Free to Fall

31

GRATEFUL I WAS IN SNEAKERS, I ran from Hamilton Hall toward Paradiso, the upsilon pendant banging against my collarbone, and I hopped the fence at the cemetery. As I sprinted across the grass, I cast a quick glance around to make sure I was alone. When my eyes landed on the statue of the archangel, I stopped in my tracks. His arm was pointed at the entrance to the cemetery, which made sense now that I’d seen the illustration in Paradise Lost. He was expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden. But I was certain that his arm had been pointed at the sky the night the Few summoned me to the angel’s wing.

I jogged over to it. It was almost imperceptible, but there was a slit in the stone at his left shoulder joint, as if his arm were a lever. I gripped his wrist and pushed up. His arm didn’t budge. I gritted my teeth and pushed again, squatting my legs for leverage. His arm inched upward, and as it did, I heard a rumble to my left. Stone sliding on stone.

It was coming from the mausoleum.

I dashed over to the building and let myself in. I knew even before I lifted the coffin’s lid what I’d done. I’d opened the entrance to the tomb.

The coffin’s marble bottom had retracted a few inches to reveal spiral stairs descending into pitch-black. I peered over the coffin’s edge, trying to make out the bottom, but I couldn’t see farther than ten feet down.

With a start I straightened back up. What if I’d set off a silent alarm? Not to mention that I’d left the mausoleum door open in broad daylight. I slammed the coffin lid shut and left the mausoleum as quickly as I’d come in, stopping only to yank the angel’s arm back down before sprinting toward the fence.

Kate was behind the register when I came barreling through the café’s door. “Hey, Rory,” she called. “North’s not here.”

“What do you mean he’s not here?” I demanded. “He has to be here.”

Kate eyed me. “Are you okay?”

“I just need to see North,” I said. “Do you know where he is?”

She shook her head. “But his break’s over in five minutes. You want me to make you something while you w—”

“No, thanks,” I said, and dashed out.

Relief washed over me when I saw him through the glass door of Ivan’s repair shop. North had his laptop open on the counter, and Ivan was tinkering with something in North’s palm. I yanked open the door, sending the bell clanging. North jerked up, his fingers clamping down on whatever was in his hand. He quickly shut his laptop, too.

“Rory,” he said when he saw me, relaxing a little, but his brow was now furrowed in concern. “What are you doing here?”

“I need to see what’s on my necklace,” I said hurriedly. “I think she put something on it. I think that’s why she took it.”

Ivan was already unlocking his loaner cabinet.

“What’s in your hand?” I asked North. His fingers were still tight around it.

He hesitated and glanced at Ivan. The old man nodded. “It’s ready to go.”

North opened his hand. The dove locket I’d seen in the shop’s glass cabinet the first night we’d hung out was lying in his palm. Even more exquisite up close. The gold was etched with intricate detail, the wing raised slightly from the surface. “I bought it for you,” North said, glancing sideways at Ivan. “To replace your necklace.” He faltered. “I mean. I know nothing could replace it, but I thought—”

“I love it,” I said, sweeping my hair up with my hands. “Will you put it on for me? And take the other one off so we can get the file?”

Feeling North’s fingers skim the nape of my neck made the tiny hairs beneath them stand on end. How I wished we could just be two regular teenagers who didn’t have a biotech conspiracy to take down.

The dove locket fell about an inch above the pendant, wedging itself in the space between my clavicles. “What’s inside?” I asked suddenly, remembering that it was a locket. The hinge was along the top, so I slid my nail between the dove’s beak, the obvious place to snap it open.

“It doesn’t open,” North said quickly. He unclasped the upsilon necklace and caught it with his hand.

“Isn’t it a locket?”

“Whoever owned it before you sealed it shut,” Ivan explained.

I slid the back of my hand under the delicate bird, lifting it so I could see it better. I remembered the dove’s eye being a turquoise gemstone, but I must’ve been mistaken, because it was black, not blue, and reflective, like mirrored glass.

“Well, I love it,” I said, turning around to smile at North. “Thank you.”

