by Julia Keller
“Sure. The only thing that stops me is not wanting to end up in a HoverUp by the time I’m twenty-five,” Violet said. Rubbing her forearm, she finished her thought. “Shura went with me for my last bone-density scan. The specialist was clear. No more trips to Old Earth for six to eight months. Shura’s trying to come up with something that will counteract the calcium-leach from the rapid gravity fluctuations, but for the time being I’m stuck on New Earth.”
“Stuck. Oh, riiiiiiight,” Delia said, the sarcasm stretching out her voice. She swept an arm around the room. “It’s just so awful here. How do you stand it? All these blue skies and sunshine and pretty houses and good food. It’s killing us, Violet. Swear.”
“Okay, okay,” Violet said. She laughed. “I get you.”
Delia’s mood shifted. “Truth is, though, I do hate to see Old Earth abandoned. Just left to rot. Sooner or later, I bet it’s going to disintegrate entirely. It’ll become this dead thing that New Earth hauls around for a while and finally lets go of.”
Violet thought about Rez’s plan to rejuvenate Old Earth. Maybe it wasn’t as far-fetched as it seemed. Maybe it would answer a deep desire that simmered in a lot of souls—her own, certainly, and Delia’s, too.
Violet’s console chimed. She looked down at the ID and frowned: Jonetta. She didn’t want to deal with her secretary’s chipper cheerfulness right now.
She declined the call. Jonetta could leave a message.
“Hey, Violet.”
Another voice in the room. She’d know it anywhere. Tin Man entered from the short hallway leading to the back of the house. He walked toward her with his brisk, confident stride, all swinging arms and broad shoulders and big grin. The silver hoop in his earlobe winked and glittered. Even though Violet had talked to him just the night before at Redshift, she was struck anew by his looks. He had changed so dramatically from the first time she had seen him two years ago.
She remembered the moment well, because it turned out to be the opening act for the most intense drama that New Earth had ever seen. Violet was monitoring a drone feed from Old Earth. Tin Man was running away from a cop. Back then, Tin Man was bone-skinny and as pale as skim milk; his scrawny, undernourished body looked like a tent pole from which his raggedy clothes flapped and wheeled.
Not anymore. Now he was cut, on account of the intense workout regimen he’d undertaken in his new home. His skin had the warm, golden hue that came from the generous sun of New Earth. He was a new man.
Yet the original Tin Man—wary, with a warrior’s heart—still lived inside him. Violet could see it in his eyes. And that wasn’t a bad thing. In fact, it was a very good thing, given what she wanted him to do for her.
“Tin Man. Hey.”
“How’re you doing? Been so long since I’ve seen you, girl.” He smirked. Violet let him have his little joke; he liked to tease her about how many nights in a row she visited Redshift. Sometimes it was more than teasing. She knew he was genuinely concerned about her—a fact that infuriated her. She didn’t need a babysitter.
“Don’t let me interrupt you guys,” Tin Man added. “I’m leaving for work in a second, anyway.”
“Actually, I need to talk to you, too,” Violet said.
Curiosity put a light in his eyes. “What’s up?”
“I want to hire you.”
“Already got a job.”
“This’ll be better.”
Intrigued, Tin Man sat down in one of the chairs. He barely fit, so broad was his heavily muscled torso.
“I need help,” Violet said. “Somebody set a trigger-trap at my office today.”
“So I heard.”
“And you didn’t ask if I was okay?”
He shrugged. “I can see you’re okay.” He grinned. “Fact is, Violet, it’s going to take a lot more than a trigger-trap to stop you from whatever it is that somebody doesn’t want you to do.”
“It was still scary as hell. That’s why I need somebody else around the office.”
“You mean like a bodyguard?”
“No. I mean like another investigator. I can take care of myself. I just need help with a case.”
He frowned. “I don’t have any experience in detective work.”
“Neither did I.”
