The Body Electric - Special Edition

  “This was the price Jadis paid,” PA Young says, holding Ms. White’s arm out to me. “She paid it the second she moved your mother aside to protect her during the Valetta Attack.”

  I swallow. “I know,” I say in a small voice. Ms. White saved my mother’s life that day.

  “And you,” PA Young says, her voice rising. “You paid the price of the war before you were even born.”

  My eyes flick from Ms. White’s arm to PA Young’s eyes. They’re filled with sympathy, but I don’t understand. Not until she says, “I’m right in remembering your family was from Valetta?”

  My eyes drop to the floor. PA Young hands Ms. White back her cyborg arm, but I’m trapped in the dark thoughts she’s led me to. A hundred thousand deaths, but I am not haunted by their ghosts. I’m haunted by my grandparents’—both my mother’s parents and my father’s were in the city at the time of the blast. And my uncle who I never met, my father’s brother, who was engaged to be married. I might have had an aunt. Cousins.

  The only family I have left now is my mother. That’s it.

  PA Young touches my shoulder. “The price of war is always heavy, and it must always be paid. And for some, that price isn’t paid for years and years after the peace treaties are signed. Such as your father. He had to pay for the Secessionary War, too.”

  “He was killed by terrorists.”

  “Terrorists who hadn’t given up on the Seccessionist’s cause. Terrorists who are still fighting the war that ended nearly twenty years ago.” PA Young stares intently at me. “The rebels are a very real threat. Our government is not an empire, though it is vast. And I am no dictator, gripping the nations together in an iron fist. Perhaps it would be simpler if I were. But no. We are a republic. The largest republic in history, but still—a republic. However, if we are to be truly one, a unified government…”

  It’s hard for me to imagine that the UC is still new—it’s existed all my life. But as far as governments go, it is just a baby, only a little older than me. And while I’ve always felt it was stable, if someone as high up in the government as Representative Belles is contemplating treachery… well, I can see why PA Young’s scared.

  “The ability to stop a war before it happens—that’s what your mother has truly invented. Not a plaything for the rich. A chance to make the Secessionary War the one that ended all wars.”

  “But the danger,” Ms. White says, flexing the fingers in her cyborg arm as she reattaches it.

  “The danger was always there. The terrorists know that your mother’s technology exists; it will not take them long to figure out a way to use it for themselves, or to attempt to destroy it so it can’t be used against them. We must strike now, and quickly.”

  PA Young stretches toward me, her icy fingertips brushing my cheek. “Ella,” she says softly. “They know you have access to your parents’ technology. These are the people who killed your father. And now they’re coming for your mother. And… you.”

  thirteen

  “I don’t like it,” Ms. White says once we’re back at the Reverie Mental Spa. She barely spoke at all after PA Young dismissed us and she kept her cool the entire cab ride back, but now that we’re in our own building, she’s pacing back and forth, twisting her hands in worry.

  “He won’t see me,” I point out. “The secondary reverie chair, the one I used, is in another room. We’ll just give Representative Belles a reverie, and I’ll slip into it like I did with Mom’s and…”

  “Too much can go wrong!” Ms. White says. “It’s far, far too dangerous.” She spins around to face me. “Can you honestly tell me you’re not afraid?”

  “Of course I’m afraid,” I say immediately, without thinking. The words take even me by surprise, and I bite my lip, considering.

  When I shut my eyes, I see the way my father died.

  “Do you really think that the terrorists will come here?” I whisper.

  Ms. White wraps me in a hug. “I don’t know,” she says. “Your mother has kept her technology a secret, even from me. But if they can’t steal it and replicate it… they may try to destroy it.”

  I see the way the bomb exploded, the way everything went white.

  I am scared. I’m terrified.

  “We could go somewhere,” I say. “Destroy Mom’s tech, sell the building, move somewhere else.”

