by Sean Platt
Ephraim managed a smile. “Now who’s being illogical?”
Neven’s face was fury and fear. He raised the tablet and shook it, his face red, spit dripping from his lower lip. “This is your last chance!”
Ephraim raised his elbow. His eyes went to Sophie, who knew he meant it. She covered her eyes, sobbing.
Neven dropped the tablet and rushed headlong like a sprinter. All that mattered was stopping Ephraim and his rogue choice, saving the precious data in his body and brain.
“DROP THE FUCKING KNIFE!”
“Sophie,” Ephraim whispered. “I love you.”
Neven was five lunging steps away.
Three.
Ephraim gritted his teeth, tensed every muscle in his arm, and drew the knife hard across his throat.
It clattered to the floor.
Neven shouted, on him at once.
Neven’s hands were under Ephraim, lifting his shoulders, shoving the only soft item at hand — a pillow — against his neck. For Ephraim, the sensation was curious. At the same time, he was being lifted, he felt like he was being lowered down into some unfathomable depth.
Breath came harder but didn’t disturb him. He couldn’t swallow. He was hot and cold at once. He wanted to push Neven away, but his arms weren’t working. He was wet. And dripping.
Neven was shouting. Railing. But Ephraim’s eyes went only to Sophie, onscreen.
She blinked through tears. She blew a kiss.
Movement from the floor, from the side of the room Neven had vacated. Papa had managed to get up on one elbow. His arm fell; he’d tossed something.
It hit the window hard enough to make a small crack. Then the object struck the floor and rolled toward Neven’s bent knees: a marble, probably left under the couch years ago.
Ephraim was finding it hard to focus through the darkness. He felt like going to sleep. But he was awake enough to see Papa touch his ear, to the tiny wire inside it. Barely conscious, he heard Papa say, “That window, Felix. Now.”
The window exploded. Men in riot gear stormed the room, making for the dropped tablet as Papa pointed madly at it, trying to crawl.
The room was dim. An unknown time later, the person holding Ephraim stopped being Neven and started being Papa Friesh.
“Stay with me, Ephraim. Stay with me!”
But he was already going. He could barely see Papa. Ephraim could only see Sophie, until the darkness fell.
Chapter 68
An Excellent Reason
Sophie sagged, almost falling. Only the console kept her upright.
She blinked, no longer wanting to battle the tears. She let them come, watching Papa shake Ephraim’s body, watching the black clad soldiers grab Neven and clear the room.
They spread out, presumably to search the cabin. The lead man, apparently named Felix, went to Papa, knelt beside him, encouraging the leader to lie down. “The paramedics will be here soon,” he said.
But for Ephraim, now in a spreading pool with the knife loose in his hand, the paramedics were already too late.
White lights replaced the red. Gas stopped pouring from the ceiling, but Sophie already felt sleepy. If she didn’t get fresh air soon, she’d die.
At least then Neven couldn’t dissect her.
Her Ephraim had died. The surrounding mist was almost a blessing.
Maybe she should lie down. Go to sleep, as Ephraim had.
The steel door retracted and opened to the hallway as if knowing the room was now stuffy.
The countdown blinked off, vanishing from every screen. Either Ephraim had been speaking literally — that it was only a bluff — or more likely, the GEM agent tapping at Neven’s tablet had figured out how to negate the dead man’s switch.
Had Neven failed to encode it with his fingerprint — a passcode impossible for anyone to duplicate? Or had another agent taken Neven’s print to stop it when she hadn’t been looking — a measure that would presumably be the reason she was no longer about to die?
Sophie didn’t care. Not even a little.
She didn’t feel sad. She felt numb.
The screen blinked off. Turned black like the others. And again, Ephraim was gone.
Rage filled her. There was no loss, no despair, no bone-crushing weight above her. Not anymore. Just anger: hot, heavy, powerful. If Sophie raged hard enough against the injustice of the now black screen, she could fix this. Rewind the clock. Break the world like it had broken Ephraim and her.
