It’s too late to save Mom. But maybe I can still save Akilah.
Maybe I can save myself.
“But how can we get in?” Julie says.
“My biometric scan is programmed into the security,” I say. “It’s my home—I can get in.”
“There will be guards,” Jack growls.
“I can take care of those.” Julie grins, as if she’s looking forward to the fight.
“I will stay with Akilah,” Xavier says. “She should not be alone.”
“I’m staying with you.” Jack glares at me. “I don’t trust that representative.”
“He’s on our side,” I try to protest.
“He’s not fighting for us,” Jack says. His voice is low, even, and he doesn’t break eye contact with me. “He’s fighting for his family. What’s left of it. He may agree with us, he may hate the government, but in the end, all he will ever want to do is protect his family.”
“The freedom of our people is more important!” Julie says fiercely. “We will never stop fighting, never stop working for what is right!”
Jack just smiles at her. “That’s a nice lie to believe,” he says.
My cuff buzzes. I read the message, then meet the others’ eyes. “Tonight,” I say. “He’s ready tonight.”
It feels so strange to be heading home. It’s only been a few days since I left, but it feels like a lifetime. I clutch my fortune cookie necklace, the only thing I really have left of the person I used to be. It feels weird that I could just walk away from my home. I briefly consider going back to my room, but what would I take? There’s so much I don’t want any more. The photos of my family are tainted with doubt and questions. The small gifts my mother made, the mementos of my father. None of it feels real.
Jack, Julie, and I stop short when we reach the gate to Central Gardens, directly across the Reverie storefront. The neon sheep bounces cheerily over the slogan, illuminating the dimming twilight with garish colors and a glossy glass surface. But when I look past all that, through the glass to the waiting lobby, the building is dark and empty.
“Wait for my word,” Julie says, slipping into the shadows. Jack and I wait, nervously, and in a few moments, Jack’s cuff buzzes.
“All clear,” he says.
Representative Belles waits for us at the street corner.
“Ready?” I ask him.
He nods. His body is tense, and his mouth is drawn tight.
“Here’s hoping this works,” I mutter as we reach the door. I press my finger against the touchpad, and the doors slide open.
sixty-six
Representative Belles looks nervous as Jack plugs him into the reverie chair. I guess if you know someone’s going to break into your mind, you’re not quite so eager to go under.
“Just think about the research you did,” I say. “I can access your memories. You won’t feel a thing.”
The representative nods tightly and shuts his eyes as Jack administers the reverie drug to him. We both leave the representative, but Jack touches my arm to hold me back before I can go to the next chair.
“Be careful,” he says. There’s real concern etched on his face, and perhaps fear.
I slip into Representative Belles’s mind as if it were a comfortable T-shirt.
There are no oranges, and it feels odd to be here without the scent of the grove filling the air.
In the background, I can hear the soft sound of a boy’s voice, barely audible, singing to the tune of a guitar.
Representative Belles stands before me, looking sheepish. “My son,” he says. The music fades to nothing.
His dreamscape is of his office. Through the window, the sky is blue and cloudless, overlooking the upper city of New Venice. In the center is a giant desk, the glass surface already filled with digi files and documents, and two raised screens displaying data.
I sit down in the representative’s chair and start reading.
Nanorobotics and Cyborg Control in Android Theory: Building a Brain Through Biology and Technology
By: Dr. Philip K. Shepherd
My scientific studies to date have always had the goal of a being with individual thought but also physical strength. I have failed to create an android with a human brain to achieve that end.
However, my current research indicates that I can approach the solution differently by reversing the starting point. Namely, a human being with an android body, rather than an android with a human brain.
Obviously, a human cannot be fully robotic. Cyborg technology in the past three decades has advanced by leaps and bounds, providing paraplegics with fully functioning limbs, but that is not the same as a full android body.
Full replication of android biomechanics is not feasible. But the advantages of an android’s body can be replicated by other means through the use of nanorobotics.
Dad’s research is dense. He used to speak that way, too, circling the issue, and providing the information, waiting for me to discover the meaning behind his words.
Across from me, Representative Belles stares out the window of his office.
This isn’t really the representative—he’s dreaming of himself here with me now.
I hear soft singing and a guitar playing again.
He turns around me, his smile apologizing for their distracting noise. “My son,” he says again.
I turn back to the desk.
Internal Report: Update on Dr. Philip Shepherd
Please note: The doctor’s wife, inventor and scientist Rose Shepherd, has been diagnosed with Hebb’s Disease. Dr. Shepherd has not asked for leave from his scientific research, but instead requests further funding for nanorobotic research in conjunction with his current theory and development.
Representative Belles touches the window, and I see that, despite the fact we’re nearly at the top of the tallest Triumph Tower, there’s a bumblebee beating against the glass, trying to get in. “I really do support what you’re doing,” the representative says. “As soon as I read your father’s research and realized what the UC was doing to people, I knew I couldn’t do nothing.”
