The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (32 page)

He couldn’t start there. He had to build up to it. He’d been cooped up with the same people in a confined space for almost a week—he needed time to acclimate before he saw her.

Shaw navigated the public tags. When he found the one he was looking for, he jumped.

Mar de Plata, the last place Grace Williams had been surfing. The waves were crashing against the sandy beach, the sun so bright on his eyes he had to turn away.

But there were so many people! The beach was crowded with surfers and topless sunbathers and children. More than he could take. He went through the tags again, and found a more remote location.

He found her again, five months earlier, surfing in the Mentawai Islands off of Indonesia. The beach only had a couple dozen surfers scattered across it. He watched Grace Williams and her partner Nosipho as they swam out to meet the next wave.

He saw Grace tense, her whole body taut and ready. She turned and swam her board toward shore, getting a jump on a massive wave that was building behind her.

Shaw marveled at her poise, a world of water all around her, and she was calm in the center of it. He wanted to join them! To get lessons and feel what she did.

He moved forward into the water, but the feeling of water on his skin was faint—the sense of touch was partially disabled in the Lattice. The lapping of water on his knees, the sun’s heat on his back, a breeze on his shoulder—all muted by the Lattice.

Then he couldn’t help but picture the drowned gambler Taveena had shown him floating in the water in front of him.

He watched Grace and Nosipho for another wave, but the joy was gone. He jumped away. Taveena’s guided tour had brought up memories he’d forgotten. He searched public tags of himself and found his first jump to Ancient Rome. He watched Caesar in the command tent with his troops, listening to a translation of his Latin in his head. In truth it wasn’t too far removed from the Civil War jumps he did now. Battle hadn’t changed much in the centuries between Caesar and Lee. Had Shaw changed so little as well that from the time he was a boy to his adulthood he still jumped to the same old battles?

Damn them all! This used to be fun!

Shaw went back to his teens. He and Elvin and Peter, the inseparable trio, lounging on his school’s bleachers, waiting for their chance in the ring. Elvin was talking about what he was going to do when he graduated—the women, the fights, the victories. It was hard to believe how readily he’d lapped it up back then.
Of course Elvin would go on to do those things. He was Elvin.

Was Shaw’s revulsion just hindsight, because he knew how things would truly go for Elvin? No. Elvin was a cocky bully, constantly setting up ways for his friends Peter and Byron to tell him how great he was. And they did it, every time. No—Peter didn’t do it. It was always Shaw. Shaw watched his old self and his friends with new eyes.

And he understood what he’d never noticed then. Peter couldn’t stand Elvin. He could barely look at him. He only grunted at his jokes. But when Shaw said something! Peter was all ears—quick with a funny response, eager to agree.

Body Shaw said that he was thinking about applying to West Point, and Elvin scoffed and asked why you’d want to spent your day doing pushups. Peter said he thought Shaw had a real shot of getting in. They kept talking until Elvin, clearly feeling left out of the new conversation, said that at least you got to kill people. And the uniform would get you laid. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

Shaw couldn’t believe it. His whole understanding of his teen years shifted before his eyes. Elvin acted like the leader of the group, and Shaw treated him that way. But it wasn’t true. Shaw was the true leader and he’d never known it. Elvin had never been in charge. And yet he’d spent so much time worrying about what Elvin thought of him.

Shaw jumped away, leaving the boys on the bleachers.

This was the Lattice at its best, right? A kind of therapy, a way to get a second look at yourself. To see your life with more objective eyes. This couldn’t have happened before. Not until Wulf had built it.

Was it enough?

Shaw jumped to watch his own death. He watched the black goop of the shock cover him as he writhed on the floor. He watched Yang’s devotion, how he accompanied him to Ramstein Air Force Base and then to DC. They’d known each other for just a few days, but Ono’s impersonation, which had at first made it so hard for Yang and Shaw to relate, eventually tied them together, each victims in their own way of the same deception.

He watched his parents cry over his coffin. He wanted to do anything he could to stop them from crying.

And then Ellie entered.

