by Barry Lyga
She’d gone from Level 2 to Level 5 literally overnight. Not even overnight, really — it was still the middle of the night. Four in the morning, if her phone was to be believed.
“We have to get out of here,” Rachel told her, her voice raw with fierce urgency. “Now.”
Cassie could do little more than stare at her phone and shake her woozy head, trying to clear it of sleep. Her mother dragged her out of bed and wrapped a coat around her. “I’ll pack a bag,” Rachel said. “Go get your toothbrush.”
Cassie blinked. Her toothbrush. Sure. That made perfect sense. In the bathroom, she grabbed her toothbrush and a few other things and then started giggling uncontrollably.
It was so stupid. It was just so amazingly, idiotically stupid. This just could not be happening. She’d made a joke. A funny one! A joke that harmed no one!
Rachel came up behind her, snatching the toiletries from her hands and thrusting them into Cassie’s backpack. “Shoes. Now. Go.”
A million years ago — when her life had made sense — the family had taken a trip to the Grand Canyon. For reasons that were beyond ten-year-old Cassie’s abilities to fathom, they’d had to wake up at some ungodly before-sunrise hour to catch the flight to Arizona. Her mom had gently woken her, then kissed her forehead and urged her into her clothes for the trip. A hell of a contrast to the demon woman now shoving her out the door and into the hallway.
Soon, they were outside, Cassie stumbling after her mother down the stoop at the front of their building. The cool fall air was just cold enough that she could see her breath. Her father had always said that it wasn’t really cold out until you could see your own breath; anything less was just brisk.
Her father. God. How could she have forgotten?
“Mom,” she said. “I forgot. I have to go back.”
Rachel, two steps ahead, turned and snapped, “Are you insane? We have to run, Cassie!”
Edging back up the stairs, Cassie replied fiercely, “No, no. I’ll be right back. I promise. Right back.”
Rachel bounded up the stairs and caught Cassie by the left wrist, squeezing much harder than was necessary. Cassie cried out.
“Are you on something?” Rachel demanded. “Did you take something? Because you’re making no sense and we have got to run right-the-hell now!”
As if on cue, a light flared up the block. Cassie turned in that direction as her mother whispered, “Oh, shit.”
Now Cassie knew it was serious. Her mother never, ever swore around her.
“They’re coming,” Rachel said. “Come on.”
“My bracelet,” Cassie protested as her mother dragged her down the steps. “The one Dad gave me. I have to go back for it.” It was more than a gift; it was the last gift he’d given her before he died. She had to have it.
“You want them to find you here?” Rachel jerked her head up the block. What had been a single light was now a dozen. Two dozen. A Hive Mob, lit by their phones, advancing on her. Marching down the street as though she were a —
She was.
She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. And yet a part of her still wanted to pull away from Rachel, run back up to the apartment, grab the bracelet. Other than the Turing AI, it was the thing that most connected her to her father. Without it, could she really …
Really …
Really what? What exactly was her mother planning?
We have to run! Rachel had said. And, yeah, sure, that made sense. Run. But … the way Levels worked, each convict had a certain amount of time during which they couldn’t escape, couldn’t leave their immediate neighborhood, in order to ensure everyone who wanted to participate in the assigned Justice had a chance to do so. And between facial recognition tech in every camera on every street corner and GPS broadcasts from her phone … Running was necessary, but pointless. At Level 5, the default range meant the mob had a year to hunt her down. Where was she supposed to go? How was she supposed to hide for that long?
There was no way and nowhere. She still had her phone, which could be tracked. It was illegal to dump your phone while you were being hunted but not illegal to run. She’d never perceived the paradox before, but now it was so bright that she expected the air around her to effervesce. They wanted people to run so the mob could hunt. There was no sport, no release, no satisfaction in a quiescent prey. But you couldn’t run too well because otherwise the mob would go bloodless and fleshless.
How had she never realized any of this before?
