Cracked Open
Page 7
She gets a dark look, the kind that comes with a kill jack on the tail end. “Yeah. But we didn’t get much out of him. They’re segmented into cells, organizationally. So they don’t rat each other out.”
“Pretty sophisticated for a bunch of borderline-demens jacker-bigots, don’t you think?” I tap my head with two fingers. “Plus he was wearing a helmet, remember? Only that was no ordinary helmet. It’s a prototype out of Tiller’s dark company, Tru-Tech. And you know who else has those helmets? The people I work for.”
She squints. “You’re working for the government.” It’s not a question.
I put up my hands. “Not voluntarily, trust me.” I don’t know if Kira trusts me—all of this is crazy conspiracy stuff—but she nods in a knowing way. And she’s famous for liberating jacker changelings the government was experimenting on as well as catching that rogue FBI agent who put the inhibitors in the water, so I figure she’s had more than one run-in with anti-jacker government agents.
She’s thinking hard now. “And you think all this is tied to the assassination.” She says it slow like she’s still piecing it together.
“I do.” I snatch up the silver satchel from the floor. “And it gets worse.”
She scowls as I dig the orb out of the bag. Juliette has wrapped it in some crinkly see-through plastic that must be insulation against whatever drawing power the thing has because it doesn’t feel cold through the wrappings. I hand it to her so she can feel the weight.
“It’s Tiller’s latest anti-jacker tech,” I say. “Juliette’s afraid to activate it, and it’s super creepy to the touch—only for jackers, though—so don’t unwrap it. She says it comes apart into drones, so I’m thinking some kind of automated weapon? I’m not sure. Do you have someone who can look at it?”
She’s turning it over. “Julian has a whole lab left over from when his parents died, but…” She focuses on the orb, then yanks it away and shakes her head.
“What?” I ask. “Did you just try to—”
“Yeah.” She grimaces. “Don’t try to jack it. Feels almost like it’s shielded… but different.”
Which makes sense, now that I think about it. “Right. That creepy sensation—very much like when I interact with a shield for too long.”
She pokes at it through the wrapping. “Sammi might be able to do something with it. She could surge it to knock out this strange protective field then jack into the programming inside without having to physically activate it.”
“Hm.” I can’t decide if Juliette will like that or not.
“Is that a problem?”
“No.” I take the orb back and slip it into the bag. “I’ll see her later today.”
“Let me know how that works out,” Kira says. “This is military-grade tech. If Tiller’s making it for them, then it’s going to end up on the streets of Jackertown at some point. And with the way things are going… maybe sooner rather than later. In the meantime, what about you?”
“Me?”
“If you’re right about this idea of jackers and readers being the same—and you can prove that—we might have something more powerful than any autonomous drone. An idea. Wars are won with those. At least, that’s what Julian always said.” The sadness in her eyes twists my stomach.
“Are we in a war?” I ask although I think I know the answer.
“Not yet.” She purses her lips. “But Julian’s death…” Her eyes glass up, and she drops her gaze to the floor.
“It’s tearing things apart.” I can’t tell her about the Master Plan buried in Jackson’s memories—mostly because I have no idea what it is. Besides, I’m sure she’s already dug through his memories and dismissed them as the rambling thoughts of a madman. But the idea that Julian’s death is destabilizing things isn’t crazy. The Stomp. The attack on the Free Thinkers. Now this Purity list and the body count to go with it. Whether the assassination was intended to cause havoc or not, things are definitely getting worse, not better.
“Right.” Kira gives me a sharp nod. “Which is why I want to help you. Julian thought you were key to all this, and I still have faith in that. The only question is how.”
“Well, you’re not getting into my head, if that’s what you’re thinking. No offense.” I trust Kira—she’s decent and good-hearted, as far as I know—but I designed my mindbarrier to be unbreakable for a reason. And I’m not unlocking it now, especially not with Wright breathing down my neck.
