Title: The YA Revolutions
Author: Nicky
Email: nicky_silvervamp@yahoo.com
Rating: R, for frequent use of language
Category: Crossover
Disclaimer: The WB owns my storyverse and all the people in it. The Ring is property of Universal.
Summary: At the end of Summer Session 2000, Jake and Will mysteriously disappear off the face of the earth. Three years later, they return to New Rawley. But they are not who they used to be…
Spoilers: Young Americans and The Matrix. There are no spoilers to Reloaded or Revolutions. Small references to the Animatrix. One scene would make more sense if you know what The Ring is about. In terms of how this story fits into canon, it takes place just before The Matrix Reloaded.
Acknowledgements: Anja for idea-bouncing. Friends on FF and LJ for being supportive. And once again thanks to Cassandra Claire, the most phenomenal fanfic writer I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading, whose stylish escapades continue to amaze and inspire me.
Author’s Notes: Readers will need a basic understanding of how the matrix operates to make heads or tails of this story.
I step out of my skin
You wouldn't know me now
Couldn't you go away?
Shouldn't I?
I won't be your soft one
I won't be encircled
You might become something I need
Something I need to destroy
- THC, Need to Destroy
***
Love is everything it's cracked up to be…
It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.
- Erica Jong
***
Prologue
‘…Welcome to Dave’s Breakfast Show, and for those of you who have just tuned in, we’ve got a treat in store today for you! Cedric Bixler from The Mars Volta will be coming in this morning, and he will be performing a couple of songs from the…’
An arm emerged from beneath the rumpled bed covers, reaching over to the radio alarm clock and slamming down on the snooze button, immediately casting the room back into silence.
Hamilton Fleming slowly disengaged himself from the messy cocoon of bedclothes. Squinting against the faint light filtering through the curtained room, he sat up, rubbing his bloodshot eyes and running a hand through his dirty, matted hair. He rummaged through the mountainous pile of clothing scattered over the floor, pulling on the first things that he came upon, a pair of old jeans and a Rawley sweatshirt, over the boxers and T-shirt that he had slept in. Catching sight of himself in the mirror across the room, he stopped mid-motion and stared, as though transfixed, at his own ashen complexion and glassy eyes.
“Munchie,” a soft voice issued from the doorway. “Honey, come down and have some breakfast.”
A moment or two passed before Hamilton snapped out of his stupor. He turned, disinterestedly eyeing Kate Fleming, who was leaning against the doorway with a hesitant look in her eye. Her face was pinched with worry, and there was a deep furrow in her brows, marring her otherwise youthful complexion.
“I’m not hungry.” His voice was a hoarse whisper.
“It’s the first day of school,” she said gently. “You’ve got to eat something.”
He looked away. “I’m not going to school.”
“Munchie,” she said, a plea in her voice. “You know you have to.”
“Why do I have to do anything?” he replied, his voice breaking as he buried his face in his hands. “You know I can’t… you know… I…”
“I know it’s hard,” she said quietly, “but you can’t hide in your room forever. Sooner or later you’ve got to start doing things again, start going to school, start to - ”
He looked up as she paused, biting down on her lower lip.
“Start to move on?” he finished for her, the corner of his lip curving up in a wry, hollow smile. “How can I? When we don’t know…? Leave me alone. I’m not going anywhere today.”
“At least have some breakfast,” she cajoled. “You’ve got to keep your strength up.”
“What’s the point?” he murmured, with a tremor in his voice as though it was hovering on the edge of a sob.
“Please,” she said, the rims of her eyes reddening as she stared at him. “Munchie, you haven’t eaten in three days…”
A moment of silence, then he glanced up, taking in his mother’s crestfallen expression. The look in his vacant eyes softened almost imperceptibly and he shrugged, turning away. “Okay, whatever.”
“Oh!” she said, a sudden smile breaking over her exhausted face, bright with relief. “You will have breakfast? Um… why don’t you come… come on down?”
“I’ll stay here,” he said. “Can you bring me some milk… and, I don’t know, a piece of toast or something.”
“Sure, anything you want. I’ll be right back,” she said, stepping out into the hallway so quickly that she almost tripped over her own feet. He averted his eyes.
***
The early autumn sunlight flooded the spacious kitchen of the Dean’s house, dusting the furniture with a bright golden glow, creating a world of difference from the dusky gloom of Hamilton’s room. Steven Fleming sat at the table, dressed in his best start-of-term suit, reading the newspaper.
Walking quickly into the kitchen, Kate grabbed a glass from the cupboard and took the milk carton from the fridge, her hands trembling with silent relief. But as she began to pour, she stopped mid-motion, examining the picture on the side of the carton, even though she had seen it many times before.
An androgynous brunette smiled out from the monochrome print. Missing, the print declared in bold black letters, as though defying the reader to question its veracity.
Kate closed her eyes, just for a second or two. The milk flowed out of the carton and into the glass in a fluid torrent, like opaque white satin. Her hands shook even harder as she opened her eyes again, tenaciously not looking at the picture. Milk splashed over the edge of the glass and onto the counter. She didn’t seem to notice.
Steven glanced up. “He’s finally eating?”
“Yeah,” she nodded, wiping her eyes quickly with the back of her hand. “Thank god.” Thrusting the empty milk carton at him, she asked, “Could you take this out to the trash? I don’t want him to see it lying around.”
He nodded with an air of understanding. “I better take this too,” he said, removing a page from the newspaper as he stood up. Kate caught the headline before he crumpled it in his hand.
No Leads On Actress’s Desperate Search For Daughter: Girl Feared Dead
Upstairs, Hamilton stared blankly at the mirror, as though expecting someone to climb in through the other side. The radio alarm went off again.
‘… and in local news, there has been no progress with the investigation into actress Monica Pratt’s missing daughter, Jacqueline…’
Without so much as a glance in its direction, Hamilton picked up the alarm clock and hurled it at the mirror. There was a crash, surprisingly loud, a sound of splintering, of things falling apart in a way that could never be fixed again. And all was again silent.
***
“So, did you hear about Jake Pratt?”
“I can’t believe he’s a girl. A whole summer in the guys’ dorms, man.”
“D’you think she was kidnapped?”
“Maybe. Isn’t her mom real famous? But I haven’t heard anything about ransom.”
“You think she’s okay?”
“I dunno. Yeah, I hope so.”
“How long has she been missing?”
“A few weeks, I think. After the end of Summer Session.”
“They’ve got no leads?”
“None at all. God, the police are a joke, aren’t they?”
“Well, they must know something, right? A person can’t just disappear into thin air.”
“Well, it says on the news that they know she arrived in New York all right, you know, after Summer Session. But apparently she just went out one day after that and never came back.”
“Dude, that is harsh…”
***
Finn strode into his classroom and assumed his place behind the teaching desk. A grave sweeping gaze, and the low rumble of confused mutterings died down at once. “Guys,” he began, rubbing his hand over his unshaven chin, faltering a little as he stared at his students’ expectant faces. “I guess… I guess all of you have been brought up to date on the situation with Jake… Jacqueline Pratt.”
Scout Calhoun glanced at Will Krudski, who sat in the next desk over and was doodling in his notebook, his expression one of utmost concentration. Having vacationed in the Caribbean for a few weeks after Summer Session, they had only found out about Jake’s disappearance days ago, upon their return. Scout looked worriedly at Will, who appeared not to take the news well at all. He had been spending excessive amounts of time alone, shying away from social contact, preferring to while the hours away on his laptop. Scout once asked what he was working on, only to be met with a glazed look and a shrug. His friends were all reacting in different ways to Jake’s disappearance, and Scout supposed that was the way Will dealt with things. He hoped that it was helping.
“I don’t know what to say,” Finn said slowly. “Not about her pretending to be a guy all summer, and not about what happened afterward.” His solemn blue gaze swept over the silent boys staring up at him, their expressions simultaneously curious and withdrawn. “I know you’ll want to talk about this in your own time,” he continued, “but please, for the sake of her friends, who include many of you, I would like to ask you to show some restraint and respect when broaching his subject. The school has set up counselling services and you’re free to go to them during study periods or after school. And,” he sighed, bowing his head, “I guess that’s all we can do for now. I’m sorry to do this, because it seems heartless and wrong, but the fact is that you’re all still here and school has started, so…” he paused, an apologetic tone to his voice as he picked up a book from the desk, “it’s time for class.”
Scout looked at Hamilton’s empty seat, sighed softly, and glanced back toward Will. The strawberry-blond boy was pale, having spent most of the summer indoors. Coming to think of it, he was acting weird even before the news of Jake reached their ears. And he’d been spending way too much time on that computer of his. Swallowing the lump that seemed to be perpetually clogging up his throat these days, Scout turned back to Finn, thinking about the ways that people chose to deal with their pain, the confusion, the grief, and hoped that whatever Will was doing, that it was helping.
In the years to come, he often wondered if things could have been different if he’d done something differently. He wondered what would have happened if he’d tried to talk to Will or Hamilton, tried to figure out what exactly was going on with his friends in the wake of Jake’s disappearance. But he didn’t, at the time. He thought it would be best to leave everyone alone with their own inarticulate sorrow, their own emptiness.
He didn’t know, at the time, that only one week later he was to wake up in their dorm room and find Will gone, just like Jake, leaving behind all his possessions, without a single word of goodbye.
After the initial shock, the tears, the media frenzy, things gradually went back to normal. Or at least a semblance of normal, because a town as small as New Rawley would never truly walk out from under the shadow of such dark times. But gradually, the matter shifted to the back of people’s minds. Older classes graduated and new kids enrolled at Rawley Academy. The names Jake Pratt and Will Krudski stopped being catalysts for sharp, stinging pain and instead became a dull ache in the back of most people’s hearts. For their friends, an impermeable sadness and terror was imprinted on the rest of their high school years, one that they knew could never truly be removed. But life went on.
Neither Jake nor Will was ever found, alive or otherwise. It was as though they disappeared off the face of the earth.
It wasn’t until nearly three years later, Spring Semester, Senior Year, when everything changed once more.
1. Darjeeling
A man in a long black coat, perhaps in his late forties or early fifties, cut an imposing figure as he stood looking out of a fifth-storey window of the New York Ritz-Carlton, gazing down at Central Park, which stood lush and verdant in the early spring. There was an elegant beauty about his defined profile and the way he held his tall frame, despite the flecks of grey in his dark hair and a deeply etched worry line between his brows.
Another black-coated man emerged from the adjacent room in the hotel suite, his long legs carrying him across the room in quick, easy strides. He looked no older than twenty, with a smattering of freckles across his face, and startlingly pale blue eyes. His strawberry-blond hair was cropped close to his skull, lending him an air of gravity that seemed at odds with his soft, boyish face. “I’ve prepared the equipment, Wakefield,” he said.
The older man gave a small start and turned. “Thank you, Shakespeare,” he said softly, checking his watch.
“They are on their way,” said Shakespeare, the second man. “I was just on the phone to Jacq. They should be coming up now.”
Wakefield nodded and turned back to the window, toying with a small silver box in the palm of his hand, flicking the lid open and snapping it shut again. Shakespeare could see the contents of the box from where he stood: two small capsules, one red, one blue. A wistful spark stirred behind his gaze and he turned away, pulling a pair of sunglasses from his breast pocket and slipping them over his eyes. A knock sounded on the door and he looked up. “They’re here.”
“Please show them in,” said Wakefield, still staring out the window, his calm gaze trained on the cloudless blue sky, the sun-dappled treetops.
Shakespeare opened the door, revealing two figures standing out in the hallway. One was a young woman with short, slicked-back dark hair, her eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. The other was a thin boy, with doe-like brown eyes and disproportionately gangly limbs characteristic of early puberty. The woman nodded at Shakespeare and ushered the boy inside, closing the door behind her.
The boy looked curiously at Wakefield, who had disengaged himself from the window and turned around with a smile.
“Are you Wakefield?” the boy asked tentatively.
“I am,” Wakefield smiled again, extending a hand. “And you, my young friend, must be Darjeeling. Welcome. It is good to meet you at last.”
Darjeeling shook the older man’s hand cautiously, looking simultaneously fascinated and terrified.
“This is Shakespeare,” Wakefield gestured. Shakespeare nodded slightly in acknowledgment. “And of course you know Jacq already.”
The woman smiled encouragingly at the boy. Up close, she had high, angular cheekbones and a defined jawline, which lent her a slightly masculine air. Sharing a small smile with Shakespeare, she walked aside and leaned against the wall, removing her sunglasses and stowing them in the pocket of her black leather coat.
“You must have many questions swimming around your head right now,” Wakefield said gently as he led Darjeeling to a seat in the corner of the room, beginning to converse with him in low tones.
Shakespeare watched them for a moment before he turned to the woman. “How was the trip in, Jacq?” he asked quietly.
“Okay,” she shrugged. “No trouble.”
“Good,” he glanced at Wakefield, who was talking earnestly to the child. “You think he’d choose the red pill?”
Jacq nodded thoughtfully. “You know, I think he will. I’ve got a feeling about him.”
“Good,” his face relaxed into a smile as he looked back at the two in the corner. “I better contact the operator and tell him to get - ”
He trailed off, his eyes fixed on a spot just outside the window. Jacq glanced at him sharply. “What’s the matter?”
“A seagull flew past the window,” he said, his voice suddenly strung. “And then I swear I saw another one fly by just like it.”
“Glitch?” she asked, turning several shades paler.
“Could be,” he said, fishing a cell phone out of his pocket. But before he could dial it began to ring, and he darted a quick, nervous look at her as he answered. “Hello?”
“There’s a glitch,” came a man’s anxious voice over the line, “they’ve cut the hard line and there’s a police squad on their way up. Get out!”
“Shit,” Shakespeare swore, raising his voice. “Wakefield, we gotta get out!”
Wakefield was holding out his hand to Darjeeling, palm up, upon which the two pills sat, crimson and azure like miniature jewels. Darjeeling was staring at them, transfixed, and they both gave a start at Shakespeare’s warning. Wakefield leapt up. “Have they cut the hard line?” he demanded.
Shakespeare nodded gravely. “There’s a squad coming up now.”
“Any agents?”
“Not sure,” Shakespeare said, sharing a look with Jacq as they reached inside their coat pockets and withdrew a pair of pistols at the same time.
“You two check outside,” commanded Wakefield, pulling Darjeeling to his feet. “I’ll get the boy out of here.”
“What’s going on?” asked Darjeeling timidly, looking at the others, his large eyes fastening on the shining barrel of Jacq’s gun as she and Shakespeare opened the door and stealthily slid out of the room.
“We’ve been traced,” Wakefield said grimly, just as the sound of shouting erupted from the hallway and Jacq and Shakespeare flew back inside, slamming the door behind them. Shakespeare slid the bolt home for good measure. Outside, the thundering sound of rushing footsteps could be heard. “We’ve got you surrounded!” a voice called, the sound of it magnified and distorted through a megaphone. “Do not attempt to escape!”
“Armed squad,” Jacq reported, slightly out of breath. “About twenty of them. They’ve blocked the exits. We can probably take them down, but not without casualties.”
“The important thing is to get the boy out of here,” Wakefield said quickly, turning to Darjeeling. “We may not have enough time… I need you to make a decision now. The blue pill or the red pill, boy? Which is it?”
“There’s no time, Wakefield!” Shakespeare exclaimed, as the sound of approaching footsteps grew louder and the room shook with a dull bang, the people outside having begun trying to knock the door down. He and Jacq backed away from it, their guns pointed and their eyes narrowed. “We need to make a break for it,” he muttered out of the side of his mouth, darting a quick glance at Jacq. She nodded gravely, not removing her gaze from the door.
Behind them, Darjeeling stared up at Wakefield, his liquid dark eyes reflecting the urgent, solemn expression on the man’s face. “I…” he said quietly, “I don’t… I don’t know - ”
There was a sudden hiss, like the crackle of static electricity, as a faint flickering began to emanate from the boy’s body and he suddenly turned rigid, his eyes glazing over, the unsaid words dying on his lips.
Wakefield recoiled. “No!” he exclaimed, causing Jacq and Shakespeare to swivel around sharply. “Not now!” he shouted, watching Darjeeling’s body start to convulse uncontrollably. Before their frightened eyes they saw the body of the boy mutate into a larger form, like some grotesque film of a growing man set on fast forward.
“Agent!” shouted Shakespeare, sharing a panicked look with Jacq as they both darted toward the window. “Wakefield, run!”
But Wakefield did not run. “No,” he moaned, watching as the transformation took place right in front of him. “I was so close…”
“There will be others!” shouted Jacq as another bang sounded from the hallway, and the door began to cave inwards in a shower of splinters. Pausing halfway to the window, she yelled, “We’ve got to go! Wakefield!”
But even as the words left her mouth, she saw the transformation complete and the dark form of a man rise up in front of Wakefield, lifting a gun to his head. “NO!” she screamed, and faster than she knew what she was doing she pointed her own pistol at the agent and pressed the trigger. There was the sound of several gunshots going off, the split-second image of two figures crumpling to the floor, a deafening crash as the police outside broke through the door, the rapid sound of machine guns sweeping the room like furious rain on a tin roof, and then Shakespeare was suddenly by her side, grabbing her by the elbow. “JUMP!” he yelled, and they ran toward the fifth-storey window at full tilt, diving through it side by side, sending a thousand sparkling glass shards exploding into the air as they fell toward the ground…
Miles beneath the surface of the earth, onboard the cruiser Descartes, the woman named Jacq awoke with a gasp.
***
A sliver of bright sunlight pierced the crack between the curtains and fell across Hamilton’s sleeping face. Groaning in irritation, he threw an arm across his eyes, rolled over and lifted his head. His Rawley dorm room focused into view, drenched in the gilded light of another late spring morning.
“Morning,” said Scout, his roommate, from the opposite end of the room. He was already up, and evidently fresh from the shower, by the look of his damp hair and the water beading on his tanned face.
“Just back from Crew?” Hamilton muttered, rubbing his eyes and sitting up.
Scout nodded, quickly scanning the other boy’s tired face. “Hey man,” he said pensively, “it’s a shame you dropped out of the team. The first seat we have now really sucks.”
“I dropped out in tenth grade,” Hamilton smiled wryly. “No one else even remembers. You have a long memory for things like this.”
“It was a good summer for Crew,” Scout said simply, his expression clouding over as he glanced at Hamilton. Their gazes met, briefly, before they averted them. The unspoken words were there, the meanings they only knew too well; they passed over in silence the friends they’d made that unforgettable summer, the people they had grown to care for, the ones who had disappeared without a trace…
Hamilton cleared his throat, his voice slightly hoarse as he got up and strode across the room, grabbing a towel from the back of his computer chair. “I’ve got to… um, shower.”
Scout nodded mutely as the other boy let himself out. Turning, he looked out the window at the brilliant spring day outside, a wave of sadness settling over his eyes.
***
The sewer tunnel network was expansive, a latticework of subterranean roads passing under mountains and oceans, providing much-needed accessways for cruisers that did not require going up to the ruins of the earth’s surface. The sewer tunnels (yes, even they) were majestic once: colossal, snaking, concrete reminders of the pinnacle of human success.
But that was before the Second Renaissance. Before what happened with the machines.
Onboard the cruiser Descartes, in the rusty metallic chamber that served both as kitchen and dining room, Shakespeare and Jacq sat at a long table together with a tall, muscular Latino, all three of them looking dispiritedly down at their dinner, bowls of nondescript cream-coloured glop that vaguely resembled cold watered-down porridge. They all bore the distinct gaunt look of slight under-nourishment, and their clothes were drab, crude garments of grey synthetic knit, well worn and patchily threadbare.
“I can’t stand another bite of this,” said Shakespeare. “Next time we’re on a mission, I say we grab takeout.”
Jacq glanced at him, cracking a small smile. “It’s not real.”
“Hey, if I can taste it,” he shrugged, “it’s real enough for me. I’ve been so deprived, I have dreams about hamburgers.”
The Latino glanced at him, “What does a hamburger taste like, Shakes?”
“I forget that you Zion-borns don’t know these things,” Shakespeare said with a small sigh. “God, imagine growing up and not knowing the taste of meat. Weird doesn’t begin to cover it, my friend.”
“Yeah, well, I find it weird that you guys have input jacks all over your body,” said the Latino evenly, with an amused glint in his eye. “So we’re fifty-fifty on that one.”
Shakespeare laughed. “You got me there. Burgers taste good, man. Better than anything we could ever have in this dump.”
“There’s no point talking about what we gave up, now eat,” snapped Jacq, resolutely shovelling a spoonful of glop into her mouth.
“Whoa,” the Latino said with a smile, “no need to get testy.”