They came closer, and Rachel cried out to her from the curb, where a car waited, the engine running. Where had it come from? How had she not noticed it before?
And that was when she realized: none of this felt real because none of it was real. She was dreaming. Of course it was impossible to jump from Level 2 to Level 5 in a matter of hours. And how would such a mob have amassed in the middle of the night?
None of it was real. Now that she had realized it, she was in that state of lucid dreaming, where she could think clearly again. She’d dosed herself with her mom’s melatonin before bed, and melatonin, she remembered now, usually triggered intense dreams. Many times she’d heard her mother complain about them when she took more than one.
Rachel took Cassie’s hands in her own. “Please, baby. We have to go. I don’t know what’s going on with you, but they’re coming and we have to go now, OK?”
Cassie grunted. “This is all just a dream, Mom. It’s OK. I’ll wake up soon.”
Her mother stared at her in bug-eyed amazement. It was actually sort of amusing, and Cassie couldn’t stifle a laugh.
“Stop it!” her mother roared, and then slapped Cassie across the face with a hand that was most assuredly not a part of any dream.
“Get in the goddamn car!” Rachel howled, biting down on each syllable, no longer willing to plead and wheedle. She dragged Cassie down the steps and over to the car, where she flung open the door.
As her mother slammed the door and ran around to the driver’s side, Cassie stared through the windshield at the approaching mob, her left hand gingerly probing the cold, tender flesh of her cheek.
It’s real, she thought. It’s really happening.
A moment later, the car’s electric engine whined and they backed away from the crowd. Rachel spun the wheel hard, overriding the car’s AI, which protested at the sudden jerk of the wheel, and soon they were roaring away from home and danger — to what, Cassie had no idea.
*
Cassie turned her phone over and over in her hands, staring down at the gigantic glowing 5 as it tumbled in the darkness of the car. As long as she focused on that, she could manage to block out everything else. The wind along the car. The sound of her mother clucking her tongue softly, something she did when she was stressed. The near-silent electric whir of the car’s engine.The pounding of her own heart, the hot oceanic roar of her pulse in her ears.
This was really happening. She’d been accelerated to Level 5 and the world was coming for her. This rental car her mom had summoned via an app couldn’t help her. At Level 5, the entire country would be looking for her. Looking to …
“What’s the punishment?” she said.
Her mom turned her attention briefly from the road. The car took over, reducing speed to the legal limit and straightening their lane presence. “What?” Mom asked.
“The punishment. Am I #stoneher or #publicjunk or what?” Cassie’s phone was still locked, broadcasting only its GPS, showing only her Level.
“I don’t know,” Mom said. “I didn’t check.”
Cassie didn’t believe her. Mom was a terrible liar.
“I woke up when your phone started going off. You didn’t wake up, so I went in. I saw the number on the screen and I freaked out. I knew we had to run.”
That actually sounded like the Rachel Cassie knew. Maybe Mom hadn’t bothered to check her own phone to se
e what the hashtag punishment was.
“Mom, I can’t run for a year. What am I supposed to do?” No one had been killed intentionally by a Hive Mob, but there had been accidents. And some of the punishments were traumatic enough that you would wish you’d been killed. Kidnapped. Held hostage. Starved and beaten. Scarred, branded, tattooed …
“We’ll run as long as we can,” Rachel told her. “Take each day as we can.”
Cassie had been thinking and talking in the singular, but her mom kept saying “we.” “You can’t do this with me, Mom.”
Rachel took the steering wheel back in her hands, clutching it until her knuckles cracked. “The hell I can’t,” she snarled. “You know what lionesses do in the wild when their cubs are threatened? While the males are out hunting, the females are home protecting the babies from everything that creeps, crawls, bites and claws. And it’s hell to pay if you try to take a lioness’s cubs.”
“Mom, you’re not a lioness. You’re a classics professor.” Either the melatonin was wearing off or the adrenaline in Cassie’s system was overwhelming it. She was starting to think more clearly. “We’re not, like, ninjas or anything.”
