by Julian North
“Nythan, there’s a fly on your nose.”
He smacked his face, nose and all. “Missed.” He looked at his empty hand.
I smiled at the ease of my success.
Dr. Willis laughed. “Holy crap. Readings spiked on both of them.” She looked at him. “Nythan, there wasn’t any fly.”
“Ridiculous,” he insisted.
The doctor laughed again. “Damn, that worked. Nythan, you’ve been trilled.”
“Huh? I think you are mistaken and confused, my dear doctor.”
Dr. Willis looked up at Havelock and Dillion. “She altered his senses. She did it.”
“We need something more concrete,” Dillion said, his voice too flat to be pleasant. “Daniela, tell Doctor Willis she has her viser on her left arm instead of her right. She needs to send me a red ping.”
I focused my eyes on Dr. Willis. I wondered at the real reason she had helped Mateo. I pushed the cold at her. She had a wall as well; it was steel, and taller and wider than Nythan’s. She was ready for me. Nythan hadn’t believed, but Dr. Willis knew what I could do. My power struck her defenses. My cold essence—the power of my mind—split, flowing upwards and to each side, looking for a way around her mental barrier. Dr. Willis’s wall expanded, climbing higher and growing wider. Her mind was quick. Her defenses held. My essence couldn’t get through. But she hadn’t protected underneath. I tunneled under her defenses while she was occupied by the feints travelling in other directions. I had her.
“Your viser is on your left arm,” I told her. “Get a message to Dillion.”
“What are the readings telling you, doctor?” Dillion asked.
Dr. Willis flicked several fingers on her left hand. She stared at her arm, and flicked again. Then she noticed the viser on her right arm. Her eyes grew wide. “I think…I put my viser on the wrong arm…How…?” She placed both hands on her head, pressing inward.
“Disorientation,” Havelock said as he watched Dr. Willis struggle. “I felt it too, when I finally realized what Kristolan had done to me. When your mind discovers it’s been tricked, it struggles to right itself. Nythan, how long will the effect last?”
“Depends on the mind, and how unnatural the change. Trilling doesn’t change your thoughts as best as we can tell. It creates barriers and detours in the mind. Once the subject realizes he or she has been tricked, it’s just a matter of time before the mind rights itself. But if you didn’t know…Months is my best guess, based on the information we have. Maybe never if the triller is subtle enough.”
“Let’s be certain,” Dillion said. “Please try me next, Daniela. Anything you like.”
I inhaled, assessing my next target as I gathered my strength. Dillion didn’t think I could make him do anything. He looked forward to testing his strength against the world. I jabbed the cold toward him. The wall facing me was forged of wood, and no bigger than Dr. Willis’s. My essence split: left, right, over and under, coming at him like an avalanche. The top stream of my essence moved faster than the wall he built.
“Your hair is on fire,” I told him.
He laughed. A haughty sound.
I realized there was another barrier behind the first. Not just a wall, but an impregnable shell of fire protecting him from my power. I approached it tentatively. I sensed its power. Dillion’s mind pushed against mine. I recoiled, knives stabbing at my head.
“You’re highborn,” I accused.
He nodded his head. “It seems we have our triller.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIX
The school news feed on Tuesday morning announced that there would be a special delegation sent to Boston to assist with a charter school initiative, jointly backed by the Robin Hood Foundation and Tuck. Daniela Machado, Lara Rae, Nythan Royce and Alissa Stein had been selected to participate by the faculty. Parents were informed, apologies made for the last-minute nature of the assignment, and the benefits of such a prestigious posting were highlighted. Only we never left the city. Instead, a sedan took us to the Vision Quad, back to the dilapidated building that hosted the safe house.
There were two large cargo transports parked across from the building. They had RocketDyn markings, but something wasn’t quite right about them. The exteriors were too clean; both had human drivers, and they looked very alert for men doing nothing. It had begun. Our chance. But I still didn’t have the details I wanted. Only empty promises that the answers were coming.
Dillion met us inside the underground entrance and escorted us upstairs. There were paper schematics of the Ziggurat, or at least part of it, waiting for us on a new, larger table.
“How accurate is this?” Nythan asked. “I see a lot of manual corrections on these papers.”
“I’m certain that it’s the most accurate blueprint in existence outside of Rose-Hart Industries, and I’m equally sure it isn’t perfect,” Dillion told us. “But it will help.”
I ran my hand over the cloth-like paper, studying the lines and proportions. I pictured the distances in my mind. The complex was massive. A city within a city. Handwritten notations had been added to the drawing at various locations. Havelock and Dillion had to have someone inside, someone with partial access, but not to the levels we needed to reach. There were a lot of areas drawn with dotted lines marked “estimated.”
“What are these red circles?” I asked.
“Guard stations with human security officers,” Dillion said. “These aren’t rent-a-cops. They are Rose-Hart elite security, probably third generation employees. They’re nopes, but dedicated partisans. Incorruptible.”
“Not many on our route,” I noted.
