Hacker: The Outlaw Chronicles (18 page)

I felt every muscle in my body ease. I drew a long breath and let it out slowly. I didn’t want to fight anymore. I was too tired and my soul felt so crooked and brittle I knew it would break if I kept going the way I had been.

“You are always in the perfect place and the perfect time,” she said again. “Do you trust that?”

“I . . . I want to.”

“Then do. Let go of your pain. There’s no need to cling to it anymore. It’s not you. It
happened
to you, but none of it is you. Don’t just believe it,
know
it.”

“
Know
it,” I whispered and closed my eyes. “Yes . . .”

Before the word left my mouth it set something in motion, something that I couldn’t see or hear or feel. My word, a simple act of surrender, triggered a seismic chain reaction that would change everything. I just didn’t know in what ways yet.

“Do you want to live?” Mom said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Then live. You’ll forget, but then you’ll remember again. It’s okay. Don’t be afraid, there’s nothing to fear. You’re always exactly where you’re meant to be, and there is always something you can do. Even now. Even with Austin.”

“Austin . . .” My thoughts zeroed in on him and the image of his dead body lying on the apartment floor. “What do I do?”

“Save him,” she said. “There’s still time, but you must hurry. Save him.”

“I want to, but I can’t. How do I save him? If it was the tumor that killed him then there’s nothing—”

“It wasn’t the tumor,” she said. “It’s what he put into his veins. It was far too much.”

The world was shifting around me. I shot a look at my watch as the second hand nudged forward. My time was nearly gone. The hack was ending.

“Restart his heart,” she said.

“I tried that!” I screamed as the street and everything around it crackled and began to burn away at the edges. “It didn’t work.”

“Put something else in his veins,” she said and pushed upright. “You already know where to look.” She stood from the wheelchair as dust swirled around us and took a step forward. My mom pulled me to her and held tight. “I love you, Nyah. I love you and I promise I’ll see you again. Don’t be afraid.”

Desperate to hang on to her, I pressed my face against her chest. “I love you too. I love you . . .”

With the roar of wind in my ears I let my mom go. I let her move on and live in that place that I knew existed so deep that no hack could go far enough to tap it. There was only one door to that reality and all of us would pass through it at some point, whether soon or when we’re old. It’s where she wanted to go and it’s where I would see her again someday.

“I love you,” she said, a whisper in my ear, and she took a step back. “To the moon and back.” Light gathered around her, swirled and engulfed her, swallowed her.

She was home.

S
TONE CIRCLED the block slowly
, headlights darkened as he scanned the streets and deserted warehouses for signs of life. It didn’t matter how far the girl ran, he would eventually catch up to her. It was simply a matter of when.

He suspected that she would come back to this place even if she intended to eventually flee the city. Something in the warehouse or the nearby building was important to her. Something or some
one
.

The building from the satellite image came into view, rising from the shadowy streets, ahead and on the right. High on the top floor a sliver of light, barely perceptible, bled through a painted-over window. It was the only trace of light for blocks. She was inside.

He parked a block north and approached the building, staying to the patchwork of shadows as he walked the perimeter. On the building’s back side he found the garage entrance and, just inside, a shattered gate arm that had likely been smashed in the girl’s haste.

No sign of movement as he entered the garage. Two caged bulbs, ancient looking and glowing dirty yellow, clung to the ceiling and cast dull circles on the pitted concrete floor. Ahead, a minivan was visible in the anemic light of a third bulb, this one centered above a black metal door that undoubtedly led into the building. The lone vehicle was parked crooked, a few feet from it.

The lack of cars confirmed his suspicion that the building itself was abandoned, a half-finished development, judging by the stacked pallets of building supplies along the far wall.

A quick search of the van revealed nothing more than a cell phone, which sat in the passenger’s seat, and a clump of crinkled registration and insurance paperwork in the glove compartment. The engine still tick-tick-ticked from the heat, but that was the only sound in the deserted place.

After slashing the van’s tires as a precaution—he couldn’t afford a second escape—Stone’s eyes leveled on the door and he stepped toward it. The next time he came out, the girl would be with him. One way or another.

T
HE BLINDING WHITE light vanished
. Electric-blue sky stretched above Austin and a jagged spine of snow-capped mountains reached toward him from far below. With the roar of wind in his ears, he soared over the top of a saw-toothed peak and the rugged mountains gave way to a vast plain of multicolored grasses and trees.

He gasped. Never before had he seen such vivid colors. There were no words to describe them, nor were they colors that were limited to the sense of sight. He could
hear
the colors and
feel
them in his chest as surely as an ocean wave crashing into him.

He looked to his left and a child gripped his hand. It was the boy he’d followed through the jungle; the one who’d led him to the hut. To Outlaw. The child’s hair lifted on the wind and his olive skin glistened in the light, which came from everywhere at once. The sun was nowhere he could see.

