From the outside, Venecia was an abandoned warehouse, all crumbling walls decorated in graffiti and spare cement blocks dotting the perimeter. At the entrance (under a blacked-out sign with a single flickering light bulb), Bryce did the knock, and when the door opened, he flashed a fake ID. He’d given Cassie one, too, and she held it up with a hand that — she was proud to note — did not tremble.
Didn’t matter. The bouncer, who barely glanced at them before holding up a finger, mouthed the word “Wait,” and closed the door again.
The pounding bass spilled onto the street in those seconds the door had been opened, leaving behind a yawning silence that made Cassie feel exposed, vulnerable. She shivered and surveyed the block. It was empty; nothing of note except an old bus stop shelter, which, with its ripped-out bench and weeds bursting through the sidewalk cracks, looked positively dystopian. On the far corner, a single streetlight cast a weak orange glow, and in it Cassie could see a mist forming, particles of water floating, trying to decide if they had enough pizazz to turn into a proper rainstorm.
“Bryce,” she croaked. “This is a bad idea.”
“That’s not my name,” he hissed. His mask was a sleek army green, and without his trademark red dreadlocks, Cassie couldn’t shake the idea that he had turned into a different person. That somehow, in the space of the day — a day when she’d been raided, forced to go on the run and watched one of her only allies killed in the process — the world had turned upside down yet again.
She fought back a fresh onslaught of tears as her last image of TonyStark flashed before her eyes. She struggled to remember the code names Bryce had insisted they use: he was Pyrrhus, the famous Greek general, and she was Lyssa, the Greek goddess of uncontrolled rage.
Bryce shifted. “This mask is hot as hell.”
“Pyrrhus …” Cassie tried again. She glanced down the block once more. The mist had made up its mind, and fat raindrops were driving down onto the cement, making pinging noises on her mask. In addition to her prosthetic mask, Bryce had handed her a headband with a plume of black feathers rising up from her forehead. It was just simple enough to be forgettable.
Over the patter of raindrops came a hoot, followed by some cheers. Tires squealed in the distance. This part of the city would’ve put Cassie on edge even without a Level 6 conviction swallowing her whole. She tugged Bryce’s elbow. “What’s taking so long? Is this normal?”
Cassie couldn’t tell what his expression was under his mask, but the glare from his eyes gave her a pretty good indication. “I don’t know. But I trust @Shameless.”
On cue the door swung open, the music drowning out Cassie’s reply. The bouncer held up a hand and waved them in. “Precaution,” he said affably, ushering them in before taking a survey of the empty block and closing the door behind them. “We instituted a new ID check after some trouble a few months back.”
“Bummer,” Bryce said, nodding their goodbyes and dragging Cassie behind him. “Keep up,” he said in a low voice. He knew where @Shameless was supposed to meet them.
She tried. But the pulsing music drowned out every word, every thought, and the shock of so many faceless dancers disoriented Cassie. The scene was unlike anything she’d ever experienced. The bass was so loud that it reverberated in her bones; it became her heartbeat, throbbing in tune. A dark dance floor glowed brightly every few seconds as a strobe light flashed. And the masks — so many masks! Beautiful painted ones and horrid, grotesque ones, disguising everyone, turning the dance floor into a pit of movement that was equal parts threatening and welcoming. No one could want to kill you when you were just a nameless mask in a crowd, right?
Bryce lifted his mask a few inches. “He should be over there!” he mouthed, his voice drowned by the crowd’s cheer as a new song played. She gripped his sleeve as they darted through thrashing limbs. No one was doing it intentionally, but it felt like the crowd — the noise, the heat — was assaulting Cassie, and by the time Bryce pulled open an unnoticeable door tucked away in the far corner of the dance floor under the DJ booth, Cassie’s body hurt.
After Bryce closed the door behind them, Cassie could hear him panting under his mask, which he then ripped off. In the dim light of the silent room, she saw his face was slick with sweat.
Cassie kept her mask on, even though she was desperate to gulp in the stale air. She realized she was still holding Bryce’s sleeve, and she dropped it before he could notice, too. The room was dark, small and cramped — boxes piled high, a single, overcrowded desk with an ancient computer, and what looked like old equipment stacked in haphazard towers — and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust. Behind the desk, an old-fashioned flat-screen television, muted but running a news channel. Cassie glanced at it, then cried out involuntarily and grabbed Bryce’s arm again.
“Mom!”
Bryce gaped, then turned over the room looking for the remote. When he found it, he jabbed some buttons until sound finally came back. The newscaster, a Ken doll with a fake tan, seemed delighted to fill them in.
