Forever Between (Between Life and Death Book 2) (17 page)

I hear the dog clicker after an endless wait, during which I waver between being convinced our shooters are dead and we’re being surrounded, or being equally convinced our folks are just being thorough and we’ve won. Five faint clicks from somewhere above me on the roof fill me with relief and I let out a huge, pent-up breath. After a moment, I hear five more clicks. That means five humans killed and five in-betweeners rising. It also means they feel they’re in the clear and are ready to get to work corralling them.

Matt hands me a dog catcher and steps to the side so he’s in view of the in-betweener chasing leaves. He gives a short, sharp whistle and the in-betweener’s head whips around. It takes a second whistle and some movement on Matt’s part before the dead guy gets a good bead on him, but once he does, he makes a beeline for us.

Following our normal mode of operation, Matt backs up a few steps and moves his arms to keep the in-betweener focused on him. As soon as the guy steps past the tree, I slip the loop on the dog catcher around his neck and tighten it via the handle. It’s a really great tool and there’s nothing better for capturing an in-betweener so that they can’t reach you while someone else bashes in their heads.

In this case, I don’t want to bash in his brains—or rather, I do, but we need his brain intact—so we use it to keep him out of range. He really is a little guy, maybe an inch taller than me, and tiny, with little bird bones. The wrists that poke out of his sweatshirt as he reaches for me are delicate, almost frail looking. He doesn’t look like someone who would be a marauder, but you never can tell about anyone, can you?

His snarling is growing louder as he gets frustrated, and the noises he’s making are starting to sound almost like words to me. That sends me back to when Sam was like that, of looking at him through the mail slot in the door and listening to his slurred words. It makes my gut clench and I squeeze my eyes shut.

“Make him shut up,” I growl between my teeth.

Matt pulls out a rag we’ve cut just for this situation and maneuvers around to the back of the in-betweener, flips the strip over his head, and pulls it tightly, forcing his mouth open. It’s an additional safety measure and not just a way to muffle their noises. If they can’t bite down, it’s harder for them to bite at all.

“Let’s go find out where the next one is,” Matt says, eyeing me while he ties the end of the dog-catcher around a bench. The pole is too long for the in-betweener to reach the release for the loop around his neck, no matter how high-functioning he might be.

We both step out from under the tree canopy and scan the roofs of the long buildings to either side of the square. Savannah hurries to the edge of the roof, spots us, and holds up two fingers. Then she points to the other side of the building and motions for us to wait.

Gregory is squatting on the far end of the building opposite of Savannah’s. Matt hoots briefly and Gregory runs over to hold up two fingers for us as well, but instead of pointing to anyplace outside, he points toward the opera house.

It doesn’t escape me that neither of them held up the sign for seeing Gloria, a circle of fingers and thumb. Still, she might be inside the opera house.

I hope she’s still inside. And still alive.

Today - Programmed to Eat

It’s so silent that the tiny rattle of the bolt outside the door is enough to make my eyes pop open, wide awake in an instant. Whoever is messing with the door is trying to be quiet, which is just drawing out the slight noise and making it more noticeable.

I slide off my bed into the space between the beds, slip the knife out from under my pillow, and reach up to grab Charlie with my other hand in one motion. He jerks, but doesn’t make any noise other than the crackle of the mattress cover. There’s no time to do anything more, because the door slowly opens.

A bit of moonlight shines through the window, so I can see the outlines of the door and the darker shape of a person entering the room. I can feel that person’s presence, displacing air and somehow changing the way the space feels. I brace myself to jump, ready to stab whoever it is because, let’s face it, anyone sneaking in at night probably doesn’t have my best interests at heart.

Charlie squeezes the hand I have on his arm, so I know he’s ready for me to move. Even as the muscles in my legs bunch to propel me toward the person, I hear a voice and stop.

“
Psst
, hey. Wake up.” Then there’s sound of someone’s toe or elbow or knee striking something hard and a vibration runs through Charlie’s bed. “Crap! Can’t we have some light here?” the voice asks in a harsh whisper.

Well, if this is an attack or anything like that, they truly suck at it, so I’m guessing it’s not.

