Guardian (17 page)

The room was abuzz in chatter now. Syd overheard words like “synergy” and “cost-benefit analysis” thrown around. Watching them perform their faith so convincingly, he had a momentary fear that he really had made himself a proxy again.

“Can you explain to me what’s going on?” Liam whispered.

“You made them think you’re me,” said Syd. “So we are selling you in order to gain access to the Machine, and until the sale is final, Marie and I are in their debt.”

“This is crazy.”

Syd didn’t disagree. “It will get us where we need to go.”

“Now.” Gianna turned back to them. “What do you charge for a drive in your hovercraft?”

Marie had to laugh. “They respect private property, I’ll grant them that.”

“Yeah,” Syd replied. “But we’re their private property now too.”

He turned to go to the hovercraft and stopped. A tingle raced through his limbs, up his neck, like he’d suddenly been swarmed with spiders. He scratched his arm where it itched, which only amplified the itch. He looked at the palm of his hand where the skin was palest. His legs wobbled.

In a flash, Liam was at his side, holding him up. “You okay?”

Syd nodded. “Yeah. Just something I ate. I’ll be fine.”

He closed his hand, hiding the little blue lines, visible for the first time against his skin.

He looked at Marie, and then at Gianna, at all the kids around their age. On the paler ones it was the most obvious, a web of lines, their blood vessels showing through. Some of them were already scratching at their skin.

It had begun.

The blood of the young was turning.

WHEN THEY REACHED THE
squat warehouse building on the edge of what had been an industrial district, Syd settled the hovercraft down in front of a barricade the Machinists constructed. It was a wall of old transports, robotic parts, and scraps of furniture. The place bore little resemblance to the club as he remembered it. The glamour was gone.

A line of guards, all of them teenagers, stood along the top of the barricade. A large piece of etched plexi had been mounted in the ground in front of a bonfire to cast a large shadow along the width of the barricade. The flickering projection read
BENEVOLENT SOCIETY. PRIVATE
PROPERTY. TRESPASSER
S EXECUTED.

The guards wielded EMD sticks like clubs. Others held crossbows and bolt guns and blades of various sizes. They may have been playing businessmen, but their invented economy didn’t yet have the illusion of civility. They understood what had really held the market together before. Violence. After all, what good was a debt if the creditor couldn’t compel it to be paid?

The guards along the barricade were dressed in a mixture of styles—some just like the Xelon kids, others in white jumpsuits, some in casual robes and sandals. Each so-called corporation, it seemed, had their own dress code, and each had their own people standing guard on the wall.

Syd saw the veins on some of their faces, saw others scratching at phantom itches on their skin. If he was going to save them, it would have to happen soon. He had no idea how fast this sickness moved. Knox’s father said it affected people differently . . . He wondered how long he had before it took him down.

Liam looked at Syd. He could tell something was wrong. The web of veins didn’t show as easily through his dark skin, but they were there, just faintly, and they would get worse. Liam wished he could mitigate that terror for Syd, erase the knowledge that with every heartbeat he got closer and closer to dying.

Then again, wasn’t that true for everyone? It was just a question of timing.

Gianna left the hovercraft first and spoke with the guards. A select group of her people followed, and she told Liam, Syd, and Marie to follow.

As he came down the ramp of the hovercraft, Liam tore open his shirt so that his tattoo was more visible. A few people cast wary glances at Marie’s green uniform, but they were mostly fixated on Liam and on the word across his chest. None of them paid Syd any attention, which was exactly what Liam had wanted. As long as they looked at Liam, no one would notice the word behind Syd’s ear, or think to question who was who.

Inside the old club, the air was thick with sour body odor, mixed with rusting metal and the chemical stench of burning plastic. Syd was amazed how the place looked like a demented nightmare of the club he’d seen the last time had been there, when it was still a playground for the rich patrons of Mountain City.

Old cars were crammed up against each other, side by side and bumper to bumper, filling the entire space from the back wall forward, with just a small ring around them creating a path along the edges toward the doors in and out. Before, these cars had made up the dance floor. Now, they had turned into a kind of encampment. Figures huddled in the open cabins of old convertibles, while fires simmered inside other vehicles, casting shadowy light throughout the room, silhouetting the forms standing on the hoods.

The holos that had been projected all over the walls the night of the original party were gone, but the cultists living here had painted some on, still images in mysterious pigments substituting for the once vibrant—and loud—holo projections that were timed with the pulsing music. Some had been scratched onto windshields and projected onto the walls by the flames inside the vehicles. The crude shadow logos flickered and shifted unevenly.

