by Tracy Korn
“OK, but how long?”
“Twenty minutes, if I interface both of these printing mechanisms,” Jack answers, gesturing to the clear enclosures down on the center platform of the room.
“That will have to work…” I say, glancing at Fraya, who’s the smallest here. Jax raises an eyebrow at me and wraps a big gorilla arm around her.
“Uh, no,” he says. “Print me.”
Calyx chuckles, looking him up and down. “Kid, we’ll be here for days. I’ll do it,” she says. Fraya blows out a breath watching her pull out one of her white-blonde hairs and hand it to Jack. “I’m not that much bigger than she is, and I know the layout of this place. Maybe there will be some baseline synapses that carryover into the clone.”
Jack nods. “I need those enclosures unlocked. There are cellulose pads in the platforms that will work well enough,” he says to Calyx. She crosses to me and takes the lanyard from around my neck, then tosses it to Jack.
“We have to hurry,” she says, turning back to me. “Keep an eye out for Briggs. We should have felt at least one small tremor by now if he was able to upload the archive.”
“I have a bad feeling about this,” I say, shaking my head. “He was never programmed into my tracker system. Do you see him?”
Calyx opens her palm and presses into her wrist to activate her locators. Several blue dots appear on the miniature, green grid display, then start to flesh out with our faces. I brace myself to see Jazz, but her face never appears. Calyx points to a dot far at the bottom, well below her hand.
“He’s still in the core room,” she says. “You’re right—something is wrong. He’s been in there way too long.”
“Do you know how to fly the ships in the hangar?” I ask.
Calyx nods. “Not like you, but I can put them in the air.”
“Can you get a ship back to The Seam? Or back to the Skyboard North doctor where we left the testing patients?”
“Why?” she asks, her black eyebrows darting together. “What are you planning?”
“I don’t know,” I say, trying to settle the churn in my stomach. I pull Calyx several steps away from the others and whisper to her. “I’m going to go find Denison. Can you get everyone on board and get them out or not?”
“You need a brain scan, literally,” she adds after a beat. “That proclivity merge in your head is happening too fast. It’s not a good idea to be alone. I’ll go. You fly them out of here.”
“I’m fine. It’s helping get things done, and if something does melt down, I don’t want to be the only one keeping a ship in the air. Autopilot won’t engage in the ion field here.”
“Then I’ll go with you.”
“No, are you listening to me?” I ask. “You need to fly. Everyone with us is either an Omnicoder or a Biodesigner—nobody else can pilot a ship. I’ll find Denison and we’ll get back to the hangar somehow. He’ll be able to fly if I check out.”
She gives me a narrowed look, but before she can protest again, Jack starts laughing out loud. “It’s working!” he almost shouts as he points to the cube enclosure on the right. Feet and ankles have already begun to form in the center, and with each laser line coming from the top of the clear cube, more of the legs start to take shape in seconds. After only a few more minutes, both knees are in place.
“OK…” I shake my head at everyone to pull out of the surreal fog that seeing an actual body being printed just put me in. “I’m going to find Denison. He’s still in the core room, so something must have gone wrong—he should have been in the hangar by now.”
“I’ll go with you,” Jax says.
“No, get everyone out. It might not be a clean shot even with a distraction, and they’ll need all the muscle they can get,” I say. He starts to protest, so I cross to him. “Please, man. Get everyone back. Get your dad back home.”
“And what if you have some kind of brain thing happen again?”
“How much longer?” I ignore his question and call to Jack, who’s still typing away at the console. I glance at the Calyx clone before I realize it and look away even faster.
“Five minutes, all that is left is her head,” Jack answers.
I blow out a breath, then see my sister approaching over Jax’s shoulder.
“Take this. It’s all I have ready right now, but give me a few more minutes,” she says, handing me a small, white disc.
“What is it?”
