“And you’re sure that’s what she said? He’s not with the Faction?” John kept his voice low. He sat in his chair close to Ian in the kitchen of the garage. Wink had left a stack of cereal bowls in the sink. A tower of twenty-seven empty pizza boxes leaned against the fridge.
Ian nodded. “I kinda freaked. I guess I should have asked more questions or something. Sorry. In my defense, I didn’t even think to ask for her phone number.”
John scowled.
“I was more worried about Xan.” Ian sighed. “And Wink.”
“Wink?” John’s eyes got big. “Don’t tell me she’s having . . .”
Ian waited. “Having?”
“You know. Female. Stuff.”
Ian made a face. “No! Jesus! How the fuck would I know?”
John shook his head. “I don’t know how men have daughters.”
“I don’t think they get a lot say in the matter.”
“So what’s wrong with her?”
“I dunno. She’s just acting . . . weird? I guess.”
John thought for a moment. He nodded. “I thought it was just everything with Xan.”
Ian shrugged. “Maybe. I mean, none of us are exactly doing great, you know.”
“Yeah.” John was stoic. “But then, I’ve had some time to get used to my disability.”
Ian shut his eyes. “I don’t wanna talk about that. Okay? Can we just not talk about that for a bit? You can bug me about it later. We’re talking about Wink now so let’s just stick with that.”
“What do you wanna do?”
Ian stood straight. He wasn’t expecting that. He wasn’t expecting John to ask. He was expecting John to solve it and give him an order.
But he did ask. And it was genuine, too. Like he actually gave a shit what Ian thought.
This moment was not nearly as exciting as Ian had thought it would be. In fact, he wanted John to just go ahead and take this one and catch him next time.
“I dunno. But I don’t like all the sneaking around. You and I whispering in a corner like this. It’s not right. We’re supposed to be a team.”
“Have you tried talking to her?”
“No. That’s what I’m saying! It seemed like I should talk to you about everything first.”
“And that’s a good instinct. But you’re right. If we’re a team, then we owe her the benefit of the doubt.” John looked Ian in the eye and waited.
“Me? Why do I have to talk to her? You’re team captain or whatever.”
“Because she sees me as some kinda dad or authority figure or something. She’ll just say everything is fine. You have the best shot at getting her to open up.” John paused. “She cares about you, ya know. That’s why she’s always giving you a hard time.”
“Oh, I know. And that’s why I can just roll with it. Usually.” Ian raised a finger. “Which isn’t always easy, you know.” He dropped his hand again. “She’s actually come up with some really clever insults. I’m kinda jealous.” Ian sighed overly loudly and walked to the door. “Duuuuude . . . being an adult sucks.”
“Tell me about it.”
Ian spun around on the heel of his Converse. “You know she’s just gonna lie. Same as always.”
“She’s a kid. Sure, she’s a genius. Maybe the smartest person just about anywhere. But she’s a kid, and she’s at that age where she’s trying to figure out what kinda person she’s gonna be. Whatever’s happened to her in the past, wherever she’s from, I get the impression it wouldn’t take much to push her off the edge.”
“She does have the makings of a serious supervillain.” Ian snorted. “I keep wondering how long it will be before she makes sharks with frickin’ laser beams on their heads.”
John shrugged. “You know what that means. If we don’t bring her around.”
Ian let his head fall back. “Xan’s so much better at the parent thing. I mean, Wink’s so frickin’ smart, half the time it doesn’t feel like I’m that much older than her.”
John turned for the door. “That’s ’cuz you’re not.”
“Gee, thanks, Dad.” Ian flipped off the retreating soldier in jest. Then he walked into the garage.
There was stuff everywhere. All Wink’s tools. All her gadgets. Everything was laid out on the floor. She had another colorful bandage, this time on her ear. A bundle of empty plastic grocery sacks sat balled in the corner.
“What happened?” He motioned to it.
The girl didn’t look up. “Nothing.”
“Things not go quite as you expected in surgery, Doctor?”
“Shut up.”
Ian looked at all the equipment. “Going somewhere?”
“What do you mean?”
“I dunno. It just looks like you’re packing up.”
“Well, duh. We’re not gonna stay here.”
“We’re not?”
“Prophet wants us to move as soon as Xan is able.”
“Leave the garage? Since when?” Ian felt his insides clench, and the reaction surprised him. The junkyard was starting to feel like home. As much as his mattress stank, and the kitchen was filthy, and he could hear Xana snoring, and he frequently had to wait to use the bathroom, it was his one constant, a fixed star in a life that had been stripped of all moorings. The possibility of moving resurrected the certainty that, at some point, all of this had to end. Quite probably in death. “Does Cap know?”
