Guardian (6 page)

Liam did not look at her. With one word, she could condemn him. She had caught him looking at Syd. Of course, it didn’t mean what she thought it did. He was just a believer. That was all. Nothing more.

But still, he
had
been looking. She knew he had been looking. She knew
how
he had been looking. Private thoughts were hard to keep that way.

“I have no doubts, Counselor,” Marie answered. “He did his duty without hesitation or regard for himself. He shot me because to do otherwise would have compromised his duty. If anyone is at fault, it is I, who did not approach my own task with the discipline it required. I am sorry and submit to the mercy of the Council.”

Liam exhaled a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. The cavernous factory was silent. After an endless moment, the chairwoman rose and the rest of the Council rose with her.

“This inquiry is complete,” she said. “Liam, you will remain at your post . . . for now. Do not fail again. Yovel—” She stopped herself and glanced at Counselor Baram. “
Sydney’s
safety is of paramount importance in these troubled times. No more mistakes.”

“Yes, Counselor,” said Liam, remaining on his knees on the floor with his head bowed.

“As for you, Purifier Alvarez.” The chairwoman pointed to Marie. “Your service until now has been exemplary and your role in the success of the Jubilee has not been forgotten. For that reason, you will be forgiven by the Reconciliation. You have disappointed yourself, however, have you not?”

“Yes, Counselor,” said Marie. “I have.”

“And?”

Liam heard Marie let out the slightest sigh. “And I will gladly surrender half my rations to purge the disappointment from myself.” The silence when Marie finished speaking lingered in the air. The Council did not move. “And half the rations of my parents,” Marie added. “Who raised me as a greedy decadent patron and therefore bear the shame of my failure as well.”

The chairwoman gave one curt nod of approval and left the factory floor, with the rest of the Advisory Council departing in other directions, through other doors, until Marie and Liam were alone.

Liam stood and turned to her.

“I don’t know what to say,” Liam started. “I guess owe you.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” she snapped at him, her voice barely containing its rage. “Debts are an outdated way of thinking.”

“Still . . .”

“Just do your job,” she said. “Keep Syd safe.” She swept by him and made her own way out into the emerald sunlight of early evening in the jungle city.

“You have no idea how much I want to,” Liam said to himself. If only Syd would let him.

THEY MOVED SYD TO
a new room every few nights. He’d slept in old factories and new barracks. He’d slept in a hovercraft and once, under the stars with nothing but a heat blanket.

Tonight’s place was the worst yet. Punishment, he was certain, for his disobedience and argumentativeness. He’d heard it a thousand times. His safety was of vital importance to the Reconciliation. His freedom, he understood, was not.

He was in an old school building, and from what he could tell, his room must have been some kind of storage space. There were no windows; the walls were bare concrete, and the door was locked from the outside.

He had a mat, his cot, a side table, a chair, and a water basin. His bathroom was a bucket behind a screen in the corner. He leaned against the wall, with his legs stretched out on his cot, his shoes still on, and his finger absently tapping on the letters behind his ear.

Locked in for the night, he had nothing to do. No holo projector—holos had been banned and there was no network to watch them on anyway; no books—they were hard to come by even before the Jubilee. Nothing to do but sleep.

He was too wound up to sleep.

He couldn’t believe what he’d seen at the rally. The Guardians couldn’t even fight back as the Purifiers slaughtered them. And the people,
his
people, cheered. No one defended the Guardians. No one would face justice for killing them. They were extraneous people now, lost, living on in a world that had no use for them. They were sick and no one would try to cure them. When they died, no one would mourn them.

A cure is not politically viable?
A fancy way of saying no one cared. The suffering of the nonoperative entities was not a priority.

But what choice had they ever had? They weren’t the ones who’d programmed themselves and they weren’t the ones who’d shut that programming down.

That was Syd. Well, Knox, on Syd’s behalf.

Syd wondered why people always abandoned the things they broke. The Guardians were broken and no one was trying to fix them. Back in the Valve, he’d worked in a repair shop, fixing the machines that others had discarded. He could fix anything back then. Now most of what he knew how to fix was gone, and most of what was broken he’d been the one to break.

It’s your future. Choose.

He stared at the bare concrete wall. A giant crack ran along it from the floor to the ceiling, zigzagging like a canyon through the desert.

The desert.

He shut his eyes.

Just a few months ago—six months and three days to be exact—he’d left Mountain City and crossed the desert. He’d had friends with him then, Egan, whom he’d known since they were in the orphanage together, and Knox, who had been his patron for about as long, but whom he’d only known in person since he’d tried to buy fake ID off him in a club. Marie came along later, a Causegirl with big ideas about tearing down the unjust system of Proxies and Patrons. She believed in the Jubilee before Syd ever did and she’d have done anything for it. She did do anything for it.

