by Terry Brooks
Then Ash is down in the reception area and crossing the room toward the entry. He is almost there when he hears raised voices behind him. He feels the fear rocket through him in a sudden jolt, but he manages to keep his attention fixed on his plan of escape. Without looking around, he moves swiftly to the closest door and passes through. The Watchmen nearby are looking in the direction of the voices and ignore him. By the time he is outside and halfway down the steps leading up from the street, they have locked the entry doors and shut down all passage in or out. He hears footsteps, and someone shouting at him, but he doesn’t slow, continuing toward the walkway, watching as people around him scatter in all directions.
He is off the steps and into the street when T.J. appears, coming toward him at a dead run. He glances around. Two Watchmen are chasing him, both yelling at the top of their lungs. Ash breaks into a run, heading for T.J. The other boy is down on one knee, a weapon pointed in his direction. Ash experiences a moment of supreme terror. Two sharp bursts sound, and his pursuers go down.
T.J. is back on his feet, motioning for him to hurry. Together they race for the gaming parlor and burst through the front doors. Ash forces down the urge to run faster as they charge through a maze of machines and players to the far end of the shop, afraid of what might happen if he were to stumble and fall. He risks a quick glance back to make sure no one is following, and then they are through the rear doors and into the alleyway beyond.
T.J. grabs him and pushes him up against the building wall. “What’s up, fish?” he snaps. “Things didn’t work out with your uncle, huh?”
“You just killed two men, T.J.!”
T.J. smirks. “Not likely. ORACLE doesn’t like it when you do that. Stun guns don’t kill you, in any case. Now, what happened?”
Ash shakes his head. “Just a real strong sense of things not being right. Relatives who really care about you don’t usually lock you in a room and tell you it’s for your own good.”
“All right, then.” T.J. lowers his voice. “Apparently they know you’ve found a way out, so we better start running. Come on!”
They head toward Metro Central at a swift trot. Ash is eager to put as much distance as possible between himself and ORACLE. By now, his uncle will looking for him. Going back no longer seems like a good idea. Maybe he is jumping to conclusions, but maybe he’s simply coming to terms with something he was unable to accept earlier.
The warning signs were there, after all; he just didn’t look closely enough. His father spent almost no time at all with his brother. Even though Cyrus lives alone and has neither wife nor children, the two remained conspicuously absent from each other’s lives. His father did not go to Cyrus about what was happening at BioGen, even after he felt threatened. It was not to his uncle and ORACLE that his father sent Ash but to the Red Zone and Street Freaks.
Ash has never really bothered to look closely at why this might be so. But he does now. His conclusion is inescapable. Everything suggests the very real possibility that Cyrus Collins is in some material way involved in everything that’s happened. Achilles Pod might be a quasi-independent police unit, but it is still an arm of ORACLE. And Uncle Cyrus is Calzonia’s ORACLE commander.
He is suddenly sick to his stomach as the realization takes hold. He is considering the possibility that his uncle might be behind his father’s death; the destruction of Faulkner, Willis4, and Beattie; and his own forced flight from his home. His uncle might be responsible for every bad thing that has happened to him over the past two weeks.
A deep humming sound fills the air, and Ash looks up in response. Three muscular blue-and-red L.A. Preventative transports are clearing the flight lanes of other traffic as they surge past, lights flashing. They are passing directly overhead and flying toward . . .
“Metro Central,” Ash whispers to himself.
All around him, people are slowing to gape at the transports, wondering what is happening. In moments, Ash knows, the transports will land and L.A. Preventatives will flood the vast Metro Central ticketing chamber and loading platforms, searching for him. If he continues on, he will almost certainly be caught and taken back to his uncle.
T.J. never hesitates. “This way.”
Behind them, the crowds are scattering. Something else is happening, and Ash imagines he doesn’t want to get involved in whatever it is. They run faster, moving away from the commotion and Metro Central both. Ash is fit enough, but he is soon breathing hard. He thinks he should have brought his mask with him, but he left it in his backpack. He thinks he should have brought his backpack, for that matter, but that’s gone too—along with his K-Bar and what’s left of his credits, which until now he had forgotten about completely.