She swallowed and glanced up. “I’m not. I’m just reminding you two of the more important things in life.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Shakespeare grumbled, examining a spoonful of glop gloomily. “The mission. Great. Gotta love that purpose to life.” Gulping down his spoonful, he made a face and turned to the Latino. “It’s a shame you can’t be plugged in, Wolf. Otherwise I’d take you in for a burger sometime. A double cheeseburger from Friendly’s… what I wouldn’t give for one of those - ”
“Yeah,” Wolf said enviously. “You know, I do wonder sometimes.”
“Yeah, I wonder about it too,” Jacq’s voice was frosty. “What it’d be like, to risk your life for a cheeseburger. Do you have any idea how fast they could trace us once we’re inside, Shakespeare? Has our three years here taught you nothing? God, this really makes me wonder if you were asleep when Wakefield took you through the training program - ”
She suddenly stopped, her hand flying to her mouth. Shakespeare and Wolf looked away, identical disconsolate expressions crossing their faces. A hush fell over the table, in equal parts awkwardness and sorrow.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered after a moment, staring down at her bowl. “I shouldn’t have brought him up.”
Wolf and Shakespeare nodded silently and went back to their porridge, not looking at each other.
“I dreamed about it again, last night,” said Jacq, tentatively.
Shakespeare glanced up, his blue eyes tinged with concern. “The day when - ”
“When he died,” she looked down again, blinking rapidly. “I just… I just can’t get it out of my head.”
Wordlessly he patted her on the shoulder, and she managed a weak smile at him, quickly dabbing her eyes with a shirtsleeve. “I wish he’s still here, that’s all,” she said softly. “I know I suck at this whole captain business.”
“Don’t put yourself down, Jacq,” said Wolf, his mean baritone uncharacteristically gentle. “You make a great captain.”
“I miss everyone, that’s all,” Jacq said, her voice cracking. “Remember the old days? Back when we had - god, what was it? - seven people on this ship? Those were the days.”
The others nodded mutely, their expressions growing melancholic at the memory. “You two had just been freed,” Wolf said meditatively. “It was right after the muscle reconstruction. You two were prowling the decks, weak as kittens. Wakefield was still around, of course, and Jillian, and Cobra - ”
“Cobra, yeah,” Shakespeare smiled sadly. “He was the one who took me through the sparring program. Thoroughly kicked my ass.”
“He was a great fighter, Cobra,” Wolf said. And then, quietly, “Bless his soul.”
There was a moment of morose silence, underpinned by the gentle humming of the ship as it cruised on autopilot through the sewers.
“Damn it!” Jacq suddenly exploded, tossing her spoon down, sending flecks of porridge flying across the table. “Damn the fucking machines!”
The other two didn’t look surprised at the outburst. Wolf looked toward Jacq, his eyes glinting with a hardened light. Shakespeare, on the other hand, glanced away, his brows furrowed.
“They chew us up and spit us back out,” Jacq fumed. “They farm billions of us like fucking cattle and still it’s not enough, they have to hunt down everyone who’d been freed, they have to pick us off one by one? God, Wakefield shouldn’t have died. Cobra shouldn’t have… And Jillian, God… It just shouldn’t have happened! None of this should have happened. Damn the agents!”
“They all think we’re terrorists anyway,” said Shakespeare, gloomily. “Sometimes I just don’t understand why we try so hard to rescue these people who don’t even want to be rescued - ”
“We are terrorists,” Jacq glanced at him, her eyes scintillating. “There’s no point deluding yourself about that. That’s the way it’s always been for people like us. To win the war we have to make the small sacrifices.”
“Yeah, but we’re not winning the war, are we?” he replied, a little colour rising to his pale face. “We’re not anywhere close to setting the masses free. For every person we rescue we seem to be losing two of our own. Just look at the whole Darjeeling debacle. Not only did we lose the kid, we lost Wakefield as well - ”
“We do what we have to do,” the look in her eyes was bright and brittle, like glass. “It’s not worth talking about it. What’s done is done.”
He merely shrugged and looked away, his expression impassive.
***
Susan Krudski opened the door to her house, pausing on the threshold and letting her eyes adjust. Two small lamps illuminated the kitchen, and the television cast a flickering blue glow over the corner of the living room. The rest of the house was doused in shadow.
She had been doing this for the past three years, still expecting to see a miracle, still expecting to see her baby boy lounging at the table, like he had done so many years ago. “What’s dinner, mom?” he would demand, “Can we get takeout from the diner? I want a double cheeseburger.”
But the room was empty. Plus, she’d shifted the table a long time ago, so that it did not stand there like an automatic trigger to absent images. There were too many stumbling blocks of memories in this house already. They mostly ate in front of the TV now - with a household of two there didn’t seem to be a need for tables. But the hope always remained, and she couldn’t conceive of it not being there. It was what kept her going, she supposed, through the blackest heart of these lonely nights.
“Why are you back so late?” Her husband mumbled from his seat in front of the TV set.
She glanced over and shut her eyes briefly when she saw that empty liquor bottles again littered the coffee table. “A woman came in late and wanted foils,” she murmured, “it took a long time for the colour to develop.”
“Whatever,” said Brian Krudski, his eyes fastened on the TV. “I’m starved. Make me something to eat, and come home earlier tomorrow. What am I supposed to do? Just sit here all by myself until you get home?”
“Here’s a thought,” Susan said, feeling the weariness of the day mounting inside her as she raised her voice, “why don’t you get a job?”
He turned around, his eyes narrowed. “What’s the problem with you, woman?”
She didn’t know where she found the sudden rage. Shouldn’t all rage be wiped out of her already, long ago? A part of her had died with the disappearance of her son, and the other part should have long succumbed to the violence of her husband. Yet, there it was, a wave of burning anger, which bubbled up like lava seeping from the fissures and cracks within her battered body. “My problem,” she said, her voice low. “Is that I have a good-for-nothing husband.”
Suddenly he was looming in front of her, his bulky figure dark and fearsome in the dim light, “You wanna say that again, bitch?” he growled.
She blanched, but she stared at him, her eyes shaded with shadows full of resentment and frustration. “So what if I do?” she said. “You’re not exactly gonna do anything to me that you haven’t done before.”
For a moment he looked almost taken aback, his watery blue eyes losing their characteristic fierceness. Then his nostrils flared, in semblance of an angered bull, and he smiled crookedly, baring his teeth. She shrank back at the look in his eyes, the cruel glint that came after the brief lull.
***
“You shouldn’t have killed Darjeeling,” Shakespeare said quietly, after a lengthy pause.
“I had no choice,” Jacq said, her eyes firmly fixed on her porridge. “You know that.”
“But I hate it,” he said, after a moment of silence. “I hate the thought of us going in on our missions, killing innocent people like they’ve done something wrong. Every time I kill someone I feel like a part of me has been replaced with something that isn’t quite human.”
“As long as a person is still stuck inside the matrix, they are a latent liability,” she said, pushing away her bowl impatiently. “God, it’s not like you don’t know this, Shakespeare! Any un-freed mind inside the matrix can be taken over by the agents at any given moment - ”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t kill them,” he retorted, brightness flaring behind his eyes. “The possession is temporary, as you well know, the agent leaves the body and the person wakes up in their bed, thinking what happened to them was all a dream! But if you manage to shoot the agent, it’s the person who dies. Does that mean nothing to you?”
She set her jaw. “Not really. Not in the greater scheme of things.”
“You know,” he muttered, shaking his head, “you’re just as bad as the machines.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded, bristling.
“I mean you treat people like they don’t matter!” he exclaimed. “To the machines, the masses are expendable; they possess any body they see fit and they don’t care if that body gets killed in the course of things because it doesn’t hurt them, they’re just a series of electrical signals - ”
“I know this,” she snapped. “Spare me the theory.”
“But if you shoot an agent while they’re possessing a body,” he continued as though he hadn’t heard her, “then you kill the person. The agent simply transfers himself out, and the body is left, shivering, bleeding on the pavement inside the matrix, and you don’t care? Out in the harvesting fields, the light in the nourishment cell flickers and goes out, and you don’t care? They are people, Jacq! They’re just like you and I! The only difference between them and us is that we got out! You talk about killing ‘for the cause’ like you’re shooting a line of ducks! God, I still can’t believe you shot Darjeeling… he was only a kid… it was our fault he was there at all - ”
“You’ve always been too soft, Shakespeare,” she interrupted, a steely glint in her eyes. “You’ve always cared too much. You don’t understand that we have to do what we do to survive. If you get stuck inside, it’s you or them. We kill to survive. Darjeeling was possessed by an agent, we couldn’t help him.”
“But you killed him, Jacq!” he exclaimed. “You killed a child, even if you didn’t mean to. Doesn’t that mean something to you? Aren’t you even a little sorry?”
“Stop acting like you’re on the moral high ground, Shakespeare!” she exclaimed angrily. “It wasn’t as though I pointed my gun at Darjeeling, and it wasn’t as though Darjeeling was the one who killed Wakefield! The whole thing was the fucking agent’s fault, and when we’re in there we just do what we have to do - ”
“What if you’re trapped,” he interrupted loudly, “and an agent took over the body of someone you care about?”
“What about it?” she replied, her voice taking on an icy edge.
“Could you do it?” he demanded, his eyes narrowed. “Could you kill the person to save your own skin? Could you shoot the agent, knowing full well that if he doesn’t dodge the bullet it’ll kill the person he’s possessing?”
“If it’ll buy me some time, yes,” she said resolutely. “You don’t get it, Shakespeare. We’re out of the matrix now. We can’t let our feelings get in the way.”
“You’re saying,” his voice was rising. “If you were stuck inside the system and your mother was the only person standing between you and your way out of there, you would shoot her?”
For a moment she stared at him, aghast. Then her expression closed over, like shutters flipping shut.
“All that is in the past, Shakespeare, we’re in the real world,” she said. “The people that used to matter to us… they can’t matter now.”
“You say the real world like it means something!” his voice shook with anger. “But it doesn’t! We care about the people because we’re human, and it doesn’t matter where we are! We can’t just sever all our ties when we leave!”
“Yes we can!” she shouted, the tips of her ears turning red. “That’s exactly what I’m saying! That’s exactly what Wakefield told us to do!”
“Oh yeah?” he yelled back, losing his composure. “Then how come you’ve been tracking Hamilton Fleming all these years?”
The colour drained from her face.
“Surprised? Yeah, I know all about it, I’ve seen your files,” he said grimly. “Your encryption skills are good, Jacq, but not that good. We have ties to our former life, okay? We all have people we still care about. Let’s just leave it at that.”
“I just…” she muttered, wrenching her gaze away angrily. “Sometimes I need to see how he’s doing - ”
“And I don’t blame you for it,” his voice softened. “That’s exactly my point. Can’t you see? You can’t just kill people inside the matrix, even if they don’t know any better. These are people, people with real lives, people who don’t deserve to be caught in the crossfire just because they aren’t freed. There will be consequences if you simply go on a rampage without thought as to what you’re - ”
A loud, urgent siren broke through his contemplative words. Jacq and Wolf started, looking around for the source of the noise. Shakespeare, however, paled at the sound. Without another word he leapt out of his chair and ran toward the control room. Jacq and Wolf, throwing a perplexed look at each other, followed.
2: Sentio Ergo Sum
“I’ll teach you to talk back to me, you bitch!” yelled Brian, shoving his wife roughly up against the living room wall. The back of her head impacted with tremendous force and she cried out, seeing sparks explode in front of her eyes, the room swinging woozily out of focus.
“Does that hurt?” His voice beside her ear was rough as sandpaper. “Good. That’ll teach you.”
He swung at her, his fist catching her squarely in the temple. She fell to the floor, gasping for breath, her eyes streaming. “Please, Brian…” she managed to choke out, but that only seemed to incense him further, as she felt the tip of his boot catch her forcefully in the ribs, and heard the bones there crack and splinter. There was another wave of pain and nausea, so intense that for a moment her world turned red then black; but the room filtered back into sight and through her blurry vision she saw him advancing, a sneer upon his lips, poised for another blow.
***
Shakespeare raced into the control room and quickly typed an access key into the main control panel, bringing up a new viewing window. Green lines of computer code flickered downward on the black screen like radioactive rain, and he gritted his teeth as he scanned it. These lines of code corresponded to events that were transpiring at that moment inside the matrix, in a little house on Cedar Street, New Rawley, a place that he’d used to call home…
“Shakespeare, what’s going on?” panted Jacq, who had run in behind him, Wolf on her heels. Catching sight of the screen, she gasped. “That’s not…?”
“It is,” he affirmed without turning around. “I’m keeping tabs on my mom, okay? Just like you with Hamilton and your own mother. And the alarm that went off means she’s in real trouble.”
“God,” Wolf said gravely as he came up behind them, his eyes travelling over the code. “He’s beating her to a pulp, that guy.”
“Does he do that a lot?” Jacq asked. “Hit her like this?”
“More and more often these days.” Shakespeare winced as another line of code raced across the screen, and in his mind he could see the event happening inside the matrix, the jarring punch catching Susan just below the right eye. The code for blood clotting and latent injury was writing itself even as he watched. “God, I hate this.”
“Don’t,” said Jacq softly. “Don’t watch.”
“How can I not?” he grimaced again, clenching his fist as he watched the scene unfold in front of him. “I wish… I wish I could do something more than just stand here. Look, he’s punching her senseless and I can’t even do anything… I can’t even - ”
“That’s why we shouldn’t watch them,” her tone was meditative. “When we know we can’t do anything to help the people we love - ”
“Oh, god,” he suddenly muttered, leaning in close to the screen, “did you see that? He’s fucking killing her in there!”
“Don’t watch,” she said, a tinge of urgency creeping into her voice, “please, just turn it off. Don’t watch.”
“I can’t,” he said, his voice rising as he stared at the monitor. “I can’t…”
“You can’t help!” she said, reaching over him in an attempt to turn off the computer.
“Lay off!” He cried, batting her hand away with impatience.
“What are you going to do?” she exclaimed. “Watch her get beaten to death? You can’t help!”
“No, this is going too far,” he said suddenly, standing up, “I need to go in. I need to help her. It’ll only take a minute, you don’t know this but I’ve set up a hard line that leads directly into their house, I just need to take five minutes - ”
“Are you telling me,” she interrupted, her voice low, an undercurrent of tension running through it like strung wire, “that you set up an unauthorised hard line into the matrix without consulting me at all?”
“This is not the time to get into it!” he exclaimed, swirling around to meet her eyes. “Can’t you see I need to - ”
“You can’t!” she shouted, frustrated. “You’ll be breaching the Code of Secrecy in a big way! You can’t show yourself to her, not after disappearing for three years!”
“Damn it, he’s killing her in there!” he shouted back, his fists balling at his side. “Can’t you see that?”
“They all think we’re dead or something!” she yelled. “You can’t just… waltz in and rescue her! You know the rules, you know this is exactly what we have to bear! You don’t know what you’re doing, you’re not thinking straight - ”
“Excuse me for wanting to save my mother’s fucking life!” he shouted, taking a step forward as though he wanted to strike her.
She stood her ground, her chin thrust out stubbornly. “I’m the captain of this ship, Shakespeare,” she said. “And I command that you walk away from this. Now.”
He stared at her. “You pulling rank on me?”
“I’m the captain of this ship,” she repeated, calmer this time, though her eyes still glimmered like those of a nervous animal, “and you will obey my orders. You are not to reveal yourself inside the matrix and risk being tracked.”
“Fuck you, Jacq!” he suddenly exploded. “You can’t stop me from doing this! This is my mom’s life on the line here, and no matter what you do or what you say, I’m going in!”
“You’d be breaching a direct order,” she said, her face very white.
“You know what?” he retorted, “I don’t care. I don’t even fucking care. I’m going in, even if you throw me off this ship, even if you send me to the Zion military prison for breaching orders, I don’t care. Wolf,” he turned to the operator, “set up the equipment. I’m going in.”
“Wolf, don’t you dare move,” barked Jacq, her gaze locking fiercely with Shakespeare’s own.
The operator looked uncertainly from one determined face to the other. “I…” he muttered, “Shakes… I can’t. She’s the captain, you know…”
Shakespeare’s expression became tauter. His pale blue gaze bored into Jacq’s, brilliant with fury, the colour like the sky she’d remembered from her previous life in the matrix, an echo of bright days when they could still see the sun overhead.
His voice, when he finally spoke again, was very soft.
“What would you do if it were Hamilton, Jake?”
She fought back a small shudder at the sound of the name he’d uttered. The silence rang out in the air as they stared at one another, seeing in the other’s eyes another time, another place, long ago, when they were different people. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d said that name - her name - out loud. In the quietness, in the metallic chamber of this cruise ship in the real world, it sounded like a sign of weakness.
Slowly, she turned toward the screen once more. The lines of code were racing, coming down so fast that they were nothing more than blurry green streaks. They were so used to reading code now that it automatically translated into images in their mind’s eye, and as she watched she could see Brian Krudski, tugging on a handful of his wife’s shining red hair, dragging her down to the ground. The code wrote itself as fast as she could read it, a fist swinging toward unguarded flesh, a trickle of blood, an agonised gasp for breath.
“Wolf,” she said, not looking at either of the men. “Prepare the input channels. Shakespeare’s going in.”
***
“Oh god,” Susan sobbed, curling into a tight ball as Brian grabbed her blouse and pulled her toward him, his menacing face looming over her own. “Please, Brian - ”
“Ungrateful bitch,” his breath was hot and alcoholic, and as she turned her face away she could feel blood seeping from her nose and from the cut on her lip. It dripped, a viscous vermilion, down her chin and slowly onto her blouse, onto his fist clenched tightly around a handful of the material. “Stupid slut,” he muttered, kicking her again, almost carelessly, in her side where she was sure several ribs have already broken. She cried out, and he clamped his other hand over her mouth. “SHUT UP!” he cried, “you whining, good-for-nothing whore!”
Dimly, Susan heard the phone ringing, as though from the direction of the basement. But she did not register the sound, nor the fact that there shouldn’t have been a phone or even a phone line in the basement. All she was aware of was the sour, pungent smell of Brian’s breath, his bloodshot eyes, the stinging pain in her scalp where he’d wrapped his hand in her hair, and the desperate fight for air into her lungs, the pain in her side becoming almost too hard to bear. Iridescent red and black stars were bursting in front of her eyes, sparkling with every tormented breath.
“You like to talk back to me, huh?” his voice was a guttural growl as he pulled back for another kick. “Well, let’s see if this will teach you - ”
He suddenly paused. For a moment she lay there, trembling, waiting, but the blows did not come again. The ringing of the phone seemed to have stopped and an ominous hush fell over the room, like a leaden weight. She heard Brian draw in a sharp breath.
“Who’s there?” he demanded.
Then, unmistakably, Susan heard the sound of footsteps. Slow and measured, they trod across the room and stopped in front of her. Brian’s hold on her hair loosened and she swivelled around, looking up at the intruder, wheezing in pain as the broken bones in her side ground against each other.
The first thing she saw were a pair of black combat boots, into which black trousers were tucked. The tails of a long coat, and her gaze travelled higher and higher until it landed on the face of their unbidden visitor. A gasp rose in her throat but she swallowed it, staring at the pale, freckled face, the sleek wraparound sunglasses that hid his eyes, the shorn reddish hair.
She had dreamed of this moment so many times, and in so many possible variations, that this seemed just like another dream for her to wake up from. But the pain in her side was unbearable, her vision was swimming in and out of focus, blood was still dripping from her face and onto the worn carpet. If this was a dream, then she must have one hell of a self-flagellating subconscious…
He wasn’t looking at her. Instead, he turned his face to Brian, and slowly removed his sunglasses, revealing startlingly pale blue eyes that were narrowed in fury.
“You touch her again,” he said, his voice a low, menacing snarl. “And I’ll break every bone in your body.”
What happened next happened so fast that, even years afterward, when she looked back, Susan could not recall in its entirety. Brian seemed to have lunged first, and there was a flurry of activity, a surprisingly loud sound of impact upon flesh, and she had a brief image of Will leaping, as though suspended in midair, his leg striking out with such force that it seemed like nothing but a flash of black, like lightning in negative. But the next moment she looked and he was back where he was, standing his ground, his demeanour of calm thinly veiling the rage and contempt that she saw bubbling in his eyes. Perhaps he hadn’t moved at all.
Yet, a moment later, Brian swayed on the spot and fell to the ground with a sickening thud, his shoulder hitting the floor first without his even throwing out a hand to break his fall. His eyes were closed, his face still bearing the expression of utter surprise, his nose oozing shining tracks of blood and very clearly broken.