Delia spoke up. “I’ve never much liked your job at that club, Tommy. All the late hours in that place. All those strangers. I’d love for you to get away from there.”
Tin Man gave Violet a meaningful glance. He wasn’t going to let Delia know that Violet was at Redshift almost as often as he was. But he was letting Violet know: I could if I wanted to.
Violet was relieved at his silence. She didn’t like the idea of Delia judging her. It’s my business what I do at night. Nobody else’s.
“We can discuss salary and all of that another time,” Violet said. “But you’ll think about it? Coming to work with me?”
“Yeah. I’ll think about it.” He stood up. “Gotta get going.” He hesitated, arms at his sides, balancing himself evenly on his black-booted feet. He had one more thing to say.
He rolled up his shirtsleeve. In the crook of his left elbow was a thick scar, a raggedy-edged patch of red, corrugated skin. It marked the spot where a younger Tin Man had tried to gouge out the Intercept chip from under his skin. Back when the Intercept was running full-time, a lot of people on Old Earth had done the same thing: They attempted to get rid of their chips so that the Intercept couldn’t access them. Some of the DIY chip removals ended in death when infection set in.
“See this?” Tin Man said. He ran a thumb across the bumpy, rutted surface of the twisted scar.
Violet didn’t answer. He didn’t need her to. He knew she was seeing it.
“I’m glad we’re friends now,” he said. “I really am. You’ve done a lot for my mom and me. We owe you our lives.” Slowly, as he continued to speak, his tone grew more emphatic. “But I want you to know something. I don’t ever forget. This scar doesn’t let me forget. I know what can happen when the Intercept is operational. I know the power it has. The terrible, terrible power. So if anything ever changed—and if you were on the other side again, on the side of the Intercept—I’d fight you with every bit of strength I had. I wouldn’t think twice about it. I’d destroy you. And I’d do what you did. I’d destroy the Intercept all over again.”
Violet was a bit shocked. His declaration had come out of nowhere.
But had it? she asked herself. The truth was, she had no idea what it had felt like to live on Old Earth in the days of the Intercept. She could listen to their stories of what it had been like—the sudden and terrible interventions, when emotions were inserted back into the consciousness with a vivid, punitive fury—but she couldn’t know.
Not like they knew.
She didn’t carry the memory in her bones like they did.
From her seat on the couch, Delia cleared her throat to get their attention. She had pushed up the sleeve of her tunic. The crook of her left elbow showed the ghostly remnant of her own small scar, the aftermath of a botched attempt to remove her chip. It wasn’t as ghastly as her son’s scar, but it was still there. A permanent reminder of how they both had suffered. And how everyone they had known on Old Earth had suffered, too.
“If the Intercept ever returns,” Delia said quietly, “we’ll fight you with anything we have. Sticks and rocks. Whatever.”
Violet loved these people, and she knew they loved her. But there was something inside them that ran even deeper and truer than love: their sense of justice. If they ever suspected that she hadn’t completely destroyed the Intercept, what would they do?
She knew the answer. She just didn’t want to think about it.
She shook her head. Forced a smile.
“Come on, guys. The Intercept is over. It’s gone,” Violet declared. Had she said it too quickly, too firmly? She worried, for the space of a single breath, that Delia and Tin Man might have picked up on her nervousness.
“Fine,” Tin Man said. “Great
. But I need to be clear with you before I come on board—if I do come on board, that is. If the Intercept ever shows up again, I’m with the Rebels.” The Rebels of Light was the name of the group that had kidnapped Ogden Crowley two years ago. Some of them had died when New Earth’s police force came after them. The survivors were locked up in Old Earth prisons.
“No problem.” Violet smiled. “If the Intercept shows up, I’ll be with the Rebels, too.”
Tin Man looked satisfied with her answer. “And now I really do have to go,” he said. “People will be lining up at the door. Once they get close enough to hear the music and feel the heat from the dance floor, they get pretty antsy.” He leaned over and kissed Delia on the cheek. “Later, Mom.”
