Join (24 page)

“Hey!” yells the bartender.

“What do you know?” Leap shouts again, and now she's just hitting him, his shoulders, face, and head, leaning as far as she can across the table. At first, her blows slide off, then, just as Rope appears to be shaking himself awake, she lands a bruising punch to his chin and one to his cheek. Chance Five throws himself against her, knocking her into the back of the booth.

Chance One turns toward the open room just as the bartender is coming around the bar with a sawed-off shotgun.

Leap has managed to knee Chance Five, knocking him far enough back to give her another shot at Rope. She's stretching across the table when the bartender, who has reached the end of their booth, starts yelling.

“Get out! All of you! I don't need fights. I don't need your kind.”

He racks a round in the shotgun, and the room becomes very still.

Rope has been slowly lifting himself in the booth. His head lolls, and then he raises it up. He smiles.

“Flipped,” he says.

“Get out!” snarls the bartender.

“I do know someone,” says Rope, slurring, barely audible, “to meet you. Ask Hamish Lyons. He's with . . . ferals . . . in Arcadia.”

His eyes close. Leap Four stretches across the table and shakes him, but he doesn't respond. Leap lowers him slowly to lie on the table.

“Get out and take that trash with you!” growls the bartender. The three of them slowly slide out of the booth. The bartender steps back and watches as they start toward the exit.

Rope shudders and sits up. “I'm gonna stay,” he says. “Need a drink.”

Leap asks loudly, “Where is Arcadia?”

Rope can't remain upright. He begins to slump toward the back of the booth.

“Don' know,” he says, “but I tell 'em yer comin'.” His eyes close again.

Team Teenager is back on
the planes of Uyuni: Chance One— Ashton. Chance Two—Renee. Chance Three—Jake. Chance Four —Shami-8. And Chance Five—Javier. Which, Chance realizes, means all of the drives must be asleep. Chance tries to ignore that, tries to avoid waking up by focusing too much on the fact of the dream.

“Hamish Lyons was joined with Music.” Jake, Chance Three, is speaking.

They're standing shoulder to shoulder in a circle, their backs to one another, facing the endlessly receding white salt plains. Each of them throws a long, distinct shadow that extends outward, as if the sun were in the center of their circle. But there is no heat from behind them. Their bodies are cool.

Jake's voice is felt as much as heard. It is audible like the sound of wind hissing across the plain. Then with each syllable, his voice takes a firmer shape, until at last it detaches from the sounds of the wind and becomes more fully the sound of breath shaping words.

“There's no record of him among ferals.”

“Before he joined Music, what did he do?” Shami's voice is sweet and comforting, high and strong. The five of them are clothed in loose denim and fleece. There is no concern about misunderstanding, no worry about perception, no work to say things well. They can each feel the bodies of two others touching the sides of their own, and the whole shifts gently as each of them breathes.

“He's the neurophysicist whose work is most closely identified with the quantum network,” Jake answers. His words sound like an article Chance once read, but Chance's mouth is speaking them. “He created experiments to demonstrate the effect of consciousness on the physical world. He was twenty-nine when he joined Music.”

“Should we tell Leap?” It's Renee who asks, her curly hair shifting slightly in the breeze.

“Tell Leap what?” asks Javier.

“That he can't help her,” says Ashton thoughtfully, considering the most likely shape of events. “That Hamish Lyons is gone. That whatever he was disappeared a long time ago into the meme virus that claimed Music. That I don't think our conversation with Rope provided anything useful.”

“Why say that?” insists Javier. “How do we know that?”

At the far edges of Uyuni, miles across the salt plain, in a distant gray dimness, each of them sees very slight movement. They each notice it at the same moment and strain to see it better. Javier realizes that he really should be seeing mountains rising up at that distance, at least in that direction, but the mountains aren't there. Instead there is a shifting, as if a storm were shuffling dark clouds very slowly toward and then away from a vanishing point on the horizon. With a chill they each have the same realization at the same moment: that movement is of bodies pressed together, people perhaps, so distant that they are indistinguishable from one another and indistinguishable from the weather that is moving them.

The five teenagers know that the faraway bodies are both familiar and alien. They are sure that they understand what the people who move those bodies long for, what they want, what the people see, and how they decide, why they shift so slowly on the far horizon. But they also know that the distant cloud of bodies is not them, is different from them, and that the clouds of people on the horizon are moved not by weather but by hunger, an essential hunger that each of the five of them standing in the circle shares.

Shami says, “It's getting cold.” And her voice sounds distant.

“Rope knows more than we do,” says Javier. “We think Hamish Lyons was part of Music, but how can that be if he's living with ferals now?”

“Arcadia isn't a real place.” Ashton speaking.

A cold breeze carrying the strong, sharp taste of salt brushes over each of them, blowing in from every direction.

“Why did we leave Rope?” asks Renee.

