“But didn’t you have more accidents that way?”
“Of course we did. But we didn’t care. Nothing feels as good as driving your own car.”
My mind went to Jesse and our road trip. She was right—nothing in the world mirrored that thrilling feel of freedom.
We drove for about twenty minutes before we could see the forty-five-foot letters in the distance. They were nothing compared to the hundred-foot letters erected thirty years ago in Topanga State Park after several landslides on the Santa Monica Mountains had toppled two of the aluminum letters, but still, there was something nostalgic about the broken, dirty sign, even if it didn’t really say anything anymore.
As we drove up the mountain, we looked for a telltale black van Mrs. Alvarez described as looking like it was out to “capture little children,” whatever that meant. For a long time, we didn’t see anything, but then, up farther, we spotted a shiny black object through several tree branches.
“That’s definitely it,” she said, and I had to admit, she’d been right about the “capturing little children” thing. The van was black, dusty, and old. It had no windows save the windshield and the two at the front, and both of them were tinted to a color that was probably illegal if cops still checked that kind of thing.
Our car let us off at the side of the road, did a perfect K turn, and disappeared back down the mountain. I followed Mrs. Alvarez to the van’s back door, where she banged her fist three times.
“Tommy?” she called out. “Vernon? Mike?”
Instead of any of those people, Darlene was the one to open the door. Her hair was coated with dust, probably from one of the earlier explosions, and her clothes were filthy. She looked like she hadn’t slept all night, and I probably looked just as bad.
“Sonia? What happened?” Then she saw me and leaped out of the van to give me a hug. “Madison, baby, are you okay?”
“Fine.”
She checked me over anyway, patting my arms and spinning me around so she could check my back and legs. Once she was satisfied that I hadn’t been injured in the explosion, she calmed down enough for us to get a word in.
“Darlene, we need to find Tommy and his crew. Someone called the Investor shot Jesse and Georgia, and if we don’t get him the technology back, they’re gone for good.”
She looked back and forth between us, as though trying to see if we were joking. We must have looked serious, since she hopped out of the van and told us to follow her.
“They set up headquarters back in the woods,” she explained as she took the second path on our right, “or what’s remaining of them. Luckily, Angelenos never come up here anymore, so I think we’re safe for a while.”
Farther down the path, we took another right and followed a winding road for about half a mile, where a whole fleet of black vans with tents set up between them blocked our way. The place looked like a secret Army base, only the soldiers were nerdy guys in black T-shirts and worn jeans. Two of them were taking a nap in camping chairs with their hats over their eyes, while two others cooked eggs and bacon over a fire, and three carried a computer from one van to the other.
“He’s in that one,” Darlene said as she pointed to the van on the end. “But you’d better let me break the news first. If you tell him, he’ll probably say no just on principle.”
“And he might say yes to you?” I asked.
“Doubtful. But he won’t throw a spare mouse at my head—I can’t promise the same for you.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Maddy
“SO, LET me get this straight,” Tommy said. “You want me to recover the data we just blew up?”
Even though he was yelling, I couldn’t take him seriously. He looked like someone’s kid brother, and not in an adorable way—he was pale, scrawny, and obviously on a lifelong power trip. Every time he raised his voice, his hands balled up into little fists and pounded on his swivel chair’s armrests.
“Right.”
“What makes you think I can even do that?” he asked. “We wiped the system and deleted all of the data, and then, just in case that wasn’t enough to get rid of the repro tech for good, we exploded it. And now you want me to just somehow—magically—put all of the little pieces together so that you can save your boyfriend/girlfriend, depending on which of those sorry souls you happen to be in love with at this minute?”
Apparently, Jesse had told him about me.
“Tommy,” Darlene chastised as she crossed her arms, “you’re being rude. I know it’s a ridiculous request, but that’s what you do, isn’t it? Solve unsolvable problems and crack uncrackable codes?”
The flattery worked its magic, just as she’d probably intended. Tommy might have been an obnoxious kid, but he had a soft spot for grandma. His voice dropped as he said, more calmly, “You’re right. But even my abilities have limits, and bombs are one of them.”
“Oh well.” Darlene shrugged. “At least you tried.”
I wanted to say something more, but if the technology really was gone, what could I do? It wasn’t like begging the obnoxious kid to help us was going to actually fix anything, so why bother?
The three of us left Tommy alone in his van. Darlene said that we should stay for lunch—someone named Vernon was apparently going to cook soy burgers on the open flame—and, seeing as we had no leads and nothing better to do, Mrs. Alvarez and I agreed to stay. Darlene set up two more camping chairs for us, and as soon as I collapsed into the polyester seat, my whole body screamed for sleep.
Resting my head on the hammock made by the top edge of the chair, I stared up at the sky and watched the gray clouds soar by like floats in the WWIII memorial parade. That one looked like a seagull. That one looked like a sofa. That one looked like the swoop of hair that always fell into Jesse’s eyes no matter how many times he ran his fingers through it.
I wanted to cry, but all my tears had apparently dried up, so my eyes fluttered, open-close-open-close, while I fought off sleep.
