Youngbloods, page 7
Chulhee is surrounded by his own fleet of tiny hovercams, recording everything he does and says. The end of tyranny hasn’t canceled his historic life, only restarted it.
I wonder if he’s asking Rafi to fill the air with dust again.
The rest of us Youngbloods join the receiving line. X is just in front of me, and he and my sister have a long chat, recounting old battles he and I shared.
It’s dizzy-making to hear him call her by my name. She must want to ask him where I am, but she can’t while swarmed with hovercams. Admitting the rift between us might damage her face rank.
Officially, Rafia of Shreve has retired to a simple life in the wild, to allow her rebel sister to bring a fresh perspective to Shreve. As Rafi always tells me in her pings, using my name gives her more distance from our father.
Then X moves on, and it’s my turn to shake my sister’s hand …
That familiar sense of dislocation bubbles up, seeing my old face in hers. As if I’m a littlie again, looking in a mirror, rehearsing tomorrow’s duties as a body double. My curtsies and handshakes were never as good as hers.
My fingers tremble a little as we touch.
I have my own face now, a body remade, but I still feel like her reflection.
There’s no way she’ll see who I really am—Tally insisted that no scanners or sniffers be present during our visit. But part of me is still certain that Rafi will see through my taller body, new muscles and nerves and bones.
My clumsy attempt at being my own person.
All she says is, ‘Lovely to meet you.’
Then she moves on, never even asking my name.
Released from her attention, I feel oddly hollow. All those years sharing an identity, and suddenly my twin sister can’t see me anymore.
Part of me misses her, I realize.
But then I notice the black band around her arm—as Frey, she’s in mourning for Col Palafox, her lost love, the Savior of Shreve.
My hand goes to my pulse knife.
With an effort that seems to tear my own muscles, I pull it away to shake the hand of the next person in line.
It’s Demeter, one of my sister’s childhood circle. I remember her from stepping in for Rafi at dance clubs and watching dust recordings to learn her friends’ names and foibles.
Demeter also helped the rebels and Victorians rescue me and Col, and later helped us rescue Boss X. Now she’s Rafi’s second-in-command.
‘Thank you for helping our children,’ she says. ‘But I don’t think I recall your name?’
Astrix has built me a false identity, but I was hoping to avoid saying it aloud. The thought of another name exhausts me.
I smile and try to move along.
She keeps hold of my hand. ‘I’m Demeter Shard. And you are …?’
It would be easy to break her grip, but I don’t want to draw attention. Luckily, the hoverbuses are landing behind me—the first stage of our plan is about to unfold.
‘Excuse me,’ I say. ‘Someone should see to the children.’
Demeter frowns, still not letting me go.
But then Shreve’s lost children charge out onto the lawn, helped along by the piles of candy Astrix left on every bus seat. The sugar-rushing littlies storm past the dignitaries, rebels, and wardens, and into Shreve House.
We’ve told them that the day’s first event is a scavenger hunt.
The wardens turn, perplexed by this sudden invasion. A few of them shout after the rampaging kids, but it’s useless. After years without adult supervision, mere wardens have no hope.
Rafi’s rebel bodyguard stays put, thanks to a quick order from their commander, Riggs. She watches me from her wheelchair, the only person in Shreve who knows my true identity.
‘We’ll handle this,’ I say to Demeter, and turn to the others. ‘Astrix, Croy, come on!’
The three of us break from the receiving line. Rafi looks up for a moment, annoyed that chaos has interrupted the choreography of her welcome. But Tally starts talking to her again, and the cams swarm them.
Croy and Astrix follow me into Shreve House, which is already being plundered by the littlies.
Somewhere in here are my sister’s secrets.
15. SHREVE HOUSE
Our sneak suits switch to dazzle mode.
Anyone watching video of this later will see us moving around in Shreve House, but our forms will be a blur. Even my gloves are camo fabric, my fingers’ motion lost in chameleon static.
I move through the halls, shouting at the littlies to search harder for scavenger hunt clues. They’re tearing the place up, finding nothing, of course. The few workers still at their stations have no luck controlling them.
All the while, I’m injecting workstations with worms and snitches. Croy and Astrix are doing the same across the other buildings.
By the time order is restored, we’ll be able to intercept every bit of information passing through the government of Shreve.
Which, so far, doesn’t seem to be that interesting. Nothing here looks like my father’s control room, with its phalanx of Security officers monitoring every speck of dust in Shreve. The airscreens around me are full of construction permits, noise complaints, requests for zoning changes—the mundane chaos of a city recovering from war and dictatorship.
I don’t know what I was expecting. Plans for another child prison left out in the open?
The mere fact that we got in so easily suggests there’s nothing here. Maybe my sister keeps her dirty secrets at the old military headquarters or in some hidden base my father left behind.
But at least now we have our foot in the door.
I storm across a floating walkway, pretending to be chasing a littlie. The walkway leads to the smallest of the satellite buildings, which floats a few meters higher than the rest.
The littlie reaches the door, but unlike all the others, it’s locked. He turns around and pushes past me, heading back to scavenge somewhere else.
