Dreams in the Tower Part 2 (2 page)

And she had been hiding this from him all these years? Mike wondered what other secrets she may be keeping.

“I think,” she said, “I can get to the bottom of this, but I need you to—”

“No.”

“But why? Don’t you—”

“Mere,” he cut in, “just
drop it. You don’t know what you’re getting into. They’ll make us all disappear, even Natalie.”

“I’m careful. There’s no way they can—”

“
Please
, Meredith.” The panic in his voice was genuine.

“Okay,” she said. “If it’s that big of a deal I’ll stop. For now,” she added in a low tone.

That was as good as it was going to get, so he said, “Thank you. I’ll try to be home for dinner tonight.”

“Bye,” she said, and then she was gone. Mike realized with regret that he hadn’t even me
ntioned his promotion.
Damn her curiosity.
It would kill her in this new world, maybe him as well.

Looking languidly at the other message, Mike saw it was from a Garrett Thu
rman—the pilot, he realized. The headline read ‘Congrats on the promo. We should talk.’ Puzzled, Mike tapped the message, but when he did it disappeared from his inbox. “What the hell?” he mumbled. There was no way the helicopter pilot could know about Mike’s new position so soon, but then he had seemed to know more about Silte’s operations than he should have. Mike decided to forget about it; there was too much else to be worried about right now.

But no matter how many worries clogged his mind, Mike couldn’t help but feel proud of
himself as he walked to the elevator. He might be little more than a well-paid prisoner, but he had just become the fourth most important person in the whole tower.

10

“Holy
fuck
, man. I thought you got caught!” Seito’s voice was hoarse, his eyes bagged and his face weary. His short, black hair was even messier than usual.

Standing his tablet up on top of the cheap table so he could put his shoes on, J
ason said, “It’s been, what, two days? I can’t call you every time we stop. Each time we reach out to someone we risk Guardian or Silte or I don’t know who else breaking through and honing in on our location.”

“I know, man, I know.” Seito sighed, looked away. “It’s just that people are disappearing here. They got
Hrothguard—or Danny Dialanza is probably what you still know him as. Nobody’s heard from him in days, and no one is sure where he was living last.”

“Danny?” Jason sat back up with only one shoe on. Danny
Dialanza had been a founding member of non-E along with Seito, Jason and Steph; he had been the designated coding extraordinaire, able to build whatever Jason dreamed up—and fix just about anything he screwed up. The last Jason had heard Danny was pulling in a huge salary high up in the ranks of Google. They hadn’t spoken in several years, but Jason still felt a little jab of loss remembering how close they had once been, back in that magical time when a group of idealistic kids were going to take on the world together. And he couldn’t help but think that this made two non-E members Silte had targeted. If they went after the others…

“Are you sure the private cops got him?” Jason asked, stooping again to finish with his ot
her shoe.

“Probably,” Seito said. “I mean, it
could’ve
been the virus, I guess. If he was alone, and he got sick…I don’t know.”

“How’s Steph, by the way?” Talk of the dreaded disease,
Silte’s heinous act of bio warfare, made Jason wonder about her. She had apparently contracted the virus, along with many demonstrators who had been on the streets that night.

“Same,” Seito said with obvious distaste, before lapsing into a tense silence.

Since the medical and scientific communities continued to refuse to classify the new virus, the media had taken to calling it the mind virus, so named because, after the initial day or two of flulike symptoms, the effects of the disease took place almost entirely in the victims’ brains, affecting their conscious minds. Jason wasn’t sure about the specifics (he had, after all, studied computer science—not
real
science), but anyone who contracted the mind virus ended up in a pseudo-vegetative state; they could talk and act on their own, but they didn’t seem to
want
to. Seito claimed he had to practically force Steph to do the simplest things—things like eating and going to the toilet rather than pissing the bed. He also said that she often seemed to only be halfway in reality, as if she were sleepwalking, living in a waking dream, only partially aware of her surroundings. Seito had taken her to a hotel somewhere and was struggling to take care of her and keep both of them hidden.

