The Body Electric - Special Edition (43 page)

I try to run.

Ms. White is in the doorway now, with her army of androids. I spin on my heel, heading for the tarp-covered gaping hole in the wall, the scar in the side of the building caused by the android explosion. Jack sweeps at my legs, knocking me down. My head cracks painfully against the tiled floor, and I taste blood in my mouth. I concentrate and realize that I can turn the pain sensors in my brain off. Handy.

He leaps on top of me, his knees pressing painfully into my chest. I try to throw him off, but his hips shift down and his biceps harden as he forces my arms down. My back bucks, and I slam my head into the floor, cracking the tile, trying to gain some traction.

It’s useless.

“Jack,” I gasp. “Please.”

Please. I think I love you. I know you love me. Please. Don’t hurt me.

Don’t be this hollow shell.

But nothing happens.

He is controlled—absolutely, utterly controlled by Ms. White. And this is what she wants to do to people. Let them have their own lives, until she wants them. Give them the strength of giants, but not the power to control it.

The pressure on my chest intensifies.

Ms. White walks casually forward. “So,” she says, as if dictating an agenda to a secretary android, “it has become painfully clear that I cannot rely on you to give me your father’s formula either consciously or subconsciously, so I will just have to take it from your body. A shame really, but it can’t be helped. And as you so graciously took my arm, perhaps I should have this boy do it.”

His fingers dig into my skin between my breasts, and it feels as if he would like to rip the beating heart from my chest and crush it in his hands.

I close my eyes for one second—no more.

My father gave me what I needed to survive.

When I open my eyes, I know what I have to do. My body—my body that is just a copy of myself, filled with nanobots and steel bones and parts manufactured in a factory—my body will not fail me. Because even if it was pieced together, it was made by my father, and my father will not fail me.

I shift my weight, springing upward, throwing Jack from me. I leap up from the floor, sliding down on one knee as I jab stiffened fingers into Ms. White’s solar plexus, sending her flying across the room, gasping for air. I twirl around Jack, grabbing the back of his head with one hand and slamming my other hand against the side of her neck. Jack is faster and stronger than I had thought, able to slip from my grasp despite the blow I’ve given him, but he’s not fast enough. I drop to both knees, sliding under his open-legged stance and kicking up from the floor, pushing him away in the same moment. He drops heavily, and I throw myself on top of his body, much like he’d pinned me to the ground before.

We’re close to where Rosie the android exploded, the gaping maw of a hole in the apartment opening up mere meters away. It still smells of destruction and burning. Scorch marks smear the ground, and the giant tarp covering the hole flaps in the wind.

But rather than try to hurt him, I stare into his eyes. They are empty and dead inside, pools of bright blue color that do not have a single spark of emotion.

Eyes are the windows to the soul.

I frame his face with both my hands, staring into him. I pour in every emotion I have: love and trust and hope, but also fear and pain and sorrow. My eyes burn the way they did before, when I first realized the power my father left for me. When I stared into Akilah. My entire body stills—and so does his.

He blinks. And when he opens his eyes again, I see him, the real him, the Jack I have fallen in love with all over again.

“No!” Ms. White screams, and she does something—some sort of remote command or something—and the life snaps out of Jack like a rubber band breaking.

He tries to shove me off, tries to pull my hands away, tries to break my arms.

But I don’t let go.

I can do this.

I hacked into Representative Belles’s computer. I hacked into my own mind. I can hack into his.

Jack’s arms snake up, his hand wrapping around my throat.

Squeezing. Squeezing.

How ironic it would be, to die at his hands while trying to save him, when he first came to me because he was trying to save me.

Black spots float in front of my eyes. I can’t breathe. This is more than when I was hiding underwater, able to hold my breath. Jack is choking not just air from me, but my very life.

The black dots merge, striped with yellow.

You’re the queen bee,
Dad said. Funny that.

Bees have been following me everywhere.

I taste honey in my mouth.

No, that’s not honey.

It’s blood.

A buzzing fills my ears.

You’re the queen bee.

But Dad wasn’t a part of the Zunzana, he didn’t know about Jack’s secret code.

Queen bee.

Queen… of the hive.

All the computers in the world are on a network. They’re linked by our cuffs. But I’m a computer. Jack’s a computer—Akilah—PA Young—all the cy-clones. We’re all computers.

You know the great thing about computers?

They can be hacked.

seventy-six

Linked computers are like bees in a hive, connected to each other, despite being separate.

And I’m the queen bee.

My eyes flash open, and I feel the burning inside of them, like fire, like rage. I stare at Jack, and his eyes fly open, too. I connect to him wirelessly, remotely, our eyes portals into our operating systems. I see—no, I feel—the string of commands that makes Jack controlled by Ms. White.

Fire and electricity and passion boil inside of me, inside of Jack, and I sever the connection.

His hands drop from my throat.

But I’m not done. My power extends far, far beyond just us. I sense PA Young, tied up with metal bars and steel downstairs, where I left her.
Snap.
I free her mind from Ms. White’s control. My reach goes further. Dozens in the capital building, sleeper cells in Triumph Towers, people who don’t even
know
that they’re cy-clones, just doing their jobs and going home at night to their families without even realizing that one day Ms. White would call on them and force them to become this inhuman monster to do her biding.

