by L. J. Hatton
“How’s it coming?” I asked Klok.
“The bulk of the files are technical drawings and markups,” he rat-tatted. “There are several mentions of Cyril in the margins, along with works listed via a code for which I do not possess the key. There are many pictures saved to the hard drive. I believe this one is significant.”
He pulled up an image of our father and a much younger version of Winnie’s grandfather from before he needed the crutch. They stood next to a couple of strangers in front of the castle-like building we’d seen in other photos.
“That’s definitely Baba,” Winnie said. “And Magnus, but who are the others?”
“There is a high probability that this one is Cyril Bledsoe,” he said of the red-faced man Jermay had noticed in the photos from the briefcase.
“How’d you get his last name?” I asked.
“I conducted an image search. This building is named the Bledsoe House and was the second attributed to famed architect Ferdinand Klein in 1902. There is a substantial amount of information on it in multiple databases worldwide, as it is favored by students of art and design. The original owners are deceased. Their descendants currently reside in it, including Cyril Bledsoe and his daughter, Maggie, who is a child and also deceased ten years ago.”
“Back up,” Birch said. “Is any of the information useful? Did you get an address?”
“Yes. I used the address to determine the quickest route from here to there. It isn’t close, but if we can catch another ride, we will be closer.”
And the closer we got to Cyril, the closer we got to our father.
We packed up, cleaned up, and left once the lounge was closed for the night. It was too late to get a car, but an after-hours airport shuttle was dropping off a family of guests as we exited the hotel. We climbed on as soon as they were clear.
“You kids headed for the airport this late?” the driver asked. “Alone?”
“Not really,” Winnie said.
She convinced him to take us another square forward on the hopscotch board we’d have to cross to reach the Bledsoe House.
We were still in Death Valley, and this time the best we could do for a place to crash was a couple of connecting rooms at what passed for the only hotel around. Birdie wouldn’t have wanted to see this one, and I wouldn’t be doing any spontaneous water ballet in the bathroom. The place was gross.
“Two more hours and we would have been out of Death Valley,” Jermay groused. “Two. We could have pushed it.”
“No we couldn’t,” Winnie said. “He was too old. If I’d pushed him any harder, it could have caused an aneurysm.”
“Then we should find another driver.”
He pulled the chain on a ceiling light made from antlers. The light bulb hadn’t been used in so long that it gave off the smell of charred dust and cast dead-bug shadows on the ceiling. Fading watercolor prints hung in cracked frames above a pair of small beds that were covered with rodeo-themed comforters. The head and footboards were wagon wheels.
The whole room was western, sort of. Somewhere an aging cowboy had a yard sale, and all of his stuff ended up here. The lamps were set atop dingy boots. A resin bull with a broken horn carried the table on its back, and the two chairs were covered in cracked saddle leather.
“Tomorrow,” I promised. I was not staying in that room more than one night. “We’re all wiped out. Cyril doesn’t know we’re coming, so he can’t run off.”
“But two hours,” Jermay whined, drawing out the words. “I want to be back in civilization.”
“It’s only a temporary break, anyway,” I reminded him.
There was one oasis of technological bliss between us and Cyril’s house. One of several unincorporated areas within the dry zone where people fought to stay off the grid.
“Can the next place at least be clean?” Birch asked. “The taps here are shaped like revolvers, and I don’t like showers that spray on more dirt than they wash off.”
Apparently the lights weren’t the only thing that hadn’t been used in a while. The faucets ran brown for the first few minutes until the pipes cleared of sediment.
I knew Jermay was really upset when he missed the setup for a dirt joke at Birch’s expense.
“If no one’s going to listen to me, I’m going to my room! Oh wait . . . I’m already there! If I get eaten by bedbugs, it’s on your head!” he complained, then jumped onto the bed nearest the wall and turned his back to us.
Sometimes Jermay’s humor was charming. When he pouted, it mostly made me want to shoot him with one of the faucet revolvers.
“I guess that’s our cue to mosey on next door and give y’all some space,” Winnie said. The fake twang clinched it. We were all losing our minds. “I’ll be sure to set the alarm for two hours so we can mark the occasion.”
Jermay frisbeed a horseshoe-shaped pillow at her.
There wasn’t nearly as much space in our new rooms as there had been at the Harts and Palms, but at least the bull table was big enough to fit the computer. While the others went to bed, Klok sat vigil with me.
“Do you get insomnia like Magnus, too?” I asked Klok. “Or is this you protecting your sister from boys?”
“We are alike,” he said, without clarifying if he meant him and our father or him and me.
I tried to work, but it was incredibly difficult to keep my mind on the screen when the person across from me didn’t move enough to register a blink. Klok was just being Klok, but I felt like I was being judged.
“I didn’t mean to take your place, you know,” I said. “That part . . . it wasn’t my idea. I didn’t know. I mean—”
How do you apologize for stealing someone’s life?
“Brothers are supposed to protect their sisters. I protect you.”
He kept repeating that line like it was his personal mantra. I wished I could hear his voice.
“You’re not a robot, Klok. You get to decide what you do and don’t want to do, no matter what our father claimed. Are you sure you want me to call you that? Wouldn’t you rather hear—”
Beep.
