“She’s gone, Jack.” Holberton paused. Javier wondered if he was about to bring up his arrival in Vegas, tell Jack that he was certain Amy was dead because he had it from the source. But instead, he said: “We don’t know where, or how, but she’s gone, and now we’re stuck with your crazy mother-in-law. And she’s scrambling every ambulance squad between here and Kabul.”
“… blame her.”
Javier heard rustling, and a sharp intake of breath. “Excuse me?” Holberton said. “What did you just say?”
“I said I don’t fucking blame her! We’re about to launch a full-scale–”
“Shut. Up. Jack.”
“Oh, fuck you, Chris. I’m well aware of operational security. It’s not like I don’t get why I can’t even have a goddamn phone in this place.”
“Only until Wednesday. After that, you can leave any time you want to.”
What was happening Wednesday? Everything in the suburbs seemed fine. Nobody was on edge – not even the humans, who had every right to feel that way. And he hadn’t passed anything that looked suspicious. No smokestacks, at any rate. He listened carefully. The two men were speaking in low tones, now. He flattened himself to the rooftop and leaned over, a little.
Jack stood with his back to the railing. Holberton faced him, with his back to Javier. He was getting a little bald spot at the crown of his head, but he did a good job covering it.
Jack’s eyes lifted, saw Javier, and widened. Two bright red spots rose in his cheeks. Javier lifted a finger to his lips.
“Are you OK?” Holberton asked.
“I think I’ve had a little too much sun,” Jack said, a little too loudly. “I’m going to splash some water on my face.”
“Sure, good idea.”
Jack practically ran for the bathroom. Holberton drifted inside, checking something on his watch. A moment later, the display came on.
The bathroom window opened, and a hand snaked out to wave him in.
It was a tight squeeze, but Javier was able to wedge one foot in, then one leg, then his head and shoulders, then the rest of him. Jack was standing in the shower. It was the only space left in the room. He flicked the fan on. It groaned into wakefulness and sputtered like an ancient propellor gathering speed.
“What are you doing here?” Jack hissed.
“Saving your ass, apparently.” Javier jerked a thumb at the door. “What the fuck is going on, here?”
“I could ask you the same thing. How are you still alive?”
Javier forced his gaze to meet Jack’s. Jack’s eyes were filling with tears, but his knuckles were white. He was torn, probably, between the urge to spill his guts to the one man who might understand his loss, and the urge to beat the shit out of him. They had neither the time nor the space for either “I can’t explain that, right now. We have to get you out of here.”
Jack took a deep breath. “OK. How?”
Javier winced. “You won’t fit through the window, huh?”
Jack lifted a leg. An ankle bracelet clung to his right ankle. It looked lab-made; the colour hinted at cheap feedstock. FEMA hadn’t purchased it from an approved contractor, or anything like that. Which meant it could be hosting any old kind of tracking they wanted. “Oh, that’s some bullshit,” Javier murmured. “I know this place is code-named Stepford, but Jesus Christ.”
Jack snorted. “It’s not Stepford. It’s the Village.”
“The what, now?”
Jack waved a hand. “Never mind.”
Javier ran a finger over the bracelet. “What are you even doing here?”
“They hired me. As a consultant. After…” Jack blinked hard. “You know.”
“I know.”
“I thought I could really help. Use my experiences for good. All that shit.” Jack shrugged. His shoulders sank lower than Javier had ever seen them. “And then they showed me the contingency plans, and…” Jack held up his hand. The knuckles were covered in small cuts in various stages of healing.
“What contingency plans?”
Jack frowned. “You mean you don’t know? Then why are you here?”
“I asked you, first!”
A knock sounded at the door. The knob twisted. It was locked. “Are you OK in there, Jack?”
It was Holberton. “I’m, uh…” He looked at Javier. Javier shook his head frantically. “I’m really not, Chris! I think I’m having some heatstroke, maybe. Or maybe just a… a bad burrito, or something!”
