Icons (26 page)

Like a hand on a throat
, I think.

“Look.” Lucas points. “This thing has roots.”

It’s true. All around us, bits of black metal poke up from the cracked concrete.
There is so much more than we can see
, I think, as my head pounds.

Who knows where it ends?

Just then, my foot catches on something in the rubble, and I stumble. It’s hard and metal, and when I bend to pick it up, it’s cool in my hand. I’m already holding it when it occurs to me that it’s a piece of the Icon. It vibrates, radiates its own kind of energy.

A breath. Or a pulse.

“Lucas?”

Lucas looks over at me. “Is that what I think it is?”

“This must have broken off when it landed.”

I turn to throw it over the wall, out into the sea of dead city below. Then I stop. I can’t bring myself to throw it away. Not after feeling it the way I do.

Which makes no sense, I know. The only thing the Icon has ever brought is death.

I should hate it.

Instead, I’m drawn to it.

“Dol? What are you doing with that thing? Get rid of it.”

I can’t. I don’t want to.

I shrug. “Who knows? Maybe Doc can use it to figure something out. Maybe it will help.” I force myself to drop the shard into my chestpack.

“Help what?” Lucas leans against the wall next to me.

I look around.

“What Fortis is planning. To shut this place down, or blow it up? Whatever does the trick, I guess. You heard him.”

When I turn his way, I see the wildness in Lucas’s eyes. “Dol. Look around you. You really think you can just find the on or off switch for an Icon? You think you or Fortis or Ro or anyone can just blow it up?”

I stare at him, confused. “Isn’t that the point? Why we’re here?”

“Are you really that—”

“What, Lucas?”

“Stupid?”

I snort, but he keeps going. “You actually want to listen to Fortis now? Jump on the Rebellion’s cause? Just forget about the fact of the Embassy, the Sympas, the weapons, the House of Lords—everything and everyone who controls the world we happen to be living in?”

Sympas. I’ve never heard him use the Grass word before
.

“Lucas. If that’s not what you want, then what are we doing here? In the Hole? At the Icon?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I brought you here to show you how
crazy it was. To prove to you we couldn’t win. To end it, Dol.” He looks at me, sadly. “I just want it to end.”

I know he does. But when I look at the Icon, in all its ugliness, I know he’s also wrong.

“This isn’t how it ends,” I say. “Our story. Whatever it is.”

“It could be. We could find a way.”

I shake my head.

“We can’t.”

“What if Fortis is lying?”

“He isn’t. You know he isn’t. Besides, look around. This isn’t a lie.” I turn my back on the city, facing the Observatory now. Lucas doesn’t. He closes his eyes to all of it.

“No. This is a nightmare.”

“And it’s not just Fortis. It’s Doc, too. You have to trust Doc.”

As I stare up at the Icon, I’m struck by how strange it is. That a machine has helped me find my way here, to where a machine has taken over our city.

Lucas’s jaw is set. He shakes his head. “Fortis is not friends with Doc. Doc’s a computer program. Nobody is friends with Doc.”

“That’s not true. You are.”

Now we’re both staring out at the city. Lucas is silent, so I say it again.

“You’ve known him since you were little—you said so yourself.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m going to blow up the Icon, just because some crazy Merk thinks it’s a good idea.”

“He’s not a Merk. And that’s not why you’re going to do it.”

“Yeah? Tell me. Why am I?”

“Because you can. We can.”

“Stop.”

“Only us. That has to mean something.”

The whine of the Icon seems to grow louder and louder, the longer we stay there. Soon I will not be able to stand it.

“Does it?”

He’s thinking, but I already know the answer. Or at least, the question.

What means something?

Of everything I have seen today, what matters?

I close my eyes and the fortune-teller enters my mind, unbidden. I can feel the jade figures in my bag. I try to remember what he said.

There’s a girl
, I think.
He said I have to find her. I’m not the important one. She is. But how can I do that? I can’t even do this.

