AQUA (The Elements Series Book 1)

by Korn, Tracy

  "And that's it for today. Don't worry if you don't remember how to use the interview stations. A tutorial that will walk you through everything will be uploaded to your bracelet dashboards, so don't be intimidated. It will all be second nature when the time comes to use any of this equipment," Etta says to the group, then smiles directly at Arco as everyone starts to disperse. "Lunch will be served in about an hour, so you're all free to go to the student center, or back to your rooms, whatever you want until then. Remember the neural links will give you a 10-minute warning, so don't be alarmed when you hear a voice in your head!" she calls after everyone with a chuckle, then starts making her way over to Arco as Liddick spots him and angles his head over to a booth. Arco shakes his head and motions to another, the booth that he'd coded for a moment just like this.

  "How is she?" Etta asks, startling him as he turns around.

  "She's fine, sleeping. Ms. Karo gave her some kind of brainwave stabilizer. I think it was like a tranquilizer because it knocked her out."

  "Sounds like a reset shot. This happens to lots of freshes. I'm sure she wasn't the first one down there today and won't be the last. She should be fine for next time, though. The nanites work like little vaccines, so they'll watch for the same biopattern if she starts down that road again and will adjust all her levels automatically."

  "I thought they were supposed to do that automatically already," Arco replies, an edge in his voice. He didn't like the idea of billions of robots crawling around in their blood manipulating their systems—probably even spying on everything and feeding it into some giant mainframe. Things don't run the way they do here for 80 years without some kind of leash on the population.

  "Well, they need to be exposed before they can learn, right? They're amazing, but they're not psychic," Etta says, smiling to one side. "Lunch is in an hour, so be expecting the neural link reminder. I'm in your contacts if you have any questions, OK?"

  Arco nods, then turns his attention back to Liddick, who's waiting at the station Arco had identified. He crosses to him in a handful of strides, angling his chin toward the viewing window and the control panel just below it.

  "Pull up the Abe Lincoln sim-corp," Arco asks Liddick, who puzzles briefly as he translates the abbreviation with the how-to instructions Etta has just given everyone about simulated corporal versions of someone from history. He keys in the instructions, and in seconds, the viewing window flickers until Abraham Lincoln appears.

  "Good afternoon. What would you like to discuss today?" Lincoln says, thumbing his lapels.

  "Tell us the story of your life," Arco replies, then keys in the button combination to mute the speaker while launching the privacy screen he'd installed.

  "What did you just do?" Liddick asks, looking around for the source that has silenced all the ambient noise in the room.

  "We're scrambled in here now because I coded this station earlier. See the blue outline?" he asks, looking up, then down. "They can't see it from the outside, but when that blue light turns on, I know they can't monitor us," Arco replies.

  Liddick nods, impressed. "And how is he not reacting to us?"

  "Because I just asked him for his life story, which will trigger the lecture mode instead of interview," Arco answers as Liddick's eyes widen.

  "How do you know how to do all that already? We don't have these things topside—they don't even have them in Skyboard."

  "Skyboard…" Arco shakes his head. "Guess they don't have everything there after all, then, do they? What a façade—just like this place."

  Liddick narrows his eyes. "What do you mean like this place?" he asks, wondering what Hart knows.

  "I tried to program this thing to pull up the staff file on Rheen, but guess what, it locked up. So then I sent the algorithm to pull the sim-corp stored data on her, all the cache, all the cross references, everything from her weird hair to what her friends and enemies say about her, anything that has ever been monitored that could be turned into a composite like this," he says, gesturing to the lecturing, muted Lincoln. "Should work just like it works for any other historical figure you queue up, right? Just punch in a name and get the computer's best guess of what the person is actually like, but all I got was a State promo feed on a loop." Arco spits it all out in one breath before shifting his weight away from Liddick, crossing his arms over his chest as the muscles in his jaw tighten again.

  "She told you, didn't she?" Liddick says quietly, then takes a seat in one of the soft brown chairs.

