She folded up her map after first ensuring she knew which way to turn to reach the empty sections, and slid the map safely inside a pocket that snapped shut; she couldn’t lose that paper now. Then she stood and called the invisible cloud of nanos to her, reforming the now all-too-familiar exoskeleton around her body. She checked for outside foot traffic and, once everything cleared, she slipped back out into the primary corridor, floated into the sky, and headed for the mysteries at the far side of the station.
She hoped her plan worked, that the residents and security forces were too distracted by the chaos she’d start to pay any attention to the ship Micah left here. Distracted enough that they could do nothing to impede her way to the ship.
Luck would be on her side this time.
It had to be.
—8—
DEIRDRE SILVER
THEY LEFT HER ISOLATED in a room where the lights never went out. Sleep was difficult; it seemed as if they were watching her, brightening the lights when she seemed closest to sleep.
The closest thing she had to human contact was the woman who entered her room twice per day, leaving behind a fresh tray of food and water, retrieving the one from the previous visit that Deirdre hadn’t touched. She felt little hunger as it was, and the processed sludge she saw glopped upon the plates sent to her offered no scent or visual appeal, triggering nary a rumble of hunger from her stomach.
Her mental anguish played a role as well; as human minds do, it replayed for her with gleeful sadism the memories that confirmed the truth she’d realized here, that her mother hadn’t died, that her father had known, and neither of them had bothered to relieve her pain. Her eyes flicked around the Spartan accommodations, sparse supplies, and disgusting food, and she cursed her own stupidity, throwing her life of opulent privilege away from some strange bout of consciousness, saving a man whose body she’d used and whose name she could no longer recall.
She wondered, sometimes aloud, if eating was worth it, because she wasn’t sure why she should eat when she wasn’t sure if she wanted to live.
She rose, moved to the tray of food, poked at the slimy mess, wrinkled her nose. Then she returned to the bed, back against the wall, arms wrapped around the knees she pulled toward her chin.
Even as she considered ending it all, there was a part of her, deep inside, that still fought. The part that wanted to break free of this prison, escape to the outside world despite the Ravager threat, and undo every bit of damage she’d caused, if indirectly. She wanted to chase Roddy down, apologize for her affairs—the ones he knew of and those he likely didn’t—and try to convince them both that she was sorry, persuade him that she'd changed and would spend the rest of her life undoing the damage to the world and their relationship in whatever manner she could.
Even if she could find him, the odds of him accepting her back and forgiving her were slim. Roddy was a man with an annoying unbreakable and unwavering moral compass. Since she’d confirmed for him her latest act of infidelity, and since he’d eventually learn that she'd known the swarms would be unleashed upon an unsuspecting populace… the odds he’d do anything other than walk away for near zero.
The odds didn’t matter, though. She'd do what she could, and she managed to soften the look of loathing she was certain he'd offer her at any future meeting—then she’d consider her life a success.
Her eyes moved back toward the food. Her visions of future encounters with Roddy, and his likely disgust, condemnation, and loathing of her didn’t contribute to her desire to eat. But in their time together, Roddy had trained her well. Food could serve as a powerful weapon against prisoners, powerful in a way that brute force could never be. A prisoner denied food would offer anything in exchange for a morsel to satisfy the horrific pangs of hunger; one so desperate to eat wouldn’t consider the possibility that captors could easily embed poisons or drugs, killing the captive or winnowing away any initial steely resolve against providing for the captor anything desired.
She had no interest in ingesting any such substances. And so she sat, ignored the food, and waited for her captors to return and tell her the next steps in her life.
She closed her eyes, trying to will her body to sleep despite the bright lights and beginning pangs of hunger finally swirling around inside her. Pain she could withstand. Fatigue might get her, though, wrenching away her mental sharpness to the point that she’d act contrary to her interests without any drugs.
She focused on her breathing, slowing down her heart rate, slowing down her respiration, feeling consciousness starting to flee…
The door clicked. Her eyes snapped open.
It was the woman, the captor who'd gleefully shared the truth of Delilah’s survival and prominence in the global power structure of the new world. The woman who was also Jeffrey's wife. She frowned a bit. He'd played her that whole time, leading her to believe that he'd been her unknown betrothed, only to be pushed aside in favor of a better pawn in Oswald's human chess match. He'd known she'd feel sympathy… and curiosity. She'd want to know if he'd find her… interesting, intriguing, even desirable. To imagine how things might have been had Roddy never showed up on their radar. And she'd thus been on her best behavior, doing whatever he'd asked, trying to earn his favor.
Just like he’d wanted.
He'd played her for a fool, and she'd played that part all too well.
Now Jeffrey was home with his wife, and she was imprisoned, looking at a bowl of sludge that made her long for the fish and mossy greens that had been the barely tolerable subsistence they’d endured on the journey here.
The woman didn't bother with preamble. “I have questions, Deirdre. And you're going to answer them.”
She'd been expecting this. They wouldn’t just leave her here and wait for Oswald to reach out. They’d mine her for information first, little nuggets they could use in any conversations with her father. Or her mother.
She could try to resist, and in so doing tempt them to resort to more direct threats to extract that information. They might even follow through. Drugs. Torture.
