The Dark Intercept

by Julia Keller

  “So my mom was meeting with one of her clients,” Shura said. Her agitation increased as she told the story. “And the client got a call. My mom could hear the voice on the other end. Something important was about to happen. Something big. It was related to the Rebels of Light. As soon as the client left, my mom called my dad and told him about it. She was really shaken up. Her client had gotten nasty, my mom said. A real bully. He wanted her to come with him to some kind of meeting. She said no. He got even more upset. He called her a traitor.

  “She was getting ready to come home when it happened. Somebody jumped her. Right outside her office. They tried to drag her away. She fought back. And they—they hit her in the head and then they—” Shura faltered. Violet put a hand on her friend’s shoulder. She felt clumsy doing that, but it was better than nothing. Violet wished once again that she was better at the whole hugging-and-comforting thing.

  “Anyway,” Shura said, after a deep breath, “the attackers must’ve been scared off by the guy who found my mom and called for help. Thank God he came along. Otherwise—” Shura shivered. She was thinking the unthinkable. Violet knew that because she was thinking it, too. She had to get her best friend’s mind off what might have happened. It was just too terrifying to contemplate.

  “Could the police trace the call?” she asked her. “The call the client got in your mom’s office?”

  “They used burner consoles. Untraceable.” Shura’s voice was bleak. “I just don’t understand. Why didn’t the Intercept stop them? It doesn’t make any sense. I guess it must be true—they’ve found a way around it.”

  * * *

  Violet had too many things on her mind. Her brain, she decided, was like an overstuffed closet. If she tugged on even one small object, the rest of the contents would collapse on her head and smother her. She wouldn’t be found for weeks.

  She looked across the living room at her father. He sat in his armchair with his eyes closed. He wasn’t sleeping. He was thinking. When his thoughts were especially deep and significant, he went into a sort of trance of heavy thinking. Violet had watched him do that ever since she was a little girl.

  The living room was dense with complicated shadows. Once again, her father had not turned on any lights. Dusk on New Earth was a muted one tonight, its colors more charcoal than ruby.

  She had just arrived home from the hospital. Shura’s mother had not yet regained consciousness.

  “How is Anna Lu?” Ogden said.

  He still didn’t open his eyes. She’d had entire conversations with her father when his eyes were closed.

  “No change.”

  “I sent the standard memo of consolation and concern to Edgar Lu on his console. I’d appreciate it if you could add my personal regrets as well.”

  “Sure, Dad.”

  Violet wanted to tell him about her trip to Old Earth. She wanted to tell him about the notebook and the mystery and all the rest of it, too. She had the same impulse that she’d had the other night, when she almost told him about her feelings for Danny. She didn’t like keeping secrets from her father.

  But sometimes, secrets were necessary. She had learned that.

  She looked over at her father. Eyes still shut. She knew how hard he was working these days, trying to uncover the identities of the Rebels of Light, fighting the threat to the Intercept. His face showed worry and fatigue, but there was still a rocklike harshness to it, a layer of steel under the layer of flesh.

  Violet knew what people said about Ogden Crowley. Some considered him cruel, even barbaric, in the way he ran New Earth. She didn’t care. She knew him better than any of them did.

  They never saw him the way he was right now: so weary from his work on behalf of New Earth that he could barely move or speak.

  Violet arranged herself on the couch. She was grateful for the darkness and for his habit of closing his eyes; both had kept her father from seeing the deep bruises on the side of her head. She’d finally gotten the bleeding to stop. She still had a headache that reverberated throughout her entire body, like somebody was using her for a gong, and she didn’t especially want to picture the giant bruise that she knew was blooming across her stomach. But she was feeling so much better than she’d felt in Delia’s kitchen that it seemed like progress.

  “I’ve been wondering, Dad. What did Mom think about the Intercept?”

  No answer.

  “Dad?”

  “Why would you ask me that?” His voice didn’t sound the same anymore. It wasn’t cordial. It was barely even nice.

  Violet was too surprised at the sudden change to answer. The question had arisen naturally in her mind as she thought about her mother’s journal, and about the revelation that she had known Kendall. Her mother had died too soon to see the system fully operational—but if she knew Kendall, she must’ve known what he was working on, and why.

  “I asked you a question,” her father snapped. “I would like an answer. And I would like it now.” His eyes were wide open, but there was no chance he would spot her bruises. He was focused too intently on the topic.

  Of all the directions Violet had speculated the conversation might go, this was not a scenario she had considered: an angry Odgen Crowley. A demanding and insistent Ogden Crowley. This was the side of her father that other people had to deal with. Not her.

  “I just—I was just thinking about it,” Violet said. “No reason.”

  Even in the semidarkness, she could see his shoulders slump as he fell back against the chair. As quickly as it had come, his anger dissipated.

  “Forgive me,” he murmured. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you. It’s just that—well, a long, long time ago, the Intercept prompted a major argument between your mother and me. The system was barely a gleam in Kendall Mayhew’s eye back then—it was just a bunch of lights and wires and bad smells in that filthy lab of his, down on Old Earth. But she hated the very idea of it. She told me that pursuing it for New Earth was morally wrong.”

