Wired (30 page)

Aside from the likelihood of Leo tracking us down through this smartie, I realized that it was entirely possible somebody would notice the discrepancy between me and its supposed owner. But it wasn't like we had a choice.

I handed the motoway attendant the reader and he casually flipped it in his hand so it pointed the other way. “Tandem?” he asked, pointing between the two of us.

Kitty looked at me. I nodded. The guy waved it
over some red bars as if he were checking me out at the supermarket and handed it back.

Wow. This smartie was turning out to be quite the all-purpose piece of equipment, a smart chip on steroids. Everyone had one; and from what I could tell, the wire-crossing GPS Mason and Leo and I were using to travel through time and splice reality was just another program loaded onto it. Simple. Too simple. No wonder the government had hired Mason to keep the code out of unauthorized hands. As I looked at the teeming mass of people around me—a fraction of what was surely an enormous world population by now—it was clear that if everyone had the ability to cross wires, the potential chaos would be almost unimaginable.

Clearly Leonardo wasn't too concerned with the outcome of such a situation, but I still couldn't exactly fault him for wanting to make the tech available. He wanted to change the past, maybe even to bring his father back, which was understandable. In fact, he wasn't so different from Mason. Both had been motivated by the loss of someone they loved. I'd never thought about how that might work. Was it wrong to want to change fate to save someone?

The motoway line was moving quickly, and within a few minutes I could see the big picture: tricked-out motorcycles moving along a kind of conveyor belt.

“Oh, shit,” Kitty said.

Oh, shit, indeed
.

She looked at me. “You are
so
driving.”

I swallowed hard as the number of people in front of us winnowed down to one couple. Both grabbed helmets from a rack, ripped off plastic sanitary ribbons,
fit them on their heads, and jumped on waiting motorcycles. There was a funny little tug backward and then the guy, motorcycle and all, shot forward into a tunnel.

“Does this strike you as insane, or is it just me?” Kitty asked.

I picked up a helmet, ripped off the ribbon, and pushed it into her gut. Then I picked one up for myself, did the same, and put it on.

The woman in front of us climbed on her motorcycle, and I saw her plug the end of her reader into the dashboard, then press a button. She pulled back for a second; then she too shot into the darkness.

The conveyer belt trundled onward, drawing up a motorcycle with a seat large enough for two. A tandem.

“Oh, shit!” Kitty said.

“Get on,” I hissed, climbing onto the moto.

Kitty stood mesmerized, her eyes huge behind the visor of her helmet. The guy behind us poked his head up. “You from the suburbs?” he asked.

Oh, for God's sake
. This was getting ridiculous. Kitty just nodded.

“First time, huh?”

Kitty nodded again.

“You'll be fine,” he said, patting her shoulder. I slanted the guy a beseeching look, and he gave her a little push. Kitty lurched forward and climbed on.

“Ready?”

“Absolutely not.”

I plugged in my smartie and pushed the button. The backward pull nearly dumped Kitty off the back. She grabbed my waist as we shot off into a tunnel,
letting out a piercing scream that lasted as long as the breath itself. The only reason I didn't scream was because I was holding my breath. We must have blasted through this tunnel for five minutes, my back and neck cramping up from crouching low over the vehicle, but I figured it was preferable to having my head lopped off by some accident.

“How does it know where to go?” Kitty yelled.

Excellent question
. I guess I should have been scared out of my mind. But after I got used to the moto, I felt a sense of freedom and an incredible thrill. Some mechanism shifted beneath us; the black became gray and then white, and then we lurched sideways as the moto split off from the tunnel expressway.

Kitty squeezed tighter, ducking her head into the back of my suit. The moto's dashboard lit up, and the words
PREPARE FOR RELEASE, REDUCE SPEED FOR MERGE
flashed in alternating red and white, accompanied by a polite female voice piped through the helmet speakers alerting me to the same. There was a click, like a train router, and the moto sped free of the belt. We careened unsteadily into bright sunlight onto a seven-lane highway.

