by Ben Oliver
* * *
We walk up a set of ancient and broken escalators that seem to go on forever. Antique advertisements for long-ago theater shows line the walls, along with faded public service posters informing commuters that pickpockets operate in this area.
We make it to a bank of dust-covered ticket barriers and hop over them. Pander looks back to Wren every few minutes to make sure she is still wearing her hat. Eventually, we come to a set of steps that leads up to a boarded-up exit.
“Okay,” Pander says, putting her bag on the floor. “This is the tricky part, and we have to move quickly because they have an idea of where we are now.” She takes a pad of paper and a pen out of her bag and scribbles a note onto it. She holds it up so Wren, Kina, and I can read it.
Still dazed from the whole experience, I almost ask Who is Dr. Ortega? But I manage to stop myself just in time. Clearly Pander has written this information down so that the microphones embedded in us won’t pick it up.
We climb the concrete steps, and Pod lifts a massive section of fallen wall away from the opening at the top.
One by one we crawl out into the street and move quickly from cover to cover until we are between the old courthouse and the church.
Pander climbs into the open manhole first, followed by Wren and then Kina. Pod goes next and I follow him. Igby is the last down.
At the bottom of the ladder, my feet are submerged to the ankles in cold, dirty water, and I have to crouch inside yet another tunnel. This one is made of brick and is only wide enough for single file. It smells so bad down here that I feel like I’m suffocating, which is doing nothing for my growing sense of claustrophobia.
“This way,” Akimi whispers, and leads the way under the city.
We follow the flashlight’s beam for ten or so minutes until we reach a ladder against one side of the tunnel that leads up to another hole that has been made in the brick.
We climb up, exiting the darkness and the smell of the sewer, and enter what looks like an old tiled bathroom.
“What is this pl—” I start to say, but then a woman wearing a surgical mask sticks a needle in my arm. “What the hell?”
I watch as the woman stumbles drunkenly over to Kina and injects her too.
“What is this?” Kina asks.
And by the time she has stuck Wren with a third syringe, the world is fading out. Colors seem to drain away; everything blends to gray and then to nothing.
* * *
There are moments of consciousness. I hear a woman with a Region 100 accent speaking, slurring her words.
“For the love of … He heals so fast, how am I supposed to operate? Someone bring me another quarter patch.”
“No!” Pander’s voice now. “No more Ebb; you’re operating, for god’s sake.”
“Why am I taking orders from a child, someone remind me? Christ, these ancient tools, it’s barbaric! Where are my robots? My nanotech? And bring me a quarter patch, I work better high, get me a quarter patch.”
“You’re already high. Just keep working,” Pander mutters.
“Every day, Just keep working, Dr. Ortega! Do what I say, Dr. Ortega! I could walk away, you know! I could leave, I don’t need you.”
I try to open my eyes but I’m groggy and numb. The argument between Pander and the Region 100–sounding doctor begins to fade away until I can’t understand the words anymore, and then I sleep again.
* * *
I awake with a start.
My eyes snap open and I try to sit up, but I can’t.
I’m paralyzed. Trapped inside my tiny cell in the Block, unable to move, unable to scream, unable to cry.
The cruelty of Happy has never been in doubt, but that last trick was malicious. And for what reason? Before, Happy had at least tried to extract information from me, but now it’s just torturing me for no reason.
If I were able to, I would cry.
I try to remember all the details of what happened. Pander and Kina had come in during the energy harvest and shattered the tube. We had escaped with Wren through the roof, with Igby driving the flying car. Then what? It’s already hard to remember, like a dream. The lake, the subway train, the sewer.
It had all been so real, and I had been foolish enough to believe it.
I’m torn away from my thoughts by a sound. I can’t turn my head to look, but I’m sure it’s coming from the metal door of my cell. A steady clanging sound that is growing in volume.
And then there’s a boom, and I’m sure the door has been smashed inward.
Next there are footsteps, slow and deliberate, approaching my bed.
