by Unknown
After a moment they were both free, and Rand turned to see what was going on. People were still crowding the stairs, but there weren’t any more attackers on the platform. The last man and woman who had come up for the initial attack were hesitating on the top stair.
They’re scared, Rand thought.
After a brief hesitation, however, the Relics began pressing forward again, even more of them spilling off the stairs and onto the platform.
“Now what?” Diane said.
Rand looked around, trying to see if Myers was still there. He couldn’t see him anywhere. He considered shouting the man’s name, but thought better of it. If anything, it would just call attention to him and put them all in even more danger.
Rand continued his sweep of the platform and surrounding square, and his eyes fell onto the building with the jutting roof supports. He nudged Diane and pointed at it.
“Can you make the jump?” he asked.
She nodded, taking the lead. “Do we have a choice?”
He was about to lean forward and tell her to be careful, but she was already running.
She launched herself up and over the edge of the platform, sailing through the air. She wasn’t old, but Rand was surprised how nimble she was for someone who wasn’t terribly young, either.
She reached out and grabbed at the wooden post that held up the roof of the shanty. One hand clasped it firmly, but the other slipped. Diane’s body swung sideways with the change of direction and slammed into the side of the shanty.
“Diane!” He yelled. He looked back at the people on the platform. A man and a woman were already running toward him, and he made a snap decision. If I hit her, we both might fall into the crowd. But if I wait for her to pull herself up…
He was in the air before he finished the thought. The Relics behind him were still charging forward, and he didn’t want to allow them any time to slow his running start.
He saw Diane just as she reached the post with her free hand. Her eyes were wide, both with the strain of pulling herself up and in seeing Rand already sailing toward her.
Rand’s hands hit the post — hard — and held on. The sting of the impact was nothing compared to the strain his arms and shoulders immediately felt as they tried to arrest his fall, precariously dangling from the post. Diane grunted as his body swung into hers, but miraculously both of them remained on the post.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll help you up.” He looked over and saw that she had almost finished pulling herself up onto the roof of the building. She turned and reached an arm out as he lifted his body weight up and onto the post.
He took a second to balance himself, then shuffled forward until he felt the reassuring strength of the roof beneath him. She helped him stand, and together they looked back down at the mass of people.
The Relics were still shouting, still pressing forward onto each other, but they were without aim. Rand couldn’t see Josiah Crane or any of his posse below, nor could he see Myers in the endless sea of faces.
None of the Relics on the platform had followed their journey through the air and onto the post, and none of them seemed terribly interested in trying. It was as though the boiling anger and fear that Crane had stirred up had dropped to a simmer, and the crowd mentality was no longer controlling their actions. Still, it’s a little unnerving, Rand thought. None of this makes any sense.
“I hate asking this,” Diane said, “but now what?”
Rand looked at her. Through the sweat, and disheveled hair, and exerted body, she was still beautiful. He leaned forward and kissed her.
She kissed him back, for only a moment. Then she pulled away and grinned.
“Seriously? Thought it was a good time?”
He shrugged, glancing down at the Relics. “They’re not going anywhere.”
“Yeah, well, let’s not test that theory. Come on.” She turned away from him and started jogging up the inclined roof, toward the next building.
Rand followed, still trying to catch his breath.
MYERS
AFTER CREEPING THROUGH THE CROWD of people in the square at the center of Relica, Myers Asher tried to follow Jonathan Rand and Diane as they were consumed by the rush of people on the platform. He’d tried as hard as possible to focus on their faces, but he was constantly struggling to focus.
Ever since he’d entered Istanbul, he’d noticed his mind slipping away from him. It was as if he was aging by the second; his memory no longer the only loss he was experiencing. He’d forced himself to remain conscious, doing all he could to engage with Diane and Rand and Lansing, and trying to understand the back-and-forth between them and Josiah Crane.
Crane.
Myers looked up. The crowd was still pressing in on the platform, but he’d lost sight of Crane. Turning all the way around, he tried to find anyone there who looked like the man who’d started all of this. He couldn’t see Diane or Rand, either.
A few people bumped around and he felt his body falling to the side. He tried to reach out to catch himself, but instead pushed against another person and crumpled to the ground.
What is going on?
He felt drunk. His vision was slightly blurred, and if he moved too quickly he felt like he was going to get a splitting headache. On the ground, he took a second to catch his breath. He looked up at the other people around him, each swaying and bumping and pressing into one another.
They’re like me, he realized. They are me.
These people, he knew, were struggling the same way as Myers. They had all gone through whatever “this” was — the weird memory loss, the feeling of drunkenness and loss of control. He wasn’t sure what to call it, but he had a feeling it was due to his being “scraped” at some point recently.
Jonathan Rand had explained this to him. He’d told Myers about being scraped, and how the System decided on its own who would be scraped and when. He mentioned also that the System didn’t even need to “bring people in” to scrape them anymore — it had little devices like bugs that could fly around cities during deactivations and scrape people on the spot.
