“I stayed with your father,” she said. “That’s what’s going on. I let him do whatever he wanted. No one’s wrong about that. It’s just the truth.”
“It’s not the whole truth. She deserves to know that.”
There was a long pause. “I’ll think about it,” she said.
I wasn’t ready for her to leave. “Mom.”
She didn’t say anything. For all I knew, she was already gone. I didn’t know her anymore; I didn’t know what to expect.
“Thanks,” I said finally. I meant it to help the lie.
Or maybe I just meant it.
There was another eternal pause. Then, “For what?”
“For trying.”
It was past midnight when the door eased open. “Shut up and let’s go,” Zo hissed, before Jude could open his big mouth and wake the house.
She brandished a slim silver cylinder that I assumed she’d used to pick the electronic lock. “You are so lucky you’re not an only child,” she whispered, as we crept out of the bedroom and down the hall toward Zo’s old room.
“And you are so lucky that Mom still knocks herself out on chillers every night, or your big, clomping feet would get us both thrown back into Kahn jail.”
She grinned. “You’re welcome.”
Zo’s bedroom was better equipped for a breakout than mine. “Nothing I haven’t done before,” she whispered, grabbing a compressible wire ladder from under her mattress and hooking it to the window frame. She swept out a gallant hand. “Ladies first.”
It had been a strange year. But there’d been nothing stranger than scaling the side of my own house, dim moonglow lighting the ladder rungs as I climbed, hand over hand, three stories down. Feeling like a criminal, stealing into the night with the Kahn family valuables, and our father might have pointed out that was exactly what I was doing—my most valuable possessions, he called us when we were little, and I’d taken it as a compliment, proud to be valued more highly than the new car. His to protect; his to destroy. Mine to creep through the darkness, following Zo as she darted in and out of the motion detectors’ sweep, avoided the cameras, deactivated the electronic gate, led us to freedom—freedom in the form of a beat-up two-door Chevrelle, Auden at the wheel.
“How’d you know?” Jude asked, as we piled into the car.
“Got the call from Mommy dearest.” Zo snorted. “Like I was supposed to believe Lia came crawling home, and wanted me for one big family reunion? Big sis is stupid—”
I jabbed her in the side.
“—but not that stupid,” Zo allowed, grinning at me. “And clearly, you’re lucky to have such a proficient juvenile delinquent for a sister.”
“Yeah. I guess I am.”
We holed up in Riley’s place, memories of him everywhere, looking for a way to fix what we’d all helped to break. Zo wanted to sneak back into the corp-town, bust everyone out. Auden wanted to go public, turn himself in to the authorities—turn himself into a martyr, if it would help, or a devil, if that would help more. And Jude was characteristically silent about what he actually wanted, uncharacteristically silent about everything.
But Zo couldn’t risk showing her face at the corp-town again, not with our mother on a rampage and Zo’s presumably suspicious disappearance timed with our own. Quinn and Ani had their own share of the toxin. We had to trust them to figure out something to do with it. Auden’s plan was just as craptastic, relying as it did on mythical authorities of an objective nature unaffiliated with any of the corps, unswayed by power and credit we didn’t have. Given that all of the secops were owned by one corp or another, that BioMax was in business with all of them, and that the Justice Department—the only arm of the government not officially licensed out to private enterprise—was also the one that hated mechs the most, we had a better chance of tracking down a unicorn. Turn himself in and he’d promptly disappear, only to resurface once BioMax and the Brotherhood had done whatever they planned to do and were ready to parade their scapegoat for public shaming.
We’d dropped what we knew and what we suspected about Safe Haven onto the network, posting it to every zone we could—knowing that most would get purged by BioMax and the rest would likely be lost in the noise, seeming no more or less credible than any of the other rumors flying about the skinner plague, as it was being called. Some probably even believed us—not just the crackpots who matched our claims with conspiracies of their own, but the occasional sane, sober observers who were inclined to suspect the corps were up to no good. Some wished us well, some even raised a little online ruckus, but none was in a position to help.
We were on our own. Two machines. Two orgs. Four teenagers with no power and no plan. At least Auden was on the run from nefarious cult leaders and corporate overlords. As opposed to me, hiding out from my mother.
It wasn’t the most promising of revolutionary cabals.
“We can’t do anything about what’s going to happen inside Safe Haven,” I said. “But we can stop phase three. Or at least we can try.”
“We can’t stop it if we don’t even know what it is,” Jude said, sounding defeated.
“Whatever it is, it’s happening on that server ship on Sunday,” I said.
“You think,” Jude said.
Zo and Auden agreed that it was the only thing that made sense with what little else we knew. The once-a-month window had given it away. “If we can get on board with Ben’s team, we can figure out what they’re doing,” I said. “We can stop them.”
“Great,” Jude said sourly. “So all we need to do—assuming your blind hunch is right—is sneak on board a high-security facility floating in a secret location in the middle of the Atlantic and stop a team of determined and presumably armed genocidal maniacs from completing their nebulous mission. Brilliant plan.”
“Glad you agree.”