I whisper, “What do you want?”

The person, a youngish male by the sound of the voice, lets out an
eep
of surprise and another voice, this time female, whispers, “Oh my god, could you be any louder?”

“Seriously, what do you want? Because you’re so loud you might as well advertise you’re here,” says Charlie as he levers himself up on his elbow in the bed.

“I checked your program!” the male voice says excitedly, moving toward the bed. My eyes are well and truly adjusted to the dark, so I can see the shape of someone with their arms extended, blindly reaching for the end of the bed.

Whoever the female voice belongs to must be at the door, because I hear the soft sound of it closing, then a tiny red LED light flares to life. With vision comes the awkward moment when we all stare at each other, the two intruders and the two prisoners, each wondering what the other will do next. Since I’m holding a knife and crouched like a lunatic, I win the creepy award, and the guy jumps back like he’s going to hide behind the woman with him.

She tosses the tiny light onto Charlie’s bed and when it moves away from her face, I recognize her. She was the guard trying not to laugh.

One point to me.

“Say what you’ve got to say. We don’t have all night,” she says and nudges the guy, who is still watching me like I could possibly be rabid, or an in-betweener.

I fold the knife closed and stand, trying to look harmless, but not really feeling it. It was a long day trapped in this room and I’m anxious to get out of it. “What did you find?” I ask.

“I can’t believe no one else thought of it. I mean, no offense or anything, but as soon as I saw it, I was like…duh. You know what I mean?”

“No, not at all,” I answer flatly.

His excitement dies back a little and he eyes me warily again. He’s the perfect picture of a computer geek, like his face should be next to the dictionary definition. It’s almost too stereotypical to be believable.

“Okay, sorry,” he says, and I hear him swallow from five feet away. “Just the basics. That program isn’t for the nanite constellation that’s causing the problems at all. It’s not about the broadcast or anything having to do with a shutdown. It’s brilliant!”

I’m confused. If it’s not about the nanites causing the problems, then what good is it? My heart sinks a little, but I figure I’m missing something crucial because he’s pretty thrilled about his news, so I ask, “And that’s good how?”

He finally catches on that he’s the only one in the room that has any clue what he’s talking about. In the dim, red light we’re all sort of staring at him, waiting for whatever this brilliant thing is to pop out and say hello.

With a wave of his hands like he’s trying to roll everything he’s said so far backwards, he takes a big breath and says, “Okay. Redo. Basically, everything we’ve done so far deals with the problem directly. That problem is the nanite types that have the factories and communications nanites that match them. We call any group like that a constellation. Trying to mess with the constellations directly doesn’t work. Nothing to do with that can work because we simply don’t have access to the program anymore. No instructions will be accepted. With me so far?”

I give Charlie a look and he shrugs, so I say, “Okay. We know what doesn’t work. Got it.”

The guy grins like I’ve understood more than he expected, which is sort of an insult, but he keeps talking. “Great, great. Alright. This is brilliant because it doesn’t even bother with the constellations. Instead, it uses early nanites, dumb ones that only worked for a while then went kaput, but the program—which is remarkably clean, by the way—makes those dumb nanites digest other nanites. Basically, any other nanite that it comes near that isn’t exactly the same gets eaten. It’s brilliant!” He throws his hands out like we’re about to sing a happy song.

“Dumb nanites, as in, the kind that fixed something specific and then went inactive?” I ask, a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach.

“Exactly!” he beams. “Actually, just like the ones you asked for, if you really did ask for some of the MBDNs. The ones for medulloblastoma? Is that what you wanted? Why do you want those anyway?”

The grim look on my face must be visible in the dim light, or else his eyes have adjusted to the dark, because his smile falters and he asks, “What?”

“I need those nanites to help someone, but I don’t want them reprogrammed or anything like that. I need them to do exactly what they’re supposed to do. Can you give them to me? Will they work if you reprogram them for everyone else?”

“Uh, yeah, I can. But that’s not how it’s going to work anyway. These nanites, they don’t have factories and they don’t communicate. That’s the point. That’s why it will work. If you want to clear someone of nanites, you’re going to have to inject them with these new nanites. The reprogrammed version will have to go directly into the bloodstream.”

