Bobby Sky

by Joe Shine

  “Okay,” she said as she tucked the device back into her pocket. “Kill order’s been canceled. Order is to bring you in now.”

  She took out a pair of zip tie handcuffs.

  “Really?” I asked.

  She hesitated.

  “This was my idea, remember?” I practically shouted.

  “Yeah, I guess,” she said, tucking them back where she’d pulled them from. “Come on,” she grumbled as she guided me away.

  “I’m really glad you didn’t have to kill me,” I told her as we both limped toward what sounded like the last of the fighting. “I wasn’t a hundred percent sure if they would have let you do it anyway.”

  “I’m glad, too. But I still don’t see the point of all this. I assume there is one, right?”

  “Oh, definitely,” I teased.

  “And?” she asked.

  “Well, there has to be a way to fix all this. Y’know, make it right. There’s gotta be something I can do to get Ryo off whatever hit list he’s on.”

  “You honestly believe that?” she said as she gave me a knowing look.

  “I have to try, don’t I? Can’t run forever.”

  “You were off our radar,” she admitted. “We’d lost you.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded.

  “You think we coulda stayed lost, though?” I asked, and we both knew the answer.

  “A lot of us stopped doubting what you could or couldn’t do a long time ago,” she said with that same sad smile. “If I had to put money on anyone being able to, it would have been you.”

  “Makin’ me blush,” I said playfully. “But come on, seriously, you think I coulda done it? Hidden from FATE forever?”

  Her smile brightened. “No. We’d have caught you eventually.”

  “Exactly. So why wait? Let’s get it over with.”

  Chapter 26

  The Homecoming King

  So good being home!

  I can’t believe I actually missed this place. Even the smell, the super clean, bleachy smell makes me smile. Am I insane? I mean, well, all Shadows are to some point, but to miss this place? This torturing, child-killing, stealing-your-soul, and wrecking-your-childhood place? Even with all that, I was still sorta excited to be back.

  And to top it all off, Claire was waiting for me in the arrival bay.

  “Claire?!” I called out, hopping out of the transport. They’d patched me up on the plane so I was all good again.

  “Ah, the world-famous Bobby Sky,” she said, waving politely before going full businesslike on me. “This way. He’s waiting for you.”

  I turned back to the transport. Sam had hopped off as well, walking away without even a goodbye or anything. Not cool. I dashed after her and grabbed her arm.

  “Hey,” I said as she turned.

  She raised her eyebrows as if to ask, what? I knew why she was being distant. Chances were Blake was still going to kill me, so rekindling anything from our past was stupid and would only bring a hurt even fire couldn’t numb. I didn’t care, though. I’d missed her and selfishly I’d be the one dying, so I didn’t have to worry about the hurt part.

  “I’m gonna be fine. Bet you a loonie we hang out later?”

  She allowed me a tiny fine, I give up smile and nodded.

  “Drink it in,” I joked, holding out my arms to show her my whole body as I walked backward away from her, “Drink it in. Last time you might get to see old Hutch here in one piece.”

  She shook her head disapprovingly, but the smile was still there. “Not funny.”

  “It sorta is,” I teased. “Kinda morbid, but still funny.”

  She lowered her eyes. “Take care of yourself, Hutch,” she said.

  “Young love,” Claire teased as I walked over to her.

  “Shut up,” I joked. I gave her a playful elbow. “Did you like that signed, shirtless calendar I sent you?”

  “I opened that in front of Blake, by the by,” she said, pretending to be angry.

  “Ha!”

  As Claire led me out of the bay and into the hallways of FATE, I told her about my life as a pop star. I had no idea if she heard a word, or cared. We eventually ended up in a small room overlooking a series of war games taking place in a hyper-real jungle room. Two teams were slowly stalking one person who was protecting another. Real-world Shadow and FIP practice. I vaguely remembered doing the same. I’d totally gone Rambo, covering myself and my pretend FIP in mud, burying us to stay hidden. I’d pop out whenever anyone was near us and “kill them.” I won the game, which I felt once again proved my point that you can learn everything you need to know from movies.

