by Amie Kaufman
The guy’s fingers tighten around mine, making my eyes jerk toward his face—and abruptly, all my simulated tears and panic come to a screeching halt. He’s actually starting to foam at the mouth, eyes rolled back into his head. He can’t be that much older than I am, and there’s something definitely, dangerously wrong with him.
One of the security guards is trying to ask me questions—has he eaten anything recently, when did he last take his medication, what’s his condition called—in order to brief the EMTs on their way. But his voice trails off as another sound rises from the center of the room, quickly growing in volume and causing the other nervous conversations in the room to peter out. The metal ring, the one the holo-projectors had been concealing, is turning itself on.
A number of lights along the base come to life, indicating that there’s data to be read now from the displays there, and the panels overhead lighting the room flicker as though the ring is drawing too much power. But neither of those things is what’s made the entire roomful of people go silent.
Little flickers of blue light start to race around the edge of the ring, appearing and vanishing as though weaving directly through the metal. They move faster as the sound of the machine coming to life intensifies and smooths out, until the entire edge of the ring is crawling with blue fire.
A hand on my arm jerks my attention away, my heart pounding as I look down.
The boy is beside me, raising one eyebrow. “Care to tell me when the wedding is, darling?” His voice is barely audible, words spoken without moving his lips.
I blink. “What?” I’m so thrown I can’t find my balance.
The boy glances at the security guard nearest us, whose attention is completely absorbed by the machinery in the center of the room, and then back at me. He wipes the remnants of foam from his mouth and then props himself up on his elbows. “Think maybe we should start the honeymoon a little early.” This time his whisper carries an edge, and he jerks his chin meaningfully toward the emergency exit.
Whoever he is, whatever he was doing here, right now we want exactly the same thing: to get out of here. And that’s enough for me. I can always lose him later.
I give him a hand up—the guard doesn’t even look in our direction—and slip back toward the exit. We reach the door just as a flash of blue light illuminates the white walls before us. While the boy in the striped shirt fumbles with the door, I glance over my shoulder.
The flickers of light around the edges of the ring are now reaching toward the center, tongues of blue sparks snapping out and vanishing, like lightning-fast stellar flares. Every now and then they meet with a tremendous flash of light—until finally the entire center of the ring is filled with light, crackling like a curtain of energy.
While I watch, a man standing near the ring collapses, sinking to the floor without a sound. I’m waiting for the people nearest him to react, to rush to his side and break the spell of fascination, but they’re all motionless, slack, like machines whose power’s been cut. More and more people are going still and silent with every passing second, security guards and protesters alike, in an expanding circle around the device at the room’s center. Every now and then another person drops to the floor, but most are standing still, upright, casting long shadows that flicker and reach toward us as the machine fires.
In between flashes of light, I can make out the faces of those on the other side—I can see their eyes.
And in that instant I’m standing on a military base on Avon, watching my father change in front of me. I’m seeing his eyes, multiplied a dozen times over in the faces around me, pupils so wide the eyes look like pools of ink, like the starless expanse of night over the swamps. I’m reliving the moment my father walked into a military barracks with an explosive strapped to his body. I’m remembering him as he was the last time I ever saw him, a shadow of himself, nothing more than a husk where his soul used to be.
There are hundreds of people still dotting the white expanse of the holosuite—and every single one of them has eyes like darkness.
At first, there is nothing more. And then come symbols that look like this:
TESTING.
Then come more words, followed by images and sounds and colors. Bit by bit the stillness floods with this new kind of life, and we begin to understand the strings of symbols and sounds that pierce the stillness. The hard, bright, cold things come more and more often, leaving ripples in the stillness, gathering up the fabric of existence in waves as they skip through the surface of the world.
YOU’D THINK I’D KNOW TO stay away from trouble by now. But here I am, my mouth tasting like a SysCleanz tablet, bolting down a hallway, sucked into this fiasco by a pair of dimples. One of these years, I really have to get smarter.
The girl just in front of me is slender, at least a head shorter than me, in one of those dresses all the rich girls are wearing right now. She’s got a mean turn of speed on her despite the heels. To add to the dimples, she’s got pale blond hair to just below her chin, tousled into an artful mess, and big, gray eyes.
Yeah, smarter ain’t showing up anytime soon.
“I’m really hoping there’s a part two of your plan, mastermind,” I gasp, as we pound down the hallway together.
“What did you do back there?” Her eyes are even huger than they were before, true fear making her voice shake and chasing away my amusement in an instant. She had a better view of what was going on, and whatever she saw has left this girl—this girl who barely batted an eye when I started foaming at the mouth right in front of her—completely shaken.
“That wasn’t me.” I glance over my shoulder, half expecting some of the security guards to round the corner on our tail. “Though I’m flattered you think it was.”
I’m about to continue when she grabs a handful of my shirt, using my momentum to shove me into an alcove housing emergency fire supplies without breaking stride. I slam into the wall and she slams into my back, and since I figure she had some reason for steering me this way beyond a desire to see me hurt, I hold still. A moment later, voices are audible around the corner, and they sound pissed. Good spotting, Dimples.
