.

  This was it.

  Violet felt that funny lurch in her stomach that always seemed to show up when Danny was involved. She didn’t even bother looking at the crook of her left elbow. She knew what she’d see there.

  On her console, the fuzziness resolved itself into a view of stark ugliness. It had to be Old Earth. This was a city, but it wasn’t like any city Violet had ever seen before.

  It was a dead place.

  A smear of soiled-looking white haze was wrapped across the horizon like a dirty bandage. The wind was blowing, shoving trash along the filthy, slanted street. It was almost dusk. At this time of night, Danny had told her, the people on Old Earth tucked themselves into whatever shelter they could find. Night was a nervous time there.

  And then she saw his face.

  It was reflected in a mud puddle. Danny had leaned over to look in it, checking its depth in case he couldn’t make it across in one leap. He moved on, taking the long way around the giant puddle. He ducked under the sagging remnants of what once had been electrical power lines but now looked like fraying dead vines.

  He stopped again. He took a deep breath. He peered around.

  Violet guessed that he needed a minute to reorient himself to Old Earth, to reacclimate himself to its foul smells and its blunt colors and the rugged, inhospitable terrain. He’d gotten a little soft after all that time on New Earth. Even the frequent trips back here couldn’t be like living here.

  Once, Danny had known every rock in this landscape. Every stick. Every gully. Every hiding place. When he and his brother were kids, he’d told Violet, the two of them would jump across the cracks and gaps in these sidewalks, chasing each other down these torn-up roads and across the weed-clogged lots, racing through the empty roofless houses with the falling-away floors and half-gone walls.

  Where was he going this time? And the destination, whatever it was, could not have been the reason for his earlier trips to Old Earth; Danny would have done it long ago. This was a different mission. A new one.

  He turned sideways and slipped into a small crevice between two dilapidated buildings. The gap was hardly big enough to call itself an alley. The space was so narrow, in fact, that Violet wasn’t sure how he’d fit himself in there, even after wriggling and drawing in his shoulders. Somehow, though, he managed.

  A vaguely rectangular section had been hacked out of the side of one of the buildings. It led to a flight of crooked and crumbling steps. At the bottom was a dented, scraped-up metal door. Garbage had blown onto the steps and stalled in the corners. Near the door was a gray pile of short crisscrossed bones. Rat? Pigeon? Human baby? Something else? Violet couldn’t tell. And frankly, she was glad about that.

  Danny shoved at the door. It didn’t budge.

  Now he lifted a booted foot and gave it a flurry of sharp kicks.

  Nothing.

  More kicks.

  Still nothing.

  Danny was breathing heavily from exertion. It seemed hopeless; the door was sealed tight. But he wasn’t a quitter. Violet knew that just as surely as she knew that she wasn’t a quitter, either.

  He stretched his neck and rolled his shoulders, preparing himself for one last try. He gulped in a deep breath. He aimed a powerful punch of a kick at the dead center of the door.

  It popped open like a cork coming out of a bottle.

  What waited inside was the most disgusting room Violet had ever seen. The floor was pounded dirt, the ceiling was low, the amount of junk was epic. Water dripped in three of the four corners, a dismal steady rhythm. In the one corner that didn’t feature a dirty waterfall, spiders had set up a complicated trapeze of giant webs. Skinny rats scuttled along the narrow twisting passageways between the junk piles, pausing every few feet to rise on their hind legs, sniffing the air.

  Danny tried to climb and sidle his way through mountains of motley stuff—crusted-over computers with shattered screens, overturned benches, thick coils of wire, old brass fittings, burnt-out plugs, rusty springs, dozens of buckets of mismatched nails, countless piles of oily rags, millions of glittering chips of glass from busted test tubes and beakers. He had to stop every few seconds and move aside ancient vacuum cleaners and splintered chairs and acid-oozing batteries and upended bookshelves and three cracked-in-half chalkboards.

  And then, with a lightning flash of insight, Violet realized what this place was.

  What it had to be.

  This is Kendall’s lab. This is where he created the Intercept.

  The revelation was half exciting, half terrifying.

  She felt goose bumps rising up on her forearms. This was the place.

  Danny was still moving. His goal seemed to be the wall at the back of the room. The cinder blocks were in desperate shape, Violet saw; they bore the marks of severe and prolonged water damage. Mold gripped them from corner to corner, a profusion of pale green starbursts. The wall looked perilously close to collapsing, but it had probably looked that way for a very long time, she thought. It might crumble in the next ten minutes or it might last another millennium; there was no telling which.

