Synthetica (35 page)

There
was a roar of thunder. The ground shook violently, and a blast of
fire and heat burst forth, as the final part of the building
exploded. Anais flew backwards through the air, her limbs flailing.
Something hard broke her fall with a
crack
.

For a brief second, Anais couldn't hear anything except a loud
ringing in her ears. She couldn't feel anything but agonising,
excruciating, blinding pain.

And then everything went black.

Twenty-three

Green and blue baubles winked lazily above her.

She blinked, and gradually everything came into sharper focus. The
baubles turned out to be mood soothing lights on a white ceiling.
They were rotating gently through the colour spectrum, making her
feel oddly peaceful. She was lying on something wonderfully soft.
She could hear the beep and whir of some kind of machine; but she
was so drowsy, she couldn't be bothered to try and figure out what
it was. All she wanted to do was close her eyes and drift back off
into a dreamless sleep.

But now that she was awake, she was becoming more aware of the
pounding in her head. In fact, now what she thought about it, every
part of her body was aching. She wondered in a detached way, why
that was. The mellow lights above her continued their soft colour
display. The sight was so mesmerising, she felt herself begin to
drift back into the realm of sleep, her brain pleasantly foggy.

“
Anais?”

She heard someone quietly speaking her name, and she reluctantly
opened her eyes again.

Someone with dark hair was leaning over her. She blinked and
Xander's face came into focus.

Anais began to sit up, her muscles screaming in protest. She
winced, unsure of what could've caused her so much pain. Xander
placed a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“
Take
it easy,” he said, his voice still quiet.

Anais sank gratefully back onto the soft pillows. Although it was
wonderfully comfortable, now that she was coming to her senses, she
had a faint tingling sense of unease. Her bed at home didn't have
such soft sheets, nor did she have colour changing lights on her
ceiling. She turned her head slightly to the side to see where the
beeping noise was coming from. A small white box was recording her
biometrics, green and blue wiggly lines flashing across the screen
as it read the information on her ID chip.

She was in the hospital.

Immediately
she sat up, and threw off the covers. The machine bleeped and the
lines spiked sharply as it registered her panic. She would not –
she
could
not – stay in the same place where Dalla had died.

“
Hey,
it's okay. You're alright,” Xander said, placing a hand on her
arm. It felt odd, as though she couldn't quite feel his touch, and
Anais glanced down. A neat white bandage covered up her forearm. The
old bandage on her left hand been replaced too. Slowly she looked
down her body. She was wearing a green gown exactly like the one
Dalla had worn when they had admitted her here. White and green
medi-patches covered spots on her legs and her other arm. She placed
a hand to her ribs and winced as she felt another bandage. Every
breath she took seemed to set her lungs on fire. Gingerly, she
touched her head where the worst pounding was. Another medi-patch
had been taped over her left temple.

“
Trust
me, you're okay,” Xander said, his voice low and soothing.
“They're not going to keep you here long. You hit your head pretty
hard, but they're just keeping you in for the night for
observation.”

Anais covered herself back up with the blanket, and she sat back
against the pillows. Now that she was sitting upright, she could see
that her room had a floor to ceiling window across the opposite
wall. Outside, it was turning to dusk, the sky tinged with purple
and pink as the sun began to sink below the horizon. Lights twinkled
all over the city.

“
How
long have I been here?” she asked, her voice still heavy with
sleep.

“
About
six hours,” Xander replied.

Anais shook her head, trying to dislodge the fog that seemed to have
taken over her brain.

“
What
happened?” she asked Xander but he didn't answer. He was simply
looking at her, his eyes dark and intense with some emotion -
sadness perhaps, or grief. Well, that made sense – Anais could
barely think Dalla's name without wanting to curl up in a ball and
scream.

Gradually, the fog began to lift, as snatches of memory began to
come back to her. She was at the parade – someone with a mask had
appeared on the giant screens claiming to be called the Hacker –
Civitas – Skye – Xander being attacked – Clay leaving – an
explosion -

She gasped and sat bolt upright. The explosion at the picochip
factory. It had happened while she was trying to get to -

“
My
parents,” she said, seized by a sudden fear. “Xander, where are
my parents?”

Xander didn't answer immediately. He simply looked at her, his eyes
weary with grief and Anais' heart dropped. There was an odd metallic
taste in her mouth.

“
Xander,”
she said more urgently. “Where are they? Are they here?”

Xander seemed to struggle with himself, as though searching for the
right words to say.

“
Your
dad is,” he said finally. “They're just patching up his legs
now. I think he may have broken one of them.”

“
And...mum?”
Anais' voice was barely above a whisper. She kept her eyes fixed on
Xander. But his head dropped and she knew, even before he spoke the
words, what the answer would be. Xander finally raised his head to
look at her, anguish in his eyes.

“
Anais...I'm
so sorry,” he said, his voice shaking. “But your
mum...she's...she's gone.”

For a moment, Anais could only stare at him, her brain refusing to
absorb the information he'd just given her. It was just not
possible.

There was no way that her mum, the one person - apart from maybe
Dalla – who had always been there for her; who used to mend her
scrapes and scratches without the first aid info that had come with
their latest ID chip upgrades; who had always loved her
unconditionally, was dead. Memories flashed before her eyes, as
though in defiance of this knowledge. Her mum picking her up from
her first day of school, taking a photo of Anais in her first school
uniform, making her dinner that time the FDU decided to break down,
sitting with Anais and comforting her on the sofa well into night,
as Anais cried over her first boyfriend.