  “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

  “She was going to leave me, Violet.” The statement came out with simple starkness. “She told me that if I continued down that road, checking in with Kendall Mayhew while he worked on it, and planning on mass installation up here in New Earth—she would leave. And she would take you with her.

  “But it didn’t really matter, in the end. Because she died. So I suppose you could say she did leave me, after all. She left both of us.” Anguish in his voice now. “Whether or not I’d ever brought the Intercept to New Earth.”

  For a few seconds Violet was quiet. The information had startled her. She realized that she needed to say something to her father—something reassuring, something supportive. She could figure out what she felt about all this later. Right now he was in distress. And he was still her dad, no matter what.

  She rose from the couch and moved in his direction.

  She never got there.

  25

  Second Attack

  A moment after Violet stood up, the front door exploded.

  That’s what it sounded like to her as it sprang open with a violent shattering of wood, a screaming wrench of hinges. She would’ve sworn that a bomb had been detonated within a foot of where she stood, turning the world upside down.

  With a roar, a swarming horde of masked intruders in heavy boots rushed in, half running, half marching. They wore black helmets, black tunics, black trousers. They must have knocked down the door with the butts of their slab guns; those guns were still held aloft in black-gloved hands, ready to strike and smash and crush, as they surged forward.

  Violet’s first thought—This can’t be happening—was quickly replaced by another one: What happened to the bodyguards? Bodyguards were posted outside the president’s door twenty-four/seven.

  There was no door anymore. She looked out into the hall. Four bodyguards lay in a heap.

  “Get down! Get down! I said GET DOWN!”

  One of the intruders was yelling at her. He grabbed Vi
olet’s shoulder and shoved her onto her knees, and then gave another hard push, forcing her to lie flat on the floor, facedown and helpless. She was still weak from her ordeal on New Earth—otherwise she would have fought back harder. She felt pathetic and stupid and very, very frightened.

  “Dad!” Violet cried out. “Dad, I—” Something small and round jammed against the base of her skull. That something, she realized, was the snout of a slab gun.

  “Shut up,” the angry voice commanded. “And stay down.”

  She heard her father’s agitated voice, climbing above the other voices: “Violet, do what they say, do exactly what they tell you to do, don’t taken any chan—” And then came a horrifying thud and her father’s voice was cut off.

  “Get him,” someone yelled, and Violet lifted her head an inch off the floor, just high enough to watch three of the intruders grab Ogden Crowley and wrench him out of his chair. The side of his face was red from the blow he’d just taken, the blow that had stopped his sentence, but still he tried to fight them off, his arms flailing, his body bucking and writhing, trying to free himself. But even his one good leg was useless. He was an old man, and no match for them.

  “Violet,” he gasped as they dragged him from the living room by his arms and legs. Before they cleared the door he’d turned his attention back to his kidnappers, exclaiming, “Leave her alone! Leave my daughter alone! Don’t you touch her—not a hair on her head—Do you hear me?—Don’t you—”

  Violet tried to get up, but the muzzle was pushed even harder against her skull. Her head was buzzing and throbbing. Waves of pain started at her temples and radiated throughout her body in endless concentric rings, a fierce and fiery ache.

  She didn’t know if a minute went by, or an hour, or several days. She didn’t know if time even had meaning anymore in the universe. At some point the slab gun was removed from the back of her head, but she didn’t know when. Her life was an agonizing dazzle of the terrible Now.

  She had let strangers take her father. She had let them pick him up like a sack of garbage and hustle him away, where anything could happen to him. She would never, ever forgive herself for that.

  Just before they flung a hood over her head, Violet took a quick look around the ruined living room. On the white wall behind the couch, in slashing black letters that looked like cuts inflicted on tender skin, were the words they had scrawled: REBELS OF LIGHT.

  Why hadn’t someone at Protocol Hall stopped this attack? Why hadn’t the kidnappers been incapacitated by a private emotion that tunneled into the deepest parts of their brains and brought them to their knees?

  Where was the Intercept?

  26

  Into the Darkness

  “Shut it down. Now.”

  The room was black. The voice that filled it had a machine-like quality, a strange, cold force born of filament and steel, not flesh and blood. Was it computer-generated? Violet didn’t think so. Her best guess was that it was someone she knew. Someone who was trying to disguise her or his voice. Someone who was trying to sound sinister.

  They wanted to intimidate her and her dad. They wanted to frighten them.

  Good luck with that, Violet thought. It might work with her—okay, it already had—but not with him. Nobody intimidated Ogden Crowley. They would find that out. Oh, yeah.

  The voice spoke again:

  “Shut down the Intercept.”

  Her father laughed. Just one short sharp bark, but it made Violet very proud of him.

  She was sitting in a chair. Her wrists and ankles were tied. They had made the knots fairly loose, as if they didn’t want to hurt her too badly, but she still couldn’t escape. And she had the worst headache of her life. Even worse than the one she’d suffered through on Old Earth.