“He was in pain. He couldn't help us.” Shami.

“The bartender forced us out.” Ashton, remembering a sting of fear as the bartender pumped the shotgun.

“Hamish Lyons knows more about the network than anyone else alive.” Jake.

“We should find him.” Javier.

Their shadows are fading on the white plains. The gray shifting clouds in the distance are closer and the distance is smaller. In the whistle of the high wind on the plain they begin to hear voices.

“Rope can't help us,” says Ashton forcefully. “He's gone. He's mad.”

Now they hear snatches of voices, each asking a piece of a question, and the questions themselves are indecipherable, the questions are the sound of the wind and the scraping of wind-borne salt crystals against the flat plain.

“We have to help Leap,” says Shami.

“I practiced for years. There is an enormous amount of research. There's nothing to be done.” Jake's voice is restrained, sad.

All of Chance's drives awaken
at the same moment. The world floods in through four sets of senses. Chance One, Two, and Five are lying across one another in a tangle of limbs that includes Leap Four. Chance is aware of many pulses beating, the warmth off the skin of limbs, chests, and stomachs, the shifting and sounds of many bodies breathing. It takes a few moments to sort through which of them doesn't belong to Chance; which belongs to Leap.

Chance's drives are each experiencing a pulse of adrenaline as the dream, which felt preternaturally real and sharp, recedes from experience into softer memory. Chance carefully stretches and flexes limbs, moving out from under and moving off of Leap, trying not to wake her while finding spots on drives that have gone numb—feet, hands, and arms—and working them slowly to reduce the tingling. Return them to normal feeling.

Chance Four sits upright on
the couch in the living room where she'd fallen asleep. It's still dark out, and the room smells of soft leather. She stands slowly and stretches. She arrives in the kitchen at the same time as Leap One.

Chance One and Five roll out of bed, and they and Leap Four form a line for the bathroom.

In the kitchen, Chance Four says, “I didn't want to wake you up.” From the way she rocks slightly forward as she walks, to the constant movement of her hair, Chance Four always conveys the impression of being about to do something.

“My Four's going back to sleep,” Leap One says. “She's beat.”

“Ah, I'm so sorry about that,” says Chance Four. “I didn't mean to tackle her that hard. Is anything hurt?”

“No. And I was out of control, so you had to. Good thing your Five knows enough karate to stop me. Guess I'm lucky he doesn't know more.”

“This drive would have restrained you more effectively,” says Chance Four.

“Without beating me up?”

“I can't guarantee you wouldn't have been hurt.” Chance smiles.

“I'm gonna join with a professional wrestler,” says Leap.

“So,” Chance says, “have you been able to hide the flip?”

“Up until yesterday, yes. But that was bad, what happened while we were shopping. Autonomy marked the video for review. I'm surprised it took this long. I thought Autonomy was stricter. Made me wonder how much we might have gotten away with.”

“Who were you flying with?”

“Regal. I don't think he even noticed.”

Chance Four laughs.

“He's such a piece of work,” says Leap One. “He invited me for a mixer and suggested I not bring One or Four. He said, ‘It would work against the aesthetic vision.' I thought, God, if I could have just shown up with my Five.”

Leap and Chance share a further laugh. Then Leap suddenly stops. At first he holds his breath, then he exhales cautiously, his eyes closing in pain as he leans back against a counter. After a moment, he breathes in slowly. He opens his eyes and says, “I can actually feel it now, all the time. Before, I didn't notice the spasms. I just felt a pain if my hand banged against something. The last couple, though, I've experienced them. It's like having razors in my mind, separating me. Like being cut by numbness. The worst thing is, it almost feels like the same thing I had as Josette.”

“Leap, I don't know if this lead, this Hamish Lyons thing, is going to work out.”

“Yeah, I know. He was part of Music, right? So, he's gone.”

Chance Five has entered the kitchen and is getting orange juice. He sets a glass on the counter in front of Leap One and one near Chance Four.

“How is your treatment going?” Leap One says, directing the question to Chance Five.

“As expected, I guess,” says Chance Five. “Not good.”

Chance Five drains his juice and shuffles slowly out, Leap One watching him go.

“I'm sorry about that,” says Leap One.

“I just had a nightmare inspired by that talk with Rope,” says Chance Four.

They had returned to the house in a state of shock, eaten dinner with minimal conversation, sat about the house for an hour or so, and then all went to bed. Chance was surprised but pleased when Leap Four decided to spend the night with Chance's three drives. While leafing through Civ News reports, Chance Four fell asleep on the couch.

“I'm going to turn him in,” Chance Four says. “Turn Apple in.”

“That's probably the right thing to do,” Leap says, “and I know it might be dangerous not to. But he said himself, he would have hurt us if he could have. He doesn't have the resources anymore, to hurt people. Can we wait, just a day or two? What if he does . . . help?”