For a moment I thought the freeway was empty, but the streaks on all sides of me morphed in and out of car shapes as they slowed and accelerated.
I've been here before. Déjà vu
. I blinked hard to clear my vision. I looked in my rearview mirror and saw a black car on my tail. My heart started pounding.
No, not black. Just blue. It's blue
. All I could do was pray there were exits nearby, because there was no possible way I could change lanes.

The dashboard blinked and presented a map. I followed
the route and headed down the appropriate exit ramp into a thick stream of traffic. The dashboard flashed an alert.

I followed more instructions and drove carefully to the back of a slowing line of other motos. Everybody was swiping smarties at a tollbooth, after which some people drove to the side and turned their vehicles and helmets back in. Others checked in and kept going. I glanced down at the GPS; there was no indication I was supposed to turn in our moto.

I paused at the tollbooth, swiped Leo's smartie, and had a quick look around. Spirals of similar speedways were layered high above the city on all sides.

A light on the tollbooth turned green. I pocketed the smartie and took a deep breath before driving into the single lane of traffic at street level. “Here goes.”

I think I gritted my teeth the whole way, because when we finally stopped at Kaysar Corporation I could barely speak for the tight pain in my jaw. “I guess we can leave the helmets with the bike,” I said.

Kitty put her hands on her hips. She opened her mouth to say something but thought better of it. It didn't matter, because the tight line of her mouth telegraphed her feelings on the matter loud and clear.

“I've come to a decision,” I said. I'd considered it earlier, but my mind was made up. Once he got what he wanted, Leo had no incentive to make sure that I was still the best possible version of myself: Roxyplus. Leo was about himself, first and foremost, whether he disguised it as family loyalty or not. When Leo was through with me, I might be a version of
myself I didn't want to be, and he'd just consider it a cost of doing business. “Leonardo Kaysar is a bad man. We should avoid him at all costs.”

Mason couldn't give me everything I wanted, either; well, he couldn't guarantee anything. But in my heart I knew he'd do the best he could. After all, this was his doing, and he'd let me keep my best friend and had reappeared Naveed's daughter. I'm sure he thought hard about it first. And to the extent that he could, he'd also let me stay the girl I wanted to be—the girl he wanted, too. But I knew you couldn't predict everything, and whenever he gave me what I wanted, he risked sacrificing something else. He had a kind of . . . moral compass that guided him, which was why he was working to maintain time's integrity. That made him trustworthy, respectable. It had once cost him his girlfriend—me. Now I hoped it would put us back together.

Kitty seemed to be struggling with her ability to process the details around us, her face a contortion of confusion and attempts to find a certain Zen in all of this. As I watched her fight panic, it made me think of myself and how I'd stopped the automatic onset of that feeling. I'd changed. I'd changed myself.

The building in front of us was the same building I'd broken into for Leonardo, a future incarnation of the same building from the early excavation I'd fallen into the bottom of. Yes, Leonardo had made me break into the present-day layer of a floor he would eventually own.

Pieces from the past, present, and future: they were all telling one story. No matter how the boys
moved the pieces around, no matter how they recut the pieces to fit.

We'd circled the entire building, sweating in our heavy leather suits. I was afraid to take mine off; I wanted us to look as normal in this time as possible.

I followed Kitty into a sliver of shade and stared the building up and down. We could go straight inside to the receptionist's desk and attempt to bullshit our way past whatever security they had, but I doubted very much I had clearance in Leo's version of the building here in the future. The other option was to break into the underground garage and work our way up through the guts of the building in some sort of . . . as yet undetermined manner.

I tried to remember the details of the layout—the elevators, the piping, and the air ducts—that Leo had shown me when he sent me on my mission the first time around.

“C'mon,” I said, heading for the garage gates. “Okay, so, here's what we're going to do. We're going to stand here on the side, looking as if it's the most natural thing in the world for us to be here, and we're going to have a conversation.”

“About what?”

