by Jesse Karp
“It’s a hostile takeover,” Aaron said. “That’s all it is. He’s using the people he can control to kill the people he can’t control. All of them.”
“Soon it will be our turn,” Laura said. “Then there won’t be anything left but him.”
Rose looked at Mal, at Aaron, both of them stopped short and staring at Laura, waiting for her to explain. Why? What was it about Laura that filled these two with such confidence in her?
“I have to go,” Laura said. “To stop him.”
“No,” Rose said, with a harshness that made her voice unfamiliar in her own ears. “There’s no way. Mal tried, but the Old Man, he’s too strong now.”
“He’s not strong,” Laura insisted. “It’s his connection to people’s brains through the neuropleth. We have to strip it from him.”
“Laura.” Mal’s voice was soft, but immovable. “You can’t.”
“No!” Laura nearly screamed, making Aaron and Rose both jump in their spots. “No. You don’t tell me what I can do.”
Mal committed to the fight, took a step toward Laura as if he were stepping into the ring.
“I fought him myself. The minds are powering him now. He’s too strong. You can’t beat him.”
“Wrong,” Laura said, with a suddenly quiet determination. “You can’t. You fought him the way you know how to fight. But you’re not prepared to die for it, Mal. I am, if that’s the price,” she said. “Me, for everyone else.”
Mal took a quick, dangerous step forward.
“No.”
“Laura,” Aaron threw in with a dubious tone, “I’ve got to say, I don’t think that’s the best—”
“Yes,” she said, and Rose watched as, right before her, a girl became something far, far greater than herself. Laura’s voice was suddenly light, easy with certainty. “I know you can’t see it, Mal. For you, sacrifice is just another way to give up a fight. That’s why you couldn’t save Tommy when we were inside the Idea, when it offered you Tommy’s and Annie’s lives for your own. But you couldn’t do it. Or you wouldn’t.”
Mal wrestled with the words, the accusation.
“But that’s how Mike beat the Idea and that’s how Remak saved you,” she continued, heedless of the pain she was causing. Or, perhaps, well aware of it. “And that’s how I’ll beat the Old Man. People like him, they don’t understand the power of sacrifice. Sacrifice isn’t giving up the fight, Mal. It’s just saying that the fight is more important than you are.”
A dark, impenetrable silence locked the room down. Rose felt unable to move. Her awe for Laura weakened her knees, made her eyes moist and her chest hollow.
“Where is he, Mal?” Laura demanded.
“Oh, come on, Laura,” Aaron said, exasperated. “You don’t need him for everything. The Old Man is in the Lazarus Towers.”
She nodded.
“Then I’ll go there. I’ll find a way to tear him down.” She turned to the door without anything further. The others watched her with drowning eyes.
“Wait,” someone said, and Rose was astonished to find that it was her.
Laura turned to her, waiting.
“You can’t just walk in there,” Rose said. “That almost killed Mal. They’ll stop you before you get anywhere near him.”
She turned to Aaron.
“It’s true,” he confirmed from within the dataflow in his head. “Security has it locked down.”
“Fix that,” she told him.
“Fix it,” he mumbled. “I could hack in, get you clearance. But they’re not robots; they’d know a teenage girl doesn’t belong there.”
“You could—”
“An escort,” Aaron charged ahead. “I’ll get you an escort to the top, like you’ve been summoned. But that won’t get you to the towers themselves. There are a lot of streets between here and there.”
“It looks quiet,” Rose said, looking up from her cell. “The newsblogs are saying that the MCT is restoring order in the city.”
“They’re ‘restoring order’?” Aaron said. “That’s not good news. Do you remember what Mal said? The MCT is working for the Old Man.”
“He can’t control unlimited numbers of people at the same time,” Mal said. “He’s not that powerful yet. That’s why he needed to arrange things with the MCT and to make sure government forces were taken unaware.”
“He needs to keep things safe and orderly for himself,” Aaron said, “until he is that powerful.”
“I’m coming with you, Laura,” Mal said.
“No,” Laura and Rose said simultaneously.
“If you’re going to beat him, to tear him away from the minds that are giving him his power, you have to do it in the neuropleth.”
“Then I’ll find a way—”
“Me,” Mal said. “I’m the way. I told you, when Remak was in me, healing me, he opened up a doorway in my head, a doorway to the neuropleth. I can do the same for you. It’s the only way to meet the Old Man on equal footing. And I’m the only one who can put you there.”
“So do it right now.” Every word Laura uttered to him was a challenge.
“That won’t—” Rose cut herself off when faces turned toward her. “That won’t work. If you want to confront the Old Man in the neuropleth, you have to have . . . Remak called it neural sync. It means your nervous systems have to make physical contact.” The echo of physical contact with the Old Man shivered through Rose’s body as she said it.
“And that means,” Mal said, “that while you’re battling him in the neuropleth, your body will be right there next to him, where he can . . . You need someone there to protect your body.”
The necessity of it was inescapable, but Laura clearly didn’t like yielding.
“Come, then,” she said brusquely.
