Chapter 6 Rosabelle
Rosabelle
I duck instinctively between buildings as shadows shift in my periphery, holding my breath until I’m convinced the movement
was caused by nothing more than a rearrangement of the clouds. I was caught in a brief, intense downpour as I crossed the
city on foot, and I stifle the impulse to shudder as a frigid gust barrels into the narrow alley, sealing cold into the damp,
ill-fitting polyester of my outfit. Of all the variables beyond my control, the weather is the most unpredictable at the moment,
and I’m running out of time.
I need to identify a bolt-hole, and fast.
A snippet of conversation carries on the wind, which then delivers a rush of incoming footsteps, and I stiffen, retreating
into the deepest shadows, pressing my body flush against the wall. Only when I’m certain I’m alone do I dart around the corner.
I run silently along a low fence toward a nondescript warehouse that I know has only two cameras, both of which are directed
toward the northwest side of the building. I did several earlier scans of the area and identified limited gaps in surveillance
here, which—
Well, at least it’s not poorly secured, for once.
I take a steadying breath, glancing quickly between buildings, then take cover behind a maintenance truck, its rugged wheels half as tall as I am.
I crouch low beside the chassis, then assess the undercarriage of the vehicle, deciding it might prove a decent hiding spot should I need to take cover again. The sky rumbles in the distance.
The air smells like rain.
I peer up at the clouds, watching them move at an unnerving pace that indicates the winds are getting worse. The only real
benefit to the weather is that this private airfield is nearly deserted. A preliminary analysis of the scattered aircraft
and their insignias indicate that this is a military outpost, which was what I’d been hoping to find.
Still, there’s nothing to celebrate.
Nine days I spent trying not to break under the emotional sledgehammer of my father’s face. Nine days I spent being tortured
in ways no training exercise ever prepared me for. Nine days of endless, unceasing nightmares.
My father.
Not now.
I glance up at the silent red lights still flashing in the windows of the central office in the distance, the insistent strobe
reminding me, without warning, of the familiar blue light of surveillance—
Of home.
I brace myself as a wave of disorientation moves through me. I remind myself to be here, where my feet are; here, where the
cold pavement is hard under my hands; here, where the air is crisp; here, where my heart hardens against my ribs.
Only criminals need privacy, Rosa.
Only criminals need—
I’m here.
Here, where the wind pushes through the grassy field in the distance, where damp, synthetic fabric is suctioned uncomfortably
to my skin, where water droplets still cling to my eyelashes. Here and not there, on Ark Island, where my sister, Clara, still
rots in an asylum. Here and not there, in prison, where my father, Hugo, grew straight out of the grave of my memories, limbs
pushing up like maggots from the earth to form a man I hadn’t seen in ten years. Of all things, it’s his voice that haunts
me most.
Rosa—ROSA—
No.
Rosa, is your mother still alive? How’s Clara?
You’ve been dead inside for years, I tell myself.
They lied to you, Rosa; I never left you—
No—
I didn’t leave you—
Die, I remind myself. Die.
Surveillance is security, Rosa. Only criminals—
Mentally I fold my father into an envelope, push the envelope through a shredder, set the shredder on fire.
The sky ruptures.
The world seems to roar as it unleashes a violent torrent of rain, icy sheets pelting the ground so hard the deluge sounds like hail.
I grit my teeth and tug my hood as far forward as it will go, resisting the impulse to wrap my arms around myself for warmth.
Much as it might provide me the illusion of comfort, I need to keep my hands free and my body ready; precious seconds could cost me everything.
I still haven’t sourced a proper weapon.
The clouds are moving quickly enough to shift around the sun erratically, shafts of illumination appearing and evaporating
in dizzying flashes. I watch dark and light change hands with the bated breath of a gambler waiting to see how the dice will
fall—
Without warning, the sun snuffs out.
I take the small win, exhaling as a vein of lightning streaks silently across the darkening sky. Cold numbs my extremities,
windswept rain seeping more aggressively into the damp canvas of my tennis shoes. I peer through the downpour as a roll of
thunder cracks in the distance. Uniformed personnel patrolling the airstrip are beginning to look around with increasing uncertainty.
