by Alex London
You’ve Arrived appeared in front of his eyes briefly, as if he didn’t know it. He swiped the image away.
Cheyenne had shaved her head and hacked her biofeed so undulating tattoos rolled around her scalp all night, old logos from long-vanished corporations sliding and slithering from her neck to her forehead. It was dizzying. Her eyes were wide as galaxies.
“Hey . . . Knox . . . Knox . . . you’re . . . Knox.” Cheyenne smiled and burst into tears. “You’re alive!”
“Okay, Chey, calm down. Help me out here.”
Cheyenne leaned over the weird stick between the seats that people used to use to control cars and she hugged Knox. “I heard about Marie. I’m sorry. You should know, though, she’s fine. She’s free. She’s on a journey into a new incarnation, you know?”
Cheyenne’s parents ran a chain of NeoBuddhism centers all over the Upper City, so she was always talking like some kind of mystic sage. Knox thought all that superstition was ridiculous—he’d been raised a strict Objectivist—but it helped Cheyenne get through and made Chey’s family rich. Two generations ago they’d been nobody.
“Whatever,” Knox said. “Just hook me up.”
Cheyenne slapped a thin plastic patch onto the back of Knox’s hand. It stuck there and lit up. Silver veins glowed on its surface, changing to pink, then to green, then yellow and then the patch dissolved into his skin, leaving nothing but a slight itchy feeling.
“Very lux.” Cheyenne smirked and leaned back on her seat. “The universe at your command.”
Knox felt lighter within seconds.
A swell of energy ran through his body. His knees started to move back and forth with the music. He couldn’t keep his hands still. A smile almost tore open his face, and he felt like his heart might explode. He looked over to Cheyenne to make sure this was normal, but Cheyenne was gone.
Maybe it had been longer than a few seconds.
He looked up at the partiers above him, dancing on the hood of the car, on the trunk, stepping over the seats clutching all kinds of weirdly colored drinks. The projections of their holos flashed and mingled in the air, passing through one another, squawking and beeping and dinging. Why couldn’t everyone keep their holos to themselves? The gas smell made his stomach turn. The music felt threatening. He was only smiling because he couldn’t stop. He flinched. He feared a spilled drink might wash his face clean off.
“Nice ride.” A girl above him laughed and squatted down on the other side of the windshield and it was like she was speaking directly into his mind.
“You going my way?”
She cackled, and though her mouth was open and her teeth were shining at him, it was like she was silent and the laughter was in his head. She stopped cackling and looked at him. She had shining purple eyes and dark, gleaming hair.
Marie. It was Marie.
Knox shot up out of the seat to grab her, but the girl jumped back from him and he hit his head on the transparent windshield. He hit so hard, his glasses went crooked on his face, but he didn’t feel any pain. The patch prevented pain. He straightened his glasses.
The girl didn’t have purple eyes and her hair was brown, not black, pure Anglo. She didn’t look like Marie at all. What the hell did Marie look like, anyway? Knox couldn’t remember. His heart skipped every other beat. He felt like he had to remember.
“Freak.” The girl who wasn’t Marie walked away, vanishing in the fumes and lights and dancing bodies. Her voice was still in his head. Echoing. Freak, freak, freak, freak.
Was that a suggestion?
He looked down at his feet. He was standing on the seat of the car. Suddenly he felt like he was moving, like the car was racing, racing down that restricted speedway. He heard a sound like crunching metal. Felt his body fly through the air. Heard a scream, a girl screaming.
“Knox! Knox!” A hand grabbed his shoulder. He spun around, startled to find himself standing exactly where he’d been standing before. He fell onto the steering wheel. Time was unraveling. How long had he been standing up on the seat? How long had it taken him to fall?
He was half wedged under the steering wheel now, and wriggling to free himself.
“Chill, bro!” Nine yelled at him. Where had he come from? The words still sounded like they weren’t coming out of the mouth that spoke them. Knox looked up into his friend’s face. He looked worried. Confused. Probably reflecting Knox back at himself. Simi was next to Nine, his powdered wig cocked to the side. He turned and talked to some other kids behind him. Nine squatted down.
