The Aftermath (14 page)

“That’s stupid,” he says. “And disgusting.”

My face burns. “Okay, you’re the moderator. Tell me how we’re going to get in.”

“I’m going to jam their signal,” he says at last.

“What?”

He draws a black box from his pocket. It’s as big as my hand and square. Three shiny tubes extend from one end of it, and the tube in the middle has a green blinking light.

Blink, blink. Pause. Blink, blink, blink. Pause. The box looks as if it will explode at any moment. I cover my head.

“Signal jammer, meet Virtue. Virtue, meet my way in. Press the button on the side—” he wiggles the device in front of my face so I can see the small black knob; I push his hand away “—and everyone with an active chip stays down for about forty-five minutes. Completely idle while I look around.”

I lift an eyebrow. I don’t like the look on his face. He won’t meet my eyes. And then I get it. He didn’t say we’d look around—he said the signal jammer is his way in, meaning he plans on searching by himself. Because I’ll be idle just like everyone else.

“No,” I say.

This plan is stupid. Utterly flawed. I’d rather wade around in garbage and filth and whatever else we may find in the sewers any day rather than allow him to leave me helpless for nearly an hour.

“It’s the only way, and I promise nothing will happen to you.”

“You’re lying. Besides, won’t their players know something’s wrong when they suddenly go off-line? Aren’t you setting us up for failure?”

“That’s the glory of the jammer.” He grins, rubbing his fingers over the metal cylinders. They spring back and forth rapidly. “It takes them all down—every character in the vicinity—so it looks like a problem within the game. And just so you know, flesh-eaters aren’t played by gamers. They’re operated by LanCorp employees. Come on, Virtue, what kind of treatment would eating people be?”

This is new, but it makes sense. It explains what Olivia said to the flesh-eater she killed in the parking garage. “Good luck with your next job, Reese. Try to last a little longer than a couple months,” she’d teased.

My stomach turns. So this is the type of job that keeps 99 percent of the Provinces’ inhabitants employed? Playing an unaware human inside a game that’s made him into a cannibal? No wonder Declan’s assignment has a new player—his former player probably quit his job. And maybe once he realized he was still able to control his character, he’d decided to play a cruel game with LanCorp. Hide-and-seek with a helpless boy who has no idea what’s really going on.

I press my lips together. “You’re not disabling me.”

“It’s a good plan. I’ve got it figured out,” Declan says.

Of course he’s got it all figured out. Everything down to abandoning me after I help him. I feel the blood rush to my neck and face and ears. If he knew that his assignment was here the entire time, why did he blackmail me into coming with him and letting him stay in my shelter?

“Do you trust me?” he asks, rising to his feet. His knuckles are white from clutching the jammer.

He’s asked me this before, but my head is so foggy right now, I can’t remember when. He’s going to deactivate me. Then he plans to leave me in a pit of flesh-eaters, and I don’t know if he’ll come back for me. I’ll wake up to a flesh-eater mauling the side of my face, just like my first day in The Aftermath—except this time, I’ll already have three years of horrible memories, and nobody will be there to save me. I shake my head.

“What do you think?” I snarl.

“You should. I made a promise. Now sit tight.”

I tackle him as he presses the button. I pound on his chest hard with both hands, and there’s a mixture of discomfort and astonishment on his face that’s instantly gratifying. Then I pause. Over his shoulder, the flesh-eaters begin to drop one by one where they stand, like dominoes falling down. He looks behind us, then back at me, eyes wide. “You’re kidding me?” He waves his hand in front of my face.

“Stop that.”

I expect him to make a disparaging comment or tease me. Instead, he rubs the tips of his fingers over the spot where my chip is implanted. Tilts my head from side to side. Touches the middle of my forehead so hard I wince. Pulling his gaze away from mine, he mutters, “Come on before they wake up.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

For just over half an hour, we search the mall frantically. We race from store to store. When we find someone, I stand a couple of steps behind him, helpless, while Declan studies his face under the sunlight shimmering through the open roof. “It’s not him,” he says so many times I lose count and optimism and part of my mind. And even though we don’t find who he’s been sent into the game to look for, I discover something in one of the last stores that stops my heart: Survivors. Seven of them in all, chained to the walls in various stages of despair. Hooking my fingers into the sharp steel of the security gate separating me from them, I stare at the youngest one—a skinny girl no bigger than myself—for a long time.