Now he turned to Violet, and she saw that his smirk had returned. He was his mother’s son—meaning that he couldn’t resist teasing her one more time. He wouldn’t openly snitch on her to Delia about how often she hung out at Redshift but he’d make her squirm.
“Oh, and Violet?” he said. “You should come check out Redshift sometime. I think you’d like it.”
18
Secrets and Lies
It was time.
Violet knew it was time—okay, it was way past time—but she still didn’t want to do it. She didn’t want to tell Kendall about Rez’s suspicion that someone might be trying to resurrect the Intercept.
She texted him:
U free?
He texted back:
Y
She replied:
Perey Park in ten
The park was her go-to place. It was the spot where she and Shura had spent so much of their free time when they were growing up. Located smack in the middle of Hawking, anchored by a round granite fountain in the middle, Perey Park was lovely in a simple, unfussy way. The grass was a soft green carpet. The trees that bordered the walking path were tall and chocolate-brown and friendly looking. And the whole place had a faintly magical quality, a kind of glow, like the memory of a birthday party from childhood.
“So,” Kendall said. He sat down next to her on the bench. He’d driven them here in his official police vehicle. She hadn’t said much during the ride. “Here we are in Violet and Shura’s secret hangout.”
“Huh?”
“That’s how I used to think of this place. You guys came here all the time, right?”
“We had a lot to talk about back then.”
“Like what?”
Like you. She had been desperately in love with Danny Mayhew—that is, the guy she thought was Danny Mayhew, but who was really Kendall, the same guy who was sitting next to her right now—and Shura had helped her deal.
“Like all kinds of stuff,” she said.
“You don’t talk about Shura so much anymore.”
Violet stood up. She didn’t feel like sitting. She also didn’t feel like talking about Shura and the changes to their friendship. “Can we walk around?”
“Absolutely.”
Their feet crunched along the gravel path. Their paces matched up well, without either one having to adjust speed.
“So there’s something I need to tell you,” Violet said.
“Shoot.”
“When I talked to Rez the other day, he mentioned something.”
“Okay.”
“That something was the Intercept.”
“It’s not a dirty word, Violet. People still talk about it. They probably always will.”
“I know that.”
Kendall stopped. She stopped, too.
“There’s something you don’t want to tell me,” he said.
“How did you figure that out?”
“Come on. We’ve been through too much. I can tell when you’re holding back.”
She took a deep breath.
“Rez thinks that somebody may be trying to get it up and running again.” There. She’d said it. She was apprehensive; she didn’t know what Kendall’s reaction would be. His feelings about the Intercept had always been so intense. He’d created it. Overseen its installation on New Earth. And then he’d watched as the dark side of his great creation had emerged, like a scaly, red-eyed, triple-headed monster from the depths of a cave.
“Can’t be,” he declared flatly.
“But Rez says—”
“Rez is wrong. There’s no way. The Intercept is way too complicated for anybody to build from scratch.”
“What if they didn’t have to build it from scratch?”
“Meaning?”
“You know what I mean. Maybe they found the notebook pages. The ones we grabbed from the floor of Protocol Hall before it exploded.”
She watched Kendall’s face.
Talking about what happened that day had been forbidden from the moment they’d made their decision to do it. They had both agreed to that, without either having to say so out loud. For two years now, they had kept that unspoken promise.
Violet had just broken the pact. In the middle of a walk in the park.
He looked around. She did, too. No one else was present, but they were still cautious. They would always be cautious when it came to the Intercept.
“Impossible,” he said. He didn’t sound like himself anymore. Gone was the confidence, the self-assurance that typically defined Kendall Mayhew. He sounded … nervous. “Totally impossible.”
“Is it?”
“I’ve had those pages locked away for two years. In a special place. A place where nobody can get to them. And even if somebody did get to them, they wouldn’t be able to do anything.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re not me. And only a handful of people would have the technical skills to whip up a new Intercept with only a few pages of notes to go on. Maybe less than a handful.”
