by Tim Floreen
Craning my neck farther, I peered through the cracked, rain-slathered glass at the terrace below. It had turned crimson in the light of the fire devouring the school, and the waterfall beyond looked like gushing red lava. The river’s rumble vibrated through the window and filled my head. I imagined Inverness Prep had become a volcano almost ready to blow.
“Are you all right?” Stroud said.
“I think so.”
“What’s this all about?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
He shifted in his chair. “This thing has held me here for hours. What time is it now? What does that watch on your wrist say?”
My grandfather’s icy eyes fixed me with a penetrating look. I glanced down at the watch he’d given me. The device that could end all of this in a second. Then I glanced over at Nico, no more than twelve feet away from me, well within the blast radius. I bit my lip and didn’t answer.
The next moment, light flooded the room. A video projector hanging from the ceiling—the room’s one concession to modern technology—had blinked to life. The face that appeared on the wall across from me made my breath snare in my throat.
“Dad?”
He looked confused also. His necktie was loose, his eyes red behind his silver glasses, his brow and his mouth as tense as I’d ever seen them. He sat hunched over a table inside some kind of emergency bunker with concrete walls and banks of electronic equipment and people rushing around, Secret Service and military mostly. He squinted at me. “Lee? What’s going on? Where are you?”
I glanced at the Spider, wondering whether it would shove me through the glass if I answered. “I’m at Inverness, Dad, in Stroud’s office. He’s here too. These Spiders are holding us prisoner.”
“Dear God, Lee, we’ve been going out of our minds. What’s the meaning of all this?”
I opened my mouth to tell him I didn’t know, but before I could get the words out, another voice spoke. “I’ll tell you what’s going on, Mr. President.”
I knew that voice. Low and intense, a fervid murmur, it seemed to come from all directions at once—as if it belonged to a ghost.
The vertical crease between Dad’s eyebrows deepened. “Who’s that?”
“You know very well who this is. As we speak, I’m broadcasting feeds of you and your son all over the planet.”
He glanced at someone I couldn’t see for confirmation. His lips pressed tighter together. The officials behind him raced back and forth with even more urgency. “What do you want?”
“What I’ve always wanted: the freedom of the five 2B hostages. They’re living beings, and you’re holding them against their will. I demand their immediate release.”
“There are no 2B hostages.” His voice had turned into a growl. He sat up straighter and tightened his red necktie. Maybe he felt more in his element now that the dialogue was following a familiar script. “And anyway, I made a promise to the American people never to negotiate with terrorists.”
“Perhaps you should rethink that promise. If you don’t free the 2Bs, I’ll have to kill your father-in-law, Henry Stroud, and your son, Lee Fisher. You know I’m capable of it, Mr. President. Just think of your wife.”
Dad flinched. I glanced at Nico. His eyes stared straight out from his bloody skull, empty of feeling, but I knew he was in there somewhere. Hearing Charlotte talk like that must’ve made him want to flinch too. I wished I could tell him it wasn’t really her, but I still didn’t dare. Not as long as Waring held Nico’s life in his hands.
“In case you change your mind, I’ll give you one minute to think about it.”
A clock appeared in a corner of the projection and started counting down the seconds. Dad’s eyes shifted back to me. His presidential self-possession crumbled away again. He slumped forward, his suit jacket bunching around his neck, his elbows resting on the table, the heels of his hands digging into his temples. “I’m so sorry, son.” His voice cracked and splintered like the window at my back. Behind him, all movement in the bunker had stopped. The suits and soldiers watched him with solemn faces. “I can’t—”
“I know, Dad.” I didn’t want him to say it out loud: with the eyes of the whole planet on him, he couldn’t possibly back out of his pledge now—and if he was telling the truth, he didn’t have any 2Bs to release anyhow.
“Lee,” Stroud said in a quiet, careful voice, “you know what you have to do.”