“I’m letting them go,” I say. As I bend down to open the gate, Declan’s hand closes around my arm. He gives it a squeeze, shaking his head, but I pull out of his grip. “Don’t screw with me.”

I pull on the security door with all my might. It creeps up a couple of feet; then I roll beneath it.

Declan doesn’t help as I pick the locks with my knife. He sits outside the gate on top of a headless mannequin that’s dressed in lingerie. Every few moments he clears his throat and rubs his fingers back and forth over his nose. The noise grates on my nerves.

“Stop it,” I say.

“What do you think you’re accomplishing by letting them loose?” he demands.

I’ve no intention of answering him—he doesn’t deserve it. He was going to disable me. And he didn’t care that I was afraid or against it. He didn’t even ask me how I felt about his plans beforehand. I jab the knife into another lock. It skims the edge of the flimsy metal, slicing across the palm of my other hand. I ignore the pain.

“All you’ll manage to do is hurt yourself.”

I’ll pretend I don’t hear him. I’ll pretend as if the area between my shoulders doesn’t hurt, pretend I don’t want to turn the weapon on him, send it flying into his chest just as Olivia did to the redheaded boy a few days ago.

But I glance behind me, take him in, before I tackle the final two bolts.

It’s much too difficult to ignore him.

“And now what?” he asks when the last lock clicks open. “We have five minutes left until the flesh-eaters are all over us. Are you going to drag each of them to safety?”

Pressing my lips together in a tight line, I stand and slip the knife back into its sheath. “At least they can run now. Their gamers can try to get them out of here. They can—”

“Do you think their gamers are going to magically log in the moment we leave here?”

When I turn my back to him, keeping silent, he continues, “They’re not. So it doesn’t matter if they’re released. These characters will just lie here, bodies wasting away, until their gamers come back to let them get tortured a little more or wait for some point-happy Survivor to come along and save them. Now, we have four minutes. You can stay here, but I’d rather you be with me. We still have a lot of work to do.”

“You were going to use the signal jammer on me,” I say, my voice breaking.

He sighs. I hear the gate jangle—he must be pulling on it or banging his head against the metal in frustration. “No, I was going to use it on them. You were a temporary casualty, and I promised I would come back for you. I wasn’t going to leave you. I never break my word.”

A temporary casualty.
I should be irritated that he’s calling me that, but for some reason, I’m not. I’m sure I’ve been called much worse. “I don’t want to leave them.” I look around me, at the seven lifeless characters—no, humans—surrounded by chains and their own blood. “They’ll die.”

“No, eventually someone will accept this mission and free them. But you’ll die if you stay. Two minutes, Virtue.”

I’d forgotten that the slightest change in this game results in new side quests. That someone’s captivity eventually means more points for another gamer. But even knowing that some clan could sweep through here to play saints as soon as Declan and I leave doesn’t take away the burning around my eyes. I blink away the tears. For thirty seconds, I count quietly in my head. I punch the wall, grit my teeth together. Then I roll under the gate, keeping my eyes off the people on the other side. I don’t care that my knuckles burn or that I bite the tip of my tongue so hard it bleeds. “Do the gamers know that we’re real people?” I know that Olivia does, but what about everyone else playing LanCorp’s games?

“Yes.”

“Why do they do this?” My voice sounds different, like something that’s been beaten halfway to death. Declan can explain the Provinces’ violence solution to me a million times—tell me how the games are a way to fix both the gamers’ and the characters’ disease—but I’m not sure I’ll ever truly understand it.

“If you’re diagnosed with the gene, treatment is mandatory. It’s against the law to refuse it. But LanCorp always gives everyone with the gene a choice—pay the money to play the game or go into Rehabilitation, become a character,” he says, sounding as if he’s quoting that directly from a prompt he studied in moderator training. He pulls me away from the gate and guides me toward the mall’s main entrance. Our eyes meet. The shame in his startles me.