  Suddenly something jumped and hissed. Danny flinched. Violet did, too, even though she was thousands of miles away, sitting safely on a comfortable bed in a large and beautiful apartment on New Earth.

  The cat had leaped down from a rickety tower of old boxes. It landed directly in front of Danny, screaming its own special cat-scream, a thin, high-pitched needle of sound, aggressive and obnoxious. The ridges of the cat’s arched backbone were visible through the patchy, matted gray fur.

  For a few seconds Danny didn’t move. Animals on Old Earth, he’d once explained to Violet, were notoriously vicious and aggressive. Because they were starving.

  Finally, after deploying an intense and malicious yellow-
eyed glare, the cat padded away. The flick of its tail seemed to reveal its thinking: A strategic withdrawal now, followed by a patient wait in the corner, would pay dividends later when this tall intruder tripped, fell, found himself trapped, and then died, whereupon the cat would be the pleased recipient of a hot meal.

  Danny approached the wall. As a very puzzled Violet watched, he knelt and counted up six blocks from the floor. Then he stood up and counted three blocks to the left.

  He tapped the block with two fingers.

  Once.

  Twice.

  Three times.

  The block slid out of the wall. It was not really a block at all, Violet saw, but a lined compartment. Nestled in the middle was a small notebook with a red leather cover. There was not a mark on it. The compartment was bone-dry.

  Danny lifted the notebook out of the compartment.

  The chip-jack’s going to fail ANY MINUTE, Violet told herself glumly. She passionately wished it to be otherwise, but she was convinced. That’s how her luck had been running lately.

  I’m going to lose the image. The signal will fade. And I’ll never know—

  The signal did not fade.

  The signal wasn’t the problem. The problem was that she had no idea what he had found.

  Danny opened the notebook. He quickly leafed through its pages. When he arrived at the right spot, he stopped. He put his index finger in the middle of the page to keep the notebook from flopping shut again. He read. He was so intensely focused that Violet wasn’t even sure he was breathing. Time stopped for him. His world collapsed into the writing on that page.

  And she was locked out.

  From her vantage point, all she could see were furious scribbles. She wasn’t close enough to see anything specific. As to what the letters and numbers meant, she did not know. They raced across the page and climbed up both margins, the figures blending in a frantic dance of information.

  Violet didn’t know why the notebook was so important to him. Or how the notebook was related—if it was related—to his earlier visit to Tin Man’s prison cell.

  Or to his repeated visits—even earlier—to Old Earth.

  Danny closed the notebook. He carefully placed it back in the compartment, and then he pushed the block until once again it was flush with the wall. Now the wall looked like an ordinary wall again—if a slimy, mold-crusted, falling-down panel of cinder blocks could be described as ordinary.

  Why doesn’t he take the notebook with him? Violet asked herself. She answered her own question: Because he needs to keep it safe. And the safest location for something on New Earth is … Old Earth.

  She kept waiting for the chip-jack signal to fade, but it didn’t. It held steady as Danny left the wet, disheveled lab—or what once had been a lab—in the same manner in which he’d come in, which meant climbing over calamitous mounds of debris and sidestepping puddles of mysterious black goo and platoons of rodent carcasses. Once he was back outside, he yanked the metal door shut behind him, double-checking the tight seal.

  He looked around for a few seconds, to make sure no one was watching, and it was at that point—with Danny’s gaze sweeping left, right, left, and then right again—that the chip-jack’s signal failed.

  With a little fzzzip sound, Violet’s console screen wavered and then went black. The chip-jack was dead. According to Rez, that was it. You sometimes—not always—got that second wind from the device, the one Violet had just experienced. A third wind was unheard of.

  She didn’t mind. Now she knew exactly what she had to do: go to Old Earth and find that notebook for herself. She’d do what she had been advising Danny not to do for months now—that is, sneak down to Old Earth. She had to uncover the secret contained in those scribbled pages. It could be the key to everything.

  The journey would be difficult, and her father would definitely ground her for life if he ever found out—but she was going to do it, anyway.

  And to get there, she would have to go through Thirlsome.

  19

  The Fall

  Thirlsome. The last remaining point of contact between the two worlds.

  The name had a kind of magic. And its own peculiar music. When Violet was a little girl and her mother returned from her latest journey to Old Earth, the word Thirlsome ignited something deep and thrilling inside her. “And so I went to the docking station on Thirlsome,” Lucretia Crowley would say, “and I got into the pod. The same pod I’d ridden in when I came down from New Earth. And I closed the door and then—whooosh—off it went, and just a little while later I was right here again with you and Daddy.”