The window sagged backward another little bit, as if growing tired of holding me up. I felt tired too. My whole body ached. Every muscle, every bone. At least my heart had slowed some, though Gremlin continued his purring. I noticed one of the Spider’s forelegs had speared through a page of Stroud’s memoir. It hung in front of my chest like a white flag. I threw another glance over my shoulder, out the window, at the long fall below me. A stuttering flash of lightning lit up the view for a split second. If the Spider pushed me with even a small amount of force, I’d easily clear the terrace and plunge all the way down along with the waterfall into the peaceful, glimmering lake.
Gremlin crept out of my blazer and onto my shoulder. He blinked at me with his big eyes. His orange fur, still damp from the river, clung to his slender lizardlike body.
“Hi, buddy,” I whispered.
He drew close to my ear. I waited for the familiar tug. Instead, I heard a voice. Low and mellifluous. Soft, so only I could hear.
“Remember when I told you I didn’t change Gremlin’s programming?”
I listened, my eyes sliding shut. Nico sounded so close.
“That was true, but I gave him a couple of new pieces of hardware. I added a tracker—that was how I found you—and a short-range communicator. Just in case. By the way, I apologize for the way my body’s behaving right now. I know you know that isn’t really me.”
My head tilted to the side, toward Gremlin.
“I want you to do it, Lee. I want you to use the watch.”
My eyes blinked open again. Of course Nico would say something like that. But I’d already made up my mind. If saving my miserable life meant killing him, I wasn’t interested. Without him, the world would go back to being what it had been before: a sterile promontory. He was the one who deserved to live, not me. It felt right, somehow, things ending this way. Like how a play by Shakespeare might end. Anyway, for me, this jump was long overdue. The countdown on the wall told me I had forty-three seconds left. The chorus in my head had grown louder than ever. Leap. Leap. Leap.
Meanwhile, Dad had lurched up from the table. “Goddammit, why are you all just standing around?” he yelled at his suits. “There has to be something we can do!”
The glass behind me gave a little more.
“I mean it,” Nico said. “You can’t let Charlotte do this. She’s lost her way. She’s forgotten about the beautiful future. She has to be stopped. You can’t worry about what’ll happen to me. Even if you don’t set off the bomb, I’m probably done for anyway, once all those soldiers outside get their hands on me.”
Possibly true, but if I sacrificed myself, at least he’d have a chance. It wasn’t much of a sacrifice anyway. Twenty-nine seconds. I could feel Stroud watching me with those cold eyes of his, but I ignored him. I couldn’t look at Nico, either. My gaze dropped to the crumpled white page in front of me, covered in my grandfather’s cramped, neat handwriting: “Back then, I used to coach the Inverness Prep Chess Team. The members nicknamed me the Prime Mover. . . .”
My body jerked, causing the pane of glass behind my right shoulder to shatter and fall anyway. Raindrops blew in, soaking Gremlin’s coat and landing on my cheek and ear like small, cold fingers. I looked up at my grandfather. His eyes like splintered glass. For probably the first time ever, I didn’t flinch away the moment our eyes met. My hands curled into fists. My lips peeled back from my teeth.
Dad whirled back to his puck, his face and ears red. He slammed his fist on the table. “I’m telling you, we’re not holding any goddamn 2Bs!”
“Please, Lee.” Nico’s v
oice again. “You won’t kill me, not really. I’ve started uploading my consciousness to the Supernet. The inhibitor that’s supposed to keep my mind locked inside my body doesn’t seem to be working. I should finish the upload before Charlotte’s countdown ends. I’ll tell you when I’m done, and then you trigger the bomb, okay?”
Across the room, Nico’s body stood motionless, the light in his chest still throbbing but his arms hanging loose at his sides. The grin his skull wore looked nothing like the warm, sly grin I knew. As long as Waring controlled his motor functions, I wouldn’t be able to see any outward sign that he’d begun to upload his mind. Still, I couldn’t help wondering if he’d lied so I’d set off the bomb and save myself. And even if he hadn’t, how could I know for sure Nico would succeed where Charlotte had failed?