“But you can get me the original version? Functional?” I ask, trying to pin down an answer.

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out two vials. I can’t see anything inside the vials in the dark, but my heart lurches at the sight of them. He grins again and waves the vials a little. “Right here. Ready to go. You just need to add the stuff from this vial to the other one to activate them. Blue vial goes into the red vial and they’ll be ready to go.”

I reach out and grip Charlie’s shoulder. He covers my hand with his own. He may not love Emily like I do, but he understands love, and would do the same for Savannah in a heartbeat. And I understand something else too. These two are going to help us get out of here.

The woman has been quiet until now. She slides a small backpack off her shoulder and tosses it onto the bed. “Here’s the rest of the stuff from your list and the instructions for the nanites. We need to get you out of here and soon. The watch will change before too much longer and then someone else will be standing at my post.”

Charlie gets up and starts putting on his boots. I never took mine off, so I gather the few things I’ve taken out of my pack and stuff the small backpack into it as well. While we bustle about, Charlie asks, “How many others are prisoner here?”

I hadn’t thought of the others. I know there must be others if there really are more than fifty people here yet so few walking around. The geek looks down and says, “It depends on what you mean by prisoner. If you mean like you, locked in a room, then there are fifteen. If you mean people who started
out
like you, then there are thirty-two.”

“Jiminy Christmas!” Charlie splutters. “What the hell? How can you be a part of this?”

The woman guard says, “Because I started out just like you and then I decided to stay. We’ve got the best chance of making it in a place like this. We have a system and we’re still kicking. That’s more than most of the world can say at this point. I’m not stupid. I know what it’s like out there. And him? He’d be hopeless out in the world. Wouldn’t you, Princeton?”

“Princeton? That your name?” I ask the geek, zipping up my now overstuffed backpack.

“Nah, I went there and I can’t seem to get away from it.”

I still don’t know the woman guard’s name, and she doesn’t seem to feel like sharing. She moves us along brusquely with her words. “You’ve got two minutes or I’m leaving you here. Listen, it’s all nice and noble of you, but you just have to go. Don’t worry about the others right now. They’re safe, which is more than I can say for them if they leave here in the middle of the night.”

Charlie is ready, his backpack shouldered, and he nods toward the door, urging me to hurry. But, I still have a question or two I really need answered. “Can you reprogram the nanites? Here? Enough for us to test on some subjects?”

“Maybe. It’s not impossible. But it won’t be enough to make a dent in what’s going on out there. For that, we’ll need the place where the cores are printed. Here we just have the supply required for the treatment of those who had that type of cancer, or one of the other cancers we can program them for. But we’re limited. It’s too complicated to try to explain, but making these things is hard. It’s a combination of chemical synthesis and ultra-fine molecular printing. The program that you brought doesn’t actually go into the nanites. They’re too small for that sort of thing. What it does is guide the printing of the nanites. The way they are printed—the actual molecules they are composed of and how they are put together—is what makes nanites do what each one does.”

He nods toward my pack, where I’ve tucked the vials and then shakes his head, looking helpless to explain further. I barely understood what he was just telling me, but what I did fully comprehend is that this is much more complex than I ever imagined it would be. I suppose I always thought of nanites as tiny computers with a processor, but now that he’s said what he has, I realize that couldn’t be true. Nanites are simply too small.

I reach out and squeeze Princeton’s forearm, which seems to surprise him a little, but not in a bad way. “But these nanites, you could program them to eat the nanites that are making the in-betweeners?” I ask.

He nods again, “We have loads of nanite cores, and we can program the functions for a limited number of treatments. Basically, I can make dumb nanites cure anything we’ve got print capability for. But that list is pretty short and there’s no way to introduce substantially different programs on a large scale. Each dose used to be programmed and printed for whatever marker an individual’s cancer had. But that’s it. The core is always the same. We can’t do more than that here. Never could. I’ll work on it, try to figure out how to introduce the new program into our smallest molecular printer, but I can’t guarantee I’ll ever be able to produce enough to make a difference. Once my supply of cores is gone, that will be it. We’ll need one of the bigger manufacturers for more.”