He beamed. “You’re welcome.” He released the USB plug on my pendant and stuck it into the port of Ivan’s laptop. “How’d you get this back?” he asked.

“Dr. Tarsus,” I said. “She gave it back to me this morning. It sounds crazy, but I think maybe she’s been trying to help me all along.”

“Help you do what?” North asked.

“I don’t know. But this morning in practicum she showed me the inside of the tomb and let me use her credentials to get into what I think is a Gnosis server room. That’s what’s beneath the reservoir.”

North said something in reply, but I was too preoccupied with the two files that had popped up on my screen to hear it. One was a JPEG, the other was an audio file, seven minutes and forty-five seconds in length. I lifted my eyes and met Ivan’s. “Do you have some earbuds I could borrow?” It wasn’t that I didn’t want North to hear it, or Ivan for that matter—I just wanted to listen to it once through first.

“Of course,” the old man replied. He went back to the loaner cabinet and retrieved a pair of vintage headphones, the kind you wore over your ears. “If you’d like some privacy, you can listen to it in my office in the back,” he said kindly, and gestured for me to come around the counter. He pointed to a door just behind the fabric curtain that separated the front of the store from the back.

“Thanks,” I said, casting my eyes back to North as I lifted the laptop off the counter. “I’ll just be a few minutes.”

The office was cramped but clean. There was an old transistor radio on the desk, propped up against the wall. It was on, set to what sounded like a news channel. The volume was too low to make out the words. I caught the phrase “solar flare” and turned it up. It was the tail end of a news story.

“. . . wind would hurl a burst of electromagnetic radiation in our direction,” the reporter was saying. “Traveling at speeds upward of eight million miles an hour, this cloud of solar plasma and magnetic field would slam into the Earth’s atmosphere in less than a day, posing significant risk to our power grid.”

A solar storm. It was the kind of thing the old Beck would’ve gone nuts over. But the new Beck probably wouldn’t see it at all. Lux would make sure of it. Weather events were on his threat list, after all.

The thought snapped me back to the present moment. I clicked to open the JPEG first.

A black-and-white photo opened onscreen. It was a yearbook picture, an action shot from the sports page. A basketball player in a Theden jersey was launching a three-point shot with four seconds left on the clock. The crowd was on its feet in the bleachers behind him. I saw my mother’s face almost immediately, her mouth open in a happy yell, hugging the girl beside her. A girl with an Afro whose inky black eyes hadn’t changed in seventeen years.

Holy crap. They were friends.

I shoved the headphones plug into the jack and clicked the other file.

“You no doubt have questions,” came Dr. Tarsus’s voice through the speakers. “I have some answers, but not all. I don’t know why your mom left Theden when she did, or whether her death was an accident, although I suspect it wasn’t. I do know that Griffin Payne is your real father, and that he and Aviana were deeply in love, and she was certain you were conceived on their wedding night.” Dr. Tarsus took a steady breath. I felt my body stiffen, bracing for whatever she was about to say.

“The last time I heard from your mother was the day you were born,” she began. “She’d been gone since the previous June. She called from a nurse’s phone to tell me she was in labor, and that she thought the Few had found her. She didn’t say what had happened to make her run, only that something terrible had, and that, because of it, you could not grow up as Griffin’s child. She said she’d made sure that Griffin didn’t suspect that you were his, and that you would grow up believing that a man named Duke Vaughn was your father.” My eyes watered at the mention of my dad’s name. How far away my life with him seemed. “She said she was calling to say good-bye,” Dr. Tarsus continued. “And to ask me to keep you safe. I promised her that I would.

“By now you know that the upsilon necklace is mine. Your mom was never a member of the Few. Neither was your father. Your father was never even considered, despite his stepfather’s pleas on his behalf—his IQ didn’t meet the threshold. Your mother was invited and went through the evaluation process, but when the time came for her vows, she refused to make them. I’ll never forget her words. She pulled back her hood and said, ‘Only the powerless hide behind masks and robes.’ The rest of us were caught up in the prestige and exclusivity, the flattery of being told that we were destined for greatness. It was so easy to rationalize it, to call this greatness our duty, to make it sound important and even good. It’s how we’re made I suppose. How did Milton put it? ‘Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.’ The choice was ours, and we chose ourselves. Not Aviana. She was wiser than that.