Most appear to have been called away by the recent security alert, and now the remaining few—six, by my count—appear to be
considering shelter indoors.
I clench my teeth harder, refusing to acknowledge the fatigue in my bones or the loss of feeling in my toes. If I can be anything,
I can be patient.
Patience is its own weapon.
It took longer than I’d hoped to orient myself after emerging from the maximum security prison—my calculations were close, but not exact—and I had to make some inadvisable choices in the pursuit of a map, a sense of direction, and a change of clothes—but more than that, the world of The New Republic was a piercing shock.
I don’t know what I was expecting.
Sharper teeth, perhaps.
Instead, I was offered a soft landing in a sea of unmanaged chaos. People and vehicles dotted everything like so much careless
seasoning; I couldn’t figure out what they were doing or why. There didn’t appear to be any system governing their actions;
no instructions or reminders were delivered over central comms. In fact, many people appeared to be outside for no reason
at all: idling on sidewalks or else watching leashed animals defecate on patches of grass. There were no soldiers on patrol;
no guards stationed at intervals; no checkpoints; no quiet zones—not a single armed officer already waiting to intercept me.
Worse: it was loud, everywhere.
I’d thought it was just the patients at the rehab facility who acted without composure and restraint. I was wrong. Pedestrians
everywhere spoke in unregulated tones all around me, with no apparent fear of being overheard or recorded or reported.
I felt like a time traveler to a land long extinct.
I soon realized that surveillance around the city was nearly nonexistent, particularly in residential zones.
High-density areas were better equipped, but these measures were consistent only in their inconsistency.
Some streets had cameras; others did not.
As I trekked across city blocks on foot, the cameras I did spot were often different makes and models, many originating from diverse manufacturers.
Some were visibly old. Others newer. Some with audio-recording capacity, others without.
Very few models were advanced enough to support facial recognition technology—and there appeared to be no great logic underpinning any of these decisions.
This was astonishing.
In the absence of a streamlined, cohesive system, there could be no centralized surveillance apparatus in The New Republic.
No unilateral network responsible for monitoring civilians; no database accounting for every person; no single purveyor of
security equipment; no principal organization devoted entirely to dissecting the micro movements of its citizens. Instead,
civilians appeared to live their lives entirely unregulated.
It soon became clear to me that I was dealing with a level of incompetence so profound it was almost impossible to believe.
I simply stopped moving.
I stood stock-still as people walked past, their eyes glancing off my uncovered face and stolen clothes without consequence
to any of us.
At one point an older woman smiled at me and said, “Good idea with that jacket, dear. I can feel the storm coming in my bones.”
I’d stolen the jacket from a teachers’ lounge after picking a few locks in a shamefully unsecured elementary school.
I wandered the unmonitored halls and quickly located a bulletin board with bright letters that read GEOGRAPHY TAKES US PLACES!
under which was a colorful map of my present location along with a number of important landmarks helpfully illustrated with pictures and street names.
“Thank you,” I said to the older woman, who flashed me another smile before moving on.
It occurred to me, as I stood there in my second change of clothes on a cracked sidewalk in a modest residential neighborhood,
that by the time anyone even noticed I’d broken out of prison I’d already be halfway across the city. It would take them days
to catch up to me—and that’s only if I stayed in one location.
These people, I realized, were breathtakingly stupid.
I’d paused on the sidewalk for just long enough to wonder how the rebels ever managed to defeat a force as powerful as The
Reestablishment, and as I turned this idea over in my mind a dusty car pulled into a sloped driveway across the street. As
one, the small family popped open doors, each one like a muted gunshot.
I recoiled like I’d been hit.
Unfolding before me was a moment of mundanity from the kind of life I’d never known. I hadn’t seen anything so prosaic since
I was a child.
The trunk sprung open with an inelegant thunk.
Little arms and legs pushed out of the car at once, then collided on the pavement only to push each other. A frazzled mother
rolled her eyes as she batted blindly at her hair, searching for the unseasonal sunglasses perched atop her head.
I held my breath.
The two children screamed at an unreasonable decibel level and my eyes darted to the neighbors’ doors and windows, bracing
for an altercation.
