“Where are you taking me?”
“Where were you going?” Bryce countered. His hand, large and hot, remained wrapped around her wrist as they ran.
“We were headed to the library,” Cassie said through gasps for air. The backpack bounced against her shoulder blades, but she was more attentive to the flare of pain at the back of her head that each step produced. She ignored them both as best she could. “Cell signals —”
“Good idea,” Bryce said, guiding her around a cluster of small trees, “but wrong place. They’ll know you went into the library, tracking your last known signal. Then they can just close it down and find you. There are only so many ways out of there, and most of them are alarmed.”
“Then where —”
“Left now.”
She followed Bryce’s lead, crashing through a thicket of overgrown shrubbery. The university needed to reconsider its landscaping budget.
Scratched and torn by brambles and sharp branches, she emerged with Bryce into a smallish clearing, no more than ten feet wide, canopied by a massive nearby elm tree that seemed to almost stoop with age. Bryce crouched down and swept his hand along the ground, brushing away leaves to reveal a sewer cover.
“Are we going —” She broke off at a glare from him, then lowered her voice. “Are we going into the sewers? Is that …”
“Wouldn’t stink be better than death?” he whispered back, wiping his forehead. Sweat had mixed with the blood from Rachel’s claw attack, and now it smeared over his flesh. “Besides, it’s not the sewers. It’s an old steam-heating maintenance tunnel from before the university switched over to solar heat.”
He focused his attention on the grate, fitting his fingers into slots on the rim of the cover. Cassie wondered if she should help, but he seemed to know what he was doing and besides, Bryce was a Norse god, right? What good would her puny mortal muscles do?
He strained and grunted, pulling with all his might. His face went as red as his hair. Cassie thought something might rupture.
She hunkered down next to him, aware of sounds and shouts in the near distance, aware of how much time they were wasting. “Do you need help?” she asked.
He huffed in a breath, puffed it out and fixed her with a solid, annoyed stare that said, Please for the love of God shut the hell up — I’m trying to focus here.
She shut up. Let him do his big-man-on-campus thing.
Bryce drew in another breath, exhaled, then, on the next inhale, heaved with all his might. The edge of the grate came up an inch, and he twisted it to the side, setting the cover gently and silently on the rim of the hole it concealed.
“Yes,” Cassie hissed. From where they had run came fresh shouts, closer than the others had been.
“Usually do this with two other guys. Come on.”
Lying on his back, he shoved the cover aside some more with his feet, then dropped into the dark space below. Cassie swallowed hard, seeing absolute pitch-black down there and nothing else. By reflex, she went for her phone and poked at the screen, looking for the flashlight app. Instead, she was greeted with the flashing 5, over and over. It was ungodly bright in the predawn gloom, and she hurriedly stuffed it back into her pocket.
No guts, no glory, her dad used to say.
“And no digestion,” young, stupid Cassie would say. It never failed to draw a big belly laugh from Harlon.
Dad, why the hell did you leave me? she thought, then went feet-first into the hole.
*
Bryce didn’t so much catch her as guide her fall, his hands finding her body in the dark and pushing her a bit so she didn’t come down too hard or collide with a wall on her way down. One hand brushed her butt and the other touched a breast. He didn’t apologize. She wasn’t sure if she liked that or not.
“You OK?” he whispered hoarsely.
She was. The fall had been short — seven or eight feet, maybe. For Bryce, at six foot and lots of change, it was nothing. Cassie was tall, but not Viking tall. There’d been a moment of vertiginous terror, then Bryce’s hands, then the ground.
And safety. Safety most of all. Dark. Underground. Hidden.
A sound made her look up. Somewhere nearby, a cry had gone up, and all the safety of the subterranean black went away. The mob had grown, from the sound of it, and it was close. If she could make out the leaves of the elm through the moon-crescent opening of the grate, then they would be able to find her. Easily.
Bryce gently moved her aside and stood beneath the opening. From a dark corner, he had produced a long pole that looked something like a shepherd’s crook, but stouter and with a strange sort of three-pronged gripping fork at the end of it. He poked this gadget straight up and the prongs slid into grooves on the underside of the cover.
“Gonna need some help this time,” he said, utterly without shame or worry.
Good. The sooner they got it closed, the safer Cassie would feel, and hopefully the more her racing heart and sweaty palms would get the message. Bryce had one hand above the other on the pole, spaced apart by a foot or so. Facing him, Cassie gripped it between his hands and followed his lead. When he pulled back, she pushed forward. After a moment of absolutely nothing, her arms began to tremble and weaken, but then there was movement. Above, the moon crescent waned, going blacker, and she redoubled her effort, grinding her teeth, digging in her heels. She directed every morsel of strength in her body to her arms and her hands.
The cover slid farther and farther. The tiny slice of lighter darkness shrank and shrank and then, with a thunk that sounded too loud, it disappeared entirely.
They waited a moment, both of them breathing hard in the pitch-black. The air down here was too thick, cold and humid and stale. It tasted metallic, like unfiltered water from the tap.
The place was also completely still. Unnaturally so. She didn’t like it, but she would take it if it meant a minute to regroup.
After a few moments, Bryce blew out a long breath. “I think we’re OK. The concrete and iron rebar will block most of your signal,” he said, “but they’ll still be able to peg your last location down to a few meters. They’ll find the cover eventually.”
“How did you even know about this place?” she asked, and then held her hand up to shield her eyes as Bryce activated the flashlight in his phone.
He shrugged as if embarrassed by his knowledge. “We used to use the tunnels for LARPing freshman year.”
She stifled a sudden giggle. The thought of Bryce, dressed in medieval armor, stomping through the tunnels under the university, swinging a sword, his red dreadlocks flailing …
On second thought, that wasn’t so funny. “Well, anyway. I’m glad you know about them.”
He nodded very seriously and held out his hand, palm up. “Let me see your phone.”
She handed it over to him. He studied it for a moment. “Do you know how to stop the proximity alerts?” she asked.
“Uh-huh,” he said, and dropped the phone to the ground and stomped on it with his ridiculously big foot.
“Hey!” Cassie yelped.
He shushed her, annoyed, then stomped on the phone again. The screen was a spiderweb of fissures now, chunks of glass missing. The frame was bent and she could make out the gray hunk of battery under the screen.
“That phone is my life!” she protested.
“Right now, it’s your death.”