“My god,” she whispered as she stared at her husband’s motionless body, shocked into submission, “what did you - ”
“Knocked him out,” said Will simply, without a trace of concern in his voice. “Don’t worry, there won’t be any lasting damage - ”
He stopped speaking, then, and slowly turned to face her as though suddenly realising where he was and whom he was talking to. Their eyes met, and she saw a streak of emotion in his eyes, and it suddenly drove home that this really was her son standing in front of her, the son who had disappeared from her life almost three years ago. She stared at him, her gaze travelling over his pale face, the determined curve of the jaw, the cynical gleam in his eye. “Will,” she whispered, and found that she could not say anything else. “Oh, Will…”
So many things bubbled up in her chest, so many questions she wanted to ask. Where had he been these three long years? Why hadn’t he contacted her, surely he knew she had cried herself to sleep all these countless nights, fretting over her only child, the pain of knowing that he had been wrenched from her grasp? And who was he now? What was he? The questions piled in her mind yet they seemed to get stuck somewhere near the region of her throat, making her choke on them as she stared at him, unable to tear her eyes from his face, this face that was at the same time foreign and familiar beyond reckoning.
Placing a hand under her arm, he helped her to her feet without speaking. She inhaled sharply as she stood up, clasping a hand to her side.
“You need to get that checked out,” he said, his voice low. “Call an ambulance.”
“Will,” she murmured, reaching out to touch his face. He recoiled, ever so slightly, as her fingertips made contact, as though her mere touched burned him. “Why… how…” she murmured, feeling a sob struggling to break free from her throat, trying to cast out the panic and the utter lack of comprehension.
“Please, mom,” his voice cracked a little as he uttered that word, and her heart gave a painful leap at the acknowledgement that, at least, he seemed to remain human - remain her son - when he said it. “Please,” he said again, seating her gently in a chair nearby that hadn’t been overturned by Brian’s violent scuffle. “Don’t ask any questions. I can’t answer them.”
“But,” she tried again, the great lump in her throat once more restricting the flow of her questions.
“I’m sorry, mom,” he said, and his gaze travelled to hers, the piercing blue of his eyes burning into her mind as he spoke rapidly, his words tumbling out one after another like some secret code that only half made sense as she sat there, her mind gone blank from astonishment and anguish. “I had to do this… he would have killed you otherwise… but I shouldn’t have come. I put all of us in grave danger tonight. You must not mention this to anybody, do you understand? Let no one know I have been here. Let no one know you’ve seen me. When dad wakes up I want you to…” he broke off and glanced behind him to where Brian lay, still unconscious. He sighed, and turned back to Susan. “I don’t know. I’ll deal with him later. I’ll make sure he doesn’t do this again.” The colour of his eyes darkened almost imperceptibly, and he set his jaw. “I’ll make sure of it,” he said again, before standing up abruptly. “I have to go, mom. Call the hospital, they will take care of you. You’ll be all right now.”
It was the sight of him, getting to his feet and turning away, that broke the invisible barrier in her throat. Suddenly the words came gushing out, in torrents, unstoppable, manic and half-incoherent. “No, I’m not all right!” she cried, leaping to her feet and feeling pain explode in her ribs as she did so. Clamping a hand to her side and ignoring the splintering, nauseating feeling behind it, she staggered forward, grabbing onto his arm roughly. “Will, what the hell is going on? What do you mean you shouldn’t have come? What are you playing at? You leave us for three years and you suddenly show up and I’m not supposed to let anyone know? Do you even know what we’ve been put through these years? Talk to me! What… what…” she gestured wildly at his coat, his combat boots, the sunglasses he had tucked into his front pocket, “what the hell is this? What on earth are you doing?”
“Mom, please,” he exclaimed, trying to free her hold on him, “I can’t explain… don’t make me explain, I can’t… just forget this ever happened. I beg you - ”
“NO!” she shouted, and even she felt shocked at the furious desperation that surged through her, like a stream of fire, like dark venom. “You will NOT do this to me! Will, look at me, I don’t understand, I need to know what you’ve been doing! What are you? A spy? Where have you been all these years? Where did you go? I - ”
She stopped in the middle of her sentence with a rattling gasp. He turned to her, alarmed, but she staggered back, holding on to the back of the chair to stop herself from falling. She looked up at him, and for a moment their eyes met. In that split second she saw a hint of comprehension dawning in his expression, a flicker of fear.
A curious sensation run through her, like static electricity that shot though her veins and arteries, and for a moment it felt like all her organs were humming. Her vision blurred and then crystallised into a focus, much brighter and sharper than she’d ever had, and for a brief moment she felt powerful, all-knowing, her mind reeling with the clarity of the situation. For a moment, she understood exactly what was going on. As she stared into Will’s eyes, she saw her own reflection in them. But it wasn’t her reflection… it wasn’t her at all. It was a solemn-looking man in a suit, his eyes obscured behind dark glasses.
And then… blackness.
***
Shakespeare lay supine behind Wolf, who was in the operator’s seat. He was lying on a worn leatherette seat, his feet shackled to the footrests, his head on an elevated support pillow with a hole in the back, through which a thick silver cord ran from the jack at the back of his head to the machine next to him, which monitored his heart rate and brain activity. His eyes were moving rapidly behind their closed lids. Jacq bent over him, checking his vital signs.
“Shit!” exclaimed Wolf as he saw the new line of code that flashed onscreen, almost leaping out of his chair in surprise.
“What’s going on?” Jacq turned sharply, striding toward the operating panel.
“We’ve got to get him out now,” Wolf said tensely. “They’ve tracked him.”
She gaped at the screen. “They sent an agent?”
“It’s taken over his mother’s body,” Wolf said, his voice grim as his fingers flew over the keyboard.
A cold shiver ran down Jacq’s back as she looked over her shoulder at Shakespeare’s immobile body, and then at the screen in front of her. “Oh god, Shakespeare,” she whispered, “run…”
***
Shakespeare did not hesitate as he saw his mother flicker in front of him, as though she had been turned briefly into a holographic image. He had seen the transition too many times to be stunned by it, knowing what came immediately afterward. The agents could take over, at will, any un-freed person inside the matrix, and once they were in place…
Well, now wasn’t the time to think about that. No freedom fighter had ever defeated an agent before, unless one counted the near-mythical recounts of what had recently transpired on the cruiser Nebuchadnezzar, the rumours of the man - The One - who had changed the matrix with his mind alone, who had utterly destroyed an agent from the inside; but now wasn’t the time to think about that, either. Instead, Shakespeare did the only logical thing that anyone would have done under the circumstances, the very first thing he was taught when he started training for active combat, the one verb that was ingrained to spring to their minds when they came into direct contact with an agent…
He ran.
A bare millisecond of hesitation, and then he was out the door, his footsteps thudding on the path leading to the quiet street. A gush of warm spring air rushed up to meet him but he did not register it, and he was only dimly aware of the sound of shots ringing out behind him, and he didn’t dare look back. Gasping in great gulps of air as his legs pumped furiously under him, he ran toward the centre of town, hardly even noticing the familiarity of the sight, the fact that he, as a child, had travelled this street countless times. What flashed through his mind instead was the memory of Wakefield standing immobile before Darjeeling’s mutating body, and the sound of Jacq’s anguished scream…
His brain worked frantically as he ran. The nearest hard line was in the Krudskis’ basement, which was where he jacked in, but surely they who tracked him would have cut that line immediately, before they even made the agent transition; and where the next closest hard line out of here was, he had no idea.
He ran out into the darkness, automatically zigzagging the way he’d been taught to avoid the agent having a direct shot at him, listening with a hint of resignation to the sound of bullets whizzing past his head. His life was out of his hands. Whether it shot him or not, whether he got out of this alive, at this point, was pure luck. As he ran his cell phone started to ring, shrilly, and his heart leapt. Grabbing it from his coat pocket, he punched the speak button with a surge of new hope. “Wolf,” he panted into the mouthpiece, “get me the fuck out of here!”
***
“Your nearest hard line is in the centre of town,” Wolf said urgently into his headset, “are you running in that direction? Good. It’s the gas station in town, up in the attic, we’ve set up a line there - ”
“He’s not gonna make it,” Jacq suddenly exclaimed from behind him, her hands clenched so hard on the back of his seat that her knuckles were turning white. “The agent’s gaining on him, he can’t run that far.”
“It’s the closest we’ve got,” said Wolf grimly, watching the screen. “Shakespeare, do you copy? Run toward the centre of the town. Upstairs in the gas station opposite the diner, do you know where it is?”
“Of course he knows where it is,” said Jacq, a hint of ironic amusement in her voice as she strode toward the jack-in seat beside Shakespeare’s motionless body. She sat down and buckled her own feet into the footrests. “He’s not gonna make it, Wolf,” she said again, pressing a button and making the seat tilt backwards until she was lying flat, her face to the ceiling. “He needs backup. Plug me in.”
“It’s too dangerous!” exclaimed Wolf as he swivelled around. “We can’t afford to lose both of you at the same time - ”
“You won’t lose us,” she said resolutely, punching in the activation codes to the jack-in system. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath. “Now come on, he doesn’t have much time.”
***
“Oh god, I can’t watch,” whimpered Bella Banks, clasping her hands over her eyes.
The living room that adjoined the gas station counter was cast into darkness, which was lit only by the lone, flickering light of the TV screen. Bella and Scout were snuggled up on the couch, his arm around her shoulders, a bowl of popcorn on the coffee table, which was littered with a stack of rental videotapes. Onscreen right now was the new American remake of The Ring, which was drawing to an end. Glancing indulgently at his girlfriend, Scout chuckled. “It’s not real, Bella.”
“Yeah,” she mumbled, burying her face in his shoulder. “I know. But that doesn’t actually make me feel any better.”
“Don’t worry,” he laughed and held her closer. “I’ll protect you.”
She smiled at him, reaching up for a small kiss. But no sooner had their lips touched than a phone rang, shrilly, the sound of it seemingly coming from upstairs. They sprang apart, Bella stifling a small shriek. “Oh my god,” she whispered, her hand flying to her mouth. Simultaneously their gazes swept to the TV screen, where the credits to The Ring were now rolling. Above their heads, the phone continued to ring.
“This is ridiculous,” Scout laughed. “It’s a coincidence, Bella. Go answer the phone.”
“Are you crazy?” she retorted, her eyes wide. “I’m not gonna take that chance!”
“Fine,” he rolled his eyes, “I’ll answer it.” Getting up from the couch, he looked around in disorientation. “Where…?”
“Scout,” she said suddenly, jumping to her feet. “Listen.”
“What is it?” he asked. The ringing overhead sounded disconcertingly loud from where he stood.
“It sounds like it’s coming from the attic,” she whispered, walking quickly toward him, a frightened gleam in her eyes.
He furrowed his brows. “So?”
“There’s no phone in the attic,” she grabbed hold of his hand. “I’m sure of it.”
He stared at her. And at that moment, the ringing stopped, leaving behind an eerie silence, the presence of the very lack of sound pressing down on them, dense and portentous.
A tense moment passed, then another. They stood face to face, their clammy hands enjoined, scarcely daring to breathe.
Finally, Scout broke into a smile. “Come on,” he said, tugging on Bella’s hand, “we’re just scaring ourselves.”
But as soon as the words left his lips, there came the distinct sound of footsteps overhead. “What was that?” he exclaimed, feeling his heart begin to race. Suddenly, they could hear the sound of glass breaking, as clear as day. A faint thud followed, as though somebody had jumped from the attic window onto the gas station’s ground-floor overhanging roof.
“Oh my god,” Bella whispered, her terrified eyes glittering in the darkness, “oh my god…”
“Stay behind me,” Scout instructed. Striding quickly across the room, he peered out the window. Breathlessly, Bella followed, peeking from behind his shoulder.
For a moment they saw nothing out of the ordinary on the quiet street. The diner across from the gas station was closed, its interior lights extinguished. A few street lamps lit the intersection, throwing onto the pavement a net of shifting light and shadow. Scout drew a cautious breath, reached for the door handle, and…
A black shape suddenly leapt from the gas station’s overhanging roof, and Scout sprang back, barely stifling a gasp. It was clearly a woman, clad in some sort of cat suit made out of clingy black material. She landed on her feet, surprisingly nimble and soundless, crouching low as though she were a prowling feline. But before Scout had time to think anything through, Bella screamed behind him, clenching his hand so tightly that he could have sworn his bones were grinding together. The woman swivelled toward the source of the sound, and for a moment her eyes met theirs, her pale features emerging out of the shadows.
Bella’s scream stopped abruptly, as though it had been severed with a sharp blade. Scout, too, stared mutely, his heart hammering in his chest, knowing that he should say something or do something but his throat was as dry as sand, his feet seemingly rooted to the floor…
Something like sorrow flashed in the woman’s eyes. But she did not stop for a second look at the couple inside the gas station. Instead, she glanced around quickly and, spotting a shiny black motorcycle resting beside the gas pumps, one of Bella’s recent motor jobs, leapt upon it, her movements fluid and graceful. The engine roared to life.
It wasn’t until the woman rode away on the bike, heading in the direction of Cedar Street, the low rumble of the motor breaking the silence of the small town street, that Scout and Bella found themselves mobile once more, recovering from the shock of what they’d just witnessed. “Was that…?” murmured Bella, her voice trailing to a whisper.
“…Jake?” Scout finished for her, and he turned, seeing the look of astonishment in her eyes as the exact echo of his own. But before he could say anything else, he saw Bella’s expression stiffen, and she took a step away from him. Then she flickered, as though she were suddenly and inexplicably lit from within. “Bella?” he asked uncertainly, but a curious sensation ran through him, like mild electrocution, and suddenly his limbs snapped together, as though they didn’t obey his brain’s commands any longer.
“What’s going on?” he whispered, before he saw Bella transform into a man in a black suit right in front of his eyes, and the world turned black.
***
“Wolf, I’m in,” said Jacq in clipped tones as she took the motorcycle through a tight bend, steering with one hand. Clasping her cell phone to her ear, she demanded, “Where’s Shakespeare?”
“Taking the turn on the street,” came Wolf’s reply. “He should be coming into your field of vision anytime now - ”
Sure enough, at that precise moment Shakespeare burst around the corner, his coat flying out behind him like giant black wings. Without another word Jacq revved the engine and sped up toward him. Within seconds he had come into the field of her bright headlight, blinking against the sudden flare. She swerved sharply to avoid hitting him and swept in a tight circle, turning the bike around. “Get on!” she shouted.
He didn’t need to be told twice. “Go! Go!” he yelled as he scrambled upon the passenger seat, wrapping one arm around her waist and clamping the other to a stitch in his side. “He’s right behind me!”
She kicked the accelerator, hard, and they took off in amidst the acrid smell of burning rubber. “Get my gun,” she yelled authoritatively into the headwind, “it’s in the holster. Shoot back if they start getting too close.”
He was slumped against her back, wheezing in ragged gasps. “We can’t,” he panted, “the agent is my mom… she transformed… I can’t shoot her…”
Knitting her brows together, Jacq said into the phone, still steering with one hand, “Wolf, I’ve got him. We’re coming back.”
“Don’t go back to the gas station!” came the immediate reply. “The couple in the house, the agents have just taken over… They’re up in the attic now and they’ve cut the hard line. You have to go to the next exit, avoid the gas station at all costs!”
“Damn it,” Jacq swore angrily, swerving the bike down a small alleyway in the nick of time. “Where’s the next closest line out of here?”
“The system says there’s one up in the boarding school by the lake,” Wolf sounded dubious. “But I don’t remember setting one up - ”
“You wouldn’t,” Jacq said curtly, manoeuvring the bike out of the small path and onto another deserted road. “I did. We’re on our way.”
***
Rawley Lake at night was a beautiful sight, Hamilton mused as he stood on the edge of the docks, looking out over the smooth silvery surface of the placid water. The moon was nearly full, and it cast its clear light over the lake, which, coupled with its own brilliant reflection, lent the atmosphere a feeling of ethereal tranquillity, as though it wasn’t really a place on Earth.
He liked that. Even now, nearly three years down the track, sometimes he wished he could just disappear into thin air and emerge elsewhere, leaving all of this behind.
Or, a small voice in the back of his head seemed to pipe up, you just want to disappear to the same place that Jake went.
There was a slow ache in the region of his stomach as the thought of her flared in his mind. An image of a lithe, dark-haired girl, clad in a pale pink dress, turning from the mirror to smile at him, her eyes crinkling in the corners. He lowered his head, staring down at his reflection in the water, half expecting to see his fifteen year old self staring back, straggly hair falling across his wide eyes, cheeks pink from excitement or innocence or love. Perhaps all three. It had been the case, once upon a time.
Instead, he received a little shock when he saw his true reflection, a gaunt young man of nearly eighteen, with deep blue eyes that seemed to emit an overwhelming sense of cold cynicism and self-enclosure. His dark hair was neatly trimmed, offsetting his pale skin that never seemed to blush the way it once did. He supposed it was the lack of sun that did it. Nowadays he spent most of his free time holed up in his room, writing songs on his Fender guitar, turning a deaf ear to his mother’s gentle urgings for him to go out and make some new friends - the irony of her forcing him to move into the dorms in Junior Year was not lost on him. It was only at night, at times like these, when he ventured outside, letting the night air caress his face.
He closed his eyes and tried to breathe in the light: it felt cool and fluid, like water. Unexpectedly, another image of Jake sparked to life behind his closed eyelids. She was indistinct, seen from a distance, through his zoom lens. She was astride her prized motorbike, clad in worn jeans and a black leather jacket, and she came riding into Rawley Academy that day. Riding into his life. At the time, or in the weeks following it, he’d never have anticipated that she could have gone out of his life just as easily. Screwing his eyes shut, he chewed on his lower lip and concentrated. At times like these she felt so real that he couldn’t believe that she was only a memory, a faded image; he could recall so clearly the sound of her voice, the sultry laugh, the low rumble of her motorcycle…
His eyes flew open. The sound of an approaching motorcycle was growing louder by the second, quite unlike a figment of his imagination. He looked around, wildly, but the trees surrounding the lake shielded everything from view. Furrowing his brows, he started toward shore.
He had only taken two or three steps before a bike tore out of the grove of trees on the town side, roaring down the dusty path toward the boathouse next to the docks. Hamilton stopped in his tracks, staring incredulously at the two figures astride the motorcycle. Surely they couldn’t be students; no Rawley kid would ever be so brash. Yet, by the very looks of them they didn’t seem like townies, either. He watched, mutely, as the bike ground to a stop and two figures abandoned it, running at full tilt toward the boathouse. A telephone was ringing loudly from inside the small wood cabin, though it made no sense because he was sure there had never been a phone line connected to the boathouse, let alone a working telephone. But the figures were running toward the sound of it… the one in front was taller, with light-coloured hair, his long coat billowing out behind him; the other one, a brunette, was holding up the rear, looking backwards as she ran. Her gait was strangely familiar. The pale moonlight gleamed dully off her form-fitting black outfit, the way it would with leather. Hamilton could vaguely make out that she had black leather gloves on.
With a pang that came so suddenly and so powerfully that it nearly sent him reeling, a memory burst into his head like a blossom of fireworks, recalling another time, another place, the girl he’d loved…
“We’re recovering your motorcycle, not lifting the Mona Lisa.”
“Jake?” the word was out of his mouth before his brain had fully registered it. Then the absurdity of it hit, like a sheet of ice water. Surely it wasn’t Jake - it couldn’t be - but he was already running down the docks, toward shore, toward the figures tearing into the boathouse, toward the sound of the ringing phone. “JAKE!” he yelled again, desperately, his footsteps drumming a hollow heartbeat across the wooden floorboards that lined the docks. The first of the two figures had already ducked inside the boathouse. The phone had stopped ringing.
“JAKE!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, running as fast as his legs could carry him. Coming off the docks, his feet struck solid ground and he nearly tripped, though he kept his eyes on the girl, putting on a fresh burst of speed despite the throbbing in his ankle. As though in slow motion he saw her turn around, the moonlight glancing off her hazel eyes, the straight nose, the lips with a determined curve to them, the pale skin. His heart thudded painfully in his chest, and it felt inflated, as though it would burst from the shock and happiness of it all. It was Jake. Her features were ingrained into his memory. They were etched onto his bones. He would never ever forget that face.
Their eyes met, and time seemed to stop. There was a flicker of incredulity in her expression, laced with an unfathomable sadness and longing. She had changed, but at the same time she hadn’t changed at all, she was his Jake, he would know her if she had crumbled to ash, he would know her by the fire that sprang up in his chest, the aching in his heart. “Hamilton?” he heard her say, softly, her voice coming as though from very, very far away. The phone was ringing again.
As he rushed toward her, a haze of static seemed to burst into existence in the base of his stomach, freezing him mid-motion. He gasped and stumbled, feeling his limbs seize up as electricity seemed to course through him, sending sparks through his bloodstream. “Jake,” he said weakly, and had a fleeting view of her expression changing from hopeful sorrow into one of mingled fear and regret, before his vision went out altogether.
