Coda (25 page)

“I have to go out,” I tell Alpha and Omega, crouching down so I’m level with their heavy-lidded eyes.

“With her?” Omega asks, staring at Ell. I wince because I know he’s remembering Haven. I have no fucking idea how I’m going to explain her absence from our lives—again—and I’m waiting until they ask.

“Yes. I’ll be back.”

Alpha throws her arms around my neck. “Do you promise?”

“I promise.”

“Don’t worry,” Ell says. “Your brother is very important now. We won’t let anything happen to him.”

“Go to bed, okay? I’ll see you in the morning.” Reluctantly, they head down the hall, both disappearing into a room with two small beds in it.

“Adorable, aren’t they?” Ell muses when they’re gone. I want to agree with her, but remember what she wants me to do to them—what I
will
do—and bite my tongue until I taste blood. “Let’s go.”

“Where?” I ask. “The studio?”

“Oh, no, not yet. It’s been a long time since you were at a club.
We must get you back into the swing of things. Give you a little inspiration, no?”

What the hell. Maybe the club will have something better than the console did.

My life is now an endless cycle of elevators. Up and down the Corp, my new building, and the skyscraper Ell leads me into now with half a dozen guards following behind.

“Welcome to your new world, Anthem,” Ell says, stepping out on the top floor. “And welcome to Sky-Club Six.” She raises her wrist to the scanner and the high-frequency beep pierces my ears once, again when I lift my own hand. The guards follow us in, but I’m not paying attention to them now.

This place
can’t
be for real. A mass of slick, polished, upper-Web types fill the revolving room. The glittering skyline outside is nothing to the one held in by the massive windows. Lights bounce from glass to metal to painted lips and back again, making spots dance in front of my eyes to the rhythm of bodies. Water bottles are lined up on a long, gleaming bar. Mirrored balls hang from the ceiling.

A guy dressed in black vinyl pulls a velvet cord to one side. Pixel’s club doesn’t even have a VIP section, and if it did I’d never have gone in it. For a moment, all I can do is stand and stare at the leather of the empty chairs, which would make me a hundred outfits back home, and the people in the occupied ones.

I can’t even imagine the number of credits some of them have spent. A few are more chrome than flesh, and one heavily muscled guy has gone the more expensive route of ink tattoos that wind around his arms and flow up from the collar of his shirt. Most mesmerizing of all is the woman with the snake across her shoulders, its head weaving eerily to the rhythm.

Where I come from, cats are the only pets anyone has, though
Alpha tried to keep a cockroach for about a week once when she was younger. The few, more exotic creatures that survived the war have been endlessly cloned for the rich. There’s no point in cloning people in an already overcrowded city, but animals don’t take up as much space.

Ell jerks her head impatiently, and I force myself to follow her to a curved booth along the wall. She nudges me around the bench until I’m trapped between her and the captors-turned-bodyguards with us. A waitress—now I
know
I’m in a Sky-Club—appears, somehow managing to balance a tray of water bottles despite heels higher than the platforms of my new boots.

“The music,” I say to Ell when the waitress is gone. She smiles at me in approval. It took me longer than it should have because there are so many other details to absorb.

“It’s encoded,” she assures me. “Just . . . not quite as much as you’re accustomed to.”

“Why not?” The answer comes to me before she’s opened her mouth, but I let her confirm it anyway and use the time to get my reaction in check.

“People up here don’t need the same encouragement to enjoy their lives.” Her teeth glint under the lights. “And losing those lives too early would be tragic.”

Breathe. In. Out. Remember the twins. Remember why I agreed to this. Still, the overrecycled plastic of the bottle buckles in my hand. “My mother was just . . . what? Expendable? My father?” Me, until they’d discovered I’m useful?

My bodyguards haven’t completely left their captor personas at home. The atmosphere at the table shifts subtly.

“Settle down,” Ell says. I almost have to give her credit. She doesn’t justify or placate or even deny.
Settle down
is all I get. “It will
work, just let yourself absorb it.”

“People up here aren’t addicted?”

Ell shakes her head. “Of course they are; we all are. This is the best feeling in the world, Anthem! Everyone tracks; the people up here simply prefer to do their harder drugs in private. No point in running the risk of embarrassing yourself, is there? And tracking in the privacy of one’s home allows for greater judgment as to when to stop. I’m sure you never left a lower-Web club before it closed for the night, correct?”

Yeah, because once you’re in, the music has you. I’ve never been strong enough to walk away while it’s still playing. Something itches at the back of my mind, but Ell’s right, it
is
starting to work, a breeze of high lapping at my skin, and I came here willingly because I don’t want to think. I sit back, watch the people on the dance floor, and gently drift away.

I put a guitar down too carelessly and earn a sharp, brief scowl from Ell on the other side of a window.

This isn’t right. The instruments are too perfect in my hands, the sound I pull from them too loud, and it’s just me. With my ever-present audience of guards, of course, and Ell, who has dropped by to check on my progress like she has a dozen times a day for almost a week.

I pick up a different one and pluck out one of the old songs I played that night. . . .

I switch again.