Snap.
They don’t even know they were trapped, but I’ve broken the bonds around them.

Further. The safe house. There’s Akilah. I fill her mind with fire, I burn away the ties twisting her brain into something it’s not.

Snap.

Further, further. To the lunar base, the soldiers Ms. White used for experiments.
Snap. Snap. Snap.
The spies she placed in the Secessionary States, awaiting a time when she might need to use more terrorism and war to convince people through fear and manipulation to willingly come into her grasp.
Snap. Snap. Snap.

Free. They’re all free.

It is only then that I stand, only then that I turn to Ms. White, with the fire of my power burning in my eyes.

“We are free,” I say, my voice buzzing with the sound of the hundreds of people she’d turned into cy-clones. We were a part of the network, a part of the hive, but it was not Ms. White who had control.

It was me.

And I have freed them all.

“We cannot be controlled,” I say. My voice is loud and low, and through my mouth, all the others speak as well. We are all united in this moment, all united against this horrible woman who thought to control us all.

Ms. White cowers in terror.

“We cannot ever be controlled!” I roar, my voice rising among the horde.

But this much power, it burns through me like a fire. I was not meant to hold the strings of every single person to me. I tremble, the power inside me scorching my veins.

“Please,” Ms. White begs. She’s scared now. She’s really, truly scared. I don’t think she ever saw me as anything other than her little robot or the container that hid Dad’s research. She forgot that I was a person, and that my father gave me a very specific set of skills, skills designed to stop her.

“Ella,” Ms. White says. “Think now. Think about what you’re doing. You’re not one of them. You have seen the possibility of war. You know what the consequences can be. Don’t—” Her voice cracks. “Don’t throw away all we’ve worked for. We are on the brink of a peace the world has never seen.”

“Control is not peace,” I say.

“You think you can stop this?” Ms. White says. Her knees quake, but she stands anyway. “There is no stopping technology. The Secessionary States already have similar tech. Someone else will make cyborg-clones, someone else will be in control. All I want is peace. Yes—I wanted a peace where I profited, but still, peace. If you stop me now, the next person to rise up won’t want peace. They’ll want war.”

I feel the ripple of fear that passes from me into the hive of all the other cy-clones. The fear of being used. The soldiers’ fear of battle.

But I pull it all back into my heart, and I lock it up inside of me.

“I will never allow you—or anyone—to take away our humanity,” I say. “We are not robots. We have a human soul, if nothing else, and I will never, ever allow this power to be used in any way.”

Ms. White smiles sadly. “You already are,” she whispers. “You think I can’t see it in the way that boy stands behind you? You’re connected to all the cy-clones. You didn’t sever my control of them; you just shifted it to yourself.”

My stomach drops. She’s right. I can feel all the other cy-clones she made, I have access to them, their thoughts, their actions, their voices. I could, with merely a thought, make Jack stride over to Ms. White and snap her neck. Or jump off the side of the building. Or kiss me. I could do it to them all. I control the Prime Administrator. I could release her from her steel bonds and put her in her office and control the whole entire world.

I could.

And the power is intoxicating. It courses through me. It burns, yes, but it burns so beautifully.

And that is the very reason why I gather all the strings of the power tightly inside of me.

And that is the very reason why I have to let it go.

I release them all. I cut the bonds I have made between all of us, and I let it all go.

And just when I stumble and think I’m about to fall, I feel Jack’s strong arms wrap around my own, holding me up, keeping me steady. Not because I forced him to. Because he loves me. Because that is what love does.

And I know.

I will never fall again.

epilogue

Prime Administrator Young looks as if she has been shaken to her very core. I don’t know if she would have believed me if I’d just gone up to her and told her she was no longer human, but a cy-clone capable of immense strength… and capable of being controlled. But she felt it, felt
me
—all of the cy-clones did.

She knows.

“I had no idea,” she says. “I think I can see it now, in some of the decisions I’ve made this last year, some of the laws I’ve put through, but at the time… it felt like
I
was the one deciding. I didn’t realize the level of control Jadis exerted over me.”

I nod. She seems different now, free of Ms. White’s influence. Perhaps a little more aged, but also a little more scared. This suits a person who faced war the way PA Young did. Not all confidence and bravado, but a little fear for her own consequences, for the people she would affect.

Her clear eyes meet mine. “I’ll have to step down, obviously.”

“But—” Jack starts.

PA Young is already shaking her head. “I cannot run the risk that someone else figures out a way to hack, er,
me
. It’s too dangerous. For the good of us all, I must step down from my position as Prime Administrator.”

And now I see why she was elected, and why she has been the strongest leader the Unified Countries has ever known. The Vice Administrator—a slightly older man originally from Mexico—seems to be a good man, but he will always be in PA Young’s shadow.

The androids, previously under Ms. White’s control, are all turned off. They’re piled into one corner, their bodies stiff and oddly-angled, their eyes still open wide and staring at nothing.

“I’ll have to take Ms. White into custody,” PA Young says. “Obviously. The trial will be a fiasco. I don’t know how we’ll keep cy-clones from the media… and that worries me, because the more people know about the possibility of… of
us
, the more likely they’ll try to emulate what Ms. White has already done.” She pauses, fear evident on her face, but she also looks resigned. “Where is she?”