“The plural of ninja is ninja,” Rachel said absently, and cranked the wheel to the left, peeling off onto a side street.
“I’m glad we know that. But you can’t go running and hiding with me!” Cassie sputtered. “You have a job. A life.”
Rachel stabbed savagely at the car’s touch screen. The headlights dimmed and the infrared night-vision HUD came up. They floated eerily down the street, guided by the car.
Turning to face Cassie, Rachel said, “My job? You think I care about my job at a time like this? You’re my daughter, Cassie. You are my life and my blood. I’m not letting some technical glitch in the fabric of the universe take you away from me for a single minute. No, wait, not a single second. You got that?”
Her mom’s expression was slightly frightening. Cassie hated to respond, hated to let it in, but she was terrified. No matter how old she was, no matter how independent, there was a part of her that yearned to surrender and let an adult take the wheel. Metaphorically, she thought, glancing at her mom’s hands in her lap. Rachel was wringing her fingers, practically scratching herself.
As though her body had a mind of its own, Cassie found herself leaning across the center console, met halfway by her mother, and the two of them embraced for the first time since … could that be right? Since the day Harlon died.
“What are we going to do?” Cassie asked, slumping into her mother. “Where are we going to go?”
“Don’t worry,” Rachel murmured against Cassie’s ear. “Don’t worry. I know where to go.”
*
Her mom did know where to go; that was the crazy thing. Who knew boring old Rachel McKinney would be such an expert at evading the law?
The car piloted them unerringly and with maximum efficiency to MS/BFU. “Once we’re there,” Rachel said, “we can hide out in the stacks and figure out our next move.”
It was an idea both brilliant and antiquated, so it made perfect sense that her mom would devise it. The stacks. Unlike Westfield High, MS/BFU still had rows and rows of actual books on its property. The library at the university was like an iceberg, Cassie knew from her visits: a smallish structure aboveground, almost unnoticeable among the other buildings on campus, with sublevel after sublevel of bookshelves spreading out underground. Some old alumnus of the university had left in his will a tidy sum that, properly invested, had guaranteed the operating budget of the library long after most colleges and universities had gone all-digital for their reference and research areas. MS/BFU had one of the world’s foremost analog collections, not that anyone but oldsters like Rachel bothered using it.
Deep underground, where no one went … No cell signal could penetrate or escape once you were below a certain level, and even Wi-Fi got dodgy down there, unable to infiltrate all those concrete walls and endless shelves crammed with dense paper.
It was a good idea, but something was gnawing at Cassie. “Here’s the thing, Mom,” she pointed out. “I can’t stay down there forever.”
“It’s just for a little while,” Rachel assured her. Her voice was calmer than it had been before, but Cassie could still hear the edge to it, that underlying current of panic. “Until we can figure out something else. Or until I can get this all cleared up.”
“Mom, it’s the Hive. You don’t clear it up. It comes for you … and then it’s over.”
Rachel wrung her hands as the car painstakingly parallel parked itself a block from the library. “There has to be something we can do. Some kind of appeals process.”
Cassie couldn’t help it; despite her terror, the phrase “appeals process” made her laugh out loud. “Can you convince the millions of people downvoting me to upvote me instead? That’s the only appeals process. Good luck with that.”
“I’ll think of something,” Rachel mumbled. She killed the engine and wrenched open the door.
Cassie sighed heavily. Her mother right now was a perfect blend of naive and badass. Cassie’s own natural inclination to not trust her mother, to dismiss her ideas, warred with her ongoing desperation. No choice. None at all.
She got out of the car and slipped her backpack on.
*
Rachel felt a migraine starting as she grabbed Cassie by the wrist and pulled her along the sidewalk. She hadn’t had a migraine in months, not since right after Harlon’s death, and she’d stopped keeping a stash of meds in her purse. She would have to bull through this. Did lionesses let a little thing like the sensation of an ice-cold railroad spike being driven through their skulls keep them from protecting their cubs? Hell, no. Neither would she.
