AER (The Elements Series Book 3)

by Tracy Korn

  "This way!" I shout, running in the direction Cathcart pointed.

  "Hey!" he shouts after us, but we just keep running.

  "This looks just like the Vishan tunnels!" Arco says, and he's right. The walls look like they're carved out of a mountain, black, jagged, shiny slabs of glasslike rock mixed in with dull brown…years and years of sand layers flowing like rivers through the sea of black. A light at the end of the tunnel is bright enough for us to see where we are, but I still feel like I'm going to crash into something at any second.

  Liddick! I shout in my mind, hoping we're close enough that he'll hear me, but I don't get a response.

  I hear voices up ahead, but I can't make out what they're saying. "Liddick!" I yell out loud this time, but still don't hear anything.

  The light is getting brighter. We have to be close! Vox yells in my mind as she runs up alongside me. We cross into a big, dark room with torches on the walls like in the Vishan tunnels and see Lieutenant Ridley. She's standing behind an older, pale man who's sitting behind a huge stone desk. The captain—Liddick—is standing in the far corner of the room with the pale guide, except…there are now two pale guides.

  "Stop!" Liddick yells, pointing at us, then pulls a neural baton like the ones from the Phase Two Gaia facility from his belt and holds it to the throat of the pale guide closest to him. "Where is it!?" he shouts again, then kicks the circular stand the guide is standing on. Instantly the other pale guide disappears.

  "Where is what?" the man behind the desk barks. "You said you were here to help us."

  "I'm here to help me," Liddick says through his teeth, and I try to reach for him.

  Liddick…can you hear me? Can you see me? I think, but he just looks at me like I'm split.

  "Folger, just do it! End this whole thing already so we can go home!" Lieutenant Ridley shouts.

  "Stop acting like you know me! You don't know me!" Liddick shouts back, pushing the neural baton harder against the pale guide's throat.

  "Listen to me!" I yell so Liddick can hear me, but he just looks at me again like I'm a ghost.

  Finally…I hear him say in my mind.

  I found you…I think.

  "Get out of my head!" Liddick yells as he reaches for something on the wall, but there's nothing there. "Go away! Get out of my head!" he shouts again.

  Liddick, I know you're in there! I know it's you! I think as hard as I can. He stops grasping at the wall, and I run to him before I realize what I'm doing. I wrap my arms around him as hard as I can. I know it's you…I know it's you…listen to me! I think.

  "Rip?" he whispers, and it's all I can do not to choke. I pull back from him, and he moves his hand to my face as he looks in my eyes like he's trying to find something there…like he's trying to find me there. I laugh and nod as my eyes start burning and my vision blurs with tears. But then he jerks his eyes to something behind me, then shoves me away, shaking his head. I'm an idiot! I'm an idiot for believing you! he thinks, reaching for the wall again, and everything flashes to white.

  ***

  When I open my eyes again, everyone is yelling. I blink hard to focus my vision, and sit up too fast.

  "You're not disconnected!" a technician yells. The room spins for a second, but then resets itself.

  "I am now," I say, sitting up.

  "What happened?" Arco asks, jumping out of his chair, then he grips his knees as the room no doubt starts spinning for him too.

  "It's gone! I don't know, it's just gone!" Eco says, frantically typing.

  "Look out," Calyx says, nearly pushing him out of the way as she takes over typing. "It's wiped…everything. All the patches…" she says as the blood drains from her face.

  "What happened!?" Arco shouts this time.

  Calyx straightens as Eco starts typing again, shaking his head the whole time as the lights in his cheekbones stream a solid line of red. My dad crosses to me and puts his hands on my face.

  "Are you all right?" he asks. Jax is at his side in a minute. I nod to him, and he wraps his arms around Fraya. My dad does the same with me, but I push back from him.

  "What happened? Why is everyone tweaking?"

  Tark stands like a statue covering his mouth with a fist as he stares at a console screen, and my stomach sinks with dread. I look over at Liam, who's biting down so hard I can see the striations of muscles jumping in his jaw. He just keeps shaking his head.

