Jaguar

by C. A. Gray

  “I’ll be right back, I promise,” I whispered. “Don’t you dare give up on me.”

  Waves of dizziness hit me on the ride into town. I’d slept a few hours the night before, and a few the night before that, but I could hardly remember my last night of uninterrupted, peaceful sleep. Combined with the blood loss and the pain, I think the only thing that kept me going was adrenaline. I made up a story to explain my shoulder and what I wanted with a manufacturing printer in my current state, especially in backwoods middle-of-nowhere—they weren’t cheap items, and most of the people in these parts couldn’t afford them.

  Fortunately, there was a wholesale store in town, staffed entirely by bots who asked no questions. They also offered no customer service, so while it would have been quite clear to any human that there was no way I could carry my purchase from the store out to my transportation, the bots weren’t about to offer. A toothless old farmer buying a pitchfork and hayseed took pity on me, abandoned his own cart, and helped me to my bicycle.

  “You all right there, miss? You don’t look so good,” he observed, eyes scanning my face. “Your, ah—cheek is peeling off a little, too.”

  My eyebrows shot up and my hand flew to my cheek: sure enough, the prosthetic makeup had started to crumble. I patted the extra cheekbone back in place, and the man gave me a pitying look.

  “Ain’t you a bit young to be rebuildin’ your face like that? I’ll bet you’re real purty ‘neath all that there makeup.”

  I mumbled my thanks, grateful he’d assumed the prosthetics were due to vanity rather than secrecy. The last thing I needed was for him to question, potentially on camera, why I was in disguise—even though Jaguar would have no reason to be monitoring camera feeds from this part of the world. There was always the possibility that she might be watching. And eventually, when she’d assimilated all the data—she would be.

  Paul helped me carry the printer, and the raw materials I’d purchased for it, into the back room where Liam still lay sleeping.

  “How is he?” I blurted to Hepzibah.

  “He still has a fever of one hundred and three,” Hepzibah reported. “Cytokine levels in the blood are triple the normal levels.”

  “What does that mean?” I demanded.

  “His body is rejecting the nanobots,” Hepzibah translated. “He needs steroids to suppress the reaction, but we have no medication to give him.”

  “Nanobots?” echoed Paul, who still stood in the doorway, frowning.

  “Paul, will you please help me with this?” I indicated the printer in the box. I didn’t have time to field his questions. He removed it from the packaging for me, and plugged it in, as I hastily filled the hoppers for each of the different ingredients for printing. “Hepzibah, print whatever medication you need!”

  She wheeled over to the printer and set to work, printing first a syringe, and then programming it again with the instructions for the medication to fill it. Paul stood behind her, slack-jawed.

  “Who are you people?” he muttered.

  But I couldn’t deal with him right now. I grabbed my netscreen and set to work accessing the Commune, for Mom (or whoever was there) to send me the VMI plans. She wasn’t online, but I saw that she’d already sent them. I opened the file, dragged the netscreen to the floor so I could read them as I went, and as soon as Hepzibah finished printing Liam’s medicine and gave him the injection, I set to work printing VMI parts as fast as I could.

  Behind me, Paul coughed. “Well. I will just… leave you to it. Shall I?”

  “Thank you!” I blurted, sparing him what probably looked like a crazed smile.

  He nodded at me, still wide-eyed. “Supper will be in an hour or so,” were his parting words, as he shut the door.

  My fingers flew as I programmed the printer for each component, though I could feel my hands shaking with adrenaline. I had to do this. I had to do this fast. Who knew how efficient Madeline’s jamming signals really were? Even if they were perfect, how likely was it that no cameras picked up the hovercraft landing and dropping us off? It wasn’t exactly inconspicuous.

  Also, Mom never responded when I told her they couldn’t deploy the virus anymore, because it would kill Liam too, at least as long as he had a functioning A.E. chip. Would they deploy it before I could get him offline? They were running out of time too, and they needed to release the virus as soon as they could verify that it wasn’t dangerous to humans. Surely Dr. St. Peters had arrived at the compound by now. How long could I reasonably expect them to hold off?

