“Get in the cell, Wade,” Dylan said. “Either that or we’re going to make you get in the cell. Your call.”
Wade wasn’t the type to back down in a fight, even one he knew he couldn’t win, so he went a little crazy. He put everything he had into punching and kicking his way out of the corridor, but it didn’t take long for three second pulses to throw him into the cell Dylan had been in and secure the door. Humiliated, Wade screamed and threw himself against the walls, but these were cells made for people who had the pulse. Wade Quinn wasn’t going anywhere once Hawk was in control of the door.
“You’re a little trickster,” Dylan said to Jade, flashing a smile full of teeth even as Faith knew he must be hurting.
“Mom told me not to tell anyone. Not ever. She said I’d know when to use it.”
Dylan pulled her into a hug and winced. “Good old Mom. She knew what she was doing, I guess.”
“Your arms are burned,” Jade said. “They got through.”
Dylan wiped a hand across his forearm and saw the red stain of having been breached. The burns ran all up and down his arms. “Battle scars. It was about time I got a few.”
Jade smiled up at him, and they both looked at Faith.
“I think you two should stay here and make sure our newly minted prisoners don’t escape,” Faith said, a new kind of command in her voice. It was the voice of a leader, not a person fueled only by anger. She looked down the hall. “I need to do this alone.”
Jade wasn’t about to question Faith on this one, and Dylan was weakened more than he was letting on. It was true, they needed to keep two of them outside the cells—it was too risky to do anything less. Hotspur was a single pulse. There would be no weapon he could throw at Faith that could kill her, and he would be unprotected.
“Are you sure you can handle this alone?” Dylan asked. His voice didn’t have the usual strength and his movements were still choppy and slow. He needed time to recover.
“You get your strength back,” Faith said, backing up toward the far end of the underground prison. “I’ll deal with Hotspur Chance.”
Chapter 13
I’m Your Hitler. I’m Your Stalin
Faith found three doors and checked them all as she moved down a narrow corridor lined with pipes and cords. The first two doors revealed rooms of machinery and boxes and looked to her like places that had once been occupied by computer programmers. The last door had been locked, but that was easily dealt with. Faith was at her full strength again. She backed up twenty feet, curled into a cannonball, and flew into it. The door exploded open as if the lock was made of toothpicks.
She knew something was wrong the moment she got her bearings and stood in the control room where Hotspur Chance was working. There was little doubt Hotspur knew what was going on. He was a master of surveillance and there were cameras everywhere.
It was immediately apparent that a genius was at work. Or was it twenty of them? This was the quandary that faced Faith as she looked around and saw not one but many Hotspur Chances working at various input stations around the circular room. All of them turned at once, an identical rueful smile on their many faces.
“You broke down my door,” they all said. Twenty Hotspurs smiled. “And you’ve imprisoned my children.” They waved their hands into the air. “Ahhh, it’s all right. They have been a disappointment to me. Some discipline might do them good.”
The twenty-odd Hotspur Chances turned away and went back to what they were doing. Electrograms? Faith thought.
“I’ve got just a little more work to do here, and then we can talk. You can even kill me once I’m through. If you can find me.”
Faith walked to the first Hotspur she saw and ran a hand through its head. Her hand cut through the image as if it was moving through dusty sunlight. One of them is real; the rest are not. She slammed a hard fist down on the workstation and expected sparks to fly, but the station was also a holographic mirage, her hand slicing through air.
“Frustrating, isn’t it?” Hotspur said. His voice reverberated strangely, twenty voices on top of one another in precise unison. Three Hotspurs and their workstations vanished, then reappeared in the center of the circular room. “I’d like to help you, but I can’t. I’m busy cutting through the last of Hawk’s viruses. He’s quite brilliant. More than I bargained for, to be fair. But he is about to fall. They all fall in the end. They are all a mere shadow of the master.”
Faith moved from Hotspur to Hotspur, slicing her fists through five of them. They vanished and reappeared in different places. It was disorienting and frustrating.
“Did it cross your mind,” they all asked at once, twenty guns being lifted off twenty desks, “that possibly Clara wouldn’t be the only one with a weapon that could put an end to you?”
Faith stopped in her tracks and realized her mistake. She turned for the door and thought of running, but what good would running do? If she didn’t at least try to stop this catastrophe from taking place, she would live in endless regret of how close she’d been to stopping a madman and of giving up in the face of bad odds.
“Don’t worry too much,” Hotspur said, putting the gun down. “Not yet anyway. I rather like having you around, keeping me company. And really, there’s nothing you can do to stop me now. We come to the very end, as it was always meant to be.”
“You don’t have to do this. You could change your mind. It’s been known to happen.”
Hotspur’s fingers flew across twenty keyboards and Faith watched as carefully as she could, looking for an anomaly that would give the real Hotspur Chance away.
“This is the antidote the world needs right now,” all the Hotspurs said. “Some pills are hard to swallow, but that doesn’t mean they won’t fix what ails the patient. No one will ever understand, and that’s okay. I don’t expect understanding.”
