Element Zero (19 page)

NOELLE HYDE

“If any of this gets through, then listen. The nukes may be your last chance. . . . ”

“What?”

“ . . . were wrong . . . the missiles don’t cause the event; they stop it,”
she said, her voice rising in pitch.
“You have to launch . . . ”

My heart skipped a beat and I felt the strength go out of my legs as the guns came up in slow motion behind the man. His mouth stretched open, drooling gray spit, and I saw his teeth were stained red around that horrible, divided tongue.

“ . . . the detonation overshadowed the rest,”
the voice shouted from the phone. “
It was all we could see, and we missed the cause behind it. . . . The lines that die out aren’t the ones that can’t stop the launch; they’re the ones that do stop it. . . . ”

Words appeared on the green concrete wall across from me, wet black lines creeping down from the hastily painted letters.

ELEVEN FROM ZERO

The deformed thing’s hands grabbed my shoulders, and as the first shot went off behind it, I screamed. The next thing I knew, all I could see was fire swirling all around, throwing hot orange embers up into the night sky like stars. The world was one fire. Everything was burning, and as dark figures lurched blindly through the flames, I heard her voice, low and hoarse, in the back of my head.

“They were wrong,”
she whispered.

“It was us all along. . . . ”

My eyes snapped open and I sat up on the sofa where I’d been lying, knocking something over and sending a metal pan down onto the floor. Penny was there, kneeling next to me, and she reached out to grab me as I started to flail.

“Easy,” she said. “Take it easy.”

I looked around and saw two armed men and a man in a bloodstained white shirt standing nearby.

“He just stitched you up,” Penny said. “You’re okay. Take it easy.”

Something smelled funny. I looked past them and saw that the sofa I was on was arranged in a big lounge in the middle of a huge condo. Two other sofas and a big love seat all faced in toward a big, heavy wooden table with a thick surface of smoked glass. A bunch of different kinds of glasses, some still half-full, were sitting on the table. There were silver platters of fancy food lined up, half-eaten. Lobster tails and raw oysters on the half shell sat in a crystal serving dish, floating in melted ice. Caviar, pâtés, and leftover hors d’oeuvres were all still sitting out, and it smelled.

“Sorry,” one of the men said. “There hasn’t been time to clean it up.”

“We’re all set,” Penny said. “Thanks, guys.”

My head pounded and my mouth tasted sour. I waited until the nausea passed, then stood up while Penny hovered near me. The room spun a little as I wobbled over to a big serving table where a bunch of food was left out in chafing dishes and serving bowls. I saw ends of rare meat on carving blocks, the edges crusted. Stray flowers of sashimi had shriveled, and raw shrimp lay drowned in a glass bowl of wine. The smell of it all made my stomach turn, but I needed a drink. A bottle of cognac was sitting on the marble tabletop, and I picked it up. I grabbed an empty crystal shot glass from the stack next to it and filled it, my hands shaking so bad I sloshed half of it onto the floor. I gulped it down and poured another one.

“You look like you saw a ghost,” Penny said. “What happened?”

I shook my head. Through the cobwebs, I checked my phone to see if Noelle’s name was there, but it wasn’t. The LCD read WACHALOWSKI.

All at once, my throat burned and my eyes were filled with tears. I half laughed and half cried, spraying spit.

“Now he calls,” I sniffed. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and took another long pull off the bottle.

“You probably shouldn’t—” the doctor said, but his voice dribbled off.

“We’re good,” Penny said again, staring at him. “Thanks. You can go.” She stepped closer, carefully. She wanted to touch me, I could tell, but she didn’t.

“Zoe, what did you see?”

“Nothing,” I said. I could barely form the word.

“That wasn’t nothing,” she said.

The men left the room, though I noticed the guards stayed outside the door. Penny followed me as I limped over to the wall of glass that looked out over the city below. Off in the distance, a big cloud had risen behind the buildings and begun to lean away from the rush of snow.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Fawkes dropped one of the nukes,” she said. “It might have triggered what you saw.”

“What?”

“Fawkes’s army surrounded the three towers: the CMC, TransTech, and here. Osterhagen ordered a Leichenesser charge dropped in the middle of the blockade outside to try to clear a path out.”

She held up a computer tablet so I could see the screen. A feed from somewhere outside looked out onto the front steps of Alto Do Mundo. From where the camera watched, I could see hundreds of people out there, surging shoulder to shoulder. They all had dirty hair and dirty faces. A lot of them bared bad teeth, and their clothes looked like they came from garbage bins. They were all facing up the huge marble stairs at the entrance to our building, staring with wide eyes that were stained black.

