It was one word. No. But I couldn’t say it. So I hesitated.
He didn’t. He pulled the trigger.
I heard a click and then the snap and suddenly I was on my knees and Dr. Tarsus was where I had just been standing, a dart sticking out of her left shoulder.
“Esperanza!” I heard Dean Atwater gasp. He stared at the gun in his hands then at her, his mouth hanging open.
“Rory,” Dr. Tarsus said calmly. “I need you to listen to me.” My head swiveled toward her. She grabbed hold of the dart with her opposite hand and yanked it out. “I am allergic to gelatin, the main component of the suspension serum used in this dart. It’s only a matter of time before my throat will start to close up.” Her tone was matter-of-fact. “I don’t know what you’re planning, but—”
“What she’s planning,” the dean said coldly, spinning the chamber of his gun to load another dart, “is less than irrelevant right now.” He’d regained his composure, the shock and dismay of the previous moment gone from his face. Behind him, something moved in the shadows. Someone. He had a black ski mask covering his face and our syringe in his hand. My breath hitched in my throat when I realized it was North. How did he find me?
“Rory,” I heard Tarsus say. “I don’t have much time.”
Something inside me gave way. “You’re a monster!” I screamed at the dean, getting to my feet. The old man laughed.
“And you’re a foolish little girl,” he said, pointing his gun at my neck. “Just like your—”
North grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back. Dean Atwater screamed and I heard a bone snap. Gritting his teeth like an animal, North drove the needle so deep into the dean’s neck, I thought the entire syringe might disappear into his skin. I heard footsteps then Rudd burst back into the room. It took him a few seconds to piece together what had happened. A few seconds too long. There was a crack and then a groan and then his body was crumpling forward to the ground.
Hershey stood behind him with an unlit torch, her eyes wild and reckless, black streaks of mascara like war paint on her face.
“Asshole,” she spat, and let the torch fall.
He was still breathing, but Rudd was out cold. She kicked him angrily with her boot.
“Hershey!” I cried, rushing toward her. “Are you okay?”
“I am now. What’s happening to him?” She was glaring at the dean, who North had pinned on the ground. The old man was blinking rapidly, trying to stay awake.
“He’s falling asleep,” I told her.
“You’re letting him live?”
“We can’t kill him, Hersh.”
Hershey crossed her arms. “Why not?”
“Because,” North said, getting to his feet. “If we kill him, he wins.”
Hershey’s eyes flicked to Dr. Tarsus, who was kneeling at Dean Atwater’s ankles, untying the laces of his navy oxfords. “What about her? Why is she still conscious?”
“She’s on our side,” I said. “She’s always been on our side. I’ll explain when we get out of here.” When. Thirty seconds ago it was if.
I knelt by Dr. Tarsus. She was wrapping a shoelace tightly around the dean’s ankles. “Your EpiPen. Where is it?” I asked.
She laid her palm on my cheek and smiled. The skin around her eyes had started to swell. “I used it last night.”
Tears rushed to my eyes. She’d used it on me.
“There’s no time for that now,” she commanded, grabbing the dean’s wrists and pulling them behind his back. His dry, papery flesh slid like snakeskin as she pushed up his sleeves. “We have work to do.”
I hurried over to where Rudd lay. North had him on his stomach already and was wrapping up his ankles. He handed me a shoelace, and I went to work on his wrists. Rudd moaned a little as I pulled the rope tight, cutting into his skin, drawing blood.
“God, I’m glad you’re okay,” North said breathlessly.
“How’d you find me?”
“Your necklace,” he said, nodding at the dove. “I put a tracking device inside it. And a camera.” He managed a smile. “I didn’t want you doing anything crazy without my knowing about it.” My limbs were limp with gratitude. For him, for Dr. Tarsus, for the inexplicable fact that I was still okay. “So did you bring Hershey in with you?”
