Z 2134 (30 page)

Jonah was
walking into something, blind and empty handed. Egan’s logic was spinning, but
he had no idea what it was spinning around.

He
should
say that yes, of course he would have helped. But that wasn’t the truth — that
wasn’t how it worked. Jonah didn’t always do the
right
thing because
sometimes the
right thing
was wrong for the greater good. He had
interests to weigh, and things were never as simple as the needs of one family.
The cause was
most
important, and protecting the interests of The
Underground, or maintaining his cover at City Watch, meant innocent people were
often denied passage.

The truth wasn’t
kind, but in his seat, it was all he had. “I don’t know what I would’ve done,”
he said, hoping his honest answer might surprise Egan enough to nudge him
closer toward his point.

Egan chewed on
Jonah’s response, pacing in a small circles around Jonah’s chair, looking like
he wanted to sit. “Why do you think no one helped your children escape?”

Jonah was
confused, and uncomfortable with the edge in Egan’s voice.

“What?”

“When City Watch
came for you, you were finished. You and everyone else had to know it. Have you
ever known City Watch to make a high-profile arrest, then let their prisoner
go?”

Egan paused, as
if waiting for Jonah to answer, though both knew there wasn’t any need. City
Watch arrested plenty of citizens, often for questioning, hoping to turn
neighbor against neighbor, or even better, sibling against sibling or child
against parent, but if an arrest made the monitors, suspects were guilty of
something
— regardless of the truth.

“The Underground
must’ve known you were arrested and must’ve been aware that your children could
be used against you or would be shuffled off to the orphanage, right? So why
weren’t they spared? Why not get them out of City 6?”

Jonah whispered
the same answer he’d turned in his mind so many times already. “Because my
children were under watch. They had to be, especially Ana. The State needed her
testimony, and they weren’t willing to let anything stand in their way.”

“Ah,” Egan
sneered, “so now that she’s outlived her usefulness, it’s off to The Games with
her? Maybe they had to get her out of The City since those false memories don’t
exactly last forever. They had to destroy evidence, which is, after all, what
you Watchers are so excellent at doing — besides manufacturing it from scratch,
of course.”

Jonah met Egan’s
eyes, surprised by something he’d said. “What do you mean the memories don’t
last forever? What are you talking about?”

“Do you know
what I did for credits before my inconvenient arrest?” Egan said, ignoring
Jonah’s question.

“You were a
factory worker, making circuit boards for the orbs, right?”

“Wow,” Egan said,
grinning. “They really didn’t tell you anything, did they? Perhaps you weren’t
as complicit in my frame-up as I suspected.”

“What are you
talking about?”

“I didn’t work
on the orbs. Well, I did, at least when I started, but I’m good with code and
was quickly moved to the seventh floor. By my third year at the factory, I was
with a small team — six of us working full-time on their chip program.”

“The identity
chips?”

“No.” Egan shook
his head. “Chips used to alter your reality, to control you.”

“They’re real?”
Jonah nearly gasped, relieved at least to finally understand his daughter’s
betrayal, and sick that The State would go to such lengths to control its
citizens.

“Yes, they’re
quite real,” he said, “though far from perfected. At least they
were
,
but I can’t imagine they’ve inched much further. They’ve been crashing into the
same development walls for decades.”

“What do the
chips do?”

“Initially, they
were designed to control violence by turning citizens docile, making and
keeping them happy. That was simple enough, but the older developers, most of
whom loved to whisper, said it was barely a minute into development before The
State started looking into other applications.”

“Like what?”

“Finding
other
ways
of controlling people — to manipulate memories and even bloom new ones
from a seed of suggestion. I was involved in the earliest stages, though. I’ve
no idea where development is now, or how close they might be to perfecting
them.”

“Lord,” Jonah
whispered, as many pieces of the unseen puzzle started snapping into place.
Duncan was right, or was at least on the right path. “Does everyone have a
chip?”

“No, not
everyone.” Egan shook his head. “But most of us, yes. The delivery mechanism
for Version 1 was crude, but Version 2 made things much better. If you’ve had a
vaccination in the past decade, you’ve probably been implanted with the nano
chips without knowing. You know of anyone who hasn’t had a vaccination in the
last decade?”

Vaccinations
were required by all citizens under penalty of banishment.

“Do you have
one?” Jonah asked.

“No, I destroyed
mine. I’m sure that’s why I was arrested, at least in part.”

“Why did you
destroy the chip?” Jonah asked.

“I didn’t like
the things it was making me do, or the thoughts I was having.”

“What sort of
thoughts?”

“Dark thoughts,”
Egan said. “Once I got rid of it, I started seeing the light. You will too.”

“What do you
mean?” Jonah said, suddenly wondering what in the hell Egan was planning to do.

“While you’ve
been more forthcoming, I still have the feeling you know more about my arrest
than you’re saying.”

“I don’t know
anything other than what I’ve said. As far as I know, they thought you were
working with The Underground.”

“Yeah, I know;
you said that.” Egan finally sat back in his seat. “And I
believe
you
believe it. But I also think you know something more. Since you probably have
no idea what you don’t know, I’m going to have Father Truth get rid of your
chips. We’ve got something that will seek out and destroy both chips inside you
— your ID and the control one.”

“Well, why the
hell didn’t you use it before now?”

“Well,
sometime’s there’s… side effects,” Egan said.

“What kind of
side effects?” Jonah asked, trying to mask his nervousness.

“Don’t you worry
about that,” Egan said. “If you have any, you’ll be too far gone to care.”

Jonah held
Egan’s eyes without flinching. “Then what? What if you find something? What
does that mean for me and my trial?”

“Oh, you’ll
still face the Council. But perhaps, if you’re helpful, we can grant leniency.”