She became aware of a low, moaning noise. It was almost
animalistic. Her eyes began to burn fiercely and there was a hard
lump in her throat, making it impossible for her to swallow.

Anais couldn't keep it back any longer. She had failed to save
Dalla, she couldn't save Marcus, she failed to find Dalla's killer,
and now because of her actions, her mum was dead.

Her shoulders began to shake as racking sobs took hold of her body.
All of her grief and the drama of the last few days finally caught
up with her, as she cried and cried as though she'd never stop. She
felt as though every bit of emotion, every piece of guilt that she'd
felt ever since that night she'd seen Donald Pearson murdered was
finally coming out. She cried, and for a long time, she just
couldn't stop.

Xander didn't say a word. He simply took her hand and held it
gently in his own. He didn't speak, but then, there was nothing he
could say. There was nothing he could say that could ever lessen
Anais' guilt over the whole situation. She wished, harder than she'd
ever wished anything before, that it had been her who had bought
that SLP instead of Dalla; or even, that it had been her that Donald
Pearson had been programmed to kill. She just didn't know how she
could deal with all of this raw emotion inside her. It felt as
though there was some kind of monster in her gut, clawing at her
insides, howling to be released. She wished with all her heart that
she was dead in her mother's place.

The sun had set outside, turning the sky into a wash of dark blue,
purple and orange, when Anais' sobs finally started to give way to
hiccups. She wiped the last few tears away from her swollen face
with the back of her hand. Xander produced a wet wipe from somewhere
and handed it to her silently.

“
Thanks,”
she muttered, wiping the tears and snot from her face. Somewhere at
the very back of her mind, Dalla was tutting and rolling her eyes
for allowing Anais to get into such a state. Anais crumpled the wipe
up in her fist.

“
Sorry,”
she mumbled to Xander. Xander gave her a small smile.

“
You
have nothing to apologise for,” he said, his voice gentle but
firm.

Anais lay her head back on the pillow, staring up at the ceiling.
Grief had left her feeling utterly empty and exhausted. She had no
energy or desire to speak to Xander, or anyone else for that matter,
for a very very long time. After Dalla had died, she had been
terrified of being left alone and she had drawn comfort from
Xander's presence. Now all she wanted in the world was to be alone.

The silence hung heavy in the air. Xander cleared his throat.

“
Anais...I
wasn't going to tell you so soon, what with everything else, but
you're going to find out sooner or later...”

“
What?”
Anais turned her head to look at him, pain throbbing in her head.
She tried to sound intrigued, but in all honesty, she had no energy
left for anything else.

“
Clay's
been arrested.”

For a second, Anais wasn't sure she'd heard right. Even after
everything that had happened, it still sounded absurd.

“
What?”
Anais said stupidly, even though she'd heard him perfectly well.

“
Clay's
been arrested,” Xander repeated. “The police caught him as he
was trying to get out of the city. With his previous record against
Civitas, and the Hacker saying about having accomplices on the
street, they've arrested him on suspicion of conspiracy to commit
murder.”

Anais' brain could barely even comprehend this. But as this new
information began to sink in, another wave of guilt washed over her.
It was her fault Clay had been dragged into this mess to begin with.

“
Well
then,” she said heavily. “I guess we're just going to have to
get him out somehow.”

“
Why?”
For the first time, Xander's voice had an edge. “We don't owe him
anything, Anais. He turned his back on us.”

“
So
what?” Anais looked at him hard. “So we're just going to stoop
down to his level? It's our fault he was in the city, anyway.”

Xander didn't look happy at this prospect.

“
Look,”
Anais tried again. “Clay did help us find out about the virus that
had been placed in the SLPs. He probably would've helped us track
down the Hacker eventually, if...”

She trailed off, not wanting to talk about the horror of the parade
or the explosion at the factory. Xander's expression softened.

“
We'll
talk about it when you're feeling better,” he said, his voice
gentle once more. “I've got to go to work.”

He stood up as Anais looked at him confused.

“
But
– it's nighttime. You don't work nights. Also,” she added as a
thought occurred to her. “Do you even have a job after we broke
into Civitas?”

Xander gave a half smile.

“
Yeah
I know. Well, Skye's kept her word and she hasn't told anyone what
happened last night. And after today, they need all hands on deck,
so it looks like I'm going to be working double shifts for a long
time. I do have a meeting at some point though,” he said, almost
as an afterthought. “The people high up want to know why I was
singled out to be attacked.”

“
How'd
they know about that?” Anais asked.

“
Anais,
we were in a crowd of roughly five thousand people, if not more.
There were people there from Civitas who recognised me when they saw
footage of the fight being played on the news.”

Anais fell quiet, digesting this. There was one question she didn't
want to know the answer to, but she had to ask.

“
How
many others?” she finally worked up the courage to ask. “Who
else died today?”

“
Two
people from Civitas. The man who was shot, and a woman who was
murdered right before the riots began. They still don't know the
body count from the factory explosion,” he said. Anais couldn't
helping noticing his face was tense, dark shadows lined his eyes.
Despite her wish to be alone, she reached out and squeezed his hand.

“
But
you're okay,” she said quietly. “You survived.”

Xander looked down at her hand and nodded. He flashed her a small
smile.

“
True.
Hey, one last thing - I thought you'd like to know - the woman who
tried to kill me, she's alive. I don't know what kind of state she's
in, it just said on the news she's in hospital,” he told her,
nodding towards a HV set in the corner of the room. Xander seemed to
hesitate for a moment, before he leaned in and kissed her gently on
her forehead.