Ruins of the Fall (The Remants Trilogy #2) (15 page)

We catch a nap in a common area, curled up together on a luxurious coach. In the morning, we’re woken by one of the Oshies, who leads us to a doorway that has ADMINISTRATOR’S OFFICE etched on the glass.

The Oshie knocks, and Reno says, “Come in.”

Evelyn and I do as we’re told and shut the door behind us. The room is unspectacular, cramped with papers and files.

“Love what you’ve done with the place,” I say.

“It’s not much,” Reno says. “A mansion compared to the ship.” He motions for us to sit down on the worn folding chairs.

“How’d you guys even find the institute,” I say once I’m seated. I glance around the room for clues. But it’s just stacks of paper. Hard to tell how anyone can even think in this mess. But apparently this is where Reno—
Commander
Reno—runs operations from most of the time. “It’s kind of—I don’t believe in luck.”

Reno has his bare feet propped up on the plain beige desk. He strokes his shiny head while I speak, nodding along. It’s a good gesture. He’s trying to build my trust. Must work gangbusters on the rest of these idiots.

Me, I’ve been burned a couple times too many for the friendly act to work. Although I am thankful for the fact that a hundred-pound imaginary dog is no longer following me around all the damn time.

That was like a full time job, trying to ignore him. It’s funny, because the way I remember it, Ramses was a pretty cool mutt inside HIVE. Don’t know why my subconscious turned him into such a raging dickbag in reality.

That’s one for the shrinks to sort out when this mess is over.

“I don’t believe in luck, either.” Reno sips from a whiskey tumbler. “We picked up a long range radio frequency. Morse Code.” He pours himself another drink. Evelyn and I have only been in the tight office for five minutes, and he’s already knocked back three fingers of whiskey. “I tell you, your brother was some kind of genius.”

“Thanks for letting me know,” I say. There’s a wall full of degrees hanging behind Reno’s chair. I don’t think they belong to him, but I find it amusing that he doesn’t care enough to clear them out.

“Y’all having any side effects?” He wipes liquor from his wispy mustache, waiting patiently for a response.

“Thus far, it’s all good.” I grit my teeth, then I say, not entirely meaning it, “Thanks for that.”

“Thanks for bein’ our guinea pigs.”

“The pleasure’s all ours, I assure you,” I say. “So you pick up this radio signal offshore.”

“Radio ain’t real common these days, with all the fancier stuff working its magic in space. I guess we were the first ones to hear it.” Reno shrugs with a kind of
aw shucks
expression. “Or maybe just the first fool enough to believe it.”

“Hope’s a dangerous mistress.”

“That she is,” Reno says. “But we came in from the shore and we used a lotta what your brother wrote to make this place semi-habitable. This place is incredible. The work they did, in just a few months, at that young an age.”

“Few months?”

“They shut it down, quick,” Reno says. “You can read the official records, you want.” He gestures towards a stack of tall files in the corner. “They’re all real interesting.”

“I’ll pass,” I say. “Tell me about where I enter this equation.”

Evelyn snorts lightly in the corner. Yeah, yeah, it’s always about me.

“You only gotta read one thing to find that out,” Reno says. “You up for that, at least?”

“Depends on how long it is,” I say.

“Never tip your hand and agree to somethin’ you can’t keep. I like that.”

“Sure.”

Reno reaches into the bottom of the desk. With a certain care, he extracts a single sheet of paper. He holds it out, over the messy surface.

I take it from him and skim it. In so many words, it’s the basic outline of HIVE’s capabilities. Matt must’ve left it here, along with the failsafe code. Most of it, I already know: HIVE stands for HoloBand Interactive Virtual Existence. His plan was to bring about a peace, since the program was ordered by Chancellor Tanner. If, for some reason, HIVE fell into the wrong hands—well, he had a failsafe set up, hidden here. There’s a locker number, where I presume he put the goods.

Only the last line is relative to me. It echoes the memory I saw at Atlas’ waystation.

If the wrong person gets HIVE, a good man will know what to do
.
Luke Stokes will know what to do.

I look up when I’m finished. Reno’s been eying me this whole time, trying to gauge my reaction. Before I speak, I hand the paper off to Evelyn.

“So, y’all see what’s going on. Why I was
excited
to find you, Luke.”