“Never speak that name. That name is dangerous! That name is gone! I’m Klok. Everything like clockwork. Perfect!”
I wondered if it was Squint or Smolly who taught him that.
I also wondered what people thought when they saw him out and about with his “parents” while he was growing up. Klok would have outgrown both of them by the time he was six or seven, and he probably outweighed them by the time he was five. Keeping him in line must have been a chore, even for someone with a temper the size of Smolly’s. Legend said she’d chased down lion cubs, but they were a lot smaller than Klok, and they couldn’t talk back or argue with a computer’s knack for knowing more than anyone else in the room.
“I grew up thinking our father built you,” I said. “Do you mind me asking how different you really are?”
He showed me a display filled with medical charts and tests. X-rays. Notations.
“I don’t know what most of that means. You’re still human, aren’t you?”
“We are alike.”
I took that as a yes. It also explained why he’d never had a say in how he lived. I didn’t get one, either. We played the parts assigned to us.
“We have located Cyril Bledsoe. What are you searching for?” Klok asked.
“Anything. Contact numbers. Inside intel.”
A reset button that would shunt me back to before my sixteenth birthday so I could stop this mess before it started . . .
“Magnus had a file with the names of refugees; he could have had a list of allies, or more importantly, different wardens and where they’re based. If we know that, we can try to figure out where Nim and Vesper are being held.”
Nim had been taken by a woman, and Vesper a man. I needed more to go on.
“Did you find any notes about that when you were scanning through?” I asked.
He’d stopped listening to me. Klok’s attention was firmly on the thin cu
rtain that we’d pulled closed when we first entered the room.
“What?” I asked.
“I hear something out of place,” he rat-tatted. “There’s too much sound. This late, people are sleeping. Death Valley is silent while people are sleeping.”
The hairs on the back of my neck pricked up. I wrenched around in my seat to check the cut-rate version of a pay box beside the door. The green light was flickering on and off, meaning some of our electronic signals were making it into the open. The curfew scanners could see us.
Klok beeped again.
“I hear . . .”
The end of his declaration turned into a long whine. He leapt across the table and pulled me down as the window blew in, shattered by a swarm of hummers that converged on the computer, smashing the screen with their bodies.
Jermay was on his feet. He grabbed one of the pillows off his bed and swatted at the hummers, but two dozen had imbedded themselves in the screen, with half their bodies poking out on either side. They’d destroyed the keyboard, too.
“What’s going on?” Winnie tripped through our connecting door, half asleep and barefoot.
“They found us,” I said.
“This fast?”
“The pay box shorted,” I told her. “We weren’t shielded.”
“Look out!” Jermay shouted.
The hummers, having neutralized their first target, were disengaging from the computer in search of other contraband signals in the room. Or, in our case, Klok and the golems. Jermay grabbed the computer and ran it into the bathroom. He threw it in the tub and turned on the water.
“Fry it,” he said. “Kill them before they get back in the air.”
I smashed one of the cheap exposed bulbs around the bathroom mirror and used my body to bridge the gap between the socket and the shower. Current crackled white and yellow down my arm, arcing toward the hummers’ ultra-conductive bodies.
We ran out of the bathroom and left them sparking.
Jermay propped the door shut with a chair, just to make sure nothing could escape.
As bad as the room had been before, it was an absolute wreck of ripped and broken furniture now. A handful of straggling hummers had chased Xerxes and Bijou around the room until Klok managed to trap them in an ice bucket, which he handed to me for disposal.
“Sisters protect brothers, too,” he wrote across his screen once they’d been added to the pile in the bathroom. “Shh. It’s a secret.”
“Where did those things come from?” Winnie asked. “If they’d been dispatched by one of the wardens tracking us, there’d be uniforms all over the place, and we’d be on lockdown.”
“It was a regulator unit,” Birch said. He carefully approached the broken window for a peek outside. “No vehicles or personnel. It’s completely automated to destroy prohibited tech as a penalty for breaking curfew.”
“If the walking Commission wiki says it, it must be true,” Jermay said. He pulled the curtain all the way back, allowing us to see the deserted parking lot.
“Don’t act like this was my fault,” Birch snapped back. “It wasn’t my room they came to.”
“Do you think that makes you look more innocent?”
“Stop it!” Winnie said, and this time she didn’t give them a choice. They were stuck in place, silently scowling.
“How long are you going to leave them that way?” I asked.
“I’d say until they could act their ages, but we don’t have that kind of time. They can move once we’re ready to go.”
“Is it really safe to leave?”
Klok cocked his head, listening to the city through the opening.
“I believe Birch’s conclusions to be correct. There are no additional sounds to indicate human personnel or vehicular incursion. Death Valley is silent at this time of night.”
That was a close one.
The local authorities had no idea who we were or what they’d destroyed. Thanks to the hummers, no one would ever be able to recover the drives.
“Then we’re in the clear,” Winnie said.
“Unless any of those things were equipped with cameras. They send photos in bursts. If they hit the official wire, we’re sunk,” I said.
“I agree,” Klok said. “I suggest we leave before the authorities come to collect their devices.”