Where were the soldiers?
Did they not assign officers to residential neighborhoods to keep order?
I looked back at the family in time to watch one child pretend to go boneless, sliding to the filthy ground with a choked
gurgle that made my heart clench reflexively.
I’d closed my eyes.
The child was playing a game, I told myself. The child was not receiving a punishment for a sound violation. The parents would
not be punished for—
“If you’re going to play dead,” someone shouted, “can you pretend to be zombies, at least?”
My eyes had flown open.
The dad was hauling bags into his arms. “I could use the help of some nice, slow-moving zombies with all these groceries—”
Groceries.
Groceries.
A sharp pang of hunger lances through me, returning me roughly to the present moment, the sound of rain roaring in my ears.
Not now, I tell my mind.
Not now, not now.
Not ever.
I press a hand to my chest, my heart beating too hard beneath the breastbone.
My head has lately been overrun with spirals of thought and explosive feeling—refusing to remain contained—and it’s scaring me.
I was fine before I came to this strange place with its strange people and their loud, unrestrained voices.
My mind was small; my heart was smaller.
Everything inside me had been hermetically sealed and stowed away in locked compartments. Now I feel as though a tornado has
torn me open, and when I’m being honest with myself I know exactly who to blame.
Can you trust me?
Stop.
Rosabelle, do you trust me?
I close my eyes, pressing my shaking hands to the cold, wet ground. I inhale the icy air, tasting rain.
I’ve been living here too long.
Almost a month I’ve spent in a world without the Nexus—without synthetic intelligence—without the constant fear of looking
into someone’s eyes and being surveilled for information.
I have a job to do; it’s time to go home.
It was a relief to discover that, all this time, I’d been deposited on the southwestern coast of what used to be North America.
All these weeks of not knowing my location had made it difficult to strategize.
Now at least I know that I’m not so far from the Ark as to make the journey home feel impossible—and yet not close enough to accept anything less efficient than a plane for transportation.
I sigh.
Reflexively, I lean my aching body against a massive tire of the maintenance truck, then quickly straighten, refusing to accept
help even from inanimate objects.
The trouble is I trust nothing, dead or alive.
Rosabelle, do you trust me?
Stop—
If you trust me, we can fix this together. If you trust me, everything is simple—
STOP, I scream in the silence of my mind.
My heart continues to race and I exhale hard, wicking away the memories, forcing my mind to blank. I clench and unclench my
deadened fists, then reassess the parked jets through the unrelenting downpour.
They look new, or at least well-maintained, but they’re unmistakably older models built for an era of weaker security. They
have internal combustion engines, not electric motors; requiring fuel, not batteries. They don’t appear to be secured by external
locking mechanisms or even basic biometric scans.
Essentially: unprotected.
I spent the last decade of my life surviving on an island where every person is connected to a neural network—a network that
effectively transforms all beings, human and animal, into active recording devices. Every pair of eyes is a camera; every
thought uploaded to a server; every word spoken and unspoken transmitted to a central surveillance office.
No one is safe.
No mother is spared spying on her child; no husband spared spying on his wife. But here—
I have no idea how they keep order.
I suppose it’s possible that the weak security measures of the mainland are enough to keep its civilians in line, but their
outdated technology is so unsophisticated I’m almost disappointed. The rebels don’t appear to understand how vulnerable they
are. Hacking these ancient systems will require little effort.
Still, I’m not prepared to leave.
Not only would it be impossible to fly in this weather, but I can’t face Klaus without the right weapon; the synthetic brain
that controls the surveillance technology of Ark Island is too inhuman to be killed easily. My only chance at disrupting the
system, destroying the Ark, and saving my sister requires tracking down the authentic vial of earth—which means the hardest
part of my mission is still ahead of me.
And I need to be untraceable.
I’ll have to find a new source of shelter every night, but first I need to verify my exit plan. My short-term goal is to wait
for nightfall before stowing away in a nearby hangar, where I’ll be close enough to test my theories about these jets. I’ll
need at least a few days to do some basic reconnaissance, not only at the airfield but—
“Hey,” he whispers. “Why are you dressed like a cat?”
My body turns to lead.