Cassie paused. He wasn’t wrong. But … “That’s illegal.” Discarding or disabling your phone when on Hive Alert was an analog crime that carried some hefty penalties.
Bryce snorted. “Are you really worried about that?”
It took her a moment to process his question, then she realized: no. No, she wasn’t worried about it. She was more worried about running like hell.
“Probably should have done that from the start,” she muttered.
He said nothing for a moment, then regarded her with kind eyes. “Hard thing to do. We’ve all become so accustomed to them — it’s like having a second brain. Hard to ditch your phone, even if you know it’s for the best. That’s what they rely on.” He pointed to his ear, and she realized: her earbud. That had Bluetooth, too. It could be tracked.
She popped it out and did the honors herself this time, crushing the little pod under her foot.
Maybe it was hypocritical or just convenient, but she didn’t care any longer that Hive Justice was the law of the land. She remembered her dad once railing against people who thought the law didn’t apply to them — people who parked in handicapped spots or gunned through red lights. And he was right because the law was for everyone, so it applied to everyone.
But all she’d done was tell a joke. A tasteless joke, sure. Offensive and crass? Yeah, OK, she’d cop to that. But the idea that she could be sent to Level 5 and have to go on the run for a year just to avoid being stoned to death … for a joke …
The outrage of what was happening, combined with what was left in the wake of her dissipating adrenaline — exhaustion, nausea, a grim sort of numbness — caused a fresh flood of tears. Cassie tried to stifle them but Bryce must have noticed, because he awkwardly put a hand on her shoulder — it felt like a weight — before shuffling a few steps away in some sweet but misguided attempt to give her some privacy.
Cassie didn’t want privacy. She wanted to know what the hell this guy was doing with her. For her. But she was also, suddenly and deeply, afraid to ask.
“What now?” she asked, her voice husky and thick. Normally, she didn’t let people lead her around. But Bryce had shown up at the right time and gotten her this far, so it made sense to give him the wheel for now.
“This way,” he told her, pointing the beam of his phone behind her. She looked. The darkness opened into a tunnel, its walls dripping with condensation and mold.
“Then what?”
He shrugged. “At some point, we turn. Don’t worry. Let’s go before my battery dies. Grab your broken phone — we don’t want to leave a trail of breadcrumbs.” He strode off, leaving her in encroaching dark.
The idea of being stranded when the phone battery died did not appeal to her. She picked up the pieces of her phone — her old life — and raced after Bryce.
*
It was easy to lose track of time in the tunnel. They were silent as they went along, Bryce a half step ahead, guiding them at every four-way intersection or T. He seemed to know the way intuitively, and she wondered exactly how much time he’d spent down here. His knowledge seemed too in-depth to have come from some innocent live-action role-playing.
The pain in her head had ebbed to a dull, persistent ache that occasionally flared into a sharp stab when she moved her neck too quickly. After a few minutes, she’d risked probing the area with cautious fingers. She needed to know how bad it was.
The bleeding had stopped. Her hair was matted and encrusted with blood, the stuff flaking away and sticking to her hands as she investigated. A large, almost tumorous lump of sensitive flesh had bloomed at the impact site. Touching it sent sparks of pain radiating out, so she avoided it. She couldn’t tell if her skull had been breached or not, but nothing seemed to be spilling out of her, so she figured she would live.
At a four-way intersection, Bryce paused for a moment, as though thinking or remembering. Then he put his hand on the wall nearest them, wiped some mold away and nodded to himself. He rubbed his hand on his jeans leg to clean it, then indicated a right turn with a tilt of his head.
Cassie lagged as he headed into the right-hand tunnel. She peered at the wall where he’d put his hand and glanced. In the receding light of Bryce’s phone, she made out a symbol, etched into the concrete:
Ω
Omega. Greek letter. The final Greek letter, actually. The Greeks had no Z — their alphabet went from alpha to omega. Hence the bit from the Bible where God says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega.” I’m everything, he was saying. I’m all of it. Ain’t nothing but me.
Having a classics professor for a mother helped in times like this. She could recite, if need be, all sorts of classical allusions and references to omega. But she was still baffled as to why it was carved into a wall down in the old steam tunnels, and that confusion offered a momentary break from the thudding fear that followed her down the tunnels with every step.
It was getting dark; Bryce hadn’t slowed down. Cassie raced to catch up to him.
“Where exactly are we going?” she asked him, breaking their silence. “And what’s the deal with the omega on the wall?”
“It’s not an omega,” he told her, neatly sidestepping the more important question.
“Of course it is. I’m not an idiot.”
“No one said you were.” He stopped and frowned at her. “I don’t think you’re an idiot,” he said a bit too earnestly.
“Great. Then treat me like I’m smart,” she shot back. She’d allowed her fear to turn into a tether to Bryce. But at some point, she had to clear it from her mind and think for herself. “Where are we going?”
Bryce sighed. “I have some friends. They might be able to help you.” Cassie’s face lit up. “Might,” Bryce cautioned her. “I can’t be sure.”
“Where are they? Are they the ones who carved that symbol into the wall?” Something occurred to her. “There were symbols carved into all of the walls at all of the intersections, right? I just didn’t notice them. That’s the only way you could know how to navigate this place.”
He nodded. “We use the tunnels to move around when we need to go undetected. Emergencies only.”
“So that LARP stuff was bullshit.”
Bryce blushed. “Uh, no. That’s how we discovered the tunnels.”
Cassie found herself grinning again. “Were you Sir Bryce of the Round Table?”
“No, I … ” His blush grew furiously redder. “Never mind.”
“Tell me!” she said, almost giddy. The pain in her head had subsided to almost nothing by now, and she was safe for the first time in hours and there was the promise of help. A lightness filled her.
“I’m not telling you,” he said. “Not happening.”
She begged some more, but nothing would move him. They walked several yards down the tunnel, then Bryce brought them up short. There was a door set into the wall to their right, recessed half a foot or so from the tunnel. Bryce looked it up and down. Cassie did, too. She spotted the omega just before he did, pointing to the small etching slightly below the top of the doorjamb. She ran her fingers over it; the cold wall and the rough edges reminded her that this wasn’t a game. People, real people, had resorted to carving lines into the walls of underground tunnels to find … what? Safety? Escape? Whatever it was, it meant something aboveground wasn’t working out well for them.
She could relate.
