Youngbloods, page 9
Astrix releases two handfuls of microdrones into the air. They flutter gently as they rise, the propellors of their tiny weather vanes spinning in the breeze. We need a strong wind at our back for this jump.
The wait begins.
We talk a little, the others’ voices scratchy in my ears. Our private comm channel is intentionally weak so we won’t be noticed by the local network. If I stray more than fifty or so meters from the others, I’ll be cut off, alone in the dark and poisonous hallways of my childhood home.
The lights of Shreve flicker and pulse in the distance. Rafi has ended my father’s rules against decorative lighting. Every night looks like a festival, the skyline a gaudy chandelier jutting up through the earth.
We might be a poor city, but solar power is free.
We …
I’m not really a citizen of Shreve—there’s no official record of my birth, and my sister stole my name. But this city is mine enough that I don’t want my sister trading away those dust recordings, the fabric of its people’s lives.
I’ve started watching the local feeds, especially stories about reunited Hideaway families. Even though it’s propaganda for my sister, with those long shots of her next to Tally on the Shreve House lawn, the images still move me. Like there’s room in me for something besides anger and grief.
There are no stories about the kids whose parents didn’t live to see my father’s end.
When my sister’s latest ping arrived, I hoped she’d mention those other lost children. But it was just her pleading with me to tell her I was still alive. My visit as Diego has her worried.
I didn’t answer.
‘Wind’s picking up,’ Astrix says.
The grass gently shifts around me. I should feel the air on my skin and in my hair, but the radiation suit is too stiff.
‘Okay, we’re good,’ comes Astrix’s voice. ‘In five, four, three …’
‘The Smoke lives,’ Tally says.
We push off, accelerating quietly. These hoverboards were printed especially for the mission—air-dropped to us by my old friend the city of Paz. The boards have seriously underpowered lifting fans but are full of other tricks.
The absolute silence of our flight somehow makes our approach more dramatic. All I can hear is my own breathing inside my helmet, and the whir of my heart.
I never thought I’d see my childhood home again.
Not from the inside.
As we gather speed, we drop, bellies on boards, to lower wind resistance. Our course takes us downhill at first to gain momentum, but the slope looms ahead, dark against the spangled city lights.
We reach the hill and climb its flank, faster and faster.
All at once, the ground drops out from under me.
For a moment, I’m sailing through the cold air, a pure projectile. No guidance or motive power, just momentum and the simple aerodynamics of my board.
The Sarcophagus is visible ahead, a dark gash in the sparkling heart of Shreve.
‘And … now,’ Astrix says.
With a click of my tongue, my hoverboard unfolds.
It’s like the Youngbloods’ gliding trick with their solar panels, but an order of magnitude more sophisticated. These boards’ riding surfaces are composed of dozens of independent layers, each of which can unfurl into its own shape in midair.
They re-form around me—a sudden origami crane the size of an aircraft. I’m nestled at its center, still lying on my belly. Every move I make shifts the delicate, papery wings, like surfing on the wind.
Our six gliders are huge against the sky, but the unfolded layers are too thin to reflect radar, the translucent wings printed with fluttering images of birds. Anyone spotting us from below will see only flocks of starlings roiling the night sky. In these radiation suits, we’re invisible to thermal vision as well.
The Youngbloods’ tech keeps surprising me with its blend of graceful stealth and raw power. Even the Paz AI was impressed when it saw the specs. We could fly straight up to my sister’s house unseen if the wind was a little stronger.
‘Sentry drones ahead,’ Croy says.
‘Don’t get close unless you’ve got a clear shot,’ Shay orders. ‘These gliders get shaky with holes in them.’
A gust of wind passes through our formation, and for a moment, we’re all too busy steering our giant paper planes to speak.
When I’ve gained control again, a drone is in front of me.
I angle toward it—carefully.
If I hit the sentry, it’ll punch right through my glider, a knife point piercing tissue paper. But we need to take at least a few of the drones out. When we escape later tonight, our hoverboards won’t be in this silent, invisible configuration.
My target hovers in position, motionless and unsuspecting.
I pull a smart net from my belt. Even that small movement sends a wobble through my craft—the target is off center.
My whole body twists, willing the glider to follow.
The huge, delicate form around me responds, drifting back where I want it. And there’s my target—lined up just beneath me.
I drop the net. It sparkles to life as it tumbles, my glider popping up a little as the weight falls away.
They collide soundlessly, the net wrapping itself around the sentry. As I shoot overhead, the two machines shudder together in midair.
The net is blocking the drone’s transmissions, parasitizing its inner workings with a dozen microdrills, a flood of nanos.
By the time I dare a glance back over my shoulder, the net has fallen away. The sentry drone hovers resolutely in the air, as if still on duty.
But it belongs to us now.
A sparkling appears to my right—X taking out another drone, a perfect shot.
I refocus on my own flight path. My father’s poisoned tomb is only a few hundred meters away, featureless in the darkness.
I’m almost home.
Something small passes between me and the Sarcophagus—a shape flitting across the blackness. Then another, and still more …
I start to reach for another net, but these aren’t sentries. They’re too small and too many. Scores of them swarming, seething, fluttering.