The boy turned his head and smiled.
Hello, Austin.
The child had not spoken, but his words—complete with inflection and the pitch of a child’s voice—came instantly into Austin’s mind. It was similar to his experience in the hack, only faster and more complete.

Where am I?
Austin said, though he too didn’t speak with words.

The child remained silent.

“Am I dead?”

“Dead?” The boy laughed. “No one dies. Not ever.”

He was young, no older than twelve, but his voice seemed ancient. Austin didn’t know the child, not like he knew Nyah or other people, yet he felt a familiarity that was unexplainable; the child emanated a presence that Austin had always felt near him.

He looked down as they flew over a vast forest. They swooped in wide, lazy arcs over ridges and between thick groves of trees twice the height and thickness of any sequoia tree he’d ever seen on his hiking trips through the Northwest.

This is Earth
, he thought, but the beauty was also something other than Earth, more than was possible on Earth. In fact, everything was somehow more than what he knew in his experience. The world felt more substantial, more
real.

It was as if he’d spent his entire life hidden deep underground, dwelling in darkness, mindlessly watching shadows on the wall that someone had told him were reality. Only now, he’d stepped into the sunlight and discovered that reality was vastly more.

As they sailed over a patch of iridescent flowers that shimmered in the light, the entire field exploded with color in motion. The flowers weren’t flowers at all, but millions of hummingbirds that took wing with a loud rush of sound. The birds darted into the sky as one and trailed behind them.

It was all unexplainable, completely illogical to the part of him that needed to know where he was and how he got there. And what “there” actually was.

“Home,” the boy said. “It’s home.”

Home. Austin—being an orphan, alone in the world—had no familiarity of the word’s deeper context; it was utterly foreign to him.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

The boy pointed ahead, to a rise in the land. “You’ll see.”

Seven waterfalls thundered into a valley below and fed a vast lake that was as emerald as glacial water. Thick mist billowed across the lake far below and the water spilled over the rocks and split into seven tributaries, the beginnings of rivers that flowed in many directions.

They sailed to the lake, so close to its surface their passing left ripples in the water. Before they reached the waterfalls they pitched steeply upward into the mist, rising nearly vertical. The water spray was cool on his face and tasted sweet on his lips. The wind blew through him as they climbed higher, through the billowing cloud, and high into the sky.

Soon they were miles above the ground and punching through a skim of clouds they ascended into an ink-black sky alive with glimmering lights, though not stars. The lights were like comets and they streaked from one horizon to the next in countless numbers. They were of different colors and as they moved the sky shimmered with deep, resonating sounds. Austin marveled at the spectacle and wanted to know more.

The boy remained silent and pulled him higher into the darkness. They slowed to a gentle stop. Silence pressed in on them.

Austin looked around him, feeling weightless. In the distance, the streaks of light crisscrossed the darkness, and he understood they were beings of some kind. As they moved, the thunderous booms reverberated through the expanse and after several moments he realized the booms were reminiscent of voices shouting . . . singing . . . laughing.

He turned to speak, but the child was no longer by his side. Still, he felt the same presence as though he were. Austin looked below him and the earth had disappeared as well, replaced by the sight of distant star spirals and blazing suns.

An overwhelming sense of comfort embraced him. He was suspended in a void, immense and infinitely deep and wide and long—the dark waters he’d been rescued from paled miserably in comparison. Here, light enveloped him. God. The fabric from which all things were cut, seen and unseen, and he knew that it wasn’t an “it” at all.

The presence that streamed through him and held every part of him together—every atom and thought—was infinite, far too vast to be described with any word or concept or idea. All of those things that he once considered real and concrete seemed pathetically one-dimensional now—shadows of shadows and nothing more. Words like infinite and omnipotent and unconditional love could never begin to capture even the slightest notion of what he was experiencing, like comparing a spark from a dying candlewick to a supernova large enough to swallow the universe.

I made this for you.

A tide of infinite warmth and compassion washed over his awareness and went to the deepest corners of him. It wasn’t a voice or even a thought that had come to him. It was something else that was far more personal. It was a Presence and it knew him entirely and accepted him without judgment.

Do you like it?

He didn’t hear the question as words, only as awareness that he himself had formed into words. An awareness that was familiar. So familiar.

Yes
, he heard himself say. His entire being, every shred and fiber of him resonated with gratitude and there was only one response possible.
Yes
. If he could have said it a million times with a million voices it still wouldn’t have been enough to express the gratitude and awe that overtook him in that instant.

This was not simply a being, but Being itself. The creative One from Whom, through Whom, and to Whom all things existed. Without this Presence, existence was impossible.

