Ash (25 page)

“It’s okay, calm down,” Sol said. He kneeled down to where I was sitting on the floor. “I don’t mean they rewrote your destiny, I don’t know what they did. I just know somebody tampered with it on all three files.”

My head seemed somehow thicker, denser—his words were taking longer to seep through and I looked up at him in confusion, trying to understand what he was saying. “How? What did they change?”

He shook his head. “I told you, I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know? You need to find out.” I grabbed his hands, clutching them in mine. “Sol, please, I have to figure out what’s going on.”

He looked at me, at our hands, then around the room. “Okay, but I need higher access.”

“You can have mine.”

“It’s not that easy,” he said, struggling for words. “You have access to find and take out files. So do I, since I work here. But inputting is different. There’s a system to keep people from accidentally entering or overriding information. People only have access to input if their job calls for it.”

“You can hack that. Just override it.”

“To find what you’re looking for, I need to write new code, introduce a new program into the system. If that doesn’t have minister approval, it will send out security alerts. I might be able to cover my tracks initially, but it would only be only a matter of time before I was caught. I couldn’t do that to my family. And I know you want this to stay quiet too.”

He was right. Government class covered
Article 31 in depth. Anyone caught penetrating and tampering with secure information from the ministry would suffer the full extent of the law. Sol would be locked up and possibly put to death even sooner than his destiny called for. And his family forced to endure an investigation into what they knew. Their whole lives would be turned upside down. “I understand. Thank you anyway,” I said, dropping his hands and gathering myself up off of the ground.

“Wait,” he said. “I didn’t say I wasn’t going to help you. I just said I need higher access.” He took a deep breath. “If you can get me into one of the ministers’ offices, I’ll be able to access the system as one of them.”

I didn’t know what to say. Part of me wanted to talk Sol out of what he was suggesting. Getting caught using a minister’s computer was just as treasonous as breaking into the mainframe in the file room. But I was desperate to understand what was happening to me. The time stamp had changed everything. My destiny had been tampered with. I needed to know the truth.

My conscience won out in the end. “Sol, I can’t ask you to do that.”

“You’re not. I’m offering.”

I couldn’t believe he was willing to do this for me. “But what if someone sees you?”

“I don’t plan on getting caught. Do you?”

I shook my head no.

“Good, then Sealy, Worthington, and Kurtz all have mainframes in their offices. Any of them out of the office?”

“Worthington is speaking to the Delegation today.” I checked my wrist tracker. “He should be starting any minute.”

“Perfect,” he said. “Next step, get rid of Elba.” He pulled out his plexi, and began typing. “Done. In a few seconds, we should have a ten minute window.”

“What? How?”

“I just sent her a message, saying she needs to bring a hard copy of Minister Worthington’s notes to the forum room. It’s a five-minute walk each way.”

“And you don’t think she’ll be a little suspicious when she sees the ping came from you?”

“Please, give me some credit. I hacked Worthington’s aide’s account. It came from there.”

I couldn’t help but smile at his quick thinking.

“Now let’s clean up in here.” Sol made a sweeping gesture with his arms and took the files, all of them still posted on the walls—the articles I had selected to copy as well as my mother’s additional files, mine, and my father’s. He swiped them to his plexi where they instantly downloaded.

“What are you doing?” I cried. “Are you crazy?”

With another sweep of his arms, he cleared away the holograms. “You came looking for something other than your destiny, right?” he asked.

I nodded slowly.

He shrugged. “Then you may want to see that information later. This way you can have it whenever you want. Everything is saved on my plexi.”

“Don’t you think someone will notice that hundreds of files were downloaded?” The last thing I needed was attention on my family issues.

“Nope. I’m synced with the mainframe. No one can tell if I move anything.”

I hedged. Everything was happening too fast. I didn’t want all that information about my family on his plexi. “What if you lose it? You don’t want to be connected with stolen data.”

He stepped on the center circle on the floor and the keyboard disappeared. “Not an issue. First of all, I can access it remotely. So I can always track it down, or if need be, erase everything on the drive. Second, I wrote a program. It’s ingenious really in its simplicity. It just takes the first letter and the last letter of each word and condenses it. If anyone were to stumble on my plexi they’d just think it was gibberish from the dead guy.” He grinned and then launched into another lesson on encryption codes, but I couldn’t focus on what he was saying.

“Elba’s probably gone by now,” I said. “We should go.”

“Hold on,” he said studying something on his plexi. “I called up the security cameras. There’s a hover cam circling by now. We should be clear in twenty seconds.”

Sol poked his head out the door and when he saw it was all clear we both exited. We repeated the process as we approached the corner near Elba’s desk.

From there we darted to Minister Worthington’s office. It was a large room, with a heavy wooden desk and oversized visitors chairs to match. Plants bloomed in the windows and the Ministry seal hung on one wall. It was a comfortable, stately place that Sol and I were violating. I locked the door behind us with shaking hands. “We need to hurry. Elba will be back soon, and she comes in here all the time.”

“You don’t need to tell me twice,” Sol said, and sat himself down in Minister Worthington’s leather chair. He seemed nervous. Not that I blamed him, I was too. But this must have been even more nerve wracking for Sol. He was in the seat of one of our country’s greatest leaders. Behind him a wall of windows showed the peaks of New City skyscrapers jutting up around us.

