We holed up in Riley’s place, memories of him everywhere, looking for a way to fix what we’d all helped to break. Zo wanted to sneak back into the corp-town, bust everyone out. Auden wanted to go public, turn himself in to the authorities—turn himself into a martyr, if it would help, or a devil, if that would help more. And Jude was characteristically silent about what he actually wanted, uncharacteristically silent about everything.
But Zo couldn’t risk showing her face at the corp-town again, not with our mother on a rampage and Zo’s presumably suspicious disappearance timed with our own. Quinn and Ani had their own share of the toxin. We had to trust them to figure out something to do with it. Auden’s plan was just as craptastic, relying as it did on mythical authorities of an objective nature unaffiliated with any of the corps, unswayed by power and credit we didn’t have. Given that all of the secops were owned by one corp or another, that BioMax was in business with all of them, and that the Justice Department—the only arm of the government not officially licensed out to private enterprise—was also the one that hated mechs the most, we had a better chance of tracking down a unicorn. Turn himself in and he’d promptly disappear, only to resurface once BioMax and the Brotherhood had done whatever they planned to do and were ready to parade their scapegoat for public shaming.
We’d dropped what we knew and what we suspected about Safe Haven onto the network, posting it to every zone we could—knowing that most would get purged by BioMax and the rest would likely be lost in the noise, seeming no more or less credible than any of the other rumors flying about the skinner plague, as it was being called. Some probably even believed us—not just the crackpots who matched our claims with conspiracies of their own, but the occasional sane, sober observers who were inclined to suspect the corps were up to no good. Some wished us well, some even raised a little online ruckus, but none was in a position to help.
We were on our own. Two machines. Two orgs. Four teenagers with no power and no plan. At least Auden was on the run from nefarious cult leaders and corporate overlords. As opposed to me, hiding out from my mother.
It wasn’t the most promising of revolutionary cabals.
“We can’t do anything about what’s going to happen inside Safe Haven,” I said. “But we can stop phase three. Or at least we can try.”
“We can’t stop it if we don’t even know what it is,” Jude said, sounding defeated.
“Whatever it is, it’s happening on that server ship on Sunday,” I said.
“You think,” Jude said.
Zo and Auden agreed that it was the only thing that made sense with what little else we knew. The once-a-month window had given it away. “If we can get on board with Ben’s team, we can figure out what they’re doing,” I said. “We can stop them.”
“Great,” Jude said sourly. “So all we need to do—assuming your blind hunch is right—is sneak on board a high-security facility floating in a secret location in the middle of the Atlantic and stop a team of determined and presumably armed genocidal maniacs from completing their nebulous mission. Brilliant plan.”
“Glad you agree.”
Jude was, of course, right. The plan—or, rather, ambiguous idea completely lacking in practical execution—wasn’t brilliant so much as insane. Especially the part that involved us getting ourselves onto a server ship without anyone noticing and, more to the point, without getting tossed overboard. The network servers were overseen by a private consortium of tech and security corps, its operations designed for maximal transparency (for those whose job it was to watch) and maximal secrecy (for the rest of us unwashed masses). They floated on massive ocean freighters, each the length of several football fields, shadowing the coastline, their endless rows of whirring machines processing the data of millions while armed guards—or armed machines, or, for all any of us knew, armed armadillos, or some deadly combination of all three—patrolled the corridors, sworn to protect the network with their lives. Ships set out once a month with reinforcements, repairs, representatives from any corp who needed to address problems with their dedicated servers—ships that plotted a top-secret course radioed to the captain on a special frequency only once the boat had X-rayed and analyzed every single thing, animate or in-, to come aboard.
The server farms were governed by no law but the law of expediency. Its servants followed a prime directive, to the exclusion of all else: Protect the servers. Protect the mindless hordes who trusted every piece of their lives to the security of the floating machines. Trusted not just their zones, their relationships and memories, but their jobs, their life savings, their lives—whenever they trusted their automated cars or their high-speed elevators or the biofilters that kept their air breathable and the wireless energy that kept everything humming, including me. The guardians of those ships protected all of us who acted as if the data cloud floated in an impermeable bubble through some alternate, inaccessible realm, as if we weren’t living in a virtual world built almost entirely on the switches and circuits and routers floating through poisonous waters and roughing stormy seas.
That, at least, was what we’d heard.
That was the only thing anyone knew about the server farms: rumors. Everyone knew a guy, who knew a guy, who used to work for someone who staffed one of the ships. Everyone had heard something, but no one knew anything. I’d once overheard my father arguing with one of his board members about whether or not the servers operated as independent international entities or were wholly owned American enterprises, and much as he’d tried to disguise it, the truth had been clear: Even he had no idea. Everyone knew—or at least “knew”—that once a month an elite group got access to the servers to upgrade them on behalf of their own corps, but either they were shielded from penetrating any of the ships’ secrets, or the ghostly overseers had a way to make them keep their mouths shut. Access to the servers meant access to everything. We were a world of connectivity; a linked-in globe. It was our pride as a human race. And apparently, it worked only if none of us knew how.
“We’re thinking too far ahead,” I said suddenly.
Auden laughed quietly. “I wouldn’t say that’s exactly your problem, Lia.”
“No, I mean it. You’re right, Jude—”
He held up a hand to stop me. “Moment of silence, please, while I enjoy this history-making moment.”
I smacked his arm. Lightly, but not too lightly. “You’re right that we have no way of getting on that ship or figuring out what’s going on—not by ourselves. And maybe you’re right that I’m just guessing. We need more answers. We need help, from someone who knows exactly what BioMax is up to—or at least knows how to find out.”
That woke him up. “Ben?”
“He’s leading the team, right? Whether he knows about phase three or he doesn’t, he’s going to be there when it happens. So either he gives us the information we need, or he makes sure that we’re there when it happens, too.”
“And why would he do that?” Jude asked.
There was a time when I would have hesitated to ask the next question. This time I didn’t. “Do you have a gun stashed here somewhere?”
Surprised, Jude shook his head. That was problematic. I’d counted on him having easy access to a weapon, as he always seemed to. We could get in touch with another of his city contacts, but that meant complications, and time…
Auden cleared his throat. “I do.”
“But it’s my gun,” Auden said, as we were packing up to leave.
“It’s safer to leave someone behind,” I said. “If anything happens and we need reinforcements—”