by Julia Keller
“Yeah. I kind of am,” he said.
“I guess there’s a reason they tell people not to go down there more than once or twice a year.”
“Yeah.” He shrugged.
“And you’ll do what they say, right? I mean—you’ll follow the advice they give to people who go to Old Earth too often? Get a physical? A bone-density scan and all the other tests?”
Danny had made four unauthorized trips back in the past month. And those were just the times she knew about. There might have been more.
Oh, there were more, Violet told herself with weary certainty. For sure.
Because, after all, this was Danny.
He shrugged again. All at once she realized just how close to her he was standing. If she moved her chair even slightly, she’d be touching him. That caused a fierce scramble of contradictory emotions to start up inside her. Some of these feelings were wonderful; some of them were not so wonderful. But all of them were intense. The swirling mix reminded her of a passage in a book she’d been assigned to read back in her WordArt class—Persuasion, by an Old Earth author named Jane Austen: “It was agitation, pain, pleasure, a something between delight and misery.” That’s how the main character described her feelings when she saw this guy she really liked.
Violet could totally relate. Jane Austen, she thought, would’ve given her Intercept chip quite a workout.
But no matter what else Violet felt about Danny, she was still mad at him. The righteous anger kept slamming up against the other thing inside her—the mushy thing. The two feelings were like a couple of asteroids that hit and bounced off each other and then hit again, until they were both so nicked and frayed they could barely limp their way across the galaxy.
She decided that she couldn’t stand this polite chitchat a minute longer.
“So why’d you go down there again?” she asked, blurting it out. This wasn’t the first time she had posed the question. She knew what his answer would be—the answer would be a nonanswer—but she had to ask.
Because just as he was Danny Mayhew, she was Violet Crowley. She was just as stubborn as he was—although her stubbornness showed up as a fierce curiosity, while his was reflected in his mysterious trips to a forbidden place.
She kept on talking. “You were almost suspended last month for the same thing, right? And then you turned around today and went back. Without permission. What’s the deal?”
Danny shrugged.
“It’s complicated,” he said.
“That’s what you always say.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Someday,” he finally replied, “I’ll be able to explain it to you. Until then—”
“What? Until then—what?”
“Until then, you’ll just have to trust me.”
“Trust you.”
“Yeah. Trust me.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. His legs must be aching, Violet thought. All that running down on Old Earth. All that tension—confronting an armed criminal, knowing that you’re seconds from death.
Danny was still talking, his voice measured and sincere. “I hope you can do that, Violet. And I hope you can say to yourself, ‘Well, I don’t understand, but it’s Danny, and so—so I know it’s fine, and he must have a good reason. I can just let things be for a while.’”
“It was a pretty close call,” she murmured.
“Yeah. Definitely.”
Violet was still mad at him, but what could she do? He wasn’t going to answer her questions. And his request had been clear.
Trust me.
But why did he do it? Why did he keep slipping back down to Old Earth without official authorization? What drew him to that bleak and broken place?
True, she wanted to go—but that was because she’d never been there. He had been there. He knew firsthand what she knew only from drone feeds: It was filthy and scarred and treacherous. Nasty things crawled along its broken streets and slithered up the scorched bricks of its shattered buildings. Danny knew that sad, battered surface all too well. He had to be haunted by his grim memories of its blasted-out towns and poisoned oceans and skeletal trees and stark, wind-mauled landscapes.
Yet back he went, every chance he got.
Why?
When he’d first started his backdoor visits down to Old Earth, Violet had guessed that maybe it was just homesickness. Old Earth might be ugly and depressing, but it was where he’d come from. It was the starting place for all his memories. Memories of life with his brother, Kendall.
Or maybe it was even simpler. Maybe he was attracted to Old Earth because somebody had told him not to go. And Danny was a rebel. A rule breaker. He did things his own way.
Violet could totally relate to that, too.
But each time he sneaked down, he increased the chances that something bad was going to happen. Something dangerous. And maybe fatal. Violet had a powerful recollection of Tin Man’s hate-filled scowl as he aimed the slab gun.
“I hope they locked up that guy,” she said.
“Yeah, they did. Callahan sent some officers down. They hauled him off to an Old Earth prison. That’s what she told me.” Michelle Callahan was the police chief. Danny’s boss. “He didn’t put up any resistance. The Intercept left him in tatters. Weak as a kitten.”
“So you talked to the chief.”
“Yeah. Stopped by on my way over here. Had to pick up my gear.” He used his toe to nudge his bag on the floor. He looked a little sheepish. “She pulled me into her office. I had to watch the playback of the Intercept feed—with her sitting right next to me.”
“Bet that was awkward. She’s got a good reason to hate slab guns.”
It was common knowledge that the chief’s husband, Paul Stark, had been severely injured by a slab gun attack back on Old Earth. He would never again walk under his own power.
“Yeah, she was pretty pissed off,” Danny said. “You know the chief—she gets intense. But she’s giving me a second chance.”
“I thought you’d already gotten a second chance.”
“I did. This is my second chance at a second chance.” He smiled.