“I was going to tell him at the briefing.”
“Did you get through all the data?” Ian sat down next to the computer array by the old tow truck and picked up a heavy, brushed metal canister sitting next to him. Wires poked from the top. He recognized it immediately. He smiled at Wink. “The magnetometer!” It was a pleasant reminder of how they met. It seemed like years ago. It had only been weeks.
The little girl snapped up from organizing her precision tools on the floor. “Uh, no. You lost that, remember? I had to make a new one.” She took the device with two hands. “And thanks for that by the way.”
“Whatever, dude. You bailed on me, remember?”
“There was a cop, doofus! When the cops come, you run.” She set the magnetometer on the floor. “Jeez, it’s like you never stole anything before.”
“I haven’t.”
“Well, it’s not my problem you’re a pussy. Now I know better.”
Ian had a thought. “Oh man . . . That big round thing under the tarp. Out back. Are you telling me that’s your reactor-thingie-whatever?”
Wink made an exaggeratedly long face and cocked her head to one side.
Ian squinted. “That’s what this is for, right? And the plutonium.” He turned his head. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen it lately. “Where did it go, by the way?”
The girl mocked Ian’s late epiphany by sliding her palms down her cheeks. It pulled her skin and her eyelids down as if she were slowly melting.
“Isn’t it a little dangerous to, ya know, keep a reactive pile just lying around?”
“Only if you turn it on.”
“What happens if there’s an accident?”
“There’ll be a big hole in New Jersey.”
Ian thought about the meltdown in China. “That’s not funny. There are innocent people.”
"I put a sign on it."
"A sign?" Ian gritted his teeth. He raised his fist, mocking his own genuine frustration.
“There’s not gonna be an accident. Fuck, man.”
“Stop swearing.”
“Stop telling me what to do.”
Ian stood. "You can’t just keep playing with plutonium."
Wink made bug eyes. “There’s not gonna be an accident. I swear.”
“Yeah.” Ian turned for the hall to the storage unit-turned-briefing room. “That’s exactly what you said when you let me get captured.”
Wink stuck out her tongue, but Ian didn’t retort.
His phone chimed with a calendar reminder. “It’s time. Let’s go.” He walked through the doorway without looking back.
“I’ll be right there.” The girl’s face grew dark. She looked at the metal canister. She wrapped up her tools and walked out the rear and through the lean-to kitchen and into a small storage shed in the yard. It smelled of paint and old turpentine. After a moment, when she was sure no one was around, she started shaking.
Then she started to cry.
She didn’t know what to do. Everyone was in danger. Serious danger. Immediate danger. Because of her. And she couldn’t tell them the truth. They’d never forgive her. Not ever. Only she’d been running the math in her head, and there was no solution this time. Not against what hunted them. Not against so many. She’d done the math. There was no victory. There was only death. John first. Then Ian and Xana. And finally herself. The best she could do was buy them some time.
But that meant blowing it all up. All of it. Everything.
Forever.
Wink sobbed softly in the shed. She breathed in short gasps and swallowed tears.
She had no idea what to do. For the first time in her life, the little genius had no more ideas.
“How did it go?” John asked.
Ian walked past without turning and sat down. “I can’t talk to her.”
John turned his chair and wheeled to the front of the white-walled briefing room. “That well?”
Xana was just across the hall. The beeps from her machines announced her pulse was stable. Dr. Zabora was sitting next to her. She looked up but didn’t say anything.
Wink walked in. Her eyes were red and her cheeks were flushed.
“You okay?” John asked.
The girl didn’t answer. She set her laptop down and plugged it into the portable projector. An image flashed on the wall.
“What are we looking at?” John asked.
“This is a satellite image from just after the meltdown in China. A couple miles upriver, there’s a huge dam complex under construction. It was supposed to have been abandoned after the radiation leakage along with everything else.” On the screen, a new image appeared of the same landscape. “This is from last week.”
“Looks like they didn’t get the memo.” John looked at the dam complex. It had changed dramatically. It seemed nearly complete. “Okay, so that’s our target.” He paused. “In rural China.” Of all places. He had no idea how they would get in there.
One problem at a time.
“How the hell are we supposed to get to China?” Ian asked as if reading John’s mind.
John shook his head. “I don’t know.” He looked at Wink. She clearly had more bad news. “What’s it for?”