“We need a diversion,” she whispers, one hand around my neck to yank my head down so she can whisper in my ear, which isn’t at all distracting. “Can you send them somewhere else?”
“What makes you think I can do that?” I’m already pulling out my lapscreen from my satchel, but I’m interested to hear how she made me.
“Please,” she mutters. “Maybe you didn’t turn on that machine, but I know you’re the one who shut off the projectors.”
Huh. Well, at least she was watching me, that’s a start. I should try asking her out for a drink later. If we’re not dead or arrested.
I wriggle around until I’m facing her, and judging by the way her lips thin, she’s all ready to pour cold water on the idea of getting this up close and personal, until she realizes I’m doing it—mostly—because I need room to get my screen in front of me. “Let’s give them something to go look at,” I mutter, pulling the activation chip from my pocket and sliding it into the port on the side of the screen.
“What are you going to do?” she asks.
“Would you understand if I answered that?” I bring the screen to life, and as always, a faint but heady buzz kicks in as I write my own invitation into the LaRoux Industries core and start the hunt for my dance partner. Not a bad system, but not good enough.
She huffs a breath. “No,” she admits. “I don’t do computers. People make more sense to me.” She sure worked those guys back in the holosuite like she knows where to find the buttons and levers in people’s brains—and though I couldn’t quite hear, I’m pretty sure she was trying to throw me under the bus until the guards made it clear she’d be joining me there. Still, I can’t really blame her—it was a tight spot, and all’s fair in love, war, and criminal trespassing.
“People, huh?” I find the trail I need, and start work.
“Think of them as c
omputers with organic circuits.” I can tell from her tone the dimples are back. I’d like to say I don’t notice how close she’s pressed against me in the shelter of the alcove, but that would be a waste. I mean, she clearly wants me to notice, and I try to help folks out when I can. “So if people make more sense to you…tell me what kind of sense I make.”
“What, you show me yours and I’ll show you mine?” She shakes her head, bemused. “I really did just come to meet someone. When the projectors went down and the guards started hauling people away, I picked you for a diversion because I saw you change your shirt. I thought maybe you weren’t supposed to be here either, so you’d probably play along.”
Boring. Not the real story. Someone like her doesn’t come here without a very good reason. Even I don’t come here without a good reason—the fact that I’m leaving this monumental screw-up without any new info on the whereabouts of Commander Antje Towers just adds salt to the wound. But my hunt for the former LaRoux Industries pawn will have to wait. I snort to let Dimples know I’m not buying her cover story, and find the components I’m looking for. Nearly ready to get my party started.
She pauses, nibbling her lip again as I glance at her profile. “How did you play along?” she asks. “How’d you make yourself froth like that?”
I run my tongue over my teeth, wrinkling my nose at the taste lingering in my mouth. “SysCleanz tab. Drop it into decontaminated water, it makes up a solution for cleaning some circuits that need an alkaline mix. Chew on it without water, which is not recommended on the packaging, and it feels like your mouth’s exploding.”
“Huh.” She sounds grudgingly impressed, and I’d bet my boots she’s filing that one away in case she needs it.
“Got a name, my wife-to-be?” I ask, pressing my advantage.
“Alexis.”
“Nice to meet you, Alexis.” You don’t mind if I stick with Dimples, do you? I mean, that’s not your real name either.
“And you are?”
“Sam Sidoti,” I say, and this time it’s her turn to eyeball me.
“Samantha Sidoti anchors the late-night news on SDM,” she points out. “And she’s a woman.”
“Busted.” I peek up from my work, and she looks back at me over her shoulder, and it turns out making that little line show up between her brows is almost as fun as looking at the dimples. “I’m nearly done. Seems like we should have a plan for after our friends out there start heading for where the emergency will be kicking off in about a minute. Or is the plan that you go your way, and I go mine?”
She’s quiet for several beats, though I can’t tell whether she’s weighing her options or just listening for approaching footsteps. “It’s less likely we’ll be stopped if we split up,” she says slowly, her eyes on my hands as I key in the last few commands, fingers racing over the screen. Then her tone firms. “But I’ve got an access card for the fire stairs, and there aren’t any security cameras there. If you want to come with me, you can.”
Well, isn’t that interesting? I power down the lapscreen with a press of my thumb against the print scanner, then pull out the chip to stow it in my pocket. “I like a girl who commits to a relationship. So hard to find these days.” I ease my neck from side to side and roll my shoulders a couple of times—pretending to throw a fit really tenses things up—and tug my shirt straight.
“Well?” she presses. “Is it done?”
I lift one hand—can’t resist a bit of showmanship—count to five in my head, and snap my fingers.
And all hell breaks loose.
The hallway’s flooded with the wail of an emergency siren, so though I can see her mouth moving, I can’t hear a word over the klaxons. I choose to believe she’s complimenting me on a hack well executed. She gives a quick shake of her head and then puts her lips close to my ear, and for a moment I’m too busy noticing the warmth of her breath on my ear to hear her. “You idiot, we need to get out through the emergency stairwell!”
