Coda (5 page)

“Daddy!” Alpha says, carefully climbing onto his legs. “Guess what we did today?”

Omega sits on the floor by his head, and he and Alpha trade excited descriptions of their days. I can tell the effort he’s expending to open his eyes and talk to them will exhaust him later, but I’m glad for their sake that he tries.

The high I’m still riding from band practice gets me through the evening without needing a hit from the console. Haven and I make dinner for them, too close in my cramped kitchen. Really, she mostly watches and slices things.

“Wake up.” My father’s eyes flicker, and I shake his shoulder with the hand not holding a plate of bread and cheese.

“Anthem,” he says through cracked lips. “Thirsty.”

I get a bottle of water and hold it to his mouth. He drinks as well as the weakness will allow, atrophied muscles slack in his face. The collar of his shirt darkens, hiding the stains already there, and he coughs.

I wonder if he felt this way when my mother was dying, torn
between wanting her pain to be over and wanting her to live for his own selfish reasons.

“You need to eat something,” I tell him. He shakes his head. We go through this pretty much every day. I help him sit up a little, then take a spot on the floor next to the couch and feed him, watching the TV during every protracted chew. From the kitchen, I hear forks clattering against plates and Haven encouraging Omega to eat his tomatoes.

“And now, a message from President Z,” says the spokeswoman. The screen goes black, but there’s nothing wrong with it. Assassinations during rebel uprisings were a pretty common cause of death for our first several leaders; now all we know of anyone in the job is a disembodied voice and a single, probably invented initial. We know even less about the Board, the group of nine who assist the president, because they don’t bother to go on TV. They sit in their offices high up in headquarters and make it illegal to reveal their identities.

“Citizens!” President Z begins, the timbre screechy from digital modification—or I hope so. I might actually have a little sympathy for the woman if she sounds like that in real life. “We have good news to share. A small skirmish was detected in Quadrant Three, but it has been taken care of. I wish to remind you all that your Corporation works for
you
, and we will go to any necessary lengths in order to protect you from those who wish to send our peaceful oasis back to the chaos of earlier times.”

I shake my head. A guy probably just had a bad reaction to a track, and others got swept up in the chaos. It happens. Disorganized riots break out and are quelled quickly by guards who blast strong drugs from speakers mounted on their pods.

“In addition, I am pleased to announce that more power has been allotted to the Grid to address a shortage in Quadrant Four, so
we can all enjoy the music to its fullest tonight. Enjoy your evenings, Citizens, and long live the Web!”

Long live
. Right. The Web might, but nothing else has longevity. At eighteen, I’d be middle-aged if I had a normal job. As a conduit, I’m on the downhill slide to old.

I throw a crust of bread at the TV.

“Turn that crap off,” says Haven from the doorway. She shoots a disgusted look at the screen and retreats back into the kitchen.

I follow her. “Are you two finished?” I ask the twins, putting my father’s half-eaten meal down by the sink. Omega still hasn’t eaten his tomatoes, and Alpha’s left most of her rice. With promises of a treat—a piece of chocolate I splurged on at the depot—I persuade them to clean their plates.

“Ant?” Omega says, licking his fingers of the last traces of sticky chocolate. “What’s a drug?”

Fine hairs around my neck jack stand on end. “Why?”

“Fable said that’s why Mommy is in the citizen-place.”

I’m going to kill that kid. I’m not paying his mother credits so he can open his bratty little mouth around my brother and sister. Haven is frozen, silvery eyebrows nearly at her hairline, when I look to her for help or inspiration or . . . something.

Lies tickle my tongue. Fable’s wrong. He’s making it up. Drugs aren’t something they have to think about. But however okay I’ve been with keeping the truth from them until the right time came, I can’t bring myself to lie outright. I do try for a minute, fail, and force air into knotted lungs.

I should have known there’d never be a right time, and now they’re
both
looking at me.

“It’s something that makes you feel good. Or bad. Sometimes it’s something that makes pain go away.”

“Why would anyone want to feel bad?” Alpha asks.

Haven’s expression unsticks, like someone’s poured warm water over it. “It’s not that simple, kiddo. You remember how I brought you that chocolate cake on your birthday and you ate so much it made you sick?” Alpha nods. “But other times, it’s the best thing in the world, and you eat just enough that it makes you happy, right?”

“Yeah.” Alpha smiles, the gap showing where she recently lost the last of her baby teeth.

My chest actually hurts from gratitude, but this isn’t Haven’s responsibility. “So it’s a little like that,” I say, forcing a smile because the twins need one and Haven deserves one. “Only it’s music that does it, and the Corporation makes sure that all the music we hear makes us feel something. Mom had too much, and it made her sick. Someone figured out how to do it a long time ago, but it’s not good for little kids, which is why you haven’t heard any yet.” Close enough.

“That’s weird,” Omega says. “When will we get to try it?”

My stomach churns. “It’s nothing you need to think about right now,” says Haven. “Why don’t you go get ready for bed?”

They disappear to their room, kissing our father goodnight on the way. I can’t make it to my own fast enough. My natural high from this afternoon is gone, ruined by the Corp, the way they poison everything.

Fuck
.

Three years
. I stab at the console screen.
Three years before they’re exposed
. It doesn’t sound like a long time, not to me. The fewer minutes you have, the shorter they feel.