From what Seito gathered from his Anti-Corp connections, the same thing was happe
ning to hundreds within the movement. It was only in the last few days that the virus had seeped into the rest of society and become sensational enough for the mainstream media to report on—as long as they did so in the way Silte wanted them to, that is. Somehow, though, the looming pandemic hadn’t created much of a stir yet among the masses.

“So,” Seito said, ending an eternity of silence. “Where are you guys, anyway?”

“Good question,” Jason said, trying to remember. “Hey Sabrina, what’s this town called again?”

“Raton,” Sabrina called from behind the half-open door to the bathroom, where she had just gotten out of the shower. Jason had learned in the nearly two weeks they’d been sharing h
otel rooms that she wasn’t too concerned with privacy.

“Raton,” Jason relayed to Seito. “New Mexico.”

“Then you’ll be in Dallas in a day or two, right?”

“Not me.” Jason picked up the tablet so he could engage fully in the conversation. “I co
nvinced Sabrina to take a detour down to Austin and drop me off. I always wanted to move there when I was younger.” This had been a point of contention of the last week. Sabrina wanted to go to Dallas to meet up with another ex-Guardian officer she knew, with whom she seemingly still nurtured the idea of taking on Silte Corp. Blinded by the idea of true justice, whatever that might be, she was probably going to end up in a cage—assuming she didn’t die first. Jason just wanted to hide until it was all over, but she needed him because he was her only link to the AC and their intelligence resources. He had finally assured her that he would stay in contact with her and keep her connected, and she had agreed to drop him off before she went into the real danger zone. It had been the AC people who had advised them—via Seito—to head toward Dallas if they wanted to help. But Jason wasn’t sure he did.

“Oh,” Seito said distractedly. He seemed to be in deep thought. “Hey, can you get som
ewhere private?”

“Uh, sure.”
This was the first time Seito had cared about whether or not Sabrina heard their conversations, so Jason was a little puzzled. But all the same he went out through the hotel room’s door and looked around the deserted second-story outdoor walkway before he said, “Okay, go ahead.”

“I’ve been talking to Ra52, you know,” Seito said, “and the AC is… Well, thing’s aren’t good. Half of us are either sick or caught.
Or dead. A lot also ditched the group and ran. And there’s some sort of disagreement or something. They split into two factions after the protest. There’s the regular Anti-Corp still—that’s who me and Ra are with—and now there’s also the People Against Corporatocracy, the PAC. It looks like they fight each other as much as they fight Silte.

“The thing is, man, we need people. People who have been there and who we can trust. People out on the streets, in Dallas for instance, who won’t join the other faction. I’ve been tal
king to Ra about you—didn’t mention your name or anything—and we really think you could help.”

“No,” Jason said vehemently. “You know how I feel about that. I—”

“
Shut the fuck up for a second
.” His voice was almost a shriek, slapping Jason into a shocked silence. “What do you have left after this? You’re blacklisted now—or worse. There is no steady job again for you, probably no normal life either if Silte wins. We’ve seen the proof of that. Jason, the AC will give you everything you had at your old job and more. We need you and you need us. It’s your only choice.”

This was a new side of Seito, and Jason was taken aback by it. He was right, of course; if
Silte got everything they wanted, Jason would likely spend the rest of his life off the grid, as a fugitive. But alone, he could at least keep a low profile. With the AC, he automatically brought himself right into Silte’s crosshairs, sealed his fate with that of the movement. And anyway, he wasn’t a fighter, not even if his belief in a cause was unshakeable.

“They gave me a choice,” Seito said, sullen now. “Recruit you or stop getting info for you guys. You can say no if you want, but I can’t promise any more help for you and that rogue cop.”

“Dammit, Sei.” Jason rubbed the stubble on his face and stared out at the endlessly stretching highway.
I should have stayed at home. I should have kept my head down and hoped they never came for me.
But they would’ve come. Sabrina had been certain of it, and the disappearance of Danny Dialanza now seemed to prove it.

Leaning against the railing, he looked out at the highway. A lonely semi crept along the qu
iet stretch of asphalt past the hotel, catching Jason’s eye. It was funny: out here in the desert where the air was fresh there were still diesel trucks spewing their carbon death into the world, while back in the smoggy cities of California non-electric vehicles had been banned for years.
Preserving the filth and polluting the pure.
It was a strange dichotomy. Jason watched until the truck became a dot in the distance.

