Free to Fall

by Lauren Miller

  “We rely on our senses to guide us. But what if you were in a situation where your senses were compromised? How would your mind compensate?”

  I looked down at my necklace again. You’ll need this, she’d said. For what?

  “You’re on the top floor of a burning building,” Dr. Tarsus was saying. “There is a single elevator that connects all the floors and a stairwell between each set of floors, but these stairwells are not stacked, meaning that each one is in a different location.” These were important details and I’d only half heard them. I shoved the envelope with my necklace back into my bag and tried to listen. Burning building. Stairwells in different locations. Escape. “The fire in this building originated on your floor,” Tarsus went on, “and will quickly escalate. Your task is to get out of the building alive. The meter at the bottom of your screen will tell you how much smoke you’ve inhaled. If you lose consciousness, the simulation will end and you will get a zero score. Good luck.”

  The lights in the room dimmed and the simulation began. I blinked a couple of times, as if that would help me see more clearly, but of course it didn’t because there was virtually no light on my screen. I looked around for the smoke Tarsus had mentioned, but I didn’t see any. Or any other signs of a fire. Find a stairwell, I told myself, moving forward slowly with my arms outstretched. A few seconds later my palms hit a surface. A cold, almost damp surface that felt like stone.

  Confusion stalled my next thought. If this building was on fire, the walls wouldn’t be cold, and they certainly wouldn’t feel damp. Had I missed something she’d said?

  Now that my eyes were adjusted to the semidarkness, I could make out the shape of something jutting out from the wall above my head. I reached up for it and felt something smooth and cylindrical mounted on a small platform. My fingers creeped up to the cylinder’s rounded edge then dipped down as I slid them over the top. Something stiff crunched beneath my middle finger and suddenly it registered. A candle with a burnt wick, mounted on a stone wall.

  I was in the Few’s tomb.

  It took effort not to obsess over the why—why had Tarsus put me in the tomb and instructed me to escape?—and instead to focus on the how—how was I going to get to whatever was beneath the reservoir? The clock at the bottom of my screen was ticking.

  Now that I knew where I was, it took me only a few seconds to determine that I was in the room where the initiation had been held. I could make out the shape of the altar on the far wall. I’d seen the doors at opposite corners, so I moved through the one closest to me. The room I stepped into was smaller than the one I’d been in, which told me I was moving toward the center.

  I turned and sprinted back through the altar room, toward the other door. I guessed that I was in the third or fourth square in the sequence, so I had six or seven more to go until I reached the arena and another four to get to the reservoir.

  Since I knew where the doors were—at opposite corners on opposite walls—I could move through the rooms quickly, slowing down only when I passed through the narrow doors. When I ran into the arena, I stopped for a moment to catch my breath and to marvel again at the sheer size of the space, standing completely still so as not to lose my bearings. It was so dark that if I got turned around, I’d be running in circles to find the opposite wall.

  When my breathing slowed, I started moving again, jogging toward the other end of the massive circular stage, praying for another door. My heart leaped when I felt an opening in the rock. It was a tunnel.

  The timer at the bottom of my screen had hit 10:00:00. I had ten minutes to get to whatever was under the reservoir. I clung to the wall at my right, keeping one palm on the stone and the other out in front of me as I fell into a steady jog, the wall curving into the shape of a spiral. Even though I was only running in place in my pod, I’d never make it the whole way if I tried to sprint.

  I figured it’d take me at least seven minutes to cover that much distance, but just shy of six I ran smack into a wall. In the darkness I didn’t see it coming. It was made of stone, like the one beside me, and I felt around for an opening, refusing to accept that it could be a dead end. My hand slid across a stone that protruded from the rest. Instinctively, I pressed it, the wall slid away.

  Behind it was another wall, this one made of glass and lit from behind. I blinked rapidly, blinded by the bright light. On the other side of the glass was a smooth steel wall with a vault door in the center, engraved with a giant G. The Gnosis logo. Beside the door was a mounted wall mic with a red button beneath it and a rectangular screen above it. To the right of the mic was a control panel with rows of green lights.