“OK, good,” Bryce said, clearly relieved. “Good.”
“This is where we go?” she asked.
Bryce nodded absently but made no move to open the door. It was barricaded with a hefty-looking two-inch-thick wooden bar that she figured she could lift on her own, if need be.
“Before we go any farther,” he said, “we need to talk.”
“About assigning me a LARP name?” Her attempt at a joke landed flat at Bryce’s feet.
“Can you please take this seriously?” he asked, his voice and expression weary.
She crossed her arms over her chest. She didn’t need to be told how serious this was. The blood drying in her hair was a pretty solid indicator. She gave him the impatient OK, talk, I’m listening look she employed during Mom lectures.
“We have to tread lightly here,” he told her. “No one knows we’re coming. I’m still new to all of this, but I wanted to help and this is the only way I know how. Let me do the talking, all right?”
“Is this …” She picked her words carefully. “Is this like one of those things in the movies where there’s a bunch of people who once got Hive Mobbed who are now hiding out in the sewers and they’re, like, called the Underground and they’re trying to bring down the system?”
He scowled at her. “Absolutely not.”
“Oh.” She was disappointed. She thought maybe there was a group to hook up with.
“For one thing,” he said, “they don’t hang out in the sewers. Gross. They have the top floor of an abandoned building. Nice views. And it’s not called the Underground. It’s the Organized Human Mutiny.”
“But other than those two massive differences … it’s a yes?” Cassie scoffed. “I was kind of kidding.”
Bryce looked thoughtful. “Isn’t that what got you into this mess in the first place?”
Cassie trained her eyes on the ground, chastened. Bryce’s words were ricocheting through her brain and she tried to grab on to them. Organized. Human. Mutiny. She looked at the omega symbol again.
It’s not an omega, Bryce had said.
It all clicked for her. She almost smiled. Organized Human Mutiny.
OHM.
Ohm. An ohm was represented by an Ω.
It was a term from electronics. She knew it from soldering motherboards with her father.
An ohm was a unit of resistance.
*
There was a moment, right as Bryce lifted the door bar and fished a key from his pocket to unlock the door, when Cassie was still operating just as a girl on the run. Blameless? Nah. But still a victim. And still, she reminded herself, thinking of all the Hive Mobs she’d heard about over the years, and the two she’d participated in, a proponent of Hive Justice.
That all changed as she absorbed the meaning of OHM. Organized Human Mutiny.
Where Bryce was leading her, she realized, was a revolution.
A disruption.
They emerged into a dark, claustrophobic boiler room, the air filled with burps from the nearby furnace. Bryce closed the door behind them and used a thin metal hook to slip through the gap between the door and the wall to reset the door bar on the other side. Then he concealed the hook behind the furnace.
“OK, let’s go.”
He took her through another doorway into a darkened hall. They made their way to yet another door, this one opening into a stairwell. In silence, they climbed the switchback stairs, three or four stories, at which point a clot of old sofas and mattresses blocked them from going any further.
“Now what?” Cassie asked.
Bryce jimmied open the fire door on the landing just below the blockade and led her into a corridor lined with identical doors on either side. It was a hotel, she realized. An old, run-down, lightless hotel.
Halfway down the hall, Bryce paused. Cassie spotted the Ω before he did, subtly carved into the wood of a door, overlaying the number 3 in such a way as to be almost invisible. Bryce snorted, annoyed and impressed at the same time.
“Beginner’s luck?” Cassie said, shrugging as Bryce opened the door.
Cassie hesitated for a moment. Slipping into a hotel room with a guy she’d just met didn’t seem like the smartest move. Then again, her options were few and becoming fewer with almost every moment that passed. Reluctantly, she followed Bryce into the room.
It was nearly empty, save for an ancient, enormous CRT television turned on one side, its screen kicked in and gaping wide like a glass-toothed mouth desperate for food. Maybe it was just the hour, the lack of sleep, the adrenaline rush, but that TV looked outright evil to her, something from one of the millions of low-budget horror movies she’d streamed, the ones she wasn’t supposed to watch but did anyway. Perfectly normal, perfectly harmless everyday items — dolls, game boards, phones, microwave ovens — suddenly became possessed and dangerous. The TV seemed to be one of them, but in the real world now, and she realized that her mother had been right all along — she shouldn’t have watched those movies.
Her mother. Ugh. A wave of grief so powerful that it seemed almost tangible hit her, rocked her back on her heels. In true Cassie/Rachel fashion, they’d parted on a sour note. Cassie hadn’t meant to imply that her mother’s escape plan was bad, but she knew she’d done just that. She’d basically said, You did a lousy job protecting me, Mom. An epically shitty way to leave things. Especially since …
Would she ever see her mother again? What would happen to Rachel if she was identified as helping a Hive fugitive? Bad enough that Cassie had ruined her own life; did she have to crush her mother’s, too?
“You all right?” Bryce asked.
She’d almost forgotten he was there. He stood across the room, by the narrow closet door, one hand on the knob.
“Is this where we hide out?” she asked. Other than the TV from hell, the room was empty. The idea of holing up here didn’t exactly thrill her …
“No,” he said. “Come on.”
He opened the closet door and she saw a ladder inside. Bryce climbed up quickly, bidding her to follow him. “Close the door before you come up,” he said.
She stepped into the tiny closet, shut the door and had barely enough room to turn around to face the ladder. Pale light came from above, the first she’d seen other than Bryce’s phone since they’d closed the steam tunnel cover over their heads.
At the top of the ladder, Bryce helped her onto the floor. This was another hotel room, but the floor squeaked and trembled at her footfalls. “The subfloor is weak. Weakened, I should say. We deliberately undermined it. Unless you walk the right pattern, you’ll end up back downstairs. With some broken bones and contusions and more blood, so …”
The pattern turned out to be pretty simple as she watched him go first and realized what Bryce was doing: you took a number of steps equal to consecutive prime numbers, turning each time the tens digit incremented. Soon they were out in a corridor again.
They made their way farther up in this manner, zigzagging from floor to floor. When rubble blocked a staircase — strategically and intentionally, she now realized — they would prowl the hallways until they found the Ω and then use concealed ladders, stairs and (in one case) a makeshift dumbwaiter to ascend. There were occasional tricks and traps, which Bryce talked her through and around.
