Guardian (15 page)

“The SecuriTech offices were emptied right after the network fell,” said Marie. “I saw it myself.”

“The offices, sure,” said Syd. “But that’s not where we’re going.”

“Where then?”

“Where you and I first met,” Syd said. “We’re going to Knox’s house.” Syd looked at Finch’s body on the floor. “But first let’s bury my old friend.”

LIAM TOOK THE FIRST
watch of the night, letting Syd and Marie sleep. Then they rotated. Syd and Liam didn’t say a word to each other as they switched places, just grunts and nods. They were careful not to bump into each other in the narrow cabin.

As the purple of the desert started to show hints of morning red, Liam woke Syd to restart the engines. Syd startled, but then, seeing the metal hand shaking his arm, remembered where he was and what he was doing. He stood, wiped his face on his shirt, and got to work.

“You feeling all right?” Liam asked.

“Fine,” said Syd.

“No symptoms yet?”

Syd shook his head. “Marie?”

“Nothing yet,” she said.

“How’s your side?” Syd asked.

“Fine,” said Liam.

“Well, here we go,” Syd announced, as the engines growled to full power and the vehicle lifted from the desert in a cloud of yellow dust. He jammed the throttle and they shot off into the morning. Syd focused on driving, Liam scanned for threats on the horizon, and Marie watched the landscape race by, waiting to see something familiar.

Four hours later, she spoke the first word since they’d taken off: “There.”

She pointed up at the shining skyscrapers of the city in the mountains, catching the light high above them. Buildings filled the slopes, smaller and more densely packed the lower down they were. A network of roads wound around the mountain, and as they got closer, they saw many of the roads were destroyed, their guardrails and blast barriers ripped down, or the roads themselves, riding high over the slums, collapsed down off their pylons, crushing the tin shacks beneath.

“If we go around the other side, we can come in through the restricted speedway that I know,” Marie told them.

“I can’t imagine it’s restricted anymore,” Syd replied.

“Force of habit. It’s probably not much of a road at all anymore.”

By Marie’s route, they came to the southern wall of the city, an imposing barricade of steel and concrete.

The wall had been there when they lived in the Mountain City, ringing the entire thing, but neither of them had ever seen it. There was a no-man’s-land on the other side, a mile-wide strip of open concrete, dotted with guard towers and patrolled by robotic sentries. No one could cross it unauthorized, and a proxy like Syd would never have been authorized. A patron like Marie would have left the city by a more dignified route, if she ever left at all, which she hadn’t . . . until the last time, with Syd and Knox. And then they’d snuck out. There was no way, however, to sneak into the city driving a hovercraft. They drove around until they found an access gate.

The paint wasn’t even faded on the steel blast door and they could see the shining logo of SecuriTech. Someone had tried to etch some scratchiti curses over it, but the door was resistant. It looked brand-new.

Looking much less new, although in fact far newer than the door, was a sandbagged sentry post beside the gate, open to the desert wind. In it stood a tripod-mounted fracture cannon—old tech, but powerful enough that the Reconciliation had seen fit to ignore their rules by placing it there. And manning the fracture cannon, wearing a green uniform, a white hood, and a respirator against the red dust cloud their hovercraft kicked up, was a Purifier, with his cannon aimed straight into their cockpit.

Syd’s blood turned to ice. He tightened his grip on the throttle, steadied the craft, but crept closer. No warning came. No order to stop. As they moved, the fracture cannon did not track them. The white-masked Purifier was still as stone.

Syd set the craft down in front of the gate. The figure in the sentry post didn’t turn to look at them. Marie peeked from the side porthole.

“He’s . . .” She pointed, unable to find the words to describe what she was seeing.

Syd idled the engine and Liam got up to look.

“I need to look closer,” he told them and lowered the rear hatch. “Stay here.”

Syd followed him out into the blazing afternoon. Liam shook his head, but didn’t stop him.

They blinked at the sun and coughed in the dust. The land around them was barren hardpan. Any water in the ground had long since been sucked into the city and any life outside the wall had long since been killed off. There was only heat and wind and the wall.

Syd caught up to Liam and they walked side by side to the Purifier. Marie followed with the bolt gun in hand.