“I didn’t know at first if you were like her. Growing up you didn’t seem to be, not from a distance, anyway. When you decided to come to Theden, I had to be sure. That’s why I asked Hershey to keep an eye on you. When she told me she would go to the dean, I knew I had to send her away, however I could. In retrospect, I wish I’d never involved her to begin with. I didn’t end up needing her weekly reports. I knew you heard the Doubt on the first day of class, when you threw yourself in front of that trolley. It was something Aviana would’ve done.” Dr. Tarsus paused there, and I imagined her smiling. I heard her smile fade before she went on.

“I didn’t see what she saw. Not then. So I took my vows that night without knowing how deep the society’s power ran. Now I know too well.” Her voice was grim. “The Few may be few, but they are everywhere. They have members in every city, in every industry, at the highest level at every major company. Gnosis and Soza are just the tip of the iceberg. Slowly and steadily, they have been creating the infrastructure for their dominance.” The infrastructure for their dominance. I shuddered. It sounded like a line from a creepy conspiracy thriller. But no, this was real life.

“But the Few have an opponent they haven’t yet overcome,” Dr. Tarsus said then. “The Doubt. A label designed by them to make the inner voice seem untrustworthy. Irrational. It wasn’t a difficult sell. After all, people who hear it do things that don’t make sense to the world—they give up what they’ve earned, they help those who don’t deserve it, they forgo what they desire. They don’t put themselves first, and selfless people are impossible to control. So the Few began to foster the idea that this ‘Doubt’ couldn’t be trusted. They created the fiction of a psychological disorder, as if the voice could be explained away by science, when, in reality, it’s the most complicated concept of our existence. The inexplicable nudge of providence that has guided the human spirit since the beginning of time. It is, I’ve come to believe, the thing that makes us human. Whether it’s coming from God or our collective conscience or some unknown part of ourselves—the voice isn’t something we can study in a lab, or put in a box. It is so much bigger than that.

“The Few helped people forget that. Slowly, methodically, they set out to change the story. The voice people once trusted became the enemy of happiness. Something to fear. Knowing that the voice wouldn’t scream to be heard, they made sure that the world stayed loud with music and movies and 24/7 news and incessant online chatter. If they couldn’t silence the whisper, they’d bombard people with other voices. Infinite choices.

“It worked, but it wasn’t perfect,” she went on. “There were still some who chose the voice. Who couldn’t be distracted. Who couldn’t be misled. So Project Hyperion was born. The Few would launch a new tech company. That tech company would develop a decision-making app, and that decision-making app would become a social necessity. They knew the world well. And they had patience.

“The summer of my senior year, the society got me an internship with Gnosis,” Dr. Tarsus continued. “That’s how I ended up as Dr. Hildebrand’s research assistant that spring. It was a fortuitous accident that someone put my name on the distribution list for that internal memo you found on my pendant. As soon as I saw it, I went straight to your mom. I wasn’t afraid for my life, not back then. Just the loss of my status. I was a girl from the Bronx who’d been given this whole new life. A life I didn’t want to lose.” Heavy with shame, her voice faltered a little. She cleared her throat and kept going.

“Your mom didn’t waver for a moment once she knew. She wanted to expose them. And with the memo and the society roster I’d put together, she had the proof she needed. Her plan was to write an open letter to all the major newspapers in the country, enclosing the memo and the roster. Every one of them would’ve run the story. Reporters were still making their own choices back then. But she said she wanted to confront Griffin’s stepfather first. Atwater was the Divine Second then. The society’s number two. Aviana felt like she needed a confession from him, if only for Griffin.”