Under any other circumstance, I’d be appalled to see an Ash sitting there. I’d have written out the fine for ring violation myself, if I had stumbled upon the sight. But while the contrast of Sol’s dingy ash clothing against the plush, royal purple chair still seemed surreal, right now I didn’t care.

Sol didn’t waste any time. He was typing so fast, everything seemed to blur. Codes and files raced at his command. A photo cube sat next to the screen, flashing pictures. I felt my entire body seize as Bastin’s smiling face rotated through. What would my boyfriend say if he could see me now? My mouth felt suddenly dry, and I swallowed.

I kept looking from my wrist tracker to the door. Ten minutes passed. I didn’t dare check to see if Elba was back, but odds were good that if she wasn’t, it would only be a matter of moments.

Another ten minutes passed. Then another eight. Then finally Sol spoke up. “Here we go. Let’s see what your original destiny said.”

I held my breath, and he tapped one last key.

“Well,” I said, moving closer to him, trying to read the screen myself.

“That’s strange,” he said. “It’s blank. They must have erased it completely.”

I was at a loss. “What do we do now?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I can check if there were any other overrides or tampering, but there are billions of files. That could take days.”

“How long would it take to just check birth records from New City, the year I was born?” I asked.

“A few minutes,” he said.

“Then let’s do it.”

A moment later, he declared, “Done. There’s just one other destiny override.”

I looked at the name on the screen. Dax Harris.

“Open it,” I instructed him.

“That’s strange,” he said. “Did you know she was born on November eleventh too? Right around the same time as you.”

I hadn’t. November eleventh was always my big day. I’d never really considered who I might share it with.

“You guys had the same Destiny Specialist too. Karina Palcove.”

“Do you think she did this? Maybe she made some errors and went back to fix them,” I suggested. If it was just the case of trying to correct a spelling mistake or two, I could handle it. And maybe in her confusion she added a time stamp to my destiny in my mom’s file. It was all pretty reasonable.

“Doubt it,” Sol said, crushing my explanation. “You’d need some serious access to make that kind of change and have no one notice it. You can’t get that at the hospital. And the changes were made about an hour after you were born. Not enough time to get from the hospital to here, and encrypt the files.”

Part of my body was overheating, the other part shivering. I knew my next question, but I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer.

I took a deep breath. I came this far, I had to find out.

“Can you tell how the Specialist changed Dax’s destiny?”

“I’ll try,” Sol said. He played around for a few minutes on the computer, and then his face paled as Dax’s original fate appeared on the screen.

I had my answer.

“Madden,” he said, his voice a whisper, “your file had the word Blank written on it when I decrypted it. I just thought that meant they didn’t fill it in. But it looks like—”

“Don’t,” I said. I knew what it meant.

My destiny had been swapped at birth.

Dax Harris was the future Minister of the Seven.

And, I, Madden Sumner, was a Blank.

“R
aze,” I yelled out. The PAE had her, I had to get back to her, I had to help, but the current was too powerful. It carried me along like a piece of debris, and I wasn’t strong enough to fight back. I tried to call out to her again, but the waves pulled me under, flinging me into the tunnel’s slimy walls. Dirty water caught in my lungs.

I grabbed hold of a nearby rock to catch my breath, to ease the coughing. The spot where I got separated from Raze was barely visible. I strained to make out if she was there, but I couldn’t tell. My body froze as a narrow beam of light hit right below my right shoulder. I might not have been able to see the PAE, but they clearly saw me. It would only be seconds until they fired the pulse. I had no choice, I took a quick, deep breath and dove.

For the next thirty minutes it was all I could do to keep my head above the water. The rushing waves made it impossible to see anything. I thought about kicking my shoes off, but after slamming against several sharp rocks, I knew I had to keep them on. My energy was waning, my body felt numb from the cold, and I kept swallowing water. I didn’t know how much more I could take. The current would pull me down soon.

No,
I told myself, I wasn’t giving up. I kept my arms and legs out around me as much as I could, compelling myself to keep my head above the frigid water. I would make it out of here. I would survive.

Eventually I could see a lighter smudge against the darkness. It was the tunnel’s end. The water picked up the pace as it exited, and it took everything I had to stay afloat as I was flung into the East River. My body felt like putty as I crossed one arm in front of the other, kicking back toward the land. Exhausted, I dragged myself onto shore.

In the distance, a crack of lightning sliced through the night. I felt a drop hit my nose, then another as I rose to my feet. I looked at my tracker, still working despite the water—trackers were virtually indestructible. The numbers glowed faintly: 8:23. If I hurried I could make it to the Ash Zone on time. I took a step and winced as the water squished in my shoes. I paused to wring my shirt. I was tired, more than tired, and my muscles sore, but I couldn’t stop. I had to find the Revenants. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and set off on my path, scrambling up the rocky bank, and into the Brown zone.

Rain began to fall in earnest as I left the shore. I kept my head down, racing toward the Brown rail station. I wasn’t the only other wet traveler standing on the platform. It was a lucky break. No one would think twice about my soggy clothing.