  "It's not true…it's not true…" he says over and over again to himself.

  Lyden scrubs his hands over his face, then pushes them through his dark hair. He blows out a long breath, somehow already behind a console when he looks up at us.

  "The patches have been purged…" he says in a quiet, slow voice. "Somehow, Liddick reset the whole virtuo-cine network. Everything we did is erased," he says.

  "Why would he do that? He was acting like he was seeing things in there…something must have happened," I say, still not quite sure I understand what's going on.

  Eco shakes his head and stops typing. "He's gone…no more Ludwig Sprague anywhere on the Grid. We got a lock on his uplink origin, though; it's a Mainframe office in Admin City, the East side, which is locked down tighter than The State. He couldn't have gotten in there without help," he says.

  "So, someone put him in there; that's possible," I say, refusing to believe Liddick would betray any of us.

  "He still used the storyboarder credential to find the Reset Register. That's where he was heading the whole time. Here are his plot points." Eco projects a green, holographic grid in front of the now motionless, gray virtuo-cine layer column. Red dots move in a fluid, clear vertical path in the code, which I can't read from where I'm sitting.

  "What are you saying? What are you saying exactly?" I ask, but my stomach drops under the weight of the answer I know he already believes.

  "He wasn't randomly finding his way through that cine. His target was to reset the server. He betrayed us— there's no reason he would have accessed our hack or our cine queue unless he found out about the sleeper code and wanted to stop our patch efforts. He's working for the other side," Tark says like he's just stating facts, and without looking away from that same console screen he's been staring at.

  "He wouldn't do that," Azeris says. "Not in a million years."

  "Well, it's done," Eco adds. "The patches we put in place are gone…it was all or nothing. The pro-Gaia, Carboderm, Biotech Global propaganda is going wide, but that's not the worst of it. It somehow leaked into the subliminal feeds too just before everything came back online. Gaia saw us coming."

  Everything in me goes numb. I don't know what to think, and I don't know what I feel. It's everything and nothing all at once. It can't be true. I felt him, I think. He knew it was me. He wouldn't do this.

  He said he was there to help himself…something happened to him. That's not Liddick anymore, Vox says in my head, but I can't even pull words together to respond. I look at Lyden, who seems lost and hollow.

  "It doesn't make any sense," he says, shaking his head, but he's looking right through me. "There has to be something we're missing…" he moves back to the console and starts typing like a doctor resuming CPR pulses over a dead patient. I feel all the hope drain out of the room as if it were spiraling down a hole in the floor. I feel it run out of me, too, from the bottom of my chest straight through the center of the earth and into outer space on the other side.

  My legs stop working, and I move to the cold floor, resting my face against the steel base of one of the virtuo-cine chairs. I close my eyes.

  "What happened to you…" I whisper. "Liddick, what happened to you…"

  Arco sits beside me and runs his hand over my hair, then moves his arms around me, pulling me to him. I feel like I don't have any bones anymore, and if it weren't for my skin, I'd spill in a thousand directions like water. He rests his chin on the top of my head and holds me like I'm going to disappear if he breathes…like he knows I'm made of water too.

  "What does this mean?" Myr
a asks from somewhere very far away, and there's silence for a few seconds until Calyx answers her.

  "It's over. Our hack is gone…vanished in the reset," she says. "I've been trying to get it back, but there's already a new firewall in place around the whole virtuo-cine network. We're back at square one."

  "That means there's only one way to stop them…" my dad says. "That message will reach everyone on the Grid within days if it's already leaked into the subliminal feeds. We have to take down the port-cloud ourselves before the message gains political traction."

  "But what does that mean?" Myra's voice cracks under the weight of the answer we all know, but are afraid to say out loud.

  Tark pulls in a breath, then blows it out as slowly as he can, buying us a few more seconds in the world we know before his gold eyes finally look up from the console.

  I know in that moment I have to say the word so he doesn't have to. I have to say it because I know he's spent his entire career trying to find a way to avoid it…trying to find a better way. I have to say it to make it real, to make it begin because the sooner it begins, the sooner it will end…one way or another, once and for all.

