Not just the racket outside, but the voices, the screaming, the wind, everything. In the quiet, my ears rang.
I opened my eyes. I was outside, on the street. There was no explosion and no falling debris. Snow fell gently through the night sky.
Neon lit up the dark. I was on a sidewalk, with my back to a parked car. There was snow piled up along the curb between the walkway and the street. The street was full of cars, and people streamed by all around me. None of them even seemed to notice I was there.
I stood up and brushed myself off. My breath trailed as I looked across the street and saw the towering face of Alto Do Mundo, all glass and neon. It was completely intact. The UTTC still stood in the distance, and far off, I could see the third needle of the CMC Tower.
I shook my head, and snow went down the back of my neck. No one looked at me, and no cars honked, even when I wandered out into the road.
From the dark mouth of an alley I saw a pair of eyes flash, low to the ground. They stared up at me, and I heard a low growl.
I took a step back as a dog moved out onto the sidewalk to face me. It was big, with matted, mangy fur. A patch was shaved on one side and I could see an ugly, scabby bite mark on the bare skin there.
“You again,” I said. It stopped a few feet away and bared its teeth. Its gums were black, and its fangs were stained red.
“You were in my dream—”
The dog jumped. I slipped and fell back onto the sidewalk with it on top of me. I could feel its breath on my face as it snapped, and I crossed my arms between us.
Its jaws clamped down on my wrist and I screamed. Blood gushed out of the wound, and my hand went numb as the dog huffed out a breath through its cold nose. I tried to kick away, but it wouldn’t let go.
A warm feeling crept up my arm from the spot where it had me. The warmth moved up to my shoulder, into my chest, into my heart. My body began to feel relaxed and a little numb. It was a little like being drunk.
The dog let me go. It barked once, then turned and ran off.
“Son of a bitch …”
I rolled over and got on my knees. None of the people on the street even glanced at me. When I held up my forearm, I could see muscle through the tear in the skin. It looked like it should hurt, but it didn’t. It didn’t hurt at all.
The weird heat coursed through my whole body, and my body relaxed. I looked around, but the dog was gone.
The neon lights flickered. I felt sick for a second, and then out of nowhere, words appeared in the air in front of me. They were like words on a computer terminal, but they just hung there in the air, like they were floating in space a few inches from my face.
“What the hell?” someone next to me asked.
I turned and saw a man standing on the sidewalk. He was staring at the air in front of him with his brow scrunched, like he was reading something.
When I looked around, I saw the others, all around me, doing the same thing. Some rubbed their eyes. They all looked confused and afraid.
“They see the words too,” a voice said. I turned and saw a woman standing a few feet away from me, her stringy black hair whipping in the wind. She had a tattoo of a snake that swallowed its own tail around her neck, just like me and just like Penny.
“You’re Noelle,” I said. Her shirt was stained with blood around a slit in the fabric. Through the hole, I could see a deep stab wound.
“They all have it,” she said.
“Have what?”
She waved for me to follow, and I did as she limped down the sidewalk to a rusted metal door just inside a nearby alley. Men bundled under dirty blankets watched us from the shadows as she pulled the door open. She waved again and stepped through.
As soon as I was through the door, it slammed behind me and everything went black. As I turned back, though, a light came on from overhead and I saw Noelle standing near an electrical switchbox on one wall. The light flickered across concrete walls that were painted green. Three electric lights, all dark, hung near the far wall. There were no bodies, and this time the table and chair were missing. When I looked around, I saw a series of wire cages along the back wall. Inside each one was a dirty-looking bedroll.
The floor was littered with trash, and the air smelled like BO and piss. In with the empty food containers and cardboard cups were torn white wrappers marked STERILE. In one corner was a used syringe with a broken needle. Noelle looked at the mess sadly.
“It’s almost time,” she said.
“I don’t understand,” I said, but she didn’t seem to hear me.
“You see your mind’s interpretation of the quantum data streams it receives,” she said. “Information can only be sent back.”
“What information? What are you talking about?”
“By now, Fawkes has released the nanovirus,” she said. “He does this in an attempt to end our influence over the rest of them.”
“Maybe he should,” I said.
“His plan will fail,” she said. “It was only supposed to replicate a set number of times. Enough to spread throughout the world, and then degenerate of its own accord. The violence of the spread would stop, leaving the world free from us, but something went wrong. Something alters the virus. The replication never stops. It can’t be allowed to spread beyond the city.”
“The bombs,” I said.
“The city’s destruction overshadowed and hid the real disaster. We couldn’t see past it. Fawkes never intended to destroy the city, but because of him, because of us, someone will have to. It will come down to the city, or the world.”
My throat burned, and I felt tears in my eyes as I leaned back against the cold concrete wall. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t have the strength. Was what she was saying true? Was any of this even real at all?
“What is this place?” I asked. “Why do I keep coming here?”
“The green zones are all that is left.”
Green zones. It was true, then; there was more than one. The Green Room changed from vision to vision because at some point in the future, there would be more than one of them.
“What are they for?”
“Refugees are brought here to see if they can be saved. This is all that’s left of humanity.”
My forearm itched. When I scratched at it, I saw the scab from the dog bite there.
“That’s how it spreads,” Noelle said, “at least at first. People without our abilities will begin to realize that we’re among them. They’ll wake up and regain their memories, but the mechanism to wake them up was fashioned on revivor technology. We didn’t know what we were dealing with until it was too late. We now believe the countervirus we developed corrupted the original variant somehow and caused the mutation. Pushed past the limits of its design, Fawkes’s variant eventually remembers its original purpose.”
“And what’s that?”
“To make revivors,” she said. “And that is what it tries to do.”
The ceiling spun over my head and a high-pitched whine filled both my ears. Pressure built up in my head and behind my eyes until every time my heart beat, pain throbbed through my skull. I felt like I was going to be sick.
“Noelle, help me …I can’t do this…. ”
