Glitch (20 page)

“They got Joss,” she said.

“It’s his own damn fault.”

Yancey stood by the cage wall, her fingers wound through the metal rings. “Skippard, what’re you doing here?” She was looking into the middle distance, no doubt using her shades to call in a search for Joss.

“You heard what I said. I’ll fight.”

“You came to make that announcement.”

“Yep.”

She shook her head at him. “You always were a sucker for drama.”

He lessened himself so that he wasn’t so large and bright. “That’s me: A show off.”

The younger Toth, Hutto, emerged out of the shadows. He looked sweaty and flustered, but unharmed. His brother, Nisson walked over to him. “You kick some teeth in?”

“Bunch of weak-assed drunks here.” Hutto saw a few bodies nearby. “Jesus, the Rogueslaves did that?”

“Some of them were prospects and sympathizers,” Nisson said. “So I did some of that.”

“And I did,” Agent Wellborn said.

Skippard saw the respect in the young boy’s eyes, which was what he wanted to see. “You won your fight.”

Hutto nodded.

Nisson patted him on the back. “It was easier than sneezing.”

Hutto laughed, and even Yancey smiled.

Simone floated over to the cage barrier. “Why was Joss here?”

“I have no idea,” Hutto said.
 

“My bet,” Skippard said, “he got curious and got in trouble. Those two go together.”

“I’ve called for our pick ups,” Yancey said. “We need to think about what to do about Joss.”

“Gramgadon wasn’t just using him to get out of the building?” Nisson asked.

“I doubt it,” Skippard said.

“What do you mean?” Yancey asked.

“How do you think the Rogues knew to send soldiers to this event?”

“Joss alerted them?” she asked.

“My guess.”

“Why?” Nisson asked.

Skippard waited to see if anyone could figure it out. He looked at his daughter who floated nearby. She was a perfect example, why. He also looked at Hutto, and Yancey, and Nisson, three more examples.

“Joss is jealous,” Yancey said.

“He was branded,” Skippard said, “and the one time he channeled, it was hijacked by the Rogues.”

“Right, and I shut him down.”

“You think Joss betrayed us?” Simone asked.

“Not really,” Skippard said. “My guess he made a trade of some sort. Just some info for ... who knows what they promised him.”

“He wants to summon,” Nisson said.

Skippard nodded. “Of course he does.”

Yancey waved everyone to the door. “The choppers are here. Time to go.” She stepped aside so Hutto and Nisson could begin walking for the exit. “I’ll get the others.” She waited a moment, looking at Simone. “I guess you’ll go back with your father?”

Simone glowed brighter. She stood there in her big boots and her flowing summer dress. Her hair hadn’t grown, of course, but she could change it at will, and now it flowed, long and full, as if in a strong breeze.

“If he’ll show me how.”

Skippard nodded. “It’s time you learned.”

Yancey turned and walked out.

“She’s pissed,” Simone said.

“That she is.”

“Jealous?”

“A little.”

“Dad, there are dead people in here.”

“You ignore that.” He solidified himself and blocked her view of a nearby pile of bodies. “The Rogues are the worst enemies the world has ever known.” He could see that she wanted him to explain what had happened in the audience. But she seemed to know. “Come on. Let me show you how to fly.”

* * *

Simone shut her eyes as the electric grasp of her father’s hand pulled her through the physical layers of the complex. His fingers connected to hers, as if they had melded. She ignored the intrusive contact with the concrete walls and rebar reinforcements. It felt as if she were being suffocated by the weight of the world itself …

When they broke free of the roof and floated above the building, she opened her eyes and saw headlights of vehicles fleeing in all directions. She even heard the beating of the helicopter rotors in the courtyard.

“Be careful,” her father said, “you don’t want to float away into the sky and never come back.” He paused between two large chimneys that jutted from the sides of a sloped roof. “This takes practice, so don’t do it on your own for a while. The idea is to think about where you want to go. That’s all it is. Keep an image of the place in your mind. Maybe Uncle Pic’s cabin, and you’ll go there. No need for GPS or maps or scribbled directions. No need to worry about the weather or the cardinal points. Or traffic.” He smiled and chuckled enough his torso shook.

