I can’t help it—I laugh. “Sorry I’m not locked up.”
“Just tell me you’re giving Wright hell.”
“Not exactly.” I glance at Renell and his blank expression and sober up fast. “Here’s the thing—I need to stay put. I’ve found my dad. I’ve got a back-door code to disable the orbs. And I’ve got an appointment to meet with the President of the United States tomorrow.”
There’s silence on the other end of the line.
“Scott?”
A pause. “You’re not Zeph.”
“What? Yes, I am—”
“Tell me something only the two of us would know.”
“We don’t have time for—”
“Zeph.” There’s deadly warning in his voice. “If this is you, you’d better come up with something fast, or I’m coming in to get you.”
“Okay!” I wrack my brain. “You helped me save Olivia when Wright sent her to Jackertown. I had to crack open your head to do it—”
“Hey, I let you do that.” He sounds gruff but less like he’s about to lead a brigade to bust me out.
“You did not.” But I’m laughing.
“Okay, kid. No need to brag.” There’s a muffled sound. “Call me when you actually need help.”
“Wait, I need to tell you—” But he’s handing the phone over to someone else.
“Zeph?” It’s Tessa.
A loose feeling runs through my body. “Hey.”
“Are you okay?” She sounds frantic.
I’m kind of in love with that sound. “I’m fine. Honest. Remember what Kira said before? About how I was supposed to work things from the inside? Well… I’m inside. Pretty deep.”
“We can get you out.” She has that serious voice, the one that’s led the Free Thinkers and organized Kira’s campaign for the Senate and no doubt filled the airwaves with revolutionary rhetoric on the Jacker Voice. Even with the JFA on the run, I have no doubt she could marshal a rescue team and bust me out of a secret DARPA facility.
“I need to stay here,” I say. But my heart’s full with the idea that she’s been trying to find me.
“Okay.” It’s a wary agreement like she’s not entirely sold.
I want to say a whole lot of things I can’t right now. But just hearing her voice—knowing she’s out there, safe—makes me more determined to end this madness.
“Tell Scott I’m going to scrit him a code,” I say. “It’s a back-end kill switch for the orbs.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.” I try not to let too much pride slip into my voice. Not with the price my dad paid for that. “Get it to Sammi—she’ll know what to do with it. And I’m working on a plan…” I glance at Renell and his stock-still form. “I’ve got Renell and Anna here with me. I’m not sure how, but I’m going to fix this, Tessa. I’m going to bring all of it down.” It sounds like bragging, but what I mean is I’m not coming home until I do. I don’t even know for sure where we stand, but right now, home feels like wherever she is.
“If anyone can,” she says softly, “it’s you.”
And now I can’t even speak.
She makes a soft sound, I’m not even sure what, but it makes me ache. She clears her throat. “We’re working it from the outside, too. The Free Thinkers have an army of lawyers filing suits on behalf of the incarcerated jackers. And the ones who’ve been turned. People are flying in from all over the country to help. The tru-casts have been criminally bad, but we’re fighting this, Zeph. In the courts and on the chat-casts and every way we can. Kira’s voice is still being heard in spite of the attack. Despite the smears. We’re putting the pressure on, and we’re not going to let up. We won’t let them commit genocide on a whole group of people.”
And that’s it. I look at Renell’s blank face, and I can see what Tiller and Wright want for the future of jackers everywhere—Tiller because he’s a bigot; Wright because she wants her own personal jacker army and the power that goes with it. Leave it to Tessa to see right through that immediately—and to attack it in the courts and the media and everything else at her disposal.
I’m kind of hopelessly in love with this girl.
“Zeph?”
“I’m here.” Just a little overwhelmed. I cough to cover that. “How’s Juliette? Is she safe?”
“She’s good. There’s all kinds of data she’s pulled down on her father’s operations. Kira’s got a whole team working on sorting it and building a case. Aaliyah’s house is overrun with forensic accountants and lawyers. I can’t even step in there, it’s so crazy.”
That makes me smile. “Hey, is Jiaying still there?”