Then I remember the gold cross, the one that belonged to my mother. The one the Ambassador pressed into my hand.

You lived so you can pay the debt.

I know why I’m here, even if Lucas doesn’t.

I’d tell him, but the noise from the Icon is making it
impossible to think, and it’s all I can do to grab his hand and pull him back toward the downhill trail.

This—all of it—is more than one person can bear, in one day.

More than I can bear.

There is so much to do
, I think,
and no one else to do it.
It’s not the way I wish it was, but the way it is.

We have to be strong.

My parents are dead. Our city is dying. This is about so much more than us.

Subject:
Paulo Fortissimo, aka Fortis

Education:
Doctorates from MIT and Columbia in astrophysics, neurology, genetics, and artificial intelligence.

Author of
Higher Power: Unleashing the Energy of Emotion
.

Special Scientific Advisor, US Department of Defense, through four presidential administrations, 2040–2056.

Special appointee to UN Commission on Near Earth Objects, instrumental in the detection and planning of response to NEO Perses.

Purported mastermind and author of research regarding Icon Children.

Location:
Unknown.

Affiliation:
Uncertain, but is known enemy of Occupation Government.

Highly dangerous.

Note: Standing Embassy order is to kill on sight.

By the time we reach the bottom of the hill, my heart is aching, my head is throbbing, my ears are bloody and ringing—and Fortis is gone.

“That Merk bastard.” Lucas is furious and so am I. My book—my secrets—have disappeared with him, for now. At least he’s left Lucas’s cuff hanging on the fence.

Lucas points up at the sky, though, and then I hear it. Freeley is landing, well beyond the gates. The air churns violently in the deserted street, the noise growing so loud I clap my hands over my ears. The Chopper blows dead brush up around us, and I don’t look to see what new bones have been uncovered.

“Doc must have given him the coordinates,” Lucas
shouts over the noise of the engine, as we slip back beyond the fence.

Moments later, the Chopper doors slam shut behind me, and we pull up and away from Griff Park. I begin to shake—so strong is the surge of relief, and so exhausting was it to feel the Icon, all around me.

I see Lucas close his eyes in his seat, and know he feels it too. The release. The space.

Reluctantly, the Icon lets go of us—it doesn’t want to, I can feel that much—and we climb up into the sky like one last lucky bird.

Freeley gets us home quickly, almost more quickly than I want him to.

Ro is watching when the helicopter lands. The closer we get to him, the better I can feel him. He is so much more than angry.

Lucas acts like he doesn’t see him. Once again, Lucas and I have reached an impasse. We don’t have the book, though we know Fortis does. We don’t have a plan, though it seems both the Rebellion and the Embassy do. We can’t fully comprehend the meaning of the things we’ve seen. Or those we haven’t.

But.

Though the events of the day have been overwhelming and inconclusive, Lucas and I have shared them. They
have sent us both into silence and hiding—from each other, from decisions, from what we must do and who we must trust—but that, too, is something we share.

He doesn’t know what to think about me, any more than I know what to think about him. But for now, how we feel is totally beside the point. How Ro feels is what matters to me, and as the Chopper nears him—and the Embassy—I feel every bit of it.

He’s hurt and he wishes I were hurt, too. I’ve never felt that from him, not Ro who would kill anyone who thought about hurting me. Things are changing between us. Maybe things have already changed. I close my eyes. I wish I could tell him. I wish I could make him understand the mess of feelings inside me. I wish I understood them, myself.

The Chopper lowers itself toward the barren concrete of the landing strip—Ro looms larger and larger—and I know there is no escaping what comes next.

I left him.

As always, in the right and wrong and good and bad world of Ro, there are no degrees to my decision. I prepare myself accordingly. I tell myself it will pass, like it always does. But it isn’t true, not anymore. At least, I can’t be sure.

When the helicopter finally touches down at the Embassy landing pad, he’s gone.

The blades are still turning when I am up the steps and heading for the Embassy doors. Lucas has to run to keep up.