She was exhausted by the time they got to the twenty-fifth floor. Her fatigue was mingling with her anger, and she found herself unreasonably mad at OHM for being smart enough to house their escape colony up in the clouds. They’d needed to pull themselves up from the twenty-fourth floor with a complicated rope-and-pulley system, and her shoulders ached.
“How much farther?” she snapped.
“One more floor.” Bryce sounded winded. He was stronger than Cassie but also much, much bigger. More muscles, but those muscles had to move around a lot more weight. He leaned against a wall and slid down to sit. She followed his lead, folding herself cross-legged on what had once been a low-pile carpet and what was now a random mosaic of threads over a plywood floor.
All of the windows they’d come across had been painted over, and the ones in this room were no exception. Only Bryce’s phone lit the way, and it had been a couple of hours of constant light.
“I’m gonna shut this off for a minute,” he told her. “Save battery. OK?”
In the unfamiliar dark, with a guy she barely knew, in a crumbling old building that was possibly haunted by the ghost of a dead TV.
“Perfect,” she muttered.
Darkness enfolded her, the spot where Bryce’s phone had been still glowing for a moment, until her eyes forgot its light. She clenched her fists, nails digging into palms. It’s not that she was afraid of the dark. She was just afraid, period. And angry. Now that they’d stopped, it all rushed in on her.
She struggled to catch her breath.
“It’ll be OK,” Bryce said. His voice was a ghost in the still, black air. “We’re close.”
“What am I doing here!” Cassie burst out. The darkness … it was getting to her.
“Cassie. It’s OK. They can help you. I know it. I’ve seen it before.”
Ask questions. It was a regular instruction in the McKinney household. Both Mom and Dad exhorted her all the time: Ask questions. It’s the only way you’ll learn anything remotely interesting in the world. The question is humanity’s best tool for forward progress.
Her parents argued a lot. Not about anything specific to them or their family or their life together. Just about the world. Her dad’s bleeding edge, if-we-can-do-it-then-we-must-do-it attitude constantly at war with Mom’s sensibilities, forged in the early fires of ancient Greece and Rome. Words like “disruption,” “democratization,” “Socratic,” and “hegemonic” sailed through the air with great frequency in the McKinney house, and the only way young Cassie could learn to make sense of what her parents were discussing was to, well …
“Why are you helping me?”
It was almost as though he’d been expecting the question at that very moment — his answer was nearly instantaneous. “I don’t like a system that beats the hell out of people for what they say.”
“First Amendment zealot?”
“Something like that.” But there was a pinched quality to his voice. There was more.
“So you do this all the time, then?”
“Not really. Usually I just give money to the right causes. But you’re in deep. I thought you needed a rope.” He paused. “Plus, I like your mom. She doesn’t tolerate any shit.”
Cassie didn’t know which comment flummoxed her more: the idea of a guy not much older than her “giving money” to causes or the fact that he could actually tolerate Rachel.
Steering away from the too-raw thought of Mom was easy. “When you say ‘give money …’ ”
Discomfort came off him in waves, radiating through the darkness. “I’m rich, OK? Born into it. My grandfather — he’s the one who made all the money in the first place — he taught me that when you have a lot, you have to give a lot. So that’s what I try to do. All right?”
It was clearly a sore point for him, though as someone who had never had much money and now had even less of it, she couldn’t understand why. Still, she moved on.
“What is this place?” she asked the blank space before her. Maybe if he talked, she’d get distracted. History was good at making people forget the present.
Bryce’s voice floated to her. “It was supposed to be a hotel. Ran out of funding.”
“Who owns it?”
Bryce paused. She imagined him sweeping his dreads off his forehead and frowning. “Good question. I guess someone owns it. But OHM hacked the city’s zoning databases and removed it, then killed any reference to it on commercial real estate sites, too. As far as the internet is concerned, this place doesn’t exist.”
Cassie opened her mouth to say that that was ridiculous, that erasing some database records wouldn’t make the place disappear, but stopped herself. As long as the tax records had vanished, the place really was invisible. She thought of all the buildings she passed each day, the anonymous ones that bore no signs or lettering. There were dozens of them, just part of the visual background noise of the city. Could one of them be a secret bunker for Hive renegades? Sure.
“Why go up?” she asked, thinking of those old horror movies again. The victims always ran up flights of stairs when being chased by the bad guy. Made no sense. Fewer options in an attic or on a second floor. More room to run if you’re at ground level. “Why put the headquarters at the top of the building?”
She could almost hear his shrug. “The higher up we go, the fewer cameras there are to catch someone and run facial recognition. Think about it.”
She did. Most cameras were mounted on walls or ceilings and pointed down. Even the ones on high lampposts were getting a wide field of vision that mostly included the space below them. Go high enough and you avoid the all-seeing, never-blinking eyes.
“But what about satellites?”
He sighed. “They’re a problem, sure, but there are a limited number and they have to be aimed at you intentionally. Plus, it’s just a matter of geometry — they point straight down. If you don’t look up, it’s not like they can see your face. Just the top of your head.”
She’d never thought of it that way before. “What about drones?” Drones were all over the place, so ubiquitous that most people hardly noticed them anymore. Cassie and Harlon had spent a lot of time spoofing the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals that most of the drones used, making them land on rooftops or fly down into sewers.
“Drones are a problem,” Bryce admitted. “But they have search patterns that you can anticipate and counter.”
The light from Bryce’s phone flicked on. “One floor to go.”
Cassie’s spirits soared. Now they were getting somewhere.
*
They found the last ladder they needed in a maid’s closet near what had been intended to serve someday as a vending machine alcove. Cassie didn’t know what time it was, but her gut knew that it had been at least twelve or thirteen hours since her last meal. To her chagrin, her stomach then emphasized the message by letting out a growl so loud that Bryce — climbing the ladder above her — paused to look down.
“We’ll get you something in a minute,” he said.
Up on the twenty-sixth floor, they found a man.
Cassie stared while Bryce spoke quietly to him. He wielded a rifle of the sort she had seen in action movies, the sight of which in real life made her twitchy. She knew nothing at all about guns, so didn’t know what kind it was, except that she was pretty sure it fired a lot of bullets in a very short period of time. Its presence made her feel both relief and fear at the same time (which, she surmised, was sort of the whole point of guns, really); for a hot, almost blinding moment, she wondered what would happen if she tried to knock him down, steal his gun and run.
