The Trials (The Red Trilogy Book 2) (42 page)

•   •   •   •

Neighborhoods along the freeway are looking tired and worn. Electricity is expensive and a lot of people are out of work. Those who can’t afford air-conditioning have moved outside, setting up cots and tables and propane stoves under canopies stitched from bedsheets. Vegetable gardens are shaded too, and everywhere, kids play under sprinklers.

Fortunately for us, air-conditioning won’t be lacking at Kelly Army Medical Center, where Joby keeps his lab. The energy-independent building was an oasis during the chaos that followed Coma Day. After Black Cross, I spent a week there with Lissa while my cyborg enhancements were repaired. Then I left on the First Light mission, and I never saw Lissa again.

So much has happened since then it feels like a lifetime ago. As we turn into the driveway I brace myself, expecting an onrush of memories, but it’s not the past that comes for me. It’s the future—the void of Lissa’s lost future, all that she might have given to the world, to me . . . reduced to nothing. Not even ashes.

Delphi’s blue eyes inspect me in the rearview mirror as she brings us to a stop beside the guard booth. “You okay?”

Jaynie glances over her shoulder, wondering what’s up, while I assume a stonewall expression.

War steals the future. On Coma Day it voided the potential of ninety-three thousand lives.

It could happen again. But I’ll be damned if it happens on my watch.

“I’m okay,” I assure Delphi. “I just want to know for sure that Vertigo Gate is a go. That’s all.”

The MP at the guard booth confirms our identities and matches our names to a visitor roster that lists our appointment with Joby. “You’re cleared to proceed, ma’am,” he tells Delphi. And then he adds, “Thank you for your service, Lieutenant Shelley, Sergeant Vasquez. And Lieutenant? Welcome back.”

•   •   •   •

We move with all practical speed from the merciless heat of the parking lot to the shade beneath the portico, and then in past the medical center’s glass front doors—where we’re enfolded by the heaven of air-conditioning and by a smiling squad of nurses and nursing assistants, all of them familiar faces. A lot of people helped me out while I was here. As we make our way across the lobby, I trade hugs and handshakes and greetings:

“Welcome back, Lieutenant Shelley.”

“Glad to see you’re in one piece this time, sir!”

“Best move the president ever made was to pardon you.”

“We know what you’ve done for us, sir, and we don’t care what the mediots say about you.”

•   •   •   •

We take the elevator to the basement. The corridor is deserted. We walk past the morgue to Joby’s lab. I try the door, find it unlocked. “Brace yourselves,” I warn. Pushing the door open, I peer cautiously inside.

The lab’s main room looks just as I remember it. There’s a clutter of model airplanes, dirigibles, and rocket ships hanging from the ceiling, and racks on the walls holding cyborg body parts. Workbenches on the side are heaped with equipment, but the center floor is open and uncluttered, the back half cushioned with a beige carpet.

I don’t see Joby, but there’s an open door in the far corner.

I go in first. Delphi and Jaynie follow. All is quiet until the door clicks shut. Then a low buzzing kicks on. It’s a sound I’ve heard before and I react involuntarily, ducking and turning as a squad of three tiny black bee drones lofts from a workbench and zips toward us. Or toward me. The devices are replicas of the little security drones that attacked us and poisoned Flynn in the Reyvik Biosystems building. I step away from Jaynie and Delphi. The drones track my movement, assuming an inverted V formation as they target my face.

“Goddamn it, Joby!” I swear, ducking low.

The squad sweeps over my head.

“You said you like these better.”

I glimpse Joby standing in the back doorway, but I don’t dare take my eyes off the bee drones as they double back, targeting my face. There is only one part of my body that isn’t threatened by the drones’ glass needles, so I use it. Shifting my weight, I launch a high kick at the closest one. My robot toes connect, sending the bee hard into the ceiling. To my surprise, the other two drones follow it up, circling around it as it stabilizes in a bobbing hover above my head.

“That’s solid engineering,” Jaynie observes. “And I mean the legs
and
the poison drones. Now call them off.”

“I didn’t make the drones,” Joby says irritably. “They’re mass-produced, with really simplistic flocking behaviors.”