  Blake and two other military-looking men were in there, chatting and watching the games below. They broke off when Claire cleared her throat. Since last I’d seen him, Blake had gone totally salt-and-pepper gray and had cut his hair. It now sat short on the sides, loosely parted on the top. He still dressed like he was living in an L.L.Bean catalog in his faded jeans, navy flannel shirt, and a light blue fleece vest.

  “Bobby!” Blake exclaimed, his big smile extending to his sparkling eyes.

  “Hey,” I said, not returning it.

  “It’s good to see you,” he said as he offered me his hand to shake.

  I shook it. Might as well. Why was he being so nice?

  “So, did you really give us all up to uh, oh what’s his name, Rino?”

  “Ryo,” I corrected. He definitely knew my FIP’s name. He had done that on purpose to get a rise out of me. It had worked.

  Score one for Blake. It would be the last point he’d get.

  “Right. Ryo Enomoto,” he said. “So? Did you?”

  “I did,” I lied.

  “You betrayed us?” Blake said, sounding seriously hurt.

  “It seemed like the right thing to do after I figured out that you were trying to kill us both,” I said evenly.

  He nodded. “So you risked exposing and destroying us all, your family, so Mr. Enomoto could feel better?”

  “Yep.” Nice try, Blake, but I’m not gonna fall for your smooth talk. I’d been ready for this and had practiced my responses. “You did this to me, remember?”

  “Fair enough.” He put his arm over my shoulder like a buddy as he said, “Come on.”

  “Where?”

  “To show you why Ryo Enomoto and Bobby Sky have to die.”

  He led me toward a part of FATE I’d never been before. A part that was totally off-limits to Shadows. I remembered passing the area and seeing the two armed guards standing on either side of the door and wondering what was back there. Was I about to peek behind the curtain? Looked like it.

  Even though it was Blake who ran this whole show, he still had to pass a retina scan and voice recognition test to get through the doors. The whole time the two guards were pointing their guns directly at his head, ready to kill him if he failed either test. He didn’t and they lowered their guns. The guards stared at me as I passed and I’m sure their confusion about who I was equaled mine about where I was going.

  “Took me a long time to get used to that,” he said as we walked through the door. “The guns,” he added in response to my confused look, “took a while to get used to—loaded guns being pointed at me.”

  “I can relate,” I answered, remembering my first few days here and the number of guns that were pointed at me.

  “I bet.” He laughed.

  The door we’d come through led into a plain, quiet hallway. At the end of the fifty-foot corridor was another door with two more guards. It looked exactly like the other one and for a second I had a Matrix déjà vu moment. We headed directly for the far door. It was quiet in this hallway and our footsteps echoed. The cough I heard somewhere off to my right behind a closed door was the only clue I had that other people were down here.

  The
guards stepped aside as we approached to let Blake pass the security system. Another retina scan, more voice recognition but with a new password, a palm scanner, and finally even a prick of the finger so that some blood could be used in a DNA check. Oh, and guns pointed at the head as usual. Even nuclear arsenals aren’t protected this much. What was back here?

  I followed Blake into a totally dark room. Once the door closed behind us I could only hear him walking forward, so I followed blindly into the darkness. After five paces a dim light above us slowly brightened until the room was comfortably lit, sorta like a movie theater. We were standing in the middle of a plain square room with blank walls. Or so I thought. Suddenly an image appeared at the bottom left corner of the wall in front of us. Then another appeared next to it and another next to that. Once the bottom strip of the wall was filled with images, the pattern snaked back around the other way. Slowly, the snaking images worked their way across and up until the whole wall was filled and there was no space left. All in all, there were thirty images up there.

