Coda (35 page)

She smells delicious. I keep my face in the fruit-scented skin of her neck as her legs wrap around my waist. No idea where I’m going, I stumble in and out of a living room and a tiny hygiene cube before I find the one small bedroom, dark—curtains shut against the afternoon.

There’s a console on the wall. The accidental blow I land with my shoulder is the most use it’ll ever see. A sound, muffled and strangled, escapes against her and she pulls away to look at me; a playful smile is the only reassurance that makes sense right now.

Legs, skin, fingers fumbling to reveal more of both until it’s just us. Her body is the warmest instrument and our breaths synchronize
to something more harmonious than music. We say nothing and so I hear everything—a hitch here, a whimper there that curls warmth in my belly.

It’s really pink in here
, I think as she half sleeps on my chest. She’s been here long enough to make her mark on it. I wonder if it was her decision, if she was unable to face the parents who couldn’t protect her or whether their shame forced her out. Even if it was the latter, I doubt it took much to make her go. I want to bring her home with me and see the expressions on the twins’ faces as I walk through the door with her, but if I had a credit for every bad idea . . .

I guess I do. At least they’re being put to good use now.

Haven shifts, lifting her hand to draw a lazy question mark on my stomach. We don’t even need our tablets. We’ll survive this. I nod and she slips from the bed. I watch her and get up only when she’s slipped a shirt over her head and left the room.

The console beckons. I grit my teeth and look away. Not here.

“Tell me how it’ll work,” I say around a mouthful of my sandwich. My brain’s been stuck on a
we’re going to have to kill them
loop. Haven slips her tablet into my hand, and I repeat myself. I don’t know if I have it in me.

“You guys get the chips. The system checks in on the members twice a day, so if we don’t want to trigger a mass shutdown, we need to get them all between those two points. Once I have the actual chips, I can use them to trick the mainframe into thinking the owners are still alive.”

You’re sure?_

“Positive. I told you, each one is password-protected, and the people who have them don’t know what it is. There’s no way to get it out of them except to get it
out
of them. The passwords are installed on the chips when a Board member or the President steps into the
job, and nothing in the mainframe runs without them. The system communicates with the chips, and if it doesn’t get a signal from one, like if someone dies, the whole thing shuts down. To reactivate it you have to implant the chip into a new person
and
physically jack everyone else in while the system does a security check. It’s the only way.”

The tablet screen is blank, waiting for words I don’t want to type. Why didn’t you tell us before, at the club? The first time?_

“I hoped”—she swallows—“I hoped that they’d realize what they’ve been doing is wrong, when we went to take the Corp.” She points a pink-nailed finger at her ear and shakes her head, lips pressed tightly together.

I put my plate on the table and lean back into the couch, one arm around her. Do I want to know how you know all this?_

Haven tilts her head to smile wryly up at me. “We don’t talk about that.”

No, we don’t. Pinpoints of detail from the room gather to form a fuzzy picture of a life I don’t know much about. Books—mostly stuff from just before the war with their spines faded and cracked—are arranged alphabetically on white shelves that meld into the walls. A glass bowl I once watched her buy from a store in the Vortex sits on the windowsill, a single pink flower floating in it. Cheap, long-dead fiber-optic tubes splay over another table, as if she had them out recently. I wasn’t ashamed when I gave them to her, but now heat crawls over my skin. She kept them, brought them here even while I was sure of her betrayal.

One kiss turns into ten, but I really do need to leave.

Quadrant Four is maybe the best preserved of them all. Old buildings outnumber new and steel staircases cling to their sides—sharp-edged
parasites with claws hooked into weathered brick. The clamor of my steps is swallowed by Web noise and I sneak, unnoticed, away from Haven’s apartment and the guard still waiting in my pod out front.

It’s afternoon. Just in time for patrol shift change. I leave Four and aim for the blinding lights competing against the shadow of headquarters. The Vortex spins my head and spits me out on the other side, a few minutes away from Quadrant Three. I find the low, flat-roofed guard station, surrounded by patrol-pods, and slip into an alley across the street to wait.

Got Crave._

Simultaneously, every tablet in the studio apart from my own emits a sharp buzz and the others pull them from pockets and bags. Pixel and Scope grin, Mage nods because he already knew, and Phoenix purses her lips as she taps out a response. He can do it?_

Yeah._ Not easily. We’ll have to get into the armory at night after clearing it of the guards who are stationed to protect it around the clock—and getting rid of our own. When I climbed back into Haven’s apartment it was empty. She had already gone to join Mage in the tunnels to hack into the mainframe and figure out the best way to create a diversion. Honestly, the two of them could probably get us in without Crave’s help, but I need him to tell us what we’re looking for. I know nothing about guns.

I didn’t relax until Haven tabbed me to tell me she made it to Mage safely. Speeding pods . . . Exaurs . . . A rain of blood . . .

