Coda (2 page)

Better. I stop shivering, and the headache fades to a dull throb at my temples. Each deep breath loosens my chest, clears the haze from my thoughts, and prepares me for the day ahead.

Barefoot, dressed only in my underwear, I pad to the hygiene cube to clean up. The mirror’s cracks scar my face. Tar soap scrubs away smudged black and blue paint and leaves me stripped to pale under the shower spray.

My fingers loosen and tap out a beat. Drums
here
, one, two, three, and now a keyboard, and now,
now
a guitar, strings screaming and wild.

My clubbing clothes stay in a crumpled pile of stitched-together rags on the floor; I trip over my gas mask and swear. It’s not needed anymore—a relic from the war—but it makes a good accessory at night, hanging loose from my neck. A joke, because it can’t protect me from the poisonous, sound-saturated air. By day, I wouldn’t dare turn up at work in anything but a suit, the collar of my ironed shirt falling just below the jack at my hairline.

“Have you even moved since yesterday?” I ask my father as I cross the living room. He ignores me, or isn’t with it enough to hear. A headset hangs from another console on the wall over his head, untouched since the last time I put on a track for him. The TV screen is filled with the face of a polished Corp spokeswoman, babbling something about new developments in hydroponics. Interesting, sure, but knowing how the farms in the skyscrapers at the North Edge
work
isn’t going to do anything to put food on our plates.

Neither is the lump on the couch.

“Ant!” my little sister says, racing across the room to throw her arms around my waist. It’s a nickname of a nickname, left over from when the twins couldn’t pronounce my full handle. Sometimes it feels more appropriate than the one I actually picked, chosen before I fully understood what it meant.

I return the hug. “Hey, Alpha.” She’s little and blonde, like our mother. Omega’s darker coloring comes from our father.

“Haven made me oatmeal the way I like it.”

“I don’t know why,” Haven teases Alpha from her position on the floor, where she’s tying Omega’s frayed shoelaces. “It’s practically soup.”

“I like soup,” Alpha says with all of her nine-year-old dignity.

“All done.” Haven finishes a final knot and stands, stepping back to lean against the counter. Free of makeup and all her pink accessories, she looks different, not as polished as she does at the club. Sound-sensitive implants sit quietly black against her olive skin, banded around her arms and embedded into the backs of her hands. One of them flickers dimly when Omega drops his spoon.

Natural instead of glamorous. I’m not sure which is sexier, and it doesn’t matter. She’s been awake for a while—long enough to track, judging by her alertness—and her hair hangs in one long, wet rope down the back of her T-shirt, the pink streaks darker than usual against the natural black. This is not the time to think of her in my shower. It never is.

Omega joins the hug and I hold on, trying to be a kid again for a second. “
Thanks
,” I mouth over their heads.

Haven smiles easily. “No problem.”

“Was the music good, Ant?” Omega asks this every morning, so I’m expecting it, but it’s not a simple question to answer. Good, yes. Healthy, not so much. But there are things they don’t understand yet—or at least things I’m not ready to explain. In three years, they’ll be taken into a large room at school and exposed. All I can do right now is pretend it isn’t going to happen.

“It was great,” I tell him.

Alpha tilts her head back, her expression daring me to lie. “Did you eat the chocolate I left for you?”

“Yes,” I answer, tickling her. “But what have I told you? Keep it
for yourself next time.”

“Whatever.” She rolls her eyes, and Haven tries not to laugh. Like I don’t know where Alpha picked that up.

“Don’t listen to him, Alpha,” Haven says. “What he really meant to say was
Thank you
. Boys are all the same.”

“Whose side are you on?” I ask.

Haven shrugs, her bare lips twitching. “Mine.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Eat,” Haven orders, throwing a green apple at me. It’s from one of the North Edge farms. With the first bite I wonder, not for the first time, whether things tasted different when they were grown in soil, beneath real sunlight.

“I want to visit Mommy,” Alpha says out of nowhere. Ow. I taste blood on my lip. Shit, that stings. Haven’s eyes widen.

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll take you after school. Go get your stuff.”

The twins run off. “You ready for that?” Haven asks.

“Has to happen sometime. They asked; I’m not gonna say no.”

“Maybe it’s better, that they see just her, before . . .” Her glance flicks toward the living room, and I don’t need to ask what she means.

“Yeah.” I give him another couple of months, maybe less.

“If you need anything . . .”

“Thanks.”

“I’ve gotta go,” she says with that distracted look she gets when her thoughts have turned to lines of code and she can’t wait to get back to her computer. She leaves a few minutes later, boots laced on, calling good-byes to the twins and waving to me with hands full of pink stuff. The track I sneak before getting Alpha and Omega out the door further banishes the looming headache and lets me float down the stairs from our apartment to the trans-pod stop nearby. All the
kids from our Quadrant are there—pale and small, their clothes washed until faded and paper-thin.

“Behave yourselves.” I wait for them to pull themselves from their friends long enough to say they heard me, then leave them to it.

My trans-pod, crowded with commuters, goes in the other direction, up into the middle of the Web. The name fits. Corp headquarters—home of the Grid’s power source—crouches, spiderlike, in the center, watchful for the slightest disturbance. Clothing stores, food depots, an old library slide across the view from my window seat. Sunlight has been coming in weak, dim bursts for days, as if the sky is some kind of old-fashioned camera—black, hulking, shapeless—watching over the city for something to happen, its flash running low on batteries. Still too bright for my eyes this morning. I squint and measure the distance of my trip by how much nicer the buildings get with each mile and how much cleaner the streets.

