Proxy

by Alex London

  At the same time, he wished he were riding with Syd again. He had the urge to explain himself, to tell Syd about his mother and his father, like that would justify why he didn’t move to help back there in the cave, why he froze up. Maybe he wanted Syd to forgive him.

  Guilt.

  That might have been the only purely human feeling Knox had left.

  They had to ride single file through the narrow cuts in the canyon. If Knox had access to a datastream he could try to bring up a map to the Interstate. It wouldn’t be on any of the authorized streams, but someone would have posted it somewhere. Knox felt useless without a network connection.

  The sound of the horses clomping kept a steady rhythm in his head. The bounce of their steps jostled his body and he had to keep his legs flexed to hold on to the wide flank of the animal. Each movement rocked him forward into Marie’s back and then back away from it so he had to hold on to her to keep from sliding off. It was a pulsing kind of touch, but it was enough to keep him awake as they rode.

  Their path twisted and turned. Syd kept stopping and looking up, as if there were a datastream just over his head telling him where to go. Knox worried for a second that Syd was secretly wearing Egan’s old lenses and leading them into some prearranged trap. He beat himself up for not searching the dead kid to get the lenses himself. He hadn’t been thinking clearly. Corpse robbery wasn’t his first instinct. He guessed it probably wasn’t Syd’s either. The lenses were still back in the cave.

  “He’s looking for the sun, I think,” said Marie. “Navigating by it. I’ve read about people doing that.”

  “You think he knows how?” asked Knox.

  “It’s not hard,” she said, pointing. “The sun’s right there. It rises in the east.”

  “So what are we gonna do when it’s right above us at noon?”

  The question stumped Marie. Up ahead, Syd was wondering the same thing.

  The air in the deep canyon was cool and the high walls cut off the sun. Occasional breaks in the rock sent rays of light down to the trail and there was a pleasant warmth when they rode through them, followed by a deep chill when they trotted out.

  They heard the buzz of drones flying over the canyons, but they were safe in the narrow cuts and channels below. Knox took a sip of the water they’d taken from the bandits. They’d taken most of the supplies, leaving only the horses with a bit of water. It was the closest thing those Maes goons would get to mercy and even that was more than they deserved.

  The smugglers would know these canyons well, and if they escaped from their ropes, would find it easy to follow three teenagers. Syd doubled back a few times. No sense making it easy on them.

  They reached a low arch in the rock in front of them, and had to dismount and lead the horses through on foot. Knox noticed that the dust on Syd’s face was streaked, as if he’d been crying. He climbed off the horse and let Marie lead it through the low opening. He rushed up to Syd’s side.

  “Syd, I’m—” He wanted to say something to him, although once his mouth was moving, he realized he didn’t know what to say.

  Syd looked back at him, waiting.

  The way Syd had held Egan’s body and whispered to it made Knox wonder if the two of them had been more than friends, or if Syd maybe had wanted them to be. Or maybe that’s just how it felt to lose a friend. If Knox had seen Simi, Chey, or Nine executed in front him, he’d be pretty messed up himself. He tried to picture cradling one of their heads in his own hands as the life drained out of it, but Nine kept making faces and Chey just looked like she was sleeping. Knox never did have much control over his imagination. Or much connection to his friends.

  “I don’t think anyone can follow us this way,” Syd said, his voice scratchy from the dry air and the long silence of the ride. Then he turned his back on Knox and led his horse ahead.

  “Come on, Justice, come on,” Marie urged her horse.

  “Justice?” Knox raised an eyebrow.

  “I told you I named her.”

  “Yeah, but Justice? They’re just tools, you know.”

  “They’re beautiful.”

  “Okay, beautiful tools.”

  “Sounds like someone else I know.” She smirked at him and he remembered their car ride, the snappy responses, the mischievous grin. This girl contained that girl. Whoever she was was also whoever she had been. The same was true for him, he guessed. He wondered if anyone really ever changed, or if stuff just piled on and on, covering up, but never erasing all the different parts. How deep would you have to dig to find who you started out as?