Dr. Tarsus’s voice was grim now. “Neither of us knew what the Few were truly capable of. We knew they were powerful, and we knew they were ruthless, but we didn’t imagine that they were murderers. I don’t know for certain that they killed your mother, but I do know they killed your father.” Her voice broke. “I hate for you to find out this way, Rory, but Griffin is dead.” My eyes welled up with tears even though I already knew. It was the sympathy in Tarsus’s voice that got to me, the unbridled compassion. “He died the night of the party,” she said softly. “Of a blood clot in his brain. He didn’t know what he was up against when he got behind that podium. He knew that the version of Lux on the Gold used a different algorithm, designed to steer people away from the Doubt, but he had no idea that people were being chemically manipulated into trusting it, or that the flu spray he got in September was riddled with nanobots.” Her voice got hard again. “Or that his bodyguard, Jason, was taking orders from someone else.”

I’d wondered who’d pressed the button to cause that clot. How much of our conversation had Jason overheard? Was I the reason Griffin was dead?

“I’m sure you think I’m a coward,” Tarsus said then, her voice faltering again. “With my position, my access, I should have done something myself, long ago, before it got this far. And you’re right. But I couldn’t take them on and keep my promise to your mom. So I’ve kept you safe, hoping that the day would come when I wouldn’t need to anymore. I wish that day were today. I want nothing more than for you to leave Theden, to disappear the way your mom tried to do. But while I am not as wise as your mother was, or as you are, I am no fool. I saw the look in your eyes when you stepped up to that altar. It’s the same look I saw in hers when she pulled back that hood. So if you choose to go back into the tomb, I will do whatever I can to get you out alive.” She started to say something else but seemed to change her mind. There was a shuffling sound, and the clip cut off.

Tears were streaming down my face now, dripping onto the desk. She hadn’t told me anything I didn’t already know, or at least suspect. But her words had solidified things for me. I wouldn’t run. I couldn’t run. Not after what these people had done to my parents. To Beck. To millions of other people.

“Rory?” North’s voice was muffled through the headphones. I pulled them from my ears, letting them drop onto the desk. “What did she say?”

I just shook my head.

“Is she really on our side?”

“More than that,” I said, hoarse from the tears. “Everything she’s done, she’s done for me. She promised my mom she’d keep me safe.” I pulled the pendant from the laptop and handed it to North. “Can you put the recording on your phone? I want to listen to it again later.”

He nodded. “Of course.” He sat on the edge of Ivan’s desk. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I wiped away my tears. “I want to talk about how we can take those bastards down.”

“Okay, you said you saw a Gnosis server room in your simulation,” North said. “What’d it look like?

I described it in as much detail as I could.

“And what about security?”

“Numerical password and a voice recognition mic.”

“Voice recognition. Yikes. How’d you get through in the simulation?”

“I was her. Tarsus. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but her voice got me through the door.”

North chewed on his lip. “You said she’d be at your initiation, right? If we could get to the room undetected, would she let us in?”

The hope that had all but vanished came surging back. “You have a plan,” I said, leaping to my feet and slamming my knees against the underside of the desk in the process.

“Well, technically it’s your plan,” North replied, the corners of his mouth turning up just a little. “I’m just a sucker for a challenge. Plus, the timing is just too perfect. It feels like a gift.”

“What do you mean?”

“The utility companies are shutting off the power grid tomorrow afternoon to protect the transformers from the solar storm. Gnosis claims its systems are grid-independent, so its taking its servers off the grid at midnight tonight.”

“Why?”

“So they’ll keep running during the blackout, I guess. The utilities are saying that power could be out for twenty-four hours.”

“God forbid that people be without Lux for that long,” I said sarcastically.

“The good news for us is that the entire Gnosis system will be offline tonight from midnight to two a.m. eastern for maintenance.”

“Including Lux,” I said. I felt my pulse pick up.

North nodded. “Which means if we can get this done while the servers are down, we might be able to do it undetected.”

“But won’t people be in the server room during that time? Like, working or whatever?”

“I doubt it,” North replied. “It’s freezing in server rooms, and super loud. And it’s not like Gnosis employees need to be in the room to access the servers anyway—they can get in through the company’s internal network.”

My heart was racing now. “Oh my gosh. We could really pull this off.”

“There’s still a lot to figure out,” North cautioned. “Assuming Tarsus can get us past security, we’d still have to find the terminal, and then I’d have to—”

“The terminal. What is that?”