“No, she—”
“I followed Kyle in,” Hershey said softly. The bravado of the previous moment was gone. She was staring at Rudd’s motionless body, tears welling up in her eyes, which were no longer hateful and fearless but sad. She looked so young standing there. Like a lost child. I stood and pulled her into my arms.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I’d been using his skeleton key,” she said miserably. “While he was asleep. That’s how I got you all that stuff. I thought all the faculty had them. I didn’t know he—” Her voice broke. “He caught me with it this morning, and I told him the truth—that we were trying to take down the assholes that had your mom killed. I thought he could help us. I thought—” Her tears spilled over. “He called the psych ward on me, Rory. He said he was getting me a cab, but I saw him dial the number—the same one they gave us the first day of school.” She pulled away from me and swatted angrily at her eyes. “I’m such an idiot. He told me he loved me. And I believed him.”
“Are we doing this?” Dr. Tarsus called. She was wheezing a little now and clutching her right arm like it hurt. Without waiting for a response, she stepped out of her suede pumps and headed toward the darkness of the tunnel.
“Doing what?” Hershey asked.
“The less you know the better,” I told her. “You should go back the way you came. Wait for us at North’s apartment.” I expected her to argue with me, or to demand details, but she just nodded. North handed her his key ring.
“Be careful,” she whispered, her lip trembling a little.
“We’ll be back in a couple of hours,” I assured her as North went for one of the torches. I prayed that I was right.
34
DR. TARSUS DIED ABOUT TEN YARDS from the Gnosis data center. Her arm had quickly swollen to twice its size and we could tell it hurt, a lot, but she didn’t complain about it once, not even when her skin started to turn blue. When she started coughing, I started crying. I knew it wasn’t fair that I should be crying when she was the one dying, but it literally felt like my heart was breaking apart in my chest. I hadn’t let the thought fully register, but when I’d listened to the audio recording she’d given me, I’d had this sense that maybe, in some messed-up way, she could become the mother figure I’d never had. Yes, I’d hated her almost the entire time I’d known her, but everything she’d done, she’d done for me. I was no expert on motherhood, but that seemed like the essence of it to me.
We’d just come around the last curve of the spiral when she fell against the wall. She looked at North first. “I’m not going to make it there,” she said. Her words were labored, but her tone was matter-of-fact. “You’ll have to use a recording. I don’t know if it’ll work, but it’s worth a try.” She eased herself down the wall until she was sitting, knock-kneed like a little girl. I knelt beside her and took her hand as North fumbled for his iPhone.
She turned to me and smiled. “Your mom would be so proud of you, Aurora.” She spoke slowly, her chest heaving from the effort. “Just promise me— Promise me that when you leave, you won’t ever look back.”
“I love you” came out instead of “I promise.” Laying her hand on my knee, she managed a weak smile.
“I love you too.”
“Whenever you’re ready,” North said gently, his thumb hovering over the record button. His voice sounded funny, as if his throat were as knotted as mine. Dr. Tarsus nodded. North hit record.
“Free to fall,” she said hoarsely, a shallow breath between every word. Her eyes fluttered shut and she shook her head. “I’ll try again,” she said, wheezing, and tried to inhale. “Free. To. Fall.”
My heart sank. I had very little experience with voice recogni
tion software, but I suspected the voice would need to at least sound like the person it was supposed to belong to. Try again, I begged her silently. A few moments passed. What little breath she had was rattling in her chest.
I took her hand and squeezed it. Her lips formed the word go. Soundless, but as commanding as her voice had ever been. We both knew I had no other choice. As I knelt and kissed her cheek, the tears I’d been holding back spilled over, dampening her face. “Thank you,” I whispered. “For everything.” She smiled, the sweat on her face glistening in the flicker of North’s torch. Then her face went slack and she was gone.
Neither North nor I spoke as we made our way to the stone wall.
“Don’t use your fingers,” he said when the stone facade retracted, bathing us in fluorescent light. “Fingerprints.”