  “So . . . Justice?” He patted the horse on the side as they walked.

  “It seemed like a good name for her,” she said.

  “Her?”

  Marie nodded. “I don’t know a lot about anatomy, but I think this one’s pretty obvious.”

  “I thought she was checking me out,” Knox joked. He was trying to capture some of that sparkle, the flirting, the banter. He needed it. Otherwise, he had no idea who he was anymore.

  Marie rolled her eyes.

  “Did you always hate me?” Knox asked her. “Even before the accident?”

  Marie stopped walking with the horse. She looked him over. He brushed a strand of hair out of his eyes. He knew it was a lame move, but old habits died hard.

  Marie took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said. “I did.”

  Then she walked the horse around a tight turn and disappeared. He followed and caught up with her in a great bowl-shaped cavern, with just a patch of sky in the center, two hundred feet up. The beam of light that pierced into it lit a perfect circle on the ground. Marie waited inside the circle for Knox to catch up.

  “You aren’t so terrible when you keep your mouth shut,” Marie added as she helped him back onto the horse. Before he could open his mouth again, she smacked the horse’s side and gave a loud “Heyup!” They rode on.

  When the sun was at its highest, they stopped to rest.

  “We need to eat something,” said Marie. “And feed the horses.”

  Syd hadn’t even thought about feeding the horses. Or himself.

  Marie found some EpiCure pills in the bandits’ supplies and handed each of the boys one of them, then took a handful over to the horses.

  Syd studied his pill, a bright blue lozenge the size of a knuckle, shining in his palm. It was stamped with a logo from EpiCure Incorporated and a flavor below it. Syd had heard of these pills, but never actually swallowed one. They were too expensive for most Valve kids, who ate food that came from the local grower gardens and the runoff from the EpiCure factory, protein pastes and gristly bone fragments boiled into soup.

  The pills were designed to create the mental sensation of taste, while delivering balanced nutrition at preset levels. They were why there was no such thing as a patron who was too fat or too skinny. Their food was the best that science had to offer. Their bodies were designed.

  Syd had a pill for something called “Lasagna.” He tossed it back and took a slug of water, wincing at the strange sensation of a solid object going down this throat.

  After a few seconds, he felt an astonishing warmth in his stomach, a fullness, as if he’d just eaten the New Year’s meal at Mr. Baram’s and then a flood of flavor in his mouth, hot and bubbly, with a taste of some kind of herb and meat and then a sweetness and a creaminess. He’d never had anything like it and it gave him the urge to burp, which he did, loudly.

  “Mmm,” said Knox, swallowing his own pill. “Pepper steak. Love that stuff.” He laughed to himself. “You know, one time I hacked the EpiCure pill database and made an entire batch of pepper steak taste like armpit. It was a riot.”

  “A week hauling their factory runoff to the river for dumping, and another selling recalled pills in the Valve,” said Syd. “I got punched in the face by a lot of unhappy customers who found the taste of armpit less than appetizing.”

  Knox cringed. “I thought they had bots for that kind of work.”

  “They have bots
for everything,” Syd said. “But they use proxies. It keeps us busy. Keeps us from, you know, joining the Rebooter cause.”

  The irony was lost on none of them.

  When the sun started its descent to the west, they mounted up again and kept riding. They rode all day, twisting and turning and saying very little to one another. As the sun got lower and lower, the canyon floor got colder. Syd stopped under a high overhang in the rock, like a shelf, and tied up his horse on a jagged boulder. Marie did the same and Knox jumped off, his legs sore and bowed.

  “I can’t tell which way to go at night,” Syd explained. “So we’ll camp here, get some sleep.”

  “Can we make a fire?” Knox asked. The bandits had ChemiFlame packs in their supplies, so it’d be easy to light one. The desert cold had already set his teeth chattering and Syd looked even worse. His lips had a light bluish tint to them. He had less meat on his bones than either of the patron kids. Syd liked the idea of a fire, but Marie disagreed.

  “The drones would catch that heat signature, even down here,” she said.

  “We’ll freeze to death without it,” said Knox.