Another file slides across the representative’s desk.
Memo
To: Jack Tyler, Research Assistant
From: Dr. Philip Shepherd
Effective immediately, you are dismissed from my employment. Should you need further information or answers pertaining to our past research together, you may consult my daughter, Ella Shepherd.
Ha! I don’t have any answers at all.
I look up, and realize that Representative Belles has moved away from the window. His eyes are zeroed in on me, and he stands uncomfortably close.
“Yes?” I ask.
“My son,” Representative Belles’s says for the third time. “He’s all I have left.”
I turn my full focus on him.
Everything goes blindingly white, then solid black.
Sparks flash in the darkness.
“My son,” Representative Belles says. “My son. My son. He’s all I have left. My son.”
“What did you do?” I whisper.
The sparks flash and die, flash and die.
“My son. My son. My son. My son. My son.”
“What did you do?” I shout.
The sparks. Just like the last one I saw in my mother’s replicated body.
It’s thought.
And the darkness means his thought is dying. Representative Belles is dying.
I look up at him, his face illuminated by the flashes. Blood leaks from a hole in his skull, dripping down his nose, spilling on either side between his eyes, falling like tears over his face.
“I think I’ve been shot,” he says. His eyes focus on me. “If I die, do you die, too? I’m sorry. My son. He’s all I have left.”
Oh, God. If he dies, do I die, too? Can he trap me in his dying body; will mine rot away, empty?
“Maybe I can live if I go back the way you came. Maybe I get to have your body, and you can stay in mine u
ntil it’s dead and gone.”
Representative Belles struggles toward me, lurching like a zombie. The bright, shimmering sparks fire rapidly, like a strobe, and he gets closer with every flash. I turn on my heel. I have to escape. I have to leave his mind, find mine.
You’re not in your right mind, Ella.
Dad’s voice cuts across my thought. Shit! I can’t have a breakdown now, no hallucinations, no bees buzzing through my brain.
Representative Belles grabs my wrist, leaving a hot, red smear of blood on my skin. I slip away, running. I can hear his footsteps coming closer, his breath on the back of my neck. The sparks of his thoughts sizzle now, burning out like a snuffed candle rather than a flash of lightning. I hear sounds behind me: children’s laughter, sobbing, inscrutable words, muffled moans, joyous shouts.
And then I hear nothing.
That’s the first to go, then, sound.
I slow to a stop. Representative Belles is still chasing me, but it’s like he’s running on a treadmill and I’m standing still. No matter how much he runs, he can’t reach me.
I smell oranges.
Representative Belles stops.
“I don’t want to die,” he says.
“Neither do I,” I whisper.
Darkness washes over us.
sixty-seven
I don’t know where I am.
“Ella!” a voice shouts. I don’t recognize the voice, but it fills me with warmth and comfort. I shiver in its absence.
“Hello?” I call. “Where am I?”
“Ella!” the voice yells, but I cannot tell where it is coming from. The sound wraps around me, spreading like spilt water and then evaporating into silence.
“Where am I?” I whisper again.
The darkness stretches out for eternity.
I take a few steps forward, but the feeling is surreal—I cannot tell if I’ve actually moved or not, because everything is nothing. I feel something wet and warm slide down my cheek, and I touch the tear with my fingertips, swiping it away.
Representative Belles is dead. I’m certain of that now. He’s gone. I’m… I’m in the place where he was, and now he’s gone, and now I’m stuck. I’m stuck in the nothingness of a dead body, and I don’t know how to get out.
My heart thuds against my chest, and I gasp for air. What if I can never get out? What if eternity is nothing more than me, alone, in the darkness? Trapped in someone else’s death.
I collapse, but it’s not like I fall on the floor. There is no floor. There was the illusion of one, but as my body gives way, I realize that I’m floating. I stretch out, my fingers and toes aching to feel, but there’s nothing, nothing at all, and I draw myself into myself, hugging my legs, my knees tucked under my chin.
I’m alone.
Maybe when Representative Belles died, I died too.
Maybe this is it.
“ELLA!” the voice roars again, and finally, I recognize it.
“Jack?” I say, lifting my head and looking futilely into the darkness.
“Ella, wake up, please, please, wake up.” His voice is softer now, almost gone.
And then one last whisper wraps around me.
“I need you.”
I open my eyes.
I expected the first thing I’d see to be Jack, but he’s not beside me. He’s broken a piece off the reverie chair—one of the arms, the one not connected to my cuff, and he’s ramming it into the control panel by the door. I rip the electrodes off my skin and leap up from the chair.
“What’s happening?” I gasp. I clutch my head, momentarily overwhelmed with dizziness.
“I heard a gunshot,” Jack says. “I went across the hall and I saw—” He turns then, and sees me. “Are you okay?”
I wave him aside and stand. “I’m fine. I—that’s never happened before.” When I saw the last spark of life in my mother fade, that was different from this tsunami of pain and regret, this sudden flash of darkness and death.
