Chapter 37
“Ghost, unplug me,” Sprite said on the chat. “Chloe: Run.”
Chloe and Norman looked at each other. “Sprite,” Norman said, “kill Chloe and Ghost.”
Chloe turned and ran, stumbling over rubble, out of the ruined NOC and into the garden.
The sun had slipped below the horizon sometime during all the talking, and in the twilight, the fires in the NOC behind her and the flames still licking the burning tree before her cast dancing, competing shadows across the grass, edging the trees and leaves in flickering orange and burnishing the dark shapes of the gardener bots.
The bots remained motionless as Chloe raced past; the System must have muted Norman as soon as she knew he was giving her an order, prevented herself from hearing it.
Ghost was safe, then. But Norman didn’t need automata to do his dirty work. His footsteps behind her were closing.
The man was insane, the apotheosis of every psychotic dictator who’d ever sought to remake the world in his own vision.
But she was running through his garden in the sky, surrounded by the city he had rebuilt from the ashes of the conflagration he had ignited, and every stride she took was weighted with the knowledge that he could do it.
Unlike every Great Man who’d preceded him, Andrew Norman was capable of permanently taking the reins of history.
All that stood in his way were two decidedly ordinary people who knew what he was up to.
His footsteps thudded closer. She veered sideways, splashed through a water channel, threw herself under a bush, and rolled deep inside, ignoring the pain from the raking branches, then stopped with her eyes squeezed shut and her breath held.
Norman’s footsteps slowed. “It’s pointless, you know,” he said conversationally. “You can hide from me, but Sprite’ll be reset in a few minutes, and no one can hide from her.” His footsteps passed, going in the direction of the stairwell and escape chute. Cutting her off.
Slowly, Chloe reached out and closed her hand over a garden stone.
She rolled out from under the bush. Crouching, she caught glimpses of Norman through the trees, a darker shape against a dark sky, and she began to move, staying low at first, then rising and breaking into a run, fully committed.
The only sound in the world seemed to be the quickening thumps of her feet.
Norman turned. Though she couldn’t see his expression in the gloom, she saw him startle, and then she was upon him.
He threw up an arm to protect himself, but she was already swinging, all her desperation in the blow, and even half deflected, it struck the side of his head with a sickening thud.
Then she and Norman were rolling in the grass, and she smelled sweat and blood and expensive cologne, and when they stopped, she was on top, with one knee on his back and one hand shoving his head into the grass.
He ceased struggling, and she let up a little, feeling the warm stickiness of his blood between her fingers. “Now what?” he gasped, turning his head sideways. “Are you going to kill me? Doesn’t matter. Sprite’ll still kill you.”
“No,” Chloe said, “we’re going to the White House, and you can tell the president everything. Everything.” He’d investigate and find the System’s human body.
Norman snorted. “That’s your plan?”
She raised the stone. “Want me to find a different one? On your feet.”
But as Norman began to stand, a steely, sweet voice said, “What are you doing to my father?”
Chloe jumped and turned, and the System was there, fully illuminated despite the darkness. But she looked somehow different, more artificial, almost plastic. Though she was wearing the same serene expression Chloe had often seen on her, something about that, too, was off.
A whine of servos and the quick-beat thumps of footsteps drew Chloe’s eyes past the System to a dark canine shape barreling toward her.
She dropped the stone and ran.
Norman was on her in an instant, and this time she had no advantage of surprise.
The man was decades older than she was and injured, but he was still, unfairly, bigger and heavier and stronger, and he easily knocked the stone out of her hand, then lifted and flung her down.
Something snapped in the wrist she flung out to stop her fall, and white pain strobed behind her eyes.
Norman’s foot struck her head, and her thoughts seeped away.