“The entry point for the system. A machine with a keyboard and a screen. It’s how you—”

I cut him off again. “I saw it. Three screens, a glass desk that looked like a giant touchpad. It was surrounded in copper mesh.”

“Okay, so we found the terminal,” North said. “But we still don’t know how tight the security is on the machine itself. And we won’t know until we get in there.”

“Not we,” I corrected. “I. I’m doing this alone.”

“Like hell you are,” North scoffed. “First of all, there’s no way you could pull this off without me. What we’re talking about is a figure-it-out-once-I’m-in-there kind of thing. I couldn’t tell you how to do this even if I wanted to. Not until I see it. Second, I love you way too much to let you walk into that place alone.”

With a sharp pang, I realized this might be my last chance to say it back. Though I was forcing myself to ignore it, I couldn’t shake the awareness of just how dangerous this plan of ours really was. “I love you too,” I said softly. “But how will we possibly get you in there?”

“Liam always brings you in, right? In a hooded robe?” North shrugged. “I’ll be Liam.”

“If they catch you—”

“They won’t catch me. And so what if they do? You said there’s the serpent, an owl, and a fox, right? With Tarsus on our side, it’s three against two.”

The knot in my stomach loosened a little. North’s confidence was contagious.

“The only question is, how do we take Liam out of commission for a couple of hours?” North asked.

“We roofie him,” I said without hesitation. “It’ll in­capacitate him without killing him, and it’ll screw with his memories.”

“Oh, okay. I’ll just grab the bottle of date-rape pills I have in my medicine cabinet.”

“Not pills,” I corrected. “Has to be injectable. There’s no way we can guarantee that he’ll drink whatever we put it in.”

North gave me an incredulous look. “You’re actually serious?”

“What? It’s what the society uses. And it’ll do exactly what we need it to do.”

North tugged at his Mohawk. “I know we don’t have time to get into this right now, but, holy crap, Rory, this shit is seriously messed up.”

“You’re right. Not the time. We have to go buy roofies.”

“Where, at Walgreens? I’m sure we’ll find them right next to the Advil.”

I crossed my arms, irritated by the sarcasm. “You’re a guy with a Mohawk and tattoos. Don’t you know people?”

“People with Rohypnol?”

“So you don’t know anyone who can get it?”

He started to shake his head but seemed to think of something. “One of my clients is a pharmacist in Greenfield. I could probably get a prescription sleeping serum from him. Something potent but legal. I can message him from my apartment.”

“We need to fill Hershey in anyway,” I said, grabbing the laptop and headphones.

We thanked Ivan and hurried out. After a quick stop at Paradiso to tell Kate that North wouldn’t be coming back to work, we headed up to North’s apartment with coffee and one of every pastry in the café’s glass case.

“Hershey?” I called out when we stepped inside. But the living room was quiet.

“She’s with mystery boy,” North said. “She came by this morning for her bag. She said she was gonna stay at his place for a few days.” His place. So he definitely didn’t live on campus. Or with his parents.

I gnawed on the inside of my bottom lip. My boyfriend didn’t go to Theden or live with his parents. That didn’t make him a psycho killer. Hershey had been hooking up with this guy, whoever he was, for a while. He wasn’t a stranger. And she was Hershey. She could take care of herself.

North had disappeared into his closet. When I joined him, he’d already launched what looked like a chat box on his screen. “This is how I communicate with my clients,” he explained. “It’s a private chat program. It’ll call his handheld and beep three times, signaling that he should log in.”

A few minutes later the guy did, and North started typing.

“He’ll do it,” North said, and grinned. “He’s at the pharmacy now. It’ll be ready in fifteen minutes.” He spun around in his chair and looked at me.

“We’re really doing this,” I said.

North’s brow furrowed. “It’s what you want, right?”

“Absolutely. It’s just—” My voice caught. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“But I got myself into this. You didn’t. You got dragged in by me.”

“You clearly don’t know me as well as I thought you did,” North said. “I don’t get dragged into things, Rory. I’m doing this because I want to. Because what these people are doing is wrong. And because the voice in my head is saying the same thing that yours is.”

“Fear not,” I whispered. North met my gaze and nodded.

“Fear not.”