Or she could assist, making herself an open book, answering every question without hesitation or abridgements. In that approach, though, they might eventually exhaust what she knew; her information was already dated in this new world.
And if she wasn’t useful for information, and her parents rejected any negotiation to free her… Jeffrey would have his excuse to kill her.
Pain or death. Neither appealed.
A third option seemed wise. She'd give up some information when asked, but not all. She’d give the general data without the most critical details. With proper questioning, they’d understand what she was doing, of course. But she’d help them just enough to retain her usefulness, perhaps even develop a bit of rapport with her captors. Perhaps she’d tease out more perks and freedoms in exchange for more enhanced answers.
They might even come to see her as an ally in the global struggle. And why not? If her parents would throw her to the sharks, she had no reason not to ally with others against them.
It was the way the game was played. Control, or be controlled.
She glanced up at the woman. “What do you want to know?”
The woman remained by the door, and Deirdre saw her draw a small gun, which she trained lazily upon the prisoner. “I want to make it clear that you have no choice but to answer.”
Deirdre rolled her eyes and sighed. “We both know you're not going to shoot me. If you kill me now, you don’t know what I’ll offer. And, if you kill me now, my parents will eventually figure out you had nothing to offer them and will renege on any deal you might make.” She stretched out and stood. “And we both know that if I leave this room without you, the people you’re certain to have waiting outside will gun me down within five feet, even if I manage to take you hostage first. So stop with the theater. Put the gun down, ask your questions, and we’ll chat like reasonable people.”
She hoped she sounded strong; inside, she was shaking at a response
that surprised her.
The woman blinked. “That wasn’t quite the response I’d expected.”
“You’ll find that I'm full of surprises.”
The woman safetied her weapon and loaded it back into a holster worn on her left side. “Tell me where your father went as the Ravagers became active, and who went with him.”
She pondered her answer carefully, weighing what the woman probably knew and what she didn’t. She lived in New Venice and knew Delilah remained alive. That meant she was certainly aware of the space station. If she knew that, she had to know the truth of powered human flight. She might even know Roddy’s true profession in service to Oswald.
But Deirdre hadn’t been there when the ship left. She knew only that Oswald would be aboard, but didn’t know for certain about anyone else. It was reasonable to think his private pilot would be there. But Deidre didn’t know if they’d brought others aboard as well.
And that became her answer. She looked the woman directly in the eye. “He planned to leave the surface with me, if that's what you mean. I obviously wasn't with him at the time, so I can’t confirm that for certain. But I'd assume he did.”
She didn’t look surprised at all. “Roddy was with him, then.”
It wasn't a question. “I can't imagine Roddy would be anywhere else.”
“Did anyone else go with them?”
Deirdre frowned. “I was supposed to go with them. To the best of my knowledge, there were no plans to include anyone else in the departure.”
The woman folded her arms, and Deirdre didn’t miss the fingers brushing the top of the gun. “I didn’t mean you. I’m asking about someone else. Someone… special to your father.”
The double meaning there hurt. The implication that Deirdre wasn’t special to her father was like a knife between her ribs, twisted for added pain because she knew it was true. “He told me to be on the ship. He didn't clear the final passenger list with me.”
The woman's eyes turned dark. “I am trying to learn the fate of a woman named Audrey. I believe she… worked for your father, no?”
Deirdre blanched. “Oh.” If they knew Audrey, and found out what happened to her, then Deirdre suspected she might not gain special perks any time soon. No matter how helpful she might be.
“So you know her?”
“I try not to think about her too much.” It seemed reasonable for a daughter to respond in a snarky tone about his father’s young lover.
“Did Audrey leave in the ship with your father?”
“I don't know.”
“Do you know if she was in the office tower at the time the Ravagers hit?”
Deirdre nodded. “She was there when I left. That was right before the Ravager activation.” She tried to maintain eye contact, but found it difficult in the face of the woman’s penetrating stare.
The woman studied Deirdre’s face carefully, looking for some indication that Deirdre was lying. “You're hiding something from me.”
Deirdre tilted her head. “You asked questions. I answered them honestly.” She tried to add a bit of nonchalance to the answer.
The woman nodded. Slowly. “That’s true.” Then she offered that devastating smirk. “You've confirmed quite a bit of what I've already learned from my other… guest.”
Deidre paled. “Your other guest? Who?”
The woman opened the door. “If he tells me something you haven't, then I'll… be quite unhappy. And if I find out you've lied to me, Deirdre?”
She stepped out into the hallway. “Then I'll make sure that Roddy feels an excruciating level of pain… and that he knows it's your fault.”
She slammed the door, leaving Deirdre shaking and in tears.
—9—
RODDY LIGHT
HIS MENTAL POWERS triggered, grabbing invisible waves of input he couldn’t see but could feel in his fashion, translating whatever format that data took into something he could feel. Their emotions, their thoughts, came to him in the form of a very real waking dream, as if he could pull back the layers of reality and see the ultimate truth, without the veneer and polish and niceties of human communication that were, in the end, all just forms of lying.
What he saw troubled him, for the two people before him believed what they said to be true.