  As the smaller images had appeared I’d gotten the feeling that they were the puzzle pieces of a much larger, fuller picture. I was right. Once the wall was full the smaller images unfocused, focused, and then began to slide around like tiles until all of them were in the right places.

  It was a park. Not one I knew, but if you’ve seen one park . . . trees, grassy fields, a fountain, kids playing, you get it. Something about it felt off though, strange, but before I could figure it out, the picture faded away and the screen went blank again. Then, like it was a never-ending cycle, a new small image appeared on the bottom left and slowly the screen began to fill all over again. A new picture. I turned to Blake, who I only then realized had been watching me the whole time. Creepy, bro.

  “Figure it out yet?” he asked.

  “I . . . no,” I admitted.

  “Welcome to the Eye, Hutch,” he said ominously. “Snapping and sending us a never-ending supply of new pictures to examine for FIPs to link to our Shadows.”

  This was the Eye?!?

  “These are the pictures from the satellite?” I confirmed.

  He nodded.

  “The ones of the future?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Freeze,” he said out loud to no one, but instantly the images on the screen froze. He walked over to one of the smaller pictures, tapped it, and said, “Focus.” The image became razor-sharp. He pinched the screen and blew up a tiny, tiny speck until I could see it was a car of some kind. Even zoomed in the image was perfectly clear. “Ever see this car before?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Of course you haven’t. It’s a”—he studied the picture for a second—“2047 Hondai, I think.”

  “You mean Honda,” I corrected.

  “No, Hondai. Honda and Hyundai merge in 2037. But we’re not here for this. Just showing off.” He swept the image off the screen and pulled out his own small glass tablet from his pocket. “We’re here for this.”

  The image of a girl, eighteen if I had to guess, appeared on the screen. She had her fist raised and was giving a passionate speech in front of a thick crowd outside a temple. She looked strong, determined, and beautiful because of it.

  “The missile that was fired at your plane was in fact from a terrorist group. It was not us. Did they know it was you when they fired? No, they simply wanted to take out a plane and yours happened to have the bad fortune of being the one they fired at. It was bad luck for you but good luck for the world in the end. This,” he said, pointing at the woman on the screen, “is eighteen-year-old Inna Yagodina from Astana, Kazakhstan.” A younger picture of Inna appears on the screen and she’s wearing an International shirt. “And this is her now, at fourteen—around the same time that your plane was shot down. She’s a huge fan and like many of your devotees is devastated that you all died. What makes her so important, though, is who her father is and what she ends up doing about it. Stas Yagodina is a back-channel financier of terrorism, and he is the man responsible for getting the money to the group that shot down your plane. In mourning, Inna will refuse to leave her room. Her father, assuming she’s in school, gets careless and takes a phone call at the house. Inna will overhear a conversation she isn’t supposed to and learns that her father is not the simple businessman she believes but a terrorist and the reason International is dead. She doesn’t cry or indulge in woe-is-me; she gets angry and acts.

  “Inna offers her services as an informant for the US and eventually becomes one of the greatest assets the US will have. She single-handedly causes the complete collapse of a dozen terrorist networks around the world by spying on her father. After that she will insist we make what she’s done public to inspire others to do the same. And boy, do they. Information starts pouring in from all over and terrorist groups around the world fall like dominoes. She is the symbol and voice of her generation in the battle against terrorism and basically shows the world the true power youth can wield when they are organized and determined. Believe me, the results are astounding.”

  The picture of Inna on the podium appeared back on the screen.

  “That’s why it is so important that Bobby Sky and Ryo Enomoto of International die,” Blake concluded.

  I got it. I really did. It made sense, but . . .

  “Okay, I get it. Then let us go. I can explain it to him and he’ll understand. We’ll disappear. No one will ever know we aren’t dead.”

  “It’s just not worth the risk, Hutch,” Blake said with a finality I recognized. “Bobby Sky has to die,” Blake said in the silence. “Nonnegotiable. But he’s an imaginary person, no? A figment of the imagination by the name of Bobby Sky must go, but Robert Hutchinson? One of the best that’s ever passed through these halls? Well, I could use someone like him.”

