Youngbloods, page 6
‘My father isn’t your fault.’
‘No—he’s our responsibility. Along with the rest of this world we created.’
‘He created himself,’ I say.
When Tally’s revolution gave everyone a voice, most people made paintings, wrote diaries, or cooked amazing meals to put on their feeds. My father filled his channel with stories about crimes, large and small. He reveled in the fact that freedom could be dangerous. Without the pretty operation, any stranger, any neighbor, might steal from you, even kill you. Eventually, the citizens of Shreve distrusted each other so much that they welcomed the dust.
‘Your father wasn’t anything new,’ Tally says. ‘Humanity always makes the same mistakes.’
‘So you wish you’d left the world the way it was?’ I ask.
She shakes her head. ‘You don’t learn anything when you’re forced to be good.’
I sigh, confused now. ‘So you want AIs to run the world?’
‘It wouldn’t matter. We build ourselves into our machines. The only real cure for humanity is ceaseless rebellion—enough people ready to knock down any system that goes bad.’
She stands up, and some of the years fall away from her. She looks like Tally in the history feeds. Young and dangerous, a girl willing to wreck the world.
‘That’s our job in this crew, Frey. To keep the people in power nervous.’
My anger fades a little.
‘My sister’s in power now,’ I say.
‘Indeed. Do you think she had anything to do with Hideaway?’
As much as I want Tally to distrust my sister, I can’t lie.
‘A fight to the death among kids—that isn’t her. Rafi’s dangerous, but never … ugly.’
Tally smiles at my choice of words. ‘Then why bother with revenge? You were her protector, her ally, until the night Shreve fell. What changed?’
I turn away, gathering myself to recall the moment of Col’s death.
There’s a dizziness that hits me in the dark, right before I go to sleep. It feels like I’m balanced on a spire jutting up through the earth, its sharp point focused on my heart. My bed spins slowly on that spike—what my sister did to me.
It takes a full minute to speak.
‘My father’s army was wrecked. My sister and her rebels had stormed his tower. He was done, and he knew it. His last card to play was his stockpile of nuclear waste.’
‘The dictator took his own city hostage,’ Tally recites. ‘But brave Col Palafox threw himself on the detonator, saving the world from a nightmare. X tells me that’s not the truth.’
I take a deep breath. ‘Our father offered Rafi a deal—his surrender for my life.’
‘Why you?’ Tally asks.
‘He thought a strong ruler couldn’t have human connections, but Rafi cared about me more than anything. So his price for surrendering Shreve was to make her kill me. Otherwise he was going to set off the bomb.’
Tally frowns. ‘So how does Col Palafox wind up dead? Why did some minor heir matter in your family drama?’
Some minor heir.
The charred stone beneath my feet turns unsteady.
‘Because I loved him. If Rafi was saved by our connection, then Col was who saved me—if I hadn’t met him, I’d still be my father’s weapon.’
A slant of ice goes through me, imagining a world in which I’d never been sent away to Victoria, never become more than Rafi’s little shadow.
‘She couldn’t kill me,’ I continue. ‘But she knew that killing Col was close enough. Our father understood right away—he was laughing when she turned the knife on him.’
Tally doesn’t speak for a while. Dawn light leaks into the crater, turning the dusty air red around us. A few shouts echo from below, littlies waking up.
My nervous system has come alight, grief boiling like anger in my veins.
I want to fight another battle now, but everything is still around me. ‘So in the end, your father got what he wanted,’ Tally finally says. ‘He severed your connection with Rafia.’
This takes a moment to sink in, trickling through the cracks in my heart.
I always thought that my sister won everything that night—she ended my father and took Shreve for herself—but maybe the last victory was his.
Rafi’s last ping admitted as much.
It was his hand that threw that knife, because he has always been, will always be, inside her.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘She lost me.’
