It could be nothing.
But it doesn’t look like nothing. This boy—this moment—is weighing on the representative’s mind. He can’t forget him, and, judging by the fuzzy outline around him, he’s tried.
I peer closer at the boy. It’s not really him here, just a memory of him. But he looks anxious—almost mournful. I watch the way his eyes dart, left-right. I can see a pulse thrumming in his neck.
A buzzing sound fills the air, and I notice a fat yellow-and-black bumblebee has made its way from the orange groves of Representative Belles’s reverie over the wall into the area where I’m working. The wall seems thinner—through it, I can see the dreaming representative still walking with his grandfather, but I know I don’t have much time left.
I turn back to the repeating image of the boy and lift my hand. A small filing cabinet rises up beside him. I lean over to open the drawer—but it won’t budge.
Locked.
My eyebrows raise. This really is a secret the representative doesn’t want me to know. It’s buried deep within his mind, and though I might be able to extract the information I need, the reverie’s already so close to ending that any effort on my part will break the connection, wake the representative, and leave me empty-handed. I release the drawer’s handle and peer down at the label instead, hoping for something.
Written across the label in handwritten green, capital letters is a name.
JACK TYLER.
I look up at the fading image of the boy who gave the representative a secret message. “Jack Tyler,” I whisper.
The image, which had been playing in a constant loop, stops. It freezes, the memory of Jack Tyler holding out the piece of paper, leaning forward.
And then, impossibly, the boy turns his face to me. His head turns eerily, as if he is possessed.
His pale eyes meet mine—
—And I wake up.
fourteen
My heart thuds in my chest. I can’t get the way he looked at me out of my mind—not just in Representative Belles’s reverie, but in real life, too, when I saw him—Jack Tyler—at my father’s grave.
I tap into the spa’s security feed, watching as Representative Belles wakes up. My cuff connects automatically to the mental spa’s interface system, the image crystal-clear on the thinner-than-paper responsive tech-foil skintight around my wrist.
Ms. White is all smiles and graciousness as she helps him up and leads him to the lifts that go to the rest of the Reverie Mental Spa. I count to ten, waiting for him to be well and truly gone, but also waiting for my heart to calm down. I catch a little of the representative’s conversation with Ms. White before they disappear into the lift—he’s completely satisfied with the reverie of his grandfather and completely ignorant of what I was doing in his mind, that I even was in in his head at all.
As soon as the representative is gone, Ms. White returns to me. She watches me in silence while I peel off the electrodes and straighten up the chair.
I take a deep breath. “He’s scared,” I say finally.
“Scared?” Her gaze is intent, worried.
I nod. “I think he’s afraid of another war.”
“A war he’s contributing to.” When I don’t answer this, Ms. White continues, “Anything else?”
I look down, rubbing the sudden chill from my bare arms.
“Ella?” Ms. White asks gently.
“Just a name,” I say. “Jack Tyler.”
Ms. White stiffens, as if she found herself unexpectedly at the edge of a precipice.
“Do you know him?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “It’s just—it’s strange to hear a specific name, you know? That might be the person who led the terrorist attack that killed your father, and to have a name to associate with that attack, just like that… it makes it all more real. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah,” I say. My stomach twists. That hadn’t occurred to me—that Jack may have had a hand in Dad’s death. Jack Tyler is about my age, but it’s possible he helped with the terrorism attack.
A shaky breath escapes my lips. I remember the sound of his voice in my ears, the way he looked a Dad’s grave, the way he looked at me.
“Ella?” Ms. White asks, her voice filled with concern. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her reach toward me, but her hand drops away before she touches me.
“I’m okay,” I say softly. “I’m sorry—I just…” When I close my eyes, I see Jack Tyler’s eyes. I feel the bombs Representative Belles felt.
“Sometimes,” she says, “I forget how young you are. Ella, I know this is hard. This is not the life a teenaged girl like you should lead. You should be applying for universities, still be carefree, go out on dates and to parties. I’m the one who’s sorry. I wish you could have those things.”
“This is more important,” I say, and I mean it.
Ms. White goes to Triumph Towers to report directly to PA Young, but I just go to bed. My head is throbbing, a low buzzing sound vibrating in my ears, and I just want to slip into nothingness.
By the time I wake up, it’s well past lunch. I walk down the hall, surprised my mother hasn’t woken me up yet. “Hey, Mom,” I say softly, pushing open her heavy door. The apartment—like all buildings in New Venice—was built with a panic room. The architects of the city were the same ones who rebuilt Malta after the Secessionary War, and every home has at least one safe stronghold. We converted the panic room in our apartment into Mom’s bedroom—it has a built in generator and a dedicated power and water source that we can use for the machines that monitor her health.
Mom looks up at me from her bed. She’s still in her dressing gown, her hair in thin, soft wisps around her face. When she blinks, I notice that her pupils are silver—she’s watching a program using her eye nanobots.
“I can’t find the book I want,” she says, offering me a goofy, self-depreciating smile. “You know, the one that movie was based on.”
