S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus (85 page)

“
What is that?” Micah asks, standing close to the fence. He looks over with a puzzled look on his face.

Tears come to my eyes. It's the rabbit, Cassie's stuffy toy. I reach into my back pocket and pull out the stack of photos and sift through them until I find the one with Cassie at the beach. There, off to one side, is a dog, not quite fully grown yet. It's got the same markings as Shinji.

I look up and he's gone. So is the rabbit.

“
It's okay,” Micah whispers, seeing the tears streaming down my face. “It's all right, Jessie.” He points, and I follow the line of his finger until I see a shadow beneath the tree. It's Shinji, curled up to sleep. Beneath his chin is the toy.

And I know, even if I'm not really his little girl, I know that he believes I am. It makes me hopeful for the reunion that awaits me just a few hundred feet away. It makes me hopeful that all will be okay and that I'll be able to fix everything, even Jake.

I'm so overwhelmed with emotion that I almost don't realize my Link is pinging.

I pull it out and tap the screen.

“
What is it?” Micah asks.

“
Text message,” I mumble. “From Kelly.”

“
What's it say?”

But I don't read it out loud, because what it says takes all my hopes and shreds them apart again.

‡ ‡

[END OF EPISODE FOUR]

“Come on, Jess,”
Micah urges. He prowls along the fence and snaps at me like an overeager guard dog. “Let's find the others and get the hell out of here. Gives me the creeps standing out here with all these bodies.”

But I can't move. All I can do is stare numbly at Kelly's message on my Link while the world collapses around me. This is what it sounds like, the roar of my life shrinking down into the space of this tiny little device in my hands. It's deafening. Everything I believed was true for the past year, everything that's happened in the past two weeks, focused on those words on my screen. Three little words—

<< MICAH WROTE FAILSAFE >>

—and everything suddenly makes sense about us breaking into Long Island. It's like watching a million shards of glass shattering, except in reverse, rendering a window pane as clear as day. I can now see through it and know the truth: Micah betrayed us. He's been betraying us ever since…

Well, probably for as long as we've known him.

I stare at the words not wanting to believe. I'd suspected, yet never wanted to acknowledge the truth. There was always something dodgy about him.

We first met him in summer school last year. He'd suddenly shown up out of the blue and seemed to be everywhere we were, whenever we happened to be out in public. And he was hard not to miss: handsome and strong, confident, smart.

Everyone knew his story. His family had famously defected from Texas, from the tyranny inflicted on them by the Southern States Coalition—that's how Micah had described it anyway, as tyranny—and it was what everyone wanted to believe, even though most people privately believed that the New Merican government was just as tyrannous.

Within days of arriving, Micah had managed to wheedle his way into our cozy little hackers club. It was like he'd known about us all along, knew who we were and what we did in the privacy of our own homes. And while it wasn't exactly common knowledge that we were hackers—we never advertised it, of course—people knew. You simply had to ask the right person the right sorts of questions. And they would give you the answers. If they trusted you.

But who would trust a stranger like Micah so soon after arriving?

The biggest clue, I guess, had to be the fact that his parents were never around. In the past year, not a one of us has met them, not even once. Micah always just shrugged the strangeness off to his father working all the time and his mother being constantly out of state for family visits. We never questioned him. We didn't want to rock the boat. Micah's house was a convenient place for us to hang out, a secure, private place where we could do whatever we wanted to without fear of parental interference or reprisal. He always had access to equipment—not very good equipment, but always better than any of the rest of us. And Micah seemed to know things. He kept us challenged. He kept us sharp and hungry for more.

Just a house of cards. And now I see how it has been crumbling down around us since the beginning. We were either too much in denial or too distracted to notice it.

Now we know how Arc always seemed to be a step ahead of us.

Does that make him the coder Nurse Mabel and that guy were talking about the night I regained consciousness in LaGuardia? Nurse Mabel:
The coder's going to be out for at least another couple more days.
And the man—what did Stephen say his name was? Beaucorps?—had replied:
Just keep following the protocols until he's online again. I don't think we should bring in another ArcWare engineer.

Micah was offline all right. He'd been injured during the bombing, but that wasn't Arc's fault. In fact, Beaucorps had been royally pissed about that happening. And Micah
had
recovered in a couple days. Okay, so his memory is still in pieces, but…

Or maybe it's not broken at all. Maybe he's faking it.

It would explain all the other strangeness, the little anomalies that never seemed to sit right with me, including:

The guard at the checkpoint in Manhattan who'd had trouble syncing up with Micah's implant. Had Micah hacked his Link to block it? Was he trying to hide the fact that he was down there? He'd hacked into our Links days before we broke into Long Island, so it seems feasible.

He'd tracked us from the moment we arrived. Quite possibly even long before that.

And what about Professor Halliwell's identification card? How did it find its way into his house? I've puzzled over this every which way till Sunday and there's just no way I know of that he'd be connected with the man who murdered my father. Not unless you throw Arc into the equation. Arc is like the glue that sticks everything together.

But then it hits me that Kelly was also working with Arc. In fact, Arc had hired him to
steal
Micah's hacks for them. If Micah was working for them, why would they need Kelly?

So many unanswered questions.

“
Jessie!”

I look up, blinking stupidly, scared that he can see it on my face, the fear. The suspicion. He's standing close to the fence, not touching it for fear of getting electrocuted. His hands are out, gesturing, imploring. He looks so vulnerable, so…

So innocent.

How can it be true?