Myers’ head hurt, and he wasn’t sure if it was due to the drugs, or side effects, or whatever happened when someone was scraped, or from trying to understand the insane world he had woken up in days ago.
They’d told him that he knew something about all of this, that he’d had something to do with the System, and where it had taken them. He had, apparently, known and understood everything there was to know about the System, due to his role at EHM and then as President of the United States of America. That was a long time ago, but he’d woken up without the memory of any of it. He may have been fifteen years older, but his mind was — mostly — the same mind of the fifteen-year-younger version of himself.
Myers stood up. The crowds were dispersing, meaning that Diane and Rand had gotten away.
Or…
He chose not to think about the other option.
He fought through the splitting headache and stumbling feeling of vertigo and tried to push through the crowd toward the platform. It was mostly empty when he got there, but he didn’t see either of the people he was looking for.
A quick glance in every direction told him Josiah Crane and the men he’d been with since they’d arrived were gone. He wondered if Red-hair was dead, or still unconscious, or if he had recovered and was with Crane now as well.
Finally, he tried to find Lansing. Myers hadn’t known him long, but he’d recognize the pilot if he saw him. Pushing through more people, he made his way toward one of the taller buildings at the edge of the square. So far no one harassed him, or even seemed to notice him. That thought stopped him cold.
Crane obviously knows who I am, he thought. There was no doubt in Myers’ mind that if Crane or one of his cronies spotted him, they’d pursue him immediately.
But the rest of these people…
No one seemed to care that Myers was walking around among them in Relica. Crane had Myers placed inside an empt
y building last night, then brought here to watch the proceedings the next day. But as soon as the “trial” began, Crane lost sight of Myers in the chaos, and he was able to slip away.
Not that it would have been difficult to do so at any other time — the Relics weren’t hostile, and there weren’t any of them that Myers thought were trained to be guards or soldiers. Crane was the only one among them that seemed completely lucid, as well. Judging by some of the people Myers had seen so far, the Relics were getting worse, slipping away into an almost constant state of stupor.
Whatever was going on inside his head, Myers wanted it to stop. He couldn’t bear the thought of becoming like the rest of them — completely lost and incapable of independent thought. The people here reminded him of a retirement home, except very few of them were of a geriatric age.
So Crane is different than the rest of them, Myers thought. He’s somehow controlling them, or at least has them convinced that he should be their leader.
He wondered if the System had anything to do with that. If there were different “levels” of scraping, or if it had somehow passed him by…
That’s it.
Myers snapped his head up, thinking. That’s it. It has to be.
He frowned, noticing something disappear over the top of one of the angled roofs. He pressed a few people to the side, trying to get a better view, his mind still racing.
His vision momentarily cleared, and he felt as though a weight was lifted off of him. He knew it was just a momentary relief, and the strange dizzying feeling would be back again soon, possibly even worse this time.
He saw it again — a head, then another.
Someone’s on the roof.
He forced his eyes to focus on the area across the square from where he stood.
Diane.
He saw the outline of her face — unmistakable to him — along with another man’s.
Jonathan Rand.
A wave of strong emotion stirred inside him, but he ignored it. He could deal with that later — for now, it was enough that they were together, and safe.
They disappeared again behind the roof, and he knew their plan was to continue on the rooftops, heading toward the edge of the city.
Satisfied, he focused on his part of their mission. If they were trying to get out of Relica — and they should — he needed to get the next piece of the puzzle solved.
He needed to find Crane, and confront him.
He wasn’t sure how, or exactly why, but one thing about the man kept nagging at him.
He wasn’t like the rest of them. He wasn’t like Myers.
He wasn’t a Relic at all.
PETER
PETER GROUSE SLOWED TO A fast walk. He’d been jogging for what seemed like hours in this heat, even though it had really only been a few minutes. After the Tracer dropped him off on the ridge, it was only a short run to the Unders’ large camp near the cliffs and valley.
He reached the first line of defense for the camp, an invisible perimeter that was constantly being monitored by a LAN-enabled SentinelCam. If two of the three line-of-sight laser walls were crossed, an alarm would illuminate a light inside one of the security tents, then a camera would fix onto the exact position of the breach.
Basically, if anything larger than a fly crossed the perimeter line, everyone inside the camp at a security station would know about it.
Grouse was fine with that — they knew he was coming. He’d gotten the call an hour ago and left his smaller camp, south of this one, immediately.
“We have the boy, but not Myers Asher,” the voice on the other end of the radio had said.
The technology the Unders had in their possession never ceased to amaze Grouse, but he was growing more and more accustomed to it. The detachments liked to follow around ARUs and steal equipment and ammunition, then wait for the System to resupply them, then repeat the process. It was an insanely inefficient process, but it worked. After years of operating that way, the Unders camps and detachments Grouse had come across had “recovered” everything from small arms to mint-condition Tracers. And to the outside world, Unders, considered the lowest on the social totem pole and deemed by most to be nothing more than bloodthirsty vagabonds, having even a working radio would seem miraculous.
