by C. J. Hill
“We just gassed the courthouse lobby,” Allana pointed out. “They’re already looking for us.”
“No,” Echo said. “They’re looking for four unknown people. Xavier and Taylor’s image scramblers blurred the surveillance cameras.” Echo picked up Taylor again, wincing this time. His shoulder was bothering him more than he let on. “Keep behind us,” he told Allana. “Taylor and I are pretending we’re in love.”
He headed toward the building, smiling at Taylor again. “I believe,” he told her in an intimate sort of tone, “you were telling me how wildly attractive you think I am. Go on. . . .”
Taylor laid her head against his neck. She caught another whiff of his sensual outdoorsy smell and wondered if he used a special type of sparkle to keep himself clean. Did bacteria come in aftershave scents? “I’d find you more wildly attractive if your ex-girlfriend wasn’t following us.” Taylor sighed playfully. “But then, the course of true love never did run smooth.”
“Shakespeare,” Echo said, as though answering a trivia question. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Taylor straightened in his arms a bit. “People still read Shakespeare here?”
“No, but historians do. Shakespeare is the most-quoted writer in history. He added over seventeen hundred words to the English language.”
Taylor leaned her head against Echo’s neck again. “I find that incredibly attractive.”
“Do you mean Shakespeare is attractive for creating all those words or I’m attractive for knowing about it?”
“You,” Taylor purred. “I’ve never been crazy about Shakespeare’s hair.”
When they were nearly to the apartment building’s front entrance, Echo whispered, “We’ll be able to find someplace private on the ground floor. Security guards only check people’s crystals if they want to use the elevators. For all the guard knows, we’re here to use the building’s foodmart. Act happy.”
As Echo carried Taylor through the front doors, she tossed back her head and managed a laugh that she hoped sounded carefree. The lobby was large and hotel-like. A security desk stood directly in front of a line of elevators, a store and a restaurant were visible to the left, and doors to several hallways circled the rest of the room. Computer-graphic flames lined the bottom of every visible wall, churning and crackling like one gigantic fireplace. It was probably supposed to look cozy, but it made Taylor want to reach for an extinguisher.
As Echo carried Taylor across the lobby, he gave her a rakish grin. He was very good at those, actually. He must have had a lot of practice doing that look. “I won’t put you down until you tell me you love me,” he said.
The bored-looking man at the security desk barely noticed them. Echo walked toward one of the hallways, passing groups of people coming or going. A few people glanced over at them. Most ignored them altogether.
Bless human nature. People in the twenty-fifth century were as obliviously unconcerned and unobservant as those in the twenty-first.
Echo walked past closed doors, and some that were open too. In those, groups of people sat on gel couches watching programs on monitors, eating, and talking. The rooms were like public living rooms.
Allana followed behind Echo, far enough to look as though she was a stranger who happened to be walking in the same direction. Even now when everything had gone wrong, Allana’s walk had a strut to it, a confidence in her beauty and power.
Right before Echo found an empty room, Allana’s gaze connected with Taylor’s. Allana’s eyes were cold, hard, and glittering with jealous hatred. There was a challenge in that look, an assurance. She might as well have said the words out loud: I will get Echo back. He’ll always love me. And in the end, he’ll do what I want.
Chapter 27
Sheridan woke up from the laser stun by degrees, drifting in an odd sort of dream state, one that felt almost like a memory. She was in a living room with Echo, sitting on a green gel couch.
He leaned his head against the back of the couch, giving her a look that was both sleepy and intimate. “Don’t go yet. Let me look at you for a few more minutes.”
“You want to look at me?” she asked, amused, flattered.
“So I’ll remember everything about you.”
And then the dream was gone and she was staring at the gray metallic ceiling of the detention center.
She blinked, trying to hold on to the images as they faded. Maybe it was one of those psychic twin bonds she’d always heard about. Perhaps she had caught a glimpse of what Taylor was doing.
The thought brought her no comfort.