“That’s when Fawkes dropped the nuke,” she said. “It was a warning, I guess.”

“There’s so many of them,” I said. There was only one spot that was clear, right down the main steps where sets of clothes and shoes were strewn, deflated and empty. They flapped in the wind, and when it blew, it stirred traces of white smoke that lingered around the remains. It looked like hundreds had been wiped out, but hundreds more were taking their places even while I watched. “We’re in trouble, Zoe.”

“Something’s wrong,” I said, still staring. The cloud outside was huge. “How long was I out?”

“Not long,” Penny said. “They’ll have Flax soon if they don’t already. With any luck, we can stop him from dropping the rest.”

You have to do it. Make sure they launch . . .

My head was still spinning. I took my next swig straight from the bottle and swallowed three big mouthfuls before gasping in a breath.

“What’s the matter?” Penny asked.

“What if we’re wrong?” I said, looking down at the lights below. Off in the distance, I could see the flashing lights from one of the helicopters as it circled the building.

“Wrong about what?” Her expression changed then. It turned a little hard, and I thought I sensed suspicion coming from her.

“Nothing.”

“No, tell me.”

“Nothing,” I said. “Never mind.”

The bottle clinked against the rim of the glass as I poured myself another one and drank it. The hard look in Penny’s eyes softened again.

“Okay,” she said. “It’s okay.”

“Thanks, Penny.”

On shaky legs I stepped away from her, and turned the cell phone over in my hand as I watched that big, deadly cloud lean closer and closer to the shore. At the window, I looked out onto the city below.

“It was us all along. . . . ”

I reached out around me, sensing the others in the room. They had begun to focus on me as something unspoken was passed around between them.

I took one last drink, then returned Nico’s call. I held the phone to my ear, my breath fogging the window in front of me as it rang. After three rings, he picked up.

“Wachalowski,” he said. And in spite of myself, I began to cry.

“It’s me,” I said, soft enough so no one else would hear.

“Zoe,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“No.” I tried to keep the slur and the shaking out of my voice as I spoke. “I’m not supposed to be talking to you.”

“But you are.”

“She told me you’d call,” I said. I felt dizzy and had to put one hand on the window to steady myself. I leaned forward so that my forehead was on the cool glass, and I was staring down into the sea of lights below.

“Who told you?”

I wasn’t sure why, but somehow I knew what Noelle had said to me in the Green Room was true. I knew too that no one would listen to me at this point, no matter what I said. As important as I supposedly was, none of them would ever listen to me say that there was no way to get out of this and still stay on top. I knew all that, and I knew that Noelle was right too. She’d been right all along, right from the start. This whole thing was a big, cosmic joke. The city was going to burn. One way or the other, it was all going to burn.

“I want you to get out of the city,” I said, wiping my eyes.

“I can’t, Zoe.”

“Promise me you’ll leave. Leave tonight. Right now.”

“I can’t.”

More attention was focusing my way. Any second now, Ai would snap out of it and realize what I’d done. When she did, she’d make me hang up.

“This is the last time we’ll talk,” I said.

“Zoe—”

“You tried to help me,” I whispered. “Please save yourself.”

“Why, Zoe?” he asked. “What are they going to do?”

“Nothing,” I told him. “But I think I am.”

He was still talking when I felt the presence worm its way into my head, gentle but firm. Some small shard of Ai’s consciousness had turned its attention to me. I wanted to keep talking to Nico. There were things I wanted to tell him but the presence wouldn’t let me.

That’s enough, Zoe.

My arm dropped and the phone slid away from my face. I watched his name on the LCD as the phone spun end over end and clattered to the floor.

Calliope Flax—Stillwell Corps Base

I woke up to the sound of static, louder than usual. I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t see.

“She’s prepped,”
a voice said. “
Are you ready to deploy?”

“Yes, sir.”

I tried to move, but I couldn’t. The last thing I remembered, they’d rushed me.

“What was that before?”
the first voice asked.

“You mean why didn’t she respond to the push?”

“A ten-year-old could control her. Why didn’t she stay under?”

“I don’t know.”

The static in my head cracked. I tried to move again, but my muscles wouldn’t respond. I opened my eyes, but it stayed dark. I tried to call Nico, but my JZI’s comm link was down.

“It doesn’t matter. Let’s just do this. Stop her heart,”
a voice said.

A needle pricked the back of my neck. I felt a cold metal ring push down on my bare back.

“What are you waiting for?”

“Maybe this isn’t a good idea,”
another voice said.

“Fawkes eighty-sixed the test subjects, and every time we grab one off the street, he cuts it loose. It’s got to be during the sync-up. She’s our last shot at this.”