“You all right?” he asked.
“YEAH.” Knox shook himself and straightened his glasses. His own voice sounded too loud. He whispered, which felt better, “Just, Chey’s umm . . .”
“Oh, that stuff’s heavy. Drink this.” Nine shoved some bright green liquid into Knox’s hand. Knox shot it back in one gulp.
“Electrolytes.” Nine smiled. “And some other stuff. Anyway, we’ve got customers.” Nine pulled Knox up to his feet and onto the trunk of the car. “These boys could use some ID. Top of the line, they’re asking for. I told them you’re the man.” Knox shook his head again, tried to get clear. “He’s a little tweaked right now, but he’s cool,” Nine yelled over the music at his customers, lost somewhere in the disintegrating universe behind him. Knox rubbed his eyes. Nine and Simi were still there. So was the universe.
Nine pulled two kids forward and Knox thought the drug was kicking in again, hard. One of them looked like every other retro wannabe in the room. But the other one, dressed incongruously in some queercore jumpsuit, had that proxy’s face. Sydney’s face.
Impossible.
[14]
THE PARTY RAGED. THAT was the only word for what it was. Raging. Like the pain behind Syd’s eyes. Egan’s head whipped around at every Upper City girl who walked past.
“He’s a little tweaked right now,” the kid called Nine yelled over the music at Syd and Egan. “But he’s cool.” Nine pulled Egan and Syd forward to meet this mysterious savior they’d been promised.
To Syd, at first, he looked like your average Upper City pretty boy. Light brown hair that hung over his ears and fell into his eyes. They were green, as far as Syd could tell, but they were also about as wide and crazed as Egan’s, and the lights of the party flashed and shifted on the lenses of some serious designer glasses he was wearing. Behind the lenses, though, the eyes looked pained, and not just because of the drugs. It made the guy kind of beautiful. Exquisite suffering and maybe a little dim.
Totally Syd’s type. Under different circumstances, he’d have been too nervous to even talk to a guy like this.
Nine tried to introduce them, but he didn’t know their names, so Egan stepped up.
Maybe he thought they had a drug-addled kinship or something, but it didn’t work. The guy kept staring right at Syd.
Nine said something offensive about his name. Why had Egan even told him that? Syd hated his stupid name, like another kind of scar, and he hated that Egan wasn’t ashamed of anything. He shared too freely. If it was annoying before today, it was dangerous now that Syd was a fugitive from his debt.
He glared at Nine and at Egan to show them he was not amused. Then he put his hand out, tried to reach through the druggy haze and get this rich kid to speak, to help him get his ID and get out of this hellish club, but the guy didn’t move. The ruins of Old Detroit flashed behind them.
Syd dropped his hand and looked closer at the rich kid. He was pale, the kind of pale that could only come from expensive sunscreens, and his skin was smooth and clear, although there was some sort of puffiness around the eyes, like a bruise that wasn’t quite done healing. He was dressed in a pair of old-fashioned jeans and a perfectly tailored blue “work shirt” that looked like it had been custom-made for this party. He had on some lux AR glasses instead of a projector so that he could keep his datastream private. He obviously took care of himself and had the means to do so.
Syd felt his heartbeat quicken. He studied the boy, looking
for details the way Mr. Baram had taught him to read a person.
He’d been injured recently—maybe a fight? He didn’t look much like a fighter. Too delicate. No scars. Although high-priced medicine could make sure there were never any scars. But still. So, an accident.
His fingernails were chewed and rough. It didn’t match the rest of him, and any kid with skin that nice and hair that perfect would have kept his nails neat. So the chewing had to be recent. Why would a rich druggy kid chew his nails? Anxiety? Guilt? There was terror in his eyes too, in the way he was looking at Syd. Like he saw a ghost.
The Guardian’s words came back to Syd: destruction of property. Reckless endangerment. Homicide.
Syd followed a hunch. He swallowed hard. If he was wrong, he could always play it off as something else, but if he was right . . .
“It’s you, isn’t it?” he asked.
The reaction told him he was right.
