The nanobots rummaging through my memories and reassembling the pieces therein were taking their time. I'd connected the crooked line of memories that had returned, and they all pointed to Lou. Coming back to the Lowers might rank as one of my more questionable maneuvers in the past twenty-four hours, but with so few options still on the table, we had to start playing what we had.
"You think that's a good idea?" Bo asked. It was hard to say whether his voice emitted genuine concern or if the Quick was tinkering with my auditory feedback loop.
Lou and I had not left our relationship in a good place, but hopefully he was enough of a businessman to at least hear me out before putting a bullet in my chest.
"No," I agreed.
Bo chuckled, a deep rolling bass echoing through his barrel chest. "Well, at least you know you're being stupid."
That seemed an odd thing to consider good, but I held that opinion to myself and followed Bo through the front door. A wall of noise hit me first: voices shouting over one another, skin sliding and grinding against every surface imaginable. Sounds that only vaguely resembled music pumped through speakers loud enough to make my ears ring.
The smell came next. Vinegar sweat mixed with wet rot. It filled the air, a cloud of humidity sticking to everything.
Bo strode purposefully into the sea of flesh. People scurried out of his way, roaches fleeing the light. I followed in his shadow before the throngs of tweakers came back together in an orgy of limbs and bad decisions.
My attention drifted over to the bar where I'd sat just the night before talking to Georgie. I saw the familiar worn stool I'd called home. The woman whose name I'd never bothered learning was scrubbing glasses behind the bar with a rag stained with brown splotches.
So much can change in a day.
There was something else at the bar I couldn't ignore. A man sitting half obscured by shadow. My feet redirected me of their own accord. Bo made a sound, but didn't try to stop me.
"Jack Dunn," I said, arriving at the bar.
The man stared down into the cloudy liquid of his drink as if it might hold the secrets of the universe. His head turned slowly, eyes flashing like two copper coins in moonlight. Nothing lived in there but the perversion that comes from years of self-preservation co-mingled with self-destruction. He grunted.
"Do you know who I am?" I asked.
"No," Dunn lied. "Should I?"
Playing the do you know who I am game is a dubious way to start any conversation. Of course he knew who I was. Intuits have a hard time hiding from one another. We're rare enough in the Lowers that we don't go unnoticed. But I needed to get the man's base line so I'd know if he was lying when I asked him my next question.
"Did you kill the kid?"
"I've killed many kids." Dunn slurped at his drink. "You're gonna have to be more specific."
"The one from last night," I said, pointing towards the end of the bar where I'd sat with Georgie.
"Oh. That kid." Dunn squinted up at me and his face cracked like an egg dropped on the ground. The yellow yolk of his teeth seeped through his smile. He pivoted on his stool like the breeze kicking trash through the gutter. He eyed Raines with the absent focus of a Duster. "What's he to ya?"
"A friend," I said, using the term very loosely.
"Yeah?" Dunn's pupils blurred in and out of focus as he shrugged. "Well in that case, nah, I didn't kill him."
I sighed. They always lie.
"My mistake," I said. I looked at Bo, shrugged, then punched Jack Dunn in the jaw. His head whipped back and he tumbled from his stool.
Bo moved forward, his protective instincts as a bouncer taking hold. Ash grabbed his wrist with a tiny hand, stopping the huge man cold. He stared down in surprise at the small girl anchoring him to the floor.
Dunn stared up from the flat of his back, mouth hanging slack, eyes suddenly alert. As he scrabbled to his feet I placed a foot on his chest and pushed him down.
"Tom, that's enough," Bo said, straining ineffectually against Ash's grip. "You made your point. You want to see the boss or not?"
My fist tingled where the knuckles had hit bone. It'd been a lazy punch. Georgie deserved better, but it would have to be enough.
I ignored Raines' questioning stare and said, "Lead the way."
