Freefall Page 16

  “Cam,” she said huskily. It wasn’t a question.

  My lips met hers. Their softness, their taste flooded my senses. I felt her hair brush my face, drew her scent into my lungs. My head swam as I brought my hand up to her cheek, touching her, lost in the softness and silkiness of her skin. She gasped and pressed my hand against her.

  Then she moved away. I saw a face at the door, the dark, glittering eyes of her head bodyguard fixed on me. Three had never been more of a crowd than at that exact moment. My heart roaring in my ears, I sat up straight, tried to catch Sofie’s glance, hoping to see in her eyes her promise for later in the night.

  But she looked away. Gathering her robe around her, she floated to the door and was gone, her guard staring at me before closing the door behind them.

  I didn’t remember much after that. I stayed in the room for a minute, collected myself, rejoined the party. In the brief time I’d been gone, Sofie had composed her face, wiping away tears and fixing smeared lipstick, capturing her hair in its usual braid. She wouldn’t look at me. I got more drunk, waited for another chance to be alone with her, but the man who’d interrupted our kiss stayed glued to her side from that point on. Later she disappeared into another anteroom with her closest advisors. Her guards stood by the door, arms crossed. The sounds of carousing from the main cabin drowned whatever words were spoken inside.

  Eventually I slept.

  I woke in my tent, head pounding, throat raw. For a second I couldn’t figure out where I was or how I’d gotten there, but then I remembered a drunken stumble off the plane, Sofie’s chief bodyguard holding me up until I got to the tent, then dropping me like a load of wet towels. My last words to Sofie came back, along with a mixed sense of giddy pleasure and embarrassed regret for saying them. My head was stuffed with cotton, but my gut burned with a bright blade of desire that felt like guilt. I wondered why it was so quiet outside.

  I stuck my head from the tent, and then I saw.

  I was alone. The camp was gone. No other tents, no equipment, no vehicles. Garbage blew in the wind.

  Sofie was gone.

  Otherworld

  Earth Year 3151

  Day

  I step closer to the open pod, leaning in to stare at its sleeping inhabitant.

  I don’t know the man’s name. No one, not Sofie and not the bodyguards themselves, ever told me their names. I always got the idea they were supposed to be anonymous, symbols of the revolution’s strength, so that when one or more of them went down like they did in New York CITI, another could always step in. Or maybe having their identities wiped made it easier for them to evade corponational authorities. But this man, I’m 100 percent certain, was the leader of Sofie’s guards on Earth, the one who grabbed me when I fled the old UN building with her, the same one who interrupted us that night in her helicar. Bigger than the rest, broader, a bit darker skinned. Bearded and sharp-eyed, though his eyes are closed now. Seeing him motionless, defenseless, is disorienting.

  But it’s nowhere near as disorienting as the thought that, of all the pods that could have chosen to come awake and answer my tracker’s call, it happened to be his.

  If I wasn’t convinced before, I am now.

  None of this can be coincidence. Too much has happened to let me believe I wasn’t supposed to be here. But that makes exactly zero sense, because the Freefall wasn’t supposed to be here. It was supposed to be on another world, across an unbridgeable chasm of space.

  Maybe, I think, Sofie’s bodyguard has the answer. Maybe he knows why his ship’s here, why he was the one chosen to wake up at my command. If so, all I have to do is wake him up.

  Which I have no idea how to do.

  I can’t see any controls to shut the aura down. My mother knew everything there was to know about deepsleep, but she never explained any of it to me, not that I’d have understood her if she had. And at the moment, she’s too busy helping Conroy rule the galaxy to show me the tricks of the trade.

  I reach toward the energy field, but I can tell before I come anywhere close that it would be a very bad idea to put my hand into the shining plasma of deepsleep. My fingers tingle, going numb at the tips, leaving no doubt that if they touch the field I’ll be returned to a state of living death, this time with no chance of awakening. I wonder if there’s a way to short-circuit the energy, but remembering Griff’s warnings about what happens when you wake up improperly from deepsleep, I can’t risk it. The man could die, or turn on me, in which case we could both die. There’s got to be another way.

