Dreams in the Tower Part 2 (4 page)

“And you have a cure?” He sounded so hopeful that she felt bad for what she was about to say.

“No,” she told him. “But I do have something almost as good: a vaccine. It took me a whole year to get it right since I had to work secretly. It’s an inactivated vaccine based largely on the flu shot. It essentially gives your body a head start so you can fight it off before it makes it to your brain. Nothing fancy; this is not really my area. But it’ll be fast and easy to produce
with my knowledge
.” She stressed the last part: she needed to put a specific value on her life and safety.

“And it works?”

“Well…” Dellia looked sternly through the mask holes at his dark brown eyes. “I haven’t gotten sick yet.” She left off the “unless I have the second stage strain.” He was listening too closely not to fill that in himself.

For a long time
Izza stared at her, and she held his gaze until she became uncomfortable and looked down at her knees. Finally, he said, “Do you have the vaccine?”

“With me?
No, of course not.”

At that, his beard stretched upward in a smile and
Dellia was alarmed at the creepy effect this had combined with his hood and lacy purple mask. “Yeah,” he said. “I would expect as much. Let’s just hope wherever you chose to hide it was good enough—for all our sakes.”

She nodded. “So I gave you information,” she said confidently, hoping to not sound as an
xious as she felt. “Now how are you going to help me?”

“We want the same thing you do.” He leaned back in his chair and perched his hands on his protruding belly. “But we’re not sure if you’re up to doing this job.”

For a few moments, Dellia sat there, seething. After all she had gone through in the last week this guy had the gall to question her ability to see it out. Or was this some garbage about her being a helpless female? Surely not in this age.  Regardless, they weren’t going to part her from her work—because that’s what it was, and it was all she had left to show for her life as a scientist.

“I need to get the vaccine to the CDC,” she said evenly. “But I have to make sure it gets to the right people. You can help me with this or I can go on by myself, but I a
ssure you I will not put this in someone else’s hands.”

Staring absently at the tablet,
Izza sighed and said, “About five minutes after I leave here, a white van will back in. Get inside through the back. You’ll have everything you need in there for a long trip. Tell the driver through the peephole exactly where to go to pick up your assets—and be quick about it: we need to get you to Houston as fast as possible.”

“Houston?”

“You’ll receive more information later. Hold your tablet up.”

Pulling her tablet out of her backpack,
Dellia hesitated, looking warily at Izza, who was now holding his own tablet up. “If you aren’t going to trust me now, you might as well leave here and find your own way to the CDC.” She stopped wavering and immediately held her tablet up, allowing him to tap his own against it. As she pulled away, ‘Download Complete’ flashed on the screen. “You have everything you need,’ Izza said. “Take it as a token of good faith that I didn’t hack your tab and upload it remotely.” He stood up.

“Wait.” She stood up too, reaching into her bag and fishing out a small vial, which she handed to him. “Here’s my token of good faith.
For you or a friend. Take off the big cap, stick it in your upper arm, take off the small cap. Pretty easy.”

Even through his mask, she could see a look of genuine gratitude; he seemed struck dumb for a few seconds before taking the vial of vaccine and thanking her. As he stuffed it away in some inner pocket and zipped up his thick hoodie,
Dellia asked, “Should I be covering up too? Like with a mask and everything?”

“Don’t bother,” he said. “We’ve had people assigned to keeping you undetected ever since you got back to Dallas.” He began walking to the car, turning back briefly to add, “We had to hide you from everyone else. Otherwise you would’ve been caught by now.” He left her there, brooding in silence. A minute later he was backing the old car out of the garage.

Humbled and embarrassed by the revelation of her own foolish naivety, Dellia watched him go and wondered if he had been at the demonstration outside Silte headquarters on that July night. Regardless, he surely at least knew people who were sick, and had probably been close enough to one or two of them to contract the virus.. She hated herself for thinking it, but she realized with regret that she might have just wasted one of her precious vials on someone who was already gone. 

12

Sabrina had lost count of how many consecutive nights they had spent in a cheap hotel in neighborhoods she would rather avoid, but this had to make at least ten. If they were lucky, no one here would notice two weary travelers who may or may not be wanted by the most powe
rful people in the world: the ones peering down from the tallest building in the city. Unlike all the other hotels, though, this soggy, bug-infested place would be home for a while. At least that’s what her hope was. Now that they were in Dallas, maybe they wouldn’t have to move around so much.

There were three knocks at the door, and then the sound of a card sliding into the slot. Jason pushed his way into the room backward, his hands full with the rest of the stuff from the car. “We’re all checked in,” he said.