“Boys, fetch the bags,” Winnie instructed. “We’re out of here.”
CHAPTER 23
“Can I say something?” Jermay asked.
“If it’s ‘two hours,’ I’ll kill you,” I told him.
“And I’ll help hide the body,” Winnie said.
“Fine, but you do realize we’d be in another suite by now? And we’d still have the computer.”
“The computer is unnecessary,” Klok beeped. “I can remember the information without it.”
“There were two hundred gigs of files on that computer,” I said.
“My memory is augmented,” he reminded me. “I remember.”
We limped into the next town after walking sixteen miles. We couldn’t fly. Even if I could have overridden the dampening nets to allow the golems full power, I couldn’t physically remove the nets without crashing the curfew system. With them in place, we’d have to fly low, so someone might have seen us.
“We should stop,” Klok said.
“We’re too close to the last motel,” I told him. “Twenty miles is the minimum.”
“You are displaying signs of extreme fatigue. As are Jermay, Winnie, and Birch. As am I. Physiological markers indicate that progress will remain minimal, but I cannot trust my readings due to interference. I should also warn you that Xerxes is getting wiggly in my backpack. I think he’s going to act out if we don’t let him run.”
Spoiled-rotten gryphon.
Zero arguments and another mile down the road, we had ourselves another room. It wasn’t the Harts and Palms, but it was a suite with a secure door and a charming lack of western decor. There was absolutely nothing gross, crawling, or gurgling in the bathrooms. I wasn’t even sure Winnie had to convince the man at the desk to give us the key. I think he took pity on us based on how we looked.
Klok face-planted on the biggest bed after flashing me with “My idea to stop. I get first pick because I am not a robot.”
He’d never looked more artificial than lying down with his armor plating on display, and he’d never sounded more human.
“So how long do we stay here?” I asked. We’d made it to Jermay’s oasis in the dry zone, so we didn’t have to worry about tripping any tech alarms. That was an advantage worth exploiting.
“Let’s start with a day and see what happens,” Winnie said. “I saw a train schedule in the lobby. Tomorrow we can see which lines are running and if any of them are cross-country. That could cut days off our travel time.”
“Don’t say anything else,” Jermay told us. “I think we should switch to a need-to-know policy.”
He flicked his gaze through the doorway to one of the side rooms where Birch had disappeared on entry. We couldn’t see him, but it was a safe bet that he’d tucked himself away with some unfortunate piece of greenery that was about to hit a renaissance.
“You’re not starting that again.” Silent communication had given Winnie an expressive face, but sometimes a plain old eye roll was all the moment called for.
“Maybe it’s not a bad idea,” I said.
“You did not just say that!” She glanced toward the other room and lowered her voice. “You know Birch isn’t capable of betrayal.”
“Not intentionally, but he’s naïve and too trusting, and his perception of the real world was stunted by his time with the wardens. I think he’s capable of slipping with the best of intentions.”
He couldn’t read people, and he only had two reactions to strangers: total trust, or none at all.
“You have to admit there are a lot of coincidences building up,” Jermay said. “What are the chances that we picked a motel room with a pay box that just happened to shor
t out while we were there?”
“It was a cheap piece of junk in a no-tell motel. Even the lights didn’t work right! You can’t expect Birch to keep defending himself!” Winnie protested.
“I’m not accusing him,” I said. “But this way, everyone will know for sure, even Jermay. Then we can consider it settled and move on.”
“It’s already settled for me,” Winnie said. “But if that’s what you want, I’ll hop back down to the desk and see if I can manage a second brain-seize without killing the guy at check-in just so you don’t have to share a door with us.”
“Winnie, wait. We don’t have to decide anything now. We can—”
“You decided the second you didn’t tell him no.” She glared at Jermay. “Birch is not the one acting out of line around here.”
“Winnie . . .” Jermay began.
“Save it. I’ve heard the ‘community first’ speech before. The problem is, you can lose so many people in the name of the group that the group ceases to be. I guess it’s a good thing I’ve got experience with exile.”
“Everyone just stop!” I shouted. “This is the seventeen miles talking. It’s exhaustion; it isn’t us. We don’t leave people behind.”
“Tell that to Birdie,” Jermay said.
“That was not the same thing, and you know it. You said it yourself, Jermay, we’re stronger together.”
My declaration ended with the sound of applause. A slow, purposeful clapping, and this time, it definitely wasn’t my imagination helping me through a difficult situation.
“Very well said. Not the most eloquent of speeches, but you get top marks for earnestness.”
The sound of that voice sent frost through my veins. I reached for Jermay’s hand; he reached for mine. Winnie stood beside my other shoulder in solidarity once again. We turned together to face a danger greater than our own discord.
The outside door to our room was open, and Warden Nye was leaning against the jamb.
“This isn’t real,” I told myself—out loud, so I could hear it. “It can’t be real. Not both of them.”
I’d finally figured out what my nightmares were trying to tell me: they were the reality. Escaping the Center was the dream. I was still a prisoner. Nye had never taken the collar off, and my mind had broken under the pressure. That’s why I couldn’t escape him or Arcineaux. I couldn’t outrun myself.
