23
THE OBSERVATORY
He must have begun moving before I hit the ground, because I’m not still for more than a second when he attacks.
The boy.
Lucas dives at him from one side, Fortis from the other. But they’re too late. All I see is the knife.
Knives.
I scream and flail, kicking and punching as hard as I can. A moment later, the attacker rolls off me. A gleaming blade falls from his hand to the dirt.
“Madre de Dios!” I keep screaming. I can’t stop.
“Dol!” Lucas starts toward the fence, but Fortis grabs him by the neck of his shirt, turning to me.
“Get a grip on yourself, love.”
Fortis shuts me up. I hold my breath until I can swallow the screaming. My breath is coming fast and ragged, but I keep silent now.
The Sympa boy is heavy and motionless. Though his face is half hidden in the dirt, I can see his eyes have rolled back in his head. I push my face closer to his. He’s not breathing. It’s like his whole body has just stopped.
“I think he’s dead.”
“Anyone who passes through the fence is. That’s what the Icon does to the rest of us,” Fortis calls out to me, but as he does, he’s moving away from the fence. Now his face is drawn tight, his eyes nervous. “Think I’d better stand back a bit.”
I stare at the newly dead boy, lying halfway through the chain.
Lucas drags him by his boots until he is all the way out, on the other side of the fence. He yanks open the boy’s jacket, feeling in his pockets. He pulls out a faded piece of paper, folded once. Before he can open it, Fortis quickly takes the paper and reads it.
“Apparently there’s a price for you. Only a thousand digs? Cheap bastards. They’re driving the whole Merk market down.” Fortis looks disgusted. “Highway robbery, that’s what that is.”
“Fortis!”
“Right. He must have recognized you and thought he’d make a few digs.”
“Who would put a price on my head?” Lucas reaches to take the paper, but Fortis waves him off. It disappears like everything else, in the voluminous folds of his long jacket.
“My guess is, it isn’t the Ambassador behind it. More likely, she doesn’t even know.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lucas frowns.
“Nothing, yet. Except you need to remember Julius Caesar.”
“How so?”
“It’s never your enemies’ senate you need to worry about. You’re more likely to be stabbed in the back by your own.”
“Great. I feel so much better.” Lucas looks annoyed.
“You’re welcome. But, all the same, I’ll nose around some and tell you if anything turns up. I’d put my money on Catallus. He’s a bit of a thug, I know that much.”
Fortis wads up his handkerchief and shoves it back into his pocket. “Poor dead fool. He probably thought it was safe for him too, the moment Dol here crossed the fence.” He backs away again, farther from where I stand. “Well, let’s not waste any more time on this one. Time for you to go, both of you. I’m not joining you, thanks for asking. You need to see for yourself.”
I can feel his brain working at light speed. They can go inside, he’s thinking. They can live inside the Icon. They’re immune. It doesn’t affect them.
I feel it all, and my face twists into doubt.
Fortis looks at me, grinning. “Sorry about that. I forget, sometimes, who I’m dealin’ with. That you can see into my mind clear as a crystal ball.”
“It doesn’t work like that. Not all the time.”
“Fine. Then a nice, big glass one. Good and cracked a little, just like old Fortis himself.”
“What does it mean, Fortis?” I look at him. I wish he would just be straight with us for once.
“What it means, I don’t know.” He doesn’t slow down. “Maybe you can tell me when you get back. Off with you, now. Up the hill, my brave little Grassgirl.” He motions to Lucas. “Let your friend ’round through the gate and get going.”
“What do we do when we get up there?” I stare in the direction of the Icon, even though I can’t see it. Not from here. From the looks of the incline, we will have a steep hike up to the top.
“I don’t know.” Lucas holds up his wrist, speaking into it. “Doc, do you have any idea of what we’re looking for?”
Doc’s voice is crackling; the connection is weak.
“Based on what we know, you should be able to locate a physical space approximating a control room, Lucas. A power source that connects throughout the building. Even if the technology is not based on Embassy specifications.”
Fortis grabs Lucas’s wrist and loosens the strap. “Old Hux is right, but he won’t be able to help you much, not past here. Radio silence. Hazard of the Icon pulse.”
“I’ve got it.” Lucas yanks his wrist free and begins to unbuckle it himself. He presses a button on his wrist cuff and the air seems that much quieter.
Doc is gone.
Fortis slaps Lucas on the shoulder. “Remember. It’s nothing from this world. Don’t expect anything you see to look like anything you know.”
“I said I’ve got it.”
Lucas is as cross as I am; as I push open the gate from the inside, he nearly trips on an edge of old bone. “Watch out,” I say, and he only glares. Our current situation is enough to put anyone in a foul mood.
But we don’t stop. We can’t. So we hike in silence until the empty houses finally give way to the steep canyon roads, and then roads become trails, and the trails become mountainside dirt. Everything twists in front of me until the city becomes the wild. Rotting remains of dense moss and fern overwhelm the dead trees on either side of the curving road. Now I understand how this Mossy Fern street got its name.
My head starts to pound.
Lucas points to the remnants of a wooden sign. Part of an arrow, and the letters ORY.
“There. The steepest incline, it must go to the Observatory.”
“Lead the way.”
He’s right.