“You’re awake,” a voice behind her said. “Good. Your visitor has been waiting.”
Sheridan recognized The Tough One’s voice before she turned to see where she was. She lay on the metal floor of an observation room. A chair sat nearby waiting for her. The Tough One stood behind her next to the door, his laser box held loosely in his hand. Visitors were never a good thing. Hesitantly, Sheridan got up from the floor and sat in the chair.
A glass wall divided the room in two. Taylor stood right on the other side it. She looked almost the same as the last time Sheridan had seen her—white hair, blue swirls on her cheeks. Her eyes were red and there was a catch to her voice, as though she’d been crying. She pressed her hand to the glass wall. “Sheridan,” she said, “you’re all right.”
That depended on your definition of all right. Sheridan was alive, mostly sane, and suspicious. Would there be fingerprints on the glass once Taylor moved her hand? Was that the sort of detail Reilly had started paying attention to?
Taylor was probably just a projection, a hologram of some sort. Reilly had used those before. She’d been visited by the images of Elise, Jeth, and Echo, all of whom looked through her instead of at her. That was why the Enforcers kept Sheridan behind the glass. You couldn’t touch holograms. Still, Sheridan’s hand automatically stretched toward the image of her sister.
Taylor gulped, chest heaving with emotion. Her words came out in a broken rush. “They said they would kill me if you didn’t help them. They said they would torture me first.” Taylor blinked back a new set of tears. “I told them that if they let me talk to you, I could get you to agree to work with them.”
Footsteps sounded from the hallway on Taylor’s side of the room, someone walking toward the door behind her. Taylor looked over her shoulder, then back at Sheridan. Her eyes were desperate. “You’re going to help them, aren’t you? Don’t let them hurt me anymore.” She moved her hand away from the glass. No fingerprints.
Sheridan sighed. “You’re not my sister.”
The door behind Taylor opened and an Enforcer walked inside. Taylor took a couple of nervous steps across the room, backing away from him, shaking now. She shot a quick look at Sheridan. “You’ve got to help me. Please.”
“You’re not real,” Sheridan said, more firmly.
“Don’t let them take me,” Taylor wailed. “Please, Sheridan, you’re the only one who can help me.”
Sheridan shut her eyes. She didn’t like seeing what would come next, even though she knew it wasn’t real. She had nightmares with these images. Taylor’s wailing grew louder. The Enforcer yelled, and then a smack sounded through the room. He was a hologram too then. Otherwise his hand would have gone right through her.
More wailing penetrated the room. Whoever had programmed the hologram didn’t know Taylor very well. The real Taylor would have showed some attitude somewhere in all that. The real Taylor would have given Sheridan some sort of message.
Sheridan hummed to block out the sounds as best she could. All of this was good news, she told herself. Reilly could have only one reason for not using the real Taylor in any of these scenes. He didn’t have her anymore. Somehow she had escaped.
Sheridan liked to think that Taylor had outsmarted them all and figured a way out of her prison, that maybe someday Taylor would find a way to rescue her too. Sheridan didn’t let herself consider, at least not for long, the possibility that Taylor was dead.
It was an outcome too horrible to think about.
The wailing stopped. The door slid closed.
Sheridan kept humming. Were they still playing the soundtrack of Taylor screaming in the hallway? Or was that only in Sheridan’s mind, a sound that wouldn’t go away?
The door behind Sheridan slid open. She turned and saw Reilly strolling in.
He was in his sixties and shorter and heavier-set then any of the other men she’d seen in the twenty-fifth century. Sheridan supposed that was due to the genetic breeding Traventon did now.
Wrinkles sagged across Reilly’s face, and he had jowls that hung down like fish gills at his neck. His thick green hair was probably real, but it reminded her of an artificial-lawn toupee. Really, he’d been here too long if he thought it looked anything but ridiculous. Ditto for his green lips and bushy green eyebrows.