“Think back,” Violet said. “Back to when you and Danny were living on Old Earth and you were working on the Intercept. Way back then. Well, who knew about you? Who would’ve ever envisioned some totally anonymous genius in a scruffy lab?”
He didn’t say anything, but she could sense he was listening. So she continued. “What if there’s another you out there—some unknown kid in a basement lab? And somehow they got those notes? And they’re re-upping the Intercept? Dusting off the code? And maybe Rez just happened to stumble across it.”
“I told you. It’s impossible.” The word impossible came out of him with marginally less conviction than before. “Okay,” Kendall finally said. “I’ll look into it. I’ll talk to Rez and ask him what he saw. And I’ll do it without tipping him off.” He paused. “I hope it doesn’t turn out that—”
“I know,” she said. “You hope you don’t find out that it’s Rez himself. Playing some kind of game. As revenge, maybe, for his prison time. Right?”
“Basically, yeah.”
“Because he’s one of the very few people with the skills to get the Intercept up and running again.”
Kendall nodded.
Both were quiet for a long moment. By now, darkness had swallowed the park. Shapes were still discernible, but specifics were not. Objects were reduced to their blunt essence: fountain, tree, bench. The gentle, radiant magic that was present here in the daytime had vanished along with the sunshine.
They were standing side by side. Violet touched Kendall’s arm. She was struck by the fact that no matter where they were standing in relation to each other—close or distant—they would be linked forever. Linked by their friendship and linked by what they’d done. It had seemed wrong to not be touching him at such a moment. She hoped he wouldn’t misinterpret her gesture, and think that maybe—
“What happened to us, Violet?”
She was startled. They didn’t talk about their relationship anymore. They. Just. Didn’t. They had tried to, early on, in the days just after the Intercept’s destruction. But it was difficult and painful, and so they had backed off into neutral corners, heeding an unstated but crucial rule: no conversation about the Relationship. They wanted the friendship to continue—and if that was going to ha
ppen, then they couldn’t discuss the fate of the romance.
But here he was, bringing it up.
Maybe it was because she was touching him. Maybe it was because the trigger-trap had gone off at her office; she knew how much Kendall worried about her, which sort of made her mad and sort of didn’t. Maybe it was the darkness. Or maybe it was the fact that they were standing fairly close, the way they had done two years ago, just before he’d kissed her for the very first time.
“What happened?” he repeated, in a soft voice. “Once I’d told you the truth about who I was, I thought we could be together. I mean—I’m the same person. The same person you fell in love with. When you thought I was Danny.”
She didn’t know how to respond. Everything he said was true; she had fallen in love with him. Hard. And he was the same guy she had known back then. Older, sure—but the same guy. The only thing that had changed was his name. And what’s a name? A name is nothing, right? Nothing at all.
But she just didn’t feel it anymore.
She wanted to, but she didn’t. She wanted to love him the way she had loved him before, with that swirly feeling that started in her stomach and made her fingertips tingle and then made her sort of dizzy every time she saw him and every time she even thought about seeing him. Or thought about him, period.
The feeling that, back when the Intercept was up and running, probably left a burn mark in the digital archive. That’s how hot it was.
But the feeling just wasn’t there anymore. She knew she was breaking his heart, and she was doing it slowly, piece by piece, each time they got together and he searched her eyes for the light he used to see there, that golden one that was like no other. And each time, she could sense his disappointment. They still had a good time together, and they talked and they laughed and they hung out, and she really looked forward to seeing him—but it wasn’t romantic love, at least on her side. She didn’t know why. She only knew what she felt.
Or what she didn’t feel.
She took a quick glimpse at the crook of her left elbow. Nothing. Of course there’s nothing. The Intercept’s been gone for two years. But it was more than that. More than just the absence of the Intercept. It was another kind of absence, too. She didn’t know what to do about Kendall. How to relate to him, especially when she saw his yearning. And his pain.