Jacq stared at the flickering form of Hamilton, standing merely feet away from her. He was thinner than she’d remembered, paler, and taller, too. “No,” she whispered, unable to tear her eyes away from his beautiful face, the tears of happiness that streaked his cheeks, even though in the back of her mind she realised what was going to happen in a moment’s time, even as he transformed into an agent right in front of her eyes. “Hamilton…” she murmured, reaching out to him, her hand shaking uncontrollably.
“Jacq, what the fuck are you doing?” roared Wolf’s voice from her cell phone, which she had let fall onto the ground without noticing. “Pick up the goddamn phone!”
She snapped back to attention just as the agent completed his transformation. He smiled at her, revealing a row of straight, white teeth. Something seemed to snap behind her eyes and without another word she turned and ran, ducking into the boathouse just as a shot sounded in the silence. Kicking the doors closed, she darted to the corner of the small cabin and picked up the phone that was still ringing shrilly, pressing the receiver to her ear. The doors flew off their hinges, revealing the agent standing in the entranceway, a black shadow backlit by the brilliant moon.
“Agent White,” he said, aiming his pistol with a grim smile. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
She stared at him. “You,” she whispered, as she felt the peculiar yet familiar sensation of the hard line connection travelling down her body, like icy pins and needles. “You’re the one who took over Darjeeling - ”
His smile deepened as he inclined his head slightly and pressed the trigger.
The bullet tore through the air and embedded itself in the wooden panelling of the opposite wall. The phone receiver fell to the ground with a dull clunk. Jacq had disappeared.
3: The Secret Names Of Us
Jacq opened her eyes and the familiar sight of the control room swung into view. Wolf was leaning over her, a concerned expression on his face. “You all right?” he asked as he unplugged the input lead from the back of her head.
She sat up, mutely, not looking at him. Bringing up a shaking hand to brush her hair out of her face, she saw that Shakespeare was already awake and out of his seat, leaning over the control board but looking over his shoulder at her with a strange expression. It was half concern and half something darker, more enigmatic. She couldn’t understand it, nor did she feel any inclination to, not while she was drowning in the turmoil of her own mind.
“I thought you were right after Shakes,” Wolf’s voice came from beside her, but it sounded as though he were talking through water. “He came through and I connected the line again, and we waited for you but you just wouldn’t pick up… what were you doing? You nearly got killed! If you’d picked up that receiver any later you would have been shot straight in the head.”
Still she did not answer.
Shakespeare turned around and leaned against the control panel, hugging himself as though cold. “Was it Hamilton?” he asked softly. “I thought I saw him.”
She affirmed this with an almost indiscernible nod. He gazed at her, licked his dry lips, and fell silent.
“Who’s Hamilton?” asked Wolf, gazing from Jacq to Shakespeare, then back to Jacq again. “Someone back in…” he jerked his thumb back toward the monitor, “the town you guys came from?”
“Yeah,” Shakespeare said shortly. Sighing, he stepped forward, “Look, Jacq, I’m really sorry about this whole thing. I know I landed both of us in some serious shit tonight and it’s a miracle we both came out of it unscathed. You can dish out the punishment, whatever. I’ll take it. I’m really sorry. But I had to do it. You saw what he was doing to her. I know we’re supposed to leave all this behind when we came out of the matrix, but I just can’t let my mom get killed in front of my eyes, I just couldn’t let that happen - ”
He trailed off, looking at Jacq uncertainly. She made no sign that she’d heard him.
“So, um,” he continued, scratching his chin thoughtfully. “You opened a hard line in Rawley without telling us?”
At that, she looked up. Her eyes were glassy, the angles and planes on her beautiful face etched by shadow.
“We do what we have to do,” she said softly, standing up. Gripping tightly onto the back of the seat as though she couldn’t hold herself up otherwise, she looked at the others with something resembling tenderness in her eyes. “Come on, guys,” she said. “Let’s all go get some sleep. We deserve it after what we went through today.”
And with that she walked out of the control room, leaving the two men staring after her.
“Dude,” Wolf emitted a low whistle. “That guy she ran into, must’ve been one hell of a romance, huh?”
Shakespeare’s gaze was fixed on the spot where Jacq disappeared into the hall. “Yeah,” he said, a trace of hollowness ringing in his voice. “Romeo and Juliet, those two.”
“Dude, do not ever do that to me again,” said Wolf. “I’m just a lowly operator, so I have to listen to you when you pull shit like this, but you could’ve gotten both of you killed tonight. Code of Secrecy or not, Jacq was a nanosecond away from having her brains plastered all over that boathouse wall, you know - ”
“I know, Wolf,” Shakespeare said wearily. “But what would you have done if it’d been your mom in there?”
“You’ve got a point,” Wolf admitted before he gave an enormous yawn and stretched his arms over his head. “I’m gonna turn in. You guys sure know how to work a guy to an early grave.”
“Come on, we’re not that bad,” Shakespeare forced a low chuckle as he glanced up. “You’re our man, Wolf. Nerves of steel, right?”
“Uh-huh,” the other man grinned as he walked out of the control room. “Whatever. G’night.”
“Night,” said Shakespeare automatically, the smile sliding off his face. Once he was sure Wolf was out of sight, he slumped down on the control seat, burying his head in his hands.
***
Hamilton awoke with a start.
The early morning sunlight was pouring in through the gap between the curtains, falling into a bright narrow oblong on the floor. The room was messy, but in a certain orderly way, just the way he’d left it. Scout was snoring in the other bed, his mouth slightly open and his head lolling off the pillow.
His heart beating a violent tattoo against his ribcage, Hamilton threw off the bedcovers and jumped to his feet. The memories of last night were racing through his mind, but even as he recounted them he sensed them blurring at the edges, the impossible logic of it bleeding into what he thought were facts until everything started making no sense at all. Jake riding into the school on a motorbike, clad in leather, and he was running toward her, and she looked so sad… what happened then? Did he black out? But how could he be back in his bed this morning like every other morning? When did he get back? Where did she go?
Wrenching open the curtains, he stared down at the boathouse by the lake, as though he could discover some clue just by the act of looking at it really hard. Was he really out there last night? Or was he just dreaming? Surely Jake couldn’t have been there, last night; otherwise how could he be still here this morning, pondering if it were a dream or reality?
“Argghh,” moaned Scout from his bed, “turn off the light.”
“Sorry, man,” Hamilton said absently, closing the curtains again.
“I’m good,” mumbled Scout as he opened his bleary eyes, “I’m awake.” Holding his head, he groaned. “Feel like I’ve been put through the grinder, though.”
“Yeah, me too,” Hamilton said heavily, sitting back down.
“I was having a pretty fucked-up dream,” chuckled Scout as he downed the glass of water by his bedside. “What about you?”
There was a small niggling sensation in Hamilton’s stomach, nursing the doubt that all this couldn’t have been just a normal, vivid dream. He remembered it too well: the pale moonlight, the unnatural clarity of the whole exchange, the heartbroken look on Jake’s face. But if it wasn’t a dream, how could he have ended back here, with no memory of what happened afterward?
“Yeah,” he said with a slow shrug. “Me too.”
***
The crew on Descartes were uncommonly groggy at breakfast. They sat together at the dining table, forcing down the meal of all-around nutritional glop without the usual jokes. Instead, there was a lethargic silence, laced with just a hint of discomfort. Jacq was lost in her own thoughts, the porridge-laden spoon nearly missing her mouth time after time as she aimed it carelessly at her chin, nose, or forehead. On the third narrow escape, she looked up to see Shakespeare staring at her avidly over his own bowl. “What?” she demanded, surprised.
The tips of his ears turned pink and he lowered his head, shrugging.
She furrowed her brows at him and set her spoon down. “What’s up with you?”
“Didn’t get much sleep last night,” he mumbled, shoving a large spoonful of glop into his mouth.
Wolf glanced up, first toward Shakespeare, then to Jacq, and frowned. “Hey,” he began hesitantly, “Don’t you think it was weird - ”
“What is?” Shakespeare asked, swallowing his mouthful of food and pushing the bowl away, carefully avoiding Jacq’s eyes.
“The fact that the agents really went to town with you guys,” Wolf said slowly. “I mean, they sent out… what was it? Three or four agents after the two of you?”
“Yeah,” Jacq said, her brows furrowing. “You’re right, that is a lot. They must think we’re high-risk.”
“That’s not it,” Shakespeare said thoughtfully. “At least, I don’t think it is. I was thinking about this yesterday. It’s got something to do with the Nebuchadnezzar. The guy who - apparently - can change the matrix at will.”
“That’s just myth,” Jacq said with a small roll of the eyes. “Don’t tell me you believe in that crap about The One. Plus, even if it’s true, and I’m not saying it is, what’s that got to do with us?”
“Everything,” said Shakespeare. Drumming his long fingers lightly on the tabletop, he looked deep in thought. “Look, just say for argument’s sake that the rumours about The One is true. That Morpheus had found him at last. Then what? The machines will be panicking, I think. They know there’s a blip on the radar, they know something atypical is going on. If they don’t retaliate while they’ve still got the upper hand, who knows what this guy - ”
“Neo,” Wolf interrupted, “his name is Neo.”
“Right,” Shakespeare inclined his head. “Who knows what this Neo is capable of? He might upset the whole machine-human balance - ”
“But that’s good,” said Jacq. “It means we finally have a chance to win this war. If he can alter the matrix from inside, then he doesn’t need to fear the agents like the rest of us. Provided that this The One stuff is true, of course,” she added, dubiously.
“That’s exactly my point, though,” Shakespeare said, lifting his gaze but quickly shifting it when she met his eyes. “All I’m saying is, it’s time for the machines’ next move. And that’s what worries me. If last night was anything to go by, they’re really concentrating on taking all of us out once and for all. If I’m thinking along the right lines, then they’ll be planning on attacking Zion, too. They can’t afford to let the news about The One get out and let us devise a game plan around him; they’ll have to take the fight to us, and if I were them, I’d do it as soon as possible.”
“Then I guess it’s good we have you on our side,” Jacq smiled tiredly, but her eyes were already glazing over; her mind seemed a million miles away.
Shakespeare glanced at her and looked down again, his eyes troubled.
***
The night sky was a deep tide of inky blue, punctured here and there with icy shafts of starlight. Hamilton again stood at the edge of the docks, this time with his camera in hand. Click, a shot of the shining edge of the moon creeping over the dark outline of trees in the distance; click, a shot of misty silver light dancing atop the glassy, rippling water; click, a shot of the boathouse doused in shadow, standing dreamlike and forlorn.
“You don’t have a flash,” a female voice behind him suddenly piped up, “they’ll come out underdeveloped.”
He gave a start and whipped around so fast that he toppled off-balance. But the expectant look in his eyes faded immediately when he saw who it was. “Hey Lena,” he said, straightening himself. “Nah, it’s cool. I’m experimenting with this new developing technique and wanted to see how it’d look without the flash.”
“Oh, okay,” said the redhead, shrugging. “So, are you meeting anyone here?”
He turned away and started focusing on another shot. “Nope.”
“It looked as though you were expecting me to be someone else,” she said, following as he started toward shore.
There was a slight pause. “Um, not really,” he said, stopping again, his eyes trained on the boathouse.
“You sure?” she asked, eyeing him curiously. “Cos you can tell me.”
There was a trace of an ironic smirk on his lips as he turned, his eyes fastening on hers for a moment before he looked away again. “Who would I be waiting for, Lena?”
She shrugged, watching his defined profile outlined in liquid silver light, the darkness in his eyes as he stared at the boathouse, as though trying to wish something into existence there. “You know,” she said softly. “We could have worked out, you and me.”
He stirred, but did not remove his gaze from boathouse. “It’s not like we didn’t try, Lena.”
“Yeah, a couple of dates in Junior Year, whatever,” she shrugged. “But your heart wasn’t in it. You can’t deny that.”
He shrugged, still not looking at her.
“You’re still waiting for Jake,” she said, “everyone knows that.”
He gave a little start at the name she uttered, biting his lower lip meditatively.
“Hamilton,” she said, a little sigh escaping on her words. “Don’t you think… I mean, don’t you think it’s about time you - ”
She trailed off, but he turned toward her, his eyes strangely bright in the darkness. “What?” he demanded. “Forget about her? Move on?”
She shrugged, looking suddenly uncomfortable. He stared at her for a moment and turned away again, the muscles in his jaw visibly tensing. “I can’t,” he said. “I just… can’t, okay? Jake… I…”
“So what?” she couldn’t help asking, a hint of sullenness creeping into her voice. “Just wait here for her, year after year after year? What if she never comes back, Hamilton? What if she’s - ”
She stopped abruptly. But the word that she skipped over remained suspended between them, as clearly as though she’d spoken it out loud. Even more so, in fact, the unsaid syllable shining darkly in the ether of their minds, like a beacon of reverse light.
“She is not dead, Lena,” he said quietly, his voice tinged with icy hardness, like the glistening edge of a steel blade. “I know it.”
“Then why hasn’t she come back, all these years?” she demanded, feeling something hot and sharp prickle behind her eyeballs. She knew she was digging too far for her own good, let alone Hamilton’s, but she didn’t seem capable of stopping. She had waited by his side for three long years, and she could feel herself growing reckless with frustration and a remote, stinging pain, watching him waste away before her eyes, pouring all his love into a mere memory.
There was a long pause. He was immobile, staring fixedly at the boathouse, his camera suspended from his neck, his thumbs hooked through the belt loops of his worn jeans. “Hey,” he said finally, but the words that came next seemed apropos of nothing. “There’s no phone line in there, right?”
“Huh?”
“I thought…” he paused. “I thought last night a phone rang in there. Or something. I don’t really remember.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, bemused. “What do you mean you ‘thought’ a phone rang in there?”
“Well,” he shrugged and glanced at her, catching the moonlight in his eyes. “It seemed like a dream. But I don’t know… I just can’t forget it. I’m so sure I heard a phone ring inside that boathouse - ”
“Wait, I’m confused,” she held up a hand quizzically. “So you think you had a dream about a phone ringing in the boathouse, but you think it might have actually happened? How can you not tell the difference?”
“I don’t know how to explain it,” he sighed. “You know… you know how sometimes you have a dream that feels so real you’re sure you’re actually awake…?”
“What else happened in this dream?” she asked sensibly.
He blinked, looking toward the boathouse again. “I think I saw Jake.”
“You saw Jake.”
It was a statement, not a question. There was a small glimmer of pity in her eyes.
“Yeah,” he said, an opaque sheen settling over his irises as he stared out over the water, toward the small wood cabin on the edge of shore. “I was running toward her, I was calling her name, and she turned around and she looked different - of course she’d look different - but it was her, I’m sure of it. I ran toward her and I heard her say my name. But - ”
The look of pity grew stronger as she took a step forward, gazing up at him. “But what?”
“I don’t know,” he buried his head in his hands, pressing hard on his temples. “I don’t know… I don’t remember anything else from last night. I woke up in my bed this morning.”
“So,” she said slowly, as though she was trying to explain something to a very small child. “It was a dream - ”
“No!” he exclaimed, turning on her, his eyes flashing angrily for a moment before the light in them faded and he turned away with a small groan of frustration. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t make sense.”
“Hamilton,” she gently laid a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry about Jake. You know that. I’m really sorry about what happened to her and how that left you on your own. But…” she sighed, tugging absently on a strand of hair, “but you’ve got to realise she’s not… it’s not…” She sighed again, “It was a dream, Hamilton. It had to be.”
“No,” he murmured, shaking his head. “I refuse to believe that. You weren’t there, Lena. You don’t know how real it felt. It’s not a normal dream! It wasn’t a dream. It meant something, I’m sure of it.”
“Then how do you explain you not remembering what happened after you saw her?” she demanded, a note of impatience creeping into her voice. The look of pity in her eyes was becoming very pronounced.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled, starting toward shore again. “But it wasn’t a dream. It can’t have been. It was just too real.”
“Hamilton…” she tried again, her tone exasperated as she stood there, crossing her arms over her chest.
“I’ll see you later, Lena,” he said simply, striding toward the boys’ dormitories, taking his camera off as he went.
She watched him go, shaking her head sadly, the moonlight glancing off her scarlet hair.
***
The light in Jacq’s sleeping cell was switched off, throwing the tiny quarters into complete darkness. She lay on her narrow bed, her hands behind her head, and she stared up blankly at the ceiling, although she could see absolutely nothing in the pitch black.
He had looked so thin, she mused, a bittersweet taste rising to the back of her throat as she recalled Hamilton running toward her, his blue eyes shining almost unnaturally under the bright moonlight. It was as though there was a fire burning inside him, a fire that had not been extinguished despite the years, despite the distance that had sprang up between them like an endless abyss.
One part of her hated seeing him that way, so pale, so wasted, a shadow of his former self. Another part of her, however, was secretly pleased. There was a painful joy in knowing that he had not forgotten her. In fact, it looked as though she was still all that he could think about. The look in his eyes as he ran toward her was desperate and haunted and so full of love that she felt herself frozen to the ground with the sheer force of it. And that… well, that had to count for something.
Her forefinger gingerly traced the outline of the large input jack at the back of her head and, unexpectedly, she felt tears spring to her eyes. Biting down on her lip, she scrunched her eyes shut, forcing herself not to think about what was and what could have been.
It was no secret that she’d always felt a little strange in her own skin, as though she were a piece of a jigsaw that didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the puzzle. It didn’t really bother her much, growing up, except for the little twinge of doubt in her stomach that churned now and again when she thought that things, perhaps, were not what they seemed. But she put that down to simply spending too much time alone. She busied herself and tried not to worry about it. She found a hobby. She thought that the inadequacy would fade as she got older.
But it was that very hobby - hacking - that brought her, finally, to the truth of how things were.
She could still remember the morning when she left the apartment to meet Wakefield, a mysterious Net entity who seemed to know much more about her than she’d ever dreamt possible. The late-summer sun was sultry, warming the pavement, touching the trees in Central Park with a diffuse golden glow, and she had marvelled at the joyous simplicity of the day. She wasn’t to know she’d never see the world quite the same way again.
When Wakefield offered her the choice between the blue pill and the red pill, she didn’t hesitate. She was sixteen years old and still imbued with glittering romantic notions of adventure. She wanted the truth, she wanted excitement, she wanted to get down to the depth of the mystery, the reality behind Wakefield’s cryptic smile. He had said that her life would change, that everything would be different, but he didn’t say how, exactly. She often wondered if he’d told her that she could never be with the ones she loved again, if she could never go back to Hamilton, whether she would have still made the same choice.
Tears were slowly making their way down her face despite her resolute efforts to hold them back. Dragging a hand across the top of her cheek, she sniffed quietly. What was done was done. And there was no way to bring Hamilton back to her.
Her train of thought was suddenly interrupted by the gentle creaking of the door as it opened, spilling a bright shaft of light into the room and directly onto her face. “Who is it?” she asked, sitting up with a squint.
“Hey,” the voice of Shakespeare answered. “It’s me.” A pause, and he asked tentatively, “Have you been crying?”
“Oh,” she smiled with embarrassment, rubbing her eyes, “it’s nothing. Come in.”
He closed the door behind him, but made no move to turn on the light. She scooted over as she felt him sit down next to her on the bed, the rough knit of his old sweater brushing against her bare forearm. For a minute neither of them spoke.
“Thinking about Hamilton?” he asked quietly, and she felt him shift beside her, hugging his knees to his chest.
Her silence was affirmation enough. He sighed softly, and stared into the darkness. She could sense the warmth emanating from his body, the familiar faint smell of engine grease mixed with the cheap crude soap rationed from Zion. She was suddenly struck by how glad she was that he was here, sitting beside her in the dark, the very presence of him a comfort, like the brother she never had.
“Do you think about Caroline?” she asked.
“Not really.” Even in the pitch dark she could sense him smiling nostalgically. “I guess I wasn’t as in love with her as I’d thought. It’s weird, isn’t it? When you’ve been in this place for a while, some of the feelings you have for certain people just… fade. But not others - it’s like they’re burned into your mind. You can’t forget them, no matter how hard you try.”
“Will,” she said softly, resting her head on his shoulder, “I sometimes wish I could go back.”
She felt him tense, almost imperceptibly, as she uttered his former name. “Yeah,” he said, his voice low. “I know we’re not supposed to want these things. But we can’t help what we want.”
“No,” she agreed, absently playing with a loose thread on his shirtsleeve, “we can’t.”
He sighed and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. She leaned into his embrace gratefully. There was a feeling that, even if all else failed, she would always have a safe haven here with him. In their three years out here, in this world of uncertainty, they had endured more than most people have ever dreamt possible, they’ve performed superhuman feats inside the matrix, and they have faced much more than their fair share of horror, of pain, and of loss. And after all these years, they remained here, a seamless team, their moods and minds coinciding in the right moments, knowing exactly what to do and what to expect from each other. In many ways, he seemed as much a part of her as her own limbs.
“Nelson Mandela once said,” his voice was distant, “there is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged, to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.”
