by Julia Keller
And she wasn’t alone.
* * *
“Rachel!” Violet called out.
She couldn’t believe it. At first, she thought she must be hallucinating. How could Rachel have ended up here? She was back with the others, wasn’t she? Safely distant from Sara and her madness?
No. She was right here, being dragged up the track of a half-finished coaster.
“Rachel!”
Another spasm of lightning and Violet saw them again. Sara was bent over, grabbing at the rails of the track with one hand, climbing slowly but persistently. With the other hand, she pulled Rachel along behind her.
Where was Sara taking her? And why?
It didn’t make sense. The track wasn’t finished; after the summit, it suddenly stopped, cut off in midair. That was as far as Rez had gotten on his Riptide Ride. There was a long, terrifying drop from that apex into the ocean below. One gigantic upward swoop of those girders and then, after the top … nothing.
Air. Space. Oblivion.
The waves slammed the pillars that had been sunk in the sand, as if the ocean was trying to tear the thing down while it still could, before the other half was built. As Violet began her climb, trying to keep Sara and Rachel in sight, she felt the massive vibrations as wave upon wave upon wave smashed against the pillars. It was jarring and unsettling. Could the track withstand these constant blows? Would it hold?
Rez built this, Violet reminded herself. It’ll hold.
She climbed. Head down, body tilted at the waist, she slowly pulled herself up the track, hand over hand. The rain intensified again. The track grew even slicker. And the wind continued its determined effort to knock her legs out from under her. If she did lose her grip—well, it was a long way down.
And now she had reached the peak.
Standing before her, just a few agonizing feet away, were Sara and Rachel. Sara had stopped at the very edge of the track. Their backs were against the vast, storm-torn sky. Below them, the black ocean boiled and seethed. Over their heads, visible each time the lightning allowed it, was the faint white outline of the distant underside of New Earth, hovering like a whispered promise above the screaming nightmare of Old Earth.
“Stay away from us!” Sara yelled. “Don’t come any closer!”
She redoubled her grip on Rachel’s arm. She held up her other arm, the one with the console strapped to her wrist, making sure Violet could see it—and understand her power.
“Let Rachel go!” Violet called out, inching forward. “We can talk about it on the ground, okay? It’s freezing up here.”
As to validate her claim, a punch of icy wind hit Violet in the face. She nearly toppled off the track.
“What?” Sara yelled. “I can’t hear you! You’ll have to come closer!”
“I told you to let her go!”
Sara shook her head. “Still can’t hear what you’re saying. Come closer!”
Violet knew what Sara was doing, but she had no choice. She had to get to Rachel.
“Okay, Sara,” Violet said, moving a bit closer, “I’m here. Look, I know you’re hurting. We can help you. I promise. But first you have to let her go.”
“No,” Sara said. “I can’t.” She whispered into her console.
And that was when Violet felt it:
The twitch.
Within seconds, the twitch intensified. Transforming itself into … a scream. The scream picked up speed and momentum. The scream became … a louder scream. A bigger scream. Louder and bigger than the storm. The scream expanded to fill Violet’s entire skull. Everywhere her thoughts turned—right, left, up, down, as if they were trying all the exits—they collided with the scream.
Violet tried to fight back—but fight back against what? Her own brain?
With a sickening surge of insight, she realized that Rez’s blocking device must have died.
The screaming in her mind grew louder still. There was no way to shut it down, no way to lessen it or redirect it. It was excruciating.
She closed her eyes. She was fresh out of ideas. She was ready to give up.
No. She already had given up. Her mind was filling with dark, foul images, with smelly things, with slithery things that cooed slyly to her, curling around her mind like the flick of a scorpion’s tail. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, why not die here and now? My friends are dying all around me. Why would I want to be alive when all of my friends are dead?
My mother—she’s dead.
My father—he’ll be dead very soon.
The voice was her voice, but it also wasn’t her voice. It was saying things that were true but also not true, things that were only true when she was feeling discouraged and sad.