“You love this, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“Flying, too?”

“It’s great. You ready?”

She nodded.

He launched himself into the night sky, pulling her with him. She began to stretch, almost as if she might disintegrate. But she retained the core part of herself, and the rest caught up. She flew upward with increasing speed. In moments, she and her father, hand-in-hand, cut into the clouds like two cobalt knives. They twisted and twirled around each other, and soon Simone lost track of time and place; she shut her eyes and imagined the coolness of damp air through which she left a wake of sparks.

When it was her time to try, her father slowed. “Now think of your uncle’s cabin.”

The dream continued as she flew with her father. She imagined they could circle the earth like this.

Uncle Pic’s cabin ...

A short time later, she saw herself descending over the familiar creek, moonlight glinting off its gentle rapids, just a ways from Uncle Pic’s forest cabin. They pushed through the brush, crossed the open space, and entered his porch.

“Now that’s definitely a perk,” she said. “How long did it take?”

“We beat the helicopters,” he said and settled into a rocker.

“No way.” She did as well, and kicked her legs, causing enough friction that the rocker moved.

“Nice trick,” he said. “I learned that one quickly, too.”

“I bet you’ve got a bunch.”

“I do—just don’t tell your mom.”

“She’s mad because you’re still a ghost?”

“She’s mad because I want to remain a ghost.”

Simone paused her rocking. “You do?”

“I love you and your mother. But I think ... the body is so limiting. We can connect in other ways, like you and I just connected it. That was real, wasn’t it? That was heaven to me.”

She nodded, considering that it did, in fact, feel as if they’d become a single person and could have remained that way forever.

“There’re many mysteries out there, Simone. We have to be brave enough to face them.”

“I’m brave.”

“How was Supertrans tonight?”

She remembered the emergence of her entity as a tidal wave of release, as if she’d been waiting for hours at the top of a roller coaster’s longest drop before going. “It was happy to be let out.”

“Still happy with your last arrangement?”

“It killed a deer in the woods.”

“They’re predators.” He continued to rock, and she followed, the chairs making faint creaking noises on the old slats of the porch floor. Beyond, the woods surrounded them in a comforting wall of darkness. “You know what is interesting about the fact that your mother, Hutto, and Nisson summoned?”

“Other than the obvious?”

He snarled at her sarcasm. “No, well, yes. The obvious problem with the fact that the entities arrive by changing our physical composition. Well, not ours, since we’re ghosts. But the embodied. When Myrmidon—”

“Mom’s entity?”

“Pretty name, isn’t it?”

“Mine’s corny.”

“I like it. Anyway, when we first began to summon our bodies changed.”

“Yeah, that’s how it was for me.”

“That was a big enough mystery, seeing as how our chemistries could change without being engineered to do it.”

“When I first learned that my body would get bigger—”

“You wore baggy clothes. Sure sign of an Alter. Your mother wears the Bodyglove.” He paused, as if he were working through mental files he had stored away, and found one. “At first we thought we were infected with nanosystems that didn’t show up in scans. How else could our chemistries change in such radical ways? The Rogues use this very technique to mimic what they find so effective in us. But we found nothing.”

He looked at her in such a way she guessed this was how her life with him would have been had he been present instead of being a Transhuman ghost warrior.

“What?” she asked.

“What’s the logical next question?”

“How?”

He shook his head. “That’s the ultimate question. The proximate question would be: Where do we go?”

“I was there. I didn’t go anywhere.”

“Exactly!”

“But where does ... the
person
go?”

“Even better!” He floated off the rocker, illuminated. “A disappearing person breaks a fundamental law of the universe regarding matter—that matter has to go somewhere. But where? The thing that is you stays, or links, or merges, with your entity. But how?” He looked like he might reveal the answer.

She waited. “How ...?”

“I have no idea.” He chuckled, as if he were the only one who got the joke.

They heard the front door creak open. Uncle Pic stood on the sill in old-man skivvies that hung to his knees and the top part of long johns that had been cut in half.

