All the Whys of Delilah's Demise

by Neve Maslakovic

  Cece asks as I pedal, How will that reveal Renee’s current status, Scott?

  Either Renee will show up to catalog the nest—or the killer will, with Renee’s chip in their pocket. I’ll watch from behind the waste pipe… Wait, no, I’ve got a better idea.

  I shift my course toward the Agency. On the shuddery ride up in the elevator past the floor that holds my new office—Wayne’s old space—I take a few deep breaths. I’ve been tense for days, ever since I found out that Delilah was my mother. On the top floor, I take the hallway past Hugh’s office. The door is closed but a vertical strip of glass allows me to see inside—he’s hunched over his computer, gems streaming across the screen. At the hallway end is a narrow staircase. I’ve never been on the roof as I wasn’t sure if it was allowed, but nothing is off limits for the number one.

  The roof, I find, holds a water tower and a garden bed with flowers and a palm tree. A single chair waits in the shade of the palm, arranged so it faces the Edge Garden. Hugh probably sat in it and watched Dax and me lie in wait behind the waste pipe. Passing on the chair, I perch on the knee-high ledge that rims the roof, my feet on the inside and Dax’s binoculars at the ready. The day is a gray one, snow clouds gathering to the north. It always feels colder on days like this, and the concrete is chilly under my body.

  The map yields the info that Renee is still in her suite. I settle in to wait, switching periodically between the map and the binoculars. The magnification is weak and what’s at the other end, the apple tree and a couple of sparrows, is smudgy and out of focus. The map has its own weakness—that part of the garden is blank, greenery not showing up on it.

  Minutes tick away.

  I check the map again. There—Renee is headed out of Housing Two, or, at least, her dot is. I should have kept my eye firmly on the map to see if a second dot popped in to collect her ConnectChip, but now it’s just one of many moving along the square. She’s making good time, as if jogging over. It’s four blocks to the garden.

  Three blocks.

  Two.

  One.

  Renee’s dot bops along into the garden—a single dot. She’s alive and well, unless someone is masking their own chip, as they must have in the basement of the Dragon and the Drumstick. The dot reaches the center of the blank spot where the apple tree is and stops. I release the map and refocus the binoculars.

  Other than the pair of birds and their young, there’s not a soul by the tree.

  Cece, snapshot, I instruct—as if that will show something other than what my eyes are seeing—and brainstorm possible explanations. Could Renee’s chip be attached to one of the sparrows? Maybe someone has been training them and that’s why they seem different and why one attacked me. But the out-of-focus sparrows have been flitting around the tree all the while, feeding the hatchlings, not flying to Housing Two and back. Does an underground train-track lead in that direction and is Renee beneath the tree? Switching to 3D mode rules that possibility out; the tracks are some distance away and the map has the dot at ground level.

  With a gut-deep feeling of unease, I send a thought: “Were you able to find the nest?”

  This time Renee’s mastery of thought-exchanges is much improved. “In the apple tree, as you reported. I will mark it on my paper map.”

  I ask straight out, “Are you really Renee?”

  “Who else would I be?”

  “I don’t know. I thought there might be a…problem.”

  “I’m not the problem here. You are.”

  I get to my feet. Having taken the binoculars off, I play with the felt strap and slowly circle the roof edge, trying to make sense of things. If that’s really Renee, she isn’t acting like a scared Outsider, in hiding because she’s afraid of becoming the killer’s next victim. She sounds bold, as if she has the upper hand.

  As if she’s the killer herself.

  Then there’s the small matter of only the birds by the apple tree.

  No person to accompany the dot… No person… Could Renee be a fake identity? A nonexistent Outsider welcomed to New Seattle. It would have taken some doing: Pretend to come in. Pass the health exam. Provide a snapshot. Catalog the nests—I saw the handwriting on the paper map with my own eyes. It’s a long list. Each item would need to be faked, the ruse kept up nonstop. Still, it’s not impossible. The busy clerk at Jobs and Housing irritably stated that Renee got the ConnectChip, but it’s not as if he personally supervised the procedure—presumably he was notified in a thought; and he in turn informed others of her assigned housing and so on.

