by K A Riley
“Confirmed?” I ask.
Granden pivots in his chair to face me. “The first thing Hiller did back in the Processor…”
With a look of realization spreading over his face, Brohn reaches over his shoulder to the top of his back. “Those Biscuits.”
Granden nods as Cardyn, Rain, Manthy, and I all reach over to feel our shoulder blades, too. “Those implants, or ‘Biscuits’ as Hiller called them, you got on the first day in the Processor,” Granden tells us, “were more than just simple tracking devices.”
I get an odd combined feeling of relief and confusion. “Then why weren’t you…I mean, why weren’t they able to track us?”
Granden presses his palms together like he’s praying. “I wondered that too, Kress. After your escape and after Hiller’s body was discovered, I was able to do some investigation of my own. From what I can tell, it turns out Manthy fried the link-up when she was with you and Brohn in the Halo with Hiller.”
I remember the exact moment he’s talking about. When Manthy tapped into the console with the odd symbols and scrolling text—right after Hiller shot herself in the head—I worried about the consequences of Manthy creating a feedback loop. I still worry about that kind of feedback whenever I initiate my connection with Render. Fortunately, Manthy seemed to be okay, despite her headaches. But now I realize that her connection with the tech back then apparently had other unknown side effects. It worked out fine for us. We got answers, and, as it turns out, the Patriots couldn’t track us. But what if my connection with Render is having the same kind of destructive impact on him? I spend so much time worrying about how our connection is affecting me, it never really occurs to me how much he might be suffering as well.
I don’t have time to dwell on it, though, as Rain, barely holding back her irritation, whips around to face Granden. “Then if they weren’t being used just to track us, what were they for?”
“They were…are…SGAs. Spectral Genomic Analyzers. They identified you as potential Emergents. Long before Manthy accidentally scorched them, they’d already fed most of your genetic information back to Krug and the Deenays. You were one day away from being transported to their labs in D.C. when you got away.”
“And now,” Wisp adds, “Krug will be here soon with his personal armed escort to finish what he started.”
Cardyn is still reaching his hand far back over his shoulder and whipping his head from side to side like a dog trying to itch a spot on its back it can’t reach. “Can’t we just get these things out of us then?”
“Not without killing you,” Olivia hums. “They’re not sending any signals out anymore, but they are still integrated through active supercoiled microfilaments with your individual genomic and nano-synaptic configurations.”
“Great,” Cardyn groans, his shoulders slumped low in resignation. “How am I supposed to sleep, knowing I’ve got a micro-nano-whatever burrowed in my spine?”
“I’m sure you’ll be fine,” Rain assures him.
“Big baby,” Manthy adds under her breath.
Wisp plops back down in her seat. “Listen. Krug has your DNA, but he needs you, including your blood, your brains, and your cooperation to make it all come together. The good news is that he needs you alive. The bad news is that he can keep you alive and in a lot of pain for a very long time until he gets what he wants. You’re the last pieces in his puzzle. The rest of his army will be just a few hours behind him. If we don’t strike before Friday night, we’ll be facing impossible odds by Saturday morning.”
Brohn holds up five fingers on one hand and his thumb on the other. “That gives us six days to turn this handful of Insubordinates of yours into an army.”
“No,” I correct him. “It gives us six days to turn them into a Conspiracy.”
4
With the plan outlined, Wisp doesn’t hesitate for a single second longer before doling out our duties.
“Olivia, call up the Style.”
Olivia says, “Initiated” and complies with her customary speed and cheerfulness. With a flick of her fluorescent tendrils, she patches back into her holo-spheres and monitors, and, before our eyes, the San Francisco city-scape, the long white wall, and the Armory are replaced by a shimmering image of the Style, the building we’re currently in. Several dozen heat signatures glow red throughout the basement and the five main floors of the building with small, scrolling info-tags blinking white above each figure.
“What are those?” Cardyn asks, pointing to the ghostly, blue and purple forms congregated on the second floor.
