Coda (6 page)

Scope waves at me from across the table. The guy beside him puts a hand on his thigh, the nails painted noxious yellow. The DJ-comp ups the volume coming from the speakers and I don’t grasp what I think might be an introduction, though I don’t miss the look.

Guess they’ve already reached the past-relationship-talk stage. Unusual for my ex, since me at least. I edge my chair closer to Haven, trying to remember to breathe, but whether the new guy gets the hint, I don’t know and it isn’t my problem.

“Yo,” Scope yells over the music. “What’s wrong with you?”

I sigh. “The twins found out. Their friend Fable spilled about the music, about tracking. About”—I gesture to the club—“this.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s your little brother and sister, right?” Yellow Guy asks. I
nod. “So what?”

He’s a moron. Haven touches my knee, and I take a deep breath. “Because it’s fucking
dangerous
, that’s why. Yeah, I remember thinking this was cool, too. Couldn’t wait to listen. Begged my parents to let me start tracking early. Even tried to sneak on a console when they weren’t looking, but my chip wouldn’t work yet.”

“Look around you,” he shouts. “Any of these people seem like they’re having a bad time?”

“Fun isn’t the point. You’re only here because you want to be?”

He concedes with silence and settles back against Scope. I lean forward. “One day, they’re going to feel like I do. And they’re going to know I didn’t protect them.”

A group at the next table turn to look at us. “Anthem,” Haven says. “Not here, okay?”

She’s right. And a bad trip’s the last thing I need right now.

The songs thrumming from speakers—louder now—are still mild doses, encoded with happiness, a general sense of good feeling. Like the descriptions I’ve read of the first few alcoholic drinks.

These days, they just need our ears to keep us in line. If necessity is the mother of invention, greed is its father. Experiments begun in overcrowded hospitals were continued; the Corp was formed by men and women already accustomed to power, technology, innovation.

A hum starts; power lines are threaded through my bones.

“C’mon, guys,” Haven says, standing. Scope and Yellow Guy pull apart, and the three of us trail behind her to the dance floor, a throng of metal and glow. Implants on arms and faces flash to the beat, pressure-sensitive body paint changes colors and turns skin to moving sunsets or rippling waves.

Hands reach for the music, magnets beneath stretched skin
pulling them into the sound.

We find a place in the middle, Scope and his . . . whatever immediately twining to become one person. Haven shouts something, and I shake my head, pointing to my ear.

“You’re crooked,” she says, her lips an inch from my skin. She reaches up and carefully rearranges the blue fiber-optic tubes. Soft fingertips find the wire and follow it down to my neck jack. “Perfect,” she whispers, stepping away.

I shiver, icicles of tension breaking free, the music hammering in my ears. A low bass note gongs through the club, drawn out like a held breath as monochrome strobes slow time to half-speed. We wait, expectant, knowing. . . .

Keyboards kick in, rainbows explode overhead, and from the speakers, sound is turned to sight and taste and smell by chemical-sounding, computer-driven noise.

For now, the pleasure is worth it. Worth everything. Which is the point, of course, but I can’t bring myself to care when the melody is pulsing through me and I feel alive, human, expansive. Memories turn to fantasies and back again. Here, everything is good and right.

I let the drug pull me into its lies. Welcome the relief.

The earthquake comes suddenly. The land is mad and it scares me. I’m at the kitchen table doing homework while my mother cooks. The utensils on the wall begin to rattle, and I hear her call my father for help as she pulls me into the doorway
.

She pulls me with fingers closed around my arm while I try to reach for something I really want on the table. I can’t leave it, and she won’t let me go! My hand is there, nearly there, but I’m stumbling backward and it’s gone, falling into the shaking earth
.

“Help!” The hand on my biceps pulls harder; my arm falls away from Haven. Blinking, I open my eyes to grin at a face that morphs
from lines of neon into Scope’s. “Anthem, come out, I need you!”

His panic makes me grit my teeth, and I search my mind for the
self
hiding behind layers of sound. My eyeballs feel like they’re about to explode. I force them to focus. Yellow Guy is on the ground, his back arched and his limbs flailing. There’s no time to drag Haven out, so Scope and I go without her, picking him up and dodging wild bodies to carry him through the crowd.

“Overdose,” is all Scope says to his brother. Pixel nods and rushes to press buttons on the wall that will call for a med-pod.

The feeling music gives is the light. This is the dark. Receptors in the brain overload with sound and vision and memory until the whole thing is forced to shut down. I don’t envy Yellow Guy the pain I know must be crashing through his head no matter how hard he presses his hands to chrome-embedded temples and screams.

There’s nowhere to put him except on the floor. Scope kneels next to him, barely flinching when each punch lands, offering comfort that—best case—will only make Scope feel better.

I concentrate on keeping my feet glued to one spot. The music is calling.

Forever passes in the length of a single track, the med-pod arriving as the vibrations change against the soles of my boots. Uniformed techs let themselves in, nod once at Pixel, and turn their attentions to the body on the floor. Only practice could give them the expertise to bind and gag Yellow Guy so quickly, then strap him to a plastic stretcher. One of them runs a portable scanner over his straining left wrist.

“I want to come,” says Scope. I stare at him.

“Medical pods only hold one citizen,” says the tech nearest Yellow Guy’s head, speaking as if Scope’s a child. Then again, it was a pretty stupid question.

“Where are you taking him?” There are a bunch of OD stations not far from here. I’ve seen the inside of three.