As he’s speaking, the three little drones form a line and withdraw, buzzing over his head to disappear into the back.

Quiet descends. Joby looks at me, his pale eyebrows knit in a scowl under a fringe of white-blond hair. He’s only five three, but he’s got an athlete’s build, with health-club muscles. “Sorry about the hack,” he says.

An apology is so unexpected I almost ask him to repeat it just to make sure I heard him right—but I catch myself, and try for something more diplomatic. “I didn’t know you had that kind of access to my overlay.”

He shrugs. “That’s what we’re here to talk about.”

He comes into the room, looks around, spots a folding chair, and carries it to the center of the carpet. “Sit here.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Just
sit
.”

I sit because I want to get this over with.

Jaynie stands a few steps away, her arms crossed, a comforting presence. She doesn’t trust Joby and she looks poised to intervene if she has to, while Delphi has gone into handler mode. She’s turning in a slow circle, scanning the lab for hazards, while every few seconds her restless gaze shifts to Joby to assess threats from that direction.

From his pocket, Joby produces a small device—not something I’ve seen before. It’s a white plastic cylinder, two inches long and half an inch in diameter. At one end is a black, flared soft-plastic cup. “Every overlay is manufactured with a back door that can be opened if you have the right keys—”

“Wait. What?” I’ve read the documentation on security vulnerabilities. “I never heard even a rumor of a standard back door.”

Joby shrugs. “Not something the manufacturer wants to advertise.”

“How did you find out?”

“That’s a proprietary secret.”

“Asshole.”

“Dickhead. But anyway”—he holds up the device for me to see—“this is proof that Jasmine Harris knew.”

Jasmine Harris? Oh, right: That was Shiloh’s real name.

“This is called an optical trigger,” Joby says, holding the device upright like a white-stemmed, black-petaled flower. “It was recovered from the building where you were held. Illegal for Exalt Communications to possess it of course, but then it was illegal for them to possess you, and they didn’t give a shit about that.”

“Yeah.” I’m not sure if Joby knows that Shiloh’s people gunned down half my squad just to make it easier to grab me, but it’s not something I want to bring up. “Thanks for helping to get me out of there.”

Joby scoffs. “Like I was going to stand by and let someone fuck with one of my projects?”

“Yeah, whatever.” I reach for the optical trigger, not sure if he’ll give it to me, but he does. I turn it over in my hands. There’s a slider on the side of the cylinder and lenses at both ends, one of them nested at the bottom of the flared black plastic fitting, which I’m almost certain is an eyecup. I look up at Joby. “So what does this have to do with cracking an overlay?”

Making a circle of his thumb and forefinger, he peers out through the loop. “Place it against your eye.”

“No fucking way.” I hand the device back to him. “Put it on
your
eye. You’ve got an overlay.”

He takes it back with a sly half smile that lets me know I’m not even close to escaping whatever he’s got in mind for me. He holds the optical trigger up to his eye. A flash
of light leaks out around the edge of the cup. He lowers the device and shrugs. “Nothing—because it’s keyed for you.” He hands it back. “Try it, you dick. It’s not going to kill you.”

It’s like I’m twelve years old. He dares me to do it, so I do. I put the device up to my eye. A light flashes for half a second, just long enough for me to perceive an image of a long string of letters, numbers, symbols, and bar codes projected in white on black. I yank it away, but it’s too late. All the latent icons are wiped from my overlay, replaced by a single icon that flowers in the center of my vision, expanding until I can’t see around it.
“What the fuck?”

Delphi moves in so close I can sense her gravity. “What’s going on?”

“You’ve been unlocked,” Joby says.

I feel Delphi’s hand grip my shoulder. “Shelley, tell me what’s happening.”

“That thing, that optical trigger, it wiped my display and introduced a new icon, a red circle with three blunt arrows inside the ring, pointing outward. It’s sitting right in the center of my field of view and I can’t see through it.”

“Don’t get up,” Joby advises. “You might fall down.”

“Joby, what the
fuck
did that thing do to my overlay?”

“Triggered the feds’ back door. It’s there in case some FBI agent wants to take a look at what you’ve got stored in your head. Now take it easy, okay? I’m going to put the trigger on your eye again. Don’t hit me.”

