AER (The Elements Series Book 3)

by Tracy Korn

  "Jazz! I've got you!" Fraya yells, and I feel a hand close over my wrist just before it positions my fingers around one of the rope rungs.

  "I can't open my eyes," I say, my eyelids now feeling like they're nailed in place.

  "OK, here! Take the rope. Can you pull yourself up?"

  "I think so," I answer, feeling for the rope with my other hand too. I find it, then start climbing again.

  "We're almost there! Keep climbing!"

  Liddick's voice begins to fade as the pain in my head grows, like an icepick drilling into the center of each eye. I squeeze my eyes shut even more tightly, then feel hands close around both of my wrists as they yank upward, hard.

  "What's wrong? What happened!?" Arco's voice is close, and I feel hands move over my face. "What's wrong with your eyes? Can you see?"

  All I can do is nearly scream in reply with the intensity of the high pitched buzzing now flooding my head.

  I hear something faintly over the debilitating sound and force my eyes open. Arco's mouth is moving, but I can't hear his words. He looks at Lyden and says something, then starts talking silently to me. I shake my head and have to close my eyes again.

  Liddick! I shout in my mind, but hear only the paralyzing buzz as everything fades to a blinding white.

  ***

  "I tried, but it's getting faster," Calyx says in the distance. I can't open my eyes against the bright light, and when I try to turn my head, nothing happens.

  "It's targeting her—we can't send her back in."

  "That's exactly why she needs to go back in. Do you want to patch this code or not?"

  "It's too risky, Eco. She is not an Alpha Channel tester."

  "What…happened?" I manage to say, the words in my throat feeling like they've been rolled in sand.

  "Jazz!" Arwyn says as a warm hand folds over mine and a cold circle forms in the center of my forehead. "This won't hurt, just stay still for me for a second, all right?" Arwyn adds.

  "There's no breech. I told you she was tough enough…" Mr. Tark says from somewhere.

  "What's…" I start to ask, but Arwyn hushes me.

  "Shh, don't try to talk yet. It causes too much neural activity, and right now we're trying to keep you off the radar, OK? Just try to relax. We'll explain everything when you wake up," she says, her voice getting quieter and quieter against the distant sound of water lapping against a barrier, and the almost imperceptible whispered echo of no more water.

  CHAPTER 29

  Quid Pro Quo

  Liddick

  Grisham scrubs his hand over his patchy stubble, then pushes his long gray hair to the side.

  "Why does Azeris have to help me get what you want from Tarriff?" I ask.

  "Because I can't imagine you just shoved my virtuo-cine equipment under your bed at mommy and daddy's before you left for Gaia. That means Azeris has it," Grisham smiles and widens his eyes, waiting for me to contradict him.

  "What does Tarriff have that belongs to you in the virtuo-cines?"

  "My port network—all the neural loading points for the commercial infobits, the subliminal ad ports, all the input sources I've mapped on the Grid," he answers, then pushes over a small metal cylinder with his foot. It falls down the pile of scrap tech equipment, then rolls across the room. "I'm locked out of direct access, so the only way in is through the back door I built in the virtuo-cine network."

  "So you have been building another uplink hub to The State's Grid…with scrap tech?" I ask, watching the cylinder clang into the far wall. Grisham shrugs and half smiles proudly.

  "Can't get equipment through normal channels anymore," Finn says. "And I can't exactly go picking it through underground channels for him with eyes and ears everywhere these days," he adds, which snaps me back to the problem at hand. Dez has no idea the danger she's in, or the danger she will probably bring down on us if I don't find her.

  "Grisham, my friend won't know to keep her mouth shut about Azeris and our plans to use his port-carnate hub if Tarriff picks her up."

  Grisham's face sobers. He glances up at his assistant and nods. "And why would you be using a port-carnate hub? Crow, bring the speakers," he says. The skinny man slips through a crack in the far wall.

