The Trials (The Red Trilogy Book 2) (35 page)

Maybe it’s just a coincidence that I’ve already heard of her operation—but more likely, there are connections between us I’m not seeing yet.

I say nothing, waiting for her to speak. As we study each other across the table, there is a glint of light in her right eye. It’s enough to tell me she’s wearing an overlay. As if this observation has freed her to speak, she asks, “So you know who I am?” Her voice is soft, a little husky, very assured. Her question is not a casual one. It’s designed to make me think about the facts of our relationship: that she has hacked into
my overlay, that she can see what I see there, that she knows of everything I do, and that she can control the activity in my skullnet and by extension, she can control me.

So there’s no sense in denying the truth. I nod and admit, “I know your real name.”

Deception cannot benefit me in this relationship. Truth and lies arise from different regions of the brain, and since Shiloh can access the data from my skullnet, she’ll always know if I’m lying.

With this matter clear between us, she moves on. “I’d like you to meet my partners. Say hello, John.”

A man’s voice issues from a speaker in the ceiling. “Hello, Shelley.”

“And Mary?”

A woman this time: “Hello.”

Fake names. Maybe they’re fake people, but Shiloh wants me to believe they’re real and that she’s not acting alone. “For reasons of security and continuity, John and Mary will remain remote observers. I’ll be your only point of interaction. Your handler, we could say.”

It’s a struggle, but I manage to keep my smartass mouth in check. “Why don’t you just tell me why I’m here?”

“I’d first like to tell you about EXALT.”

A word pops up in the center of my overlay, rendered in huge, bold text. It’s like having something thrown in my face. I’m so startled I flinch, jerking my head back, but the word is still there, written out as an acronym:
EXALT
.

I slam my fists down on the table. “Get the
fuck
out of my head.”

The text disappears. Shiloh looks apologetic. Through the speaker, John says, “Sorry, I’m new at this.”

Asshole.
At least I know he’s real.

I lean forward, glaring at Shiloh. “What the hell do you people want with me?”

“The world is changing, Shelley.”

“Look around, Shiloh. The world
has
changed.”

She dismisses this with a shrug. “What we’ve seen so far is just the beginning. New rules are being rolled out. You’re already operating under them. So is this partnership. We are beginning to understand the algorithms that determine the behavior of the Red. That’s how we succeeded in bringing you here, Shelley. Understanding is power. We’re learning to predict and influence what the Red will do, which means we’ll be able to turn conflicts and competitions in our favor.”

Yeah, okay. I get it now. Jaynie pointed it out to me months ago when we were prepping for First Light:
I think most of the people who know anything about this stuff don’t want to get rid of the Red. They want to control it, because whoever figures out first how to do that gets to run things.

Shiloh is one of those people, confident in her own brilliance.

“You want to be a dragon?” I ask her.

“Who doesn’t?”

I don’t, but I don’t tell her that. People who want to rule the world tend not to believe that some of us would say no to the privilege. I think about Jaynie quietly calculating what it might cost to construct her own Apocalypse Fortress:
Be a lot of money to buy that kind of privacy.
She’d like to have the choice, but when the Coma Day bomb maker offered to trade a fortune for his life? She didn’t even blink.

Money and power mean a lot, but they’re not everything.

I remind Shiloh, “Being a dragon didn’t do Thelma Sheridan any good.”

“It’s given her a worldwide audience. The testimony coming out of Niamey is damning for a lot of powerful people. It’s a miracle that trial hasn’t been shut down.”

I don’t tell her what Carl Vanda intended. I don’t want to bring him up.

“If you want to know,” Shiloh says gently like she’s conveying delicate news, “no one who’s been following the trial can doubt Sheridan’s guilt. The evidence you provided—”

“Colonel Kendrick made that happen, not me.”

She nods to acknowledge this. “Unless the panel of judges is utterly corrupt, Sheridan will be convicted.”

So there’s that. We achieved at least this one thing. It’s a relief. Even in my present circumstances, it makes me glad.