A face slowly appears in my field of vision and my heart begins to race.
“Hello, Luka Kane,” Tyco says.
The last time I had seen Tyco Roth was in the moments after he had drugged me with Ebb. His plan had been to separate me from the group, drug me, and then murder me, because he blamed me for the death of his brother. In truth it had been Molly, my sister, who had pushed his brother from the roof of the Black Road Vertical, but she had only pushed him because he was going to shoot her.
I was saved from Tyco’s assassination attempt by Shion and Day Cho, a mother and her daughter who survived Happy’s plan to wipe out civilization by being high at the time of the chemical drop. Shion had shot Tyco six times. Tyco is dead, I know that, and so this is just another one of Happy’s attempts to torture me with nightmarish visions.
“I’m going to kill you, Luka Kane,” Tyco says, and then he raises his hand. A knife with a long gleaming blade is grasped tightly in his fist and he brings it down into my chest.
I can’t feel it, but I see him struggling to pull the knife free before plunging it down again, and again.
In my peripheral vision I can see blood beginning to pool around my head as Tyco stabs and stabs and stabs, smiling all the while. And I think, At least it’s over now. At least it’s all over.
I gasp in a deep breath and sit up. I can feel the sweat covering my body, and for a few moments I can’t tell if this is real or if I’m still dreaming.
I look around. The room is unfamiliar at first, but then I recognize it as the tiled room in which the doctor injected me with a sedative. Tentative hope begins to fill me up, but I push it away. I know that hope—when dashed—is more painful than anything physical.
But it’s true, it’s real: I am no longer in the Block.
I let out a long sigh that, for a few moments, turns into sobs of pure relief, and then I get myself together and try to remember all that happened.
She was operating on me, I think, and more flashbacks burst into my mind. Delays; the scientific experiments that the government subjected us to in the Loop to push back the date of our executions, various surgeons cutting into my skin, injecting me with viruses so that they could try out experimental cures, slicing out cartilage from my ribs. But what had happened in this room had not been a Delay.
I look around; the tiled room is lit only by the dim light coming through a frosted glass window high up on the far wall.
I’m lying in a bed in the middle of the room. Kina is asleep on another bed on my right and Wren is on a bed on my left.
I look at the stained walls, the plumbing fixtures, the old rotted wooden cubicles against the far wall.
This is a bathroom! I think. They operated on me in an old bathroom? And then, Why were they operating on me?
On a small stainless-steel table in the corner of the room, I see a set of primitive medical tools: a scalpel; some long, pointed tweezers; a set of forceps that look as though they belong in a kitchen somewhere. All these instruments are covered in blood.
I pull the thin blanket off me and begin examining my body for signs of an operation. Of course, our wounds heal themselves rapidly, but they still leave a mark if the cut is deep enough. I see two long, straight scars up both of my forearms, and I realize that they’ve removed the electromagnetic cuffs from inside my wrists. Without thinking, my hand reaches up to my forehead where
the Panoptic camera should be. I can no longer feel the little bump where the tiny piece of equipment used to sit.
Immediately I feel calmer, less conspicuous, safer. Ironic, really, seeing as the government had forced the Panoptic cameras upon the citizens of the world under the guise of increased safety.
The bathroom door creaks open a tiny bit, and I see Igby peering in.
“Hey,” he whispers, “how you feeling?”
“Not bad,” I whisper back, climbing down from the bed and walking toward him. “What time is it?” Igby holds the door open and I step out into the most enormous old library I have ever seen.
I’m frozen for a minute, staggered by the grandeur of the place. Three floors stacked with thousands and thousands of old-fashioned paper books.
“It’s almost five p.m. the day after you were sedated,” Igby replies, laughing. “You’ve been out for over a day!”
“What … where is this place?” I ask, still gazing at my new surroundings.
“Some dusty old library,” Igby replies, shrugging. He points up to the cathedral-style domed glass roof. “That gives us a three-sixty view. If Happy sends any of its minions our way, we’ll know about it.”
