Mindwalker (25 page)

Something catches my eye—something moving on the street outside my bedroom window. I freeze, my blouse half buttoned. A gray car with tinted windows has pulled up in front of my house; I can see it through a gap in the gauzy pink curtains. The car lingers for a minute, and a chill spreads under my skin. It looks like one of IFEN's vehicles. I wait, holding my breath. The car pulls away.

Dr. Swan sent it. He must have. Why, though? If he instructed someone to pick me up, the driver would have waited out front instead of moving on. If he just wanted to keep an eye on my house, he could have done it through the street cameras.

He's waiting for me to leave. That's the only explanation. He's planning to do something once I'm gone. Are they going to search the house? Confiscate my Gate? Or …

Steven.

My hands clench on the blouse, trembling. They know Steven is here, and they're waiting for me to leave so they can take him. God, how could I have been so stupid?

I hurry down to the kitchen. “Steven, we have to get out of here. It's not safe.”

He blinks. “What?”

“There was a car, and— There's no time to explain, but I think we might both be in real danger. We need to go. Now.”

“I'll take your word for it, but—go
where
?”

That's a good question. There's no place in the city we'll be safe—IFEN has cameras everywhere. We could hide out at Ian's, but I don't want to drag him into this. It would be only a matter of time before Dr. Swan located us, anyway. “We'll leave the city.”

He stares at me, expressionless.

“We'll make a run for the northern border,” I say. My head spins. Am I really saying this? Am I really
considering
this? “I know security is tight, but people still manage to cross over illegally, so there must be a way. IFEN has no authority in Canada.”

“If we leave,” he says, “we can't come back. You know that, right?”

My breathing quickens. I have one last chance to reclaim my old life, and all I have to do is walk into IFEN headquarters. If I don't, that chance will be lost forever. I'll be a fugitive. There's no guarantee that we'll make it to the border, or that we'll be able to get across, and even if we do, I have only the foggiest idea of what things are like in Canada, whether we'll be welcomed or treated as criminals. Dizziness swims over me.

Ian's face flashes through my head. What will happen to him if Steven and I run away?

What will happen to Steven if we don't?

“I know,” I whisper, and turn away. “I'm going to get packed.”

In my bedroom, I throw some clothes into a suitcase,
along with a few other essentials. I set my cell phone on my dresser. Abandoning it feels like leaving one of my arms behind, but cell phones can be tracked. Instead, I take a credit card preloaded with about five hundred Silver Units. It should be enough to last us a few days.

Of course, they might be able to track me using the car's GPS, too. But I'm not sure what to do about that; I know, there's no way to remove it without destroying the vehicle's functionality. I'll just have to hope we can evade them.

“Chloe,” I say.

Her sleek black form shimmers into place on my desk. She's sitting, tail curled around her paws, head tilted to one side. “What is it, Lain?”

“Please clear out your memory caches for the past week. All the searches I've done within that time period, all the conversations we've had, including this one—I need it all erased. Can you do that?”

“Of course.” She closes her eyes. Her ears twitch, then her eyes open, softly glowing orbs. “Memory caches cleared.” She smiles, showing tiny, sharp teeth. “I'll deactivate now, if that's all right.”

“Thank you.”

With a flurry of sparkles, she vanishes.

I pause, looking at my phone, then pick it up and dial. Making a call is risky, but I can't just leave without telling him. The phone rings and rings, then finally beeps and goes to voice mail. “Ian? I—I'm going away for a while. It might be a long time before I can get in touch with you. I won't be able to answer if you call.” I feel like I should say something else, but I don't know what. My thoughts are a chaotic mess. “Please
take care of yourself.” It's inadequate, I know, especially after everything he's done for me. But it's all I can give.

I hang up.

I dash downstairs, grab my Gate from the basement, and load the whole thing—the two helmets and slim hard drive—into the trunk of my car. I don't expect to need it. I just don't want it falling into Dr. Swan's hands if his cronies come poking around. This Gate belonged to my father, and now it's mine. No one will take it from me.

I think of the compact, still in my coat pocket, with the Chinese dragon pill inside. Briefly, I consider leaving it behind. It's dangerous. An overdose of this drug almost killed someone. I waver for a few seconds before deciding to keep it with me.

As much as I'd like to, I can't forget the eyes I saw in Steven's memory. I have to know what they mean. This isn't about finding the truth for truth's sake anymore. Now it's personal.

When Steven and I leave the house, it's dark.

“Destination, please,” intones the computer's clear, neutral voice.

I can't just tell the car to head for Canada; I need a more specific location. What pops into my mind is the town where Steven was discovered after his kidnapping, the town where Emmett Pike allegedly lived. “Wolf's Run,” I say.

“Calculating route. Please wait.”

As the car pulls out of the driveway and glides down the street, Steven says, “That's the town, isn't it? The one near St. Mary's?”

I nod. “It's at the top of the Northeast Quadrant, close to the border.”

“There's nothing in St. Mary's. We
saw
it. It's just ruins.”

“I don't intend to stop there. Our route just takes us through the area.”

He looks at me from the corner of his eye but says nothing.

The car heads north, toward the shining band of the Aura River, which curls around the city like a protective arm. A bridge arches over the water. It's slender and white, and appears almost too delicate to be real, though, in actuality, it's very sturdy. It's also the only highway leading out of the city. There are numerous monorail tracks running out from Aura like the spokes of a wheel, carrying passengers to the other major cities, and to tourist spots, but few people travel by car outside of Aura. Using the monos is cheaper, faster, and more comfortable. But of course, there are no monorails to Wolf's Run.