“What if you’re wrong?” Faith pleaded. She swiped her hand through another fake Hotspur and found herself wholly unprepared when he used his single-pulse mind to throw her across the wide room and slam into a wall. She crumpled onto the floor, and when she stood up, slightly dazed, only one Hotspur stood before her. It was holding the titanium-bullet gun, pointing it at her head.
“I am not wrong.”
She’d struck a nerve, but before she could think to send him flying to his death he beat her to the punch, sending her one more time across the room and slamming into the far wall. He’s powerful, Faith thought. More powerful than normal single pulses.
When she stood and turned to the room all twenty Hotspurs were back, working at their stations. They looked up at her, mournful and angry. “Did you know it’s hypothetically possible to have the opposite opinion of every single living person and still be right?”
“So you’re God, then. Perfect.”
“Not perfect,” Hotspur said, tapping wildly at the keys. He looked up and appeared to be contemplating the God part. “You’re a history buff—I know this about you. Were you aware that great individuals, people you probably admire very much, had rather a high view of themselves?”
“Like who?” Faith asked in an effort to keep him distracted.
“George Washington wanted very much to be called His Mightiness. Columbus practically demanded that he be addressed as the Admiral of the Ocean. Can you imagine? The king of all the navigable seas? And what about Catherine the Great? Did you know she refused to open any letter that was not addressed to Her Imperial Majesty? Victor Hugo, the esteemed writer, demanded that Paris be renamed in his honor. The list goes on and on—any person who stands far above the rest has good reason to ask for such titles. But I never asked for any of that.”
“You don’t make any sense,” Faith said. She felt like arguing with him, but she knew that would be a mistake. He’s trying to distract you. Don’t let him, she thought.
“So close,” Hotspur said. “Just a few more keystrokes and our little man will be vanquished. A shame he’ll go with the rest, in the blink of an eye. At least he won’t feel it
. Well, not for very long anyway. It will be over almost before it began.”
Faith was simultaneously running out of time and ideas. What could she do?
“Ahhh, here we are, then,” Hotspur said. “Just need the right number of zeroes—one hundred and twenty-two—and a one, and then we’re all done. Finally.”
Hotspur turned to Faith, one hand typing, the other holding the gun trained in her direction. Which one is he? She couldn’t know. She was in a room full of gun-wielding maniacs, and yet there was only one maniac.
“I’m not going to shoot you, Faith,” Hotspur said. As he spoke, one of his electrograms faltered. A clue had emerged at last. A halo bloomed around its body and it sputtered out of existence. “We’re both going to die down here. We all are. Because the world needs someone to blame or it will go mad and spiral into chaos. Don’t you understand? I don’t need a grand title or anyone to worship at my feet—I’m beyond all that. I know what humanity needs. People need more than this event, so long in the making. People need someone to blame.”
Two more electrograms vanished and Hotspur’s finger kept hitting the zero key. He knew how many he was typing in.
Seventeen Hotspur Chances looked into Faith’s eyes with a destructive sadness, a willful defiance against humanity. “I am your Hitler. I am your Stalin. I am your demon, your death maker, your one to blame on down through the ages. I take this moniker willingly upon myself and I go happily into the great unknown because that, Faith Daniels, is what you need. It is not who I am, it is who you need me to be. Do you understand?”
He paused a moment and shook his many heads with a smile. “Of course you don’t understand—no one does. No one will ever see the truth about all this: that I was right, that I saved the entire world, that I alone had the courage to do what had to be done. You are like children, all of you. So I give you what you need. I give you a villain to hate so you can sleep at night.”
Five more Hotspurs plinked out of existence as his finger held in the air above the key, then moved across the keyboard to the number one, farthest away from the zero. His finger hung there and all but three Hotspurs vanished.
Three Faith could pick up and move. Three she could deal with, and so she did.
As his finger moved down and brushed the one key, she lifted all three off their feet and into the ceiling above. Two didn’t move at all, but the real Hotspur did. His head hit the solid mass of wall overhead, crushing his skull, and he fell back to the floor at the only true workstation in the room. With all the electrograms gone, the entire room was virtually empty. Just the one station where a man could work and get things done, like murdering hundreds of millions of people in the blink of an eye.
Faith was about to move in for the kill, to make sure he was finished off, when his hand flashed upward and slammed down on the right side of the keyboard.
Hotspur Chance had hit the last key. The one key.
The screen he had been staring into flashed with light and code streamed in liquid lines. Something big and terrible was happening.
“You were almost fast enough,” Hotspur said. “Not quite, though.”
A bloody smile smeared across his mouth and Faith lifted him off the floor, dropped him hard in the chair at his desk, and moved his nearly dead hands over the keyboard.
“Reverse the code!”
But Hotspur’s hands were as lifeless as two pieces of wood. He breathed faintly and looked up at Faith.
“What do they say about Faith?” he asked, and Faith thought it was a cruel final blow to play on her name’s meaning. “I thought you could move mountains?”
