by Anne Tibbets
Ric turned his head in disgust and stalked toward the door of the building. “You can’t make decisions like that for all of us.” He paused to take the handle. “This isn’t just about you.”
I almost laughed at that, even though it wasn’t funny. “Really? You and Sonya waged war against Auberge to try and erase the identities of freed girls from the Line. This whole thing started with survivors like me. It kept going because of girls like me. If this isn’t about me, then what is it about?”
He didn’t have an answer to this, but I saw his jaw relax and he tossed his hands in the air as if admitting defeat.
“Knowing is best,” I said, unable to let it go.
He shook his head and licked his lips. “Let’s agree to disagree on that one, okay?” He yanked on the factory door. It was locked. We heard the bolt snap. The door slid open from the inside. From the opening, the barrel of a gun appeared and pointed at Ric’s face. He walked backward slowly, raising his palms into the air.
“What’s the password?” a gruff voice asked from inside the dark factory.
Ric took another step back until he stood in front of me. All we could see was the tip of a revolver, gleaming in the flickering light from the overhead lamp above the door. I waited, ready to run.
“We’re here to see Sonya,” I said.
“What’s the password?” the voice repeated. A man took a step forward. He was wide and muscular, dark-skinned. The handgun looked puny in his enormous hands.
“Tell Sonya that Doc and Naya are here,” I said.
“That’s not the password.” He cocked the hammer of the gun with his thumb. “Move along.”
Ric flushed. “We didn’t drive all this way for the scenery. Sonya asked us to come!”
“And she didn’t mention any password,” I added.
“Move. Along,” the man repeated, and he took another step toward us.
I took a shot in the dark. “Bunny slippers!”
The man shook his head quickly as if he wasn’t sure if he’d heard me correctly. “What’d you say?”
“No? That’s not the password? How about pickpocket?”
The barrel of the gun dipped slightly as he eyed me with suspicion. “Are you nuts? I said move along.”
“Nose ring?”
He lowered the gun to his side and pursed his lips. “What’s the matter with you? I point a gun at your boyfriend’s face, and you guess nose ring?”
“How about belts?”
The man shook his head and turned to go back inside. “Wait here.” He disappeared through the door.
Ric let out the breath he’d been holding. “Either belts is the password, or he’s coming back out shooting. What made you guess that?”
“The first time I met Sonya, she loaned me one of her belts,” I explained.
“That’s random.”
“It’s a little odd she asked us to come and didn’t tell us the password,” I said.
“Well, we did tell her to get out.”
“True.”
The factory door opened again. The big man came first, his gun tucked into the front of his jeans, and behind him was Sonya.
She took one look at us and grinned. “I’ll be damned.”
* * *
Inside the building, Sonya gave us what she called “the five-credit tour,” which was about what the place appeared to be worth.
It was an enormous empty tomb. The machines from its shoe manufacturing days had been pushed against the walls. Corpses of half-finished soles were scattered on the floor and in the corners. Down the center aisle, dilapidated folding tables had been set up all in a row, leading down to a table and chairs in a small makeshift kitchen. The light inside the factory came from a row of square fixtures by the broken windows near the ceiling. Since there was no glass, they also let in wind, bugs, pigeons and showed rays of spiraling dust in each beam of light.
“This here is the armory,” Sonya said and pointed to the first table. Her bunny slippers shuffled on the cement floor as she went past it. The table was piled high with rifles, handguns, cubes of claylike material wrapped in wax paper and boxes of bullets. “Bubbs is in charge of that,” she added and nodded at the large muscular man who’d answered the door. He stood on the inside, beside the opening. His arms were so thick he could barely cross them, and his thin T-shirt was stretched tight enough to be transparent.
Sonya’s hand flicked to the other table across the aisle. “This is tech support.” Seated at the table was a light-skinned woman who typed on an old plastic laptop. She didn’t look up or acknowledge our presence even after I said hello.
So far, I was unimpressed. If this was all we had to work against Auberge, we were doomed. Tech support alone was reason for concern. It was a far cry from Tym’s old hacker lair, which had had dozens of hard drives, cables snaking across the floor of an abandoned warehouse and an entire wall of touch screens from floor to ceiling.
This hacker, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen, resembled an underground mole with unevenly bobbed hair and glasses as thick as magnifying glasses. She wore a rumpled sweatshirt and jeans with large, frayed holes in the knees. She sat at the table, hunching over the laptop, typing with lightning fingers and squinting at the screen as if she was half-blind.
“Say hi, Minnie,” Sonya said to the girl.
Minnie typed, never pulling her attention from the laptop screen. “Yo.”
Sonya walked a few meters down the aisle then stopped at another broken-down folding table. It was piled with Auberge uniforms, boots, hats and the black metal tablets the guards all carried. “This is wardrobe.” Sonya flicked her hand in the air as she shuffled by.