Mrs. Alvarez had sat down next to me, but she wasn’t relaxed in her chair like I was. In fact, when I turned to look at her, she was tapping her fingers against the metal frame nervously and jiggling her legs. She had untied her ponytail, but that was the extent of her recreation.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“No.” Her legs kept jiggling. “Something is wrong.”
I sat up. “What do you mean?”
“I can’t explain it, mi hijo, but I have a bad feeling, and it won’t go away.”
When she called me my son, all the emotion I’d been too tired and shocked to feel came back again. My own mother called me Madison, and thinking of her reminded me that I’d basically disowned her for good. Back when I’d first shown up at Jesse’s apartment and his mom had called me a nerd at a volume it was impossible to miss, I’d never have imagined that I’d be sitting next to her, in the middle of a random park outside Los Angeles, listening to her say those two words when my own mother wanted a Ken doll for a son.
“I mean it,” Mrs. Alvarez said when she saw my face. “My Jesse is lucky to have you. But this feeling I have… I think that little boy is lying.”
“You do?”
“Sí. It’s the same feeling I used to get when Jesse told me you two were studying with the door closed.” She winked at me, which was unsettling since she didn’t smile. “He’s hiding something from us.”
“So what should we do?”
With a practiced hand, she pulled her hair back into a ponytail and looped a tie around it. Then she stood up, held out a hand, and helped me out of my chair.
“Follow me, mi hijo. I’m going to show you how we get answers in my family.”
“WHAT THE hell are you doing?” Tommy squealed as Mrs. Alvarez stood over his computer brandishing the steel fire poker and shovel.
“If you don’t tell me what you’re hiding, mentiroso, I swear to God, I will destroy every machine in this van. Then I’ll put you out of your misery and destroy you too.”
> Tommy’s eyes went wide. His hands were probably shaking too, though I was too distracted by Mrs. Alvarez’s fury to check.
“You wouldn’t,” Tommy said.
Mrs. Alvarez laughed. She actually laughed, and the sound was the most frightening thing I had ever heard. Then she planted her feet like a player up to bat and raised the poker.
“Sto—” Tommy started to say, but with one quick motion, Mrs. Alvarez slammed the fire poker right into Tommy’s expensive wall monitor with a crunch.
Glass exploded everywhere as she hacked out all her fury on the machine. Like a crazed surgeon, she chopped and cut, leaving wires dangling behind her. Sweat poured down her face and neck as first one and then another monitor went, littering glass rain on the floor at her feet.
“Tell me what you know about my son,” she shouted as she swung, “or I swear to Dios, my little friend, I’ll destroy the desktops next.”
Tommy’s eyes went to his beloved towers, and then he clutched the one closest to him like it was the life preserver and he was the drowning man.
“Fine!” he yelled. “You’re right, I do know something. In fact, I know everything. Everyone here thinks we destroyed the repro tech, but we actually just stole it.”
Instantly, Mrs. Alvarez halted her destruction.
“I knew it.” Her hair came out of its ponytail, and she readjusted her shirt. “Where’d you store it?”
Tommy looked down at the tower he’d wrapped his arms around, and he didn’t have to say anything more.
“Can you get it up and running?” Mrs. Alvarez asked.
“Uh,” Tommy started, and his sarcastic, mightier-than-thou tone was back again, “I’m not sure if you noticed, but you destroyed all of my monitors.”
“So get another one,” Mrs. Alvarez said unsympathetically.
Tommy sighed heavily. “I don’t have time to explain the qualities of those monitors. You probably wouldn’t understand me anyway.”
Mrs. Alvarez raised the fire poker again, and Tommy shrank back.
“Anyway, yes, I can display the tech on a new monitor, but what’s the point? Repro tech wasn’t just about the program, it was about the machine HORUS had built. One they’re probably rebuilding as we speak, ready for the program they know you’ll bring them to get your precious Jesse back. So predictable.”
“If you hate them so much, why’d you keep the program?” I asked.
“Because I’m not an idiot. Repro tech is the largest advancement in technology in our century, and now that one person’s done it, other people will follow. Sure, that may not happen in the next decade, but in the next fifty years? Absolutely. And at that point, I’ll take credit for the program, and I’ll prove, without a doubt, that I had it first.”
“But that’s a lie,” I said.
“So?”
For a kid, Tommy sure was cold-blooded. I still couldn’t believe he and sweet Darlene were related, but then again, I couldn’t believe I was related to my own family either.
“So you’re saying we need to give this over to the Investor to use on his machine in order to bring my Jesse back?” Mrs. Alvarez asked.
Tommy thought for a second, and then his lips turned up in a slight smile. Then again, it could have been a sneer—obviously I had underestimated his condescension before.
“No. I’m saying you need to take control of his machine and use it to bring Jesse back. As long as you can defeat the Investor and his cronies in the meantime, you all might actually get out of this alive.”
Mrs. Alvarez looked at me, and I looked at her. We stood there, looking at each other, for an uncomfortably long amount of time.
“Fine,” I agreed, and she smiled again. “But I get to shoot the Investor myself.”
“That’s mi hijo,” she said.
In one smooth motion, she pulled her hair into the third ponytail of the day.
