“But the source code.” Who else would possibly know how? “Please, GAIA needs your help. Don’t...”
Footfalls rampaged, an angry figure cloaked in black armor and brandishing a sword ran towards them. A samurai? Here? It made no sense. He had no time to dwell on that, however, as the first clang of the bell descended from the clock tower over the palace gates, bringing with it an electrifying chill.
Goooonggg.
Francisco checked the facsimile of his Papa’s watch. Midnight.
Not-Omala lashed her head around, her face paling. “Laporte?”
The petite man said, “She’ll need to maintain a logistical framework to attack. It will be a disadvantage.”
Francisco didn’t understand who the samurai was, or why Not-Omala needed to run from her, but he did know the Asian woman across the way had one hell of a sword in her hand, and it made the knife the kidnapper had used look like a spatula. Before he stopped to think otherwise, Francisco threaded his hand through Not-Omala’s, and pulled her with all his might. “We have to run!”
Goooonggg.
Their feet pounded, but their pursuer made a mockery of their flight. Lithe steps and swift feet weren’t winning; the samurai ate the space between them with each step. It didn’t help that whatever shoes Not-Omala had on clanked and clicked with each pump of her legs. All the while, that infernal clock tower rang from afar, reminding them that danger was coming at them from all levels.
Goooonggg.
Not-Omala stopped suddenly, yanking Francisco back and holding out her hand. “Quick, give me the knife!”
Was she crazy? “No, we can make it to the exit!”
She took the blade, despite his protest. “I need to make sure you’re safe. You’re the prince; I’m no one!”
Goooonggg.
“I need to get into the source code, before GAIA comes crashing down. If the person you know can help me do that—”
His argument seemed to win her over. Suddenly, her feet began to move.
Goooonggg.
They reached the port. A silver button on the frame of the door pulsed light, one of the few things to behave in a non-era conforming way in the platform. Francisco’s hand smashed down, and inside his head, an internal countdown clock began to tick off the five-second delay required before jumping.
Five... Four....
Three... Two...
“No!”
Just as his foot fell forward, her hand left his.
Francisco spun and found disaster: the samurai, her left arm braced around not-Omala’s neck, with the sword pushed against the base of his kidnapper’s throat. A drop of blood trickled down from where the blade nicked her.
The samurai’s speech held no accent. “Back away from the gate, Your Majesty.”
Goooonggg.
Not-Omala’s hands clutched around her captor’s arm, but proved powerless to free herself, Not-Omala’s lip quivered. “Don’t listen to her. Go!”
His head swiveled between the situation before him and the exit behind him. “But she’ll kill you.”
“Think! I’m out at midnight, but why would she want you to stay?”
Goooonggg.
He’d been so wrapped up in the danger before him, he’d failed to anticipate that to come. Not-Omala made a good point: He was not only a free citizen, but the Prince of GAIA. What reason would this –she must be a security bot of some kind?– have for forcing his presence at such dire stakes if not for an ulterior motive?
And who was the woman held captive, that the samurai didn’t just slay her on sight?
Someone who was of value to his enemies as well.
Someone... who knew how to access the source code.
Goooonggg.
Francisco looked upon the woman with newfound reverence. “It’s you.”
“Your Majesty—” The samurai’s blade bit deeper, bringing a trickle chasing the path of the previous single drop. It must have hurt, but Not-Omala did nothing more than suck in a breath. “I must insist.”
What could he do? What could he do? He couldn’t let this woman die, and he couldn’t succumb to threats.
But before he could act on his own, before he could even decide what to do, his options were taken away from him.
Not-Omala groaned, throwing all her weight back. The heel of her translucent shoe sped his direction. Instinct drove Francisco. Sensing an attack, he tried to catch her blow before it connected. All he managed was to get a hold of one of her curious slippers, which came off in his hands as the force of the maneuver threw him off balance and falling backward.
A moment was all it took for the samurai’s sword to fall between them, slicing into Francisco’s wrist just as his body passed through the portal.
