They hung back from the end of the alley, beyond the direct sight of passersby. Daniel looked odd in his wetsuit, but it would be her silver suit that would be more identifiable. She moved several paces right, in the direction of the headquarters. The hand holding the device dropped to Daniel’s side.
“You’ll never get past security.”
“I need to talk to my mother.”
Daniel gave a sharp, dismissive shake of his head and shifted his feet, ready to move again. He had been against letting her mom get involved. Another instance where his vision had been clearer than hers.
“And you think showing up at headquarters will help that?”
Storm felt the sudden popping of a bubble she had been working so hard to keep inflated. She had always made excuses for her mom, the same way her dad had, yet her mother had known where she was. Even if she’d been busy, sending an email took almost no effort at all. She pushed her foot against the bottom of a faded plank fence. It gave beneath her force.
“Do you have a better idea?”
Two men passed on the sidewalk, wearing casual pants and light jackets. One glanced into the alley and Daniel stepped in front of her. They would look like two freaks to anyone walking by, anonymous unless the viewer knew what to look for. After the video, she was more exposed than she had been to the fields.
A car horn blared and she startled. An elderly man mid-block slipped a garbage bag into a can. She was a rat trapped in a maze, with some scientist or official just waiting for her to reach the cheese. She had to think. Not just follow the obvious path.
“We should go back underground.”
For once it wasn’t the fields she was escaping.
Daniel nodded, watching his screen.
“That’s what I’m trying to do.”
She matched his stride, faster this time, and she felt the energy from the needles softening, the depth of it not what she had hoped. It was hot inside the suit and she already needed water. Sweat rolled down Daniel’s face, the neoprene suit worse.
They came out onto a street that fed into the busier area, a few businesses set up in what were once houses, a few broken sidewalk tiles and poorly tended planters giving an air of businesses that were surviving, if not thriving. She was grateful, as it meant less pedestrian traffic.
They crossed a large square, its concrete layout like the one she and Megan had traversed. She searched for red chevrons, scanning for the safe path. At the entrance Daniel held the door for her, his face an unhealthy red, the smell of sweat and rubber rising off him like steam.
They bypassed the elevator and followed the stairs down, traversing similar empty flights to those she and Megan had climbed. At the bottom of the first flight she paused and couldn’t help but feel she was moving backwards. Another person entered the stairwell from above and Daniel waved her onwards, his hurried footsteps close behind her.
At the third flight, he stopped her with a hand on her shoulder, steering her into the parking garage. Her legs weakened at the rows upon rows of parked cars. He didn’t stop, walking fearlessly between the gleaming red, blue, and greens of the cars. The place was lit up like the showroom of a car dealership. The cars looked to her like a battalion ready to deploy at any time. Lights reflected in expansive windshields, and an ominous bank of charging stations sat along the back wall.
She held her breath as she walked almost on top of Daniel, feeling as if he were placing down red chevrons with each step. She didn’t speak, afraid the cars would hear her and suddenly come alive. They reached the end of the row and turned right, seeing more empty spaces now, some of the cars older electric models, their sheen not as bright.
“Through here.”
They passed through another doorway and a smaller staircase going down, lit by dim emergency lights. There was dirt in the crevasses, a stale dark smell wafting up the stairs. She choked. The air tasted like they were descending into a sewer. They were already far deeper than the subway.
Daniel pulled back his hood, his scalp slick with sweat. Storm covered her nose. His eyes were haggard in a scorched face.
“It doesn’t last long.”
They were moving away from where they needed to be. They had once been inseparable, a formidable team, but now there was no way to know who side he was on. He could easily be aligned with the group Megan had saved her from.
“Wait.”
She had her fingers over her nostrils yet she still smelled the stench.
“Where are we going?”
He leaned heavily on the rail.
“This is where I live.”
For a moment she thought he meant the cold bare walled stairwell, yet he continued moving down, faster, letting gravity propel him. He reached the landing, turning down the next flight, but she hadn’t moved. It felt wrong to be going underground, but she didn’t know if it was the stench, the parking lot, or the feeling that she had gotten off track.
One flight down, Daniel stopped. She could hear him breathing.
“Storm?”
There it was again, as if he were calling her in an empty apartment.
“This feels like running away.”
Dirt darkened the pockets in the concrete walls, a column of solid inertness rising above and below.
“The Yukon is running away. This is survival.”
She pulled off her hood, the damp air cool. She listened, waiting, as if she would be able to sense whether this was a good place or bad the same way she could feel the fields.
His footsteps started moving, slow and tired.
She caught him easily, sweat dripping off his nose, his cheeks too red. She unzipped the back of his suit. The red welts had spread to the middle of his back, some of them oozing pus, all washed in sweat.
“We’re almost there.”
He was panting and his hand gripped tight on the rail. She slipped under his shoulder, his weight immediately falling on her.
“Tell me where.”
