******
They had reached a vertical, cement-walled tube just wide enough for one person at a time to squeeze inside. The front wall of the tube was furnished with a rusted metal ladder.
“The transports are just outside,” said John. He glanced at the ladder. “I’ll go first.”
Without another word, he started up the ladder, scaling the thing with practiced ease. Jessica and Vincent followed more slowly behind him. When they breached the tube and emerged into the sunlight, they were in the middle of a street. It reminded Vincent of the scene from Mr. Watts’s morning sim – barren and dusted over with the remnants of crumbled buildings, vehicles overturned and deserted.
“Right over here,” said John. He stared toward a pile of rubble at the curb. “Washing isn’t far, but we’ll have to hurry.”
Vincent pulled his gaze from the wreckage. He took off after John with Jessica at his side.
When they got to the rubble, John reached over the nearest boulder, like he was trying to flip it. Instead, he stripped the thing of its fabric disguise and exposed one of the military looking transports beneath. He pressed a button on the door and the ramp extended.
“After you,” he said, and they climbed in.
Seconds later, they were flying. They went much faster than any of the transports Vincent had seen in Hux. The outside was a blur of gray and black as they left the outskirts of the city, then gold and green as they zoomed past the fields outside the city limits. It took them well over a minute to reach what seemed like their top speed, and only then did Vincent’s back come unglued from the seat behind him. He stared out the window in awe. John grinned.
“Newsight doesn’t have all the engineers,” he said proudly. “Just most.”
They continued like that for a few seconds, the blur out the windows, the thundering of the wind on the glass.
“Your mother is an engineer,” said Jessica. “Isn’t she?”
John propped his head up from its position against the glass. “She was the last time I talked to her,” he said.
“When was that?” asked Vincent.
“Recently, but we only talk about the Order. She doesn’t tell me anything else. Not even about Brian.”
Vincent bit down on his tongue, nodding. Lynn, apparently, had been avoiding the news as well.
“So she is in the Order?” said Jessica, shifting the subject.
“Of course she is. She helped build it.”
“And what about your father?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said John. He turned back to the window. “He started travelling before I was born. He’s a lobbyist. Or was – I don’t know if he’s still alive. But Newsight consumed him, like they do everyone. I’ve always thought that’s why my mom sought out the Order. To get back at him for leaving. But then she started leaving more, too. Even when she was home, she wasn’t really there, not for Brian. She stayed away from him. I was the one who took care of him.” He shook his head at the thought. “I was barely old enough to take care of myself.”
“How old were you?” asked Jessica.
John thought for a moment. He watched the blurred landscape outside. “Eight,” he said. “That’s when she started coming home late. Later and later. Then not at all, sometimes for days. I was the one who got Brian ready for school in the mornings. Made him dinner at night. I was so angry. At her, some, but mostly at him. Like it was his fault. I couldn’t stand to be around him. There was always something he needed, something I had to give him.”
Jessica was watching John closely. Her posture was so delicate, so careful she may have been floating a centimeter off her seat. “So you left,” she said, her voice soft. John nodded.
“I was 11,” he said. “But I already knew how to drive a transport. So I took off. It was easier, back then. The Lenses came out. The transports could be taken off the network. You could still disappear, so that’s what I did. I ended up in Washing with Jack and Abigail before they lived in the garage.” He smiled at the thought, in a way he never had when talking about his mother. “They introduced me to Kendra and the rest of the protestors, the people who refused to wear Lenses, and I became a part of the movement. I might still be with them had Goodwin not found me.”
“How did he find you?” asked Vincent. “Did he make you part of the Order?”
John lifted his head from the window, blinking, as if pulled from a dream. “He did, just like that,” he said. “I expect my mother was the one who told him. She knew where I was, somehow. It was just like her to send someone else after her own kid.” He let out a puff of air, shaking his head again. “But it was better that way. Goodwin showed me THE SIM. He told me the truth about the world. And he let me do something about it. He told me about his idea to infiltrate Newsight, to go after the prints. I felt guilty leaving Jack and Abigail, but I knew I had to go to the city. I think even then I knew the Lenses wouldn’t always be temporary. I think I was still looking out for Brian. I knew he would need a way out someday, when he was old enough. Now it’s finally time to go back for him.”
Vincent turned to Jessica. She was looking out the window. Her cheeks were sucked into her mouth; her hands were fidgeting in her lap. “So we are going back,” she said “To the Seclusion.”
Vincent shot her a look, but he said nothing. He knew what she had been thinking about with her gaze fixed out the window – not about the Seclusion, but about the Hole, about John’s reunion that news of Brian would only ruin.
John straightened in his seat, suddenly unreadable. “That is for Goodwin to tell you,” he said, and he turned back to the window. Vincent didn’t attempt to restart the conversation, and nor did Jessica – she seemed more than content with the silence.