“And if not?”
Jonah said.

“Well,” Egan
shrugged. “Then you die.”

A
dam woke up
sometime in the middle of the night, terrified before he opened his eyes. A
hand, not a grown-up’s, was pressed hard on his lips. He lifted his lids.
Morgan was above him, whispering, “Say a word and you fucking die.”

Behind Morgan
stood Tommy and Daniel, both glaring down at Adam even though he could barely
see them in the scant light of the sleeping hall. They looked angry.

Adam tried to
stay silent, knowing Morgan meant what he said, but as he squirmed against the
mattress, an involuntary whimper fell from his mouth. Morgan’s hand pressed
harder on his face, pinching his cheekbones tight.

Tommy leaned in,
slipping the tip of a knife just under Adam’s chin. “We’re going for a little
walk,” Daniel said.

Adam managed to
hold his second whimper inside as Daniel pulled him from the bed and roughly
whispered, “We’re going to the bathroom. You make a sound or try to run away,
then Tommy will cut your throat. We’ll leave your body in the hallway and put
the knife in Johnny Ross Wells’s locker. Nod if you understand.”

Adam nodded,
trying to hold back the tears.

They cut through
the sleeping hall as Adam wondered how many kids were awake, pretending to
sleep so the same thing wouldn’t happen to them. They stepped into the hallway,
then crept to the bathroom. Once inside, Daniel slammed Adam into the cold
tiled wall of the bathroom. Pain crashed across the back of Adam’s head as it
hit, and likely cracked, the wall.

Adam saw
Daniel’s fist as it pulled back like the band in a slingshot. He was prepared
to take a punch in the gut, but the punch came lower, an explosion of ungodly
pain in his balls. He fell hard to the filthy bathroom floor, crying.

“How do the
grapefruits feel now?” Daniel said, curling his fingers into Adam’s hair and
dragging him over to a stall.

What are they
gonna do?

Adam’s heart
raced. He wanted to cry out, scream, something, but was so afraid of being cut,
he kept his cries stifled, a hostage to whatever ride they planned.

Daniel shoved
Adam through the door of the bathroom stall and then shoved him down hard to
his knees. The stench of caked urine immediately greeted Adam.

Tommy was on top
of him again, pushing the cold knife against his neck. Tommy was pressing it so
hard, Adam was sure he was cutting into him, or close to it.

Tommy said, “You
better stop your crying, or we’ll leave you for dead. No one will doubt it was
Johnny that done it.”

While Johnny had
always been nice to Adam, he was prone to violence and would be an easy kid to
set up with a stabbing.

Morgan crammed
into the stall between Tommy and Daniel, though Adam couldn’t see anything with
his face near the toilet.

Morgan asked,
“Why’d you rat on us?”

Adam could
barely think through his terror. He’d say anything they wanted if he knew what
it was. He could swear innocence, insist he had no choice, but would that be
enough?

He never wanted
to hurt anyone, especially his only friends, but he’d had no choice. What was
he going to do, upset Keller by not telling? Choosing to disappoint either his
friends or Keller, his friends had seemed the obvious choice — until now.

“I’m so, so
sorry,” Adam whimpered, hating himself for not being able to hold his tears
inside, worried that Tommy would slit his throat at any second. “I never meant
to do anything wrong; they took me to the schoolmaster’s office!”

Tommy pulled the
knife away, turned Adam around, facing all three of them in the tiny stall,
then reeled back and punched him hard below the throat.

Adam gasped,
clutching at his neck, swallowing to keep from vomiting.

Tommy said, “I
can kill you right now, and no one will know it was us.”

“No one would
even care,” Daniel added, taunting him. “Fucking freak!”

Adam surprised
himself by swallowing tears. “I
had
to tell on you guys! Mr. Keller
already knew, and if I didn’t admit the truth, they would’ve done something
even worse. I was trying to protect you! Besides, he said one of you, or the
girls, had already told on me! So I figured he already knew and was just
testing me to see if I’d lie.”

“Yeah, right!”
Daniel said, punching Adam hard in his left ribcage.

Adam ignored the
pain, insisting, “I swear, why would I ever want anything bad to happen to you?
You’re my only friends.”

All three
laughed out loud, but Morgan said, “You think we’re friends? We’re not friends,
Freakshow. We only talked to you because your daddy was in The Games, and then
your sister. Without your fucked-up family, you’re just another freak destined
to end up in the Quarters!”

Tommy’s knife
was again under his throat. “Give us one reason not to kill you now.”

Adam had at
least 100, but couldn’t get a single one out. He tried speaking, but only
stuttered.

Morgan turned to
Tommy. “What do you think?”

“That he’s dumb
enough to believe everything he said.” Tommy dragged the knife from Adam’s neck
to his chin, then around his lips as Adam shuddered and tried not to bawl. “But
if we let his deed go unpunished, people will talk. Then maybe they’ll start
disrespecting us, too. That can’t happen inside The Rock.”

Tommy pulled the
knife back and turned to the others. “So, should we punish him, or just go
ahead and kill the freak and get this finished?”

Morgan said,
“Kill him.”

Daniel laughed.
“Yeah, I can’t think of a reason to keep this asshole alive.” He punched Adam
again in his side, pulling him into a headlock while Tommy brought his knife up
to Adam’s face.

Adam sobbed and
whimpered, squirmed and squealed, certain he was seconds from dying.

Hot piss poured
down his pajama bottoms. The smell, along with the fear churning in his guts,
made Adam feel like he was going to vomit.

No sooner had he
felt it than he did it.

Daniel’s fist
landed on his guts, launching a violent spatter of liquid chunks from Adam’s
mouth.