They reach the end of the street and rush into the lobby of a posh Westron Heights Skyline, one of many in an elite hotel chain in Calzonia. T.J. slows them and accepts the greeting offered by the bot doorman and receptionists smiling cheerfully from behind the check-in desks. They continue on through the lobby to reach the backside of the building and a hallway that houses vidviews, reader boards, and information kiosks.
T.J. slows and turns to face him. “Deep breath. You’re going to have to man up. You got the cojones for it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just down the hall there’s a transmat.”
“No,” Ash says at once. “Not a transmat.”
T.J. makes a face. “This is a bad time for you to go timid on me, fish. No, I take that back. You’re not a fish anymore. That’s over. From now on, you’re just Ash. Because it looks like you’re not returning to the general population after all. You’re coming back to stay with us.”
“There has to be another way,” Ash insists. “Any other way. Those things aren’t safe.”
“Oh, well, then, let’s see. We could try a different Metro substem. But they’ll all be crawling with L.A. Preventatives. We could take a robo-taxi, but every last one will have been alerted and all the bot drivers programmed to deliver you to ORACLE’s front doorstep. Now let’s review. What’s left? Oh, that’s right. Nothing! Except a transmat, of course. A mode of transportation that, by the way, is essentially untraceable.”
“We could walk.”
“Twenty miles? Me, maybe. But not you. Besides, we’d be out in the open and exposed for entirely too long. Way too risky. You put yourself in this situation by insisting on coming here. Now you have to do what’s required to get yourself out.”
He says it calmly, but there is an edge to his voice. Ash hesitates, then takes a deep breath. “All right. The transmat it is.”
“That’s better. Nothing’s safe, Ash. Not for ’tweeners and not for you. Everything’s a risk. You just go with the best choice available.”
They go down the hallway to a door marked TRANSMAT in bold letters. T.J. turns the handle and they step inside. The room is banked wall-to-wall with air intakes, nodes, and digital readouts that glow and blink. At the room’s center stands the transmat cylinder, which looks exactly like the pictures he has seen. Ash stares at it fixedly, as if it by doing so he might somehow persuade it to reveal whether it is working properly.
T.J. goes over to the programming console, sets the controls for a destination, deposits the required credits, and after a final perusal of his efforts, steps back.
“Inside, Ash,” he says.
A deep breath fails to steady him, but he opens the transmat door and steps inside. The door closes behind him.
He stands in the middle of the cylinder, trying hard not to panic. For a moment, he is not sure if he has to do something more. T.J. is motioning for him to look down. He does so and notices the raised pad off to his right with a large green nodule that reads ENGAGE. He stares at it a moment, glances at T.J., who nods, then closes his eyes, gives up any hope of a long life, and presses the bump.
There is a whine as the transmat powers up, and a tingling rises from his feet to the top of his head, a sort of electrical charge that leaves him shaking. Suddenly everything goe
s black. There is an instant in which he loses consciousness—or at least it seems that way—as all thought and recognition leaves him. When he comes back to himself, eyes still closed, the tingling is still flowing through him. Then it disappears, and his body goes still. He waits patiently for something to happen, but nothing does.
Unable to stand the suspense, he opens his eyes. He is still inside the cylinder. He is still in one piece. Nothing has happened. He looks through the flexglass for T.J., but the other boy is nowhere to be seen. Something is wrong.
Then he realizes that the room and the transmat both look slightly different. Nothing is wrong after all. In fact, everything is fine. He has been transported to his new destination. He is inside a different cylinder. He presses the nodule on the pad that opens the sliding door and steps out into a chamber similar to, but marginally changed from, the one he started out in.
