The Girl in the Machine (Leah King Book 3)

by Philip Harris

  The thought did nothing to ease the pain or the fear that she’d collapse into a misshapen pile of flesh if she tried to stand. Somewhere back in the real world, her body was feeling the pain of whatever was happening here. The damage she’d seen wrought on Westler haunted her. Leah had done that, true, but what if the program ripping this virtual world did the same to her mind? Would she end up a drooling, gibbering mess? Would she die?

  She planted her hands against the ground and forced herself to her feet. A constant tidal wave of thunder boomed around her.

  This isn’t real.

  Leah walked across the road toward the storm.

  50

  The wolves were little more than husks. The white fluid that had leaked from them had turned to powder. Gusts of wind swept across the road, lifting it up into the air in little alabaster dust devils. The chest of one of the wolves shuddered and collapsed in on itself.

  Old Leah, the one that had played at being a scavenger in the rural zone outside Columbia, might have felt some measure of sympathy for the creature. This Leah did not. She walked past them to the door with barely a glance.

  As she got close, fingers of gray cloud reached out toward her. The air grew cold. She felt a crust of ice form across her skin. Her limbs became heavy. It felt like someone was hanging from her arms and legs. Not just weighed down but actively held back. The sensation increased until her entire body felt as though it were being pulled in all directions. Any moment, it might shatter into a billion pieces.

  Wind whistled around her. It buffeted her and pushed her off balance. Twice she stumbled and thought she might fall. She kept her eyes locked on the triangular doorway. The cloud boiled around the edges of the opening. The rest of the building was obscured, only revealed when blasts of lightning illuminated the cloud from within.

  A thin veil of mist hung over the opening. Particles floated within it, drifting to and fro. Eddies formed and dissipated. The low-pitched groan of shifting metal echoed through the building, filling the gaps between the din of the thunder.

  Leah reached out and touched the veil with her fingers. The feeling of being pulled apart vanished the moment her hand passed through the mist. Warmth set her fingers tingling.

  Not daring to think what might happen to her if the cloud tore apart the building before she found what she was looking for, Leah walked through the wall of cloud.

  The roar of thunder died. The cold was gone as well—not through a gradual warming but instantly. The effect was disconcerting and left her feeling as though she were simply standing inside a normal building in a normal world. She half thought that if she turned and walked back out, she’d find herself standing in the sun on an ordinary street. Leah looked back over her shoulder. The doorway was still there, but now it was sealed with a block of gray concrete.

  None of the austere, windowless lobby she found herself inside matched the silver spike of the building’s exterior. Every surface was unfinished concrete. Concrete floor, concrete walls, concrete pillars supporting a bare concrete ceiling. The half-dozen doors that led off the lobby were the exception. They were gray metal.

  The building’s triangular motif had been carried forward inside. Bas-relief triangles adorned the walls, and the concrete reception desk was triangular, as were the pillars and the glowing white lights set into the ceiling.

  Half a dozen doors led out of the lobby, all of them triangular, but it was the solitary rectangular door that caught Leah’s attention. She walked over to the panel beside it. There were two triangular buttons, one pointing up, the other down. Her fingers hovered over the buttons for a moment, then she pressed the up arrow.

  The doors immediately swept noiselessly open to reveal an elevator. She stepped inside, and the doors closed behind her. The control panel showed the building had fifty floors. Letting her intuition guide her, Leah pressed the button for the top floor.

  The elevator began to ascend in total silence. Only the initial slight increase in gravity and the rapidly climbing number above the door gave her any indication the cab was moving.

  She watched the red LED display count the floors. At forty-nine, she felt the cab slow. The number ticked over to fifty, and the door slid open.

  She stepped out of the elevator into a circular room, about fifty feet across and half that high. She’d hoped she might find herself in a library. Instead, she was disappointed to see not shelves of books but hundreds of computers mounted on racks. Thousands of LEDs set into the front of the machines glowed and blinked. To Leah, they looked like eyes. She reached for the infiltration kit on her belt then realized she didn’t have it.

  Hovering in the middle of the room was a semitransparent rectangle that glowed with a neon-blue light. As Leah walked around the edge of the room, the blue rectangle turned with her, always presenting a flat surface.

  Leah made a complete circuit of the room, looking for some kind of input device, a keyboard, or maybe even a VR interface. She didn’t find one. Not even a simple button or dial. As far as she could tell, there was no way to interact with these computers.

  She could sense the mass of data behind them, though. Billions of gigabytes of records lying just out of reach. This was a library, after all, and the information she was looking for was there, she was sure of it. She was also sure time was running out. Somewhere out there, the virtual world was tearing itself apart in Westler’s final act of revenge.

  As though to emphasize that fact, a low grinding sound ran through the room. The blue rectangle flickered slightly. Its edges were darker and almost solid, giving the shape a frame. Leah reached out and touched it. Her fingers passed through the blue haze. Where they broke the rectangle, little patches of distortion formed that vanished again when she pulled her hand back.