“But if you had the financial resources, would you really want someone else controlling you when you could be the one in power?” Declan asks.

* * *

It takes us a while to get home, an extra hour to be exact. After what happened in the mall, I feel powerless. That hopelessness screams through me, making me little more than dead weight.

To my surprise, Declan doesn’t complain. He walks next to me, although there’s at least two feet between us. He avoids my eyes, his mouth twisted into a grimace. I want to know what he’s thinking, but maybe asking outright is not a good idea. So I keep quiet.

When we reach the bar, he steps in front of me, blocking my way in. I sigh—a drawn-out noise that’s so full of defeat it physically hurts. I’m exhausted. I don’t want to deal with Declan’s games. I open my mouth to tell him this, but he cuts me off, covering my lips with his index finger.

“I’m sorry, Virtue,” he says. “For making you think I’d go traitor on you.”

We’re standing out in the open, where any player can see us, and he chooses to apologize? Crazy, strange, gorgeous Declan. I feel a little surge of joy in my chest, though. “No harm done,” I say. My words are muffled because his finger is still over my mouth.

He smiles and moves a little closer to me. I notice how flushed his cheeks are, how strands of black hair cling to the sweat on his forehead. How heavily he’s breathing. “Do you still want to know about deletion?”

“Yes.”

He drops his hands to his side. “It’s not pretty.”

“Nothing about LanCorp is,” I point out. “You’ve already said he’ll die. I can’t imagine death being anything but ugly. And I’ve seen so many people die it’s pathetic. I can handle whatever you tell me.”

“Virtue...”

“Don’t Virtue me. Don’t lie to me, either. You never break your promises, remember?”

His smile wavers, then fades completely into a frown. He’s usually so calm under pressure, and everything about today has caught me off guard. He places his hands on either side of my shoulders, bends until we’re eye level.

“Why do you need to know this?”

“I’m not immune like you are, Declan. Every moment I’m with you and not out of this game I’m at risk of my gamer finding out what I can do. Don’t tell me you don’t think she’ll have me deleted in a heartbeat?”

But in the back of my mind, I’m curious. Maybe I am invulnerable to deletion. If Olivia tries to do away with me by severing my connection, would the result be the same as Declan’s signal jammer? Back at the mall he was so sure I’d go idle with the rest of the characters, but it didn’t happen. What other LanCorp technology do my head and the chip inside it challenge?

“I’ll protect you from her,” he says, interrupting my thoughts. “She’s not going to hurt you.”

“Please tell me the truth.”

He entwines his fingers with mine. Static rushes through my arm, and I suppress a gasp. He doesn’t seem to notice as he leads me away from the building. The sun is setting. Over the dry vegetation springing up out of the sidewalk and street and the broken buildings, it’s lovely. Heartbreakingly beautiful.

I shiver and he looks down at me. “I am being honest, Virtue. Nobody will hurt you when you’re with me.”

For some reason, this time, I believe him.

Flesh-eaters don’t frequent this area. I’ve paid close attention to Olivia’s map, and the only names nearby are highlighted in green. Still, I fumble around to make sure my gun and knife are easily accessible.

We don’t go far—to a child’s playground a few blocks from the shelter. It’s a pointless landmark in this game. Only an idiot would use it for shelter and the few younger children in The Aftermath who aren’t quickly killed by flesh-eaters are too busy running for their lives to find any enjoyment in it.

Yet, here I am, next to Declan, on corroded swings that creak as they sway back and forth.

“Reminds me of being a kid,” he says, squinting up at the sky.

“Deletion,” I prompt him.

He looks down at a patch of dirt and rakes his boot through it. The corners of his mouth lift just as his shoulders sag. “They’ll take him to a deletion facility.”

“A deletion facility. Like a special place just to kill characters?” I ask. He nods, and I almost shout, “Why not just shoot them or electrocute them to death?”

“Who knows? That’s just the way LanCorp does it.”

“And once the character reaches the deletion facility?”

“They’re operated on by a physician.”

