Proxy

by Alex London

  Living in a place like the Valve you learned quickly when something was about to step off. The air crackled with the electricity of impending violence. Everyone growing up there had some ability to feel it and the better your feeling for it, the safer you were. The Slum Sixth Sense, they called it. Syd’s sixth sense was firing.

  “Where are the advos?” Marie wondered.

  “What are you—” Knox said, but his question was cut off.

  “Ahhhh!”

  A boy’s scream.

  Syd looked toward the polar bear exhibit as one of the great white beasts leapt into the main plaza and reared up to attack the kid. The invisible fence was down. The polar bears were free. And a little boy was about to die.

  [30]

  SYD RAN STRAIGHT TOWARD the polar bear exhibit.

  It took Knox a moment to realize what was happening. A bear had stepped off the ice and reared up over a little boy. Syd dove at the boy, tackling him out of the way and covering him with his body.

  Marie moved next, rushing to them as the bear prepared to come down on both Syd and the boy. Knox stood dumbfounded.

  Marie pulled out her EMD stick and shot a pulse into the bear, who recoiled and charged away into the plaza to find easier prey.

  Panic ran through the crowd at the zoo like a flash flood in the wastelands. There were far too many children and far too few adults. The robotic nannies tried to lead the children in their care to safety, but their programming was woefully inadequate to face dangers the programmers hadn’t imagined. They fired off EMD pulses at the escaped animals, but just as often were kicked aside by other children running scared. Children screamed and cried as the rest of the animals broke from their invisible cages.

  Knox was mesmerized by the madness. The zoo had unraveled like everything else in his life. He started to wonder whether he had died in the accident after all and this was the afterlife all those religious nuts were on about all the time. No rules. No fences. No control. This was his hell.

  A bot had reached Syd and was zapping him on the ankle to free the boy beneath him. Syd’s muscles spasmed with each zap.

  “Release him!” the bot commanded, and Syd couldn’t even get control of himself to obey. The pulses were as hard as any he’d felt before. The nannies packed a punch.

  Knox rushed over. The big vein on the side of Syd’s dark neck bulged and his head smacked back against the floor. Knox wondered if all the pulses Syd had been hit with in the last twenty-four hours would do permanent damage to him. His brain might just burst right there on the floor of the zoo.

  Knox wondered what the punishment for getting your proxy killed while trying to set him free would be? And who would be punished for it? Knox could picture his father’s face. He imagined the scolding: “You can’t even defy me successfully! You’re no son of mine!”

  While Knox stood there thinking about his father, Marie smashed her foot into the side of the fuzzy pink bot and sent it sailing onto the polar ice.

  One of the zookeepers rushed toward a howling monkey, trying to scoop it into his arms, when a jet-black panther leapt down on his back, sinking long fangs into the man’s neck. He never even had the chance to scream. Knox turned away, gasping.

  Marie reached down to help Syd up onto shaky legs and they both nearly collapsed under him. Knox knocked her out of the way and grabbed Syd under the shoulders and held him up.

  “I got him,” he told her. He felt a little foolish that he’d stood there doing nothing while Marie saved Syd’s life.

  “Let me down,” Syd grunted, and Knox let him down onto his feet. On the ground, the little boy sobbed. Marie helped the boy up with an angry glance in Knox’s direction.

  “See those other bots?” Marie pointed. The boy nodded. “You have to follow them. Stay close to them and you won’t get hurt, understand?”

  “But . . . but . . .” The boy wiped his nose. “They aren’t mine.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Just run.”

  Marie shoved him toward the little bot that was leading the mischievous brother and sister they’d seen getting in trouble through the chaos. The boy ran after them, his little legs pumping as fast they could.

  A lion charged across the plaza behind him, chasing a column of frightened penguins that were waddling toward the exit. The lion caught the slowest one, which let out a bloodcurdling screech.

  Knox looked away as the penguin was ripped to pieces, just in time to see the brown bear from the lobby bounding straight at Marie’s back. He swung out his arm and grabbed her by the waist, spinning her out of the way, as he snatched her EMD stick and jammed it into the brown bear’s chest.