“Wait,” Rose said. “Remak told me that you can touch other minds while you’re in the neuropleth, but if you try to go into another body like Remak did, you’ll become like him—your own body will turn into what Remak was.”
Laura and Mal cataloged this, added it to their arsenal.
“Laura,” Aaron said, gracing her with a rare glimpse of his full, unadulterated attention. “Are you sure you can do this?”
She looked at him, and, impossibly, a smile broke across her face, soft and deeply sad.
“What’s happening now? Out there.”
“The MCT is mobilizing special squads. They’re shooting people down in the street.”
Laura looked back at him, the inevitability of this out where everyone could see it.
“Laura,” Aaron said, and something unfamiliar and uncomfortable rode his face. “Thank you.” He hugged her ferociously, like a baby animal about to lose its mother. Suddenly, even to Rose, he looked like a child.
Just as suddenly, he released, stepped back, and nodded.
Laura stood before him like a big sister seeing her younger brother off to college. Then, without another word, she turned and went out the door. Mal followed, but at the threshold he stopped himself. He stepped back to Rose, stood directly before her. For the first time, he took her hand in his.
“Find your strength, Rose,” he whispered to her. “It’s in you. Just find it.”
She took in every inch of him carefully, as though he were the most precious thing in the world and he was about to shatter.
He released her hand, turned, and was gone.
The Forgotten Places
THEIR FEET BEAT THE PAVEMENT as they moved uptown, holding as best they could to niches and recesses. MCT jeeps stalked up the streets like predators. In the distance, plumes of smoke rose into the sky, distant shouts echoed upward, stray gun shots cracked between the buildings. But around them, the concrete canyons resounded with Laura’s and Mal’s lonely footsteps. The city seemed haunted now, by the thing up in that tower, and the MCT was clearing away the last remnants of the living.
“They’re going to see us eventually,” Laura said.
“I know,” Mal replied. “Just one more block
.”
Distantly, the Lazarus Towers slashed out of the skyline, its central spire wounding the sky. It was much farther than a block away.
Mal took her by the hand, prepared to sprint the last length. She pulled her hand from him, glared back into his eyes. He turned away.
“There.” He pointed to a spot on the far corner and ran. She followed after him and came to a stop beside him, in front of a grocery store, its doors barred and its window slivered with cracks.
“We have to go in,” he said, holding his hand out to her tentatively.
“In here?” she said, ignoring his hand.
“No. I can’t show you unless you take my hand.”
She put her loose hand in his, offering no message or emotion through it. He pulled her to the edge of the grocery store, toward the stairway of the next building over. Until, suddenly, he was opening a door, and they were walking into a building that hadn’t been there a moment before. It was a single large room, its walls covered with bookshelves. Everything here was gray, not just in its appearance, but in its nature. The books had lost their pigment, the writing on the bindings fading into an illegible blur.
“One of the forgotten places,” Laura said, a memory she was not pleased to have back.
“Yes. Bookstores are slipping away fast now. There’s a network of them throughout the city. There’s a forgotten alleyway behind this one that cuts to another one. I can get us safely to the towers from here.”
She followed him through the heartbreaking rows, a haze of ghostly dust clinging to the air, kicked up by long-absent customers, and now never to fall because gravity forgot its hold on the particles.
He took her through the stockroom, out the back door into an alleyway, the concrete walls oddly rubbery as she brushed by them. He took her through these pale byways that cut through the city, made out of absences; soundless, no wind to blow the dead papers from the places where they lay, slowly receding from existence.
The quiet between Mal and Laura was dreadful. It felt to her like walking down the street with a stranger, her mind churning for something to say, but also firing with the wild anger of what had been done to her.
He pulled them out of the last forgotten place within sight of their destination.
The towers seemed to swallow up her field of vision, rendering even the gleaming carapace of the dome all but invisible to her. She could see Mal’s entire body straining toward the central tower, in the shadow of which he had nearly died. He looked as if he wanted to lift his fists and duke it out with the very structure itself.
She could almost feel the Old Man here: the air seemed thick with the sense of something prodding, probing, an itch just beneath her senses, bugs crawling beneath her skin.
Why was she not terrified? She was walking to her doom with the full intention of never returning. Did she not believe she was really going to die? Or was it, in fact, that she had somehow always been headed for this, for sacrifice? In the most mundane of miracles, her parents had made a strong child, and the child had made a strong woman, a woman who would become what she needed to in order to fight.
Mal’s strength was that he would never bend, never change. But hers was that she could.
And this, this bastion of humanity, this beneficent doomsday machine, was what she needed to be now. What everyone needed her to be.
The tower sheared up, higher and higher as they approached it, Laura leading the way.
Aaron and Rose
A HEAVY AND UNWELCOME QUIET had fallen in the apartment, too. Rose sat, hunkered on her bed, her knees hugged to her chest, her brow knit in a deep concentration that had no room for Aaron.
Aaron had tried to chat at her in a futile effort to gain a response. He preferred a hum around him, a crackle of motion and sound.
