Free to Fall

34

DR. TARSUS DIED ABOUT TEN YARDS from the Gnosis data center. Her arm had quickly swollen to twice its size and we could tell it hurt, a lot, but she didn’t complain about it once, not even when her skin started to turn blue. When she started coughing, I started crying. I knew it wasn’t fair that I should be crying when she was the one dying, but it literally felt like my heart was breaking apart in my chest. I hadn’t let the thought fully register, but when I’d listened to the audio recording she’d given me, I’d had this sense that maybe, in some messed-up way, she could become the mother figure I’d never had. Yes, I’d hated her almost the entire time I’d known her, but everything she’d done, she’d done for me. I was no expert on motherhood, but that seemed like the essence of it to me.

We’d just come around the last curve of the spiral when she fell against the wall. She looked at North first. “I’m not going to make it there,” she said. Her words were labored, but her tone was matter-of-fact. “You’ll have to use a recording. I don’t know if it’ll work, but it’s worth a try.” She eased herself down the wall until she was sitting, knock-kneed like a little girl. I knelt beside her and took her hand as North fumbled for his iPhone.

She turned to me and smiled. “Your mom would be so proud of you, Aurora.” She spoke slowly, her chest heaving from the effort. “Just promise me— Promise me that when you leave, you won’t ever look back.”

“I love you” came out instead of “I promise.” Laying her hand on my knee, she managed a weak smile.

“I love you too.”

“Whenever you’re ready,” North said gently, his thumb hovering over the record button. His voice sounded funny, as if his throat were as knotted as mine. Dr. Tarsus nodded. North hit record.

“Free to fall,” she said hoarsely, a shallow breath between every word. Her eyes fluttered shut and she shook her head. “I’ll try again,” she said, wheezing, and tried to inhale. “Free. To. Fall.”

My heart sank. I had very little experience with voice recognition software, but I suspected the voice would need to at least sound like the person it was supposed to belong to. Try again, I begged her silently. A few moments passed. What little breath she had was rattling in her chest.

I took her hand and squeezed it. Her lips formed the word go. Soundless, but as commanding as her voice had ever been. We both knew I had no other choice. As I knelt and kissed her cheek, the tears I’d been holding back spilled over, dampening her face. “Thank you,” I whispered. “For everything.” She smiled, the sweat on her face glistening in the flicker of North’s torch. Then her face went slack and she was gone.

Neither North nor I spoke as we made our way to the stone wall.

“Don’t use your fingers,” he said when the stone facade retracted, bathing us in fluorescent light. “Fingerprints.”

I nodded and touched the glass with the knuckle of my thumb. The screen lit up with twelve boxes again, but the first four numbers were different this time.

I’d written the first fifty numbers in the Fibonacci sequence on the inside of my forearm in preparation for this moment—North’s idea—and 10,946 was the twenty-third number on the list, which meant that the next eight digits were 6, 1, 7, 7, 1, 1, 2, 8. I typed them as fast I could.

As soon as my knuckle hit the eight, the glass door slid open with a whoosh of warm air, just like in my simulation. I followed North inside the small chamber. A few seconds later the glass slid shut and the stone facade retracted back into place, concealing us. He pulled out his phone and stepped up to the microphone.

“You think it’ll work?” I asked him.

“Maybe,” he said, but he sounded doubtful. He tried the first recording first. I knew before I heard the words access denied that we were screwed. Not even I would’ve recognized her voice if I hadn’t heard her record it. The second recording was even worse.

“Damn it,” I whispered, and squeezed my eyes shut. I waited for the Doubt to give me guidance, but I heard Dr. Tarsus’s voice instead.

Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.

My eyes sprung open. “North,” I said urgently. “The audio recording—the one Tarsus made—it’s still on your phone, right?”

“Yeah, why?”

“She said free to fall. In the recording. Toward the beginning, I think.”

North was already pulling up the file. He nudged the track bar to the right and pressed play. Dr. Tarsus’s voice—her regular, healthy voice—filled the small chamber.

“It’s right after that,” I told him, and he bumped the slider forward.

“It’s how we’re made I suppose” came her voice through the tiny speaker. “How did Milton put it? ‘Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.’ The choice was ours, and we chose ourselves.”

