by Karen Healey
It was “Here Comes the Sun.”
They always wanted me to sing “Here Comes the Sun.”
From the corner of my eye, I could see President Cox, smiling and nodding along to the beat, and Diane in the wings, looking bored. She was looking at the crowd, scanning them idly.
But Lat was watching Tegan.
His eyes were trained directly on her face, and I felt that fear rise within me again. He’d do it. He’d bend her body to his will. The one thing I’d learned to depend on when it came to SADU is that no matter what we did or how good we were, they would always find a reason to hurt us.
As I looked away, unable to bear the possessive fervor in Lat’s face, my eyes snagged on a lump under the president’s jacket. Probably ninety percent of the people in that room would never have seen it, but over the last six months, I’d become hypersensitized to those lumps and what they indicated.
That lump meant that Cox was armed.
Almost idly, I considered the possibilities. I could finish the song and go over to shake his hand again, grab the weapon, aim for Lat, aim for Diane if I got a second shot….
Cold sweat prickled in the curve of my back, as fantasy condensed into a viable plan.
I really could do it. The only drawback, as far as I could tell, was that I would definitely die. And they’d punish Tegan afterward—but I wouldn’t be around to watch.
I might be able to save her from Lat, though. Perhaps my death would be able to save her entirely. Questions would be asked; people would want to know what had happened and why. My parents were already unhappy, and with me dead they wouldn’t have to step carefully around the need to keep my current guardians happy; they could cause the outcry I knew they wanted to make. Perhaps the furor would give Tegan an opportunity to escape and tell the truth. Perhaps these Save Tegan people would gain some political traction. Perhaps the Ark Project would be revealed for the horror it was.
I wouldn’t be around to see it, but it might happen.
And I wouldn’t have to commit that final betrayal and lie to Joph.
That was it, I decided. It would be better if I had a way to warn Tegan, but there wasn’t any time for hesitation, and if there was anything of the real, brave Tegan left, I thought she would understand that—she’d always been the one who leaped fearlessly into action. Funny, almost, that I would die in my attempt to do the same.
We neared the end of the song, and I poured joy and power into the final chorus, drinking in my final moments. I would go down singing—that felt right; that was proper. The crowd brightened in response to my sudden effort, and I smiled, my gaze sliding around the room. I felt almost sorry for those excited, happy people, who would soon be scared and shocked.
My gaze caught on a slender girl with short tan hair, pushing her way forward to the front row. She was staring directly at me, her brown eyes lit with the same reckless joy that was rising in me.
I smiled at Joph, wishing that I could say good-bye.
Jump, she mouthed.
I frowned, confused. Joph grimaced and beckoned extravagantly. “Jump!” she shouted, her voice cutting clear across the moment of silence at the end of the song.
And as all the lights went out and the startled murmurs began, I launched myself forward, into the dark.
CHAPTER FIVE
Volante
Without being able to see the floor, I landed hard, slamming into a body on the way down. I rolled off and crawled a few paces, striking out in the darkness toward where I thought I’d leaped from. This blackout wasn’t part of the performance. If I could just get Tegan off the stage, we could conceivably make a run for it.
Someone grabbed my upper arm, and I gasped.
“Abdi, it’s me,” Joph whispered, and pulled me up into a crouch. “Stay still.”
I was bracing against the pain that should be blasting through my skull, but it hadn’t come. Why hadn’t Diane put me down? She didn’t need to see me to stop me.
“What’s happening?” I whispered back. I was taking a chance, but since the implant wasn’t causing me pain, it also might not be picking up everything said around me. Besides, I had plenty of cover with the panicked yells all around us. Had these people never encountered a blackout before?
Or maybe this was something else. In a blackout, I’d expect to see people using their computers as flashlights, but there were no lights cutting through this velvet darkness.
“EMP,” she said, and there was a thread of something in her voice, a tone that wasn’t entirely happy. “We’ve knocked out all the electronics.”
I could barely process the implications of that. “Tegan,” I said, too loud. “You have to save Tegan.”