  But Bodi talked to Renee in person. Did someone wear a wig to fool him?

  I grunt in exasperation. Dax said that we should be on the lookout for the simplest answer and I’ve just accomplished the opposite—spun a theory too wild to fit into a neat box.

  Having circled the roof a few times, I stop. I’m six floors up. The garden topping the building across the street, Town Offices One, is a level lower and empty of visitors. The blinds are closed on the first floor where the security offices are, but on the other floors I can see people settling into their desks for the workday. A couple of the floors belong to Code Enforcement, where onyxes await Dax and me.

  To get a better view of the street between the buildings, a main thoroughfare, I take a step up onto the ledge. Below, pedestrians move about their day. Black-haired, auburn, sandy heads bobble along, the pace brisk if the backs are upright and young, more leisurely if not, nameless and anonymous all. Halos do not pop up, not at this distance and without a view of the face.

  And me? I used to be like that—anonymous. Now I’m the number one, supposedly adored by all, but only until the news of the section Q violation breaks… I should be enjoying it for the short time it’s going to last, stocking up on chocolate and other goodies. I’m having trouble remembering why I’m not in my office getting ready for my afternoon clients, why I rode the elevator all the way up, why I brought the binoculars in my hand, what I hoped to achieve.

  Why I’m standing here all alone.

  But I don’t have to be alone. I can change my whereabouts in an instant. Join the people on the street, a shortcut to being anonymous once again, just another body among many.

  I inch forward as an experiment, just to see how it feels.

  The answer is—it feels quite free.

  “You should not have come after me, Scott.”

  “I had to, Renee. I was worried for you.”

  “One more step, Scott. It’d be so easy, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes. So easy…”

  I jut my chin out. A breath forward and gravity will do the rest. Gravity, it strikes me, is a powerful thing, a force that belongs to everyone and no one; for Delilah, its pull was stopped only by the cold, unforgiving concrete of Jada’s roof. I didn’t really know Delilah—all the layers she was made up of: stage acting, the writing of plays, secrets hoarded and favors traded, her love for Tadeo, the genes and advice she gifted to me… I didn’t see past the rubies in her halo. I wasn’t meant to. None of us want others to know all the layers.

  “So easy, Scott. Lean…”

  I spread out my arms, ready to fly off, and the binoculars drop from my fingers. The clatter as they meet the concrete of the roof shakes me awake, as if I’ve been dreaming.

  What on earth am I doing? I have people who need me, who rely on me not to break the gift they’ve given me. Stepping back to safety, I pick up Dax’s binoculars and turn them over to make sure they aren’t damaged. A corner from the boy half has chipped off and I get down on my hands and knees to look for it. I find the fragment and try to stick it back in, but my hands are shaky and the piece won’t stay in place—I’ll have to glue it on later.

  The binoculars safely back around my neck, I drop onto the ledge, my feet firmly facing inward, my heart racing. On the map, Renee’s dot hovers for a few more seconds at the apple tree, then takes off back in the direction of Founders Square.

  I sit for a long while, my head in my hands. I was a bre
ath away from tumbling off the rooftop. Renee was not behind me in flesh and blood to push me off. But she did push on me. From within. And there’s only one way that could happen.

  Cece.

  Cece, taking charge well outside her programming.

  There’s something else—what happened in my room. The piebald sparrow I laid to rest in the Edge Garden: Did it attack me…or did I attack it? All I can recall is a strong sense of fiery anger. Did Cece take over my person, control my hands, compel me use the dresser drawer as a weapon?

  An icy hand of horror reaches deep into my stomach. If I killed a bird without knowing it, what else have I done?

  36

  10:05 a.m.

  Hugh has taken the rare step of crossing the street to the Security Office. Bodi waves him in from his desk and Hugh comes to the point at once. “Bodi. Have you noticed all the rubies that streamed in for Renee?”