  "Because I need to catch up with the rest of my friends in Admin City. We escaped from Gaia…everything we thought they were doing is true. They're experimenting on people, Grisham. Please…"

  "Admin City, huh? All right—I'll help you find your friend, but listen to me. The longer Tarriff has my network ports, the more control The State has over everyone else, understand? We have less than 300 years topside before this air becomes unbreathable—think they care about us? Pshhh," Grisham says.

  "We're still on the same side. I know Gaia is corrupt, but replacing State propaganda with Seam propaganda didn't work before," I say. "They still took my brothers even when you were filtering the feeds. They put gills in Lyden, Grisham. We need to hit them with something harder than public service announcements."

  He stands and crosses his arms over his chest. "Mr. Wright, I've come to understand your conviction," he says, then starts talking to the ceiling. "These days I'm in favor of a more…direct approach. Let's just say The Seam and I are on the outs; call it a difference of philosophy, but we do still agree that the port-cloud needs to come down. The only way that's going to happen without turning society upside down is if port-carnate becomes mainstream first, but they're taking their sweet time on that agenda," he says, shaking his head. I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from rolling my eyes.

  "I don't have time to debate logistics with you right now, but I'm still on board to help you, all right? First, I need you to find my friend before Tarriff does."

  Grisham's skinny assistant slinks back through the door with two flat, metal circles, holding them up and tilting them back and forth like he's trying to get them to dry or something.

  "Got the speakers," he says, bouncing his eyebrows, then sets the disks on the floor in front of Grisham.

  "Load everything from the swallow field to the North sector. Draw coordinates for every GE female under age 20 with a Skyboard bioprint," Grisham says, walking toward the flat disks with his arms still crossed over his chest. Crow, his assistant, sits crosslegged in front of the disks, then starts typing into a hovering green holographic keypad. The second he stops typing, images of different girls walking around, sleeping, or talking with other people start populating the small projected grid field, but then all the images disappear except one—Dez. She's walking past the far edge of Tinkerer Square, past the crumbling outer warehouse buildings toward Skyboard North.

  "What's the timestamp on this?" I ask. "She's walking toward Skyboard."

  "This is live—you'll never catch her, even if you leave right now," Crow says just as the image of Dez disintegrates. "See? She's already out of range."

  I pinch the bridge of my nose trying to hold back the pressure building in my head, but it doesn't work.

  "She said she's from Sundial City…that has to be where she's going now," I say to the floor, then look up at Grisham. "I need to find her."

  "You won't make it. She's been walking at least a few hours, and will be a few hours ahead of you the whole way. You said you'll need to be back to Azeris's hub by daylight?"

  "I'll find a quick way to him once I get to Skyboard North. I still know some people there."

  Grisham looks at me for a long time, then sighs.

  "Crow, bring the rattle trap, would you?"

  Crow's face blanches. "But I'm not done building it."

  "It's done enough to get him there," Grisham says. "Just going to be a bumpy ride."

  He motions for Crow to pass him the holographic keypad, which Crow pushes toward him. Grisham starts typing, and Crow shrugs at me before heading back through the door.

  "Well, Mr. Wright…I may have a solution to your problem, but it won't be without hazard," Grisham says as he finishes typing, then nods at his keypad. Crow returns with a flat,
circular hub that he can barely reach around and sets it down next to the two disks he used to scan for Dez.

  "I don't have the buffers in, and the field isn't stabilized yet," Crow says. Grisham waves him off.

  "Like I said, it won't be without hazard."

  "Is that a port-carnate hub?" I ask, half hoping it is and half hoping it's not. I haven't seen a hack job like that since the first public service announcements against port-carnate tech came out when I was a kid.

  "Almost," Crow says, snorting.

  "I need you to enter the Grid and deactivate the firewall around my port-network, then freeze Tarriff's access for about 10 minutes. I just need a small window—a little hole in the sky," Grisham says. His eyes flash like the blue in a fresh match, and I can feel his hope ignite in my stomach. He thinks he can get everything back…that everything can be made right again. "So, I'll get you to the edge of the hill—do you still have your Skyboard biochip?"

  "As far as I know," I say. "Azeris masked it before I went to Gaia so it wouldn't come up as contraband if they scanned us."

