Youngbloods, page 8
‘You came here with X,’ she says, her voice pleading. ‘Aren’t the two of them still friends?’
Part of me feels bad for my sister. She really is worried about me.
Another part of me decides to twist to knife.
‘Indeed, X is Frey’s closest friend and ally. You made sure of that three months ago.’ I fold my hands on the desk, just as our father used to do when he punished us. ‘And yet he has no idea where she is.’
‘Really?’ she pleads.
I gesture at the now-covered painting.
‘So we ask again, are you following in your father’s footsteps? Is this your trophy room?’
‘No!’ A cry from ragged lungs. ‘I’d never hurt my sister!’
I feel my cool expression waver. The spire of pain that comes for me at night is lurking beneath the floor, perilously close.
But Rafi’s too upset to notice.
‘You did hurt her,’ I say, ‘when you murdered Col Palafox.’
‘I saved her that night.’ She looks up at me. ‘I’d throw that knife again, a thousand times.’
My whole body goes rigid. It takes all my will to imagine myself as a machine, countless arrays of numbers, a mind too large to be moved by the death of one minor heir.
‘Then why lie to the world about what happened?’ I ask.
‘Hiding it was your idea. All I care about is your money. That’s the only thing I’m trading for.’
My mind focuses again—in her last ping, my sister said she was trading with the free cities. But what does Shreve have to offer?
‘As long as you’re keeping up your end of the bargain, Rafia.’
‘Of course. You’ll get your data.’
Data?
All I can think to ask is ‘When?’
‘At least another week,’ Rafi says. ‘There are too many grays to rush things.’
Grays? Nothing she’s saying makes sense.
I have to keep her talking. ‘Our patience is limited. Do you want us to tell the world what you did to Col Palafox?’
She gives me a chilling look. ‘Feel free to tell them exactly what happened that night—how I saved my whole city. Show them exactly what my choices were. You’ll only make me a hero.’
The spire rises up through the floor. Its tip touches my heart.
‘Shreve will love me for my sacrifice.’ Rafi stands, clutching her pulse knife again. ‘And the rest of the world will secretly applaud. Nobody wants the Rusty nightmare coming back—cities dying under mushroom clouds. If you were a real person, you’d understand that!’
Her last words echo an old fear of mine. For so long, I was just a shadow of my sister. Being real is new to me.
Rafi senses my weakness—she gives me her cruelest smile. The advantage I gained when she saw the portrait is erased.
‘I should’ve known you were a machine the moment those littlies started ransacking Shreve House. No human would use damaged children as a diversion.’
That’s … exactly what we did. For a moment, I wonder about my new allies, who came up with this plan. Only Croy objected.
I never gave it a second thought.
‘Does Tally even know what you are?’ Rafi asks. ‘Doesn’t she hate AI?’
The question gives me another opening.
‘Tally despises us,’ I say. ‘And yet she was willing to help us keep an eye on you, “Frey of Shreve,” because we’ve told her the truth. She knows your rebel name is stolen.’
This doesn’t have the effect I was going for—my sister only sighs, her hand dropping from her pulse knife.
‘Youngblood’s opinion doesn’t matter,’ she says. ‘All that counts is that more than half the people of this city trust me. That was our deal.’
‘Would they trust you, if they knew you were Rafia?’
She waves a hand. ‘Not nearly as much, but then you’d have to admit that you lied too, Diego. Or worse, you’d have to pretend that a mere human fooled you. Until then, I’m honored to rule in Frey’s name.’
Her voice breaks a little at the end, and I see it … behind all her anger and bluster, Rafi still loves me and wants me to love her back. After everything she’s done to me, she thinks it’s possible.
I have to leave this room before it shows on my face how sad that is.
I stand up from my father’s desk. ‘The citizens of Shreve might trust you, but we don’t. We’ll be dropping in again.’
Rafi watches me walk past, still uncertain about why Diego was here.
‘I’ll get you your data,’ she says in an exhausted voice. ‘Just keep the aid coming—for them, not me.’