“I’ll tell you where the person goes.” He stepped onto the porch, no more bothered by the cold than would a polar bear. “It goes to some mystical, magical fairyland called Bullshitville where everyone sings songs and skips rope and plays Chutes and Ladders. That’s where it goes.” He walked to the free rocker and sat down, as if his back hurt. “You talking about the missing person issue?” Her father nodded. “Well, good, because it’s time she knows about these things. You told her what I think happens?”

Her father waved that away. “Making stuff up doesn’t help.”

“Tell me what?” Simone asked.

“Not now, Pic. We have more important things to talk about.”

“Don’t change the subject just because I’m out here.”

“A Rogue lieutenant took one of the students. Gramgadon did.”

Uncle Pic frowned as if you’d just told him he was going to get a toothache in an hour. “Goddammit, Skippard, a student? And Gramgadon?”

“I know. It’s not my fault. I think he got himself mixed up.”

“It’s Joss,” Simone said.

“The boy who was deformed?” Uncle Pic seemed to understand. “I doubt that’s a coincidence.”

“Looks like they remember him.”

“Of course they remember him,” Uncle Pic said. “Those dirty bastards never forget when it’s someone who knows
you
.”

“He doesn’t know me.”

“You understand what I mean.” Uncle Pic looked at Simone, as if she were too young to hear what was about to be said. “What’s she know about Cliff?”

Her father settled on the porch and diminished his glow. “Not much.”

“Well, damn, Skippard. Same thing’s happening again, and I bet Cliff is mixed up in this.”

“He is, somehow.”

“Mom never told me what happened,” Simone said.

“Cliff was a talented Interfacer,” her father said. “I found him when he was a teenager, brought him into our home. You hadn’t been born yet. Like Joss, he got branded, and I spent a year battling for him. I lost. A Rogueslave shot him full of nanojunk. Almost killed him. When we got him to the clinic, we succeeded in cleansing him but the technicians had to change him. He’s like Rigon now, but worse. He’s been reworked so much that something’s off in him. He went hardline Consortium agent all the way; he was feeding them intelligence about me. When I perfected my process of ghosting, he came after me.”

“You tried to help him?” She asked.

“I did.”

“He’s a bastard, then. What’ll they do to Joss?”

Her father shrugged. “I imagine they’ll give him what he wants, for a price, unless someone gets him back before it’s too late.”

“Too late?”

Uncle Pic snorted. “Those software gods up there in the cyber sky or whatever it is look for any way they can to reach down here and fiddle with the good and natural stuff of everyday life. They’ll use that boy to push into our world. They’ll toss him aside.” He glanced at her. “You be careful no one does the same to you.”

Her father rounded on his brother. “All right, Pic, don’t start with your personal attacks.”

Uncle Pic bared his teeth. “Hell, Skippard, we’ve been meaning to do this for some time. She’s here. I thought it would be Yancey who’d bring it out of us. But Simone’ll do. This ain’t no rational process you can control. I was there on the steppe, remember? Goddammit, I’m a Megamech captain, and I saw what those Psy-sorcerer pinheads created on the steppe. Those colossi took down most of our mechs, except for the one standing guard not far from here. And looky there: They go and capture another super-hacker right from Sterling. I know what they want to do with him. They’ll give him whatever he wants and put him on a path to becoming one of their Technowizards.”

“He’s young,” her father said. “He has no idea how to channel. Besides, he’s got a Consort brand on him. They’ll have to negotiate that.”

Uncle Pic waved in the air. “Ah, you and your technicalities. That’s what got us into this mess in the first place.” He looked at Simone again. “Do you realize your father thinks the rules he set years ago still dictate their behavior?”

“They do,” her father said. “They want the Protocols, Pic. That’s the prize.”

“What’s the prize for you? You just keep running? Getting away?”

“You still don’t get it, do you?” her father said while looking at her. “The Rogues are just practice, Pic. You know that. Wasn’t that why we started all this?”

Uncle Pic stood, now both arms waving. “I don’t want you bringing that up.”

Her father continued. “You know it’s true. We created those scenarios as simulations for real conflicts with real alien intelligences, and we created the enemies we feared … as practice.”

“Or the real enemies came because we were now interesting to them.”

“Either way, Pic, we saw what was happening. I’ve been trying to get us prepared ever since.”