They went down two more flights, most of his weight on her. The stench of sewage was thick and strangely warm. A key for a locked steel door was retrieved, and as the door clanged behind them the smell eased. Rows of vast blank gray cabinets rose to the ceiling. A cold wash of sweat trickled down her back. Daniel stumbled away.
Conduits fed out the top of the cabinets to run across the ceiling and vanish through holes in the walls. She didn’t move, even as Daniel struggled out of his suit near a cot and makeshift kitchen. Hundreds, thousands of megawatts would have fed through this substation, the place alive with the hum from within each cabinet, the occasional click of a relay opening, the thin needles marking the power that surged through the wires before fanning out to the world above. It made her sick to think about what this room had once been, as if trace elements would lick out from behind the cabinet doors to tear a strip of flesh off her back.
Daniel grunted as he struggled to free himself from the wetsuit, too weak to pull his arms free from the sleeves, the top of the suit bunched at his waist. She moved to help, conscious of the looming gray faces of the switchgear as if they watched her, longing to be able to unleash their old power on her.
Daniel gave himself over to her as she pulled one hand, then the other from the tight sleeve, trying not to touch the red sores. He was shivering, cringing each time she brushed against them. He leaned on her again and she laid him onto a dishevelled cot so she could pull off the bottom. She worried that she would break him, his thigh’s flesh hanging off bone, his feet white and boney like dead fish. She pulled a grimy blue sleeping bag up to his chin, his face so pale, lips tinged blue.
He lifted his hand briefly off the pillow, towards a second aisle between switchgear.
“Look on the bench.”
He had set up a mini lab, with a bench and what looked like a test area. The whole area was lit with LED lights that had once b
een used for energy efficiency.
“I’m missing something.”
He dropped his head and his face relaxed, the slightest bit of warmth against her cheek indicating he still breathed.
Her own heart raced as she turned and faced up against an unbeatable opponent. An accidental flip of a switch somewhere above and Daniel would have been snuffed out in a single, ultimate seizure.
She felt oddly embarrassed as she walked to the bench, trespassing into his private space. The lab was neatly organized, a contrast to the squalor of his cot and the makeshift kitchen.
She found notebooks labelled with letters and project codes she couldn’t decipher. A well-stocked testing bench with tiny circuit boards and lattices of crystals stacked in cubby holes. A work station encased in a thick black box and a screen draped with copper mesh. And to her fascinated horror, a glass test area within which was the original version of the Gatherer.
THIRTY-ONE
It was amazingly crude in comparison to the sleek white Gatherer in Three Rocks. A shallow concave disc that housed the crystals, wires from the converter hanging out the bottom like the legs of a jellyfish. A fine mesh screen stretched across the opening of the dish, preventing debris from interfering with the crystal structure.
Daniel had added a frame of wooden blocks so that it looked like a bad version of the Olympic torch, or more realistically a neglected bird bath with burned out Christmas lights hanging out the bottom.
She circled, gently laying a finger on the rim of the dish, the stretched mesh delicate as a spider’s web. It was an assortment of odd pieces that could have made something miraculous or nothing at all. She felt surprisingly protective of this early model, even knowing what would come after.
She traced the wires back to Daniel’s work station, abandoning them when she saw the contraptions on his work bench. A row of three lattices, each the identical size of the one that formed the core of the original Gatherer. She couldn’t see the imperfections in the lattice, but she knew they would be there.
Daniel had arrived at the lab shortly after the Gatherer had collected its first energy. He had paced between the screen showing a graph of the process and the inert Gatherer lying in its test bed.
“Show me again what you did.”
She had checked the results again on the screen, not believing what she was seeing.
“I changed the lattice. Increased the frequency.”
“How exactly?”
She didn’t dare tell him that she had been distracted when she’d made the final adjustments, not expecting this test to be any different than the others.
“I’m not sure.”
“You didn’t record it?”
“I didn’t expect it to work.”
She lifted her hand to check another screen.
“Don’t touch anything!”
“Relax. I’m not changing anything.”
He came close, watching over her shoulder. The frustration and bickering of the previous weeks flowed through them, both of them gripped by the fear that they would lose this moment. She took a moment to breathe, focussing on the tiny blip on the screen that showed energy collected.
“It’ll be alright. We can go back and recreate what I did.”
It had taken hours to determine that the tiny imperfections she had accidentally created in the lattice were what had allowed the Gatherer to work. Only she and Daniel had been the ones to understand it. Had Maria known there was something she and Daniel had kept to themselves? Is that why she had sought her out?
Small wires ran from the three lattices on Daniel’s makeshift workbench, the wires connected to a circuit board the size of her hand. An inspection showed the circuit was designed to deliver currents at different frequencies. He’d been testing different combinations of structure and frequency, looking for a safer configuration that would deliver the same energy without the consequences. Or was he simply looking for proof one way or the other of the Gatherer’s culpability in the plague?
She lifted her hand from the bench and wiped it on her thighs. She had been trying to create a shield to protect herself and he had been trying to fix what they had done.