Red everywhere.
Blood in his eyes.
Dead eyes staring into his soul.
“Breathe, Your Majesty! Breathe!”
His eyelids shot up, but the sight didn’t bring clarity. All around him, GAIA security forces swarmed. He was still in his jackpod, but the lid had been lifted away. A pressure on his wrist forced him to pull his arm up to examine it, out of a physician’s hands.
“Your Majesty! Wait.” The woman yanked his arm back under his control. “I have to finish the wrapping. We’ll get you to a medical suite as soon as we staunch the bleeding. Try to stay calm.”
“Bleeding? I—”
His words tapered off where his confusion took over.
The physician looked up just long enough to grimace. “You have a deep cut to your right arm. It will require sutures.”
“How? I was jacked in. How did I get injured while I was—”
But then it all came rushing back to him: the ball, the confrontation with Hugo, the kidnapping, the samurai.
The woman.
Francisco’s head lashed to the side, finding two members of his tech team hovering on the periphery of the bubble about him. “The woman who abducted me. Who was she?”
They looked at each other in confusion. “Abduction?”
Of course, they wouldn’t know. Anyone else at the ball would have had to leave the palace to exit as well. No chance Carlos had yet gotten back to reveal the emergency within, and his security officers only had tangential access to Tybor’s system to observe.
No matter. Soon enough, the whole world would know.
Francisco yanked back his hand, pulling the damaged arm into his chest, and sat up, despite his physician’s protestations.
“Find her!” He shouted. “I don’t care what it takes, just find her!”
30
Goooonggg.
Any relief Cindira felt at seeing Francisco’s form fall into a darkened doorway and, presumably, out of the platform evaporated when the tip of Yuchi’s sword pierced her skin.
“Laporte?” Cindira’s eyes moved in the direction of the fidgeting figure to the right. “What do I do?”
“I’ve determined the best option is to fight your way out.”
The involuntary guffaw that erupted from her chest would have been funny any other time. “Seriously? Why can’t you just do whatever you did back in the castle and force her to restart?”
Goooonggg.
“Because she’s adapted to my attack; it wouldn’t work a second time.” Laporte came to her aid, pulling Cindira to her feet.
“Enough of your chattering!” Yuchi’s hand flew out. If the dagger had been on her person somewhere, or if she’d conjured it out of air on a whim, Cindira couldn’t say. Laporte’s eyes bugged. He let out one very terrified shriek as he dissolved into a mouse and scurried away to safety underneath a nearby water trough.
“Laporte!”
Goooonggg.
Her shouting achieved nothing. It was too late.
As the resonance of the last bell dissipated, Cindira closed her eyes and accepted the inevitable. She would be booted out of The Kingdom. Would it kill her? Would it hurt? Would it somehow reveal her true identity? All these answers lay on the other side of
midnight.
Only, nothing happened. She was still jacked in. She cracked open her eyes and looked down at her legs pressed into the ground before her. She no longer wore the servant attire. Her hands pressed to her face, recognizing not her mother, but her own.
With no one else to ask, Cindira looked up at the travel bot. “Why am I still here? How?”
Yuchi still held out her sword. “You are to wait.”
“Wait?” Cindira scooted back, only for Yuchi to advance in her retreat. “For what?”
“An override to your rejection was ordered by the Queen. You will be detained until she arrives.” At last, her weapon dropped to her side. “You will not be harmed as long as you are compliant.”
The scenario played out in Cindira’s mind in the snap of a second: Johanna’s arrival, being discovered for who she really was, her step-mother’s realization that she had confessed to Omala’s own daughter the murder she’d committed. The possibility that a magic-wielding, world-controlling Johanna may decide it would be easier to kill Cindira here and cover up yet another death.
No, she couldn’t let that happen. She must live. She must avenge her mother. She must save her father. She must protect GAIA.