  She reached out with her thoughts toward the machine and felt the familiar walls rise up to meet her. Her spirits sank; the defenses were far stronger than they had been outside. She was too tired from the fight with the wolves to be able to break through them.

  Then the barrier was gone. The walls of the room seemed to expand. They swept away from her, revealing an expanse of blackness peppered with billions of tiny points of blue light. Data bombarded her senses—the endless gigabytes of information stored in Transport’s database. The machine took hold of her, pulling her deeper as though it was trying to drown her in the ocean of knowledge.

  Thousands of images bombarded her mind. She tried fighting back with memories of her own, but this time it had no effect. Every memory she conjured was ripped away, shredded, and lost. The pressure in the room began to increase. It pressed down on her, crushing her.

  Darkness wrapped itself around Leah’s body as the data closed in, obscuring everything. The neon-blue glow of the data swarming around her was the only thing visible now. She shuddered and twisted. She felt herself breaking apart. Fragments of her life came loose, chipped away as the machine worked to absorb her.

  Time stretched. Seconds became endless. Cracks formed in her resolve. The cracks turned to fissures.

  She had no physical presence in this maelstrom of data, but she braced herself anyway. She clung to her memories as the machine tried to pluck them away. Most of all, she clung to the photograph of her mother that her father had kept in his bedroom. And with that image came knowledge. Just a few threads at first, but they quickly knitted themselves into a tapestry of information. Information about her mother.

  Leah embraced the data around her. She let it suffuse her being, welcoming it and becoming a conduit for the machine instead of fighting against it. The maelstrom eased. Hope flickered inside her. She was grasping at the data now, wrapping it around her like a cocoon. And as she did, she felt herself re-forming.

  Reality solidified around her, and once again she was standing in the circular room, but now the machine was still there with all its data—and it was waiting for her.

  She turned her attention to the blue rectangle floating in the middle of the room. A picture of a woman in a
plain dress and a white bonnet appeared. The woman’s head was tipped back slightly, and she was laughing at something. There was delight in her eyes and more than a little mischief. She was outside but sitting in a metal chair with padded armrests. Behind her stood a wooden building. It was slightly out of focus, but it looked like a house.

  A stray lock of hair had escaped the woman’s bonnet, and without thinking, Leah reached out to brush it away. The image shimmered as her fingers passed through it, and she pulled her hand away. It was shaking. Two words appeared beneath the image.

  SUSANNAH KING

  Leah let out a soft cry. The sound was a mix of excitement and relief.

  The display flickered slightly. The image disappeared and was replaced by a dozen lines of text. Suddenly terrified, Leah scanned down until she found the final line.

  CURRENT STATUS: Resident. Lancaster, Pennsylvania

  A smile curled Leah’s lips. Her mother was alive. All she had to do now was find Lancaster, and surely TRACE would be able to do that for her. They might even take her there. She was going to see—

  A siren began to wail, and the overhead lights in the room turned red. The image on the screen flickered, and the display went blank.

  Leah moved toward the door then stopped herself. The bombs. She needed to find something that would help TRACE stop Transport.

  She let the data flow through her. The alarm pounded at her concentration and pulled her back into the real world time and time again. Data streamed past, and Leah’s desperation grew. Then she found a thread leading to Westler’s records.

  An image of a young Westler appeared on the display—some sort of enrollment record. Leah skipped past the personal details. She didn’t want to know anything more about the woman she’d killed. There were half a dozen pages detailing Westler’s work for Transport. ANDREW KING flashed across the screen, but it was just one in a list of dozens of names. There was no mention of the bomb in Columbia or anywhere else.

  Leah let go of the data and stared at the screen. The insistent wail of the alarm seemed even more strident. The floor beneath her feet vibrated and shook. She needed a link from the Columbia bomb to Transport.

  Katherine!

  It took a handful of seconds to find Katherine’s information. She skimmed through the sparse file until she reached the end. Two words stood out—PROJECT PHOENIX.

  Leah swept through the data, chasing links and creating new connections. Every second that passed solidified her bond with the machine, and she found herself smiling as she manipulated the data with growing ease.

  The Project Phoenix records were huge. Gigabytes of text, images, and video. Far too much for her to process. She focused on the text and skimmed through it. She was searching for some nugget of data TRACE could use to unravel Transport’s plans.

  The ground beneath her feet shook. An ear-splitting crack cut through the wailing of the siren.

  Four names appeared on the screen.

  KATHERINE BRADLEY

  JACOB WHITE

  RENATA MARINO

  NICOLAS BECK

  Katherine had claimed Transport had forced her to work with them. If that was the case, maybe the other three people were in the same situation.

  There was no time to work out if she was right. She focused on the three new names and tried to force them into her long-term memory.

  A fresh tremor shook the building. Leah released herself from the machine and ran.

  51

  The siren was louder outside the room, but Leah could feel the building vibrating under the onslaught of the storm. The walls of the corridor seemed to curve inward. A crack appeared in the ceiling overhead. Chunks of concrete rained down on her as she ran to the elevator and slammed her hand against the down button.