The Purifier’s white mask was tinted rust red from the desert sand and his uniform was coated with the same red dust. His hands were tied to the fracture cannon with rough cord, but the cannon’s mechanism was ripped out; all the circuits and pieces that had made it a weapon were gone. It was just a prop.

Just like the Purifier himself.

“At least we know why he didn’t shoot us down,” Syd observed.

The Purifier’s hands were all bone, no flesh, and beneath the white mask, they could see a glimpse of a bare skull—the jagged toothy grimace, the black eye sockets. A skeleton.

“He’s been posed like this,” Liam said.

“Why would someone pose a skeleton?” Marie wondered.

“It’s a warning.” Syd reached out and brushed the dust and sand from the front of his uniform to reveal writing in a brown smear of dried blood. The writing was childish.

NO RECONCILATION ALLOWED.

“The Mountain City doesn’t belong to the Reconciliation anymore,” Liam observed.

“I don’t think it has for a while,” Syd added.

“The Reconciliation evacuated most of the city,” said Marie. “Moved everyone out to the countryside right after the networks fell. They only left a few people behind to gather the stragglers and the resisters, and to organize the salvage.”

“Just a skeleton crew?” Syd suggested.

“That’s a joke Knox would have made,” Marie said back. Syd bit his lip. He would have liked to take it as a compliment, but the memory stung. And in truth, while he lived, Knox’s sarcasm had annoyed Syd. Now he held on to it because he was afraid not to. He was afraid of what he’d lose when he let it go.

“Whoever they left behind was clearly overrun,” Liam said. “We have to assume whoever still lives in this city is going to be hostile.”

“We’ve got to go in,” said Syd. “If it’s Machinists who’ve taken over, that’s what we want. We’re on their side now.”

“I’m not,” said Marie. She looked over at the dead body. She had pledged herself to the Purifiers, wore the uniform, tried to lead the younger ones as best she could toward the better society she thought they were making. She had no desire to turn back the clock. She just wanted to save her parents.

“We’re not going anywhere unless we can get that gate open,” Liam noted.

“Remember how we got out of the cell?” Syd asked.

“Uh, Syd.” Liam shook his head. “This gate is about a thousand times the size of that cell door and a thousand times as strong.”

“Yeah,” said Syd, “but we’ll use the same principle.”

Liam stared up at the giant door. “The same principle?”

“Our hovercraft has a solar fission battery, right?”

Liam shrugged.

“It does,” said Syd. “I wasn’t really asking.”

“How is that the same principle as blowing out the air locks on a prison door?” Liam imagined himself bending pistons and crossing wires under Syd’s direction. He wasn’t sure he had the strength for it.

“Well, not blowing out this time,” said Syd. “Blowing up.”

“You’re going to self-destruct the hovercraft?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Guys?” Marie called.

Liam shook his head. “The explosion will tell everyone we’re here. Whoever killed that Purifier. Cousin’s goons coming after us. Anyone. They’ll all come running.”

“We’ll just have to run faster.”

“This is a terrible idea.”

“You have a better one?”

“Guys?” Marie tried again.

“Fine,” Liam relented. In truth, he couldn’t think of a better idea. He wasn’t really an ideas guy. He never really trusted complicated plans. He had a bias toward action, even half-considered action. Blowing up the hovercraft certainly seemed half considered. “So how do we do it?”

“If we can open that hatch—” Syd pointed to a metal panel near the rear of the vehicle that looked painfully heavy to Liam. “Then I’ll shut off the coolant system. The engine will overheat; I short out the safety catches, we’ll create a feedback loop and when we hit critical mass, well, then, we better be under cover and—”

“Guys!” Marie yelled.

The boys turned to her.

“We could just open the gate.” She walked up to a large box with a lever in it, swung open the box, and yanked down the lever.

A siren sounded three times and the gate split open in the middle, two halves sliding into the wall.

“Why do guys always go right to blowing things up?” she wondered aloud, walking past them back to the hovercraft.

Syd and Liam stared at the open door, the warning skeleton, and the empty concrete beyond. They looked at each other, then back to the hovercraft, and climbed aboard.

“I’m glad she’s on our side,” said Liam, and Syd couldn’t have agreed more.