Joph clapped her hand over my mouth and yanked back hard, as a whisper of fabric passed over my outstretched hands. A fleeing audience member? Or Diane on the prowl? I could sense her moving out there: fluid, silent, and dangerous, like the big cats I’d seen in zoos. I felt that if I strained I could catch the vanilla and jasmine scent of her perfume. I’d liked the smell of vanilla, once upon a time.
“Tegan knows. She’s coming. This way.” Joph seemed to have no trouble seeing her way through the panicked crowds, but I blundered into people rushing through the darkness, tripped over the limbs of people lying huddled on the floor.
Excitement was racing through me—excitement and fear. This was the rescue I had dreamed of for so many nights, and now that it was here, I was afraid the reality was also a dream. The adrenaline and the darkness pulled at my head, until I was seeing colors that weren’t there while Joph went inexorably onward. She could have been walking in a circle, for all I knew. She could have been leading me into Diane’s open arms.
Or worst of all, I could have gone for Cox’s gun and died, and this was my brain’s last attempt to comfort me as I lay in a pool of blood and shattered bone. I shivered, my hand tightening on Joph’s shoulder. Either way, I’d been ready to die to escape. I’d make them kill me before I let them take me again.
Joph suddenly ducked, and I went down with her. “The guards outside are coming in,” she whispered. “They have dark vision, too. Move with me.”
She began to crawl, and I followed, more confident now that I knew she had dark-vision lenses in her eyes to guide our way. There were shouts over the crowd, loud orders for everyone to freeze. But this panic wasn’t so easy to stifle. Whoever was behind this rescue had planned it well.
Joph stopped and I kept going, prompting a pained noise as I stumbled over her legs.
“Are you…”
“I’m fine,” she said breathily, and I remembered, again, the wound to her leg.
“Door’s here. Once we’re through we have to move fast. Okay? Go.”
I went, stumbling after her through the door. It was just as dark in here, but much warmer, and I could feel walls on either side with my outstretched hands. A corridor of some sort.
Joph rustled, something snapped, and there was abruptly light glowing in her hands, a yellow sphere filled with fluid. She tossed it to me and grabbed another from the cleavage of her long dress. “Run.”
Running was no problem. I’d wanted to run for months, and my new muscles stretched out into that familiar rhythm, relishing the smooth speed. Joph, on the other hand, was limping slightly, lurching to one side, and I felt a killing rage surge inside me again. They’d shot her; they’d killed children; they’d hurt Tegan and me; they’d—
“Here,” she said, and banged through a door marked CAUTION: ALARM. I flinched instinctively, but no alarm went off.
We burst out into one of Melbourne’s alleyways, complete with the collection of garbage, compost and humanure bins that were stacked behind every commercial building. It was dark, and it was raining, a warm, soft drizzle that wouldn’t do anything more than dampen the city’s depleted dams. Except for the camps, it was the first time I’d been outside for six months, and I took one deep breath of unsanitized, uncooled, unapproved air.
Then I noticed the
body lying by the door. It was very definitely a dead body, since it didn’t have a head.
Joph saw it, too, and jumped.
In the chemiluminescent glow, I could see something black all over the cobbles, trickling into the gutter that had formed in the middle.
“He’s dead,” I said, very intelligently, and held the glowing sphere down lower. He was wearing a SADU uniform. “Is he a guard? Did you kill the guards?”
“No!”
“I hate them.” I poked the body with my foot. “I think I’m glad he’s dead.”
“Don’t do that.” Joph clutched at me. “We have to go, Abdi. Come on!”
I straightened. Somewhere in the back of my head a voice that sounded very much like my mother’s was insisting that this would be a bad time to go into shock. “Where’s Tegan?”
I heard screeching wheels but whatever was responsible for the sound was out of range of our lights. I reached for Joph, meaning to pull her behind me, but she let out a relieved noise and went toward the vehicle. I followed, to see a large white van that looked like an ambulance. When I climbed in after Joph, I saw it was an ambulance: twin narrow float-beds, equipment and all.
