Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2)

by Knite, Therin

  And then Mark shoots Andrew four times in the chest.

  * * *

  The first time Mark DuPont pulls the trigger and Andrew Stiegel staggers back in a burst of blood, the former’s only thought is, Well, shit. As the blood spray coats the floor, the nearby crates, and his own skin, Mark can do nothing but feel the weight of the cold steel in his hand and wonder how he transformed, in a matter of months, from some goody two-shoes perfectionist into this strung-out wreck of a man on the verge of leaping from the roof of a tall building. But, of course, when Andrew Stiegel lurches sideways into a crate stack, gasping, Mark reminds himself that the answer is so simple: he hasn’t changed at all.

  No, what he’s doing now—what he just did—it all boils down to the same compulsive tendencies he’s struggled with his entire life. Start. Start. Start. Finish. Finish. Finish. Win. Win. Win. And don’t let anyone, ever, try to stop you.

  The same mantra, drilled into his head by a father who died years ago. But it stuck. And now it’s stickier than ever—here in a blustery warehouse in the dead of winter night, surrounded by his competition teammates and their enemies.

  Baltimore. The idiots who thought they could con their way to victory by stealing secrets.

  Stiegel sinks to the floor, hands over the hole in his chest. Blood dribbles down his chin, and air catches in his throat. The bullet ate a chunk of his lung, and the boy can’t breathe. But Mark, instead of helping, instead of letting anyone help, waves his gun around from one Baltimore bastard to another, a silent warning on the tips of his sneer-angled lips. In the darkest corners of the empty warehouse, the echo of the shot still reverberates, and as it slowly fades, it’s replaced by the shriek of the worsening winds. Snowflakes float in through the door and stick to the floor in front of the suffocating college coder.

  Mark bites his tongue so hard he tastes copper, but he swallows it down and barks out, “All of you fuckers better back away. No tricks. We’re leaving this ‘negotiation,’ and you will not be following us. So help me, if a single one of you pulls an Ocom to call the cops or emergency services before we’re a mile away from here, I’ll round back and shoot you all in your screwed-up heads. You hear?” His pitch rises with each syllable, and the last one, hear, is a bolt of lightning striking shiny sheet metal. The Baltimore kids flinch at the sound, and Mark’s own friends curl in on themselves, shuddering.

  Ten feet away from the “action,” Chelsea stares at the unfolding catastrophe in shock. Mark doesn't blame her. Could never blame her. She set this deal up in good faith, thinking her boyfriend was a decent fellow with a good heart and a greedy soul, same as her, same as all of them, bent on grabbing the cash prize at the end of this rollercoaster no matter the corners in need of cutting. But Chelsea, single-minded Chelsea, always hung on simple threads, failed to see that the Baltimore gang never had any intention of playing this deal fair.

  They want the whole two fifty for themselves. (So does Poly.)

  Mark knew it the day the first virus popped up on his team’s shared cloud space, right as he was fleshing out some crucial code lines for the program. That day, Mark later realized, after he spent three hours fending off the attack and saving their work from theft or, possibly worse, destruction—that day was the day Chelsea told Stiegel about Mark, the day she realized she knew members of both teams, the day she concocted the bright idea of having the teams, now low on funds and time, work together toward a common goal. Like this was some elementary school playground game and not the real world. Where people cheat and lie and steal and kill to get what they want.

  It took Mark less than an hour to trace the first attack back to Baltimore.

  It took Mark far longer than an hour to make the decision to meet with their rivals, to use Chelsea’s beloved cooperation scheme as bait, to make a show of force far greater than a little worm crawling through the cloud.

  I love you, Chelsea, Mark thinks now, with a gun in his hand aimed at the bleeding boyfriend of his best friend. I love you, and I’m so sorry I have to do this. He backs away from Stiegel’s hacking, choking form, the red stain beneath the Baltimore coder now dense and wide enough to be called a puddle. The man’s winter coat, once cobalt blue, is stained dark violet. With his every attempt to breathe, spurts of blood pulse through the fingers clenching at his chest.