Another woman sitting in the back of the room caught my attention. She was smoking a cigarette while cross-legged atop an old factory machine. I nodded at her, but she didn’t look too pleased to have us there. Her long blond hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail and even from across the room I could see the scars from old pox marks on her face. She wore an Auberge uniform but she’d altered it, making it snug enough to emphasize the curves of her body. The tip of her cigarette glowed as she sucked another drag.
“That’s Cat,” Sonya said, meaning the woman.
When she didn’t offer up the scope of Cat’s responsibilities, Ric cleared his throat. “And what does Cat do?”
Sonya trundled forward to the next cracked table. “She gets stuff.” When she noticed our perplexed faces, she elaborated. “You know, equipment, the uniforms, the guns, the tech. She gets them.”
“You mean she steals them?” Ric asked.
“Yeah—or barters. Cat knows every black market that Auberge doesn’t. She’s good like that.”
“Does that mean you’ve retired?” I asked. “From the burglary business?”
Sonya raised her eyebrows at me. “Of course. Can’t risk getting caught. Too much is at stake. But I do lift an occasional wallet every now and then. Old habits die hard.” She stopped in front of an empty table. “This is medical.”
Ric pursed his lips. “You’re a little short on supplies.”
She shrugged and moved on toward the last table. “Well, I guess we could have Cat barter for a box of sticky bandages and some ointment, if it’ll make you feel better, Doc.”
“He’s a doctor?” a voice asked. It was the smoking woman. Cat’s craggy voice echoed off the walls of the dead factory. She sounded as if she’d gargled with broken glass.
“Something like that,” Sonya said.
“I’m a veterinarian,” Ric corrected her. “But I used to work at a medical clinic. I have practical experience.”
Cat narrowed her eyes and puffed on her cigarette again. “Great.”
“Hey,” Sonya spat. “At least they came.”
“And what’s the
waif’s function?” Cat asked.
It took me a second to realize she was talking about me.
“That’s Naya,” Sonya said, as if my name was explanation enough.
“And what does she bring to the table?” Cat pressed. She jumped off the factory machine and landed on the cement floor with the thunder of two large Auberge boots.
The sound reverberated off the inside of my head like a wrecking ball, causing my stomach to drop. It was too close to the sound of the guards in the Line. I covered it quickly, but it still made my heart skip a beat.
My emotions must have showed on my face. Ric reached for my hand and I took it, gladly.
Cat sashayed across the floor toward us, watching me falter. She squinted at me as she approached. “What does she do?”
Sonya didn’t seem fazed by Cat’s suspicion. “She’s been inside HQ.”
Cat stopped behind the table of Auberge uniforms and puffed on her cigarette again. Smoke trailed up and around her face, and memories of my mother came to mind.
She’d been a smoker too.
I had a vivid memory, from when I was very young, of her sitting at the tiny kitchen table in our East apartment, rolling her cigarettes.
Where did Cat get hers? The one she smoked had a filter. Mama had made her own from papers and a plant she’d kept out on the balcony, but Cat’s looked manufactured, which was impossible.
“Where’d you get that cigarette?” I asked.
“Why? You want one?”
“No. But it didn’t come from Auberge.”
Cat glared at me. “Is that what you do? Ask questions?”
This woman was a tough nut to crack. Her face was practically expressionless.
“I cook,” I said.
This answer seemed to please her. “Finally,” she said, and she stubbed out her cigarette with her boot. “Just what we need. A fucking housekeeper.”
“Cat,” Sonya warned.
She shrugged and pulled another cigarette from the breast pocket of her bomber jacket. She lit it from a metal lighter she pulled from her pant pocket, then flicked the lid closed.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, unwilling to take the bait. Note to self, I thought. Cat’s a bitch.
She didn’t respond to my greeting and puffed on her cigarette.
“Is this it?” Ric asked.
Sonya nodded. “Not bad, eh?”
Ric motioned around the grungy factory. “This is your revolution?”
Sonya’s face hardened. “What did you expect?”
“Well, I gotta be honest,” he said. “I was hoping for a little more than this.” His eyes widened. “You’ve seen it out there, right? I’m pretty sure in order to bring down Auberge, we’re going to need more than two Neanderthals and a hacker with Asperger’s.”
“High-functioning autism, asshole,” said Minnie, who’d finally stopped typing on her laptop.
“I told you,” Cat said, and Sonya cursed at her in response.
“We took on Auberge with only four of us last time,” Sonya said tightly.
He glared at her. “And look how that turned out.”
“You want out?” she snapped. “There’s the door.”
“Hold on,” I said and held my hand in the air as if that would stop the words from coming.
Sonya ignored that, of course. “This is all we need,” she said. “The more people we bring in, the more risk there is of getting caught. We only need six. And six is how many we’ve got.”
“That’s debatable,” Cat said.
“Six people?” Ric scoffed. “You need at least six thousand. When you said revolution, I thought you meant an actual revolution. But this? I don’t even know what this is.”
“Why do you only need six people?” I asked Sonya. “What’s the play?”
She shuffled past us and went to Minnie. “Show them.”