The man finally nodded to Bryce and opened a door behind him. Bryce ushered Cassie in.
What lay beyond was the last thing she expected to see. She’d been anticipating more dark, cramped rooms and corridors. Instead, the room beyond the door was massive, an open space the size of half a floor, broken up only by cubicles made of what she realized were the headboards from the hotel’s missing beds. There were thirty or forty people, most of them sitting at makeshift desks with laptops or tablets, furiously working.
And lights! Sweet, sweet electric lights overhead. The place reminded her of the tech start-ups her dad had taken her to, businesses looking to seduce the famous Harlon McKinney away to apply his special brand of techno-magic to their service or app or system infrastructure. Mom had worked ten years at the same school; Dad had changed jobs literally fifteen times that Cassie could remember, hopping from tech firm to tech firm depending on his whims and what seemed most interesting to him at the time.
She peered around the room. The perimeter of the space was entirely composed of large floor-to-ceiling windows, every last one of which was covered with black crepe paper.
Bryce had stepped away from her when they entered. Now he approached, brandishing a brace of protein bars, both of which Cassie grabbed. Food overrode fear. Not anger, though; Cassie still glared at him as she stripped the foil wrapper.
“‘Nice views?’” she quoted him from earlier.
He shrugged. “If you peel back the paper, yeah.” A pause. “Don’t ever peel back the paper. And let me do all the talking here. They know me.”
He guided her without actually touching her toward one of the cubicles. Within it, a slim guy with a shaven head, maybe somewhere in his mid-twenties, sat in a threadbare recliner, tapping a laptop keyboard, spellbound by what was on the screen. Cassie sneaked a peek — it was Swift code. He was writing or modifying a framework for system-level face detection as best she could tell from the fast-scrolling screen. She felt the rage monster inside her settle down. The code lulled her into a sense of calm.
He was so caught up in his work that it took a protracted, exaggerated throat-clearing from Bryce to get his attention. He finally looked up and blinked at the two of them, saying nothing.
“This is TonyStark,” Bryce said.
Cassie fiercely resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Hi, uh, Mr. Stark.”
“No, no,” he told her. She realized that he was still typing, albeit more slowly. He hadn’t stopped. “Not, like, first name Tony last name Stark. TonyStark. All one word. InterCapped.”
“Right.”
TonyStark returned his gaze to the screen. “No girlfriends, Bryce. You know the rules. This isn’t a hangout. It’s a —”
“Resistance movement, no shit.” If Bryce was disturbed by the girlfriend comment, he didn’t show it. Cassie decided to be irritated for both of them, but TonyStark didn’t look up to see her expression. “I know. She’s not my girlfriend. She’s Hive hunted.”
TonyStark grunted and kept pounding the keys. “Join the club. Who isn’t?”
“You don’t get it,” Bryce said. “This is Cassie McKinney.”
It was the first time in her life that Cassie heard her name spoken as though it mattered. She liked it.
TonyStark had precisely zero reaction. “Cassie for Catherine or Cassie for Cathleen? Oh, wait — I don’t care.”
“McKinney,” Bryce said. “Dude.”
“So what?” Tap, tap, tap.
“McKinney,” Bryce said one more time, then enunciated it precisely: “Mick. Kin. E.”
“I’m Level 5,” Cassie said, ignoring Bryce’s look that said I said to let me do the talking.
Level 5 seemed to get TonyStark’s attention. His fingers stopped on the keyboard and he slowly closed the lid of the laptop, turning to look at her as though seeing her for the first time.
“Level 5.” He said it without inflection, without emotion. “For real?”
“Check for yourself,” Cassie told him.
TonyStark pursed his lips and tapped the earbud in his left ear. “Hive search, BLINQ, Cassie McKinney.”
She and Bryce waited until the AI in his earbud got back to him. Probably just the results of a standard Google search, but it would be enough.
TonyStark’s eyes widened and he whistled low and long. “Oh, yeah, Abortion Joke Girl. Goddamn, Red Dread. What have you brought us?”
“Red Dread?” Cassie glanced over at Bryce, who was fuming. “So that’s your LARP name!”
“Can we focus on what matters?” Bryce’s irked tone told her she’d struck gold. Or blood. Maybe both. A small victory on a fantastically terrible day.
“You brought us a Level 5.” TonyStark shook his head, then leaned back in the recliner, steepling his fingers. “Are you crazy? Bringing that kind of heat up here?”
“She’s in trouble,” Bryce said, “and she —”
“And she doesn’t like being talked about as if she’s not right here,” Cassie said, her cheeks hot. “Look, we wrecked my phone and came through the steam tunnels to get here. No one tracked us. You’re still safe. But I’m not, and I’m looking at at least a year before I am, to say nothing of the criminal charges for breaking my phone. Is there anything you can do?”
TonyStark held her gaze. He didn’t blink, not once, for a good thirty seconds. It was unnerving as hell.
“Can we reverse her Condemns?” Bryce asked. “Upvote her enough to drop her down a couple of Levels?”
TonyStark barked a cynical laugh. “Are you kidding?”
“We’ve done it before,” Bryce reminded him.
They had? Cassie had figured this to be longest of all long shots. She’d never heard of anyone reversing Condemns, but then again thousands of people got bumped to Level 1 every day. She couldn’t keep track of all of them. But if OHM had managed to reverse Condemns, that meant there was hope for her. If there was a way to thwart the Hive, she wanted in.
“That was different,” TonyStark was saying. “There were only a few thousand votes there. Not hard to game it and drop from Level 2 to Level 1. She’s at Level 5, with millions of votes. You really struck a nerve, girl. We’d need to scour the system for millions of unaligned votes, calculate the odds of those people voting on their own, isolate the uncommitteds and hack them … It would take forever, and at the end of the day it probably still wouldn’t work.” He flipped open the laptop, minimized his Xcode window and hit the web. “Check it, man: she’s still getting down-voted. With her velocity, we’re behind the eight ball. If we pulled out all the stops, we might be able to get her down to Level 4, but —”
“I’ll take Level 4,” she blurted out.
Level 4. Six months. A few hours ago, the idea of being on the run for that long would have seemed insurmountable, but compared to a year it was a vacation.
TonyStark snorted and slammed his laptop shut again. “I bet you would. You really want me to risk everyone here to put all our other work on hold just to help you?” He chuckled without a drop of mirth. “Your girlfriend has some balls, Red Dread.”