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” she says, musing and tapping her lips with her finger. Julian had the same nervous habit. “I could talk you through going internal, working on your own mind—it’s not hard, but most people need to be guided through it. I could show you how to trigger an adrenaline dose that could amp up your abilities, whatever they are.”
“Yeah… no thanks. It’s more finesse than strength.”
“In that case, we could try syncing up.” At my puzzled look, she adds, “It might not work. You’d have to relax your mindfield enough to synchronize with mine. Then I could ride along and watch, so to speak, while you did your jacking.”
“I don’t think that’s going to work, either,” I say, not least because I’ve got zero interest in having Kira linked in with my ability. “What I really need is someone to experiment on—someone I can try reshaping from a jacker into a reader or vice versa—but that’s crazy. And awful. And morally questionable. Not to mention painful. It’s always painful.”
“Well, the pain I could do something about,” she says thoughtfully as if I haven’t just mentioned the horrific idea of experimenting on humans. “But yeah, I hear what you’re saying about volunteers.” She frowns at the floor then looks up into my eyes. “I’ll do it.”
“What? No. Kira.” What is it with these JFA types? First Sasha volunteering to get his head locked and now Kira? But this only reminds me—I promised to talk Kira into a whole different line of work.
Her face is twisting up. “Well, there has to be some way I can help you.” Tears gather in her eyes again. She’s genuinely upset. “It was his dying wish, Zeph.” Her voice fades at the end.
“Hey.” I ease forward and take her by the shoulders, craning my head down, so she’ll look me in the eyes instead of glaring her frustration into the floor. “You’re holding everything together right now, okay? That’s point number one. But if you really want to carry on Julian’s work… you know there’s a way you can do that, right?”
Her mouth works for a moment, but nothing comes out.
“You loved him, right?”
Her lips press together, and she nods fast. I feel like I should hug her or something, but it’s awkward enough as it is.
“You’ve been through everything with him. You believed in him. Do you really think, if he could talk to you right now, he’d want you to be here with me, trying to sort out my messed up head? With everything else that’s going on? I don’t think so.”
Her face is scrunching up more. I have no idea if I’m helping or making things worse.
Suddenly, the door to the Mediation Center slams open. I twist around…
Tessa.
She’s flying into the room like her feet have sprouted wings. She stumbles a little when she sees Kira and I huddled up on stage, but then Kira quickly steps back out of my hold. She turns her back, obviously wiping at her eyes. Tessa recovers and keeps barreling toward us, climbing the steps to the stage in one bound.
She’s breathless, and her face is flushed. No matter how often I see her—no matter the range of emotional states—she’s always ridiculously beautiful. Angry beautiful. Shocked beautiful. Right now, it’s panicked beautiful.
“You have to see this,” Tessa rushes out when she reaches us. She’s talking to Kira, not me. Which figures, since the last time I saw her, I was a jerk. Tessa holds up a portable screen and plays a snippet of tru-cast for both of us.
A middle-aged man stands at a lectern that’s decorated with a blue-and-white banner. His pale skin is loose on his chee
ks, and his slightly unkempt hair and angry, watery eyes make him look like he’s been on a three-day binge. Tessa has the sound enabled. His voice is raspy like he’s been shouting all day. “It’s not a coincidence, friends. You see it. I see it. Everyone sees what’s obvious in front of us. The jackers are multiplying. Spreading like an infectious disease. There’s more and more of them every day. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the JFA is behind this. We all know they’re putting more of those inhibitors in the water!”
My chest squeezes down—I’m almost certain it’s not true, but this was Wright’s reason for me to spy on Julian.
Kira’s face is turning red. “That bastard! How dare he…” She trails off, inarticulate in her rage.
“He’s Mac Simpson, the leader of the Reader’s First Front,” Tessa informs me in a hushed voice while Kira clenches up her fists and beats the air.
