Death Thieves (16 page)

Then the spinning world stopped.

***

We were still in the mountains, only everything seemed dead. The trees looked like petrified stumps sticking up out of hardened mud. Farther down the mountainside, flowers bloomed and wild grasses swayed against the light breeze, but the spot we stood on looked like a bald spot on an old man’s head. Mount Rainier’s eruption must have tumbled through this area.

There were several hilltops surrounding us with houses still on them, one had a full-on neighborhood. “Do people still live in those houses?” I asked.

He didn’t answer me. Tag licked his thumb and pressed it against his ring. The silver band flashed a brilliant red color and Tag aimed his hand to the sky directing a red light—sharp and crisp like a laser beam into the sky.

“What is that?” I asked.

Tag put his finger to his lips to indicate the need for silence.

“Why should I be quiet? No one’s anywhere near us.”

Tag wiped his hand down his face in frustration and pointed to his IDR.

Oh. So the ring had a microphone, did it? He couldn’t have mentioned that before we left? I was tempted to grab Tag’s hand and let out an ear splitting scream into his ring, but refrained. Apprehension kept me in line.

Within moments, a bright yellow car with wings that had big fans in them appeared in the sky over our heads. Tag dropped my hand immediately. When I gave him a startled questioning look, he frowned and shook his head imperceptibly.

The car landed twenty feet from where we stood. It looked like a flying taxi cab. Tag walked toward it, showing no fear, apprehension, or any other butterflies-in-the-stomach-inducing feeling. He left me with no choice but to follow. He opened the cab door for me, revealing a soft white microfiber interior. Tag inclined his head indicating I should get in, which I did, ducking so I wouldn’t bang my own head on the bright yellow wing. Tag climbed in after me. He tightened a shoulder harness over me so it felt like I’d been cinched into the seat permanently.

A muscular man with dark skin and darker sunglasses sat in the driver’s seat. His black hair was slicked back so perfectly tight and molded against his head that it looked like he wore a shiny hat.

“You’re late, Taggert,” the man said.

Tag didn’t respond. His mouth tightened into a grim line, and he looked out the window as we lifted off from the bald-patched mountain and into the air. It shot forward so fast, my head jerked back into the seat. I moved to grab Tag’s hand in a moment of panic at actually flying—in a car!—But Tag moved his arm out of my reach.

Confused, I nearly forgot we were in a flying taxi cab going at speeds that seemed impossible, and occupied my brain with worrying why Tag was acting so weird. I stared at Tag while he stared outside. What had happened to cause such a change? Before we’d left, he’d been small smiles, and hints of humor, along with being vastly overprotective of me.

Now? Now he acted as though he’d never heard of me, as though he was sharing a flying taxi cab with a perfect stranger, and remained quiet and out of reach in order to avoid having to make small talk. He stayed stiff and coldly silent until the space between us felt like a growing chasm—one that I would never be able to cross.

We were in the air for a long time, an hour maybe, and yet landed where I felt we were still in the sky. I looked out the window and could see nothing but clouds beneath me. The clouds stretched around us forming a sort of false bottom to the sky.

“Have we stopped moving?” The sound from hydraulics and machinery along with the jolts and shudders of the car unnerved me. We were definitely not going forward any more, but we were definitely still in the sky. The wings shadowing the windows folded into themselves the way a bird’s wings might, allowing the sunlight to shine in. On Tag’s side, I found myself staring at, well, myself.

The mirrored building next to us reflected my confusion right back at me. With a final shudder, the car moved forward again, picking up momentum, a rolling vibration sound came from underneath us. Tracks occasionally broke through the clouds. The building on Tag’s side flew past and was gone. No building for me to feel anchored to anything.

I looked to Tag to explain, which he did in a cool neutral tone as though telling a stranger what the time might be. “We’re on rails. Flying is prohibited in the city.”

And we
were
in the city. As we rounded the building, there were suddenly dozens more. The car followed the tracks, speeding fast enough to make me feel slightly ill. The man in front had turned around to chatter with Tag, which meant the man was no longer looking forward.

