by Barry Lyga
She fought back a fresh onslaught of tears as her last image of TonyStark flashed before her eyes. She struggled to remember the code names Bryce had insisted they use: he was Pyrrhus, the famous Greek general, and she was Lyssa, the Greek goddess of uncontrolled rage.
Bryce shifted. “This mask is hot as hell.”
“Pyrrhus …” Cassie tried again. She glanced down the block once more. The mist had made up its mind, and fat raindrops were driving down onto the cement, making pinging noises on her mask. In addition to her prosthetic mask, Bryce had handed her a headband with a plume of black feathers rising up from her forehead. It was just simple enough to be forgettable.
Over the patter of raindrops came a hoot, followed by some cheers. Tires squealed in the distance. This part of the city would’ve put Cassie on edge even without a Level 6 conviction swallowing her whole. She tugged Bryce’s elbow. “What’s taking so long? Is this normal?”
Cassie couldn’t tell what his expression was under his mask, but the glare from his eyes gave her a pretty good indication. “I don’t know. But I trust @Shameless.”
On cue the door swung open, the music drowning out Cassie’s reply. The bouncer held up a hand and waved them in. “Precaution,” he said affably, ushering them in before taking a survey of the empty block and closing the door behind them. “We instituted a new ID check after some trouble a few months back.”
“Bummer,” Bryce said, nodding their goodbyes and dragging Cassie behind him. “Keep up,” he said in a low voice. He knew where @Shameless was supposed to meet them.
She tried. But the pulsing music drowned out every word, every thought, and the shock of so many faceless dancers disoriented Cassie. The scene was unlike anything she’d ever experienced. The bass was so loud that it reverberated in her bones; it became her heartbeat, throbbing in tune. A dark dance floor glowed brightly every few seconds as a strobe light flashed. And the masks — so many masks! Beautiful painted ones and horrid, grotesque ones, disguising everyone, turning the dance floor into a pit of movement that was equal parts threatening and welcoming. No one could want to kill you when you were just a nameless mask in a crowd, right?
Bryce lifted his mask a few inches. “He should be over there!” he mouthed, his voice drowned by the crowd’s cheer as a new song played. She gripped his sleeve as they darted through thrashing limbs. No one was doing it intentionally, but it felt like the crowd — the noise, the heat — was assaulting Cassie, and by the time Bryce pulled open an unnoticeable door tucked away in the far corner of the dance floor under the DJ booth, Cassie’s body hurt.
After Bryce closed the door behind them, Cassie could hear him panting under his mask, which he then ripped off. In the dim light of the silent room, she saw his face was slick with sweat.
Cassie kept her mask on, even though she was desperate to gulp in the stale air. She realized she was still holding Bryce’s sleeve, and she dropped it before he could notice, too. The room was dark, small and cramped — boxes piled high, a single, overcrowded desk with an ancient computer, and what looked like old equipment stacked in haphazard towers — and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust. Behind the desk, an old-fashioned flat-screen television, muted but running a news channel. Cassie glanced at it, then cried out involuntarily and grabbed Bryce’s arm again.
“Mom!”
Bryce gaped, then turned over the room looking for the remote. When he found it, he jabbed some buttons until sound finally came back. The newscaster, a Ken doll with a fake tan, seemed delighted to fill them in.
“If you’re just joining us, take a look at today’s unexpected event. Rachel N. McKinney, mother of Level 6 Hive convict Cassie McKinney, led a protest today that consisted of, in the words of her spokesperson, a, quote, mom army demanding protection for our kids in this age of mob rule run by an unjust horde of unqualified aggressors, unquote. Hundreds of supporters rallied in person to put an end to Hive rule, while online the event trended as thousands in other locations shared their agreement. Rachel McKinney has gone viral, taking to the ’net to appeal to other parents for help. She is under 24-7 surveillance for suspected contact with her daughter who, as we all know, has been ordered to be killed on contact.” He turned to his co-anchor, who appeared to take equal pleasure in sharing the news, and added, “What a mom. You have kids, Lee. Would you do the same if your child was in danger?”