  I touched the glass in front of me to get a sense of how thick it was, and the glass became a touchscreen with a keypad. Twelve boxes appeared, with numbers inside the first four.

  It was a password sequence. My brain went to work to find a pattern. Two plus three equaled five, and five plus three equaled eight, but eight plus three didn’t equal four. Damn it. My eyes flicked to the bottom of my screen. 2:59:45 remaining. I felt my mood dip. The time was going to run out while I was still standing here.

  Think, Rory, I told myself. My mom had thought of everything. She had to have left me a clue for this. My mind raced over everything she’d wanted me to have. The necklace, the note, the blanket.

  The blanket. With its mathematical pattern.

  In a flash, I saw it. It wasn’t 2, 5, 8, and 4. It was 2,584, the twentieth number in the Fibonacci sequence. I’d calculated it last night. What was the next number in the sequence? My brain stalled. I couldn’t remember. I’d have to start at the beginning. The first two numbers were zero and one, and every number after that was the sum of the two before it. Doing the math, the number right after 2,584 was 4,181. I quickly typed four, one, eight, and one into the next four boxes. Now for the last four: 2,584 + 4,181 = 6,765. I added these, took a breath, and touched the enter button.

  Clang.

  I jumped at the loud sound, metal against metal. A lock lifting out of place. A moment later there was a sound like a puff of air, and then a whoosh as the glass retracted and slid away. My eyes darted to the timer: 1:45:00 left.

  I stepped inside the chamber. As soon as I did, the glass resealed behind me. There was a sucking sound as it resealed, trapping me between glass and steel. Now what? I scanned the small chamber. The red button beneath the mic was blinking, as if the mic were recording. Was I supposed to say something? If there was a password, I certainly didn’t know it. I watched as the screen above the mic lit up with a moving wave pattern, as if I was speaking.

  Then I heard a beep as the lights on the control panel flashed from green to red, followed by a loud metallic snap as the lock on the vault door disengaged.

  It was letting me in.

  As I reached to pull open the vault door, I noticed for the first time that the skin on my arm was black. I surveyed the rest of me and realized why the system was letting me in. It thought I was someone else. All this time, I’d been Dr. Tarsus in this simulation and hadn’t realized it. No wonder I’d gotten here so fast. My virtual legs were twice as long.

  With only ten seconds left on my timer, I darted through the heptagonal opening and into the biggest room I’d ever been in.

  It was unlike anything I had ever seen. Lit with an eerie blue light. Stacked with rows and rows of identical machines, from floor to ceiling. So cold, it felt like a freezer.

  The floor beneath me was grated and raised several feet off the ground beneath it, which seemed to be cut from sparkling stone. I looked up at the ceiling, more than a football field away. The size, the machines, the temperature. This was a server room. It had to be.

  Look to your right!

  The words were a boom, like thunder, bathing me in fear and relief. The voice was here, helping me, and, from its tone, it cared about this as much as I did. I spun to my right and saw a machine that looked different than the others. Tri-panel screens suspended above a glass desk sitting inside a copper-colore
d cage. I took a step toward it and my screen went black.

  “No,” I blurted out. “Not yet.”

  But the timer had run out and the simulation was over. A few seconds later, my screen lit up with our class roster, ranked by escape times. My name was at the middle of the list. Inconspicuous. As far as anyone else in the class could tell, I’d done the same simulation they had. Only Tarsus and I knew the truth: that, for some reason I couldn’t begin to fathom, she was trying to help me. She’d not only let me loose in the tomb, she’d showed me how to access Gnosis’s server bank.

  Our teacher spent the rest of the class period going over the various mistakes my classmates had made in their sims. I didn’t hear a word of it. I just stared at my pendant.

  Had she left that copy of my mom’s transcript under my pillow? Had she written Dr. Hildebrand’s name in North’s book? I heard the voice loud and clear then, not a boom like before, but more of an echo. Two words, resounding in my head.

  Trust her.