North slid the track bar back and lifted his phone back up to the mic. As he held down the record button, I held my breath. It sounded just like her, but was the intonation right?

Please let it work, I prayed.

“Look,” North said suddenly, pointing at the control panel I’d seen in my simulation. One by one, the green lights were turning red. “That’s a security panel. Each of those lights is connected to a camera. I think they’re going offline.” A few seconds later there was a loud clang as steel slid against steel and the vault door disengaged.

We were in.

Part of me was still expecting to see workers inside, doing their thing, but North was right. The massive blue-lit space was completely empty. And loud. And freezing. I closed the door behind us, but not all the way. I had no idea how it opened from the inside, if at all.

North was tugging on a pair of gloves. They were thin, with rubber pads on the fingertips. “Hacker hands,” he explained, yelling over the hum of the machines. “No prints.” Seeing the gloves reminded me that this moment, or some version of it anyway, had always been part of our plan. But instead of reassuring me, it only emphasized how far we’d veered off course. I blinked quickly, afraid of what I’d see behind my eyelids if they stayed shut too long.

“I thought the servers didn’t go offline until midnight,” I said as I followed him between rows of servers toward the terminal. The floor beneath us was made out of some sort of metal mesh. I could see smooth gray concrete several feet beneath it.

“They don’t,” North replied, touching the keyboard in front of the terminal to light up its three screens. “Which makes it harder, but not impossible, to hide our tracks.” The screens were locked, with a login box at the center of each one.

“Now what?” I started to ask, but North had already bypassed the login screen. He was typing at lightning speed, not glancing at his fingers once as lines and lines of computer code appeared on screen. His eyes kept darting from screen to screen as he opened and closed about a thousand different windows. Hunting for the Lux program code. What if he couldn’t find it?

I started to pace.

“Rory,” I heard North say.

“What?”

“Stop pacing. It’s stressing me out.”

I sat down on the grated metal floor behind him. “I just feel so useless right now. What can I do to help?”

Without taking his eyes off the screens in front of him, he reached into his back pocket and handed me his iPhone. “Find us some good music.”

Hours passed as the music played. North hummed a little as he worked. I was quiet, watching the back of him, waiting for the click click clicking of fingers on keys to go quiet. Finally it did. It was after eleven.

“Rory,” he said urgently. I was tracing the squares of grating beneath me with my fingertips. “I’m in the algorithm. I need you to check my work to make sure I got the changes right.”

I scrambled to my feet. There was a string of words and symbols in a box on the center screen. “Uh. I have no idea what any of that means.”

“I know that,” North said, sounding testy. I looked at him then and saw how tired he was.

“What can I do?” I said.

“Read it out loud,” he told me, closing his eyes. “My eyes are swimming, I can’t even see it anymore. Just read exactly what you see.”

He kept his eyes closed the entire time I read it, his brow furrowed tight. When I got to the end, the muscles in his face went slack.

“North?”

Several seconds passed. My heart sank to my knees. I said his name again, quieter this time, almost a whisper.

“There was a fifteen-minute period about an hour ago when I was convinced it couldn’t be done,” he said with his eyes shut. “The algorithm was too nuanced to just do a one-to-one exchange of the inputs, not without driving people’s cars into one another or risking mass suicide.” Mass suicide. At the whim of an algorithm, no less. I pictured that dopey smile on Beck’s face as he interacted with Lux and shuddered. “I couldn’t see a way around it,” North said. “I was ready to give up.” He opened his eyes finally and looked at me.

“But?”

“But then I heard the voice. ‘It’s there’ was all it said.” He shook his head in amazement. “And at that moment, I saw it. A very slight variation in the way the algorithm treated certain categories of threats. And I realized if I could isolate these categories and come up with a way to treat them as a sort of preferred opportunity, a trump card almost, I could essentially override the formula instead of just reversing it. It meant I had to create an additional command string within the algorithm, which made the whole thing about nine thousand times harder, but I think it’ll work.”

I wrapped my arms around his neck and climbed into his chair, sliding my knees in next to his hips. He laid his hands on my thighs, sending a ripple up my spine. “You,” I said, “are a genius.”

