His wife spoke for him, knowing his mind better than he did. “Explain yourself, daughter.”
“Liam resists. I’ve traveled with them, beyond the high levels to the surface itself. The sun doesn’t burn your flesh, there is no radiation. Animals cavort in gentle sunlight, plants—green plants!—flourish under blue skies. And rain! You wouldn’t believe rain, even if I showed it to you. Fresh water falls from the sky to nourish the land below. You wouldn’t believe.”
Darren opened his mouth, but Ona cut him off. “You swear this? On your life you swear this?”
“I do.”
“Then tell us how to get there.” He and Ona locked eyes over their daughter.
But Felicity shook her head. “You’ll betray us. I know you, father, and I know you, mother, and I know you’re too loyal, and that you have to see it first to believe. We live in the Pit, and your lives are dedicated to keeping us there.”
“Daughter,” Darren said. “I warned you.”
Ona kissed his cheek, and he fell to her calming warmth. “Let me talk to her,” she whispered.
The girls went into the bedroom, the only other room in their tiny apartment, and while they talked Darren slept as an acolyte should. Energy controlled everything they did, every shred they used for themselves a selfish denial of the World-Machine, every Joule a sacrilege to the agony It suffered on their behalf. He woke when footsteps intruded on his dream.
Ona bowed her head, eyes cast to the floor. “She’s sleeping.”
“As is right,” they intoned together.
He brushed her cheek with his fingertips, an electric thrill even after all these years. They’d chosen.
They cried together, and made frantic, desperate love on the floor, and cried again and again. And then he opened a channel. His mother’s voice answered.
~
He jostled awake, and brushed his daughter’s hand from his shoulder. “What time is it?”
“An hour before morning claxon. Let’s go.”
He stumbled to his feet, still in his travel clothes from the day before. He stepped toward the bathroom and his daughter shoved him toward the front door. “There’s no time! Just go.”
He paused. The turn of a knob, and his daughter would feed the World-Machine. A step into darkness, and his family would die. Would Ona’s love die with their daughter? Would his?
He turned the handle and stepped outside, running his tongue over gritty teeth. The lights would come on only at claxon, so darkness consumed everything. “Fel, we’re—” he breathed a sigh of relief as three yellow eyes blinded him from everything else. “Come, daughter. It’s time to go.”
Agony wracked him, more than he thought possible. Despair is a sin, he thought, but the thought didn’t save him. It took an eternity to realize the pain wasn’t emotional, wasn’t spiritual. Three yellow eyes dimmed, disappeared, became two. Green, not yellow. Liam’s. His daughter’s voice accompanied him to the afterlife.
“It’s okay, dad. It’s okay.”
~
He woke to an alien world. Blue blazed above him, an unrelenting brightness that penetrated to the core of his being. He turned from it, tried to see in the unrelenting light, could just make out humanoid shapes in a sea of soft green. The priests have come.
A step forward, then two. Something tickled his feet, a scattering of tiny strips like his mop, green instead of orange. Delicate, they crushed underfoot. He breathed deep, and couldn’t describe the joy contained in that air. Life, hope, happiness, he’d never known an aroma so rich.
A silhouette filled his vision, black curls and pale skin, delicate hands in a blue dress.
“Hi, papa. Welcome to the surface.”
He reached out, grabbed her, pulled her to him. “What is this?”
“This is truth. Our life underground, that’s the lie.”
“No.” He shook his head and buried it in his daughter’s shoulder. “My whole life, the things I’ve done. It needs me. It needs us.”
“No, dad. It used you. It used me and your mother and everyone you’ve ever known. The World-Machine is the Pit.”
He cupped her cheeks, then dropped his hands to her neck. Her pulse quickened under his callouses, a desperate flutter unhinged from reason. He squeezed. “Liar.” She clawed at him, raked her nails across his hands, drew precious microliters of blood but didn’t, couldn’t, diminish his purpose. “You want me to give up my wife. You want me to live a blasphemy. I cannot. I will not. I. Will. Not.”