  "Then I'll get you to the dome checkpoint. Once you're at Skyboard, though, you're on your own. You find your friend and get back to Azeris by whatever means you may still be able to charm for yourself up there, and then you link up with me to download the instructions to restore my port-network. If I don't hear from you in the next 48 hours, I'm putting you wide—your picture, your bioprint, your port-carnate logs…The State will pick you up in a minute and ship you down to Lima. Agreed?" Grisham looks down his long nose at me.

  "Agreed. I know what to do once I get to Skyboard—people will help me there. I just need to get there before Dez."

  "Are you sure she'll even make it there?" Finn asks. "It's a hike from the perimeter to the edge of the dome. Not to mention the sand traps and strangle bushes."

  "Can you help me with that?" I ask. "I'll pay for trackers. You know I'm good for it."

  "Tonight?" Finn sighs. "I'd have to leave now to stir them up."

  "How many can you get?"

  "Well, the old crew will come just because you're asking. The new ones, though? The five of them will probably want at least a hundred credits. Each."

  "Done. Just get me their networks; I'll get it all transferred."

  Finn nods. "All right. I'll send those to Azeris; I'll let him know you lost the Cloudy, too," he smirks, then shoves me.

  "Get out of here." I force a laugh, but my stomach twists at the thought of Dez in the Badlands, let alone outside the perimeter. The Fringe are the ones who make those sand traps—the people Vox calls Fringe.

  Finn smiles, then slaps me on the shoulder. "Stop looking so worried, man. Let's get back to work."

  I nod at him. We're going to do this. We're going to start fixing everything around here again…if I survive this hacked port-carnate hub, I think. "Take care of yourself. If you find her, take her to Azeris, all right? And thank you."

  Finn nods, then raises two fingers to his forehead and brushes them toward me before disappearing through the door.

  "What's that bracelet?" Crow asks, jerking his chin at my wrist cuff. "Can't have any metal in this thing."

  "I don't know what it's made of. They put them on us to go to Gaia. It's supposed to have my records on it, but there's more. It's fused to me—I tried to get it off; it just gets tighter."

  Grisham crosses to me and grabs my wrist, then taps my bracelet cuff with a wrench. The sound is hollow and lasts a few seconds like the timber of a bell.

  "Parmide," he nods. "Can't get this off without a neural disconnect. I can't help you with that—at least not until I get my port-network back and can reinstate my trade channels. Just consider it more incentive to deliver, Mr. Wright."

  "I'll deliver. Just make sure you get those instructions ready for download. I'm not going to have a lot of time to wait around once I get to Skyboard."

  "Well, you can't go to Skyboard wearing…that," he says, eyeing my ripped dive suit. "Crowie, give him that coat."

  "But I just printed it!"

  "Print another one."

  Crow rolls his eyes and throws his long black coat at me, too hard for how close he's standing, and the sleeve whips me in the face. I narrow my eyes at him and press my teeth together to keep what I want to say in my mouth.

  "Thanks," I manage, then put on the coat. "So this thing will send me to the Skyboard checkpoint? There's a hub there now?"

  "Not exactly to the checkpoint. There's a trader post about a quarter-mile from the dome. It's beyond the swallow fields, but you may have a few strangle bushes to negotiate."

  I wave him off. "Who's at the post?"

  "Ensign," Grisham answers, and the second I hear the name my eyes close in a long blink. I let out all the breath in my lungs.

  "Ensign…" I say, shaking my head. "Grisham, he's a complete troglodyte."

  "He can collect my credits, and if anyone gets wise, he can keep them quiet. For good. That's all I need out there," Grisham says, grabbing my bracelet again and needling it with a long silver pin. It immediately shrinks around my wrist, hard.

  "Ow, crite!" I say, instinctively making a fist, like that will stop the contraction. Surprisingly, it does. "Whoa…"

  Grisham nods, satisfied with himself. "Definitely parmide," he says. "Don't let anyone from the hill poke around with that. It's government grade; people there will know that, and then you'll have shadows everywhere you go."