“Titanic of the Stars?” I ask. She’s read the book at least a half-dozen times before.
She nods and holds out her wrist to me. I type across her cuffLINK, bringing up the book she wants, a historical drama about the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the world’s first interstellar ship. “You know how it ends,” I say, half-laughing as I download the book into her eye bots for her.
“Well, obviously,” she says. “It’s based on Godspeed. Of course I know how it ends. But I’ve heard this version is good.”
I blink. “Oh?” I ask, trying to keep my voice light. “You’ve not read this one before?”
Mom laughs. “It just came out, Ella, how could I have?”
My stomach drops. A symptom of advanced stages of Hebb’s Disease: Memory loss.
I step outside and call for Rosie the nursing android. It records this new symptom of Mom’s disease without betraying any emotion.
I open the door wider, letting it into Mom’s room.
“Take care of her,” I say.
“Of course,” Rosie replies in her even, clipped tones. “It’s what I am programmed to do.”
“Ella?” Mom calls, her voice cracking in a cough, the sound like splintering wood. I rush to her side, watching helplessly as she heaves.
She mutters something as I arrange a blanket around her legs after she stops wheezing.
“What?” I ask, forcing a cheery smile on my face.
“Not much longer now,” Mom says, her voice barely a whisper. “Then you’ll be free of me.”
It takes a moment for the full impact of her words to hit me, for me to realize what she means by “free.” I swoop down over her and wrap her in so tight a hug that she squeaks in protest.
“I don’t want to be free of you.” My voice is strained and raspy; I don’t want her to see me cry. “Not ever.”
Mom smiles up at me as I pull back, examining her face.
I can already see the goodbye in her eyes.
fifteen
I wander into the kitchen, making myself a sandwi
ch as I scroll through messages on my cuff. I widen the interface, staring at the holographic icons spinning before my eyes, thanks to my eye bots. I tap the communication box. The program bursts open, sparks of light shooting between my fingers and reforming into a video chat box hovering at eye-level.
“Contact: Akilah Xuereb,” I say.
A moment later, my best friend fills my vision.
“Hella’ Ella!” she says brightly. “Feeling better?”
“Not really,” I say. I touch the charm on my necklace—a fortune cookie locket. Inside is a digi file—Akilah and I at the Summer Festa when we were eight. The UC shipped in fireflies, and we stayed up half the night in Central Gardens, trying to catch them all. Dad gave Akilah and I both a locket—mine’s silver, hers in gold—with the digi strip inside it when her father left her family and she moved to the Foqra District.
Akilah leans forward. “What happened?” she asks.
For the first time in my life, I don’t reveal the secrets
of my heart to her. I used to tell Aks everything, but… this is the stuff of national security, of anti-terrorism. I can’t tell her about this.
“Is it your mother?” she asks.
It would be so easy for me to lie now, to tell her that everything bothering me comes back to Mom’s illness. And, of course, I’m worried that she’s worse, and the way she seems to have given up. But it’s not her ghost that haunts me.
“I’m just… I’m doing some new work at the mental spa,” I say.
“Gah, I wish I was there,” Akilah says. She applied to be an intern for her service year, just like me, but she was selected for military instead.
“Me too,” I say, my voice dropping. “But this… this job. It’s just—it’s really intense.”
“What are they having you do?”
I open my mouth, but I don’t know what to say. I can’t tell her that I just spied on someone’s mind—she’d never believe me, and even if she did, I don’t think I should say anything.
Akilah’s brow wrinkles in worry.
“I know you’re in the military now,” I say, “and basically the whole point of being a solider is taking orders. But… have you ever had to do something that…”
After a long pause, Akilah asks, “That what?”
“That scared you?” I say, the words rushing out. “I mean, you’re armed, and you’re trained, and it’s not like the War is still happening, but it might, and you don’t know what will happen, and you have to trust that the people higher up than you know what they’re doing, but it’s still dangerous, it’s still… scary.”
I almost roll my eyes at myself. I sound like such a moron. Scary? That’s the best word I could come up with?
“Just what is Ms. White having you do at the mental spa?” Akilah looks as frightened as I feel.
“It’s not—” I bite back the words. It’s not Ms. White. But how can I tell my best friend that I’m taking orders from the Prime Administrator of the entire freaking world?
Akilah curses. “I hate being stuck here, so far away from you!”
“I’m okay, Aks, really. Sorry to have bothered—”
“Don’t you dare, Ella Shepherd!” Akilah shoots back. “Don’t you dare try to apologize for this! Of course I want you to tell me if something’s wrong!”
I can hear the buzzing sound in my head again, and my skin jumps from the aftershocks of bombs that only went off in my mind.
“I—I’ve got to go,” I say. Akilah tries to protest, but I close the screen. I can’t tell her what’s troubling me, and that makes it even worse than if I’d not talked to her at all.
She tries to call me right back, but I block the message. I don’t have any answers—not for her, not for me.
Ms. White was right. Seeing Jack Tyler’s name in Representative Belles’s reverie made everything much more real for me. Dad’s death, the threat of war… it’s so overwhelming.