“Darren!”
He turned at his wife’s shriek, almost let go of their daughter. Her struggles weakened, and he squeezed harder.
Something large and pale filled his vision, then his head exploded in pain.
On his knees, he struggled to regain his feet. Another explosion of light and pain, and he lay on the green strips. Grass. This is grass. His mind plucked the fact from somewhere, childhood movies from before the Scouring or fairy tales from his father.
“Yes, father,” Felicity said, and he realized he’d spoken aloud.
He looked up, and found his daughter holding hands with their neighbor, the sandy-haired boy Liam.
They smiled at him, sad and hopeful.
“It’s impossible. But it’s real. Everything you’ve known is a lie. When we go back—”
Darren shook his head. “No. We can’t go back. I’ve betrayed you. You and Liam. They’re going to take you for the tithe. If we go back, you’ll die.”
Liam’s smile held no warmth. “We know. And it’s too late to do anything about that. But you can do something. You can bring it down. Save humanity from the Pit.”
“No, it doesn’t have to be like this. I can—” A sharp pain stabbed into his neck, and the world swam, then went dark.
~
Darren shook the cobwebs from his head. A cacophony filled his ears—gunfire and screaming and laughter—and then only laughter. He rushed forward, mop in hand, bucket handle tucked into his elbow, as he’d done a thousand times.
The first body lay face-down, a sandy-haired man, too lean, too young. Another lay next to him, her mangled, naked body twisted into a parody of human form, but still she held his hand. Jacelyn tore them from one another, and he refused to see their faces. He shoulder-blocked Curt out of the way with a feral snarl, smeared the polyfiber strips through the wet, red liquid, and squeezed it into the bucket.
The priests had given him another chance. They’d given him new life, new purpose. Three hundred sixty-five days, fourteen thousand four hundred kilograms.
And yet ….
FOAM RIDE
“Do you want the fucking job or not?” Barry slammed down his Mai Tai, the orange-red liquid sloshing over the glass onto his hand, his intense glare boring holes through Alyssa’s skull.
She brushed sand off her leg as an excuse to control her actions. “Of course I do.” Punching him here wouldn’t do any good anyway, and he brought her quality work by the bucket. Like this job for twenty-five thousand euros, almost six month’s rent, four after catching up on what she owed.
“Then what’s the problem?”
She looked out across the water, a crystal blue too pure for nature. The sand squished between her toes well enough, but she could just make out the thin haze of pixel blur around the horizon, Barry’s telltale architecture glitch. “You said 2008. So what’s the scam? Who’s the client you’re ripping off?”
He sucked sticky liquid from his fingers, obviously stalling. “Not until you sign.”
She leaned forward with a scowl. “I’m not in the fraud business.”
“It’s not fraud.”
“‘Course it is. There aren’t any pads in ’08.” She twirled a finger around a lock of dark brown hair, enjoying the sensation while she had it. It helped her control her temper; maybe growing it out again wouldn’t be a bad idea. S
he ran a hand over her scalp—her real scalp, back in her living room—and suppressed a sigh at the prickly stubble around the neural jacks. Her avatar maintained a look of bored, somewhat hostile disbelief.
“He insists there is. A first-gen prototype.”
She froze.
Barry laughed, a hearty bellow too loud over the artificial surf. “Why do you think you’re getting paid so much?”
In her room she reached for her head jack. The smell of diaper and litter box and poverty crept in as she let her consciousness drift to the real world, and she stayed her hand. “I want a million euros.”
Barry raised an eyebrow. “For a foam ride?”
She snapped her fingers, and above her hand a hologram appeared. The most famous monkey in the history of history, Koko had been the first primate to travel through time and survive. His mangled, pulsing muscles shivered, exposed to the air in thousands of places. Tufts of fur smoldered where he had skin at all. “I got kids to feed, so if I’m risking that kind of ride, a million euros or fuck off.”