  I open my mouth and am suddenly terrified, suddenly hoping the word will just voluntarily come out, but it won't. It sits on my tongue like a planet, and I have to imagine that I am an exploding sun just to force it out. When I hear it, it's barely there, barely even a word like the last echo in a canyon…

  "War."

  EPILOGUE

  Liddick

  The first thing I see when I open my eyes is my fist, still gripping the Reset lever that isn't there anymore. My knuckles are white, and the strap around my wrist is biting into my skin. It releases all at once, and I nearly hit myself in the face.

  "Well done, Mr. Wright! Well done!" I hear the same shadow voice as before…I'm back in the virtuo-cine chair. I'm done. I did it…I think.

  "I reset your stupid server. Now send me back to my friends," I say just as a man comes out of the shadows.

  He's tall with slick, black hair and bright green eyes, just like Pitt's. He looks down his long, narrow nose at me and cocks his head.

  "So, you're Liddick Wright," he says. "Dezzie has told me so much about you."

  I nearly swallow my tongue. "Mr. Spaulding?"

  "Call me Van," he says, trying to bend his lips into a smile, but it's not working. I feel panic closing down my lungs, so I try to take controlled breaths.

  "I tried to help her. I went after her…" I say, sure that he's probably going to kill me.

  "I know you did. I know, and it's because of you that she's here right now. What would she want with that biodesigner practice I had waiting for her here in Admin City anyway, right?"

  "What?" I ask, shaking my head and getting to my feet as fast as I can. Where's the door…I think. How is there no door in here?

  "My children were on a track to complete their career training at Gaia Sur before you came along," Van Spaulding says, leaning back against the wall and studying his nails.

  "Gaia took both my brothers. They made one of them put gills in the other one!" I shout, but Van Spaulding barely looks up at me.

  "A choice they made when they refused to use their obvious talents for the greater good," he says, then goes back to studying his nails. "But I digress. Dezzie isn't well, you see. She's been through quite a lot of unnecessary hardship with the loss of her brother, Pitt, to those spores, then having to leave Tieg in those tunnels with some creature?" he asks, looking up at me. "Is this true, Liddick?"

  "I tried to help her! If she'd have gone back in that tunnel, something would have taken her too. I went looking for her when she ran off!"

  "Well, despite all the trouble and heartache you've caused her with this, not to mention with Jack Ripley's daughter, Dezzie still seems to want you around. That means I have to find a use for you. She's been through enough, don't you agree?"

  "I need to get back to my friends," I say, but as the words are coming out of my mouth, I know it's pointless.

  "I don't think you still have friends, Liddick Wright," Spaulding smiles, then nods to the shadow man. I can see his hands tap something into his console, and a few seconds later, the last part of the virtuo-cine I was just in starts replaying in the middle of the room…with Jazz, Vox, my brother, Lyden, and the others. Everything in me locks up in disbelief.

  "It really was them? They were really there?" I ask, feeling all the breath leave my lungs.

  "Oh, yes. They were masked by archaic level one bioprints because of the flag on their neural signatures, but The Seam's technology is unreliable. Ancient, really," Spaulding says, but I can't process it all as I watch the rest of the cine play out…the Reset lever I was reaching for wasn't even there, at least not from their perspective. None of what I saw or heard registered to them at all…I look completely split.

  "I didn't know what was real in that cine—I thought the programmers just pulled memories of them out of my head so I'd go along with the propaganda…I thought that's what the cine was programmed to do for anyone who went into it, " I say, but not to him, or to anyone except myself. I just feel like I have to say it out loud.

  "Well, lucky for us they didn't know that," Spaulding laughs, breaking my self-contained bubble, and I feel myself crash back into reality. Blood starts pounding in my ears, and I glare at him.

  "You did all this. Why? Why did you set me up?"

  "I didn't do a thing. You wrote that propaganda and sabotaged their efforts to patch their pathetic code message all by yourself. You are brilliantly intuitive, I might add."