There were also some smugglers from the Maes gang, real criminals, whose only plan was to get paid.

Syd hadn’t wanted to change the world, just his own little piece of it. But it cost him, cost them all.

Knox’s father killed Marie’s proxy, an innocent girl whose only crime was being poor.

One of the Maes bandits killed Egan, whose only crime was being poor and stupid. Well, no, actually Egan had plenty of crimes, but still . . . nothing he deserved to die for.

So Syd killed the bandit who killed his friend. He could still see her face, sneering, mocking Egan, crumpling dead at Syd’s feet. Her face haunted him. She deserved to die. Of course she did. If anyone deserved to die it was her.

But still, Syd saw her face. And the face of the assassin this morning.

It was self-defense.

Each of them died so that Syd would live.

But still . . . what made their lives worth less than his? Or Finch’s? Or the nopes? Credit and debt might have been wiped away, but the old rules still applied. A person was judged by their value, their life set against some fixed worth. Those who were useful, like Syd, were worth more than those who were not, like the nopes. Death wasn’t an arbitrary event. It was an expression of value. The nopes were worth less. Worthless.

What about Knox? Was Knox’s life worth more because at the end, he’d sacrificed himself willingly? Was life the kind of thing that gained value by giving it away? Knox, who had spent his whole life being a thoughtless knock-off patron, in that one moment, found his worth. Syd couldn’t help but feel he was letting Knox down, that it was he himself who was worthless.

Marie wasn’t much help, even if she was the closest thing Syd had to a friend. She was always gone on some Purifier assignment, proudly wearing the green and white. She submitted herself willingly and completely to the new system, which allowed her to protect her parents from execution for the crime of having once been rich.

Syd had arranged, on her behalf, for her parents to be sent to a farming cooperative in the desert where they would receive reeducation, as if trying to harvest food from sand would teach them to forget their comfortable past, as if memory could be erased by suffering. In Syd’s experience, suffering only made memory stronger.

And vice versa.

But her parents were alive, at least. Marie got to see them. She even kept her old name as a reminder to others that, under the new system, even patrons could be reformed. Her friendship with Syd gave her that privilege. The Reconciliation couldn’t exactly disappear their savior’s only friend because they didn’t like her name. And besides, she was a good Purifier. Competent and thorough, with unwavering faith in the new ideas.

Syd couldn’t care less about the new ideas. He just wanted to be left to himself, but being “Yovel” made that impossible. He wasn’t cut out for this savior-of-the-people business. He was just Syd.

He banged the back of his head against the wall, tapped his finger on the spot behind his ear, mouthed the word to himself.

Yo-vel.

It didn’t even sound like a name. It was a reminder of the destiny he didn’t want and that he hadn’t fulfilled. It was a reminder of what Knox had done for him.

He wished he could forget.

That day of Jubilee, when the system broke down, Knox’s father wept in front of the machine where Knox’s body had been vaporized. The man’s wealth, all his power, and the last of his family gone in a flash.

Chaos followed.

Syd stood with Marie, shocked, uncertain, not knowing what came next.

Old Mr. Baram, though, he knew. He’d raised Syd, as much as anyone had, all the while expecting that one day Syd would have to give his life so that the revolution could triumph.

Now that Syd lived, Baram had a new idea.

He sealed the factory as the battle outside wound down. Without the network, combatbots shut off, drones crashed from the sky, and the Guardians stopped in place, their minds instantly blank. Nonoperative. Without the network, there was no way to transmit orders and no one to follow the orders anyway. Regular people didn’t fight for free and there was no way to pay them. The entire financial system was gone. Deletion was almost instantaneous.

Baram immediately ordered complete secrecy about what had taken place with Knox and Syd and the machine.

“Syd destroyed the networks.” Mr. Baram commanded the room, his voice booming from beneath his thick gray beard. “It was Syd, in the face of great resistance, who broke the corporate systems, who erased all debts and deleted the data that held us all in chains for so long. It was Syd—Yovel, as his father named him—who brought us victory, brought us to this new era. It is Year Zero now. We begin again. We begin again, thanks to This. Boy. Here.
Yovel.
Understood?”

Cheers could be heard through the broken windows. Syd could only imagine what the millions in Mountain City were thinking now that all their networks were gone. The patrons would be terrified. Would Knox’s friends have any idea what their old pal had done? Would they even notice the network was down, or would they all be too tweaked to notice, partying at some lux Upper City club?

What would all the proxies and the other slum rats think? They were just as networked as the rich. Everyone was networked. Everyone
had
been networked.

Each soldier in the room consented to Baram’s instructions one by one. Even Marie, teary eyed, consented.

Syd did not consent.