He let me kiss him, but then he pulled back and shook his head. “No. I can’t take credit for this. If it were up to me, I would’ve given up.”

I started to argue with him but thought better of it. The Few needed the credit for their victories. The boy I loved didn’t. That’s why I loved him.

“So can we get out of here now?” I asked.

“Almost,” North said. “I just have to copy all these changes to the versioned control system and deploy the code to the servers, then wait for Gnosis to initiate the reboot.” I glanced at the clock on his screen. It was 11:53.

“Is seven minutes enough time to do whatever you need to do?” I asked.

“Should be,” North said. “Then, once the system reboots, I’ll run a script to hide my tracks and deploy the worm. Then we can get out of here.”

“The worm?”

“It’s our diversion,” North explained. “In case someone at Gnosis figures out that we were inside the network. They’ll see the worm and think they got us.”

“So crafty. Did the voice tell you to do that, too?”

North grinned and kissed my nose. “Nah. That one was mostly me.”

He leaned around me to type on the touchpad on the desk. I kept my eyes on his face, watching him work. All the fatigue I’d seen before had vanished.

I nuzzled his ear with my nose. “You’re amazing,” I whispered, and went to kiss his cheek.

“Shit,” he said, his whole body tensing.

I jerked back. “What?”

“I tripped an alarm,” he said, cursing under his breath. He was typing furiously.

“What kind of alarm?” I asked as I tried to slide off his lap without touching either of his arms. My heart was pounding in my chest and my legs felt like jelly beneath me. At what point did we run?

“I don’t know.”

I looked at the center screen. At first I thought it was strings of computer code, but then I realized that it was rows of Greek characters. “Wait,” I told North, touching his arm. “I think it’s a riddle.”

“A riddle?”

“Yes,” I said, not as certain as I sounded. “Just give it a second.” Just as North lifted his fingers from the touchpad, six lines at the center of the screen morphed into English.

I formd them free, and free they must remain,

Till they enthrall themselves; I else must change

Thir nature, and revoke the high decree

Unchangeable, eternal, which ordain’d

Thir freedom, they themselves ordain’d thir fall.

PRESS THE NECESSARY KEY TO PROCEED.

In my peripheral vision, I saw North’s eyes go wide with surprise. “These are lines from Paradise Lost. The ones your mom left you.” He looked over at me. “The Greek, that’s how you knew what it was?”

I nodded. “Not what it said, just that it was a puzzle. The ones we had to answer during the evaluation process, they all started as red Greek text. But those were—” I was about to say timed, but right then my eyes caught the little clock at the bottom right corner of the screen, racing down from sixty. One minute. That’s all we had. “Hurry,” I said urgently. “We have only sixty seconds.”

“Rory, there’s no way I can crack the code that fast.”

“So we’ll solve it. ‘Press the necessary key to proceed.’ The answer has to be in the quotation. That’s why it’s there.”

For several seconds we were quiet, both of us just staring at the screen. “Rory, there are one hundred and one keys on this keyboard,” North said finally, tugging on his Mohawk in frustration. “And we’ve got thirty-two seconds left. I don’t think—”

“Could it be the letter e?” I asked. “There are a bunch of them missing. Formd, thir. Maybe we’re supposed to complete the words.”

North shook his head. “I don’t think so. Milton wrote those words without the e’s. That’s how they look in the original.”

“Okay, so it’s got to be something in the meaning, then. What does—?”

With a start, North bolted upright in his chair. “Milton is talking about man’s imprisonment here,” he said excitedly. “So the ‘necessary’ key is the escape key.”

I considered this. It made sense. And it was clever, which made me think it had to be right. North’s finger was hovering over the ESC key, waiting for my cue. There were only twenty seconds left. Heart racing, I squeezed my eyes shut. It was time to decide.

Free they must remain. Suddenly I remembered what the serpent had said during initiation. The fool will always seek a master.

“No,” I said abruptly, my eyes popping open. “There’s nothing to escape from. That was Milton’s whole point, right? ‘Till they enthrall themselves.’ It’s only a trap if we let it be. To proceed, all we need to do is enter.”

North didn’t hesitate or question me. He hit the enter key and instantly, all the words disappeared. All but one.