I take the handle, give it a hard twist. It doesn’t budge.
Any normal door would break under my strength, but this one is solid duralloy. Finally, I’ve found something interesting.
There’s no time to cover my tracks—I squirt some metal-eating nanos into the lock. Furious chemical reactions kick off inside, the handle heating up in my palm.
But when the warmth fades, it still doesn’t budge. It’s the first time I’ve seen Astrix’s tech defeated.
I set my sneak suit to sky blue, then jump onto the top of the floating building.
The thatch roofing up here is purely ornamental—it conceals ceramic armor, like Rafi’s expecting an orbital bombardment like the one that ended our father. My pulse knife can cut through it eventually, but not without filling the air with smoke.
I lower myself in front of a window, pulling equipment from my belt. This might not be the artful infiltration that Shay asked for, but this room is too tempting to pass up. At worst, Rafi will know that the Youngbloods have their eyes on her.
The duralloy shutters are open, and the window is simple polycarbonate. I slap on a shaped explosive charge and press myself against it to muffle the sound.
The whump travels through my body armor, down to my skeleton. For a long moment, I can’t breathe. Healing nanos are buzzing in my rib cage, and my armor is cracked.
But the window is gone. I roll inside, feet crunching on shattered plastic.
This is my sister’s office.
I recognize the desk in the far corner of the room. A thousand times our father sat behind it, hands folded, lecturing me or Rafi about something we’d done wrong. The sight of it makes my stomach clench.
I step closer. My scanner detects a sliver of radiation.
Rafi left my father’s body to rot in the Sarcophagus, but she salvaged this symbol of his power. And his cruelty—prisoners at Hideaway must have poached the old-growth wood.
I scan the desk’s interior. There’s nothing more high-tech than joinery and nails. The drawers hold only feathers.
The sight of them sends another pang through me—Rafi first took them from birds in the southern continent, when she was hiding from our father with the Palafoxes. When we were all on the same side.
I don’t have time to ponder how things went wrong, though—the wardens could show up any minute. Back in the tower, my father’s office had a hundred sensors in the walls. He could read his visitors’ body temperatures, their micro-expressions, their fingerprints.
But another scan reveals no cams, no microphones in the walls or furniture. Hardly any tech at all.
Whatever Rafi does in this office, she isn’t recording it for posterity.
My scanner pings only once—for a pair of cloth panels covering something on the wall. More tendrils of radiation are leaking out from them, something else salvaged from my father’s tower.
The panels are held closed by an old-fashioned mechanical lock. When I try Astrix’s metal-eating nanos again, the lock opens in seconds with an easy, liquid feel.
I push the panels apart …
It’s me.
Or rather, a painting of what I used to look like.
Mussed hair, workout sweats, a pulse knife in my hand—there’s no chance it’s my sister. The artist even captured the look of battle ecstasy in my eyes.
I’ve seen this portrait before, almost a year ago. My father had it painted when I left home, and hung it after he thought I’d died in his attack on Victoria. That was his custom with all his vanquished enemies. He had a whole room full of trophies just like this.
The canvas was torn in the Battle of Shreve, when my friends blew their way out of the tower, but is now lovingly restored. The frame is chipped, but it’s been carefully patched.
Why did she save this painting? What is this room for? There are no airscreen projectors, no cams to broadcast or record meetings. Not even a pen to write with.
Just a portrait of me, mounted in the perfect spot for viewing from my father’s desk.
I sit down in his old chair and stare at myself.
The first time I saw this painting, I didn’t understand why my father had tried to obliterate me along with House Palafox. I’d always done everything he’d asked of me.
That was before I found out that I’d killed his missing son, Seanan.
Does Rafi see me as an enemy too?
A breeze stirs the room, and from my father’s desk, I see the looming shape framed perfectly in the shattered window.
The Sarcophagus.
Our childhood home. Our father’s tomb.
I imagine Rafi sitting here, contemplating these two memorials. It’s like being inside her head, but her thoughts are just out of reach.
The door clicks.
I raise my hands in surrender, ready to accept whatever scolding the wardens have the nerve to deliver to one of Tally Youngblood’s crew.
But when the door opens, it’s not a warden.
It’s my sister.
16. SOVEREIGN CITY
Rafi closes the door behind her.
‘This better be important,’ she says. ‘That’s Tally Youngblood out there.’
I freeze. At last we’re alone together, and part of me wants to scream all my anger at her.
But I can’t reveal who I am.
Rafi frowns at the broken window. ‘Smashing things? You might be taking that costume a little seriously.’
‘Costume?’ I ask.
Rafi laughs. ‘As if I wouldn’t spot you.’
A deep note of panic travels through my body—the old anxiety of being found out. The terror of being the object of my big sister’s scorn.
This unbreakable body feels suddenly fragile, transparent.
‘How?’ I ask.
Rafi gives me a mocking smile. ‘You’re so much smarter than me. I’m sure you can figure it out.’
Smarter than me—Rafi would never say that of me. Not in a million years.
She thinks I’m someone else.
I have to stall. ‘We said no scans. Did you cheat?’
‘Microscopically.’ Rafi shows me her right palm. ‘A DNA sniffer woven into the whorls of my skin.’