  I press more random buttons on the tracker, with as much success as the previous time I tried that tactic. I stop pressing when it occurs to me I might stumble across a self-destruct function. Having exhausted my day’s supply of genius ideas, I step back, letting out a hard breath in frustration.

  The energy field flickers.

  It’s a momentary thing, a wave passing through the yellow globe of light, so fast I’d have missed it if I had blinked. Luckily, I’m staring too hard to blink.

  I try my voice this time.

  “Shut down,” I say.

  Again the field flickers. But other than that, there’s no change.

  “Turn off,” I try. “Release. Come out of deepsleep. Wake up. Get your ass out of there. Double-time, worm.” That last one always worked when our ColPrep trainers wanted us to shift into high gear to avoid a beating. Plus, given my history with the guy, it’s kind of fun to say.

  But with this corpse, nothing.

  I breathe deeply, try to rein in my mounting annoyance. What good is having a magic word if you don’t know what the magic word is?

  Then I remember.

  Did I mention that I’m a complete idiot? There’s a magic word, all right, and I’ve known it all along.

  I take another breath. Step right up to the pod. And say her name.

  “Sofie.”

  The light quivers. Another wave rolls through it, deeper this time, firmer, like an invisible hand smoothing the energy out of the way. Yellow light turns to white, then slowly dims to gray, then to nothing. Wisps of energy curl from the pod, dissipating on contact with the surrounding air. In a matter of seconds, the field is gone, and Sofie’s bodyguard lies before me, eyes closed and body unmoving.

  His chest heaves a breath, and his eyelids flutter.

  He’s groggy, rising clumsily on an elbow, trying to lower his legs to the floor without stepping out of the pod first. I reach for his hand and grip, and he recoils instinctively, throwing his other hand up in a motion that would be threatening if it weren’t so uncoordinated. Moments later, though, he returns my hand’s pressure, his grasp much stronger than mine. He squints at me through the blear of departing deepsleep, but then his eyes sharpen, and I know he knows me. With my assistance, he swings his legs over the lip of the pod and rests there, head in hands, broad chest expanding as he draws increasingly deep breaths. Minutes pass like that, tens of minutes, an hour. I wonder if he’ll move again.

  Then, without warning, he slides his sandaled feet to the floor of the ship, and with one strong arm over my shoulder, he stands.

  He stumbles, but I catch him. His full weight’s probably more than I can bear for long, which makes it fortunate that he quickly gets his legs under him. I reach around his waist to steady him, but he waves me off and takes a step on his own. He wobbles, nearly falls on top of me, then rights himself and cranes his neck around the pod bay, taking in the chaos that surrounds us.

  “Where are we?” he asks, the first time he’s spoken directly to me. His English is only lightly accented, his voice softer and higher pitched than I expected.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “We’re on the Freefall. But it’s landed on an unknown planet.” An unlivable planet, I think but don’t say. “The Upperworld ship’s here too.”

  “How can this be?”

  “I don’t know,” I say again. I feel like I’m the one who just came out of deepsleep. “But your pod made its way to me. When I said Sofie’s n
ame. I think I was supposed to find you.”

  He nods, but I can’t tell whether he’s agreeing or as bewildered as I am. “Where is Sofie?”

  I wish I could say I don’t know to this one.

  “She’s not here,” I say. “Her pod ejected before touchdown. She’s . . .” I pick my words carefully. He’s freshly out of deepsleep, woozy and disoriented. I’m afraid too much information will upset him, damage him. Or convince him to damage me. “She’s on the Upperworld ship,” I say at last.

  “Then we must go to her.”

  “Right.” He stands before me, arms crossed, waiting. This is not the kind of guy I want to disappoint. On the other hand, he’s not the kind of guy I want to help, either. He must have been in on the whole plan back on Earth, from the first unknown words Sofie spoke to him at the United Nations building to the last moment he dumped my drunken carcass in the Lowerworld tent. I don’t owe him anything. He’ll tear me apart if I tell him that, but I don’t owe him a damn thing.

  Except Sofie’s life.

  How many times has he saved her in the past? How far would he go to save her now? I’m not sure I can trust him, but I’m not sure I can find a more trustworthy person I’m not sure I can trust, either.