  Ms. White holds me tighter. “Maybe…” she says, her voice trailing off, but we both know it would be a long shot. It’s hard to disappear. We’d have to disable our cuffs, and that would make us look suspicious anywhere we go. Besides, if the terrorists could reach someone as high up in the government as Representative Belles, then how hard would it be to take us out? As long as Mom’s alive, she’s a threat—even if she destroyed the reverie chairs, she still has the knowledge to make more.

  And we’re both forgetting the most important piece of information. “Mom’s too sick to go on the run,” I say. I pull away from Ms. White. “And we can’t tell her about this.”

  “But—”

  “She’s getting worse. You said so yourself. We can’t let her know about the danger.”

  Ms. White nods slowly. “Are you going to do the reverie with Representative Belles?” she asks. “We could refuse. No one knows you can do this except the two of us and PA Young. If we hide your ability, the terrorists might not…”

  “PA Young said they were already a threat to us,” I counter. “We can’t run, and we can’t hide. We have to beat them at their own game.”

  The next morning, I watch Representative Belles arrive at the Reverie Mental Spa from the security feed while I hide in the secondary reverie chamber. His face is full, but overall he’s slender and tall. He looks nervous. This is his first reverie. He has no idea how nervous he should be.

  The Prime Administrator arranged it so that Representative Belles “won” a raffle for a series of free visits to the mental spa. Hopefully, even if the terrorists know that Mom’s technology can be corrupted to be used for spying, Representative Belles doesn’t. He doesn’t appear to be suspicious, at least, and Ms. White is a master at putting clients at ease.

  When they enter the reverie chamber, I start to get ready. While Ms. White is giving the representative a dose of the reverie drug, pressing electrodes into his skin, and hooking the interface system up with his cuffLINK device, I’m doing the same in this hidden room, connected by wires to the representative’s reverie chair.

  The door to my room opens, and Ms. White steps in. She scans the chair, checking behind me to make sure I’m fully plugged in and ready for the reverie.

  “Promise you’re okay?” she asks, worry clear in her eyes.

  I don’t bother answering; I just lower the sonic hood over my head. Ms. White pushes a button, and a puff of the bright green reverie drug bursts straight into my open eyes.

  My eyelids droop and my head feels heavy, sleep starting to pull me in. There’s no pain this time—thankfully—but the black behind my eyelids turns to bright white, and I feel a moment of nothingness before the world—Representative Belles’s world inside his mind—starts to develop.

  I am in the middle of a war.

  For a moment, I’m struck by the horror of it all. The Secessionary War was more than twenty years ago, and of course I’ve seen the digi files on it, but I never… I was never in the middle of it. I never lived it.

  I didn’t know that wars were so dusty. The air is thick with it, swirling streams of acrid smoke and debris. I cough, choking. This isn’t real, I remind myself. It isn’t real. I shut my eyes, clenching them so tight that the blackness behind my eyelids bursts into my brain. When I open them, for a second I see the dream Representative Belles is trying to have—an old man and an orange grove—but then a bomb bursts, and all I can see is the war.

  Representative Belles is obsessed with the idea of war right now. He can’t quit thinking about it. This is the fear inside him, drowning out every single other thought. It’s not different, really, from the way Mom can
’t have a reverie when the pain of her disease is too much to bear.

  Terror creeps along my throat, like a spider trying to crawl out of my mouth. I could suppress Mom’s pain, help her forget it, because I wanted to forget it, too. But this? Representative Belles’s fear is my fear, too. I cannot break him from a fear that I share with him.

  We’re both sinking into the nightmare.

  Panic rips through me. What if I get stuck, trapped inside the representative’s mind? What if this is my fate, doomed to live in another man’s hell?

  A missile soars overhead, whistling through the sky before it crashes into Triumph Towers, the largest buildings in the city, home of all the representatives, including Prime Administrator Young and where Representative Belles works. The towers were built to look like flames, topped with solar glass that glitters day and night, rising from the ashes of the Secessionary War. But now, in Representative Belles’s dream, the towers burn for real. They shatter like crystal, sparkling amidst the rubble.