“Not really,” I say.

“You don’t know what to do?” He raises a graying eyebrow. His wind-beaten skin scrunches up around the corners of his eyes. “Well then, why’d I bring you here.”

Evelyn breathes quicker. I don’t. I look through Reno and say with lackadaisical ease, “I know what to do.” I reach into my back pocket, taking the worn and frayed printout Atlas gave me. That meeting feels like years ago. With methodical slowness, I unfold it and offer it to Reno.

“I can’t read this,” Reno says. “You can?”

“Your nerds can,” I say. “That’s why you pay them the big bucks, right?”

“If you can’t read it, you don’t really know.”

“I know,” I say. Then I direct my gaze to him, so white-hot that he has to look away. “Call it faith, right?”

A man can’t argue with his own words. He nods.

“I’ll take you to what your brother did.”

He rises and slips past us. As he’s working the fickle doorknob, the building shakes and dust comes down from the ceiling.

Turns out it’s just the opening salvo.

Because a few seconds later, the office wall crumbles, in a smoky explosion, sending me to the floor.

“Goddamnit,” Reno yells above the smoke and noise. “The hell happened out there?”

I wriggle out from beneath him, uninterested in the grand scope of things. “Evelyn? Evelyn?” My voice rises in pitch, frantic, hopeful—dreading that no answer will come. Eyes stinging from the smoke and dust, I push the through swirl of heat and bitter cold, fingers searching.

They brush across something soft. It smells ever so faintly of lilac.

“I—I’m stuck.”

The words fill my chest with ice and elation simultaneously. “Can’t move?”

“The files are…” She grunts and heaves, a labored breath expelled from her lungs. “They’re on top of me.”

I move my hands further along, catching the crinkled edges of manila folders and dense stacks of paper. This doesn’t seem so bad. My hands move down, and hit metal. Heart dropping, I press against the cabinet.

Evelyn whimpers softly like a wounded animal when I try to move the cabinet.

“It hurts, Luke.”

I try to answer, but my reply is devoured by another explosion. The office’s light fixture crashes down and explodes in a shower of sparks about two feet from my head. Reno curses, apparently nicked by some of the debris.

Flames lap at the massive hole in the office wall. Through the roiling smoke, I can see the ruined flagpole. I can walk out and simply touch it.

But that would mean I have to leave Evelyn behind.

“Help me, Reno,” I yell through the blurry room. My free hand swings about, brushing against his slick head. “She’s beneath the cabinet.”

“We gotta get the damn failsafe,” Reno says. “It’s underground. Bastards are coming for it.”

“She stays, I stay.”

“You have to leave, Luke,” Evelyn says as another shell explodes into the building, maybe fifteen, twenty feet away. The ground shakes, and the ash storm is sent whirling into the air again. Visibility is zero. It’s like being inside a perpetual fog machine.

The smoke parts for a brief moment when an arctic breeze whips through. In the chasm in the wall, I see troops starting to advance. Methodically, fanning out. They’re still outside the gates. If they ran fast, they could be here within half a minute. But I suspect the fight with the Oshies has been a bloody one, and they’re wary of tricks.

A sniper shot cracks out, and the invading soldiers immediately drop to the ground. And then the debris cloud forms again, leaving me unable to even see in front of my face.

“
Reno
.”

“All right, lead me to y’all.”

I grab the thick padding of his jacket and guide him towards Evelyn. When I place his hand on the cabinet, I say, “You push on the count.”

“Don’t do it,” Evelyn says, panicked. “Just leave me.”

I ignore her and say, “Now.”

We push, the heavy groan of the cabinet not nearly enough to drown out her screams. Outside, the invading army under Kid Vegas’ command trades shots with the soldiers defending the institute. I have no way of telling who’s winning the battle. But if it’s enough to crack through Reno’s cowboy cool, then it has me worried.

I lift Evelyn to her feet. She leans against me, putting all her weight on one leg. “Compound fracture,” she says underneath her breath. “Potential ligament damage. Kneecap dislocation probable…”

As we turn around, looking for the door, she continues reciting her diagnosis. I don’t say anything. It’s taking her mind off the pain.

Reno yanks my arm towards the doorway.

“It’s in the basement,” he says. “We gotta move, y’all.”