“He just dropped a nuke in the middle of the bay. When he sees what we’ve done—”

“If this works, he won’t be doing anything.”

“But if it doesn’t—”

“Osterhagen says, ‘Risk it.’ Now stop her fucking heart; that’s an order.”

“She can still hear us,”
I heard Singh say under his breath.

“I don’t give a shit. Is the virus ready to go?”

Singh sighed.
“Yes, sir.”

“Then do it. Now.”

A hand touched my face. I felt warm breath in my ear.

“Sorry, Cal.”

A circuit lit up on my JZI then. I still couldn’t call out, but someone on the outside was calling in. It was Singh.

Singh, get me the fuck out of here, or I swear I will—

Don’t be afraid, Cal,
he said.

I’m not afraid, asshole.

You need to die just long enough for the Huma nodes to finish forming, but I’ll make sure you can be resuscitated.

Fuck you. Get me the hell out—

Pay attention. There’s no time to get into it, Cal, but we have to do this. If we can get you onto the carriers’ network, we can deploy a virus that will shut them all down. This is happening. It might be our only chance, and we have to stop those things. I know you understand that. Do you trust me?

I didn’t, but he was right about one thing: I did understand. I was fucked; they knew I was a carrier, and they had me. If there was a way out, Singh was it.

You’re a fucking asshole, Singh.

I know. Do you trust me?

What do I have to do?

You don’t have to do anything. You’re already part of the mesh; that’s why you can sense them, but you’re not fully synced up. We’re hoping Fawkes won’t interpret this as a new node joining, just an update of an existing one.... If we’re right, then you’ll be off his radar. When the nodes finish forming, the first thing they’ll do is transmit a sync request giving your stats, uptime, location, and so forth. The virus will be attached to the request and propagated. Understand?

No.

All you need to know is that your body will die for about a minute, but I’ll bring you back, Cal, I swear. As a human, not a revivor. Are you ready?

I wasn’t, but they had me. There was nothing I could do, and even though Singh was a prick, he was a smart prick. If he thought this could work, it might work.

If you fuck up,
I told him,
and I turn—

You won’t.

Don’t leave me like that.

I won’t.

I heard a thud, and pain slammed through my chest. It pulsed down my arms and up my neck, but I couldn’t move. The air died in my lungs and every muscle in my body went slack. I heard my vitals tone go flat, then fade out like I’d fallen down a deep tunnel. Everything got quiet. I couldn’t move or see or hear. There was just a big, black nothing.

Is this it? Am I dead?
I never got to say bye to Nico. I didn’t even know where the fuck I was.

Node formation previously interrupted. Continuing. . .

The words popped up in the dark. They came from a JZ implant, so my brain still worked.

Is it alive, though?
Was I alive or dead?

I got an itch at the back of my neck, like bugs under the skin. I could at least sense my body again. Just barely, I felt my fingers and toes prick with pins and needles.

Node formation successful. Reinitializing communications network.

In the back of my skull, the white noise streamed in like TV snow. The inhibitor usually stopped it, but not today.

All units clear zone H1B,
a message said. As it faded, a shit-ton of them connected all at once and started blasting me with info. The node count kept climbing: a hundred, a thousand, two thousand . . .

Shit . . .

The count passed six thousand. I’d linked with revivors before, but never more than nine. Back in the field, I’d get a feed for each one on my JZI so I could keep an eye on them, but this time there were so many there was no way to show them all. Each feed came up as a point of light on a grid at the bottom of my periphery. They looked like stars.

We are fucked.

I focused on one of those points of light and my receiver called it out. I couldn’t control the revivor on the other end, but when I homed in, I could see what it saw. It was looking down at a concrete wall that was covered in graffiti. It was female; I could make out a pair of tits. Strapped between them was some kind of metal casing. A display was fixed there, with an LCD that flashed blue.

It didn’t move. It just stared. The display jumped, and the feed fell back on the pile with the rest.

This is what the static was.
All this time, I had a link to all of them. At first they must have been dormant, then the inhibitor kept them back, but now I was in it. I was in there with them, up to my neck.

Mesh established. Synchronizing . . .

“The virus is embedded in the synchronization package,”
Singh said. His voice was muddy, like I was underwater.
“It’s going out . . . now.”

The last link lit up, and my node puked data over every one of them. Shit flew back and forth as we all synced up. In seconds, they knew who and where I was. A map of the network formed on the grid in front of me and formed a kind of shape.

“Did it work?”
Ramirez asked.

“It’s converging,”
a voice said. That was Singh. He was close by.
“Hold on.”