“She’s keeping everyone in line.”
I smile more. “Tell her I found her bad guy. And he got what he deserved. I’ll tell her all about it when I get back.” Just in case I don’t, at least she’ll know that much. “And tell Scott I’ll call him if I need him—but no more scrits. I’m undercover here.”
There’s a pause on Tessa’s end. Then she says, “Zeph?’
“Yeah?”
“Be careful.” And the way she says it…
“I will.” By which I mean, I’m coming back to you. But I can’t say that.
She hangs up, and I just stand there for a moment, listening to the silence. Then I stuff my phone back in my pocket and turn back to Renell.
“Okay, my friend. Let’s do this.” I reach out mentally and alight the barest hold on his mindfield. A gentle tug gives a tiny bit of movement. A little more force almost spins it up, but then it lapses back into the state he’s in. Renell’s body twitches with what I’m sure was a pulse of pain. I’m afraid if I pull much harder, it will simply shatter. With a grimace, I try it anyway—gently, slowly, but with determination… and suddenly, his mindfield breaks free of the smoothed-out configuration and spins.
I let out a sigh of relief.
Renell falls to the ground, moaning with such an unnatural keen it sends shivers through me. I hustle to jack through the spinning field and implant a control phrase deep in his mind. I tag it with the strongest jack-command I can—a modified form of Julian’s instinct jack, marrying the phrase to the irresistible urge to follow the instructions of the one thinking it. Just as I’m about to reshape his mindfield into his original mindmap—to see if I can resurrect him completely—I hear the door swing open behind me.
Dammit.
Instead, I spin Renell back into the Obedient configuration and let that drop into place. His writhing on the ground stops, and he mechanically climbs to his feet as if nothing happened.
“Progress, then?” Wright asks.
I turn to her—she has Anna with her, helmeted and cuffed and held on either side by armed guards. She looks awful, her eyes squinting against the light. She barely seems to realize I’m there. They must have started the mega-dose inhibitors on her. Crap.
“Yeah,” I say. “I was able to implant the control phrase.”
“What is it?” Wright asks.
“Tiller is a jackhole.”
She arches an eyebrow at me.
“Totally juvenile of me.” I smirk. “I regret nothing.”
She shakes her head then focuses on Renell. He lunges for me, hands out and headed for my throat.
“Hey!” I dance back out of the way, and he stumbles to a stop. “Not funny, Wright.”
“On the contrary,” she says. “I think it’s brilliant.” She means that I’ve sped up her Obedient processing time from three days to basically instant. Or that she can harass me again with her pet Obedient. Not sure. “You can proceed with Ms. Navarro next.”
That wakes Anna up a little. She swings from looking at Wright to the guards, then fixates on Renell. Finally, she finds me.
She blinks, her expression dulled by whatever drugs they gave her, but still wary. She fights as they remove her helmet, cursing out my name. I wince, wait until her mindfield is clear, then get to work right away, before Wright can think I’m hesitating. Before Anna can say anything to make me reg
ret this more than I already do.
Her screams echo off the walls of the lab.
Two armed guards are escorting me to see the president.
I’m not sure who Wright thinks she’s protecting against whom. Or if she thinks I might make a run for it and that two helmeted guys with weapons will slow me down. Either way, we’re taking a ride in a black government hydrocar to downtown Chicago.
When we stop, several helmeted Secret Service agents are conspicuous outside the twenty-story white-stone building. It’s pre-Change Chicago architecture on the outside, but once we’re past the scanners and the pat-down, the atrium is spacious and modern, multiple stories tall with a glittering light sculpture suspended above us. Wright’s guards and their weapons have to remain at the entrance while I get escorted by two Secret Service agents further into the building. It opens up to a tall one-story art gallery that’s easily a block in each direction. A forest of white columns holds up the ceiling, each one slightly unique—a thousand variations on the theme of a functional white pillar, all the same, unless you look closely. The wall panels display post-Change art, which is a strange mix of viscerally raw images of individuals and the misty beauty of groups. Post-Change really means mindreader art—a distinctive style that’s all about open minds, honest hearts, and that weird state when readers sync their thoughts into a harmonious whole that fuzzes out the individual. It goes without saying that there’s no jacker art—to be honest, I don’t know what that would be. Scattered between the panels of paintings are pairs of seats, all blue and cushioned and square… and slightly unique like the columns. Deviation allowed, as long as everything is still the same.