I squint up to the roof and see Akimi sitting in a makeshift crow’s nest. It appears to be made out of an office chair suspended by a dozen or so ropes. Akimi spins slowly around, scanning the city.
“Wow,” I say.
“And that,” Igby says, pointing to a brand-new, pristine Volta Category 9 sitting in the middle of the mosaic tiled floor, “is my baby. And our getaway plan.”
“You sure do love flying cars through glass roofs,” I say.
“It’s both badass and a fuckload of fun, Luka,” he says, grinning at me. “Although I might have to replace it with something bigger now that there are more of us.”
I turn slowly around, taking in the place. All the windows (barring the glass domed roof) have been covered by metal sheeting that has been riveted to the walls. The doors too are barred shut in this same manner, but I’m not really focusing on the safety features; my eyes are wandering over the shelves of books. A section marked REFERENCE, one marked CHILDREN’S, another reads SCI-FI, MYSTERY, FANTASY, there’s a door marked PERIODICALS, a massive semicircular desk near the front entrance, and a rack full of ancient graphic novels, and that’s just the first floor.
“How did you find this place?” I ask, unable to hide the awe from my voice.
“We sort of stumbled upon it when we were escaping after Midway,” Igby replies. “She was already here, though.” He points to the doctor who operated on me. She has created a bed for herself using hundreds of books and is snoring loudly. I see half an Ebb patch stuck to her wrist.
“Who is she?” I ask.
“She is the mad doctor. Dr. Abril Ortega. She loves Ebb and is constantly high, but she’s a great surgeon. She removed all our Panoptics.”
“You found her here?” I ask.
“Yep, stoned out of her mind. She kept saying, ‘They’ll kill me for what I’ve done. I destroyed nearly all of it.’ We still don’t know what the hell she was talking about. I don’t think she even knows.”
The doctor stirs at this and opens one eye. “Are you creepy little boys watching me sleep?”
“No,” I say, taken aback by the bleary accusation.
“Why not? Am I not beautiful?”
“I … I …” I look to Igby, who shrugs. “You are beautiful, but I wasn’t watching you sleep.”
“Good,” she says, turning over to face the other way. “Watching someone sleep is not romantic. Besides, I’m thirty years old—far too old for you, little boy.”
I turn again to Igby, who rolls his eyes and mouths, She’s forty-five. We walk away toward the far side of the big room.
“So, she performed the same surgery on you guys too?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Igby replies. “No more cuffs, no more cameras. She can’t remove the heart device—it’s embedded and woven through a bunch of arteries and stuff. Even with our healing it would kill us if she tried.”
“A brand-new friend!” an odd, cartoonish voice yells out from somewhere above me.
“Oh Final Gods, give me strength,” Igby mutters.
“What the hell was that?” I ask, still looking for the source of the voice.
And then from the third floor I see a blur of lights zipping toward me.
“Apple-Moth, power down!” Igby calls out, but the drone—which is no bigger than a sparrow—doesn’t seem to hear, and before I know it, it’s spinning around and around my head.
“Hi, new friend! I’m Apple-Moth, what’s your name?”
“Umm, what?” I manage.
Igby steps forward and raises his voice. “Apple-Moth, power down!”
The drone—which I now recognize as a companion drone—ignores him and continues speeding around and around my head. “I love making new friends! What’s your name? Do you wanna hear a joke?”
“Apple-Moth!” Igby screams, and the drone stops dead, hovering in front of my eyes.
“Oh, hi, Igby!” Apple-Moth says, a note of caution in its computerized voice.
“I told you to power down.”
“But I don’t want to power down!” the drone replies, sounding sulky now.
“I don’t care, I’ve asked you to power down, so do as you’re told.”
Apple-Moth, whose lights had been glowing yellow, fades to an angry pink. The drone zips over to Igby and projects the face of an angry ogre over Igby’s own face. The effect is so convincing that I’m actually taken aback for a second.