Ash released her grip on Bo. The large man rubbed his wrist and nodded. We left Dunn, still in shock, sprawled out on the ground. We'd made it less than ten feet when I heard Dunn shout, "You're a dead man.
As if I didn't already know.
***
Lou's office was nicer than anything I’d ever seen in the Lowers, with a design sensibility inspired by those living in the Uppers. The room was enormous in every dimension worth measuring—a rarity in the Lowers, where every year the walls constricted tighter.
A desk the size of a Peregrine sat in the center of the room, an oasis upon itself. Behind it, Lou stood, his eyes hidden behind a backwashed slurry of liquid ooze.
I dug my fingernails into my forearm while we waited for him to emerge from the Stream. Checking the Tracker was a compulsion, a nervous tic, under the best conditions. With the events of the past day, and the Quick Sliver turning against me, the urge to check nagged like a mosquito bite on the nipple.
Scratching wouldn't do any good, and if I went at it long enough, I'd come out the other side with one less nipple, but I did it anyhow.
"What a pleasure it is to see you still up and running, Tom," Lou said, returning to the land of the physical. "After our chance encounter last night I was afraid you'd kick the bucket before we could meet again." Lou made a show of interlocking his fingers in the air. "Fate has grand designs for us, doesn't it, my friend?"
Talking about chance and fate in the same sentence felt odd, but I kept quiet. I was here because of the past, not the future. The present was only a fleeting moment between the two.
"Drop the act and get to talking. Why me?"
Lou's eyes twinkled, but his lips pulled down into a frown. "Afraid I don't follow."
"I was a little blurred last night. Didn't see things so well. But I've had a couple hours to think about it, and the more I do, the more I see you pulling my strings."
"How so?" Lou said with genuine amusement in his voice.
"You deal in information, right?"
"It's my number one import and export."
"And in the world of information gathering, nothing beats having an Intuit in your corner."
"They do have their uses."
"So, I'm guessing you have at least a couple Intuits working for you. If not, you'd be vulnerable. You don't seem particularly vulnerable."
"You flatter me."
"Now, if you got a couple Intuits already working for you, the question I ask myself is, why does he need me?"
"And?" Lou rested his chin on his palm.
"You don't," I said. "You don't need me."
"I'm a man of few needs, and many wants."
"Sure, you wanted me. Or rather, something I had."
"First-rate deductive reasoning?"
"That...and the key you stole from me."
"Stole? Such a dirty word. We had a deal. You gave it willingly."
"Before I knew you were gaming me."
"Ah, but that's the beauty of life, isn't it? We're all gaming each other."
"You know what it unlocks, don't you?" I said. "You know what's inside."
"Maybe." Lou circled his desk, leaned against the front with arms folded, and said, "Do you?"
"No."
"And here with all your bravado, I thought you'd figured it out."
"Close enough to count."
"This isn't a game of horseshoes, Tom."
"Suppose not, but you're going to give me back that key and tell me what it unlocks."
"Not leaving much room for negotiation, huh?" Lou reached across the desk and pressed a button. "Well, in that case, my boss wants to speak to you."
"Boss?" I said, sifting through the kitty litter of my memories,
trying to find the single nugget that suggested Lou had a boss. "Thought you were the top of the food chain down here."
"Even the devil must answer to God."
"Well, where is he?" I asked, scanning the small army of thugs turned bodyguard milling around a pool table across the room.
"He'll meet you in the Stream."
"Fine," I said.
BLINK.
The Stream sparked in my pupils. A pending request flashed in the corner. I accepted and the world shifted and spread as if somebody were stretching a too-small photo to fit a frame. Lou's physical body became a petroleum jelly smear across the threshold of my display. The murk cleared, drew taut, and came into focus with startling clarity.
I stumbled out of the Stream and back into the office. Somebody else had entered the room and sat in Lou's chair. My eyes stuttered between Lou and the dark man at the desk.
"What the hell?" I said, wiping sweaty palms against my pants. "It glitched."