But Grouse knew the real truth — while some of them were mostly self-serving vagrants who had a sickening bloodlust, most of Grouse’s army was made up of people searching for a second chance. People who had made a choice to live outside the rules the System gave them, outside the expectations the rest of the world had for them.
People like Grouse.
He’d made his choice, and it was the right decision. With no family, his wife dead and kids long missing, he had nothing more to lose.
When he’d started making the rounds with a group of Unders, finding hits and pegging them on the Boards, then turning the profit for another round, he knew he’d found something he could do.
Something he could be good at again.
His military training and experience had prepared him well, and the leadership benefits hadn’t hurt, either. He quickly rose through the ranks and eventually found himself leading the largest collection of Unders in the entire region. They were disciplined men and women, a society that functioned well. No one expected an easy life, and everyone did their part to meet the needs of the group.
And Grouse led them well.
He loved going out with different detachments, training with them and working among them. When Myers Asher had appeared on the Boards, he’d jumped at the chance to help with the hit. There was Unders activity in the region — groups that weren’t part of his own — and he knew it would be a dangerous mission. Still, he couldn’t help himself. It would further solidify his character in the eyes of his men, and he relished the idea of dragging Myers back to camp himself.
The mission had mostly failed, but Ravi and Solomon had been the consolation prize. They should have been more than enough to trade for Myers Asher. When they went missing, it was all he could do to remain calm enough to focus on the overall plan. He had to keep pushing forward, toward a war with the Relics. He had to keep his army focused as well. He kept the knowledge of the two fugitives to a few of his closest allies, but he’d radioed to the larger camp and ordered them to send out a search party. The man in charge of the Unders there, Kellan Merrick, had more reason than most to find them.
He was Solomon Merrick’s son.
When Kellan Merrick had discovered that one of the men Grouse had picked up from Umutsuz was Solomon Merrick, he’d begged Grouse to bring him to his camp. Grouse refused, needing both of them with him for questioning. He’d promised to turn Solomon over to Kellan when he was finished with him.
When he’d gotten the call that Ravi Patel and Solomon Merrick had been found and brought to the camp, he was relieved. He had no more use for Solomon, but he might still need the boy — alive. There was still hope that his original plan would carry forward, and he would have Myers Asher with him soon. If not, he’d still make the plan work.
RAVI
“ARY, YOU HAVE TO TELL me what’s going on.”
“I don’t.”
Ravi shook his head. Damn, she’s frustrating.
“Why did Kellan kill Solomon?” he hoped that the directness would make her open up.
Ary looked around, checking to see if they were still alone. “Stop asking questions. Grouse is going to be here soon, and I need you to answer some questions for me.” She paused, then knelt down again so she was face-to-face with Ravi, still seated and tied to the chair. “What was your group planning to do with Myers?”
“It wasn’t my group. Myers and Solomon left me —“
“Fine, just answer the question.”
Ravi spat.
“Ravi, would you like me to tell you what Grouse will do you once he arrives? Do you need me to go into detail about what he was doing to Solomon?”
Ravi swallowed, but he kept his jaw clenched.
“
Ravi, I’m planning to get you out of here if you talk to me.”
He laughed. “Right, I’m going to trust —“
“What do you need Myers for?”
He sighed, then resigned himself to his fate. Might as well talk. It’s not like I know anything. “I don’t know. Solomon told me they were trying to take him to Paris. That’s all I know.”
She thought for a moment. “The ICPL.”
“The International Computer Physics Laboratory? Hasn’t that been defunct for a decade?”
“It’s no longer considered an active research facility, but it’s still fully operational. It housed the world’s fastest supercomputer at one time, which means it has the bandwidth for that sort of connection… Do they think Myers can interface with the System somehow?”
Ravi shook his head. “Look, Ary, I have no idea. Like I was saying, they left me for dead —“
“And Solomon used to work with him. What else does he know?”
“Ary, I — “
“Answer the question.”
“I can’t, Ary. Stop. If Sol was still alive, you could ask him yourself, so answer my question: why did Kellan shoot Solomon?”
“Solomon was Kellan’s father.”
“What? Why —“ Ravi’s heart sank, as if he’d just lost Solomon Merrick all over again. Kellan is Sol’s son.
“No one knows why, but he’s had a bone to pick with him for years.” Ravi suddenly found himself staring at a small, sharp knife, swaying in front of his head. “Moving on. I’m going to cut your bindings, but if you move…”
“I’m dead?”
“No. Hardly. But you will wish you were.”
“Understood.” Ravi watched as Ary carefully cut the ropes binding his arms and let them fall to the ground. “Tell me again why you’re letting me go?”
“First of all, I’m not letting you go. We’re getting out of here. Together. And second, it’s all part of the game, Ravi. Stand up.” She pointed the knife at his throat, point-out.
He stood.
“Walk toward the end of the table, stand near the tent wall.”