She grabbed the first thing in reach. That stupid fucking red fire engine. It took her both hands to throw it, and she missed. Sophie wanted to shatter that screen into a million shards. Instead, the engine struck the wall beneath the screen and rolled to its side on the floor, mocking her.
The chair.
She wasn’t strong enough to swing the rolling chair behind the console, but if she didn’t lift it and kiss the anger, she’d have to look at that thing she couldn’t stand to confront.
She rolled it out. Gripped its back. Hefted the chair in a small circle, using her mass as a counterweight. It didn’t lift high off the ground, but high enough. Its casters smashed into the console on the first rotation, sending sharp plastic flying through the air, along with some sparks for good measure.
Half-crying and half-heaving with exertion, Sophie searched for something else of Neven’s to break. Some other way to punish him. She couldn’t even mourn. She’d been dragged away from Ephraim as the pall descended, and now she was alone.
Movement behind her — a dragging sound. The chair coming to a rest. Or so she imagined, because now Sophie could only focus on what she should have been punishing all along.
In its dumb little case. Atop its stupid little platform.
The reason all of this had happened.
Sophie stalked to the case. She grabbed the Quarry and yanked, thinking for a moment that it was plugged in.
It wasn’t, so her yank was too vigorous. She took a few steps, almost falling, then stopped to consider the thing in her hands.
Sophie stared at it. Hated it.
This is all your fault.
It was the Quarry that Neven had wanted — one primary reason he’d made the Ephraim clone to begin with. It was the Quarry that Fiona had given to Ephraim, meaning to double-cross, upending all of GEM when it fell into the wrong hands. The Quarry technology made Neven’s plan possible, and was maybe the reason Neven hadn’t truly died when Ephraim killed him. The Quarry was why there were almost 300 Altruance Browns in New York, scaring the shit out of everyone, and it was the most important blueprint in that information bomb Neven had almost given the world.
The bomb was disarmed, and Neven was apparently in custody, but the Quarry — this little matte-black motherfucker — was apparently about to go free.
Well, not if Sophie could help it.
She gripped the thing with the prongs facing away and began to bend it, testing its strength like kids yanking on a wishbone.
There was a second noise from the dim behind her — the dragging, rolling sound that hadn’t, it turned out, been her thrown objects coming to rest.
Sophie turned to see a pair of women behind her. One stood, the other was in a wheelchair.
It was hard to see much detail from where Sophie was standing, but Fiona looked different somehow. No longer furious that another woman had hands on her property, the way she’d jealously guarded the Quarry before. If anything, her shadowed expression seemed almost amused.
“Go ahead. Break it, if you want,” Fiona said, “but I can give you an excellent reason not to.”
Chapter 69
Five Minutes
The women came forward. Sophie didn’t immediately see what was amiss, but then it dawned on her. Fiona usually steered her wheelchair with a straw. Now she was moving it with a joystick.
Sophie was holding the Quarry like a bow bent backward.
“If you’re not going to break it, at least plug it back in.” Fiona flicked her eyes toward the case Sophie
had violently snatched it from.
“So it can charge?”
“So it will stop broadcasting its signal,” Maria said from beside Fiona.
“Neven’s got that cord wired to a jammer,” Fiona explained, indicating the case. “When it’s plugged in, no signals can leave the island.” Fiona looked at the broken console and the mark below the big screen where Sophie had hurled her projectile. “Although it seems you didn’t like what was streaming on TV today anyway.”
Sophie’s hand went to the Doodad in her pocket. She’d unplugged the cord and got reception. That was when the video call — the one she was already trying to put out of her mind — became possible.
“When there’s no jamming, the Quarry’s homing beacon is visible to anyone who thinks to look for it,” Fiona said. “It was probably unplugged for hours before we got here. If things weren’t so chaotic on the mainland, I’m sure someone would be here already.”
Maria looked at her Doodad. “Our plants say nobody has seen the beacon at NYPD or GEM, Fiona.”