Everything inside Faith burned with pain as she thought of the long journey that had led her to this moment. In all that time she had somehow managed to avoid killing someone with her bare hands. It was a line she had made sure she never crossed. She feared what it might do to her, how it might change her. But now, as she stared at the bleeding man in front of her who had terminated millions of lives, she reached out and put her hands around his neck. The skin was warm and she felt the big veins and the bones underneath. She felt him struggle to breathe and imagined his brain collapsing into itself, the cells in a deadly dance, searching for oxygen and blood. As she watched him struggle, tears welled up and ran down her face. She felt a storm of regret and anguish for what she was doing, for what this man had done, for failing to stop him.
And then it was over. Hotspur Chance was gone and she released him. She couldn’t stop her hands from shaking.
And for the first time in ages Faith cut herself some slack: I did everything I could, she thought. At that moment she lost all hope in any kind of happy future, but there was a little grace, and that had been enough to keep her alive.
She looked once more at the workstation, from which so much destruction had been orchestrated. The whole screen had filled and more code ran in fluid lines across the top of the screen, pushing new lines down and off the bottom. Faith couldn’t help wondering if each character she saw represented a human life being shocked out of existence.
Wait, that wasn’t right.
Faith blinked hard, leaned in closer.
The lines of code weren’t being added. It was an illusion at such high speed.
The lines of code were being removed.
Hawk’s voice echoed softly into the nearly empty space. It was like a voice straight out of heaven, and everything terrible about Faith’s life lifted in the space of a heartbeat. Six simple words, but for Faith they were the voice of a nerd angel.
“I think I have it contained.”
Chapter 14
Shackles and Bone
“Hawk?”
Faith wanted to believe it was really him, but there was still a small part of her that couldn’t trust it as she watched the numbers continue to reverse on the screen. She’d been burned by trusting people and things and feelings before.
“A little busy right at the moment,” Hawk said.
“Did it start yet?” Faith yelled, but what she was really thinking was Has anyone died yet? Has Hotspur’s killing machine been engaged?
There was a long enough pause to make Faith question everything all over again, but then Hawk’s voice returned. “Not yet. It’s like staying in front of a hundred electrified zombies coming at me from different directions. Good thing I played all those video games! I’m beating this undead code back into the ground. I got this!”
His voice was crisp and clear on speakers mounted somewhere Faith couldn’t see. This is really happening, she thought. We’re saving the Western State.
“I think I hear you saying you’ve got this under control,” Faith said. This was one thing she wanted to be sure about. “So the zombies are the electrical charges Hotspur released into the State? And you’re . . . what, like, zapping them?”
She couldn’t speak geek to save her life.
“You got that right! The initial impact sent out charges that need to pass through a series of relay checkpoints. I’ve created a zero virus and now I’m tagging the relays before they can hit.”
Silence from Faith sent Hawk into another code-slinging frenzy of hyper chat.
“It’s a mistake, Faith. Hotspur Chance made a mistake. He was going for efficiency and speed, but he failed to put in any kind of backup plan if something went wrong.”
Faith couldn’t help looking at Hotspur Chance’s face, caught in a twisted grin, and remembering what he’d said: I’m never wrong. I’m always right. The same thing had happened to Clara. They thought they were never wrong, so they didn’t plan for it.
“Sounds like his real mistake was assuming you wouldn’t be there to stop him,” Faith said.
“Maybe so,” Hawk said, but Faith could tell he thought it was something else. “I want you to understand this, it’s important to me. All these electrical signals—zombie death machines, if you will—he pointed them all at one relay point. The smart thing about that? If the relay is open, they all sail through at once. It’s an electric zombie
apocalypse in the Western State. Not to be gross, but everyone fries at once. The whole system is infected in the same few seconds of time. But the really stupid part, the part I can’t believe, is that he didn’t plan for anyone to close that relay point. It never occurred to him it might happen, because he hard-coded this thing from the start. My level of hacking didn’t even exist when he programmed this. I hadn’t entered his imagination. Anyway, I closed the relay barely in time, and that’s when it got interesting.”
“Interesting how? You don’t mean there’s still a chance?”
“Nope, no, no chance. Even if I keeled over from a heart attack right now, this electricity infestation is toast. Go back to the zombie parallel—they all turn back when they reach the closed relay. They get confused. They start eating one another! Okay, that’s seriously gross, but that’s what happens. They chow right through one another until some of them leak out and then they hive, because that’s what Hotspur programmed these zombies to do. They hive, and then they go searching for the next available relay. Mind you, all this is happening in seconds, not minutes or hours. It’s fast.”
“Can you keep up? Are you sure?”
“Don’t have to. I just ran the last piece of programming and hit enter. My programming follows the action, watches where they’re going, and stands at the ready with a zombie-killing wall of death!”
“Why not just shut all the relays down at once?” Faith asked. She thought it sounded dangerous to leave them open in case even one stream of electric energy found a way out.
“Can’t do that. It would shut down the entire Western State. That’s what electromagnetic shocks can do, and that would be a disaster of its own. Not as big, but definitely not good. Those relays are used for all the Western State’s energy to move around the grid. Also, there are 3.8 million relay points. It’s too many.”