I nodded and touched the glass with the knuckle of my thumb. The screen lit up with twelve boxes again, but the first four numbers were different this time.
I’d written the first fifty numbers in the Fibonacci sequence on the inside of my forearm in preparation for this moment—North’s idea—and 10,946 was the twenty-third number on the list, which meant that the next eight digits were 6, 1, 7, 7, 1, 1, 2, 8. I typed them as fast I could.
As soon as my knuckle hit the eight, the glass door slid open with a whoosh of warm air, just like in my simulation. I followed North inside the small chamber. A few seconds later the glass slid shut and the stone facade retracted back into place, concealing us. He pulled out his phone and stepped up to the microphone.
“You think it’ll work?” I asked him.
“Maybe,” he said, but he sounded doubtful. He tried the first recording first. I knew before I heard the words access denied that we were screwed. Not even I would’ve recognized her voice if I hadn’t heard her record it. The second recording was even worse.
“Damn it,” I whispered, and squeezed my eyes shut. I waited for the Doubt to give me guidance, but I heard Dr. Tarsus’s voice instead.
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
My eyes sprung open. “North,” I said urgently. “The audio recording—the one Tarsus made—it’s still on your phone, right?”
“Yeah, why?”
“She said free to fall. In the recording. Toward the beginning, I think.”
North was already pulling up the file. He nudged the track bar to the right and pressed play. Dr. Tarsus’s voice—her regular, healthy voice—filled the small chamber.
“It’s right after that,” I told him, and he bumped the slider forward.
“It’s how we’re made I suppose” came her voice through the tiny speaker. “How did Milton put it? ‘Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.’ The choice was ours, and we chose ourselves.”
North slid the track bar back and lifted his phone back up to the mic. As he held down the record button, I held my breath. It sounded just like her, but was the intonation right?
Please let it work, I prayed.
“Look,” North said suddenly, pointing at the control panel I’d seen in my simulation. One by one, the green lights were turning red. “That’s a security panel. Each of those lights is connected to a camera. I think they’re going offline.” A few seconds later there was a loud clang as steel slid against steel and the vault door disengaged.
We were in.
Part of me was still expecting to see workers inside, doing their thing, but North was right. The massive blue-lit space was completely empty. And loud. And freezing. I closed the door behind us, but not all the way. I had no idea how it opened from the inside, if at all.
North was tugging on a pair of gloves. They were thin, with rubber pads on the fingertips. “Hacker hands,” he explained, yelling over the hum of the machines. “No prints.” Seeing the gloves reminded me that this moment, or some version of it anyway, had always been part of our plan. But instead of reassuring me, it only emphasized how far we’d veered off course. I blinked quickly, afraid of what I’d see behind my eyelids if they stayed shut too long.
“I thought the servers didn’t go offline until midnight,” I said as I followed him between rows of servers toward the terminal. The floor beneath us was made out of some sort of metal mesh. I could see smooth gray concrete several feet beneath it.
“They don’t,” North replied, touching the keyboard in front of the terminal to light up its three screens. “Which makes it harder, but not impossible, to hide our tracks.” The screens were locked, with a login box at the center of each one.
“Now what?” I started to ask, but North had already bypassed the login screen. He was typing at lightning speed, not glancing at his fingers once as lines and lines of computer code appeared on screen. His eyes kept darting from screen to screen as he opened and closed about a thousand different windows. Hunting for the Lux program code. What if he couldn’t find it?
I started to pace.
“Rory,” I heard North say.
“What?”
“Stop pacing. It’s stressing me out.”
I sat down on the grated metal floor behind him. “I just feel so useless right now. What can I do to help?”
Without taking his eyes off the screens in front of him, he reached into his back pocket and handed me his iPhone. “Find us some good music.”
Hours passed as the music played. North hummed a little as he worked. I was quiet, watching the back of him, waiting for the click click clicking of fingers on keys to go quiet. Finally it did. It was after eleven.
