by Barry Lyga
She stepped into the tiny closet, shut the door and had barely enough room to turn around to face the ladder. Pale light came from above, the first she’d seen other than Bryce’s phone since they’d closed the steam tunnel cover over their heads.
At the top of the ladder, Bryce helped her onto the floor. This was another hotel room, but the floor squeaked and trembled at her footfalls. “The subfloor is weak. Weakened, I should say. We deliberately undermined it. Unless you walk the right pattern, you’ll end up back downstairs. With some broken bones and contusions and more blood, so …”
The pattern turned out to be pretty simple as she watched him go first and realized what Bryce was doing: you took a number of steps equal to consecutive prime numbers, turning each time the tens digit incremented. Soon they were out in a corridor again.
They made their way farther up in this manner, zigzagging from floor to floor. When rubble blocked a staircase — strategically and intentionally, she now realized — they would prowl the hallways until they found the Ω and then use concealed ladders, stairs and (in one case) a makeshift dumbwaiter to ascend. There were occasional tricks and traps, which Bryce talked her through and around.
She was exhausted by the time they got to the twenty-fifth floor. Her fatigue was mingling with her anger, and she found herself unreasonably mad at OHM for being smart enough to house their escape colony up in the clouds. They’d needed to pull themselves up from the twenty-fourth floor with a complicated rope-and-pulley system, and her shoulders ached.
“How much farther?” she snapped.
“One more floor.” Bryce sounded winded. He was stronger than Cassie but also much, much bigger. More muscles, but those muscles had to move around a lot more weight. He leaned against a wall and slid down to sit. She followed his lead, folding herself cross-legged on what had once been a low-pile carpet and what was now a random mosaic of threads over a plywood floor.
All of the windows they’d come across had been painted over, and the ones in this room were no exception. Only Bryce’s phone lit the way, and it had been a couple of hours of constant light.
“I’m gonna shut this off for a minute,” he told her. “Save battery. OK?”
In the unfamiliar dark, with a guy she barely knew, in a crumbling old building that was possibly haunted by the ghost of a dead TV.
“Perfect,” she muttered.
Darkness enfolded her, the spot where Bryce’s phone had been still glowing for a moment, until her eyes forgot its light. She clenched her fists, nails digging into palms. It’s not that she was afraid of the dark. She was just afraid, period. And angry. Now that they’d stopped, it all rushed in on her.
She struggled to catch her breath.
“It’ll be OK,” Bryce said. His voice was a ghost in the still, black air. “We’re close.”
“What am I doing here!” Cassie burst out. The darkness … it was getting to her.
“Cassie. It’s OK. They can help you. I know it. I’ve seen it before.”
Ask questions. It was a regular instruction in the McKinney household. Both Mom and Dad exhorted her all the time: Ask questions. It’s the only way you’ll learn anything remotely interesting in the world. The question is humanity’s best tool for forward progress.
Her parents argued a lot. Not about anything specific to them or their family or their life together. Just about the world. Her dad’s bleeding edge, if-we-can-do-it-then-we-must-do-it attitude constantly at war with Mom’s sensibilities, forged in the early fires of ancient Greece and Rome. Words like “disruption,” “democratization,” “Socratic,” and “hegemonic” sailed through the air with great frequency in the McKinney house, and the only way young Cassie could learn to make sense of what her parents were discussing was to, well …
“Why are you helping me?”
It was almost as though he’d been expecting the question at that very moment — his answer was nearly instantaneous. “I don’t like a system that beats the hell out of people for what they say.”
“First Amendment zealot?”
“Something like that.” But there was a pinched quality to his voice. There was more.
“So you do this all the time, then?”
“Not really. Usually I just give money to the right causes. But you’re in deep. I thought you needed a rope.” He paused. “Plus, I like your mom. She doesn’t tolerate any shit.”
Cassie didn’t know which comment flummoxed her more: the idea of a guy not much older than her “giving money” to causes or the fact that he could actually tolerate Rachel.