“If you’re just joining us, take a look at today’s unexpected event. Rachel N. McKinney, mother of Level 6 Hive convict Cassie McKinney, led a protest today that consisted of, in the words of her spokesperson, a, quote, mom army demanding protection for our kids in this age of mob rule run by an unjust horde of unqualified aggressors, unquote. Hundreds of supporters rallied in person to put an end to Hive rule, while online the event trended as thousands in other locations shared their agreement. Rachel McKinney has gone viral, taking to the ’net to appeal to other parents for help. She is under 24-7 surveillance for suspected contact with her daughter who, as we all know, has been ordered to be killed on contact.” He turned to his co-anchor, who appeared to take equal pleasure in sharing the news, and added, “What a mom. You have kids, Lee. Would you do the same if your child was in danger?”
Not missing a beat, Lee brightened her smile by another ten degrees and nodded. “Of course, Dan. Now let’s take a look at the weather.”
Bryce muted the television as Cassie stood, struck silent, trying to process this new idea. Her mother. Rachel. Hosting a protest.
Going viral.
Heat began to spread around her neck, up her cheeks. She placed a hand on her chest, checking to see if her heart had pumped its way out.
“Cass,” Bryce whispered. He nodded to the area behind some boxes. Cassie could see there was enough room for someone to comfortably perch there, to sneak up on them. Bryce held a finger to his lips. Cassie nodded tightly. There was someone else in the room.
“@Shameless?” Bryce asked. He tugged Cassie’s arm until his hand found hers and he clasped it.
@Shameless was wearing a glittery yellow mask, curving around the edges of his face. He nodded once and stepped forward, out of the shadows, lifting his mask as he did so.
Cassie gasped. Bryce went silent, his face stony.
“But you’re …” Cassie sputtered.
“A woman?” A tired smile flashed briefly. “Surprise.”
Cassie grinned despite herself. “Cool,” she murmured to Bryce. But he didn’t respond. His eyes were trained on @Shameless tightly, like he was locking her in place. Or, Cassie realized, like he was expecting her to make a move. A dangerous move.
Something about the woman … She was familiar … Cassie couldn’t quite place it …
Cassie’s eyes ticked between Bryce and @Shameless. “Bryce?” she said quietly. “Is this safe?”
“Are you kidding?” Bryce leaped backward, swinging toward the closed door, yanking Cassie so hard that her shoulder nearly popped out of its socket. “That’s Alexandra fucking Pastor! The fucking enemy!”
*
Alexandra Pastor. The woman who ran the Hive for the Department of Justice. She’d spoken at the president’s press conference when Cassie was bumped to Level 6.
She let Bryce drag her to the door. Alexandra Pastor. Holy crap. But there was something else, too … She’d recognized Alexandra before Bryce said anything, but it hadn’t been from the press conference. She —
“Stop!” Alexandra called. Bryce fumbled with the doorknob as Cassie gripped her shoulder.
“We have backup!” Bryce lied, finally getting the knob to release. The door swung open and the music from the club invaded their little space, a wave of sound that nearly knocked Cassie over. Bryce pushed her ahead but Alexandra lunged forward, her body crashing into the door before Bryce could pull his own frame through.
“I’m on your side!” she exclaimed. She must’ve been stronger than her petite frame suggested because she managed to hold Bryce back for a few seconds longer than Cassie would have guessed possible. “Just hear me out!”
Alexandra and Bryce locked eyes. From this angle, Cassie could see a little tattoo on the back of her neck, white stars that stood out against her warm ochre skin. She gaped. That was it. The tattoo. She knew that tattoo. Once, for a while, it had been present in her own house.
“I know you.”
A break in the music made Cassie’s statement loud enough for both Bryce and Alexandra to hear it. Their heads swiveled toward her. The music started up again, a beat that throbbed in time to the pulsing pain in her shoulder, and she winced. She saw a flash of sympathy in Alexandra’s eyes, and in that moment, Cassie decided to trust her.
They didn’t have much choice, anyway.
“Get back in there,” Cassie demanded.
“She’s dangerous!” Bryce hissed.
“No, she’s your inside man,” Cassie reminded him. Besides, the secret weight of the gun in her waistband emboldened her. She had options. Lousy ones, yes, but better than none.
They allowed themselves to be shoved back into the room and closed the door behind her. Cassie took a deep breath and ripped off her prosthetic mask. “How did you know my dad?”
“What the fuck!” Bryce yelled, eyes wild. “This isn’t about your dad! This is Alexandra fucking Pastor! She reports directly to the president. She’s the exact reason you are where you are right now! She’s in charge of the whole goddamn Hive!”
Cassie eyed Alexandra carefully, feeling out the situation. If she was wrong …
She could see it, though, dancing before her eyes as though it had just happened. She’d come back from a soccer match with her mom. She must’ve been eight or nine, maybe. Harlon had missed her match, and she remembered snapping at Rachel on their walk home, and Rachel trying to explain that Harlon was working on a special project, but did Cassie want some ice cream to make up for it?
At home, Cassie found her dad in his office with a woman she’d never seen before. She was magazine-level fashionable — trendy boots and leather pants, plum lipstick striking against her black skin, stuff her mom wouldn’t be caught dead in. As she leaned over her keyboard her hair fell forward, and Cassie spotted the stars on her neck.