“For how many nights?”

“Tonight, and as many more as we need.”
He deposited the bags of food and other essentials on the bed. “I told the guy at the desk I’d pay each day in cash by wallet app. I still don’t think it’s a good idea to have them keep the fake account on file, even at a place like this.”

Every time the phony bank account was brought up, Sabrina felt a little guilty—and more than a little dirty. The first thing Jason had done as they pulled away from his house was to get his shady friend Seito to help set up the account under a made-up identity and fill it with mo
ney that did not ‘technically’ exist; they did it even before taking her car off the surveillance grid. This was the kind of thing that used to lead to major raids and arrests when Guardian was still employed by the government. She had helped uncover and prosecute entire rings of bank fraud, and now she was doing it herself. She had to admit, though, it was a much smarter way of getting money than her original idea of going to her bank, closing her accounts out and having the funds transferred to a digital wallet. At least this way Erris still had access to their joint account.
Oh why did I have to think about her?

Desperate to take her mind off what she had left behind, she said, “How is the account, a
nyway? I mean, we’ve spent a lot now.”

With a lazy wave of his hand, Jason said, “Seito fixed that already. He’s keeping an eye on our finances now—or
someone
is.” He went and sat at the little table and pulled out his tablet: an act that had become a sort of monotonous routine at every stop on the road they had made. “We’re valuable assets now, remember?”

“Uh-huh.” She didn’t at all like that they were still tacking on more offenses to those they had committed so far. But then, when you were on the run from superpo
wers like Silte and the GPA your very existence was an offense, at least so far as it took place outside of their custody. When you considered that, breaking a few laws didn’t seem so horrible as long as no one got hurt. There was probably no going back for her anyway.

“I’m going to check in with Seito,” Jason said. “You might want to pull a chair up. He’ll probably have some new information from the AC.
Maybe instructions or something.”

Now intrigued, Sabrina pulled the other chair around the table to sit by him as he sent a vid-call request to his friend. According to Jason’s assurances, the communic
ation app he used to stay in touch with the Anti-Corp via Seito was completely secure and untraceable; it apparently would not even work if Sabrina tried to use it alone on his tablet. The only way it was even accessible while she, never having been a member of the hacktivist group non-E, sat here was because Jason had turned off some of the more strict (and perhaps unnecessary) security features. She didn’t like being entirely dependent on another person with something so vital, but at least he was proving loyal and trustworthy so far.

“Where are you?” Seito’s voice, fast and high-pitched, rang out two seconds before his fra
ntic face appeared on the screen.

“Dallas, south edge of downtown,” Jason said. “We just—”

“Get
out
of there!” The alarming volume to his voice made both Jason and Sabrina jump. “Get in your car and go now. South. Highway. I’ll call you soon.” The call cut off at his end, leaving a stunned silence behind.

After a few seconds of staring at the blank screen, Jason asked, “Do you think we should go?”

“What do you think?” Sabrina asked. “He’s your friend. Do you trust him enough to listen to him?”

For a while, Jason was silent, deep in thought. “If Seito says to go,” he said, “we should go.” He stood up quickly, crossing the room to the bags and grabbing a full load. “We should go now. You finish here. I’ll get the car.”

*  *  *

It was
a little after 7 p.m.; the evening rush—no more than a slight slowdown in recent days—was over, but there was still enough light in the sky that some of the headlights weren’t on yet. It was hot, stifling, even with the climate control keeping their bodies at an optimal temperature; the sweat covering Sabrina after her luggage-laden jog from the room to the car was refusing to dry, making her feel sticky and disgusting.
Texas is
hot, she thought, not for the first time.

I-45 out of Dallas was oddly deserted. Despite this, Jason drove her car carefully, staying close to the speed limit; getting pulled over for speeding was not an option for them. The GPA
didn’t bother with traffic stops, but if the Lone Star Rangers or the Southern Patrol pulled them over it was a sure bet Guardian would find out. Though, if Seito’s panicked state wasn’t just paranoia, then they may not need to worry about private police or militia outside of the city since they would presumably all be rushing in for the action.

Seito had called almost immediately after they were on the highway. He had i
nsisted that he hold off on an explanation and instead tell them exactly where they were going and why; he might be cut off abruptly, he had explained hurriedly, and there was no guarantee he could call back. He had then rushed into telling them to head to Houston, more specifically Silte’s Houston Warehouse. Sabrina had felt a stab of regret when she heard him mention it, but she listened closely to what he said, ready to seize on the moment she had waited for.