“She’s not my girlfriend and stop calling me that.”
TonyStark shrugged.
“You don’t understand,” Bryce added. “This is Harlon McKinney’s kid.”
Cassie could tell that this tidbit intrigued TonyStark because he actually raised his left eyebrow two or three millimeters. It was the most life she’d seen in him yet.
“This girl?” he said, deigning to shift his eyes momentarily to Cassie. “You’re telling me this kid’s pops is Black Moses?”
The uttering of her dad’s online handle hit Cassie harder than she thought it would. She’d grown up knowing he was a legend in hacker circles, that the tag Black Moses on an open-source library meant it would be gobbled up and used by everyone from script-kiddies in their parents’ basements to international megacorporations worth billions. When she’d taken her first tentative steps into the world of hacking and cracking, she’d been amazed at her father’s presence. She’d known that he was famous and beloved in hacker culture, but knowing something and witnessing it for yourself were two different things.
“Yeah,” Cassie said, “this girl is Harlon’s kid. And seriously, do you hate women or something? Stop talking to him like he owns me.”
Bryce bristled. Through clenched teeth, he said, “Cassie, these are the only people who can help you, so —”
“No, no,” TonyStark interrupted. “She’s right.” He grinned for the first time since she’d met him, and his grin was startlingly open and genuine. “Manners are the first thing to go when you’re on the run. We’re all hiding, you dig? We’ve all been subject to Hive ‘Justice.’” He actually made the air quotes. “Most of us don’t want anything to do with the outside world. Or new people. Not anymore.”
“I get it. I’m a little hot right now,” Cassie said.
“Being on the run will do that,” TonyStark said. “But look: I’m still not convinced you’re the real McCoy. Or McKinney. Convenient story for someone looking for us to make the impossible happen.”
Bryce said, “Do you want to see her ID or something? Birth certificate? Jesus, just Google up a picture of McKinney’s kid.”
“Won’t work,” Cassie said. “Dad was super protective of me. There aren’t any pictures of me online until I was old enough to make that decision myself. And even then, he doesn’t show up in any of them. He was worried some hacker asshole might decide to prove what a big shot he was by taking down Black Moses’s daughter.”
“Oh,” said Bryce, abashed. He stroked his dreads. “Then …”
“Like I said, mighty convenient.” TonyStark turned his attention back to his laptop. “Now, I need to get back to it.”
“I can prove it,” Cassie said.
TonyStark sighed heavily and Cassie thought she’d lost him. He’d made up his mind. He was done with her. The only person in the world who might be able to fix her life.
Bryce held his hands up in a helpless gesture, his expression screaming, I don’t know.
She couldn’t just give up.
“You know Cloakr?” she blurted out.
Of course TonyStark did. Anyone who claimed to know their way around source code did. Cloakr was her dad’s first big app, the one that put him on the map. It autodetected attempts by rogue Wi-Fi routers to plant malware on someone’s phone, then employed a series of firewalls to make that phone appear invisible to those routers. The trick was filtering out the legit Wi-Fi signals and letting them through. Harlon’s app made him famous among white-hat hackers, infamous among black hats.
“Duh,” TonyStark said. He dug into his pocket and flashed his phone at her. Right there on the home screen was the Cloakr icon.
“Cool,” she said. “Go to GitTown and check the commits on the app.”
GitTown was an online repository where coders uploaded their source code for others to see and contribute to. Harlon liked it because it had ironclad security and because, in his words, “the XML and CSS are written like poetry.”
Code is poetry, she thought, and thought of Carson, his shirt, his eyes. The potency of the memory shocked her. She’d only seen him twice, had barely connected with him, and yet … And yet she’d imagined some possibility there. Hard to believe that mere hours ago, he had been at the forefront of her mind. She’d cast him out of her thoughts. That was another life. A life that was no longer hers and probably never had been possible to begin with.
TonyStark grunted and shrugged as if to say, OK, I’ll play along. For now. He loaded up GitTown in his browser.
Cassie skimmed the screen quickly. “Go to Cloakr and check the commit on September 30,” she told him.
“Which year?” Clearly still skeptical.
“Doesn’t matter. There’s only the one.”
Sure enough, Harlon had committed a source code update on only a single September 30.
“It’s my birthday,” Cassie said offhandedly. “That’s what you want. Open it up.”
TonyStark opened the source code to the September 30 version of Cloakr. The screen scrolled with code.
“You’re looking for ‘var CTMspecial,’ ” she told TonyStark.
He paused, fingers hovering over the keyboard. “I’ve practically memorized this app. There’s no such variable.”
“There is in this version.”
He found the variable. It had been declared, but there was no value for it, and it was commented out so it wouldn’t run when compiled.
“Define CTMspecial as an integer,” she said. “The value is 1349. The time of my birth.”
TonyStark’s fingers flew over the keyboard, doing as she’d bidden. She cast a glance at Bryce, who looked baffled. Not a coder. Even at his height, out of his depth.
“Now uncomment that line and commit the code under your own name,” she said. “Then run a diff on the current version.”
“Diff” was programming speak for letting the computer go through two similar files and produce a report showing the differences between them. It was a lot more convenient and a lot more accurate than letting frail, imperfect human eyes do the job.
TonyStark had GitTown run the diff. A new window popped up, filled with two columns of code, one for each version of the source code being compared. Differences were highlighted in red.
Scrolling down, TonyStark stopped, blinked.
Roughly halfway down the second column was this: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CASSIE.
“Oh, holy shit!” TonyStark spun around in his chair and gazed up at her. “You’re her! You’re you!”
Cassie sniffed, affecting icy calm on the outside. “Cool story, bro,” she told him.
He winced. “Just tell me one thing. Answer one question, OK? Do you think your joke was funny?”
There was a right answer and a wrong answer, and she figured one meant help and the other meant she was on her own.
But she didn’t waste any time trying to suss out what answer TonyStark wanted to hear. “Hell, yeah, it was funny,” she said.
TonyStark’s face split into a wide toothy grin.
*
Bryce stuck with them, even though he didn’t have to anymore. Cassie had been accepted by TonyStark — at least temporarily — which meant that she now had a fighting chance at staying with OHM and at having them help figure out what the hell had happened with her BLINQ scores.