His heart was breaking as he saw the pain she was hiding inside. Her sister couldn’t see it—she was self-involved enough, Shaw thought, that she needed feeds to tell her what her sister was feeling. But Shaw could tell. How torn up Ellie was inside. How much anger and sadness was in her. She was a mess of emotions, and she was doing everything she could to keep them in.

He could barely stand to see her like this. Shaw searched the tags again. He found her most recent tag and jumped to see her.

There she was, now and in the moment. It was barely past dawn in St. Louis, but Ellie was up. The smell of brewing coffee hit Shaw’s nose, and he was transported back to countless mornings, padding into the kitchen half-naked, finding Ellie at the window watching the morning begin. She loved the Arch, the way it looked steely and dull or dazzlingly luminescent depending on the cloud cover or the position of the sun.

He reached out, wanting to wrap his arms around her waist, but his avatar’s limbs passed right through her. He was a ghost, haunting his wife.

On a whim, Shaw checked the ring’s settings and saw that all chat and messaging functions were disabled. He was trapped. On the wrong side of some sort of ethereal plane, unable to go back, to tell her how he missed her, how he loved her.

He jumped back and kept watching her. She was wearing a thin robe, pulled tighter than she normally wore it. Was she too aware these days of how many people could be watching? Or was it his absence? She was alone in their home, the warmth of her husband gone.

He wanted more than anything to stay there with her. But at the same time he felt like a voyeur, peering through a window at his own wife. He couldn’t think of anything more miserable.

Shaw found a new tag, this one of her thoughts.

He jumped in, expecting to slip into the same comfortable familiarity he’d found seeing Ellie in their kitchen. But where her orderly mind had once been a precision clock, he now found all the gears exploded into shifting fragments, a consciousness that was roiling and heaving in emotions, and all of it was of loss, of grief, of heartbreak, of betrayal, of anger, and of hate.

Oh the hate! He’d never jumped into Ellie when she’d felt anything so powerful, anything so consuming as the anger she felt—toward the raiders, toward the Army, the CEOs of the Lattice reader manufacturers, the country, the job that took Shaw away from her. How she loathed everything—vigils for her husband, the feeds that reported on her loneliness, Shaw for leaving her, herself for sending him away, the Lattice for taking him, the OJs in her clinic who were too weak and fell under its spell, her fellow nurses who would never save them.

She hated everyone, everybody she’d come into contact with, especially those who dared to put their hand on her shoulder.

But above all, she hated the Lattice. He saw her wishes that the raiders had succeeded in destroying it—irrationally believing that Shaw would have survived it, too. He’d never caught her hoping that the Lattice was gone, but now she had a yearning for a new world, a new start, one clean of the terrible things that had all led to her husband’s death, and violent pervasive anger and contempt for the world as it was.

Her pro and con list for the Lattice was all but gone. Or rather—what was there was so clear to her now that she didn’t even need the list anymore. Because the Lattice had taken Byron from her. And that was all that mattered anymore.

Shaw finally left the jump, almost afraid he would choke on the hate in her thoughts. He found himself floating in his room—he’d been so eager to use the ring that he hadn’t even remembered to take the precaution of belting down to the bunk. His breath was short.

He’d never seen Ellie like that. And he didn’t know how to react. She was devastated in her grief for him, and he knew that he had to see everything through that one fact. But how could he just ignore it? She was too smart to just throw it all away because she was miserable and sad to lose him, he thought. What if this wasn’t just a knee-jerk reaction, but what if she was right? Maybe destroying the Lattice was the right thing to do. And here he was, on a ship with a team of people who wanted nothing more than to give Ellie exactly what she wanted. The very same thing, too, that would allow him to come home to her.

Once the new thought was there in his head, Shaw couldn’t unthink it. He stayed in his room for hours, avoiding the ring, and thinking about everything he’d heard from Taveena and Wulf and Annalise and even Tranq. And Ellie. It was as if all the counter-arguments and protests against this radical action began to be sucked away in a swirling tidal pool, leaving nothing but plain simple facts finally exposed to the light of day, no longer buried under the murky water but gleaming bright and alive and true in the light of the sun.

