Another difference between this and the estate: the presence of orgs, uniformed “volunteers” and “helpers” who wandered through our ranks with glazed expressions and recognizable bulges beneath their jackets: the pulse gun, which discharged an electric pulse that could cut down a mech at twenty feet, frying his neural matrix for at least an hour—and that was assuming the charge was set on low and nothing went wrong. Of course they weren’t there to shoot us. They were just there to watch. For our own protection.
According to Quinn, speaking in a low voice and veiled terms, the footage that BioMax had been airing to the viewing public had all been shot in the first few days, a suitable advertisement for idyllic corp living. Once the cameras shut down, so did the dome, locking the mechs indoors. Then came the confiscations of clothing, ViMs, all other belongings, the jammed network and VM signals. Communications to the outside were monitored, so if you wanted to tell your parents what a wonderful time you were having at Camp BioMax, you were free to do so. Anything with more detail or more accuracy was promptly censored. For our own protection.
It obviously wouldn’t be necessary to persuade the mechs that they needed to leave. So the real issue was persuading BioMax to let us.
“I get why you came back,” Quinn told Jude. “And I’m not surprised your little lapdog followed along—no offense,” she added quickly, before I could bare my teeth. “But I’d have thought you would be smarter,” she said to Ani.
“I thought the same about you,” Ani said. “Guess I was wrong.”
“So you’ve come to rescue the fair maiden from the tower?”
There was a pause. “And what if I did?”
Another pause, longer this time, like that wasn’t the answer Quinn had been expecting. “Then I hope you really like towers. Because you’re going to be stuck in this one for a long time.”
None of us was ready to admit she was right. There was no denying the fact that we were stuck behind locked doors, without any contact to the world beyond the steel dome, but it’s not like we’d expected to walk into paradise. Much less that we’d be able to just walk right out again. We would find a way.
BioMax staff were positioned at strategic points throughout the atrium, but they periodically disappeared through locked doors into some hidden portion of the dome to which we were denied access. It seemed likely that was where we would find our answers, and maybe even unrestricted access to the network that would let us document the conditions here. For whatever reason, BioMax clearly cared about persuading the world that they had our best interests at heart—which indicated that our best interests lay in revealing their lies. We could have used someone on the inside. But if Auden had been true to his word and snuck someone onto the staff, someone inclined to help us, he wasn’t making his presence known. We were on our own, and breaking an electronic lock and slipping into a forbidden zone without getting noticed by the cameras or the orgs was going to take more than luck and desperation. When the lights went out at the end of that first day, we’d yet to muster anything.
I’d expected that our best exploring would be done that night, but at ten on the dot we were herded into our dark rooms. The door shut behind us, locking with a loud click.
“Sweet dreams, my heroes,” Quinn said. “Can’t wait to see who you save tomorrow.”
She could pretend she didn’t care, but I could tell that even Quinn was allowing herself a little hope. I wasn’t the only one who felt motion was better than standing still, even if you weren’t sure what you were hurtling toward. I spent the night awake, hoping that the darkness and the quiet would facilitate some kind of brilliant insight about how to sneak into the restricted zone. But my mind strayed—away from what I could do, toward what I should have done. If I’d broadcast what I knew to the network sooner, if I’d found a way to out BioMax or stop the Brotherhood before any of this had ever happened, if all those months ago I’d let Auden kiss me and kissed him back, if I’d never gone to the waterfall and he’d never been hurt.
If Zo had been the one to get in the car that day.
It was getting easier and easier to dream without going to sleep.
Finally the lights flared; the alarm screamed; morning came. And with it a cardboard box of fresh uniforms. How thoughtful of them. I kicked it across the room, and cheap synthetic jumpsuits went flying—along with something else. Something that shouldn’t have been there at all. It clattered to the floor, blade gleaming under the fluorescents. Without hesitation, Jude snatched it off the ground and palmed it.
Ani and Quinn watched the door—if the cameras had caught our unexpected windfall and guards came blasting through, at least we’d be ready. Jude perched on his bed, slipped his hand beneath the pillow, and kept it there, drawing strength, I suspected, from the cool blade.
I knelt by the box. There was something taped into one corner: a slim plastic card. I tore off the tape and pulled it out, suspicions confirmed—it was a pass card, an exact replica of the ones the guards flashed as they slipped through their locked steel doors and into the forbidden zone.
I hid it as swiftly as Jude had hidden the knife, tracing my fingers across the smooth plastic.
Auden had come through for us after all.
I drew back my lips, feeling a sudden return to the days when every emotional response was a serious of careful decisions, a memorized series of muscles to be flexed and contracted. This is a smile. This is happy.
I couldn’t say it out loud, it was too dangerous. But the words played in my head, deliriously certain.
I know what to do with the knife.
13. TRUST
“Don’t move,” I whispered, holding the blade a few centimeters from his skin.
Jude lay perfectly still beneath me. “Do it already,” he hissed.
It was harder than I’d thought it would be. Not the mechanics of it—those were simple. We lay in the bed together. He was on his stomach, and I straddled him, knees tight around his hips. A blanket was draped over my head, blocking the cameras but allowing in enough light that I could see the curve of his neck and the tip of the knife. I pressed my thumb against the spot, a hard, raised ridge at the base of the neck. Easy enough to slide the blade into the skin, peel away the flesh, remove the chip. It had, at least, seemed easy when I came up with the idea.
“You want me to do you first?” Jude whispered, when I hesitated.
“No. I have this.”
He’d asked me to do it. Not Ani, not Quinn. He’d wanted the knife in my hands.
It would take no more than the flexing of a single muscle to drive the blade into his back, cut a vital conduit, carve out a life. In the new age of the virus there was only this one body, and Jude was offering his up to me.
I slid the knife across the hard ridge of skin, fast and sure. He gasped, but didn’t move. “Almost done,” I said. I pressed my thumb against the lump, massaging the chip out through the small incision. It slid into view, coated in a viscous green fluid. “Got it.”
He flipped himself over without warning, and suddenly we were face-to-face. His orange eyes glowed in the dim light.
“Your turn.”
I lay beside him and bent my head. Exposed my neck. Trusted him.