“Rory,” he said urgently. I was tracing the squares of grating beneath me with my fingertips. “I’m in the algorithm. I need you to check my work to make sure I got the changes right.”
I scrambled to my feet. There was a string of words and symbols in a box on the center screen. “Uh. I have no idea what any of that means.”
“I know that,” North said, sounding testy. I looked at him then and saw how tired he was.
“What can I do?” I said.
“Read it out loud,” he told me, closing his eyes. “My eyes are swimming, I can’t even see it anymore. Just read exactly what you see.”
He kept his eyes closed the entire time I read it, his brow furrowed tight. When I got to the end, the muscles in his face went slack.
“North?”
Several seconds passed. My heart sank to my knees. I said his name again, quieter this time, almost a whisper.
“There was a fifteen-minute period about an hour ago when I was convinced it couldn’t be done,” he said with his eyes shut. “The algorithm was too nuanced to just do a one-to-one exchange of the inputs, not without driving people’s cars into one another or risking mass suicide.” Mass suicide. At the whim of an algorithm, no less. I pictured that dopey smile on Beck’s face as he interacted with Lux and shuddered. “I couldn’t see a way around it,” North said. “I was ready to give up.” He opened his eyes finally and looked at me.
“But?”
“But then I heard the voice. ‘It’s there’ was all it said.” He shook his head in amazement. “And at that moment, I saw it. A very slight variation in the way the algorithm treated certain categories of threats. And I realized if I could isolate these categories and come up with a way to treat them as a sort of preferred opportunity, a trump card almost, I could essentially override the formula instead of just reversing it. It meant I had to create an additional command string within the algorithm, which made the whole thing about nine thousand times harder, but I think it’ll work.”
I wrapped my arms around his neck and climbed into his chair, sliding my knees in next to his hips. He laid his hands on my thighs, sending a ripple up my spine. “You,” I said, “are a genius.”
He let me kiss him, but then he pulled back and shook his head. “No. I can’t take credit for this. If it were up to me, I would’ve given up.”
I started to argue with him but thought better of it. The Few needed the credit for their victories. The boy I loved didn’t. That’s why I loved him.
“Almost,” North said. “I just have to copy all these changes to the versioned control system and deploy the code to the servers, then wait for Gnosis to initiate the reboot.” I glanced at the clock on his screen. It was 11:53.
“Is seven minutes enough time to do whatever you need to do?” I asked.
“Should be,” North said. “Then, once the system reboots, I’ll run a script to hide my tracks and deploy the worm. Then we can get out of here.”
“The worm?”
“It’s our diversion,” North explained. “In case someone at Gnosis figures out that we were inside the network. They’ll see the worm and think they got us.”
“So crafty. Did the voice tell you to do that, too?”
North grinned and kissed my nose. “Nah. That one was mostly me.”
He leaned around me to type on the touchpad on the desk. I kept my eyes on his face, watching him work. All the fatigue I’d seen before had vanished.
I nuzzled his ear with my nose. “You’re amazing,” I whispered, and went to kiss his cheek.
“Shit,” he said, his whole body tensing.
I jerked back. “What?”
“I tripped an alarm,” he said, cursing under his breath. He was typing furiously.
“What kind of alarm?” I asked as I tried to slide off his lap without touching either of his arms. My heart was pounding in my chest and my legs felt like jelly beneath me. At what point did we run?
“I don’t know.”
I looked at the center screen. At first I thought it was strings of computer code, but then I realized that it was rows of Greek characters. “Wait,” I told North, touching his arm. “I think it’s a riddle.”
“A riddle?”
“Yes,” I said, not as certain as I sounded. “Just give it a second.” Just as North lifted his fingers from the touchpad, six lines at the center of the screen morphed into English.
I formd them free, and free they must remain,
Free to Fall Page 33