Ultraviolet

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  He raised his empty hands. “I’m impressed.”

  “You should be. I’m amazing,” I said dully. “Gun, in the lake.”

  He slowly pulled out his pistol and threw it into the water.

  “Shut down the drone. Let it fall in the lake, too.”

  He took out his phone and tapped the screen. The soft hum of the SkyEye’s motor fell silent and the wobbly little machine plunged into the water. It splashed, floated for a moment, and then slipped out of sight.

  “Now what?” Frost almost sounded amused.

  “Handcuffs. Cuff yourself.”

  He plucked the cuffs out of his jacket pocket and locked one end over his left wrist. And then he spun around and shoved me.

  I’m not sure what he thought would happen, but he definitely looked surprised when instead of shoving me back he ended up shoving himself down the bank and into ankle-deep water. He stood there a moment, looking confused.

  “You can’t move a hologram from the outside,” I said. “Didn’t you see that first clip of me with the shield? The laws of motion don’t apply to solid-light constructs, for some reason. Now put that cuff on and get back up here.” I kept my sword pointed at his face, even though he was several steps away now.

  He paused, clearly thinking it over, trying to outsmart me, trying to catch me and get home in time to watch his favorite shows. But then he shook his head and closed the cuff over his right wrist as he walked back up the bank to the paved path beside me.

  “Looks like you win this one,” he said. “But it won’t last long. We’re being watched.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not done yet. Lux, bike.” The black motorcycle flashed into life under me, its edges burning with violet wisps of energy. I pointed to the saddle in front me. “You, lie down here, on your belly, face down.”

  He winced. “Can I sit if I promise no funny stuff on the bike?”

  “No. I’ll club you unconscious and drag you off face-down, just the same.”

  He sighed as he walked over to the bike and leaned over it, worming his way to try to balance his body. It looked uncomfortable, and dangerous. I smiled. “Here we go.”

  I started off pretty slowly, cruising around the lake-side path to get a feel for the weight of the man flopped over the saddle in front me like a big fish. The bike seemed to take the extra weight in stride, so I opened it up and raced along a path into the woods. I glimpsed a drone hovering over the trees, but I was gone before it could pursue us. I was heading north through the park, and every few moments the trees would break to reveal a baseball diamond, or some public building. A handful of people were out, but I passed them so fast that I doubt they got a clear look at me, or at my passenger.

  I really don’t need any negative publicity now.

  I was heading north, and the park wasn’t very big for someone on a high-speed motorcycle, so it only took a minute to reach my destination. The zoo.

  I knew the Maryland Zoo pretty well. It was one of the few things that had survived the transition to private management after the government couldn’t afford to run it anymore, and it was one of the few places where my father really liked to take me as a kid, much more than the aquarium or the Science Center, or any of the weird little museums scattered around Baltimore. So when I saw the penguin island through the trees, I knew exactly where I was.

  The holo-bike made short work of the fence, smashing through an old post and knocking the rails down, and we rode straight inside past the penguins. There were about a dozen people there, and they all stared and pointed as I rolled by them. Fortunately, I didn’t have far to go. It was just a quick run up the hill past the giraffe feeding station and the warthogs, around the corner, and up to a large enclosure surrounded by a massive fence of heavy logs that rose at least twenty feet into the air.

  The lion pen.

  “Lux, bike off.”

  The bike vanished and Frost fell to the ground at my feet. He stood up and glanced at the sign on the fence. “You’re going to feed me to the lions?”

  “I hope not,” I said. “I’m hoping that I can just threaten you with death by lions, and you’ll decide to help me out. Let Dom go. Leave me alone.”

  “Yeah, no, I’m not afraid of threats.” He shook his head. “I know, and you know, that you’re not going to put me in there. Remember, I’ve read your files. Fourth in your class, strong on math, weak on teamwork, only child, mixed parentage, not religious, non-confrontational. I know you, Carmen. You’re not going to hurt me.”

  I nodded. “I’m sure that would have been true about the girl in your files, the one who lived alone, loved her job, and thought she had a bright future ahead of her. But you took all that away from her. So I’m something different now.”

  The cold, confident glint in his eye faded. “I don’t think so. Maybe you believe that. Maybe you think a few days on the street have made you a hardened criminal, but they haven’t. You’re not a killer, or anything else remotely scary. You’re just a kid lashing out because the world isn’t fair. And you’re doing a great job, really. Bravo at lashing out. You’ve made quite a big mess and gotten a lot of attention. Good for you. But it doesn’t mean anything, in the long run, in the big picture. You’re still the same person you were last week.”

  I thought about sleeping at Felix’s house and jumping off the Transamerica Tower and fighting the dealers at the market and thrashing Brian’s office to make him release Mercy. I tilted my head at Frost and said,” I really don’t think so.”

  With a flick of my wrist, I smashed the small armored window in the wall of logs using my black sword, so there was nothing between us and four very large lionesses except an empty window frame.

  Frost shook his head. “Breaking windows? We both know you can’t throw me in there, and I’m not going to be bullied or threatened into going by myself.”

  “Uh huh.” I took a step back and crouched down so that he was between me and the window frame. “Lux, stilts, five yards.”

