The Dark Intercept

by Julia Keller

  But she had. Head sunk down on her chest, hands dangling, she must have drifted off after a few sips of the completely tasteless tea. The beating she’d taken surely was responsible; she was exhausted, and her head and her stomach throbbed rhythmically, like mean matching metronomes. She was desperate for a short break from consciousness.

  She woke up. Her head jerked sharply. The motion nearly rocked her right off the bucket.

  “Whoa. Hold on there,” Delia said from across the room. “Don’t hurt yourself.” She was standing by a window—or what was left of it—staring out at Old Earth. Six of the eight panes were gone, replaced by cardboard with badly taped edges. The other two panes were intact. And they were just at eye level, enabling her to have a view. Having a view—and not just a view of cardboard, blocking the real one—was a tiny miracle in a place from which most of the miracles had flown long ago.

  “What are you looking at?” Violet said.

  “If you were from here,” Delia answered, moving back toward Violet, “you wouldn’t ask that. Because the answer is ‘nothing.’ The answer will always be ‘nothing.’ The scenery won’t change. It can’t change. This is Old Earth, remember?”

  Violet stood up. She felt marginally better. At least she wasn’t tempted to throw up or fall to the floor in a gelatinous ooze of fatigue. Her head even felt relatively okay.

  She took a step. She took another. So far, so good.

  She considered, once more, telling Delia that the woman who had done so much good here on Old Earth was her mother, and about what had happened to her. But she stopped herself. If the expectation of Lucretia’s return one day was what kept Delia going, then Violet didn’t want to take that away from her. No matter what the truth was.

  “I’m heading out,” Violet said. “I’ve got to be back at the portal in an hour. Doesn’t leave me much time for what I have to find. Thanks for the first aid. And the tea. And the nap.”

  Delia looked concerned. “You’re going to have to be a lot more careful, okay? Keep an eye on your surroundings. If somebody starts coming at you, go in the other direction. How fast can you run?”

  “Fast.” Violet wasn’t bragging. She was stating a fact.

  Delia’s face changed. It softened. “The way you said that—it sounded so much like the way my little girl would’ve said it. She loved to run. And she was very proud of being fast. ‘I’m fast as lightning, Mama,’ she used to tell me. ‘You just watch.’” Delia swallowed hard. “I never thought I’d lose both of them, you know? But that’s what it’s like down here. You can’t count on having a tomorrow.”

  By this time, Violet thought, she’d earned the right to ask. After all, she hadn’t even complained about the terrible tea.

  “What happened to your kids?”

  “Molly died of Missip Fever.” Delia’s voice sounded strained, as if just saying those words had put a stressful burden on it. “My son Tommy’s in prison.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault.” She shrugged. A sharpness came into her face. A meanness. “Or maybe it is your fault, come to think of it. You’re from New Earth. And that’s what started this whole stupid mess in the first place. It’s what forced Tommy to do what he did. Old Earth, New Earth—what was wrong with just the plain old Earth? I’m old enough to remember the time before. And it wasn’t perfect, God knows—in fact it was pretty miserable with all the wars, all the pollution, and all the death—but you know what? We were all in it together. And look at us now. Is this really better? Is it?”

  Violet didn’t answer. She knew that the arguments over the wisdom of the split had been intense, and that they had raged for years. It wasn’t likely that a few words from her were going to change Delia’s mind. Not even if she pointed out that New Earth worked—that it was clean and safe. Nothing like this place, with its blasted streets and blown-down buildings, its dust and its danger.

  You have no idea, Violet wanted to say to Delia in a pointed, deliberate tone. You don’t have a clue. If you ever came to New Earth, you’d see. You’d know. And then you wouldn’t be so angry about—

  It was no use. Delia would never get to New Earth. With only a few exceptions, the gates for immigrants were closed and locked. Danny and Kendall had made it in—but that was a special case. Kendall had something that New Earth wanted.

  Violet’s head was clear now. And she didn’t want to argue. So she knew it was time to leave.