There's a checkpoint at the end of the bridge, a tiny station with a peaked roof. As we draw nearer, wires tighten in my chest and stomach. I remind myself that there's nothing to worry about. Right now, I'm a Type Two, but that shouldn't affect my ability to enter or leave the city. If I were a Three, maybe—but I can't have been reclassified again so soon. Dr. Swan is powerful, but he's still subject to the law, and there are rules and procedures to follow. I should be all right.

Steven's another matter.

“Duck down,” I say. He does, and I pull a blanket from the backseat and throw it over him. With luck, it will be enough.

A man with a bushy mustache and a blue uniform leans out of the station's window. Only when I see him flicker do I realize he's a hologram. The car slows to a stop.

“Name?” he asks.

“Lain Fisher.”

“Occupation?”

“Mindwalker. I'm a student at Greenborough High School.”

“And your purpose for leaving the city of Aura?”

I freeze. Steven elbows me from beneath his blanket. “Uh … recreation.”

“Please be more specific.”

“I'm sightseeing. You know. For fun.”

His mustache twitches. He peers at me through small blue eyes. If I hadn't seen that flicker, I'd swear he was real. A human might find it suspicious that a seventeen-year-old girl is sightseeing this late, and on a school night. Hopefully, a computer program won't question the logic. “Please look into the retinal scanner,” he says.

I do, and a green light blinks.

“Identity verified.” There's another pause.

“Can I go?” I ask, trying not to sound nervous.

“You've been flagged with a Special Alert. Do not be alarmed. You haven't been charged with any crime, but a Special Alert may temporarily inhibit your ability to leave the city. Please wait a few minutes while I access my database.” He tilts his head back and places two fingers against his temple.

This isn't good. I gulp. Ahead of us, a lowered metal bar blocks the road. It's thin and flimsy-looking, but that doesn't matter; there's no way to make the car start. It's locked in park, its artificial intelligence obeying some signal from the checkpoint station.

Steven mutters a curse and throws the blanket aside. He pulls a bent paper clip out of his pocket.

I tense. “What are you—”

He jams the end of the paper clip into a tiny hole in the dashboard. “A trick someone showed me.”

“There is an unreported passenger in your vehicle,” the hologram says. “Please state your passenger's name and occupation.”

Steven jiggles the paper clip, twists it, and jams it in deeper. The car surges forward and plows through the metal gate, which rips off with an earsplitting screech. It catches on the car's hood and drags on the pavement, trailing a shower of sparks.

I hear the hologram's voice: “You are not authorized to leave the city. Please stop your vehicle, or you may be charged with a violation of Code 47B—”

The car shoots forward, the speedometer hovering around seventy-five miles an hour. I don't think I've ever been in a car moving this fast. I press my back against the seat, heart hammering, fingers digging into the cushions.

The gate falls off the hood and clatters to the pavement. As I watch it recede in the rearview mirror, I press a hand to my mouth. “Oh God.” A hysterical giggle bubbles up in my throat, and I choke it down. The bent paper clip is still jammed into the dashboard. “Is this—safe?”

“Kind of,” Steven says.

“Kind of?”

“Well, I wasn't going to sit around and wait for that holo to contact the police. Or IFEN.”

Behind us, the towering city of Aura dwindles, its skyscrapers glowing softly in the darkness. The whole city radiates light. I rarely see it from a distance, and I find myself watching over my shoulder as the buildings grow smaller and smaller. All around us, cornfields sprawl, stalks waving in the breeze. Miles and miles of cornfields, broken only by occasional
smooth white domes, like gigantic eggs buried upside down. Agricultural centers. In the distance, I can see the shining silver line of a monorail track, built on tall, slender trestles.

I've only been outside the city once before, on a class field trip to an agricultural center. I was awed—as I am now—by the vast emptiness around me. Some of the fields have already been harvested, leaving barren patches of land.

“Is there a way to
stop
the car?” I ask.

“The emergency brake should still work. But we probably shouldn't stop unless we have to. We need to get away from the city, fast.”

The car still steers itself, following the slight curves of the road, and its speed remains steady. There's nothing but open road ahead of us. I exhale and dare to relax a little. Well, the car seems to know what it's doing. Enough not to crash, anyway. “I guess we're criminals now.” I smile, as if that makes the words less frightening, though a panicky static is starting to creep through my thoughts.

Steven studies my face. “You okay?”

“Yes. I think so.” I focus on breathing for a few minutes, then turn my attention back to the view, watching the endless fields roll past. It's strange to think that people used to live out here. Before the war, the population was spread across the whole country. It must have been … inefficient. Now over ninety-five percent of citizens live in the five major cities. Aura, the rough geographical center of the United Republic, is the nation's capital, and each of the four quadrants has its own lesser capital.

After the war, there was an aggressive push from both IFEN and the government to relocate people from small towns
to metropolitan areas. IFEN stressed that, statistically speaking, rural areas were breeding grounds for domestic terrorists and antigovernment radicals. In response, the government offered sizable tax benefits for anyone who moved to a major city, and the exodus left huge stretches of land completely uninhabited, save for the workers tending the machinery in the agricultural centers. A handful of small towns still exist, but they're regarded as quaint relics of a bygone age, largely cut off from the rest of the world.

“Hey,” Steven says, “if you want to turn around, there's still time.” He's sitting stiffly, arms crossed over his chest like a shield.