It was several minutes before the transport began to slow. By that time, the green and gold blur had begun to morph back into a familiar gray and black.
“When were the pamphlets dropped?” asked John, breaking the silence.
“About a week ago they said,” said Jessica. “The attack happened the day we left.”
Vincent remembered the way Jack had hurried back in the bus. They had all known the attack would come, but it was an odd feeling all the same as the transport slowed, and the blur out the windows became the shattered remains of fallen skyscrapers. The city that had stood as the final reminder of everything untouched by Newsight, now lay in ruins.
Slowly, they began to decrease altitude. Vincent could see the parking garage not far ahead. Only the far half of it seemed seriously damaged. The upper stories had been completely torn off, but the base – the important part – seemed intact.
“That’s it?” said John. Vincent and Jessica both nodded. John’s eyes went out of focus as he assumed manual control of the transport. Vincent looked around at the six-man pod they were seated in. Somehow, he doubted everyone in the Hole would fit.
“Setting down,” said John. “Hold on.”
The pod tipped forward as they started for the street next to the garage. Vincent didn’t bother looking for a handhold – the transports never afforded any. Instead, he closed his eyes until he heard the ramp fall onto the pavement outside.
“Here we are,” said John. Vincent could hear the excitement in his voice.
John’s eyes flashed out of focus yet again, and the pod fell the last few centimeters to the ground with a thud. Vincent jumped. Grinning, John climbed from his seat and out the sliding door to the ramp.
“Through there?” asked John when they had both followed him. He was pointing to the vehicle-sized opening in the garage’s side.
“I think so,” said Vincent.
John started forward without another word. There was a spring in his step now Vincent hadn’t seen back in the tunnels.
“Do you think we’ll be able to get in?” whispered Jessica. “The entrance may have collapsed.”
Vincent looked up at the corner of the garage that housed the stairwell. It looked as sturdy as ever. “It looks fine to me,” he said. Jes
sica followed his gaze. She still looked skeptical, but she stayed silent as they followed John across the debris-strewn street. They didn’t speak again until they were inside.
“They had only just started to work on it before I left,” said John, slowing his pace. “But Kendra said they were building supports. I’m not surprised the thing is still standing.”
He looked around them as they walked. The echoes of their footsteps followed him like a shadow, consuming his voice, muting it as soon as it left his lips.
“Which way?” he asked.
Vincent pointed to the stairwell. Nodding, John started for it. Jessica drew a bit closer to Vincent as they followed. Vincent could hear her breathing: shallow, quiet, as if not wanting to disturb the fragile air around them. By the time they had gone down the first few steps, the breathing was all Vincent could hear. It was growing shallower.
“This is where you entered?”
John had reached the bottom landing a flight ahead of them. When they rounded the final corner to catch up, the breathing stopped – the door to the Hole was ajar. There were no piercing bright lights to greet their entry this time. No warning voice calling out from inside.
“Is this it?” pressed John. He was pointing at the door.
“Yes,” said Vincent.
John must have heard the quiver in Vincent’s voice, because he didn’t step forward right away. Instead, he hesitated, there at the knob, eyes locked on the sliding metal slit at eye level. After a pause, with both hands laid on the door’s surface, and with his shoulders rising and falling a bit quicker than usual, he pushed. The scent of the air that blew in to meet them was one Vincent had smelled before. Though he hadn’t tasted the stench in real life, the simulation had provided him more than enough experience to know its source. John seemed to know it too, but he kept forward all the same. Vincent and Jessica followed at a distance. The breathing resumed, but with even longer pauses between inhales now, longer pauses between each drink of the foul-tasting air that surrounded them.
Most of the fluorescent lights from the ceiling lay shattered on the ground. The rest provided the place with weak rays of white light. They cast their feeble beams on utter stillness. They detected no movement through the perpetual, underground shadow but that of John and Vincent and Jessica, and even that had been stalled. The three of them stood at the mouth of the stairwell, unmoving, gripped by the total silence of the place, transfixed by the half-shadowed mounds in the shapes of bodies, filled with the odd hope that some would rise up and greet them, shocked into numb observation by the crimson streaks on the pavement where the inconvenient bodies had been dragged away to clear a path to the stairs.
The breathing began to quicken once more, coming in short, sharp bursts – the stunned, realizing breaths that preceded tears. Vincent felt his shoulders shake in time with the ragged inhales; the breaths were coming from his own lips now.
Next to him, Jessica turned away. Her face was pulled into a look of sour disgust, her eyes glassy. Ahead, John remained where he stood, not turning at the neck, but seeming to take in the entire scene all the same. After several seconds, he spoke.
“Let’s go,” he said.
His words cut through the fragile blanket of silence like razors. He didn’t seem to care. He had turned around and was already starting for the stairs. He bumped into Vincent’s shoulder as he passed, but said nothing in apology. Slowly, and with Jessica close beside him, Vincent followed.