  The stilts expanded swiftly out of the bottoms of my boots, lifting me off the ground at a shallow angle, straight toward the man’s chest. The solid-light beams kept expanding, shoving me into him, shoving him back, and up, straight through the broken window. He smacked his head on the frame, and his legs banged around a bit, but we got through the narrow opening in just a second and he fell to the grass.

  “Lux, stilts off.”

  The stilts vanished and I dropped to the ground beside him. The four lionesses were all staring at us very intently.

  Frost staggered to his feet, one hand pressed to the back of his head. “You crazy little…”

  “So, I know that these lions have been in captivity all their lives, and they don’t have a lot of hunting experience, yada yada yada.” I backed away from Frost toward the broken window, keeping my eyes on the big cats. “But they’re still really big and strong, and I bet if they smelled blood, they would figure out what to do pretty quickly.”

  Frost took his hand from his head to reveal three fingers smeared with bright red blood. “Well, I’ll give you credit, kid. I didn’t think you had the balls to actually hurt me. But I still don’t think you’ll let anything worse happen to me. So no deal. Dom stays put until you turn over that suit.”

  I watched one of the lionesses stand up, stretch her back, and take a few cautious steps in our direction.

  “Mister Frost, I’ve known Dominic Tate since kindergarten. I know his parents. I know his allergies, and most of his meds. I hung out in the hospital with him after his surgeries. I let him take me to senior prom because, honestly, back then it looked like he might die and I wanted him to have a good night, even though I wanted to go with Lucas Rosario, who was really cute. I even tried to give him a kidney once, but we weren’t a match.”

  I paused. I hadn’t thought about the kidney in years. It had been a really stressful episode in the saga of Dom’s poor health and it made me suddenly wish I could see his face right then.

  “I’m telling you
all of this so you’ll understand that Dom isn’t just a friend, he’s someone I care about more than most people on this planet, and I’ve spent a lot of my life taking care of him. Usually, his life sucks because he’s sick. But right now, his life sucks because of me. And you have no idea how angry that is making me right now.”

  Frost turned to look at the lioness. She had taken a few more steps toward him, and now was lying on her belly, staring at him with her huge golden eyes.

  “I may not have the guts to hurt you myself, but I’m pretty sure I have the guts to stand here and let that cat tear you apart,” I said. “Maybe that’s cowardly and terrible, but I’m running out of ideas and Dom’s running out of time. He needs to be home, with his meds and his gear and his mom.”

  The lioness began crawling forward on her belly, wriggling her long legs and huge paws carefully through the grass, almost silently. The other three lionesses stood up, stretched, and licked their fangs.

  Frost kept his full attention on the approaching cat. “Well, that’s a nice play, Carmen. Let the cat do the dirty work for you.” He shrugged. “Well, if I didn’t trust you to kill me before, I definitely don’t trust you to save me now, and this job isn’t worth dying over. So, deal. Let me out of here and we’ll go get your friend.”

  “Make the call first.”

  Frost started moving toward me, his eyes still fixed on the lioness. “I think we should get out first.”

  “Call first.” The huge tawny predator was getting closer by the second, not just to him but to me too. I had no idea what a lion would make of a person covered in glowing holographic armor, but more importantly, I didn’t know whether the armor was strong enough to withstand the strength and weight of a huge killing machine like that. I mean, those cats can crush bones with their jaws, and my bones were protected by nothing more than particles of light. “Give Dom his phone back and have him call me. I want to hear it from him.”

  Frost yanked out his phone and called someone. “Yeah, it’s me. Let the fat kid go, we’re done with him. And I want you to give him his phone right now, right this second, and tell him to call Carmen Zhao. Right now.” He hung up and glanced briefly at me. “Done.”

  We waited. The lioness got closer. She was all the way down the hill now, just a short stone’s throw from our feet, and my heart was hammering away in my chest as I recalled every nature documentary my dad had ever made me watch. I got particularly hung up on the image in my mind of a pride of twenty huge lions attacking a bull elephant, leaping onto its back and tackling it to the ground to tear it apart while it was still alive.

  My phone buzzed. “Dom?”

  “Car? Are you okay? The craziest—”

  “Yeah, I know. Are you okay? Are they letting you go? For real?”

  “Uh, yeah. Door’s open and everything. I’m walking down the hall with the guy now. He says he’s going to drive me home. Where are you?”

  “Can’t talk. I’ll explain later. Just get home safe, okay?”

  I hung up and nodded at Frost. “Okay, go.”

  He frowned at me, and at the lioness, and then he began smoothly gliding toward me and the window behind me.

  The lioness attacked.

  She leapt up and ran straight at us, hundreds of pounds of muscle and claws and fangs, silent as death, fast as lightning. My heart stopped and my hands shook. “Lux, shield one!”

  The circular shield flashed to life on my left arm and the cat abruptly changed course, veering from Frost to me, and she jump straight at my face, those huge paws spread out to wrap around me, claws like daggers, fangs just beginning to part as they rose to the level of my throat.