“Well, we can pretend. We just need to look as innocent and normal as possible. And then, when someone comes through the gates, we'll saunter in before they close.”

“Saunter?”

“Yeah. Saunter. It's important that we affect an air of nonchalance.”

“Good god,” Kitty muttered, rolling her eyes.

“You ready?”

“Uh-huh.”

We stood there for five minutes discussing the merits of organic fish food before someone finally drove out. Then we sauntered. The gates closed behind us, and we stood in the dark garage.

Kitty unzipped the neck of her catsuit and sniffed herself. “Yikes. Sweat.”

“Sshh. Someone's coming.”

Two men in light blue cloth jumpsuits and huge belts laden with construction tools of every possible purpose had stepped out of the service elevator. I forgot about nonchalance and innocence, and froze.

“Hi,” Kitty chirped.

“Hello,” the portly guy on the left said, his eyes brightening as he took in the vision that was Kitty. His thinner coworker couldn't get beyond a stupid grin. They took off their toolbelts and began reorganizing the contents, swapping back tools they'd apparently borrowed from each other.

“What now?” Kitty whispered.

I wasn't sure. These guys could give us access to the elevator. That'd be much better than working our way up through the ventilation system. “What would a Bond girl do?” I asked.

Kitty looked at me. “Cleavage.”

I looked at her in horror. “You're kidding.”

“Oh, please, Roxanne. If you can think of a more intellectual way of getting them to let us in without I.D., by all means, share.”

I, of course, had nothing to share.

Kitty unzipped the neck of my suit and dragged me forward. She launched a barrage of perky chatter while I did my best to stand there and look appealing.
The weird thing was, they were looking at me as much as her. I started working it like a Bond girl would. And within a few minutes, they'd swiped their readers and we were in the service elevator on the way to the thirtieth floor.

Rattling and shaking, the elevator took forever to climb. It stopped with an old-school
ding
, and the door opened with no trouble at all. I pressed the open button as the door tried to close. I could feel Kitty watching me, but I needed a moment to collect myself for what we might confront. Finally, I took a deep breath, looked at Kitty as if I hadn't the slightest reservation about our situation and said, “Shall we proceed?”

“Sure. Do you know how to get from here into the room you're looking for?”

“You could say that,” I said—and that was all the explanation I gave her. There was no way in hell I was going to use the term
air duct
before it was absolutely necessary.

I'd been right about the geometry of my present resembling a layer under the future, and it had gotten us this far. If I could remember Leonardo's instructions when he talked me into and through the air duct, I figured I could use my memories of our little
Mission Impossible
scheme to my advantage. Kitty and I would simply go in the way I had before. Things would go even more smoothly without the dress and heels. And this way there was no need to get involved with the kind of front-desk nonsense that could, if Leo was looking to do it, get a person arrested in the wrong theoretical time.

Kitty actually didn't need much coaching. I think she'd gone to a place in her head where she was at a science-fiction convention and was reenacting one of the exploration sequences from
Lord of the Rings
.

When I saw what we were facing, my heart sank. The room wasn't like the one I'd been in before. It had a different layout. In this layer it was . . . off-kilter.
Obviously, they'd redecorated this level several times over, but I'd still expected it to basically match.

“Does your neck hurt?” Kitty asked.

“Huh?”

She tipped her head sideways, and I realized she was mimicking me. I tipped mine back straight. “The vent was on the left of this wall, I think.” Instead, there was a heavy metal racking system laden with boxes of ancient computer parts, spilling over with wires, cords, and plugs that looked long-since forgotten. I looked through the bits and pieces: maybe I shouldn't have been surprised that this stuff hadn't been touched in a long, long time.

“Well . . . let's do this. Can you give me a hand?”

Kitty paused for a moment, but just a moment. I knew hard labor wasn't her thing, but she put what she had into it, and shoulder to shoulder we shoved the rack. She said, “I'm only doing this because I think it will be helpful for both of us to understand the full extent of your insanity.”