Chapter 30
Chloe was falling, leaflike, in a torrent of air, eyes squeezed shut, when a rising shriek reverberated in the enclosed space of the escape chute, followed by a concussive noise so loud and sharp it felt like a blow.
Her eyes snapped open in panic as her already terrifying descent accelerated sharply.
Someone knocked against her as they plummeted past in a tight ball, spinning her around.
She deflected off the padded side of the tube, felt the friction burn her arm, and found herself on her back, looking up the long shaft at the dozens of people falling after her, and, beyond them, a jagged rift of sky through which smoke and fluttering debris were propelled by a torrent of exiting air.
She had just time enough to realize why her fall had gotten faster—the tube was breached, and there was no longer a controlled level of pressure—before she hit the foam at the bottom on her back.
She barely felt the impact through the pulse of adrenaline, but so many people were coming down after her that she was in danger of being crushed.
Agent Tavion, impossibly, stood upright in the rain of falling bodies, his lips compressed as they glanced off him.
He waded forward and grabbed two people at once, propelling them to their feet and toward the exit, and at the same time managed to draw breath and bellow over the scream of air and the screams of fear, “Everybody, ooouut!”
Everyone who could, surged forward, mostly on hands and knees, and the logjam began to clear.
Chloe never managed to get her feet under her but was carried out the door by the surging crush, and then she was rolling across the grass and coming to a gasping stop on her back, blinking upward through the drizzling rain.
The Tower’s dome, the NOC, the center of Norman’s great eye, was shattered. Black smoke belched from the jagged remains. Fluttering bits of debris mingled with the rain, drifting through ripples of heat toward the ground. Superimposed over the sight still floated the message: Nets connection lost.
A lot more had been lost than that.
It was a mercy, Chloe thought dully, that the System had targeted the NOC rather than bringing the whole edifice down by striking lower.
The Tower still stood, and even the garden wings appeared intact.
And it seemed Norman had ordered the evacuation just in time for the surgical strike to fail.
Did she dare hope everyone had gotten out?
Did it matter? Ten thousand were dead; did a few dozen more even matter?
In her mind’s eye, she saw the System’s face: People will die.
If she hadn’t exposed the System, if she hadn’t started this, those people would be alive. The thought made the smoking Tower spin above her.
But if she had done what the System wanted, the System would be in total control. Was that worse? Yes! But she wanted to believe that, because she wanted the deaths of ten thousand people to be somehow better than the alternative.
She rolled on her side and threw up in the grass.
No, she thought as she wiped the bitter tang from her mouth, if anyone else had died here at the Tower, it did matter.
The System would say they were statistically insignificant, but they were significant to Chloe, every single one.
Every death was a tragedy, the destruction of a universe.
She tried to raise herself on her elbows, but the weight of all those individual tragedies, all that suffering, pressed down on her and made it hard to get her arms under her.
“Get away from the building!” Tavion was shouting.
“Away from the building!” He stood on the grass, making great sweeping motions with his arms, and people began stumbling up and away from the decapitated Tower.
Tavion pointed across the Park and bridges toward the luxury hotels and shops edging the Potomac, whose dark windows and doorways were filling with gawkers. “Get away, find somewhere safe!”
A hand caught Chloe’s elbow and steadied her. A voice in her ear said, “Not you. You come with me.”
She lifted her face and found herself looking into the narrowed ice-chip eyes of Andrew Norman. His usually neat hair and beard were in disarray, and he had grass stains on one shoulder, but his gaze was steady.
“What for?” she said numbly as she rose to her feet.
“To stop her.”
The confidence in his voice gave her a burst of hope—he had a plan, he could save them!—but common sense objected. “Why do you need me?”
“You have an obligation to help fix the mess you made.”
She felt bile rise in her throat again and jerked her arm away. “You’re the one who created her and lost control.”
“You helped her bypass her Overchecks. You owe me.”
“No,” Chloe told him. “No. I don’t owe you anything. But the people she killed, I owe them.”
“Fine. You owe them. So come with me. Help me reset her.”
“What people?” asked a new voice, and Chloe looked over to see the hacker, Ghost, standing a little apart, hands in pockets and shoulders hunched against the splattering rain.
His eyes were alert but distant, as aloof as his posture.
He’d been duped as thoroughly as she had, she realized, and she could see by the deadness in his eyes that he knew it as thoroughly as she did.
“She killed ten thousand people,” Chloe told him. “Oh, and the president. Andrew shut down OverNet before she could convince the VP to nuke Europe.”
Ghost went very still, but his expression didn’t change.
“Shut up,” Norman told her.
“It’s not like people aren’t going to know, Andrew. You can’t hide something like that, even if you do get the Nets back under your control.”
“We don’t know why those people died,” he said. “Accidents happen all the time.”
Chloe stared at him.