“You’re wrong about that, Yuchi.” Cindira kneeled down, feeling the stem of the knife press into her hand. “I’ve been compliant all my life, and the only thing it’s done is bring me harm.”
Eyes shifting, grin lifting, the bot followed Cindira’s movement like a cat sizing it’s prey. “You don’t really think you can take me, can you?”
“I can’t defeat you, but I don’t need to. The only thing I need to do is get through that portal.”
The Kingdom wasn’t reality. The vreal world was a creation of a genius but human mind, and AI or no, a human mind could rule it, change it, command it. Johanna had done it, tossing around waves of “magic,” but magic wasn’t real. She’s doing here what I do in the Stadium, Cindira thought. And if she can do that without knowing what I know, what couldn’t I do if I tried?
Her right arm lashed out, while her mind strung together the code to render what she’d imagined. Yuchi took a step back when the steak knife disappeared, and a rapier replaced it.
“You... You recoded it. While inside the platform! Impossible!”
Cindira kept her focus, lifting the sword back, to the right, to the ready. “We don’t have to do this. Just let me leave.”
The samurai mirrored the pose. “I cannot permit it.”
Confusion. Noise. Strength. Fear. The swing of the katana brought them all in Cindira’s direction.
She leapt back. Once. Twice. Volley. Block. Thrust.
Cindira fought with the might of the woman she was, and the child she’d been. Every attack was met in kind. Every strike, blocked. Every parry, met with equal rebuttal. Being able to conjure a sword out of nothing was impressive, but it was not indominable. Yuchi settled both her hands on her sword, rounding with a barbarous yelp in a spinning blow.
“Stand down!” Yuchi bellowed. “I will not harm you unless driven to do so.”
Unless driven to do so...
Laporte’s words echoed in her mind. “She’ll need to maintain a logistical framework to attack. It will be a disadvantage.”
If that was true, that meant Yuchi was subject to the same rules Cindira was. But whereas Yuchi was a creature born of code, who could only carry out programming and act on protocol, Cindira was not.
The katana fell away as the earth below the samurai’s feet bubbled and stewed. A few lines of the program altered, inserted by Cindira’s thoughts into The Kingdom’s programming as a limited application. She’d made a sandbox of the place where Yuchi stood, and filled it with quicksand.
Cindira wasted no time. Jumping to her feet, she realized suddenly why her balance felt so uneven. One of her shoes was missing. Only, where was it?
The clop-clop of horse hooves filtered through the air, and she knew she’d have to leave it behind. It was only a vreal world manifestation of the glass slipper, after all. Surely its absence didn’t imply anything more.
Eyes on the gate, Cindira dropped the sword in her hand, and threw herself forward, into to the exit portal.
31
Johanna stewed in her office, her eyes cataloguing the skyline that stretched out from their perch on Twin Peaks, down to where parts of the old city had been reclaimed by the tides. Across the Bay, Oakland twinkled, almost as if Omala, rotting in her grave, managed to laugh at her.
A knock on her door broke her reverie.
“Yes?”
Her assistant, Willa, had previously been Rex’s for the last six years. She’d stopped asking when her boss would be coming back a week ago. Soon, she’d get suspicious that the story Johanna presented over and over was just that: a fairy tale.
Willa peeked around the corner. “Your daughter is here to see you, Mrs. Tieg.”
“Tell Kaylie I’ll come by her office in a little while.”
Willa took two steps into the office. “Not that daughter.”
“I only have one—”
Johanna cut herself off the moment she realized what the assistant meant. She sent the comque moments before, a request to Cindira to meet and discuss heightened security protocols. Covering up what had happened two nights ago in The Kingdom proved impossible; there were far too many witnesses. Damage control took priority now, should have taken priority from the start.
Cindira was the best coder Tybor had. The best coder anywhere, perhaps. For Tybor to survive this, Omala Grover’s meek little step-daughter had a lot of work before her.
“Cindira? Already?”
Willa confirmed it with a nod. “Did you want me to send her away?”