“Whoa!” I say.
“What is it?” Igby asks. “Is the stupid drone using its stupid face-changer app?”
I laugh as the ogre face moves perfectly in time with Igby’s words.
“Dammit, Apple-Moth, power down!” the Igby ogre commands.
“Fine!” the drone says, and floats moodily to the floor, the ogre face fading away from Igby’s.
Apple-Moth’s lights go off completely, except for one tiny red light blinking near the base.
“What on Earth is—” I start, but Igby holds up a hand to silence me.
“Apple-Moth,” Igby says, glaring down at the small, insectile machine, “I know you haven’t powered down.”
There are a few seconds of silence, and then the companion drone replies, “Yes, I have.”
“How are you replying if you’ve powered down?” Igby demands. The drone is silent. “Well?”
“Fine!” the drone replies finally. And this time, the small flashing red light goes out too.
I look up at Igby. “What?” is all I can manage through my confusion.
“That,” Igby says, sighing, “is Apple-Moth.”
“And … why?” I ask.
“We plan on using it for missions beyond the scrambler,” Igby says, as if I’m supposed to understand what that means.
“Excuse me?”
“I’ve set up a surveillance scrambler with a three-mile radius. It pretty much makes us invisible to Mosquitoes and any other tech that Happy is scanning the city with,” he says, using the slang term for surveillance drones. They got the name Mosquitoes due to their size and the sound of their high-pitched solar engines. “But eventually we’ll need to go out farther than the three-mile radius, and when we do, we’ll need to take a mobile scrambler with us—Apple-Moth. We modified it to include a cloak, a jammer, and—if all else fails—a simple laser light to blind cameras.”
“All right,” I say, “and what’s with the personality?”
“It was a kid’s toy back before, you know, the world ended. It actually runs on Happy tech, but we managed to disconnect it from the network. Pod has tried to erase its personality but, I swear, it just gets more and more annoying each time we try to delete it.”
“You two?” I say. “The guys who hot-wire cars and make ancient trains run as if by magic; you can’t erase a toy’s personality?”
“Shut up!” I
gby replies, shoving me. “It’s impossible!”
“Yeah, sure,” I say, laughing.
“Fuck off,” Igby says, picking up the tiny drone and placing it on a table. He smiles. “Come over here, I want to show you something.”
Igby leads the way to what must have been a checkout desk at some point in the distant past. He jumps and slides over the varnished wooden desktop. I walk around and watch him remove a thin rug from the floor and place it on a chair. He begins to remove floorboards until a trapdoor is revealed.
“Check this out,” Igby says, grabbing the same laptop he’d used to start the subway train and descending a set of wooden stairs into the darkness.
I follow him down and find myself in a narrow corridor that leads to something up ahead that I can’t quite make out.
“What is this?” I ask.
“This is where we go if the Mosquito scrambler fails and Happy comes looking for us,” Igby says, his face lit by the screen of the laptop.
He types in a command and the circular metal door up ahead of us begins to unwind, like a complex puzzle, until it is fully open.
“What … what is it?” I ask.
“A panic room,” Igby says, stepping inside.
I follow him into the metal-walled room. It’s long and narrow; the walls are thick steel with benches and shelves molded into the metal. There are cans of food and bottles of water lining the shelves, along with flashlights and a few books. In the far right corner, there is a toilet that is reminiscent of the metal toilets in the Loop.
“How long did it take you to build this?” I ask.
“About two weeks. Me and Pod made it. When we first got here it was a lot easier to get supplies from the city. Happy hadn’t mobilized its armies properly yet, so we got all the steel and plumbing easily enough.”
Igby leans over to a sink and spins a tap. Fresh water comes out and drains down a sink.
“This is really impressive!” I say.
“Yeah, I’m really good at this shit,” Igby replies, shrugging. “I have to fix a glitch with the door, but other than that this place is basically bombproof. It even has an intercom so you can speak to people in the main room.” He presses a button on the wall and I hear a microphone click on.