“Are you ready for this?”
“Just spit it out.” Ian was already annoyed.
“It’s like one of their projectors, the tech that lets them look out of people’s eyes. But way worse.”
“Worse? Worse how?”
“You’d have to understand quantum biology for me to answer that.”
“Quantum biology?” Ian scowled. “Is that really a thing?”
“Look it up.”
John squinted at the screen. “Are you saying they’ve cracked the human brain?”
“Actually, they discovered it was already cracked.”
“By who?”
“You,” the girl answered. “Or people like you. It’s a version of hitching. They must have found someone else like you at some point.”
John thought about the old woman in the cave. Someone must have taught her, just as she taught him. How far back did it go? Centuries, probably. It only made sense there was someone else. Probably multiple someones. John had been running for so long, he hadn’t thought about there being other people like him in the world. Would they see him as a threat? He couldn’t worry about that now.
“They collect all the weird shit in the world, right? Once they found this, they started designing machines to replicate it. Quantum entanglement. Only the technology is still in its infancy, so they can’t take anybody over. All they can do is sort of hang on. Vision or hearing. But not both at the same time.”
“So they really can see out of other people’s eyes.” Amarta was standing in the doorway. She walked in and took a seat, putting a hand on John’s shoulder as she passed.
Wink saw it. “Get this. A decade ago, if you used one of those automated photo booths in the mall, odds are you got snagged, at least for a while.”
Amarta looked confused. “Why? Why target random strangers?”
“A test,” John said without looking.
Wink nodded. “Operational test. And not just of the tech, but of the whole system on a large scale. Could they produce the equipment with a low defect rate? Could they distribute in secret? How long would the entanglement remain stable and over how great a distance? Would any environmental factors interfere, like microwave ovens or high-tension power lines or a blow to the head? What kind of data could they extract? What could they learn? There’s a million variables to something like this.”
Wink tapped on her computer and a new window opened next to the satellite image. A few dozen blue dots appeared on a map of the world. “Thirty-seven cities around the globe for a period of eighteen months.”
John pointed to the dam complex. “So I’m guessing whatever’s in there increases their reach.”
“The technology uses quantum entanglement to link neurons so that one firing stimulates an analogous neuron in another brain instantaneously. When Cap hitches, he never actually leaves his own body. It just seems like he does because the two minds are connected at a distance.” She pointed. “With this machine, along with their satellite and ground network, they can entangle almost anyone on the planet.”
Ian whistled.
“What do you mean almost?” John asked.
“The final plan is to have three machines running simultaneously.” An image of the globe appeared on the wall. Red dots blinked. “One in China, one in Somalia, and one in Guyana. That’s why they were manipulating the Guyanese government into opening up the jungle for mining. Once the bauxite is depleted and everyone moves on, they get the big giant hole in the ground near the equator way out in the middle of nowhere. In fact, all three locations are extremely remote, underdeveloped, far from population centers, with direct access to a major river.”
“Why a river?” Ian asked.
“Hydroelectric power. They don’t want to be dependent on any national grid. And the near-equatorial placement at these three locations ensures steady water flow even in drought as well as gives them double-redundant coverage over most of the earth’s habitable landmass. If any one site goes down, they’ll still be operational with a second backup.”
John squinted. “How far are they on the other sites?”
“They haven’t even started. So far they’ve only broken ground at the China location.”
Ian nodded. “The reactor meltdown. Nothing keeps everyone away like a quarantine.”
John stared at the screen. “That’s a lot of concrete.”
Wink nodded. “It’s a dam.”
“It’s a fortress,” John added.
Wink brought up a diagram of the entanglement generator. It was a massive, three-pronged spinning magnet inside a fourteen-story concrete sphere two hundred meters underground.
Everyone stared for a long time. It was like a massive machine claw reaching up from the earth. The room fell silent.
Ian was the first to say what they had all been thinking. “Nothing will ever be secret.” He spoke softly. “Ever.”
The others turned to him.
He shifted his weight and looked at Stubs. “Nothing. Ever.”
Amarta nodded.
John carried the thought. “Nuclear launch codes. Diplomatic strategies. Weapon designs. The formula for Coke. Your tax records. The love song you share with your wife. Your daughter’s diary. Your secret weaknesses. Your dark fantasies.
“They’ll see everything.” Ian was stoic. “They’re literally going to hack the world.”
The team sat in silence.