  "Parts of it. She told me you would tell me the rest," Arco squares his stance and turns to face Liddick. "Why do you know the rest?"

  Liddick exhales, bracing his elbows on his knees and pushing his hands over his face.

  "It's a long story, man," he starts.

  "Last I checked we were going to be here awhile," Arco says, bringing his hands to his hips.

  "A lot longer than we thought, that's for sure," Liddick says, meeting Arco's narrowed glare.

  "What are you talking about? What happened in Jazz's advisor meeting?"

  Liddick takes in a quick breath and straightens in his chair before dropping his gaze to answer, "We're never going home, Hart. There are no port calls. There's nothing but that," he says, jerking his chin at the bowed window and the endless water just beyond it.

  "We've had people visit us on port-calls," Arco replies, but in the pit of his stomach, he remembers what the trace he ran on Arwyn's last port-call started to read.

  "Those weren't from real people," Liddick says.

  "Then what were they? What did you and Jazz see in your advising sessions?"Arco asks, his voice pulling tightly around the words.

  "What did she tell you?" Liddick replies, his dark brows drawing together as they stare at each other for a few seconds, neither wanting to acquiesce. They were not friends, not for years, but each of them knew in the back of his mind that if they were going to make any progress at all, they would need to put the past aside and be allies, at least for now.

  "She said she saw your brothers," Arco answers, looking toward the enormous expanse of dark water through the window across the room. "They were in trouble…and so was Arwyn. She said Liam told her to pretend to be what they wanted, whoever they is."

  "What kind of trouble?" Liddick asks, now getting to his feet, his eyes sharpened on every blink, every twitch Arco makes.

  "Something about a container that Lyden and Arwyn were in. She said Lyden tried to fight someone, and then something about her father. Her father," Arco enunciates the last word as if to convince himself.

  "Did she see the water? The lines on Lyden?" Liddick asks, nearly breathless. Arco shakes his head.

  "She didn't mention anything like that, but she was fading pretty fast with whatever Karo gave her. What did you see? What happened to Arwyn?"

  Liddick takes in a deep breath, moving his hands to his hips as he looks down at the floor trying to find the right words to relay what he'd seen in there. Hart has a trigger, especially about his sister, and no one needs to see that go down right here in the middle of this fishbowl.

  "She was all right at first—she was just locked in a clear room next to Lyden, then started yelling and fighting when they filled Lyden's room with water. Rheen and Styx came in to observe."

  "Rheen and Styx?"Arco's eyes widen. "And what do you mean she was all right at first?"

  "Rheen was supervising it all, and Styx just looked like he was consulting. They did something to Lyden, to his chest. He had these red lines that seemed to be…" Liddick forces himself to remember as he swallows and looks toward the dark sea pushing back at the window on the other side of the room, his brows and the set of his mouth fighting against the pressure to fold in on themselves. "They were like gills. They just appeared down either side of his chest when the water filled his room and he couldn't get any air. He was thrashing until he jerked a few times and then just stopped," he says, looking back up at Hart now and succumbing to the struggle with his composure, the same shock regis
tering on his face as when he had first watched the scene. "I thought he was dead, but he wasn't. He pressed his hands to the glass wall trying to get Arwyn's attention—to let her know he was OK because she was wrecked—except he wasn't OK. He was a fish, Hart. A damn fish!"

  Liddick's stomach knots, and he opts for the chair behind him again. He leans forward as he sits, resting his head on the fist he brings up to meet it, his blond hair falling forward and exposing the darker roots.

  Arco is frozen where he stands. His initial impulse is to believe Wright because he can almost feel it tearing into him, but then, this is Liddick Wright, and he should probably tell him to go to hell—that this was nothing to spin about because something definitely happened in there with Jazz, and he needed to know what it was.

  "I'm…sorry," Arco finally says, unable to reconcile more. "But maybe it was just some kind of projection, like a subconscious worry or something?" he grasps, although he knows it would be impossible for both Jazz and Liddick to see the same things if that were the case. Liddick looks up at him, seeing the effort, and at least appreciates that.