  31

  GRATEFUL I WAS IN SNEAKERS, I ran from Hamilton Hall toward Paradiso, the upsilon pendant banging against my collarbone, and I hopped the fence at the cemetery. As I sprinted across the grass, I cast a quick glance around to make sure I was alone. When my eyes landed on the statue of the archangel, I stopped in my tracks. His arm was pointed at the entrance to the cemetery, which made sense now that I’d seen the illustration in Paradise Lost. He was expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden. But I was certain that his arm had been pointed at the sky the night the Few summoned me to the angel’s wing.

  I jogged over to it. It was almost imperceptible, but there was a slit in the stone at his left shoulder joint, as if his arm were a lever. I gripped his wrist and pushed up. His arm didn’t budge. I gritted my teeth and pushed again, squatting my legs for leverage. His arm inched upward, and as it did, I heard a rumble to my left. Stone sliding on stone.

  It was coming from the mausoleum.

  I dashed over to the building and let myself in. I knew even before I lifted the coffin’s lid what I’d done. I’d opened the entrance to the tomb.

  The coffin’s marble bottom had retracted a few inches to reveal spiral stairs descending into pitch-black. I peered over the coffin’s edge, trying to make out the bottom, but I couldn’t see farther than ten feet down.

  With a start I straightened back up. What if I’d set off a silent alarm? Not to mention that I’d left the mausoleum door open in broad daylight. I slammed the coffin lid shut and left the mausoleum as quickly as I’d come in, stopping only to yank the angel’s arm back down before sprinting toward the fence.

  Kate was behind the register when I came barreling through the café’s door. “Hey, Rory,” she called. “North’s not here.”

  “What do you mean he’s not here?” I demanded. “He has to be here.”

  Kate eyed me. “Are you okay?”

  “I just need to see North,” I said. “Do you know where he is?”

  She shook her head. “But his break’s over in five minutes. You want me to make you something while you w—”

  “No, thanks,” I said, and dashed out.

  Relief washed over me when I saw him through the glass door of Ivan’s repair shop. North had his laptop open on the counter, and Ivan was tinkering with something in North’s palm. I yanked open the door, sending the bell clanging. North jerked up, his fingers clamping down on whatever was in his hand. He quickly shut his laptop, too.

  “Rory,” he said when he saw me, relaxing a little, but his brow was now furrowed in concern. “What are you doing here?”

  “I need to see what’s on my necklace,” I said hurriedly. “I think she put something on it. I think that’s why she took it.”

  Ivan was already unlocking his loaner cabinet.

  “What’s in your hand?” I asked North. His fingers were still tight around it.

  He hesitated and glanced at Ivan. The old man nodded. “It’s ready to go.”

  North opened his hand. The dove locket I’d seen in the shop’s glass cabinet the first night we’d hung out was lying in his palm. Even more exquisite up close. The gold was etched with intricate detail, the wing raised slightly from the surface. “I bought it for you,” North said, glancing sideways at Ivan. “To replace your necklace.” He faltered. “I mean. I know nothing could replace it, but I thought—”

  “I love it,” I said, sweeping my hair up with my hands. “Will you put it on for me? And take the other one off so we can get the file?”

  Feeling North’s fingers skim the nape of my neck made the tiny hairs beneath them stand on end. How I wished we could just be two regular teenagers who didn’t have a biotech conspiracy to take down.

  The dove locket fell about an inch above the pendant, wedging itself in the space between my clavicles. “What’s inside?” I asked suddenly, remembering that it was a locket. The hinge was along the top, so I slid my nail between the dove’s beak, the obvious place to snap it open.

  “It doesn’t open,” North said quickly. He unclasped the upsilon necklace and caught it with his hand.

  “Isn’t it a locket?”

  “Whoever owned it before you sealed it shut,” Ivan explained.

  I slid the back of my hand under the delicate bird, lifting it so I could see it better. I remembered the dove’s eye being a turquoise gemstone, but I must’ve been mistaken, because it was black, not blue, and reflective, like mirrored glass.

  “Well, I love it,” I said, turning around to smile at North. “Thank you.”

  He beamed. “You’re welcome.” He released the USB plug on my pendant and stuck it into the port of Ivan’s laptop. “How’d you get this back?” he asked.

  “Dr. Tarsus,” I said. “She gave it back to me this morning. It sounds crazy, but I think maybe she’s been trying to help me all along.”