  “All right,” I say. “But give me a minute. There are a few things I need to catch you up on.”

  Earth, 2151

  Upperworld

  Griff met me at the heliport. He looked happy to see me. Happy, impressed, amazed. The story of where I’d gone hadn’t sounded promising, but it had turned into the talk of the Upperworld in the past couple of days.

  “Saw you on the link,” he said as we sat on the bullet train, speeding back home. “You and that girl. Way to go, dude.”

  I looked up sharply, anticipating sarcasm in his voice. But there was none. This was Griff.

  “She left me, man,” I said.

  “I know,” Griff said.

  • • •

  I didn’t expect my parents to welcome me back with open arms. But I didn’t expect them to throw me out on my ass, either. Turned out I’d become something of an expert at not expecting crappy things to happen to me. Fearing they’d be implicated in what I’d done—or, more likely, being as disgusted by me as everyone else in the Upperworld was—they reprogrammed their doors and sent me a text suggesting I find another place to live.

  If this had been six months ago, I would have moved in with Adrian. But six months and everything that had happened in between had put an end to that.

  The only friend I could turn to, the only person in all of CanAm who didn’t seem to hate my guts, was Griff. His dad had a place he made Griff stay when he needed his son out of the house. Right now, with three months left to do the final coding on the starships before liftoff, Griff’s dad needed him out of the house. So I stayed with him at his separate apartment.

  Sofie’s interview—I couldn’t think of it as our interview without getting a sick feeling in my stomach—worked exactly as she had planned. For the first time since the rise of Sumati, the child of Upperworld VIPs and the leader of the Lowerworld revolution had faced the worldlink lenses and declared the same dream: One World not Two, an opportunity Earth had missed but space might make possible. It didn’t hurt that sympathy for Sofie’s cause had been growing ever since the true account of what had happened in her home village leaked, or that there was genuine concern among the Upperworld corponations that Lowerworld unrest might overwhelm the colonization effort entirely. It didn’t hurt either that the request Sofie announced after the interview—no greater than forty percent Lowerworld representation among the Otherworld colonists, with the specific percentage to be worked out at a later date—helped stave off Upperworld fears of another revolution on the world we traveled to. When she and her team met the following week with Chairman Conroy, the board of JIPOC, and the CEOs of the two most powerful Upperworld corponations—CanAm and ExCon—two additional concessions emerged: The Lowerworld was willing to allow its chosen passengers to be sequestered on the Freefall during the starships’ flight, and to delay negotiations concerning planetary cohabitation until arrival. Though it obviously incensed Adrian’s dad to have his pet project waylaid at this late date by Lowerworld agitators—one of them his son’s former best friend—those two final concessions made a joint Upperworld-Lowerworld colonization a virtual certainty. With the Lowerworld a minority on the far distant world, the chances of their being able to force a situation unfavorable to the Upperworld seemed remote.

  I watched it all on the link. That had been as close as I could get to her when I first saw her, and though I’d stood beside her since then, worked beside her, touched her, kissed her—kissed her—it was as close as I could get to her now.

  It wasn’t a neat process, this march toward reconciliation. For me there was personal blowback, not only my parents’ rejection but the battery of supplemental genetic screens and psychometrics I was forced to take to ensure I remained suitable material for the colonization. Why I didn’t get thrown off the passenger list altogether I had no idea. I clung to the fantasy that Sofie had pled my case behind the scenes, but chances are it was some brilliant PR move to show how magnanimous Chairman Conroy was. Even after I passed the tests, propaganda surfaced portraying me as the dupe of Lowerworld masterminds. The ugliest was a piece that showed me, unshaven and with a wild glint in my eyes, underneath a splashy banner that read: Kidnapped. Tortured. Brainwashed. Betrayed. In that one, they’d taken footage from the interview but edited it in such a way as to make me look like a clueless, aimless kid who wasn’t trying to change the world so much as he was trying to get his hands on a prime piece of Lowerworld ass. This kid babbled things like, “I’ve lived in the Lowerworld for months now. I’ve seen what it’s really like. And yeah, I guess you could say I’ve fallen in love.” I remembered saying that—how could I forget, when I’d repeated it over and over in my mind every day since?—though I could hardly believe I had. But when they intercut my words with clips of me exchanging glances with Sofie, headshots of adjournalists winking at the worldlink lenses, and jittery footage of Terrarist bombings, the clear implication was that Cameron Newell was one sick puppy.