Jude was, of course, right. The plan—or, rather, ambiguous idea completely lacking in practical execution—wasn’t brilliant so much as insane. Especially the part that involved us getting ourselves onto a server ship without anyone noticing and, more to the point, without getting tossed overboard. The network servers were overseen by a private consortium of tech and security corps, its operations designed for maximal transparency (for those whose job it was to watch) and maximal secrecy (for the rest of us unwashed masses). They floated on massive ocean freighters, each the length of several football fields, shadowing the coastline, their endless rows of whirring machines processing the data of millions while armed guards—or armed machines, or, for all any of us knew, armed armadillos, or some deadly combination of all three—patrolled the corridors, sworn to protect the network with their lives. Ships set out once a month with reinforcements, repairs, representatives from any corp who needed to address problems with their dedicated servers—ships that plotted a top-secret course radioed to the captain on a special frequency only once the boat had X-rayed and analyzed every single thing, animate or in-, to come aboard.
The server farms were governed by no law but the law of expediency. Its servants followed a prime directive, to the exclusion of all else: Protect the servers. Protect the mindless hordes who trusted every piece of their lives to the security of the floating machines. Trusted not just their zones, their relationships and memories, but their jobs, their life savings, their lives—whenever they trusted their automated cars or their high-speed elevators or the biofilters that kept their air breathable and the wireless energy that kept everything humming, including me. The guardians of those ships protected all of us who acted as if the data cloud floated in an impermeable bubble through some alternate, inaccessible realm, as if we weren’t living in a virtual world built almost entirely on the switches and circuits and routers floating through poisonous waters and roughing stormy seas.
That, at least, was what we’d heard.
That was the only thing anyone knew about the server farms: rumors. Everyone knew a guy, who knew a guy, who used to work for someone who staffed one of the ships. Everyone had
heard something, but no one knew anything. I’d once overheard my father arguing with one of his board members about whether or not the servers operated as independent international entities or were wholly owned American enterprises, and much as he’d tried to disguise it, the truth had been clear: Even he had no idea. Everyone knew—or at least “knew”—that once a month an elite group got access to the servers to upgrade them on behalf of their own corps, but either they were shielded from penetrating any of the ships’ secrets, or the ghostly overseers had a way to make them keep their mouths shut. Access to the servers meant access to everything. We were a world of connectivity; a linked-in globe. It was our pride as a human race. And apparently, it worked only if none of us knew how.
“We’re thinking too far ahead,” I said suddenly.
Auden laughed quietly. “I wouldn’t say that’s exactly your problem, Lia.”
“No, I mean it. You’re right, Jude—”
He held up a hand to stop me. “Moment of silence, please, while I enjoy this history-making moment.”
I smacked his arm. Lightly, but not too lightly. “You’re right that we have no way of getting on that ship or figuring out what’s going on—not by ourselves. And maybe you’re right that I’m just guessing. We need more answers. We need help, from someone who knows exactly what BioMax is up to—or at least knows how to find out.”
That woke him up. “Ben?”
“He’s leading the team, right? Whether he knows about phase three or he doesn’t, he’s going to be there when it happens. So either he gives us the information we need, or he makes sure that we’re there when it happens, too.”
“And why would he do that?” Jude asked.
There was a time when I would have hesitated to ask the next question. This time I didn’t. “Do you have a gun stashed here somewhere?”
Surprised, Jude shook his head. That was problematic. I’d counted on him having easy access to a weapon, as he always seemed to. We could get in touch with another of his city contacts, but that meant complications, and time …
Auden cleared his throat. “I do.”
“But it’s my gun,” Auden said, as we were packing up to leave.
“It’s safer to leave someone behind,” I said. “If anything happens and we need reinforcements—”
“Bullshit.”
“Auden …”
“You don’t want me along; just say it.”
I didn’t want to.
“You don’t trust me,” he said.
“No, I don’t.”
“But that’s not it,” he said.
“No. It’s not.”
He scowled. “It’s not your job to worry about me.”
There wasn’t time to protect his feelings—and after everything that had happened, maybe that was no longer a huge priority. “You’re weak,” I said. “The limp, the lung issues, what happens when your body gets too stressed … You could be a liability.”
He didn’t flinch. “See? It wasn’t so hard to just say it.”
“Fine. I said it. So now you’ll stay here?”
“Not a chance.”
“You’re not—”
“I can do this,” he said. “I’m not as weak as you think.”
“Or you’re weaker than you think. And we find out at the worst possible time.”
“Let him come,” Jude said.
“What?”
“If he says he can do it, he can do it.”
“You’re kidding me,” I said. “What, are you hoping he’ll do something stupid and get himself killed?”
“He looks weak,” Jude said. “It doesn’t mean he is. And you don’t get to decide what he’s strong enough to do.”
“Thanks,” Auden said, sounding surprised.
“I’m just saying what’s true,” Jude said. “I still hate you.”
“Back at you.”
“It’s wonderful that you two are bonding, but this isn’t some kind of self-actualization field trip,” I snapped. “We can’t afford—”
“We can’t afford not to use everything we’ve got,” Jude said over me. “Besides, he owes us.”
“I can do this, Lia,” Auden said.
I shrugged, and waved him out the door. At least he hadn’t asked me to trust him.