The man continues his vitriol. “I’m not saying that Jackson fellow did the right thing, but he was just a man concerned about how our city is becoming overrun. Gangs of jackers roaming the streets. Jacker mobs operating with impunity. Now that Senator Navarro has been laid to rest, it’s time we put a reader back in the Senate. Someone who understands the threat these aliens pose to our way of life. Someone who will do what needs to be done. You shouldn’t have to live in fear, my friends. That’s why I’m declaring my candidacy for the U.S. Senate.”
Tessa pauses the vid.
Kira looks like she’s about to blow a gasket. “I can’t believe it. No. No.” She paces away from Tessa and the screen, but she only goes a couple steps, then she turns back. But she’s too angry or something because she doesn’t speak, just curls up her fists and paces away again.
Tessa is wide-eyed, nervously clutching the edges of the small screen and flicking looks between Kira and me.
It’s up to me to say it. “You’ve got to run, Kira.”
She whirls on me. “What I need… is to find that man…” She jabs a finger at the blank screen in Tessa’s hands. “And jack him—hard, repeatedly—until he turns into something that resembles a decent human being.” She’s shouting and crying and jabbing her finger.
I step between her and Tessa because I don’t want anything going accidentally sideways. “You’re angry.”
“Of course, I’m angry!” she spits at me. Then she balls her fists tighter and shakes them at me. I think she’d take a swing if it wasn’t so ridiculous.
I stand as still against her frustration as possible. “Anyone would be angry. Anyone would want revenge. But you’re not anyone. You’re Kira Moore.”
“I don’t care!” And now it’s more a screech of pain than anger.
“I do.” I’m surprised to hear myself say it, but it’s true—I care that guys like this Fronter are on the rise. That my sister was twisted and used as a weapon by people in league with him. People like Wright using them both, along with a huge heaping of hate—everywhere hate and anger and fear—for their own power. “People like this guy can’t be allowed to win. We have to fight them.” Kira has stopped her pacing. She’s listening. I feel Tessa’s presence at my back, but I keep my gaze locked with Kira’s. I lift both hands in an elaborate shrug. “I have no idea if we can win, but there’s no question in my mind that we have to fight. I’ve tried running away before, and trust me, that just lets the bad guys do whatever they like. This time, I’m going to stay. And fight. And do what I can to see that guys like this don’t win the day.”
Kira’s face is still blotched red from anger, but her expression is open. Surprised. “You sound like him.”
I know she means Julian. “But I can’t be him.” I sweep my hand back to Tessa and her screen. “I can’t do this. I can’t work this from the outside, on a stage, making speeches.” I step closer to Kira, whose expression is in flux, warring emotions fighting across the landscape of her face. “I’ll work this from the inside, if you’ll work this from the outside. It has to be both… or we’ve got no chance to stop it.” I’m not even sure what “it” is, much less if we have any chance to stop it, but still… this isn’t a line I’m feeding her. I believe this. “If we don’t fight these guys, they’ll win.”
A new expression of calm settles on her face. “You’re on the inside.”
“Yeah. Not that I want to be, but that’s how it is.” I gesture at the silver satchel sitting on the floor of the stage of few feet away. “I don’t know how all the pieces fit together, but I know the kind of people involved in this—and if they have their way, none of this ends well for jackers.”
Kira nods, but it’s in an absent way like her mind is already racing ahead. “You’re on the inside. I’m on the outside.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay.” She pulls in a deep breath and frowns. “We’ll stop them together.”
“Deal.” I’m not even sure what I can do to uphold my end of the bargain, but there’s a sense of elation, regardless. As if the mere act of deciding were enough to make it possible.
Tessa edges forward, eyes wide and shining. “You’re going to run.” It’s directed at Kira, and it’s not quite a question. More like a confirmation.
She nods, and Tessa can barely restrain her fist pump. “I’ll get started on an announcement speech right away.” She waits for Kira to give her a nod of permission, then Tessa gives me a look like she wants to give me one of her drive-by hugs, but she just flashes a smile instead. Then she hurries off the stage, already bending over her screen and tapping madly at it.