“I’ll call you a nurse,” Holberton said. They heard him walk away.
“A bad burrito?” Javier whispered. “Could you be more racist?”
“Oh, shut up,” Jack said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Javier unhasped the bracelet, then reached out the window and attached it to a stormdrain. With any luck, it would still register Jack as being in the apartment. Next he had to get Jack out, which involved his getting out first, dangling over the side of the roof, and telling Jack to climb out through the window.
“Are you out of your mind? I’ll fall!”
“You won’t fall. If you fall, I really will lose my mind. Literally. So I have a vested interest in you not falling.”
Squeezing his eyes shut, Jack wriggled himself out of the window. It was an oddly quiet process. Out here, there weren’t even dogs to get confused by their display. It was a big contrast to Puerto Limón, and even to the island itself. Jack lost his balance once, but Javier grabbed his hand and held him in place until he could stand up on his own. Then he grabbed both of Jack’s hands, and pulled.
Jack had some seriously sweaty palms.
“Hold my wrists, goddamn it,” Javier hissed.
“I can’t do that without moving my hands!”
“So fucking move them!”
“Fuck you!”
Javier growled and yanked. Jack yelped, but he was able to scramble up and over the ledge. He lay panting on the roof, but Javier was already standing up.
“Come on. Let’s go.”
Jack coughed. “How?”
Javier knelt. “Get on.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish I were. Get on.”
“Is it… safe?”
“It will be if you hold on. If you don’t, we’ll both die.”
“Oh. Great.” Jack draped himself gingerly over Javier’s back. “This is awkward.” He sniffed. “How come all vN smell like waffles?”
Javier took to the air.
They flew.
He ran, then jumped, then ran some more. The library was close to the centre of the prototype city, and he ran ever deeper into it. His feet pounded glittering recycled pavement, and bounced off slippery glass towers. He watched himself reflected, multiplied, in each pane of glass. With Jack on his back, it felt a little like leaping with all the boys he’d lost.
In between the buildings, when his knees rose to his chest and his shirt rode up and the wind went through his hair, he felt more secure. He landed tumbling, ass over teakettle, as one of his more elderly lovers was fond of saying.
Righting himself, he let Jack go. They stood in the crossroads between skyscrapers. They were all dark, save for occasional blips and pings of light fluttering over their surfaces. If he looked closely, he could see the louvers of their glass cladding slowly turning. As they did, they caught the light emanating from strategically-placed LEDs. Anti-bird lighting, probably. Something to keep whatever sparrows still lived in this desert from flying into the towers and dying.
The divinity student he’d fucked before going to Amy for the final time, he’d explained that one passage about sparrows in the Bible. “His eye is on the sparrow,” the student explained, “but God’s not watching it fly. He’s watching it fall.”
Now was probably not the time to explain that to Jack.
“Thanks,” Jack was saying.
Javier shrugged. “It’s nothing.” A flicker of light caught his eye. “I just…”
The four buildings surrounding them were changing. Their
louvers were shifting, and presenting a dark face to him. Something was wrong. When he looked up at the traffic lights, he knew it for sure. Each tiny camera on the intersection was pointed at them. As he watched, botflies zoomed onto the scene. They twinkled above, hovering, waiting, watching.
The building behind them cast their shadow in another direction. Jack stumbled a little in surprise.
“I” the building’s face read.
“HAVE,” read the next.
“LOVE,” read the third.
IN
ME
THE
LIKES
OF
WHICH
YOU
CAN
SCARCELY
IMAGINE
AND
RAGE
THE
LIKES
OF
WHICH
YOU
WOULD
NOT
BELIEVE.
IF
I
CANNOT
SATISFY
THE
ONE,
I
WILL
INDULGE
THE
OTHER.
The words followed each other, faster and faster, becoming a sentence, a chant, a mantra. A car parked nearby suddenly lit up. Its high-beams pointed at him. Its wipers waved hello. Its stereo fired up. It flipped through a selection of sounds, hints of songs and voices, until it settled on one, mid-song, a woman’s voice.
