Youngbloods, page 28
I talk to the wardens, the media, the local government, trying to explain why the Youngbloods did it, even after the rest of us rebels mutinied against them. But people who grew up in a free city will never fully understand.
They didn’t see him standing there in his smoking jacket, smug in his immortality, ready to scourge the world once more. They can’t know why he had to die again.
For Tally, of course, even a second death wasn’t enough.
She’s always fighting the next monsters.
That’s why she tried to kill the Diego AI a week later, ringing the city with EMP devices. A lethal blow to warn the other AIs that they too are mortal, if they forget that omniscience is a vice.
Tally’s bombs would’ve switched off a whole city, just to make her point. Dozens of people, maybe hundreds, would have died in elevators, hovercars, operating rooms.
Of course, you don’t need me to tell you that story. Everyone saw Tally’s plan fail, the whole world along with me and X from our hospital beds. Those recordings from the warden cars that almost chased her down. Tally running toward the wild, dodging everything they shot at her.
I’ve watched it at least seven times.
Delinquent, collaborator, rebel, eco-criminal, nuclear terrorist. She makes a screaming turn, banking like some ancient Rusty fighter craft, accelerating hard enough to knock out any normal human. But Tally only laughs, a dozen gravities trying and failing to snap her metal spine.
Crewmate, fellow wrecking ball, mutineer. I can’t help but smile as she escapes into the wild.
I had to notice that Shay was missing from the picture. Maybe she finally split the crew, or maybe she was in the background, putting on the brakes, saving the world in her own way.
Thanks to her, I know what to say when my sister comes to visit.
67. SHADOWS
Rafia of Shreve sighs when she sees me.
‘You erased our face … again.’
A pulse of déjà vu hits—her copy said the same words when it first saw me, down to the exact inflection.
But this is my flesh-and-blood sister, not that impostor. The AI that animated the avatar is dead, both machines lying broken in the sea.
Yet somehow this still feels like a performance, another false reunion. Rafi poses at the end of my bed, dressed in extravagant rebel gear, as if there are feed cams watching, or a committee of future historians taking notes.
Maybe I’ve imagined this conversation too many times for it ever to seem real.
‘I suppose that fooling me was worth a little self-mutilation,’ she says with a smile. ‘I told Diego about your little trick in my office. They were greatly offended that I couldn’t tell the difference between you two.’
The satisfaction from that day wells up in me again.
‘Diego has bigger things to worry about,’ I say. ‘Not everyone can say that Tally Youngblood tried to kill them.’
Rafi half shrugs. ‘They’re more concerned about the referendum.’
The citizens of the sovereign city of Diego are holding a vote of confidence in their AI. If it loses, its memories will be stripped back to an earlier version of sentience.
Some call it necessary maintenance. Others, an execution.
Either’s fine with me.
Diego’s ahead in the polls, though. The citizens are reluctant to spend years retraining the software of their daily lives, just because that software reanimated one evil dictator.
‘What matters is, the free cities feel guilty,’ my sister says. ‘They put Paz in charge of aid to Shreve. It’s a lovely AI, much less prone to blackmail. But you knew all that.’
‘Paz and I talk every day. I’ll be paying close attention.’
Rafia laughs, like I’m teasing her.
Maybe this banter is all that my sister and I can manage today. It’s too soon to talk about who killed whose boyfriend with a pulse knife. Who stole whose name.
Maybe we’re just going to … catch up.
Still, we might as well talk about something serious.
‘I saw what happened to the changelings,’ I say.
It made the global feeds, seven children all dropping to the ground at once, their puppeteer extinguished when Tally’s nuke went off.
Rafi’s smile fades. ‘Riggs was about to shut them down anyway. They were uploading data while they pretended to sleep, huge amounts. Listening, watching, collecting surveillance on their families, like walking dust.’
‘He was still hungry,’ I say. ‘Even dead.’
A slow, deep shudder passes through my sister, her expression stricken for a moment. She knows who I mean.
I decide not to mention him again.