Kira’s staring off into nothingness. “This is what he would want.” She’s not talking to anyone but herself.
I answer anyway. “We’re going to win this for him.”
She cuts her gaze to me, a slight smile on her face. “You know, he said you didn’t like him much. But that you would come around.”
I pull a face. “Was he always this annoyingly right about everything?”
She smiles, and it’s the first genuine one I’ve seen since the assassination. “All the time.”
I shake my head, but I’m teasing.
The humor quickly drops off her face. “Take that black anti-jacker orb to Sammi and see what she can do with it. Then let me know. I need you to keep me in the loop, Zeph. About that… and anything else. Everything else. Understood?”
I swallow. “Understood.” I have a ridiculous number of secrets. I’ll figure out later which ones Kira Moore really needs to know.
I snag the silver satchel from the floor and look for Tessa, but she’s long gone. It sounds like she’ll be hip-deep in running Kira’s campaign, so with any luck, I’ll see her later.
And maybe then there will be a chance for that drive-by hug.
A half hour later, I cruise into Aaliyah’s Home with my anti-jacker weapon.
I’m hot to get Sammi’s help on cracking it quickly—partly so I can report back to Kira and possibly see Tessa, and partly so we can handle this before Juliette gets out of school. I expect Sammi to be bored from having to babysit Olivia, anyway, so I figure this will serve triple-duty as a diversion.
I don’t expect to find Sammi and Olivia slaughtering octo-aliens in the living room.
I stand there for a good ten seconds, gaping at the two of them hopping around the room, in full gamer gear with gloves and helmets, fighting the enemy in a version of Tentacle I’ve never seen before. Someone has hacked Aaliyah’s screen into a virtual overlay, and I’m honestly torn whether it’s Sammi or Olivia—they both have the skills, they’re both gamers, and they both apparently are Commodore level on this new version of Tentacle. Never mind that Sammi was supposed to help my sister with her jacking skills—I’m just now realizing I’ve created a monster friendship. They’re so absorbed in the game, they totally don’t notice me standing in the doorway with my silver bag.
“Hey!” I shout to be heard over the laser fire and octo-plasm splats.
They don’t even slow down.
“Hey!” I shout louder.
Nothing.
“Dude, what?” she complains, stepping to the side to cancel out my interference. “Can’t you see we’re almost through the first brigade?”
“I need to borrow your pod-mate.” I flail my arm in Sammi’s view path—only large motions will disrupt the sim enough to catch her attention, but she’s still hyper-focused on the game and ignoring my existence. She probably can’t hear me, given they’ve got music blasting in the helmets, orchestrated to their assault. Assuming this is like every other version of Tentacle that Olivia and I have been playing since we were kids. She’s still a kid—I’m in denial that my sister is now fourteen, with all the signs of young womanhood, because it’s just horrifying to think about. Sammi should be the adult here, but it’s Olivia who growls at me and finally cuts the game short.
Sammi groans. Loudly. “What the jack!” She tugs at the helmet, working it free of her long red hair. “I thought I fixed—” She stops when she sees me. “Oh. Hey, Zeph.”
“Hello.” I give her a look like What in the world, Sammi?
She just shrugs. “We were bored.”
“So you commandeered Aaliyah’s reception room screen?” I sincerely hope they asked first. The last thing I need is Aaliyah booting us out.
“She said we could,” Olivia says, coming to Sammi’s defense. Not that Sammi looks at all concerned. She’s peeling off the gloves like it’s no big deal. Olivia gushes out, “Sammi jacked in and reset all the software.” She’s impressed. “I had no idea a standard plasma screen could even do virtual!” The look she’s giving Sammi makes it clear who Olivia’s new favorite person in the world is. “And she got us an early-release version of Tentacle Seven.” Olivia turns back to me. “Totally exclusive! Nobody has it yet, just developers.”
I squint at Sammi. “You stole it.”