Harlon, distracted, had waved and blown Cassie a kiss but then closed the door. Alexandra left sometime later, but he remained cloistered all weekend. Rachel brought him food and water and finally, late the next afternoon, she persuaded him to go to sleep. Cassie had never seen that woman again.
I’m not wrong, she thought.
“She’s been playing the long game this whole time.” The realization dawned on her quickly; a sped-up sunrise.
Alexandra’s dark eyes sparkled. “Harlon always said you were too smart for your own good.”
Bryce let out a tortured moan, an animal sound. Then he slammed his fist into the wall. “Someone please tell me what the hell is going on here?”
“Happy to,” Alexandra said smoothly. She gestured to a small space behind a stack of boxes. “Come with me.”
Behind the boxes was a sort of crawl space; they had to crouch, but there were a few chairs, a laptop and what looked like a martini glass, half full. Alexandra shrugged when Cassie noticed it. “Whatever gets you through, right?”
“Tell us what you want.” Bryce crossed his arms. He chose to sit on the floor rather than on the remaining rickety chair.
“Let me tell you a story,” Alexandra said, draining the rest of her drink. She clapped her hands together once, then rubbed them as if she was trying to generate heat. “I helped devise the Hive. And of course, when we talk about the Hive, what we’re really talking about is the algorithm.”
Cassie nodded. Bryce looked unimpressed.
“I hired the programmers. Then I wrote the rules that they all used to code the Hive — everything, from the Condemn thresholds to the aggregators. Some of those rules I devised right in your house, Cassie.”
The air in the crawl space was thick. Cassie tried not to inhale it too deeply but she was finding it hard to breathe. She fumbled for the words. “What are you saying, exactly?”
Alexandra sat silently for a few moments, surveying Cassie, before saying, “How much did you really know about your father and what he believed?”
Cassie rolled her eyes. Her whole life, Harlon’s fans — the really intense ones, the hackers who kept posters of him on their walls — would try to test her bond with her dad. As though she, his only child, couldn’t possibly be as close to him as they, his many disciples, were. “I promise, I know more about him than you think I do.” But even as she said it, a seed of doubt was growing.
If she noticed, Alexandra was at least kind enough to say nothing. “If it can be coded, it should be coded. He used to say that, and a thousand variants of that, all the time. Right?”
Cassie nodded. Harlon had lived his life on the premise that coding could be both life sustaining — lifesaving, even — and frivolous, and that both options were of equal value.
“He was always generous with his time and especially with his skills,” Alexandra mused. “There’s a confidence in having that much talent. He never worried that someone would overtake him. I think he liked the idea of it, actually. I sometimes got the impression he was looking for someone to challenge him.”
“Can you speed this up?” Bryce said impatiently.
Alexandra clapped her hands together again, startling Cassie, who’d been lost in a swirl of memories. “Of course. What I’m trying to say is that Harlon and I created the Hive together, under a contract from the DOJ.”
In the stunned silence that followed, Cassie briefly envisioned what would happen if she punched Alexandra in the face. Hard.
“I’d known him through the usual hacker circles online, but I never thought he’d come on board. He was a pretty big get, as you can imagine,” Alexandra continued, as if she hadn’t dropped a bomb, as if she weren’t now staring at the hole it had left behind. “This was a big deal. We knew we were going to change the world.”
“My dad would never create something like this!” The certainty burst out of Cassie as she gestured vaguely around her, at her version of the Hive, which now existed everywhere, in everyone, in every shadow that would extend its long arms in the spaces around her. Her hands were trembling. No way. Harlon hacked for the people, not to turn them against each other.
Alexandra trained her gaze on her. “I guess you do know your father better, Cassie. Because you’re right. A few weeks into the project, Harlon expressed some moral concerns about the Hive. He ripped up our contract and walked away.” She let out a chuckle, but it was hard to say whether it was mirthful or resentful. “Almost left me high and dry there. It was a lot of money. But he didn’t hold it against me when I went back and convinced Justice to give me a chance to do it all on my own. And I did. Got myself a political appointment, a cushy job …”
Cassie bit back her disgust at the satisfaction in Alexandra’s voice and focused on the feeling of pride rising in her.
“He quit?” she whispered. Alexandra nodded and Cassie caught her breath, her vision of Harlon resettled back into the comfortable, reliable version she’d always known: Harlon McKinney, white hat, hacker for good. Or if not good, at least not for evil. She ducked her head, hiding the smile she couldn’t stop from spreading. Building the Hive would’ve been the project of a lifetime. A legacy.
She was proud of him, but also, layered behind the pride, a little dismayed that he’d never told her.
What else, she wondered, hadn’t he told her?
“I used Harlon’s office sometimes in those early days. Rachel was always really nice about letting me crash there when we were deep in a code binge. I don’t know how she put up with him. Us.”