Haven joins me, pacing the length of my room while I attempt to still my whirling thoughts with a track. It doesn’t work. Over and over, around and around; there is no way to twist the twins’ blossoming understanding into something okay. My mother died before
she had to watch the drug fully sink its talons into me; my father might as well have done the same.

In three years, I’ll still be lucid enough to have to watch the two people I love most fall into the inescapable abyss. While they were in the dark, I could close my eyes and join them.

Soon the twins are going to figure out the whole truth. Then they’ll realize it’ll happen to me, too. And how do I tell them that none of us have a choice about going to the clubs or tracking at home? Even if trying to abstain didn’t make my body shake and turn my mind to sludge, the Corp monitors that stuff. They know when we’re not listening enough.

Three years. The days will run into each other, one shade of gray blending into the next, and suddenly I’ll be sending them off to school worrying that today is
the
day.

And on that day, everything will fall apart. They’ll come home with dreamy, complacent smiles. Food will taste like colors, and the music they’ve just heard will light their minds with sunshine.

I’ll never forget that first hit. Nothing really compares. We all spend the rest of our lives hoping the next new release will recreate it. Sometimes it comes close, and the high from those can last for hours or even days. The first time a track did that for me, I wound up in an OD station for a week.

That was just before Johnny found me, and that’s the worst part of this. I
know
what real music is. Untainted sound, the pure beauty it’s supposed to be, and I can’t tell them. Not before it’s too late, not at all. Nothing could make me break the promise of secrecy I swore to the guy who gave me something to live for at a time when I was too dumb to realize what I already had, not even the twins.

“Anthem,” Haven says. I read my name on her lips and pull the headphones off as the final beats of the track fade away.

“Don’t.” I shake my head. “Just . . . don’t say anything.”

Arms slide around my waist. She smells like roses from the park.

“You know they were only eight when they picked their handles? I was almost twelve,” I say.

“They’re growing up fast, I know. You didn’t have an older brother to worship. They watch everything you do.”

“What if I’m doing all of it wrong?”

“You’re not. You make this a real family, Anthem. Not like mine,” she whispers.

I lift my head from her shoulder and step away because everything’s just too close right now and my willpower is wavering. “Go without me, I’ll meet you there.”

“You sure?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” She reaches out to take my hand and squeezes my fingers.

The twins wait for me, curled under blankets in their beds. I sit by Alpha’s feet and tell them about sprawling fields between sunlit cities, the way people could travel to the next town or all the way to the other side of the world. I describe the grand adventures I’ve read, of people crossing oceans in huge boats or climbing mountains a hundred times higher than the Hydro-Farms.

I hope that the ideas of brightness, of blue water and clean air and healthy ground, will be enough to give them sweet dreams, and don’t remind them that, these days, we can’t even go to the other side of the river. Tunnels were caved in, bridges were dismantled. To keep us safe, of course. To keep us protected in a fortress of glass and steel and concrete. The airports didn’t survive the war, and the last planes fell out of the sky when the pulse bombs went off, but we’ve
been shown footage taken on flights in restored helicopters.

There is nothing out there. We’re trapped here.
I’m
trapped here, with them, and the future is coming fast, pouring grains of time around my ankles. It won’t stop until it buries me.

Light from the TV flickers across my father’s face as I sit on the floor to lace up my boots. Expressionless, blank . . . there’s almost nothing left of the man I once knew.

I press my palms to my eyes, careful not to smear my makeup. It doesn’t help, anyway. The darkness just makes it easier to imagine the scars creeping along neural pathways, fault lines ready for an earthquake.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” I say into the silence. He blinks once, which could be a coincidence. “They’ll ask me why. What do I tell them?”

Nothing. I check on the twins. I fight off the urge to superimpose dull eyes over closed ones and imagine what they’ll look like in ten years. They’re healthy and strong, just sleeping.

Wind blows in off the river; it’s easier to think out here. All of it started innocently, I guess. Supplies of most medications were depleted almost to nonexistence during the war, so people had to think of other ways to help the sick, the injured. Playing music for them worked better than anything else at tempering pain.

If only it’d stopped there.

I kick the doorframe on my way in. Pixel opens his mouth, painted sticky green, then shakes his head. The streaks in his hair match his lips.

“Only half an hour late, I’m impressed. How goes the life of the con artist?”

Rolling my eyes, I scan my wrist. “Don’t call me that, and I’m fine. You?”

“Same old. They’re on the balcony.”

“Cool.” I can’t hear it yet, but I can feel it. Tracking at home last night kept me going, but my body itches for the better fix I’ll get on the dance floor. “Take it easy,” I say, my hand on the door to the soundproof room.

“Always do.”

Inside, the music hasn’t reached its full addictive momentum yet. Gentle tracks play to ease us in, selected by a computer in a glass booth that would once have held a person. I climb mirrored stairs to the table where my friends are waiting, voices raised above the noise. Implants and ultraviolet makeup seize rotating lights. Haven’s saved me a seat beside her; I slide into it and catch that something is
choice
.

She reads too many trashy prewar novels when she’s not here or at my place, or doing strange things on her computer.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” Haven says, leaning over so I can hear her, long legs inches from mine. I think she wears that skirt to torture me. In my lap, my knuckles turn white.