Silver Eyes (4 page)

“Still think Michael Vallant is here?” Anaximander asked.

I was beginning to doubt that, but I didn't want to admit it. “Yes.”

“I disagree. But just in case you do find him . . . here.” He held out an innocuous-looking white square with a loop of thread in one corner. This time he didn't assume. “Have you ever used Knockout medi-patches?”

I shook my head. I'd only seen them in movies. I touched the two-inch square gingerly with one fingernail. “How does it work?”

Anaximander looped a finger through the thread and turned the white square so that the side facing out from his palm had a faint red-stripe pattern on it. “You peel off the protective film”—he demonstrated—“then hit your opponent with it. It doesn't matter where, as long as the patch touches skin. The sedative is absorbed into the bloodstream upon contact. Within ten seconds your opponent will be unconscious.” Without warning,
he stepped in close and tried to slap the medi-patch on my arm.

“Hey!” I nimbly skipped back out of range.

“As you can see, the weapon has its limitations,” Anaximander said, expressionless, as if he had never doubted my ability to pass his test. “It's a weapon of surprise only, a last resort if you get into trouble. If you do find the thief, call me on the headset, and I'll cross over and take him out.”

For the first time I felt nervous.

It must have showed on my face. “Are you sure you want to do this?” Anaximander asked after I'd taken the patches.

He expected me to back down. My spine stiffened. “Yes. I'm just waiting for that.” I pointed at a swiftly moving wisp of cloud overhead. The hex was half a kilometer across. If I were going to cross it without killing myself I would need shade. I had chosen to land on the northeast side of the hex because of the direction of the wind.

Anaximander grunted, silently skeptical.

I charted the shadow cast by the small cloud, and when it drifted overhead, I was ready. I closed my eyes again, took a deep breath, and stepped out into the smothering heat.

I was dressed all in white to help prevent heatstroke, but it was hard to imagine how black could have been worse. And I was in the shade!

I walked carefully in the direction the cloud had been moving, trying to match its speed and stay under its protective umbrella. I counted steps, reasoning that about a thousand steps should take me to the other side.

Halfway across, I lost the cloud's shadow.

My eyes snapped open—and were dazzled by the mirror glare. I shut them again, and spots danced on my eyelids.

Blind, I zagged left trying to find the cloud's protection again and failing. I took three more steps forward, caught the leading edge of shadow like a
physical touch, and then lost it again. No amount of zigging and zagging after that helped.

A thin wedge of panic drove itself into my brain. Without the shade, it was blazing hot in the center of the mirror. I imagined that the clothes on my body were catching fire in the intense heat, burning up.

I would have to turn around and go back, but which way was back? In my frantic zigzagging I'd lost track.

“There's another cloud coming up. Take five steps to the left.” Anaximander's calm voice came over my headset. No lectures this time.

I obeyed gratefully, following his instructions in a strange dance across the mirror. Run forward four steps, zag left one, walk forward, left two, run forward.

“You're at the other side,” Anaximander said.

I opened my eyes but left my sunglasses polarized. The west solar wall loomed over me.

The shadow cast by the wall was narrow, almost falling within the sixty-degree slant of the wall itself. At noon the five feet of shade I was standing in might vanish altogether. A person would have to be desperate to hide here.

Nevertheless, my guess had been right. A black tent stood to my right, previously invisible in the mirror's harsh glare.

I looped a Knockout medi-patch over my palm and cat-footed closer. I wanted to be sure that the thief was actually in residence before I radioed Anaximander. I listened outside a moment but could detect no sound from within. It occurred to me that the thief would probably sleep during the intense heat of the day and wake at night.

I decided to peek in.

I depolarized my sunglasses and removed the film from my Knockout patch, then lifted a tiny corner of the tent flap.

A quick glance took in the battery-operated fan, large cooler, and bags of half-melted ice that made the tent bearable. Then I focused on the teenage boy lying on a blanket.

Grinning, I stepped inside, hand held out—and he sat up.

He saw me.

He looked too young to be a million-dollar thief, was my first confused thought, no more than nineteen. In the heat he had removed his shirt and wore only denim cutoffs. His legs were tanned, and his body was lean and athletic. His hair was raven dark, his face strong and handsome—
and his eyes were violet like mine.

Violet eyes lie.

I recognized him—and then my brain short-circuited, throwing me into the drowning memory, my worst flashback yet.

Plunging down through cold water, murky green at first, but getting darker and colder with every second, every breath not taken—

The drowning memory held me blind and vulnerable. Instinct made me lift the Knockout medi-patch
I knew was in my hand though all I could feel was cold water.

My eyes saw only the lightless depths of a watery grave as I slapped out wildly, trying to ward off the thief.

My hand hit flesh, but I wasn't attacked in return.