The mention of Rachel lit a match inside Cassie. She had forgotten, somehow, all the times she would wake up in the middle of the night to find Harlon holding court in his office, his tech buddies enraptured as they strung themselves out on greasy food and caffeine or occasionally on bottles of golden-brown liquid that Cassie could smell from down the hall. Coding parties, he’d call them. She had forgotten how many times she’d watched Rachel clean up the messes as Harlon slept them off, the sun blazing high in the sky. When was the last time he’d hosted one? Cassie struggled to think, the weight of TonyStark still turning her stomach. There had been one right after her ninth birthday — she could remember because there were still balloons, sparkly and green, floating languidly around the house for weeks after the party, and one of Harlon’s friends had popped them all late during one all-nighter, waking Cassie from a dream and making her cry.
Harlon had never hosted another one. The Hive was established not long after that.
Cassie turned some new thoughts over in her head. All those years of putting Harlon on a pedestal … all those months of hating Rachel for things Cassie couldn’t remember, emotions she couldn’t name. What if this whole time Rachel had been holding Harlon together, making it so he could be a father sometimes, even though she had to be a mother all the time?
“Anyway,” Alexandra said. “I built it, and it changed the world. We knew it would, of course. But we didn’t know it would change it like this.”
Bryce snorted. “You didn’t know you would get people killed?”
Alexandra’s gaze was steady and clear. “You obviously don’t remember what it was like … especially for women and people of color. The death threats. The casual racism and misogyny. The insults. And then people taking the law into their own hands.”
“So instead of stopping them,” Bryce said, “you just made it legal for them to do it. Congratulations.”
Alexandra Pastor fumed. “No, you brat. We put a structure in place. It got so bad that people were dying. We put a stop to that.”
“Until now,” Cassie said quietly.
Bryce folded his arms over his chest and nodded at Alexandra triumphantly.
“People were having their lives ruined. Every time they went online, it followed them. We made it predictable, enforceable and finite. This part wasn’t supposed to happen,” Alexandra said, her voice low. “All that stuff I livestreamed? About Level 6 being part of the original spec? Bullshit. Level 6 was never part of the spec. Nothing that I worked on. Certainly nothing that Harlon worked on. Gorfinkle put it in place and he’s been itching to use it. They did it over my objections, told me it would never be used. And now here we are. Here you are.”
Cassie went still. The words hung in the room for a long time, long enough that she turned them over and over in her mind until they became mush, just unintelligible sounds. They didn’t mean anything.
Alexandra eventually continued. “It’s a tale as old as time, isn’t it? Eventually, especially when the president saw how Hive polled, all the plans we’d made turned upside down. The algorithms took on a life of their own …”
“Bullshit. You designed them to do that. Don’t blame the code; blame yourself,” Bryce spat.
“GIGO,” Cassie whispered. Garbage in. Garbage out.
But who was the garbage? Was she? She swallowed hotly, seeing streaks of TonyStark’s blood splattered against the pavement, a collage of destruction. Was he?
“I designed them when I thought the positive aspects of humanity outweighed the negative ones,” Alexandra countered. Her bottom lip trembled just once, enough for Cassie to notice. “What I failed to factor into my many, many equations was neutrality.”
“Apathy,” Cassie said. Like her, before her father’s death. Before Rowan. Before, before, before.
“Exactly,” Alexandra agreed. She jumped up from her seat and began pacing, her shoulders slouched and neck bent so she didn’t hit her head. “It turned out that a nontrivial percentage of people didn’t want to participate in Hive Justice. They just wanted to watch it. But above all, they didn’t care that the only people who were actively participating were approaching it from the wrong angles. We expected a counterbalance and it never came.”
“Jesus. Did you consult anyone who’d ever worked in fucking retail?” Bryce fumed. “Humanity is filled with people dying to complain. To avenge. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, man.”
“We thought …” Alexandra paused, then collapsed back into her chair.
“Yeah, yeah,” Bryce said. “We all thought.”
“Shut up!” Cassie snapped. “Let her talk. She owes it to us.”
“That’s the thing. It quickly became apparent that the Hive wasn’t going to turn itself around. It wasn’t going to self-correct. So we started experimenting with some tweaks to the code. When it didn’t work, we just thought, well, the human mind … it’s unpredictable, really. It’s not logical. And when you agglomerate a critical mass of them, you throw the rules of logic out the window. Chaos theory takes over. But then …”
Cassie shifted in her uncomfortable seat and, realizing she had been holding her breath, exhaled.
Alexandra continued: “A few weeks ago, I got a note in my personal email directing me to an anonymous site. I had to hack into it, and the back end was … my God, it was beautiful. Just outstanding. Whoever coded this page is damn good. They buried a message so deep in the code that it took me days to find it. And it said … It said that the administration has been manipulating Hive Justice all along. That someone created ghost accounts, hidden from public view but able to alter the Condemn threads as needed. The counterbalance had been manufactured and then misdirected. It was everything I feared, laid out in front of me in a way I couldn’t ignore.”