THOUGH BOTH SYD AND
Marie had grown up in the city, they recognized nothing as Syd guided the hovercraft along the broken road. Where once the packed jumble of shanties at the base of the city had teemed with life, there were only smoldering piles of soot, the odd retaining wall, or empty concrete storefront. The city looked like the ruins of Old Detroit, without the graceful cover of nature that hid the old disasters. Civilization without humanity was just a graveyard.

Liam thought he saw movement from the corner of his eye, but when he turned, there was nothing there. The city was a security nightmare. Every dark opening looked threatening, every turn held an unknown danger. How could he keep Syd safe in a place like this?

“They must have abandoned the Lower City,” Syd said. “No one would stay down here longer than they had to. Even when the city was alive, people did whatever they could to get out.”

He thought of Finch, his body buried in the desert. He’d had dreams of his own and plans that the network collapse had undone. Bitterness, rage, vengeance . . . could Syd blame him? How many millions of plans had been destroyed when the networks fell? How many millions more now that this sickness had begun to take hold? If Syd failed, if everyone died because of him, did all his mistakes die too? Would negation free him or would there be judgment on the other side? Justice or oblivion?

Which did he hope for?

They roared over a broken blast barrier that had separated the Lower City roads from the restricted speedway of the Upper City. Syd was able to move faster there. The ruins had more order to them, as if the lux Upper City even decayed better than the poor districts. The slums of the Valve and the Lower City might as well have never existed, but the Upper City was dug in deeper. Its patterns endured.

They rose and rose, and as they rose, their large vehicle knocked aside the burned and abandoned husks of small transports. Syd didn’t look too closely as he smashed them out of the way, in case he saw the bodies inside. The barriers were in better shape the farther into the Upper City they climbed. He figured that once the borders had been crossed, there was no need to tear the walls down. There were richer targets for destruction: SecuriTech depots and Xelon Corporate Credit Bureaus, fashion boutiques and medical clinics, EpiCure Flavor Emporia and Gamify Data Centers. There were offices and apartments and mansions. There was wealth in the ruins.

The destruction seemed wanton at first glance, but patterns emerged. There appeared to be different sets of motives at work: the spontaneous revenge of the liberated Lower City, the Reconciliation’s deliberate destruction of the old mechanisms of power and control, and then the plain old pragmatism of looting.

The scratchiti carved into the walls told the stories.

PROXIES ARISE
and
NOT YOUR SLAVES ANYMORE
and
BURN THE KNOCK-OFFS ALIVE
and
THE ONLY GOOD PATRON IS A DEAD PATRON
and
GREED IS GONE
and above them all,
REPENT FOR THE MACHINE, CHEY IS WATCHING
.

“What is Chey?” Liam asked.

Syd shrugged. Sometimes people just wanted to leave a mark. It didn’t have to mean more than that.

Strangely, as they crept into the swanky residential district where Knox had lived, they still hadn’t seen any people. Marie pointed Syd along the roads, as Liam scanned the perimeter. Syd slowed the engines; the roar became a whine and they sank closer to the ground.

“I recognize this,” Syd said as they approached Xelon Park. “I couldn’t believe the beauty of this place when I first saw it.”

The park’s weeping willows were chopped down, and even their stumps had been burned up. The grass was trampled, the hedges uprooted, and the scattered remains of campsites were the only evidence that anything had been there at all before, other than dirt.

Ahead of them was the gated drive up to Knox’s old house. The gate itself was gone, even the gateposts and hinges hauled away. On one of the remaining sections of wall that had ringed the house someone had scratched
YOUR DEBT IS DUE, SECURITECH SKUM
.

“The house was more impressive before,” Syd noted.

“I like the place how it is now,” Liam said.

Syd settled the hovercraft in the front drive. The grand entry door, which had been reinforced graphene covered in antique mahogany, was now little more than splinters. Mold had begun its slow creep into the entry hall, and even from outside, they could see a riot of dirty footprints going in and out through the doorway and the gaping hole where a floor-to-ceiling plexi window had given astounding views of the park and the city below it.

“Let me go in first,” said Liam. “To make sure it’s secure. Then you follow.”

The house was empty, so Liam called in Marie and Syd after him.