“Angel!” he exclaimed. “What the hell took you so long? I've been waiting weeks—”

He gave a strangled gasp as the Knockout sedative entered his bloodstream, and when the drowning memory cleared from my vision, he was lying unconscious at my feet.

“H
E KNEW MY NAME,
”
I said to Anaximander when he flew over to join me ten minutes later. I felt as pale and shaken as if I truly had drowned. “How did he know my name?”

“He was trying to throw you off,” Anaximander said after a pause. “He must have hacked into SilverDollar's personnel files and matched your picture to your face.”

I nodded, even though the small tent had no palmtop computer. I said nothing of my own flash of recognition before the drowning memory washed it away. I wanted Anaximander to think I was competent, not crazed.

“So is it here?” I asked. “What does it look like?”

“What does what look like?”

“The thing Michael Vallant stole.”

“It's not here.” Anaximander sounded certain although he'd barely glanced around the tent. “He'll have hidden it somewhere. Help me carry him to the aircar.”

I picked up Michael Vallant's feet, and we carried him to the Panther. All the while, my mind kept churning, trying to figure things out.

“Angel! What the hell took you so long? I've been waiting weeks—”

If he had been waiting for me, it implied that we were partners, that I was also a thief. The thought of stealing from SilverDollar filled me with nausea. It couldn't be true. It must have been a ruse, as Anaximander said.

But what if it was true and I just didn't remember?

After wrestling with the hideous thought during the flight back to SilverDollar's facility, I decided that it didn't matter what I had done before my memory loss. That Angel was a different person.

I prayed that Michael Vallant didn't give me away. Before becoming SilverDollar's employee, I had taken a Loyalty oath that had very strict penalties for deception.

A cordon of guards met us at the aircar hangar when we set down. They took charge of Michael Vallant's limp body.

Anaximander went with them. When I started to follow, he stopped me. “There's no need for you to attend the interrogation. You don't know the particulars of his case so his testimony won't mean anything to you.”

I was reluctant to let Michael Vallant out of my sight. “I've never attended a truth-drug interrogation,” I said. “I should learn the procedure in case I ever need to use it on the job.”

Anaximander frowned. “Another time. You have
a doctor's appointment this afternoon to have your head wound checked.”

I opened my mouth to argue some more, but Anaximander cut me off. “Don't worry, I'll give you full credit for the apprehension when I report to Mr. Castellan.”

“Eddy,” I corrected.

Anaximander gave me a very even look, and I backed down. I didn't want him to think I was trying to impress the boss at his expense. “All right. I'll go see Dr. Clark.”

The appointment took a total of fifteen minutes—five of them spent in the waiting room. After a quick look under my bandage, Dr. Clark asked me a few questions. Had I had any headaches? Any dizziness? Truthfully I answered no and avoided mentioning my memory problems.

Outside the infirmary, I looked at my watch and frowned. I could have easily attended the interrogation; obviously Anaximander had simply wished to exclude me.

Why? Did he want to do the interrogation alone to make himself look better when he reported to Eddy? Or did he suspect that Michael Vallant knew me?

Deciding that I was making too much out of the words of a thief, I reluctantly began my next history lesson on the World Environmental Crisis. As usual, I decided to take the test first to see if I needed to bother with the lesson itself.

Question One: In what year did the World Environmental Crisis start? The year 2032, 2049, 2059, or 2047? I picked 2049, because it could be easily confused with two other answers.

A red check mark appeared, and Question Two replaced Question One. What caused the crisis? An asteroid, a volcanic eruption, an epidemic, or a biological agent? Since I knew the Wasteland had been caused by a man-made microbe that ate black topsoil and turned it into gray powder, I selected D. Another check mark.

Question Three: What country released the biological agent? NorAm, China, Turkey-Iran, or Egypt? I was fairly sure NorAm had been the victim, not the perpetrator, but I couldn't remember with whom NorAm had been at war at the time. I guessed Egypt, but an X appeared and Turkey-Iran became highlighted.

I got the next five questions right, remembering that the blight had soon spread over the whole globe and that the Earth would have become one huge wasteland if the United Nations hadn't developed an antibody that killed the microbe. Not that the UN had just handed the antibody out for free. Instead, they'd used their possession of the antibody as a way to stop traditional warfare. Countries had been forced to surrender all their weapons of mass destruction or be eaten by the blight.

Question Nine—What effect did the World Environmental Crisis have on mining?—stumped me for a moment. In the end I selected A, the UN began enforcing strict environmental laws, making mining on Earth more expensive. The wording “on Earth” made me remember that SilverDollar had a number of mines on Mars, where there was no environment to pollute.

That gave me a ninety percent, and I went on to
the next module on strip mining, about which I knew nothing. I was forced to yawn my way through twenty-five pages of dense information before I could pass the test.