  "Thanks, let's just get this over with," I say, then step into the center of the ridiculous homemade port-carnate hub, which I see is rusted on the inside. Great…watch me get blood poisoning, I think, then remember my nanites. "Wait!" I shout, but it's too late. The white light floods the hub, and the room full of scrap metal fades away.

  CHAPTER 30

  No More Water

  Jazz

  Sand dollar, wake up, Vox says in my head. Her voice is loud and clear, like all other sounds have somehow been vacuumed out of existence. I try to open my eyes, but I can't.

  What's wrong with me? What's happening?

  They unjacked us all for now. Something about the code trying to defend itself. It knows we're trying to stop it.

  I try to think of a reply to this, but the words won't come. More than that, it's like I don't even have words at my disposal. I try to shake my head.

  "Jazz? Are you awake?" Arwyn asks, taking my hand. I open my mouth to talk, but still can't seem to make sound come out. "It's OK, we had to put in several neural blocks, so some may not have worn off yet."

  "Wh…?" I manage.

  "It's a lot to explain. The code is changing. When you patched the first Glyph, it triggered a self-defense mechanism in the code that we didn't know about," she says just as Eco takes a step toward me.

  "We thought when you saw Liddick in the cine, it was a form of NET connection, but now it's more than that—the code knows we're trying to stop it from spreading the news about Biotech and the others suppressing port-carnate technology," he adds.

  "Tell her everything. You said it was hunting her," Arco snarls.

  "Because it was hunting her," Eco fires back. "That's why things went south in the last cine. Once it registered her neural signature, it started pulling what it needed to draw her out of the plot line she was in."

  "Why her? They all have Empath traits," Jax adds. "Vox and Lyden are even both Readers."

  "She was the strongest Empath that close to the Glyph, so her signal was more apparent. She's also the one who patched the last Glyph," Lyden answers from his virtuo-cine chair across from me.

  "Why did she see things I couldn't see, though? I was right there with her, and I didn't see Liddick," Fraya says, sitting up in her chair.

  "All right, everyone just take a breath," Calyx says, walking into the circle of us. She stops in front of the cylinder of spectrum colors that are spinning so fast it almost looks like a long, gradient rainbow cloud floating in the air.

  "Jazz isn't going back in there," Jax says. "No
t if these Glyphs are going to be hunting her now."

  "Is someone going to tell me what's going on?" I finally ask as I push myself to sit up, and my head immediately starts spinning. I close my eyes again.

  "Try not to move too quickly. The neural blocks take a while to completely wear off, so you might feel a little disoriented for the next few hours," Arwyn says.

  "Why did you give me neural blocks? And…Liddick. He was—" I start to explain, but Liam holds up a hand to stop me.

  "That wasn't Liddick. The code found memory scraps in your mind, Jazwyn…the way Liddick looks, sounds, things he's said."

  "Why?"

  "Because the code is fighting back. It's trying to change the game on us," Tark says, walking into our chair circle after Calyx. He scrubs his big hands over his now visible black and gray stubble. "Your father is one hell of an Omnicoder."

  "What are you talking about?" I say, shaking my head.

  "Dad built a failsafe into the code," Jax explains. "When he and Liam built the warning for us on the front end, he left the back end open for when The Seam was ready to add the last few lines and expose Gaia and the others," Jax says.

  "We already know that…it doesn't answer why they had to give me neural blocks."

  "Unfinished code is a weak point because if the last lines of code are unwritten, someone could just as easily write in a change or abort the code all together. That's why Dad built in the firewalls…a defense protocol in case Gaia or Biotech Global, or any of them got wise and tried to stop The Seam's messages from going out."

  "So it's hijacking memories to distract us from finding the right Glyphs to patch?" I ask, turning to Calyx, then feel anxiety from Vox's direction.

  A river of tingles runs down my spine when I think of the code trying to reach into our memories to distract us, and especially Vox's memories…all the experiences she must have had on her boundary scouting journeys—the strangle bushes, falling into traps the people her people call Fringe had set for passersby.