  A bomb lands near my feet, sending broken stone up in a shower of rocky debris. I stare down at the unexploded bomb—it’s made of glass and glitters like liquid gold swirls inside. Solar glass. A recent import from the extrasolar colonies, solar glass provides a lot of the fuel needed to run New Venice, but ever since the disastrous attempts to use solar bombs during the Secessionary War, they’ve been utterly banned as weapons across all nations. Still—this is Representative Belles’s fear, so it’s real here.

  I hear screaming. A long, long cry of utter sorrow. This is a dream; it is focused on the Representative’s greatest fears. And his fear is personified here at my feet.

  Two children, a boy a few years younger than me and a little girl. Blood trickling down their faces. Their eyes staring up, empty.

  Dead.

  The entire dreamscape rumbles with Representative Belles’s grief. The world darkens. This is enough to rip him from his reverie, just like the pain pulls Mom out of hers.

  But while I share the representative’s fear of war, I do not know these children dead at my feet. And not knowing them reminds me that this isn’t real.

  I close my eyes again, concentrating. I sweep my arms out, and the air smells sweeter, like citrus. I bring up a warm breeze. I take away all sound, then concentrate on the soft whispers coming in through the sensory chamber Representative Belles’s is in. Leaves clattering. Branches creaking.

  When I open my eyes, Santiago Belles stands before an old man.

  “Abuélo,” he says, wonderingly. He casts his eyes back, and even though he looks right at me, he doesn’t really see. His brain wants to be in this dream, the one with his grandfather. His face melts, and he looks younger as he turns back to the man beside the orange tree. Behind them, an entire grove rises.

  “I fought in the Secessionary War,” the dream-grandfather says.

  Crap. I don’t need his own dream kicking him back into a nightmare. I start to intervene, but then the grandfather continues.

  “Fought for the losing side. Least, that’s what they told me. But I didn’t really fight for either side.” The old man looks Representative Belles square in the eyes. “I fought for my family.” He taps the representative in the chest, just over his heart. “Nothing more important than family. You gonna fight for something, you fight for something that you’re willing to die for. I wasn’t willing to die for my government, Secessionary or UC. But I was willing to die for the people I love.”

  I choke down a snort of derision. Idealistic mantras like that are what made the Secessionary War so bad. All you have to do is look at the hole where Valletta once stood or the broken arch of the Azure Window to know that. The old buildings in the country still carry the scars of battle, two decades later. Preventing another war like that is exactly the reason why I’m in Representative Belles’s mind in the first place.

  It’s harder to enhance the dreams of someone I don’t know, especially when fighting against the worry of war, but I work with what I have. Focusing my mind on the sensory details already present, I make the smells stronger, the music louder. I add warmth from the Spanish sun, birds chirping and locusts humming. I focus on the grandfather, giving him specific details, wrinkles from every old face I’ve seen, clothes that smell of detergent and dirt and sweat.

  As the dreamscape around me grows clearer, I slip further away from it. The mind is a magical thing, I’m discovering. A dreamscape is made of thought and is wider than the sky, able to grow large enough to fit not just our own world, but every possibility and impossibility beyond it. Once I quit thinking of it as being forced into the laws of physics, it’s easy to manipulate the dreamscape into anything I want. I don’t know how I know all this, no more than I understand how I know things when I dream. I just do.

  I throw up my hand, and a wall rises between the orange grove and me. Behind the wall, I start creating the world I need in Representative Belles’s mind.

  A filing cabinet first, then a desk. This is work; Representative Belles’s mind is my office.

  Filing cabinets are hardly ever used any more—most records are on the interface. But the only really secure information isn’t stored on the interface system—its hard copies kept under lock and key, just like Mom’s research in the secured databank in England.