  "I wish that were it, but we both know it's not," Liddick replies, taking a deep breath and blowing it out hard.

  Arco steels himself. "The others, Arwyn…Liam and Jazz's father?" he says after several seconds, and Liddick doesn't answer for several more.

  "Liam did the surgery. They made him put those things in Lyden because they said they'd kill me if he didn't do it, then they made him stay in there while they tested it all. He was the supervising physician. Jazz's father was the biocoder who mixed the hybridizing solutions so the gills would take."

  "But her father is dead. The hydrogen plant accident…"

  "That was never him, aren't you listening to me? I don't know what happened or how he got to that holding facility they were testing in, but it wasn't him at the plant that day, just like that biodesigner in Skyboard isn't Liam," Liddick says.

  "And Arwyn?" Arco asks again, clenching his teeth in preparation. Liddick takes in another breath and looks up squarely at Arco.

  "They'd made her fireproof, Hart," he says very quietly. Arco's chest tightens as the words squeeze out all his air.

  "What?"

  "Just like they made it so Lyden could breathe under water," Liddick continues, then pauses. "She's alive, but when they lit her on fire, only her clothes burned away in that container next to Lyden," Liddick's chest compresses and his throat closes up as he feels the news shoot through Hart, and he clenches his teeth against the emotional reverberation of it. "I'm sorry, man."

  Arco bites down hard, sniffing back the tears that claw at the back of his throat, then swallows them down where they wrap around his heart like barbed wire pulling taut. He can't talk. He wants to scream, to hit something until it breaks into a hundred sharp, splintering pieces, but he can't do either closed up in this little cage with Wright. He begins to pace, one hand on his hip and the other wrapping around the back of his neck.

  "Liam did that to her?" Arco finally manages to say, cutting a wild eye at Liddick.

  "I don't know. If he did, it was because they made him, and they'd have gotten someone else if not him—probably someone not as good, and then she might be…" Liddick starts, then thinks better of the direction that's heading as he gets to his feet and takes a step toward Hart, "…they're alive, and the people we think are them aren't them. We have to focus on that," he says, trying to meet Hart's eyes, to get him to come back into himself before he does something stupid. "Hey, I know, all right. I know better than anyone what this is like. But we need to help them. They're reaching out to us to help them."

  Arco stops pacing and crosses his arms over his chest as he looks at Liddick. He swallows again, then takes a deep breath and holds it for a second before letting it fall out of him. "I think you're actually right about that," he says, his voice thick as he looks again at the ground and clears his throat. Liddick watches him, feeling the swimming in his own stomach, and waits as Arco finishes wrestling with it. "I found an echo in the algorithm of the cuff mainframe the night we got here," Arco finally explains. "When they put the bracelet cuffs on us at the interview, they didn't tell us anything about them, not really. Didn't you think that was split?"

  "I did, but there was a lot going on then," Liddick answers.

  "Exactly. And they counted on that. What they didn't count on was you and Jazz hearing that marlin."

  Liddick's air rushes out, and his expression hardens against the punch he suddenly feels to his gut.

  "Jazz told you that?" he asks, feeling each little claw of it climbing up his back. She wouldn't tell Hart about that night, not him of all people.

  "No, she didn't tell me," Arco replies, shoving his hands into his pockets as he turns to face Lincoln, who is still silently lecturing. "I followed you that night you met up. I was worried about her when I could tell you were spinning about the rat…I didn't trust you."

  Liddick takes a motivated step toward Hart, then stops himself. "I saved her that night, you chutz. Was I supposed to let her become the butt of every joke until Nann's port-festival? Did you really want people to remember her like that? For her little sister and her mother to remember her like that? No one else saw what we saw, Hart!" Liddick's throat flushes with color, and his teeth lock together with the effort to restrain himself.