“A neural blocker. It’s like a pain-killer, but I altered it with some of their equipment over there.” She pushes her chin to the bay of consoles where Jack is still typing. “I don’t have a way to keep it charged, but it will buffer your hemisphere merge until it dies. If you don’t surge, it could last seven or eight hours.”
“And if I do surge?”
“Maybe a half-life after each episode. Four hours after the first time, and two after another.”
“So, third strike, and I’m out?” I smile at her, and tears fill her eyes.
“Stow it. Hurry up and swallow it, will you?” she says, giving me a trembling smile.
It tastes like something dead and rotting, and I cough to the point that I gag. Jax laughs and slaps me on the back. “You OK?”
The first thing I see when I recover is Calyx’s clone, now complete with a head, but still no clothes, and I cough again on the shocked breath I suck in.
“Yeah, here,” I say, taking off the lab coat I took from the doctor. “Put this on her.”
“You’ll need that to get past the guards,” Jack answers.
“The guards are going to be chasing her. Can she—er, it talk?”
“No,” Jack says, catching the coat I toss to him. “But I programmed a trajectory into its base code. Basically, it can run, and it can fight.”
“Great,” I manage, around the last of my coughing. “Can any of you pull up Jazz, Vox, and Liam on your tracking?”
“I’ve been trying. They’re all out of range,” he answers.
“How can they be out of range? The whole point of getting these trackers put in was to—“ I start, but my sister cuts me off.
“Arco,” she says just as I feel blood run over my lip. I wipe it on my sleeve. “Crite, this is asinine.”
“Sometimes pain can trigger a surge,” she says, crossing to me with something small in her hands. “Here, this is done loading now. Hold still.”
Arwyn shoves the little tube into my nose without a warning, and a second later, it feels like the whole inside of my head is flushed with ice.
“Wha—!?” I start, but the cold pushes into my throat and cuts off my words.
“Your rebooted nanites aren’t keeping up,” Arwyn says, taking a few steps toward me. “There’s no time to splice any either, so take this,” she adds, handing me the little cylinder. “There’s enough for two more shots. It won’t stop the damage from the surge, but it will stop the bleeding. Between that and the neural blocker, you should be OK for now.”
“What is it?” I choke.
“Oxygen, mainly. It’s a primitive composition, but that’s the best we could do with what’s here—or at least, what we could find,” she says, looking around at the stark walls. “They must have a way to print what they need on demand.”
“Are we ready?” Lyden says, peering through the cracked door at the top of the stairs.
“Almost,” Jack says, hammering something into the console. The clone of Calyx opens its eyes, then starts marching toward Lyden at the top of the stairs.
“What’s it doing?” he asks, registering a little panic.
“It’s all right. She’s going to start by walking, and when she registers that she’s been noticed, she’ll start running to draw the guards away. Don’t engage her,” Jack says. Lyden takes several steps back from the door, letting the Calyx clone have plenty of room.
The real Calyx stands up behind a console near Jack and stares at the clone in awe. “I’ll be damned, Jack. No wonder they pinched you for Gaia even after you told them to go to hell.�
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“It’s just a few neural connections and the right organic tech,” he says with a shrug.
The breeze from the corridor blows the clone’s lab coat open just as it passes me. I reach to button it, but my sister grips my wrist.
“No, don’t engage or it will start running, remember?” she says. I nod, feeling stupid.
“Right, right. OK, come on. We need to get in the wake of that thing,” I say, waving everyone toward the lab door. Jax moves to my side, opening the door the rest of the way for the clone.
It walks over the threshold, keeping a normal pace for about twenty-five yards until several guards start to take notice.
“You remember the last play against Seaboard East last year?” I say to Jax. “All right. Let’s go.”
He grins. “Set ‘em up, knock ‘em down.”
“You there! Stop!” one of the guards shouts to the Calyx clone, but instead of stopping, it starts running, taking most of the guards with it.