  A distant hum reverberated through the metal door, but she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t either the thunder from outside or the sound of the building tearing itself apart. She held her breath until the doors slid open. She threw herself into the elevator and jabbed the G button. The doors closed, muffling the sound of the siren.

  The expected feeling of weightlessness didn’t come. The button she’d pressed hadn’t lit. She slammed the heel of her hand against it. The control panel responded with a dull crackle.

  Again and again, she crushed her fingers against the button. “Come on! Come on!”

  In desperation, she tried the other floors and was greeted by a chorus of irritated buzzes. It wasn’t until she stopped pressing the buttons and fell back against the wall in defeat that the elevator finally moved.

  It dropped suddenly and quickly. The sound of the siren receded and was replaced by the whine of the elevator. It grew louder and higher. The elevator was accelerating. The metal wall behind her began to vibrate then shudder.

  Leah watched helplessly as the numbers above the door counted down faster and faster.

  30

  A heavy clunk sounded somewhere above her.

  20

  She braced herself against the corner of the cab.

  10

  Sadness crashed over her. She wouldn’t get to see her mother after all.

  5

  Leah felt a weight pressing down on her as the cab suddenly decelerated. The pressure forced her to her knees.

  There was another clunk.

  The number above the door rolled over one last time.

  G

  The door opened onto a whirlwind of concrete and rain. The storm had broken through.

  Wind buffeted her as she staggered out of the elevator. Dust and debris swirled around the lobby, driven by the onslaught of the storm. She raised her arms over her head to protect herself from the hundreds of tiny shards of concrete whipping through the air. They ricocheted off her hands and neck, stinging like tiny gray wasps. A metal strut bounced past her, almost clipping her knees. Two lights exploded in a shower of sparks.

  The howling wind did nothing to obscure the sound of the building tearing itself apart. Concrete popped and cracked. Metal screamed. The floor beneath Leah’s feet bucked and twisted. She fell. A chunk of concrete slammed into the floor beside her and exploded. More fragments peppered her face.

  She struggled back to her feet. The elevator was gone. Whether it had been swallowed up by the storm or merely concealed, she wasn’t sure. Disoriented, she staggered across the lobby as the building was torn to pieces around her.

  The walls of the building were gone, too. Instead, the edge of the lobby was a mass of roiling cloud. Gray tendrils stretched from the body of the storm to the floor. They writhed and twisted, their tips seeking out cracks in the concrete. When they found one, they drove deep into the surface, ripping it apart and dragging the resultant debris up and into the storm.

  One of the tendrils reached out toward Leah. She retreated to the center of the room. If there was an eye of the storm, this wasn’t it. Concrete flew through the air. A piece hit her on the shoulder. The impact knocked her forward. Her arm went momentarily numb.

  The scream of twisting metal filled the air, rising to a crescendo. The floor began to vibrate. Cracks zigzagged across the room, sending plumes of gray dust into the air that were quickly swallowed up by the raging storm.

  Leah spun around, searching for an escape, but the lobby was gone. Above her, the storm had created a tunnel lined with the remains of the building. Red lightning flickered along its walls and left glowing imprints on Leah’s vision.

  She willed herself out of the simulation. Her body shifted, as though she were about to break apart. Then the sensation faded, and she was back inside the storm.

  A deep rumble passed through the building, making Leah’s body vibrate. The floor around her shattered. A web of cracks opened up, and she had to jump back as one threatened to swallow her up.

  The rumble came again. This time, it was followed by the banshee screech of buckling metal. The pressure in the room increased until it was crushing her. Pain flared behind her eyes. It felt as though someone were hammering iron n
ails into them. She squeezed them closed, and tears streamed down her face.

  Leah fell forward onto her knees. The weight on her shoulders intensified and pinned her to the ground. Wind plucked at her clothes. A deep-seated ache formed in her bones. The screaming rose in pitch, joining with the howl of the wind.

  Lying on the ground, Leah could feel the vibration of the storm. The floor was shifting, rising and falling under the onslaught of some unseen force. The pain in her bones ebbed and flowed with the floor’s movement. Each wave brought more intensity until she was screaming in agony.

  The bones in her arms and legs began to twist. They cracked then snapped. She could feel the splintered ends grinding against each other. The full force of the storm bore down on her. Her left side collapsed inward. Her ribs cracked and tore through her lungs. She tasted blood.

  Her vision blurred. The world turned to a swirling mass of gray. Her jaw was suddenly pulled sideways, as though someone had grabbed it and was trying to tear it off. Pain ripped through her body. Blood pooled in her eyes as she imagined the world around her peeling apart and the Transport facility reappearing in its place.

  Finally, the pain overwhelmed her senses, and darkness claimed her.

  Void

  Leah hung in the void.

  Her shattered and broken bones were whole again.

  There was no pain, no sound.

  A single thought filled her mind.

  It’s over.

  And then a feeling.

  Relief.

  52

  Cold metal pressed against Leah’s chest.

  A shouted word.

  Her back arched as electricity coursed through her body. She let out a strangled cry through gritted teeth. Her head slammed against the chair’s padded back. The electrical charge faded. The cold touch of the metal fell away.