“The control comes from now, not then. You won’t have issues just because the landing pad’s a prototype. Eighth-generation quantum foam software, sixth generation hardware, everything state-of-the-art.”
“A million, or find somebody else.”
“Done.”
Barry said it so fast she didn’t have time to react.
A million euros.
“W—what’s the job, then?”
A stack of papers appeared on the table in front of her, held down at the corner by her Corona. She flipped through them. “Wait, this job is for Seth Newell?”
“Yeah, why?”
Memories savaged her; sleepless nights spent talking despite finals week, shared experiences of orphanages and foster care, sweat and heartbeats and shared breath in the back of an ancient Camaro, a white dress and an altar and vows unsaid.
She schooled her face to flat neutrality. “Why would Seth want to bring down the company he helped found?”
“Newell never forgave Dean Crossing for taking Foam Tech public, didn’t think the public was ready, or responsible enough, for time travel.”
She snorted. “He was right. What have we done with it besides screw people?”
Barry shrugged. “You can’t change the past—”
“—just snoop around in it,” she finished for him. “How many people have you blackmailed with the information I’ve given you? How many companies—lives—have you destroyed?”
He shrugged, a massive heave of massive shoulders. “You take the jobs.”
“Yeah, but I don’t like it. What’s he going to do with the information? Pandora’s Box had the lid blown off.” She read further, enlarging the text for her tired eyes. “That’s it? A million cash to get the number off a rabies tag?”
“That’s it.”
She dropped the papers and locked eyes with him. “What’s the catch?”
“The catch is that that dog tag holds the final decryption code for Foam Tech’s mainframe, and if they find out you’re after it they’ll kill you and everyone you know. And you’ll be going to a prototype pad. The prototype pad.”
“I thought you said it was safe.”
“We’re pretty sure it is. They’re almost to the point where a landing pad is outmoded tech.”
“That’s impossible.”
He shrugged again. “Was impossible. Soon it won’t be.”
“So why not wait and do the job once it’s possible?”
“Client wants it done now. He can’t get any younger.”
She weighed the risks and wondered how much she trusted Barry. “Alright. Wire the money.”
She yanked out the jack and shuddered as reality slammed in. Dropping the metal probe into the bleach solution, she whirled around in her chair and smiled at Tyler, still on the floor pushing around a toy maglev train. “You,” she booped his nose, “need a diaper change.”
He reached up as she inserted sterile plastic plugs into the holes in her cranium. That done, she lifted him, grunting at the weight, and carried him through the tiny kitchen into the nursery. A plastic crib, faded and cracked, lurked in the corner next to a dim lamp.
What kind of crib can a million euros buy?
~
Alyssa tossed a meager tip at the cabbie and got out, feeling underdressed in her most expensive dress, a blue faux-silk, with synthetic sapphire earrings to match. A brown wig covered her bald head, freshly shaved in preparation for the night’s job. Cars passed, sleek Motoyamas and TetraTeslas, with the occasional vintage gasoline retrofit BMW or Mercedes-Benz, rumbling with artificial engine noise. She shuffled, uneasy and out of place, toward Seth Newell’s mansion. No, scratch that. Palace.
The sprawling campus held four buildings, squat edifices of peach brick and stark white mortar behind a black iron fence twenty feet high. She identified herself at the intercom and they buzzed her through. Slate pavers meandered through lush gardens of flowers and citrus trees and green grass, a fortune spent on fresh water in a world running dry. Servos whined as cameras tracked her progress up the walk, rendering the lighted doorbell almost quaint. She rang it anyway, with a single lacquered nail, for half a second.
