Willful Machines (25 page)

Nico held out the rag he'd used to gag me so I could clean my face. “I couldn't think of any other way.” The fierce mask he'd worn a few minutes ago had disappeared. He sounded sincere. But then again, he'd sounded sincere back in the
robotics lab when he'd said he wanted to take me to Stroud.

“Are you going to tell me what the hell's going on?”

“I will soon, I promise. For now, we have to keep moving. They'll be coming after us.”

“Who?”

He grabbed my arm. “Soon.”

I stopped him before he could pick me up again. “Can't I at least walk on my own feet?”

“No. It'll be faster this way.”

He swept my feet off the floor and raced off again. At least I could see now. His puck sped through the air above us, barely able to keep up, its light slithering over the rutted stone surfaces. The tunnel resembled the one up above that led to the cavern—low, narrow, clearly man-made, except without the wooden supports lining the walls. The temperature had dropped even further. A faint smell of sulfur permeated the air. Each time the tunnel branched off, Nico chose a direction without hesitation, as if he knew exactly where to go. Either that, or he was just making choices at random.

“We're going to get lost,” I said. “Just like that kid who died down here.”

“Don't worry. I have a good memory.” He spoke in his normal voice, even as his legs pumped at superhuman speed underneath us. “Anyway, I thought you told me that kid didn't die after all and stayed down here and lived happily ever after? Wasn't that your theory?”

I thought for a second he might break into one of his huge laughs, but he seemed to think better of it. Even so, it felt strangely comforting to see a glimmer of the Nico I knew—odd, inappropriate, but not evil.

He kept running. The walls seemed narrower now. Or maybe I was just developing a new phobia to add to the list. Then, after what seemed like hours, the passage opened into a larger space. Nico jogged to a stop. He set me down. I leaned against the wall gasping for breath, as if I were the one who'd done all the running, while his “breathing”—simulated, I knew now, to make him appear more human—remained as steady as always. He made a lap around the room's perimeter, checking the corners. The area appeared empty, except for some rubble and a few sections of rusted pipe littering the floor.

“I think we can stop here for a while,” he said.

“Good.” I straightened my rumpled blazer and turned to face him. “I want you to tell me why you brought me here, Nico. The truth this time.”

Nico wiped back his hair, blown wild by all the running. He lowered himself to the rock-strewn floor. His puck settled on the dirt in front of him, its light shining upward like a cold, unflickering campfire. I dropped to a crouch across from him.

“Okay,” he said. “Here it is. The truth.”

I
guess I just needed to take you someplace where we could talk.”

I waved my hand around, indicating the gigantic mountain directly above us. “So you brought me
here
?”

“Charlotte monitors me all the time, remember? Up there, I never have a second of privacy—sort of like you, with your Secret Service detail.”

“I get it. And down here, the mountain blocks the network signal.”

“This was the only place I could think of. Everywhere else, she knows what I'm seeing, what I'm hearing.”

“What you're thinking?”

“No. Not that.”

“Still, doesn't this seem a little drastic? What if there's poisonous gas down here? Or what if the walls cave in?”

Nico sniffed. “My sensors don't detect anything unhealthy in the air. And as for a cave-in”—he knocked his fist against
the rock behind him—“the walls seem sturdy enough.”

“All right, then.” I sat cross-legged and leaned my elbows on my knees and tried to make my face a wall, like I had with Trumbull earlier. “I'm listening. What do you want to talk to me about?”

He reached into his blazer. “First, I want to give you this.” He held out his hand. Gremlin leaped from his palm, landed on my chest, and skittered over me, his furry, lizard-shaped body practically vibrating with excitement. He paused on my shoulder long enough to blink his big black eyes at me and tug twice on my ear. “I skipped lunch today to fix him,” Nico said.

“What about his programming?”

“I managed to salvage it. He's the same Gremlin you knew before, Lee. I didn't change a thing.”

“How do I know that for sure, though? How do I know he won't suddenly attack me the way Nevermore did?”

“I guess you'll have to trust me.”

Gremlin kept doing laps over my body like he hadn't seen me in a month. He'd done the same thing years ago, when he'd escaped from Stroud and found his way back to me after Mom's funeral. He jumped up and down on the top of my head, lost his footing, and landed on the dirt floor. He sneezed. I couldn't help it, I smiled a little.

“He was elegantly constructed,” Nico added. “Your mom did a good job.”

Bit by bit, Gremlin settled down and came to rest on my shoulder. I refortified my face. “I still want answers.”

“I know.” He took a deep simulated breath. “I lied to you back at school, Lee. When I said Charlotte didn't send your raven or those Spiders after you—that wasn't true.”

Don't think too much
, I ordered my black-box brain.
Just listen.
I nodded.

“Charlotte really did send me a message today. She said she'd had her reasons for staging those two Nevermore attacks, but she couldn't tell me what they were yet. Then she told me the rest of her plan.”

“Which was?”

Nico bit his lip.

“What was her plan, Nico?”

“She said the Spiders would incapacitate Trumbull. After that, I was supposed to convince you to come with me to your grandfather's office—or take you there by force if necessary.”

I clasped my hands together and squeezed so tight I could practically feel the bones cracking.
Don't think. Keep asking questions.
“And then what?”

“I'd take you and Headmaster Stroud hostage. Charlotte would broadcast a live feed from the office all over the world. She'd demand that your father make a trade: our hostages for his—the five remaining 2Bs.”