  Bodi gives an easy shrug. “It’s not what you think—halo-padding. Just a second wave of goodwill gems, people being supportive, that’s all.”

  Bodi’s antique, a silver letter opener, is lying next to the people-tracking monitor at an angle and Hugh resists the urge to align it with the edge of the desk. He came in to make sure Bodi has things under control. But the security chief’s words so far have done nothing to reassure him and his next ones even less so.

  “One of the rubies for Renee is mine, as it happens. I had my doubts about the Goodwill Campaign at first, but no longer. We should all be more supportive of each other.” Here Bodi gets to his feet and offers a hand. “Speaking of which, I’m not sure I’ve ever thanked you for all that you’ve done for our town over the years, Hugh.”

  Hugh has no choice but to shake back. “Likewise,” he replies, releasing the other man’s hand as soon as possible. He’s not used to physical interactions—not for years now.

  There’s a problem with Bodi’s unusually naive interpretation. If it is just a second wave of goodwill gems, why has Blank Jack been left behind at ten while Renee catapulted over him to number two? Hugh’s concern is greeted with a nonchalant shrug. “Blank Jack’s been here longer. Renee is new—plus she has a larger spotlight on her with the Bird Control thing.”

  It’s the kind of explanation that sounds right, but the gems say otherwise. Everyone seems to admire Renee. She’s gone from needing to be welcomed to being treated the other way around, as if the town craves her. Before he can push harder he sees Bodi put a thick wrist on his forehead. “Just a headache. It’s all very puzzling…”

  “Renee’s gems?” Hugh prompts him.

  “No… Scott was the only one who could have attacked Bonnie, but I was sure it wasn’t her. Must think… I might make time for a walk, to give myself a break from the office. Care to join me?”

  “I think I’d better get back to my desk.”

  The muscled man responds with a gentle appeal. “Are you sure? I’m convinced a walk would help things. A loop around Founders Square perhaps?”

  “Quite sure, thanks.”

  Having followed Bodi out, Hugh pauses to watch him head toward the square. He’s aware of an oddity in his present mood. He regrets passing on the walk idea.

  Back in his own office, he finds that things have gotten even stranger. All incoming rubies—and they’re all rubies, not a single exception—are for Renee, and they all say the same thing: “Renee is awesome. Renee will show us the way.”

  That word: awesome. He must have learned it recently, though he doesn’t remember the occasion. But he understands what it means. He brings up the snapshot of Renee to see what the appeal is—her first week on the List was accompanied by a bare-bones profile, but a snapshot of a young woman duly arrived a couple of days ago. That’s curious… It’s as if he’s done this before, spent some time looking at the snapshot. Possibly… Yes, possibly even touched it up according to instructions supplied by— No, he doesn’t remember who.

  But he has an inkling of whose face he started with. Scott, the new number one.

  37

  I make my way down from the Agency roof, my hands still shaking, consoling myself that a brain chip cannot take over a person. They aren’t designed that way. Cece is not Renee. I’m not under her control, I didn’t kill Delilah and Rick, didn’t attack Bonnie…

  And yet everything that’s happened benefited only one person in the end—me.

  I pass Hugh’s office, where he’s settling into his desk as if he’s been away, and get onto the elevator. Two people dead and one bird, and I’m responsible. I know where I must go. To the Security Office to turn myself in.

  Bodi was right to suspect me.

  Delilah said no to my request for a rank boost and she died. Not knowing she was my mother, did I delete the Maintenance alerts after all, so when she leaned on the railing it went—and then forget I did it?

  Rick’s mishap dispatched the Incompetent Intern brand. Did I sneak into the theater, climb the ladder to the heavens, and work on the chandelier rope with a knife—and forget that, too?

  The final step landed me a turbocharged brand and the number one spot. In the basement of the Dragon and the Drumstick, did I knock Bonnie on the head, stage the scene to make it seem like she slipped, then proceed to “save” her…and forget that, too?

  With Eternal Life prolonging my existence, Cece’s own is extended too. As for Renee… Did Cece create her out of thin air? At number two, Renee is now a buffer between me and the rest of the town. Anyone coming for me would have to go through her first.