  “There are heat blankets in the supplies we took,” Marie said. “The shiny things. We’ll wrap up in those and huddle together for the night.”

  Knox raised an eyebrow at her. He wasn’t going to actually say anything.

  She rolled her eyes, but she didn’t insult him.

  Progress.

  [40]

  ONCE THEY’D LAID THE blankets out beneath the overhang, they stood side by side considering their bed. Marie turned to Knox.

  “I am so not sleeping next to you,” she declared.

  “Huddling together was your idea,” Knox objected. He couldn’t help a slight grin from lighting up his dusty face.

  “You’re a dog,” she told him and Knox laughed. He didn’t deny it. Hadn’t she said she liked him better when he kept his mouth shut?

  Syd stepped away from the two of them. He didn’t feel like arguing about sleeping arrangements. He stood and shivered near the red rocks of the canyon wall, looking up at a discolored patch high above. It was a painting of some kind, a splotch of black and red and brown sprayed on the wall by an artist who’d been dead for centuries. Anyone it meant anything to was dead.

  He stepped back a little to get a better look, and a trick of sound bouncing off the walls made everything Knox and Marie were saying perfectly clear to him where he stood, as if they were whispering right into his ear. He listened, like he used to listen to the Changs arguing in the shack across the alley. The thought that he’d had a virus growing in his blood the whole time, something dangerous and powerful, discolored the memories. Mr. Baram had known it and kept it from him and he couldn’t think about his past without the present distorting the memory. Instead, he listened.

  “That means Syd’s in the middle,” Knox whispered to Marie.

  “You’re a genius,” Marie replied.

  “But what if he—” Knox lowered his voice, but it didn’t change the clarity where Syd stood. “What if he gets . . . you know? Ideas?”

  “Ideas?”

  “You know . . .” Knox didn’t feel he needed to elaborate.

  “Oh.” Marie nodded. “Like the ideas you’re having about me?”

  Knox didn’t exactly deny it. Syd smirked and kept his back to them. It felt good to smile. He remembered there was more to life than his own misery and regret.

  “Grow up, Knox,” Marie grunted. “Not everyone thinks about sex all the time.”

  Clearly Marie didn’t know a lot about guys.

  “Syd lost his best friend today,” she said. “He killed a woman and he’s running for his life with two people that he seems to hate. I don’t think he’s looking to jump you in your sleep. Hard as that must be for you to imagine.”

  “He kissed me,” said Knox.

  Syd remembered the feeling of Knox’s lips against his, the pulse beating in his neck where his hand gripped it to keep Knox from pulling away, to keep the Guardians from seeing. They say you never forget your first kiss.

  “He did not.” Marie crossed her arms.

  “In Arcadia, after Syd found me, he grabbed me and he kissed me, like, with feeling . . . I was too tweaked to resist.”

  “You’re lying,” Marie said.

  Nope, thought Syd. He’s not. Except the “feeling” Syd had at the time was not the one that Knox was thinking of.

  “I am not lying,” said Knox. “There were these Guardians after him and he, like, used my face to hide.”

  “So he didn’t really kiss you,” Marie said. “He used you.”

  “He used me by kissing me,” said Knox. “He could have done something else, but he went right to kissing. What does that say?”

  “That you’re full of yourself.”

  Knox grumbled some kind of remark Syd couldn’t discern.

  “Anyway, what are you afraid of?” Marie teased him. “That he’ll make a pass and you’ll enjoy it?”

  “No . . . ,” Knox said. He was pretty sure that wasn’t the case.

  “Or is this an act?” Marie goaded him. “Do you secretly want my approval to snuggle with your proxy? They say that everyone gets feelings for their proxy sometime. It’s a phase.”

  “Oh, just shut up,” Knox grunted. “Let him sleep in the middle. I’ll curl up with him. I don’t care.”

  “Don’t worry, Knox.” Syd turned around and strolled up to them, grinning. “If anyone asks, I’ll say you put up more of a fight.”

  Knox blushed rust red. He tried to change the subject. “What were you looking at up there on the rocks?” he asked.