I’m not surprised when Lucas charms our way past the front entrance to the Embassy compound—but Ro’s not inside the door, as I hoped he would be. The Sympa guards are there, however, so our day’s adventure comes to a swift halt. Ro’s not in any of the hallways I am marched through—also not in Examination Facility #9B, once my Sympa detail has locked me inside. I realize, all at once, that I may not be able to fix things with Ro, and I think how much has changed since we left the Mission.

I have to find him.

After my third try with the lock, I slump against my door. Then it occurs to me that there are easier ways to open doors now at my disposal. “Doc? Are you there?”

“Yes, Doloria.”

“Can you open the door for me, Doc?”

“Of course I can.”

I scramble to my feet, waiting in silence. Nothing happens. I sigh. “Doc. What I meant was,
will you
open my door?”

“I suggest amending your speech patterns to say what you mean—” The bolt reverses itself obligingly.

“Next time, Doc.” I’m out the door before he can finish scolding me.

There are no guards posted outside my door—one of the benefits, I imagine, of being considered safely locked in a room. I’ve learned how to dodge patrols all the way to the library, but when I get there, Ro’s not there. I don’t find him in the glass prison classroom either, though Tima’s there, and she manages to simultaneously not look up from her digi-text and yet still glare at me. I sneak up the back stairwell to the catwalk at the Presidio, but there is no sign of him. It’s only when I reach the far end of the catwalk that I spy Ro sitting on the rocky shoreline.

I make my way down to him—once again, exactly as Tima has taught me—staying clear of the guards, keeping my head down, changing stairwells three times until I find the one that connects to the small strip of land behind the Presidio wing of the Embassy. The door slams shut behind me, but the wind is so loud Ro doesn’t know I’m there.

The air whips all around us, as violently as if we were standing next to the helicopter.

It’s not the wind; it’s Ro. This is how it goes with him. It starts inside him until he can’t contain it. Then it spreads, the red heat, first to the people nearest him, then farther. When the adrenaline pounds, he’s so strong he could rip a steel girder in half.

That’s also when he’s chemically, electromagnetically insane.

I push the burning waves away, though they surge at me, pressing in on me.

I sit down next to him. He says nothing.

“I’m sorry.” It’s all I can say.

“Doc said the Sympas were shooting at you. I thought you were dead.”

“But we weren’t. Doc should have told you. When we were safe.”

I see his hands. They’re red and scarred. Burned, bruised marks in his own palms, from his own fists. I’ve hurt him.

No.

He’s hurt himself.

That’s what the Padre would say. Try to find the place where Ro ends and you begin. You are two people. You aren’t the same person.

We aren’t. I know we aren’t, but it’s hard for me to remember, because I feel everything he feels, more than I feel everyone else in the world. Maybe everyone else in the world, combined.

Two people.
I say it to myself.

Not one.

Two.

But the Padre knows—knew—with Ro and me, it’s more complicated than that.

Now all I can do is reassure him. “I was fine. You couldn’t have done anything.”

“That’s the point. I couldn’t do anything. I can’t protect you from him.” The idea is almost funny.

“Him? Lucas? You don’t need to protect me from Lucas.”

“You’re right. I don’t need to protect you from someone who takes you with him into the Hole and gets you shot at and whatever other trouble you were into today.”

I steal a look out the corner of my eye, improvising my story as I go along.

“He seemed so upset. I only meant to go find him and talk to him. I thought I could convince him to come back into the library. Try again to figure out what was going on with the missing data. But Lucas practically ran straight into a helicopter, and before I knew it we were in the air…”

It’s a lie, not one of my better ones, and we both know it.

“Tima’s feelings are pretty hurt. She thinks you’re going after Lucas. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but she…” He shrugs.

“Hard not to notice that.” Her eyes never leave him. He’s all she seems to think about, other than terrible disasters. Yeah, I noticed. But for Ro to see it too, that’s really saying something.

He must be angrier than I thought.

“So.” The word comes out evenly, with all the force of the other words, the words he won’t say.