“Knox died for me,” Syd said, choking on the words. He kept his eyes on the machine where Knox had stood minutes before. His friend had winked at him. There was nothing left of him now. The radiation it took to spread the virus through the system had vaporized him. “He died for all of us.”

“And we will always know that.” Mr. Baram turned to comfort him, but Syd hadn’t wanted comfort. “To build a new society, we need new symbols.
You
will be our new symbol. You. Not Knox. It cannot be Knox.”

“But—”

“No,” Mr. Baram cut Syd off. “The people will need something to believe in. We are taking away all they have ever known. People will be frightened. They need to turn somewhere and they cannot turn to the memory of a dead patron. They cannot turn to any of the old elite for hope. They
must
turn to us, you understand? To
our
symbols. We need them to believe in the world we will create, if we have any hope of creating a better one.
You
will be that hope.”

Syd looked back into Mr. Baram’s eyes, but he did not see kindness there. The eyes were fixed, penetrating, and firm. This was not an argument Syd could win. His consent was not even necessary.

He couldn’t say the words, but he nodded. Mr. Baram patted his shoulder.

“Good boy,” he said. “Good.”

Syd’s mouth twisted, fighting back tears.

“God gives burdens, but also shoulders,”
said Mr. Baram.

“What?” Syd cocked his head at the old man.

Mr. Baram cleared his throat. “Just an old line from an old book. You could mourn your whole life if you let yourself, Sydney, but you’re stronger than that. It’s time for the future.”

“Ha!” A cutting laugh exploded from Knox’s father, who was pressed to his knees, his face still wet with tears. “Some future! This trash is your symbol? Your whole revolution stands on my son’s corpse and now you pile it high with lies? You’re doomed, Baram! This boy”—he spat at Syd—“always did live in my son’s shadow. He’s nothing. He’s nobody. And he never, ever will be. You’ll fail, Baram. You and your empty symbol will fail.”

“Eeron Brindle,” Mr. Baram said. “You are under arrest as an enemy of the people. You are charged with the exploitation of debt, with the abuses of the SecuriTech Corporation, and the crimes of every single—”

“You can’t reboot humanity.” Knox’s father talked over Mr. Baram, indifferent to the charges that had just been made against him. “There’s no ‘year zero.’ No starting over.” His bitter laughter sounded almost like choking. Knox’s father looked at Syd with the same bright green eyes his son had, those green eyes that had winked good-bye the moment before he died. But his father did not wink. His lips pulled back to show the perfect white of his perfect teeth. Even though his hands were pinned behind his back, he seemed to point an accusation right at Syd.

“Your symbol’s not even a real man, you know that?” he said. “He’d rather be kissing my dead son’s ashes than leading your pathetic revolution of moochers and thieves and—”

A metal fist smashed across Knox’s father’s face, toppling him forward onto the concrete, blood dribbling from his mouth. He’d lost a few teeth from the blow and his glasses skittered across the floor. He breathed, but did not get up. Over him, metal fist still clenched, stood the boy with the cropped red hair and sad puppy eyes, the boy that Syd would come to know as Liam.

Mr. Baram nodded his approval.

From that moment on, Liam had been assigned as Syd’s personal bodyguard.

The lie went out from that factory and became the truth through repetition: Syd was the people’s hero. There was no datastream anymore, so if anyone doubted it, they had no way to share their doubts very far. And no one, really, had any reason to doubt it. Who would imagine that a spoiled brat like Knox Brindle, scion of SecuriTech, would die for his proxy, let alone for some proxy’s cause?

The new organization was no longer the Rebooters. They called themselves the Reconciliation and their cadres crossed the desert and entered Mountain City. People were so disoriented at the loss of their datastreams that they put up no resistance. The Reconciliation thickened its ranks from the slums and marched up into the high-rises and mansions of the Upper City. They rounded up the patrons. They rounded up the corporate middlemen and the collaborators. They rounded up any enemies they could find and they settled old scores.

All with the name Yovel on their lips.

Syd pressed the bases of his palms into his eyes, remembering, not wanting to remember.

With eyes closed, he saw the Guardians hacked to pieces, their skin webbed black with veins. He saw Finch gleefully tearing them apart and the crowd cheering him on. The bald man strolled through the slaughter. The pictures popped up unwanted, like old advos in the datastream that you couldn’t turn off, but they weren’t selling him anything. They were accusing him.

It’s your future. Choose.

He’d let the Guardians be murdered. Some savior he was. No one cared about them. Call them nopes and erase them. Call him Yovel and exalt him. What was the difference really? It was all the same kind of forgetting.

He took deep breaths. He wanted to sleep. At least in sleeping, he could find a kind of peace. At least in sleeping, he could dream about his dead friends and maybe, until the sun came up, feel like he wasn’t all alone.

He slept and in his sleep he was still alone.