PROCEED.

Almost immediately, a new window opened and the words COMMAND_COMPLETED appeared on screen.

“Thank you,” I heard North murmur as his body went slack against the chair. He looked back at me. “I thought we were screwed.”

“But we’re not?” I asked, just to make sure.

“Not so far,” he said, laying his forehead on my stomach. “Now we wait.”

I stared at the clock at the bottom of the screen as it ticked from 11:58 to 11:59 to 12:00. When nothing happened, I tapped North’s head.

“It’s midnight,” I told him. “Nothing’s happening.”

“It could take a couple of minutes,” North said, his voice muffled against my sweatshirt. “Someone at Gnosis has to initiate the reboot, and he’ll want to be sure everyone is logged out of the internal network before he does.”

“And the new algorithm will go into effect when the servers come back on?” I asked him.

“It should.” He sat back in his chair. “Although I’m not sure how the solar storm will affect Lux generally. But as long as the app is working, the algorithm should too.”

“And what about us? Will we be okay?”

“Oh, we’ll be fine,” he said, pulling me back down into his lap. “We’ll hole up in my apartment and play battery-operated electronics and eat cold SpaghettiOs from the can.”

At 12:02, there was a wave of whew sounds as the rows and rows of machines around us began to power down. The terminal was the last to shut off, and when it did, the room was completely quiet. The emergency lights gave the room an eerie green glow.

“What happens if someone comes down here?” I whispered.

North didn’t look up. “We run.”

But no one came. A few minutes later the servers turned back on again in a ripple of beeps and whirls. After the quiet, the noise was unnerving. I felt uneasy now.

A loud clang behind me made me jerk so violently, North’s head snapped back. “What was that?” I whispered.

“I don’t know,” North said, sounding as concerned as I felt. He spun in his chair and we both saw it. A wall where the society’s secret door had been.

“It must be programmed to close on restart,” North said, sounding sick.

I didn’t respond. We’re trapped, I told myself, because clearly my brain wasn’t grasping it. If it were, I’d be freaking out, and I was just sitting there, completely still, staring at the wall. You couldn’t tell there’d ever been a door there.

“Rory?” I heard North say.

“There has to be a way to get aboveground from here,” I said calmly. So calmly, it caught me by surprise. But my mom hadn’t let me down yet, and she’d sewn two orange Xs on my blanket. There had to be another way out.

“All I see are elevators,” North replied. “Two Gnosis elevators that require key card access. But the door we came through, it has to open from the inside, right?” His voice sounded tight. Panicky.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I’m not sure the Few would risk someone discovering a way to open it. But I don’t think we’re stuck. I think there’s a way to get from this room all the way outside.” I pointed at the terminal screen. “You finish what you need to do. I’ll get us out of here.”

North looked skeptical, but he nodded and brought his eyes back to his screen, which was now lit up with the Gnosis login box.

I jogged around the periphery of the room first. The two elevators North saw and an alarmed door marked EMERGENCY EXIT were the only visible ways out. There wasn’t even a bathroom down here. I scanned the ceiling next, but it was ridiculously high up, so even if there’d been an opening, we never could’ve reached it. If there was a way out of here, it had to be in the floor. Starting at the opposite corner of the room, at least a football field from where North was sitting, I went row by row, combing the cement beneath the mesh grating. All I saw was smooth concrete. My stomach twisted in knots. Had I been wrong?

I waited for words of comfort, some assurance from the voice that there was a way out. But I didn’t get any. I hadn’t gotten any, not since we hatched this plan. Not once had the voice promised me that we’d get away with this.

I looked up again, and this time my eyes caught the security camera mounted on the wall to my left. I froze.

Oh, my God. The cameras. If the reboot reset the door, it probably turned the cameras back on too. I opened my mouth to scream North’s name but quickly shut it and went sprinting toward him with my head down instead.

I was halfway there when the toe of my shoe caught the grating and I went flying. My hands hit the ground first, hard, metal digging into flesh, and my knees banged down right after. My eyes smarted with the pain, but I quickly forgot it when I saw what was beneath me. A round manhole cover in the concrete with the letters έξοδος engraved into its face. I didn’t know what the letters meant, but I was pretty sure manhole covers didn’t come standard with Greek engraving. My eyes swept the floor, looking for a way to get beneath the grating. It was lined up against the bottom edge of a nearby server bank, so I almost missed it. A latch.