  My head jerked up. “Are you really . . . ?”

  He smiled. “I’m going to bring you home, Hutch. I have use for someone like you.”

  “My home is by Ryo’s side. Death is worth keeping him safe. Why are we even having this conversation? You pumped me full of stuff that makes it impossible to choose anything but him. This is pointless.”

  I shook my head. I’d rolled the dice and come up empty. I’d come here hoping I could fix it. There was no way to fix this. No way to make it right. Nothing I could say to Blake would allow Ryo to live. It was in my DNA to die protecting him. I was ready to do that now. I had faith in Akiko that she’d keep Ryo safe.

  “I’m not going to kill you,” he went on. “I did all of this to you. That is correct, but then that means I also know that with the right incentives anything is possible. Hutch, I’m going to do some terrible, unforgivable things to you, but in the end they will allow you to lead us to Ryo. We will then unlink you before we kill him so that all the memories from the day you were linked until that moment are erased, this moment included. Witnessing his death will then feel like nothing more than that of a stranger’s and it won’t faze you in the least. Then you can come home.”

  I didn’t like where this was going. What was about to happen?

  A screen on the wall came to life. It was a video stream of Sam. She was sitting at a table cleaning her guns. A normal routine after being out on a mission.

  “Tell me where Ryo is hiding or she dies,” Blake said flatly.

  What? Was he serious?

  “You have until five, four, three, two, one.” And when he hit one and I hadn’t answered, he spoke into his comm device and said, “Proceed.”

  A man appeared from off-screen, walked up behind Sam, and killed her.

  “No!” I yelled as she collapsed to the floor.

  I grabbed Blake by the collar, lifted him up off the ground, and slammed him into the wall. I would kill him for this. There was the sound of automatic weapons being locked and loaded behind me. The two guards from outside had come in and were aiming their guns right at me.
I slowly let him slide down the wall until his feet touched the ground. If he was scared, he didn’t show it.

  “Well,” he started, “I believe I may have touched on something there. Are you ready to tell me now, or shall we continue?”

  I took a step away but kept silent.

  A new image appeared on the screen. Leggo. She was rehearsing in an empty studio.

  “No,” I said, so quietly I’m not even sure it counted as talking.

  “Yes, unless of course you’d like to tell me where Ryo is. Is her life incentive enough to betray him?”

  I had not expected this. I had not been prepared for this. This was a torture I never could have imagined. And yet, I still couldn’t do it.

  “You have until five, four, three . . . two . . . one—”

  “Wait!” I yelled.

  He looked at me, ready for me to speak. But the words wouldn’t come. I couldn’t do it. My mind wouldn’t let me betray him.

  When Blake realized I wasn’t going to say anything else, he spoke into his comm device and said, “Proceed.”

  A woman in leggings and dance gear entered the room and they exchanged a few words before Leggo nodded and the woman thanked her. But as the woman walked behind Leggo, she pulled out a wire and in a flash had it wrapped around Leggo’s neck.

  I wanted to turn away, but I forced myself to watch.

  “Are you ready to tell me now, or shall we continue?” Blake asked.

  I was numb. I was a mixture of fury, pain, and sadness. I didn’t know what to feel or how to feel it. I wanted someone to come in, to stop this, to put an end to it. But I knew that nobody would.

  “Please stop,” I said. “It’s not working. You’re just killing innocent people. I can’t betray him. It’s not working,” I repeated, begging him.

  “Oh, but it is working. Each death is another chink in the armor. I told you this would be unpleasant, but know that it will continue until you find the power to overcome the link. For your sake, and for the next person who will appear on this screen, I hope it’s soon.” Blake sighed before he said, “It pains me we’ve made it this far, but I hope this shows you that I will take it as far as needed.”