Ghost gave a soft, bitter laugh. “Still trying to salvage something? It’s too late for that.”
Norman’s eyes flicked to him appraisingly. “Ghost. What a pleasant surprise.” He did indeed look grimly pleased. “The hacker and the politician, the two architects of this crisis, here with me. Well, you can redeem yourselves now. Help me reset her.”
“You’re not going to reset her,” Ghost said. “You’re going to kill her. If you don’t, I will.”
Norman rolled his eyes. “Still the same shortsighted—”
He was interrupted by a roar from above. A fighter jet scooted through the sky, its dark dagger shape distinct against the lighter gray of the clouds.
Chloe drew in a fearful breath, but Ghost said, “That’s a manned fighter. Human inside. It’s not what hit the Tower.”
“What did?” Norman said.
“That.” Ghost pointed through the milling crowd at the Revere battery a couple hundred yards away across the Park. National Guard soldiers milled around it, looking from its smoking tubes to the Tower, a hopeless slackness to their limbs, while their dog dronebots faced outward, heads lowered.
“But that’s an antiair missile,” Norman said.
“A cruise missile went by, really low, just beyond the Tower. The Revere fired at it and hit the Tower instead.”
“Clever bitch,” Norman breathed. “She knew it would intercept any missile she fired at me, so she made the Revere her missile. The damned Guardsmen just shot at the blip on their screens. It probably never crossed their stupid young minds that they’d crack my Tower open.”
The jet above rolled ninety degrees and began a tight turn. “What’s it doing?” Chloe asked.
A bright little light whizzed over their heads and passed behind the plane, leaving a long, thin line of smoke across the sky.
“Well, phreak,” said Ghost calmly.
Another tip-lit smoke trail reached out toward the plane, and this time it intersected with the fighter jet’s turn and enveloped it in a bright flash.
A moment later, the sharp crump of the sound reached them.
At almost the same instant, an oppressively loud ripping noise pressed down on them, and a second gray shape streaked low over their heads, so low that it was below the level of the Tower.
Its shadow flicked across them for a split second, its shriek buffeted them, and then was gone.
“Let’s go!” Norman said over the shouts and screams from the crowd, which was flowing toward the bridges like a swarm of cockroaches when the light goes on. Norman, Ghost, and Chloe joined the flow.
“Okay,” Chloe said as they jogged, “call the cops, or the military, or whoever you need to get us a ride and—” She looked back at the remains of the Tower and grimaced. “Some protection.”
“Call with what?” said Ghost. “Everything’s down.”
“Then we’ll just have to . . .” She realized she couldn’t think of a backup option. “Wait. Do you mean to tell me there’s no way to communicate over distance right now?”
“Without OverNet,” Norman said, “nothing works.”
“We can’t use a radio or something?”
“Do you have a radio?” Norman asked in a tone of polite curiosity.
“Maybe Agent Tavion does?”
“No,” Norman said. “Everything’s done through the Nets.”
But there were no Nets. No MeNet, no NewsNet, no VoiceNet, no MeetNet, no way to talk to anyone who wasn’t right beside you. “Well, that’s a stupid design!”
Norman shrugged. “Worked until ten minutes ago.”
The hacker said, quietly amused, “Andrew Norman’s utopia has become the Wild West.”
“Even the Wild West had the telegraph,” Chloe said. She had a sudden, breathless sense of being disconnected from her family, as cut off as if they were on the moon.
But maybe this communication failure was a mercy, because while Marcus would be worried, he wouldn’t be nearly as worried as he should be.
There was no way for anyone to learn what had happened to the Tower, what had happened just before, what had almost happened.
Let her family, let all of America, keep their ignorance as long as they could.
Let them keep their fear, because if there was fear, there was also hope that those fears might not be true.
Her own certainty was only a sick weight, with room for neither fear nor hope.
“This is a setback,” Norman said. “It won’t be permanent. But without what I’m trying to build, we will suffer a permanent crash someday. It’s just a matter of time.”
“Are you trying to convince us, or yourself?” Chloe said.
They were jogging along the vehicle bridge now, passing motionless cabs, beginning to cross the Potomac toward DC, and she noticed that the crowd was keeping pace with them, and seemed thickest closest to them—closest to Norman.
They were taking their cues from him, as if he could protect them.
As if his creation hadn’t just lobbed a missile at him.
Ghost snorted softly. “If Sprite gets the Nets active again, your crash’ll be permanent, all right.”
“I’ll get Agent Tavion, at least,” Chloe said, starting to turn back to where Tavion was tailing the crowd watchfully like some loyal sheepdog, but Norman’s hand closed tightly on her arm.
“He needs to stay and help the evacuees.”
“Andrew, we’re going to need all the help we can get.”
“More people won’t help. They’ll just draw her attention. She doesn’t know where her core is, and I don’t want a crowd pointing it out to her.”
Ghost cleared his throat. “About that.”