  She thanked Delia one more time, and then she went back down the broken steps and out into the windy, barren street. She looked around. The kids who’d attacked her were gone; the only reminder of their presence was the jumbled imprint in the dirt where the ringleader had fallen and thrashed around a bit. Right now, she thought, he surely had a major headache. Worse than hers.

  Good.

  She shivered. The sky was going from gray to black, like someone whose bad mood is escalating into a lethal rage. Something brooded over this world, something sinister. Violet’s shivering increased. It wasn’t really cold, but it felt cold, anyway. It was as if even the idea of warmth had run away from this world as fast as it could go.

  She heard a ferociously loud bang.

  She turned quickly, trying to spot the source of the noise. She thought her heart might sprint right out of her chest.

  And then she saw it: a dilapidated gate, farther up the road. The fence itself was long gone. The wind had pushed the gate so that it flapped against the crumbling post, creating the bang. And scaring me silly, Violet thought. She trembled a bit from the shock. Then she pictured Danny’s face, and she wasn’t so afraid anymore.

  She didn’t know how she was going to find Kendall’s lab. She didn’t have a map. All she had was a sketchy memory of the landmarks she’d seen while following Danny with the chip-jack. Her quest was completely illogical.

  But that was the thing about love: It wasn’t even on speaking terms with logic.

  23

  The Notebook

  Violet walked along a bleak stretch of dirt road. She wondered what this land had been like Before: before the Water Wars and the Mineral Wars.

  Before the land was scorched by bombs. Before the trees died and the crops shriveled in the fields. Before the ice caps melted and flooded the coastlines.

  Before the world was divided in two. Before New Earth. Before the Intercept.

  Even inanimate things had a Before and an After, Violet realized. Even a road. Even an ordinary, everyday road like this one.

  The road took her to the edge of a city. She wondered what city it was and then she realized it didn’t matter. Why would its name matter? She was surrounded by the hunched ruins of once-proud buildings. People slunk past her, but unlike the welcoming committee outside Delia’s house, these people had no interest in her. They didn’t even make eye contact. Some of them mumbled, but they weren’t talking to her; they seemed to be talking to themselves. This is what people look like, Violet thought, when all the hope is taken away from them. This is what’s left. They pulled their rags tighter around their frail torsos and dipped their heads and kept going. They were hurrying somewhere, or they were hurrying nowhere. Once again, it didn’t matter.

  She tried to remember the particulars of Danny’s journey so that she could follow it: the turns he had taken, the route he had followed, the angle of the horizon she had seen through his eyes, which would let her know she was going in the right direction.

  As she walked the gray and garbage-filled streets, passing through battered neighborhood after battered neighborhood, feeling sadder with every step, she wondered: Would she ever be able to confess to him that she had used a chip-jack to spy on him? Was it the kind of thing you could ever forgive someone for? Even if it was for a good cause?

  And then there it was: the alley.

  The steps.

  The door.

  She did not hesitate, even though she was still sore. She flung herself at it shoulder-first, hitting the spot that Danny had hit, too, when he slammed
against it. The door popped open, just as it had for him. Inside, the room was just as she remembered it—dark, crowded, clotted with a massive amount of junk that was packed tight in every direction. But there was a difference. Before, she had only been looking it.

  Now she was living it.

  The smell was the knock-you-over kind, worse than anything she’d smelled outside. The outside smells of Old Earth were foul, but the foulness was constantly on the move, quickly dissipated by the constant, constant wind. Here, the smell was like a green blobby toad squatting right in the middle of the path: It did not move. It was a permanent feature of the place. The lab had been locked up for years, except for Danny’s recent visit, with no ventilation. The deadness of the dead things behind the walls and under the piles and piles of junk had only gotten deader. The stink had only gotten stinkier.

  Violet stood still for a few moments, trying not to keel over from the rich, insinuating odors. She tried her best not to breathe too deeply. Gradually, she was able to adjust her lungs to the rancid reality; she acclimated herself to the incredibly hideous stench.