The voice continued to whisper, I’ll be left alone. I am already alone. The emptiness—it surrounds me like this storm, screaming and twisting, squeezing my soul until there is nothing left, just a hollow, echoing place where my soul used to be …
I am alone. I have no one. I have nothing.
I am nothing.
Violet clamped her hands on either side of her head. If she could have, she would’ve pushed those sides together, tight enough to smash open her skull. That prospect seemed far more palatable than putting up with the screaming for another second.
Then, like a tiny light in the distance on this dark, cold, wet, terrible night, she remembered something:
I can be my own Intercept.
Tin Man’s words. Tin Man’s idea. Tin Man, her friend. The son of the woman who’d been a second mother to her. She could keep Delia’s memory alive by staying alive herself—and by deciding which ideas and images should have access to her mind. And which ones shouldn’t.
Be my own Intercept.
She could let feelings linger when she wanted them to, not because an entity outside herself put them there.
Be my own Intercept.
She gritted her teeth. She focused. She gave it everything she had.
She began repeating the words to herself over and over again. She remembered Tin Man saying them, and so it was as if they were saying them together, a desperate duet.
Be my own Intercept.
Be my own Intercept.
Her words pushed back fiercely against the other words, the ones Sara was trying to inject into Violet’s brain. Life is meaningless. Nothing matters. I want to die.
This was a fight, and Violet Crowley had never backed away from a fight in her life. Back and forth they went, the two sides vying for control of her mind.
Be my own Intercept.
I want to die.
Be my own Intercept.
I want to die.
Be my own Intercept.
I want to die.
Be my own Intercept.
I want to … I want to live.
She slammed shut the big iron door in her mind and twisted the lock.
I want to live.
Breathing hard, each breath tearing in and out of her body with its own savage certainty, Violet stood on the track and faced Sara. Her fists hung at her sides. The icy rain was pouring off her shoulders, streaming down her face, leaking into her shoes. Every part of her was drenched.
Yet she didn’t feel misery. She felt joy.
Sara, too, was completely undone by the freezing rain, rain that cascaded out of a midnight-black and wind-mauled sky. Her hair was plastered around her face. Her coat and her boots were sopping. She stabbed at the buttons on her console, pushing them harder and harder, in case the voice activation feature was on the fritz.
“You want to die!” Sara called out to her. “You want to jump, don’t you?”
“No.”
“You do! You do want to die! Hear the screaming? Hear it? Don’t you want to make it stop?” Sara kept speaking to her console, prodding the Intercept.
“Sara, it’s over,” Violet called back. “Let Rachel go. We’ll climb back down. We’ll go back to the others.”
“I won’t give you the girl!” Sara yelled. “She’s my shield! I
need her! As long as I have her, I can escape!”
Rachel still had not said a word. Violet squinted at the small wet face. Now she could see the reason for her silence: Rachel was paralyzed with fright. She might be brilliant, but she was still a little girl.
“Rachel, look at me,” Violet said. “It’s going to be okay.”
Rachel shook her head. She seemed to rise momentarily from her trance. “I followed you, Violet. When you went after Sara. I was … I was just trying to help. I thought I could talk to her, make her see reason. But she grabbed me.”
Because you’re eleven years old, Violet wanted to yell at her. You may be smarter than Einstein and Franklin and Hawking put together, but you’re still just a kid. Instead she said, “Rachel, just do what she says. Don’t take any chances.” Back to Sara: “Come on. It’s me you want, not her. Let her go. We’ll go back together.”
“I … I can’t!” Sara was sobbing now. With each sob, she shook the little girl’s arm as if she were a rag doll. Rachel didn’t cry out. She let herself be yanked and pulled as Sara’s hysteria grew. “Don’t you understand, Violet? I can’t. I can’t go back. Everything I wanted is gone. The job I loved, the life I wanted … gone. Gone forever. And the things I’ve done … unforgivable.” Once again, she tightened her grip on Rachel’s arm. Violet saw Rachel wince with pain. “Frank Bainbridge fired me. I was going to start with him, use the Intercept and make him kill himself. Make him pay. But then he died in an accident, before I got the chance, so I had to go after his daughter. I sent Amelia notes. Terrible notes. And then I made her kill herself.”