Not missing a beat, Lee brightened her smile by another ten degrees and nodded. “Of course, Dan. Now let’s take a look at the weather.”
Bryce muted the television as Cassie stood, struck silent, trying to process this new idea. Her mother. Rachel. Hosting a protest.
Going viral.
Heat began to spread around her neck, up her cheeks. She placed a hand on her chest, checking to see if her heart had pumped its way out.
“Cass,” Bryce whispered. He nodded to the area behind some boxes. Cassie could see there was enough room for someone to comfortably perch there, to sneak up on them. Bryce held a finger to his lips. Cassie nodded tightly. There was someone else in the room.
“@Shameless?” Bryce asked. He tugged Cassie’s arm until his hand found hers and he clasped it.
@Shameless was wearing a glittery yellow mask, curving around the edges of his face. He nodded once and stepped forward, out of the shadows, lifting his mask as he did so.
Cassie gasped. Bryce went silent, his face stony.
“But you’re …” Cassie sputtered.
“A woman?” A tired smile flashed briefly. “Surprise.”
Cassie grinned despite herself. “Cool,” she murmured to Bryce. But he didn’t respond. His eyes were trained on @Shameless tightly, like he was locking her in place. Or, Cassie realized, like he was expecting her to make a move. A dangerous move.
Something about the woman … She was familiar … Cassie couldn’t quite place it …
Cassie’s eyes ticked between Bryce and @Shameless. “Bryce?” she said quietly. “Is this safe?”
“Are you kidding?” Bryce leaped backward, swinging toward the closed door, yanking Cassie so hard that her shoulder nearly popped out of its socket. “That’s Alexandra fucking Pastor! The fucking enemy!”
*
Alexandra Pastor. The woman who ran the Hive for the Department of Justice. She’d spoken at the president’s press conference when Cassie was bumped to Level 6.
She let Bryce drag her to the door. Alexandra Pastor. Holy crap. But there was something else, too … She’d recognized Alexandra before Bryce said anything, but it hadn’t been from the press conference. She —
“Stop!” Alexandra called. Bryce fumbled with the doorknob as Cassie gripped her shoulder.
“We have backup!” Bryce lied, finally getting the knob to release. The door swung open and the music from the club invaded their little space, a wave of sound that nearly knocked Cassie over. Bryce pushed her ahead but Alexandra lunged forward, her body crashing into the door before Bryce could pull his own frame through.
“I’m on your side!” she exclaimed. She must’ve been stronger than her petite frame suggested because she managed to hold Bryce back for a few seconds longer than Cassie would have guessed possible. “Just hear me out!”
Alexandra and Bryce locked eyes. From this angle, Cassie could see a little tattoo on the back of her neck, white stars that stood out against her warm ochre skin. She gaped. That was it. The tattoo. She knew that tattoo. Once, for a while, it had been present in her own house.
“I know you.”
A break in the music made Cassie’s statement loud enough for both Bryce and Alexandra to hear it. Their heads swiveled toward her. The music started up again, a beat that throbbed in time to the pulsing pain in her shoulder, and she winced. She saw a flash of sympathy in Alexandra’s eyes, and in that moment, Cassie decided to trust her.
They didn’t have much choice, anyway.
“Get back in the
re,” Cassie demanded.
“She’s dangerous!” Bryce hissed.
“No, she’s your inside man,” Cassie reminded him. Besides, the secret weight of the gun in her waistband emboldened her. She had options. Lousy ones, yes, but better than none.
They allowed themselves to be shoved back into the room and closed the door behind her. Cassie took a deep breath and ripped off her prosthetic mask. “How did you know my dad?”
“What the fuck!” Bryce yelled, eyes wild. “This isn’t about your dad! This is Alexandra fucking Pastor! She reports directly to the president. She’s the exact reason you are where you are right now! She’s in charge of the whole goddamn Hive!”