Fiona’s fingers twitched in a miniature version of the yeah, yeah gesture. “Just plug it in or break it,” she told Sophie. “I’d rather nobody saw us leave.”
Sophie’s eyes formed a question.
“Helicopter,” Fiona answered. “On the roof.”
“You were here all along?”
“We came back yesterday.”
“Back? You mean you were here before, too?”
“I’m not an idiot, Miss Norris. I know how to find my hardware a lot faster than the police. I can detect the Quarry’s signature even if there is jamming, as long as I have a clue where to look. I caught up with your old friend Mercer Fox last week. After some nudging and a bit of detective work, we had a good idea that he could only have come from one of these offshore islands. I didn’t know he was working for Neven. That was a genuine back-from-the-dead surprise. We had to watch and wait for him to leave, which finally happened a few days after Jubilee. We came after Neven was gone. I wasn’t about to stick around when we could come just back later.”
“Why? I mean, you left and then …” Sophie didn’t know her own questions.
“Decide what you’re going to do with that,” Fiona said, indicating the Quarry, “and we’ll talk.”
Sophie eyed Fiona. According to Ephraim, this woman was always saying one thing and meaning another. Fiona wanted the Quarry. She’d moved Heaven and Earth to get the thing. Sophie called her bluff and bowed it further.
Fiona said nothing, waiting.
“You don’t care if I break this?” Sophie asked.
“Not at all. It’s what we were coming up here to do when the door came down, sealing off the cube.”
“Why?”
“It’s useless to me now. Neven put the Quarry’s blueprint into the cloud. I decrypted his file and saw that he made some smart modifications to both the software and hardware. The model you’re holding — my original — is antiquated. If I needed another Quarry, I’d build one using Neven’s specs. Not that I don’t have any tricks of my own. His improvements made me more aware of my own — enough to cut his clone-production time in half. If Neven had thought to include me, we’d have had two brains being better than one. We could have been producing clones in a handful of days.”
Fiona shrugged as if to say that some people couldn’t be reasoned with. “Just more proof that Evermore and Riverbed should have worked together all along. Collaboration is the spark of magic.”
Sophie didn’t believe it. Fiona was always playing an angle. She pushed the Quarry’s body harder and heard something start to crack.
“He’s fried it anyway,” Fiona said. “And any other use I had is moot now.”
“You said you could give me a good reason not to destroy it.”
“Plug it in, Sophie. I know what happened. Maria picked up the video while we were out in the hallway. Now that GEM has Neven, they’ll be able to pull his file bomb off the cloud. It won’t take them long to realize Wood isn’t who he’s supposed to be. They’ll arrest him, then figure out there must be a rogue 2.0 cloning facility nearby. They’ll be looking for a place like this, and until you plug that cord back into the Quarry, they’ll be able to find it.”
“Nothing yet,” Maria said, glancing at her Doodad.
Sophie let go of the Quarry with one hand and took the unplugged cord in the other. Making as if to mate them, she said, “Tell me what you meant.”
“Plug it in, Sophie.”
But this was too weird. Too much wasn’t being said.
“No.”
“Trust me.”
Sophie laughed. A bitter noise without any mirth. Still, it felt better than facing that thing she couldn’t stand to look in the eye.
He’s dead. Because you weren’t there like they both told you to be, Sophie. It doesn’t matter if you never got the messages because he’s gone and it’s all your fault.
“Why would I trust you?”
“Plug in the Quarry, Sophie,” said Maria. “Now.”
Sophie stared them both down. She had the cord in one hand and the Quarry in the other. Resisting was petulance. There was no reason not to do as Fiona said, except that right now of all times, Sophie didn’t feel like being anyone’s puppet.
She let go of the cord and the Quarry.
It hit the ground with a flat, undramatic sound.
“You do it,” she said, marching for the door.
“Don’t leave.”
“Don’t leave, Sophie,” Maria echoed Fiona.