I scrambled to my feet and went running toward North. Without saying anything, I pulled his hoodie up over his head. “The cameras,” I whispered in his ears. His whole body went rigid. At that exact moment, the speakers above and around us began to scream with a shrill, piercing sound. We’d been seen.

“I found a way out,” I said, my lips pressed to North’s ear, and tugged on his arm.

“Wait,” he said. “I can delete the footage. I need to delete the footage.”

My nails dug into his forearm. “There’s no time.”

“The Gnosis complex is six miles away,” he said, already typing. A flurry of windows opened and closed as he flew through the network. “Even if there’s an underground train between here and there, it’ll take them at least five minutes to get here. I can do this in sixty seconds. I saw the feed earlier. I know where it is.” The sweat on his brow was back, but he was determined. I stared at the two elevator doors, my heart pounding so hard my ribs ached. “Done,” North said finally, pushing back his chair so hard it went flying.

I took off toward the manhole, North right on my heels. The latch did exactly what I thought it would, freeing a portion of the grate, which lifted like a cellar door. Once beneath it, we relatched the grate and, on our hands and knees, started twisting the manhole with our fingers in the pick holes. It turned easily. Moving it was harder. It must’ve weighed fifty pounds, and on all fours it was difficult to get enough leverage to lift it, especially with the alarm screaming in our ears.

We’d just gotten it to the side when we heard the elevator doors whoosh open. Go, North mouthed, and pointed down the hole. I peered into the blackness. It was impossible to tell how far down it was, but since there was no ladder, I figured it couldn’t be that far. So I eased my legs into the opening then slid around onto my belly and lowered the rest of my body down until I was hanging just by my hands. When my face passed beneath the floor, I was hit with the stench of rotten eggs and a terrible fear that I’d made a mistake. “Please,” I murmured, kicking off my left shoe with my right foot. Please don’t let me break my neck, please let this work, please don’t let them find us. When I heard the shoe hit rock a second later, I let go.

I kept my knees bent, so when my feet landed, the impact pitched me forward, onto my hands. The ground was rough and prickly beneath me, like coarse stone. I couldn’t have been more than fifteen feet down, but the light from above did little to illuminate the dank space. I heard shouting and running above me and a sliding sound as North tried to move the manhole cover back into place before he dropped down. He had his fingers through the pick holes and was trying to heave the metal disk over as he dangled from it, his feet just above my head. With a jarring clang it slipped into place, leaving us in complete darkness. North landed with a soft thud beside me.

“Do you think they saw you?” I asked him.

“Let’s not wait to find out,” North replied. His face lit up as he turned on his phone’s flashlight. He revolved slowly with his hand extended, the weak beam revealing the smallness of the space we were in. The stone walls shimmered in the light, as if they were flecked with gold and might have been beautiful had their presence not meant that we were trapped. I felt a pressing, suffocating weight pushing in on me. The opening we’d come through was now sealed with a heavy metal plate. Even if I stood on North’s shoulders, I wouldn’t be able to reach it, and even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to lift it enough to slide it over.

“Rory,” I heard North say. “There’s an opening over there. It’s narrow, but it looks like it was made to pass through.” I followed his light and saw a slit carved in the rock behind me, almost hidden in a shadow. “Let’s go,” he said, and took my hand.

The ground slanted down on the other side of the slit, taking us farther into the earth instead of toward the surface. The passageway was tight, the walls on either side grazing North’s shoulders as we walked, and the ceiling was too low to stand up straight. As we inched down the rocky slant, crouched so as not to bang our heads, I focused on my breath, refusing to panic again. If we really were stuck down there, there would be plenty of time to freak out once we were sure of it. The sulfur egg smell got worse as we descended. “What is that?” I asked, pulling my shirt up over my nose.

“I don’t know,” North replied. “But I’m really glad we didn’t eat before this.”