Tegan was lying motionless on one of those float-beds. Lat was holding her down, one hand planted in the middle of her back. His other hand held a knife.
Red fury flung me at him, my hand sweeping the blade away. I smashed him against the back of the driver’s seat, prompting a yell—a driver, I should be wary of the driver—and then whirled to throw him against the ambulance wall itself. The vehicle rocked as I dug my thumbs into the hollow of his throat.
“Wait,” Lat choked, his shark eyes wide. I squeezed harder, stopping his voice with his breath. I crushed him against the wall with my body when he kicked, then ducked to take an elbow strike on my forehead, not in the eye. My head rang with the impact and skin tore, spilling warm fluid down my face. But he was losing strength. He couldn’t stop me now. No one could stop me now.
There was blood dripping over one eye, blood dribbling into my mouth as I gritted my teeth and locked my hands and shoved—
—and something cool and wet sprayed the base of my spine. It traveled the length of my back in a tingling rush, and my limbs went weightless and limp, falling from Lat’s neck. I crumpled, and he caught me, carrying me down to the ambulance floor.
“I’m on your side,” he wheezed.
My mouth wouldn’t work properly. “Ur sah…” I slurred. “Sah hur Teahn…”
Joph knelt by me, blinking the dark-vision lenses out of her eyes to reveal the concerned warm brown underneath. There was a hypospray in her hand. “We have to get the implants out,” she said. “Abdi, there wasn’t time to explain.”
I could see Tegan over her shoulder. She was motionless, too, but her eyes were open, blinking at me, and I could see her mouth working in the same lazy way mine was.
“Help me get him up,” Lat said. His voice was raw and creaky, but he handled me with gentle strength as he and Joph got me laid out face down on the other float-bed. “Ready, Carl,” he told the driver, and the ambulance started to move. Joph braced herself against the bed, microinjector dropping from her hand. “But the trackers—”
“We’re out of time,” Lat said, and scooped something up from the floor. It was the knife—a scalpel, really, bright and sharp. “We’ll have to do it on the move. Hold him down.”
Whatever Joph had stuck me with blocked pain as well. I felt the blade slice through my flesh, and nothing hurt at all.
CHAPTER SIX
Glissando
It was incredibly frustrating, traveling in the back of the ambulance with my brain whirring but my body limp. I wanted to be demanding answers or checking on Tegan, but neither of these were options. Joph’s microinjector hadn’t held a total muscle paralyzer, obviously—my heart was still beating and my lungs were pushing oxygen to my brain—but it had been remarkably effective at shutting down most of my motor functions.
“Ah-ee,” Tegan said, blinking deliberately at me as Lat turned his scalpel on her. I blinked back, about all the conscious motion I could manage, and made myself watch as he cut. He made one precise slice, popping through the skin on the back of her neck. Blood welled up and he traded the scalpel for a suction tube. Joph leaned in with a long device with a flat round end.
She yelped as the ambulance swayed, sending her sprawling onto the float-bed. Tegan grunted at the impact, and Lat grabbed Joph’s arm. “Steady.”
“I’m trying!”
“We’re right on the edge of the dead zone, Joph. We can’t keep dodging round like this; they’ll catch us.”
“I know.” Joph let out a deep breath, and slid the device smoothly into the incision. She twisted her wrist slightly and pulled, and the implant was out, stuck on the end of her surgical probe.
It was so small for something that had caused us so much agony. Just a white, vaguely rectangular blob of plastic and metal. Smeared with blood as it was, I couldn’t see the thin wires that bristled around it. Those wires had spun themselves deep into our nervous systems, pushing their tiny tendrils everywhere. Joph must have cut all those connections when she pulled the implant out.
