Amped (31 page)

My scraggly beard hasn’t fooled him.

I don’t think about how to respond. That’s just the problem. The technology does it for me, and by reflex the world outside is moving again. That flashlight grows brighter. A surprised adolescent squawk escapes the soldier as the heel of my palm tags his windpipe. A moment of vertigo as the flashlight spins in the air. I can feel myself spinning with it in a gentle arc. Ground turns to sky turns to ground.

I catch the flashlight, crouch, and gently set it down. Then I leap.

Now my right arm is in a viselike V shape, closing in tight
around the soldier’s neck. It blocks the surging, panicked pulse of his carotid and jugular. The back of his head is pushed against my cheek, and I can smell the sweat in his hair. I smell his shampoo and I’m trying so hard to will my arm to stop, but it’s like trying to focus your eyes on something too close to your face. I can’t haul myself up out of this hole
in my mind. Through gritted teeth, I scream at myself, at my own tightly locked arms.

The soldier goes loose and limp. He makes a little snorting sound from deep in his throat. I can see his face is relaxed and serene as a doll and I know that now he is dying. Each tenth of a second without oxygen takes him closer. The urgency of this knowledge floods my body with new adrenaline. My grip begins to shake. With a whining grunt behind my teeth, I force my arm to open. A bit and then some more.

The spell finally shatters and the Zenith deactivates.

I lay the soldier gently on the ground, pull his body into the shadows. He is unarmed. Just a billy club and a radio. The sickly colors around me finally recede and the patterns of death and destruction shrink back into the earth.

Leaning over, I check the soldier’s pulse. Sluggish, but he’s alive. He’ll likely wake up inside twenty minutes, confused. And then this place will be on lockdown.

Standing, I turn and stride away.

In half an hour they’ll be tearing the under-bridge apart looking for me. But as of right now, I am a prisoner. Just an amp like any other.

I walk quickly, trying not to draw attention to myself.

The warehouse roof soars overhead, hazy with distance and smoke from portable stoves. On the ground, people are crammed in together everywhere. Capsules of privacy grid the landscape. People crouch behind walls made of cardboard boxes and inside
tents or hastily constructed shacks. They are resting and cooking and reading books in lawn chairs. The adults are marinated in boredom. The children are in constant motion.

Most occupants are amps, but not all. Plenty of reggie families are here with their amped relatives. Husbands following wives and vice versa. Mothers and fathers dragged into this situation by their littlest and most vulnerable family members.

I find a maze of hanging tarps and curtains suspended by drooping twine. I peek behind them, finding only strange faces. It’s been fifteen minutes already. My head is clouded by the urgency of this search. The closest thing I have to family is here. If I don’t find them before Vaughn does, I don’t want to know what may happen.

Then, I hear a familiar giggle.

Striding down a winding aisle between cots, I peek behind a government blanket hung up to form a partition. When I push it away I find my favorite people on opposite ends of a cot, sitting cross-legged and wearing pajamas, playing cards under the high rusting bones of the warehouse.

Nick and Lucy.

The instant Nick sets his piggish eyes on me, he leaps off the cot. Grabs me around the neck and hugs me for all he’s worth. Without a counterweight, the cot tips Lucy backward. Her cards fly into the air like confetti. Nick in one arm, I dive forward and catch Lucy around the back. We all land in a heap on a blanket, feeling the bite of the cement underneath, like a reminder.

I give Lucy small starving kisses.

Nick mimes the kisses, making fun, and I push his small face away with my free arm. Between kisses, I try to explain. Priders could rush the warehouse any minute. I’ve got maybe ten minutes to get us all out. Before the military police come looking for me, searching bed to bed for the intruder.

Lucy grabs my arms and sits me down on a plastic milk crate. Nick watches us expectantly.

“How’d you get in here?” he asks.

I hesitate, and they stare at me in the weak light, worried. The warehouse thrums with conversation like waves murmuring against a dock. I can still feel prickles of sensation on my face from the soldier’s flashlight.

“I used the Zenith. All of it.”

Lucy puts a hand over her mouth. Nick leans forward, eyes bright. “What’s it like?” he asks.

“Like … being a ghost. Watching somebody else’s life. Seeing events unfold precisely according to a plan that nobody told you.”

“Like destiny,” muses Nick.

Destiny. I think about how it feels to fall down inside my own head. The potential outcomes of my actions laid out in colored stripes on the ground. Dance steps painted in invisible ink. Could I choose to do something else? I realize I haven’t tried.

“I’ve got to get you both out of here. Right now.”

Nick and Lucy don’t move. I’m not getting through to them, so I continue.

“Vaughn won. He used Lyle to spark an atrocity so bad that it made places like this. Camps where amps are separated and regulated. The feds took me to Vaughn, but I escaped. Not before he threatened to kill all of us.”

Lucy frowns. “Lyle wouldn’t let anybody use him,” she says.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Vaughn wants us dead and I’ve got about three minutes to get you out of here.”

“And then what?” asks Lucy.

“Then we run. Stay alive.”

Lucy takes my face in her hands. She turns my head and I see. Dozens of amps stand around us. Peeking over the tops of blankets and towels and shower curtains. Standing tall and grim and
stone-faced. Some have their children. Many have crude weapons fashioned from whatever can be scavenged: furniture, tools, lawn equipment.

“We’re all part of this, Owen,” Lucy says. “There is no other life right out there. No place to go. It’s not safe to be alone. In here, we can look after each other.”

“But it’s not safe—” I say.

“Jim died for these people.”

