“Good-bye, Faye,” I heard Fawkes say, and the memories collapsed.
The rest of my systems began to shut down, rapidfire, one following another. Before I could even grasp what had happened, half of my modules had winked out. Warnings spilled by through the air in front of me as my awareness began to fade away.
I saw Fawkes’s leather shoes, then nothing at all as my visual feed cut out. My balance went next, and I began to fall to one side. There wasn’t time to do anything else; before I lost control of my core systems, I launched the override program.
Code flooded past in a stream as the shutdown was halted. The program infected my control nodes and targeted the command spoke. It began to tear it down, and purged all outstanding instructions from Fawkes….
…And for just a second, it was wide open. For just a second I could see into him as completely as he could see into me. Unlike Lev, or any of the rest of us, Fawkes maintained a command spoke with all of us. Different ones were active at different times, but they never went away. I could sense his connection to all of them, clustered like individual memories somewhere deep inside his mind. They didn’t link to stored information, though. Those portals gave him control over each of the revivors in his network.
Fawkes’s mouth parted slightly.
“What did you—”
He was speaking, but I could barely hear him. Everything else fell away as I stared past the collection of command spokes to another construct that hung behind it. There were thousands of portals, hot orange embers that floated in the dark to form a vast, hazy sphere. It emanated a continuous hum, the combination of thousands of voices, and I knew then what it was.
I’d been outfitted with a secondary communications array that tuned me in to their collective network, so at least on some level, I could sense them. Their constant whispering, like wind or water, had become more pronounced since they’d all been turned and I knew that there were thousands, but to see Fawkes’s connection to them all …it was hard for me to grasp.
“I can see them—” I whispered.
The words got stuck in my throat as thousands of connections opened at once. A flood of data came crashing down on me, choking my buffers before they adjusted in order to keep pace. I felt the field of my memories recede, the points of light sinking into the darkness as a new field of light appeared above them. The individual points in that new field were sharp and clear, like hot embers in the dark. I could sense them all, and like my memories, I could pull them up individually. Each one was a constant stream of information. I watched the embers as they swirled through the void, around that huge, smoldering mass of white light. I could sense their eyes all over the city. They were still concentrated in several large pockets, but that changed by the second as they spread farther, and farther away. It was amazing he could keep command of so many.
“Faye, stop.”
I chose one of the cinders at random and pulled it into the foreground. I was able to coax it open like a portal and look inside. At first, I saw only darkness, but then something moved. Sensations flowed through the connection and into my consciousness. I sensed a bitter cold, and could hear the crackle of ice and grit under many feet as it echoed through the blackness. The unit was underground somewhere. Many more shapes moved through the shadows in front of it.
I reached through the portal and tried to make contact. The images shifted as the revivor turned. When it moved, hundreds of eyes looked back from out of the dark, and each set flashed like those of an animal. They were all together. The sea of eyes flowed by until the revivor stopped moving again, and I caught a glimpse of a tunnel’s concrete wall where someone had spray painted graffiti:
ELEVEN FROM ZERO.
“How are you doing this?” I heard Fawkes ask.
ELEVEN FROM ZERO. It looked like it had been painted a long time ago. I wondered what it meant….
The portal closed. The field of cinders faded and disappeared as Fawkes managed to lock me out.
My HUD flickered, and then I could see again. Fawkes’s blade was tracing an arc toward my neck. I blocked him, and the point embedded in the wall with a thud. The rest of my systems were coming back. Fawkes’s eyes widened slightly as he pulled the bayonet free.
His command spoke had been severed. Orange light burned in Fawkes’s pupils as he tried to issue the override code and realized he no longer had control of me.
Before he could swing again, I struck him in the ribs with my palm and fired my own bayonet. His expression didn’t change as the blade penetrated him and cool, thick blood oozed between my fingers.
He pulled away and the blade came free. He kicked me in the chest with his heel and drew a pistol from inside his jacket. I swept his legs out from under him, and the shot fired into the ceiling as he fell back. He struck the corner of the desk and spun onto the floor as I pulled open the door and scrambled out into the hall.
“Stop her!” I heard him shout.
I kept low as I ran back the way I’d come. Revivors patrolled between the rows, and as they received the order, I saw their guns come out. Several shots boomed behind me, and I heard screams as glass shattered. I caught a glimpse of a woman in one of the cubes as I passed, her face streaked with tears.
Bullets punched through the drywall next to the door’s frame as I reached it and ran through into the hallway beyond.
Zoe Ott—Main Drag
I woke up on my back. It was hot and bright, and right away I knew it wasn’t real.
I rolled over and felt warm pavement under my hands. The sun beat down hard, and the dry air had a bitter, smoky smell. Somewhere under that I caught a whiff of gas fumes. When I was caught in a vision, a lot of times sounds and smells from the real world crept in. Those smells weren’t good.
When I opened my eyes, I saw I was facedown on a big chunk of blacktop that sat at an angle in the sand. All around were other pieces of what at one point must have been street, but it had all been torn up.
A little ways off, I saw half a body buried in the dirt. A harsh wind peppered my face with grit and made the shredded remains of clothes flap around the corpse so that I could see bones underneath.
I got my footing and looked around. The city was gone and all that was left were pieces of buildings—jagged walls with burned-out windows and twisted metal beams. The sky was kind of reddish-brown with no clouds, and it was weirdly quiet. A big gust of wind stirred up dust in the distance that formed a big spiral. I watched it get bigger, then blow itself out. There was no sound but the rush of wind.
Something vibrated in my pocket, and I reached in and pulled out my cell phone. It buzzed again in my hand. I shaded the LCD with my hand and squinted at it. The display said NOELLE HYDE.
I answered the phone, and static crackled in my ear.
“Hello?” I asked. The wind blew again and made my clothes snap.
“We were wrong,” a woman’s voice said. I could barely hear her over the wind and the static.
“What?”
“If any of this gets through,” she said, “you have to do it.”
“Do what?”
“We made a mistake. You have to be the one to—”
The line cut out.
“Hello?” The display on my phone said the call was disconnected.
“What mistake?” I wondered out loud. I had to be the one to do what?
I looked out over the wreckage again. Wind kicked up more sand and I saw more bones underneath. More than sixteen million people had lived there once.