He was responsible for expediting Laura’s entrance to the tower, which required slicing their system and placing false orders, which themselves required code signatures, which required him to slice even deeper down. This was busy work to him, a mindless chore of running probable algorithms based on their code styles until he found one that allowed him to slip through. He had been told he was a genius at this sort of work. His father had once even brought him in for a shareholder demonstration, a sort of PR event about the limitless potential of Argaven leadership. But the truth was that Aaron’s genius was far beyond this stuff; it lacked challenge. It was the mental equivalent of twiddling his thumbs, and it did not eat nearly enough of his concentration to shut out the burden of solitude around him.
So he went to look out the window, to see some motion, some life. As it turned out, with the bars placed inside the window, he could not get his face close enough to the surface to have a look down there. He could see only across to another shining, featureless façade. It struck him only then how like a prison this place was, and he wondered what the people trapped living in these boxes did with the knowledge that they were being treated as cattle. Or, worse yet, did they not even know? Did they simply feel it, and were their lives, in some way, unconsciously guided by this feeling?
He patched into the MCT’s visual security net, looking through the eyes of various security cameras for the life and motion he craved. The streets, though, were weirdly empty, with only scurrying shadows at the edges of view and giant, rumbling MCT vehicles lumbering slowly along the avenues. Even the wondrous flow of information—the ones and zeroes of binary code that created the music of Aaron’s world—was plodding in an unprecedented funk, slowed in some kind of sympathetic fugue with the human world.
He was not getting what he wanted, and he was struck with a pang of realization: that all of this equipment was suddenly, epically unsatisfactory to his needs. Because what he wanted, what he really needed, was Laura. Just to tell him to shut it or to scold him for being so monomaniacal or to put her hand on his arm. But none of that was ever going to happen again, because she would soon be quite dead and would leave Aaron with a hole that was even emptier than the one she had filled to begin with.
Goddamn her.
He spun on Rose as though he were going to take out his frustration on her frail and yielding emotions. But the moment he locked her in his sights, when the words were welling up, there was a hurried pounding on the door.
Rose lurched off the bed, clutched at the door, and yanked it open—assuming, no doubt, that it was Mal.
Instead, waiting on the other side was a tall, slim woman so perfectly honed in the line and balance of her sharp features and the tailoring of her sharp suit that she seemed to have been machined into existence, molded and refined from a flawless alloy. Her blond hair was in a tight bun, and the perfect silver dot of her cellpatch gleamed even under the dull light offered in this dreary place. Her eyes were hidden behind cellenses, and her face was so smooth and unlined that it was impossible to tell what age she could be, or even what decade of her life she was in. Her poise, framed in the doorway, was well controlled, giving nothing away.
Rose, whose poise was quite the opposite, took a stumbling step back at the alien figure in her midst.
“I need to speak to Mal Jericho right now,” the woman said in a voice that chimed like crystal ice.
“He’s not here,” Aaron answered when Rose remained silent. “Who are you, exactly?” As he asked, he sent a proximity code and found that her cellpatch security was tighter than the security of both the Lazarus Towers and the MCT.
Cracks began to form in her poise.
“I need to speak to Mal Jericho. Do you— Wait. Are you . . .” She held her question in a moment longer, clearly not believing. “Are you Aaron Argaven? How are you . . . What are you doing here?”
Knowing that she knew of him and the way she reacted to his presence there revealed certain things about her: the line of work she was in, her level in the hierarchy respective to Aaron’s lineage. This knowledge pumped confidence into Aaron’s voice.
“Look, don’t dither in the hallway,” he said. “Come in and explain yourself, and then
we’ll see about answering your question.”
Her head jerked about with shock that she was even still in the hallway, and she stepped into the apartment, distaste for the uncouthness of her journey nipping at her heels.
“Your name?” he asked, shutting the door behind her.
“It doesn’t— My name is Arielle Kliest.” Her voice was becoming shriller and her delicate, sculpturesque fingers with their gleaming jewel-like nails were fluttering in agitation. “I work for the Old Man. I’ve been his right hand for years. But he’s gone over the— No. He’s just gone. It’s not even him anymore. Or it’s more him than it ever was. He’s going to tear us down. He’s going to tear everything down. Mal Jericho is the only one who can stop him.”
“How’s that exactly?” Aaron maintained his own poise, not because he was immune to the effect of her words, but because after a lifetime of privilege, he knew how you acted in front of a menial.
“The Old Man has fused with a—a—a thing. Mal is the only person who knows what it is, I think, or knows how to get it out of him.”
“And what gives you—”
“Listen,” she said, and were she not pressing down on it with all her control, her voice would have been a shriek instead of a hiss. “There’s no time. Someone’s been sent after me. You need to tell me where Mal is right now.”
With impossible punctuality, as if by merely giving it the shape of words made it true, the doom that had followed Arielle Kliest from the Lazarus Towers bore down upon them.
The door did not bother with a knock this time but was instead flung open with such force that one of the hinges audibly cracked. The shape of a man shattered the precarious safe haven of the room. His form was low and wide, like a bull. His face, though, was not altogether a man’s. It was missing something inexpressible, something no civilized face should have. Shadows seemed to gather unnaturally at the eyes.
To her credit, Arielle Kliest regained her poise and stared her fate in its inhuman face.