“We have rules,” TonyStark told her. “You break them, you’re out. Even Black Moses’s daughter only gets one strike in this game.”
“Oh, good,” Cassie said with a voice dripping sarcasm. “Sports metaphors. I was wondering when we would get to the sports metaphors.”
“Holy Christ …” Bryce moaned.
But TonyStark just smiled. “Keep your attitude, Cassie. It’s gonna help you stay alive. But seriously — we’re going way out on a limb for you. Remember that.”
He took her on a quick “tour” of the OHM floor, showing her a series of cots and a frightening-looking bathroom. The place was like some warped version of an orphanage, like the photos Cassie had seen in old news stories, and she squeezed her eyes closed and reminded herself to breathe. She couldn’t get back to real life soon enough. How long was she supposed to stay here?
How long could she stay here? Right now, all she had was TonyStark’s promise and Bryce’s assurances that these people could and would help, that they wouldn’t toss her out on the street or bring a Hive Mob down on her. Promises from two men she’d just met.
Sadly, that was better than any of her other options.
“I can’t promise you results,” TonyStark said as he introduced her to some of the others. “We’ll do what we can. We’ve had some success in the past, but only with Levels 1 and 2. Level 5 is a whole ’nother ball game. The sheer number of votes makes things exponentially more complicated.”
“I understand.” And she did, she truly did. But understanding the complexity of it didn’t lessen her urgency to reverse her Hive Level and get the hell back to her life.
“Let’s see what we’re dealing with.” TonyStark steered her toward a cubicle where a woman with a half-shaved head and enough metal in her left ear to build a drive train stared at three enormous monitors. “Hey, Tish, check out Cassie McKinney, local area, can you?”
Tish glanced over her shoulder. She wore black lip gloss and had dramatic green eye shadow over her right eye only. It made her look vaguely cyborgish. Cassie figured that was the point.
Her fingers flew over the keyboard. In a moment, the center screen lit up with Cassie’s BLINQ profile, the aggregate of her social media footprint, with feeds from Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Yardio and Guessom. Her avatar had gone black and white, with a red bar through it, indicating her Level 5 status.
Tish’s eyebrow arched significantly.
The flanking screens on the right and left filled up. On the right, an endless scroll of numbers. On the left, a graph in the classic “hockey stick” mode, showing a slow build, followed by a sudden and dramatic spike.
“This is where you went viral,” Tish said, pointing to the spot where the gentle up slope became a leap into the stratosphere. “Looks like, uh, a retweet from a retweet got the attention of @BlitzenBot202, who has something like twenty thousand followers. Once he/she/they retweeted, you were on a rocket ride to Hive Justice.”
“I have no idea who that person is,” Cassie confessed, peering at the profile.
Tish shrugged. “I’d wonder if they even were a person, but check out the history. Volume levels are normal. It seems to be a news aggregator account. But anything’s possible. Could be a busy bot.”
Everyone on BLINQ was a real, verified person — that was the whole point of BLINQ — but bots still crawled the other sites, like Instagram and Twitter. And they could gin up dissatisfaction and discontent among real people that then got fed back into BLINQ, into the system that had Condemned Cassie. BLINQ was both a platform and an aggregator. The most important aggregator in the country.
“What’s her velocity like?” TonyStark asked.
“Most of the pass-along virality seems to have abated,” Tish told him. “Still getting like bounces and shares, but the major push has — whoa.”
They all swiveled to look at what had caught her attention. On the center screen, Cassie’s black-and-white avatar had gone to full color, and the red Level 5 bar through it had vanished.
“What happened?” Cassie asked. “What just happened?” Her heart raced and her words couldn’t keep up. “What did you do? Oh, my God, am I cleared? Did you fix the Condemns?”
“Shut down, girl!” Tish said. “I didn’t do anything. I’ve never seen this before —”
“Wait, look!” Bryce leaned over, clearly aggravating Tish. She turned from her monitors long enough to shoot him a death glare. “Look at this.”
His finger hovered on the center screen, just below Cassie’s avatar. They’d missed it in the shock of seeing the Level 5 bar disappear. The small, almost innocuous, Hold Action icon had appeared there.
Cassie could barely breathe. It was happening. Somehow, it was happening. The trend was reversing. Everything was going to be fine! In a few hours — well, maybe a few days — she’d be laughing about this with her mom.
“Going back down to Level 4,” Cassie said hopefully, “and they’re making sure no one tries to kill me in the meantime.”
“I’ve seriously never seen anything like this,” Tish repeated. “It doesn’t usually work like … Oh, shit!”
No one had to ask what had prompted the curse from her. They all saw it.
In the blink of an eye, Cassie’s avatar returned to black and white, only this time there was something deeper and more sinister about it. The gray-scale effect had harsher shadows, more contrast. Cassie looked like something out of a horror movie.
And the red bar was back, too.
The only thing that didn’t return was the legend Level 5.
That had been replaced by something none of them had ever seen before:
And beneath that
*
Livestream from the White House Press Briefing Room
Dean Hythe, President of the United States:
“I’m not going to get into details. I’m just not going to do it.
“Look, what this girl said was vile. OK? Vile. Absolutely disgusting. I don’t even want to repeat it and I can’t believe the media has been plastering it all over every TV screen and every phone and computer and what have you. Just disgusting. Really an embarrassment for the media, the way they treat these things, and we’re going to do something about that soon, believe me.
“But this isn’t about me. Or about my family. Even though we’ve been treated horribly — just horribly — in this whole thing. This is about the will of the people, OK? The will. Of. The people. The whole point of Hive Justice is to put some power into the hands of the people. I ran for this office and won — twice — with some of the biggest margins in history. Some say the biggest margins. I don’t say that. I just say some of the biggest because maybe there are some that are bigger. I don’t know of any, but maybe there are.
“Anyway, this is the whole reason for Hive in the first place. This isn’t me saying this girl should die, though she should pay a serious price for what she did, I think you know. It isn’t me. Don’t write that in your papers and on your blogs or whatever. This is the will of the people. I ran and won twice to give power back to the people, and they have that power now. It’s up to them to use it.
“And I know you all have a lot of questions about this Level 6 and so on, so I’m going to turn it over to — where is she? Where’s … Ah, there. There. Here she is, everyone. Alexandra Pastor. You know her, right? Doing great work, such great work, at my Justice Department. Really fantastic work, and no one knows Hive like she knows Hive. So I’m gonna bring her up here and let her talk to you about it all.”