  The bear yelped and turned, its paws sliding on the tile floor as it collapsed in a heap of fur.

  Marie wiggled free of Knox’s grip.

  “You’re welcome,” he said and her eyes shot right to the weapon, now in his hands.

  “What is going on here?” Syd asked. “Is this your father’s doing?”

  “I don’t think so.” Knox shook his head.

  “Let’s get to the café,” Syd said.

  “This isn’t right,” said Marie. “Something is very wrong.” She looked around. There was blood on the floor, birds flying overhead beneath the enclosed glass dome, and everywhere, frightened children.

  “You think?” Knox shook his head at her.

  “Enough, both of you!” Syd’s temper flared. “I’m sick of hearing you two.”

  “She’s the one who—” Knox started, but Syd stepped right up to his face. Their noses were almost touching. Knox could feel Syd’s breath on his lips.

  Syd looked him in the eye, reached out, wrapping his dark hand around Knox’s. Knox tensed as Syd slid the EMD stick from his grip.

  “You guys are my hostages, after all,” Syd said with a nod. Then he ran in the direction that their contact had gone, holding the stick up, ready for anything that sprang his way. Knox and Marie ran after him.

  Service doors opened and armed security guards rushed in to contain the animals. The zoo café had a wide glass door and beyond it, a scattering of shining steel tables and sleek multicolored chairs. Exotic plants wrapped around columns throughout the room and a large waterfall flowed down a sheet of shining marble against the back wall. Children hid underneath tables and behind the columns, casting frightened glances toward the entrance.

  Syd stood still in the middle the room, panting, and Knox ran to his side. He followed Syd’s gaze to the slender red-haired woman. She lay facedown in the corner of the café, her coils of copper hair splayed out all around her. A pool of blood blossomed on the tile below, soaking into the cloth of her shirt.

  She was dead.

  [31]

  SYD COULDN’T TAKE HIS eyes off the body on the floor. It struck him as odd to see a patron’s blood, to see a patron’s body lying just as dead as anyone else’s.

  It occurred to him that he’d never really thought of them as human before.

  He knew they were human, of course, just like him. That was the idea of the entire system. In theory, everyone was equal.

  In primitive times, back in the Holy Land, as Mr. Baram called it, they’d used a goat to pay for all their sins. The high priests would confess all the sins of the community to a goat and then send it off into the wilderness to die, freeing the people of their burdens.

  Of course, it made no sense.

  The goat couldn’t object or agree. The goat couldn’t forgive. The goat didn’t even know what was happening. Only humans could accept responsibility, and only humans could take on a debt. Only humans could stand in for one another. We all begin as equals, but a contract, like a confession, changes our relationship. One becomes a debtor, one becomes a creditor. One a proxy, the other a patron. The contract defines us until its terms are met. A goat would always be a goat, but humans can change how they define one another and how they define themselves. That was civilization.

  But beneath it all, everyone bleeds.

  S
yd played the thought around in his mind.

  Everyone bleeds.

  Behind the talk of debts and contracts and obligations, it was all held together by brute force. By blood. And there was something in his blood that could unravel it all.

  “Well, she was a big help,” said Knox. His sarcasm, even in the face of death, astonished Syd. Sarcasm was the easy expression of an empty mind. It carried no information, nothing he could learn except that Knox was an ass, which he knew already. The knowledge wasn’t useful.

  Suddenly, there was a scream and all their heads turned to the café entrance. A panther stalked into the room and landed without a sound on top of a table. Its sleek black head scanned from side to side, its tail swished just in front of the terrified children crouched beneath the tabletop. Its mouth shone wet with blood.

  Syd’s grip tightened around the EMD stick, but he didn’t raise it at the giant cat. He watched it prowl.