"That wasn't a glitch," Ash said from two chairs to my right. "We're still in the Stream."
Impossible. I reached for the tendrils of data packets that should be filling the ether, but found nothing. I couldn't even see the white nodes of nanocomps in the room. I looked straight through Raines' skull and saw nothing.
I massaged my temples, trying to make sense of what was happening. I'd seen all manner of virtual rooms, but none that I couldn't manipulate. I suddenly understood what it was to be normal.
"I apologize for the disorientation," the man behind the desk said. "It will pass momentarily as your nanocomp adjusts to the viewing channel."
His voice slid thick and smooth like honey on a hot summer day.
It covered me. Made me tingle. The room boosted the signal, adding a layer of reality that went beyond even hyper-reality.
"Who are you?" I asked
"Felix Cross," the man said. "It's a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance, Mr. Mandel."
I knew that name.
Everybody in the world knew that name.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Second Time Is Hard, Too
Felix Cross, founder of Phoenix, the largest dealer of nanotechnology in the world, was a reclusive figure bordering on mythical. Young Middies and Uppies, who saw him as the closest thing to a god in the digital age, followed him with a cultish obsession.
Cross could buy the world ten times over, a fact he'd proven by establishing Phoenix's headquarters on the island formerly known as the United Kingdom. There he lived and worked on the nanite technologies reshaping the world.
His relationship with the leaders of Unity was tenuous under even the best circumstances. On the one hand, Unity needed his technologies. On the other, by choosing to base Phoenix headquarters so close to the volatile East—and so far from the nearest Unity city—he'd placed himself in a position vulnerable to the marauding bands of Lost still scouring the Eurasian continent.
The leaders of Unity held a very real concern that if the technologies stashed in the Phoenix arsenal ever fell into the hands of the Lost, the East could rise again and tip the precarious hierarchy established by Unity.
While technically a sound argument, even the staunchest of critics would agree the likelihood of the Lost overpowering Phoenix's bastion of technological might to be all but impossible. Cross, on multiple occasions, publicly proclaimed his island to be immune to any sort of infiltration—a boast rumored to have been tested by Division black ops teams with no success.
Twenty-two years ago, Unity attempted to put Cross and his cohorts in their place by subverting Phoenix Corporation's Stream access. A then young Cross returned the favor and bombarded District Five's Stream access with junk data that slowed the network to a crawl for a full three hours.
In general, people don't want to fight. They simply want to get on with their lives. Cross understood and exploited this. The disruption was as chilling as it was potent.
With that one act Cross proved he could not be manipulated or coerced. That from then on a single man could be viewed as either an ally or an enemy.
The leaders of Unity didn't want another war, nor did they want to risk compromising the Stream, so they allowed Cross his autonomy. Personally I thought they should've made him President, but he lacked aspirations of power in that arena.
Cross, in the few interviews he'd granted, stated he simply wanted to be left alone to go about his work. He provided a continual flux of technology generations ahead of anything coming out of Division subsidiaries, so nobody really complained.
Nobody understood how he continually out-innovated Unity-based developers, but until they did, Cross remained a country unto himself.
"Wouldn't have thought to see you cavorting with a Slumlord like Lou," I said after the initial shock had subsided.
"It's good to have hands and ears in all places. In a global market, diversification is the key to staying ahead of the curve." The smooth creases of Felix's black marble skin retracted to reveal a row of ivory pebble teeth.
It'd worked out for the man, so I wasn't in a place to argue.
"How do I fit into your diversification scheme?" I asked.
"Have you ever sat and listened to the breeze?"
"Not unless you count listening to the hum of the air filtration system down here."
"Pity. Whispered rumors float on the breeze."
"Oh? What are the winds saying these days?"
"They're shifting. Ever shifting. They're bringing a storm, I think," Felix said, looking at Ash. "A storm can be good, if you do not resist it. Do not stand in its path when it strikes." Felix paused. "I wonder, where are you standing?"