Cassie eyed Alexandra carefully, feeling out the situation. If she was wrong …
She could see it, though, dancing before her eyes as though it had just happened. She’d come back from a soccer match with her mom. She must’ve been eight or nine, maybe. Harlon had missed her match, and she remembered snapping at Rachel on their walk home, and Rachel trying to explain that Harlon was working on a special project, but did Cassie want some ice cream to make up for it?
At home, Cassie found her dad in his office with a woman she’d never seen before. She was magazine-level fashionable — trendy boots and leather pants, plum lipstick striking against her black skin, stuff her mom wouldn’t be caught dead in. As she leaned over her keyboard her hair fell forward, and Cassie spotted the stars on her neck.
Harlon, distracted, had waved and blown Cassie a kiss but then closed the door. Alexandra left sometime later, but he remained cloistered all weekend. Rachel brought him food and water and finally, late the next afternoon, she persuaded him to go to sleep. Cassie had never seen that woman again.
I’m not wrong, she thought.
“She’s been playing the long game this whole time.” The realization dawned on her quickly; a sped-up sunrise.
Alexandra’s dark eyes sparkled. “Harlon always said you were too smart for your own good.”
Bryce let out a tortured moan, an animal sound. Then he slammed his fist into the wall. “Someone please tell me what the hell is going on here?”
“Happy to,” Alexandra said smoothly. She gestured to a small space behind a stack of boxes. “Come with me.”
Behind the boxes was a sort of crawl space; they had to crouch, but there were a few chairs, a laptop and what looked like a martini glass, half full. Alexandra shrugged when Cassie noticed it. “Whatever gets you through, right?”
“Tell us what you want.” Bryce crossed his arms. He chose to sit on the floor rather than on the remaining rickety chair.
“Let me tell you a story,” Alexandra said, draining the rest of her drink. She clapped her hands together once, then rubbed them as if she was trying to generate heat. “I helped devise the Hive. And of course, when we talk about the Hive, what we’re really talking about is the algorithm.”
Cassie nodded. Bryce looked unimpressed.
“I hired the programmers. Then I wrote the rules that they all used to code the Hive — everything, from the Condemn thresholds to the aggregators. Some of those rules I devised right in your house, Cassie.”
The air in the crawl space was thick. Cassie tried not to inhale it too deeply but she was finding it hard to breathe. She fumbled for the words. “What are you saying, exactly?”
Alexandra sat silently for a few moments, surveying Cassie, before saying, “How much did you really know about your father and what he believed?”
Cassie rolled her eyes. Her whole life, Harlon’s fans — the really intense ones, the hackers who kept posters of him on their walls — would try to test her bond with her dad. As though she, his only child, couldn’t possibly be as close to him as they, his many disciples, were. “I promise, I know more about him than you think I do.” But even as she said it, a seed of doubt was growing.
If she noticed, Alexandra was at least kind enough to say nothing. “If it can be coded, it should be coded. He used to say that, and a thousand variants of that, all the time. Right?”
Cassie nodded. Harlon had lived his life on the premise that coding could be both life sustaining — lifesaving, even — and frivolous, and that both options were of equal value.
“He was always generous with his time and especially with his skills,” Alexandra mused. “There’s a confidence in having that much talent. He never worried that someone would overtake him. I think he liked the idea of it, actually. I sometimes got the impression he was looking for someone to challenge him.”
“Can you speed this up?” Bryce said impatiently.
Alexandra clapped her hands together again, startling Cassie, who’d been lost in a swirl of memories. “Of course. What I’m trying to say is that Harlon and I created the Hive together, under a contract from the DOJ.”
In the stunned silence that followed, Cassie briefly envisioned what would happen if she punched Alexandra in the face. Hard.
“I’d known him through the usual hacker circles online, but I never thought he’d come on board. He was a pretty big get, as you can imagine,” Alexandra continued, as if she hadn’t dropped a bomb, as if she weren’t now staring at the hole it had left behind. “This was a big deal. We knew we were going to change the world.”
“My dad would never create something like this!” The certainty burst out of Cassie as she gestured vaguely around her, at her version of the Hive, which now existed everywhere, in everyone, in every shadow that would extend its long arms in the spaces around her. Her hands were trembling. No way. Harlon hacked for the people, not to turn them against each other.