The music itself had been reproduced too, a sad simulacrum of the party that had been. Half a dozen forms on a metal catwalk above the dance floor banged and pounded on improvised drums and tubes, making a syncopated beat while a chorus of voices tried to reproduce digital sounds with their mouths. Most of them didn’t have a talent for it, but they all had enthusiasm. The effect was not something a person would be tempted to dance to, and yet, throughout the space, small groups danced in jerky, writhing motions.

“They’re dancing,” Marie stated the obvious, more to remind herself that this was real, that she hadn’t gone totally insane.

“They’re going through the motions,” said Syd.

“Why?” Liam wondered.

“They’ve built a knock-off world to bring back the one they lost.” Syd looked up. The old neon sign still hung over the space, its buzzing glow long since extinguished.

ET IN ARCADIA EGO

He had first seen that sign just moments before he’d met Knox. He didn’t know what it meant then. He didn’t know now. A nonsense language or an extinct one, it didn’t really matter. The past was past. The future was all they had to cling to now, and if they failed to get the networks back on, there wouldn’t be a future at all.

There was a bitter taste in Syd’s mouth. He felt cold, in spite of the heat of the room. One look at Marie told him she wasn’t faring much better. None of them were.

He scratched at his neck, tried to strip away the spidery feeling beneath his skin, let his nails dig deeper, just a little deeper. Relief didn’t come, but if he could just scrape a little deeper into the flesh . . . He stopped himself. Remembered the nopes. Scratching wouldn’t help him. Focus. He had to focus.

Wires ran around the edges of the room, networks of cables and cords webbed across the ceiling. It struck Syd how much the networked wires looked like the web of veins across the skin of the sick. The disease was an echo of the networks’ destruction.

“Who are you?” A form came toward them from the darkness, flanked by several others. Liam shifted himself in front of Syd, his metal fist clenched.

“They are our proxies!” Gianna exclaimed, causing a stir of murmurs from the dance floor and the catwalk above.

“Proxies?” The form stepped into the light. It was another teenaged girl, about Marie’s age. Anglo, with her head shaved. She wore a crisp white outfit, perfectly tailored, perfectly clean, with a red silk scarf around her neck.

Two boys flanked her. They too had shaved heads and white suits, although their suits didn’t quite fit them and they’d gone shiny and gray at the elbows and knees. Unlike the girl, they were armed.

Bolt guns.

Liam nodded politely at them as they approached. He’d already thought of four different ways to kill them.

A ring of differently attired cultists flanked this trio. Syd understood they were all guards from different “corporations,” each vying to stay close to this girl. She was the one who mattered here, the only one.

Chey.

Syd’s heart beat faster. He had come to the right place. The Machine was real. He could save them. He could save everyone.

The girl strolled forward, confident in her command, and her escorts helped her down from the hood of an old car so that she stood just in front of Liam, Syd, and Marie.

“There are no proxies anymore,” she said. “Not until the Machine wakes.”

“We’ve entered into an agreement with Gianna from Xelon,” Marie explained. Chey looked her up and down, taking in the green Purifier uniform, lingering on Marie’s face. She pursed her lips, nodded.

Gianna rushed up the Chey’s side and began explaining. “They fled the Reconciliation and they entered into an agreement with us and they brought—”

“Yovel,” said Chey.

“Yes,” said Gianna. “For the Machine. For a fee, we will broker a deal for Yovel. His death will please the Machine?”

Liam stiffened; he puffed his chest out slightly. Chey turned to the guards by her side, whispered with them, then she stepped up to Liam.

“Yovel?” she said. “The one who did all this?” She waved her hand around the club, as if it was somehow the revolution that created a cracked mirror image of what these patron kids used to do for fun.

“He will give himself freely to the Machine,” Syd said. “If you will take us to it.”

Chey looked to Syd. She brushed Liam aside with a graceful wave of her hand and stepped directly in front of Syd’s face. Syd saw Liam tense, his muscles ready to uncoil.

“Why would he do this? The hero of the Reconciliation allow us to sacrifice him?”

“The Reconciliation is bankrupt,” Syd said. “Something new must take its place.”

“We do not want something new,” she said. “We want something back.”

Syd looked closely at the girl. Up close, he could see every vein in her face, the tiny capillaries around the mouth, the pulsing arteries in her neck. She projected confidence, but she was not confident. There were sores on her neck, at least half a dozen of them from excessive scratching, and they were poorly concealed by her white suit and red scarf.

She, like him, like all of them, was in the process of dying.

“He wants the network restored,” said Syd. “He too wants things to go back. He believes in the Machine and that the Machine will save us.”