The orders had come from high up the Anti-Corp ranks: they were to go to the Warehouse and, after rendezvousing with a group of AC people in the area, free a group of the mov
ement’s informers and sympathizers who were imprisoned there after being discovered in Silte’s corporate family. They were relying on Sabrina’s knowledge of Guardian’s standard procedure and computer systems to make the rescue a success, since it had been determined that the GPA was stationed there. But Sabrina wasn’t sure that was wise; she may have intimate knowledge of the GPA, but she was a detective, not a special task force operative. Infiltrations and hostage liberations were as foreign to her as crime scene investigation was to an assault officer pumped full of steroids. This was not a welcome task, but the alternative meant leaving innocent people to suffer the same fate as those in the report that had cost Sabrina her job.

“And that’s really all I can say right now,” Seito said, ending his frantic speech. After this barely-coherent explanation, he abruptly stopped talking, distracted with something off-camera for a few minutes.

Unable to handle the suspense any longer, Sabrina said, “So what was going on in Dallas? Why did we have to leave so fast?”

“
Hm?” Seito looked up; because of the angle at which the tablet was propped up on the center console his eyes appeared to meet hers, briefly. “Not just Dallas,” he said. “Here, New York, Chicago, even Houston. Everywhere. It’s the riots…more of an assault actually. All those millions of suspended employees are angry at Silte; some of them decided to band together. It only took a few guys from the movement to turn them into armies. Not like the protests a couple weeks ago—that was nothing. These guys are really pissed; they’re armed, and they’re going to fight.”

“The movement is involved?” Jason asked.

“It’s Anti-Corp and PAC leading them. The smaller factions are choosing sides or staying out. The one here is PAC, which is why I’m laying low. Dallas is AC, but it’s the biggest one—obviously, since Silte headquarters is there. If you hadn’t gotten out right away you might have been stuck for a very long time. Maybe even killed.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this shit was going on?” Jason looked as alarmed as Sabrina felt. They had seen the laid-off masses lining streets with anti-
Silte signs in some of the larger cities they passed through, but nothing had indicated massive, organized riots.

“I didn’t know,” Seito shot back in irritation. Clearly he had not been sleeping much; the weariness showed in his face and his mood. “I only found out an hour ago. I called you right a
fter. They said there might be bombs.”

“Bombs?”
Turning in her seat and straining against the seatbelt, Sabrina looked back at the fading Dallas skyline, as if she would be able to see the imminent discord and chaos. “And what about when we get to Houston—and everywhere in between?”

“Just get there,” Seito said. “That’s all I can tell you.”

“Well, thank you, Seito,” Sabrina said, trying hard to use her most un-detective-like tone. “For the warning. And all your help.”

“Thanks,
Sei-kai,” Jason added.

“Yeah,” Seito said gloomily. In that moment, his exhaustion seemed to fall upon him all at once, pulling his face downward into a half-shadowed state. “I’ll be in touch.” The vid-call en
ded, leaving a black screen in its wake.

A car came up on them fast and zoomed by down the highway.
Running away?
Sabrina wondered. Maybe they had also been tipped off. But did they know that they might be heading into more of the same? Central Texas was highly concentrated with Silte-controlled ventures, which meant a relatively high number of their employees, recently laid off and turning to violence in their frustration. Many of them would have made their way up to Dallas to join the big fight, but on the other hand she and Jason could be driving into waves of destruction.

Not to mention, they could both attract the very wrong kind of attention. It was a highly paranoid line of thinking, but if the protesters somehow figured out that she was a Guardian officer, or if someone from the PAC faction knew Jason had ties to their e
nemies, things could get bad. She knew firsthand what kind of terrifying information-gathering technology the GPA possessed, and she had no doubt these hacker groups had their own fearsome version that would easily be able to pick either of them out of a crowd. All it took was one angry rioter using a facial-recognition app at the right moment while they were stopped at a charging station, and then their number of pursuers multiplied.

That was a situation that they must avoid. Anyway, it made no sense to go in blindly at this point; in fact, her experience as an officer would not allow such irrationality. She grabbed J
ason’s tablet, opened the television app, and found the live stream for ONN, the 24-hour news channel. Immediately, she saw aerial shots of thousands of people marching down a street, waving flags and long, slender objects in the air.

“Mainstream media?” Jason said derisively. “We might as well enjoy the quiet. It’s all lies.”

“Yeah,” Sabrina said. “But lies are better than nothing.”