Chapter Thirty
Maddy
“SO HOW does this machine work, exactly?” I asked Tommy as I bit into corn on the cob with butter slathered all over it. I’d never had corn on the cob before—in my house, food was always consumed in small, ladylike bites—and it tasted crunchy and sweet at the same time.
In front of us lay the blueprints for the Investor’s headquarters. Tommy had managed to track him down using face recognition software after I spotted the Investor in an article about the “Top 40 Investors” of our time, and from there, it was a simple search for his office. His real name was apparently Edwin Franks, and his company, under which so many other companies existed, was called EFI, or Edwin Franks Inc.
“How can I explain this in a way you’ll understand?” Tommy feigned thinking as he dramatically tapped his hand on his chin. “Oh, wait. You won’t.”
Mrs. Alvarez scowled at him, and Tommy shrank back in his seat.
“Fine. The repro technology basically uses transporter technology, which takes the atoms from the body, moves them, and reproduces them on the other side via a tunnel through space-time. Now, however, they’ve found a way to recreate the process that the transporter uses to reconstruct the person, but instead of using the atoms that came through the tunnel, they can use a different source of matter to build anything they want, including people.”
We’d lost Mrs. Alvarez, who had started a heated debate with one of the crew members about whether Mexican corn on the cob—which apparently used lime juice, cotija cheese, and a sprinkle of chili power to spice up the sweetness—was better than American corn on the cob. Mrs. Alvarez was winning the argument, but then again, everyone was so scared of her that the victory might not have meant anything.
“Anyway, that’s why we can’t build our own,” Tommy finished with a sigh. “Even with all of the hacked banking programs we’ve written, we still couldn’t get enough cash to buy a reactor ourselves, let alone all of the other pieces that are involved.”
“And the Investor can?”
“Without a doubt. From what I’ve seen online about him, he has enough money to buy just about anything he wants.”
Every time we talked about him, my heart raced. Until the day I died, I would probably never be able to forget the sound of those two gunshots and the look on the Investor’s face as his cronies carried out his orders: complete and total calm.
“So how are we going to get to it?” I asked as I looked down at the map illuminated by firelight. “This is the most heavily guarded place I’ve ever seen.”
“You’ve never tried to hack the White House,” Tommy said under his breath.
“You didn’t!”
“Of course I did. And I got in too, with full access to our nation’s greatest secrets.” He sawed at his fire-charred soy chicken. “Spent a glorious ten minutes in there poking around before someone caught me and shut the door—metaphorically speaking, of course.”
“See anything cool?”
He smiled a secretive smile. “I’ve seen more in my short life, my dear Madison, then you can possibly imagine.”
I rolled my eyes for show, but I believed him.
“So how are we getting into this fortress?” Mrs. Alvarez asked again as she waved her fork at the map.
“We need to hack their security system first in order to redirect the robots that monitor the halls as well as loop the cameras directly across from the back entrance. Hopefully the humans monitoring the cameras won’t notice.”
“But what about the sensors?” I asked. “Won’t they detect human activity and fry us or something?”
“Infrared will detect body heat,” Tommy admitted, “but when they scan our faces, we’ll have already added ourselves to the system as employees.”
“Okay, so we get in.” I scraped the last bit of barbecue sauce and chicken bits off my plate and licked my fork, then continued. “Then what?”
“Then?” Tommy popped open a beer and handed it to the guy next to him, took out a new can, and started the process again. Then he got a soda for himself. “Then we get to the machine and hope for the
best.”
This is a bad idea, Jesse’s voice said. Or rather, my doubts manifested themselves in his voice. Why would you risk giving the Investor the repro tech to save two people who are already dead?
But you’re not dead, I argued. That’s the thing about repro tech. You can always come back.
But how do you know I’d want to? I killed myself—remember? And Georgia is dead in a few years anyway. Are we really worth the risk?
Of course you are.
But obviously I wasn’t sure. They were worth the risk to me because I loved them, but what about the billions of people that would use repro technology to make the “better” versions of themselves? Or for worse outcomes, things I hadn’t even thought of yet?
I looked at Mrs. Alvarez, who’d been passed the first beer and already finished it before the last guy got his first sip. She was mumbling something, and her hands were pressed together.
“What are you saying?” I asked.
“Hail, Mary, full of grace,” she started again, “the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
“Amen,” Tommy echoed as he raised his soda.
I had never been so sure I was making the wrong decision in my life.
Chapter Thirty-One
Maddy
“WAKE UP, Maddy.” Mrs. Alvarez shook my shoulder.
Apparently I’d fallen asleep in the camping chair. The sky was dark and starless, and the fire had turned to glowing coals. The air was colder, and I shivered as soon as I was aware of the chill on my skin.
“What happened?” I asked as I looked around. I noticed she was dressed in all black, including a black cap pulled past her ears.
“You fell asleep.”
“Oh.” I stood up. “Is it time to go?”
She handed me a matching black hat, which I took to mean yes. “Tommy already hacked the Investor’s system, so we need to move quickly. He said we have about three hours before their IT guys realize what’s happened and the robots revert to their old pattern—just enough to bring Tommy and Georgia back and get out of there.”
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