“Two guard stations, we think. Both staffed by a single security officer, according to our information,” Dillion said. “The advantage of our plan, and our route, is that Rose-Hart doesn’t trust their own employees with the knowledge of what happens on level eleven. Human security is less prevalent at the sub-level access lift, and on level eleven itself. Think you can handle two guards, Daniela?”
His tone hinted towards mocking.
“As long as they aren’t highborn. What about others on the floor? Researchers, company employees?”
“We’re going in after hours. We’ll have minimal contact with regular staff. Also, the arrangements on level eleven are unique. You’ll be briefed on that later. You might need to improvise with a scientist in an emergency. You ready?”
“I already answered that.”
“We’ll get you some more practice over the next few days,” Dillion said. “You may need to work quickly, or at a distance. You need to know exactly what you are going to command, and what we need those guards to do.”
“How are we going to get in there?” I asked. “I see a nice route to the lift, then up to the designated level. But how do we reach the sub-level to begin with?”
“We still need to keep operational secrecy on this mission,” Dillion told me with an air of self-importance. “We’ll get you there, believe it.”
I glared at him. “This place is blanketed with countermeasures. No one is leaving. We go inside in days. It would be helpful to know the entire plan.”
“Your role isn’t to get us in,” Dillion said. “That’s up to the logistics team, and they are working on it. They’ll be ready. You need to spend the next few days proving you aren’t going to get everyone killed because you panic in front of the guards. Or flake out at the last minute.”
“I’m not going anywhere unless I know how I’m getting there, and that someone has my back,” I answered.
“Don’t be an ass, Dillion,” Alissa said. “Daniela’s with us. She might be a highborn jack like you, but she got us the DNA. She’s proved she’s with us.”
Dillion sighed. “Flip the paper.”
I turned the blueprint over. On the other side was a series of drawings showing transit tunnels, including several under construction.
“The Magnetic Transit System supposedly being built by RocketDyn, is a partial truth. The ini
tial system has been operational for a decade. This is just an expansion. The existing line runs along this route.” He pointed to the edge of Manhattan island. “This is a port and transshipment facility owned by Rose-Hart Industries. They move sensitive cargo they don’t trust to third parties through it. Some are things they don’t want on surface roads, so they use the MTS. It has a stop at a secure facility here.” He pointed to a multilevel subterranean structure with no interior details filled in. “Then it continues on to a special sub-floor beneath the Ziggurat. That’s where we’ll enter.”
“How do we get access to a transit car?” I asked. “Traffic is bound to be closely monitored by remote operators. The cars probably have internal video feeds.”
“We know what we’re doing, Daniela,” Dillion assured me, not hiding his annoyance at being questioned. “We’ve hacked the transit control system. The scheduled transit car will get stuck in the tunnel. We managed to finish the tracks of one of the new tunnels that link up with the operating line. They don’t know it’s active, but it’ll be fully operational by Saturday. We’ll steal one of the cars that have been put into place for the new line. It will pull into the Ziggurat sub-level precisely on time. The guard station will assume we are the scheduled arrival. Then you need to work your magic. We’ve got Landrew’s DNA, which we used to create finger sheaths for the scanners. But the guard needs to think he’s seeing Landrew Foster-Rose-Hart. That’s the human fail-safe in their security. Can you do that?”
“I can do it.”
“As you pointed out, we’ll be watched remotely the whole time, including in the lift. So it has to look like we passed security normally. It has to look like we belong. The feeds are video, not audio. Once past the guard station, we ride up to eleven. No external monitoring inside the labs on that level. We don’t know exactly what to expect, but, based on payroll records, we think there is one, perhaps two, security personnel on the floor. Most of the security is DNA coded, and we’ve got that covered. The controlColonies are in there. All of them. And so is access to the closed-network computers with all the data we want. Nythan just has to hack it.”
“You need me for the guards and any surprises,” I said. “Nythan knows the computers and understands the Waste…Why are Alissa and Lara going? They’re hardly fighters. Aren’t we going to attract attention? I’m guessing we’re a little young to be Rose-Hart employees, particularly in their most restricted areas.”
I got a face of stone from Dillion. “Every one of you has a special talent. That’s all you need to know. This briefing is over. Get to work. Show me you can do what you say. Let me worry about the rest.”
I spent the next two days memorizing floor plans and improving my trilling abilities. Alissa, Lara, and Nythan acted as test subjects. The practice confirmed something I already knew: I had been able to trill for most of my life. I’d broken out when I was five years old, when I lost my mom. That was all the emotional turmoil a five-year-old needed. Maybe an adult needed Nythan’s drugs and virtual reality process. But I didn’t. Kris probably had a similar experience somewhere in her past.
My special place—the essence of cold that I drew upon when running and in times of stress—was the same reservoir of power I used to trill. It required total control over my body, the ability to marshal and direct the entirety of my will. I had been training for that my whole life on the track. It never occurred to me to use that power to impose my will upon others. But once I had been shown the way, I adapted my technique. A distance runner could also do sprints.