  Nausea rolls through Mark’s stomach in a thick, syrupy wave, but he swallows down the rising bile and all but shouts, “This is the only warning you fuckers get”—he points the gun directly at Stiegel’s terrified face—“before I shoot you all point blank. One more virus in our system, one more attempt to break into our apartments and steal our notes, one more setup attempt like this, where you try to wear us down with fake friendliness and sugar-sweetened lies…and that’s it. I will hunt down every single one of you.” The barrel of the gun quivers in his shaking grip, and Mark tries to tell himself it’s the cold, the snowstorm now upon them, that makes his fingers look so weak, so fragile.

  But it’s not. It’s the fact that he just shot a boy, and he’ll remember every microsecond of the event, burned into the folds of his gray matter like metal soldered to skin—forever.

  Forever in a minute and fifty-two seconds.

  Because that’s how long the silence lasts in the wake of his shot. That’s how long his own crew lingers in their scattered places, in shock, mouths hung open, at the sight of the gun they didn’t know he had, used for a purpose they didn’t know he planned, and the boy on the receiving end of its blow now dying on the floor before its might. That’s how long the other Baltimore coders stand frozen in their strategic “battle positions,” half of them mid-stride in a first step of a mad-dash toward the exit, half of them mid-stride in a first step of a mad-dash toward their fallen comrade, the cowards and the brave alike, arranged in a square with Stiegel as its center.

  That’s how long Chelsea wavers on her feet, her Ocom forgotten, having slipped from her fingers, lying on the ground with its screen now scuffed. Her lower lip trembles, building up speed and power and anger-horror-sorrow all mushed together in a single, high-pitched whine that emerges as—

  “Mark! What the fuck are you doing? What’s wrong with you? What—?”

  And that’s when the dying Andrew Stiegel tears off his woe is me victim façade, casts his shock aside, and lunges for Mark with a very large knife he ripped from his coat pocket while no one was looking.

  And that…that is when Mark shoots Andrew Stiegel three more times in the chest.

  And that…that is when Andrew Stiegel crumples to the floor, dead on arrival, a bullet in his heart.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Coming down from the high of a mental reconstruction is like waking after anesthesia. The zinging emotional waves of the incident in the warehouse wash away, rain on chalk, are replaced by the muffled sensations of the real world slowly fading in. I’m in the wheelchair, up against the wall across from the interrogation room where Dynara decked Castile. My gaze is tilted up toward the steel gray ceiling, buzzing fluorescents sunk into the tiles.

  On either side of me, EDPA and IBI agents loiter in pairs or trios. Some watch Chai speak with the GM Poly kids sitting where their so-called mentors sat earlier, in two tiny chairs before a tiny table, flanked by a wall still stained with dried blood. Others, however, have their sights set on me.

  As the Poly kids recounted the experience of Stiegel’s murder, I crafted my reconstruction around their words and spoke the story aloud. Filled in the blanks they silently screamed with their quivering lips and flashes of bitten red tongues, their darting eyes that would not dare to meet Chai’s probing, quizzical eyes, their twitching limbs and squirming hips, the little nervous tics neither realize they possess. Camden Morse and Kelley Garcia, scraped and bruised from their near-death echo encounter, may be coder geniuses, bright and quick and sharp as knives—but even the best blades can be dulled by poor use.

  They lost the nerve to hide the truth the second Lang’s dream breached in the museum.<
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  Now, they sit across from the best psychiatrist in the district, whose honey-sweet tone lulls them to speak slowly and clearly and honestly, even through their fear of their inevitable, lengthy stints in prison. And I read them as they talk, weeding out their unintentional half-truths, the things they squirrel away in the darkest corners of their minds:

  DuPont shooting Stiegel. Them, standing there, doing nothing to help while the boy bled out. Running away when the deed was done, under DuPont’s command, as if their worlds would keep turning if they listened to a boy who was so sick in the head, he believed murder was appropriate retaliation for a cyber attack.

  They ran straight into a tangled web of lies and secrets and murder mysteries.

  EDPA will cut them out of it, but the dirt that clings to their sticky skin will never wash off.

  Too little. Too late.

  For Stiegel and DuPont, who led their teams straight to hell.