  “You’re muttering,” Madeline informed me, rolling up beside me. “And your eyes look kind of crazy.”

  I realized I was also breathing hard. “There’s not enough time!” I gasped, my hands trembling as the printer spat out the next widget, and I immediately began programming the next one. “If the steroids don’t work, Liam dies. If they deploy the virus before I finish, Liam dies. If Jaguar’s police bots can still follow his signal despite your jamming, we all die! And even once I assemble this thing, I have to get his A.E. chip number, and I have no idea how to disable it from the labyrinth, but I’ll have to figure it out, and then we have to get out of here and back to the compound, which has to mean sneaking back to a Quantum Track somehow since the hovercraft is gone and Liam isn’t even conscious yet, so we’ll have to stay here until he is, and what if he doesn’t wake up?”

  “Rebecca. Please breathe,” Madeline slid her cold hands on either side of my face. I realized my chest was constricting.

  “E-hem.”

  I spun around to see Miriam standing in the doorframe, bearing a tray of food. How much had she overheard?

  “Mama sent me to ask if you’d like to join us for supper,” she said, casting glances at the bed where Liam lay. “But, I suspected you’d prefer to eat while you work.”

  Tears choked me. “Thank you,” I managed, nodding as she set the tray down beside me.

  Miriam searched my face. “I think you will do better work if you sleep for a bit.”

  “I can’t!” I burst out, and the tears began to gush onto my face despite my attempts at self-control. “I can’t stop, I have to get this done!”

  “Are you making something to try to help your… husband?”

  The hesitation in Miriam’s voice told me that either she had overheard some of what I’d said to Madeline, or else she otherwise suspected some aspect of our story wasn’t true. But her face was sympathetic. She made me miss Julie.

  “I’m sorry,” I gasped, wiping the tears from my cheeks. “It’s been… a very long few days.”

  “I would help you if I knew how,” Miriam murmured, still gazing at me with sympathy before she excused herself from the room. Madeline wheeled after her, shutting the door to give more space in the bedroom for assembly. The room was barely large enough for the bed, the two robots, the printer, and the VMI machine I was shortly to build. There wasn’t even space left over for an open door.

  After two more hours, long after the sky grew dark outside, I’d finally completed assembly of the VMI—but it wouldn’t power on. I couldn’t understand it. I’d followed all the instructions to a T, exactly as Liam and I had done the first time and Francis and I had done the second time. I disassembled and reassembled. I checked all the connections, choking back sobs. I felt my chest constrict again.

  “Why, why why?” I demanded of it, and nearly beat my creation with my fists, restraining myself at the last minute and instead slamming my palms onto the threadbare greenish carpet. I gasped and sobbed in despair and fury.

  Get it together, I commanded myself, there’s no time for this! Mom wouldn’t be sitting here having a meltdown, she’d be fixing the problem! Figure it out!

  “Bec?”

  I stopped crying abruptly, and spun around to the bed, wondering if I’d only imagined it. But no—Liam’s eyes, blue like the sea, watched me.

  “Liam!” I gasped, jumping up and running to his side. I cradled both sides o
f his face in my hands, now such a ball of mixed up emotions that I couldn’t even describe how I felt if I’d tried. Frantically, I kissed his cheeks, his forehead, his chin, and his nose, my own face still wet with tears. I probably looked like my sanity was hanging by a thread.

  “Leave me here,” he croaked.

  “Like hell,” I retorted, shoving away from the bed to glare at him.

  “Listen to me,” he slurred his words together such that I could barely make them out, but with each word, his voice seemed to grow stronger. “They’re probably combing the area already. I’m as good as lost anyway. Tell the Renegades to deploy the virus…”

  “Shut up!” I snapped, angry now. In the back of my mind, I realized he must have been conscious a lot longer than I’d thought, to know all that. “I did not come all this way only to leave you here to die. That is not happening!”

  “Bec—” he started to prop himself up on his elbows.