Bryce’s jaw tensed.
Alexandra noticed.
“The note also led me to a hidden data cache. Evidence, it said. Top-level encryption. But everything else in the email was legit, so I knew whatever was in the cache had to be the real deal. It only gave me one clue: the color is the code.”
“This is crazy,” Bryce said. “You really expect me to believe you built this thing almost single-handedly, but someone else is conveniently misusing it?”
“Believe what you want,” she told him. “All I can say is this: throughout my tenure at the Hive, there have been … inconsistencies. I stayed abreast of them in the beginning, but I got promoted at a fast rate … unprecedented, really. My new work would distract me for weeks or months on end. I stopped looking for the mistakes. I was told to keep focusing on the positive aspects of the Hive, on all the good we were doing.”
“So the system is biased.”
“It was biased from day one,” Alexandra said, a touch of exasperation in her tone. “Humans coded it. Humans implemented it.”
“But you invented it,” Bryce countered, his voice thin and tight, a violin string ready to snap. “You allowed it to be violated. And now we’re in danger. Our friend is dead.”
Alexandra dropped her head. “I know.”
“But why unleash the ghost accounts on me?” Cassie burst out. “I made a dumb joke. Why do they care so much that they’d do this to me?”
Alexandra sighed. “They were looking for a scapegoat. You fit their needs …” she trailed off. “Do you follow politics, Cassie?”
Cassie felt a pang of guilt for not knowing what she was getting at. Then she felt a stifling hot anger — her old friend, rage. She was seventeen. She couldn’t even vote yet. Did she follow politics? Not especially.
“The president is facing the end of his second term and the end of his power — not acceptable to a man like that. He’s out for blood. Willing to try anything. If he thought he could turn this embarrassment, this laughingstock you made of him, into a hook to hang a campaign on —”
“Make him a sympathetic figure instead of a corrupt, all-powerful one …” Bryce added, his fingers drumming together.
“And build on the organic reactions, elevate the negativity …”
Cassie’s head swung between them.
“Turn her into a scapegoat for all that’s wrong with humanity,” Bryce continued, his voice rising. “Make her the bully. A vulgar thing who preys on innocent babies. Someone who spends too much time on the Hive when she should be studying, or at least comforting her widowed mother.”
“And then, while we’re all distracted by how much we hate Cassie, how wrong she is for this society …” Alexandra continued.
“The president gets to become the person who saved us from someone like her. From ourselves.”
“And furthermore leverages the publicity and the acclaim to call a new Constitutional Convention,” Alexandra said quietly.
“Wait, say what?” Bryce’s jaw dropped open.
Constitutional Convention. That Cassie understood. They’d studied it in school. With his party in power at a Constitutional Convention, the president could literally rewrite the country’s fundamental laws and leverage the Hive to have the states ratify his new constitution. At one stroke, every policy he favored could be enacted as the law. Virtually inviolable.
Including the elimination of term limits. He could run for a third, a fourth … And with the Hive Mobs on his side, no one could stop him.
“And I make it all possible,” Cassie said quietly.
“People say nasty shit about the president all day, every day. Why do you think they picked you? The daughter of a controversial hacker?” Alexandra smiled grimly. “The NSA had already been watching you and your mom since he died, looking for anything he left behind. Looking for any excuse to get their fingers in Harlon’s cookie jar. And you just went ahead and raised your hand, giving them the pretext they needed to come in and scoop it all up. Like a lamb eager for slaughter. Two birds with one stone.”
“Watch it,” Bryce warned, stepping close to Cassie.
Ignoring Bryce, Alexandra delivered the final blow: “Your death is an asset to the president, Cassie. It’s the test case that proves the efficacy of Hive Justice and gives him a way to eliminate people who stand up to him. Legally. Permanently. With no blood on his hands.”
Cassie felt herself slide out of her seat, her legs unable to bear weight. Her mind raced, trying to find a word, any word, to describe the tornado of emotions running through it.
Bryce crawled over to her, shaking her shoulders until she met his eyes. “Cass, this is good news.”
“What?” Cassie fought tears again, despair her new default state. “The president personally needs me dead. How is that good news?”
“We know now. We know what they did!” Bryce laughed, an actual laugh Cassie hadn’t ever heard. “There’s a way out. We know what to do. We can find the ghost accounts. Cassie, this is it!”
“You’re making it sound much easier than it actually is,” Alexandra warned him. “Even if you can reverse the numbers programmatically, you’ll need it to spill into organic reversals, too.”
“Don’t listen to her. You’ll be acquitted, Cassie!”
Free.
Bryce shook her again, only it was more of a hug attempt this time, and Cassie welcomed it, leaning into his neck and closing her eyes. “I’ll get to see my mom again?” Her words were muffled by Bryce’s skin, rough and warm against her cheek.