Tally comes closer. ‘Please understand why I’m asking all this, Frey-la. You want me to intervene in family politics—two rich kids fighting over an inheritance. Before finding Hideaway, that’s all this was to me.’
‘But now you’ve seen our real inheritance,’ I say. ‘A child prison set to self-destruct, the inmates fighting in some kind of tournament.’
‘I can see it’s not over for you two,’ Tally says softly. ‘Even if Rafia did the right thing.’
The oxygen seems to leave the air. All sound is sucked away.
‘What did you just say?’
Tally shrugs. ‘That’s what Hideaway proves—your father would’ve pulled that trigger. Rafi saved a million people. Killing Col was the right idea.’
The tight coil of anger in me unravels all at once.
I launch myself at Tally Youngblood.
It’s a wild attack, my combat lessons with Shay swept away by anger. These deadly, inhuman muscles carry me across the broken stone, savage and frantic, fists flailing.
Tally ducks gracefully beneath the blows, letting my momentum carry me over her. A fist stabs up my midriff as I fly past, sending a shock wave through my chest.
I land on my back two meters away, unable to breathe.
‘I can’t judge your sister,’ Tally says, as if I didn’t just try to take her head off. ‘Not for a decision she had a few seconds to make.’
I try to get up, but my muscles won’t work. My lungs feel paralyzed.
My new rib cage is made from unbreakable ceramics, strong as a spacecraft hull—but Tally hit me just below, straight to my lungs. A perfect blow to disable a Special.
I reach out a hand, trying to grasp her leg. To get her on the ground beside me.
She’s too far away.
‘I’ve made split-second choices that I regretted,’ she continues. ‘Sometimes the best option looks ethics-missing the next day.’
I sink back to the ground, closing my eyes. Tally isn’t going to help me.
No one is.
‘But your sister still worries me.’ Tally comes a few steps closer and settles on the dusty ground.
I open my eyes, trying to beam hatred at her. Failing.
My anger, which seemed so endless and untiring, has curdled into despair.
‘Rafia knew exactly how to stop your father,’ Tally says. ‘They were in perfect alignment that night—like they were the twins. But you never saw her solution coming, did you?’
It’s all I can do to shake my head.
In those terrible moments, I’d started to think that my death was the only way to save our city. It took me hours to fully grasp why Rafi threw her knife at Col’s heart instead of mine.
‘If that’s how close Rafia and your father were,’ Tally goes on, ‘then maybe she does know about this place.’
Tally offers me her canteen, and I take a sip of water.
‘Maybe,’ I manage.
‘And even if she didn’t, that night may have changed her for the worse. You turned away from her when she needed you most.’
I glare at Tally. ‘So it’s my fault if she goes bad?’
‘Not your fault—your responsibility. Like this new world is mine.’
I reach out again, wanting to take Tally by her neck and shake her. But she clasps hold of my hand and straightens her legs, hauling us both to standing.
I manage to keep my feet. ‘Rafi was already like our father.’
‘Because she made a hard decision?’ Tally asks.
I shake my head—it isn’t that simple. It takes a moment for the right words to find their way to me.
‘She murdered Col without any hesitation. It wasn’t a hard choice, just the solution to a problem. If she’d do that to me, her sister, what will she do to the citizens of Shreve if they decide to replace her? It’s a democracy, but she’s still got her rebel army, and my father’s weapons.’
‘An interesting question.’ Tally looks down at the valley, at a gang of littlies playing soccer in the rubble. ‘When we take them back to Shreve, we’ll have a look around. Someone there knew about this place.’
At those words, anger and frustration let go of my heart, and I can breathe again. My sister might have our city, and my name.
But I have Tally Youngblood.
‘Sorry I tried to kill you,’ I say.
She shrugs. ‘It’s a good sign. Sometimes the Special surge makes people go cold. With their pain damped down, they don’t feel anything anymore.’
‘That’s not me, Boss.’ I don’t need physical pain to make me feel. The spire of grief pointed at my heart makes sure of that.