“Sara, we can talk about all this when we get down. When all three of us are safe.”
Violet inched toward them while Sara talked. Creeping closer. The footing was treacherous; the coaster track vibrated wildly in the harrowing wind, its stability compromised by being half-finished. Violet was terrified that she might stumble forward and fall into Sara, tipping all three of them over the edge.
“Sara, let her go. Please.”
“There’s no hope!”
“There’s always hope!” Violet yelled back. She had to scream it, because the wind had suddenly picked up again, and she had to fight to be heard over the shattering noise.
Violet reached out.
“Give Rachel to me, Sara!” she hollered. “Pass her here! And then give me your hand.”
Sara lifted her free hand. The gesture encouraged Violet to move even closer, to take another step toward her—and to the drop-off that was just inches from Sara’s back.
“Closer!” Sara called. She wiggled the fingers of her outstretched hand. With her other hand, she redoubled her grip on Rachel’s tiny wrist.
Violet took another step. A violent gust of wind almost upended her; for a heart-stopping second, she swayed precariously back and forth, finally regaining her balance.
“Just a little bit closer, Violet!” Sara yelled over the chaos of the wind, leaning forward, stretching out her arm. The desperate strain showed on her face. She had pulled Rachel very close to her now, an arm slung diagonally across the little girl’s chest.
Violet gingerly took one more step. The tips of her fingers were just grazing Sara’s fingertips when she saw it: the hysterical gleam in Sara’s eyes. There was a calculating, diabolical look in those eyes, a look that Violet interpreted in a flash.
She’s going to jump, and she wants to pull me over the edge, too.
Just as the thought registered in Violet’s brain, Sara lunged forward, a crazed grin on her face. Her curved hand settled on Violet’s forearm with a talon-like grip.
“We’ll die together!” Sara screamed. She gave a mighty yank on Violet’s arm. Rachel let out a small cry.
But Violet was ready. She had half a second to prepare, and so she lurched back and sideways, trying to free herself from Sara’s hold. For an instant, the struggle was like a life-and-death version of a seesaw—Violet pulling one way, Sara pulling the other—until finally Violet was able to jerk her arm out of Sara’s grip.
The link was broken.
Sara teetered wildly on the lip of the track’s ending point. Her face was contorted. She held Rachel even tighter, pressing the child’s body against her own.
Violet tried one more time to save them. She braced herself and leaned the upper half of her body forward, extending her arm to Sara. “Grab it!” Violet screamed. “You can do it! You can—”
Sara flew backward off the edge of the track, tumbling through the air into the hell-black, storm-shredded ocean hundreds of meters below. She never let of go Rachel, and so the little girl tumbled right along with her.
35
Rachel’s Star
“There it is.”
Violet stopped at the sound of Shura’s voice. She had been walking alongside her friend in a sort of daze, not really noticing the world that surrounded them.
They were here to see the small memorial that Steve Reznik had placed for his sister in Perey Park.
A week had passed since the night when Rachel Reznik was dragged into an Old Earth ocean by Sara Verity. Sara’s body still had not been recovered, but divers sent down the very next day from New Earth had located Rachel’s body right away. Their intention had been to bring her back to New Earth. Rachel and Rez’s father, however, agreed with Rez:
Rachel deserved something different. Something special.
And so she had been cremated that very afternoon on Old Earth. It was done quickly and privately; Rez had wanted to handle things himself. He had described the aftermath to Violet, telling her how he had gently nestled his sister’s ashes in a tiny wooden box. He placed the box inside a slightly bigger capsule, a biodegradable one that would disintegrate within hours. Then he used a small booster rocket to send the capsule into space. By day’s end, Rachel’s ashes were mingling with stardust, drifting through the galaxy as pure light.