  “No!” I nearly shouted, spinning back around to my useless VMI. “I just have to figure out why this thing isn’t working.” I took apart the helmet, piece by piece, and reconnected it wrong. It wouldn’t even fit when I tried to reassemble it. I was past the point of reasoning, though—I jammed it, and when it still wouldn’t go, I swore, and burst into tears in earnest.

  Suddenly Liam was on the floor beside me, propped up against the bed. He scooped me into his lap, and reached around me to the VMI helmet.

  “You just have to flip it around,” he murmured into my hair, and I heard the widgets clicking back into place. “Okay, but still no image. It might just be the connection to the interface…”

  Liam verbalized his thought process like this as he went, now sounding almost like his old self. I marveled at how fast he went from unconscious to apparently recovered—but I didn’t marvel for very long. Despite the fact that I could feel his arms moving on either side of me as he pushed and pulled and plugged and tested, the part of my brain that felt like I had to fix it, I had to make it happen, finally let go. There was nothing left in me to resist the tug of sweet oblivion, and I succumbed.

  Chapter 26: Francis

  “Francis?”

  I felt long fingers caressing my forehead, the gentle sound of waves, and the occasional light breeze against my skin. From all this I deduced that I must have lost consciousness at some point on the hovercraft ride back to the compound, and now I found myself back in the cabin I shared with Larissa. I also did a quick head-to-toe assessment before opening my eyes. Side: hurts, but in an aching sort of way, more like an old wound than a fresh gunshot. I also felt stronger than I remembered feeling when I lost consciousness, more so than I would have expected from the mere lapse of time. I twisted both of my arms a little bit to see if I felt any restriction, and sure enough, I could tell that one of them had been taped. I’d already received a transfusion, then.

  I opened my eyes, pleased with myself that I’d been so accurate in my assessments. It was midday, and the window in my bedroom was open to the sea. I glanced at Larissa, who was backlit by the sun streaming in from the window. It made her reddish hair look a bit like a halo, and her lips and cheeks seemed fuller at this angle. Then I saw that her lashes were damp and there were streaks of wetness on her cheeks.

  “Who died?” I demanded at once.

  “What? No one!” she exclaimed, and then amended, “Well—no human, anyway. Dr St. Peters is here, and he verified that the virus has no effect on humans. So they tested it on Alex, and she’s ‘dead.’ Or broken beyond repair, however you want to say that.”

  I felt… something… at this, as I remembered Alex before I’d known what she was. I didn’t wish to speak for a few moments, under the oppression of that feeling.

  Perhaps this is regret, I thought, curiously. My eyes tracked back to Larissa.

  “But you disliked Alex,” I noted, “why should her death cause you tears?”

  “It didn’t, silly. I was—” she sniffed, and confessed, “I was crying about you.”

  “Why should you do that? I’m fine.”

  “I see that now,” she crawled onto the bed beside me and pressed up against my good side. “But we didn’t know you would be, before this moment.”

  I liked this position, though I could not have said why. I also liked that she’d been crying for me. I felt the instinct to curl an arm around her, and saw no reason to resist it. So I obeyed. Larissa gave a contented little sigh and nestled closer.

  Then suddenly I jolted, sitting bolt upright as Larissa’s words about the virus finally sank in. Larissa gave a little cry. My vision went dark for a second before the blood caught up to my head. “The virus! They didn’t deploy it, right? It will kill Liam!”

  “We know,” Larissa soothed, “Becca told M. On the Commune. But Dr. St Peters doesn’t think we have enough time to come up with a target for a new virus, so M said we should wait until Becca could build the VMI and get Liam’s A.E. chip offline. Only no one’s heard from them for six hours. M is freaking out.”

  I groaned.

  “I think if she doesn’t hear back from them in another hour or two, she’s just going to deploy it,” Larissa fretted. “We don’t know if they’ve been captured already, or what.”

  “What about the Hendersons? Can we send a message to them?”

  Larissa shrugged. “Sure, but we can tell from their previous Commune activity that they’re almost never online. They’re just not—‘techie’.”