For a moment I'm beset by doubt. What if Kelly is wrong? Where's his proof? He's been wrong before.

Somebody pushed me
.

That's what he'd said to me, the day we'd gone to the Manhattan side of the Midtown tunnel. He'd told me afterward that he thought someone had pushed him over the railing. We'd all just figured he'd either slipped or gone in on his own.

But he'd accused Reggie, not Micah. And then, more recently, it was Jake he was all paranoid about. Jake deserved the suspicion, though not for the same reasons Micah did. All he wanted was to fit in.

And now Kelly's saying it's Micah we can't trust? Maybe I should be worrying about him and not the others. This is classic paranoia, and I—

I shouldn't think that way. He's only trying to protect me.

I remember how angry he'd been when I'd shrugged off that first accusation. But what else could I do? There was no proof, and bringing it up would only have made things worse between him and Reg. They were already constantly needling each other. Who needs that?

He's your friend, Kelly.
Our
friend.
Reggie would never do something like push him into the water.

But what if Kelly had been right? What if he was just mistaken about who it was? What if Micah really did push him in?

I can see Micah planting the seed of the idea to break into Long Island in Reggie's head. Makes sense. Reggie wasn't much for original ideas. More of a follower, actually.

Come out, come out
, my mind whispers.
Come out, from inside that fractured little head of yours, Micah, and show me the monster sleeping inside.

But he doesn't come out. He just stands there and gives me this quizzical look. “What's wrong, Jessie.” He pretends not to have a clue what I'm thinking.

I swallow and nod, uncertain about what to do and how to respond to this newfound knowledge. But there really is only one thing to do, is there? We have to go inside and find the others. So I somehow steel my nerves and stumble over to the tree and prepare myself for climbing it.

Shinji raises his head and smiles his toothy yellow smile at me as I grip the vines. No barking now; he's as happy as a clam, content to just lie there in the damp grass underneath, his stomach full of tuna and the sun about to come up and dry everything. He doesn't care that the Undead around us have died for the last time and now lay peacefully in their final resting places, their infected bodies twisted into unnatural poses of agony. He doesn't care because he's a dog and he doesn't have to worry about things like his friends betraying him. All he knows is that he has a family again after all these years. So what if I'm not really his girl, his Cassie? Cassandra. The little girl from the family he knew before the living fled this forsaken land and left the Undead to tend it. He probably knows deep down that I'm not her, but he doesn't care. To him, having a family is what's important.

It's all that matters.

I climb the tree without really being aware of what I'm doing. My body remembers the movements, but the rest of me is lost somewhere else. Only a ghost, my mind in attendance, possessing a body that seems not to need any control. I edge out over the murderous fence, the toe of my shoe dangling close enough that Micah shouts at me to be careful. It's tempting to just let it relax another inch or two, to see what it would feel like. To feel alive just for a moment before I die.

But I don't have the guts; I never did.

I drop to the other side and he rushes over to me, yelling in a hoarse whisper. “What the hell's gotten into you all of a sudden?” The words snap and bite at me through his angry teeth, making me think of lizards for some odd reason. He grabs me by the shoulders and shakes me, and I recoil beneath his touch, feeling both revolted and guilty. How can he look at me like that? How can I so easily accept Kelly's accusation without proof? Who's the betrayer now?

But then he gives me this dark look and words come out from between his lips, and suddenly all my doubts flee. “Was that Kelly?” he asks. “What did he say?”

Olly olly oxen free. The monster is peeking out, isn't it? It's sampling the air with its forked tongue.

“
Nothing,” I tell him, brushing him aside. “Never mind. Let's just go find the others.”

“
Yeah,” he says, unconvincingly, “I just want to get out of here and go home.”

The smile on his lips is all wrong, twisted into a mask of concern, hiding deceit. His words ring false to my ears. We both know going home isn't going to be as simple as that, not now. Even if Jake wasn't bitten. Micah's betrayal has made that impossible.

He turns and trundles through the tall grass, and everything about him screams to me that going home is the last thing he wants. And so I wonder:
What does he really want?

 

We peek inside
the nearest building, but it's immediately apparent to me that we're looking in the wrong place. The inside walls are painted a sickly orange color instead of the light gray we'd seen through Ashley's Link. It looks like the inside of a pumpkin.

“
Somebody was either color blind,” Micah says, making a face, “or made a really poor choice.”

I grunt. I can't help feeling resentful at his attempts at normalcy.

Thankfully, the walls in the second building are the right color. An LED nightlight outside the door flickers, the detector either faulty or sensing the first rays of the approaching day.

“
Didn't Kelly say it was the smallest building they were in?” Micah asks. “This would be it.”

He stops and frowns at my silence, getting frustrated with me, as if I should be grateful that he remembered this little tidbit of information.

The knob is smashed away, the fragments tossed carelessly to the cracked and crumbling cement outside. I reach past him and pry open the door with my little penknife. It swings open with barely a sound.

One last glance behind me, east to where the sky has begun to lighten from black to dark purple. A thin blood-red line has formed low on the horizon. Morning is coming, and with it the end of a very long night. Above us, the strange cloud I'd noticed earlier on the road is now hidden behind the clotted thunderheads in the distance, a faint scar in the bleeding sky.

Micah stretches and yawns as he waits. It triggers a yawn inside me, despite my anxiousness to find the others. I'm exhausted and need some serious sleep.

“
I'd kill for a Red Bull,” he says, a bit too jovially. A tad too normally. I want to scream at him to shut the hell up. “And some Golden Dragon cashew chicken.”