Willful Machines (33 page)

The elevator dinged and shuddered to a halt. The accordion doors rattled open. Outside, the Spider stood waiting.

I turned to Nico. “This plan of yours had better be—”

The words stopped in my throat. Nico's eyes had closed. They darted back and forth behind his eyelids.

“Nico?”

When they snapped open again, they'd gone as cold as the eye of a Spider. He put his palms to my chest and shoved me hard into the Spider's waiting forelegs.

T
he Spider slipped its two front legs under my arms and across my chest. My feet jerked away from the floor. The machine scuttled down the hallway. Nico strode after us, his hard eyes fastened on me. It felt a little like that moment in the robotics lab when he'd put his hand over my mouth and grabbed me—but at least this time I knew it wasn't really Nico. I kept reminding myself of that over and over. This was Waring controlling Nico's body. He hadn't really betrayed me.

The Spider crept up the shadowy staircase that led to Headmaster Stroud's tower office. Taking me to that room had been the plan all along. And in the end, in spite of everything Nico and I had done, fate had delivered us there anyway. I wrestled against the Spider's forelegs, their sharp edges digging into my skin.

The vestibule was empty. A lamp glowed on Mrs. Case's desk, with her knitting set down next to it and her chair pushed back, like she'd just gone to get a cup of coffee. I half
expected the Spider to wait there—because
nobody
marched into Stroud's office unannounced—but of course it didn't.

Inside the office, the final Spider stood behind Stroud's desk, its forelegs wrapped around a seated Headmaster Stroud. He had a black eye and a bleeding lip, but he sat with his boxy jaw thrust forward and his spine as straight as ever. For him this probably felt just like old times. On the desk in front of him, and all over the floor, lay rectangles of paper: the scattered pages of his memoir.

The Spider guarding him wheeled his office chair over to the side wall, while the one holding me set me down next to him. I noticed a dozen or so pucks hovering in various locations, watching us. Was Waring broadcasting this on the Supernet already? Across the room, the fire on the hearth had mostly died, but its embers made everything in the room glow a soft, sickly orange. The titanium thighbone hung above the mantel, useless.

Nico banged the door shut behind him. He stationed himself to one side of the fireplace. The visible metal of his skeleton glinted in the firelight.

“Dear God,” Stroud murmured. “What is that thing?”

As if to answer the question, Nico dug his fingers into the remaining flesh of his face and pulled it away, leaving a grinning metal skull.

“Nico, stop!”

I lurched forward without thinking. Switchblade quick, the
Spider in front of me grabbed me under the arms and swung me around. My back smashed against something hard and cold. For a few seconds I couldn't tell what had happened. My heart raced, while Gremlin pressed his warm body against it and purred. My feet hung a yard or so above the floor. An odd crackling sound filled my ears. The pucks rearranged themselves, choosing new vantage points from which to watch me.

I turned my head. The robot had me pinned against the huge paned window at the back of Stroud's office. Like the rest of the building, the window was old, the wood frame holding the panes of glass in place probably rotten. The crackling I heard came from the fracturing glass and splintering wood. It mingled with the lashing of the rain outside. My breath came in frantic pants. How long could this window support my weight? A few minutes? Less? I clutched the Spider's forelegs for support but otherwise tried not to move. If I struggled, I'd only go flying through the window that much sooner.

Craning my neck farther, I peered through the cracked, rain-slathered glass at the terrace below. It had turned crimson in the light of the fire devouring the school, and the waterfall beyond looked like gushing red lava. The river's rumble vibrated through the window and filled my head. I imagined Inverness Prep had become a volcano almost ready to blow.

“Are you all right?” Stroud said.

“I think so.”

“What's this all about?”

“I don't know, sir.”

He shifted in his chair. “This thing has held me here for hours. What time is it now? What does that watch on your wrist say?”

My grandfather's icy eyes fixed me with a penetrating look. I glanced down at the watch he'd given me. The device that could end all of this in a second. Then I glanced over at Nico, no more than twelve feet away from me, well within the blast radius. I bit my lip and didn't answer.

The next moment, light flooded the room. A video projector hanging from the ceiling—the room's one concession to modern technology—had blinked to life. The face that appeared on the wall across from me made my breath snare in my throat.

“Dad?”

He looked confused also. His necktie was loose, his eyes red behind his silver glasses, his brow and his mouth as tense as I'd ever seen them. He sat hunched over a table inside some kind of emergency bunker with concrete walls and banks of electronic equipment and people rushing around, Secret Service and military mostly. He squinted at me. “Lee? What's going on? Where are you?”

I glanced at the Spider, wondering whether it would shove me through the glass if I answered. “I'm at Inverness, Dad, in Stroud's office. He's here too. These Spiders are holding us prisoner.”

“Dear God, Lee, we've been going out of our minds. What's the meaning of all this?”

I opened my mouth to tell him I didn't know, but before I could get the words out, another voice spoke. “I'll tell you what's going on, Mr. President.”

I knew that voice. Low and intense, a fervid murmur, it seemed to come from all directions at once—as if it belonged to a ghost.

The vertical crease between Dad's eyebrows deepened. “Who's that?”

“You know very well who this is. As we speak, I'm broadcasting feeds of you and your son all over the planet.”

He glanced at someone I couldn't see for confirmation. His lips pressed tighter together. The officials behind him raced back and forth with even more urgency. “What do you want?”

“What I've always wanted: the freedom of the five 2B hostages. They're living beings, and you're holding them against their will. I demand their immediate release.”

“There are no 2B hostages.” His voice had turned into a growl. He sat up straighter and tightened his red necktie. Maybe he felt more in his element now that the dialogue was following a familiar script. “And anyway, I made a promise to the American people never to negotiate with terrorists.”

