Element Zero (12 page)

“Good-bye, Faye,” I heard Fawkes say, and the memories collapsed.

The rest of my systems began to shut down, rapidfire, one following another. Before I could even grasp what had happened, half of my modules had winked out. Warnings spilled by through the air in front of me as my awareness began to fade away.

I saw Fawkes’s leather shoes, then nothing at all as my visual feed cut out. My balance went next, and I began to fall to one side. There wasn’t time to do anything else; before I lost control of my core systems, I launched the override program.

Code flooded past in a stream as the shutdown was halted. The program infected my control nodes and targeted the command spoke. It began to tear it down, and purged all outstanding instructions from Fawkes. . . .

. . . And for just a second, it was wide open. For just a second I could see into him as completely as he could see into me. Unlike Lev, or any of the rest of us, Fawkes maintained a command spoke with all of us. Different ones were active at different times, but they never went away. I could sense his connection to all of them, clustered like individual memories somewhere deep inside his mind. They didn’t link to stored information, though. Those portals gave him control over each of the revivors in his network.

Fawkes’s mouth parted slightly.

“What did you—”

He was speaking, but I could barely hear him. Everything else fell away as I stared past the collection of command spokes to another construct that hung behind it. There were thousands of portals, hot orange embers that floated in the dark to form a vast, hazy sphere. It emanated a continuous hum, the combination of thousands of voices, and I knew then what it was.

I’d been outfitted with a secondary communications array that tuned me in to their collective network, so at least on some level, I could sense them. Their constant whispering, like wind or water, had become more pronounced since they’d all been turned and I knew that there were thousands, but to see Fawkes’s connection to them all . . . it was hard for me to grasp.

“I can see them—” I whispered.

The words got stuck in my throat as thousands of connections opened at once. A flood of data came crashing down on me, choking my buffers before they adjusted in order to keep pace. I felt the field of my memories recede, the points of light sinking into the darkness as a new field of light appeared above them. The individual points in that new field were sharp and clear, like hot embers in the dark. I could sense them all, and like my memories, I could pull them up individually. Each one was a constant stream of information. I watched the embers as they swirled through the void, around that huge, smoldering mass of white light. I could sense their eyes all over the city. They were still concentrated in several large pockets, but that changed by the second as they spread farther, and farther away. It was amazing he could keep command of so many.

“Faye, stop.”

I chose one of the cinders at random and pulled it into the foreground. I was able to coax it open like a portal and look inside. At first, I saw only darkness, but then something moved. Sensations flowed through the connection and into my consciousness. I sensed a bitter cold, and could hear the crackle of ice and grit under many feet as it echoed through the blackness. The unit was underground somewhere. Many more shapes moved through the shadows in front of it.

I reached through the portal and tried to make contact. The images shifted as the revivor turned. When it moved, hundreds of eyes looked back from out of the dark, and each set flashed like those of an animal. They were all together. The sea of eyes flowed by until the revivor stopped moving again, and I caught a glimpse of a tunnel’s concrete wall where someone had spray painted graffiti:

ELEVEN FROM ZERO.

“How are you doing this?” I heard Fawkes ask.

ELEVEN FROM ZERO. It looked like it had been painted a long time ago. I wondered what it meant. . . .

The portal closed. The field of cinders faded and disappeared as Fawkes managed to lock me out.

My HUD flickered, and then I could see again. Fawkes’s blade was tracing an arc toward my neck. I blocked him, and the point embedded in the wall with a thud. The rest of my systems were coming back. Fawkes’s eyes widened slightly as he pulled the bayonet free.

His command spoke had been severed. Orange light burned in Fawkes’s pupils as he tried to issue the override code and realized he no longer had control of me.

Before he could swing again, I struck him in the ribs with my palm and fired my own bayonet. His expression didn’t change as the blade penetrated him and cool, thick blood oozed between my fingers.

He pulled away and the blade came free. He kicked me in the chest with his heel and drew a pistol from inside his jacket. I swept his legs out from under him, and the shot fired into the ceiling as he fell back. He struck the corner of the desk and spun onto the floor as I pulled open the door and scrambled out into the hall.