The Huma node took all the data that came in and used it to make a picture; a map of the city blinked on and an electric inkblot spread over it. Blotches of light spread and bled together.

Synchronization complete.
The pattern covered everything; they were all through the city. The light was brightest in shitholes like Pyt-Yahk, and they were clustered around the three towers, but they’d spread all over. They were moving through the whole city, heading out.

All units clear zone H1B.
The message popped up again. With the connection to the rest, I saw an area outlined on the city map; the zone surrounded the CMC Tower.

“What’s that there?”
a voice asked. Ramirez.

“Looks like he’s moving them away from Central Media Communications.”
On the map, the cluster around the tower was thinning out.

“Why?”

I heard fingers tap at a keypad.

“I don’t like it. Contact them and let them know.”

All units clear zone H—

One signal whined from out of the static, coming through loud and strong.

Initializing command spoke . . .

The link lit up under the rest of them. I knew what that was. Usually I was on the other side of it, but I knew what it was. Whoever was on the other end started to pull data from me. I watched the data stream by; my heart rate and body temp had bottomed, but no revivor signature had formed. Not yet.

“The command spoke is active,”
a voice said. I barely heard it.

“He’s going to cut her off. Did the virus go out?”

“Yes, sir.”

Node 5948. Report in.
The message came over the command spoke. It was him; it was Fawkes.

“There.”

“Are you sure?”

“We’ve got activity from a remote source. It’s trying to assert control. He’s seen her.”

“Did the virus work?”

“No change in activity yet.”

“What about her?”

Commands dropped in. Fawkes had kicked off some kind of diag from the other end. It triggered my systems and code flicked by as my JZI came back online. He connected to it and started to dump its memory.

“He’s got her. If she drops off now, it will tip him. Let him have her.”

He was pulling data from me. Along with the rest of the shit he was pulling, I packaged up a little something else for him.

A handy ’bot we’d passed around the grinder got pulled back over the link with the rest of it and stuck itself in Fawkes’s memory. He might be a smart jack, but he was still a jack, and an old one too.

Respond,
Fawkes said. I decided to try to bluff him.

Node 5948. Reporting in.

There was some corruption detected during the synchronization. Stand by.

Understood.

He went idle for a few seconds, then:
You’re on the private military base.

Before I could think of a response, Fawkes tried to pull my signature and didn’t find one.

You’re not a revivor,
he said. He’d started some kind of scan.
Who are you?

The game was up.

The one who’s going to fuck your dead ass.

The goddamned spoke let him pry through into my JZI and before I could stop him, he’d tapped into my systems. In seconds he’d found my communication node and broke in, branching out over every connection he could find.

“He’s in our system!” I heard a voice shout. “Shit! He’s in our system!”

“How is that possible?”

“Cut the link!”

Whatever you’re attempting, Calliope T. Flax, it won’t work.

Don’t be so sure.

As you can see, my army is still online, so whatever you’re trying to do, it hasn’t worked. The people behind this are going to pay for that, and so will you. My next strike won’t be a warning.

Yeah, well none of my strikes are ever warnings. If Nico doesn’t get to you first, then you’re mine.

That shut him up for a second.

Who are you?
he asked. The son of a bitch didn’t even remember me.

I set off the remote ’bot, and it started to dump everything in his memory buffers back to my JZI.

You never should have brought me on that boat, fucker.

I found his Leichenesser seed and popped it, but the link stayed up, so he must have had it taken out at some point. I tapped his visual feed, and a window popped up in the dark. Through it, I saw what he saw.

He was at a desk. He looked down at a console that showed a bunch of security feeds, while a figure off to his right reached in front of him and touched one window. It came to the front, and I saw a woman walk through the frame.

I’ve seen her. . . .
It was that creepy revivor bitch, the one Nico locked lips with on the tanker that night.

The image went blank.

“Damn it!”
Right behind the visuals, the command spoke went dark.

“He just killed the spoke.”

“The virus went out; he’s too late.”

“She’s still tied to the mesh. He still can’t trigger the kill switch with the inhibitor in place, but—”

Fawkes was inside Heinlein. I pulled up the stuff I’d grabbed from his buffers. I didn’t get it all, but I got enough. I couldn’t tell the assholes in the room with me what I had because I couldn’t fucking talk, but if Singh came through and got my JZI back online, I might be able to get it to Nico.

“Shit,”
someone said.

Ramirez answered,
“What?”

“We just got a surge of activity out there. A lot of it. Look.”

On the map, the large blotch changed shape while I watched. It was close to where we were. Slowly, part of the shape began to branch out and move.

It began to creep in our direction.