The Body Electric - Special Edition (8 page)

“I fought in the Secessionary War,” the dream-grandfather says.

Crap. I don’t need his own dream kicking him back into a nightmare. I start to intervene, but then the grandfather continues.

“Fought for the losing side. Least, that’s what they told me. But I didn’t really fight for either side.” The old man looks Representative Belles square in the eyes. “I fought for my family.” He taps the representative in the chest, just over his heart. “Nothing more important than family. You gonna fight for something, you fight for something that you’re willing to die for. I wasn’t willing to die for my government, Secessionary or UC. But I was willing to die for the people I love.”

I choke down a snort of derision. Idealistic mantras like that are what made the Secessionary War so bad. All you have to do is look at the hole where Valletta once stood or the broken arch of the Azure Window to know that. The old buildings in the country still carry the scars of battle, two decades later. Preventing another war like that is exactly the reason why I’m in Representative Belles’s mind in the first place.

It’s harder to enhance the dreams of someone I don’t know, especially when fighting against the worry of war, but I work with what I have. Focusing my mind on the sensory details already present, I make the smells stronger, the music louder. I add warmth from the Spanish sun, birds chirping and locusts humming. I focus on the grandfather, giving him specific details, wrinkles from every old face I’ve seen, clothes that smell of detergent and dirt and sweat.

As the dreamscape around me grows clearer, I slip further away from it. The mind is a magical thing, I’m discovering. A dreamscape is made of thought and is wider than the sky, able to grow large enough to fit not just our own world, but every possibility and impossibility beyond it. Once I quit thinking of it as being forced into the laws of physics, it’s easy to manipulate the dreamscape into anything I want. I don’t know how I know all this, no more than I understand how I know things when I dream. I just do.

I throw up my hand, and a wall rises between the orange grove and me. Behind the wall, I start creating the world I need in Representative Belles’s mind.

A filing cabinet first, then a desk. This is work; Representative Belles’s mind is my office.

Filing cabinets are hardly ever used any more—most records are on the interface. But the only really secure information isn’t stored on the interface system—its hard copies kept under lock and key, just like Mom’s research in the secured databank in England.

Representative Belles’s mind opens up to me as I slide open the top drawer of the filing cabinet. The tabs are easy and expected: childhood, school, family—two children and a loving wife, Spain, Malta, Triumph Towers. Getting closer—Triumph Towers is where the government works. Campaign, compromise, duties, cabinet meetings.

Secrets.

I snatch the folder up and toss it on the desk. My mind’s eye wavers as I look at the contents. Focus. I have to focus. But the insides are a jumble. Representative Belles himself isn’t sure of everything he’s learned—the seeds of his rebellion are just beginning to form.

I pick up the largest paper in the folder, and a moving image loops over and over—Prime Administrator Hwa Young stands at the head of a long wooden table, shouting at a representative administrator I don’t know. She’s utterly eviscerating the man seated before her, globules of spit flying in his face as she tears him apart. Slowly, her voice rises from the page, deep for a woman, cold, furious.

The dreamscape rumbles.

I slam the page face-down on the desk, shut my eyes, and think of sunlight and oranges and the buzzing of bees and the way old men’s voices crack when they speak of the past. The more I focus on something, the more Representative Belles’s mind will focus on it, and it’s important that I keep him in his reverie long enough for me to discover the terrorists.

I flip to another page in his file. It’s a spreadsheet of data—money. I scan it, trying to make sense of the numbers, but I can’t. Sometimes the mind works that way—it remembers things in a way only that mind can interpret. This chart would make sense to Representative Belles, but not to anyone else.

This isn’t working. Representative Belles might be seditious, but I’ve found no proof that he’s a key player in the terrorist plot. The number data could be tracking where funds shift to a rebel group… or they could mean nothing. He might not even be in any rebel groups yet; he might just be considering it.

Maybe he’s been approached, though…

If he knows any of the known terrorists, that might be the link we need to find them. I pluck out another file from the cabinet, this one marked simply, People. I open it on the floor, and, rather than paper falling out, a city street explodes into being around me. I’m in a crowd of people, maybe a hundred or more. These are the people in the representative’s immediate memory, the ones he’s been thinking about most recently. They’re grouped in different places, his family in one corner of his mind, a wife and two children; his friends crowded around a bar, drinking beer; his fellow representatives in suits and business clothes, around a long, polished wooden table. And more: a group of schoolchildren—part of his charity work, I think; employees standing around a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Madrid; crowds of everyday people. Street androids selling pastizzi and honey rings. The girl who makes his coffee. The representative from Brazil who flirts with him when he works late.

A boy with dark hair and pale eyes.

My heart stutters.

“I know you,” I whisper.

It’s the boy from the gardens, the one who approached me with a warning and stopped to pay respect to my father’s grave.

Looking at him makes my heart race, my breathing come shallow. I feel…

Fear? No, that’s not it.

I sweep my arm out, and everyone else disappears. Just me, and this boy.

His face is made of sharp angles and shadows. He has the clearest eyes I’ve ever seen. His shoulders are broad and lined with hard muscles hidden under a long-sleeved black t-shirt. There’s a flash of gold—some sort of pin—near his collar. His skin is tanned and his hair is dark, but he’s white—he doesn’t have the deep brown coloring of a native Maltese like me. Judging from his accent when he spoke before, he’s probably English. I ruffle my cropped dark hair nervously. Despite the fact that this is all just echoes in Representative Belles’s mind, it feels as if his eyes are resting on me and me alone.

