by Beth Revis
A muscle moves behind Jack’s jaw. “Around a half a year after I joined,” he says. “After Akilah…”
I wave my hand, dismissing this. Akilah’s not dead.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Jack growls.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m a deserter.”
“Akilah’s not dead,” I state, and saying the words makes me feel stronger. “You are a deserter, and—” I stop talking. I don’t know what I was going to say next. And I’m leaving? No—I can’t. I don’t know how I got the tracker program on my cuff, but regardless, the tracker’s destroyed now. If I leave, I’ll never be able to find Jack again. This may be my only chance to capture him for PA Young.
My hand closes on my wrist, my finger millimeters away from the panic button that will bring the police.
“Wait,” Jack says. It’s the way his voice cracks over the word, desperate, that makes me look up at him. “God, I hate this,” he mutters, running his fingers through his shorn hair. His clear, pale eyes—not quite blue or gray, but something in between—look up and meet mine.
“Just—here.” Jack holds out the thing he retrieved from the other room earlier, waiting for me to take it. My hand shakes as I reach for it. A small, folded up piece of paper that’s slick and heavier than normal paper. A digi strip. “Just watch this, then I think you’ll understand.”
“What is this?” I ask, opening the strip up. The screen is dark, waiting my command.
“Answers.”
Exactly the thing I came here to find.
“I’ll wait, here.” He points to the other room. “Just—watch it. And then if you still don’t believe me, I’ll…” He lets the promise hang in the air between us, unspoken.
I unfold the digi strip slowly as he turns to the other room to give me privacy.
“And—” Jack says, pausing at the door.
I turn, but he doesn’t speak for a long time. He just looks into my eyes, as if trying to see through me.
“And?” I prompt, impatient.
“And,” Jack says, his voice low now, “I’m sorry.”
I flatten the unfolded digi strip in my hand, swiping my fingers across the surface to turn it on. A date written in black letters illuminates the screen. December 26, 2341. Last year, just after Winter Festa. There’s a small timestamp on the bottom, certification that this digi file was recorded on this date.
“Jack, what are you doing?”
My heart freezes at the sound of Akilah’s voice. She sounds happy, playful. She sounds exactly the way I remember her.
“Recording.” Jack’s gruff voice.
The image bleeds onto the paper: Akilah, wearing her military uniform. She looks so professional—wild hair tamed into a beautiful twist, the crisp lines of her pants visible even on the digi file, her brown eyes big and smiling. A single star glitters on the right side of her chest—she’d only been in the military for a short time, and already had risen up one rank.
“Yeah, but why are you recording?” Akilah looks impatient, but she smiles playfully at him.
The image sweeps away from Akilah, toward a building. They’re clearly both at the Lunar Base in Serenitatis—there are military grade rovers scattered on the roads, the shimmering dome in the background. But Jack’s focusing the camera on one building in particular. It looks almost like a hospital or dormitory, but as Jack zooms in, I can see that the windows aren’t glass but painted bricks and the doors are locked with heavy iron bars across them.
“Don’t you ever wonder what’s over there?” Jack says in a low voice.
“None of my business.” Akilah sounds serious now, too. Maybe even a little scared.
The camera moves, as if Jack’s turning to talk to Aks. “The people ordered to go into the Laboratory Facilities… they’re not coming out the same way they were.”
Akilah rolls her eyes. “Not everything is a conspiracy theory, Jack.”
“What’s going on over there?” A deep female voice shouts out, followed by a series of thuds as she approaches.
“Nothing, sir,” Akilah says immediately, jumping to a salute.
Jack doesn’t speak. His camera is facing the ground, hidden by his hand. “Sir, nothing sir, we were just wondering, sir.”
“Wondering about what?”
“The Lab Facilities.”
The woman pauses. “Soldier, it would be an honor—an honor—to be selected for duty at the Laboratory Facilities. It is a privilege, and only the top officers are allowed entry.”
“Sir, yes sir,” Jack mumbles.
There’s more words I can’t distinguish, but soon the commanding officer strides away. Jack seems to have forgotten about the camera, but the audio is still recording.
“Akilah, look—the people who go in that building come out different,” he says in a rushed voice. “And they’re targeting people from the Foqra District.”
Akilah sucks in a harsh breath. The Foqra District—the poor section of New Venice—is where she lived before she was assigned to military duty for her year of service.
“The people who go in… they come out not caring about anyone or anything. What’s the most important thing in the world to you?”
The camera tilts—Jack’s remembered he’s holding it again. It fills with Akilah’s face as she touches the fortune cookie locket around her neck. I do the same, fingering the familiar smooth silver. This is the sign of our friendship, the thing that ties us together even when we’re so far apart.
Akilah’s father disappeared on them when we started secondary school. Her mom was financially ruined, and she and Akilah had to move to the Foqra District. When Akilah got her military assignment, her mother decided to move to Tunisia to look for work, and I know that Akilah doesn’t hear from her often.
Neither Aks nor I have a sibling, and fate and tragedy has isolated us. But the one thing we always had was each other.
Akilah doesn’t answer Jack’s question, but she doesn’t need to.