I grin and shout back, “I made the system think the fire’s in the stairwell. Everyone’s going to head for the opposite end of the building.”
She pauses, giving me a moment to revel in her grudging admiration. Then, with a jerk of her head, she bids me follow, and ducks out into the corridor to take a right, then a quick right again at the next intersection.
But at the next crossroads she skids to a halt when a scream rises briefly over the wail of the sirens. It’s coming from the direction of the holosuite we were in before, as far as I can tell. But it’s not an outraged shout or a demand for freedom from some protester who remembered why they were there. It’s a scream, and it’s cut off with the high-pitched squeal of a laser weapon.
The girl meets my eyes, her own wide with a sudden fear that mirrors the way my own pulse is quickening. Whatever’s happening in there, it’s not what either of us prepared for, even in worst-case-scenario planning. “Did you see…” She raises her voice to be heard, but I can hear the higher note in there, the edge of her nerve. “When we were leaving…”
I saw the people standing there like statues, all turned in like worshippers toward that huge metal ring in the middle of the room as it filled with blue fire. I think I know what the ring was, but…
“Those people,” I shout back. “I don’t know what the hell was happening.”
“I do.” I almost miss her reply, but there’s no mistaking the look on her face. Just for a moment, Dimples has shed her mask, and whatever it is that she knows, it’s shaking her to the core. I draw breath, lips moving to form a question, but she doesn’t give me the chance. Instead, she’s suddenly moving again, grabbing at my arm to turn me around and take off down a different corridor.
The walls are all the same, a creamy white color, all the doors identical, creating the unsettling illusion that we’re going in circles, but she doesn’t hesitate, taking the twists and turns one after another. My screaming fire alarm worked; the halls are empty, save for the occasional guard, who we dodge without much trouble. It’s at least a quarter hour before she halts, holding up a hand and closing her eyes, consulting some internal map. I keep myself nice and busy checking for any unwelcome visitors, and after half a minute she nods and leads me on again.
I want to know more—a lot more—about this girl who has a pass to the fire escape stairs, a killer smile, and a memorized map of the employees-only hallways.
Eventually our luck runs out, and a peek around a corner reveals a security guard standing by a door with a neon EXIT sign—the way through to the fire escape. The guard’s a little pudgy, his shirt so new it still has creases ironed into it. I’m guessing a fresh hire. Eyes wide, he clearly didn’t bargain on encountering whatever’s happening here so early in his career. I don’t know what my companion sees, but whatever it is, it causes her to smile as she pulls back around the corner.
She lifts one hand to press it against my chest, and for an instant all I’m focused on is that one point of contact, the warmth of her skin coming through my shirt. Then she’s shoving me back against the wall. This is becoming a habit. She’s clearly not used to working with a partner. “Stay here,” she says, using that same hand to fish down the front of her bra, an activity I can only imagine I’m supposed to admire, so I do. She pulls out a little blue capsule and squishes it in one hand. When she runs her fingers through her platinum blond hair I see the capsule was full of dye, and in that one movement her hair’s streaked a brilliant blue. “I said I’d show you mine,” she continues, crouching to wipe her hand on the carpeting.
“Oh yeah?” I’m grinning, and she’s aiming a coy smile back—just the one dimple, this time. I think I like that even better. I like that, at least for now, her fear’s receding, though I can still see traces of it in the depths of her gaze.
“Watch and learn.” She pinches her cheeks with her clean fingers so they start to flush, and huffs a few quick breaths, then whirls around the corner. She runs straight for the guard, already crying as she throws herself at him. I’ve s
een plenty of artists on the lower levels, but this girl is good.
The guard’s clearly bewildered to find his arms full of semi-hysterical, blue-haired teenager, and tries variations on are you hurt and the evacuation point’s back that way, miss. I keep an eye on them as I peel off my shirt, quickly turning it inside out and pulling it back on again, so the LaRoux Industries badge I doctored up is showing on the outside once more.
Meanwhile, Dimples sucks in a few quick breaths and tries again, this time a little clearer despite her “fear.” “Back that way,” she gasps, pointing to the hallway opposite the one I’m hiding in. “He tried to take me hostage, he’s got a gun! Please, you have to help.” She lets herself subside into whimpery distress noises after that, though I can’t hear much more of it over the alarms still screaming above us. I can tell from the guy’s body language what he’s saying as he manages to get her pried loose from his arm. Stay right here and I’ll take care of it. Though when he jogs off the way she pointed, he’s not moving too fast. Probably doesn’t want to be the one to find this armed hostage-taker, and fair enough, really.
I stay hidden until he’s turned a corner, then hurry out to find my friend fishing in her purse—who even carries one of those?—and producing a swipe card. She manages to look only a tiny bit relieved when the pad lights up green, and a moment later we’re in the stark emergency stairwell. The alarms are dimmed in here, and our footsteps echo as we start down.
“What the hell did you do back there?” she calls back over her shoulder after a while. “I saw you doing something with your lapscreen and that data port in the tree, right before the holo-projections cut out, but this is a whole other level of security.”