“What took you so long, Taggert? There’s talk that you crazed like your—”

“Enough!” Tag’s loud and abrupt interruption made me jump. “No questions. I will answer to no one but the professor. It’s the way.”

“Sorry.” The driver looked sorry, too. But he still
wasn’t
looking forward.

“Um, hey, not to interrupt your conference or anything but—” I closed my eyes as the car sped along its tracks straight toward a tall building. I felt the swerve as the tracks prevented us from actually colliding with the building. “Don’t you guys think the driver, should be
driving
?”

“It’s tracked.” The driver looked over the top of his glasses at me. His pupils were circled by a rainbow. Like Tag’s eyes were blue, and mine were hazel, the driver’s irises were like a
rainbow
.

I must have gasped or something because the driver’s lip curled—though whether he was sneering or growling at me, I couldn’t tell.

“Tracked?”

“He means it’s automated and on rails. We don’t need drivers in the sense you’re thinking once the cars are tracked. Sensors keep them from colliding with any other cars on the rails, and the rails themselves keep the cars from colliding into anything else. There are no traffic accidents here. If you and your boyfriend had lived in this time, you wouldn’t have died. The tracks are actually energy efficient since we’ve been able to recycle the energy from braking back into the car, like subways. Between the recycled energy and solar energy, we don’t depend on fossil fuel anymore.”

He must have sensed my raised eyebrows and my glance out the window to the layer of clouds that looked like pollution to me.

“Low storm rolled in. That’s not pollution.”

“Where do you get the energy to fly?”

“Not everyone has cars with that feature. In fact most people don’t. Most people don’t have cars at all. Povs can’t afford them.” He didn’t really answer the question, but he made it sound as though only the very wealthy could afford whatever energy made cars fly.

“Are we—” I hated to ask since it would invariably make me sound stupid, but I needed to know. “Are we on the ground?”

The driver laughed. Tag didn’t laugh but seemed irritated with my questions as they forced him to be civil to me by answering. “No. We’re on the track system. A lot of crime and povs exist at the street levels. The mids, middle class, voted the tracks to be above the street so they had the top-of-the-world view and less chance of being victimized by the povs. Since they funded the project, they won by majority.” He went back to his window with a deep breath that indicated he was done with my questions.

The rest of the ride remained quiet. We circled around buildings, and then the clouds broke up enough to allow a view down to the ocean, where rain fell and whipped the waves into frothy caps. I focused hard on the space in front of the car, and sometimes the clouds swirled away enough for me to see the tracks in front of us. I tried to see through the clouds directly beneath us but could only make out faint lights blinking as we whisked past.

The driver leaned his seat back in the reclining position so his head was almost in my lap. He shook his ring finger close to his ear and then rested his hands across his chest. A diffused light shone from his ring shone light. When the light touched the ceiling of the car, I realized he was watching what looked like a homemade movie.

His IDR had provided a movie for him.

I shot Tag an incredulous look, but Tag still refused to act like we occupied the same car—or plane or train or whatever the thing we were in was called.

The driver’s ring wasn’t on his left hand but on his right thumb. His was a fancy gold-looking thing with little stones that looked like tiny balls of granite lining the edges.

He laughed out loud at the characters moving on the ceiling, and I scowled. There wasn’t any sound. What was he laughing at?

“What—” I started to ask, but Tag interrupted me.

He kept his focus out the window while he interrupted me. “He’s hearing the movie internally. The IDR transmits to the drive and plays inside his brain through pulse power. Most people use vid glasses since transmitting in public is rude.”

I looked back at the driver who’d gone to ignoring me nearly as well as Tag had a moment before.
Pulse power?
“Are you saying he’s got a hard drive in his
head
?”

Tag didn’t respond. His blue gaze fixated on whatever lay outside the glass window.

The weirdness of his silence mingled with the laughter from the driver while we made hairpin turns on a track leading us around buildings and in some cases
through
buildings made me physically ill.

“I’m going to throw up.” I announced, and meant every word.

The driver sat his seat up immediately, apparently not wanting to be in my aim.