  “Some painting,” said Syd. He didn’t know a lot about art. It was not a subject they covered at Vocation High School IV. He wondered if the Upper City kids would think he was dumb. Did they learn about ancient art in their lux schools? If he had a projector, he could look it up in the datastream, but out here, the only data were what you could see with your own two eyes.

  Knox and Marie squinted up where Syd pointed. The painting showed a collection of figures, a group of men with sticks around some kind of big animal with horns.

  “What do you see?” Syd asked.

  “People? Dancing around an animal?” Knox suggested. “Maybe they’re worshipping the animal? Like in one of the old religions?”

  “I think they’re hunting it,” said Syd.

  “It’s a sacrifice,” said Marie. “The ancient religions used to sacrifice animals. The blood of the animals was like payment to the gods.”

  “Payment for what?” Knox wondered.

  None of them knew.

  “Who do you think painted it?” Syd asked. They didn’t know that either. He guessed patrons didn’t study this stuff in school either.

  “Collectors in the Upper City judge art by price,” said Marie. “They have consultants who buy it for them.”

  “I think my father owns art he’s never even seen,” said Knox.

  They all looked back at the painting. The style looked so basic, so old, the colors organic, almost as if the painting itself were part of the desert, put there by the wind and the heat and time itself. Syd wondered how long it had been since anyone had laid eyes on it.

  “We should get to sleep,” Marie said. “We’ll need to rest for the ride tomorrow.”

  “Do you know how much farther it is to the, uh, Interstate?” asked Knox.

  “No idea,” said Syd. “We just have to keep riding east and hope.”

  A gust of wind tore through the canyon and Syd hugged himself from the cold.

  Marie smiled and put her arm around his shoulders. He flinched, but then relaxed. He let himself be guided.

  They huddled up where the walls blocked the wind, and wrapped themselves in their emergency blankets, Syd in between Knox and Marie, with the bundle of stolen supplies for pillows. They watched their breath frost in the air in front of them. It was hard to believe how hot the day had been, now that the night was so cold.
No wonder humans abandoned the desert regions. Nature clearly did not want them there.

  When he closed his eyes, Syd saw Egan’s face, looking back at him with unseeing eyes. Dead. He kept his eyes open. He wasn’t ready for sleep. The thought terrified him.

  “Knox?” Syd asked, sensing that the others were just as awake as he was.

  “Yeah?” Knox answered.

  Syd dropped his voice to a whisper and rolled onto his side to look Knox in the eyes. He spoke loud enough for Marie to hear: “Will you kiss me good night?”

  “I . . . I . . .” Knox stuttered.

  Syd rolled onto his back and looked at Marie. A wide grin broke across his face. He burst out laughing, real full-on belly laughs.

  “He was totally going to do it,” Marie cried.

  “You two are glitched.” Knox shook his head.

  Syd and Marie fell into convulsions of laughter. Syd hadn’t laughed like this in ages. He’d never laughed like this with anyone but Egan, in fact, but now, he couldn’t stop. It rolled over him in waves.

  Knox sat up. “Seriously? Seriously?”

  Marie gasped and Syd covered his eyes with one forearm, his whole body shaking. He could hardly breathe.

  “Beyond glitched.” Knox dropped his head back onto the makeshift pillow.

  Syd cackled. “The expression on your face . . .”

  “Go on, make jokes,” Knox grumbled.

  “Look, he’s pouting.” Marie made a sad face, but she could hardly hold it. Laughter broke it open again. She laughed carelessly, maniacally. Syd wondered if he’d gone too far. The pretty ones could be so fragile. In the sky, lightning flashed.

  “Whatever,” said Knox. “I only kiss guys when Guardians are watching. I’m an exhibitionist.” He exhaled loudly and let a heavy moment pass before he exploded in laughter himself, which set off a new round of laughing in the other two.

  “Marie, on the other hand . . . ,” Knox added.

  “Not on your life!” she said, cackling.

  “Well”—Knox pointed toward the horses—“I saw Justice eyeing me earlier, maybe . . .”

  Thunder from a distant storm replied and that too seemed funny.