I push Shiloh. “Knowing that, you and your partners still want to be dragons? Because there’s one rule of the Red I
have
worked out, and that’s if you stand up too high, you’ll get hammered down.”

She shrugs, unimpressed. “It happened once, to Sheridan, but there are still a lot of dragons operating in the world.”

It happened to Vanda too, but all I say is, “It’s early yet.”

“True. But Thelma Sheridan had nasty ambitions. She did some very bad things.”

“Like mass murder.”

“Yes. Don’t think I’m naïve, Shelley. I used to work for her. So did my partners. We all heard the diatribes, and I had a firsthand view of her paranoia. I put up with it because I was being paid a fortune to do what I would have done for free—try to understand the Red.”

“You were one of the software engineers in her consortium? That was real?”

“Very real. But then you kidnapped her and the money dried up.”

“I hope you’re not expecting me to apologize.”

That earns a smile. “No. It was for the best, really. It led us to establish our own consortium. It’s the frontier out there, Shelley. Wide-open opportunities.”

Given that I’m imprisoned in a radio-opaque basement, I’m less than impressed by the opportunities available to me.
But I want more information, so I keep up my end of the conversation. “Opportunities for what?”

“To devise new stories.”

We stare at each other like this is some significant, revelatory moment, but that’s bullshit. She’s playing me, working to pique my interest, to get me involved. I hate these games. “Just give me the sitrep.”

“I need you to understand what’s already been accomplished. John’s going to show you another image.”

I’m ready for it this time. It’s an artist’s rendering of an EXALT aerial node: seven floating spheres reflecting the sky around them, arranged in a vertical line and linked by a filament. “Your company’s putting those up, right? It’s a federal work project.”

“It’s a new communications system.”

I delete the image. “EXALT. Expandable Aerial Labyrinth Traffic.”

“You remember,” she says, sounding impressed—because she can see my overlay, so she knows I’m not reading from the encyclopedia. “EXALT is a communications system intended to replace the bottlenecks of satellite and cable, and to eliminate the vulnerabilities that were clearly demonstrated on Coma Day. What you’re looking at is, of course, only one node in a distributed network of aerial communications towers. Each node is self-powered by solar and wind.”

“Don’t they blow away?”

“They do, but not easily, and they can change altitude to avoid wind currents or use them to migrate. As you said, it’s officially a federal stimulus project—funded to shore up infrastructure while putting people back to work—but the funding and the federal oversight are . . . complex to trace. Much like your reality show.”

I understand now why she’s telling me about her work. “You’re saying the Red is behind EXALT.”

She acknowledges this with a gracious nod, a regal gesture oddly enhanced by the nontraditional boldness of her buzz cut. “Exalt Communications was built around an existing design and suddenly we had funding, permits, permission to issue subcontracts. So yes, I’d say the Red wants this. Badly. No more Coma Days, and lots of new ways to observe and interact. We used EXALT to find you, Shelley. We don’t have access to satellite surveillance, but we’ve developed an efficient observation network. We picked you up in the parking lot of a hotel in western Pennsylvania a week ago. Your identity was logged by a facial-recognition routine that runs on the farsights of EXALT users.”

I flash on that night, the first night out of New York, making it . . . seven days ago? Is that possible? I’m burning through my life—but then, these days I have left aren’t really mine. My time ended with shafts of blazing sunlight lasering through the bullet-perforated walls of a shadowy hangar reeking of blood. Everything since has been borrowed time.

“What are you thinking about, Shelley?”

I tell her the truth: “I don’t know.” I draw a deep breath and bring myself back on track. The best thing I can do now, the only thing, is gather information. “It was the girl with the crowbar,” I say. “She had new farsights, but she was starving.”

“It began there, yes, but there were other observers.” The girl doesn’t matter to Shiloh beyond her function as a mobile platform for EXALT data collection. “Once we had your vehicle type, we were able to track you through public traffic cams.” She smiles a condescending smile. “The license plate images are automatically obscured to protect ‘privacy,’ but it’s a joke. Any good image-analysis program can identify specific vehicles, especially when two are traveling together.”