Natural light blares in from the wall of windows to the east overlooking the lake. The place is entirely devoid of people, as far as I can see.
The Secret Service agents stop just inside the entrance to the gallery. One taps his helmet and must have mindware-enabled comms because he doesn’t speak. The other eyes me like he’s prepared to kill me if I breathe wrong. After a moment, a thin man with pale skin and a helmeted head appears around the edge of a display wall. He strides toward us, his dead eyes intent on me—I know him. He’s just as creepy as the first time I saw him, in Wright’s surgical theatre where she forced me to flip Ethan from jacker to reader. And this guy was at the assassination, too. I’m struggling for his name.
He stops in front of me and nods to the Secret Service agents. “Please come with me, Mr. MacCay.” I’ve never heard him speak before, but his voice is as off-the-charts soul-shivering as his face.
The agents stay behind as I follow Creepy Guy into the maze of the gallery. What is his name? He’s involved in everything—the coup, the jacker Obedient program, probably Tiller’s orb development as well. Then I remember: Jeremy Ailsberg, chief political strategist for the president. The prior president—that Ailsberg stayed on when Torquin went from VP to POTUS cinched my conspiracy theory as almost certainly fact in my head.
We pass a panel with a painting of a lone, vacant-eyed individual hovering over and menacing a group that’s swirled into gauzy synchrony. I get that it’s a jacker, but the dead eyes have a more-than-passing resemblance to Ailsberg’s.
The president is seated in a blue armchair behind the panel.
He looks up from his screen and smiles. “Zeph! Thanks for coming. Please have a seat.” He gestures to the upholstered chair next to his, swiping his screen off and handing it to Ailsberg. They both have helmets, so they have to speak out loud, but Torquin just nods, and it seems like they have some non-verbal thing going on.
Ailsberg beats a retreat as I sit.
The president and I are alone. I reach out to locate the smooth helmet-fields of Ailsberg and the Secret Service guys. I could break the helmets and jack them if I had to—the president, too, for that matter. No one seems concerned about that. Maybe because I wouldn’t make it out of the building.
Torquin claimed to know everything… but I suspect he doesn’t know I can jack through helmets. So, Wright’s playing that one close to the vest. Interesting.
Torquin’s checking me out like he can read something on my face.
“You wanted to meet?” I say because I’m not at all sure what this is about. Ostensibly the fact that I’m a government-designed jacker superweapon—the only real question is how Torquin thinks he will use me.
And what I can do to stop him.
“How did your meeting with your father go?”
“My father?” I’m having an instant heart attack. Does Torquin know about my dad and the kill switch for the orb? “I thought you said he wasn’t my dad.”
“Well, I assume you’ve discussed that with him.” Torquin leans back and crosses his legs at the ankle. “Did he tell you the truth?”
“Pretty sure I know more about my family than you do.” He may be the president, but he’s also kind of a jackhole. “The question is why do you care? And why am I here?”
“All right, then.” He leans forward again, tapping one finger against his lips as he looks me over. “Let’s start with Jackertown. You should know the attack there was not authorized by my office or anyone at the Federal level, including DARPA’s Jacker Technologies Division.”
I narrow my eyes. “I was there. Looked officially sanctioned to me.” Wright said she was surprised, but that doesn’t mean Torquin or someone in the government wasn’t involved. Maybe his pet slug, Ailsberg.
He waves that off. “I can assure you it wasn’t—not least because it’s presenting all kinds of backlash and difficulties that would have been avoided had we stuck to the plan. Tiller went off the rails because he’s an egomaniacal hot head convinced of his own brilliance and pseudo-religious mandate.”