He strode across the room to her with the same air of self-importance that always accompanied him. His rank badge read 42 today—up one from the 43 it had been every other day she’d seen him. She wondered if he’d had one of his rivals killed off.
Reilly shook his head in disapproval. “You’re not a very loving sister, are you? Do you even care that Taylor was dragged off to be tortured?”
Sheridan forced a smile. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m completely against the torture of holograms. It makes me wonder what you’re going to beat up next. Fairies? Leprechauns? I’d hate to see Ronald McDonald getting roughed up.”
“Still so flippant.” Reilly walked over until he stood next to her. He casually reached out and ran his hand across a strand of her hair. His breath smelled like coffee. “Do you think I’m a hologram too?”
She eyed him. “You could be. A real person wouldn’t purposely do his hair that way. Must be a computer malfunction.”
Reilly slapped her so quickly that she didn’t have time to brace herself beforehand.
“Real enough?” he asked her. “Or do you need more proof?”
Sheridan’s cheek stung. She tasted blood in her mouth. This was probably a good time to shut up, and yet she didn’t. She’d grown reckless here in prison. Somehow it seemed worth it to make him angry even though she knew it would cost her. “Do I need the proof or do you? Do you believe you’re real?”
He stared at her without answering.
“Why should people believe in you,” she said, “when it’s clear to everyone else you don’t believe in yourself?”
He hit her again. This time she expected it and flinched. Taylor had done this, resisted him. Taylor hadn’t cried. Sheridan could be as strong as Taylor.
Sheridan shut her eyes. “Go away and send me another hologram. How about a hot guy from our century? Can you do a young Harrison Ford? Make him look like Han Solo. I might tell Han Solo everything I know about the QGP.” It wouldn’t, she thought wryly, even be a long conversation. She didn’t know much about physics.
Technically Reilly had already tried the hot-guy informant trick on her, was still trying it on her. The two weeks that Reilly had been gone, Tariq had spent hours every day talking, playing games, and flirting with Sheridan. He’d brought her real food: strawberries, peaches, and cookies. Even though it was hard to keep her appetite at bay, she never ate enough to completely fill her. If she landed in a VR program again, she wanted to have a way to tell.
On the last day of Reilly’s absence, Tariq sneaked her out of her cell and took her to the top floor of the detention center, to an apartment the warden used for entertaining visitors. “Enforcers,” Tariq told her confidentially, “use it when the warden doesn’t. It’s my turn to have it tonight.”
The room looked as though it belonged on a spaceship. The walls and ceiling were black with stars twinkling everywhere. A three-dimensional moon glowed on one wall. A swirling nebula pulsed on another. Saturn hung down in the middle of the room, providing light as its rings turned. Slick black couches faced each other over a silver coffee table.
What held Sheridan’s attention the most was a dimly lit glass case that stood against the nearest wall. Food sat on its shelves. Bowls of fruit, sandwiches, and pieces of cake in puddles of chocolate. Some of the dishes she didn’t recognize. They still made her mouth water.
Tariq stood behind Sheridan. He put his hands on her shoulders and leaned near enough to whisper in her ear. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it—how the rich people live.”
She pulled her attention away from the food. “Where I lived, everyone used to be able to see the stars. Although”—she gestured to the glowing planet hanging from the ceiling—“Saturn was a lot smaller.”
He took her hand and led her toward the food. “What do you want to eat?”
All of it. Especially the chocolate. A fork sat on the side of each plate, beckoning to be used. “Won’t the warden notice if food is missing? I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
As soon as Tariq stopped in front of the glass case, the door slid open. “Don’t worry. The foodmart workers will make more. They overlook our indiscretions, and we overlook theirs. Choose something.”
Sheridan told herself to take something she could resist, something that wouldn’t fill her up. She reached for the chocolate cake anyway. It was in her hand before she could finish reminding herself to protect her hunger. She couldn’t help herself. Chocolate tasted like home.
Tariq took a raspberry pastry, then motioned for her to follow him over to the couch. “Have you ever had a massage?”