The Vortex sucks us in, a dizzying sprawl of reclaimed metal and power-sucking lights. Every vertical surface except one glows, flashes, and whirrs with neon, more and more concentrated as we near the center. Corp headquarters isn’t as tall as the buildings around it but still casts a shadow that covers the entire island.

My tracking buzz has worn off by the time the pod stops outside the Corp. Good, since I have to work, but it means my morning dose of anger at the statue isn’t dulled by anything.

Asshole. It sits there in front of the entrance, formed from iron that was probably once an innocent bridge or fence, a likeness of the man who is behind all of this. Only the guards watching my approach keep the spit under my tongue. Their black uniforms reflect off the smoked glass behind them, normal human outlines fractured by shotgun barrels rising above their shoulders.

I don’t get so much as a
Citizen
or even a nod from the guards
when I pass; they know why I’m here. The cuff of my shirt resists a little when I pull it away from my ID chip and wait for the scanner to beep.

My headache refreshed, I’m allowed inside a lobby of sharp edges and sharper suits. Typical Corp types. Suspended TV screens play the news channel and a receptionist sits at a marble desk. Behind her, sealed doors are set into a curved wall, one cylinder inside another. The entrance to the mainframe that stretches into the sky.

The hum is everywhere; I’ve never managed to get used to it or tune it out. It raises the hair on my arms. This is less a tower containing computers than it is a tower made from them—a huge network that knows us, controls us, and makes sure we have food and water and the right number of credits in our accounts, however much or little that might be.

And music. It delivers the music.

Doors hiss. I step into an elevator along one of the outer walls and ignore the dismissive sneers of the other occupants when I press the button for the lowest basement level. It’s too much to ask that they be grateful for what I do. As if they’re so much better. Underground floors are reserved for menial, unwanted jobs. Conduits are literally the lowest of the low.

Alone, I step out into what we dub the Energy Farm, though not with any affection. One massive room, walled in by uncovered concrete and divided into more cubicles than I’ve ever bothered to count. After five years, I don’t need to watch where I’m going to find mine.

“Morning, Anthem,” says the white-coated tech in charge of my sector when I walk into the few square feet of space Scope likes to refer to as my
office
. He’s not as funny as he thinks.

“Hi, Tango.” She’s been my tech for a while, and she’s okay. We’re close enough to know each other’s handles, anyway.

“
You look tired
,” she mouths. “Are you feeling well this morning?” she asks at normal volume.

It’s never safe to assume we’re not being overheard. “I’m fine,” I lie. The answer matters. If I’m sick, tired, or depressed, I have less to offer the Grid, and I need this job.

“Excellent,” Tango says, frowning at me. I stand beside the chair where I’ll spend the next eight hours, unmoving, my limbs getting heavier as my own energy is sucked from me and poured into the Grid. Sometimes, I’ll look at a flickering TV screen, or glowing billboard, or listen to a track and think,
that’s me
. That’s one minute off my life. Another. Another.

Tango checks my vital signs before I’m allowed to sit down, my neck jack resting over a gap in the headrest. Her purple hair smells like Hydro-Farm lavender today. I wonder if she matched the color and scent on purpose. Only when I’m close enough to smell it do I notice the reddened, swollen rims of her artificially violet eyes and the tremor of her hands on my wrist.

“
You okay
?” I ask, keeping my voice low.

She shakes her head. I raise my eyebrows and her shoulders slump.
“One of my friends was caught stealing food from a depot.”

Oh. I point at my ears, but don’t really need her nod of confirmation. After the pain subsides and withdrawal passes, there’ll be another Exaur roaming the Web, relying on the kindness of the Corp to feed them, clothe them in telltale uniforms, give them shelter.
“I’m sorry.”
There’s really nothing else I can offer.

“What do you want?” she asks, too loud, too cheerful.

“I haven’t finished
War & Peace
yet.”

“I’m surprised that book doesn’t put you to sleep.” The point is to
keep me awake. Conduits are given whatever mental stimulation we want while we’re jacked in, barring a few specific subjects. Another few months and I’ll be done with the Russians. “I’ll put you on drain-level six. Hold still.”

Being jacked in will never
not
be weird. A feeling that I’m part of something much bigger than just me takes over. I am the machines, the power that buzzes everywhere.

Green text begins to scroll across my mind. I close my eyes.

Alpha and Omega hold my hands as we cross the street from the trans-pod stop to one of the nicer old buildings that survived the war; the only new addition to the facade is a plaque beside the doors bearing the words
CITIZEN REMEMBRANCE CENTER: QUADRANT TWO
.

CRCs are the Corp’s brainchildren, one of their many attempts to convince us that they’re benevolent. Generous, even, in giving us this special, different kind of library.

We climb the stairs; I briefly let go of Omega to scan my wrist. The doors swish open, and inside we climb to the third floor.

The twins stop, eyes wide, on the threshold of the huge room.

“She’s here?” Omega asks.

“It’s just like Fable said,” Alpha says.

Rows of small, glass-fronted lockers stacked to shoulder height run all the way to the far wall. Every twenty feet or so a round pedestal rises a few inches from polished marble that swallows and spits back the clunk of my boots. A metal tower stands in front of each one, covered in lights that wink at intermittent intervals, a touch screen sitting on top.

I come here a lot, but it’s been a while since I thought about what my first time was like.