“Stop her!” I heard him shout.

I kept low as I ran back the way I’d come. Revivors patrolled between the rows, and as they received the order, I saw their guns come out. Several shots boomed behind me, and I heard screams as glass shattered. I caught a glimpse of a woman in one of the cubes as I passed, her face streaked with tears.

Bullets punched through the drywall next to the door’s frame as I reached it and ran through into the hallway beyond.

Zoe Ott—Main Drag

I woke up on my back. It was hot and bright, and right away I knew it wasn’t real.

I rolled over and felt warm pavement under my hands. The sun beat down hard, and the dry air had a bitter, smoky smell. Somewhere under that I caught a whiff of gas fumes. When I was caught in a vision, a lot of times sounds and smells from the real world crept in. Those smells weren’t good.

When I opened my eyes, I saw I was facedown on a big chunk of blacktop that sat at an angle in the sand. All around were other pieces of what at one point must have been street, but it had all been torn up.

A little ways off, I saw half a body buried in the dirt. A harsh wind peppered my face with grit and made the shredded remains of clothes flap around the corpse so that I could see bones underneath.

This is it,
I thought.
The wasteland vision, the vision Ai has been waiting for me to have again.
I was there.

The next time it happens, try to get more information,
she had said.

I got my footing and looked around. The city was gone and all that was left were pieces of buildings—jagged walls with burned-out windows and twisted metal beams. The sky was kind of reddish-brown with no clouds, and it was weirdly quiet. A big gust of wind stirred up dust in the distance that formed a big spiral. I watched it get bigger, then blow itself out. There was no sound but the rush of wind.

Something vibrated in my pocket, and I reached in and pulled out my cell phone. It buzzed again in my hand. I shaded the LCD with my hand and squinted at it. The display said NOELLE HYDE.

“She had a name!”

I answered the phone, and static crackled in my ear.

“Hello?” I asked. The wind blew again and made my clothes snap.

“We were wrong,” a woman’s voice said. I could barely hear her over the wind and the static.

“What?”

“If any of this gets through,” she said, “you have to do it.”

“Do what?”

“We made a mistake. You have to be the one to—”

The line cut out.

“Hello?” The display on my phone said the call was disconnected.

“What mistake?” I wondered out loud. I had to be the one to do what?

I looked out over the wreckage again. Wind kicked up more sand and I saw more bones underneath. More than sixteen million people had lived there once.

We were wrong.
What did that mean?

When I tried to call back, the phone wouldn’t work. It lost power and went dark.

“Come on . . . ”

I shook it and was trying to get it to turn back on when I heard a growl in front of me and looked up. A dog was standing at the base of the blacktop slope. It was a big, black-and-white dog with blue eyes that stared up at me. One of its haunches was shaved, and there was a bite mark on the bare patch.

Standing next to the dog was a woman. She wore combat boots and an army-green T-shirt, and with her almost-shaved head, she looked like a guy. She had on black lipstick, and a spiderweb tattoo covered one side of her neck. A pair of dog tags hung around her neck, and I could just make out the name FLAX, CALLIOPE T.

My face flushed, getting hot as anger surged up from inside me. I knew that woman. I’d never forget that face as long as I lived. That was the bitch that went to Karen’s apartment that day, looking for me. Because of her, my best friend was dead.

“It’s a bitch, huh?” she asked. The dog let out a low growl, and when I flinched, she smiled to show a missing tooth in the front.

“What the hell do you want?” I asked. She knelt down and pet the dog on the side near the shaved patch. When she looked up at me, I could see there were black spots, like ink, spreading through the white parts of her eyes. It was like the carriers Penny and I had just seen at the Stillwell lab. The Huma carriers got them after they died and came back. She smiled again, and all of a sudden, I understood.

“You’re one of them,” I whispered.

Ai and the others knew she was still alive. They even knew she was important, important enough that they wouldn’t let me or anyone else kill her no matter how many times I asked. She was off-limits, one of the elements that would play a crucial role when the event either did or didn’t occur. They didn’t know she’d been injected, though. They didn’t know she was a carrier. That could be a game changer.