I could breach any of my companions’ defenses, at least for the harmless commands I was implanting for practice. After the first day of trilling them I realized I should be more cautious about using my power on the same person. The more my companions worked with me, the better they got at fighting me off. I noticed it with Nythan first. His wall quickly became higher, stronger. It switched from stone to duraglass. His reaction time to my attacks became faster. I beat him with my tunneling trick, but the next time I tried it, his wall extended underground. With Lara, I deliberately flubbed most of my attempts to trill her, except when Dillion was watching. She crooned in pleasure each time she fought me off. I smiled inside.
Dillion came and went several times a day. He worked with each of the others on mission details they kept from me. I could’ve tried to trill it out of them, but Dillion was always checking in on our practice sessions. We were all beginning to get cabin fever. I stood by the boarded window, peeking out whenever I got the chance. There were small gaps where light could enter and leave.
“You should keep away from the windows,” Dillion warned me. “There aren’t any drones around here, but you never know who’s looking.”
I kept going to the windows, but only when he left the room.
On Thursday, just as we were all going crazy in that cramped, confined space, Dillion led us out of the safe house to a second, larger set of rooms one floor above. It was an all-interior space—no windows or other source of natural light. The floor was bare sheetrock, the walls mostly stripped to their girders. Cheap portable sodium lights provided the only illumination, except for the screens, of which there were at least a dozen scattered on walls and tables. A singular square machine, no larger than a fabricator, stood alone in another corner of the room, some type of communication array protruding from its mirror-like surface. It looked expensive. A stack of bedrolls had been shoved into another corner.
Havelock was already there, along with two other new faces. One was a tall, dark-skinned man with short clipped obsidian hair, who I guessed to be around Mateo’s age. He had the same tall, nearly gaunt build as Havelock, but without the urbane mannerisms. I wondered if he was a fellow Rwandan. His companion was a woman, around the same age, deeply tanned, with bulb cut platinum hair on top of a rounded face. Her hair might have even been natural.
“You know them?” I whispered into Nythan’s ear.
“Strangers to me,” he said. “Check out the visers.”
The devices around their wrists resembled Alissa’s bioengineered Rose-Hart model, but several generations more advanced. I saw no metal or other hard surface. It was if their skin had been bleached to form a screen on their lower palm, while the rest of the device had been grafted onto their arm.
“Welcome everyone,” Dillion announced to the room. “Please gather around. It’s finally time for the operational team and the Tuck team to meet. You’ve been working towards the same goal, but have been kept apart for your mutual protection. With only days left, it’s time to bring the two hands together. At least in part. So, Brice and Helena, please meet Nythan, Lara, Alissa, and Daniela.”
There was wariness and arrogance in the new faces, but not warmth. These were not students. I doubted they were idealists. They looked like professionals with a job to do. I wondered if they were highborn like Dillion. Probably. More people immune to my power. My throat tightened looking at them, at their visers, and the strange communication equipment.
“The Tuck team will be going in with me,” Dillion told everyone. “Helena will coordinate the hack of the MTS controls. We’ve arranged for an emergency shutdown of the transit car at eight thirty-five tomorrow evening. Brice will remotely pilot the hijacked transit car onto the regular track using our new access tunnel. Our phantom train will return to retrieve the team at nine fifteen. That leaves us thirty-five minutes inside. If we do this right, we’ll get in and out, and they won’t even know we were there.”
“What happens if the trains aren’t working? If Rose-Hart regains control of their transit system, how do we get out?” I asked.
Helena cleared her throat. “It’ll happen the way Dillion says. Their systems are pretty good, but not closely watched. They’re complacent. They don’t think anyone knows about their underground railroad. We’re already in their network. Their own secrecy helps us. They probably have limited personnel to handle emergencies. They won’t be able to call their regular tech staff without violating their securi
ty protocols.”
“Humor my hypothetical disaster scenario,” I insisted. “What is Plan B?”
“The MTS trains move at two hundred miles per hour. The magnets beneath are super-cooled with liquid nitrogen. I don’t suggest you enter the tunnels except via the train. If that isn’t to your liking, there are three other entrances on the main level. Security staff of about fifty humans, and several dozen drones. And that’s just within the building. The grounds have additional countermeasures. Trill to your heart’s content, you won’t make it out that way. It’s our way or not at all.”
I didn’t hide my scowl. One way in or out. We were at the mercy of a bunch of people we barely knew. I doubted they were here to cure the Waste either. I glanced at Nythan, wondering at his thoughts. His face showed me nothing. His eyes just watched—a kid listening to the rules of the next game.
“Timing and movement will be crucial. We will be watched every second, from the tunnel until we get to level eleven, then again on the way out. It has to look authentic. First, that means we’ll be using company-issued visers only—your own will stay here. Your new ones will not be able to transmit externally, which would trip the alarm anyway.”
That news was like a lead weight in my stomach. I figured I’d be cut off, but now I wouldn’t even have a viser I could rely on.
“Even Picasso needed decent brushes,” Nythan said.
“We received your work requirements, Mr. Royce, and anticipated your needs. You’ll be issued an organic model like I have, suitable for your needs. You can download whatever programs and tools you need to your new viser. These don’t show on conventional scanners. We’ll use facades over them so they appear to be standard-issue company models.”