  "Zone, I get it…just sit back down," Arco says, looking from side to side and noticing that they're starting to draw stares from a few girls across the room. "But that's why I had to find out what was happening, all right? I couldn't hear you anymore after you went up that dune, so I went home and started examining my cuff. I couldn't get it off—in fact, when I tried, it made itself smaller so it wouldn't even slide over my wrist. When I stopped, it went back to normal size. It's like it had a mind of its own—it could read what I was doing, so I knew then that it was more than just a scannable ticket for the shuttle with our medical and school records like they said."

  Liddick feels his pulse slow and his breathing relax as Arco crosses to the chair in front of him. Liddick moves back into his own chair and scrubs his hands over his face. To our corners, then, he thinks, chastising himself for thinking Jazz would ever tell Hart what he told her that night. He'd never told that story about Liam to anyone before, and she had to know that too.

  "How did you hack it?" Liddick asks, pushing the thoughts of Jazz aside.

  "After my roommate went to sleep that first night, I managed to pull up the same screen we just saw in the advising session—it was accidental then. I somehow pushed the right place on the cuff, and once I was in, it was just a matter of coding a workaround to reboot the system and get to the mainframe."

  "But how did you know how to do that? We've been here two days," Liddick asks.

  "I don't know. I was awake almost the whole night tinkering with it, hacking into this interview station from it," Arco says, gesturing to Lincoln, "…the whole time wondering how the hell I knew what to do, what the symbols and numbers meant. I've always been pretty decent with patterns, coding, but not like this. They put that bracelet on me and something just clicked on."

  "That's why Jazz could hear the marlin that night…something must have been activated in some of us with these cuffs. Have you heard any of the others talking about the same thing happening to them?" Liddick asks. "Ellis has been Captain Nanite since the port festival," he says, rolling his eyes.

  "I don't know, I haven't been paying a lot of attention with everything else going on."

  "All right, but if it's the bracelets, Gaia had to know something like that would happen, so why would they store Liam's message on there for anyone to find?" Liddick asks, leaning in on his forearms.

  "They didn't. It's not on the mainframe for anyone to find, it's just an echo." Liddick raises an eyebrow, and Arco exhales impatiently. "OK, look," he says, leaning toward Liddick and opening his hands, "when information is in a place, then deleted, it leaves an impression. Think of it like walking on the be
ach—you leave a footprint when your foot isn't there anymore, right, and then the water comes along and washes that footprint away, but the microscopic abrasions to the individual grains of sand can't be washed away, at least not instantly. No one ever sees those because first of all, they're impossible to see with the naked eye, and second, all the grains are scattered into different directions, and your eye can't trace all the paths at the same time even if it could see the microscopic abrasions. But if someone could trace all the grains and then reassemble them with the exact original geometry, they could reconstruct your footprint," Arco says, looking at Liddick for some sign of comprehension.

  "OK, I can see that, but what does that have to do with Liam's message, or what Jazz and I just saw in there?"

  "After I found out about what happened with the marlin, I wrote an algorithm to find the data signature—the footprint—for that phrase it said about never seeing it coming, then I put in the time stamp. It collected all those scattered grains of sand, and from that, I was able to reconstruct the footprint and trace where it came from. Wright, that wasn't a marlin talking to you, it was an echo from Liam. He left a data signature in the code."

  "You traced it? Where?" Liddick says urgently. "I know it's from him—it's not the first time I've heard it, or something like it, but I can't get a lock on where it's coming from," he says, moving to the edge of his seat.

  "I don't have exact coordinates yet, but the ping is coming from somewhere inside the core," Arco replies.

  "Can you trace it again now that we're here? Can you find out exactly where they are?" Liddick asks.

  "I don't know. Maybe if I had more time. Since the trace was cut, it would take at least a day just to get to the plot points where it left off. Not to mention I don't have automators here to help carry the ping camouflage, so add even more time because the ping will have to run in the background of the rest of the programs instead of invisibly on top of them. Did Jazz's dad say anything? If he did, I can rig a trace the same way as the marlin message. Like the grains of sand, remember?" Arco says.