Was he asking for one? A part of her was still afraid of Tariq, wary of what he would do next. He was her guard, and he might expect something in return for his gifts.
Sheridan took the fork from her plate. It was light, plastic-like. Not much of a weapon. “Everyone has had a massage, haven’t they?”
Tariq sat down on the couch, and it shifted and reshaped underneath him, supporting his legs like a recliner. He leaned back and took a bite of his pastry. “I love these.”
Sheridan sat down on the opposite end of the couch and then realized Tariq’s love was directed at the couch, not the pastry. Not only did the couch shape shift around her, but warm jets of air kneaded into her back, massaging the muscles there. She melted into the couch, relaxing. “Civilization has made progress after all.”
As they ate, Tariq told her about other things the warden had in his apartment: 3-D action games and programs people could watch or take part in. “He doesn’t have to go to a virtual reality center and spend credits on it like everyone else. He’s got his own equipment.”
Sheridan took slow, savoring bites of her cake. She told herself every bite would be her last but somehow ate the whole thing anyway. Chocolate, her Achilles’s heel. This would mean she couldn’t eat any of her meal bar tonight. She needed her hunger.
The couch’s pulsing massage faded into a warm, soothing sensation. Tariq took her plate and her fork and placed them on the floor. “Music,” he said. “Twenty-first century.”
At first Sheridan had no idea what he meant. Then a melody from The Nutcracker filled the room.
Tariq moved over next to her, and the couch automatically shifted to accommodate the change. He slid his arm around her shoulder. “Do you like this?”
Sheridan’s heart began to pound, beating out a warning. “The music? Yes. But it’s not twenty-first century.” She leaned away from him to put more space between them. “I mean, we had The Nutcracker in the twenty-first century, but it was written in the nineteenth. At least, those are the sorts of clothes the people in the ballet wore.” She was nervous and babbling.
Tariq smiled at her, amused that she was flustered. “I meant, do you like me putting my arm around you?” His fingers wound through her hair, teasing the skin at the nape of her neck.
“Oh.” She didn’t move closer to him. “Sorry. I guess I’m not one for doomed romances.”
“Are you sure ours is doomed?” He leaned over so that his breath brushed against her cheek, then his lips brushed there as well.
“You’re my guard,” Sherida
n said slowly. “Sooner or later you’ll have to take me in for a memory wash. That’s pretty much the definition of a doomed romance.”
His lips slid from her cheek to her earlobe. “It doesn’t have to end that way.”
“Right. Reilly could order me executed instead.”
“Or I could help you escape.”
A shiver of hope went through Sheridan. She turned, pulling away from Tariq enough to see his eyes and gauge their sincerity. “Are you offering?”
His fingers continued to stroke the hair at her neck. “I read your file. I had to find out if what you’d told me about coming from the past was true. I know why you’re here. I know about the QGPs.”
“Are you going to help me escape?” she asked again.
He hesitated, deciding how much to say. “You have to understand—it’s not something I can do by myself.”
The shiver of hope turned to a tremor. This was real. She had eaten cake and it had made her less hungry. Tariq was actually here talking about helping her.
He dropped his hand away from her neck and turned to look at her squarely. “I belong to a group called the DW. At first they weren’t interested in helping you. It’s dangerous for them, and you’re not a member. But after I told them about the QGPs, once they understood you’ve refused to help Reilly because you don’t want to hurt people, they agreed.”
Sheridan knew who the DW were. Elise had told her they had ways to get out of the city safely.
“The DW’s engineers,” Tariq went on, “want to build machines that counter the QGPs. The problem is we don’t have the schematics. We have to know how the QGP works so we can figure out how to stop it.”
Well, that would present a problem since Sheridan didn’t know the schematics. Still, if Sheridan took Taylor with her, Taylor would be able to help them. Taylor already knew how to destroy QGPs. “Can they free my sister too?”
“We can try. Her guards aren’t my friends. It will be harder to get Taylor away from them.”