An electric current seems to sweep across the warehouse floor. People are chattering to each other in hushed voices. In quick furtive motions parents are corralling their children, folding their valuables into backpacks.

“The guards are coming,” says Lucy. She pushes a backpack into my hands. Inside, I see a few granola bars, some clothes, a few stray dollars.

“You’ve got to go,” Lucy says. “Nick and I can hide here. Nobody will let anything happen to us.”

“If someone asks you to go with them for questioning, you say no. Don’t go with
anyone
. Always stay with …” I stop. Looking into her face, I already know what she’s capable of. How strong she is. I grab my backpack and squeeze her in a quick half hug. I nod to Nick and touch his shoulder.

“I’ll fix this, okay?”

“Vaughn?” asks Nick.

“I’m going to stop him from hurting you. Once and for all.”

At level five, there is constant movement in stillness. Especially in stillness. There are so many potentials in the quiet moments before action.

I catch up with Vaughn outside his PHCC offices near the University of Pittsburgh. My old neighborhood. The buildings and telephone poles are plastered with signs about Vaughn’s Pure Pride speech later this afternoon. From a cab, I watch the front door of his building until the man himself finally emerges. Four gray suits shuffle him into a generic black SUV.

I dig money out of my backpack and hand it over to the cabbie. When he looks at me, I turn my head on instinct to keep my nub pointed away from him. We lurch into traffic, following Vaughn for a few miles. Finally, his car pulls off the road.

The gray suits let Vaughn out at the front gate of the Allegheny Cemetery. The facade of the place is centuries old, built to look like a castle with battlements of brown sandstone. Beyond the gate, rolling hills sprout tombstones that are linked by shady cement paths under ancient trees.

Senator Vaughn goes in alone.

I pay the rest of my fare and take a walk up the street. A block down, I jump the winding stone fence. Then, I track Vaughn through the woods.

I’ve been thinking. Lyle may be a weapon, but Vaughn is the person who pulled the trigger. Even if Lyle were out of the picture,
Vaughn would keep going. He’d find another weapon and use it. There is only one way to stop him.

Three, two, one, zero.
Level five consent and I’m in.

Pacing between the trees, a series of attack simulations come to me. I can’t stop them. My Zenith is talking to retinal. The two collude, slicing up my vision with crisp blue lines. The beams crisscross, meander down the stone path along high-probability approach routes. If the target comes this way, do this. If he comes that way, do that.

The choice is mine, sure, but either way, it’s kill, kill, kill.

Shadows play through the chattering leaves overhead, dappling Vaughn’s suit as he crosses a hill about a hundred yards away. Incredible to think this man single-handedly engineered a national crisis. Made a whole country afraid of amps. Capitalized on it to outlaw the technology and imprison everyone who has it.

Some small sound alerts me to the presence of a bodyguard. Without seeing him, I change route to flank. Place my steps one by one, quiet and deliberate.

I close my eyes, but the blue lines are still there—rolling Gaussian hills, superimposed over a faded image of the path as I last saw it. The faux scene plays out on the backs of my eyelids, borrowed from my memory of seeing it, even tilting and moving when I turn my head.

That would be cochlear talking to neural talking to retinal.

Shit, I’m carrying a lot of plastic in my head. A scrapyard of high-tech, all of it communicating and collaborating. Hundreds of subprocesses running alongside each other to figure out what’s happening, already happened, or is going to happen very soon.

My target keeps moving: Senator Joseph Vaughn. Six foot one. Forty-four. Graying at the temples. Snake eyes. Absolutely human through and through, and damn proud of it.

In a few hours, Vaughn will orate to the world. He will stand
on an ornate wrought iron balcony jutting from the sheer limestone face of the Cathedral of Learning. On camera with his black wire-rimmed glasses and clean white teeth and a pure gold American flag pin on his lapel.

When he speaks, his words will bury me. If he announces my capture and escape, there will be no refuge. No way of proving my innocence. The crime is too colossal—it blots out all details by its existence.

Vaughn pauses to look at a grave. Leans over it, hands behind his back. The tombstone is white marble.

I crouch next to a tree. Put my fingers against the bark and feel every whorl and crevice in minute detail. Every one of my senses is alive and trained on one goal: killing the unlucky man standing over that tombstone.

A gray suit strolls past in the distance, but the bodyguard doesn’t go near Vaughn, keeps walking instead.

It’s pretty likely that here in about sixty seconds, I’m going to bury my skinned-up knuckles into Vaughn’s soft gut as I work my way up to crushing his windpipe. Mathematically speaking, there are an infinite number of ways to kill him with my bare hands. Combat algorithms rip through my vision, indicating exactly where I should stand. How to pivot. Which vertebrae to shatter and how much force it takes. Pressure points and bone-cracking leverage.

Whole fucking hog.

I
want
to hurt him for what he’s done. I want to gouge out his natural eyes and break his natural arms and legs. Puncture his natural organs with his natural ribs. Until Vaughn’s definition of a human being came along, me and Lyle and Samantha—we weren’t amps. We were people.

Someday, we’ll be people again.

The phantom movements I’ll make are already itching through my hands, a series of reflexive twitches. Every approach
and outcome pair are broken down to physics and equations and meat. The grass swarms with six-inch-tall figures, glowing blue and visible only to me. Implant generated, the dummies grow out of the shadows and engage each other in a variety of high probability mock-combat situations.

Twitch, twitch, snap. Twitch, twitch, snap.

One of the tiny golems silently bends back the virtual fingers of its diminutive enemy, breaking them one by one. I shiver, hoping that scenario doesn’t happen. It looks painful as hell, even virtually.