“That’s true,” she whispered.
“What are you thinking, Jake?” his voice was husky.
“I miss him,” she said softly. “God, I miss him so much.”
There was a pause. “Ah yes,” he said. “Hamilton.”
“I didn’t even realise how much I missed him until I saw him again,” she said. “When I was standing face to face with him, it was like everything just stopped. It didn’t matter that he had absolutely no idea what I was doing or what the matrix is. It didn’t matter that I haven’t seen him for three years. None of that mattered. He’s still Hamilton and I’m still me and…” she sighed. “Am I just crazy?”
“Depends on who you think you are, Jacq,” he said, and suddenly there was frostiness to his voice, nearly indiscernible, but there nevertheless.
She glanced at him inquisitively, though she could not make out his profile. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” he said shortly, and even in the darkness she could sense him looking away, his muscles tensing under his worn tunic.
“Will,” she asked, mystified. “What’s wrong?”
“Don’t call me that,” he said, and his voice had gone a little raspy. “That name… it doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
There was a sweet dark feeling when they used their old names, when they said them out loud to each other. It seemed to imply that there was something between their words, meanings scattered and gathered like gleaming fragments of long-lost dreams. But in saying what he said, he seemed to have broken a spell that had temporarily fallen over them, a certain camaraderie in knowing who they were and who they have turned into. She blinked, suddenly and inexplicably disillusioned, and folded her arms over her chest. “I thought we were reminiscing, that’s all.”
He sighed and turned back, and she didn’t need light to know that he was staring at her intently, his eyes clear and anguished, as though burning with some secret shame. “Jacq,” he said, his voice issuing forth on an urgent torrent of words. “Let’s not talk about this anymore, okay? It’s in the past. My mom, Hamilton… they’re all in the past. It was wrong for me to go back last night, and it’s wrong for us to keep talking about it now. Let’s just forget it, okay? Let’s just live our lives out here like we’re meant to. Let’s not - ”
“I…” she interrupted him even before she realised what she’d wanted to say. “I don’t think I can.”
He stopped abruptly. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” she sighed, pressing a hand to her burning forehead. “I can’t stop thinking about him, Will. I haven’t been able to sleep, or eat, or think, or do anything since I came back. All I can see is him. I can’t forget him… I guess I never did. The feelings that we used to have, God, it’s all flooding back and I can’t stop it, and when I close my eyes he’s all around me. When I’m not thinking about him it feels like a part of me is missing, and when I am thinking about him it gets so painful I don’t know how I can even cope - ”
“Don’t,” he interrupted roughly, withdrawing his arm from around her shoulder.
“Don’t what?” she demanded, her eyes bright in the dark. “Look, I’m trying to tell you how I feel! I thought this is what friends are supposed to do, listen to each other! The whole thing is driving me insane, I need to talk to somebody about it and I need to - ”
“He’s in the past,” his voice was low and strained.
“Well, that’s just it,” she said hurriedly, “I don’t think I can bear not having him in my life anymore, not now, not after I’ve seen him… I know he still loves me! I need to see him again - ”
Her words were suddenly cut off as Shakespeare leaned forward and kissed her.
His lips moved over hers, hot and dry and fervent, dizzying in its urgent intensity, and suddenly his arms were wrapped around her again, but in a very different way than before, so tight that she could hardly breathe, and his mouth was on hers and her heart was leaping in the region of her throat and blood was rushing to her head and there was a faint tinny ringing in her ears like the aftershock of an explosion…
A few stunned moments passed before she sprang to her feet, pushing him away. She lunged across the narrow chamber, breathing hard, grappling for a switch and suddenly the cell was flooded with light. She pressed her back against the wall opposite the bed, staring at him with one hand over her mouth.
He remained on the bed, and he was breathless, too, his chest rising and falling rapidly, his cheeks a dull scarlet. But his eyes were glittering as he looked toward her, the expression in them caught halfway between desperation and undisguised pain. “Jacq,” he said weakly, “I - ”
“What the hell was that?” she exploded. “What are you trying to do, Shakespeare? What the fuck was that all about? I… I… I’m sitting here confiding in you about Hamilton and all of a sudden you kiss me like I was talking about you!”
“I know you’re talking about Hamilton!” he retorted, his cheeks growing an even more pronounced shade of red, from either hurt or anger. “But guess what, Jacq? He’s not here! He’s not part of our world!”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, staring hard at him.
“Of course it matters!” he shouted, leaping to his feet. “God, Jacq, it’s been three years! We’ve fought side by side all this time, we’ve been standing on the edge of the world for three fucking years and you still can’t forget him?”
“It was you who said we can’t help what we want!” she exclaimed.
“Well, I’m sick of it!” he yelled, his eyes extraordinarily bright. “We’ve done everything together these years! Who was it that went with you to rescue Wakefield? Who was it that comforted you when he died? It was me! When I was trapped inside last night, it was you who saved me - ”
“It was because there was no one else,” she muttered, still staring at him as though she was seeing him for the first time.
“You saved me!” he shouted. “This means something, Jacq! You and me, we mean something! Don’t tell me you don’t care for me because I won’t believe it - ”
“I do,” she cried, “but you’re like my brother! I never thought… I never knew…”
He stared at her, his breaths still coming quickly as though he’d just run a strenuous, haphazard race. She stared back at those anguished eyes, the overwhelming misery in them, and she felt compelled to look away.
“I know you, Jacq,” he said softly, and under the intense artificial light his face was pale and washed-out, the splatter of freckles across his nose standing out in sharp relief. His eyes were pale, too, the shade of it reminding her of an opaline winter sky. “I know you in ways he would never know you,” he continued, his gaze fixed on her as though he couldn’t tear it away. “The person you remember, the Hamilton you think you saw… you don’t even know what he’s like.”
“I do too!” she exclaimed, fully aware that she sounded like a petulant child. Shaking her head angrily, she tried again, “I do know him! You don’t know what we had that summer, he was my best friend, I loved him - ”
“That’s right,” his eyes were very bright. “You loved him. Three years is a long time, Jacq, and he doesn’t know anything about you - ”
“Oh, and you do?” she demanded, her voice high-pitched, bordering on hysterical.
His pale blue eyes fastened on hers and she fought a shudder. His gaze was hot and penetrating, like a laser, one that seemed to drill straight into her mind.
“I do,” he said softly, but at the same time there was a determined edge to his voice, a hard, solid undercurrent of certainty. “I was lying in the bed next to you during the muscle reconstruction. I watched as you fought Wakefield for the first time in the sparring program. I was with you when they loaded the Jump program for us and I was with you when we both failed, the first time, as we fell three hundred feet toward the ground. I was with you on your first mission and I was with you when we abandoned Wakefield’s lifeless body and jumped through that hotel window. Do you want me to go on? I know what it’s like, being stuck inside this hole, trying not to think about the choices you made and the life you gave up. I know you as Hamilton would never know you - I know you for you, not the person you were three years ago - ”
“You don’t know anything!” she shouted, tears brimming in her eyes. “You make it sound like… you make it sound… Hamilton still loves me, I know he does! And I love him too, and that’s all I need to know!”
“You don’t even know who it is that you love!” he shouted. “People change, Jacq!”
“I don’t care!” she shouted back, angrily dragging the back of her hand across her eyes. “Our love was meant to be forever! We’re supposed to be together!”
“No one is meant to be together,” he exclaimed. “I thought we had something! I thought our three years together would mean more than a memory of a fifteen-year-old boy you used to be in love with! Clearly,” he gritted his teeth, “I was wrong.”
She stared at him.
“Clearly,” she said, her voice catching in her throat, “you were.”
She turned and walked out, slamming the door behind her as hard as she could.
4: The Doom Generation
Hamilton had not bothered to turn the lights on in his room. He sat at his desk, staring dazedly at the screen of his computer, with only the light from the monitor illuminating the room.
Scout was again over at Bella’s tonight, and Hamilton was grateful for the time alone. He had been dredging up old articles, press releases, public investigation reports, anything he could find on Jake and Will’s disappearance. At the time he had been too out of it, too shell-shocked by the whole event that the media frenzy just whipped him by, but now he felt ready and rearing to go, his motivation boosted by the memory of that look in Lena’s eye, the one of pity and exasperation, as though he were nothing but a tenacious lunatic who must be treated with soothing lies.
No matter what the others said, no matter that they thought he was crazy, trying to figure out if there was a grain of truth in something that to all intents and purposes seemed just a dream, he needed to get to the bottom of this. He didn’t think he would be able to sleep otherwise. He scrolled through pages and pages of archived newspaper scans, black print on white, black print on white, and it was starting to make him dizzy and sick. But he looked on. There had to be something. Will and Jake. Will and Jake. The disappearances were surely too uncanny to be unrelated. The guy he saw in the ‘dream’, the one who ran into the boathouse before Jake, that could have been Will, if the imagination was stretched enough… But then what did that mean? And to all possible knowledge he still couldn’t discount the fact that to the ordinary observer the dream remained a dream, with no evidence whatsoever to the contrary. He had checked the boathouse earlier; there was an old, battered telephone in there, whose presence he never remembered, but it wasn’t connected to a phone line. Nothing on the power of this earth could have caused it to ring the other night.
Still, he looked on.
***
“Fuck!” Jacq muttered to herself as she strode into the control room, pressing a shaking hand to her temple as she looked around wildly.
In hindsight, she didn’t know why she didn’t see this coming. Maybe she was simply deluding herself, thinking of Shakespeare as a brother all these years? Did it honestly never cross her mind that he may have wanted more? Or was she simply too preoccupied to see it?
Well, it wasn’t her fault that she didn’t see it, she mused angrily as she flopped down in the operator seat. He knew she still held a torch for Hamilton, why else would she have bothered keeping tabs on him inside the matrix all these years? She had never loved anyone else in her life and if Shakespeare thought it was high time for her to move on, it was his problem, not hers.
She tapped lightly on a screen to her left, and a new browser window opened, bringing with it more of the lines of code that she was so familiar with. Often, when she couldn’t sleep at night, she had sat here, simply watching the code trickle down the black screen, representations of the lives that people inside were leading, the choices they were making, good, bad, or otherwise.
Her heart was still beating violently in her chest, as though it wanted out, the aftershock of the kiss running rampant through her blood. She shook her head vigorously, trying to clear the memory of Shakespeare’s hot lips pressed upon hers, voracious and desolate, the last attempt of a man trying to hold on to the woman he wanted. Biting down on her lower lip, she touched the screen again, typing in an access key. The screen flickered, and a new window appeared, bringing with it a new set of code.
She sighed softly. Hamilton. The first thing she did this morning was check that he was all right. He had, as was the case with agent possessions, woken up in bed with no notion of what had happened after the agent took over his body. She briefly wondered what his reaction would be if he knew that he was the one who aimed the gun at her last night, if he was the one who was milliseconds away from planting a bullet in her head.
But it wasn’t him, her heart moaned. He couldn’t help being possessed by an agent any more than I can help loving him.
And she still loved him. That much, at least, she was clear on.
Lost in her thoughts, it was a few moments before she registered what Hamilton was doing. Leaning closer to the screen, watching the code writing itself, her mind reeled as she realised that he, too, was sitting in front of a computer, searching, thinking, trying to piece together the puzzle of her disappearance.
A hot acidic feeling rose in her stomach. He didn’t forget her. He was still trying. Shakespeare was wrong. They still loved each other as much as they ever did. This love was one that would never die.
I know you as Hamilton would never know you, he had shouted, his blue eyes blazing with fury. Well, she would show him, she thought angrily, a reckless rage slipping over her mind like a hot muffler and stifling the thoughts there, but at the same time making everything clearer than ever before. Pulling her seat closer to the control panel, she began to type furiously. Hamilton did know her. He still does. She would make damn sure of that.
***
Hamilton’s brain felt as though it was made of cotton wool. He had sat here for hours, searching for clues to Jake’s disappearance, but so far all he managed to get was a really big headache. It was always the same words over and over again: ‘missing’, ‘no body has yet been found’, ‘double disappearance’, ‘inquiry at Rawley Academy’. Those were things he knew. Those were the cataclysmic painful periods that he had to live through. He remembered the odd reporter prowling the Rawley grounds from which the media were banned because of their adverse effect on the students; he remembered the watchful, sympathetic faces of everyone he knew as he finally ventured to class. He remembered the haunted look in Scout’s eyes, and Bella crying for days on end after Will’s disappearance. But those things did not help him now, they gave him no indication as to what happened to Jake and Will, the eternal mystery…
His eyelids were drooping. His forehead was touching the computer desk. Perhaps just a little rest, then…
He mustn’t give up, though, there had to be something others overlooked, some crucial connection…
It certainly felt nice to close his aching eyes for a while…
He saw Jake in a dream, or did he…?
His arms made a surprisingly comfortable squashy pillow…
What was really the difference between dream and reality, anyway…?
Wake up Hamilton.
He loved Jake…
Wake up
There was a funny beeping sound right next to his ear…
WAKE UP
He jerked awake with a sudden gasp. “Wha…?” he muttered, looking around in disorientation. It was a moment before he realised that he had fallen asleep in front of the computer, and another moment before he realised that the monitor had gone blank. At the top of the black screen were small green words.
“What the hell?” he muttered, rubbing a hand over his eyes, jumping back in surprise as more words appeared onscreen as though typed by an invisible hand.
Do you want to know what is happening?
He stared at the words, which emitted an eerie green glow over his face. Brows furrowed, he chewed on his lower lip and tentatively started typing.
Who is this?
A pause, then,
I can give you answers
He was fully awake now, and his hands felt cold and clammy as he typed the next question.
Are you Jake?
There was a long pause. He could feel a pulse beating at the base of his throat as he leaned forward, willing the invisible typist on the other end to affirm or deny his suspicion. His fingers flew over the keyboard in impatience,
jake?!?
Another minute passed before the message came,
Some guys are sneaking out of the dorms tonight. Go with them.
“What?” he muttered, staring at the screen.
They’re in the parking lot now. Go with them and you’ll get your answers.
“But,” he muttered, beginning to type again,
How do you know this?
The answer came quickly this time.
I know everything.
He stifled a snort of incredulity. “What the hell is this?” he demanded to the screen, “some stupid prank?”
No, not a prank
“What the…!” he leapt off his chair and looked around wildly. “Come out! Where are you hiding? How can you hear me?”
I am everywhere.
“Stop doing that!” he exclaimed to the empty room, peering out the window as though expecting to see Jake perched in a tree. “Where the hell are you? Who the hell are you?”
Go now if you want to find out.
And with that, the screen suddenly flickered and blanked out altogether. A moment later, the computer beeped and rebooted itself. Hamilton stared at it, aghast, his mind reeling furiously.
Then he turned and ran out the door.
***
“Wolf,” Jacq commanded into her headset, “you awake?”
She was still seated at the control panel, staring at the screen, her body racked by small, persistent tremors. In some ways, she couldn’t believe what she had just done. In other ways, it was as though this was predestined, all along. She’d made contact, just like that. After all these years of thinking about it, of dreaming about it, of pure, undiluted longing, she finally went ahead and did it. How could it have been so simple? They could be together just like that…
“I am now,” came Wolf’s sleepy, disgruntled voice over the line. “What’s the emergency?”
“I need to be plugged in,” she said, feeling a tinge of guilt creeping into her stomach. “Now.”
“What’s happening?” he suddenly sounded wide-awake. “What’s going on?”
She opened her mouth, then closed it again, her mind scrolling rapidly through the possibilities of trying to justify her excursion. “Just get here,” she said briskly, and switched off the headset.
Sliding off the operator’s seat, she paced up and down the control room, chewing her nails. A moment later Wolf dashed into the room, slightly out of breath. He had his sweater on inside out, and his eyes were gritty with sleep. “What’s going on?” he demanded, looking around anxiously and at the same time trying to stifle a yawn. “Rescue mission?”
“Um,” she chewed on her lip, “recon. I’ve gotta meet somebody inside. The location code is already in place, you just have to plug me in.”
“Where are you going?” He glanced toward the screen and suddenly looked suspicious. “Carson? Isn’t that really close to New Rawley? Who are you meeting?”
She reddened slightly. “Does it matter?”
“It’s not that dude,” he peered at her, “the one from last night… Hamilton, is it?”
“So what if it is?” she retorted defensively.
He looked exasperated. “You wanna go in for a chat with your old boyfriend? Do you know how many rules you’re breaking by doing that?”
“Shakespeare did it last night,” she said sullenly.
“It was an emergency,” he replied. “His mother was getting kicked to death. This Hamilton dude’s not even in danger, is he? I’m not plugging you in to make a house call!”
“Well, it’s lucky for me that you’re not the one who’s calling the shots,” she said coldly, striding toward the jack-in seat. “Come on.”
He looked taken aback for a moment. “Does Shakespeare know about this?”
“Shakespeare is…” she paused, her eyes narrowing, “indisposed at the moment. It’s just you and me, Wolf. Plug me in, and that’s an order.”
“I’ve got a real bad feeling about this,” he muttered, typing access codes into the control panel as she took her seat. He walked over and turned on the heart-rate monitor reluctantly, eyeing her as she shackled her feet into the footrests. She leaned back, and he crossed his arms over his chest, frowning. “Are you sure about this?”
“I’m going in,” she said simply, closing her eyes.
“All right,” he sighed and picked up the input lead from the floor. “You’re the captain. But I’m not likin’ this, I’m not likin’ this at all…”
“Quit worrying, I’ll be - ”
She was about to finish her sentence when she felt something thin and cold ram into the input jack at the back of her head. The sensation was familiar, but nevertheless she gasped at the suddenness of it, the feeling of utter intrusion that never failed to send an unpleasant cold shiver down her spine. The world suddenly rushed away from her in a dizzying blur of colour and sound, like being caught in a roller-coaster ride that was going haywire.
The sensation only took a few seconds, and it stopped as abruptly as it began when she felt her body give a jolt and her feet hit solid ground. She opened her eyes and looked around.
She was standing in what looked like an abandoned factory, and she was no longer wearing her threadbare grey tunic. Instead, she was clad in a tight black tank top and form-fitting black leather pants. There was a phone standing on a low table in front of her, and as she looked, it began to ring.
She took a deep breath and picked up the receiver. “I’m in.”
***
“Dude, we never figured you for the partying type,” said Kyle Stratten as he, Hamilton and a few other guys scrambled out of the back of another Rawley guy’s car. “What brought this on?”
Hamilton merely shrugged, looking around. They were standing right in front of a dark, dilapidated building, from which a deep pulsing bass emitted. “Where are we?” he asked.
“The Doom, man,” Kyle grinned. “The hottest club in Carson. Come on.”
Bemused, Hamilton followed the other guys into the rickety building. As they turned a corner and walked down a set of narrow stairs, the sound of the bass grew louder. Squinting in the dim light, Hamilton could make out a small closed door at the end of this stairs, from which the music emitted. An unnaturally tall, thickset man stood by the door, glowering down at them. “Twenty,” he growled.
The guys all rummaged through their pockets for the cover charge. As Hamilton pulled out his wallet with a sense of foreboding, he whispered to Kyle, “I don’t have fake ID.”
“Nah, you don’t need it,” Kyle whispered back as he slapped a twenty into the bouncer’s palm. “Just act cool, man.”
Hamilton smiled weakly and gave the bouncer his money, feeling the taller man checking him out with a disdainful eye. But whatever test it was, he passed, because the next moment the bouncer gave a grunt and pushed the door open.
The sound of music suddenly grew deafening as multicoloured light exploded in front of Hamilton’s eyes. A wave of humid, smoky air hit him straight in the face and he fought back a cough, blinking. The guys behind him pushed forward, and he stumbled into the Doom Club, looking around in confusion. Behind them, the door closed again.
The overhead sound system was blasting a techno tune, and out on the small dance floor was a mass of writhing bodies, pressing and grinding against each other with careless abandon. A DJ presided over the mayhem, nodding his head to the beat as he flipped a vinyl disc between his hands. A bar lined one side of the small club, which was dimly lit, and he could only make out the vague outlines of patrons sitting on high stools and the shadowy form of the bartender behind the counter. As he looked around, a couple of giggling girls bumped into him and then promptly wandered away without so much as a glance at him, looking quite out of it and making him seriously think that they’d probably had something other than just the vodka martinis spilling out of their glasses.
“Cool, huh?” laughed Kyle, clearly enjoying the other boy’s befuddlement. “They never card you in this place. Once you’re in, you’re sweet. Come on, let’s go get us some tequila!”