A few minutes later we reached flat surface again. A room, bigger than the first one, but with a lower ceiling. North could stand upright, but only barely. The walls around us were textured and uneven and looked bronze when North shone the light on them. There was only one way forward, another tunnel, this one rounder and more uneven, as if it’d been there longer. As we moved toward it, North’s light caught some writing on the wall. It was a drawing, crudely done, of a mine cart moving toward a tunnel. Seeing the image, it clicked. We were in the old pyrite mine. The shimmer in the walls wasn’t gold but its cheap impostor. It was ironic, or maybe just fitting, that the Few had commandeered this space for their empire. They’d built their castle on a foundation of fool’s gold.

I followed North into the tunnel. This one sloped up and was even more slippery than the first, rock sliding on rock. More than once I lost my balance and landed on my hands. It was tempting to take off my shoes. Bare feet had to be better than no-traction Toms. But there was no way to know what I might step on, and so I left them on. When it got steep, North stopped to let me pass him, and somehow it was easier to stay balanced knowing that he was there to catch me if I fell.

We’d been climbing for a while when North’s phone made the sound I’d been dreading. The low battery whimper. We didn’t acknowledge it between us. We just kept climbing, shoes and hands on rock the only sound in the silence. There was no use saying what we both were thinking. If this was a dead end, we were done.

I slipped again, and this time the rock was wet beneath my hands. “There’s water on the rocks,” I said over my shoulder to North. I could feel him right on my heels. “It has to be coming from somewhere aboveground, right?”

“You’d think,” North said, his voice laced with the hope I felt. We kept climbing.

When the ground leveled out again, North caught my arm. “Wait,” he cautioned. “There could be a drop-off.” He shone his light on the floor and around us. My heart sank when I saw the solid walls. The tunnel we’d come through was the only way out.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to curse the voice that had told me not to be afraid when it knew this is where we’d end up. But right behind my anger was the realization that this was exactly the moment that voice had been trying to prepare me for. Fear not for I am with you. Not as some amulet to protect me from all harm, but as a refuge when there was nowhere left to turn.

You did what you came to do, whispered the voice. And instead of anger, instead of fear, I felt peace.

North was at the wall, combing the surface with his light. “Hey, come look at this,” he called. It was another drawing, etched in black in the shimmery stone. It was simple, just a circle and three lines, but it was so clearly the shape of a dove. I reached out my hand to touch it, moved beyond words by its presence. What was it doing here? Why a dove? It felt like a sign. A gift.

As I traced its simple shape with my fingertip, North’s phone finally went dead. Neither of us reacted. We’d been expecting it, after all. And for me, it was a relief not to be waiting anymore, dreading the moment the light would go out. Now that it had, we could get on with it.

North reached for me in the darkness, pulling me to him. His hands slid up my arms to my face, and though I couldn’t see him at all, in a weird way, I could. Not with my eyes, but with my memory, which felt more real somehow. More true. When he kissed me, I forgot everything else. The darkness, the stench, my thirst. Our fate. All I could feel were his lips on my lips, his body pressed against mine. All I could smell were his skin and his citrusy shampoo. All I could hear was his breath, and mine, hot and fast as we clung to each other, each wanting more of the other.

Then, out of nowhere, there was a cracking sound above us, so loud I thought the earth was breaking apart. We froze.

“Was that—?”

“Thunder,” North said.

My hand flew to the place where the dove was. All at once I understood why it was there.

“The miners,” I said breathlessly. “The ones who were trapped in the mine. They were here.”

“What? How do you know?”

“I saw it on Panopticon. The care packages the rescue workers sent down here, they were called doves. The hole they used was eventually widened to get the miners out.”

The thunder boomed again, even louder this time.

“The opening is above us,” I said. “We didn’t see it before because we never looked up.” I tilted my head back.

A raindrop hit my cheek.

I didn’t react, not right away. I waited for another one, and another, until the rain was spraying my face, and then I laughed.

“What is it?” North asked.

“It’s raining,” I said, pulling him into the icy spray.

“It’s raining,” he said, astonished. Then he laughed too.

It took us a couple of tries to get me up on his shoulders, but when we did, it was easy for me to feel the opening in the rock. It was a perfect, smooth circle, as wide as the manhole we’d come through. And a few inches into it, there was the frayed end of a rope.