The building periodically shakes, buffeted by explosions, as we move through the halls. Here, too, the dust is thick, ceiling tiles and plaster hanging by thin threads above us. When we get a few feet outside the office, though, visibility increases enough that I can actually see in front of me.

Not far, but enough.

Evelyn stumbles across a ruined locker, breaking her string of concentration. When she falls, I get a look at her leg and almost have to turn away. The bone is sticking through the back of her calf, crushed through the skin by the cabinet’s weight.

I lift her off the ground and put her over my shoulder. Behind us, far down the hallway, the building shakes. This time from footsteps, moving in lockstep, disciplined unison.

“A good woman’s hard to find, I take it,” Reno says. He looks kind of funny without the hat, his blue eyes shining through the gritty dust. A broken water fountain spits a small geyser into the air behind him, spraying his head with a light film of moisture.

“You have no idea,” I say. I can feel Evelyn sigh as I move.

“That Kid Vegas fella ain’t gonna stop,” Reno says. “Made that clear when he came.”

“You met him?” I adjust the weight on my shoulders so Evelyn’s hip isn’t digging into my joint.

“Met a man who knows the man,” Reno says. “Let’s just leave it at that.” He nods towards an open doorway. In the low light dust, it’s hard to tell what he’s gesturing towards.

When I get closer, I can see that it’s a stairwell. The building quakes again. It gives me the slightest idea what it must’ve been like, out here, when the fault line ruptured. The emergency lights leading to the basement tremble and sway.

“Or you could tell me.”

Reno stops on the middle of the steps. “Y’all want to wait for story time?”

“The short version will do.” No matter what position I arrange Evelyn in, each step feels like a pile driver going through my shoulder.

He hits the basement, which is unlit. Scrounging around the unfinished walls, Reno eventually finds a tiny battery powered lantern. It casts a ghostly glow that barely cuts five feet ahead.

“He sent one of our captured boys back with a message,” Reno says. Dirt and rocks trickle off the low ceiling. I have to crouch slightly so that Evelyn’s back doesn’t bang off the tunnel. It’s wide enough not to be claustrophobic. Still, you wouldn’t want to be caught down here for an extended period of time.

“What was the message?”

“Message was, half the boy’s face was damn burned off,” Reno says. “Implication bein’, if we didn’t give up, we were going to suffer something bad.”

Kid doesn’t do cruelty for no reason. There’s always a motive behind his actions—a motive, even, behind the motive. That’s the thing with the people trained in Gifted Minds. They’re a half dozen steps ahead, playing on a different game board.

So a frontal assault on the institute was a move Reno wasn’t expecting. But what comes next, the chess move twenty minutes from now, that’s what I’m curious about.

Kid Vegas and Olivia Redmond played me for a fool once before. Led me exactly where I needed to go, to do the things they couldn’t do themselves. Then they picked up the fruits of my futile labor as simply as an apple from a roadside stand.

“What was your response?”

“The hell you mean, my response,” Reno says.

“I mean, what’d you do? Your operation change at all?”

He stops in the tunnel, and I almost bump into him. “You questionin’ my judgement?”

“Kid’s got an end game in mind,” I say. “I’m trying to figure that out.”

“He want to crush us. Ain’t too hard to figure out.” Reno starts walking again, wiping his sweaty brow. That is a funny thing about being down here. The confined space traps our body heat, making it seem warmer than it actually is. “You best watch your head. And your girlfriend’s leg.”

I see why in another thirty paces. The tunnel narrows, the ceiling dipping to about four feet high. Reno ducks through the opening.

“This is gonna hurt, Ev,” I say.

She groans, only half-awake. As gently as I can, I dip her down, so that I’m cradling her body in my arms. Then I crouch down, bent at the back, and hand her off through the hole. Reno takes hold of her, but the slight impact of the hand off makes her scream.

The noise bounces off the long tunnel, over and over, as I squeeze through the entranceway.

He lays her down in a corner of the room. Her eyes are shut tight, trying to stave off the tears.

“We dug it out over the past year,” Reno says. “Hell of a lot of work.”

“Why bother?” The unfinished dirt room is about 9 x 9. The lantern isn’t powerful enough to illuminate the whole thing.