Standing in place, he listens to the transmat door slide shut again and begins checking himself to see if everything is still present and accounted for. It is. Remarkably, he feels no ill effects from being disintegrated and put back together again. He feels a burst of euphoria. Sometimes technology really is a wonderful thing.
Seconds later, T.J. comes through, exiting the booth as if nothing has happened. “Come on.”
When they leave the room, they are in the lobby of another Westron. Wordlessly, T.J. takes Ash by the arm and walks him out the lobby doors and into the fast fading sunlight of a day steadily marching toward dusk.
“Where are we?” Ash says, looking around in bewilderment. “I didn’t know they had Westron Hotels in the Zone.”
“They don’t have Westron Hotels in the Zone!” T.J. looks at him as if he is an idiot. “They don’t even have transmats in the Zone! Neither one would last out the day. Come on. We have some walking to do.”
They head out from the Westron down a broad street that quickly goes from upscale to downtrodden. The well-kept buildings and streets change radically, and all at once they are passing signs that indicate the boundaries of the Red Zone. T.J. doesn’t slow, entering the Zone with Ash on his heels. They continue walking until they sight the substem that garages the Flick.
“How was your transmat experience?” T.J. asks. “All your necessaries still intact?”
Ash nods. “Think so. Guess I overreacted. It wasn’t so bad.”
“You see? I’m usually right about stuff. It complements my perfect physical engineering. So, did your uncle ask you where you’ve been?”
“Right away. I didn’t say a word about Street Freaks. I told him I’d been hiding out in the Metro, living on the streets.”
“He believed you?”
“Don’t know. He retrieved the records from my father’s vidview. He knew the last message sent was to me. He wanted to know what it said. I told him I never got it, that I was too busy running for my life from the Hazmats.”
“But he locked you in a room, right?”
“Yep.”
“Then he knows you’re lying.”
“Well, he’s lying too. After locking me in, he went off to talk to that Achilles Pod guy Jenny faced down at the gates. He also asked if my father might have told me something or kept notes on what he was working on. He was pumping me for information the whole time!”
T.J. shakes his head. “Never should have gone there.”
There are no signs of a police presence, and before long they are driving up the Straightaway for home. Ash is at the wheel. T.J. has insisted. Ash doesn’t question it. He just drives. But what he really wants is to go to bed.
When they arrive and enter the building, they find Jenny Cruz waiting, an expression of disgust on her face. “The Shoe’s gone out again, and he won’t be back before tomorrow. So you’re both off the hook until then.”
The way she says it tells Ash she knows where they’ve been and what they’ve been up to. T.J. merely shrugs. “Ash hasn’t done anything wrong. Just what the Shoe told him to do.”
“I’m sure that explanation will interest him,” she replies, her words icy.
“I’m sorry about this,” Ash says.
“Which is why you’re asking us to take you back again? That is why you’re here, isn’t it?”
He hadn’t really thought about it. He’d just followed T.J.’s lead. “I guess so.”
She shook her head doubtfully. “Go into the dining room, Ash.”
Ash does what he is told, finds Woodrow and Holly waiting, and sits down at the table across from them. He feels badly about what might happen to T.J. It will be his fault if the other boy gets in trouble. His own situation seems unimportant by comparison. He might get tossed out on his ear—probably will—but it would be terrible if something like that happened to T.J. Street Freaks isn’t really Ash’s home, but it is T.J.’s.
Jenny and T.J. sit down next to the others, all of them facing Ash. It feels like a tribunal, four confronting one. Jenny looks at him and waits for him to look back. When he does, she leans forward. “Tell us what happened. Tell us everything. No holding back, no half-truths. Tell us all of it.”
So he tells her. Why not? Either they’re going to help him or they’re not. He is almost beyond caring. He gives them the full story, everything about his meeting with Cyrus Collins and their exchange in the conference room, how he was locked in but escaped, how T.J. found him and saved him, and how they managed to get out of the Metro and come back to Street Freaks.
When he is finished, the others stare at him, and then abruptly Jenny Cruz says, “You’re in a tough spot, Ash.”