‘Tell your spy we’re coming to Shreve,’ Tally says.
‘But the kids saw your face, Boss. Even if you disguise yourself, they’ll tell everyone who you are.’
‘Maybe it’s time to come out of hiding,’ she says.
I stare at her, halted by a question that the world has asked a million times.
When I was six years old, Tally’s face was everywhere. She looked much younger then, more than those ten years. The whole world celebrated her, and countless people pledged themselves to continue her rebellion in the wild.
Then one day she vanished without a word. Not long after that, my father filled the air of his city with dust.
‘Why did you disappear, Tally?’ I manage.
She spreads her hands, helpless for a moment. ‘People kept expecting me to pass judgment on everything new. As a kid, all I wanted was to be pretty, and I wound up with power instead. But I didn’t really know anything about rebuilding the world.’
‘You were supposed to protect us,’ I say, hating how childish the words sound.
But that was the role I was raised to play—protector, last line of defense. The possibility that I was some echo of Tally Youngblood helped my childhood almost make sense.
‘I thought disappearing would keep everyone nervous,’ she says. ‘Like when you haven’t seen the monster in a horror feed, and your imagination does the work.’
‘My father didn’t have much of an imagination. He only believed what he could see.’
Tally smiles, her teeth sharp in the sunlight.
‘Then it’s time to let everyone see me again.’
14. WELCOME HOME
Shreve puts on a welcome bash.
Like all my sister’s parties, it is immaculately planned.
A thousand hovercams greet us over Bossier Fountain, flying in shifting formation against the perfect blue sky. Each has been decorated by a different classroom of Shreve students—with painted faces, blinking lights, or dangling streamers aflutter with folded paper cranes. The worldwide audience can choose any of the cams’ viewpoints to watch to our approach. A school choir sings on the fountain stage below, amid dancing sprays of water.
We six Youngbloods ride on our boards, Tally’s famous face on full display. In our body armor and sneak suits, we look like a military escort for the three hoverbuses full of lost children.
The littlies’ faces are plastered to the windows, gazing down on this colorful, exuberant new Shreve. It must look like a different city to them, a different world.
Their hometown is under new management.
The locals are out in force, two hundred thousand according to the feeds. More boisterous than any Shreve crowd I’ve ever seen, they’re dressed in bright colors, like this is Paz or Victoria. The grays of my father’s era are gone.
Everyone’s waving the city’s new flag—a gold phoenix rising from blue flames.
When the global feeds broke the news of Hideaway’s discovery this morning, the story was paired with grim music and photos of grieving parents. A child prison was another reminder of my city’s dark past, along with the war-ravaged buildings, the traumatized former prisoners, the economy ruined by blockade.
But somehow my sister has turned that bleak message on its head. By late afternoon, the story of Hideaway has become one of hope and celebration.
Of Tally Youngblood returned to the world.
A spray of fireworks rips the sky around us, bright enough to blind even in daylight.
‘Just what these kids need,’ Tally mutters on our private channel. ‘More explosions.’
‘Told you, Boss,’ I say. ‘My sister never misses a chance to dazzle an audience.’
Most dazzling to me is the air above Shreve—I’ve never seen it clear of dust. My new senses keep searching for the telltale flickers of sunlight, the sooty scent of nanocams. But there’s nothing except the smell of pine and wildflowers.
For the first time, I believe in my bones that Rafi has stripped away some vital part of our father’s regime.
Our parade winds across the city, taking us within sight of my childhood home. My father’s tower stood at the outskirts of Shreve, a symbol of his omniscience, the tallest building in the city. But three months after his fall, a huge mass of permacrete rises up there. Called the Sarcophagus, the new structure is almost complete. In another few days, the construction drones, radioactive by now, will seal themselves inside forever, along with my father’s stockpile of nuclear waste.
