TWENTY-ONE
Mere finds me lying on the grate, staring up at the stairs above my head. “There's nothing on the laptop,” she says. “Just an unlocked guest account that was set to load when I brought it out of sleep mode. There's no sign it's ever been on a network or the Internet. The hardware isn't that new, so it looks like it was wiped and reformatted a couple of days ago, the video was loaded—probably from a CD or USB device—and then it was configured to surprise us. That's it.”
Her words stir something in my head, and I try to grab it, but it remains elusive.
“What is it?” she asks, sensing my aggravation.
“I've been down there—” I indicate the open space beneath the grate. “But I can't remember when or why. We forget things after a while. It's too much to hang on to, all that history, and the brain starts to jettison bits and pieces of it after… Anyway, there are some practices we've adopted that ease the discomfort of memory loss, but it doesn't clean up everything. There are little shards that remain, tiny chips of history that lodge themselves in the brain. They're disassociated from the core memory that binds them together, and the brain struggles to keep itself ordered. These little pieces end up in strange spots and, as the brain folds them in, they become disconcerting breaks in your mental history.”
“That sounds confusing.”
“You get used to it. After a while.”
I don't tell her how Mother helps us when we go into her embrace. She won't understand. She hasn't lived as long as I have.
“Is there any reason to stay here then?” she asks. “Is it going to get better?”
“No,” I sigh. “Probably not.” I look wistfully at the spikes in the wall once more. Would getting the grate removed help? Would I actually understand what I found down below? Our would it be something that I felt like I should remember, but couldn't?
Would that be worse?
“Come on,” she says, offering me her hand. “I want to find the server room. Let's see if it is in that first subbasement. Maybe there's something left there.”
Using her hand, I pull myself up. She doesn't let go and I end up standing close to her. She leans toward me for a second, squeezing my hand. “I'm sorry,” she says.
“For what?”
“For what happened to Nigel.”
Why? is the first word that had popped into my head. He was a bastard. I shudder slightly and, feeling the tremor in my body, she squeezes harder.
“Thanks,” I say, even though she's misreading my reaction.
I don't feel any sadness at Nigel's death. I should, but I don't. He wasn't family. Not in the truest sense. Not even in the slightest sense.
I miss Mere's hand touching mine more than I miss Nigel.
The lab server room is more of a closet, and the narrow space contains two racks of computer gear. It's a bunch of black boxes with a tangled mess of wires coming in and out of everything in an incomprehensible maze, but Mere looks at it like she understands what she's seeing. “Patch panel,” she says to herself as she starts inventorying the boxes, “Router. One—no, two—switches. Four servers, and… shit.”
“What?”
“See these lights?” She pops off a plastic panel and shows me a row of red lights next to empty slots. “The drives have all been pulled. Each of these slots should be filled with a hard drive, but they're all empty.” She checks each one of the boxes that she counted as a server, and they're all the same.
“They really wanted to make sure we couldn't get any data off these. Probably put them all in a bag and tossed it into the ocean. That'd be the quickest way to ruin the data. Damnit. There's nothing here. Nothing at all.” She leans tiredly against the rack. “This was just a waste of time,” she says quietly. “Such a f*cking waste of time.”
“We're still alive,” I say. “We're not in immediate danger. We have freedom to move about. It's—”
She whirls on me. “‘It's not that bad.' Is that what you're going to say? This entire facility was burned because you took me out of that hospital. They burned Eden Park too! How many have died now? Secutores is covering their tracks, and they don't seem to care about collateral damage along the way. What are we going to do? Where are we going to go? Do you think they'll just let us wander off? We're loose ends. They're going to come after us. Shit, Silas, for all we know they're waiting upstairs for us, laughing at us as we stumble around down here in the dark.” She taps me on the chest, punctuating her remarks. “We don't know why. We don't know what or even where. We don't know anything.”
I grab her finger. “We're alive,” I repeat. “It's a start.”
“A start of what?”
“I don't know. That's why I found you. Intelligence gathering isn't my forte.”
“Me? That's your whole plan? Find Mere; she'll figure it out. That's it?”
“Sort of.”
“Oh, shit. That's not a plan, Silas. That's barely”—she searches for a nice way to say it—“that's like something on a grocery list. Get eggs. Meat. Maybe some cheese.”
“Short lists work well,” I say.
“Find Mere. Kill all the bad guys. Like that?”
“Sure. It's easy to remember.”
She stares at me. “You're a grunt,” she says. She pulls her finger out of my grip. “That's what you are—what you were. How long have you been following orders, Silas? Jesus Christ. Who put you up to this? Is this your idea? Have you ever thought for yourself?”
“Yes,” I say. “The night I saved your life, for one.”
She looks away. “That's not fair,” she says quietly.
“It's true.”
“Goddamnit, Silas, I don't need that on me. You saved my life once. You do it again, and this time how many people have died?”
“You can't connect those events like that. It doesn't work.”
“Why not?”
“Because it's not about you. It's—”
“What? It's about you?”
“No,” I say, struggling to grab on to that elusive thought that has been darting out of reach every time I try to reach for it. “Yes,” I change my mind. “It's about us. Arcadians.” And then the thought stops hiding from me.
“Secutores didn't do this,” I say.
“What? How do you know?”
“It was all a trap,” I say. “Right? Everything was set up to capture an Arcadian. Even after the Liberty. Those pop guns couldn't stop me; they were meant to drive me in a specific direction. They wanted me alive.”
“Secutores?”
I nod. “Yes. So if that video was made by Secutores, then they have Nigel. They already have an Arcadian. So why burn the lab? Why leave the laptop for us to find? There's no reason to leave that video other than to taunt us. To tell us we're too late. There's nothing we can do for Nigel. He's gone.”
“Which means this lab belongs to someone else.”
I nod. “And they didn't want Secutores finding anything useful here. Other than their message: We have him; you don't.”
“Wait. Were they expecting Secutores to show up?” she asks. “Or us? And if they weren't expecting us, then… oh shit, there was a plane coming in to the airport when we were coming here. Secutores might be coming here right now.”