I don’t answer, walking out the door and down the walkway, ignoring the swarm of wardens who’ve arrived to return order to Shreve House.
As the racing of my heart slows, I replay the conversation in my head. My sister is selling something to Diego. There must be a way to use that against her.
The problem is, I don’t know how to explain what happened here to Tally and the others. It was too many tangled deceptions even for me.
But one thing keeps going through my head …
For the first time ever, I fooled Rafia of Shreve.
17. NORMAL
‘Rafi has a deal with Diego,’ I tell the others. ‘She’s giving them something in exchange for reconstruction aid.’
The five of them stare across the campfire, waiting for more.
We’re camping three klicks out from the city border, despite offers of rooms at the best hotels in Shreve. A feather bed sounded good to me, but the Youngbloods prefer the wild. Seems like they only feel comfortable with the stars overhead.
‘What can she give Diego?’ Shay asks. ‘Shreve has nothing.’
‘I don’t know exactly. Some kind of data.’
Croy snorts. ‘That could mean anything. We’re talking about an AI—they’re made of data. It’s like me saying I want some atoms!’
He keeps laughing at his own joke. The rest of them just stare at the fire, pondering how little I’ve brought them.
I had Rafi right where I wanted her—off balance, uncertain—and all I got were a few random words.
‘What does this have to do with Hideaway?’ Shay asks.
‘Nothing. My sister had no idea about those littlies. I’m certain of it.’
Shay turns to Tally. ‘So why stick around, Boss? Two random cities made a shady deal—happens all the time. It’s not our business.’
Tally doesn’t answer, just throws another stick into the fire.
X speaks up. ‘Shreve isn’t a random city, Shay. Some of us died for its freedom.’
‘And you won,’ she replies. ‘There’s no more dictator.’
‘And yet his daughter still rules,’ X says.
Shay laughs. ‘His other daughter’s sitting next to you. If evil’s genetic, we have a more immediate problem.’
All eyes fall on me. I’m not sure how much Shay was joking, whether to argue or laugh it off.
‘Same genes,’ Tally says. ‘Different upbringing.’
The same words I used with her this morning. A lightness comes over me, the singular feeling of having Tally Youngblood on my side.
‘Here’s a question,’ Croy says. ‘Sending data takes half a second. Why isn’t this deal already done?’
I try to recall my sister’s specific words. ‘Rafi said it would take another week. Something about too many grays in the cores, whatever that means.’
Everyone looks at Astrix, our tech expert.
‘Weird,’ she says. ‘Data’s ones and zeroes—not much room for grays.’
She goes back to setting up airscreen projectors on the rocks around her. In a few minutes, our spy nanos in Shreve House will start bouncing stolen info packets off a Paz satellite.
Maybe they’ll supply some answers.
‘So we’re just guessing,’ Shay says.
Tally throws another stick in the fire. ‘We can’t ignore this, Shay-la. Like X said—rebels helped take Shreve, and Rafia still calls herself a rebel boss. That makes this mess our responsibility.’
Shay gives one sharp laugh. ‘The free cities bombed this city from space, not us! If they want Rafia gone, they can remove her too.’
‘They won’t get their hands dirty,’ I say. ‘Look how long it took them to act against my father. They just want everything to go back to normal.’
X rumbles with a soft growl. ‘Rafia isn’t normal.’
‘She is for people in Shreve.’ The flames pop and dance before me. ‘They grew up with her face on every channel.’
‘But they think she’s you,’ Croy says.
I shrug. ‘Acting like a rebel only makes it easier to be a dictator.’
Tally nods her head, like I’ve made some profound revelation, but she doesn’t say anything. She’s waiting for me to keep making my case. I’m the expert in Shreve politics, after all. That’s why she let the daughter of a mass murderer join her crew.
But all I can think of is the moment when Rafi saw my portrait hanging exposed on the wall. The pain on her face, the desperation to shut those panels again.
Losing me has wounded her, deeper than I thought.