“This is Knox,” Nine said. “Dude, Knox, what’s up? You hanging in there?”
Syd watched Knox crumple in front of him. Amazing after all these years that this boy—his patron—had a name.
Knox.
All those petty crimes. All those brutal punishments he took for a boy named Knox with hazy green eyes and professionally protected skin.
He remembered an ancient clay tablet. When he was little—about four years old maybe—he remembered being dragged out of bed at the orphanage in nothing but his underpants, almost like today, and made to stand in a bright room off Mrs. Prabu’s office.
A light appeared on a wall panel and shone right into his eyes. Mrs. Prabu spoke toward the wall, like she was introducing Syd to the light. He now knew she had been speaking to his patron and whoever else was watching, but at the time he thought it was kind of funny, and he laughed.
He’d stopped laughing when Mrs. Prabu took out the long silver EMD stick. She asked him some question he didn’t understand about credits and debt and that was the first time he heard the words “proxy” and “patron”; all he remembered clearly after that was the pain of the shocks she gave him, one, two, three, four, five, like his skin was being burned off from the inside and he cried and cried.
It took him about a year to stop crying when he was punished, and another year to understand that he wasn’t being punished for anything that he did. He came to believe he was being punished simply for being born.
When he was about twelve and started to realize he had feelings that weren’t like other boys’ feelings, when he’d stare too long at Egan while he slept, or watch some of the older boys wrestling in the muddy riverbed too intensely, he started to believe that his patron’s misdeeds were a reflection of his own dark thoughts. He went back to the childish belief that he deserved every punishment he received. For a few years, alone with his secret, he convinced himself that this patron of his was cosmic punishment for his desires. Part of him still believed it.
And now Syd stood face-to-face with the author of his punishment, his lifelong creditor, and he was beautiful, and he was tweaked, and he had killed a girl, and only he could save Syd’s life.
Knox stared back at the boy he’d only ever seen on-screen, the boy he’d watched get tortured in his place just a few hours ago. The boy who, right now, was supposed to go to Sterling Work Colony in his place for sixteen years.
He felt his hands go numb, his mouth tingle. It didn’t make sense. He couldn’t be here. Patron confidentiality. He wasn’t real. His eyes shone through the haze like polished black diamonds.
What the hell was a black diamond?
Knox shook himself and vowed never to take anything Chey gave him ever again.
He backed away, turned from his proxy, and tried to vanish into the mass of dancing bodies, blurred by the lights and the projections and the fumes.
Syd was not going to let him get away so easily.
“Where are you going?” Nine called, as Syd raced into the crowd after Knox.
Knox didn’t look back. He weaved through the bodies, stumbled over hood ornaments, knocked people out of the way.
Syd was right behind him.
“Hey, Ed.” A girl with shining silver hair grabbed Syd’s arm and pulled him toward her. Or was it him? Androgyny was a privilege of the wealthy. “You wanna fix my car?”
Syd felt a hand on his chest, another reaching around his back, which was still tender from the shocks he’d been given. He winced and pulled away.
“Where you going, Ed?” his silver-haired pursuer called out. “I need some auto repair! My engine’s running hot!”
Syd wished Egan hadn’t put that rainbow label on the coveralls. He’d lost time; Knox had slipped away.
Syd climbed up onto the cab of a truck to get a better view of the space.
Knox pushed dancers out of the way, slammed into their shoulders, stumbled. He was too tweaked, moving too fast. Texts popped up in his glasses.
You party?
Hey Foxy Knoxy, where you runnin’?
Knox ignored them. He couldn’t stop. He rushed for the door.
Syd jumped off the truck to follow him, when he saw a strikingly beautiful woman weaving through the crowd in the opposite direction. There were two more by the entrance. He whipped around and saw the same beautiful face scattered through the crowd, dressed to blend in, but still far too perfect to be natural.
The Guardians had found him.
[15]
“PATRON CONFIDENTIALITY,” KNOX REPEATED to himself over and over, willing it to be true, willing it far too late for his will to matter. His proxy simply could not have found him. And yet he had.