“Yovel believes?” Chey looked back at Liam.

Liam nodded.

Chey looked back into Syd’s eyes. She leaned to his side and lifted her hand up to stroke his cheek. She walked her fingers back to his ear, bent it forward, and looked at the word emblazoned there.

She turned back to the two boys who had been at her side. “You were right,” she said. “Syd.”

In a flash, Liam whirled around, knocking Chey’s bodyguards aside and yanking her away from Syd. He held her in a headlock, his metal hand wrapped around her throat. Marie drew the bolt gun and pointed it straight at Gianna’s head.

“Stay back!” Marie shouted.

“Liam! No!” Syd yelled at the same instant.

“Where’s the Machine?” Liam demanded. “Take us to it.”

A circle formed around them; Marie turned and pointed the gun from person to person to keep them from rushing forward. They’d been in better shape during the standoff back at Knox’s house. At least there they’d only been outnumbered ten to one.

“Did you kill Knox?” Chey asked Syd, her voice squeaking out through the vise grip Liam had on her.

Syd stepped close. “What?”

“That night,” she repeated. Liam loosened his grip slightly so she could talk. “When you left here . . . did you kill Knox?”

“You . . . you knew Knox?”

“He was my friend,” Chey said.

Syd glanced at Marie, then back to Chey.

He gestured for Marie to lower her weapon.

“He was my friend too,” he said.

Chey studied Syd, her neck bulging where Liam gripped it. “Lower your weapons!” she called out. “Let them be.”

Syd nodded at Liam.

“You sure?” Liam asked.

“I’m sure,” said Syd.

Liam released Chey, who gasped and stepped back, rubbing her throat. There were deep impressions of Liam’s metal fingers in her skin and she would certainly bruise. The crowd encircling them stood still, their leader in the center, with Liam, Syd, and Marie.

The two boys in white suits stepped forward to stand with her.

“Nine,” one of the boys introduced himself. “And this is Simi.”

Syd looked at them closely. They were familiar. They’d met before . . . in this very club. Knox’s friends. These were Knox’s friends. The other one put his hand out for a fist bump. Syd ignored it.

“I’m Cheyenne,” the girl in the center said. She turned to Marie. “And I recognize you too. I didn’t at first . . . your hair, your eyes . . . they’re different. But you’re Marie? The girl . . . with Knox.”

Marie nodded.

“We were in school together.”

“For a little while,” said Marie.

“You were supposed to have died,” Nine said.

“I know,” Marie answered.

“You need to explain this me,” Cheyenne said. “What did you do to Knox? Why have you come back here?”

“I didn’t do anything to Knox,” Syd explained. “He did all of this. He gave his life to shut down the networks and the Reconciliation didn’t want to give a patron credit for it. They told everyone I did it. But it was a lie. It was Knox.”

“That doesn’t sound like him,” Cheyenne said.

“He surprised us all,” said Syd. “People do that.”

“And now you’ve come here for what? To make amends?”

“To stop that.” Syd pointed at her hands. She hadn’t even noticed that she’d started scratching her stomach furiously. She stopped.

“This is our punishment!” Gianna stepped into the circle. “Our punishment for serving the Machine without proper zeal!”

“Be quiet!” Cheyenne snapped at her. “We don’t require your input here.”

Gianna ground her teeth and sniffed, tried to act as if she hadn’t just been publicly insulted.

“It can be stopped,” Syd to Cheyenne. “Your Machine . . . if we can get it working . . .” He pulled the journal from the pocket on his leg, flipped through to the illustrations.

“You can do this?” Cheyenne asked him.

“I can try.”

Cheyenne took the journal from his hand and studied it. Her brow was furrowed, her lips pursed. Syd could tell she didn’t know what she was looking at it, but he didn’t dare offend her by speaking up. She handed the journal back.

“Come with me,” she said.

“Wait!” Gianna shouted. “We brought these three here on good faith. We were promised compensation!”

“Compensation?” Cheyenne looked at her two associates and back at Gianna with her ragtag cultists. “What compensation do you want?”

Gianna pointed at Syd. “The blood of Yovel . . . or whoever this is.”

“No,” Cheyenne said.

“But—!”

“Not yet.” She looked between Syd, Liam, and Marie. “But if they cannot bring back our networks, I promise you, there will be blood.”

Reluctantly, Gianna gave her consent. Not that she had much choice in the matter.

“I don’t like this,” Liam told Syd as they followed Cheyenne onto the hoods of the cars and weaved their way across the dance floor to the rear of the club. They were surrounded by over a hundred armed figures now, coughing and spitting and scratching and eyeing Syd. “They all hate you.”