The screen fades to black, and a new date pops up: January 8, 2342. This year, a few weeks after Jack’s first vid.
The image on the screen makes me feel motion sick—it’s bouncing around as if the person holding the camera is running. The entire screen turns white for a moment, then a loud boom echoes from the digi file. A bomb. My eyes search the screen, trying to pick out Akilah in the mass of people screaming and shouting, running away from—or, in the case of the military, toward—the bomb.
The person holding the camera curses—I think it’s Jack again, but I’m not sure—and a small cloud of gray dust obscures the screen.
The voice behind the camera starts again—just one word over and over: “Nonononononono.” And then the camera drops. I see Jack fall to his knees, gray dust smearing his clothing. And something wet. Something red.
Blood.
Not his.
An arm. The forearm shorn to the bone, white standing out starkly against dark flesh.
Jack crouches over the body of a girl, slender and tall, with wild hair done up in twists. His shoulders start to shake. I see him stiffen then, and lean back.
And I see her face.
Akilah’s dead, staring eyes.
Water splashes onto the digi file screen. I smear my tears away.
Jack pushes on Akilah’s chest, up-down, up-down, but it’s too late. Her stomach is ripped apart, her guts spilling onto the dusty ground, turning the grayish earth dark. One leg is twisted up under her body, the other is completely gone.
I sob, choking for air. My eyes burn so much that I cannot see the rest of the film strip.
Jack wasn’t lying. This isn’t a lie. There is nothing truer than her death and the way my soul is silently crying out in sorrow.
twenty
I slam my palm on the screen, pausing it. My legs give out and I sprawl on the cold, dusty floor, my chest heaving.
I don’t want to believe this is true.
I examine the digi strip, but it’s secure an
d sealed—it can’t have been tampered with. And Akilah would never fake her death, not like this.
The evidence is right here in front of me, but it’s impossible. There have been no reports of her death.
But the image of her body, torn apart by bombs, is burned into my retinas.
And… I just spoke to her. Not that long ago. She’s fine. She’s fine, she’s fine, she can’t be dead.
With a shaking hand, I start the last vid stored on the digi strip. The date—with the official time stamp authenticating it—glows darkly. One week after Akilah’s death.
The image is of a military bunker of some sort. Cots line the building, and it appears as if the camera is propped up on a pillow, pointing to the center of the room. Jack and a few other men are talking to someone, but I cannot see the person’s face. Then the crowd shifts.
I gasp aloud, my heart stuttering.
Akilah walks before a group of military men. She stands straight and tall—on both her legs. She has no scars. No sign that she was injured, let alone killed.
The group of people are just far enough away that I can’t hear what anyone’s saying, just that it appears as if Akilah’s giving orders. I glance at her uniform. She now has six stars shining on her chest. A few weeks ago, she was barely an officer; now she’s nearly a general.
Jack breaks off from the group talking to Akilah and rushes to the camera and the cot it rests on. He does something I can’t see, but when he turns around, I notice a gold necklace in his hand. The fortune cookie necklace. I touch my own, warm from my body heat, and my fingers curl around the metal, squeezing it. Jack rushes back to Akilah and hands it to her.
The gold chain dangles through her fingers. She looks up at Jack, confused. Says something. I strain my ears, but there’s no sound this time other than muffled, indiscernible voices. Jack says something else, as if he’s trying to explain, but Akilah just shrugs as she leaves the group. The other men snap to attention, saluting Akilah, but Jack just stares at her as she passes a rubbish bin and drops the necklace in it.
The screen fades to black. It slips from my numb fingers.
“What does this mean?” I wonder aloud. That Akilah is dead… but she’s not? She’s fine—but different? She hasn’t seemed different. But she hasn’t said anything about dying, either.
There’s one sure way to find out. I stand up, tapping my fingers on my cuff. My eye and ear bots connect to the cuff, and soon a hologram of Akilah fills my vision.
“What’s wrong?” she asks immediately.
I wipe my face with my hands, feeling the grime smear against the tear tracks. “Akilah—you’re okay, right?”
She laughs—nervously, still worried about my obvious distress. “Yeah, of course I am. What happened? Is it your mother?”
I shake my head, swallowing down the fear and sorrow that had risen inside me. I give her a watery smile. “I was just… someone lied to me,” I say. “I’m sorry to bug you.”
Akilah grins at me. “No worries,” she says. She leans forward, reaching for something I can’t see.
“Akilah?” I ask, my voice hollow.
She freezes and leans slowly back, focusing her attention on me. “Yes?”
“Where’s your necklace?”
She stares at me, confused.
I reach up, tugging the silver chain of my fortune cookie locket out, swinging the charm toward her. “Where’s yours?” I demand.
Akilah touches her neck, but there’s nothing there but the collar of her shirt. “I… um…” Her mind’s racing, as if she has no idea what I’m talking about. I narrow my eyes at her. That necklace was the symbol of our friendship. She got special permission from her commanding officer to wear it under her uniform because she didn’t want to take it off, ever. And she didn’t even notice it was gone?
“I didn’t want to worry you,” Akilah says in a rush, as if she’s reading lines from a play. “It broke, but it should be fixed soon, and—”
“I have to go.” I sever the connection without another goodbye.