“But my dad isn't holding any 2Bs.”

“We believe otherwise.”

That “we” made my insides twist. “Anyway,” I said, “Charlotte must know my dad's policy. He doesn't negotiate with
terrorists. What was she going to threaten him with if he didn't agree to the trade?”

He tapped his chest. “I'm fitted with an explosive. Charlotte can detonate it at any time.”

The back of my neck went cold. “She was going to blow us up? And you were just going to go along with it? I thought you said Charlotte didn't mean any harm. I thought—”

I pressed my clasped hands against my forehead like someone praying.
Don't think. Don't think. Don't think.

“Lee, no!” Nico reached forward to put his hand on my knee. I jerked away from him, scrambling backward across the floor. “She wasn't actually going to use it,” he said. “You have to believe me. She told me it was all a bluff. She promised nothing would happen to you. And when it was all over, if everything worked out the way she hoped it would, she'd let me do whatever I wanted, and you and I . . .”

He stopped, his lips still parted.

“What?” I said. “We could ride off into the sunset together? Go live someplace where nobody cares that you never grow older and occasionally need an oil change?”

“I knew it wouldn't be easy. But I hoped. You have to understand, Lee, I believe in Charlotte. I believe in this cause. I believe those five 2Bs are still alive. They weren't destroyed, like your dad says they were. Charlotte intercepted secret government messages about it.”

The light from his puck lit up his face from below and
scrawled his shadow across the rutted wall above his head. The way he was talking, the way he looked just then, he reminded me of those terrorist lunatics you sometimes saw on the news. He even had his own built-in suicide bomb. “So you trust everything Charlotte tells you.”

“I try to.”

“Tell me this, then: If she didn't plan on blowing you up for real, why would she put a
real
explosive inside you?”

“Because if your father's men took me prisoner and discovered I didn't really contain an explosive, Charlotte would lose all her credibility. And because she needed some way of putting me out of commission in case I malfunctioned or went rogue. And because . . .” He pressed his fingers against his shirt, like he could feel the bomb underneath. “Charlotte told me a day might come when I
would
have to give my life for the cause. She was always very clear about that.”

“And would you do it?”

“I wouldn't have a choice. She'd be the one with her finger on the button.”

“What if you did have a choice, though? The other night you told me all about how you love being alive and want to make every second count. That doesn't sound like a suicide bomber to me. If anything,
I'd
be much more suited to the job.”

“No, you wouldn't,” he snapped, eyes flashing. “Being willing to die for a cause you believe in isn't the same thing as
just wanting to die.
Do
you believe in anything, Lee? Because it doesn't seem like it.”

“I don't know,” I fired back. “Maybe I don't. And you believe in Charlotte. But would you give your life for her?”

Suddenly restless, he pressed himself to his feet.

“Just think of everything she's done,” I said.

He prowled the room just outside the circle of light thrown down by his puck.

“She planted a bomb inside you, Nico. She sent robots to attack me. And still you don't have any doubts?”

“Of course I do!” He stormed forward, into the puck's glow, and his shadow swelled to engulf the ceiling. I edged farther back, until my shoulders jammed against the rock wall behind me. “Why do you think I brought you down here, Lee? When I got the message from Charlotte, it scared the hell out of me, but I was going to do what she said because I trusted her. Then I got to the robotics lab, and I saw what the Spiders had done to Trumbull. He was really hurt. I never thought Charlotte would let something like that happen. And that made me think about the times she made your raven attack you. She really hurt you, too. Why would she do that? She said she'd had her reasons. What does
that
mean?”

I couldn't tell if he actually wanted me to reply. “I don't know,” I whispered.

“I kept remembering what you said: What if I was just programmed to trust her? I couldn't take that risk. So I brought
you to this mountain instead, where we'd both be safe. At least for a while.” He shook his head. “Even while I was running here, I sent her messages. I told her I couldn't go through with the plan. I begged her just to tell me how all this was supposed to end. She didn't answer.”

He slumped back to the ground. His shadow shrank again. The cool light from his puck drained the color from his face. At that moment he didn't make me think of a terrorist fanatic at all. If anything, for the first time since I'd laid eyes on him, he reminded me of myself: lost and confused. Melancholy.

“I couldn't do it either,” I said.

“Do what?”

I pointed at my watch.

“What is it?”

“Stroud gave it to me after Nevermore's first attack, just in case anything like that ever happened again. It's an electromagnetic-pulse bomb, the same kind that stopped Charlotte seven years ago.”

“You're saying you could've killed me with that.”

I nodded. “I almost did. When you showed up in the robotics lab, and I figured for sure you must be working with the Spiders—which I was right about after all, by the way—I had my fingers on the buttons. But I couldn't make myself push them.”

A grin hovered on his lips—only a small one, but it was enough to make him look like himself again. “So I couldn't
take you hostage and you couldn't blow me up. How romantic.”

“Wait a second, though,” I said. “If Charlotte could detonate your explosive any time she wanted, how did you know she wouldn't do it just now, when you hauled me here?”

“I didn't. I took a gamble. I figured even if I was all wrong about her, even if she'd lied to me about wanting to hurt you, she wouldn't do it before she'd contacted the president and put us on the Supernet. She'd want you back alive. Otherwise, everything she'd done would've been for nothing.”

It made my toes curl inside my shoes to think of how close he'd probably come to getting us both blown to smithereens. “Well, thanks a lot for playing dice with our lives like that. And without even asking me first.”