There it is. I knew we were being watched. I just thought it would be through drones and satellites, not traffic cams. That’s what comes of spending too much time in remote locations. I forget to be wary of the basics.

“We lost track of you in northern Iowa.”

She waits, like I’m supposed to say where we went. I’m surprised she doesn’t already know. Then I remember: I didn’t record our road trip, or my assault on Carl Vanda, so there was no digital memory in my overlay for her to steal. Of course, she could make me talk, the same way Carl Vanda was made to spill his secrets. I look away as my heart rate ramps up, but Shiloh and her partners can read every twitch in my vitals, so it’s not like I can hide my anxiety.

She watches me thoughtfully, as if she’s trying to guess the details of what’s going on in my head. “Another EXALT node picked you up at the Brunswick airfield. You took off again shortly after that. You know we have the video you recorded?”

“If you use it against me, you’ll just incriminate yourself.”

“That’s not our intention. The action you took aboard that ship was impressive, important—but at the time, we didn’t know where you’d gone. I didn’t think you’d return. I thought the Red would try to keep you out of our reach. But it didn’t. And that implies you are meant to be here, that this is a planned association.
Not
something you should be fighting.”

Yeah. I’m already haunted by that idea.

“We’re working to develop a radical, innovative new episode to your story, Shelley. In your story you’ve been a servant of the Red, striking down its enemies, protecting its interests, exposing political corruption to weaken the positions of the very powerful. We’ve served the Red too, by building EXALT.”

I despise the smug certainty on her face. “Are you thinking
that buys you karma points? That it puts the Red on your side?”

“All our simulations show the odds of success go up for those who serve the goals and interests of the Red.
Way
up. But we’ve never been able to simulate
you
. Your story is an outlier. It doesn’t fit with anything else we’ve seen. Our best theory is that yours is a meta story.”

That was Lissa’s theory too. She believed
Linked Combat Squad
was a reality show meant to influence the emotions and choices of the millions who watched it.

Shiloh pulls me back to the present. “Surveys have been done showing that your story resonates across widely divergent groups. People interpret it differently and they come to different conclusions, but those conclusions empower individuals by leading them to take action in their own lives. But why was it you? Your qualities are right. You’re sufficiently intelligent without being intimidating, you’re bold, irreverent when it comes to authority, you look good in front of a camera—”

“Is this a fucking casting call?”

“The same traits could be found in a hundred thousand other Americans. My pet theory is that the Red picked you because you parse out as a keystone according to some presently inscrutable machine logic extrapolated a million moves ahead.”

I may not be smart enough to be intimidating, but I do know some things. “It’s not possible to calculate the future.”

“True, but it
is
possible to calculate probabilities. And when you have thousands, possibly millions, of candidates—as the Red does—some of those probabilities are going to play out just as predicted. Your importance to us though, doesn’t hinge on
why
the Red set a meta story around you. But just that it has. That you exist in a state of divine favor.”

Divine favor?
For a few seconds I’m not sure I heard her
right—and then fury rolls in, because what I’ve done, what I’ve witnessed, what I’ve suffered, what I’ve survived that others have not, my certainty that Shiloh and her friends
murdered my squad
to make it easier to grab me—that’s not divine favor. It’s a curse and these are trials that I’ve lived through, that I have to live with. I am not going to sit quietly and listen to her call it divine favor. “You’re fucked, lady. You’re twisted just as bad as Sheridan.”

I stand. So far as I’m concerned, this interview is over—but Crow has a different opinion. Powered by his arm struts, he slams me back into the chair. I don’t stay there. I pivot out, crouched this time and moving fast. Weaving my fingers together, I swing my shackled hands in an upward stroke, hammering Crow’s balls. His breath whooshes out of his lungs and he doubles over. I swing again and catch him under the chin, sending him over backward though I cut my left hand on the bottom of his visor. That’s all I achieve because the Silent One hits me with a Taser.

It hurts.

It fucking hurts.

It hurts like getting my robot knees shot out.

Next thing I know, I’m on the floor, staring at the ceiling, scared because I can’t move my legs and I can’t see any icons in my overlay.
Fuck.
Did my electronics get fried?