They aren’t drones at all.
It’s a flock of birds, and I’m about to hit them.
19. FLOCK
‘Birdstrike!’ Tally cries.
There’s a word for this? tilts through my head as a tearing sound comes from my right, a tremor shivering the papery frame around me. A surprised squawk and flutter trailing away behind.
The bird went straight through my wing.
The craft still feels steady, but there are more birdstrikes coming.
Lots of them.
It’s like a rainstorm—one drop, then two more. Only seconds till a steady stream builds, each collision sending a sick-making shudder through the glider.
A flapping form rushes out of the darkness straight at my face. The shock of impact rattles my radiation helmet, a burst of squawks and feathers.
With every tear, the craft’s stability takes a hit. I’m losing altitude.
The comm channel is full of chatter—at the back of our formation, Shay and Astrix are unhit. Tally and Croy, in the lead, are already spiraling down to earth.
I’m too busy to say anything, no longer gliding straight and true. My right wing sags, and the craft starts a slow turn in that direction.
A few wingspans away, X’s glider is tilting toward mine. His left wing passed through the same flock as my right, and now we’re listing in opposite directions, heading for each other.
His voice in my ear: ‘Hold on tight, Frey-la.’
We crash in slow motion, like ocean liners grinding hulls. Both gliders buckle, deforming around us, but X’s has more holes than mine. His craft starts to fold up …
‘Coming aboard!’ he calls.
X scrambles toward me across the near wing, which bows beneath his weight like a tree branch. A gap opens between the gliders, and it looks like he’s going to drop away. But he leaps—and grabs the tail of my glider.
The nose pitches up, but I don’t have enough momentum to climb. The whole contraption stalls in midair, the wind dying around us.
‘Hang on!’ I cry.
Stalled out, carrying two people, full of holes, the glider starts to pinwheel downward, a leaf spinning from branch to ground.
I wrap my arms around the slender core of hoverboard—here in the middle of the craft, the spinning isn’t bad. But X is out on the tail, the full centrifugal force of our rotation trying to fling him into the dark.
When the crash comes, it’s oddly soft and quiet, with the muted bounce of a crumpled paper ball. The structure sags around me, then tips to the right, settling on the ground.
I stand up, wobbly on the thin surface.
‘X? You still with me?’
‘Unhurt,’ comes his answer.
I turn and look through the darkness—it’s a shredded wreck back there.
X stands up, trussed in a harness of smart plastic ropes. Looped around the glider’s tail, they’ve torn it to pieces.
But his improvised rig held just long enough.
At a flick of X’s wrists, the ropes wind around his belt again. He walks toward me through the crumpled remains of the glider.
I face the Sarcophagus, barely a hundred meters away. What appears to be a flock of birds is descending in its shadow, oddly shaky in the air.
I tell my glider to disintegrate as X walks up beside me.
‘Shall we run?’ he asks. ‘Don’t want them starting without us.’
From up close, the skin of the giant pyramid is a slice of starless night.
It’s coated with a special substance, blacker than black—boiling hot in the sun, intimidating in the dark. It’s too slippery to climb and almost impossible to break. If you do manage to break away a piece, it gives off a choking smell of rot and sulfur.
The Sarcophagus is designed to discourage future explorers. Even those a thousand years from now, when my father’s name is forgotten but the poison of his last crime remains.
Here in the present, its mass settles over me like a bad dream.
The Youngbloods are waiting for us on the far side of the pyramid’s base. Past them, the city lights glitter in contrast to the baleful Sarcophagus.
‘Glad you two could make it,’ Tally says with a smile.
‘Birds!’ Croy exclaims. ‘Didn’t see that coming.’
‘We have three working boards.’ Shay stares at the pyramid’s smooth side. The peak of the structure is still open, the triangle jagged and unfinished. There’s still access to the top of my father’s tower—his office, the control room, and the data vaults where the dust recordings reside.
‘Going up with two people on a board is no problem,’ Shay says. ‘But it’ll be slow for exfiltration.’
‘Also known as running away,’ Croy clarifies.
‘We might not have to run.’ Astrix is scanning the sky above the city with her field glasses. ‘We got all the sentry drones on the wild side, and there aren’t any between us and the city.’
‘None?’ I squint into the darkness above Shreve. ‘Does that seem weird?’
Croy shrugs. ‘Maybe nobody’s worried about trespassers. Who’s brain-missing enough to wander into a nuclear waste dump?’
20. DRONES
X and I share a hoverboard, creeping up the pyramid on shaky magnetics. There are metal trusses inside the structure, but the outer layer is thick.
From this close, the surface is gently reflective, like polished black stone. The silhouette of the two us crouching on the board ripples across the dark expanse, occulting the pinprick stars.
Inside my helmet, a hesitant sound begins. Like diamonds dropping onto a piece of glass, one by one.
X and I lock eyes.
‘What an epitaph,’ he says. ‘The tick of a radiation meter.’
I wonder once more why my father filled our home with nuclear waste.
Maybe Tally’s right, and he just wanted to be in control one last time. But what he chose to do with that last glint of power—bargaining with Rafi to kill me—still makes my head spin.