  From somewhere close beside her in the dark, she heard her father’s breathing, the raspy, clotted rhythm she knew so well. After the laugh, he had gone silent.

  Their captors had swept them out of their apartment and into some sort of vehicle. The hoods over their heads prevented them from knowing where they were going. Violet had listened intently during the ride, straining to pick up on any clues about their captors’ identities, and she assumed her father had, too—but the kidnappers said nothing. She tried to remember the turns the vehicle made, and the number of stops, and the probable direction in which they were heading, but at some point, she lost track. She must have passed out. When she awoke, she was in the dark room.

  “Shut it down,” the voice said once again.

  “This is getting a bit tiring,” Ogden said. “Can’t you think of something else to say?”

  Violet understood her father’s plan. He was being argumentative on purpose, buying time while he tried to figure out a few things. The most important thing he was trying to figure out, she knew, was why the Intercept hadn’t been triggered at the moment they were taken. There was nowhere on New Earth where its reach did not extend.

  So it was true: They had found a way to get around it. To thwart its power. Violet was mystified. Her father would be more than merely mystified: He would be livid. He’d been absolutely sure that the system was foolproof. Kendall Mayhew had guaranteed it. There was no way around it. And yet this group—these faceless criminals, dressed all in black—had found one. They had discovered a loophole.

  “Shut it down and we will release you,” the voice declared.

  “Go to hell,” Ogden replied. His tone shifted. “Violet, are you there? Are you okay, sweetheart?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. She wasn’t fine—she was about as far from fine as it was possible to be, and she tried to keep her voice from shaking—but she didn’t want him to worry about her. If he could be brave, then she could be brave, too.

  Her father was completely under the control of whoever had kidnapped them—and yet he didn’t back down. He only had one good leg, and he was an old man, and he was weak—but he was standing up to them.

  “You’d better start cooperating, Crowley.”

  “Release us,” her father declared. “This instant. I demand that you let us go.”

  “You’re not in a position to demand anything. You’re not in charge here.”

  “I’m the president of New Earth,” Ogden shot back. “And when I get out of this place, every single one of you is going to be arrested. I’ll see to that. And I’ll also make sure that you serve your time in an Old Earth prison. Do you know about those? Do you know what you’re in for? You’ll be locked away in a cell carved into the side of a mountain. You’ll rot there.” Her father’s tone revealed his complete satisfaction with that idea.

  “Shut it down.”

  “This is pointless,” Ogden went on. “You can’t win. You’re going to be caught and punished. I don’t know who you are, but I’ll find out. You might as well just give up now before you—”

  He stopped.

  “Give up now,” her father said, picking up his sentence where he had left off, “before you face severe consequences and—”

  He stopped again.

  Something was wrong. Violet heard him moving restlessly within his bonds, shifting his position in the chair. He coughed. His breath was even raspier than usual, as if he was having trouble getting enough air into his lungs.

  “Dad?” she said. “Dad, are you all right?”

  “Violet,” he said. His voice had lost its bravado. It was small now, and filled with agitation. “I see … I see colors. Red and green and blue. It’s not … it’s not what I thought it would…” His words trailed off. When he spoke next, he sounded frightened and lost: “Violet, help me.”

  She fought against the ropes that held her, frantically squirming and pulling. “Leave him alone!” she cried out. “Stop hurting him.”

  The words of their captor came out calmly and evenly. “We’re not doing anything to your father that he hasn’t done to others. This, you see, is what is commonly known as payback.” He uttered a low chuckle. Somehow it sounded more menacing to Violet than a threat or
a curse. “And we’ve decided,” the voice went on, “that you get to watch.”

  A screen was thrust in Violet’s face. It was held steady in front of her eyes by two hands sheathed in black gloves. Another pair of gloved hands held her head in place, so that she couldn’t look away. She was forced to watch everything that happened on the screen, every image, every nuance, and to hear the sounds.

  It took Violet another few seconds to realize what she was seeing.

  They had somehow initiated her father’s Intercept feed. An intense emotional memory was sweeping into his brain. And he was powerless to stop it.

  * * *

  Twenty-five years ago:

  Ogden Crowley is disgusted. It’s supposed to be a political rally, but nobody showed up, because the guy who was supposed to do the promotional work plainly didn’t. So nobody knows about his speech.

  So nobody’s here.

  He sits in the front row of the small basement theater. The “curtain” is an old drape, scavenged from an abandoned house. The rickety, mismatched chairs are little more than sticks. The rows and rows of empty seats? A total embarrassment. It isn’t supposed to be like this.

  He clutches his stupid notes. Almost crushes them in his twisted, gnarled hands. The plan was for him to be introduced to the raucous cheers of an enthusiastic audience and make his way up onto the stage as best he can—he will not use a cane, no matter how many people tell him he ought to—and then he’ll deliver a fantastically effective speech about his idea:

  A new Earth.

  And afterward, if they’ve caught the fever, too, the fever of his colossal idea, somebody might just start a chant: Crowley, Crowley, Crowley. Because if they listen to him, if they follow his logic, they’ll want to join him. They’ll see that he’s right.