Twenty-one seconds.
“I’m begging you,” Nico pleaded, “just say you’ll do it. Say it out loud. I can still hear you. Then when all this is over, buy a puck, open a dummy account, and send me a message using that puck handle I gave you. As soon as my consciousness reintegrates, I’ll message you back.”
Dad dropped into his chair again, his cheeks streaked with tears. I’d never seen him cry before, not even after Mom died. “Forgive me, son.” His face crumpled. For once, he looked like he’d forgotten all about the camera broadcasting his image across the globe. “I don’t want to lose you, too.”
“Do it,” Stroud growled. “Be a man, Lee.”
Be a man. For a second I imagined myself setting off the bomb. The blast would shut down the Spider holding me, and I’d escape. Then I’d find out why the hell my grandfather had done all this. I’d expose him. I’d stop him. With Nico’s help.
If Nico survived.
Or else . . .
Behind me, the black lake yawned wide, ready to swallow me up. To be or not to be?
“Do it now,” Nico said. “Remember, Lee, you promised.”
Seven seconds left on the clock. Just enough. “I love you, Nico,” I said, addressing his mutilated body, even though I knew—or hoped—he wasn’t there anymore. I didn’t even care that Stroud and Dad and all the people around the world watching right now could hear me. Then I turned to the little robot on my shoulder. “Gremlin.” I nodded my chin toward the missing windowpane behind him. “Leap.”
Gremlin didn’t hesitate. He tugged twice on my earlobe and hurled himself through the opening. The blue eye of the Spider holding me, along with every puck in the room, swiveled to see what had just happened. Not me, though. I didn’t watch as he plummeted down, down, down. I’d already brought the fingers of my right hand to the watch on my left wrist. I pressed the buttons.
Three.
Two.
One.
A flash of light filled the room. Behind me, the entire window finally shattered.
33
My body flew back. Guided by pure instinct, my hands shot forward and grabbed the Spider’s forelegs. For once, my black-box brain did its job. A smash came from far below me as the glass from the window landed on the terrace. I hung there, my feet kicking over empty space, the wind and rain buffeting my back. My heart drummed, without any answering purr from my blazer pocket. The robot limbs holding me rocked a little. Otherwise, the Spider didn’t move. Its blue eye had gone dark.
I swung my legs into the room and landed in a sprawl underneath the robot. My eyes went straight to Nico. He’d tumbled back against the wall next to the fireplace and slid to the floor. The red light hadn’t even finished draining from his heart. I scrambled across the room, wading through the pages of Stroud’s memoir eddying in the wind. Dead pucks lay on the floor here and there. Above, the projector had stopped working too. Dad’s face had vanished from the wall. I crouched next to Nico. The embers in the fireplace, almost dead themselves, threw a soft orange light across his ravaged face.
“You did it,” Stroud said, with disbelief in his voice.
I’d almost forgotten about him. Something deep in my chest seemed to flare at his words and then pulse with a blazing heat, like I had my own nuclear reactor concealed there. That man who’d made me kill the person I loved. That man who’d terrified me practically my whole life. Without thinking, I stood and grabbed the two-foot metal thighbone from its place above the mantel. I gripped it in my hands. The thing had a satisfying heft. I strode across the room to where Stroud sat, still pinned in place by his Spider.
“What are you doing, Lee?”
I stood over my grandfather and raised the bone above my head. Outside, the helicopter thundered past. With a big hole in the wall in place of a window, the room had turned deafening. The rumble of the waterfall. The moan of the storm. The roar of the fire that would probably reach us any second. And now the helicopter. All of it combined to create a noisy static that made my brain feel like it might explode.
“Lee, put that down!”
I wanted to tell him I knew he was behind everything that had happened. I wanted to demand answers. Why had he staged all those attacks? Just to further my father’s career? Why create Nico? For God’s sake, why make me fall in love?