  She remembered Danny telling her that for the first few years after he and Kendall left for New Earth, people had broken in, escaping from the cold. They stole what they needed to survive. They stored the junk they’d scavenged. When he returned, Danny said, he saw the results: a once-amazing place had become just another hiding place, just another port in the never-ending storm of Old Earth. He wasn’t too upset by that, however; people needed to live. They did what they had to do. A lab was only four walls and a floor and a bunch of stuff. A lab didn’t breathe. A lab didn’t hope. People come first, Danny told her. People are more important than computers or equipment. I’m glad they used this place to save themselves, even though I hate seeing what it’s become.

  Violet moved forward. She had to shove an old sewing machine and a bicycle wheel out of the way in order to do so.

  She kept going. Now she had to turn sideways, because the only trail through the stacked-up stuff was skinnier than she was. And she was pretty skinny.

  She had to get to the cinder-block wall in the back. That was where the notebook was.

  As she scooted and ducked and crawled and twisted and climbed, she glimpsed, now and then, the bones of the lab, the things that lay at the bottom of all the junk that had taken over the place during the years of neglect. She saw wires and shattered test tubes. She saw long workbenches—resting on their sides now, or upside down, with pieces hacked out that had been used as firewood—and she saw microscopes and monitors. The microscopes had been stripped of their knobs and the monitors were all smashed. But they were there—the ghosts of a working lab, a lab where Kendall had created the Intercept.

  I’m in Kendall’s lab. The place where Danny spent a lot of time when he was a kid. Where—despite everything that was happening all around the two brothers, despite the danger and the chaos—Danny was happy, because he was with his last surviving family member.

  The thought was exhilarating. And deeply sad, too. She didn’t bother looking into the crook of her left elbow, checking for the flash; she didn’t care what the Intercept thought about this moment. It was hers. It belonged to her, and her alone.

  At last she made it to the wall.

  She hesitated before touching it, because it was green and slimy and disgusting. But this was why she had come here. A little slime never killed anybody, right?

  Well, maybe it had. She imagined the billions of germs that were probably gyrating in the spongy ick, ready to latch on and tunnel under her skin and infiltrate her bloodstream and …

  Violet swallowed hard. Get a grip, girl. She counted six blocks up from the floor. Three blocks to the left.

  She tapped on the block three times, using two fingers, just as Danny had.

  The block slowly opened.

  She reached inside. Her heart was pounding hard and fast. If I have a heart attack, I bet that mean cat eats me in, like, five minutes or less. She didn’t have a heart attack. Her hand shook as she touched the red leather cover, but her heart kept on beating, just as it was supposed to.

  She opened the notebook. On the inside cover, she saw the name scrawled with a pencil:

  Kendall Mayhew

  With a deep breath, she began turning the pages. Faster and faster and faster. She was searching for whatever it was that had made Danny come back to the lab. Searching for whatever secret was hidden in his brother’s notebook.

  Surely this was a journal, like the one her mother had kept. Violet expected long entries detailing Kendall’s thoughts and feelings.

  The first few pages were filled with numbers, symbols, equations.

  The next batch of pages was filled with … the same thing: numbers, symbols, equations. Squiggly lines and formulas. Fractions and graphs and parabolas.

  The next was filled with … the same thing.

  And the next.

  And the next and then all the pages after that, too.

  She flipped through the notebook, growing increasingly frustrated. Every page was the same. Different, but the same. This was a workbook, not a personal record. And it was meaningless to her.

  The Intercept was already a reality. Why would Danny need the notebook? He wouldn’t be able to understand the soaring, complicated mathematics and crazy-brilliant formulas any more than she could.

  Violet put the notebook back in the compartment. She slid the block into the wall. Danny would never know she had been here.

  Disappointment washed over her like a cold shower.

  Damn, damn, damn.

