Proxy (11 page)

Syd was right behind him.

“Hey, Ed.” A girl with shining silver hair grabbed Syd’s arm and pulled him toward her. Or was it him? Androgyny was a privilege of the wealthy. “You wanna fix my car?”

Syd felt a hand on his chest, another reaching around his back, which was still tender from the shocks he’d been given. He winced and pulled away.

“Where you going, Ed?” his silver-haired pursuer called out. “I need some auto repair! My engine’s running hot!”

Syd wished Egan hadn’t put that rainbow label on the coveralls. He’d lost time; Knox had slipped away.

Syd climbed up onto the cab of a truck to get a better view of the space.

Knox pushed dancers out of the way, slammed into their shoulders, stumbled. He was too tweaked, moving too fast. Texts popped up in his glasses.

You party?

Hey Foxy Knoxy, where you runnin’?

Knox ignored them. He couldn’t stop. He rushed for the door.

Syd jumped off the truck to follow him, when he saw a strikingly beautiful woman weaving through the crowd in the opposite direction. There were two more by the entrance. He whipped around and saw the same beautiful face scattered through the crowd, dressed to blend in, but still far too perfect to be natural.

The Guardians had found him.

[15]

“PATRON CONFIDENTIALITY,” KNOX REPEATED to himself over and over, willing it to be true, willing it far too late for his will to matter. His proxy simply could not have found him. And yet he had.

Knox’s steps reverberated off the hoods of the cars as he ran, thumping along with the beat of the music. Every face he saw looked like Marie’s. Every body that touched his as he passed felt like a threat. He was losing it and he knew he was losing it and there was nothing he could do but run.

Except he didn’t know which way to go. He couldn’t tell where the door was. His vision was a kaleidoscope of light and skin and impossible faces and he knew he was now just turning in place, spinning, panicked, but his feet wouldn’t push him forward. He stood beneath the old neon sign with the cryptic words in the weird language and he just spun.

As the faces around him swirled, one face stood out, like it wouldn’t blur no matter how fast he turned. It was beautiful. Striking.

A Guardian. And she was heading right for him.

His father must have sent them. His dad probably knew that Knox had checked out of the hospital and sent the Guardians to drag him home. Watching Sydney’s punishment wouldn’t have been enough. He probably wanted to keep Knox sealed away to avoid any more “embarrassment.” Or maybe he knew Sydney had escaped and sent them to protect Knox. Which one was it? Protection or punishment? Who could Knox trust?

Nobody, he decided, or maybe the patch racing through his blood decided for him. He spun away from the Guardian and tried to head in the opposite direction. The faces around him were laughing. They didn’t look like Marie anymore; they didn’t even look human, just teeth, just laughing teeth, mocking him as he spun and stumbled and spun some more.

He tried to text Chey or Simi or Nine to get help, but he couldn’t get his lenses to work right. He just blinked uselessly and waved his arms, flapping his hands like a dying plague victim. The glasses suddenly felt slick on his face, like they were covered in blood, thick, black, oily blood.

He couldn’t see. He pulled them off and wiped at them furiously, snapping out one of the lenses. It clattered between his feet and vanished down a crack between two cars. He dropped the frames and stomped on them, kicked the fragments away. He didn’t need any augmented reality. He had the patch for that and it had turned on him. He needed obliterated reality, anti-reality.

Knox looked up. Everything was a little duller, a little grayer, a little more blurry. Still way too real.

“You’re coming with me.”
A voice broke through the noise in his brain, froze his blood, stopped him spinning.

Sydney stood in front of him. He’d grabbed Knox by the shoulder and gripped him tightly. He stared into Knox’s eyes.

“You hear me? You’re coming with me right now. We’re getting out of here. You will not steal my life.” His words matched his mouth movements. They weren’t in Knox’s head anymore. This was a good sign

“I . . . ,” Knox started.

One of Sydney’s hands went to his pocket. He pulled out a small plastic tube and pressed it against Knox’s side. Knox heard a click. This was not a good sign.

Some kind of weapon? Was he being kidnapped?

Knox Brindle, scion of SecuriTech, kidnapped?

Should he cry out for help? Scream for his father’s beautiful goons to come to the rescue?