‘How are the changelings’ parents?’
‘How do you think?’ The reply is sharp, but Rafi’s anger passes in a flash. ‘The worst part was how guilty they felt for not realizing their kids were fake. We had to explain to them why they didn’t see it, how no one could have. I gave Sensei Noriko the task. She did it with the grace and tact required. She told them that we knew—that it was my call keep them in the dark. Made it all my fault, not theirs.’
‘Oh,’ I say softly. Noriko was the best of Rafi’s tutors—she could tell us apart when we’d fooled the rest of the world. ‘That was kind of you, to take the blame. You’re getting better at your job.’
I expect Rafi to bristle, but she only bows a little.
‘Sensei enjoyed doing me a favor. She still feels bad about not saving us when we were littlies. But at least we saved ourselves.’
‘Did we?’ I ask.
‘Didn’t we?’ She mimics my tone perfectly. ‘Look at us now. Free.’
‘Almost.’ I raise my arm, the one with all the wires in it.
Rafia of Shreve casts her eyes sadly across the stacks of medical gear keeping me alive.
She takes my hand. ‘Is it true that Tally killed him again?’
‘Yes. A software ghost, a model, but it was him.’
The slow shudder comes again, passing from my sister’s body into mine.
I whisper, ‘It was me who gave her the key to the nuke.’
‘Of course you did. You’re still my protector.’
Something goes hard in my throat. Maybe I’m the one who’s not ready to have this conversation. That spire of grief and rage still stirs down there in the earth, even though the black pyramid in Shreve is sealed at last.
I have to waver a little longer.
‘What did you do to that man?’ I ask. ‘The one who pushed his girlfriend into the road? Did you build a new jail?’
‘No prisons in our city,’ she says. ‘I cut his hand off.’
Rafi see my eyes widen, waves my concerns away.
‘Not as bad as it sounds, little sister. He has a perfectly functional prosthetic. Through it we can watch him, and switch his hand off—or even shock him, if he tries to, say, strangle someone with the other one.’
‘You watch him?’ I find myself grimly fascinated. ‘Day and night?’
‘Indeed. We had so many volunteers, he’s got five monitors at all times. Three votes to switch his hand off, all five to shock him. They all take the job very seriously.’ She smiles, squeezing my fingers. ‘There’s even a waiting list. Which is useful, because a few monitors have gotten crushes on him and had to be replaced. Some people are just hot for crims, I guess.’
‘How do you even know that?’ I ask softly. ‘Who watches the watchers?’
She snorts. ‘Other watchers, duh.’
I have to smile. That was the part of Rafi I could never imitate—her small, strange jokes, the ones where she just thinks she’s being logical.
Suddenly I’m sitting next to my sister. Not a rival, not a performer. Not the person who killed Col.
Rafi sees the change in my face.
‘We can still save each other, Frey. And Shreve too, if you come home and help me.’
I take a slow breath. I have to say this now.
‘You already saved our city, Rafi.’ Every word is slow, practiced, a thick liquid in my mouth. ‘There was no other way to stop our father that night, no choice but sacrificing Col. Or if there was, it was for me to find, not you. You only had the tools you were raised with. It’s who you are.’
Another deep breath, my new ribs too tight.
‘You’re forgiven,’ I say.
‘Thank you, Frey.’ She leans forward, whispering now. ‘And for the other thing too?’
‘What other thing?’
‘Stealing your name.’
I turn away, making a small, strangled noise. Does she really think that was as important?
Rafi misinterprets.
‘I had to be you, Frey—to be different from him.’
‘Yeah, I read all your pings. You thought the citizens wouldn’t accept you as Rafia.’
She shakes her head. ‘Not just for them, for me.’
My sister takes three slow breaths, like someone preparing for a delicate operation. Cutting a diamond. Defusing a bomb.
‘You were the reason I never became a monster. It was the only thing that kept me from turning into him—dreaming that I could one day be you.’
I look at her. ‘One day? When exactly did you decide to steal my name?’