I listen to the squeaking of the swing and close my eyes. Deletion is done by a doctor. In an actual facility using a method that requires physical contact. I suddenly see myself, lying inside a coffin, unconscious, with my face swollen and dozens of clear tubes running into my body. I swallow hard.

“And they do something to their head, huh?”

He nods. “Total deactivation. They break the link between character and gamer or player. Fry the Cerebrum Chip.” He reaches over and taps the top of my head. I duck, push his hand away. “The character is brain-dead in thirty seconds, a minute max. LanCorp doesn’t want their technology duplicated, but deletion doesn’t happen that often. Usually characters are picked up by contractors after their gamer’s done with treatment or decides to buy another character. Then they’re put back into the games as villains with hired workers playing them. Like the flesh-eaters. In order to be deleted, you have to be so damaged, the effort and cost to fix you isn’t worth it.”

The image of me in the machine evaporates from my mind. It’s replaced by another memory—the woman who reminded me of Mia in the courthouse grabbing at her head and screaming for me to get something out of her. I tighten my grip on the gritty metal links. “But what if a character finishes LanCorp’s sham of a Rehabilitation? What then?”

When he shoots me a look out of the corner of his eye, I immediately know that no character has ever gotten through Rehabilitation and it’s very likely that no character ever will. I breathe in deeply to calm myself. “And you’re okay working for someone who does this to other humans? Who offers people jobs to play flesh-eaters?” I demand.

“Virtue—”

But he doesn’t finish. We just sit there, swaying, people watching. Character watching. Only a few pass by, and none of them pay us any attention. Someday, any of these people might regain control of themselves only minutes before their brain explodes.

“Do you think they feel what’s happening when they’re being deleted? The characters, I mean?” I ask.

He exhales sharply. “Yes, sometimes.”

“Then...can it be stopped?” When he raises one of his eyebrows, I continue, “Can the games be destroyed and deletion be stopped? If there’s the technology to jam several chip signals, isn’t there something that could—I don’t know—free a mass of characters at once?”

And then what? Return their minds to the right place just to make them fight to survive?

Declan looks down at the ground. “It’s possible.” Then he snorts. “One of LanCorp’s rivals is probably already on it.”

“I hope they are.” And I hope it’s in time to save Ethan. I don’t realize I say his name aloud until Declan clears his throat. I glance over in time to see him roll his eyes. “What?”

“Why do you care what happens to him?”

“Because he’s a boy who might die because some asshole has the right to just discard him.” Because there’s an enormous part of me that’s emotionally attached to Ethan’s voice and his kind face.

And to Landon’s personality.

Declan stops swinging and shakes his head to each side. “He could be completely unlikable, you know. The real Ethan could be a killer or neurotic. He could kick puppies.”

“I could be any of those things, too,” I point out.

He inches closer. The swing makes a grating noise that causes me to shudder. “You’re none of those things.”

“I’ve killed,” I say. “Many times.”

“You killed because somebody else made you do it. You’re not her, Virtue.” But even he doesn’t sound entirely convinced.

“It still feels like me, especially when it’s my finger pulling the trigger.” I release a choked noise from the back of my throat. “I can try all I want to pretend like it’s not, but it doesn’t change anything.”

He tilts his head to the side and stares at me for a few seconds. I feel like I’m a bug under a magnifying glass, and I bite my lip and look away.

“What?” I ask.

“You’re going to tear yourself to pieces with all that guilt, Virtue. Do me a favor and just relax for a minute. Here, close your eyes.”

“Why do I—”

“Just do it. Close them and go someplace else. Anywhere but The Aftermath.”

I grumble, but then I do it. I squeeze my eyes shut. And the moment that I do, a memory hits me.

I’m standing on a ledge, between two windows, with my back pressed against a limestone building. This isn’t anywhere I’ve ever been inside The Aftermath, but it’s familiar. I can taste the fear. Feel my damp palms slide against the glass on either side of me. Hear my heart pounding in my ears. There is nothing but havoc all around me—the other buildings are up in flames, and people are fighting in the streets ten stories below me.