“It’s been completely looted,” Liam said. “I don’t know what you think you’ll find.”

Syd stood in the middle of the great room, looking up to the balcony above, remembering the last time he was here—the only other time he’d been here—when he first saw Knox’s father, first saw Marie. When Knox had made the decision to help him escape. Had Knox suspected he’d never come home again?

Syd held the journal in front of him, flipped through the pages, looking for anything that might resemble the pictures the doctor had drawn, some piece of tech, some clue. There was nothing.

Syd moved to the grand staircase that curved to the floor above and stalked up it, sliding his hand along the smooth surface of the metal banister. Mold had painted black spots on the walls where expensive art had hung. He inched along the upstairs hall and came to Knox’s old room.

The door had been blown open by a Guardian before the networks fell and it hadn’t been repaired. The room itself was bare, stripped to nothing. Even the plexi in the window was gone. The hazy view of the city beyond showed the dark skyscrapers with shattered windows jutting like rotted teeth gnawing on mushy clouds. Everything was ruined. There was no machine here and no clues for finding one. What had he been thinking, following a dream of Knox back to this place?

“Stay back!” he heard Liam shout. He rushed out to the hallway and looked down over the railing to the great room below.

Marie had the bolt gun up and Liam had assumed a fighting stance, Finch’s EMD stick raised. A raggedy assortment of figures was climbing up through the open wall of windows. There were at least a dozen of them, and more came in through the open front door, pressing Liam and Marie back toward the stairs. They moved up step by step, side by side, and the figures pressed in on them.

They were all dressed in combinations of filthy lux fabrics, dirty suits, and half-shredded gowns. The remains of formalwear and Upper City chic, most of it too big for most of them. All of them were teens, none much older than Syd himself. Tattoos of ones and zeros looped around their necks, poked from their sleeves, and on a few of them, covered their faces. Machinists, every one.

They did not seem happy to find visitors.

They all carried weapons—sharpened poles, powerless EMD sticks, one or two bolt guns. To the side, a boy hauled an old combat robot on a length of rope. It was missing three of its legs and the barrel of one of its fracture cannons was bent sideways. It slumped on its own weight and had begun to rust. The boy had mounted a slingshot on its back. That appeared to be in full working order.

“I said stay back,” Liam ordered again.

Marie fixed her aim on the guy with the bot. “One more step from anyone and he dies,” she said.

The crowd stopped. They all looked to the guy whom she’d threatened. He dropped the leash and put his hands up. The guy behind him, holding the band of the slingshot, kept it aimed at Marie. He’d loaded it with rusted metal bits.

Everyone looked back to Marie.

“What now?” she whispered to Liam.

Syd ducked low, so they couldn’t see him from the floor below. He realized he’d hidden here before, in this exact spot, with Knox by his side.

There was a name for the
feeling
of having done something before, but he couldn’t remember what it was. Was there a name for the
reality
of having done something before, repeating your own history in stranger and stranger ways, trapped in a decaying version of the past, losing people as you went?

“Who are you?” a girl in the crowd demanded of Marie. The guy with the bolt gun aimed at him bulged his eyes at her and shook his head, but she moved to the front of the crowd and repeated her question. The girl looked Marie up and down. “Purifier?”

“No,” said Marie. “Not anymore.”

The girl snorted, skeptical. She wore a man’s suit with a tie she’d fashioned from a strip of cloth, and her belt buckle was the gleaming ornament of a lux transport. She had three Purifier’s masks hanging from her belt, all of them stained with dried brown streaks. Not all of the streaks were mud, of that Syd was certain. Blood dries brown. The girl’s knuckles were marked with alternating ones and zeros.

Marie also noticed the bloody masks, the tattoos in binary. “Who are
you
?” she asked.

The girl cocked her head. “You’re in our house, outnumbered, and we ask the questions.”

“This isn’t your house,” said Marie. “Property is shared by all.”

That sent a laugh through the crowd. Hoots and howls.

“There’s no Reconciliation here, Purifier.” The girl laughed. “You can shove your knock-off collectivism.”

“I told you I’m not a Purifier,” Marie repeated.

“You sound like one,” the girl said. She pointed to Liam. “Who’s your big friend?”