My eyebrows lift. “Well, we can agree about that.” Then I frown. “Wait… what plan?” In the back of my mind, warning bells are going off. The President of the United States is sharing high-level plans regarding jackers with me. This is the kind of meeting you don’t walk away from with your memories intact. Not unless a price is paid.
“Something much less aggravating to the public, I assure you.” Torquin’s annoyance is real, as far as I can tell, but not deadly—well, not to me. “Tiller acted without restraint, just like Kestrel two years ago.”
I nod, but my heart is thudding. Because I know Kestrel didn’t put the inhibitors in the water—Kira did. And if that information got into Torquin’s hands, it would be a disaster. Not that he hasn’t already tried to pin the ongoing dumping of inhibitors on the JFA, all while Scott was the one who actually did it—on DARPA’s orders. With the pushback Tessa said they were bringing to bear… I’m sure Torquin wants a way to tear down Kira and her message.
“Kestrel made a mess of things by going rogue and putting responsible people—people trying to maintain some semblance of order, like President Ashton—in a difficult position.”
My heart continues to thud erratically—if I’m right, Torquin orchestrated the coup against Ashton. At a minimum, Ailsberg knew. “So President Ashton didn’t want the inhibitors put in the water?”
Torquin makes a face. “No. Of course not. That the JFA continues to pollute the water supply is also something that must be stopped.”
Okay, he’s outright lying now. To my face. Either that or the president has no knowledge of what’s happening at DARPA.
I say nothing.
“Regardless, Tiller was obviously trying to force the issue. And he succeeded. Which brings me to you and your talents, Zeph.”
He has all my attention now. “What do you mean?”
“Given you were at Jackertown during the orb demonstration—”
“Attack.” I just cut off the President of the United States. Can’t believe I did that, but… “You mean attack. People died.”
He looks amused. “Yes, of course. The attack. There were only a few casualties, and I lay those entirely at Tiller’s feet. He’s been, shall we say, restrained for the moment…”
I school my face to not show m
y surprise. What did the president do to Tiller?
“…but it’s obvious the orbs weren’t quite ready for the public. Yet, Tiller went ahead. And now I have a mess on my hands. One I’d like your help to clean up, Zeph.”
“Me?” And here it is—I brace myself, literally clutching the arms of the cushioned armchair I’m perched on.
“I need a demonstration for the people to see how it’s perfectly safe to use the orbs in our new program to cure the mutant jacker problem by helping them convert back to their natural reader form.”
“Natural… reader… form.” Every thought in my mind comes to a screeching halt as I try to process what the president just said.
“Come now.” He chastises me with a lift of his eyebrow. “You of all people know there’s essentially no difference between us—jackers and readers are variants on a spectrum. But this difference in ability is far too destabilizing. It has to end, Zeph. And I hope you can see there’s really only one way that’s going to happen—and it doesn’t involved jackers roaming our streets causing mayhem. You’re simply too dangerous.”
My fingers dig into the cushions. “I’m not killing jackers for you.” It’s out before I can stop it—my plan was to play along, get what I could from Torquin, but if that’s what he wants—
“Kill?” He gives me a look like he’s reassessing my intelligence. “I already have too many bodies. That’s what I’m trying to prevent here, Zeph.”
My death-grip on the chair eases. “I don’t understand.”
Torquin scowls. “Tiller’s demonstration was a disaster precisely because it didn’t work. The orbs barely functioned. They outright killed some jackers. Then he sent the Obedients in to destroy anyone who didn’t convert. There weren’t enough successful conversions to tout on the news, and I don’t have near enough prison space for the rest. Nor do I need that kind of body count. It causes problems—most of the public understands the threat of jackers, yet some still have a certain queasiness when bodies pile up.”
“Imagine that.” My mouth will get me in trouble. I need to reel it in.
Torquin just smirks. “Oh, their bloodlust wouldn’t mind a few. Did you notice that the purity killings were slowly rising, but not too fast—just enough to titillate the evening tru-cast? But not enough to provoke panic or the kind of shock that might require some thoughtful analysis?”
Broken Wide Page 18