I leaned closer to get a better look. I couldn’t see inside her or anything, but somehow I knew. I was sure. How was it that no one had picked her up?

Nico.

I frowned. He knew; he had to. He knew, and he kept it quiet. He was immune to our influence, so he was one of the few people that could keep secrets from Ai. He’d done this.

The dog barked, making me jump.

“Good dog,” Calliope said. It bared its teeth and growled again. When it did, I saw its gums were bleeding. A string of rust-colored drool oozed between its fangs and blew in the wind.

My heart started to race, but instead of lunging, the dog turned and ran off. It kicked up sand as it headed toward the remains of the skyline. I let out a breath and looked back at the phone. It was still dark. I stowed it in my pocket. When I looked up, Calliope was gone too.

“Hello?” I called. No one answered.

Carefully, I stepped down the slope. Sand squished under my leather boots as I followed the dog tracks toward the broken wall of a building. The remains of a stairwell there led up to a chunk of what used to be the second floor. I climbed up and stood on the edge, then looked out over the wreckage for anything that seemed like it might be important.

If you stay calm,
Ai had told me again and again,
then you’ll know what you’re looking for when you see it. You’ll feel it.

Ai was, hands down, the strangest person I had ever met in my life. Never mind her stunted body with its baby hands and too-big head; half the time it was hard to understand what she was even talking about. Half the time she wouldn’t look at you when she talked to you, and she’d answer things you said like you’d just said something totally different. She spooked me at first, and sometimes, secretly, she frustrated me.

I realized, though, after a while that all of it was because she was like me, only worse. She had visions almost all the time, but she learned to stay at least semilucid during them. When you were with her, a lot of times there were others in the room that only she could see. Sometimes I think they were other versions of people who were already there. I don’t know how she kept it all straight. Honestly, I don’t know how she didn’t kill herself years ago. It was bad enough when it happened on and off. If I had to live in that nightmare full-time, I’d have gone off the deep end before I hit puberty.

She was strange, and she spent half her time floating in an isolation tank, and the other half running on custom-made psychoactive drugs. But she was, in a weird way, almost like a mother to me, which is something I hadn’t had in a long time. She taught me more in just a few years than I think I’d ever learned before in my whole life.

I looked out over the ruins and sighed, smelling gas fumes again. If Ai was right, then this place really did exist somewhere, just one version of the city in an endless string of them. The closer that one of them matched ours, the more it bled over for people like me to see. Visions like the wasteland bled over a lot. It meant that’s where we were headed.

“We made a mistake. You have to be the one to—”

Me. Element One. I was supposed to somehow help stop all this. But how?

In the distance, more bodies lay half-buried in the sand. The sun glinted off shiny, metallic bits that were scattered around. They were some kind of components that came from revivors. From the amount on the ground, there must have been thousands of them there at one point, but whatever happened, they were long gone, along with everyone else.

Up ahead, I could make out one building that was more intact than the rest. It must have been huge when it was still standing, because what was left looked like it could fill a city block. The wreckage drew my attention. It seemed to vibrate, almost like a tuning fork. I could actually sense a far-off, high-pitched wail. That spot was important.

That’s it. That’s where it starts, the thing that triggers all this destruction.
When I looked at it, something almost pulled me forward. I brushed my hair out of my face and climbed back down the steps.

I hiked toward it while the sun beat down on my scalp and sand got in my boots. The air was so dry, it made my throat hurt. When I finally got close enough, I stepped into the shade of what was left of the building and rested. The base of the building was piled with rubble, and nearby a big metal trash bin lay on its side, scorched and warped. Crushed against the pitted concrete were the remains of a sign that might have been mounted on the side of the building at one point. Sockets for lights were arranged to form big letters, but it was too damaged to tell what it said. Giant metal brackets ran down one edge of the frame, twisted and snapped.

I stared at the sign and let it fill my line of sight like Ai had told me. I stared until it blurred in front of me and the light around me got brighter. Sometimes if you focused just right, you could see not just the possibility being presented in the vision, but all the ones before it too. The farther out you went, the farther ahead the timeline went so if you flipped through them going backwards . . .