It’s not working. I feel like I’m trying to wrap my arms around a shadow after I’ve spent my life with the person who cast it.

Above me, a red light glows. I know Ell can hear. “I need my band,” I tell her. If they’ll play with me again. If they’ll even speak to me now that I’ve sold out to the Corp.

Through the glass, she’s quiet for several beats. One. Two. A silent rhythm I could string a melody along. Finally, she nods. “I will see what I can arrange,” she says, looking at her watch and turning to my guards. “I have a meeting about our new project. Make sure he doesn’t do anything foolish.”

I go back to practicing. There are enough guitars here that I can keep one in every tuning I’ll ever need. A deep turquoise electric is already my favorite, but at the end of each afternoon, I’ve ended up in a corner with a deep, mellow acoustic that sounds like honey from the bees kept at the North Edge farms. My first real day in here, Ell sent someone to teach me things I didn’t know, about different kinds of pickups and distortion pedals and other fancy equipment we didn’t
have down in the warehouse.

Between songs, I hook myself up to the console so conveniently placed on the wall. I don’t think I’ve really been sober since Ell took me to Sky-Club Six, but I long for the consuming, euphoric, hallucinogenic highs of Pixel’s club.

I want to forget. I want to be numb.

At least I don’t have to be scared anymore. They haven’t gone to all this effort just to kill me now.

Ell probably won’t let me go down to one of the lower Quadrants just to get a fix. She does keep her word about the band, though, so after the guards bring me lunch I spend a pod trip to Two with my stomach in knots.

I talked her out of bringing them to headquarters. Scope and Phoenix are both more likely to agree to something if they think they’re making the choice for themselves.

Instead, I’m the one with the escort. As long as I behave, they will, too.

“Let me go in alone,” I say when we’ve stopped outside the building where Scope lives with his mother and Pixel. Uncertainty twists three faces. “What, you think I’m going to run away? You have my family.”

“One moment,” says the one I think is in charge. The others watch him with a measure of respect, anyway. He pulls out a tablet and types a message. The reply comes a moment later in a synchronous
beep
and
buzz
. He nods.

Up four flights of stairs, along a vomit-colored hallway. The carpet is stained and scuffed. The original gray only peeks through at
haphazard intervals.

Bubbles of homesickness explode in my head. I lift my hand to knock and stand there, frozen, until courage thaws me out.

“Anthem.” Pixel looks somehow surprised and not, all in the second after he opens the door. And more tired than I’ve ever seen him, his skin pale and his once vibrant hair dull around his face. The brightest thing about him is the hint of anger in his dark eyes.

“I didn’t have a choice.” It’s the only thing I can say that matters right now.

The spark glows, then fizzles, leaving the irises a dull, sad brown. “I know. Saw you on TV. Nice band name.” He can’t blame me too much if he’s teasing me.

“Fuck, don’t remind me. And yeah, that was . . .” Ridiculous. Five minutes with a spokeswoman, regurgitating lies. Ell says they already want me back again. “Can I see him?”

“Come on in.” I follow him into an empty living room, body wracked with the fever-chills of nostalgia. “Scope!” he calls.

The door to Scope’s room stays closed. Maybe he knows it’s me.

“How is he?”

“He’s been tracking pretty heavy since we got out. Not that I blame him, guess I have, too. Maybe he didn’t hear me.” He crosses the room and opens the door, not bothering to knock, closing it again before I can glimpse anything inside.

Out the window, I look down at the roof of my pod. A few of the guards are on the sidewalk, leaning against the vehicle and staring up. One of them catches my eye and glances pointedly at his watch.

Whatever. They can wait.

“Hey,” says Scope in barely a whisper. I turn so quickly something pops in my neck, and I rub it with my fingers, feeling the edge
of my jack. Useless now. I’ll never have to go down to the Energy Farm again. I wonder what happened to Tango.

“Hi.” We stare at each other. I’m not sure which of us moves first, but suddenly we’re in the middle of the room, hugging, our shoulders shaking in unison.

“Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”

“Not badly. You?” He pulls away, examining my face. His eyes widen. “The twins?”

“Okay. We’re okay.”

“What about Haven? Anthem? What, did they do something to her?”

“You don’t know.”

“We don’t know much of anything,” Pixel says from the bedroom doorway. “They had us. I spent days in a fucking cell trying to figure out who’d done it. Then, they just let us out. Took away the club, and the chrome studio, and I see guards all over the damn place, but they just let us go.”

“They only wanted me,” I say. “Leader of the rebellion, now the biggest sellout to the Corp. Of course, they don’t want everyone
knowing
what I did, because that’d give people ideas. But for the ones who do . . . they let you go as soon as I caved.”

“That’s smarter than I give the Corp credit for,” Scope says.

“Yeah, well, they had some help. Who’s the smartest person we know?”

“No, shit,” they both breathe at once. “
Haven
?”

I stare at my boots, too shiny in this dusty apartment. We all just stand in silence for a minute. I’m sure the guards are getting impatient. “I need your help,” I say. “I can’t do this alone, Scope. I don’t know how to play alone.”