Steering away from the too-raw thought of Mom was easy. “When you say ‘give money …’ ”
Discomfort came off him in waves, radiating through the darkness. “I’m rich, OK? Born into it. My grandfather — he’s the one who made all the money in the first place — he taught me that when you have a lot, you have to give a lot. So that’s what I try to do. All right?”
It was clearly a sore point for him, though as someone who had never had much money and now had even less of it, she couldn’t understand why. Still, she moved on.
“What is this place?” she asked the blank space before her. Maybe if he talked, she’d get distracted. History was good at making people forget the present.
Bryce’s voice floated to her. “It was supposed to be a hotel. Ran out of funding.”
“Who owns it?”
Bryce paused. She imagined him sweeping his dreads off his forehead and frowning. “Good question. I guess someone owns it. But OHM hacked the city’s zoning databases and removed it, then killed any reference to it on commercial real estate sites, too. As far as the internet is concerned, this place doesn’t exist.”
Cassie opened her mouth to say that that was ridiculous, that erasing some database records wouldn’t make the place disappear, but stopped herself. As long as the tax records had vanished, the place really was invisible. She thought of all the buildings she passed each day, the anonymous ones that bore no signs or lettering. There were dozens of them, just part of the visual background noise of the city. Could one of them be a secret bunker for Hive renegades? Sure.
“Why go up?” she asked, thinking of those old horror movies again. The victims always ran up flights of stairs when being chased by the bad guy. Made no sense. Fewer options in an attic or on a second floor. More room to run if you’re at ground level. “Why put the headquarters at the top of the building?”
She could almost hear his shrug. “The higher up we go, the fewer cameras there are to catch someone and run facial recognition. Think about it.”
She did. Most cameras were mounted on walls or ceilings and pointed down. Even the ones on high lampposts were getting a wide field of vision that mostly included the space below them. Go high enough and you avoid the all-seeing, never-blinking eyes.
“But what about satellites?”
He sighed. “They’re a problem, sure, but there are a limited number and they have to be aimed at you intentionally. Plus, it’s just a matter of geometry — they point straight down. If you don’t look up, it’s not like they can see your face. Just the top of your head.”
She’d never thought of it that way before. “What about drones?” Drones were all over the place, so ubiquitous that most people hardly noticed them anymore. Cassie and Harlon had spent a lot of time spoofing the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals that most of the drones used, making them land on rooftops or fly down into sewers.
“Drones are a problem,” Bryce admitted. “But they have search patterns that you can anticipate and counter.”
The light from Bryce’s phone flicked on. “One floor to go.”
Cassie’s spirits soared. Now they were getting somewhere.
*
They found the last ladder they needed in a maid’s closet near what had been intended to serve someday as a vending machine alcove. Cassie di
dn’t know what time it was, but her gut knew that it had been at least twelve or thirteen hours since her last meal. To her chagrin, her stomach then emphasized the message by letting out a growl so loud that Bryce — climbing the ladder above her — paused to look down.
“We’ll get you something in a minute,” he said.
Up on the twenty-sixth floor, they found a man.
Cassie stared while Bryce spoke quietly to him. He wielded a rifle of the sort she had seen in action movies, the sight of which in real life made her twitchy. She knew nothing at all about guns, so didn’t know what kind it was, except that she was pretty sure it fired a lot of bullets in a very short period of time. Its presence made her feel both relief and fear at the same time (which, she surmised, was sort of the whole point of guns, really); for a hot, almost blinding moment, she wondered what would happen if she tried to knock him down, steal his gun and run.
The man finally nodded to Bryce and opened a door behind him. Bryce ushered Cassie in.
What lay beyond was the last thing she expected to see. She’d been anticipating more dark, cramped rooms and corridors. Instead, the room beyond the door was massive, an open space the size of half a floor, broken up only by cubicles made of what she realized were the headboards from the hotel’s missing beds. There were thirty or forty people, most of them sitting at makeshift desks with laptops or tablets, furiously working.