And the facts were there for everyone to see: the Lattice had made the lives of billions of people, especially the poor, that much worse. It wasn’t much better for the rich, either, whom it allowed to become enslaved to their pleasures and vices. It opened up everyone’s most private, humble, human failings for all the world to see and judge.

Above all that, only by destroying the Lattice could he get home to Ellie. To take her in his arms for real this time, and tell her everything would be all right. That she could release her anger and grief, that he had taken away the thing that had caused her so much pain, and that he would never leave her again.

He knew what he had to do.

But he’d come to know it too late. His life was going to be put to a vote in less than forty-eight hours, and now he wanted more than anything to survive it.

Right when his chances of success were at their worst.

He’d thrown away everything in a fleeting move of an addict who tried to stop himself from getting better. And now here he was, committed to the cause, in place with a team to help him do it, and he’d just betrayed them all, nearly killing them in the process, and costing Annalise her hand.

What hope could he possibly have of convincing them now? He was a dead man.

The crew stood in a circle in the middle of the great room. Nothing else was in the room, and the Earth’s blue light was once again shining in, a sign they’d returned to a safe orbit, this time under the shield of an orbiting mining waystation.

Shaw looked up at the Earth and thought of its inhabitants. Ellie. His daughter. His parents. Peter. Yang, even.

“We stand as one,” Wulf announced from the other side of the circle, and Shaw’s mind was called back from the surface of the Earth. If he were ever going to get back there, he would have to survive these next few minutes. He’d been lobbying hard these past two days, but he was almost certain he’d come up short. Kuhn had been keeping to her room with Tranq for as many hours as she could, and Annalise had been tending to her new hand and forearm. Shaw didn’t dare interrupt her.

“We know the dangers. We know the risks. We accept the sacrifices because we believe the goal is worth all of it, and more. Each of us has been called here. Each of us has been chosen by our peers, who have agreed to bear those risks and share those sacrifices with us. We ask that now of Byron Shaw.”

Wulf called out across the circle. “Byron Shaw, do you wish to join us, knowing our intentions, knowing the sacrifices we will ask?”

“I do,” Shaw answered with whatever gravity he could muster.

“You have been with us for one week. In that time, you have gotten to know us, and we have gotten to know you. Are you prepared for us to stand in judgment? Knowing that if we vote to accept you, you will be sworn to the group until our objective has been achieved, and that if we vote to cast you out, that you will be executed humanely and painlessly.”

Was there another choice at this point?

“I understand.”

Wulf looked around him.

“A majority must vote for Byron to stay. You may speak for or against as you vote, but you must not argue with another person’s vote, nor may you bring up the vote after today. If Byron is to join us, and you did not vote for him, you will still treat him like a brother. If he is to leave us, and you voted for him, do not begrudge those who voted against.”

Shaw looked around the circle. Was anyone here ready to treat him like a brother? He very much doubted it.

“I brought him before you for nomination, so I will make the first vote,” Wulf continued. “I vote for Byron to stay with us. He’s shown courage and humility, two traits I prize very highly. I’ve looked in his heart, and I believe he is with us.” Wulf then looked to his left, nodding at Helix.

Helix didn’t hesitate. “I vote against,” she said. “He tried to kill us, and almost succeeded. Annalise lost her hand in the process. I won’t ever come to trust him.”

Shaw found himself nodding. He expected that one. He’d barely spoken to Helix, except in an argument. She didn’t seem to hate him like Jpeg did, but whatever distance there was, was enough.

“Tranq,” Wulf said.

Tranq looked down at Kuhn and his eyes flickered to Shaw.

“I can’t say I like the guy,” Tranq said. “But I think we need him.”

Shaw felt his eyes bulge.
Tranq wanted him to stay?
Elsewhere there was a ripple of bodies shifting and adjusting.

“He thinks differently than we do,” Tranq continued. “He stopped our raid. He almost caught us a few days later with that fingerprint business. Even here, when we thought we had him isolated, he figured out a way to nearly reveal us.