He knew all of this instantaneously. He needed no evidence because it was self-evident.

Austin was silent, rendered speechless with wonder and awe. But he knew that this was only the beginning.

I
STUMBLED
out of the saltwater tank, blinking to focus my eyes, and rushed into the apartment with Mom’s words resonating through my mind. She was where I’d left her, slumped forward in the wheelchair with her chin resting on her chest.

I reached her and felt for a pulse, but I already knew she was dead. It’s what she wanted and what I’d help her find: lasting peace and freedom.

“I love you, Mom,” I said, placing a kiss on her head. “I’ll save him, I promise.”

I ran to a nearby shelving unit and scanned the medical supplies Austin had stacked there. Mom had said that something Austin had put in his veins had killed him. I had to assume she meant the Kick compound. He’d said he wanted to go deeper, but the only way to do that was to up the dosage to minimize his brain activity. The dosage must have been too much for his body to process.

Tracing my finger from box to box I scanned the labels. I had to find the epinephrine. Mom said I needed to put something in his veins to jump-start his heart, and the only thing I knew that could do that was epinephrine.

My gaze dropped to the bottom shelf. A red plastic container the size of a thick book was bound to the shelf by a single black strap. Thick white letters were printed across the top: Epinephrine.

I pulled the case free and charged back to Austin.

Dropping to my knees beside him, I snapped open the case’s lid. Inside, embedded in grey foam, lay several vials of clear liquid and a large syringe with a capped needle. Epinephrine: medical adrenaline, the kind used to jolt patients’ bodies out of anaphylactic shock or cardiac arrest. It’s a last-resort solution, sometimes administered directly to the heart tissue and has been known to bring clinically dead patients gasping back to life.

With trembling fingers, I worked the needle cap loose and drew an entire vial of the drug into the syringe. It didn’t look like enough, though, so I drew another, holding it to the light.

I tossed aside the empty vial, and it skittered across the floor as I leaned over Austin’s body. Getting the drug into his body would be the easy part, but how would it circulate? His heart wasn’t pumping so it would do no good to inject it into his arm.

Jab it into his heart?

Without a better idea I straddled his body and, syringe in my right hand, ran my left over his ribs, feeling for a gap. I couldn’t just stab him, using the syringe like a knife. If I hit a bone, the needle could snap. If my aim was off, I could puncture his lung and miss his heart entirely. No, I’d have to lean into it and push it in slowly.

I traced my fingers over his cold skin, feeling for what I thought might give me the best shot at his heart, and marked the gap with my fingers.

I took a deep breath and pressed the thin needle against his skin. The flesh gave beneath the pressure and the needle punctured it, releasing a bead of blood. The needle flexed dangerously and scraped against a rib. The needle was too thin and too short.

I slid it out and sat up. What now? How could I reach his heart?

Austin’s head had flopped to the side, exposing a large, pale blue vein in his neck.

There. I leaned close and worked the needle beneath his skin until it was inserted into the vein. Holding it steady, I jammed the plunger home and watched the fluid as it entered the vein, ballooning it slightly.

I jerked the needle free and tossed it aside. I leaned into his chest with my hands. I had to circulate the adrenaline on my own. It was the only way to get it through his heart and into the rest of his body.

T
HE THRUM vibrating
through Austin was like the roar of a million tides. It was life itself and it filled him in a way that he believed he had known once before, long ago. Even before he was in the womb of his unknown mother, this was here. This is where all things came from long before anything ever was, and this was where he belonged. He knew it all in less than an instant, in the impossibly small space between thoughts—here, where the past, present, and future seemed to be all happening at once, beyond time.

Here there was only love, unending and inexhaustible, bottomless, extending out to the entire universe, wrapped around it, cradling it.

Here there was only God.

Who are you?

The revelation came as an instant flash of knowledge—not an answer that came as a thought or even words, but something far more fundamental.

I AM that I AM.

A deep, impenetrable gratitude as deep and fluid as a million oceans coursed through him. All of those years of seeking and wrestling and struggling for knowledge, revelation, and truth was possible only because he was being led forward, beckoned. The struggle and pain of pursuing the answers had led him here.

These were the words of Jesus when asked who he was.
Before Abraham was, I AM
. The life he’d lived with the simple belief of a child, as a child, came flooding back to him. This was that kingdom of heaven, as much inside of him as beyond him.

But the him he’d always thought of as him, wasn’t really him. He realized that he could no longer sense possessing a physical body. He had no fleshly hands to hold in front of his face or legs to stand on. He’d been stripped down to the core of who he was, without a body or brain, which had no significance here where the expanse and depth and height and width of truth was too much for his or any mind to hold. And this reality too much for a trillion minds to grasp. In a short lifetime of scraping together philosophies and ideas and facts, he’d learned many things, but all of that knowing was, at best, hollow and, at worst, a shadow that he’d fallen in love with.