But it’s worse just sitting here, waiting for PA Young to tell me what to do next. I have only one real lead to follow, and it’s not much of one, but I’ll do what I can. I dismiss the chat box on my cuff and bring up the search icon.
“Jack Tyler,” I order.
Unfortunately, Jack Tyler is a very common name, from a prominent American politician to a British actor from the twenty-second century. I narrow the search perimeters, but still get too many hits, so I switch to an image search, plugging in his features as well as name.
Soon, I find him.
It’s a picture taken in a scientific laboratory—glittering test tubes and vials shine in front of a white tiled wall. Jack stands in the middle of a group of six men, all smiling in front of the body of something that appears to be a dead girl, except her chest is open, exposing a bundle of wires and circuits, not blood and bone. An android.
But that’s not what makes me hold my hand out to the interface screen as if I could reach through it and touch the people in the image.
The man with his arm slung around Jack’s shoulder, the one with a crooked smile and a laugh in his eyes—
Is my father.
sixteen
Lead scientist Dr. Philip Shepherd with his team working on a prototype for meta-functioning android technology.
While Dad used nanobots to come up with something of a cure for Mom’s Hebb’s Disease, his real scientific focus was on android technology. This picture must have been taken very soon before he died. I glance back up at it, taking note of everyone.
Everyone in the picture—with the exception of Jack—was killed in the same terrorist-planted lab explosion that killed Dad.
My body grows tense. “Now what are the chances that only Jack survived?” I growl under my breath. My eyes narrow as I focus on his smiling face.
I pull the photo out of the article and blow it up to life-size. I try to look at Jack, but my eyes go to Dad. He’s smiling here. He looks happy. Proud. And his hand is on Jack’s shoulder, as if he’s his son.
I slice my arm through the holographic projection and sweep it aside, cutting Dad out of the photo. I do the same to the right-hand side of the photo, isolating Jack. In the hologram, he’s just a little taller than me, like in real life. His hair is different here, shorter. I lean up on my tiptoes, nose-to-nose with a holographic image of this boy who, somehow, is tangled up in the parts of my life I’ve kept hidden. His eyes stare forward, glittering with the holo-light.
“Who are you?” I ask, but of course he doesn’t answer.
I swipe away the photo and scan the article attached to it. Jack’s listed as an intern, with a note that his parents are aides in the Representative Assembly.
I turn back to the interface system, trying to find more on Jack. I find an article dated only about a year ago—no, not an article. An obituary. Two government officials working in the Prime Administrator’s office killed in a car crash near the beaches in Gozo, and a note saying they were survived by their only son, Jack Tyler. They died nearly a month after Dad.
So he’s an orphan.
Like me.
I jerk back, repulsed by my own thoughts. I am not an orphan. I still have my mother. How could I even think that?
I swipe my arms across the holo-display, pushing away the rest of the obituary. So what if he has a tragic past? I think about the picture of him with my father. Maybe Jack Tyler contributed to my own tragic past.
I search using other perimeters, but I can find no new information. He’s done a very good job at keeping himself off the interface—or of erasing things that used to be there.
I sigh, disappointed in the fruitless research. I sweep aside the search box, but another holo-icon replaces it almost immediately. I stare, reading the words across the bottom with growing shock:
Open in case of search for Jack Tyler.
I check the file information—whatever this is, it’s hard-wired directly into my cuff. Only I could have put this file here, or someone who was actually feeding wires directly into my system. This is no easy ha
ck—someone would have had to have either stolen my cuff (which is impossible, as I’ve never taken it off), or linked directly to it, which is also impossible as no one has shared a direct link to my cuff in years.
The holo-icon twirls inside my vision.
I know I didn’t put this file here. But I also know it’s impossible for anyone else to have either.
I touch the holo-icon, and it opens as soon as I select it.
Processing, the screen flashes at me. I feel a buzzing at my wrist and look down to my cuff, which is synced to the interface system. Program complete, it says.
Program? Program?! I don’t want to open a program—I just wanted to see what was in the file! My eyes grow foggy—the program has already linked to my nanobots, the ones that display directly into my eyes. I blink madly, even though I know it’ll do no good, but I freeze when I see the words being projected into my vision.
To find Jack Tyler.
I squeeze my eyes shut, my mind racing. This must be some sort of bot virus. Jack Tyler must have found me, hacked the code into the system.
I move automatically to my cuff. I can call Ms. White, the police—anyone. I can show this program to them, have them trace the hack, figure out where Jack Tyler is and how he’s involved with all of this.
And then I open my eyes. In the reflection of the mirror hanging on the wall across from the table, I see myself, my irises silver from the nanobots.
And standing behind me is my father.
“Dad?” I whisper, my voice cracking on the word.
seventeen
My father is standing right in front of me.
“Dad?” I ask again. My eyes are watering now for an entirely different reason, my heart thudding in my chest so violently that I feel as if I’m about to throw up. I try to say his name again, but I don’t have any more words within me. Instead, I rush forward, my arms out—
—And I go right through him, as if he was nothing more than a ghost.