  Representative Belles’s mind opens up to me as I slide open the top drawer of the filing cabinet. The tabs are easy and expected: childhood, school, family—two children and a loving wife, Spain, Malta, Triumph Towers. Getting closer—Triumph Towers is where the government works. Campaign, compromise, duties, cabinet meetings.

  Secrets.

  I snatch the folder up and toss it on the desk. My mind’s eye wavers as I look at the contents. Focus. I have to focus. But the insides are a jumble. Representative Belles himself isn’t sure of everything he’s learned—the seeds of his rebellion are just beginning to form.

  I pick up the largest paper in the folder, and a moving image loops over and over—Prime Administrator Hwa Young stands at the head of a long wooden table, shouting at a representative administrator I don’t know. She’s utterly eviscerating the man seated before her, globules of spit flying in his face as she tears him apart. Slowly, her voice rises from the page, deep for a woman, cold, furious.

  The dreamscape rumbles.

  I slam the page face-down on the desk, shut my eyes, and think of sunlight and oranges and the buzzing of bees and the way old men’s voices crack when they speak of the past. The more I focus on something, the more Representative Belles’s mind will focus on it, and it’s important that I keep him in his reverie long enough for me to discover the terrorists.

  I flip to another page in his file. It’s a spreadsheet of data—money. I scan it, trying to make sense of the numbers, but I can’t. Sometimes the mind works that way—it remembers things in a way only that mind can interpret. This chart would make sense to Representative Belles, but not to anyone else.

  This isn’t working. Representative Belles might be seditious, but I’ve found no proof that he’s a key player in the terrorist plot. The number data could be tracking where funds shift to a rebel group… or they could mean nothing. He might not even be in any rebel groups yet; he might just be considering it.

  Maybe he’s been approached, though…

  If he knows any of the known terrorists, that might be the link we need to find them. I pluck out another file from the cabinet, this one marked simply, People. I open it on the floor, and, rather than paper falling out, a city street explodes into being around me. I’m in a crowd of people, maybe a hundred or more. These are the people in the representative’s immediate memory, the ones he’s been thinking about most recently. They’re grouped in different places, his family in one corner of his mind, a wife and two children; his friends crowded around a bar, drinking beer; his fellow representatives in suits and business clothes, around a long, polished wooden table. And more: a group of schoolchildren—part of his charity work, I think; employees standing around a
ribbon-cutting ceremony in Madrid; crowds of everyday people. Street androids selling pastizzi and honey rings. The girl who makes his coffee. The representative from Brazil who flirts with him when he works late.

  A boy with dark hair and pale eyes.

  My heart stutters.

  “I know you,” I whisper.

  It’s the boy from the gardens, the one who approached me with a warning and stopped to pay respect to my father’s grave.

  Looking at him makes my heart race, my breathing come shallow. I feel…

  Fear? No, that’s not it.

  I sweep my arm out, and everyone else disappears. Just me, and this boy.

  His face is made of sharp angles and shadows. He has the clearest eyes I’ve ever seen. His shoulders are broad and lined with hard muscles hidden under a long-sleeved black t-shirt. There’s a flash of gold—some sort of pin—near his collar. His skin is tanned and his hair is dark, but he’s white—he doesn’t have the deep brown coloring of a native Maltese like me. Judging from his accent when he spoke before, he’s probably English. I ruffle my cropped dark hair nervously. Despite the fact that this is all just echoes in Representative Belles’s mind, it feels as if his eyes are resting on me and me alone.

  I dig deeper into Representative Belles’s mind, trying to figure out how he knows this beautiful boy. A name, an address, anything. A ghostly image of their last interaction plays on a loop: the boy looking around furtively, whispering something too fast for me to catch, and holding something out for Representative Belles’s to take. A folded up piece of paper, or maybe a digi strip; I can’t tell. And while Representative Belles’s memories show that he took the paper, he hasn’t looked inside it yet. He himself doesn’t know what it contains.