Hamilton nodded and tried to follow the guys to the bar, but he had taken only a few steps before another group of scantily-clad girls pushed past him and he staggered back, losing sight of Kyle and the other guys amidst the crowd. Someone jostled him from behind and he bumped into a guy in front of him, causing the guy to spill half a jug of beer down Hamilton’s T-shirt. The guy gave him a dirty look and stalked off, leaving Hamilton standing there with beer dripping from his chest like a giant sweat-stain. The air in the club was stale with the smell of alcohol and warm bodies, and the thumping music was already giving him a headache. He looked around nervously, trying to retain a sense of personal space, which was easier said than done in a packed place like this. Fighting the urge to hold his hands over his ears, he edged toward a corner of the club, the one that was furthest from the pulsating speakers, trying to wring out his shirt at the same time without looking too conspicuous about it.
Pressing his back against the wall, he crossed his arms over his chest and looked around, trying to act cool and aloof. Inside, he was seething. What the hell was this sick prank played on his computer, and how could he have been stupid enough to fall for it? Now he was stuck in a nightclub in Carson, his ride back to Rawley was off getting slammed on hard liquor and god knew what else, and to top it all off he was soaked in beer. “Damn it!” he muttered under his breath, looking down at his shirt, which was starting to cling to his skin in warm, sticky patches. “This bites.”
“Hamilton?”
He froze. It wasn’t so much for the fact that someone spoke his name but for the voice that uttered it, a voice that he had heard so many times in his dreams that he couldn’t even remember if it was the way it actually sounded, or just his mind’s manifestation of it.
But that voice… husky, androgynous, the tentative tone of it, the slight inflexion on the first syllable of his name that was so uniquely -
“Jake?” he whispered, and he looked up.
It was as though the club had suddenly faded into nothing. He could no longer hear the deafening music, nor see the shifting throngs of people. There was only one person with him in the room right now, and she was standing right in front of him, almost close enough for him to touch. It felt as though all the blood in his body had turned to boiling acid.
She looked different. Older. Her dark hair was longer now, slicked back behind her ears with a razor-sharp part down one side. She looked thinner, too, her jawline more defined than he’d remembered it. But there was no doubting that it was her, standing in front of him, her eyes shimmering with equal parts sorrow and love.
“Jake,” he said again, and lifted his shaking hand. She stared at him, unmoving, as he reached for her, the light behind her gaze bright and lucent and strangely yielding.
Ten thousand anguished thoughts ran through his head as he watched, almost mesmerised, at his own white fingers extending toward her like some malnourished plant growing toward the sun. Please please please don’t let this be a dream or an illusion, please oh god don’t wake me up from this, and then he felt cool skin under his fingertips, her smooth cheek growing rapidly warm under his touch, and it suddenly hit home that she was real, that she was really there, and that a glistening tear was trailing down her cheek. It felt as though his heart had seized up, there was a rush of blood to his head with the sound of rolling thunder, and his chest was constricting and he couldn’t get enough air into his lungs…
The next moment, she taken a step forward, pushing him back against the wall, and then she was kissing him, his face was in her hands, her lips searching over his, and he finally knew completion.
And oh, this was the kiss he remembered. It was the kiss he had dreamed of for three years. It was the thing he was waiting for, the one single clemency to fill the wretched, gaping hole in his life, the unspoken promise that things would once again be all right. He kissed her back hungrily, wrapping his arms around her waist so tightly that he thought they might both snap under the sheer force of it, but he didn’t care. He wanted to immerse himself in her, he wanted to drown inside this kiss. Perhaps in the back of his mind there was the desperate thought that this was still not quite real, so he poured all of himself into this kiss, trying to communicate through it the three long years of waiting, of longing, and of the love that was pent up inside and cherished and kept until she finally came back and he could finally give it all back to her, in a surging, blinding wave of passion. She gave a muffled gasp against his lips but that only made him kiss her harder, savouring the taste of her in his mouth, running his fingers through her sleek hair and tousling the dark tresses. Her body was warm and solid in his grasp, and he held on to her stubbornly, lest she disappear if he’d let her go. “Oh god, Jake,” he murmured, kissing her again, his joy and his pain twisting up inside him in one fervid, intangible torrent. There was a sour prickling sensation behind his eyelids and he could feel himself shaking with barely constrained sobs, as though he was on the verge of total breakdown. But he was kissing her, really kissing her, and that was all that mattered.
When then finally broke apart, they were both gasping for breath. But he retained his vicelike grip on her thin waist, clasping her to him, stubbornly not letting go. “Jake?” he whispered, resting his forehead against hers, staring intently into her eyes. “What’s going on?”
“Oh god,” she murmured, looking shocked, “oh god, I can’t believe I just did that…”
“What’s going on, Jake?” he demanded again. “I don’t understand any of this! Where have you been all these years? Last night… that thing last night at the boathouse, that wasn’t a dream, was it? You were there! What the hell happened? Why don’t I remember any of it? God, I don’t know what the hell is going on but - ”
“Oh god,” she muttered again, sounding utterly stunned. “What have I done?”
“Talk to me, Jake!” he exclaimed, tilting her chin up so that he could look directly into her eyes. “Tell me what all this is about! Was it you who wrote all those messages on my computer?”
Mutely, she nodded. The look in her eyes was scintillant, uncertain, and more than just a little dazed. He was forcefully reminded of the giggling girls he’d bumped into earlier. “God, Jake,” he muttered, “you’re not on drugs, are you?”
She looked startled. “What? N… no.”
“Well,” he was at a loss for words. “Good. Now tell me what’s going on! Please! Don’t just stand there looking at me! I need to know - ”
“You already know too much,” said a cold voice from right beside him.
Both Jake and Hamilton gave a start, swivelling wildly in the direction of the voice. In all the turmoil they probably wouldn’t have even noticed if the roof had caved in, let alone that someone had pushed his way through the crowd until he was nearly on top of them.
“Will?” demanded Hamilton incredulously, looking at the man standing next to him, his arms crossed over his chest, eyes hidden behind a pair of dark glasses. Will, or whoever this guy was now, was clad in a black trench coat, and he, like Jake, was wearing black leather pants and combat boots. “Oh my god, Will!” Hamilton exclaimed, his jaw slack. “What happened to you? What’s going on?”
“I’m afraid I can’t divulge that information,” said Will grimly, as he took off his sunglasses and reached for Jake. “Come on,” he said urgently, his fingers closing over her wrist, “we have to go.”
“Leave me alone!” she snarled at him, vehemently shaking away his hand. “You’re not supposed to be here!”
“Neither are you!” he exclaimed, his eyes flashing. “Jacq, what the fuck do you think you’re doing, coming to him like this? What the hell is he supposed to think of all this?”
“Wait, what?” Hamilton tried to get a word in, but Jake cut him off angrily as she swung around to face Will, her eyes blazing.
“Stop poking your nose into my business, okay?” she shouted. “You don’t own me! In fact, you don’t have any say in my love life, you don’t have any part to play in it whatsoever, I think I made that perfectly clear earlier!”
Will looked like he’d been struck. A taut moment followed, in which neither of them spoke but merely glared at each other, their faces white with anger. Hamilton looked from one to the other, licking his dry lips and feeling as though he was a bit player in a play whose lines he did not know. “Guys,” he said weakly, but did not know how to continue.
“Fine,” Will said, dropping his gaze angrily. “I just came to tell you we’re within attack radius of a group of sentinels, that’s all. But if you want to stay here and continue your little make-out session, then fine. I’m going back.”
“Wait,” her body suddenly went rigid in Hamilton’s arms. “Sentinels? How many?”
“Five,” he said sombrely, shooting Hamilton a calculated, mistrusting look before turning away and disappearing into the crowd.
“Oh my god,” Jake murmured, and suddenly she sprang into action. “Hamilton,” she said urgently, “I have to go. I’m sorry, but this is an emergency, I have to go - ”
“Go where?” he demanded, “I’ll come with you!”
“You can’t come with me,” she exclaimed, disentangling herself from his grasp. “I have to go!”
“No, Jake!” he shouted, grabbing onto her arm, “you can’t leave just like this! I need to know… you need to tell me… I…” The words escaped him as he stared at her, his fingers digging desperately into her forearm, clinging onto her as though she would disappear into a puff of smoke if he’d let go.
“No, Hamilton,” she yelled, her eyes shining with frustrated tears, “please… you don’t understand… I have to go!”
And with that she gave a mighty tug, her arm slipping from his grasp. He hesitated, for just a moment, and then she moved closer and her lips were pressed upon his again, one more urgent kiss, before she whispered ‘I’ll get in touch soon, I promise’ into his ear, and suddenly she was gone, swallowed up by the crowd, melting into the throngs of people like a desert mirage.
“Jake?” he yelled, looking around wildly, shoving his way into the thick of the crowd. “JAKE!”
But she was gone.
5: The Greatest Misfortune
As soon as Jacq was unplugged, she, Wolf and Shakespeare raced down to the cockpit. “We’re cutting it close,” panted Wolf as he slid into the pilot’s seat, flicking off the autopilot and grabbing the steering shift. The ship jerked violently in protest, and they struggled to stay on their feet. “They are coming up from behind,” said Wolf, white-faced as he struggled with the bucking ship.
“Jesus, they are fast,” breathed Shakespeare as he watched the figures of the large octopus-like robots on the display screen. Wolf manoeuvred the ship around a tight bend in the tunnels, into a smaller sewer sub-branch, but the sentinels followed like hounds hot on the smell of blood. “Damn,” he swore, “they’ve spotted us.”
“Prepare the EMP,” Jacq commanded, her voice low.
Shakespeare nodded and flicked open a small glass box near the pilot controls, inside which a large red button resided. He punched in a set of access codes. “EMP charged,” he said. “Wolf, land the ship, prepare for power shut-down.”
“I’m… trying… to!” Wolf said through gritted teeth as the cruiser zigzagged and bounced through the cramped tunnel.
“Quick!” Jacq exclaimed, gripping the pilot seat tightly as she watched the progress of the sentinels on the display screen, “they’re nearly on top of us!”
“Shut up and let the man concentrate, will you?” Shakespeare snarled. Jacq turned on him angrily, but in that moment a sharp metallic clanking could be heard from the back of the ship as the cruiser suddenly sank a few feet, causing their heads to jar the low ceiling.
“They’re here,” Wolf muttered, just as a siren began to blare overhead, and a large red warning declaring ‘hull breach’ began to flicker upon the control screen. Face screwed up in concentration, he pulled sharply on the steering shift, and they all fell back as the ship skidded into contact with the tunnel floor, grinding to a stop a few moments later. Wolf flipped back a series of switches on the control board and suddenly all the lights in the ship went out, the sound of the alarm abruptly cut short, leaving behind only an eerie silence, broken by the occasional ominous screech from the back of the ship, where they knew sentinels were now wrenching the hull to pieces with their powerful tentacles. “All power is off,” Wolf said urgently.
“EMP, now!” Jacq exclaimed.
Shakespeare did not need more prompting. Bearing a look of grim determination, he pressed down sharply on the red button.
They were suddenly jerked forward as a powerful electro-magnetic pulse issued from the ship, knocking away the two sentinels on top of the hull as well as the three that were coming up behind them. Their circuits fried, the robots fell to the ground with a series of deafening clunks, enveloping the area in a gigantic cloud of dust.
Inside the tense darkness of the cockpit, Jacq breathed a sigh of relief. “We got them,” she said.
Wolf nodded, flicking another couple of switches. “Stand by for power reboot.”
There was a moment of silence. And then Shakespeare spoke, his voice very strained.
“What were you doing in the matrix, Jacq?”
Wolf glanced up quickly, his eyes flickering over the shadowy forms of Jacq and Shakespeare, who were resolutely not looking at each other.
“You know the Code of Secrecy,” Shakespeare continued when Jacq didn’t respond, his voice bitter. “You know we’re not suppose to meddle in the matrix - ”
“You did!” she exclaimed angrily. “God, why is everyone laying this on me? Do neither of you remember that only last night you went in yourself? Or is that not counted as meddling?”
“My mom was dying!” he shouted. “What the hell were you doing tonight, huh?”
A flood of warmth rushed to her cheeks, though she knew the others couldn’t see it in the darkness. “That’s none of your business,” she snapped.
“Of course it’s my business!” he shouted. “It’s our business! We can’t allow you to just run rampant in the matrix, catching up on make-out sessions! God, Jacq, you’re such a hypocrite! First you tell me I’m too soft about people in the matrix, you tell me we have to sever ourselves from them, and now… now you’re running after Hamilton like your life depended on it! Well, excuse me, but I don’t see how we’re supposed to win the war with you attached to his lips!”
“Come off the righteous act,” she was shaking with anger. “I know exactly what your problem with Hamilton is. You’re jealous, Shakespeare, jealous of what we have and what you’ll never - ”
“It’s not jealousy that’s the problem here!” he yelled. “Not everything is about you, Jacq! And that’s your problem! You think the rules can be bent for you, you will tell us to follow the Code as long as it suits you, but as soon as your old boyfriend comes into the picture you can throw that all away, you expose all of us to danger just so you could get laid - ”
His words were abruptly cut off when she slapped him, hard, across the face.
There was a moment of stunned silence. Then the overhead lights flickered and turned themselves back on, flooding the cockpit with harsh white light.
Jacq was clutching her right hand with her left, looking simultaneously incredulous and mortified. Shakespeare was staring at her, his eyes very bright, an angry red splotch on his pale cheek marking clearly where she’d struck him.
Wolf gaped at the two of them, his mouth slightly open. Clearing his throat, he mumbled, “Power’s back on. Preparing to start the ship.”
The others took no notice of him. Slowly, Shakespeare lifted his hand and gingerly touched his face, all the while keeping his eyes on Jacq, the look in them half resignation, half sorrow.
“You know I’m right,” he said quietly, before he turned and walked out.
They could hear him striding down the hall, step after hollow step, a series of forlorn echoes.
***
Hamilton pushed through the crowds one more time, even though he knew the chance of finding Jake now was less than zero. Already the night was bearing on its boundaries the hazy marks of a dream. A solid, vivid dream, but a dream nevertheless. “Fuck,” he muttered under his breath, shoving his way through the dance floor, scattering disgruntled clubbers in his wake. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck…”
“Mr. Fleming?”
He looked up, startled. A man was standing in front of him, clad in a tailored dark suit and sunglasses. There was an air of formality about him, his cool scrutiny of Hamilton remotely unsettling. “Hamilton Fleming?” he asked again.
“Yeah,” Hamilton said irritably. “That’s me. Who the hell are you? And what’s up with the sunglasses, anyway? Do none of you guys realise we’re indoors, and that it’s nighttime?”
“Agent White,” the man said, ignoring Hamilton’s tirade and flashing an official-looking identity card at him. “I’m from the Bureau.”
“The FBI?” Hamilton whispered, his mouth falling open. “What… why…? What have I done? What’s going on?”
Agent White removed his sunglasses. Behind them, his eyes were a steely grey. He placed a hand on Hamilton’s shoulder, and Hamilton fought back a shudder: the man’s touch felt like ice.
“Let’s walk and talk, Mr. Fleming,” he said, moving toward the door. Hamilton swallowed nervously, looked at the oblivious clubbers all around him, and followed.
***
Jacq paused in front of Shakespeare’s sleeping cell, took a deep breath, and knocked on the door.
“Go away,” came his voice from the other side. “I’m sleeping.”
“I need to talk to you,” she said.
“Go away.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Go away.”
“Please,” she said, pressing her forehead wearily against the door. “Will, please.”
Perhaps it was the use of his former name. Perhaps it was the desperate, plaintive quality in her voice, the sound of a hidden sob. But whatever it was, it worked, because a moment later the door swung open to reveal Shakespeare in the doorway. Eyeing her wearily for a moment, he walked away and slumped down on his bed. “Come in,” he said, his voice decidedly unaffected.
She slipped in after him and closed the door behind her. “I’m sorry I hit you,” she said, somewhat awkwardly.
“You pack a mean punch,” his smile was wry and remote. “Even outside the matrix.”
She chuckled uncertainly and sat down beside him. He scooted a little further away. She glanced at him quickly, but he was resolutely staring down at the floor and just as resolutely not looking at her. She sighed. “I’m really sorry, okay?”
“Yeah, you said that already,” he replied coolly. “It’s all right, whatever.”
“You don’t sound all right,” she said hesitantly.
“I have a strong feeling you didn’t come here to ask whether I’m all right,” he said, matter-of-factly. “What did you want to talk to me about? Wait, let me guess. You want to free Hamilton from the matrix.”
She stared at him. “How do you know?”
“Because I know you, Jacq,” he said quietly, his gaze flicking upwards and connecting with hers for a moment before he wrenched it away again.
She chose not to acknowledge the comment. “So what do you think?”
“I think it’s a terrible idea,” he said, his tone very bland.
“I know he doesn’t have the hacking skills we normally look for,” she said, “but neither did you, at first, and look how you turned out… and he knows too much now, anyway, don’t you think - ”
“It’s not about his skills,” he said quietly. “Skills can be learnt. God, nowadays we just stick them in a program and anyone can learn anything in a matter of minutes. That’s not an issue.”
“Then…” she began uncertainly, her eyes searching over his wan expression.
“We can’t just free people at will, Jacq,” he murmured, still not looking at her. “Remember what Wakefield said? We have to choose people with no ties, people who won’t be tempted to go back. I think after these couple of days it’s clear exactly what can happen if we free someone who just wants to go back inside the matrix and be with their old life - ”
“I’m sorry about that,” she said contritely. “I truly am. I breached the Code when there was no need. But don’t you see this is a solution to that? If we get him out, then I wouldn’t be tempted to go back in anymore - ”
“Yeah, and what about him?” he interrupted. “What about his life inside the matrix? Are you sure he’s so ready just to follow you at a moment’s notice and leave everything behind?”
“He loves me,” her voice was soft. “Will, he loves me.”
She could see his pale throat working, as though he was fighting down a torrent of words he didn’t want her to hear. “You speak of love like it’s a miracle,” he whispered.
She looked at him. “Do you really doubt that he will choose the red pill if we give him that choice?”
“I don’t doubt that he will follow you,” he said, and paused, looking up at her, the expression on his face unreadable. “But have you considered that love might not be enough?”
She leaned back and folded her arms. “What are you saying?”
“You’re asking him to leave his entire life behind,” he said, his voice carrying a hint of melancholy and also something else that she could not discern. “You’re asking him to leave his world and come into ours. It’s a world he has no conception of, it’s a world that’s dark and dangerous and empty. Are you sure he’s ready for that?”
“He’s the one who’s going to be making the choice,” she said. “Not me.”
“Not if he’s uninformed about it,” he said. “And face it, how many of us were really informed when we were given that choice? How many of us knew what kind of change really lay ahead of us? Can you honestly say you would have taken that red pill, knowing what you know now?”
“Would you?” she asked instead of answering the question, her voice very quiet.
“No,” he said, looking away again. “Of course I wouldn’t.”
“Hamilton is different,” she murmured. “He’ll have me, out here, in the real world. He wouldn’t be alone.”
“I wonder if you really know him when you say that,” he said, staring at the floor, his long fingers steepled on his lap. “You’ve got to realise… Hamilton is an artist. He sees things the way I saw things - he sees the sky and the sun and the stars and he feels something when he looks at them. That’s why he’s a photographer. That’s why I wrote poetry. We felt something when we were looking at the world. There’s something about moonlight, about the lake on a sunny day, about walking barefoot across a lawn… even now, when I know all that is just illusion, I still want it. I dream about it at night. If I could go back, I would. I love the world of the matrix so much more than I love…” he gestured at his small quarters, the cold metal, the worn clothes, “all this. And I think he does, too. It’s not even about the people you’ll be leaving behind, or who will be waiting for you in the real world. It’s about whether you can stand to see your beautiful world shattered.”
“But,” she looked baffled. “What about knowing the truth?”
“The truth,” he smiled wryly. “The truth is a funny thing. Jacq, you are the kind of person who should be in the real world. Freeing me was a mistake - Wakefield’s mistake. I shouldn’t be here.”
She chewed on her lower lip, feeling as though she should say something, but the right words were lost to her, dashed away by the glum honesty in his voice.
“You’re different, though,” he continued without looking at her. “You like your truths to be absolute, you like your world to be embedded in metaphysical solidarity. But you don’t understand what it’s like to see it through an artist’s eyes - you don’t understand the pain of having the world you love snatched from you - ”
“But I do!” she exclaimed. “That’s why I went back tonight! I had a world that I loved, I had Hamilton, but they took me away from all that - ”
“Your world was Hamilton,” he said quietly. “You loved Hamilton. You didn’t love the world. You didn’t love the illusion for what it is, Jacq, you didn’t love the matrix. You saw it for what it was, perhaps even when you were inside - an illusion. But people like me, we saw it differently.”
She blinked at him, mystified.
“How can I explain this in a way that will make sense to you?” he sighed. “You know how you asked me if I missed Caroline? I don’t. Not really. Certainly not in the way you miss Hamilton. But there is something that I miss, it tore out a hole in me when I left, the memory of it haunts me, each and every day that I spend here.”