“The marker’s beautiful,” Violet said. She had dropped to her knees to get a closer look at the square brass plate that read:
RACHEL REZNIK
ASTRA CASTRA, NUMEN LUMEN
The words were Latin for “The stars my camp, God my light.” The marker was affixed to the base of a massive oak, one of the largest trees in Perey Park. Looking up from the spot where she knelt, Violet saw how the spreading network of leaf-furred branches reached with crooked beauty across the very sky that was Rachel’s new home.
“Yes,” Shura said. She had remained standing. “It really is.”
The day was a splendid one. Warm sun, mild breeze. It was a vivid and dramatic contrast to what they had endured on Old Earth: howling wind, freezing rain that felt like little knives repeatedly stabbing the skin, a black horizon split open again and again by angry lightning. Sometimes, even now, that night seemed to Violet as if it had all been a dream—but other times, it was the present moment that seemed like the dream. The terror of Old Earth was the true thing, whereas the calmness and beauty of New Earth seemed like something one might wish for, yearn for, but that would never be real.
“I wonder,” Shura said.
“Wonder what?”
“I wonder what Rachel would have done with her life. She was so smart.”
Violet smiled. “You couldn’t exactly ask her what she was going to be when she grew up. She was already a lawyer. And a good one.”
“She’d have to be, if she kept your butt out of jail.”
“Can’t argue with you there.”
Violet stood up. She wiped off the dirt from the knees of her jeans. She felt a bit better now. Only a best friend knew exactly when to joke about the dark stuff.
She would never forget Rachel. She would never forget Delia, either, of course. Nor would she ever forget Amelia Bainbridge, Rita and Rosalinda Wilton, Wendell Prokop, and Oliver Crosby. Sara’s other victims.
How could you mourn people you’d never even met?
It didn’t make sense, maybe, but she did.
* * *
“I still can’t get warm,�
�� Jonetta said. “Not after that night. How about you, Vi?”
A half an hour later, Violet was settled behind her desk. Jonetta breezed in, dropped her rear end into the only other chair in the room, and then proceeded to toss off the hated nickname.
Violet had said goodbye to Shura at the edge of Perey Park. Both of them needed to get back to work: Shura to her improvements on the HoverUp and her research on vaccines and her paintings, and Violet to … well, something. Something to take her mind off … everything.
But the first thing Violet faced out of the gate was Jonetta and a repeat performance of the Vi abomination.
Violet didn’t care how much she and Jonetta had gone through together on Old Earth. She didn’t care how instrumental Jonetta had been in solving the Bainbridge case. She didn’t care how loyal and reliable Jonetta was.
Don’t care, don’t care, don’t care.
She was going to put a stop to the vile Vi business, once and for all.
“Before I answer that,” Violet said, “I’ve got a question for you.”
“Okay.” Jonetta stopped sorting the piles of unpaid bills on Violet’s desk. “Shoot.”
“I’ve told you over and over again not to call me Vi. And you keep doing it. Why?”
“Oh, that’s an easy one.”
“Really.”
“Yeah. I kept wondering when you’d get around to asking me.” She grinned. “Your dad told me to.”
Now Violet was totally confused. Her father had encouraged Jonetta to piss her off? To keep on calling her by a nickname that Violet loathed and despised—and had made quite clear that she loathed and despised from the get-go?
“What are you talking about?” Violet’s tone was even testier.
“Well,” Jonetta said, “it’s like this. I really, really wanted to work here. My dad talked to your dad, and your dad said he’d get you to hire me, and—”
“Ancient history,” Violet snapped. “Get to the point.”
“Okay, okay.” Jonetta settled back in her seat. “Well, your dad made it happen. Just like he said he would. And when I visited him at Starbridge to thank him, the day before I started working here, he told me that he had one piece of advice.