The Sarcophagus protects Shreve from radiation but also has its own dark beauty. A hundred-meter-high pyramid, its sides are coated in night blackness. His body is still inside, lying where Rafi cut him in half, the Sarcophagus a monument not to him, but to his obliteration.
Rafi’s new home, Shreve House, is the tower’s opposite in every way.
It sprawls on a plot of land cleared by the war, a dozen buildings arranged among grassy hills, held aloft by hoverstruts, connected by floating walkways. They’re made of light materials, full of airy windows, like temporary bungalows thrown up for a beach vacation.
My sister’s reign is transparent, playful, humble.
But the two capitols lie within sight of each other. Here in late afternoon, the shadow of the old stretches toward the new.
The dignitaries of the city wait for us on the green lawn of Shreve House—the head wardens, the elected council, a few of her rich friends. And of course Rafi’s bodyguard of rebels, the liberators of the city.
Our spy is among them.
Riggs was one of the commandoes on my last mission with Col, sent by Rafi to spy on me. Now she leads my sister’s bodyguard—and spies on her for me and X. On top of that, Riggs kissed me once, when she thought I was Rafi.
The two of them have a complicated relationship.
The littlies’ surviving parents aren’t here yet. My sister didn’t want the spectacle of some families being reunited while other children stood awkwardly alone. The real tragedy of this day will wait until the cameras are turned off.
As we land, my sister comes out to greet us.
It’s the first time I’ve seen her since she killed Col, and sharp, righteous anger ripples through me. For a moment, it carves away the grief, fills up the emptiness.
Rafi no longer dresses like a rebel queen, in animal skins and body armor. No exotic feathers in her hair, just a pulse knife on her belt.
And she wears my name: Frey of Shreve.
She’s not impersonating me today, though, not like when she was with the rebels. It’s her own body language, an imperious stance, movements delicate and considered—all those mannerisms that are still etched into my muscles.
Her dress is perfectly chosen, her hair under control in a way I could never manage. Whatever name she calls herself, she’s done being me.
It’s a relief, not to see myself in her.
But something else has taken my place—a razor certainty in her eyes, an authority that presses down like gravity on everyone around her.
Another aspect of our father has settled onto Rafi, now that she’s in charge.
An explosion of applause—at least a hundred government workers are arrayed on the hill behind the dignitaries. Hovercams are released from their hold patterns, a swarm of anxious hummingbirds, making my skin prickle. My new face feels like cheap camo surge, easy to see through.
But everyone’s looking at Tally Youngblood.
Rafi’s face lights up as she approaches the guest of honor, hands outstretched.
Suddenly this plan feels like a mistake. Shaking Tally’s hand will only make my sister more beloved, more a rebel queen.
I can feel her face rank creeping upward.
‘Welcome to my city,’ she says. ‘And welcome back to the world.’
‘I never left,’ Tally answers.
Rafi skips a beat, a pause so brief only I would notice. Her mind is scrambling for meaning in Tally’s answer—signs of a threat, an opportunity.
‘We missed you all the same,’ Rafi says, all graciousness, then starts the introductions.
It’s an endless ritual. Every dignitary wants a moment with Tally in front of the assembled cams—especially the council members, thinking of the next election.
No one knows how independent Shreve’s elected government really is. Or what will happen if they ever go against my sister’s will. Our father shared power with a city council too, until he didn’t.
I recognize one of the counselors—Chulhee, the head of a clique called Future. They believed that everyone whose life was recorded by surveillance dust would be studied by future historians. They performed their lives for an invisible, unborn audience, trying to be dramatic and historic.
The night my father fell, the Futures helped us rescue Boss X, creating distractions across the city. Maybe because it was the right thing to do, or maybe because they wanted to go down in history as heroes.
I wonder how they’re coping, now that all the drama they spent their lives creating has been erased. The recordings were stored in my father’s tower, and it turns out that radioactive battle zones aren’t the best environment for DNA memory cores.