  For Tanaka, who succumbed to Lang’s fury.

  And for Lang, too, as soon as May’s strike team collects her from house arrest. Which should be in, oh, half an hour.

  I sigh and adjust myself in the chair, my upper back tingling, ant legs under skin, as the med-four nanos move into the last phase of rapid healing. Once they’re finished, I can ditch the damn chair and stand up with the rest of my stern-faced taskforce teammates. For now, though, I’m stuck with my line of sight a mere two inches over the edge of the interrogation room window, trying not to shudder at the feeling of fifteen pairs of eyes looking down on me.

  Briggs, paired with Weiss (surprise), a few steps away from my chair, is the first to speak in the hall after the close of my reconstruction. “How accurate do you think that account was, Adamend?”

  “Sixty-two percent, by my estimation,” I reply. The mental replay was based not only on Morse and Garcia’s statements but also the IBI reports on Stiegel’s murder, my knowledge of Lang and Stiegel’s relationship (thanks to Lance’s expertise at advanced image search and analysis methods), and Lang’s behavior from the time we first caught her at GM Poly up until she was carted off to house arrest. My reconstruction is far from perfect—Stiegel’s frame of mind is a guess at best, based on Garcia’s description of his personality—but it’s accurate enough to discern Lang’s motivations. It maps straight to DuPont’s murder, to her museum assault, to her clever deceptions.

  She was blind to the nature of the competition between the two programmer teams. Willfully blind, because it was convenient. For her wants and needs and base desires.

  Stiegel’s death forced her to open her eyes. In all the wrong ways.

  Dynara, parked two feet from the interrogation room window, stares soulfully into her own reflection and says, “You can fill in the remaining blanks when we haul Lang down here, I imagine?”

  “Most of them.” I tap my fingers on the armrests of my chair. “I think I can reach about ninety percent accuracy based on what Lang can, and will, say about the murders. And, of course, how she happened to acquire her echo-making powers, plus such expertise, in a short period of time. There will always be some uncertainty: I can’t perfectly predict the thoughts of the dead, and this Finn character is a wildcard because we know so little. But I should be able to cover what we need to close this case, especially if Castile and Anderson spill whatever beans they’ve been gorging on. Which I imagine won’t be too difficult to extract, given how many teeth Castile spit out last time she was here.”

  Briggs bristles at my implication and glares a couple of daggers into Dynara’s back. Dynara sees him in the window reflection but doesn’t acknowledge his staunch disapproval of illegal interrogation techniques. But then, Briggs has long had a vendetta against the things that go on within the walls of dear old EDPA, and this isn’t the first (and won’t be the last) time he and Dynara clash over cases.

  Dynara taps twice on the window with her knuckles. A signal to Chai to move on to the next line of questioning—the nature of the competition, which even I’ve been unable to gauge from context clues. Garcia and Morse skirt around the type of program they’ve been tasked to build every single time it comes up, even though they described, in gory detail, the disastrous encounter at the warehouse. Whatever the competition teams are building, its impact on this case, on the world, overshadows a string of brutal murders, the deaths of (too) many federal agents, and all the other countless pounds and fluid ounces of agony sitting on the wrong side of the scale.

  In the interrogation room, Chai laces her fingers together, polishes her faux friendly face off again, and shifts her line of questioning in one smooth move from the museum attack, the end of all things to the GM Poly kids, to the time and place where this all began. Months ago. Between classes. Castile and Anderson rounded them up, plunked them all down in chairs, five strangers or loose acquaintances, and fed them a spiel about a glorious future, two hundred fifty million dollars, that could be theirs. In exchange for a single file and a few thousand lines of code.

  Chai turns her attention to Morse; he’s been slightly more talkative than Garcia for the duration of the interview. “All right. So I’m clear on how your interactions with Baltimore played out. They stepped out of line, struck first, and you tried defense, but when that didn’t work, you retaliated in kind. Understandable. Perfectly understandable.”

  Her expression flutters with silk-soft sympathy, a level of mastery over external emotional expression not even I’ve been able to manage, despite years of practice. The best I can do is erase my feelings and throw on a thin mask. Chai appears so sincere you’d honestly believe she condoned the Poly kids’ actions…if you didn’t know better. And they don’t.