I force the slippery, many-legged thought back into its box. She’s fine. Alone in the tunnels now, but fine. “Okay, one more time,” I say out loud, my hands hovering over strings. It’s a song the guard in the control booth has heard us practice a hundred times. Nothing out of the ordinary. The twitchy sound tech has joined him today. It’s impossible to tell whether he’s bobbing his head in time to the rhythm while we play or if he’d be doing it regardless.

With two drum kits, it’s like clouds have descended into the studio and we’re trapped inside a storm; crashes of thunder are set to perfect time and
there
, at the crucial moment of critical mass, the cymbals are metallic lightning.

I leave my voice packed away. Phoenix and I will record in one of the isolation booths later, when I can hear myself think. It’s better to get the instruments right first, anyway, before I have to sicken myself with more singing of the Corp’s praises. It’s nice, novel, to be able to focus on nothing but the guitar, the bite of the wires into my fingers, my toes kicking at distortion pedals.

This one will go out to the Board members.

“Damn it!”

“It’s okay.” I smile at Phoenix, who is examining a broken nail.

“Maybe if you didn’t hit it like its personally offended you . . . ,” Mage tells her. She gives him the finger.

“Again,” I say.

I know as soon as we hit the sweet spot, an intangible instant when the music gains control of fluttering wings to take real flight—soaring, swooping, diving and rising in the small studio. No single one of us is in control. The wall of sound is its own thing—lifted, weight shared, by five pairs of hands. I shake hair from closed eyes just because I need to move. If I let the pressure build and build and keep it in my hands, in the guitar, I’ll explode. We carve out places for the verses, the chorus repetitions, and the coda. We line the edges of each sonic space with rhythm and melody and stand Scope’s sharp samples at each corner.

I don’t open my eyes again until we’ve finished, the final chord still echoing around the room. The guard still looks apathetic and it pisses me off. One of those types who just tracks because he has to, but doesn’t know what any kind of music is really
for
. I’d love to shake him, tell him to listen and feel and let it take over. The sound tech gets it. He’s staring at us with his eyes wide and milky; his hands dance over the control board by instinct, almost without looking. I guess we all have our instrument of choice.

Mage catches the slight incline of my head and follows my lead into the control room. “Can we get some food, please?” I ask the guard. Nicely. Good little citizens.

He snorts. “Babysitting a bunch of noisy kids. Do I look like a fucking servant? Sure. Anything for the
stars
.”

Mage and I wait until the door closes behind him.

“Can you work with that?” I ask the tech. He nods furiously.

“L5329 and the Board and President Z will all be thrilled. It’s even better than the first one you guys gave to me. L5329 said you got to hear it. Did you like it? This one is going to be amazing; I can’t wait to get it upstairs. When do you want to do vocals? Today?”

“After lunch.” Mage’s lips are white with the effort of holding in his laugh. This guy and Mage in the same room is kind of weird. Maybe they’ll counteract each other and cancel each other out.

“Yo, man, tell me more about this stuff?” Mage asks. “I used to be a coder, before I came to do this, so this kinda thing interests me.”

“You really should see the computer side of it, then, you know? To really understand. And we always need more sound techs, people who really get the coding side and the music side. I should show you. Come with me.”

Behind the tech’s back, I give Mage a thumbs-up. The guy is talking nonstop about equalizer levels and chip codes and the auditory cortex and waveforms. Interesting, and knowing how this works is key. Mage grins lazily, opening the door for them both.

“That was easy.” Phoenix smirks.

“It’s going to get harder.” Like the sound storm, critical mass is coming.

“You’d think you’d be less of a downer now that you’ve got your girl back.”

Scope and Pixel laugh. I glare.

The chrome on the back of my hand gleams in the studio spotlights.

We’re wiping our fingers free of the last streaks of grease when Mage and the sound tech get back. The tech joins the guard in the control room, and Mage comes in to grab a piece of chicken. He catches my attention and unfurls his palm under the pretense of grabbing the food. A small black object rests within it—a portable hard drive. The thing disappears into his pocket before he takes lunch and sits on a nearby chair to eat. I wonder if it feels heavy, the technology of death.

Mage’s theft calms my stomach and relaxes my voice when I step into the vocal booth with Phoenix to record the lyrics, the nauseating, Corp-friendly message made bearable by the knowledge of what we’re going to do with them. We get them laid down while the others track, their eyes glazing over, bodies relaxing against the nearest firm surface. I itch to do it, too. Between sending the twins off to school and coming here, I haven’t tracked since this morning. A tightrope is strung across my brain from addiction to lucidity. I have to track enough to stand in the middle without falling.

“Next one?” I ask, stepping out of the booth and breaking Scope, Pixel, and Mage from their reveries. The smiles are too slack, agreements too drawled.

I clench my jaw. “Let’s do it, then.” I take down the turquoise guitar and shuffle my pedals as far across the room from the console as the tethering cables will allow.

Four pairs of eyes hit my face at once when I strum the opening chords. We haven’t played this since our time at the club.

“Anthem?” Phoenix asks.

“Trust me.”

“That’s what I think it is?” The question’s been burning a hole through the tip of my tongue for hours.