My mind’s reeling. My best friend would never just forget about our necklaces. Inside the fortune cookie locket is a small digi strip, one we made together. We both swore to never take it off.
It makes no sense that she doesn’t have it. But it also make no sense that she died, and came back as the kind of person who’d throw away the locket as if it means nothing.
“Jack?” I call, striding across the room. “This was not ‘answers.’ You need to start speaking, now.”
I throw open the door to the room he said he’d wait for me in.
It’s empty.
“Son of a—” I mutter.
The window’s open, a warm breeze blowing. I race to it. It’s low and easy for me to hoist myself over the ledge and drop down on the street on the other side. I gaze around, trying to find Jack, but he’s long gone.
twenty-one
Great. I had one lead—one person directly connected to the terrorist attacks PA Young warned me were imminent. One. And instead of calling the police the second I saw him, I let myself be distracted by his lies and fall into a confusing world where nothing makes sense.
I need answers.
Jack’s idea of answers just led me to more questions. I can’t ask Mom; I can’t risk triggering an attack or making her upset. Ms. White knows as much as I do.
I need answers from the person pulling the strings.
A giant fountain rises up in the center of the plaza in front of Triumph Towers. Everything here—except the glittering steel-and-glass towers—is made of gray granite and marble imported from Italy—a stark contrast to the dusty brown limestone that nearly every other building in Malta is made of. And the water here, rather than the blue of the Mediterranean, is golden like honey. I’m not sure if the water’s been dyed, or if it’s just a clever trick of the light, reflecting the bronze base of the fountain up through the water.
I tilt my head back, scanning the roof of the tallest tower, wondering briefly if PA Young is up there, looking down at all of us.
If anyone can tell me what’s going on, it’s her. I’m just not sure how much I trust her. Jack’s digi strip was convincing—maybe there is something going on in that so-called Laboratory Facilities. And that’s government run—which means PA Young isn’t telling me everything.
But… how do you stride into the most secure building in the world and demand answers from the woman who runs the largest global government in history?
Auto-taxis from Mdina and Rabat crowd the corners of the streets, but no vehicles are allowed directly in front of the plaza—safety first. Nearly everyone in the plaza has their eyes glued to their wrists—some are on calls with others or going over their schedules or reviewing notes for the workday. The tourists are holding their wrists up, lining up photos on their cuffLINKs. The only people not staring at their cuffs or with silver eyes showing their nanobots are the security force. Dressed in all-black, the officers stand at attention, their eyes skimming the milling crowd for any trouble.
I twirl my own necklace through my fingers as I stand before Triumph Towers. Before, I had always looked at these buildings with a sort of patriotic pride—they’re gorgeous, skyscrapers that are both magnificently tall and also beautifully built. But now they seem ominous. Glittering in the sunlight, but still—ominous.
A piercing, high-pitched laugh echoes through the plaza, and I’m not the only one who spins around in the direction of the little girl in the neon-bright pink dress who’s half-hiding behind the statue at the base of one of the towers. An older man carrying two cups of a gelato lunges at the girl and she skitters away to her mother, laughing, before racing up to the man and snatching the chocolate gelato cup. I squint, but it’s not until the man turns and sits on the base of the statue beside his daughter that I realize who it is.
Representative Belles.
He looks so different here from when I saw him earlier, after the reverie. He seems lighter, somehow, as if he h
as no worries. The little girl in the bright dress doesn’t stop bouncing around and spinning as she eats her gelato, and the representative and his wife smile fondly at her. She tries to do a pirouette while balancing a huge dollop of gelato on the little shovel-like flat spoons the android vendors dole out, and chocolate plops down the front of her pink dress. She looks on the verge of tears until Representative Belles swoops down, whispering something in her ear and sending her into a gale of giggles.
The corners of my lips twitch up. The representative seems nice.
I hope he’s not a traitor.
I hear a small buzzing sound just before I feel a jab of pain in my hand. I smack my wrist automatically, and my palm comes away smeared with the guts of a fat bumblebee, the stinger embedded into my skin, already puffy and swelling.
“That looks like it hurts,” a voice says.
My stomach drops, and I swallow nervously as I lift my eyes.
And see Dad. Real Dad. My Dad.
I don’t know how I could have been tricked by the hologram tracker program earlier, even if for just a moment. It was nothing compared to Dad standing in front of me right now. He’s real. His hair moves in the gentle sea breeze, his chest rises and falls with each breath, a heartbeat thrums at the vein on his throat.
I leap up, throwing my arms around him. This is Dad. He’s warm and real and here.
“How… how?” I stammer, clutching the sides of his arms. “You… you’re dead.” I whisper the last word, dreading the sound of it on my lips.
“Ella,” he says, his voice trailing off. My name spoken in his voice is heaven; my heart leaps and I want nothing more than to live in this moment, me, holding onto Dad, real and in front of me and clearly, obviously, not dead.
“What happened?” I say. “Was it fake? Your death? Are you in hiding? Is that why you couldn’t come to me and Mom, why you disappeared? We thought you were dead, Dad, we thought—” My voice cracks, and words fade.