Crossover (8 page)

He vaulted over the
fence rather than diverting toward the open gate. When he landed
inside the compound, he pulled the coat hook off his belt and swung
it on the climbing rope, around and around, so fast that it looked
like the propeller in a jet engine.

Then he let go.

The hook rocketed
upwards with much more velocity than Ash had expected. It sailed
past the fifth-floor window for which she had advised him to aim,
and kept shooting up into the darkness until it was out of sight.
The rope kept unspooling from the coil over his shoulder.

After a moment, the
rope stopped unravelling. Six gave it two brisk tugs and then
started climbing, hand over hand. After only a few seconds, he was
so high that Ash couldn't see him any more.

'Six is in,' Ash
said.

'Great,' Benjamin
replied. 'I may lose radio contact with you when you get inside,
but you can phone me if you need to. In ten minutes I'll be outside
the front gate with the car. In forty-five minutes, the scientists
will return to shut off the alarm. Make sure you're out before
then.'

'Got it.'

Ash dashed across the
dust toward the open gate, hoping Six had done his part. Otherwise,
she would find herself trapped on the lower levels while he was up
the top, looking for–

Ash froze. She could
see a shadow, clambering up the smooth wall of the tower like a
gecko. Could that possibly be a person? The outfit was a dull grey,
so it was hard to get a good look as he or she scrambled up the
concrete surface.

We're not alone, Ash
thought.

'Benjamin,' she hissed.
'Someone else is here.'

'Who?'

'No idea. They're
climbing up the wall after Six. They must be looking for the
ununoctium.'

Benjamin cursed. 'We
should leave. We're not prepared for this.'

'We can't leave Six
behind.'

'He's superhuman. He
can take care of himself.'

'Not when he doesn't
know he's in danger,' Ash said. 'I have to go in.'

'Ash–'

The shadow disappeared
into the darkness up above. Ash ran through the gate, and
approached the door to Vepa Tower.

Six shook the last of
the broken glass from his clothes and listened. The alarm wailed.
The breeze moaned outside the broken window. There was no other
sound. This floor was empty.

The inside of Vepa
Tower was more cramped than he had expected, with a low ceiling of
iron girders, and dirty walls made of reinforced concrete. The
window through which he'd entered appeared to be the only one on
this level. The floor was strewn with kipple.

It seemed wasteful to
have a whole tower of unused floors. Perhaps it had been built with
other occupants in mind, but once the top level's purpose had been
determined, no-one wanted an office in a tower which might explode.
Or perhaps there was some other reason.

Six found the fire
door. The hinges groaned as he pushed it open and found himself in
a pitch black stairwell. He couldn't see the steps, but he could
hear them with echolocation – the screeching alarm echoed through
the darkness, outlining each concrete slab, each dented hand
rail.

He trotted down through
the darkness until he reached the bottom floor. The last door was
locked with a bulky steel bolt, but it was designed to stop
intruders from getting in, while still allowing evacuees to escape.
It would be a matter of seconds to drag it aside and pull the door
open. The girl should be waiting on the other side.

He hesitated. Why
should he let her in?

He doubted that he
needed her help to find the ununoctium. And he certainly didn't
need her to destroy it. Why was she so determined to join him? She
had said she felt guilty about the thefts, and Six knew better than
most people that guilt was a strong motivator. But he sensed that
something else was afoot here.

Unfortunately, he had
no choice but to let her in. If he didn't, she would simply wait
outside the door until he came out with the ununoctium – assuming
he didn't accidentally blow it up, killing them both. He had to
stick to the plan. Let her in, find the element, get it out of the
building, take it to the lifeless centre of the nearby desert, and
leave it to destabilise itself.

He pulled back the bolt
and opened the door.

'What kept you?' the
girl asked.

Six ignored the
question. 'You'll need a flashlight.'

'Someone else is
here.'

'What? Who?'

'Don't know. Not one of
the soldiers. He or she climbed up the wall of the tower, somehow.
I think they're after the ununoctium.'

Sounds like someone
with Deck training, Six thought. Perhaps Soren Byre sent herself
back in time after me. But why? To stop me from getting to the
ununoctium? How does she plan to get back to the future
afterwards?

'We need to move
quickly,' he said, and started running up the stairs. A flashlight
clicked on behind him, and he heard the girl's footsteps behind
him. He expected her to fall behind fairly quickly, but she
didn't.

'Flashlight,' she said
as she ran. 'It's all American English in the future, huh?'

'Amerwhat?'

'Never mind.'

By the time they
reached the top floor, Six's heart – grown from a fusion of horse
and falcon DNA – was pumping at an accelerated rate. Behind him, it
sounded like the girl was struggling to breathe.

Six put his hand on the
fire door. 'You should wait here.'

The girl shook her
head.

'If the intruder is who
I think it is,' Six whispered, 'she won't hesitate to kill
you.'

'I'm going in,' the
girl panted.

There was no time to
argue further. Six nodded and pushed the door open.

The room was unlike the
rest of the tower. The walls and floor were panelled in a sleek
white material. Sterilised power cables hung from the ceiling,
secured by safety chains, ready to be attached to equipment. In the
centre of the room, panes of reinforced glass formed a cube around
a steel box.

There it is, Six
thought.

A sound from behind
him. He peered back into the darkness of the stairwell.

'Get behind me,' he
told the girl.

* * *

Ash skipped deeper into
the experimentation chamber, leaving the boy from the future to
stare into the stairwell, his hands shrinking into fists, his
stance settling into a kickboxer's crouch.

The glass enclosure had
a latch on the side. Probably magnetic. She could open it with the
positively charged iron attachment in her pocketknife.