The techs lift the stretcher. “He may contact you when he has recovered,” answers the same one, in the same tone. For a second I wonder if the other tech, silent and indifferent to us since they got here, is an Exaur, for some reason not in an orange uniform, but that’s ridiculous. Scope’s not the only one thinking like an idiot.

Pixel puts his arm around Scope, holding him back from the opening door. Yellow Guy’s muffled screams extinguish when it closes again.

“He’ll be okay, little brother,” Pixel says. “Was he tracking earlier? Were you with him?”

“Don’t know. I met up with him here.”

“Yeah, well, it happens. Probably just the song. Go back inside. You should have enough time to go under again. I’ll come since I don’t need to wait for Anthem tonight.” Pixel jerks his head in my direction and reaches over to press the button that will seal the doors. “About time I got my own fix on.”

Scope looks at me. I shrug. “It’s that or go home,” I tell him even as I start moving toward the door to the inner room. His heart’s not really in it, I can see that, so the music won’t work as well as usual or he’ll have a bad trip, but there’s really nothing else we can do for Yellow Guy tonight.

“Leave him to me,” says Pixel. “Go find your girl.”

“Thanks.”

Some jerk with too many credits to spend on chrome and blood-red contacts is trying to dance with Haven. It doesn’t look like she’s noticed. Sobered—mostly—by now, I can feel every degree of the molten heat that wells in the pit of my stomach. “Leave her alone!” I shout over the music. He just smiles, too far gone to really
understand, and my patient streak narrows to slide into the inch of space between them. My push sends him reeling into the crowd. There. He can understand
that
. I take his place, keeping my hands to myself but letting her fill my other senses, whirls of pink and heat rising from her tawny skin.

She smells like her name. Like everything safe and good. We dance until the club closes; my drugged fog, when I help her back to my place, is lighter than normal. I cover her laughing mouth with my hand to keep her from waking the twins; she kisses my palm and my knees go weak. The bedroom floor seems harder than usual. I toss and turn to the sound of her breathing above my head, my hand clenched to hold in the echo of her lips.

“Scope with his
friend
?” Haven grins and examines the budding leaves on the stunted, disfigured trees. I watch her, drinking her in because she was busy with some family thing last night. Her hair catches the sunlight and holds it until she steps forward.

I keep to the path. Ahead, it turns a corner and winds its way through the leisure area of the park. “Yeah, Scope says he’s doing okay.”

“Rest and antidote will do that. How are the kids?”

“Fine. With Fable.” I haven’t strangled him yet.

“They can’t really understand it right now,” she says. “Kids are too accepting of weird stuff at their age. I was.”

“Same here.”

We walk more, find a comfortable patch of grass. People pass us—others out enjoying the first warm day of the year.

“I got further into the mainframe yesterday. That system is
choice. Bastards can build a network, I’ll give them that.”

I look around to make sure no one’s close enough to hear us. “What’d you find?”

“Nothing. Boring stuff. Corp employee records, birth and death files. Why anyone would bring a child into this . . . Anyway, the point is I’ve never gotten that far before.”

“You are careful when you do this, right?” It’s kind of an asshole question; I’ve never asked Mage that.

“Anthem.” She rolls her eyes. “One, I’m not an idiot. Two, I physically
can’t
make any major unauthorized changes, the security is . . . intense. I can get past some of it, but not all. And I just like to play around. It’s beautiful in there.”

I wonder if I’d wear that expression when talking about the band. “You’re kind of a geek, you know.”

She pokes me in the ribs. Hard. I fall back, laughing. It feels like music. The darkness of worry is chased away by the sun on my face. When I’m quiet again, Haven joins me, our arms almost touching. I bend my knees and dig my fingers into my thigh. The moment stretches—fifteen quiet minutes I want to bottle and keep.

“Anthem?”

“Hmmm?”

“What if we . . . the twins . . . what if there
is
a choice?”

I turn my head. Her eyes are closed, body relaxed, in contrast to mine. All my cells are like taut rubber, about to snap. “How so?”

“I hear things, sometimes. Like, about people who play stuff that isn’t encoded.”

The park swims and blurs around me as I sit up. “Keep your voice down.” An old couple, maybe in their late thirties, walk past us on the path. Expensively dressed, they stare a little too long at Haven, and I wonder if they know her. “Who told you people do that?”

“No one, exactly,” she says, looking up at me. “I overheard my father talking about it. They were discussing ways to get inside the groups. Like, catch them in the act. I . . . I think they’re worried. There are more people fighting the music than there used to be, like, immunity or something. I don’t know.”

The sun is too hot. “The Corp would know if the twins weren’t tracking after being exposed. And there’s nothing we can do to stop that first time.”

“Yeah, I guess.” She sighs. “I’d like to hear it, though. Just to see what it sounds like. How it’s different. I think a lot of people would.”

“You have to promise me you won’t get involved in that,” I say, grabbing her wrist. “It’s dangerous, Haven. Your father was talking about catching them for a reason. Please, promise me.”

Hypocrisy tastes like burnt toast. She raises herself on one elbow to properly look at me, and I see my own omissions reflected back by her eyebrows.

“Okay,” she says finally. “Okay, chill. It was just an idea.”

A tempting one. Just for a second, I let myself think about what it would be like to somehow spread the word, the sound of unencoded music. To be able to sing for Haven, alone, or with the band around me. I could teach the twins about real music.