“You met them yesterday,” Wisp reminds him. “Those are the Modifieds.”
“But why—?”
Olivia looks up from her monitors. “Glitchy neuro-synaptic firing. Distorted thermal and electromagnetic radiation patterns. Inconsistent atom vibration frequencies. And altered heat-signatures. All side-effects of being one of us,” she adds.
Addressing Brohn and Cardyn, Granden stands and points to various spots on the image that light up green as he touches them.
“We have our weapons cache here in the basement. That includes guns, ammunition, body armor, combat knives, and a small collection of explosive devices. There are other supplies, too. Comm-links, zip-cuffs, stun-sticks, argon torches, night-vision goggles…things like that. Not as much or as sophisticated as we’d like, but we have to make do. We have a relay system already in place,” Granden informs us, pointing to the fifth floor of the image. “As you can see, there is a team of Insubordinates already moving the supplies from the basement up to the top floor.”
Cardyn turns his attention from Granden to Wisp. “And what, exactly, are we supposed to do with these Insubordinates and all these weapons and supplies?”
“If I knew that,” Wisp laughs, “I’d do it myself.”
“You remember your training?” Granden asks.
Brohn and Cardyn nod in unison.
“Well, it’ll be just like that. Only faster. And more difficult. And with a lot less time, less disciplined trainees, less rest, and a lot more on the line.”
Brohn leans back in his chair and looks across the table at Cardyn who has begun chewing nervously at the skin around his fingernail. “Don’t worry, Card,” Brohn assures him. “We can do this. We don’t need to turn them into super soldiers,” he adds, turning toward his sister. “Just give them the basics, right?”
Wisp gives him a smile and a thumbs up. “Nothing to it. Make sure they know the difference between a knife-handle and the blade, and which end of a gun the bullets come out. That’ll already be more than most of them know.”
“I’ve been training them for a while now,” Granden says. “A couple of weeks anyway. But I can’t do it myself, and, honestly, I can’t do it as well as you’ll be able to.”
Brohn and Cardyn exchange a “what do you think?” look across the table. Card returns Brohn’s small, affirmative nod with half-smile and a completely skeptical look of tepid agreement. “When do we start?”
Granden reaches into the image and focuses in on and enlarges the fifth floor, where we see the heat signatures of the Insubordinates unloading a freight elevator. “About five minutes ago,” he says. His tone is unmistakable, and he’s already ushering Brohn and Cardyn toward the door before his words fade into silence.
Brohn waves back at me and calls out, “I’ll see you tonight,” and then the door whooshes shut behind him, leaving me, Rain, and Manthy alone with Olivia and Wisp in the Intel Room.
With the boys off to start conducting the training, the rest of us work tirelessly for the remainder of the day and deep into the night to lay out battle plans and organize training protocols for the Insubordinates. At first, Manthy and I mostly sit and watch as Wisp and Olivia talk strategy with Rain. They ask for our input from time to time, but Manthy and I don’t have much to add. Manthy can talk to tech. I can talk to Render. Neither of us has ever been very good at strategizing. Personally, I don’t know how Rain does it. In the Valta, I once saw her working o
ut a complex logic problem, solving a math equation, and teaching a Juven about the inner workings of the internal combustion engine…all at the same time. Even though my memory seems to be getting better and closer to perfect by the day, I still can’t apply it to multiple tasks at a time the way Rain can.
Over the next few hours, Rain spins the city image around, asks Olivia for as much detail as she can provide, and makes suggestions to Wisp about approach points and gaps in defensive positions. Wisp taps her comm-link, and, a few seconds later, one of the Insubordinates or another pokes a head into the room to receive instructions.
Wisp is an unhesitating machine of efficiency. She seems to have complete and detailed knowledge of the inner-workings of the entire underground movement. Rattling off names of buildings and lists of streets and neighborhoods, she sends a few Insubordinates on supply runs. She sends a squad of three Insubordinates out to communicate with some other smaller faction hidden somewhere in the city. A few minutes after that, she withdraws a metal box from a small locker over by the door and instructs two boys to deliver a voice-mod synthesizer and neuro-inducer to Caldwell downstairs on the second floor where the Modifieds are being tended to.