Which was worse, the Guardians and his father or this orphan from the Valve who was probably bent on some horrifying revenge?

He nodded at his proxy.

He didn’t need his father to rescue him. He’d do it himself.

“This way.” He felt Sydney pulling him forward, knocking dancers out of the way, weaving toward the door as he dug the tube harder into Knox’s ribs.

Suddenly, they stopped. He followed Sydney’s line of sight to two Guardians coming straight toward them. Sydney spun around so his back was to the Guardians, blocking their view. He looked Knox right in the eyes. Knox wished there was still a holo projection between them.

“Sorry about this,” Sydney said and put one hand behind Knox’s head and pulled him close, kissing him deeply on the mouth, wrapping himself around Knox, pressing their bodies tight against each other. He felt a little stubble from Sydney’s chin. The proxy’s lips were chapped and he smelled like sweat and fumes and metal. Terrible breath.

Knox had never kissed anyone with stubble before. He’d never kissed anyone with chapped lips or bad breath either. He had standards.

He tried to pull away but the more he struggled, the tighter Syd held him. Knox went rigid, didn’t move a muscle. He thought about biting Sydney, but the Guardians walked right past them and Knox felt Sydney let him go. His face moved away. It betrayed no emotion. It had actually been some pretty quick thinking on the proxy’s part. Knox might have appreciated it more if he wasn’t being kidnapped.

He didn’t hesitate. He took a swing at Sydney, but he was still sloppy from Chey’s patch, and he swung wide. Sydney grabbed his arm as it flew past and twisted it around his back and pressed the plastic tube against Knox’s ribs again.

“Come on,” he said, and they were moving through the crowd.

The music was thumping and the dancers in heavy boots jumped up and down on the cars. The sound of crunching metal ripped right through Knox and he felt himself going backward in his mind, going back to the accident. He saw Marie next to him in the car, laughing with delight, then screaming. He felt his body fly through the air.

The next thing Knox knew he and Sydney were standing outside, off to the side of the building. Sydney pulled him behind a large generator in the alley.

“The generator will hide our signal from drones,” Sydney said. Knox just looked at him. He was insane.

“My father wouldn’t have sent drones looking for me,” Knox said.

“What?” Sydney snapped. “Your father? What are you talking about? The drones are looking for me. And it’s your fault.”

Knox didn’t answer. He had to remember his training. Every SecuriTech executive’s family received training about what to do in a kidnapping. His instructor was some meathead from the special forces of the Benevolent Society. He told them horror stories about his years on the East Coast running rescue operations. He told them about all the violent groups that wanted to see them and their way of life destroyed: foreign competitors, unlicensed scavengers, Sinoid crime syndicates, Rebooters and flesh peddlers, fanatic pastoralists and old-fashioned warlords.

Knox remembered being bored. At the end they’d taken a quiz. Knox hadn’t passed and his father refused to speak to him for days.

When Knox objected to the silent treatment, his father told him, “It’ll be a lot worse when you’re in captivity in some swampy bog, riding out hurricanes and being sold back to me in pieces.”

He’d made Knox retake the class with a private security tutor. She was gorgeous. He remembered that much. Natural redhead. Retired combat operations consultant for one of the big software companies. He remembered the curve of her neck, the small piece of her ear that was missing from a firefight with one of the IP piracy gangs. The way she let him flirt and then twisted his neck with one hand when he tried to kiss her. He was thirteen and it was the first time an adult had ever inflicted any pain on him.

He screamed out, begged her to stop. She ignored him. She kept twisting.

“No proxy here for you now,” she said. “It’s just you and me.”

And then he’d remembered her first rule: Make yourself human to your abductor. Tell them about yourself. Become real. Through his tears, he told the instructor how his mother died, how it was his fault. She was the only person he’d ever told.

The instructor let his neck go.

“It’s the debts you can’t repay that matter,” she said. Knox stormed out of the room crying and the instructor never said a word to his father. He passed the course.

He had to make himself human to this boy, Sydney. It was his only chance.

“Listen, Sydney,” he said.

“Just Syd,” the kid growled.

“What?”

“Just Syd,” he repeated. “Not Sydney.”