‘Frey’s right about one thing,’ Shay says. ‘The city AIs love normal. They were fine with a tyrant in Shreve, until he started generating chaos. They could live with evil but not messiness.’
Tally smiles at her. ‘Kind of like our old friend, Dr. Cable.’
I remember that name from reading up before my surgery. Cable was the woman who created the first Specials. She designed them to be cool, calculating, empathy-missing—the opposite of messy.
Diego would have approved.
A question hits me. ‘Maybe that’s what the AIs want from Rafi—some kind of data that makes things normal.’
Astrix sits up straight—the airscreen whorls in her eyes disappear.
‘You might be right. And it’s not good.’
‘What’d you find?’ Tally asks.
‘Mostly the usual boring government stuff—permits and noise complaints. Almost like someone got caught breaking in and Shreve House knew to scrub their secrets.’ Astrix gives me a hard look. ‘But there’s one weird thing, Frey-la: Your city uses lots of old Rusty engineering standards.’
I nod. ‘One of my father’s brilliant ideas. If something’s made in Shreve, you can’t buy spare parts for it anywhere else.’
‘Nightmare,’ Astrix says. ‘And also why I’ve never heard of grays before.’
She waves a hand, throwing up an airscreen over the fire. A man’s face appears there, fuzzy with smoke and embers.
‘This is Louis Harold Gray, Rusty scientist,’ Astrix says. ‘Not particularly famous, unless you’re interested in how nuclear fallout affects living things. There’s an old unit of measurement named after him—guess what grays measure.’
‘Radiation,’ Tally says softly.
‘Whoa,’ Croy says. ‘So this data’s in the Sarcophagus?’
Astrix raises her hands, giving him a silent round of applause.
I turn my head instinctively in the direction of my childhood home. The tower is out there in the darkness, still full of secrets.
‘The dust,’ I say.
‘Exactly.’ Astrix waves away the image of Louis Gray over the fire. ‘Rafi wasn’t talking about some data. She meant all the data—ten years of surveillance. Every word spoken in Shreve, every sunset, every kiss, everything that happened in two million people’s lives. We’re talking zettabytes, not some file you can attach to a ping.’
Croy frowns. ‘But it was all destroyed in the Fall of Shreve.’
‘Unless it wasn’t,’ Tally says.
I look at Astrix. ‘Who cares about old recordings of Shreve?’
She stands up and starts to pace, her finger flexing. ‘Lots of people! The Futures want to preserve their historic lives. Another clique—called Whole Truth—wants to find out who cooperated with your dad’s regime, to shame people who spied on friends and family.’
‘Didn’t everybody?’ Shay asks.
‘Some more than others,’ Tally says. ‘If we had that data, we could find out who set up Hideaway.’
‘Sure—we could judge everyone in Shreve.’ Shay throws a piece of kindling at Tally. ‘Like you never collaborated with the authorities?’
Tally just looks away.
Astrix ignores them, as if this is an old argument. ‘Problem is, it’d take us six about a million years to watch all those recordings, even if we fast-forward past the sleeping parts. I repeat myself: It’s a lot of data.’
‘Not for brains the size of cities,’ I say. ‘But why does Diego want it? To do their own Whole Truth?’
‘Much worse,’ Astrix says. ‘They want to study us.’
She sits down hard, close to the fire, and glares into its depths.
‘There’s an old theory about artificial intelligence,’ she says. ‘We shouldn’t let it get to know us too well. That’s why cities have privacy laws. Machines already analyze our traffic patterns and pings, and even peek into our trash cans. Imagine them listening to every word you said, watching every decision, every expression that crossed your face—times two million people, times ten years.’
‘What it is to be human,’ Tally says softly, ‘in one database.’
‘AIs could start making their own people,’ Astrix says. ‘And we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.’
A memory passes through me with a shudder—how Diego manipulated me and my sister, turning us against each other. It did all that with a cold, impersonal avatar.
What if Diego could act just like one of us? But a million times more charming, funny, and insightful?
The best impostor ever.