Jude followed, but Zo hung behind, watching me carefully.
“What?” I said finally.
She paused, looking unsure whether or not to risk it. “So you’re not going to try to talk me out of coming along?”
“Would there be any point?”
She shook her head.
“Then what are you waiting for?”
For a second I was afraid she was going to hug me. But instead she just smiled and ran past me out the door, practically skipping, as if she were seven again and I’d given her the secret password to the big-kids’ clubhouse. I told myself that she knew exactly how serious this was and how big a risk she was taking, and that—as she’d proved to me over and over again—she was old enough and tough enough to decide she wanted to take it.
After the accident it had quickly—though maybe not quickly enough—become obvious that I wasn’t the same person I used to be. It had taken another year to figure out that Zo wasn’t either. But I finally got it. She was, after everything, still my little sister. But she was also Zo Kahn, someone I’d never bothered to know, not really—and now that I did, it was clear that protecting her from herself was neither an option nor a necessity. It was also clear that, as far as she was concerned, this wasn’t just my fight. It was ours. So she was going to risk everything for it. And I was going to let her.
It had been easy enough for Zo to hack through the priv-walls on Ben’s zone to discover he lived on a modest estate less than twenty miles away. The zone offered a cornucopia of Ben trivia: He lived alone, on the opposite coast from his ex-wife and teenage daughter, who, judging from the number of plaintive messages he sent her and the nonexistent response, wasn’t any fonder of her father than I was of mine. The girl looked less like Zo than I’d thought when I first saw her picture—the stringy hair and baggy clothes were the same, but her features were smoother and more rounded. She had the same soft, waxy beauty as her father, if none of his impeccable fashion sense.
The house itself wasn’t that impressive. It was half the size of ours, with barely any grounds, and what there was had fallen into disrepair. Kudzu crawled up the decaying brick, nearly blocking out the windows, and the weedy, browning lawn clearly hadn’t been trimmed or watered in months. The security system was a sad, bargain-basement model—probably because no burglar in his right mind would choose a house like this to burgle when there were so many better options on offer—and Jude had no trouble jamming the alarm, shutting down the electrified perimeter, and easing open the back door.
“You’re good at this,” I said softly.
“Practice makes perfect,” he muttered.
I didn’t want to know.
It was well past midnight, and the house was completely dark. Auden, with a minimum of whining, had agreed to wait in the car under the theory that every criminal operation needed a getaway driver. Zo, Jude, and I used our ViM screens to light our way, and took our time making our way through the house, just in case we stumbled across anything relevant. Like a giant blinking poster detailing the logistics of phase three. Or a rabid guard dog.
Fortunately or unfortunately, there was nothing but a bare, personality-free house, with empty walls and furniture that, for the most part, appeared completely untouched. The kitchen was empty of both food and standard appliances. Breaking into someone’s house was different from breaking into a corp—it felt almost like we were peering inside call-me-Ben’s head, and, much as I disliked the guy, I couldn’t take much pleasure in the fact that the view was so pathetic. The only sign that someone actually lived here was the occasional pic of his daughter, some from years ago, some clearly recent, the only commonality between them the fact that Ben was never in the shot.
We crept up the stairs, peeking silently into each room we passed. The first was a closet, the second a marbled bathroom, and the third a true surprise: a cluttered laboratory, its tables and shelves filled with spare mech parts, its whiteboard walls covered with Ben’s messy scrawl, circuit diagrams dotted with question marks and the occasional exclamation point. Ben may not have gotten much living done in his house, but apparently that was because he was too hard at work. Against my will I felt another stab of sympathy, one that was easy enough to suppress when I reminded myself what he was probably working toward. We fanned out through the lab, searching for anything that screamed death to mechs, but none of us was particularly well equipped to analyze his equipment or the thrust of his research. Ben was one of the lead techs at BioMax, and had led the team that designed the original download technology—he could be working on anything, and we weren’t going to figure it out by studying his circuit boards. He would have to tell us.
The next door was the bedroom.
I held the gun. Jude cleared his throat. Ben woke up. There was a moment of sleepy confusion; then he saw the muzzle pointed at his forehead, and bolted upright. I stood at the foot of the bed, about five feet away from him. Far enough that he couldn’t do something stupid, like lunge at the gun. Close enough that even I couldn’t miss. Zo waited in the hallway, just outside the door, on guard for reinforcements we weren’t expecting—and, if it came to that, reinforcement herself if Ben proved somehow, unexpectedly, able to take on me, Jude, and a nine-millimeter pistol. The weapon was just as heavy as I remembered, but it fit more comfortably in my hands this time. The safety was off.
“What is this, Lia?” Ben asked in a low voice. I could tell he was trying not to show fear, but his eyes darted back and forth, from Jude to me to the gun and back to Jude again. He was afraid. His hand inched toward the nightstand.
Jude shook his head. “I wouldn’t,” he said. “Unless you think your trigger finger’s faster than hers is.”
Even a low-budget security system came with silent alarm switches that could be conveniently positioned around the house. Maybe Ben had just meant to turn on the light, or reach for his ViM. But there was no point in taking the chance. “I’d listen to him,” I said.