And lights! Sweet, sweet electric lights overhead. The place reminded her of the tech start-ups her dad had taken her to, businesses looking to seduce the famous Harlon McKinney away to apply his special brand of techno-magic to their service or app or system infrastructure. Mom had worked ten years at the same school; Dad had changed jobs literally fifteen times that Cassie could remember, hopping from tech firm to tech firm depending on his whims and what seemed most interesting to him at the time.
She peered around the room. The perimeter of the space was entirely composed of large floor-to-ceiling windows, every last one of which was covered with black crepe paper.
Bryce had stepped away from her when they entered. Now he approached, brandishing a brace of protein bars, both of which Cassie grabbed. Food overrode fear. Not anger, though; Cassie still glared at him as she stripped the foil wrapper.
“‘Nice views?’” she quoted him from earlier.
He shrugged. “If you peel back the paper, yeah.” A pause. “Don’t ever peel back the paper. And let me do all the talking here. They know me.”
He guided her without actually touching her toward one of the cubicles. Within it, a slim guy with a shaven head, maybe somewhere in his mid-twenties, sat in a threadbare recliner, tapping a laptop keyboard, spellbound by what was on the screen. Cassie sneaked a peek — it was Swift code. He was writing or modifying a framework for system-level face detection as best she could tell from the fast-scrolling screen. She felt the rage monster inside her settle down. The code lulled her into a sense of calm.
He was so caught up in his work that it took a protracted, exaggerated throat-clearing from Bryce to get his attention. He finally looked up and blinked at the two of them, saying nothing.
“This is TonyStark,” Bryce said.
Cassie fiercely resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Hi, uh, Mr. Stark.”
“No, no,” he told her. She realized that he was still typing, albeit more slowly. He hadn’t stopped. “Not, like, first name Tony last name Stark. TonyStark. All one word. InterCapped.”
“Right.”
TonyStark returned his gaze to the screen. “No girlfriends, Bryce. You know the rules. This isn’t a hangout. It’s a —”
“Resistance movement, no shit.” If Bryce was disturbed by the girlfriend comment, he didn’t show it. Cassie decided to be irritated for both of them, but TonyStark didn’t look up to see her expression. “I know. She’s not my girlfriend. She’s Hive hunted.”
TonyStark grunted and kept pounding the keys. “Join the club. Who isn’t?”
“You don’t get it,” Bryce said. “This is Cassie McKinney.”
It was the first time in her life that Cassie heard her name spoken as though it mattered. She liked it.
TonyStark had precisely zero reaction. “Cassie for Catherine or Cassie for Cathleen? Oh, wait — I don’t care.”
“McKinney,” Bryce said. “Dude.”
“So what?” Tap, tap, tap.
“McKinney,” Bryce said one more time, then enunciated it precisely: “Mick. Kin. E.”
“I’m Level 5,” Cassie said, ignoring Bryce’s look that said I said to let me do the talking.
Level 5 seemed to get TonyStark’s attention. His fingers stopped on the keyboard and he slowly closed the lid of the laptop, turning to look at her as though seeing her for the first time.
“Level 5.” He said it without inflection, without emotion. “For real?”
“Check for yourself,” Cassie told him.
TonyStark pursed his lips and tapped the earbud in his left ear. “Hive search, BLINQ, Cassie McKinney.”
She and Bryce waited until the AI in his earbud got back to him. Probably just the results of a standard Google search, but it would be enough.
TonyStark’s eyes widened and he whistled low and long. “Oh, yeah, Abortion Joke Girl. Goddamn, Red Dread. What have you brought us?”
“Red Dread?” Cassie glanced over at Bryce, who was fuming. “So that’s your LARP name!”
“Can we focus on what matters?” Bryce’s irked tone told her she’d struck gold. Or blood. Maybe both. A small victory on a fantastically terrible day.