“No lover of the Reconciliation,” Liam answered.

The girl smirked. “I like your hand. You got a name?”

Liam opened and closed his metal hand. “Liam,” he said. “You?”

“Gianna, acting chief operating officer of the Xelon Corporation.” She bent at the waist into a low open-armed bow. When she came up, she produced a piece of plexi with something scratched onto the surface of it. Beside her, a smaller boy whipped out a tiny solar LED and shined the light through the glass. It projected the scratchings on the glass through onto the wall:

GIANNA S. COO, XELON CORP.

She’d made a primitive holo to imitate the business bios executives used to have. It was ugly, but ingenious. She’d improvised her own little piece of the past.

Marie kept her weapon pointed at the nervous guy beside the bot. “Xelon?” she asked, shocked to see the name of her father’s company shining against the wall. She hadn’t heard it said out loud in all the months since the Reconciliation banned the corporate names, let alone seen it projected on a wall.

“We’re all Xelon here,” Gianna said. “House is ours, the park beyond. Xelon territory. We care for the brand until the Machine.”

“We aren’t from here,” Liam explained. “We didn’t mean to trespass.”

The girl smiled. “The Xelon Corporation welcomes guests. We’re not like other corporations in the city. We extend credit without cruelty or bias.”

Marie and Liam looked at each other, eyebrows raised. Syd, above, stayed hidden. They were very much outnumbered and he did not want to lose the element of surprise by revealing himself. It was their only advantage if things turned bad.

“Credit?” Marie asked.

“If you are worthy of credit, we will offer it on favorable terms,” Gianna told them.

“And if not?” Liam wondered.

“You go bankrupt.” Gianna held out her hands, palms up, empty. The crowd hooted again and whooped. Some waved stained Purifier masks above their heads. Bankrupt did not sound like something they wanted to be. “So . . . why did you come here? Why do you deserve our credit?”

“We . . . uh . . .” Marie was trying to think of an answer when a shout from above cut her off. She and Liam turned to see Syd, standing with his hands up; another teenager, this one in the uniform of a Xelon security guard, stood behind him and jammed a weapon into his back.

“Found this one up here snooping!” he shouted.

“Espionage?” Gianna raised her eyebrows. “You from the competition? Come to steal our corporate secrets? That’s grounds for execution!”

“Hey,” the one behind Syd said, jabbing a kind of pointy stick into his back. Syd glanced over his shoulder and saw that the weapon was simply that: a pointy stick. The boy hooted: “This one’s got a marking . . . like a logo behind his ear. It’s dirty, though; I can’t tell if it’s—”

“We’ve come for the Machine!” Liam announced, loudly.

Syd gave Liam a “what are you doing” kind of look. Marie gave him an “are you completely glitched” kind of look.

Liam peeled off his shirt in one quick motion and the crowd gasped, not at the bloody bandage running along his side, but at the letters inked across his chest—letters that, by now, had become legendary.

“Yovel,” Gianna said.

“That’s right,” said Liam. “I am Yovel. I destroyed the networks and only I can restore them.”

In the hush that followed, Syd couldn’t decide if Liam’s plan had just saved them from a bloody death, or ensured they were all going to be killed.

Gianna waved for Syd to come down the steps. He moved slowly, the stick jabbing into his back. He wasn’t sure what Liam’s endgame here was supposed to be. Marie still had her bolt gun raised and Liam’s EMD stick was charged. They wouldn’t last long in a fight, but they’d take a few of these cultists with them. The rest would follow soon enough.

Gianna turned back to Liam. She rested her fingers on the tattoo on his chest, tapped it delicately. Even though the room was warm and humid, goose bumps formed on his skin. He began to doubt his entire idea, as much as it could be called an idea. He hadn’t really thought past the part where they didn’t discover it was Syd who was actually Yovel, Syd who had caused the Jubilee, Syd whom their assassins had so far failed to kill.

The corners of Gianna’s mouth twitched and she turned back to the crowd. She had made some kind of decision.

“It was Yovel who destroyed our corporate data!” she told them, her arms raised in the air. She reminded Syd of Counselor Baram giving his speeches. The crowd hung on everything Gianna said.