“Not in my ride!” He slammed the brakes making metal squeal against metal. The car lifted off the tracks and moved to the side. I opened my door and vomited outside the car into the layer of clouds. I hoped nobody was beneath me at the same time I felt extreme gratitude for the harnesses holding me securely inside the car. Another car flew past us on the track, and I wondered if we had stayed on the track, would we have been run over? Advertisements I hadn’t noticed so much before while we were driving scrolled across and down the impossibly tall buildings, making everything seem to be in a sickeningly constant wave of movement, as though the buildings themselves were crawling.

Sensory overload. My brain couldn’t comprehend everything my eyes scanned.

The thought of running away again left before it could fully form. Instead, I closed the door to the taxi car-plane-train and closed my eyes so my brain wouldn’t fry from too much information. The future we’d stayed in at the cabin didn’t seem half as overwhelming as the future of 2113.

The driver waited to be certain I’d finished before moving back to the tracks, where the car jolted as it connected itself to the track.

I didn’t look up again until the car had moved to the side of the tracks and stopped on a platform. Tag got out on his side and walked around the car to open my door for me. I wanted to grab him and insist he take me home to Winter immediately, except my jaw dropped at the building I found myself staring at. The car had parked by a huge glass coliseum. A steady stream of people entered and exited the glass building. With every person who went through the doors, whether coming or going, the door frame glowed green. Most of the clothing seemed normal enough—jeans, loose blousy shirts, skirts on most of the women and many of the men, but the hair colors were as varied as the colors of their clothes. Pinks, oranges, reds, blues, whites, yellows, greens, blacks, and purples bobbed along as the crowd maneuvered around one another. There were even some silvers and golds—a crayon box assortment of heads. A lot of people had swirls and shapes inked between their hairline and their eyes, messages that looked like—“Is that a Coca Cola ad on his forehead?” I asked

“Businesses pay a lot of money for personal ad statements.” Tag looked at the man in question with mild disgust. “But you have to be willing to be rented for an entire month. Foreheads and backs of hands are prime marketing spaces.”

Match your hair to your outfit and run an ad for your favorite soft drink on your forehead. Welcome to the future.

A small group of guys who looked harder and more serious than Tag surrounded us on the platform. They were all younger—late teens early twenties, but they looked old, like they’d seen too much and didn’t want to talk about it. They wore silvery black jeans and black jackets like Tag’s. None of them bore any advertisements on their foreheads or hands. Maybe the military didn’t allow it. One of the taller guys took a step forward out of the circle of the others and walked toward us. He looked older, older and meaner, than the rest. He had spiky red hair, and not red as in ginger red, but red as though he’d dipped his head in a vat of fresh blood. His eyebrows had been dyed to match and seemed to make his pale skin chalky in comparison. “Soldier Taggert.” His voice sounded as though stones had been stuffed in his throat and were grating against one another with the movement of his sharp Adam’s apple.

“General.” Tag bent his head low in respect.

“You’re late, soldier.”

The “general” didn’t even look in my direction or acknowledge me in any way. I had a thousand different snarky remarks to make about my being a queen, but I bit my tongue and watched with fascination and horror. To make things worse, the wind buffeted me, threatening to shove me off the platform and toss me into the swirling clouds below.

“We ran into some malfunctions with the Orbital, sir.” There was a slight pause before the word
sir
. A pause so slight, it went unchecked by the general, but not by me. Such nuances were part of me, testing the pecking order and figuring out where I stood in it. Tag stood below this person, but he didn’t
feel
below this person. Interesting. No wonder Tag noticed how I played the system, living in what he called my self-made mediocrity. He apparently did the same thing.

“Malfunctions?”

I stiffened, wondering if Tag would rat me out for causing so many problems. The way the man shifted his weight from one foot to the other felt dangerous
.

Tag’s glance slid to me again, briefly, and was accompanied by another slight shake of the head. “We had a power shortage due to inclement weather. The shortage in power disrupted the electrics, sending us off course. We ended up in the Rainier explosion, which further afflicted the electrics. We had to jump to a safe place and wait until the Orbital could be charged and trusted to bring her here safely. The rest of my report will be given to the professor only, sir.”