  The polar bears had impressed him with their size, but this animal simply captivated him. All its muscles rippled; its eyes glimmered with graceful danger. The man-made perfection of the Guardians was nothing compared with the panther, returned from a long-gone world. The imagination that had conceived this creature was bigger than any Syd could comprehend.

  The cat met his eyes and Syd felt it looking at him as he’d never been looked at before, considering him without envy or hatred or pity or need. It was a look from the wild, as out of place in the patrons’ zoo café as Syd was. He never wanted to look away.

  But the panther turned and jumped from the table, again without a sound, and left the café, its tail swishing behind it as it went.

  “You just stared that panther down,” Knox whispered into his ear, resting his hand delicately on the small of Syd’s back.

  “No,” said Syd, wishing Knox hadn’t just ruined the moment and stepping away from his patron’s touch. He couldn’t explain what he’d just felt even if he wanted to. And glancing back at Knox, he was certain that he didn’t want to.

  “Listen.” Knox leaned in conspiratorially. Marie had gone over to the dead woman, leaned down to check her pulse and her breathing, hoping against hope that they hadn’t just lost their way out. “Let’s just ditch Marie and get out of here. We’ll find another way for you to get to the Rebooters. We don’t need her. She’s crazy. She’ll get us all killed.”

  “I don’t even know if I want to go to the Rebooters,” he said. “I don’t want anyone owning me, your father or them.”

  “But what if what that old guy said is true? What if you are, like, the savior of the proxies or something?”

  Syd shrugged. “Do you think I am?”

  Knox didn’t answer. He only wanted Syd to go so he could hurt his father and they both knew it. The rest of it didn’t matter to Knox. He didn’t care about a cause. He hadn’t thought this through all that well. If Syd did have some kind of power in him, that’d be it for the world Knox knew. Aside from the last few days, he quite liked the world he knew. It worked for him.

  “I’ll take that as a no,” said Syd.

  “Let’s just say I’m a skeptic,” Knox replied. “But you’re safer with me than with her.”

  “Why are you so committed to helping me?” asked Syd. “Last night you tried to beat my face in. You can’t hate your father that much.”

  “Yes, I can.” Knox didn’t elaborate. Syd didn’t press him. He didn’t need to know Knox any better than he did already. He wasn’t trying to make a friend.

  Syd looked over at Marie, the true believer who put her cause before everything, and then at Knox, the pretty boy who believed in nothing but himself. Syd had the EMD stick. He had the choice. Stay with them. Ditch them. It was up to him.

  With the murdered woman in front of him and the chaos of the patrons’ zoo all around him, Syd smiled. It was the first time in his life that he ever had a real choice in anything.

  He stepped over to Marie and stood over the patron’s body. He squatted down in front of her. Knox scuttled over to be in earshot. He didn’t want the two of them having secrets from him.

  “You think I can change the world,” he said.

  She nodded with her hand still resting on the dead woman’s cheek. “Someone has to.”

  “If we’re going to make it to Old Detroit, I need to know that you and Knox aren’t going to kill each other,” Syd said.

  She nodded again.

  Syd rested his hand over hers, pulled it away from the dead woman’s cheek, and looked her in the eyes. Her purple irises contracted.

  “I can’t change the world,” he told her, trying to be as clear as possible. He needed her to know he wasn’t a hero. He couldn’t carry the weight of her faith in him out of the city, across the desert, all the way to the ruins of Old Detroit. If they were going together, they needed to go as people, not as ideas. “I can’t take away your guilt. Beatrice is dead and I can’t make that right.”

  She reached up and put her finger, still cold from the dead body, against the bone behind his ear. She touched the four letters of his mark. “You don’t have to believe it,” she said. “But I know it’s true. I just know it.”

  “You have a serious glitch! You know that?” Knox interrupted. He threw his hands up in the air, exasperated. “Listen to Syd! He. Is. Telling. You. He isn’t a revolutionary. He’s just some—again no offense here, Syd—some swampcat running for his life. He just told me. That’s all he wants to be.”

