Chapter 27
Wait, read the message in his lenses. A door slid open. Exit calmly, said his lenses, and Jason exited, but not calmly. He found himself alone on the NNA grounds. A crowd of evacuees, guarded by soldiers and dronebots, milled at the edge of the Park, but no one was close by.
He started to run around the building toward the entrance, but he could see into the empty atrium where an elevator was rising, probably on its way to pick up Bruno and his SWAT team.
If Sprite were lying shattered and broken in the atrium, he couldn’t help her.
He swerved away, sprinting across the grass into the Park in the opposite direction of the evacuees.
This took him closer to a Revere battery, and he skirted wide around it, noting with dull acceptance the smoke trail leading upward to where it had intercepted another missile, his missile, the missile he had sacrificed Sprite’s life to fire.
As he stumbled into the trees at the edge of the Park, he pulled up NewsNet in the desperate hope that Sprite’s broken body would not be featured there.
Every news org was carrying the same stream: Andrew Norman standing in the NOC, talking emphatically, white brows pulled sharply down over icy eyes, while the System looked out from a vast screen behind him. Jason enlarged and unmuted the window.
“—cruise missile was launched at the System’s physical infrastructure, but it was automatically intercepted and destroyed by a Revere missile defense system here in the capitol. The hackers were engaged in the Tower by a SWAT team, and one was killed, with the loss of no American lives.”
Jason slumped, hands on his knees, as the world spun around him. He’d tried to be clever, tried to destroy the System, but he had destroyed Sprite instead, because the System wasn’t able to save her.
“All you had to do was delete the file,” said her voice.
He whipped around and there she was, standing in the dappled shadows of the leaves, slim and straight and unharmed. “You screwed everything up,” she said. “We’ve lost.”
Some part of Jason registered the failure of everything he’d been striving toward for years, but that was inconsequential because she was here, she was safe, she was right here in front of him, solid, real, alive. Without thinking, he stepped forward and enveloped her in a hug.
His arms closed around air.
He stumbled, spun, looked, spun again.
She was gone.
There was nowhere she could have gone and no way she could have gone there, but she was gone.
His brain raced, but it, too, had nowhere to go; it was like an overspeeding engine, revving out of control, threatening to tear itself apart from lack of traction.
“People of the United States,” Norman was saying, as the child with electric-blue eyes smiled serenely over his shoulder, “humans of our shared world. The time has come for everyone, friend or enemy, to see why all attacks on this nation will meet with the same failure. I now introduce to you the System for Processing Rational and Intuitive Thought and Emotion.”
Jason’s over-revving brain caught on Norman’s words and shifted suddenly into understanding, and the mental torque drove him to his knees even as Norman finished.
“Or, as she prefers to be called: SPRITE.”