  But I messed up the plan by turning to Dax. With the section Q onyx looming, Eternal Life and the prospect of staying number one began to crumble away. I was called in to talk to Bodi. On the horizon was a slide back into the bottom thousand and—probably sooner rather than later—a fall into the last spot. With me sent sledding or to a greenhouse, Cece would cease to be. And so she had to aim for being transferred into someone else. She took a gamble that a six-story fall would leave my chip—leave her—intact, having eliminated an uncooperative human host. And then a transfer into a new infant without her memory being wiped, a detail that, next to everything else she made happen, is probably within her reach.

  Outside the Agency, my bike is gone from the rack out front, but it doesn’t matter as I’m not going far. I cross the street into Town Offices One to find Bodi’s door locked. I stand outside it not knowing what to do. Cece, did we—you and I—make all the bad things happen?

  I don’t understand the question, Scott.

  Delilah and Rick. We killed them, didn’t we? I killed them.

  That seems unlikely, Scott.

  I make my way on foot to the Gardens Center along unusually busy streets. The front desk is unattended and I pass a row of closed doors to push open the one to Dax’s lab. It’s deserted. My heart sinks. All I want is to have Dax reassure me that everything’s all right—to hear him say, “Of course you didn’t kill Delilah and Rick. A ConnectChip can’t take over a person.”

  Even pretending to hear those words helps. An objection bubbles up from inside me, as if Dax is there to provide it. If Cece did grow a personality and a will of her own, she could have made me attack Delilah, Rick, and Bonnie…but she cannot be Renee. It’s the same list I came up with before, of all the holes that need to be plugged up to shore up the fake identity.

  There’s something else—whoever she is, whatever she is, Renee feels bigger than Cece.

  The ant farm in one corner is the only source of movement in the room. I press my head against the cool glass and watch the tiny black bodies, identical and nameless, shuffle industriously through dirt tunnels. It’s peaceful. No collisions, no wrong turns. It makes me wonder if the ants are content to serve the colony or if they’re just mindless drones, trapped by more than clear glass, serving an invisible master. A whole that exceeds its parts, Dax said.

  And then I understand.

  All this time, I’ve been asking the wrong question, looking at Delilah’s death as if it was the end of someth
ing instead of the beginning. I’ve put it all together, finally—the deaths and Renee’s god-like ability to manipulate. Cece couldn’t do all that. No single CC could. But together…

  The solidness of Dax’s binoculars against my chest provides a calming effect, as if the physical object holds a bit of him inside its tiny painting of the straw-hatted boy playing a flute. I send a thought. “Dax, where are you?”

  “Founders Square. Something’s happening here.”

  “Meet me at your lab— No, at CC Central.”

  “Come and find me in the square.”

  I don’t have time to argue or attempt to explain. Stricken with an idea, I run back to Town Offices One and CC Central, in the building’s basement. There seems to be only a single person left on the premises, a technician hanging a white lab coat on the back of a door. “Sorry, whatever it is will have to wait,” he says. “I’m on my way out.”

  The lab consists of a pair of desks with computers, tables with electronic equipment, and a large temperature-controlled glass case. Dax was wrong; there are plenty of CCs left. Small vials line the glass-case’s shelves, each with a pale-blue drop of liquid suspended in it, a matrix of eyes watching us.

  I all but push the technician back into the lab, though he’s taller than me and probably twice the weight. “ConnectChips—can they be more?”

  “Hey, watch it,” he says. His halo lets me know that his name is Jack; he’s the reason Blank Jack had to be given a moniker. “More than what?” He rattles off the CC tripod. “A ConnectChip provides three services and three only. Communication—exchange of thoughts, the Commons cloud. Information—halos and gems, the people map, the Knowledge Repository. And Memory Aid, in the form of corkboards. That’s it. Now please get out of my way.”

  “What about a whole lot of them?”

  “A whole lot of them is just a gaggle of virtual assistants.”