Counselor Nigel planted Yahvi in the chair, then withdrew from the room. As if responding to a signal, the anteaters closed in, one on each side, one blocking the exit, one facing her.
“You are Yahvi Stewart-Radhakrishnan,” the Aggregate thing said in its childlike voice. “You have entered Free Nation U.S. without permission and in a hostile manner.”
“Correct,” she said. Given her heaving chest and constricted throat, she was lucky she could utter a word.
“What did you hope to accomplish?”
“To reconnect with fellow humans,” she said. Then, realizing there was no point in hiding anything, she added, “And to destroy all of you.”
A different Aggregate to her left asked the next question. “How would this destruction be accomplished?”
Her parents would freak out if they heard this, but the Aggregates would learn anyway. “By importing a virus that would use your own ability to communicate as a vector.”
She had hoped for some kind of response: nothing. Maybe they already knew. Then a third Aggregate, to her right, said, “Are you carrying this virus with you?”
She so wanted to smile and say, “You bet! It’s right here in my pocket!” Except that this was no place for jokes . . . and she didn’t have a pocket. “It’s in our cargo.”
From behind her, a different Aggregate said, “Why are you so cooperative?”
“The counselors convinced me it would be to my benefit,” she said.
So far the questioning was no more taxing than what Yahvi had experienced with THE—aside from the creepy nature of the questioners. A pause gave her time to remember just what it was she and every human hated about the Reivers.
It wasn’t just their resemblance, in one mode, to terrestrial tropical bugs that would swarm and sting. Yahvi thought the anteater model was close to terrifying in its sounds, its inability to be still, its inexplicable behavior.
They reproduced quickly, too, using up resources and quickly imposing their will on everything around them. Creatures that got in the way or failed to get out of the way with sufficient speed were simply . . . eliminated. One fact Rachel had shared with Yahvi before Adventure’s launch: The population of the former United States had fallen from 330,000,000 in 2019 to two thirds that. “It might even be less,” she had said, “because that isn’t a census number, just an ISRO estimate based on acreage for food production and consumption. The Reivers are slowly eliminating human beings.”
And that was the problem, Yahvi realized. What she hated about the Reivers was their lack of any detectable emotions or concern for others—or for themselves! Their formations would march into harm’s way, being picked off in twos and threes like soldiers in a Civil War charge, never stopping or changing course. What kind of beings gave up their lives so easily? Eagerly?
Maybe you didn’t mind dying if you were just one element in a larger machine.
But that was a terrifying thought, too—
They were closing in now. She could actually smell them, a tangy odor that reminded her of the subway passages within Keanu: old, machine-related, nasty.
She wanted to scream.
And then she blacked out.
When she woke up, the Aggregates had backed off . . . and the first sensation she noted was a burning smell. Her? God, the skin on her left leg was blistered! It didn’t hurt, really. There was a gel of some kind on it.
Fearing that they had drilled into her skull and detected the transmitter, she touched her head. No, thank God.
But her clothes were in disarray, as if they had stripped and then possibly probed her.
And how long had she been out? It was night; the darkness outside the windows hadn’t changed.
She jumped to her feet, towering half a meter over them, shouting, “What did you do to me?”
An Aggregate in the corner said, “You were examined.”
She pointed to her leg. “Did you put something in me?” She was afraid that her head wasn’t the only possible receptacle.
A different Aggregate spoke. “You were examined.”
Was that a yes or a no? God, she hated these things. Her frustration caused her to lose control, weeping and shouting, “I’ve told you everything I know! I’m a child! And I need to see my parents!”
To her amazement, the Aggregate formation performed a dancelike maneuver, eight of them exiting the room, leaving four to arrange themselves around Yahvi. “Follow the formation,” the one to her left said.
That was easy enough, though the damage to her leg made walking tricky. It wasn’t the skin that hurt; she experienced sharp pains up and down the leg, as if it had been shot full of electricity.
Which was probably what had happened. Yahvi wondered why the Aggregates had resorted to these harsh techniques—hadn’t they been able to tell that she was being truthful?
Maybe they had orders to torture her and it didn’t matter what she’d said.
Maybe they were just mean.
The ground floor of the Edwards building was buzzing with so many Aggregate formations that Yahvi thought she would black out again, from the noise, the sight, and, now that she was sensitized to it, the smell. The whole scene suggested chaos.
She saw several THE counselors, too, including Nigel, Cory, and Ivetta, who watched her from across the room with a look that Yahvi found troubling. It was as if they were surprised she was still walking, still alive!
Counselor Nigel stepped forward, sliding between whirling Aggregates with a grace Yahvi didn’t expect. “We didn’t know,” he said.
“Didn’t know what?” Yahvi said, forced to shout over the buzzing. She waited for an elbow in her ribs from one of her escorts.
“The thing you mentioned.” Counselor Nigel looked human and vulnerable for the first time. “It’s bad for them.”
The thing she had mentioned? Oh, Yahvi thought: the cloud in the east.
Rachel and Pav were sitting outside in a tiny quadrangle filled with metal tables. It was a place for lunch or even a picnic, Yahvi realized, in better times. Or at least in daylight.
They flung themselves at each other. Yahvi heard a groan from her father, and saw, even in the near-darkness, that he had a huge bruise on his face; he had clearly been beaten. “Oh my God, Daddy, did those things do this?”
“Those little shitboxes? Their arms would break if they hit you. No, this was the human guards.”
“Your father tried to overcome four-to-one odds,” Rachel said, in a tone that Yahvi recognized as teasing. Tonight, though, it was clearly affectionate, possibly even proud.
Looking closely at her mother, she saw signs of distress. “Did they question you?”
“Of course.” She held out her arm, displaying the same kind of blistering Yahvi had experienced on her leg. “What about you?”
“It was mostly THE,” she said. When Rachel gave a confused look, she added: “Trans-Human Evolutionaries or whatever they call themselves.”
“The kids in the black suits,” Pav said.
Rachel seemed to accept that. It was too dark for her to see how Yahvi had been damaged, and while Yahvi had no particular desire to spare her mother’s feelings . . . this was not the time to offer complaints. “Where is everybody else?”
“Tea was in the room next to us, upstairs,” Rachel said.
“They kept you together?” Yahvi said.
“For a while.” She made an unhappy face. “I wasn’t able to hear everything, but I’m pretty sure she went through what I went through.”
“Which was?”
“A billion questions, many threats.”
“Was it people or Reivers?”
“People,” Rachel said. “There were three Reivers in the room, but they just watched.”
“Same with me,” Pav said. “The people were bad enough.” He seemed to shudder, which made Yahvi want to start crying again. “Xavier is in one of the rooms on this floor,” Pav said. “They took him and all our equipment to the same place.”