“Oh . . . right, Syd. Well, listen, Syd, I’m sorry about . . .” He couldn’t think what. It wasn’t like
he
owned Syd’s debt. That was his father. “Everything,” he said, which he figured was broad enough. You could never repay “everything,” right?

“Don’t read anything into that kiss back there,” Syd said. “I don’t like you and I don’t want to know you. I don’t care what you think about anything or what you’re sorry for. The only thing you can do for me now is help me get out of this city. Egan and your friend told me you can do that. Can you do that?”

“I . . .” Knox stumbled. “You don’t want to, like, torture me?”

Syd stared at him, breathing loudly through his nose. “You have no idea how much I want to,” he said after a minute. Knox swallowed hard. “But that’s not gonna happen. I just want to get away from all this and I can’t do it without your help. You owe me that.”

“I owe you?” Knox couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The debt was Syd’s, not Knox’s. Knox didn’t have any debt. He was a patron. He had more money than he could spend in a lifetime.

“Yes,” said Syd.

“I don’t owe you anything,” Knox answered. “Get that? Nothing. You’re just the one with the weapon.”

Syd clenched his jaw. “Then I guess you owe me obedience, right? I mean, if I’ve got the weapon?”

Knox seethed quietly, but he nodded. “How did you even find me?”

“I didn’t,” said Syd. He didn’t elaborate and he didn’t explain. Knox was suspicious. As the patch’s effects throbbed their way out of his system, he started to think more clearly.

He and Nine had been selling fake biofeed patches for a while now. Nine knew all kinds of sleazy characters and Knox knew how to hack his father’s company’s system to make the IDs.

What if SecuriTech was on to it and they’d given Syd a choice: You can go to Sterling Work Colony for sixteen years or you can help us plug a security leak? Oh, and by the way you’ll also get revenge for everything your patron has put you through.

Knox knew what he would do in that situation. It wasn’t a choice at all.

The only question was whether or not his father knew what was going on. And his father always knew what was going on. He must have sent Syd after Knox the moment he heard that Knox had left the hospital.

The whole thing had to be a setup. It had to be. Or were the drugs just making him paranoid?

No matter what, Knox knew now that he couldn’t trust a word this Syd kid said. He had to get away as soon as possible.

[16]

SYD HAD IMAGINED MEETING his patron so many times over the years in so many different ways. He’d imagined beating him senseless with his fists; he’d imagined hitting him with the EMD at the highest settings; he’d imagined his patron begging for forgiveness and he’d imagined all the things he’d say to this person who’d made his life a living hell since he was four years old.

None of his fantasies went like this.

He’d also imagined his first kiss. He’d imagined it thousands of times, maybe millions, with Atticus Finch, with that one security guard trainee at the dispensary, with some imagined patron who appeared in the shop one day needing an emergency repair on his CX-30 who would sweep Syd away to Upper City to live in love and light and luxury. He’d even thought about a kiss with Egan, though he’d never admit it to his best friend’s face.

None of those fantasies went like this either.

He was squatting behind a greasy generator, dressed like some sort of zonked-out club kid, while drones prowled the sky. The Guardians would be here any second. He gripped Knox’s arm to keep him down, squeezing it tighter than he probably needed to, and he was holding an antique pen against his patron’s rib cage. He was in deep breach of contract now.

Attacking your patron? What happened to the butcher Doolaine would seem like a kindness in comparison to what they’d do to him.

Knox shifted his weight, like he was about to run. His eyes darting around the alley looking for the best escape route. He was probably paranoid from whatever drug he was on. Syd had seen it a million times with Egan. If things got weird, the drug made them weirder. If things got scary, the drug made them scarier. Tonight qualified as both weird and scary, and Knox was probably losing it.

Knox would be useless to Syd if he freaked out again, spinning in circles and muttering, and if he tried to run, Syd couldn’t stop him out in the open without the drones or the Guardians seeing him. In truth, he had no idea how he was going to get out of here without Knox cooperating.

He had to convince this guy that he was telling the truth, he hadn’t come looking for him. He had to make Knox want to help.

“I didn’t mean to find you,” Syd explained. “I was just trying to get away and I heard you could hook me up with ID. I didn’t know you would also be
you
 . . .” He wasn’t making much sense. He was probably freaking Knox out even more. “Look, I get it; this is crazy. Impossible, even. But it’s happening.”