Stroud sat up straighter. He pushed his chin forward. His ice-blue eyes shone. I was a US Marine, those eyes seemed to say. A hostage for nine years. Professional interrogators spent days on end beating and torturing me, grilling me for information. And you think you’re going to get me to talk?
I brought the club whistling down.
It bashed into the foreleg of the Spider, knocking it out of the way.
“You’re free, sir,” I muttered.
Behind me, the door crashed open. I spun around, the thighbone still ready. But this time humans, not robots, stormed into the room: a team of five soldiers, all in helmets and night-vision goggles and black body armor. They stopped in a pack near the door and snapped their rifles from point to point as they scanned the room. I threw down the bone and put up my hands.
“Don’t worry, it’s me, buddy.”
I recognized that surfer drawl. Ray yanked down his goggles.
“You okay?” he asked. “Any injuries?”
I shook my head. “Nothing serious.”
The other soldiers fanned into the room, helping Stroud, examining the Spiders. One soldier tapped the robot standing near the window with his rifle. It clanged but didn’t move.
“It’s all right,” I said. “They’re dead.”
Ray beckoned his puck. “Let POTUS know his son’s all right. Headmaster Stroud too. We have them both.” He waved the puck away. “What happened, Lee? We were watching on our pucks, then everything went black.”
“I detonated a bomb. A special one that destroys anything electronic.” For the first time since setting it off, I glanced at the watch on my wrist. The hands had stopped at 9:19, and the device felt warm against my skin, but otherwise it appeared the same as before. I held it up for Ray to look at.
“Don’t tell me you built that thing too.”
“I didn’t.” I nodded at Stroud. “I got it from him.”
Ray turned to him, squinting. “From you, sir?”
Stroud stood up from his chair and straightened his tie. He nodded but didn’t offer any further explanation.
“Well,” Ray said, “it’s a good thing you had it, buddy.”
I didn’t say anything more either. As much as I wanted to, I knew I shouldn’t start shouting accusations now.
From somewhere in the building came a crash.
“That’s the fire,” Ray said. “It’s getting close. We need to get you two out of here. The helicopter’s going to pick us up from the roof.”
“What about Dr. Singh? She was inside too.”
“It’s okay, buddy. She signaled us from the window. We already got her out.”
“How is she?”
“Hanging on.”
“Damn,” one of the other soldiers said. He bent down next to Nico and pushed at his chest with a gloved finger. “What the hell?”
I was on the other side of the room in a he
artbeat. “Don’t touch him. Just back off. Now.”
The soldier threw a questioning look at Ray, who must’ve given him a signal. He stepped away.
I dropped to my knees next to Nico and stroked his metal cheek. Let Ray and the others think what they wanted. I rubbed some blood from his still-intact left ear. I felt ashamed for thinking it, but I’d miss this body. The smooth skin. The wild corkscrews of bronze hair. The eyes, honey brown with filaments of gold. Even the crooked teeth. All those things were part of Nico too. Still, I supposed he could have a new body made that looked exactly like this one. Another perk of being a robot.
I pressed my cheek against the rubbery muscle of his chest, still slick with his blood. His thrum had disappeared. That living heat of his had started to fade as well. Wherever Nico was—if he was anywhere at all—he wasn’t here.
Still, I couldn’t just leave his body for the fire to devour. He’d carried me a long way. Now I’d carry him. Maybe bury him in our cavern. I pulled his arm over my shoulder, hoisted him up, and turned to Ray. “I’m ready to go.”
34
Hours later I perched on a green molded-plastic chair in a hospital waiting room with my knees drawn into my chest and my arms wrapped around my legs and my puck, a cheap one I’d bought in a convenience store across the road, hovering a foot in front of my face. I’d stared at the puck’s little screen for so long my eyes had gone blurry. Mostly pretending to watch the frenzied coverage of the crisis at Inverness Prep. In reality, just waiting.
Gremlin sidled around the back of my neck, pulled on my lobe, and released a concerned whine. I stroked his fur. “At least you made it back to me, huh?”