The light got brighter and the air rippled in front of me. My vision collapsed to a tunnel, until all I could see was the shape of the ruined sign. The surface of it began to warp. The blackened metal on the sign inverted and the soot began to fall away. The bent brackets straightened and turned shiny again. Powder boiled around it like fog and then formed lights in each empty socket, while pain began to build in my head.

“Zoe,” a voice said. It was Ai’s voice. The scene in front of me wavered as my concentration threatened to break.

Come on . . .

The building began to reform. Dust and debris and a zillion glass shards rose and took shape. It was huge. Mirrored glass formed massive sheets that tumbled back up into the air, then back into place as the walls reformed. The structure grew until it would have towered above even the other skyscrapers that once surrounded it. A warm trickle began to creep from one of my nostrils as the pain in my head got worse.

“Zoe, listen to me.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her. She was standing a few feet away, staring up at me with her large, penetrating eyes.

“Wait,” I told her. “I can see it. . . . ”

“You’re in terrible danger,” she said. “You have to wake up now.”

The twisted sign broke free of the sand and rose into the air to remount on one side of the building. As it did, it turned slowly, and I saw the lights that spelled out its name flicker on.

ALTO DO MUNDO

I gasped, and the sign fell. A loud boom went off, so loud it made my teeth rattle. The building’s glass panels warped and all of them blew into dust. I clamped my hands over my ears as a sound like thunder cracked through the air and the ground shook under my feet. I stumbled and tried not to fall as the dust mushroomed up all around me.

“Zoe, wake up!”

The last thing I saw before I closed my eyes was the silhouette of the building’s peak as it sank down into the cloud. The whole building was imploding, crashing down toward the street as voices all around began to scream....

I snapped awake to the sound of a car horn and sirens. Nearby I heard people running, their footsteps crunching on broken glass. Over the racket, someone was screaming.

What the hell?

All the blood had rushed to my face and my head throbbed. I opened my eyes and saw blacktop through the windshield, which had been webbed with cracks. My hair hung down over the blood-spattered dome light, where the neck of a glass bottle lay among broken shards. I was upside-down, hanging from my seat belt. As I watched, more dots of blood appeared to join the others.

“Penny?”

Several pairs of feet ran by the window to my right, and I heard something smash in the distance. A voice was barking over a bullhorn, but I couldn’t make out what the man was saying. I could smell smoke and gasoline.

I pawed the deflated skin of the airbag away and looked to my left. Penny’s body hung limp from her seat belt, lines of blood painted down one side of her face. Behind her eyelids, I could see her eyes moving back and forth.

“Penny, wake up,” I said. “We’re in trouble.”

A gunshot went off somewhere close by, and people screamed. Penny sucked in a quick breath and her eyes snapped open as two more gunshots went off, their muzzle flashes reflecting off the ice through the window.

“Zoe?” she called.

“I’m right here.”

She looked over, and for a second I saw tears shine in her eyes. She reached out and touched my face, turning my head gently so she could see better.

“I’m okay,” I said.

She clenched her teeth and held on to the steering wheel with one hand while she reached down and released the latch on her belt. She lowered herself carefully, then crouched on the roof’s interior while she twisted around to face me.

The latch on my seat belt was stuck, so she took a thin knife from her boot and cut it. I slipped into her arms and she guided me down.

“Let me see,” she said, brushing my hair away from my face. I could feel it was wet with cold blood, and tried to twist away.

“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m . . . fine. What happened?”

“Fawkes did it,” she said. “He sent the trigger code. The Huma carriers, they’ve all turned.”

“I saw her,” I said. “That bitch Flax . . . she’s one of them.”

“The slum rat?” I nodded.

“I saw her. She’s a carrier—”

We both jumped as something hit the window next to me hard, and I turned to see a homeless man crouched there with a brick in one dirty hand. Black spots had bled through the whites of his bloodshot eyes, and through the gap in his disgusting beard I could see teeth that were yellow and brown. He stared at us through the glass as he reared back the brick again and smashed it against the glass. If it hadn’t been bulletproof, it would have broken for sure.