Once he was gone, Auden gave me a weird look. “What was that?”
“What?”
“The two of you.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” He headed back toward the group of mechs waiting for their field trip to begin. “Let’s just go.”
We took two cars. Jude and Auden sat in the front seat of ours, not talking. I squeezed into the back with Quinn and some guy whose name I didn’t hear the first time—and didn’t get much chance to ask a second time, since he spent most of the ride with his tongue down Quinn’s throat. I looked out the window.
The skyline carved dark, jagged chunks out of the sky. The car sped along swooping bands of concrete, a purposeless, unending sculpture of roads that dipped over and under one another, splitting, merging, crisscrossing; so much space and all of it empty. Even without the curfew no one would be stupid enough to enter a city at night. And no one who lived there had a car. That would have guzzled too much fuel; that would have made it too easy to get out.
We parked on a narrow street. Without a word Quinn and the other mech began collecting armfuls of debris from the gutter while Jude pulled a stained beige tarp from the trunk and draped it over the car. The gutter trash went on top.
“Best way to keep it safe,” Jude explained. Across the street the passengers of the second car were doing the same.
It was eerily quiet. The dark buildings shot up on all sides, and I reminded myself that at least some of them were full of people, staying warm, staying dry, staying off the streets after curfew. But everything was so still and empty, it was hard to imagine that anyone was alive here. The group moved stealthily, stepping lightly, staying clustered in a pack. Only Auden breathed.
“What now?” I whispered.
“We look around,” Jude said. “And we try not to get caught.”
Caught by who? I wanted to ask. But I didn’t really want an answer.
This city had been lucky. No major bombings, so no radioactive debris. Too far east for the Water Wars, too far north for the flooding. They’d gotten hit by the Comstock flu strain, but no worse than any of the other population centers, and in the last bio-attack, before the cities cleared out for good, they’d lost less than a million.
They’d been lucky.
Not lucky enough for anyone to stay, at least voluntarily, but that much was true for all the cities. Who would be crazy enough to stick around an energy-poor, germ-ridden death trap if they had enough credit to get the hell out?
We wandered down the broad, empty avenues, flashlight beams playing across the pavement. I tried to imagine what it would be like to live in a place where the lights went off two hours after sunset, where you could only link in once a day if you were lucky enough to find a screen that worked, where the punishment for energy theft was death.
I couldn’t.
There wasn’t enough to go around, I reminded myself. Of anything. There wasn’t enough energy for everyone to stay wired all day, every day. There wasn’t enough fuel or enough road for everyone to own cars. There weren’t enough cows—at least not enough free-range, grass-fed cows, now that you weren’t allowed to raise anything else—for everyone to eat meat. There wasn’t enough space for everyone to have a kid. Either we would all have to suffer—or some would have to sacrifice.
I was just glad it was them and not me.
I was also glad my power cells were fully loaded. There was no wireless web of energy here, and if something happened, if I somehow got left behind, there would be nowhere to recharge. After a few days I would just… fade out.
“Those used to light up,” Auden whispered in my ear, pointing at the thick, empty screens papered across almost every building. “Like giant pop-ups. Telling people what to buy.”
“What a waste of energy,” I whispered back. Maybe these people deserved to live in the dark.
Our feet crunched with every step. Crushed glass, I decided, as we passed broken window after broken window. Everything here was broken.
I wanted to go home.
A distant howl cut through the silence.
“What was that?” I whispered, freezing in place.
“Just a dog.” Jude didn’t bother to whisper. “Fighting it out for who gets to run the place. Like the rats and the roaches haven’t already won.” He turned sharply to the right, leading us down another wide avenue, its gutters flowing with trash. Auden was breathing shallowly and, for the first time, it occurred to me how the place must stink, with its mounds of garbage heaped on urine-stained pavement. “This way.”
Two blocks later we heard the scream. High-pitched, piercing, it went on and on and—it stopped. It didn’t fade away. It just stopped.
That was no dog.
We went deeper into the city, and I tried not to wonder how we would find our way out.
Jude stopped short in front of a building so tall it blotted out most of the sky. “Last stop for orgs,” he said, staring at Auden.
Auden glared back. “Meaning?”
“Building’s locked down, and all those biosensors…” Jude smirked. “You don’t want to start panting and get us caught, now do you?”
“I’m supposed to wait out here while you… do what, exactly?”
“Just taking a look around. We’ll be back before you get too scared.”
“I’m not scared,” Auden said fiercely.
Jude shrugged. “Great. Then you don’t mind if we—”
“You’re not going with them?” Auden half-said, half-asked, grabbing my arm.
I paused. “I don’t have to. I can wait down here with you… if you want.” I knew I should stay.
But I didn’t want to.
“No.” Auden closed his eyes for a moment. “You’re the one who wanted to do this. So you should do it. All the way.”
Jude chuckled softly. “Funny, she never struck me as an all-the-way kind of girl.”
I ignored him.
“You sure?” I asked Auden.
“Yeah. Go.” He gave me a weak smile. “Be careful.”
“You too.”
Jude and one of the other guys, the tall, brooding one named Riley, bashed open one of the doors, and we crept inside. It was even darker in there, a broad space smudged with shadows. A screen glinted in the beam of someone’s flashlight, and then another and another. This is where the city people came to link in, I realized. It explained why the building was locked down. It didn’t explain what we were doing there.
Jude led us to a bank of elevators, and we waited as Riley pried open a control panel and dug his hands into the mess of wiring.
“Isn’t the electricity shut off?” I asked.
“They keep it running low-level in this building,” Jude said. “For the hardware. Easy to tap into if you know what you’re doing.”
“And he knows what he’s doing?” I said, nodding toward Riley.
“He knows a lot of things. You don’t hear any alarms going, do you?”
I shook my head.
“Thank Riley.”
A few seconds later the elevator doors popped open. The group stepped on, but when I tried to follow, Jude held me back. “We’ll take the next one,” he said.
Before I could argue, the doors shut, and we were alone.
“What do you want?” I said.
“What do you want?”
Another set of doors opened, and we stepped into the small space. Together. The doors shut behind us, and the elevator whooshed up the shaft. Jude turned to face me, backing me into a corner.
“Touch me and I’ll kill you,” I hissed.
He just laughed. “A, you’ve really got to train yourself to stop thinking in outdated terms, like life and death, and B, I have zero interest in touching you. Not at the moment, at least.”
I promised myself I had no interest in touching him, either. “So what the hell is this about?”