  Sofie was subjected to more attacks than me, of course. According to one scandalous report, she was the daughter of minor ExCon officials, a wild kid who’d been a worldlink star in her youth but had fled her parents’ home as a preteen to mingle with the criminal elements of the Lowerworld. In that report she was charged with everything they could think of: crystal-death smuggling, human trafficking, illegal weapons shipping. The report stopped short of saying that she herself had participated in the flesh trade, but what else were you supposed to conclude? Some seriously disturbing images made the rounds of a precocious little girl they claimed was Sofie, staring straight into the lens with pale green eyes that looked nothing like hers and reciting an oath of allegiance to “the happy lands of the Upperworld.” Another equally unbelievable report surfaced saying that she’d been responsible for Sumati’s assassination, that she’d charmed her way into the older woman’s confidence before having her gunned down. The same source suggested that the village that had died (“of unknown causes”) hadn’t been Sofie’s birthplace at all, and that—just maybe—she’d had something to do with its mysterious end. Splicing footage from her speech in New York CITI with heavily doctored clips from the interview and scenes of Lowerworld demonstrators pumping their fists outside corponational headquarters, they presented Sofie as a violent fanatic bent on the overthrow of the civilized world, or at least on amassing power for her own vile purposes. I imagined her watching this garbage, sitting with her legs crossed and her hands in her lap, taking deep, calming breaths through her nostrils. She knew better than to respond with a denial. She knew the tide of world opinion would turn, already had turned, her way.

  Everything had turned her way. I didn’t resent that. It was the way I wanted things to turn too. But I’d thought, hoped, dreamed that I would be with her when
it did.

  When she’d left me in the middle of nowhere, she’d at least had the decency to leave behind a fully charged selfone. Not that it did me much good in the middle of nowhere. They’d confiscated my personal phone, which pissed me off—it wasn’t like I’d spent the past four months running around the Lowerworld taking pictures of classified documents. I hiked for a couple of hours, guessing at the direction by the light of the sun and the pockets of displaced sand left by her helicar convoy, until I finally arrived, footsore and sunburned, at the nearest village. There I discovered that Sofie’s team had arranged everything for my departure: I was booked on a shuttle to the corponational capital, booked on a flight from the capital to my home heliport. I landed in CanAm with nothing but the phone and the clothes on my back, but that was all I’d taken with me when I’d left anyway. The only other things I carried back home—and these were big and heavy and wouldn’t fit in the overhead rack or under the seat in front of me—were the feelings of anger and hurt that came from knowing she’d tricked me and used me and then unceremoniously dumped me, though not before getting herself drunk enough to make me think I stood a chance with her.

  If I could’ve hated her for everything she’d done, my life would’ve been ten times easier. But the truth was, no matter what she’d done, I still loved her. More than that, I still believed in her, or at least in what she was trying to do. I even accepted that, in order for her to achieve her objectives, a certain number of starry-eyed dimwits like me were going to have to get screwed. But that didn’t make it any easier to deal with the feelings of betrayal and loss.

  Griff got that. During the months I’d spent in the Lowerworld, I’d barely thought about him—something else I could feel crummy about, even if I had good reason for my mind to be elsewhere—but the reverse hadn’t been true. He’d followed the movement as well as he could on the public channels, hacked into Lowerworld sites when he needed to. He claimed he’d seen me on the link before the interview, and I didn’t bother telling him when he showed me the grainy, handheld shots from some Cons Piracy site that I hadn’t been with Sofie in those early days. He was even more critical of the colonization than I remembered him being before I left, totally convinced that there was some worldwide conspiracy behind it having to do with JIPOC and Chairman Conroy and little green men from outer space for all I knew. But he never doubted me. In fact, now that I’d traveled to the Lowerworld—in the company of its revolutionary leader, no less—he’d chilled out about the dangers of getting involved. His faith that I’d been part of something mind-blowing and world-shaking helped me cope with the deeper dangers he’d never suspected.