“You’ll get to live your life again,” Bryce assured her, squeezing her tighter, a brotherly, euphoric embrace. She relaxed into him, letting her limbs settle, trying to catch her breath. The promise of a return to her regular life had knocked the wind out of her.
Alexandra suddenly shushed them, even though no one was saying anything. She held up a hand, her head cocked toward the door. Cassie thought she saw her eyes flash a warning to Bryce.
“What is it?” she whispered. It was, she realized, too quiet. The music in the club had stopped.
It all happened in slow motion — Alexandra’s eyes widening; Bryce releasing Cassie and standing up, knocking over his chair. It tumbled to the floor, taking an eternity to land, to shatter the silence.
Cassie wondered if her heart would leap through her chest and land on the floor next to the chair. Whatever was happening outside, every cell in her body was telling her it was bad news.
In their cramped space, Cassie stared at Alexandra and Bryce, willing them to give her some clue with their eyes, their hands. Sign language, maybe. Anything.
Instead, they just looked at each other, communicating in a way that Cassie couldn’t decipher.
Something was on the tip of her tongue, some dawning realization.
She ran out of time to wait for it. The door burst open.
Someone screamed.
It was, Cassie realized, her own voice.
*
She wasn’t the only one making noise. Outside the door, where there had once been the relentless beat of music, there were more screams. There were crashes as things unseen fell over or were thrown. Within seconds, the noises built until Cassie couldn’t tell if they were real or simply part of a song she’d never heard. Bryce grabbed her, covering her mouth with his hand.
“Shut up! Shut up!” he hissed.
Through tears she managed to find the yawning hole inside her where the scream was escaping and willed herself to close it. It didn’t matter, though. The noises outside the storage space escalated, a rising crescendo.
“The Hive is here,” Alexandra said, and Cassie felt that space open up inside her again. A cavern, really. A sinkhole.
Alexandra punched buttons on her phone and then tucked her laptop into her jacket pocket and added, in an eerily calm tone, “I suggest you run.” Then, in a superhero move Cassie couldn’t appreciate in the moment, she slipped out the door and disappeared into the chaos.
She left the door open.
“Go! Go!” Bryce yelled, his voice muffled amid the screams and — oh, my God, were those gunshots? — from the club. But Cassie was frozen. She looked helplessly at Bryce.
“I can’t move my legs,” she whispered. She couldn’t escape again. She didn’t have it in her.
“You have to run!” Bryce yelled again. “They will kill you before we get a chance to stop all this! Mask up and run!”
Cassie closed her eyes. It was only a matter of seconds before they would find her, she knew. The club couldn’t have that many hiding spaces.
Harlon would make her run, she thought. Her dad would never let her stand still like this, an open target for the very people who had set her up. He’d tell her to go, go, go, to Fuck the Man and make them chase her until time ended, or she died, or they caught her — whichever came first.
But she thought suddenly of the night she’d hit Level 5. Of her mother dragging her out of bed, down the stairs into the car …
Yes, her dad would make her run, but her mother would run with her.
Cassie didn’t have time to take a deep breath, but she did it anyway, and in that space she heard her mother’s voice in her head. It said, I’m here, baby. We have to go now.
Her body responded. She ducked under Bryce’s raised arm and threw herself into the crowd, tugging her mask into place as she did so.
It was dark. The mob must’ve cut the power when they raided the club, and a spatter of flashlights danced across the room, seeking her out. She drove deeper into the crowd, into bodies and noise. Bryce was right behind her, one hand grazing her elbow. The noise was deafening, a steady hum of moans and whimpers punctuated by high-pitched screams of “Help me!” and “What the fuck!” If only people would stop screaming, Cassie thought, she might have a chance to make a plan. Instead, she was moving by instinct, keeping her body low.
A voice, amplified over a loudspeaker, and probably through everyone’s earbuds, if the bodily convulsions were any indication: “Cassie McKinney! Level 6 perpetrator! Hive Justice demands you! Show yourself!”
It was a mistake for them to say her name. Before the announcement had even finished a wave of screams rose up in response. What had been a loud but mostly quiescent crowd, perhaps assuming this was a drug raid or an immersive floor show, was now practically foaming at the mouth, desperate with the knowledge that there was a Level 6 perpetrator in the room, that they could join the mob and be the ones to take her down. Their thirst slammed into Cassie.
She was in the middle of the club floor, still crouched low, keeping one eye on the pattern of flashlights against the walls and another on Bryce, who still crept behind her. He was harder to hide than she was. Norse gods couldn’t stay invisible for long.