But the walls were falling. Sophie’s alarm had given her a thin skin of defense, and defying Fiona for no real reason had kept her mind occupied. But now the hardest truth was dawning. The thing she’d been trying to push away was cresting above her like a wave, and she could feel its drag on her soul.
Sophie skirted Maria, already starting to cry. Maria grabbed her arm.
“Goddammit, Sophie,” Fiona said. “I’m trying for a fresh start here.”
Fiona’s words meant nothing and Sophie didn’t care to decipher them. The air was poisoned. A leaden weight gathered on her shoulders. She needed to flee. It didn’t matter if it was almost completely dark outside, that she’d need to boat across a strip of ocean with barely a light, or that she might capsize, get lost, or drown. None of it mattered. She had to escape.
Maria held Sophie’s arm. She jerked hard, but Maria’s grip was tight. The next time she tried to wrench away, Sophie pulled them both a foot toward the door. Maria held fast, locked like a manacle.
“Let go of me!”
“Settle down! Will you at least hear me out?”
Sophie screamed, “Fuck you! This is all your fault, you fucking bitch!”
Tears were streaming freely. Sophie’s protective shell of shock was no longer on her. She was a naked thing, exposed to all the world’s cruelties. Her face was a torrent, unable to see for the grief.
“Sophie. Plug in the Quarry. Give me five minutes. That’s all I ask.”
“Fuck you, Fiona! Fuck your Quarry! Fuck you, and I hope you die!”
“Maria. Plug it in.”
But Maria was occupied, barely clinging to a thrashing Sophie — a dervish of limbs, claws out.
“Sophie! Listen to me. You can’t go anywhere tonight anyway. If you have a gun, then point it at me while we talk. I don’t care. I need this.”
“Fuck what you need!”
“You need it, too. Just talk to me.”
“I’m not talking to you!”
“Then go into another room and cool off. But first, plug in the—”
Sophie thrashed. Maria firmed her grip, eliciting a cry of fury from her captive.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Fiona said. “I’ll do it myself.”
Sophie was furious. Seeing crimson. She couldn’t think, feel, or speak. Awash with sadness, gripped by hatred. She didn’t have her true mind at all, but what happened next nabbed her attention.
Fiona bent her arms and pl
aced her palms flat on the wheelchair’s armrests. Then, with effort, she stood and took five shambling steps toward the lighted cabinet. Maria’s grip went slack. Sophie could run, but she stayed perfectly still, watching as Fiona mated cord and Quarry.
Fiona then retraced her uncertain steps, returned to the chair, and sat with a heavy exhale.
The room was quiet.
“Five minutes,” Fiona said, meeting Sophie’s eyes. “That’s all I ask.”
Chapter 70
The One Thing ...
Papa looked up to meet the clone’s eyes. Even seated, Altruance was so much taller than him. “Do you understand?”
Altruance didn’t answer immediately. That was good. What Papa wanted — what he always sought and got when deprogramming went well — was thoughtful agreement on key issues, never blind acceptance.
He’d once played mind tricks on Ephraim to get his attention, pulling puppet strings that Neven had conditioned into him. It wasn’t that way with freed-mind clones. They became capable of their own decisions. They weren’t 1.0 or 2.0 or 3.0 or 4.0 clones by Neven’s definitions. They were something else.
The man on the couch in front of Papa had been born as a clone of Altruance Brown, but today he was a new person.
“I think so,” he said.
“Do you have any questions?” Papa asked.
“A few. Where should I start?”
“Wherever you’d like.”
“What’s my name?”
Papa smiled. “It’s whatever you want it to be.”
“Is it Altruance Brown?”
“Many of the others chose to keep that name after deprogramming. You may do the same, or you can pick something else.”
“It’s up to me?”
Papa nodded. “The choice is whether you like the tyranny of having the same name as all the others now that you’re a free man with a free mind, or whether you’d prefer the tyranny of choosing something new as an act of rebellion. Either choice gives Neven power over you. Except …”
Papa raised his eyebrows.
“Except that I take the power back simply through the act of deciding.”