‘When we shook hands …’
‘Had to make sure I was meeting the real Tally, not some impostor.’
I nod, still uncertain who she thinks I am. My DNA hasn’t changed. No surgery can replace every cell in the human body.
‘It seemed like a glitch at first,’ Rafi says. ‘Until I realized that you weren’t human.’
Right—a sniffer built into Rafi’s skin would have to ignore her own DNA, which is exactly the same as mine.
Six handshakes, five results.
She doesn’t think I’m real.
‘We are impressed,’ I say, dropping into a speech pattern I know all too well. ‘Though a little concerned as well. The need to verify Tally’s identity suggests a measure of paranoia.’
Rafi rolls her eyes. ‘It’s not paranoia when you’re right—one of you was pretending. For a mind the size of a city, you’re being rather slow.’
I smile, my theory confirmed.
She thinks I’m an avatar, an artificial body run by an AI—perhaps the only thing in the world that Rafi would consider smarter than herself.
She’ll assume I’m the city of Diego, who spent the war playing us against each other. First they offered to make me my father’s heir, saying Rafi was too unstable. Then they told my sister I was trying to supplant her. That’s why she sidelined me three months ago, taking Shreve for herself.
I despise Diego, but they represent the alliance of free cities whose aid is keeping Shreve from falling apart.
I have all the power here.
‘Sorry to hijack your party,’ I say. ‘We thought it was time for a chat.’
Rafi frowns. ‘You infiltrated the Youngbloods and trashed my home … for a chat?’
I give her a placid smile, but my mind is spinning. This is the first time I’ve pretended to have a brain the size of a city.
‘Did you know about Hideaway?’ I ask.
Rafi gives me a dumbfounded look. ‘Are you serious?’
‘We are always serious.’
‘You think I’d let my father keep hurting those children, even after he was dead?’ She takes a step closer. ‘After what he did to me? What he did to Frey?’
Her hand goes to the pulse knife on her belt.
She could use that knife on me—to her I’m just a skin suit. Diego doesn’t even feel a tickle if one of its bodies is destroyed.
For me, it’s more of an issue.
I raise my hands. ‘Rafia, the whole world is asking the question.’
‘Allow me to clarify, then. My father forced me to pretend my own sister didn’t exist. He made her into a killing machine. We were abused—you think I’d traumatize those kids for a few trees?’
She still looks like she’s about to throw the knife at me, and yet something untwists in my heart.
Her anger has finally clarified what part of me already knew—my sister is not my father. Not really.
‘The children mentioned a “nice crumbly man,”’ I say. ‘The person who welcomed them to Hideaway. You need to find him.’
‘We will.’ Rafi’s hand drops from the knife. ‘Trust me.’
I nod, wondering what to say next. This is a priceless opportunity to find out what my sister is up to.
‘You’ve always wanted to rule, Rafia. How does the reality compare?’
She rolls her eyes again. ‘Is this a newsfeed interview? The reality’s the same as last time we spoke—not enough money, too much war damage. Endless emergency calls about imaginary crimes.’
‘That’s to be expected,’ I say.
For ten years, the citizens of Shreve breathed surveillance dust, every move, every word monitored by Security. Lying, littering, even kissing the wrong person were all tricky—actual crime was impossible.
The arrival of freedom must seem like chaos.
‘There’s a new clique called Breakage,’ Rafi says. ‘One night, they destroyed half the streetlights in Shreve. Ridiculous, but annoying.’
‘Are you cracking down on them?’
She shakes her head. ‘We helped a different clique make repairs. A good example is easier than force. The only serious sabotage has been near the border—disgruntled Victorians, probably. Is that why you’re here?’
I try to keep the cool, distant expression of an avatar. Rafi’s about ten seconds away from starting to wonder if I’m really a city-level intelligence.
I need to throw her off balance.
I see something glittering in the sunlight through the broken window—a small key on a chain around her neck. It’s just the right size for the locked panels.
Of course. That’s her weak point.
Me.
I gesture at the portrait behind her. ‘To be honest, we were wondering if you’d heard anything from your sister.’
Rafi turns and sees the open panels for the first time.
She transforms in front of me, fists clenching, face twisting. With two quick steps, she reaches the painting and slams the panels closed.
‘That’s not for you.’ Her voice breaks on the last word.
‘Did you really think we couldn’t see through your ridiculous story about her retiring to the wild?’
‘Why do you care where she is?’
‘Because it looks as though you’ve taken up your father’s old habits. He only hung such portraits when his enemies were dead.’
Rafi’s eyes flash. ‘Frey isn’t my enemy—she’s my sister!’
‘Can’t someone be both?’
She only glares at me.
The advantage is all mine again. I keep pressing.
‘We can’t help but notice, Rafia, that in your indignation you’ve dodged our question. To the best of your knowledge, is your sister still alive?’
At those words, the anger goes out of her. ‘That’s why you’re here? Because you think I’d …’
My older sister does something I haven’t seen her do since we were six years old. She slides down the wall and sits on the floor.
Her cold and perfect dignity—all of it vanishes.