Cassie plotted her move. The front door was out, surely; so, too, was the back exit, even though its red EXIT sign seemed to be beckoning her. Those were too obvious. She looked up, through the bodies, to the ceiling. There, about a foot down, was a system of wide, exposed ductwork that looked strong enough to support her. Her idea was a risk, but if she could hoist herself up onto the air ducts, she could crawl along to reach somewhere more private — the bathrooms, maybe, or the kitchen, the back of the bar, wherever — and she could probably climb her way through the building, all with a bird’s-eye view. From up there, she could find her escape route. She thought of Bryce’s words when this all began, during that horrible excursion through the tunnels and up the abandoned hotel to OHM. The higher up we go, the fewer cameras.
And if there wasn’t an escape route? Cassie wouldn’t let that thought linger. She could ride it out up there if she had to. The mob couldn’t stay in the building forever … right?
A fresh wave of yells convinced her to push away the doubts (and there were many) and make a decision. She was out of time. Any second now, people were going to start removing their masks to prove they weren’t Cassie McKinney.
She tugged on Bryce’s fingers, pointed up and yelled — knowing no one could her hear — “I’m going up! I’ll find you when things settle down!” He blinked in confusion, then looked up, realized Cassie’s plan and nodded. He, too, knew they were out of time.
She darted through the crowd on all fours, her body braced against stray kicks and accidental punches. Two people actually stepped on her, and she flinched in agony. She kept her head protected as best she could and continued on, seeking spaces in the darkness, blocking out the noises, the pain. Bruises and sprains would be dealt with later. Just get there, she told herself.
Going by gut instinct, or maybe driven by fate, or finally having some good luck, Cassie touched something other than body parts: a wall.
“Yes!” she whispered, trying to catch her breath, her hands feeling her way along it. Her fingers grasped a hinge — an opening, maybe? Just then another announcement shook the club.
“Stop what you’re doing or face immediate consequences! We are seeking a Level 6 perpetrator. Hive Justice demands it! Everybody freeze!”
Cassie heard the instructions, but her body disobeyed. You could tell a crowd of hundreds to freeze but dozens of them would still be moving within it, still be fidgeting or thinking the order didn’t apply to them. Her fingers inched along the hinge, finding the opening. Her eyes were adjusting to the dark and shapes started to appear — a set of calves and knees just a few feet away from her; several discarded earbuds; someone’s phone, jostled from a hand, on the ground. Did she dare?
She almost guffawed. That ship had sailed days ago. She slid her hands across the floor, her fingers brushing the aluminum and glass. Centimeter by centimeter, she pulled it toward her, into her pocket. A new phone. Better than the crap in her other pocket.
Now, the door. She couldn’t wait any longer. People were growing restless.
“Show yourself, Cassie!” someone nearby yelled, followed by a chorus of cheers.
“Has Cassie surfaced yet?” someone else yelled, half laughing, answered by waves of giggles and shouts. Cassie’s heart thrummed quickly. Was she a joke now? Was her life a joke?
Would her death be, too?
Behind the fear came fury, fast and threatening, and it made her move ahead. She refused to be a joke. Her fingers danced over the walls, her body following, until she found a handle. She pulled it down, bracing herself for a click or a burst of light to give her away. But the door opened silently, and she slipped into darkness. It was, in retrospect, so easy.
The room had a sliver of a window near the ceiling, letting in a glimmer of moonlight outside the club, just enough for Cassie to make out that this was a bathroom. She blinked and checked under the three stalls. Empty. The silvery ductwork above her glinted. Her height was an advantage as she stood on the rim of the toilet (Don’t look at it, don’t look at it, she told herself), took a deep, courage-filling breath and leaped.
The top of the duct was smooth and slippery; she almost lost her grip but managed to cling by her fingers and then haul herself, bracing her feet against the wall of the stall, walking up until she could throw her leg over.
She could practically hear the duct heaving as her long body slid onto it, but she moved along, left toward the main club, silently and smoothly. The walls in this place didn’t go all the way to the ceiling — there were gaps at the top to let the trendy pipes and ductwork through.
Grace had never been Cassie’s forte, but she turned herself into a lithe gymnast as she navigated, clutching the edges of the duct, keeping herself flat as she inched forward slowly, each limb, each muscle operating in tandem with the others. She had no idea where Bryce would turn up, but he knew the plan, ill-conceived as it was.
After a few moments, Cassie paused, guessing she must have been somewhere near the far edge of the dance floor. It was as good a place as any to check, so she risked peeking over the side.
“Fuck!” she exclaimed, pulling back to the cover of the ductwork, then cursing herself for speaking aloud. She’d misjudged; she was directly above the dance floor, which was still crawling with people. Half of them seemed to be ignoring the mob’s demands, and half of them seemed to be joining in. Fortunately, no one was looking up. Between the shadows of the club’s rigging and the maze of exposed pipes and ducts up here, she was shielded. She had to keep moving, find a safe exit. But first, she had to find Bryce.
She scurried faster, her knees occasionally reverberating against the corrugated duct beneath her. Anyone with remotely decent hearing could trace her movements, if they were paying attention. Cassie just had to hope they weren’t. After another twenty feet or so — she hoped — she tried again, peeking over the side …
Bingo. She was right above the bar, where the bartenders were casually sneaking sips out of bottles and elbowing each other with amusement while the mob was busy. People in one corner, guided by some hefty-looking men, were already removing their masks, proving their innocence with their faces.