“You brought us a Level 5.” TonyStark shook his head, then leaned back in the recliner, steepling his fingers. “Are you crazy? Bringing that kind of heat up here?”
“She’s in trouble,” Bryce said, “and she —”
“And she doesn’t like being talked about as if she’s not right here,” Cassie said, her cheeks hot. “Look, we wrecked my phone and came through the steam tunnels to get here. No one tracked us. You’re still safe. But I’m not, and I’m looking at at least a year before I am, to say nothing of the criminal charges for breaking my phone. Is there anything you can do?”
TonyStark held her gaze. He didn’t blink, not once, for a good thirty seconds. It was unnerving as hell.
“Can we reverse her Condemns?” Bryce asked. “Upvote her enough to drop her down a couple of Levels?”
TonyStark barked a cynical laugh. “Are you kidding?”
“We’ve done it before,” Bryce reminded him.
They had? Cassie had figured this to be longest of all long shots. She’d never heard of anyone reversing Condemns, but then again thousands of people got bumped to Level 1 every day. She couldn’t keep track of all of them. But if OHM had managed to reverse Condemns, that meant there was hope for her. If there was a way to thwart the Hive, she wanted in.
“That was different,” TonyStark was saying. “There were only a few thousand votes there. Not hard to game it and drop from Level 2 to Level 1. She’s at Level 5, with millions of votes. You really struck a nerve, girl. We’d need to scour the system for millions of unaligned votes, calculate the odds of those people voting on their own, isolate the uncommitteds and hack them … It would take forever, and at the end of the day it probably still wouldn’t work.” He flipped open the laptop, minimized his Xcode window and hit the web. “Check it, man: she’s still getting down-voted. With her velocity, we’re behind the eight ball. If we pulled out all the stops, we might be able to get her down to Level 4, but —”
“I’ll take Level 4,” she blurted out.
Level 4. Six months. A few hours ago, the idea of being on the run for that long would have seemed insurmountable, but compared to a year it was a vacation.
TonyStark snorted and slammed his laptop shut again. “I bet you would. You really want me to risk everyone here to put all our other work on
hold just to help you?” He chuckled without a drop of mirth. “Your girlfriend has some balls, Red Dread.”
“She’s not my girlfriend and stop calling me that.”
TonyStark shrugged.
“You don’t understand,” Bryce added. “This is Harlon McKinney’s kid.”
Cassie could tell that this tidbit intrigued TonyStark because he actually raised his left eyebrow two or three millimeters. It was the most life she’d seen in him yet.
“This girl?” he said, deigning to shift his eyes momentarily to Cassie. “You’re telling me this kid’s pops is Black Moses?”
The uttering of her dad’s online handle hit Cassie harder than she thought it would. She’d grown up knowing he was a legend in hacker circles, that the tag Black Moses on an open-source library meant it would be gobbled up and used by everyone from script-kiddies in their parents’ basements to international megacorporations worth billions. When she’d taken her first tentative steps into the world of hacking and cracking, she’d been amazed at her father’s presence. She’d known that he was famous and beloved in hacker culture, but knowing something and witnessing it for yourself were two different things.
“Yeah,” Cassie said, “this girl is Harlon’s kid. And seriously, do you hate women or something? Stop talking to him like he owns me.”
Bryce bristled. Through clenched teeth, he said, “Cassie, these are the only people who can help you, so —”
“No, no,” TonyStark interrupted. “She’s right.” He grinned for the first time since she’d met him, and his grin was startlingly open and genuine. “Manners are the first thing to go when you’re on the run. We’re all hiding, you dig? We’ve all been subject to Hive ‘Justice.’” He actually made the air quotes. “Most of us don’t want anything to do with the outside world. Or new people. Not anymore.”
“I get it. I’m a little hot right now,” Cassie said.
“Being on the run will do that,” TonyStark said. “But look: I’m still not convinced you’re the real McCoy. Or McKinney. Convenient story for someone looking for us to make the impossible happen.”