  "I didn't write any propaganda!" I protest, but then feel sick…the storyboarder credential…I think. I didn't care about the plot. I just wanted to get to the Reset lever. Spaulding must see the realization dawn on my face because he just smiles that bent smile again and nods at me.

  "And bonus kudos for leading us straight to The Seam's message with whatever psychic connection you seem to have to the Ripley girl. We never would have known about the embedded sleeper without the neural bridge access you provided," he laughs.

  "What embedded sleeper?" I ask, my mind racing almost as fast as the blood hammering in my head. Those random thoughts about the Platform…the counting…it really was Jazz…is that what he's saying?

  Spaulding laughs even harder. "You really have no idea, do you?" he manages to ask between guffaws. He moves behind the console and starts typing something, and Grisham's stupid face appears.

  "Grisham! What the hell is happening? None of this was our deal!" I shout.

  Spaulding is laughing so hard now he can't even put a sentence together. I look around for something to throw at him, to throw in general, but there's nothing in this stupid room.

  "Cred-Fed, listen to me…things have changed," Grisham says. "This is all for the better now. We're going to the top."

  "What are you talking about? You used to want to help other people. We were making things better topside!"

  "And a lot of good it did. But then you brought me Van Spaulding's daughter, half out of her head. How could I not leverage that and make things easier? I thought you were a smart kid…come on…how do you think you got all those breaks? Like I've got heliocars on standby? I couldn't even check my voice messages with Tarriff locking down my tech."

  "We had a deal! I reset that server for you…you were supposed to help me get my friend back. I trusted you, Grisham!"

  "I helped her get to a safe place. I delivered; you delivered," he shrugs. "I'm not leaving you hanging here. You'll work with me now."

  "No! Are you split? I need to find my friends!"

  "Friends? You really think you still have friends Cred-Fed? You're the one writing that propaganda in the cine. Hell, they think you sabotaged their patchwork efforts. Eco probably electrocuted himself reacting to that!" Grisham laughs, then coughs. "Serves that arrogant little skod right."

  "I didn't know how that storyboarder credential worked! I didn't try to sabotage anything!
"

  "Doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is what seems to have happened. You've seen too much to join your so-called friends with The Seam. You're dead to all those people, anyway, kid. Time to start over."

  There has to be a way out of this…I think. All right, calm down. Try to play their game… "Start over with what?" I ask, trying to slow down my breathing.

  Spaulding claps his hands in front of him and steps out from behind the console. "Glad you asked. The first thing I'm going to need you to do is lead a team back into those tunnels and find Tieg," he says. "Then we'll discuss your new career field, storyboarding, with strict monitoring, of course. You've shown quite a bit of promise," he adds with a half smile that turns my blood to acid.

  "I'm never going to work for you…I'm not going to help you lie to everyone about Carboderm and Biotech Global, least of all about Gaia!"

  "But you already have helped me…" he laughs again. "More than I ever could have hoped. You're a natural liar."

  I start to protest, but Grisham starts talking again before I can get a word in.

  "Cred-Fed, don't be stupid. You have nothing to go back to now, don't you see that? Your parents think you're tucked away becoming some kind of diplomat—Spaulding already arranged for the long term clone, just like the ones for your brothers. You're an outcast now, just like me, but we'll get back at them all."

  I shake my head. "Jazz wouldn't believe any of that. She knows me better. I just need to see her and explain."

  "That won't be possible, I'm afraid," Spaulding says. "And I have other plans for your time."

  "You can't do this!" I shout, but it doesn't make any difference.

  "I'd love to stay and continue catching up, but business calls. Take a few days and let it sink in, Wright. I'll be in touch," Grisham says through a bar wedge smile just before his projection disappears.

  "I really should be getting back too." Spaulding nods to his shadow man, who waves his hand over the wall behind him. It dissipates into a doorway, where another person is standing in the shadows. "Get him cleaned up and deliver him to his new habitat," Spaulding says. "And be sure he understands the…dangers of running off." He laughs, then goes through the door with the original shadow man.