John looked at the now-familiar symbol at the bottom of the screen. He pointed. “Look. Three sites. Three circles. And the lines . . . connecting everything to everything else. And all of us in the middle. This was always their plan. It was the endgame from the very beginning.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Wink tapped on her computer. “It gets worse.”
“Worse?” Ian snorted. “How could it possibly get any worse?”
“Phase I was the test. Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Sites are Phase II. It looks like there’s a Phase III. The technology isn’t ready yet, but they’re progressing fast. Thanks to some nanotech research by someone named Pavel Havek.”
“Progressing with what?” John asked.
Ian stood and paced. “I don’t wanna know.”
“Direct computer interface, sort of like facial recognition, only for thought patterns.”
“Wait.” Ian was incredulous. “You’ll mean they’ll be able to read our thoughts?”
Wink nodded.
“Remotely. Everyone on the planet.”
Wink nodded again.
“Jesus Christ.” John looked down.
Wink pointed to a technical design on the screen. “Every thought of every human. Scanned into a database. Real-time. As it appears. Sorted. Indexed. Searchable.”
Ian shook his head. “They'll be no resistance. No bunker you can hide in. No ocean trench.”
Amarta started laughing. Her lungs burst and she put her hand in front of her reddening face as she leaned uncontrollably to one side.
John turned. “What’s so funny?”
Amarta caught her breath. She shook her head as if to say it was no big deal. “Sorry. Nothing. It’s just . . . Orwell was an optimist.” Amarta laughed again.
John turned back to the massive curved prongs on the screen.
“I mean, if you can believe that,” Amarta continued. “He just assumed we’d know Big Brother was watching. That we’d know he exists. It’s so 20th-century. We won’t even know there is such a thing as thought-crime, let alone when we’re committing one. No one will have any clue that there are people out there doing keyword searches on their minds, the metadata of their thoughts, looking for patterns, running predictive algorithms.” She shook her head.
Ian leaned back against the wall and twisted his shoes on the floor.
John felt numb for the first time in months. He didn’t feel anything. He pressed his lips together. It was the ultimate conquest. Forget communism. Or even terrorism. Amarta was right. Knowing you had an enemy out there somewhere, even if they were hiding, that was positively optimistic. This wasn’t a cold war. It was a secret war.
How could people win a fight they didn’t know they were in?
“Complete, utter, total control . . .” Ian was rocking in his shoes, shifting his weight back and forth. He wanted to run. He wanted to hit something.
John nodded to the screen. “Over time, those in the know will want to be exempt. A new ruling elite will emerge, a phantom aristocracy, tied—not to wealth or oil or mass media—but to thoughts, to pure human information. Their whims will determine everything. The course of history.”
Ian kept rocking. He shook his head. There was no army that could stop this. No cavalry to call. “Somebody’s gotta stop them.”
“Who?”
“Someone.”
“You mean us.”
“I mean someone. There’s gotta be someone. I mean . . . there are people who know, right? Why isn’t anyone doing anything? Why aren’t they in the street starting a revolt?”
John was quiet. “Right now they’re out there asking us the same thing.”
Ian thought about the pictures Axl had shown him. People were doing something, he realized.
But no one cared. He hadn’t. When he was worried about his job. About Emli. About the Vermont Conspiracy concert.
“What’s going on?”
Ian spun around. His mouth dropped open. “XAN!”
He put his hand on the big woman leaning against the door. Her eyes were half-shut and her voice was slurred from the pain medication.
“You shouldn’t be up. You need to get back to bed.”
“I’m okay. I’m just tired.”
“Xan, you just had open-heart surgery yesterday.”
“Where am I? Where’s my picture of AJ?”
Amarta stepped forward and pulled Xana gently back toward the bed. “Ms. Jace, you need to lie down. You’ve just had heart surgery.”
“Surgery?” Xana scowled as she shuffled across the hall. She was trailing tubed and wires. She reached behind and fumbled with the sheets and blanket on the gurney as she slowly lowered herself. “What do you mean surgery? What kind of surgery?”
The team huddled into the room. Ian helped Xana lift her large feet into the bed as best he could with one hand.
“Heart surgery,” Amarta repeated. “Your heart stopped. Your friends here made a pretty miraculous effort to save you. You’re lucky to be alive.”
Wink ran around and hooked everything back up. “It totally makes sense she’s up already. Her super-strong muscles are keeping the incisions closed. Like a vise. As long as she’s on pain medication and doesn’t exert herself for a while, she should be totally fine.” She said it like she was trying to convince herself.