*
Bitch ran. Ditch that bitch. #InfiniteRange #KillOnSight #CassieMcKinney
READ THIS THREAD! According to local PD, there have been NO PINGS from #CassieMcKinney’s phone in FOUR HOURS. SHE BROKE HER PHONE! READ THE THREAD, PEOPLE!
While you’re all distracted by #CassieMcKinney and #Level6, @POTUS just signed a bill allowing gov’t hacking of cell phones w/o #4A procedures. Wake up, sheeple! #4Amatters
Local PD claims #CassieMcKinney has “gone underground.” Where is she? #HasCassieSurfacedYet?
Check out photos from city near MS/BFU, last known sighting of #CassieMcKinney. BIGGEST #HIVEMOB EVER! #HasCassieSurfacedYet?
I’m no fan of @POTUS, but her joke was disgusting and she deserves punishment. #HasCassieSurfacedYet?
Doxxers reveal she’s the daughter of notorious hacker Black Moses. The same Black Moses who hacked Super Bowl halftime show to play “Fuck Tha Police” while children were watching. Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it? #HasCassieSurfacedYet?
Two injured when #HiveMob seeking #CassieMcKinney collided with #HiveMob in pursuit of #OldManFlasher. LOL. #KillOnSight? I have only two words for you: Fuck yeah. #HasCassieSurfacedYet?
I have never been happier to live in this country! #HasCassieSurfacedYet? #KillOnSight #InfiniteRange
No one can hide 4ever, she has to come up at some point. #HasCassieSurfacedYet?
*
Livestream continues
Alexandra Pastor, Special Deputy Attorney General, Justice Department Division of Heuristic Internet Vetting Engine:
“Thank you for the podium, Mr. President. It’s been such an honor to work under such a visionary. I’m happy to discuss Level 6 and Infinite Range. Let me give you a little background first, and then I’m happy to take some questions.
“First of all, Level 6 is not new. Level 6 was built into Hive from the outset. It was part of the initial spec and it’s been there from the beginning. It was designed and developed by the same programmers who assembled the rest of the Hive experience. I’ve heard some scattered rumors on the internet that this was some kind of secret black-box protocol bolted onto the system after the fact, or put into place at the order of the president after Ms. McKinney’s comment trended. This is not true.
“Level 6 was part of the system from the start but never set to public-facing because honestly we never thought it would be necessary. Now, take a look at this chart, please. As you can see, the incidence of online harassment and bullying dropped dramatically with the announcement of the Hive system. This was before it was even activated. At that time, we realized that we had a very potent weapon on our hands in the war for decency and good behavior. So we made the decision to mask Level 6, thinking it would end up being unnecessary. And when Hive launched later that year, the chart shows us online harassment dropped even further. Ninety-two percent of all Hive matters are Level 1. Only 1 percent have risen to Level 5.
“In short, the system works. People are behaving themselves.
“But then came Cassie McKinney. Now, we’re still processing the votes, but her virality blew away all of our models. We held her at Levels 1 and 2 for as long as we reasonably could while we made certain that there were no glitches in the system. Everything was legit. And more and more votes kept coming in, to the point that she rapidly ascended to Level 5. At that point, signals stopped coming from her phone, indicating that she’d destroyed it, in contravention of Hive Law. Such an act algorithmically pushed her over the edge into Level 6. We planned to reveal this in a press conference, but the system’s machine learning engine decided to proceed on its own. And so here we are today. Now I’d like to introduce Erich Gorfinkle. As you’ll recall, he was handpicked by President Hythe’s predecessor for this role, and he is the ultimate expert on day-to-day Hive operations.”
*
LOL. Facebook just served me an ad for spelunking gear. Because I posted that #CassieMcKinney has “gone underground.” Stupid algorithms.
I’ve written a post on the necessary brutality of Hive Justice and why, whether you agree with #HasCassieSurfacedYet? or not, she has to die. Please read and share it! sh.ort/Cassie
2 days and #HasCassieSurfacedYet? WTF??? She should be EXTRA killed for BREAKING THE LAW. Should have been found by now.
Just curious, but are there restrictions on HOW she’s supposed to be killed? I can’t find any relevant info online. #HasCassieSurfacedYet?
#HasCassieSurfacedYet? I hope whoever finds her RAPES HER FIRST. Teach that bitch to open her mouth.
New doxx dump up at hivecommunity.justice! Includes elem school grades, FB history, PICS!!! #HasCassieSurfacedYet?
Dam, that booty tho! #HasCassieSurfacedYet?
Don’t usually like black chix, but id hit dat before hitting dat, if u get me! #HasCassieSurfacedYet?
Not saying id do it, but … do u have to kill her right away or can u make it slow? Again: JUST ASKING. #HasCassieSurfacedYet?
PLEASE READ: “Why Cassie McKinney’s Biraciality Speaks Volumes about Justice in America.” http://short.link/7 #HasCassieSurfacedYet?
Interesting stat: 82% of whites consider Cassie McKinney to be black. #HasCassieSurfacedYet?
BLINQ Alert! BLINQ Alert! Woman spotted in Dallas shopping mall is NOT @CassieMcK39. Hive Mobs in Dallas, desist from further action. Police and EMTs en route.
Like, what im saying is technically is it legal 2 do stuff 2 her BEFORE u kill her or in the PROCESS of killing her? Thats all, so please stop saying im a musoginist. I’m just ASKING QUESTIONS, OK? #HasCassieSurfacedYet?
*
Livestream continues
Erich Gorfinkle, Protocol Manager, Justice Department Division of Heuristic Internet Vetting Engine:
“Everyone seems to be up in arms today about one thing or another, but can we just take a moment and remember what things were like before Hive went live? Online harassment and bullying were at an all-time high and had spilled out into the streets. Vigilante groups were stalking and doxxing with impunity.
“Now there’s a structure to it. Gone are the days when someone could hashtag their neighbor and get a mob together to beat him up. There’s a system now, and it works, thanks to the vision and genius of this president. Now the mobs aren’t just random expressions of anger; they reflect our own outrage in a measured, approved fashion. As they should.
“Do you really want to go back to the way things were? Lawless and out of control? Now we have Hive Justice — legal, potent and above all, effective. It works.
“And no, I won’t be taking any questions.”