  “Help you do what?” North asked.

  “I don’t know. But this morning in practicum she showed me the inside of the tomb and let me use her credentials to get into what I think is a Gnosis server room. That’s what’s beneath the reservoir.”

  North said something in reply, but I was too preoccupied with the two files that had popped up on my screen to hear it. One was a JPEG, the other was an audio file, seven minutes and forty-five seconds in length. I lifted my eyes and met Ivan’s. “Do you have some earbuds I could borrow?” It wasn’t that I didn’t want North to hear it, or Ivan for that matter—I just wanted to listen to it once through first.

  “Of course,” the old man replied. He went back to the loaner cabinet and retrieved a pair of vintage headphones, the kind you wore over your ears. “If you’d like some privacy, you can listen to it in my office in the back,” he said kindly, and gestured for me to come around the counter. He pointed to a door just behind the fabric curtain that separated the front of the store from the back.

  “Thanks,” I said, casting my eyes back to North as I lifted the laptop off the counter. “I’ll just be a few minutes.”

  The office was cramped but clean. There was an old transistor radio on the desk, propped up against the wall. It was on, set to what sounded like a news channel. The volume was too low to make out the words. I caught the phrase “solar flare” and turned it up. It was the tail end of a news story.

  “. . . wind would hurl a burst of electromagnetic radiation in our direction,” the reporter was saying. “Traveling at speeds upward of eight million miles an hour, this cloud of solar plasma and magnetic field would slam into the Earth’s atmosphere in less than a day, posing significant risk to our power grid.”

  A solar storm. It was the kind of thing the old Beck would’ve gone nuts over. But the new Beck probably wouldn’t see it at all. Lux would make sure of it. Weather events were on his threat list, after all.

  The thought snapped me back to the present moment. I clicked to open the JPEG first.

  A black-and-white photo opened onscreen. It was a yearbook picture, an action shot from the sports page. A basketball p
layer in a Theden jersey was launching a three-point shot with four seconds left on the clock. The crowd was on its feet in the bleachers behind him. I saw my mother’s face almost immediately, her mouth open in a happy yell, hugging the girl beside her. A girl with an Afro whose inky black eyes hadn’t changed in seventeen years.

  Holy crap. They were friends.

  I shoved the headphones plug into the jack and clicked the other file.

  “You no doubt have questions,” came Dr. Tarsus’s voice through the speakers. “I have some answers, but not all. I don’t know why your mom left Theden when she did, or whether her death was an accident, although I suspect it wasn’t. I do know that Griffin Payne is your real father, and that he and Aviana were deeply in love, and she was certain you were conceived on their wedding night.” Dr. Tarsus took a steady breath. I felt my body stiffen, bracing for whatever she was about to say.

  “The last time I heard from your mother was the day you were born,” she began. “She’d been gone since the previous June. She called from a nurse’s phone to tell me she was in labor, and that she thought the Few had found her. She didn’t say what had happened to make her run, only that something terrible had, and that, because of it, you could not grow up as Griffin’s child. She said she’d made sure that Griffin didn’t suspect that you were his, and that you would grow up believing that a man named Duke Vaughn was your father.” My eyes watered at the mention of my dad’s name. How far away my life with him seemed. “She said she was calling to say good-bye,” Dr. Tarsus continued. “And to ask me to keep you safe. I promised her that I would.

  “By now you know that the upsilon necklace is mine. Your mom was never a member of the Few. Neither was your father. Your father was never even considered, despite his stepfather’s pleas on his behalf—his IQ didn’t meet the threshold. Your mother was invited and went through the evaluation process, but when the time came for her vows, she refused to make them. I’ll never forget her words. She pulled back her hood and said, ‘Only the powerless hide behind masks and robes.’ The rest of us were caught up in the prestige and exclusivity, the flattery of being told that we were destined for greatness. It was so easy to rationalize it, to call this greatness our duty, to make it sound important and even good. It’s how we’re made I suppose. How did Milton put it? ‘Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.’ The choice was ours, and we chose ourselves. Not Aviana. She was wiser than that.