Yes, I murdered his son. But I was his creature.
Everything my father did after I killed Seanan—invading Victoria, attacking Paz, forcing the free cities to come for him—seems like a man trying to destroy himself.
As if I ended my father the same day I killed Seanan.
Watching the thoughts on my face, X says, ‘This place doesn’t define you, Frey.’
‘Rafi and I used to dance on our balcony, when the rain washed the dust from the air.’
X smiles at this. ‘Already a rebel.’
Rafi was too, the radiation meter whispers in my ear.
We climb higher, following the angle of the pyramid inward toward the top of the buried tower. Past the level of the trophy room, where my portrait hung before my sister salvaged it. Past the data vaults full of meticulous recordings of Shreve’s last decade.
There’s not much security here.
I wonder if Rafi knows what a prize she’s giving the machines. Does she think their interest in human behavior is merely academic? Is she too busy mending her broken city to care?
Maybe she simply doesn’t think she could ever be outpoliticked by an AI. Not in the city she was born to rule.
As we near the opening at the pyramid’s top, the ticking of my rad meter picks up.
A drone is passing ten meters away, carrying a load of cargo down the slope. Too heavy for lifters, it walks on six legs, its grippy footpads the size of dinner plates. Even so, it skids a little on the glassy skin of the Sarcophagus. No cameras to see us with, just an impact sensor in front.
Surely Rafi wouldn’t trust a simple machine like this to haul away the memory cores. But we drift closer to make sure.
The chattering in my helmet grows.
I peek under the tarp covering the cargo—it’s a jumble of forks and knives.
‘Silverware?’ X murmurs.
A wave of memory hits me, practicing eating with clumsy hands. ‘The formal stuff, for my father’s state banquets.’
If antique silver is worth saving from a waste dump, Rafi really does need money.
Or maybe she wants reminders of our old life. The pomp and circumstance of being the heir, without the responsibility of healing a wounded city.
I drop the tarp’s corner and let the cargo drone pass into the darkness below. I’m done with trying to psychoanalyze my sister. I had to live inside her head for sixteen years, learning her gestures, her smiles.
Sometimes I wish we were enemies who’d never met each other.
The wind is picking up, whistling through the construction site above us.
There are more drones up there—motionless, waiting for tomorrow’s work to start. So they aren’t going day and night to give Diego what it wants. Either Rafi’s dragging her feet, or she wants the human controllers at their best for the delicate work of saving the memory cores.
I wonder again why it’s so security-missing up here.
‘You bumped into it,’ Astrix hisses in my ears.
‘Your fault!’ Croy protests.
I scan the darkness and find his tall silhouette, crowded onto a board with her small one.
Sliding away from them is one of the shut-down drones, headed toward me and X across the glassy surface. I expect it to come to life, resetting its grip or calling for help.
But it slides straight at us, building speed.
X and I both react, leaning in opposite directions—the board goes nowhere.
The drone clips X’s end, sending us spinning.
The world gyrates around us, dark sky and darker Sarcophagus, the others’ voices frantic in our helmets. X presses hard against me in our whirling dance.
I’ve stopped a hundred spinouts but never with another rider aboard. X and I keep contradicting each other, or overcorrecting. The spin grows wilder.
Then firm hands grasp my shoulders, and we come to a jerking halt.
In this suddenly steady universe, Tally’s face is looking straight into mine.
‘Are you two done messing around?’
‘That drone.’ I turn to look down the slope. ‘It wasn’t just sleeping. It’s dead.’
The machine is still sliding, picking up more speed as it descends. It clips the cargo carrier that passed me and X, and they both skid away.
Tally gives me a soft ‘huh.’
The drones fade into smudges in the darkness; then we hear the brittle, sparkly crash of silverware spilling across the ground.
Tally releases my shoulders. ‘That is kind of weird.’
‘Maybe not, Boss,’ Shay’s voice comes.
We look up the slope, to where the others are waiting at the entrance to the pyramid’s peak. Shay is waving a scanner at a cement-mixer drone.
‘These machines are all dead,’ she says.
‘Out of charge?’ Tally asks.
‘Crashed—intentionally. And I bet those missing sentries on the city side are too.’
Shay’s sigh ripples softly in my helmet.
‘Someone got here before us, Tally-wa.’
21. SARCOPHAGUS
We crouch at the opening to the Sarcophagus.
Astrix sends in three small scout drones.
This radiation suit makes me feel like some random—clumsy, sense-missing, with no camouflage. If whoever beat us to this place is still here, we’ll be sitting ducks.
But we can’t take the suits off now. My rad meter is making an angry clatter, like stones popping on the underside of a hoverboard flying low and fast across gravel.
I turn the volume down, trusting the suit to ping me if the radiation spikes.
‘Nobody up here but us,’ Astrix says.
We look down into the Sarcophagus.
The pyramid’s interior is a web of duralloy girders, supporting its sides until the whole thing is filled with permacrete. The wind whistles in through the opening, mournful and hesitant. Our comms are shut off, so I can’t hear the others breathing anymore.
The hollowness of the vast space thrums in my chest.