You were created to love and be loved.

The truth thundered across the cosmos in a shock wave of raw energy and love. It spread in all directions at the same time, causing all of existence to shimmer and vibrate. There was nothing he could ever do that would cause him to be loved less than he was in that moment—or in any moment of his existence. Nor could he possibly be loved more. Nor could he disappoint the One who’d breathed him into being. Austin was fully known in ways that he couldn’t understand, and yet he was fully, completely accepted and treasured.

How was it possible that such unfathomable perfection would love him so completely? He wasn’t perfect; nobody was.

And yet, he was loved. He knew that without question. Here, all things were as they should be or they would not be at all. In this Love, all things were held together.

In dying, your life blooms; in letting go, you find your true self.

The universe suddenly swirled and shifted, revealing an overwhelming panorama of spiral galaxies that stretched before him, more than could ever be counted. Billions of them, or maybe billions of billions.

Purple veins of shimmering energy crisscrossed the vast open space, coiling and connecting in all directions in geometric patterns he could barely process. Newborn stars pulsed within dense clouds of swirling, multicolored gas. In the distance, a massive star collapsed into itself, compressing into a pinpoint of light that disappeared before erupting again in an explosion great enough to wipe out entire galaxies.

Look closer
.

Immediately he saw beyond the galaxies. Yet not beyond as if
overlaying
them. Entire dimensions shimmering in light, expanding outward in a swirling, dervish motion—a dance—as they raced across the void at speeds no human could ever experience while bound to the limited dimensions of his earthly existence.

There was no end to them. No edge to any of it. Everything stretched as far distant as was possible for him to see and beyond. There was no beginning and no end.

Austin watched in stunned awe, surrounded by an overwhelming sense that he too was eternal. He too was known long before he was ever born, before the foundations of the worlds were laid.

The words were like salve that worked deep into the fractures of his heart. He’d never considered it before. There was no evidence, there were no facts, to prove that he was anything more than his biological mind, yet it was now a self-evident truth that didn’t need proving any more than his own existence.

His mind
wasn’t
him
.
There was a part of him that existed beyond his body, beyond his mind, beyond his thoughts. There was a place where this deep resonating existence connected with him and, there, he was at home. The realization brought him back to his childhood, growing up in a monastery, learning of an infinite God and being in wonder and accepting that truth without question. This was essentially that.

But then the words had put God in a box, as words could only do. In truth, he saw, God was not defined by words. God was the Word itself. Infinite. And he was in awe once again. Weeping with gratitude and ecstasy without shedding a tear.

How long Austin remained in that state of raw bliss he could not know, because there was no time in his awareness. He only became aware that there was yet time at all when something changed.

There was a jolt of light and his field of vision shuddered.

What was that?

There is nothing to fear.

Another flash and he felt himself being drawn down. Falling away.

But he couldn’t go! Not now!

The world he’d seen earlier materialized around him as he was drawn downward. Within seconds he was falling through the clouds with the boy once more by his side. The child spoke not a word as they tumbled through empty space.

They were careening toward the earth far below. He looked over at the young boy.

“I don’t want to go back!”

The child was silent, his focus intent on a pinprick of darkness far below. It was death, he thought. Or the dimension his body had lived in.

“Please . . . I want to stay.”

But the boy said nothing. The pinprick of darkness ahead grew into a yawning abyss that stretched wide to swallow him again.

“No . . .”

He felt the boy release his hand.

Then Austin was alone, rushing into that darkness.

I
BLEW hard
into Austin’s mouth again, struggling to fill his lungs. I locked my elbows, placed the heels of my palms over his chest and drove my weight into him in the hope that his heart would spasm to life again. The adrenaline was in his veins, but was it circulating?

“Hang on,” I said and tilted his chin. Two more long breaths into his mouth before switching my hands to his chest. I was gasping for breath myself as I compressed his rib cage, tank water still dripping off my face.

One, two . . .

“Come on . . .”

Three, four, five . . .

Again, more breaths and compressions until I was sure I would crack his ribs. But I didn’t care, I had to bring him back. Again and again, but with each breath, each compression, each thump on his chest, the finality of his death became my own.

“Wake up!” I screamed, as if to myself as much as to him. “Wake up!”

Austin had moved into this apartment to escape the world, to drop off the grid. Reclusion meant privacy and peace, but also isolation. No one was coming.

There was nothing I could do. My brother and father were dead. Austin was dead. My mother was dead.

I was alone.

Darkness crushed me with that realization. It was as if I’d been dropped into the middle of the ocean with a lead weight chained to my neck.

I lifted my chin and screamed at the ceiling, a ragged scream filled with years of pain.

I really was alone.