“
Fuck
,” I whisper. Delphi’s hand tightens on my shoulder. But I sit quietly while Joby gently presses the device against my left eye. The red arrows turn green. “What’s going on?”

“Upload. Everything in your overlay is being mirrored on the stick.”

“Hey!”
I pull away from the trigger and the arrows go red again. “That’s
my
data.”

“I’ve seen it before and it’s not that interesting.”

“Get these fucking arrows out of my face.”

“
Don’t
hit me.” He covers my eye again with the device. I see the white-on-black character string flash past and then the alien icon is gone. My own display returns.

“It would take a lot more time to mirror everything,” Joby says as he takes the optical trigger away. “But you can see how it works.”

“So the idea is, I stick that thing in Semak’s face, and it’ll extract a copy of everything he’s got in his overlay?”

“Fuck no. It won’t extract a thing.”

“Nakagawa said it’s keyed to you,” Jaynie reminds me.

“Right.” Joby twirls the optical trigger in his fingers. “Every overlay is manufactured with a unique access code that has to be scanned into the optical trigger before the connection can work.”

Okay, I see where this is going. “And you don’t have Semak’s code?”

“I don’t even have mine.”

“Wait . . . then how come you have
my
access code? Where’d that come from?”

Joby cracks a cynical smile. “Your army personnel file. When your new overlay was installed after Black Cross, someone decided to record your supposedly secret access code. I don’t know how they got it or why, but at least now we know it’s the right code and the system works.”

Jaynie doesn’t have a lot of patience for bullshit. “So just to be clear,” she says in an icy voice. “No record of Semak’s access code was found in the intel retrieved during Black Phoenix?”

“No. I’ve run searches through all of it and found nothing. If Jasmine Harris had the code, she probably kept it in her overlay.”

“
If
she had it,” Delphi says thoughtfully. “Do you think that piece was missing?”

“Evidence-free guess?” Joby asks. “No. Harris had it, and she had it early in the game. It would be stupid to take the risks she did if she wasn’t sure she could crack Semak’s overlay. She hit the federal courthouse and when that didn’t work, she gunned down the Apocalypse Squad—”

So he does know.

“—so she must have been sure.”

“Then how do we get it?” Jaynie asks.

Joby turns the question around. “How did Harris get it?”

“Bribed somebody, I would guess.”

“I think it’s more likely it was an inside job, that she had someone in her conspiracy who worked for the manufacturer—someone with high-level access who could copy the code without being detected.”

“We can reassess the recovered data,” Delphi says, moving around the room in her restless manner. “There might be hints about who that was. . . .”

As they discuss it, I get up, fold the chair, and return it to the side of the room, silenced by an unsettling suspicion that all this was meant to be, that it was planned years ago.

I interrupt their discussion. “Joby.” All three turn to look at me. “How high in the corporate hierarchy do you think you’d have to be to have access to those codes?”

He hands the optical trigger to Jaynie. “Why? You know someone? Got a favor you can call in?”

He’s joking, but in fact I do. “My cousin Mark Graham is a cybernetics engineer. He’s one of the company founders. Set me up with my first overlay a year before the product was officially released.”

For maybe the first time ever, Joby looks impressed. “No shit?”

We trade stares, like neither one of us can believe the coincidence. Adrenaline sprints through my system as I weigh the odds that I would know one of the few people in the
world who can get the code we need—and I ask myself: Is this scheme coming together like puzzle pieces because the Red set it up to work that way when I was still a naïve kid, nineteen years old? Surely that’s impossible. We don’t live in a clockwork universe. No entity could look forward in time more than five years and predict that we would be here, now.

“It’s not really a coincidence,” I decide.

“It’s really fucking weird,” Joby says.

“No, it’s not that weird.” I want it to be explainable, so I explain it. “It’s straight-up cause and effect. The only reason I have an overlay is because my cousin helped design them. He got me interested and he got me in early—”

“Gave you what you needed to bring the cops down on you,” Jaynie says, looking thoughtful.

“Hey, that wasn’t his fault.”

She cocks an eyebrow. “That illegal video you made with your overlay is the only reason you ended up in the army.”

“Yeah, but that was my doing. Not his.”