Minnie typed on the laptop, then turned the unit around so we could see the screen. It was a blueprint of Auberge headquarters.
“They’ve closed off the exterior air vents,” Sonya explained, pointing to the blueprints. “They’ve installed an air purifier and circulation system on the roof. That’s why we can’t get in through the airshafts. They’ve also moved the mainframe server room. It used to be here, in the subbasement. But after Naya and I burned it down, they dumped that one and are using the backup. Here.” She directed us to the top of the screen. “On the highest floor. It houses the palm prints and DNA files for every person in Auberge. Every registered man, woman and child.”
She leaned over the screen and zoomed in on the top floor schematics. “Minnie has designed a virus big enough and fast enough to wipe out the whole thing. The whole grid. Not just the palm prints, but everything.”
Ric pressed his lips into a fine line. “Impossible.”
Minnie blinked at him. “Not if you attack the storage algorithm.”
“She’s got the upload down to thirty seconds,” Sonya added.
“All we have to do,” Cat said, puffing on her cigarette and talking with a trail of smoke seeping from her mouth, “is get you in, plug in the virus and get out before the system shuts down.”
“And I’ll be on the video feeds, guiding you through the whole thing,” Minnie said. “We can’t fail.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “If we erase the identities of everyone, how will that shut down the whole system?”
“Because while you’re on the top floor wiping out the memory, I’ll be here,” Sonya said, typing on the laptop and scrolling through the map to show another large open space on the ninety-eighth floor. “Using a version of the same virus to disrupt all Auberge outputs.”
“Outputs?” I still didn’t get it.
“No commands from Auberge,” Minnie explained. “Anywhere. No power. No communication. No screens. No electricity. No banks. No nothing. Complete system shutdown. Everywhere.”
“It’ll be total anarchy,” Sonya finished, beaming with delight. She leaned away from the laptop to watch our faces.
I didn’t know how to feel. Anarchy? How was that a solution? We were destroying one problem and creating another. What if we made things worse?
“Then what?” Ric asked.
Sonya furrowed her eyebrows. “What do you mean? Then Auberge is over.”
“Then what will people do for power?” I asked. “And for credits?”
“There won’t be power or credits anymore,” Cat said.
“The whole of Auberge will belong to no one,” Sonya said. “Don’t you get it? We are the apocalypse.”
Chapter Five
I clasped my knees to my chest and pulled them in. Tight.
“What about Bio-Tox 6364?” Ric asked.
In the back rooms of the abandoned shoe factory, Sonya and the others had created small living quarters out of supply closets, each with a cot, a candle and a thin old blanket. It reminded me of the appointment rooms on the Line, but I kept this observation to myself. Some memories were best abandoned.
One of the rooms had two cots, and Sonya had shown us to it, telling us it was ours during the “operation.” She then excused herself and said she had things to discuss with the others.
“It’ll give you two a chance to talk it over,” she’d said, as though she knew we weren’t on board with her chaotic plan.
Given Ric’s exacerbated pacing, she was right. He wrung his hands together as if they were strangling each other. It was a miracle he didn’t rub off his own skin. “What’s to stop Auberge from releasing the toxin after the system is shut down?” he asked.
“They won’t have communications,” I said. “They won’t be able to reach anyone to tell them to release it.”
“This is crazy,” he fussed, turning on his heel a
nd pacing in the other direction.
“Crazy, yes. But it might work.”
“But work for what? Mass chaos? Rioting? If the guards spook, they could start shooting people at random. Thousands could die. And for what? So they can reboot the system and assume control all over again? What does this plan gain?”
“But what if they don’t spook?” I asked. “What if we cut the head off and it kills the whole beast? If the citizens take over, it’ll be a whole new beginning. A whole new government, controlled by the people. The end of Auberge rule.” The idea was almost too impossible to hope for.
“Who’s to say the next rule won’t be worse?”
“Think about that statement,” I said. “How can it get any worse?”
He shrugged and turned to pace again. “I’d hate to imagine it. I mean, if it’s so easy to get inside and infect the whole system, don’t you think someone would have done it before? What about Tym? Why didn’t he?”
“Maybe he couldn’t. Sounds like Minnie can, I guess.”
“You say that like it’s a good thing.”
“I think it might work.”
“There’s just six of us. The only thing this plan is good for is getting us all killed.”
I threaded my fingers together and inched my thighs closer to my chest. “We can’t storm HQ with an army. What army? None of the people in Central have any weapons, except the guards. At least this plan gives us a chance. Once the guards lose communication, they won’t know what to do. We could take control of Central, a sector at a time.”
“How?” he scoffed. “With unarmed citizens?”
I nodded. “Don’t forget, citizens outnumber guards.”
He pursed his lips and shook his head at me. “You’re already convinced.”
“I think I am.”
“What about Adena and Clea?”
The mention of their names sliced at my heart. I loosened my grip on my knees and let my feet hit the floor. “What about them?”
“If we do this, they won’t be safe.”
“They’ll be free.”
“Or killed by a looter,” he snapped.