She crept closer,
sneaking a glance back at the boy. He wasn't watching her. Getting
the box out would be easy. Getting it past him would be harder –
she might have to knock him out with the ether-soaked cloth in her
pocket.

She put one hand on the
glass. Hesitated.

Six's
voice echoed through her mind.
There was
no sudden catastrophe. Just greed, eating civilisation one small
bite at a time.

Had she created the
grim world from which he came?

Ash
gritted her teeth. The ununoctium was worth millions of dollars.
She couldn't
not
take it. She needed the money. Benjamin needed it. Her father
needed it.

If she donated a
hundred thousand dollars to Oxfam, surely that would offset any
damage she did?

But still her palm
stayed frozen against the enclosure. Whoever she sold the element
to, they were unlikely to use it for good. It would probably end up
in a bomb.

Cursing her conscience,
she stepped away from the glass and turned to face the door.
Whoever would coming, she and Six would stop them. Together.

A footstep reverberated
through the darkness. A face emerged from the gloom in the
doorway.

Six swung his fist
toward the apparition–

And froze.

Ash's eyes widened. The
boy in the stairwell was Six. His hair was different, his clothes
were different, but the face was identical. But how could there be
two of him?

She looked from one Six
to the other, baffled.

'Kyntak?' Six
demanded.

'Six,' the other boy
said. Even his voice sounded like Six's. 'We're in trouble.'

'What are you doing
here in the past?'

'I'm not in the past,'
Kyntak said. 'Neither are you. We're both inside the index of
everything.'

* * *

Six's mind was
whirling. 'I don't understand.'

Kyntak spread his arms
wide. 'This is all a simulation of the world as it was in the early
21st Century.'

Six looked back at the
girl. All the colour had drained from her face.

'Six,' she said. 'Who
is this?'

'This is my brother,
Kyntak,' Six said. 'He–'

Kyntak interrupted him.
'She's not real. She's software. A recreation of a real historical
figure, assembled based on photographs, phone conversations,
emails...'

Six stared down at his
hands. They looked real. They felt real.

'Why would Soren Byre
put me inside the index?' he demanded.

'Because she needed
ununoctium,' Kyntak said. 'And the index knew where the last
stockpile was – deep within the radioactive wastelands, on the top
floor of Vepa Tower, forgotten by everyone for more than a
century.'

'But Byre already had
the ununoctium,' Six said.

'I'm guessing she told
you that,' Kyntak said, 'so you would try to destroy it when you
thought that you were in the past. Now that you've found it in the
index, she knows where it is in real life. You've led her right to
it. And now she can build the machine for real.'

'I'm not software,' the
girl whispered. 'I'm a person.'

Six glanced back at
her. She looked like she believed herself to be telling the truth.
But so did Kyntak.

'Why didn't Byre just
put herself in the index to find the ununoctium?' Six said.

'She was probably
worried that you would find her body while her mind was in here.
She'd be defenseless. By putting you into the index instead of
herself, she achieved two goals – tracking down the ununoctium and
incapacitating the person most likely to stop her.'

'Six,' the girl said.
'Don't listen to him. It's a trick.'

Kyntak ignored her.
'Six,' he said. 'When I found your body, Byre was nowhere to be
found. By watching your progress, she must have already found out
where the ununoctium is, and now she's gone to get it. We have to
stop her.'

'But you came in after
me,' Six said. 'Now we're both stuck.'

'No,' Kyntak said.
'There's a pass phrase. When you say the words, you're ejected from
the index.'

'What is it?'

'Listen carefully,
because I can only say it once. Ready?'

'Ready.'

'I've been searching
high and low. Now it's time for me to go.'

Kyntak flickered, and
vanished.

Six stared at the empty
air where his brother had been standing.

'You think it's true,'
the girl said. 'You think that this isn't the real world.'

Six nodded.

'But... But everything
is so...'

'I don't have time to
discuss this with you,' Six said. 'But if it's any consolation, one
of my best friends is a robot. Just because you're artificial
doesn't mean you're not real.' He took a deep breath. 'I've been
searching high and low. Now it's time for me to go.'

The whole world went
black.

* * *

Ash leaned back against
the glass enclosure. She was alone. The boy from the future – or
the boy from the present – and his twin brother had both
disappeared before her eyes.

She knew that the
soldiers would be coming back soon. But they weren't real. She
wasn't real. What did it matter if she got caught?

I'm an app, she
thought. I'm nothing.

She looked at the steel
box. Inside was not ununoctium, but a digital representation of it.
If she could get it out, she could still sell it. A fake buyer
would purchase it with fake money. And then probably use it to kill
fake people, like her.

She took her hand away
from the glass. Even knowing that there would be no real-world
consequences, she couldn't take the box. It wasn't right.

A humming noise brought
her to her senses, and she realised that her phone had been
vibrating in her pocket for some time. She looked at the screen.
Benjamin.

What will I tell him?
she wondered.

She answered the phone.
'Hi.'

'Ash, where are you?
The soldiers will be back in ten minutes!'

'Benjamin,' Ash said.
'If something really bad happened, and there was nothing you could
do about it, would you want to know?'

He laughed nervously.
'No. We've had this conversation before.'

Ash said nothing.

'Why?' Benjamin said.
'What's happened?'

'Nothing,' Ash said.
'It was just a hypothetical – everything's fine. I'm coming out.
I'll see you soon.'

Six's eyes snapped
open. He let out a long, desperate gasp. His heart thumped
painfully against his lungs as the cold air washed over him. The
world inside the index hadn't felt fake, but now that he was in
reality, he could feel the difference. The dim light of the fallout
shelter was so vivid. The acrid smell of the concrete left him
gagging.

He lifted his arms. The
chains were gone. Kyntak must have freed him before going
under–

Kyntak. Six looked
around, but could see no sign of his brother.