  “He’s not ‘just some swampcat’—” Marie started, when she was cut off by the sudden blast of an EMD pulse and sent reeling backward over her heels, twitching on the floor. Syd whirled around, his own EMD stick raised.

  “Right-o,” said Egan, strolling across the café floor as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He gripped a dinged-up old EMD stick in one hand and his beloved antique knife in the other. The blade was wet with bright-red blood. Fresh. “He’s my swampcat.”

  [32]

  EGAN WAS IN THE same clothes he’d worn to Arcadia, trying to look lux. Knox could tell there was nothing lux about him. He didn’t belong at the patrons’ zoo. Even his EMD stick was old.

  It took Knox a moment to see the wet blade in his other hand.

  “Egan,” said Syd, so shocked to see his friend that he didn’t check if Marie was okay.

  “Girl was trying to strangle you.” Egan pointed at Marie with the stick.

  “No.” Syd shook his head. “She wasn’t.”

  “Oops.” Egan shrugged and giggled, his pupils wide as the sky.

  Syd started to wonder if he were back in a nightmare. The bloody knife, the body on the floor, the impossibility of Egan . . . he wished it were all in his head. He saw the rise and fall of Marie’s chest and felt a little better about the reality he was trapped in. She was breathing. Egan hadn’t killed her. One lucky break for the day.

  Syd rushed over to his friend.

  Knox seethed. Egan had done this, all this. He was the one who had approached Nine about the fake ID. He was the one who brought Syd to Arcadia. If it weren’t for Egan, Knox never would have met his proxy. He never would have found out that Marie was still alive. He’d have dealt with his guilt and his father’s disappointment and moved on. His life would be . . . well, not this anyway.

  “What are you doing here?” Syd asked.

  “Looking out for my best friend,” Egan answered. “Like I always said I would. Now let’s get out of here. Extinct animals freak me out.”

  Knox had to strain to listen to Syd and Egan talking. His alliance with Syd, fragile as it had been, was now in danger of shattering completely. He had to know what Egan was up to.

  “You killed that woman.” Syd pointed at the dead patron on the floor.

  “She was going to send you straight to Sterling,” Egan told him. “You can’t trust these Upper City people.”

  “Mr. Baram sent her!” Syd objected.

  “Trust me, brother. She was going to sell you out. I know things.”

  “Did you
let the animals go?” Syd asked.

  “You think I could do that?”

  “That’s not an answer,” Knox interjected. Egan looked him up and down, then turned back to Syd.

  “Can’t believe you ran off with . . . him,” said Egan.

  “How did you even find me here?” Syd demanded.

  “I had some help. I can’t explain now.” Egan wiped the blade of his knife on his pants leg and tucked it into his belt. He tapped Syd on the shoulder with the EMD stick—it wasn’t turned on anymore—and nodded at Knox. “Want me to fry this knockoff loser?”

  Knox stepped back. He spread his hands with open palms, in a gesture he thought looked open and trusting without looking too much like surrender. It was, however, surrender.

  For some reason, his mother’s face passed through his mind. It was hazy, like a bad transmission. He hardly remembered what she looked like, she’d been gone so long. If Egan killed him right now, maybe he’d get to see her again.

  He held his breath, braced for the pain. He didn’t know what an EMD pulse felt like, but it looked agonizing. He hoped he could handle it without embarrassing himself. He felt an anxious pressure on his bladder.

  “No.” Syd pushed Egan’s EMD stick down. He was not going to let anyone else die because of him. Not even Knox.

  Egan grunted. “Fine. If you want to take your patron, I get it. A little revenge? Maybe something else . . .” Egan smirked and Knox cringed. “But the girl? What possible use could you have for her?”

  Syd rolled his eyes. “It’s not that. At all.”

  “Well, let me know if you change your mind.” He smiled widely at Knox and waved the EMD stick in his direction. “I can play matchmaker . . .”

  “Don’t even joke,” said Syd.

  “You used to be more fun,” said Egan.

  “I didn’t used to have the whole city trying to kill me,” said Syd. “Anyway, Knox stays with me. They both do.”