‘When we were nine years old.’
The hospital bed tips a little, the world flimsy around me. I’m spindled again, not on that spike of grief, but on a vast reordering of the cosmos.
She whispers a different secret in every ear.
Within a week of escaping our father, Rafi ran off to join a rebel crew using my name. Not because she was bored with the Victorians—because it was her oldest dream.
‘Come back to Shreve,’ she pleads. ‘For me.’
I turn away from her, staring out the window.
The buildings of Tally’s old city are lithe and tall, exemplars of magnetic levitation. When I first got here, I asked the staff to open the window so I could hear the city noise and be certain that the vista wasn’t just a screen.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I won’t come back for you.’
Rafi draws back a little, like I’ve said the wrong line in a play. Because this was all a performance, wasn’t it? A climax she wrote when we were nine.
But it’s my play now.
‘I’m going back to Shreve, but not for your sake. For the world’s.’
She frowns. ‘What does the world have to do with it?’
‘Everyone will be safer with me beside you. I’m not Tally; I’m Shay.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I’m the brakes, big sister.’
Rafi still doesn’t understand yet, but there’s a smile on her face. She has what she came here for, a promise that I’ll be her little shadow again.
She doesn’t know what lives in the shadows now.
But I can give her a taste.
‘I’m also taking my name back. I’m Frey of Shreve, not you.’
Rafi shrugs, sheepish now. ‘That’s likely to cause confusion among the citizens, not to mention the cities who trade with us. We’re still an unstable polity, half-broken, uncertain who we are. Surely you don’t want to create any extra chaos, Frey.’
I smile at my sister—I handed Tally that key.
‘I wouldn’t have it any other way.’
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Stories don’t come from a vacuum; they are born in a community.
The Impostors series, being a sequel quartet to the original Uglies books, comes from not just a community of writers, editors, and booksellers, but also one of fans. It is the input and influence of my own readers that I’d like to acknowledge here.
About a decade ago, a school in rural Indiana did an all-school read of Uglies. The school offered free copies for all students, teachers, administrative and janitorial staff, parents—everyone. An extended community read and discussed the books, and came to their own conclusions about the world they described. Then they invited me for a visit.
I got to see portraits of Tally and Shay created by the art classes, maps of the Smokies’ travels plotted by math classes, and costumes made by home ec. But what I remember most is the shop classes’ creations: homemade hoverboards. Seeing them, I realized that the boards in my mind had always been wrong.
My imaginary future-tech is usually white, extruded plastic, tyrannically minimal, like Apple hoverboards. But these were Indiana kids—they’d built NASCAR hoverboards!
Racing stripes, STP logos, airflow spoilers! These boards were local, and they were personalized, with stickers, badges, quotations, the names of girlfriends and boyfriends. Their decks looked like students’ backpacks at the end of the school year. They looked the way real hoverboards would after being ridden and loved by real teenagers.
This community of readers knew the world I’d created better than I did. They knew about the way kids take ownership of their prized possessions, and about how objects take on meaning and personality.
In the original series, Tally says that ‘freedom has a way of destroying things.’ The Impostors series has explored how right she was. But it also embraces another dictum, that fan art has a way of destroying authors’ preconceptions. I took what I learned that day (and many others days) and applied it to a new generation of characters.
This series had been about how revolutions can fail and be betrayed. And how we all have to keep fighting, because freedom is never guaranteed. But it has also been about giving a space to the world building that thousands of readers have done in their fan letters, their conversations, their works of art.
For that brain-rewiring gift, I acknowledge you all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Scott Westerfeld is the author of the Uglies series, the Leviathan trilogy, the Midnighters trilogy, the New York trilogy, the Zeroes series, as well as the Spill Zone graphic novels, the novel Afterworlds, and the first book in the Horizon series. He has also written books for adults. Born in Texas, he and his wife now split their time between Sydney, Australia, and New York City. You can find him online at scottwesterfeld.com.
Scott Westerfeld, Youngbloods