In the beginning of the darkness beyond the test area, in a continuation of the aisle between the switchgear, she found ruined carcasses of old Gatherers. The exploded crystals and burned out wires spoke to countless failed attempts. She could imagine Daniel toiling down here in his pool of light with no one to break the obsession and make him rest, the silent bulks of the switchgear the witnesses as one after the other of his experiments failed and the Gatherer slowly stripped away his health.
Those same witnesses recognized her inadequacy. For despite their flight to the headquarters and their determination that it was she who had to set this right, she still had no idea how to do that. The solution had not shown itself when they had trekked through endless marsh, remained elusive when they had wound upriver, and not once while she had slept, unconscious or otherwise, had it shown itself or provided even the faintest of way markers.
She turned from the ruined pieces, the lights feeling dimmer, and the darkness deeper. Daniel’s cot made barely a dent in the expansive concrete floor, his kitchen a table with a camp stove and a few pots. It was heartbreaking that he tried to save himself from the discomfort of an electric hot plate in between running tests on the Gatherer.
Only the top of his head peeked above his sleeping bag, his body curled on its side, still in its utter exhaustion. Textbooks and manuals lay in toppled piles next to the bed, a notebook filled with scratched diagrams face up beside them. She didn’t remember why it had seemed like a good idea to not take him with her.
He kept his food in a mostly empty Tupperware beneath the table. A bag of rice, several packs of ramen noodles, a single dusty can of tuna, and a stale end of bread. The stove hissed as she lit it with a pack of matches she found in the bin. A yellow, then blue flame flickered, a small stream of smoke curling into the empty ceiling.
She filled a small pot from a water jug in the corner, the hum of the gas increasing as she adjusted the flame beneath to a clear, deep blue.
While she waited for the water to boil, she lifted Daniel’s notebook off the concrete. She sat on the only stool and flipped through the last pages. The entries were disjointed, some jotted notes, others larger exposition about connections and missing links. Despite the confusion, she found the progression of an idea. Diagrams of crystal structures, roughly drawn and scratched out. Calculations of micro-volts and current levels made for each adjustment. Graphs of harmonic signals and the resulting waveform when coupled with the output of the Gatherer.
He had been trying to force the Gatherer to operate within a certain threshold. One that would shut down the channel and render it useless.
She poured a cup of rice into the boiling water and turned the flames down to small blue buds.
Her mother had never given Daniel, or any of the team, their due, giving all the credit to her daughter. Storm had asked her to help the team, look after them, and Daniel lived like a rat in a sewer.
She flipped pages to the low hiss of the stove, following the progression of Daniel’s experiments as he moved away from physically altering the crystal structure to short bits of computer code. He had never been a programmer and the code trailed off, stopping when it ran into the firewalls and layers of security that surrounded the Gatherer.
She turned off the flame, the room bigger in the quiet, and lifted the pot off the stove. Daniel’s can opener was rusty and barely turned, but she managed to pry off the lid of the tuna and stir it into the rice. She spooned half into the only bowl and left the rest in the pot, keeping the lid on to keep it warm. With her food in front of her she opened the notebook at the first page.
She read slowly, stopping occasionally to remember the idiosyncrasies of Daniel’s writing, and ate her first warm meal in d
ays to the soft in and out of Daniel’s breathing. She followed his train of thought, looking for the error, the smallest change in direction that could set them on their final path.
* * * *
Storm held the bowl out to Daniel.
“You need to eat.”
He shook his head, eyes closed. He had slept for close to four hours and seemed incapable of lifting his head.
“Did you look at the crystals?”
She pulled the stool next to the cot and sat, the bowl of rice and tuna cold on her lap.
“I saw your notes.”
His eyes opened, tight at the corners as he braced against some kind of pain.
“And?”
“Can I get you anything?”
He rose to his elbow, right hip twisted towards her. The silver cross hung at his clavicle, the neck that supported it so much thinner than before.
“What am I missing? Did you figure it out?”
She laid the bowl on the concrete, having a sudden image of rats coming out of the walls to fight over its contents.
“You were trying to shut down the channel. Using the imperfections.”
His face reflected the gray of the cabinets, the stretched skin devoid of colour. His head dipped and he collapsed back onto the cot.
“I can’t get it to close. Once it’s open it won’t revert.”
“Should I get your needles?”
A slight movement that signalled no as his jaw hardened. His neck arched and the tendons rose out of his neck like the stressed guy-wires of a sailboat in a storm. She lifted the side of the blanket, releasing the smell of old sweat, and held onto his clenched fist. There was no trembling or shaking, his body as rigid and flat as the steel columns around them, his unseeing gaze locked on the web of conduits that snaked through the rafters.
She thought of the syringes left with Maria in the boat. They were probably at the bottom of the river by now, or shot into some undeserving kid’s veins.
The Gatherer Series, Book 1 Page 25