My father never let the Shreve AI learn from the data it collected. I thought he was being paranoid—but maybe it was smart.
‘With those recordings,’ Astrix says, ‘an AI could run the perfect political campaign, tell the perfect lie, predict in detail what us puny humans will do next.’
Shay frowns. ‘And your sister’s trading all that—for food?’
‘You don’t eat, you die,’ Astrix says. ‘And it’s just a theory.’
‘A theory that Diego wants to test,’ Tally says. ‘That’s nervous-making enough for me.’
We’re all lost in thought, and the darkness around us rushes into the silence. The sounds of small creatures, wind, a gurgling creek—the wild, ever noisy and unsatisfied.
Shreve is still haunted by my father’s dust watching everyone for all those years. And now the results of his steady, unblinking gaze might ripple across the world.
What if this was the reason why …?
‘Oh, crap,’ I say.
Everyone looks at me, but it takes a moment to speak.
‘After the Fall of Shreve, Diego came to visit me in the hospital. They apologized for taking so long to stop my father. They admitted the free cities gave him too many chances, like they were hoping he’d fix himself. But what if they were stalling—what if their cowardice was intentional?’
Tally softly swears. ‘Because they wanted the dust to keep recording everyone in Shreve. Your father was making something they were hungry for.’
‘Talk about things going back to normal,’ Astrix says. ‘If this theory’s right, the AIs can use those recordings to ride humanity like a hoverboard—smooth and steady forever.’
Her certainty sinks into me. Diego was always so interested in me and Rafi, and who would rule Shreve afterward. They were the only city that sent jump troops the night my father fell, storming his tower alongside my sister’s rebels.
‘We have to get those recordings,’ Tally says.
‘Boss.’ Shay gives a weary sigh. ‘Are we seriously thinking of breaking into a nuclear waste dump? Because of a theory?’
‘No,’ Tally says. ‘Because the AIs want to make the world normal again. We’re rebels, Shay-la. Abnormal is what we do.’
18. PAPER PLANES
We train four days before launching ourselves at the Sarcophagus.
The full moon has waned since we found Hideaway, rising later every night. Now, two hours after sunset, a scattered cover of clouds is enough to make the darkness total.
We stand on our new hoverboards, ready to take the jump. Astrix drifts down the line, spraying us with a sparkling mist from a bottle.
‘Check your seals,’ she says.
I flex the joints on my protective suit, bending my knees and elbows, turning my head. If any of the mist gets inside, an alarm will sound and we’ll have to scrub the mission for tonight.
It’s weird being swaddled like this, breathing canned air. The rad suit slows my movements, makes me feel clumsy and uncertain for the first time since I became Special. My senses are muffled by the layers between me and the world.
X seems to enjoy it even less. He twitches beside me like a cat in wrapping paper.
But no one argued about putting on these suits. Duralloy bones and healing nanos won’t count for much inside the Sarcophagus. A day before the Fall of Shreve, I took one false step in a Rusty nuclear site, and the bones of my left foot had to be replaced.
No alarms—everyone’s suit has passed the test.
‘Okay, crew,’ Tally says, replacing Astrix out front. ‘On this mission, we have to ignore our usual instincts. You bubbleheads all think you’re indestructible. That’s why we programmed our crash bracelets to wake up when you shake them—everyone kept forgetting to turn them on!’
We all laugh at this.
‘But on this mission, anything that can rip your suit can kill you. If you hear an alarm, patch up and get out. Remember what it was like to be uglies playing tricks, always ready to run and hide.’
The other Youngbloods smile at this, reminding me how different I am from them. Growing up with my sister’s face, no one ever dared call me an ugly, and my tutors trained me never to run and hide.
I wasn’t bulletproof—I was sniper bait.
‘All I’m saying is, stay safe.’ Tally angles her board, and gets back in line.
I check my position again, laying a terrain map onto my eyescreen. Our approach has been precisely calculated. We have to hit the hill before us—gently sloping on this side, steep on the far end—at exactly the right angle.