They weren’t happy about it, Cassie could see. A grumble appeared to be rising and spreading. She hoped they’d hurry. If the dance crowd turned on the mob, that could be her best chance to escape.
But where was Bryce? She scanned the crowd, telling her eyes to look for the biggest, bulkiest man in the room. Meanwhile, she reached behind her, into her pocket, to get the phone she’d snagged from the club floor. If Bryce didn’t look up, she’d have to call him.
Her eyes ricocheted between the phone and the floor until, finally, she spotted him. He was skulking along the perimeter of the club, near the wall. Cassie could see his lips mouthing “Excuse me, excuse me,” to each person he passed, including to those he had to forcibly pick up and move out of his way. She was struck, suddenly, by how kind Bryce was. How unfailingly polite. How much he’d stuck his neck out for her, for Rachel, for TonyStark, for OHM.
She smiled and began dialing. He would be so surprised when he picked up his phone and Cassie told him, “Look up!”
Except he didn’t answer. Cassie watched as Bryce looked at his phone. Something passed over his face, something hard to decipher from this far up, and he put it back into his pocket. In Cassie’s ear, it still rang.
It was a random, anonymous number to him, but given the circumstances, she figured he’d answer. Disappointed, she tried again. And again. Bryce kept moving. By this point he’d traveled in nearly a full circle, his eyes roaming the room. “Bryce,” she whispered frantically, knowing no one could hear her.
Finally, he stopped. His eyes lit up. Cassie had a fleeting moment of hope, of wondering if Bryce had seen someone from OHM, someone who could help them. Her.
Instead, Bryce leaned down and patted the shoulder of someone Cassie didn’t recognize. He was wiry and short, with big eyes and a big nose and a big earring in his left ear, like his face was making up for all the space his body couldn’t occupy. He and Bryce began whispering furiously.
Cassie grabbed the phone and began pounding on it. , she texted.
Nothing. He checked the phone but just as quickly slid it back into his pocket.
Of course. He couldn’t be sure unless …
Cassie must have finally hit peak annoyance, because Bryce pulled out his phone again and read the messages. Cassie watched his eyes widen, dart up, scanning the ceiling. She waved just enough to catch his attention, hoping it was only his she caught.
Finally, Bryce saw her. Cassie broke into a smile, ready to see his shocked expression, his surprise at her having been so clever, so ingenious, that she’d managed to rise above the danger. That she’d managed, for once, to save him, instead of him saving her.
He didn’t seem happy, though.
His eyes still locked with hers, Bryce tapped his friend again on the shoulder. His friend looked up and followed Bryce’s line of vision. His big eyes grew even bigger.
It took only a moment, a flash, for Cassie to realize something was wrong, to realize how horrifically exposed she was. Bryce pointed just past her, and Cassie’s feeling of vulnerability revved into high gear. Why wasn’t he acknowledging her? What was he doing?
She craned her neck, but her precarious perch made it impossible to see what he was pointing at. There was nothing back there anyway, except for the DJ booth …
… with its microphone …
… and lights …
Oh, no.
As she watched, Bryce and the little guy bolted forward, running right under her.
Microphone. Lights. To get the crowd’s attention. To point her out.
She twisted, gripping the duct with her thighs like a jockey, nearly falling. Yes. They were almost there now, almost at the booth.
They were coming after her.
The realization hit Cassie like a bolt of thunder.
She’d been betrayed.
By Bryce.
It was Bryce. Pretending to help her, actually leading her astray. She was furious at herself for not trusting her gut. Or for trusting it too much. She wasn’t sure which.
He’d led the Hive to OHM. He’d led her right to @Shameless, no doubt figuring that would be the end of her. And now … now he’d led the Hive to her once again.
The phone slid from her hands. It bounced once off a ledge on the duct pipe, then tumbled down into the crowd below.
She didn’t wait to see where it landed or who looked up. She just ran.
Crawled, really. Back from where she came, hoping the bathroom would be as empty as it was when she disappeared, thinking she might somehow manage to squeeze out of its tiny window. She moved much faster on the return trip, her limbs used to the movement, her brain not caring how many people heard her. Getting out was her only goal.
The wall between the dance floor and the bathroom only stretched to within a few feet of the ceiling. She rushed toward the gap, scuttled into the bathroom, then let her legs dangle and she dropped without even checking for witnesses. Her mind racing, blind from Bryce’s betrayal, she paid no mind to the open toilet underneath her feet, so when she let gravity do its job, her right foot slipped, landing in the bowl. Water sloshed over the sides of the toilet, and she yelped in surprise.
Amazingly, the bathroom was still empty. She hobbled over to the window. It would be a tight squeeze.
But it would be done.