  I didn’t manage to raise my shield so much as I twisted it in front of me and let the lion’s full weight crash into my body. The force of the impact didn’t even make me shudder. Just like when those two goons from the market ran into me on the street, the lioness’s weight seemed to just bounce off the holographic shield. Except she didn’t bounce off so much as she wrapped the curling ends of her claws around the edges of the shield and clung to it.

  And while holograms can defy the laws of motion, like the whole “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” deal, a hologram still has to occupy space and repel other objects, and oh yeah, deal with gravity. And that was a problem, because now my weightless shield weighed over three hundred pounds.

  I fell to the ground with the lioness on top of me, snarling and growling in my face with only a thin wall of cold photons between my nose and her teeth. Her weight wasn’t crushing me, thanks to my armor, but her weight was definitely keeping me from moving. I was lying flat on my back, legs stretched out, unable to even bend my knees.

  It’s hard to think clearly when there’s a lion lying on your body, and the lion is trying to eat your face. Even if you’re not in pain, and you’re pretty sure it can’t kill you, trust me, it’s still pretty terrifying, which makes it hard to figure out how to escape. So I lay there, staring into this lion’s mouth and eyes for a second, just babbling noises as I tried to get my brain in gear.

  “L-L-Lux, Lux, Lux! Lux, shield two!”

  The round shield morphed into a longer, rectangular shield, more like the ones police officers use in riots, and that pushed the claws away from my body a little, and it put another layer of cold photons between my face and her fangs.

  “Lux! Lux!” My brain was stuck in neutral. All I could think about were the constructs I had used recently. The bike, the wingsuit, the stilts, the skates. Nothing that would help me escape from a hungry lioness on my chest.

  And then I figured it out.

  “Lux, sphere!”

  The sphere expanded outward from my body to form a protective bubble around me. Where the bubble touched the ground, it simply ended, flowing and adapting to the contour of the earth to keep the sphere as perfect as possible.

  The good news was that the lioness was gone, pushed out by the expanding bubble, forced far enough away that I could stand up and breathe and feel slightly safe again.

  The bad news was that the hologram was perfectly black, except for the violet glow along the bottom edge where the sphere met the ground. So I couldn’t see through it. I couldn’t see the lions, or Frost, or the way out of the enclosure. I couldn’t see anything at all.

  I turned around and faced the direction where I was pretty sure the window was. Then I took a deep breath and yelled, “Lux, sphere off!”

  The moment the bubble vanished, I sprinted toward the wall and dove through the broken window. It wasn’t the most graceful dive, but I did get through the window, and slipped to the ground without too much flailing around. My body armor kept me safe and sound, and a moment later I was standing on the sidewalk, all limbs accounted for.

  Frost was standing beside me, his head and hands streaked with blood. His glare shifted from me to the lions and back to me again. “That was a hell of a thing. You’re some piece of work.”

  For a tiny moment, I felt ashamed. I had almost killed someone. Those lions really could have killed him. And not just killed him like a gun kills someone, but they would have killed him horribly, tearing him to pieces, eating him while he was still alive, or something equally awful, I assume.

  What the hell am I doing? Who the hell am I now?

  But that moment passed, and I shrugged. “You started this. You kidnapped my parents and my friends. Innocent people. You put them in danger, just to steal something from me, something I created, something that could help a lot of people. And for what? Money? Screw you.”

  I turned and started walking away.

  “Carmen.”

  I didn’t look back. “Lux, bike.”

  And I rode away.

  Chapter 12

  Unpaid Leave

  “You don’t understand, Felix, it was like… like I was someone else. I was doing things, saying things… I could have killed him. Killed. For real.”

  “But you didn’t. You saved Dom, that’s the important thing. Yo
u did what you had to do to protect the people you love. That’s what matters.”

  “You’re not listening!”

  I couldn’t look at him. He didn’t understand. He was being too nice, because he hadn’t been there, he hadn’t seen what I did, he couldn’t understand how real it was. To him, it was just a story that I had told him. But for me, it was the sight of Frost standing in a field, covered in his own blood, being stalked by a giant deadly animal.

  It sounded crazy, but it was real. I was there. I did it to him.

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I… I don’t see why you’re so upset.”

  We were sitting in the park near his house. It was out in the open and there were plenty of people around us. If anyone recognized me, I didn’t care. I wasn’t afraid of being seen, or even being caught. Let Frost and his security team come, let the cops come. I was bullet-proof, and I could out-run anyone. I’d been running for days. I was starting to expect it, the running. It was almost normal now. So who cares if I have to run again?

  “I’m upset because… what if this is how it happens? One day you’re normal, and the next day you get scared, so you do something terrible and it works out for you, and then the day after that you figure it’s okay to do something even more terrible.” I shook my head and looked away. The thoughts were coming faster than I could say them out loud and I got up to take a few steps away from him.

  “Hey, no, no, don’t even think that.” He stood up and put his arms around me. “You’re not like them. And you’re not going to turn into one of them.”

  “But what if I do? I mean, right now I feel like I’m the victim, I’m the good guy, I’m justified,” I said. “But what about tomorrow? Next month? Next year? I wrecked an office full of innocent people yesterday. They probably feel like victims now, they probably feel justified in hating me, wanting me locked up. I mean, where does it stop?”