Violet didn’t smile back. She couldn’t forget the dank, shadowy alley back on Old Earth and the sight of Danny in danger.
“It just seems to me,” she said, “that it was sort of an amazing coincidence. You coming across a drug dealer down there, I mean. Totally accidentally.”
He stared at her. “What do you mean?”
“Old Earth’s a big place. The chances of you just bumping into a crime scene like that are pretty slim.”
“Guess so.” He shrugged. “My lucky day.”
Lucky? That’s what Violet wanted to say back to him. Yell it, even. Lucky? You almost DIED.
But she didn’t say it. He already knew. He didn’t need her to point it out yet again. Besides, talking that way would make her sound like a wheedling coward—something that Violet Crowley would never be. She was tough. And brave. As tough and brave as Danny was, actually, even if she hadn’t broken as many rules as he had.
Yet.
“Good thing we have the Intercept,” she said.
He paused. “Yeah. Right.”
His hesitation surprised her. So did his tone. It almost sounded as if Danny was being sarcastic. As if he had some doubts about the Intercept, about the amazing technology that made New Earth secure, day after day. About the system that kept everything running smoothly.
But that was impossible. Because his own brother had invented it. Kendall Mayhew had died a year and a half ago. The Intercept was his legacy. And to Danny, nothing was more important than loyalty to his brother’s memory.
Violet knew that for sure. There might be a ton of things she didn’t know about Danny—such as why he couldn’t stay away from Old Earth—but his love for his brother was beyond question.
What, then, accounted for the odd note in his voice just now? Maybe, she thought, he’d been hearing the same whispers about the Intercept. The speculation swirled in the wi
nds that were pumped perpetually through the atmosphere of New Earth from the giant turbines in Farraday. It rode in the mild rumble beneath the floor of Protocol Hall.
“So what do you think about the rumors?” she said.
He looked at her sharply. “What rumors?”
“That there’s something wrong with the Intercept. A weak spot.”
Danny shook his head. “Can’t be. My brother didn’t make any mistakes.”
“Yeah, but maybe there’s something he didn’t fore—”
“No. No matter what you’ve heard, the Intercept works fine. It will always work fine. It’s perfect. It’s always going to be there. We’ll never lose it.” His voice had a funny edge to it.
“You don’t actually sound too thrilled about that.”
“Why wouldn’t I be thrilled? It saved my life.” And with that, Danny brushed at some dirt on the sleeve of his tunic, even though Violet didn’t see anything in that particular spot that needed removal. It almost seemed like he was buying time while he figured out what to say next. “Anyway,” he went on, “along with telling you guys how grateful I am, I also came by to see how it’s going. Getting ready for your Intercept intervention and all.”
“It’s okay. I can handle it.”
“I know you can.” He glanced away from her again, a sure sign that he was going to say something important. Something that made it hard for him to look at her when he said it. “Everything’s good, Violet. Like I said—just trust me, okay?”
“I do. I mean it. You know that.”
And she did mean it. Mostly.
Because in spite of it all—in spite of the regulations he ignored and the people he pissed off and the trouble he made for Chief Callahan and for her father, in spite of the annoyance and hurt she felt because he wouldn’t tell her why he kept running back down to Old Earth every chance he got—yes, she trusted him. On some mysterious level that transcended all her doubts, Violet trusted Danny.
But couldn’t you trust somebody and be worried that maybe he was in trouble? Couldn’t you trust him and need to find out why he was doing something that might get him hurt or killed?
Sometimes Violet didn’t like the fact that she had such intense feelings for him. She hated being dependent on anybody. Ever. In every other realm of her life, she was capable, confident, self-assured. Some people might even call her cocky. Because she was smart and she knew it. Because she was attractive in a casual, sporty, unfussy sort of way—and she knew that, too.
Around Danny, though, Violet was off-balance, uncertain. And clumsy. It made her wonder if liking somebody would always make her feel so … stupid. Or if someday—when she was older—she would turn around and realize that the emotion was making her feel stronger, not weaker. Making her behave like her real self. Not like some disgusting idiot who was obsessed all the time by the fear that somebody might figure out her true feelings. One day, she might look forward to that little blue flash.
Feelings. They had such urgent, scary power—which was the point, of course, of the Intercept in the first place. That was the key. That was why it worked so well. Such had been Kendall Mayhew’s great inspiration: to use the vast coiled might of recollected emotions to control behavior, to force people into doing what they should have been doing in the first place.
Feelings made people so astonishingly vulnerable. The Intercept proved that every day, every minute. The idea of life without it—of a civilization that could somehow function without the collection and re-deployment of emotions—was unthinkable now.
“So,” Danny said. “Wish I had time to grab a coffee or something. But I’ve got a few things to do.”
You always have things to do, Violet thought grumpily. What things?
“Sure,” she said.
“See you later, okay?”
“Sounds good.” She always pretended that it didn’t matter to her one way or another whether they got together or not. It was a matter of pride.