“I’ll do it.”

Seito’s relief was almost audible. “You’re making the right decision,” he said, smiling. “You know what this means right? About Austin?”

“I’m going to Dallas, aren’t I?

“Yeah,” Seito said. “Unless they need you somewhere else. But from what I know, the whole point of getting you was to have someone with that privy-cop when she gets to Dallas. You’re our link to her now.”

“Sabrina will be happy,” Jason said.

“Oh, by the way, don’t tell her you’re part of the movement yet. I was supposed to stress that. Oh, and that Dellia girl you were asking about? They’re working hard trying to track her down. Silte’s not the only one that wants her. But it’s like someone is hiding her—from us and them.”

“So what should I do?” It felt strange, asking Seito for orders.

“Just keep on the way you are,” Seito said. “You’ll hear from me soon. ’Til then…later Joans.”

“See you,
Sei-kai.”

For a long time after the call ended, Jason stared out at the red mountains, aglow with the light of the sunrise. Only a few more stood between them and the city in the East, and very soon those would be in the past as well. Jason and Sabrina had taken their time and weaved what they hoped was a confusing and imperceptible path through the Southwest, but they had d
ecided this would be the day they began sacrificing caution for speed. Without the detour to Austin, they could be in Dallas by that night. He expected this would be welcome news to Sabrina.

It hadn’t been her idea to come to Dallas. After taking the
hyperloop down to L.A. (both of them immensely relieved when they weren’t apprehended at either security checkpoint), Sabrina’s plan had apparently been to wander around and wait for something to happen. They passed the time with him telling her all he knew about Silte Corp and its above-the-law business practices and providing updates from Seito on what had become a full-scale cyberwar. What finally pushed her into action was when he relayed Seito’s message about the leaked Project Unify report; that had driven her to offer to do whatever she could to help the movement. Two days later, Seito delivered the message that she and Jason should start heading towards Dallas.
But why
, Jason had wondered,
go there, into Silte’s swarming hive?
Could it really be just about saving some girl Silte wanted to kill? Jason didn’t know. He just went where they told him; that’s all he could do now. The fact that Sabrina had some ex-cop friend there who she swore would be sympathetic to the cause was enough to justify the suicide mission in her mind, so it had to be good enough for him as well.

“You about ready?”

Jason turned to find Sabrina standing in the open doorway of their room. The soapy fr
agrance of her recent shower wafted to him: a pleasant change from the stench of the road. “Whenever you are,” he said.

“Great.” She smiled solemnly at him. “You want to risk stopping for some real breakfast? I’m tired of motel food.”

*  *  *

As Sabrina merged her little Honda e-car (a civilian car that was untraceable thanks to Seito’s remote masking job) back onto the highway, Jason gulped his now-lukewarm coffee. His sto
mach was full of bacon and egg croissant and he was somehow much more optimistic than he had been in recent days. It was amazing what a nice meal and a cup of fresh coffee could do after almost two weeks of gas station food and cheap caffeinated dirt-water.

Maybe it was the breakfast that sparked his good mood, or maybe it was a
cceptance; what it surely
was not
was the conversation with Seito. His friend had forced him to examine, for the first time, the unsavory choice of either jumping into a pool of raw sewage or gradually wading out until the muck finally rose above his head. The decision he had made, to jump right in, seemed like the better option simply because he might help save a few people. But it was all the same in the end.
At least I have Sabrina.
With her cop training and years of experience, Jason did feel a little safer when he was with her. Still, one detective didn’t mean much when the other side had an army.

“You know,” he said as Sabrina tuned the satellite radio to a news station, “I was thinking earlier, about
Silte and Dellia Thomas and everything else. I want to help. I want to go with you to Dallas.” He wanted to tell her the truth just then. They hadn’t been together long, but being on the run had brought them much closer than anything could have in their former lives. He had come to fully trust this woman; he even considered her one of his only real friends. But he had orders to follow now. It would be better not to forget them so soon.

“Really?”
She shot a quick glance over at him, her eyebrows rising up over the frames of her black sunglasses. “That’s great. What made you change your mind?”