Knox’s steps reverberated off the hoods of the cars as he ran, thumping along with the beat of the music. Every face he saw looked like Marie’s. Every body that touched his as he passed felt like a threat. He was losing it and he knew he was losing it and there was nothing he could do but run.
Except he didn’t know which way to go. He couldn’t tell where the door was. His vision was a kaleidoscope of light and skin and impossible faces and he knew he was now just turning in place, spinning, panicked, but his feet wouldn’t push him forward. He stood beneath the old neon sign with the cryptic words in the weird language and he just spun.
As the faces around him swirled, one face stood out, like it wouldn’t blur no matter how fast he turned. It was beautiful. Striking.
A Guardian. And she was heading right for him.
His father must have sent them. His dad probably knew that Knox had checked out of the hospital and sent the Guardians to drag him home. Watching Sydney’s punishment wouldn’t have been enough. He probably wanted to keep Knox sealed away to avoid any more “embarrassment.” Or maybe he knew Sydney had escaped and sent them to protect Knox. Which one was it? Protection or punishment? Who could Knox trust?
Nobody, he decided, or maybe the patch racing through his blood decided for him. He spun away from the Guardian and tried to head in the opposite direction. The faces around him were laughing. They didn’t look like Marie anymore; they didn’t even look human, just teeth, just laughing teeth, mocking him as he spun and stumbled and spun some more.
He tried to text Chey or Simi or Nine to get help, but he couldn’t get his lenses to work right. He just blinked uselessly and waved his arms, flapping his hands like a dying plague victim. The glasses suddenly felt slick on his face, like they were covered in blood, thick, black, oily blood.
He couldn’t see. He pulled them off and wiped at them furiously, snapping out one of the lenses. It clattered between his feet and vanished down a crack between two cars. He dropped the frames and stomped on them, kicked the fragments away. He didn’t need any augmented reality. He had the patch for that and it had turned on him. He needed obliterated reality, anti-reality.
Knox looked up. Everything was a little duller, a little grayer, a little more blurry. Still way too real.
“You’re coming with me.” A voice broke through the noise in his brain, froze his blood, stopped him spinning.
Sydney stood in front of him. He’d grabbed Knox by the shoulder and gripped him tightly. He stared into Knox’s eyes.
“You hear me? You’re coming with me right now. We’re getting out of here. You will not steal my life.” His words matched his mouth movements. They weren’t in Knox’s head anymore. This was a good sign
“I . . . ,” Knox started.
One of Sydney’s hands went to his pocket. He pulled out a small plastic tube and pressed it against Knox’s side. Knox heard a click. This was not a good sign.
Some kind of weapon? Was he being kidnapped?
Knox Brindle, scion of SecuriTech, kidnapped?
Should he cry out for help? Scream for his father’s beautiful goons to come to the rescue?
Which was worse, the Guardians and his father or this orphan from the Valve who was probably bent on some horrifying revenge?
He nodded at his proxy.
He didn’t need his father to rescue him. He’d do it himself.
“This way.” He felt Sydney pulling him forward, knocking dancers out of the way, weaving toward the door as he dug the tube harder into Knox’s ribs.
Suddenly, they stopped. He followed Sydney’s line of sight to two Guardians coming straight toward them. Sydney spun around so his back was to the Guardians, blocking their view. He looked Knox right in the eyes. Knox wished there was still a holo projection between them.
“Sorry about this,” Sydney said and put one hand behind Knox’s head and pulled him close, kissing him deeply on the mouth, wrapping himself around Knox, pressing their bodies tight against each other. He felt a little stubble from Sydney’s chin. The proxy’s lips were chapped and he smelled like sweat and fumes and metal. Terrible breath.
Knox had never kissed anyone with stubble before. He’d never kissed anyone with chapped lips or bad breath either. He had standards.
He tried to pull away but the more he struggled, the tighter Syd held him. Knox went rigid, didn’t move a muscle. He thought about biting Sydney, but the Guardians walked right past them and Knox felt Sydney let him go. His face moved away. It betrayed no emotion. It had actually been some pretty quick thinking on the proxy’s part. Knox might have appreciated it more if he wasn’t being kidnapped.