“What is it?” she asked, her voice softer than she’d thought herself capable of.
“It’s the colour of the sky,” he said, and there was a distant look in his eyes as he lifted his head. “It’s the cold air on snowy days. It’s the sensation of jumping fully clothed into the lake and feeling the water close over your head like some sort of cocoon. It’s the moonlight, the shadows under the trees, the smell of coffee first thing in the morning - ”
“I hear they’ve made mock-coffee back on Zion,” she said helpfully. “Apparently it’s not bad. Maybe we can pick some up next time we refuel.”
He smiled, then. Raising his eyes to hers, he leaned in and softly kissed her on the cheek. Fighting the urge to flinch and draw away, she remained still as his dry lips brushed against her skin, a brief touch, almost careless.
“Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies,” he said, drawing back. Seeing her uncomprehending look, he smiled and added, “Emerson.”
“Stop being cryptic,” she said impatiently.
“That was the best way I could have put it,” he said, blinking slowly and looking up toward the light. There was an expression on his face that seemed almost like disappointment. “Maybe it’s best you don’t know what I mean.”
She stared at him. “Why doesn’t anything you say make sense right now?” she demanded. “You’re acting like… like I’m missing the point to something important, but I don’t get what you’re trying to say. I really don’t.”
“It’s okay,” he shrugged, glancing at her with a faint smile. “So what now? We contact Hamilton? Offer him the choice?”
She looked suddenly nervous at the prospect. “I guess.”
He nodded. “Then we follow procedure, okay? No back doors, no shortcuts, no favours. If we want to free him, we do it the usual way. We don’t want to draw even more attention to him than what we’ve done already. The agents are probably already on his tail as it is.” He paused, and sighed, “I don’t want to see what happened to Darjeeling happen again.”
“Fine,” she agreed readily. “We do it by the book.”
He looked at her, his gaze flickering with shadows. For a moment he seemed more forlorn than she’d ever seen him, with dark rings under his eyes the colour of fresh bruises, his lips a thin line like a razor cut.
But all he said was, “I’ll make contact.”
***
Hamilton woke up screaming.
There was a confusion of noise and movement as Scout fell out of his bed in his haste to get to his roommate. “What is it?” he demanded, stumbling to Hamilton’s bedside, “What’s wrong, man? Calm down!”
His heart thumping wildly, Hamilton struggled to sit up, gasping. He tried to speak, but his throat was dry as bone and he could only manage an incoherent rasp. Scout snatched the glass of water on his nightstand and handed it to the other boy, who downed it in one grateful gulp.
Scout looked on anxiously, and Hamilton set the glass down, feeling his rampant pulse begin to slow. “Uh,” he murmured, staring at his roommate, “it was just a nightmare… I think…”
Scout’s apprehensive expression relaxed. “Oh,” he said, sitting down beside Hamilton. “Are you all right now?”
“Um,” Hamilton said, noticing that his hands were still shaking. “I… I think so.”
“What was the nightmare about?” Scout asked curiously.
“Um,” Hamilton said again, his gaze darting around the sun-drenched room in bewilderment. “The FBI… they locked me inside an interrogation room… and then there was this robotic bug thing that they put on my stomach, and it was trying to burrow into my bellybutton…” Wincing at the memory, he lifted his T-shirt and looked down. His stomach was the same as always. He wasn’t exactly sure what he actually expected to see - a bug-shaped bulge under his skin? Looking up, he smiled sheepishly. “Sorry, it just felt so real.”
“That’s all right, man,” Scout nodded in understanding, standing up. “Pretty intense night, huh?”
“Yeah…” murmured Hamilton, the tentative smile freezing on his face as more images suddenly flashed in his mind, memories that he had temporarily forgotten in his panic. Messages on his computer. A car ride with Kyle Stratten’s gang. A nightclub in Carson.
“Jake!” he exclaimed, leaping out of bed like he’d been stung, looking around wildly as though expecting her to be hiding in his room. “Jake?”
“What?” demanded Scout, turning around.
Hamilton ignored the other boy. Lifting up his shirt again, he scrutinised his stomach, pressing down on it as though he expected the robot bug in his dreams to come shooting out of his belly button. Nothing. His stomach was smooth, pale and lightly muscled, as it always had been. No bug in sight.
“Dude, what’s going on?” Scout asked apprehensively, crossing his arms over his chest.
Hamilton looked up blankly, his mind reeling. The nightclub. The FBI agent. Jake. Was it all a dream? Was his subconscious so hungry for Jake after the first dream that it decided to compensate for the whole thing by making up yet another dream that involved Jake communicating with him through the computer in an eerily omniscient way before telling him to go out with Kyle Stratten, which led him to some club in Carson he’d never heard of and consequently to her? The whole thing seemed ridiculous now, and even though he was beginning to recall details with more and more clarity, the utter ludicrousness didn’t do much to rule out the possibility that it was just one long, extremely fucked-up dream…
Suddenly, he realised that he was still clenching the hem of his T-shirt with both hands, his palms sweating profusely. He made a move to release the shirt from his grasp, but no sooner had the sticky material left his hands than he gasped and snatched it again, scratching himself rather severely in his haste. Paying no attention to the pain now shooting up from his chest, he cautiously lowered his head and sniffed, his eyes very, very wide.
Beer.
His shirt smelt like beer.
“Hamilton, you’re scaring me,” Scout mumbled, his eyes darting nervously between Hamilton and the door. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Oh my god,” Hamilton muttered, diving across the room and knocking several objects off his desk in his haste to get to the computer. Opening a command window, he furiously started typing.
Jake, are you there?
>> ‘Jake’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
jake answer me!
>> ‘jake’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
I know you’re there!
>> ‘I’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
fuck, jake, talk to me! i have something really important to tell you!!!!!
>> ‘fuck’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
“FUCK!” he yelled at the screen. “You don’t recognise ‘fuck’, you stupid fucking computer? Go fuck yourself, there’s a fucking external command for you! FUCK!”
“Hamilton!” Scout exclaimed, looking like he had half a mind to bolt. “What the hell is up with you?”
Hamilton swirled around, suddenly aware that there was still someone else in the room. “Um,” he muttered, “nothing. I… I’m just trying to do something on the computer - ”
“What are you talking about?” demanded Scout. “What has Jake got to do with this?”
“I don’t know,” Hamilton babbled, “I don’t even know what I’m talking about. Don’t mind me, I’m just a little hyped from that stupid dream of mine - ”
“You wanna go see the school nurse?” asked Scout warily. “You don’t look so good, man. And you’re acting, um, a little crazy.”
“No, I’m fine,” Hamilton said quickly. “Really, I am.”
“Okay…” Scout said, slowly. “Well, I’m going to go take a shower.”
“Good!” Hamilton exclaimed. Scout looked taken aback, and Hamilton grinned weakly. “I mean, you know, showers are good. Clean.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to go see the nurse?” Scout asked again, his brows furrowed.
“Seriously, I’m fine,” Hamilton insisted. “One plus one is two, two plus two is four. I haven’t lost my mind or anything. If I am delusional or something, you think I’d still think Bush is president?”
That coaxed a smile out of Scout. “All right,” he said, very slowly. “I’ll be back soon. Take it easy, man.”
“Yeah, I will,” Hamilton said, watching his roommate head out the door, still throwing suspicious glances over his shoulder. The door closed behind Scout, and he could hear the sound of the other boy’s shuffling footsteps disappear down the hall.
“Fuck,” he said again, under his breath, burying his face in his hands. It was at that moment that the computer emitted a loud beep and he turned, sharply, just in time to see the screen go black. And then, as he watched, small green words appeared in the upper left-hand corner, just like he remembered.
Hello Hamilton.
He dove for the keyboard.
Jake?
A pause, and then,
This is Will. I go by the name Shakespeare now.
Will? What the hell is going on? Where is Jake?
Do you want answers?
Of course I do!!!!
Then meet us tonight. Midnight. Out by Friendly’s on Main Street. Can you do that?
Who is us? You and Jake?
You’ll know everything when you get there.
I’ll be there. What’s this about?
All I can say now is that you will be making a choice, Hamilton. A choice that will affect the rest of your life in ways you can’t even imagine.
What on earth are you talking about?
Tonight, Hamilton. Tell no one about this.
Wait, Will, stop being so goddamn cryptic!!!
But there was no response. A moment later, the computer gave another loud beep and rebooted itself.
***
Shakespeare walked into the dining room, where Jacq and Wolf were sitting at the table, forcing down their usual breakfast. “I did it,” he said as the other two looked up expectantly. “Told him to meet us tonight. The hard lines in New Rawley might all be watched, and I figured we could drive him down to Carson.”
“Thanks,” Jacq said softly, pushing a bowl in his direction.
He sat down and stirred his porridge with a spoon, making no move to actually do any eating. “So,” he said, not looking at her, “I guess this is it.”
“Yeah,” she said, and there was a gleam in her eye, simultaneously elated and terrified. “I guess it is.”
“He’ll take the red pill,” he said, with no trace of doubt in his voice. “He’s as in love with you as he’s ever been, and he will follow you to the edge of the world. I just don’t think he’d imagined that he’d have to do it literally.”
“You sound very sure,” Wolf said, scratching his head.
“He loves her,” Shakespeare replied, still avoiding Jacq’s eyes. “And that love will lead him into the ruins of the real world.”
“You say it like it’s a bad thing,” she said, smiling weakly.
He turned to look at her, the expression in his pale blue eyes sharp, unmoved, and completely unfathomable.
“Love is the greatest misfortune,” he said simply, and began to eat his breakfast.
6: Love Or Something Like it
It was a typical late-spring night, the air laced with the fragrance of night blossoms as Hamilton made his way up Main Street. The street was deserted, the faint yellow light of roadside lamps pooling in misty circles on the pavement. There was no sound other than the slight shuffle of his sneakers as he walked quickly toward Friendly’s, which had been shut down for the night. However, light was still shining through the curtained window above the gas station, and he scooted self-consciously closer to the diner, trying to hide himself from view, just in case Bella decided to peek out of her bedroom window. Pushing his hair out of his eyes, he checked his watch: 11:58pm.
There was no one in sight. Exhaling deeply, he wrapped his arms around himself and leaned against the diner wall, letting himself be engulfed in its dark shadow. Experimentally, he ran a hand over his stomach again. Nothing seemed different than before. Still, he wasn’t exactly pacified by that thought. Resolving to tell Jake about it as soon as he saw her, he checked his watch again, anxiously. 11:59pm. Still nothing.
But as the numbers flipped over to 12:00am, a small black sports car burst out of a back alleyway, and amidst screeching tires it pulled to a stop right in front of the diner. Hamilton jumped back in surprise, staring at his reflection in the black-tinted window, which rolled downward, revealing Will sitting in the driver’s seat. “Get in,” he commanded curtly, scrutinising Hamilton over the top of his sunglasses.
“Where’s Jake?” demanded Hamilton, trying to peer inside the car.
“She’s waiting,” said Will. “In Carson.”
Hamilton opened the door and slid into the leather bucket-seat. He was struggling with the seat belt when Will silently handed him a piece of folded newsprint.
“What’s this?” Hamilton asked, unfolding it. It was a newspaper clipping, dated several months back. The headline read Two Found Dead in the Ritz-Carlton. Terrorism suspected. There was what appeared to be a school photo of a smiling boy with dark, liquid eyes, who looked no older than thirteen. He looked up at Will, confusion written all over his face.
“Just thought you’d want to know what you’re getting yourself into,” Will said. “You might want to pay particular attention to the eye-witness accounts of the two ‘terrorists’ who escaped by jumping through the fifth-storey window.”
Hamilton stared at the other man, who seemed to have metamorphosed over the years into a complete stranger. Will looked back, calmly, his expression unreadable behind those dark glasses. Then he turned back to the wheel and stepped on the accelerator.
The car took off like a shot down the quiet street.
***
Jacq paced up and down the disused factory on the outskirts of Carson, where she’d jacked in last night. She was wearing a long black PVC coat today, and knee-high boots. Every now and again she checked her watch, chewing her nails anxiously. Near the back of the factory, there were a couple of computers set up on a rickety table, next to a worn high-backed chair linked to a set of complex-looking equipment. Sighing impatiently, she checked her watch again, running her hands through her hair.
Finally, there came sound of a car pulling to a stop outside, and she rushed forward to unlock the heavy metal door to the factory. Shakespeare entered first, giving her a small smile. But she did not smile back. Her attention was completely captured by the sight of Hamilton behind him, looking wan and thoughtful, and she ran forward to greet him without another look in Shakespeare’s direction. “Hamilton!” she exclaimed happily, leaning in to kiss him on the lips.
He kissed her back, briefly, before drawing away. “Hey,” he said, not quite meeting her eyes.
“Hamilton?” she demanded, thrown by his change in demeanour. “What’s wrong?”
“I need you to explain something to me,” he said, pulling something out of his jacket pocket. She darted a quick, curious glance at him before she took it: it was a newspaper clipping.
“What’s this?” she asked, scanning through the by-lines, and as her eyes fell upon the picture of the young boy, a stony, blank expression slipped over her face.
“Oh,” she said.
“Tell me it isn’t true,” he said, his voice very quiet.
She glanced at him and bit her lower lip. “Who gave this to you?”
He nodded in Shakespeare’s direction. She swivelled on the other man, who removed his sunglasses and looked back at her, his gaze melancholic. “He deserves to know,” he said softly. “People should know what they’re getting themselves into.”
“Oh god,” she turned back to Hamilton, anxiety written all over her face. “I know how it looks, but it’s not like that! He was possessed by an agent, if I didn’t shoot him they would have - ”
“So it’s true?” he asked, expressionless. “You killed that kid?”
“Don’t look at me like that!” she exclaimed. “You don’t understand the circumstances, Hamilton! This is why we brought you here tonight! I can explain - ”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “So explain.”
She stared at him. “I can’t. I can’t unless you choose to become one of us.”
He stared back, and after a moment gave a short, incredulous laugh. “Are you kidding me? Me? Become one of you? Right after this?”
“No,” she felt as though her insides were clogged with words and explanations and a dense, acerbic pressure was building up behind them but she just couldn’t get them out. “Shakespeare!” she exclaimed, swirling around again, “tell him!”
“What do you want me to say, Jacq?” the other man asked, his voice wistful. “I told you there’d be consequences. Do you want to know what Darjeeling’s real name was? Where he went to school? Who his parents are? Would that make it more real for you? Would you be sorry if you knew?”
“No!” she exclaimed, frustrated. “I don’t want to know! This is what we do… we make sacrifices because we have to! We don’t have a choice in the grand scheme of things - ”
“And that’s why I brought him here,” Shakespeare said, sadly. “You still don’t get that, do you? This is the choice, right here, that he should be making - it’s the choice that we didn’t get, the catch that Wakefield did not bother explaining. We didn’t know that in his world we’d have to kill just to survive. Each time I do it, each time I shoot an innocent person, I feel like I die a little more inside.”
“Spare me the poetry!” she glared at him. “Why are you doing this now? We do what we have to do, that’s all!”
“And doesn’t Hamilton deserve to know what it is?” he asked, his voice soft. “The things we have to do? Do you want to watch him suffer in silence, haunted by the faces of the people he’d have to kill? Because that’s what’s going to happen if you take him away from his world and into ours.”
“Who are you?” whispered Hamilton, his gaze fastening on Jacq. “I… I just don’t understand. Are you spies? Are you working for the Government? The CIA?”
Jacq and Shakespeare shared a rueful smile at those words. She turned back to Hamilton, her eyes weary, and reached inside her coat pocket. She extracted a small silver box, flipping its lid open as she spoke.
“I didn’t plan for it to go this way,” she said, removing two small capsules from the box, one red, one blue. “You weren’t supposed to be accusing me of being a murderer. We were supposed to sit down, you were supposed to ask questions, and I was supposed to give you this choice. I guess it isn’t much of a choice now.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, staring, entranced, at the two pills on her open palm. They held a strange sheen to them, semi-transparent and vividly coloured, the blue one shimmering like the summer sky right after sunset, the red one glistening like blood.
“Take the blue pill,” she said, “and this ends here. You won’t see any more of us - of me, again. You’ll wake up tomorrow and think it’s all a dream and that will be that. But if you take the red pill, then we can give you all the answers you want. You follow us into our world and there’ll be no coming back.”
“You came back,” he said.
She smiled, a careless curl of the lip, a humourless gesture. “Not in the same way.”
“Never the same way,” Shakespeare murmured, averting his eyes. “Never again.”
Slowly, Hamilton’s gaze moved from Jacq’s outstretched palm to her expectant eyes. “So you’re saying,” he said slowly, “if I take the red pill, I’ll become one of you.”
She nodded. In her peripheral vision she could see Shakespeare, his face a mask of passiveness, looking away as though he couldn’t bear the outcome.
“I’ll become a terrorist?” whispered Hamilton. “I’ll have to kill people?”
“You don’t understand,” she murmured, again. “It’s not like that - ”
“No, you don’t understand, Jacq,” Shakespeare suddenly spoke, his voice pensive. “This is exactly what we’ve been doing. You might tell yourself otherwise, you might say you had no choice, you might say you were shooting agents, not real people, but the truth of the matter is we’ve been killing people exactly like Hamilton. People with families and lovers and friends, people who don’t know that there’s a world outside of their own - ”
“Don’t,” she was shaking now. “It’s not like that.”
Shakespeare sighed, and glanced back toward Hamilton. “Look,” he said tiredly, “I’ll give it to you straight. If you take the red pill, you join us. You’ll be expected to fight; you’ll be expected in some cases even to kill. It’s a hard road to go down - you’ll never see your friends and family again. You’ll never see the world in the same way again. There is no beauty where we live now, everything is empty and grey and there’s nothing worth holding onto.”
Hamilton stared at the other man, his mouth hanging slightly open.
“But,” briefly Shakespeare glanced toward Jacq, a soft light flickering in his eyes. “You will have her.”
Hamilton looked back at Jacq. She shivered slightly under his questioning gaze, and couldn’t quite bring herself to look into his eyes, for fear of what she would find there.
“Sometimes that’s enough,” said Shakespeare, quietly.
“And sometimes that’s not,” said Jacq, and suddenly she looked petrified. “Hamilton…”
“Who will I be expected to kill?” demanded Hamilton. “How can you two just stand here and talk about it like… like…” he trailed off, the incredulous look in his wide eyes completing the question for him more eloquently than words ever could.
“You’ll just have to trust us on this one,” Shakespeare smiled sadly. “It’ll make sense, I promise. Just a raw survival deal, nothing more and nothing less than that. It’s a lot like falling in love, really. Jumping in with your eyes closed.”
“Jake,” Hamilton began to say, another question balancing on the tip of his tongue, but she shook her head.
“Don’t,” she said softly. “I told you all that I could. This is as much answer as you can get without making a choice. I guess it’s what it comes down to.” Looking down at her hand, which was still outstretched, she bit her lower lip. “It sounds so stupid now. Take the blue pill, and forget about me. Forget about all this. Go back and have a normal life, with your photography and school and everything else. Fall in love with a girl. Have a family. Be happy. Or you can take the red pill and we can live a screwed-up life together in a cold dark world, and we might have to kill people just to survive. It wasn’t the way I would have put it, but Shakespeare is right. You deserve to know what you’re getting yourself into.”
He nodded slowly.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s pretty much all I needed to know.”
She blinked, looking away from him. “I love you, you know that,” she whispered.
“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”
And he picked up the red pill.
“Can I have some water?” he asked.
She stared at him, stunned into speechlessness.
“I’ll get you some,” said Shakespeare, his voice betraying no sign of surprise as he strode into the adjoining room. “Wait here. Jacq, you’d better prep the equipment.”
Hamilton nodded, examining the small red capsule in his hand for a moment before he looked back at Jacq.
“Why?” she asked, an inadvertent tear trailing down her cheek, though she was smiling now, and there was a light behind her eyes like he’d never seen before. It was as though there was some secret soft glow within her body, radiating from every inch of her skin. “Why?” she asked again, her lower lip trembling. “After all that we’ve told you… after you know what you’ll be expected to do…”
“Because I love you,” he replied simply. “I didn’t fall in love with someone else that summer, Jake, and I never fell out of love. I know you. I don’t know what you’ve been through these years, and I don’t know what ‘your world’ is that you keep talking about, but I don’t care. You do the things you think you must do, and for me, it’s enough that I love you, and that I trust you, and that I don’t want to let you go.”
Another tear fell, though she looked as though she was hardly aware of it. “But,” she whispered, “don’t you understand you have to leave your family and your friends and this world… Will said so many things I didn’t understand, about the world and the way you’ll love it and miss it when it’s gone, about artists and moonlight and coffee…”
“Shh,” he moved toward her, wrapping his arms around her waist, his hand still clenched around the red pill. “It’s okay, Jake. I’ll have you. That’s enough. It’s always been enough for me.”