I dig deeper into Representative Belles’s mind, trying to figure out how he knows this beautiful boy. A name, an address, anything. A ghostly image of their last interaction plays on a loop: the boy looking around furtively, whispering something too fast for me to catch, and holding something out for Representative Belles’s to take. A folded up piece of paper, or maybe a digi strip; I can’t tell. And while Representative Belles’s memories show that he took the paper, he hasn’t looked inside it yet. He himself doesn’t know what it contains.

It could be nothing.

But it doesn’t look like nothing. This boy—this moment—is weighing on the representative’s mind. He can’t forget him, and, judging by the fuzzy outline around him, he’s tried.

I peer closer at the boy. It’s not really him here, just a memory of him. But he looks anxious—almost mournful. I watch the way his eyes dart, left-right. I can see a pulse thrumming in his neck.

A buzzing sound fills the air, and I notice a fat yellow-and-black bumblebee has made its way from the orange groves of Representative Belles’s reverie over the wall into the area where I’m working. The wall seems thinner—through it, I can see the dreaming representative still walking with his grandfather, but I know I don’t have much time left.

I turn back to the repeating image of the boy and lift my hand. A small filing cabinet rises up beside him. I lean over to open the drawer—but it won’t budge.

Locked.

My eyebrows raise. This really is a secret the representative doesn’t want me to know. It’s buried deep within his mind, and though I might be able to extract the information I need, the reverie’s already so close to ending that any effort on my part will break the connection, wake the representative, and leave me empty-handed. I release the drawer’s handle and peer down at the label instead, hoping for something.

Written across the label in handwritten green, capital letters is a name.

JACK TYLER.

I look up at the fading image of the boy who gave the representative a secret message. “Jack Tyler,” I whisper.

The image, which had been playing in a constant loop, stops. It freezes, the memory of Jack Tyler holding out the piece of paper, leaning forward.

And then, impossibly, the boy turns his face to me. His head turns eerily, as if he is possessed.

His pale eyes meet mine—

—And I wake up.

fourteen

My heart thuds in my chest. I can’t get the way he looked at me out of my mind—not just in Representative Belles’s reverie, but in real life, too, when I saw him—Jack Tyler—at my father’s grave.

I tap into the spa’s security feed, watching as Representative Belles wakes up. My cuff connects automatically to the mental spa’s interface system, the image crystal-clear on the thinner-than-paper responsive tech-foil skintight around my wrist.

Ms. White is all smiles and graciousness as she helps him up and leads him to the lifts that go to the rest of the Reverie Mental Spa. I count to ten, waiting for him to be well and truly gone, but also waiting for my heart to calm down. I catch a little of the representative’s conversation with Ms. White before they disappear into the lift—he’s completely satisfied with the reverie of his grandfather and completely ignorant of what I was doing in his mind, that I even was in in his head at all.

As soon as the representative is gone, Ms. White returns to me. She watches me in silence while I peel off the electrodes and straighten up the chair.

I take a deep breath. “He’s scared,” I say finally.

“Scared?” Her gaze is intent, worried.

I nod. “I think he’s afraid of another war.”

“A war he’s contributing to.” When I don’t answer this, Ms. White continues, “Anything else?”

I look down, rubbing the sudden chill from my bare arms.

“Ella?” Ms. White asks gently.

“Just a name,” I say. “Jack Tyler.”

Ms. White stiffens, as if she found herself unexpectedly at the edge of a precipice.

“Do you know him?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “It’s just—it’s strange to hear a specific name, you know? That might be the person who led the terrorist attack that killed your father, and to have a name to associate with that attack, just like that… it makes it all more real. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah,” I say. My stomach twists. That hadn’t occurred to me—that Jack may have had a hand in Dad’s death. Jack Tyler is about my age, but it’s possible he helped with the terrorism attack.

A shaky breath escapes my lips. I remember the sound of his voice in my ears, the way he looked a Dad’s grave, the way he looked at me.

“Ella?” Ms. White asks, her voice filled with concern. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her reach toward me, but her hand drops away before she touches me.

“I’m okay,” I say softly. “I’m sorry—I just…” When I close my eyes, I see Jack Tyler’s eyes. I feel the bombs Representative Belles felt.

“Sometimes,” she says, “I forget how young you are. Ella, I know this is hard. This is not the life a teenaged girl like you should lead. You should be applying for universities, still be carefree, go out on dates and to parties. I’m the one who’s sorry. I wish you could have those things.”

“This is more important,” I say, and I mean it.

Ms. White goes to Triumph Towers to report directly to PA Young, but I just go to bed. My head is throbbing, a low buzzing sound vibrating in my ears, and I just want to slip into nothingness.

By the time I wake up, it’s well past lunch. I walk down the hall, surprised my mother hasn’t woken me up yet. “Hey, Mom,” I say softly, pushing open her heavy door. The apartment—like all buildings in New Venice—was built with a panic room. The architects of the city were the same ones who rebuilt Malta after the Secessionary War, and every home has at least one safe stronghold. We converted the panic room in our apartment into Mom’s bedroom—it has a built in generator and a dedicated power and water source that we can use for the machines that monitor her health.

Mom looks up at me from her bed. She’s still in her dressing gown, her hair in thin, soft wisps around her face. When she blinks, I notice that her pupils are silver—she’s watching a program using her eye nanobots.

“I can’t find the book I want,” she says, offering me a goofy, self-depreciating smile. “You know, the one that movie was based on.”

“
Titanic of the Stars
?” I ask. She’s read the book at least a half-dozen times before.

She nods and holds out her wrist to me. I type across her cuffLINK, bringing up the book she wants, a historical drama about the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the world’s first interstellar ship. “You know how it ends,” I say, half-laughing as I download the book into her eye bots for her.