  “And we have no other way to contact Cordeaux,” I murmured. “Wait, what about Madeline? She’s on the Commune, and she has to be powered up and emitting the jammer frequency, or they would have been captured for certain. Give me a netscreen!” I ordered, ignoring the swimming sensation in my head. Larissa paused to fluff up some pillows behind me and tried to ease me back onto them, until I heaved an exasperated sigh.

  “Okay, okay, I’m getting it!” she told me, padding into the living room.

  She returned a minute later with a netscreen, but she opened it and began scrolling and clicking first before handing it over. I realized she was getting it to the screen I wanted, and I heaved another impatient sigh.

  “I’m not an invalid, Larissa. Just hand it over.”

  “You are the worst patient ever,” she said crossly, but did as she was bid.

  I got to the Commune screen, and frowned, momentarily distracted by the name at the top: Cathy Kelly. She had given me the LP address of one of her netscreens to network her to the Commune, and I’d done so in the hovercraft before we’d busted Liam out of Pendergast. I’d sent her an introductory message to let her know that she was now connected, but hadn’t received her responses, as I’d been shot shortly thereafter.

  Hours later, she’d written one line, in apparent gibberish. But I somehow still knew at once what it said, though I couldn’t explain how. Larissa looked at me, puzzled.

  “Is… that a foreign language or something?”

  I shook my head, slowly. “It says, ‘Jaguar is on to us.’”

  She blinked. “How do you know?”

  “I’m… not sure. But I know that’s what it says.”

  “So if Jaguar is watching her, then anything she does on a netscreen also networked to the labyrinth will be monitored!” Larissa gasped.

  I nodded, realizing this must be why Liam Senior hadn’t responded to my introductory message, either. “Indeed. If Jaguar is watching them, she’ll see anything they say,” I agreed, closing my eyes and pinching the skin between my eyebrows. I needed to buy time for Liam. I needed to get Jaguar off of Cathy and Liam Senior, distract her somehow.

  And I needed to lay the growing suspicion in my mind to rest, once and for all. I suspected I did know how I cracked Cathy’s code. I’d begun to suspect from the moment I met Cathy, and she couldn’t stop staring at me.

  I snapped my fingers. “I’m going back to London.”

  “What?” Larissa demanded. “Are you crazy? You literally just woke up!�
��

  I turned to face her, eyes wide, one shoulder pinched against the headboard of the bed. “Before we deploy the virus, we have to make the Silver Six think that Jaguar is planning to take them out! Pit them against each other!” I declared. “Think about it: if they have a little time to anticipate and suspect her, it will divert their attention from Liam and Cordeaux, and from finding us, if nothing else. They also might level a counter-attack against her—especially after we release the virus and they know they’re dying. How long did it take Alex to die?”

  “About twelve hours,” Larissa frowned.

  “Okay, so in those twelve hours, they’ll fight back, and draw Jaguar’s attention away from us. I doubt they’ll succeed, but that gives us a twelve hour window to figure out how to take Jaguar down!”

  There was a knock at the door, and Mack poked his head in.

  “I heard voices. Francis, you’re awake!”

  Larissa heaved a frustrated sigh. “Yes, and he’s already planning to go back to London!”

  I started to explain my reasoning again, but Mack cut me off. “Hold on, let me go get Karen. That way you don’t have to explain it all twice.”

  I settled back against the headboard as we waited for them to return, Larissa spooning against me, her head on my chest.

  “I’m coming with you,” she murmured.

  “No,” I said shortly. “I can do this alone.”

  “You just got shot. You can’t even take a bath alone,” she retorted.

  I felt the look of horror on my face. “You didn’t.”

  She giggled wickedly. “Not yet, no. But it’s true, you probably will need my help—”

  “I most certainly will not!” I could feel the heat in my face, and it came against both may will and my reason. I found this most unsettling.

  We heard footsteps in our cabin living room a few moments later. Before they entered, Larissa hissed, “If you’re going, I’m going too, like it or not!”