Chapter 24
“When this goes down,” Sprite said from her chat window, “it’ll go down fast. Are you ready?”
“Yes,” Jason said shortly. The clouds that had been gathering all afternoon were piling over the Tower and throwing it and the whole city into twilight, but escaping rays of the lowering sun cast the slides and monkey bars in gold and projected their elongated shadows far across the playground, where the System’s aircab had dropped him off.
The last time he could remember being on a park playground, he’d been about seven.
There must have been times since then, but they hadn’t stuck with him.
The memory surfaced now with unusual clarity, maybe because it had also been evening then, with a similar sun lancing brilliance from beneath dark clouds.
Their foster parents had been in the habit of leaving him and Mia at that park for hours every day, and they’d gotten territorial, treating the tunnel under the slide’s stairs as their own personal fort. Fort Jam: Jason And Mia.
He could see now that they’d been in the wrong to not let a younger boy trespass on their domain, but when that boy had brought his older brother, it had felt like necessary defensive warfare.
Mia blocked the entryway, so the older boy forcibly pulled her out to open a path for his little brother.
Seeing Mia yanked by her arm, hair flying, and dragged, screaming, across the mulch, Jason’s vision went bright.
His next memories were fragmented and washed in that painful, brittle brightness: the boy stumbling in the mulch and falling with Jason on top; glimpses of the boy’s furious face; then not the image but the vivid feeling of hands around his own neck, his bright vision dimming, and the fury of knowing he would lose to this boy, this enemy.
And then the thump of Mia dropping to her knees beside him, and the following thumps of her fists descending, and his vision bright again and his own fists joining Mia’s, up and down, up and down, no sensation, no pain, barely a feeling of movement, just a thing to be done.
The boy’s face angry, then distressed, then shrieking, mouth agape, nose streaming scarlet.
And the little boy standing to one side, arms slack, mouth wailing.
There had been consequences. Jason could barely remember the foster parents who, of the dozen or so they’d had over the years, had been in charge then, but the event had signaled a regime change, and like all such regime changes, the trend had been from bad to worse.
Maybe that was the moment they’d become Problem Kids.
Somewhere, there existed amazing foster parents, but not for Problem Kids.
And yet that violent moment was as golden in his memory as the sunset that lit it.
Jason and Mia, side by side, fighting for each other.
He swallowed.
“The Feds’ll swarm the Tower,” Sprite said. “I don’t think they’ll be in an ask-first, shoot-later mood. So don’t do anything stupid thinking I can get you out of trouble, because I can’t. Okay?”
“Thanks for that,” Jason said thickly, opening his virtual workspace across his knees and pulling up everything he’d need to send select pieces of information over select pathways. “Given I’m gonna be risking my life for your ‘sister,’ I appreciate knowing you don’t have my back.”
“I’m risking more than you know,” Sprite said in a quiet voice that echoed strangely in his ears, and he whipped his head up as he realized what it meant.
She was standing only feet away, hands shoved in pockets, shoulders hunched, looking out across the crowd at the Tower.
“What the phreak are you doing here?” he asked, the stab of pleasure at seeing her changing immediately to alarm.
“I’m coming with you.”
“Like phreak you are.”
“I’m not gonna be a face in a box while you risk your life. Not this time.” She pushed a strand of dark hair away from her face and glanced sideways at him. He was acutely aware of her physical presence, almost but not quite in touching distance. “I’m coming.”
“Fine. Good,” he said. “Grab a seat.” He nodded at the empty swing beside him, but she just turned to look at the Tower again. After a moment, she pulled her hands from her pockets and crossed them over her chest as if she were cold.
Jason didn’t feel cold. He felt a flush of heat and a new nervousness that had nothing to do with what they were about to do.
For a moment he wanted to go to Sprite, put his arms around her, for real this time, but her body language was closed, and he didn’t dare.
He took a steadying breath instead. Do the job.
Think about the girl after. If there was an after.
The remainder of the preparations took only a minute, and he double-checked them almost as fast. His voice shook slightly as he said, “Ready when you give the word.”
Her eyes flicked down to his hand where it rested on his knee, and his heart stuttered, but she didn’t change her hunched, self-hugging posture or move any closer to him.
Her eyes returned to the Tower. “There’ll be no going back,” she said, so quietly he almost couldn’t hear.
“No save-scumming. No reloads. No retries.”
“I’ve had that moment a few times already.”
“I haven’t, not really.”
“You get used to it.”
“I hope not.” She unclasped her arms and drew herself up straight. “Do it.”
He did, sending packets of information racing along paths he knew would be watched.
Chat windows appeared in Jason’s smartspace, showing the faces of the old woman whose window was labeled “Grandma” and Chloe Dunne-Carr.
“Here we go,” Grandma whispered, in that strange, amplified subvocalization.
“Turn off background-noise suppression.” That was a command to her phone, Jason realized, because he could suddenly hear voices in the background, one of which was Andrew Norman’s.
The System’s little-girl voice cut loudly across them: “Dr. Norman! I am detecting traffic in the hacker dark nets, which indicates an imminent attack on this building!”
The background voices died instantly. In the sudden silence, Norman could be clearly heard. “What kind of attack? How certain are you?”
There was a pause, and then the System, voice grave, said, “I am one hundred percent certain there is a miniaturized dirty bomb in the building.”