  She looked around. Maybe there was something to be gained from the trip, after all. Maybe, if she dug through some of this mess, she could find a clue. Maybe Kendall had left something else behind that would explain—

  Her console beeped. It was Shura’s ringtone. Violet hadn’t expected her console to work this far from New Earth. Kendall’s lab must be one of the few pockets of Old Earth with a strong signal.

  “Hey,” Violet said.

  She kept it on audio. Only Sara Verity knew where she was, and Sara could say she’d been lied to about Violet’s purpose for going to Old Earth. Which was true. Violet didn’t want anybody else to get into trouble if she was discovered. She’d answer for her own actions.

  Shura’s voice was peppered with desperation. “Violet,” she said, choking back tears. “I need you. Right now.”

  24

  First Attack

  “What’s wrong?”

  Shura’s words came in a panicked gush. “It’s my mom. She was attacked when she was leaving her office. She got away—but she’s in the hospital. She’s hurt really bad. She might even—” She stopped, uttering a sob. “That’s where I am right now. My dad’s in the room with her. They haven’t let me in yet.”

  The words shocked Violet. “Did they arrest anybody?”

  “No. But Violet—how could this happen? Why didn’t the Intercept stop it?”

  Violet didn’t know what to say. She was wondering the same thing.

  “Can you come?” Shura said. “Can you be with me here? In case—” She broke off her sentence. “They don’t know if my mom’s going to—” She broke off that one, too.

  Violet was torn, but only for an instant. Yes, she eagerly wanted more time to look around the lab. Maybe she could find something to shed light on the notebook. Maybe she could figure it out. She was smart, after all. Not Kendall-smart, but smart. She was good at codes and puzzles, especially after working with Rez and getting pointers from him.

  But Shura was her best friend. And Shura needed her.

  “I’m coming,” Violet said. She signed off and tapped her console, notifying Sara that she would be returning very soon. Kendall’s lab could wait. She was going back.

  How, Violet wondered as she raced to the pod, would the Intercept label her current emotion? It was a mix of love—she loved her friend—and loyalty and protectiveness, and other things as well. And there was a rising anger at
whoever had hurt Anna Lu. Plus a profound curiosity: What did the markings in Kendall’s notebook mean? Who had cracked the code of the Intercept—and what did they want?

  * * *

  “My God, Violet—you look awful.”

  Shura stared at her.

  “Rough day,” Violet said.

  “You look like you should be admitted, too. Those bruises—” Shura reached out toward the nastiest one on the side of Violet’s face, but before she could get there, Violet gathered her up in a hug. Violet was still the world’s worst hugger, but if there was ever a moment when that didn’t matter, it was now.

  They broke apart awkwardly.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” Violet said. “Your mom—is she—”

  “My dad came out a few minutes ago to talk to me. She’s stable. That’s all they’re telling him. She’s still unconscious.”

  They stood in a long, brightly lit corridor. People in green smocks hurried past them from time to time, speaking into consoles or consulting notes on tablets. Everyone seemed preoccupied. That’s a good thing, Violet told herself. They’re focused on getting patients well. Patients like Shura’s mom.

  She didn’t like to think about sick moms. Even though she was forced to now, because that’s why she was here.

  “So what did they want?” Violet said. “The people who did this to her, I mean.”

  “We don’t know,” Shura said. “My dad told me how it happened, but not why. Nobody knows the ‘why’ yet.”

  They stood close to each other, talking in soft voices. Something about being in a hospital makes you want to keep your voice low, Violet thought. It’s like if you whisper, if you don’t make a fuss, maybe you’ll go back to sleep and realize the whole thing is a bad dream.

  It wasn’t a bad dream.

  Shura looked more traumatized than Violet had ever seen her. Her friend’s pale complexion had faded to an even paler shade, which Violet had not thought possible. The red rings around her eyes testified to the fact that Shura had been crying for quite a long time. Her small shoulders were drawn forward, as if she was trying to ward off an attack—the emotional kind as well as the physical kind. Her hands—the part of her that Violet most admired, because they were the transfer point between the visions in Shura’s mind and what showed up on the canvas—were constantly in motion, opening and closing, opening and closing.