“Now! Come on! We still have a few at the door!” I call back to everyone. Jax runs next to me until I go wide, hoping one of the guards will try to shoot at me. “Hey, test tube!” I shout. The clone guard jerks his ray toward me just as Jax bulldozes him. He falls, skidding across the slick floor. Jax flies past him, grabbing up his neural ray. “Go! Go!”
“You too! Hurry up!” he calls back, taking out the other three clone guards alongside Lyden and Jack. I watch them make their way through the hangar door before I turn down a corridor and realize I have no idea where I am.
“Crite…” I breathe, then remember the arrow uplink we took from the doctors. “Core Room,” I say out loud.
“This way to the Core Room, Dr. Beckett,” the arrow voice in my head says as a blue arrow materializes in the corner of my vision, and again, I’m running.
The Core Room is down multiple flights of steps, and I manage to stay ahead of any clone guards. I use the credential I took back from Calyx to open the Core Room door and duck to the side just in case there’s someone on the other side who isn’t Denison. The room is full of consoles and one giant, white, churning cylinder in the middle of the room, which reminds me of the virtuo-cine platform back in Admin City. It’s surrounded by controls that Denison is hammering over and over again.
“Come on!” he shouts. I take another quick look around the area but only see a few unconscious clone guards on the ground. Denison has a neural ray slung over his back.
I pick up the other one next to one of the downed guards and rush over to him. “What’s wrong?”
“The sample is corrupt—shriveled.”
“How? We took it directly from The Seam’s containment room!”
“I know. I was there,” he barks, then swears. “It had to be Eco. He exposed the other sample to ultraviolet light. He must have done the whole thing at once.”
“Useless skod!” I grip the back of my neck, which helps me think when I don’t have a two-inch tracker incision healing exactly there. A shot of adrenaline pushes pounding blood to my ears with the initial jolt of pain. “All right, well, we need to abort then. There’s no recovering the sample, right? No restoring it?”
“No, I’ve been trying since I got here,” Denison answers, stopping for a second to push his hands through his cropped, white hair. He pulls them down over his face and blows out a breath.
“Then let’s go. Calyx is securing a ship in the hangar right n—“ I’m cut off by another blinding light that feels like an ice pick through the center of my head. It drills through my skull to the base of my neck, then freezes my spine for a second until more numbers appear in my peripheral vision. A wave, an arrow cap, three curved lines, and a flame? The first three are the key signatures for seaboard communities, mountain communities, and underwater homesteads… What’s the flame? What’s the flame!?
“What’s happening? Are you all right?” Denison asks. I push the heels of my hands into my eyes to clear my vision, then move behind the console. My hands are moving over the screen before I know what I’m doing, pressing numbers, entering equations, hitting button after button and swiping screen after screen until another database system appears.
SECURITY BYPASS…ALPHA TWELVE…EXODUS PROJECT…UPLINK CONNECTION…PROXY SCRIPT…LOCATING HOST…CONNECTED…ACTIVATE ARC SEQUENCE?
I pull back when the last button appears with the flame symbol embedded in the center. Activate Arc Sequence? What does that mean? I think, as the rest of the numbers and symbols on the console screen stop scrolling. Whenever I try to swipe the screen away or look for anything else on it—an exit symbol, something—the piercing ice headache returns. It only stops when I look directly at the blinking button. It’s the only way…so I push it.
ARC SEQUENCE ACTIVATED. PREPARE FOR LAUNCH IN T-MINUS THIRTY MINUTES.
“Wait, what? What?” I say out loud, then turn to Denison. “What’s the Arc? Is it another ship?”
He looks at me blankly and shakes his head.
“I have no idea. What happened?” He moves in front of the console and sees the same message.
“I just activated some kind of countdown sequence.”
“What is this? How did you get to this screen? It’s not even in the Phase Three database.”