As soon as it was suppertime, I went to the cafeteria. Anaximander always ate promptly at six, and I wanted to pump him for information regarding Michael Vallant.

Anaximander was very health-conscious so I loaded up my plate with vegetables and brown bread. I didn't want to waste time being lectured about my diet.

“So how did things go with the thief?” I asked, setting my tray down beside Anaximander's. Small talk was wasted on him. “Did he tell you where he hid the loot?”

“The interrogation was successful.” Anaximander gave nothing away.

“So what happens to him now?” I asked casually. “Does he go to prison?” What would be my punishment if I had, in fact, been Michael Vallant's partner?

Anaximander surprised me. “No. In return for SilverDollar's dropping the charges he has agreed to work for us. After his Loyalty Induction, he'll join you in training.”

My jaw dropped open. I closed it hastily, but long after supper was over and the pickup volleyball game in the gym had fizzled out, Anaximander's revelation kept exploding over and over in my mind.

I'd been hoping to make some friends my age at SilverDollar, but Michael Vallant wasn't whom I'd had in mind. Laying aside the problem of whether or not we knew each other, he was a
thief. A criminal. How could I work with him?

But what disturbed me the most was the thought of Michael Vallant undergoing Loyalty
Induction. Logically, I knew that Loyalty Induction was necessary to prevent industrial spies from infiltrating SilverDollar. I remembered my own Induction only vaguely, but I knew it had been rigorous, verging on painful. For some reason the thought of the violet-eyed thief experiencing even the small amount of pain caused by the Loyalty Induction bothered me—greatly.

Evenings at SilverDollar were always long— most of the other employees spent the time with their families, leaving me at loose ends—but this evening dragged on for years. I spent it rereading the articles I'd downloaded, searching for some clue I'd missed, and not finding anything. I was about to resort to watching
Escape from History
again when I came to my senses and went to bed early instead.

Black dreams woke me, in which I chased myself through the maze, never able to catch the Angel from the past to demand answers.

Cold, I rubbed my upper arms, trying to create some friction heat. My thumb traced the raised surface of a scar on my inner arm, following lines and curved shapes.

Letters.

“Computer, lights on.” Heart pounding, I lifted my arm over my head. Twisting my head so far around made my neck ache, so I went into the bathroom for a better look. The jumble of lines resolved itself into letters, a word written in mirror writing, another message from Angel in the past.

A message so important I'd carved it in my own flesh.

“Michelangelo.”

This message clearly referred to the second one I'd found, as Michelangelo had been a great Renaissance artist, but my mind saw a different, hidden meaning: Michael + Angel.

I shivered, icy with something I didn't understand, didn't remember.

Sleep was impossible. Driven by a need I couldn't deny, I dressed and slipped out the door. I had to see Michael Vallant.

My footsteps echoed down the deserted halls as I hurried from Blue to Gray Section. Two levels down in the subbasement, I stopped in front of the gunmetal gray door labeled L.I. for Loyalty Induction. The door was locked, but last week Anaximander had taught me how to jimmy cardlocks and this one opened easily.

I eased open the door and, thankfully, found that the room beyond was empty. The technicians must have all returned to their quarters for the night. The large one-way window in the far wall drew my gaze. I stood with one hand pressed against the glass, looking in.

I'd forgotten the chamber's odd dimensions: two stories high but only eight feet square. The room was utterly bare. Its starkness chilled me, as if it were an old-fashioned prison cell where men were thrown after being tortured for information.

Michael Vallant sat leaning against the opposite wall. His dark hair was mussed, and there were bags under his eyes, but I couldn't take my eyes off him.

He was very deliberately staring at the one-way wall that hid the Observation Room, making a statement that he knew he was being watched. He was awake, and now I remembered why: sleep deprivation was part of the Loyalty Induction procedure. Hidden speakers inside the chamber produced an earsplitting screech that prowled up and down the limits of human hearing.

A video camera recorded everything that happened in the room; no doubt the technicians would fast forward through the tape in the morning to see how Michael Vallant had fared during the night.

I turned off the camera. If anything happened that the technicians needed to know about, I would tell them. If it was all foolishness on my part, I didn't want any witnesses.

As soon as I stepped inside, a high-pitched whine assaulted my ears, scraping my nerves raw.

Michael Vallant's head came up when he saw me, and he stood. “Finally.” There was both relief and anger in his voice. “Get me out of here.” He held out his bound hands.

I took a step back. “I can't do that.” The sight of the padded handcuffs and chains he wore made me feel sick. I had to keeping reminding myself that Michael Vallant had agreed to the Loyalty Induction and the restraints were there to keep him from momentarily changing his mind about taking the oath.