Even with the implant out, there were wires still inside me, clinging to my nerves like barbed wire wrapped around a fence. The thought made me sick, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I watched as Lat took the suction tube away and bound the wound with autostitch and skin spray. The standard medium brown shade of the fake skin looked very dark against Tegan’s skin; I knew from previous experience that it looked pale against mine. I was so dark that my mother had joked about losing me at night. But she’d lost me in the gray light of the Australian dawn when SADU had first taken us away; it was at night that I was taking the first steps back.
Lat climbed into the passenger seat beside the hidden driver, while Joph sat cross-legged on the ambulance floor and took my limp hand. I rolled my eyes around to watch her.
“It’s all right. Everything will make sense soon,” she said, and gave me that peaceful smile. But her face was weary, and she was kneading her thigh with the heel of her free hand—a gesture that looked so unconscious as to be habitual. How often did her leg cause her pain?
My fingers twitched as I tried to return her comforting squeeze.
Joph looked sharply at me. “Did you just move?”
I concentrated fiercely on my fingers. There was no mistaking the motion that time, and Joph bit her lip. “Oh damn.”
“Uh?”
“You’re bigger than you used to be, and I didn’t account for your increased muscle mass. I think the relaxant’s wearing off.”
“Ooh,” I said emphatically.
“It’s not good. It’s an anesthetic as well, and if your metabolism’s burning it up that quickly…” Joph stood up and began rummaging through the cabinets above my head. “Kelleritizene, Lebeaumitol…” Her hand went to her pocket; to a computer that wasn’t there. She turned a look of dismay on me. “I should have checked for contraindications beforehand. I don’t think I can give you any of these.”
“Ih oh-kay.” My tongue had gained enough control to make the k-sound, which I was inordinately pleased by.
“You have a bleeding hole in your neck!”
And Diane could never hurt me with that implant again. I didn’t have enough muscle control back for a phrase like that, so I repeated, “Iss okay.” The back of my neck was beginning to sting, but I felt great. Better than great. Tegan and I were out of that hellhole, I was reunited with a good friend, and Lat was sitting up front, not hovering over Tegan and infuriating me.
And best of all, I had realized this rescue meant people were moving. People had listened to Tegan’s story and believed it, people had known better than to swallow the Australian government’s lies and the blatant falseness of our feel-good performances.
There were sirens, out there in the night, wailing through the streets. Looking for us, or looking for trouble—I tensed automat
ically, realized I could, and realized a split second afterward that tensing really, really hurt. My head was aching from the adrenaline backwash and the blow Lat had landed on my skull. That cut over my eyebrow was stinging, and the implant removal site felt worse than the second-degree burns I’d acquired on my first week in Australia. I hadn’t believed that I needed to wear sunscreen—my skin had always been enough protection at home. I’d gone to Williamstown’s artificial sandy beach without any covering and stayed there for hours, trying to re-create the feeling of the natural beaches of Djibouti. I’d gone back to my host father’s house even more homesick, with a prickling sting on my bare scalp. Djibouti was much hotter, but the UV wasn’t so terrible there.
My growing pain must have been obvious, because Joph dropped back down to take my hand. “I should have… they told me not to bring my computer in, but I should have looked it up beforehand. Abdi, I’m so sorry. Tell me if it gets too bad, and I’ll try the Lebeaumitol anyway.”
“Will do,” I said, and then looked across at Tegan, who was still, thankfully, motionless. If muscle mass was the problem, Joph’s dose might have even been slightly too strong for her. “She knew,” I said. It wasn’t a question; I could put a puzzle together when all the pieces were there.
Lat was apparently on our side, and as soon as he’d turned up, Tegan had started playing nice with our captors. And then she’d gone on tour, where there must have been security holes that could be exploited, and a plan developed. She’d known rescue would come tonight.
Tegan must have nearly lost it when it looked as if I wouldn’t walk onto the stage. No wonder she’d looked so grateful to Lat, when he’d whispered those horrible things to make me move.
“She knew,” Joph said. “She wanted to tell you. But we couldn’t get word to you.”
Tegan had started telling Diane when I disobeyed. She’d adapted because she had a plan, because she needed both of us in one specific place at a specific time for this rescue to work.