“Shit,” Javier murmured. “Tell me about the contingency plans. Quick. Now.”
“OK. It’s in the food…” Jack stared at the buildings. “Is this some kind of art installation?”
Javier snapped his fingers. “Jack! The food! What about it?”
“FEMA is printing new vN food, starting Tuesday. It’ll be in stores by Wednesday. Same wrappers, different contents. Real public-private partnership.” He swallowed. “It’ll be a small rollout at first. It’ll look like a malfunction.”
Javier tore his eyes from the buildings. “For the Amys?”
Jack shut his eyes. “No, Javier. Not just the Amys.” His eyes opened. “It’s for all of the vN. Everywhere.”
Javier stepped away. “What?”
“It’s true. They’re going to poison the entire system. In a single generation, the total vN population will be diminished to the point of practical extinction.”
He shook his head. He thought of his iteration inside him. If he didn’t grow it quickly enough, it would die there in his belly. “We’ll eat garbage. We’ll stock up.”
“They know. They’re prepared. They’ve had this plan since the beginning. They don’t care if it takes years.”
He remembered thinking the same thing about Powell. Now he might not have those years. Now, he needed Amy more than ever. Which meant he needed Holberton.
Fuck.
“Do you have access to Holberton’s files?”
“Some of them. Why?”
“Give me the login.”
“But–”
“Trust me, Jack. It’s bad enough you escaped – you don’t want to know what I’m trying to do.”
Jack beamed. “You’re trying to bring her back, Javier. That’s what you always do.”
A car whispered alongside them. Its door opened. Inside, a woman was crooning “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Jack whistled low. “Deus ex machina.”
“Don’t get in there. It’s Portia. She’ll crash you.”
Jack looked around. “You know, I think I’ll take my chances.” He gave Javier a sudden hug. It was an awkward straight male in-law hug, but it was still nice. Jack patted his back. Actually patted it. “The password is usually Imperial House. Merry Christmas.”
And then the car was gone.
His legs were exhausted. They felt like they’d been jumping for miles. And they had been. He had journeyed too far in too short a time. He’d survived fire and water and the belly of a whale. He was here, now, in the crossroads of an artificial city, and praying for this to be real.
What had Alice said? They’re always with us.
“Say it’s you,” he said. “Just tell me you’re there. Tell me you’re listening.”
The city remained quiet. Maybe it was just Portia, messing with him. That would be like her: holding out hope and snatching it back. Making him believe, and grinding his faith under her heel. There was no moment she couldn’t ruin. No happiness of his that she hadn’t tried her very best to destroy utterly. None that he hadn’t already destroyed himself.
“Please, querida. Please.” His legs were so tired. They crumpled beneath him. The asphalt was warm on his knees. He shut his eyes. “Please. Forgive me. Please.”
The car was returning. He opened his eyes. The buildings were dark. And Holberton’s car was there, now. Leaving the door hanging open, Holberton ran out into the street.
“Jesus!” Holberton lifted him up. “Holy shit, Javier! I almost ran you over! Fuck!”
The towers were black and silent.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Holberton said.
Javier turned to him. “Can we go to your place, now?”
TWELVE
I’ll Be Seeing You
“We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.”
“What does that mean?” Javier asks.
Ignacio shrugs. “I think it’s a reference within the poem to another poem. The Inferno, I think. That part’s about a count who gets locked up in a tower and with all his sons and grandsons and then gets left to starve.”
Javier turns over to face Ignacio. He is still small enough to fit comfortably beside him in the bunk, but only just. “At least they had each other.”
“Yeah, they had each other for dinner.”
“Eww…”
“It happens. It used to happen here, more often.”
Javier sees a flash of pixels, and shudders. “Stop talking about it.”
Ignacio pets his hair. “OK. Sorry.”
