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.”
32
WHILE NORTH TOOK HIS MOTORBIKE to the pharmacy in Greenfield, I stayed behind to wait for Hershey. We’d decided to leave for North’s apartment in Manhattan as soon as we got out of the tomb, so this might be my last chance to say good-bye. If we pulled this off, we’d have to disappear.
Our plan was actually pretty simple. We’d decided to manufacture chaos by reprogramming Lux to direct Gold users into their threats and weaknesses instead of away from them, enabling people to experience the moments the Few were so intent on keeping them from— and throwing a massive wrench into their daily schedules in the process. It wasn’t breaking the shackles, exactly, but if people’s lives were thrown off kilter, maybe they’d look up from their screens. Maybe they’d seek guidance from somewhere other than the shiny gold box on their wrists. It was all we could do, really. Lay the groundwork. In the end, people had to choose.
I formed them free and free they must remain. I saw the quote from Paradise Lost differently now. The Few hadn’t changed human nature. They hadn’t taken away free will—they didn’t have the power to do that. Yes, the nanobots in people’s brains were manufacturing a sense of trust, leading them to blindly put their faith in Lux, but those tiny machines weren’t dictating their choices. Nobody was. Nobody could, not even God. It was the message on Griffin’s ring. Steinbeck’s timshel. Thou mayest. With Lux, people were simply choosing not to choose. We had to remind them that they still could.
We were optimistic. After seeing Beck’s Lux profile and my reaction to it, North had started clicking through Lux profiles randomly, looking at the users’ threats and weaknesses. As it turned out, there were some that appeared on nearly every profile, so he’d started cataloging the repeats. Synchronicity, serendipity, and sunsets, for example, were common threats. As were unfulfilled expectations and unanticipated delays. Meanwhile, the same five traits appeared almost universally as user weaknesses. Patience, compassion, humility, gratitude, and mercy. Their antitheses—instant gratification, smugness, confidence, entitlement, and indifference—were at the top of nearly every strengths list. Our plan was to keep the app’s existing algorithm but change the variables. If North got the code right, our modified version of Lux would manufacture the scenarios it had previously been programmed to avoid. I didn’t know exactly what to expect if we succeeded, but I knew that if the Few were keeping people from having them, then these types of experiences—moments of compassion, of mercy, of gratitude, of humility—must be powerful. I kept thinking of the way Hershey acted after I helped her study for her midterms. She was a recipient of my grace that night, and it changed her.
I put my earbuds in and pressed play on Tarsus’s recording. North had put it on his iPhone like I’d asked, and since he’d been gone, I’d listened to it three more times. As Tarsus spoke, I pulled my legs up under me and closed my eyes. Focusing on my breath, I tried to clear my brain of its whirling, fruitless worry. In . . . Out . . . In. My breath sounded like the ocean, or like the wind.
The wind blows wherever it pleases, I heard the voice say. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.
So it was with the voice, I realized. It, like the wind, could not be predicted or contained. I held on to these words, letting them repeat like a refrain as I steadied my breaths. I couldn’t control who the voice would speak to, or even when it would choose to speak to me. All I could do was decide to listen each time it did.
Peace took ahold of my heart as I sat there, its presence filling me with the certainty that there was purpose in our plan and confidence that we would carry it through. I remembered the words the voice spoke the day I arrived at Theden, the promise I’d forgotten until now. You won’t fail, it had whispered. I waited now for an assurance that nothing bad would happen to us in the process, but none ever came.
“Rory?” I felt a hand on my shoulder and a gentle shake. Groggy with sleep, I opened my eyes. The light had faded in the living room, the sun a warm amber through the slats in the window shade. My earbuds were still in my ears, but the recording had long since cut off. North was next to me on the couch, a pharmacy bag on his lap. He brushed the hair out of my face. “I thought you were meditating,” he said, then smiled. “Until I heard a snore.”
I punched him in the arm. “So you got it?”
North pulled a small vial and a box of needles from the bag. “One dose of intravenous triazolam. It should sedate him within minutes and keep him out for at least eight hours. If all goes according to plan, we could be in Manhattan before he wakes up.”
I only nodded. If all goes according to plan. That was a big if.
North glanced at his watch. “It’s almost six,” he told me. “I need to get all my gear to the storage unit before it closes. And you should probably go pack up whatever you want to bring with you and get it back here before you go to Liam’s.” The plan was for me to go to Liam’s dorm room a few minutes before curfew, under the guise of being nervous about initiation. His roommate had flown to Birmingham that morning for his grandmother’s funeral and wouldn’t be back until the following day, so Liam would be alone. Since he no doubt kept his robe hidden, I’d have to somehow convince him to show it to me before I pricked him. We’d talked about waiting until Liam left for the cemetery but decided that leaving him out in the open was too risky, for him and for us. It was safer for everyone if he spent the night in bed. Once I had him tucked in, I’d take his robe and meet North in the cemetery to wait for the text from the Few. North wanted to come with me to Liam’s dorm, but we couldn’t risk someone seeing him, especially not with the restraining order still in effect.
“Not yet,” I told North, sliding my back down the couch and pulling him on top of me. His body tensed up in surprise. I held him tight against me, arching my back to press against him. He framed my face with his forearms and kissed me, gently at first, then deeper. Hands trembling, I fumbled for the button on his jeans.
“Whoa,” North said, pulling away from me. I met his gaze and brought my hands back to the button, tugging it loose. “Rory—” he began.