Ash says nothing. He doesn’t know what to say. He shifts his gaze from one face to the next and waits.
“Why is your uncle so desperate to get his hands on you?” Jenny asks finally. “There must be a reason. He’s going to an awful lot of trouble to hunt you down. If it isn’t to help you, what’s the point?”
Holly clears her throat. “You have this phenomenal memory. You sure you didn’t see or hear something you’re not supposed to know?”
Ash shakes his head and repeats what he has already told them several times. “My father never showed me anything about his work. He rarely even talked about it.”
“But your uncle doesn’t believe that, does he?”
Ash is suddenly overwhelmed by the immensity of what he is up against. The weight of his difficulties and his inability to figure out how to lift it from his shoulders presses down on him. “I don’t know what else to tell you,” he confesses, his voice rough and uneven.
He manages to keep from breaking down, but only barely and only because he would be embarrassed beyond words. He is at a point by now where he isn’t sure he can trust anyone. Even these kids he thinks are his friends. But he has to take a chance on someone, so he cannot afford to give them further reason to cast him out—especially when he feels it is right on the verge of happening anyway.
He takes a deep breath. “Isn’t there something I can say or do to persuade you to let me stay? Just until I find a way out of this mess? I really don’t have anywhere else to go now. I’ll do anything you ask.”
He means it too. No one besides the Shoe and the kids at Street Freaks is likely to help him. He never dreamed he would find himself trapped in the Red Zone and begging to stay, but there it is.
“Things have changed, Ash,” Jenny says quietly. “Some of which we can’t talk about yet. I can tell you this much. Your father and the Shoe knew each other. The Shoe and your uncle know each other as well. Your father was the link between them, but the circumstances are murky. Your father was involved in a very complex and secretive bit of research at BioGen. So secret I couldn’t find out anything about it. Perhaps the Shoe knows, but he isn’t saying if he does.”
“So that’s why my father sent me here?” he interrupts.
“Not exactly. It was probably for another reason—one I’m not prepared to talk about. In any case, it is dangerous for you to stay. Your uncle likely suspects you were hiding out here all along. He will undoubt
edly have Achilles Pod take another run at us at some point. If he finds you here when he does, we are all out of luck. The Shoe included. He knows you left. He was probably relieved you did, and he might not be so happy to find you back. The four of us have a different view, but it isn’t our call. It’s his. So we have several problems to address.”
He looks at their solemn faces and grins in spite of himself. All four faces bear mixed expressions. T.J. looks decidedly eager. Holly seems entirely confident. Woodrow looks like he always does—stoic and questioning—but also hopeful about something Ash can’t begin to guess. Jenny is just plain poker-faced.
She will be the one who decides, he realizes. He does not feel reassured.
“So the bad news is, you’re thinking of helping me?” he asks, trying to leaven the mood.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Jenny says at once. “Our idea of helping you might not necessarily square with yours. There is a fresh risk to all of us involved if we do so. One besides the threat of another visit from Achilles Pod.”
“What, then?”
“I’m not sure we should tell you that.”
“I’m not sure you should either.”
They stare at each other wordlessly. Then Jenny seems to make up her mind.
“Some of what we do here is considerably more dangerous than you realize. We do things we haven’t told you about yet. Things that if they were discovered would put all of us in prison—or even worse.”
Ash stares. “What sort of things?”
“If I agree to explain, you will first have to promise that you will stay and help us—no matter what I ask of you, no matter what your personal feelings might be. You could be a tremendous asset to us; your ability to memorize quickly and comprehensively could prove invaluable. But you put us all at risk if we cannot trust you. Our work is too important to let you jeopardize it.”
She pauses. “In exchange for your help, we will give you ours. We will shelter and protect you. We will keep you safe and do our best to find out what happened to your father. We will tell the Shoe you have to be allowed to stay. We took a vote. We like you and we want you with us. But you have to commit. Now.”