The sliding door that leads into the reverie chamber creaks as the mechanics try to open it. Jack curses, driving the bit of the chair deep into the electronic tap-lock. I hear the heavy thud of bolts shooting down into the floor, sealing the door closed.
Jack whirls around. “It was a trap. All of this—it was a trap.”
I stumble again, and sit back down on the reverie chair.
“The Prime Administrator was here. She killed Representative Belles,” Jack says. His eyes are wild, panicked. “I saw—I saw the gun in her hand. The bullet hole…”
“He had a son,” is all I can think to say.
“Ella!” I can hear her now, PA Young, calling to us from the other side of the door Jack’s sealed closed. “Open the door, please, dear.”
I hear the echo of Representative Belles’s voice, pleading for me to understand. He was scared. He didn’t want to betray us… but he did. He had to. PA Young forced him to bring us right here, right to the exact place where she had control, and then she killed him. Because he had a son, the last of the family she’d already nearly destroyed.
“I couldn’t wake you,” Jack says. “I couldn’t get you out.” He sounds defeated, as if he’s doomed us all.
I look around the room wildly. The things that were all designed to provide us comfort—the chair, now broken, the walls of sensory screens and soothing lights—it’s all just the trappings of a prison.
He couldn’t wake me, so he locked us in here.
“There’s no other door,” I say, turning to Jack. “That’s the only way in or out.”
Jack’s jaw hardens.
The door echoes with a thud.
I raise my wrist, my fingers sliding across the screen of my cuff, hoping to call for help. But nothing happens.
“I tried that already,” Jack says, nodding at my cuff. “But we got that from Representative Belles.”
“And he got it from Young,” I say.
Jack nods once, strained. “It was all a setup.”
The door shudders. It’s made of solid steel and reinforced with lockdown rods.
Then silence.
Then soft clicks of metal-on-metal. PA Young is attaching something to the steel doors.
Jack whirls around and grabs me by the shoulders, yanking both of us to the corner, as far away from the door as possible. “Ella,” he says, more emotion in that one word than I’ve ever heard before. “Ella, the door won’t hold. She’s going to get in. She’s going to get us.”
His fingers dig into my shoulder, and while it’s painful, I relish the sensation. As long as he’s holding on to me, he’s here, and that’s enough.
“They might kill me.”
“No!” I say. The word rips out of me with a force I didn’t know I have. The idea of Jack, dead, Jack, gone—it fills me up with the same sort of darkness as I felt when I was lost in Representative Belles’s empty shell of a body.
“I’m not important,” Jack says. “They don’t need me. They’ll probably—”
“No!” I scream the word, shutting my eyes and shaking my head.
“Listen,” Jack hisses, pulling me closer, his fingers tightening even more on my shoulders. “Listen, Ella. No matter what happens to me, you have to escape. You hear me? You have to escape.”
Now I hear soft beeps.
A countdown clock to whatever explosives have been strapped to the door.
“Your father knew,” Jack says. My focus whips back to him. “He knew something was wrong, and they killed him for it. You have to figure it out, Ella. You have to stop them. You are the key.”
“I’m not, I’m nothing, I’m not,” I say, tears burning my eyes.
The world rips open.
The flash of light is so bright that I’m momentarily blinded. All I can do is clutch Jack as we both scream over the sound of the metal wall disintegrating—the solid steel door with bolts in the floor that is supposed to be impenetrable. The metal at the edges glows orange-red.
As the smoke clears, PA Young’s image appears
. And behind her—
Androids. Of course, androids. At least these are true robots, without the face of anyone I know or love. But still, she controls them. She controls everything.
“Ella, you are the key,” Jack says urgently, forcing my attention back on him. “Your father knew he was being targeted. He told me before he died; he told me he would hide the information inside of you. I didn’t understand that before, but now I do. That’s why I came back to warn you; you’re the key, you’re the key to it all.”
I nod, tears dripping down my nose.
“He hid information for you, I’m sure of it, something only you can find. Find it. Whatever happens to me, don’t give up. Ella, I believe in you. I know you can finish what your father started. I—”
The androids move closer, their footsteps heavy on the tiled floor.
Jack wraps his arms around me, pulling me close and whirling me away, protecting me with his body.
For one brief moment, it is only him and me as the world falls apart around us.
His head dips close. “Don’t forget, Ella,” he says in a low voice, only for my ears. And then his mouth comes crashing down against mine, his kiss panic driven and desperate, his arms clutching me against his rock-hard body, supporting me as my own legs turn to jelly. He holds me as if he wants to crush our bodies together, but his grip isn’t strong enough, and silicone-covered metal fingers worm their way between us, and Jack is yanked back, thrown against the floor so violently that his body bounces.
“Really, we don’t have time for this,” PA Young says dispassionately as two androids hold Jack against the ground. I stumble away, my body confused by his sudden absence. Jack bucks against the floor, trying to throw the androids off, but PA Young swoops down.