At the same she’s directing this flurry of activity, she’s filling me and Rain and Manthy in on what comes next for us. Following Wisp’s orders, Olivia continues to show us as much of the Armory and the other strategic locations in the areas she’s able to patch into. Speckling her report with the history of nearly every neighborhood in San Francisco, she calls up image after image of the city and its thousands of buildings. One at a time, she peels back layers of her multiple floating diagrams to reveal everything from subway systems to water lines to electric power girds. She shows us 3-D images of City Hall, the Transamerica Pyramid nestled in with the other towering downtown skyscrapers, the United Nations Plaza, which looks like a five-story capital “D,” and Grace Cathedral—one of the Insubordinates’ backup hideouts not too far from here. All the structures, bridges, piers, and grid-maps of the city spin and shed their outer layers to reveal the skeletal foundations beneath. It’s an information overload made more challenging by all the gaps and missing sections where the intel is compromised, inconclusive, or incomplete.
After a few more hours and with my eyes glazed over from fatigue, I ask Wisp if it’s all right if I head upstairs to check on Brohn and Cardyn’s progress with the Insubordinates. Telling me not to be too long because she may need me soon, Wisp gives me the go-ahead. I’m already up the first flight of stairs when it occurs to me how odd it is to be working under the supervision of a girl who used to seem so tiny and frail. Once, when Brohn and I were Juvens and she was still a lowly Neo, she burst into tears because she couldn’t keep up with him when he went walking down to the water reservoir. Another time, I watched Wisp, her hair in pigtails, follow a butterfly around the Valta for an entire afternoon. Now, she’s called “the Major,” people do her bidding, and she doesn’t seem to mind having the weight of the world on her narrow shoulders. In fact, she seems to delight in it. It’s like size really doesn’t matter, and this is who she was meant to be all along.
Grinning, I take the next flight of stairs two at a time and push open the steel door at the top landing.
Stepping through the door and out onto the fifth floor of the Style, I’m stunned. Unlike the dark, tech-filled Intel Room downstairs where I’ve been cooped up all day, this floor is abuzz with energy, activity, and a throng of bodies in motion. Together, Brohn and Cardyn are a whirlwind of organization. They’re working at super-speed with Granden to turn the rooms on this top floor of the building into a fully-stocked training facility. A dozen Insubordinates unload two big freight-lifts at the end of the hall, and a dozen more are busily pushing equipment around on hovering mag-carts as they work to fill the rooms and cordoned-off sections of the wide hallway with training supplies and combat gear. With their high-fives and hearty backslaps, the Insubordinates seem inappropriately happy considering what we’re preparing them for.
Striding up to me through the noisy crowd, Brohn greets me with a big smile and a sweaty hug.
“Welcome to training!”
“Well, this is certainly impressive.”
“We’ve already started teaching them some of the basics,” Brohn boasts with a broad wave of his hand in the direction of the tittering Insubordinates. “Wisp apparently tracked down some more supplies for us, so we’re offloading those before we get back to it.”
Cardyn waves to me from down the hall as Brohn starts to explain how they have specific rooms dedicated to certain elements of their training schedule. Pointing one at a time to the series of doorways lining the long hall, he rattles off the purpose of each room like a proud parent bragging about his child’s report card. “This room is for hand-to-hand combat training. We have blocking pads and sparring equipment on the way. This room is for stealth operations training. We’re going to introduce them to night fighting. This room is to teach them how to communicate with each other and work as a team. And that one down there is a long, double-room that has the target gallery to teach them how to shoot straight so they don’t wind up killing one of us by mistake when Friday rolls around.”
I nod, impressed. “You really are already whipping them into shape, aren’t you?”