Alexandra trained her gaze on her. “I guess you do know your father better, Cassie. Because you’re right. A few weeks into the project, Harlon expressed some moral concerns about the Hive. He ripped up our contract and walked away.” She let out a chuckle, but it was hard to say whether it was mirthful or resentful. “Almost left me high and dry there. It was a lot of money. But he didn’t hold it against me when I went back and convinced Justice to give me a chance to do it all on my own. And I did. Got myself a political appointment, a cushy job …”
Cassie bit back her disgust at the satisfaction in Alexandra’s voice and focused on the feeling of pride rising in her.
“He quit?” she whispered. Alexandra nodded and Cassie caught her breath, her vision of Harlon resettled back into the comfortable, reliable version she’d always known: Harlon McKinney, white hat, hacker for good. Or if not good, at least not for evil. She ducked her head, hiding the smile she couldn’t stop from spreading. Building the Hive would’ve been the project of a lifetime. A legacy.
She was proud of him, but also, layered behind the pride, a little dismayed that he’d never told her.
What else, she wondered, hadn’t he told her?
“I used Harlon’s office sometimes in those early days. Rachel was always really nice about letting me crash there when we were deep in a code binge. I don’t know how she put up with him. Us.”
The mention of Rachel lit a match inside Cassie. She had forgotten, somehow, all the times she would wake up in the middle of the night to find Harlon holding court in his office, his tech buddies enraptured as they strung themselves out on greasy food and caffeine or occasionally on bottles of golden-brown liquid that Cassie could smell from down the hall. Coding parties, he’d call them. She had forgotten how many times she’d watched Rachel clean up the messes as Harlon slept them off, the sun blazing high in the sky. When was the last time he’d hosted one? Cassie struggled to think, the weight of TonyStark still turning her stomach. There had been one right after her ninth birthday — she could remember because there were still balloons, sparkly and green, floating languidly around the house for weeks after the party, and one of Harlon’s friends had popped them all late during one all-nighter, waking Cassie from a dream and making her cry.
Harlon had never hosted ano
ther one. The Hive was established not long after that.
Cassie turned some new thoughts over in her head. All those years of putting Harlon on a pedestal … all those months of hating Rachel for things Cassie couldn’t remember, emotions she couldn’t name. What if this whole time Rachel had been holding Harlon together, making it so he could be a father sometimes, even though she had to be a mother all the time?
“Anyway,” Alexandra said. “I built it, and it changed the world. We knew it would, of course. But we didn’t know it would change it like this.”
Bryce snorted. “You didn’t know you would get people killed?”
Alexandra’s gaze was steady and clear. “You obviously don’t remember what it was like … especially for women and people of color. The death threats. The casual racism and misogyny. The insults. And then people taking the law into their own hands.”
“So instead of stopping them,” Bryce said, “you just made it legal for them to do it. Congratulations.”
Alexandra Pastor fumed. “No, you brat. We put a structure in place. It got so bad that people were dying. We put a stop to that.”
“Until now,” Cassie said quietly.
Bryce folded his arms over his chest and nodded at Alexandra triumphantly.
“People were having their lives ruined. Every time they went online, it followed them. We made it predictable, enforceable and finite. This part wasn’t supposed to happen,” Alexandra said, her voice low. “All that stuff I livestreamed? About Level 6 being part of the original spec? Bullshit. Level 6 was never part of the spec. Nothing that I worked on. Certainly nothing that Harlon worked on. Gorfinkle put it in place and he’s been itching to use it. They did it over my objections, told me it would never be used. And now here we are. Here you are.”
Cassie went still. The words hung in the room for a long time, long enough that she turned them over and over in her mind until they became mush, just unintelligible sounds. They didn’t mean anything.
Alexandra eventually continued. “It’s a tale as old as time, isn’t it? Eventually, especially when the president saw how Hive polled, all the plans we’d made turned upside down. The algorithms took on a life of their own …”