“No, I—” Johanna smoothed out her jacket and cleared her throat. “Show her in.”
Johanna couldn’t remember when she’d started hating her step-daughter. No matter what anyone claimed, it had not been since their first meeting. In fact, Johanna had been rather taken by the beautiful, precocious, and vastly intelligent eight-year-old child. So much so, that she envied Omala for her fortune.
But no matter how hard Johanna tried to win Cindira’s heart, it was not to be done. Oh, the girl had never been disrespectful. On the contrary, Rex’s child from his first marriage was gracious to a fault. After a while, that wore on Johanna. And, oh, how Rex doted on her. Who was this child to treat her cordially and distantly at the same time?
No, hate had not come first. First it was confusion, then bitterness. And then, jealousy. Jealousy when Johanna understood that Rex would always love his daughter so much more than he loved her, and that this daughter was so much like her mother that...
Well, when put that way, it seemed silly, but such was the human heart. Omala’s death had been the perfect opportunity, it turned out, to exorcise Cindira from their lives. “Everything here will remind her of her mother,” she’d told Rex. “She’ll constantly be brought down by reminders at every turn. And she’s so intelligent. Kaylie and Cade? They tease and taunt, and she doesn’t deserve that. Boarding school is really the best thing for her now.”’
Rex bought into the “mother’s insight” line. Such a fool.
A fool she hadn’t planned on loving but managed it anyhow.
“Surely you’ve heard about what happened.” Tybor’s commander kept her eyes turned to the city outside the windows as her step-daughter crossed the distance between the door and the chair in front of the desk with tentative, measured steps.
Cindira’s tiny, unsure voice answered, “The prince, kidnapped. They say he’s okay though. I read that some mysterious woman managed to hack her way into the program.”
Johanna turned her gaze to the meek little coder. “We don’t know if it was a woman.” Johanna had suspicions, but none she planned to share in current company. “The avatar used belonged to a woman, but it, too, was hijacked. We should assume nothing.”
The girl’s eyes raced to the floor. “Of course.” Then, barely lo
oking up, she added. “How do you know the avatar was hijacked?”
“Because who it belonged to...there’s no way that person could really be there. It’s impossible.”
Luckily, Cindira pressed no further, only nodding and looking back to her feet.
Johanna turned her attention back to the matter at hand. “So far, most of the press has accepted my explanation: the whole thing was a test to see if our security measures were as effective as we claimed them to be. They failed, and one rogue hacker was able to take advantage of the situation.” Johanna leaned forward, her voice lowering. “But you and I know that’s not what really happened, don’t we?”
The young thing flushed. She never could take an authoritative tone well. “We do?”
“Yes, we do. Your mother was a genius. What, does it surprise you to hear me say that? You think I didn’t respect her talents? She was a luminary, and you were her little doppelganger from the very first time I met you.”
Cindira stayed maddeningly quiet.
Johanna smashed her palm against the desk. “Enough is enough, already. Admit you know how to access the source code, and then do it. Genius or no, we need to tap into the root directories and fortify The Kingdom, or it’s all going to fall apart.”
“But I keep telling you, I don’t know how to get into the source code.”
“Find a way. Clean up this mess made by the gaps in your mother’s code! If you don’t—”
It would sound like a threat, and for once, Johanna didn’t want that. But what else could she say? It was the truth.
“If you don’t,” the blonde’s chest fell as she exhaled, “then you’re probably going to be an orphan very soon.”
Cindira looked like a caught fish trying to understand how she’d ended up on land. “I’m sorry?”
Now that the can of worms was open, nothing remained but to bait the hook. “Your father isn’t traveling. He’s been kidnapped. Kidnapped, sound familiar? The same tactic used by the hacker who broke into The Kingdom. I don’t doubt they are one in the same.”
For a girl who harped on about the inability to reach her father for months, Cindira took the news with amazing poise. “Is that so?”
City of Cinders Page 15