"I don't know if I'm in its way or if it's following me, but I suspect it doesn't matter either way."
"Well then, perhaps we can be of mutual benefit to one another."
"I'm not the guy you want to be sharing benefits with."
"Don't sell yourself short. Every great shift comes with agents of change. Men and women who fate plucks"—Felix lifted a knife from the desk. His arm drifted lazily before dropping the blade. The pointed end buried itself in the wood with a thunk—"from the masses and charges with the task of ushering in a new age. I believe you are one of those men."
"How about you?" I said. "Are you one of these agents, too?"
"It remains to be seen." Felix shrugged. "For now, I'm content helping you on your quest."
"And what do you know about my quest?"
"I know you're highly motivated to succeed despite your attempt to convince others to the contrary. You hide behind a veneer of self-loathing and self-deprecation, afraid that by caring you'll open yourself to the possibility of loss once again. Because it's hard to hurt a man who does not care, isn't that right?"
"If you say so."
"And yet apathetic men bleed the same as all the rest," Felix said.
His words sat in the stillness of the room. There were questions stewing in the pot I wanted to ask. But they wouldn't lead to answers, only wasted breaths. I didn't have time for wasted breaths.
"What makes you think you know what's going on here?"
"Word travels quickly when the leaders of Unity are held at gunpoint," he said, waving a dismissive hand. "And this little squabble between Unity and Castle hasn't been the great secret they imagine." Felix turned his stare to Ash. "It's fitting you call your organization Castle, by the way. It conjures memories of a simpler time when knights fought for honor in public. Now all the battles worth fighting take place in shadow, behind tightly drawn curtains."
Ash nodded and said, "Even shadows fighting in the dark leave a mark. It's inevitable you would find out. What you do with that knowledge is what matters now."
"Indeed." Felix steepled his fingers beneath his chin. "I suppose you're wondering if you can trust me. If I know about Castle, then it raises the question of what else I might know, and how I know it. How can you be sure Adam himself doesn't whisper in my ear while I sleep?"
Ash was fast. Faste
r than anyone I'd ever seen. Her micro-expressions, then, were especially fleeting. But the look she wore lingered.
Her pupils dilated, contracting to droplets of ink. Cheeks tensed against puckered lips. Nose scrunched.
Shock.
That Felix knew this Adam character was more disconcerting to Ash than the fact that he knew about Castle. Felix strummed this newly discovered bundle of nerves. Ash regained her composure, but the way she sat in her chair changed. Her body tightened, realizing now just how dangerous the other players in this game were.
These were the conclusions I drew from the brief exchange of words and body language between Felix and Ash, but I didn't need a diagram to know my conclusions were correct.
"How do you propose to help us?" Ash said, glossing over whatever had elicited such a reaction from her the moment before.
"Cybercore has the best coders in the world. That cannot be disputed. Your software is unrivaled, and I say that as Cybercore's number one competitor," Felix said, pulling a briefcase from the floor beside his chair and placing it on the desk. He thumbed the combination, tumblers rolled into place, and the lid popped open. "But, in the world of hardware, Phoenix is without equal."
Felix pulled from the case a pyramid cut from black glass that fit in the palm of his hand.
"What's that?" I asked.
"This is my gift to you in your effort against Unity," Felix said, smiling from cheek to ear. "I call it the Hive Mind. I think you'll find it useful moving forward into the next stage of your investigation."
"What's it do?"
"The nanites crawling across the surface of the Hive Mind allow the user remote access to whatever system they've infected."
I processed this information like the first primate using a stick to suck ants from their hill. "You're talking nanocomps, aren't you?"
"Ye—"
The Stream dissolved. White light and static noise covered me. I tumbled out of the system and clutched my ears. Tears blurred my vision but I could see enough to know we were back in Lou's office. Felix Cross was gone. My eardrums pulsed as if stabbed with an icepick.
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