She looked at him, apprehension written all over her beautiful face. “What if it’s not?”
“That’ll never happen,” he whispered. “I love you, Jake. You are the world.”
“I love you too,” she gave a muffled sob-laugh and reached up, her lips meeting his once more. And this time he kissed her back thoroughly, freed from his doubts and his anger. Perhaps it was selfish, perhaps it was irrational and stupid to abandon this life for a girl, to jump headlong into a world without rules and boundaries and laws and perhaps even morality, but that was his choice. He’ll take everything as it comes, with her by his side.
There came the sound of a ringing cell phone, and then the sound of breaking glass in the next room. Jacq broke the kiss abruptly and turned toward the source of the noise. “Shakespeare?” she called, “are you okay?”
Shakespeare came running back in, his face suddenly drawn. “Jacq,” he said urgently, “we have to leave, now.”
“Glitch?” she demanded, and as she stared into his eyes she could see exactly what he was thinking: the symmetry of the situation, the sameness of it all as history rushed up toward them and swallowed them within its inexplicable tide, like a scratched disc doomed to repeat its mistaken melody over and over again.
“Major déjà-vu,” he affirmed, turning back to his cell phone. “Wolf,” he demanded, “What’s the situation now?”
He listened for a few moments, his brows knitting closer and closer together as Jacq waited tensely, her hands enjoined to Hamilton’s. The other boy was looking from one person to another, bewilderment written all over his face, though he merely squeezed her hand tightly, biting back the questions he was dying to ask.
“All right,” Shakespeare finally said, snapping the phone shut. “There are ten policemen outside,” he told Jacq quickly, “with a back-up squad seven minutes away, and they’ve cut the hard line, obviously.”
“Any agents?” she demanded.
“Not yet, but there will be,” his voice was grave. “Wolf says we’ve been traced.”
“Traced?” she had gone white. “How?”
“Agents…” Hamilton muttered to himself. “Oh god, Jake, I meant to tell you earlier, in case it meant something. I had a dream where this FBI agent took me to an office and - ”
All the blood drained from Jacq and Shakespeare’s faces, their expressions of horror sharpening to such solemn gravity that Hamilton trailed to a stop.
“And they stuck a robot bug inside your stomach?” Shakespeare finished for him, grimly.
“Uh,” Hamilton looked completely taken aback. “Yeah.”
“Oh my god,” Jacq pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, “oh my god…”
“Well, we can’t stay here,” said Shakespeare urgently. “Look, we’ll have to de-bug Hamilton and then get a move on.”
“There’s not enough time to de-bug,” she said, springing into action. “We’ll just have to - ”
But they never got to hear whatever it was that she wanted them to do, because the next moment there was a cacophonous clang as the doors flew open, and a voice outside commanded, “Drop your weapons! Come out with your hands in the air!”
Jacq and Shakespeare shared a meaningful look. “It’s the police,” Jacq whispered to Hamilton out of the side of her mouth, her tone urgent and her expression more serious than he’d ever seen her. “We’ll have to go outside.”
“But I thought you were the police,” he muttered.
“No time to talk,” she whispered. “You have to listen carefully. Once we’re outside, as soon as I say ‘go’, duck and run back inside the building. Hide behind the door. Me and Will can take care of them, their back-up squad isn’t here yet. But don’t come out until we say it’s okay.” She glanced at him, her gaze boring into his in the brief second their eyes met. “Do you understand? This is a matter of life and death, so don’t play the hero. You don’t know what you’re dealing with. We do.”
He nodded, swallowing hard.
“I repeat,” the voice outside declared, “drop your weapons and come out with your hands in the air, now!”
Jacq and Shakespeare looked at each other again, nodded, and slowly raised their hands above their head, beginning to walk toward the door, their footfalls ringing out across the empty factory. Hamilton quickly slipped his red pill inside his jacket pocket, and did the same.
“That’s it,” the man outside said, “nice and easy… now don’t you try anything funny, we’ve got a whole firing squad pointing their PST59s straight at your heads…”
“Liar,” Jacq muttered under her breath as she, Shakespeare, and Hamilton stepped outside the door.
For a split second, Hamilton saw the moonlight cascading down on the ground in sheets of liquid silver, the faces of a group of policemen behind pointed pistols, the anxious, fearful looks in their eyes that they tried to hide with a veneer of righteous calm. And then Jacq shouted ‘go!’ and suddenly her fist shot out as though from nowhere and Shakespeare’s legs flew out from under his long coat, kicking two pistols out of their owners’ hands just as they pulled on the trigger and shots rang out in the silence of the night and Hamilton turned and ducked and ran back inside the factory, concealing himself behind the steel door, his heart beating like a jackhammer inside his chest. Outside, he could hear more shots, ricocheting off the factory’s exterior walls, the sound of steel-capped boots making contact with soft flesh, dull thuds as bodies hit the ground. His breaths coming fast and shallow, he clenched his fists and wished fervently that he could do something, anything, instead of crouching here like a coward and a child, waiting for his girlfriend to save him…
But he knew, too, that she and Will were no longer ordinary people. Slipping a shaking hand into his pocket, he withdrew the red pill. Was this all it took? Could he, too, become like them if he’d only swallowed it? It couldn’t hurt, they were about to give it to him anyway…
He nodded resolutely to himself and opened his mouth. But before he could place the pill on his tongue, something seemed to run through him, as though he had been mildly electrocuted. His limbs seized up and the pill slipped from his fingers, dropping soundlessly onto the floor. It was like being dunked in a vat of tepid liquid, something that fizzled and crackled with energy like warm soda gone alien and organic. The sensation was familiar, somehow, as though he’d experienced it before…
***
Outside, Jacq ran vertically up the factory wall and somersaulted over the heads of the gaping policemen, knocking them down as she landed with a double kick. She whipped around, her coat flying out around her, thrusting her elbow backwards and hearing a reassuring crack as it connected with another policeman’s nose. He fell and she turned, seizing his pistol from his slackened fingers before he quite hit the ground, casting her eyes over the scene. Most of the policemen were sprawled on the ground, unconscious. A little way away, Shakespeare was making quick work with the ones remaining. She smiled grimly to herself and ran into the factory. “Hamilton,” she called, peering around the door, “it’s okay to…”
The words died on her lips as the crouched figure behind the door stood up.
Agent White brushed off his suit. He adjusted his sunglasses. He smiled.
“Looking for your boyfriend?” he asked.
She stared at him, and it felt like the world was crumbling down around her even as she lifted her pistol with a trembling hand. “Hamilton,” she murmured, pointing the gun at his chest.
“Is still an un-freed mind,” White said smoothly. “And therefore liable to be taken over by agents. And it would seem that I have taken that liberty.”
“I’ll shoot,” she said, her voice shaking.
“Ah, yes,” he smiled, again revealing his impossibly straight white teeth. “I was wondering when we’d come to this interesting little dilemma. You see, Jacq, I was hoping we’d meet again.”
“Well, you got your wish,” she said, her body racking with violent tremors even as she kept the gun pointed, her index finger trembling over the trigger.
“And it’s just the scenario that I wanted,” he smiled again. “Because now, Jacq, she who wouldn’t mind shooting innocent people, children, even; it would seem that you have a rather harder choice to make.”
“Oh yeah?” her teeth were chattering as though it wasn’t a sultry spring night but the heart of winter, an age of hopelessness, of dead things and endings. “And what’s that?”
“It’s perfectly simple. You don’t need me to spell it out for you,” he said. “But just for clarification’s sake, I’ll do it anyway. Shoot me, and you kill your boyfriend, though it would give you a precious few minutes - all that you need, really - to make your escape. Don’t shoot, and,” he shrugged elegantly, withdrawing a pistol from inside his suit pocket and cocking it with studied nonchalance, “I’ll kill you. Much like… what was his name? Wakefield, was it? I thought he’d have put up a better fight, to be honest.”
She kept her pistol pointed at him, though tears were welling up in her eyes and beginning to blur her vision. “You bastard,” she murmured, almost choking on the words. “You sick, sick bastard. I can’t believe a machine could be this evil…”
“Oh no,” White smiled again. “Evil is an entirely human concept. I am not enjoying the irony of the situation as humans might enjoy it; rather, I see it as an interesting experiment. Our version of the red pill, blue pill scenario, if you will. That was why I bugged this man in the first place. You see,” he continued, raising the pistol and pointing it at her head with an obscenely leisurely air. “I’ve always thought that love, humankind’s great white hope, was also its greatest weakness. And I’m keen to test that theory.”
At that moment Shakespeare burst back into the factory, having dispatched the other policemen. “Jacq,” he panted, skidding to a stop as he saw the deadlock in front of him. “NO!” he shouted, his hand flying to his holster and grabbing hold of his gun -
“Will, STOP!” screamed Jacq, her face going suddenly and terribly white. He stopped mid-motion, his gun barely drawn, staring at her incredulously. Another tear spilled onto her cheek as she closed her eyes and shook her head.
A faint flicker of something stirred behind his ice-blue gaze, a realisation perhaps, of abstract and haunted things.
“Ah yes,” said White. “The plot thickens. You see, Shakespeare, she doesn’t want you to shoot me because, essentially, I am Hamilton. But there’s a different dilemma for you altogether, isn’t there?”
“You don’t need to spell it out,” said Shakespeare, pointing his gun at the agent, and Jacq thought she could hear a despondent echo in his voice, grim and desolate and perhaps even more painful than that.
“Oh,” White smiled, “but I want to. I delight in the textbook balance of it. I delight in the fact that, even if you don’t care enough about Hamilton to see whether he lives or dies, I can assure you that I will shoot the woman the moment you press that trigger. Tell me, Shakespeare, can anyone on your ship dodge bullets?”
Shakespeare’s gaze flickered downward, then, for a split second. He didn’t answer the question. But slowly, almost painfully, he lowered his gun and bent down, setting it on the ground. “What do you want?” he asked the agent, though his eyes were firmly trained on Jacq. She stared back at him, trying to discern any hint of solace in his eyes, and finding none there. She stifled a sob and looked away.
“I just want to see the outcome of this experiment,” White said. “That’s all. Oh, you humans speak of love like it is the supreme saviour, and I simply want to put its sublime transcendence to the test. So, Jacq,” he cocked his head and coolly scrutinised the woman. “What will it be? Shoot Hamilton, or die yourself?”
“You can dodge bullets,” she whispered, tears coursing down her face. There was a faint roaring in her ears, like the sound of waves crashing over distant shores. Her tears tasted of salt.
“Yes,” he smiled again. “But isn’t it more fun if I don’t?”
“I didn’t know sadism was part of your programming,” said Shakespeare, his fist clenching at his side, his voice shadowed with apprehension and something deeper, firmer, almost steely in texture. It sounded like resolution, in a way; but that, like everything else he did lately, made no sense to her.
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” said White simply, and he smiled, again, almost graciously, as Jacq lowered her gun, inch by excruciating inch, tear tracks still shining on her face.
“Jacq,” Shakespeare whispered, his fists balling at his sides. “Don’t…”
“We do what we have to do, Will,” she replied, staring right into White’s mirrored lenses and seeing her own reflection stare back, pale-faced but resigned, shaded with unearthly calm.
“Yes,” White murmured, the smile still lingering on his face. “I’d rather thought this might be the case. Very interesting.”
“Do it,” Jacq said, and she closed her eyes.
Something flickered in White’s expression, something akin to the heightened solitude of ecstasy. He took a deep breath, as though he were inhaling something other than just sense data, just computer code, as though he himself was something rather than nothing, and his fingers tensed on the trigger. But before he could press down on it a blur of black streaked toward him, a brief flash of jewel red and then there was suddenly something in his mouth - in Hamilton’s mouth - and he swallowed upon instinct because really, he wasn’t very used to being in this dirty human body, and abruptly he felt as though he were wrenched away with a violent tug, he heard the main system calling him back, in numbers, in figures, in gloriously elegant binary. “No,” he shouted, but the sound came out a gurgle as he felt himself being jerked from the body he inhabited, as something tackled him and he pulled back on the trigger with his last remaining human strength and heard the gun fire as though from far, far away. But he didn’t get to see the result of his experiment because suddenly he was not in human form anymore, he was energy, he was light, catapulted through the sparking connections crisscrossing the matrix, back to the computer mainframe…
As the gun went off Jacq breathed in quickly, screwing her eyes shut, waiting for the inevitable moment, waiting for the bullet to pierce her body and take her into oblivion.
It didn’t come. A second passed, and then another. There was silence. She opened her eyes.
The gun had fallen to the ground. Shakespeare was lying next to it, a pool of blood rapidly spreading from the bullet wound in his stomach.
“Oh my god,” she cried, diving toward him, clamping her hands over the wound as though that could stop the blood from gushing out, “what happened? Will, what happened? Where’s the agent? Where’s Hamilton?”
He looked up at her, his eyes glazed. “I…” he murmured, his body jerking beneath her hands. “I… picked up the red pill when I put down the gun… Hamilton must have dropped it, earlier…”
“Don’t talk now,” she sobbed, watching blood spill out through the cracks in her fingers, staining her skin with viscous scarlet, “we’ve got to get you out of here - ”
“I… tackled White,” he gasped out, “I shoved the red pill into his mouth, but he shot me before he disappeared… Do you understand? The tracer inside the red pill, the disruption of output signals from the matrix… it was the only way to save Hamilton and save you, too…”
“An agent can’t possess a freed mind,” she cried, ripping a length of cloth from her shirt, her hands shaking so badly that she could hardly control what they were doing, “I understand, oh god, Will - ”
“We’ve freed Hamilton,” he whispered. “And White… he was sent back to the mainframe… but hurry, he’ll be back soon…”
“We’ve got to get you out of here!” she shouted, her words choking in her throat, pressing the wad of dry cotton against his wound and seeing it become soaked almost instantaneously. “We’ve got to - ”
“It’s too late,” he whispered, and she recognised a flicker of resignation in his eyes, a thin line of blood emerging from between his lips and trailing down his chin, like a razor cut, like poetry. “ I can feel it. Just leave me…”
“Don’t say that!” she cried, “I forbid you to say it, Will! Stay awake for me, we’ll get you out - ”
“Hamilton’s out in the real world now,” he said, his voice so low that she had to press her ear to his lips to hear anything at all. “He’s waking up… in the harvesting fields… you need… to be there… there was no time to hook him up to the… equipment, you’ll need to trace him… when you’re… back… on the ship…”
“Shh,” she sobbed, pressing her hand to her own mouth and leaving a crimson smear there, a mark painted by blood, like possession. “Don’t talk, don’t try to do anything, just stay still and I’ll get us out of here - ”
“You have to get Hamilton,” he wheezed, his body trembling under her touch, his eyes rapidly losing focus. There was a sheen of cold sweat on his forehead, and blood was beginning to froth at the corners of his mouth, a miraculous, terrible blossom of the night.
“I’m not leaving you!” she cried, cradling his head in her lap, still trying desperately to stop the blood flow with her hands. How could one body contain so much blood? Her hands were completely covered in it, thick and warm and sticky with the nostalgic smell of copper and salt. “Why did you do it, Will? Oh god, why did you…?”
He smiled, then, and this time there was no mystery in his expression, nothing she couldn’t recognise. She was suddenly aware of the utter emptiness of the factory, the echoes in it, the wide swath of moonlight cutting across the bloodstained floor and falling across them, like some kind of final absolution.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he murmured, and as she leaned down to hear him she could feel his lips shift against her cheek, as though in another kiss, an altogether different kind. “We… we do what we… have to do. You could… die… for Hamilton…”
“Yes, but…” she whispered, tears streaming down her face, “but - ”
“Yeah, well…” she could feel his lips curl up in a small smile. “I guess… I love you…”
A shudder ran through his body, and he was suddenly still.
“Will?” she exclaimed, pulling back and shaking him violently in a wave of new panic, her vision blurred by tears. “Will!”
He didn’t respond, his head falling to one side as she shook him, his eyes fluttering closed. The smile remained on his face, though, and as she stared at him she was suddenly and forcefully struck by the memory of their days back at Rawley Academy, the best summer of their lives, where anything could happen and their lives were waiting to start. “No,” she whispered, her hand straying to the base of his neck, scrabbling for a pulse. “No!”
As though from far away, she could hear the faint ringing in her ears again, growing louder and louder until it was almost unbearable, and it was a few moments before she realised that the sound came from none other than her cell phone. Her fingers tracing crimson marks all over his pale, exposed neck, she fished the phone out of her pocket and held it up to her ear, still grappling for that elusive pulse. For a moment she could hear nothing but a distant, continuous beep over the line and she couldn’t figure out what the hell that was supposed to be and then she heard Wolf’s hoarse voice, thick with the sound of restrained sobs, “Jacq,” he said, “he’s gone, he’s gone,” and then she suddenly realised what that first sound was, the beeping, the undiluted sound of the utter loss of hope; it was a familiar sound from all the hospital sitcoms she used to watch as a child, it was the sound that marked the end of worlds. It was the sound of a flatline on a heart rate monitor. “NO!” she screamed into the phone, Shakespeare’s head still cradled in her arms, “No, no, no, NO, NO!”
“You can’t do anything for him now,” Wolf cried over the line, “please, Jacq, you need to move - ”
“You’re wrong!” she shouted, placing a shaking hand over Shakespeare’s heart as though that could send a jolt into the ether and bring him back. All it did, however, was leave another dark wet imprint on his already blood-soaked shirt. “No,” she whispered, staring down at his face. Something was rending in her heart, tearing her to pieces from the inside. “Oh god, Will, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry…”
“You’ve got to go!” yelled Wolf, his voice verging on the hysterical, “Jacq, the armed squad is coming and you can’t take them down by yourself!”
“I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry - ” she repeated the litany until it seemed to lose all meaning, her body racked with sobs, the sound of it like the backwash of a wave, “god, I am so sorry…”
“He did what he had to do to save you!” shouted Wolf, “Just like you did what you had to do! Now you must leave him! There’s nothing more you can do, we need to get Hamilton, I’ve locked onto his coordinates, we need to rescue him from the harvesting fields - ”
“Hamilton,” she repeated vacantly, touching Will’s pale cheek and leaving another red smear behind. The sound of the flatline was still coming from the phone, and it seemed to be getting louder and louder. “Hamilton…”
Hamilton.
The name broke through her dazed consciousness like a shard of glass. It was as though a bright white light had suddenly been flicked on in her brain, crystallising everything with a painful clarity. She looked down at Will’s face, the pale translucent blue of his eyelids, the deeper blue of the shadows beneath his eyes, the faint smile.
“Wolf,” she whispered into the phone, gritting her teeth and pressing a hand to her throat as though to stop the sobs from cascading out into the silent night air. “I’m coming out. Where’s the nearest hard line?”
“Two miles east from here, in an abandoned barn on the highway,” Wolf said urgently. “You’ve got to go now, the armed squad is nearly there, and I think the agent is coming back soon… and, I’ve just had a critical call from Zion, they’re calling all the ships in, something about a message from the Osiris - ”
“I’m coming,” she said, choking on the words as she looked down at Will’s soft boyish face, the secret smile. Slowly, she set him on the ground, his head turned to one side, his hand placed over his heart. Her tears carved a path through the blood on her face, his blood, a symbol of the things that he’d gifted to her, a sign of protection and of love, of faith and darker things, of sacrifice.
Then she stood up and turned away, a new resolution slipping over her face. As she walked away she did not look back.
“I’m getting in the car right now,” she said into the phone, striding out of the factory and over the unconscious bodies of the policemen. She wrenched the car door open, leaving yet another crimson smudge on the silver handle, and got into the driver’s seat. “You’ve got Hamilton’s co-ordinates? Good. Take the ship to the sector as fast as you can. I’m coming.”
She only had a brief view of the factory in her rear view mirror as she drove away from it, away from Will’s lifeless body. As she drove she could feel the tears coursing down her face, the painful thud of her heart, the prickling, empty feeling in her chest expanding like a cavern of ice. The grief wasn’t quite there yet, but she knew from experience that it was coming, and that it would be cataclysmic when it finally hits. But for now there was only a complex emptiness, an aching, a stupid anaesthetic imperviousness, and she was glad for it. She needed to stay standing long enough to get through the trials yet to come, for Hamilton, for her love lost and regained. As the car raced down the motorway it was doused in the cleansing silver glow of moonlight, its cool caress washing over her face.
And at that moment, speeding away from the man who loved her enough to die for her, toward the man who loved her and whom she loved in return, she thought she understood what Will meant, earlier, when he looked into her eyes and told her about the things that mattered most to him. It was the colour of the sky and the cold air on snowy days. It was the shadows under the trees and the smell of coffee. It was the inexplicable beauty and the utter desolation in what they could feel here and now: the perfection, the heartache, the symmetry.
End
[ f e e d b a c k ]