Seth opened the door himself. She wasn’t sure why that surprised her, but it did. She took in his boyish grin and sandy, sloppy hair and easy stance, vestiges of the boy she knew from a lifetime ago. The crow’s feet were new, and the thousand-euro shirt. She smirked at his bare feet before meeting his gaze. They held what her mother had called “the W’s”: wary, weary, wise. It took a special kind of person to lie with their eyes, and no amount of coaching on her part had made him any better at it.
“Al!” He hugged her, lean muscle and subtle aftershave, and mumbled into her ear. “It’s been too long.” He steered her through a foyer bigger than her apartment, her heels clacking on stone tile.
“Granite floors?”
He chuckled, a tinge of red gracing his cheekbones. “Grandiose, I know. When you run in my circles, you have to have what other people don’t, or they won’t respect you. You should see the elevators.”
“You have elevators in a three-story building?”
“Most of the complex is underground.”
They entered an intimate kitchen, almost too clean, with stainless steel appliances and a small island for eating. He pulled open the fridge, grabbed a beer, and with a grin handed her a diet Dr. Pepper.
“No way!” She twisted off the cap and swilled the delicious, ice-cold beverage.
“You drank the same thing for four years straight.”
“… and you just happened to have some on hand, in case I stopped by after fifteen years?”
His grin vanished. “You talked to Barry. I knew you’d be by.”
She froze mid-swig, lowered the bottle. “I did. And here I am.”
“Your price go up?”
She laughed, a humorless, quiet thing dead on arrival. “Had I known it was you, I’d have asked for ten million.”
He said nothing for a moment. “Did I really hurt you that much?”
She set down the drink and hugged him, and her lips brushed his ear. “Yeah, but it was a long time ago, and I forgave you the moment it happened.” She pulled back, patted his cheek, and stared into his baby blues. “You weren’t ready and I pressured you and you loved her, too, and that’s okay. We’re adults. We thought we were adults then and know better now.”
He sighed, and she continued.
“But that’s not why. I’d ask for ten million because you’ve got more money than God.”
His cheeks reddened further and he looked at the floor. “If you needed help, you only had to ask.”
“I don’t need your help.” She barked a bitter laugh at their respective career paths, his meteoric, hers through the mud. “I need a paycheck
, and you’re asking me to do something insanely dangerous. A ride into a prototype pad could turn me into scrambled eggs.”
“Then don’t do it.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You’re the one hiring me.”
“I could hire someone else.”
“Do you want to?”
“No.”
She stared into those triple-W baby blues and watched his pupils flash, his lids tense just a hair. Why are you lying to me, Seth? She licked her lips, formulated a dozen replies, and said none of them.
He broke eye contact to look out the quaint window above the quaint sink, at the majestic and not-at-all quaint garden exploding with color only the fabulously wealthy could hope to own.
He cleared his throat. “This could be dangerous.”
“Yup.”
“Not just the foam ride. If they catch wind and send someone back—”
“I’ve dealt with rivals in the past.” She snorted. “Literally.”
“Don’t underestimate these people. I trust you to do this, but don’t want you getting hurt.”
She shrugged. “We know I don’t die.”
He shook his head. “C’mon, you know better. Just because nobody’s ever found your body doesn’t mean you didn’t die. Totally different things.”
She smirked. “Do you think I’m going to die?”
“No.” His eyes told the same truth as his mouth.
“Are you certain?”
“Nobody can be certain.”
Another lie.
“A million euros, then.”
“Yes.”
Why does this make you so sad, babe?
~
She stepped into the launch pad, a cylinder of brushed chrome as featureless on the inside as out. In a vintage T-shirt, blue jeans, and sandals, she looked the part of an early-century woman, save for the cranial jacks, which she covered with a bleach-blonde wig. Her backpack, also vintage, held only the essentials: a ski mask, brass knuckles, a B&E kit, and two kilograms of beef jerky.
“In position?” Barry asked through the intercom. She didn’t know where he really was, and it didn’t matter. Nobody could match his ability at manipulating quantum foam to stimulate temporal slide.
In the Garden of Rusting Gods Page 12