“I don’t know. The numbers were just in my head, under the screen somehow. Lots of layers under. That doesn’t make sense…” I trip over my words. “I don’t know. I just saw them,” I try again, only vaguely registering the sudden reverberation of the yell I let out and the pain in my knees when they hit the ground. The ice headache comes again, washing out everything.
CHAPTER 35
The Platform
Jazz
“What is that?” I ask Vox as a small tremor rattles the rock under our feet.
“I don’t know. Do you hear the buzzing?”
I nod, feeling the thrum again just behind my eyes. I press my palm to the black, smooth wall and feel the vibration run up my arm.
“Something is happening,” I say, turning back to Vita.
“Has anything like this ever happened before? Is it an earthquake?”
“No, not in my lifetime,” she says. “But the prophecy says these lands will be destroyed when we rejoin the ancestors.”
Vox and I exchange glances.
“Destroyed how?”
“First, the earth will break away…”
“Break away?” I ask. “The tremors…” I add, looking again at Vox.
“And then, a great flood.”
“Vita!” Vox almost shouts.
“Don’t you think that was maybe critical information back at the Origin Wall?”
“I tried to tell you. You didn’t want a cart—a cargotro…”
“Ugh…a cartography lesson,” Vox answers, rolling her eyes. “We have to get out of here. We have to get everyone out.”
We make our way up the long corridor that circles back to Center Hall where everyone is being lined up with their belongings at the foot of the Lookout Pier.
“Where are they going?” I ask Vita. She opens her mouth to answer, but Vox cuts her off.
“And don’t say to the stars.”
Vita closes her mouth.
“Crite,” I say, blowing out a breath.
“Vox!” Cal shouts, making us all jump as he appears from around the corner of the Lookout Pier staircase, which is buried in the black slab of the rock wall. We follow him while all the Vishan lined up against it stare silently at us as we pass, some of them looking hopeful, and others looking at us like we’re on our way to be executed.
This isn’t right, I think. The younger Vishan look happy. The older ones…don’t.
They know something, Vox answers in my mind. I feel a wash of panic from her before it’s buried under a cold, muted weight in my stomach.
There’s nothing up there. If they’re sending everyone up there, it can only be to push them off or something. Like a ritual suicide? I think in a panic.
I don’t think they would do that, Vo
x answers.
These people brand their faces and throats, Vox! I don’t think they’d think twice about taking a swan dive off that pier! Especially if the whole damn ocean is going to bust through here.
“Finally. Come up here!” Cal clears the top of the stairs and disappears around the corner just as the sound of fighting breaks out in the distance. I jerk around but can’t see Center Hall anymore.
“They’re almost here. Spaulding’s men…” I say to Vox. We sprint up the next several steps of the stairwell with Vita just a few feet behind us. I press my hands against the smooth, black obsidian to keep from falling, and feel the electric current vibrating against my palm again. The sharp edges of the glass-like stone glint in the light of the Lookout Pier, but then fall into shadows when Liddick comes bolting halfway down the stairwell to us.
“Crite, Rip…where did you go?” he asks, gripping my shoulders.
“We went to the Origin Wall to find out more about this prophecy. It has something to do with Vox—somehow, she’s supposed to go to the stars.”
“I know, they’re looking for her,” he says, darting a glance over his shoulder. “There’s a storm gathering too, just like the one when we went into the Rush. You can feel the electricity in your teeth up there.”
“What’s happening? What do they want?” Vox asks Vita.
“It’s the prophecy…they’re preparing for you to open the door.”
“How!?” Vox asks, throwing up her hands. Vita shakes her head. I touch the wall of the corridor and feel the electric current again just like before. The hum is getting even louder now in my ears.
“Do you feel that? It’s happening again. The hum—can you hear the hum?”
Liddick nods and glances over his shoulder again. “OK, we need to make a decision here. That way is Spaulding’s goons,” he says, jerking his chin behind us, then tossing a glance over his shoulder at the rest of the stairwell leading to the Lookout Pier. “That way is maybe some kind of magic carpet ride out of here.”