Brohn blushes and shrugs. “I don’t think I’d go that far. We’re just getting started. But I’ve got a good feeling, Kress. I really do. We’re in the process of figuring out what everyone is capable of. Their strengths and abilities and such. We’re hoping to get a cascading effect going on a rotational basis where the Insubordinates are able to cycle through certain parts of the training protocols to help each other as we go.”
“Kind of like how we taught each other for all those years in the Valta,” I say.
“Exactly. Here, I’ll show you what we’ve done so far.”
Weaving between throngs of kids, a few adults, and an assortment of wooden and synth-steel crates, we walk farther down the hall, and I get my second sweaty hug as Cardyn trots over, red-faced and beaming. Together, Brohn and Cardyn talk over each other like excited schoolboys about all their plans. Cardyn picks up on Brohn’s tour and shows me a room dedicated to edged-weapon combat. Another room has equipment and monitors set up to teach the Insubordinates about communication and code-breaking.
“And this is going to be one of our simulation rooms!” Cardyn exclaims. “Wisp is having some supplies sent over. Granden is downstairs right now to receive them.”
“And once you help her get better intel,” Brohn continues, “Olivia is going to relay details of the key rooms we’re going to infiltrate, and we’ll replicate them in here, so the Insubordinates get a chance to preview the targets and the attack plan.”
I tell them how impressed I am, and both boys blush like I just told them “Good boy!” and tossed them a treat.
Proceeding with the tour, I continue to be impressed. In addition to the swarms of bubbling Insubordinates, the rooms are loaded with boxes of ammo, tables of knives and handguns, racks of rifles, and a whole array of comm-links for in-the-field communication. Somehow, Brohn and Cardyn have worked together with Granden to turn the place into a proper training facility.
And all in less than a day.
I’m filled with a mind-swirling combination of pride and regret. I’m happy that Brohn has taken on such a leadership role, but I wish I could stay up here with him instead of going back down into that cave of an Intel Room. Although I know how important it is for me to work with Manthy and the others downstairs, there’s a small part of me that misses the muscle-straining thrill of sparring and the adrenaline rush of combat, and there’s a large part of me that misses Brohn.
When Card goes over to talk to some of the Insubordinates, Brohn puts his hand on my cheek, and I don’t know if it’s the heat of his palm or the public nature of the gesture, but I can feel myself blush crimson red.
“I wish I could be downstairs with you,” he says, dropping
his arms down to take my hands in his. “I miss being able to talk with you about, well, everything.”
“Funny,” I reply, “I was just thinking how nice it would be to stay up here with you.”
“I’ll come visit you,” Brohn says as he looks around at the busy productivity of the hallway and the rooms around us. “Next chance I get. I promise.”
I follow his gaze around the hall at all the laughing and bubbling camaraderie. This could have been us. Under different circumstances. In a different world or in a different life. We could have been the ones bouncing cheerfully down long hallways filled with our happy, energetic peers. We could have been learning new things and sharing funny stories about all of our adventures on each new day. We don’t have that, though, and we probably never will. I just hope that in six days, when all this is over, we’ll still have each other.
Brohn leans toward me, and three boys standing nearby, probably in their early teens, ooh and ahh as he kisses me goodbye. He shoos them away with a wave of his hand and gives me an apologetic shrug.
“See you later in the dorm?”
“Can’t wait,” I say. I wave a long-distance “goodbye” to Cardyn who is putting on an impromptu martial arts demonstration to a group of wide-eyed Insubordinates down the hall.
Turning to go, I walk down the two flights of stairs to the third floor, proud of what I’m a part of but saddened that each step is taking me farther away from Brohn.
Later that night, we reunite in the dorm, bone-weary but feeling a common sense of satisfaction at having spent an entire day being productive for once instead of moving from place to place and trying not to get killed in the apocalyptic world outside this city. In our spoked-wheel configuration of beds, we laugh together, compare notes about the day, reminisce about the past, and speculate about the future. Well, all of us do that except for Manthy. She tucks her head under her covers with the lower part of her legs exposed at the center of the circle, so we’re treated to the full bouquet of her smelly feet.