Xana didn’t lose her confused scowl. She settled into the bed, feet hanging off the end, and leaned against the inclined back.
“Do you understand where you are?” Amarta stepped closer and looked back and forth between Xana’s eyes.
John knew what she was doing—looking for evidence of neurological damage. Xana’s brain had been without oxygen for several minutes while they restarted her heart. Both times. That’s when Wink had rigged the machines from the Mast and John had cooked up the plan. Drive to Philly and find Amarta. Wink found a suitable location close enough to risk moving her. Ian got the necessary supplies.
“Ms. Jace? Can you understand me? You’re coming off anesthetic. And you’re on pain medication. You may be a little groggy and confused. It’s completely normal.”
Xana scowled at her own toes poking up from under the blanket. She wriggled them. They were definitely hers. But it didn’t seem like it. “What did you say about my heart? Is it okay?”
“I’ll get it.” Wink ran from the room.
“Get it?” Xana turned her eyes just in time to see the little girl disappear. “Get what?”
Amarta raised a finger in front of Xana’s face. “Ms. Jace, I’m a doctor. I’m a friend of John’s.”
“John?”
“Follow my fingers, please. Can you do that?”
Xana nodded and did as she was told.
Amarta took Xana’s hand and put three fingers in her palm. “Can you squeeze for me?”
John raised his hand and rolled forward. “Whoa whoa I wouldn’t do that—”
“Ah!” Amarta dropped to her knees and pulled her hand free. She stood and shook her fingers and walked in a circle. “Oh my God.”
“Are you okay?” John smiled.
Amarta made a fist and opened it “Yes. I think so. Good thing she’s still weak. Holy cow.”
“Here it is!” Wink ran into the room with a metal-topped glass jar. “I saved it. I thought you might want it.”
She handed it to Xana, who took it slowly.
Confusion left. Tears came.
Xana cradled the jar in her hands.
Her heart rocked back and forth inside. Floating.
Her lips quivered. “What did you do?” she asked softly.
“Wink . . .” Ian covered his eyes.
The room fell silent.
Xana’s face twisted in sadness. “What did you do to me?” She looked up at them, from one to the next.
No one knew what to say.
“We . . .” Wink fumbled in confusion. “We saved you,” she pleaded. “We made you better.”
Xana looked to her, then back at the still heart cradled in her hands. They were so big. The heart looked tiny. Or was that an illusion from the fluid in the jar, like how a stick bends when you poke it in the river?
The river.
Home.
AJ.
Xana’s eyes went wide. She placed a hand over her heart.
Nothing.
She wrapped her hand around her neck and felt for a pulse.
Nothing.
Her eyes welled until they were blurry. She turned to the team. “What did you do?”
“It’s a thermal-powered pump and gas exchange. It hyper-oxygenates your blood cells so now you’ll be even stron—”
“Wink,” John interjected softly.
“Whaaat?” She turned. “I’m just trying to explain how—”
“I think we should give her some time.” Amarta put her hand on the little girl’s shoulder.
Wink turned up her palms and squinted. “What the hell, man?” She spun back to Xana. “You wanted to die? Is that it?”
“Wink,” Ian chided.
“No! We improved her.” The little girl looked around. “Is everyone too stupid to see? We made her measurably better. Her muscles are totally unbounded now. Not by her bones. Not by her heart. So she doesn’t have a heartbeat anymore. Big frickin’ deal!”
The adults were silent.
“Come.” Amarta reached out again.
But Wink didn’t move. She looked at Xana, tearing and hunched over her heart. She looked so frail. So hurt. Like she’d—Wink pressed her lips together in realization—like she’d had her heart cut out.
The little girl felt her skin flush and turn deep red. Everyone was staring at her.
Maybe she miscalculated a few things. About hearts.
And everything.
She had missed something. Lots of things. Maybe—just maybe—that meant she was the moron after all.
She ran from the room.
The others watched. Then they followed and left Xana sobbing softly. The big woman didn’t watch them leave. She simply bawled over the heart in her hands. The organ in the jar that had once held all of her love. For her father. For Sister Rosa. For AJ. For everyone. Ever.
Ian turned in the hall. He raised his eyebrows to John, lifted his hood over his head, and walked away silently as he reached for the stub of his severed arm.
Amarta shut the door. She looked at John. “You . . . have your work cut out for you.”
But John didn’t answer. His eyes were on the projection in the briefing room across the hall.
In the lower right corner, the countdown ticked relentlessly.
The whole world had less than two weeks.