  Hearing the word Thirlsome—then and now—made Violet’s stomach do a little tap dance. The syllables stirred up a reminder of everything she wanted in her life: adventure and mystery and maybe a pinch of danger, too. Thirlsome was all about Elsewhere—something beyond the safety and calm and predictability that defined her life, day after day, on New Earth.

  Thirlsome.

  To Violet, it wasn’t just a word. It was the lure of the unknown. It was everything her father tried to protect her from—and chief among those things was Old Earth itself. Thirlsome was the threshold of that distant, forbidden place.

  In the present, however, there was a small complication:

  How was she going to actually get there?

  You couldn’t just hop in a pod on New Earth and scoot down to Old Earth. No way. Travel was strictly regulated. As hard as it was to go from Old Earth to New Earth—and thousands of would-be immigrants tried, year after year, begging Shura’s mother to help them—it was even harder to make the trip down from New Earth to the port of Thirlsome.

  People with official business, such as Violet’s mother and Anna Lu, were allowed, but only after filing petitions and going through ID checks and submitting to multiple interviews about their intentions.

  It would be impossible for a sixteen-year-old girl with no official business on Old Earth to get in a pod on New Earth and somehow make it to Thirlsome.

  Impossible, that is, for any ordinary sixteen-year-old girl.

  But she was Violet Crowley. And she had a plan.

  * * *

  “You know why they picked it, right? Picked Thirlsome for the transport site? It was part of my training. I had to learn all the history junk.”

  Sara Verity took a long drink of her soda. She was thirsty because she had been talking. And talking. And then talking some more. At the end of every few sentences, she pushed a springy thatch of red curls up and off her forehead; they tended to stray there when Sara became emphatic about a particular point, leaning forward, bobbing her head.

  She was very emphatic right now, because she was trying to persuade Violet to forget the whole thing. In the middle of her spiel, she had lapsed into the material from her transport logistics handbook. It was her way of buying time, hoping Violet would reconsider. Sara had been talking for quite a long while. She had the dry throat to prove it.

  “Okay—why’d they pick it?” Violet said. She didn’t really care. She was just being polite to Sara. Because she wanted something from her.

  Sara was on pod duty tonight. Violet had showed up and barged in, which technically was against the rules, but pod duty was a lonely business and so Sara didn’t mind. The traffic between Old Earth and New Earth was drastically reduced these days, with only a few journeys each month. And those were mostly made by cops or scientists, who never had much to say to the red-haired intern with the shy smile and the plaid bag.

  But someone had to be here, twenty-four/seven, and that usually meant an intern. Like Sara.

  This was one of those times when Violet didn’t mind being the president’s daughter. She had been waved past the perimeter checkpoints when the cops recognized her face. Anybody else would have been stopped before they got within a mile of the transport center.

  She and Sara sat in the center’s lobby, a small room with a black-and-red checkerboard tile floor, white foam walls, and red backless couches that ran
along all four walls. When people arrived for transport down to Old Earth, they sat on these couches, waiting for their name to be called by the Pod Officer on duty.

  Unless you’re Danny, Violet had reminded herself, when she first got here tonight and looked around the lobby. Then you slip in the back and sneak your way into a pod.

  Part of her was irritated by that. And part of her admired him for it.

  “Thirlsome was chosen for the site because of its isolation and its favorable geographical coordinates,” Sara droned on. Violet struggled to pay attention. “The Kampura caves on its southern shore of Old Earth matched up ideally with the trajectory of incoming pods from New Earth. In the early 2280s, when thousands of people were being taken up every hour, day after day, month after month, the Kampura caves were overflowing. Vendors set up stalls that sold food and drinks and Old Earth souvenirs. Now, though, since immigration is so tightly controlled, the caves are mostly empty. And so—”

  “Only one portal is left. That’s what I read,” Violet said. She hated to interrupt, but she was getting impatient.

  Sara took another drink of her soda. “Right. We’ve got two up here—they’re just behind the heat shield over there—but on Thirlsome, there’s only one left. The rest of them were stripped for their metal a long time ago.”

  Violet was now officially Bored Out of Her Mind.

  “Okay,” she said. “Listen, Sara, I know this is a huge favor. But like I said, I need to get to Old Earth. Right away.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s an errand for my dad.” Violet cringed inwardly at the lie, but this was for the greater good. Right? And nobody said no to Ogden Crowley.

  Sara was troubled. Her emotions were easy for Violet to read. Her face bunched into a frown. The bunching made the skin around her eyes crinkle, and the crinkling inspired a bundle of wrinkles to jet across her forehead.