Rachel knew Cassie enjoyed the clueless-about-the-modern-world demeanor she put on, but she knew more about the Hive than Cassie thought. She’d been married to Harlon McKinney, after all. She knew there would be consequences — dire ones — if she got caught. If they got caught. But Rachel would dare any mother to say she wouldn’t do exactly the same thing in Rachel’s position.
“Come on,” she told Cassie, and she already sounded brittle to her own ears. She forced herself to steady her voice. “Library is this way. Let’s go.”
Cassie resisted for a moment. “Are you OK? You’re getting a headache, aren’t you?”
“I’m fine,” she assured Cassie. “Hurry.”
At this hour, the library would be shuttered, but Rachel could get in with her faculty ID. It was the first thing she’d done on her first day — guarantee that she had access to the stacks at all hours. Contrary to popular belief, there was knowledge in the world that could not be found in the endless tracts of Google or Wikipedia. Original editions with the authors’ notes scribbled in margins. Volumes so forlorn and forgotten that they’d never been scanned and uploaded. A whole world of secret knowledge lurking under a layer of dust, waiting to be discovered.
And now, serving as a hideout for her fugitive daughter.
She’d expected the sodium-lit cobblestone paths cutting through the quad to be empty at this hour, but it was a college campus, one populated by overachievers. Even this early in the morning (or this late at night, depending on how you viewed it), there were a few students out and about, either staggering home from all-nighters and hookups or heading out to get a jump start on the day.
Holding Cassie’s hand tightly, she hauled her daughter toward the library. The first glint of morning light was appearing over the horizon, splitting the dark of night. Migraine or not, she chose to see the rising sun as a metaphor. A hopeful one.
That optimism lasted roughly sixty seconds. That was how long it took for the first student to pause as they passed, turning to watch. At first Rachel thought he was checking out one of them — Cassie, no doubt, let’s be honest — and her protective mother’s instincts flared along with her migraine. But t
hen she realized he was also checking his phone. A tone had gone off just as they’d passed by, the sort of alert she’d never heard before.
“Hive proximity alert,” Cassie muttered, reading her mind.
Proximity alert. Right. She remembered hearing about this. Designed to make it easier for the predator to track the prey. At Level 5, Cassie’s phone broadcast a signal to other phones in the immediate area, alerting people that a digital criminal was nearby. It hardly seemed fair; one more advantage to a mob that had so many.
She walked faster, tugging Cassie away from the student, who now was tapping his phone. Getting more details? Contacting others? Rachel didn’t have time to guess.
Two young women with the look of being partied out of breath, heels slung over their shoulders, nudged each other, touched their earbuds, then double-checked their phones as she and Cassie passed. They argued briefly and then one of the women broke away from the other and started following them.
“Mom, get out of here,” Cassie said, her voice low, her eyes darting. In a nearby building, a window flickered with light, then a shadow appeared there, as if gazing out. Alerts were sounding in the distance; students were waking up to their phones bleating.
THERE’S A LEVEL 5 RIGHT OUTSIDE!
JOIN THE MOB! HIVE! HIVE!
Her lioness self-image aside, Rachel suddenly realized how powerless she was. They were a block from the library. A single block. On a summer day, you wouldn’t even notice the distance as you walked it. But on this fall night, brightening to morning, it suddenly seemed insurmountable. There were four people surrounding them now, and while they didn’t look particularly dangerous, they were twice as many as Cassie and Rachel.
“Go, Mom,” Cassie told her. “Give me your ID card. I’ll get to the library.”
Before Rachel could respond, a rock came flying through the air at them. She pushed Cassie aside as a bright blossom of pain exploded in her head. It took a single, long second to realize the pain came from the inside, not the outside — the rock had missed her, but the sudden shock had jump-started her migraine into full action.