Outside, the rain beats down on the concrete as though it too is a warden itching for someone to punish. It hems them in just as effectively. They have already bathed in it, having taken some homemade soap gotten from pigeon fat and ashes and stolen aftershave out to the yard with them for the hour. Now they are drying off, sort of. The sheets reek of mildew. Then again, so does everything else.
“We have to get you out of here, conejito. You have to eat more, and get bigger, so you can hop the fence.”
Javier shakes his head. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“I’m going to be here for a long time, conejito. You don’t have to be. You shouldn’t be.”
Javier rolls away. “Did I do something bad?”
“Mierda, no. You didn’t do anything. That’s the point. You didn’t do anything wrong. You don’t deserve to be here. You tried to shoplift, and you screwed up. I’m not even sure that’s a real crime.”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters! The law matters. Even here. Your being here should be an indictment of the system, not how the system functions.”
Ignacio often talks about “the system.” Javier isn’t entirely sure what he means by it – whether he means the prison, or Nicaragua, or even the whole world. The scale of the conversation seems to change, night to night. Sometimes he wakes up and Ignacio is writing furiously. During visiting hours, he is always talking to a lot of humans – men and women who stare at him with vacant adoration, who laugh at his jokes even when they’re not funny and hug him hard so he won’t see them shedding the tears that have waited patiently for the entirety of the visit. Javier is the one who sees those things, not Ignacio. He tries to talk to Ignacio about them, sometimes, but Ignacio always waves him off.
“I’m just a man,” he says.
Once, Javier replied with a question: “Will I be a man, when I grow up? Is there another word for grown-up vN?”
Ignacio shrugged. “I don’t know. You’ll
look like a man. A certain kind of man, but a man. You’ll be a machine, though. But that is all this world allows any of us to be.” He paused to rebutton Javier’s shirt and to pull a stray thread away from it decisively. He wound the thread around his finger and stuck it in his pocket. It would probably be useful, later. He rested his hands on Javier’s little shoulders. “Whoever you turn out to be, you’ll have to make peace with that. Someday you’ll look at where you are, and all the choices that brought you there, and you’ll remember everyone you ever met and everything you ever said, and you’ll have to make peace with that, even if it doesn’t turn out the way you wanted.”
Now, lying in the mouldering bunk, Javier knows things must not have turned out the way Ignacio wanted. He has a wife at home. Dionisia. They met in the visitation yard when she was visiting her brother. They courted on Saturdays. She brought fruit and vegetables, and he folded little things for her out of leaves: cranes, boxes, fortune-tellers, even unicorns. They have a baby girl, together. She doesn’t always come to visit. The crowds are too big for her, Ignacio says. She knew him when he was nobody knew him. When he was nothing. And she doesn’t always like to share.
“I wish you could go live with her, when you get out of here,” Ignacio said, once. “But it’s the first place they’d look, I think.”
Ignacio is more excited about Javier’s escape than he is his own release. He and his lawyer – an elderly, functional alcoholic named Gabriel – have argued about it, many times.
“Did you know that you two are in here because of the same person?” Gabriel had asked, once. “Well, not a person, an entity. A company.” Gabriel’s knobby old finger drew a line between the two of them. “The company that made you, and the one that he pirates the patterns from, they’re the same. Lionheart.”
“We’re like family, then,” Ignacio said.
“Well, they’re also the same company that makes the cameras here and programs them, so keep that in mind.”
They know the cameras well. The cameras are the newest, cleanest thing about the place. They’re fuelled wirelessly, no batteries, nothing to short out. The cameras know their faces, their gaits, even their hand gestures. The cameras tell them where to go, at least indirectly. They’re part of the prison scheduling system, which pings their cuffs at certain times of day to go left or right until they arrive at a certain room for a specific job. Javier has done most every kind of job, now: mail, laundry, garbage, kitchen, library. They keep him out of the infirmary because it might trigger him, but sometimes he delivers things there because he moves more quickly than the others.
iD Page 18