Could Danny see through her fake-cool attitude? She wasn’t sure. And that made her wonder, in turn, how an emotion such as uncertainty might register on the Intercept—in shades of gray, maybe, with a lot of squiggly lines heading in different directions?
“Okay,” he said. “And hey, listen—thanks again.”
“Sure.” Her next words came out in a rush. She was as surprised by them as he was. She didn’t know she was going to say them until she did. “When you go back down there, is it—is it the same? The same as when you left?”
Violet’s voice was full of wonder. She had a sharp hunger to know about the strange world he had left behind.
Fleetingly, she thought about the Intercept, and what it might do with her deep desire to experience Old Earth, a desire that was rekindled over and over again. How would that emotion register on the Intercept? As an endless longing, she supposed. As a kind of fevered yearning.
Danny didn’t answer right away. She waited. He was still here, yes, but in another way, it felt to Violet as if he was very far away, too. Even if she tried to make contact with him, she had the notion that he would always be—like his image on her screen earlier today—forever out of her reach.
“It’s the same,” he said, in a quiet voice. “But it’s also not the same, you know? Not at all.”
“I bet you miss it.”
“Come on, Violet.” Now his voice was scoffing. “It’s terrible down there. You’ve seen the pictures. Dirt, hunger, disease—you know what it’s like. It was bad when my brother and I left and it’s worse now. How could anybody miss that?”
“I didn’t ask about anybody. I asked about you.”
He closed his eyes. Then he opened them again. “Okay,” he said. He wasn’t scoffing anymore. Violet had the distinct sense that a knot inside him had just loosened a little bit. “I do, actually,” he said. “Sometimes—yeah. I miss it. Even as ugly and awful as it is, I miss it. Funny how you get that. I don’t think anybody else ever has.”
“I don’t know about Old Earth. But I know about missing things.”
“Yeah,” Danny said. She could tell by the way he looked at her that he was waiting for more—waiting for more questions about why he risked so much to return as often as he did. Questions he was ready to ignore or deflect. His guard was up again; the shields had returned to their regular positions.
But she didn’t ask anything else. She’d asked him enough for one day.
“So I get that,” Violet said.
Their eyes locked. The moment was awkward—and the moment wasn’t awkward, too, at exactly the same time. Violet had never felt anything quite like it with anybody other than him. On the one hand, she was nervous, fluttery, uncomfortable—but on the other, she’d never felt more relaxed. Or happier.
Was Danny feeling that way, too? Unless he decided to tell her, she couldn’t know. Only the Intercept knew, based on history and probability.
“I’d better get going,” he said.
“Yeah.”
Violet picked up her tablet as if she was going back to her reading. She didn’t want him to know she’d be watching him leave. But that’s exactly what she planned to do.
As soon as he began his swift, long-legged stride across the wide expanse of white marble on the floor of Protocol Hall, Violet stood up so that she could follow his movements. Looking down from her workstation, she could easily keep track of his progress through the crowd. For one thing, only field cops wore dark blue uniforms. And Danny was taller and leaner than a lot of people. He reached the big glass double doors and waited a brief second for them to swish open. In another minute he would be crossing the plaza in front of Protocol Hall. The plaza, the main meeting spot for people her age on New Earth, was a large flagstone square surrounded by a low stone wall where people sat or leaned while they talked and laughed or read and drank coffee or just thoughtfully watched the sky. There was always a great deal of sky-watching on New Earth. The colors changed all the time.
Now that she was no longer distracted by
Danny’s close physical presence, the questions came back to her with fresh intensity, questions she wished she’d had the courage to ask him—instead of putting up with his evasions. He had asked her to trust him. But how could she do that, when his actions didn’t make sense?
Why can’t you just stay away from Old Earth? I wish you’d tell me. Or tell me why you can’t tell me. Why are you risking so much to keep going down there?
Sometimes she had an inkling that—by not answering her questions—he thought he was protecting her. But from what?
From himself, maybe. From a secret he held deep inside, a secret he gripped so tightly that it had grown right into his soul, indistinguishable from his very being.
Or maybe it was something else entirely.
A new suspicion had recently occurred to her, a terrible hunch that had nothing to do with his soul. It could explain all too well why Danny kept sneaking down to Old Earth.
And the thought of it made her go cold inside.
3
The Very Bad Detective
She knew that what she was doing was weird. She knew that it bordered on stalker territory. She could hear Shura’s voice in her head: BORDERS on stalker territory? Um—I think you’re actually crossing the border at this point, girl.
She knew Danny would be angry if he ever found out. He would say it meant she didn’t trust him, after all. Which—yeah, okay—it sort of did.
But Violet had to do it, anyway. She had to know why Danny kept risking his career and his future by going down to Old Earth. And she had to know right now.
She didn’t know why she had to know right now—after all, she’d put up with the mystery for months now, and it was getting dark outside—but she did. Sometimes it happened like that for her: A situation was fine, fine, fine, and then suddenly it wasn’t fine—in fact, it was unbearable—and she couldn’t suffer through it for one more second.
She slapped a hand on the desk. The slap was like putting a period at the end of a sentence—and the sentence was this: I’m going to follow him.