  Garcia and Morse are lulled into a false sense of security by her words, their postures relaxing, their defense walls crumbling to dust as Chai continues, “But what I don’t yet know is how your interactions with each other impacted the situation. This program you were all working together to build—I’ve heard that not all of you were keen on the sorts of things it could be used for. That its nature was a point of contention. And, as I’ve said before, any and all stressors that could have contributed to the tragic death of Mark and Lawrence are vital to this case. Vital to the pursuit of justice for your friends. So, please.

  “I know you’ve been instructed to keep quiet about the program, but the man who set the competition up, Finn, is not on your side. We are, us here at EDPA and the IBI. We want justice for Mark, for Lawrence. We want to prevent more death and destruction, and I know you two want that as well. A lot of money may be up for grabs, but really, tell me: is any amount of money worth what happened to Lawrence Tanaka in that museum? You saw it, right before your eyes, that poor boy suffocate to death. Is any number with a dollar sign stuck in front of it worth the pain and fear that boy felt as he was dying? Worth the terror and agony Mark felt when Chelsea Lang’s dream monster butchered him? Money is great, y’all, but it is far from the greatest thing in life.

  “The greatest thing in life is living, and your friends have lost that. For good. Do you want to risk losing it, too? Or risk Harlow up in the infirmary? Or risk your families?”

  She unlocks her fingers and rests each of her hands on one of theirs, glancing from Morse’s dark, red-rimmed eyes to Garcia’s downcast baby blues. “Come on, y’all. It’s time to tell the truth.” A beat. “What kind of program did Finn ask y’all to build?”

  Jin, leaning against the wall a few feet from my chair, bends toward me and mutters, “It’s Morse who’s going to break, right? He seems the type.”

  I nudge Jin’s thigh with my elbow (it’s as high as I can reach with it). “Correct. You’ve been paying attention to my reading lessons recently, huh?”

  “I always pay attention to you, Adem.” He flicks my shoulder with a finger. “You just don’t realize it because you’re so far ahead of me most days, it looks like I’m standing still instead of running full speed.”

  I start and lift my chin enough to glimpse his tired face, lids sagging,
five o’clock shadow growing in. “Do you always feel like that? You’ve never mentioned it before.”

  A sly gray-blue eye rolls my way, the other one now closed, a distorted wink. “You realize the irony in that statement, yeah? That you can read most human beings you’ve never met better than the smartest scholars can read a children’s book, and yet, you can’t see the struggles of silly old Jin when he’s standing right in front of you, all his pages splayed out for your perusal?”

  I peel my attention away from him and cast it through the glass again, toward Morse. His lips are parted, teeth spread, tongue half an inch from forming his first syllable. “I can see, Jin,” I say. “Perfectly. I just intentionally ignore your words, wide-open book that you are, because you’re my friend. Reading you like I read others would be cheating my way through a relationship. Not fair to you. Not fair to me. Easy, sure. But friendships aren’t supposed to be easy.

  “Friendships are built on trial and error, push and pull, give and take. Having all the answers all the time doesn’t equate to a more functional relationship—in fact, from experience, I’m pretty sure it’s the opposite. I want to be your friend, Jin, so I look away from your words and wait for you to speak them when you think the time is right.”

  Jin opens his mouth, slack jawed, and tries to reply, but it comes out as gibberish, thoughts in disarray. He gives up and says instead, “Gods, Adem. If only you were as cold as you pretend to be. That would make things so much simpler.”

  But life, I don’t respond to him, isn’t meant to be simple. Far from it.

  Life is complicated in good ways. Life is complicated in awful ways.

  Just ask DuPont and Stiegel and Tanaka and Geller and Monica Wallis who lost her legs.

  Just ask Morse, who finally says with trembling lips:

  “The program is a decrypt snake, as it’s known to coders. It’s meant to slip past high-level encryption systems repeatedly over a period of time and steal very tiny amounts of information with each pass, so as to make its activities less likely to trigger the encryption system’s defenses.”