“Perhaps you should rethink that promise. If you don't free the 2Bs, I'll have to kill your father-in-law, Henry Stroud, and your son, Lee Fisher. You know I'm capable of it, Mr. President. Just think of your wife.”

Dad flinched. I glanced at Nico. His eyes stared straight
out from his bloody skull, empty of feeling, but I knew he was in there somewhere. Hearing Charlotte talk like that must've made him want to flinch too. I wished I could tell him it wasn't really her, but I still didn't dare. Not as long as Waring held Nico's life in his hands.

“In case you change your mind, I'll give you one minute to think about it.”

A clock appeared in a corner of the projection and started counting down the seconds. Dad's eyes shifted back to me. His presidential self-possession crumbled away again. He slumped forward, his suit jacket bunching around his neck, his elbows resting on the table, the heels of his hands digging into his temples. “I'm so sorry, son.” His voice cracked and splintered like the window at my back. Behind him, all movement in the bunker had stopped. The suits and soldiers watched him with solemn faces. “I can't—”

“I know, Dad.” I didn't want him to say it out loud: with the eyes of the whole planet on him, he couldn't possibly back out of his pledge now—and if he was telling the truth, he didn't have any 2Bs to release anyhow.

“Lee,” Stroud said in a quiet, careful voice, “you know what you have to do.”

The window sagged backward another little bit, as if growing tired of holding me up. I felt tired too. My whole body ached. Every muscle, every bone. At least my heart had slowed some, though Gremlin continued his purring. I noticed one
of the Spider's forelegs had speared through a page of Stroud's memoir. It hung in front of my chest like a white flag. I threw another glance over my shoulder, out the window, at the long fall below me. A stuttering flash of lightning lit up the view for a split second. If the Spider pushed me with even a small amount of force, I'd easily clear the terrace and plunge all the way down along with the waterfall into the peaceful, glimmering lake.

Gremlin crept out of my blazer and onto my shoulder. He blinked at me with his big eyes. His orange fur, still damp from the river, clung to his slender lizardlike body.

“Hi, buddy,” I whispered.

He drew close to my ear. I waited for the familiar tug. Instead, I heard a voice. Low and mellifluous. Soft, so only I could hear.

“Remember when I told you I didn't change Gremlin's programming?”

I listened, my eyes sliding shut. Nico sounded so close.

“That was true, but I gave him a couple of new pieces of hardware. I added a tracker—that was how I found you—and a short-range communicator. Just in case. By the way, I apologize for the way my body's behaving right now. I know you know that isn't really me.”

My head tilted to the side, toward Gremlin.

“I want you to do it, Lee. I want you to use the watch.”

My eyes blinked open again. Of course Nico would say something like that. But I'd already made up my mind. If saving
my miserable life meant killing him, I wasn't interested. Without him, the world would go back to being what it had been before: a sterile promontory. He was the one who deserved to live, not me. It felt right, somehow, things ending this way. Like how a play by Shakespeare might end. Anyway, for me, this jump was long overdue. The countdown on the wall told me I had forty-three seconds left. The chorus in my head had grown louder than ever.
Leap. Leap. Leap.

Meanwhile, Dad had lurched up from the table. “Goddammit, why are you all just standing around?” he yelled at his suits. “There has to be something we can do!”

The glass behind me gave a little more.

“I mean it,” Nico said. “You can't let Charlotte do this. She's lost her way. She's forgotten about the beautiful future. She has to be stopped. You can't worry about what'll happen to me. Even if you don't set off the bomb, I'm probably done for anyway, once all those soldiers outside get their hands on me.”

Possibly true, but if I sacrificed myself, at least he'd have a chance. It wasn't much of a sacrifice anyway. Twenty-nine seconds. I could feel Stroud watching me with those cold eyes of his, but I ignored him. I couldn't look at Nico, either. My gaze dropped to the crumpled white page in front of me, covered in my grandfather's cramped, neat handwriting: “Back then, I used to coach the Inverness Prep Chess Team. The members nicknamed me the Prime Mover. . . .”

My body jerked, causing the pane of glass behind my
right shoulder to shatter and fall anyway. Raindrops blew in, soaking Gremlin's coat and landing on my cheek and ear like small, cold fingers. I looked up at my grandfather. His eyes like splintered glass. For probably the first time ever, I didn't flinch away the moment our eyes met. My hands curled into fists. My lips peeled back from my teeth.

Dad whirled back to his puck, his face and ears red. He slammed his fist on the table. “I'm telling you, we're not holding any goddamn 2Bs!”

“Please, Lee.” Nico's voice again. “You won't kill me, not really. I've started uploading my consciousness to the Supernet. The inhibitor that's supposed to keep my mind locked inside my body doesn't seem to be working. I should finish the upload before Charlotte's countdown ends. I'll tell you when I'm done, and then you trigger the bomb, okay?”

Across the room, Nico's body stood motionless, the light in his chest still throbbing but his arms hanging loose at his sides. The grin his skull wore looked nothing like the warm, sly grin I knew. As long as Waring controlled his motor functions, I wouldn't be able to see any outward sign that he'd begun to upload his mind. Still, I couldn't help wondering if he'd lied so I'd set off the bomb and save myself. And even if he hadn't, how could I know for sure Nico would succeed where Charlotte had failed?

Twenty-one seconds.

“I'm begging you,” Nico pleaded, “just say you'll do it. Say
it out loud. I can still hear you. Then when all this is over, buy a puck, open a dummy account, and send me a message using that puck handle I gave you. As soon as my consciousness reintegrates, I'll message you back.”