Instead of answering, Reno walks over to the corner and shines the light. There’s a rickety looking ladder that leads upwards.

“In case of emergency,” Reno says. “An escape tunnel.”

The pieces click together. “You responded with force, didn’t you?”

“Can’t let a man push you around like that,” Reno says. “Shows weakness. You face the storm.”

“So most of your forces are elsewhere?”

“We ain’t got time for this,” Reno says. He walks over to the table, where a small, ancient drive sits. Without reading the label or seeing it closer, I can tell immediately that it’s part of HIVE. The technology is ancient—2.5” solid state drive. Only Matt could use something so old to create something so brilliant.

Then again, there’s an old saying from great artists. It’s the constraints that make innovation possible. So maybe, by zagging and pulling from the past, he was able to see a path that others couldn’t. Not like I can ask him.

“This was in the locker,” Reno says. “I assume you know what to do with it?”

“I said I did earlier, didn’t I?”

“Just checkin’ to see if you had a change of heart.” He pockets the drive and points towards the ladder. “Shall we?”

“I don’t think so.”

His radiant blue eyes narrow. It’s the first time I’ve seen him angry. “The hell you mean?”

“You sent your forces out to strike back,” I say. “The majority of them at least. Problem is, that did two things. One, you’re gonna be losing the media war. They’re painting you as savage. Obliterating some small, overmatched force for scouting.”

“That ain’t the truth.”

“Truth doesn’t play into it,” I say. “So Kid has the people behind the action. That’s the first step. But the other thing is, he pushed you out of position. Opened you up to an attack. Your emotions got the better of you.”

Reno doesn’t say anything. It’s fifty-fifty whether the calm returns, or his anger boils over and becomes a full blown storm. For the Oshies’ sake, I hope it’s the former. Feelings and being pissed off will get everyone killed.

And I don’t really want to live in the New Allied States.

“Let’s say you’re right,” Reno says, his tone measured. “And I ain’t sayin’ you are. Then what?”

“Simple,” I say. “He makes you panic. You’re left unguarded. Probably think he has a bigger force than he does. They’re still scouting. You haven’t seen the rest of the country, but it’s a shithole. No army is mobilizing that quick.” I shrug. “Besides, there’s only a couple million people left, by most estimates. And a bunch of them are in HIVE.”

“A lot more than we got,” Reno says, still guarded. Unwilling to let go of his notion that we have to rush through to the surface, haul ass away from the institute.

“That may be true some point in the future,” I say. “But right now, you probably outnumber Kid’s forces. I’d bet on it.”

“You a roulette playin’ man, Luke?”

“I prefer being the house,” I say, holding his gaze. “Think about it. You pop out this hole, and you bring him exactly what he wants, but hasn’t found yet. The failsafe.” I work backwards, how Kid could’ve gotten the intel. “They must’ve found out about the failsafe from Atlas.”

“Atlas?” I’m throwing too much at Reno at once.

“Don’t worry about it,” I say. “Old friend. But, I suspect, a dead one.” Unless it was Jana, since she was the only other person who really knew. But something tells me she isn’t dead yet. “Anyway, it’s easier for Kid to smoke you out then for him to fight a war of attrition.”

“How you figure?”

“Because that’s why the Circle isn’t fighting the factions any more.” It’s all obvious now. Each move slots in easily. Chancellor Blackstone is a smart man, far more intelligent and savvy than his predecessor Tanner. It’s easier to win by guile than outright force. To
enlist
rather than
enforce
.

Any good con artist knows that. Without the mark’s own inertia, running a con would be a Sisyphean failure.

And right now, Blackstone is very interested in rebuilding. He wants a legacy. You don’t get that by going scorched earth on your enemies. None of that sounds bad, considering how awful the world is. Until you realize the methodology of the current leadership. Which is to people’s throats without killing them.

Without them even knowing it.

That’s what HIVE is. Living in the NAC—or the New Allied States—will be like. The experience of being soul-crushingly dead. But being conscious for all of it.

The worst kind of hell.

Maybe it takes people a couple years until they realize what they traded. Like with the Circle: stability in exchange for freedom. But when the quake hit and the volcano spewed ash over the west, the edifice of that civilization crumbled.

And so will this false front Blackstone and the others are erecting.