They truly believed that they were his parents.
More impossibly, they believed that Roddy had been married before his powerful amnesia, an amnesia they believed they’d caused. Roddy hadn’t just been a married man when this bizarre adventure began, though, as if that wasn’t troubling enough.
They also believe him to be a father himself. Of twins, no less. Still was, unless they’d hidden an even worse truth from him than the others they so earnestly believed to be true.
And given everything else that had happened since that fateful day that Deirdre killed Audrey and he’d taken Oswald to the floating city in space… he had no reason to think they were wrong.
And it made him realize just how much he wanted—no, needed—an explanation of the years of his life that just didn’t exist in his memories.
Jeffrey and Desdemona bound his hands lightly before him, using cuffs that looked tighter, heavier, and more painful than they were. The pair adopted stern looks and guided him with an extra bit of firmness to the door and out into the hallway. They nudged him as needed, dragged him as necessary, and otherwise made clear to anyone watching that the large man they steered to some unknown destination was their prisoner.
If the look on his face mirrored in any way the turmoil inside him, few would doubt the couple to be effective jailers, efficient at rendering the most physically dominant man imaginable weak before them.
He didn’t care. If their words were true, it meant he’d been unfaithful in the most public way possible to his first wife, for there was no one in the Western world with more visibility than Deirdre Silver.
His sense of honor ate away at him as he stumbled in whatever direction they led him. The idea that he had children who’d think him a terrible, evil man sapped him of the physical strength he’d always had, at least in the years still inside his head.
He’d paid little attention to the path they weaved through the intricate maze of crisscrossing hallways and changing tile patterns; typically, he’d be tracking their steps and turns and watching for the seemingly minor nuanced changes around them to mentally map his way back out. They stopped him at last, operated a touchscreen outside one of the many doors, opened the door after faint buzzing sound resonated through the hall, and nudged him forward into the room.
His captors or parents or both opened the door and made a show of shoving him inside, shouting at him about his need to cooperate better in the future lest his treatment further deteriorate. His mental instability translated into a physical imbalance, and he stumbled forward into the room, face planting into the thin mattress atop a narrow bed shoved against the far wall. It occurred to him that the mental distress had him acting in the best way possible to sell an illusion that he was a prisoner here.
Assuming it was an illusion, of course.
The door closed with a click that echoed through the small room.
The thin mattress smelled faintly of sweat from the last resident or prisoner who’d lodged here, and Roddy’s nose crinkled as he continued trying to make sense of what he'd been told. And he also couldn’t understand why, if the man called Jeffrey and the woman called Desdemona were truly his parents, they felt the need to play up the idea that he was a prisoner and not their son, or at least someone they knew.
He felt Mona’s hand on his shoulder. It felt comfortable, familiar somehow, as if his body knew what his mind couldn’t. He rolled over slowly and sat up, legs dangling off the bed, eyes darting back and forth between the two of them, asking all the questions he couldn’t quite formulate aloud.
Jeffrey glanced over his shoulder at the door, as if to ensure that it had shut securely, and then spoke. “Mona and I operate this facility, Roddy, as a secure site
against the Ravager swarms we all knew were coming. It’s here for those who, for whatever reason, didn’t care to wait things out aboard the space station. The facility here is nominally loyal to Phoenix, with various factions here allied with the various big names in the Phoenix world, like your boss. Former boss, that is.” He offered a wry smile that Roddy didn’t return. “While everyone here follows our orders on day-to-day operational issues, only about a quarter of them know that we do so as a means of gathering intel on the Elite, and that our end goal is the elimination of those Elite, freeing humanity at last from the shackles of those who dictate existence from the shadows. Does that make sense?”
Roddy nodded.
“When the young man who was known to all here as our son announced he was leaving for the cityplexes to expose the truth about Phoenix to the masses, he did so with an entirely different look than you have now. You are, in your current form, totally unrecognizable to everyone here, even our closest allies. The old Roddy’s declaration meant that we had to publicly declare that we disowned you, that it would be our duty and our pleasure to capture and imprison you for daring to question the motives and actions of Phoenix. When you showed up here, you were either our disowned son or a member of Phoenix who somehow didn’t make it to safety before the activation or someone not part of Phoenix who, for lack of a better term, illegally lived through the swarm. In each of those cases, security should detain you for thorough questioning and isolated imprisonment.”
“I understand that part,” Roddy said, his words feeling like molasses as they spilled sloppily from his mouth. “But why… nobody recognizes me… I don’t know of the events you mention… It’s…” He paused, feeling helpless. “I don’t understand any of this, other than to know you truly believe everything you say.”
Mona squeezed Roddy’s shoulder as Jeffrey nodded before responding. “It will take time to understand everything. There’s a way for you to regain your full lifetime of memories, and you’ll have the ability to do that if you so choose. For now, except in cases where we are offered adequate privacy from prying ears and eyes, we will treat you as a dangerous prisoner and let everyone who asks know that you are uncooperative and unwilling to tell us how you came to be here through the height of the Ravager rampage. You are viewed as a threat, and as the leaders of this facility with responsibility for its security, we have a deep personal interest in you and how you got here. And for what purpose.”
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