We’re here, only I don’t know what I’m looking at. Through the empty parking lot, past the few outlines of rusted cars, there it is.
An observatory. People used to look into the heavens from here. Now the heavens have occupied it, and it observes us, visible for miles around. It reminds me of the Santa Catalina Presidio, almost, except the ocean doesn’t stretch out in front of it, only a great lost city. I see the reason we are here, jutting up into the sky above the older building. The blackened metal of the Icon unfolds like an ominous shadow over everything else before us.
“Just keep walking,” mutters Lucas. He sees it too.
I nod.
As we near the building, everything becomes darker, stranger, more damaged. The pounding in my head grows stronger. The building no longer looks like an observatory. It looks like an abandoned military plant.
We mount the cracked concrete stairs that lead to the central complex. The doors are chained shut. Lucas rattles them, but I don’t waste my time.
I make my way around the side of the building, until I find myself on a concrete platform behind the Observatory, on the edge of the hill overlooking the sweep of the city.
The Hole.
I can see the wash of buildings, the white haze of horizon where they cling to each other in clusters that are nothing like anything found in nature. Shells of abandoned business centers rise up like ancient obelisks and artifacts from a time that doesn’t matter anymore. Closer to the hills beneath the Observatory, the pale sprawl gives way to curving hillsides of scrubby green trees and twisting dirt paths. I can see all the way from the mountains in the east to the water in the west.
Beyond that, I see the faint, jagged outline of Santa Catalina Island, only a brief disruption in the horizon.
I look at the Hole, all of it, and that’s just what it is. A hole. I try to imagine it alive, free again from the constant fear of death.
I can’t.
I can’t escape the feeling that it’s over, that this once-great city will never be anything again. Because as I stand here at the Observatory, the main thing I can observe is that the city is dying.
The Icon, the machine that pulses right behind me, is killing it—what was left of it to kill.
Like the dead houses on the way up the hill, only everywhere, and worse.
“There you are.”
Lucas has found me, but he’s found something else, too. He stumbles backward, staring up at the sky.
I follow, turning reluctantly toward the Observatory.
Toward the Icon.
I half expect to see inhuman guards, shielded Sympa soldiers, or maybe some alien tech that will keep us from entering. Then I remember that no humans could ever walk where I am standing, and that there is no way anyone operating the Icon would have planned for security here.
But when we get closer to the Icon, what I see is more frightening than any security system. The ground in front of us is completely covered with rubble. Partial walls rise into broken windows, as if an earthquake has hit the building. The front doors are wide open. One has fallen, the other hangs on its hinges.
“Easy enough.” Lucas sighs, grim.
Neither one of us wants to go any farther.
But we do.
We walk straight toward the largest building of the central compound.
Lucas goes first, shaking his head as if he is trying to get something out of it. “Feel that?” A drop of blood slides down from the inside of his ear.
I nod. Because my entire body is trembling—even my heart is vibrating. It’s all we can do to stay on our feet. No one can tolerate the energy this close to the Icon.
Not even us.
“We shouldn’t be here, Lucas,” I say, reaching toward his ear. He pulls his head away.
“Yeah. Neither should this.”
He takes my hand and I let him.
“Let’s look for the brain and get out of here, Dol.”
We step inside.
The Icon has destroyed what used to be the Observatory.
What we see now looks like only part of the Icon—the part we can see from inside—but even this much is completely intimidating.
It’s hard and sharp, metallic and silvery black.
The surface appears to pulsate, almost like a liquid, swirling and flowing in complex patterns.
I don’t dare touch it.
The thing is like a jagged spike from a giant claw.
Long, protruding tubes like fingers run in and out of the building. The main part of the Icon body is long and broad and covered with nodes, a vertical strip of massive, circular steel rings. It’s ironic; this part of the Icon, whatever it is, is the only thing that seems to be alive in the entire park.
The machine—I don’t really know what else to call it—looks nothing like what I have seen from any distance, through any telescope. What can be seen from outside is just the shell. What we stand looking at remains hidden from the world, but more powerful than anything else in it.
It’s not just the brains we’ve found. It has its own sort of heart, I think. We stand there watching it beat, feeling it pulse. Lucas raises his hand to his forehead. I feel it too, the strange energy coming from the Icon. I feel it probing at me, pounding at me, attacking me.
The power is incredible.
The power it has to stop everything that keeps me alive. It pounds out a rhythm like a heartbeat.
Something’s there—deep in the center of this Icon. Something alive. Something powerful. Something that exists solely to kill.
I bring my hand to my chest to feel my heart banging inside.
Yes.
I close my eyes and remember the Padre and Ramona, and see the tiniest details.
Remember.
I know the Icon wants to control every pulse in my body, but I also feel something inside myself that pushes back against it.
My heart is not going to stop today.
I reach out in my mind and hold on to Lucas, next to me. Hand in hand, heart to heart.
He is frightened too, but we can’t stop here, having come this far.
We pick our way through the debris and the wiring. The building is in ruins; the Icon tech has ravaged the old structure. Finally we agree we’ve seen enough, and it’s time to go.
By the time we make our way outside, we see that the walls of the Observatory aren’t strong enough to tolerate too much fusion, and the concrete blocks have crumbled under the grip of the Icon.
Like a hand on a throat, I think.
“Look.” Lucas points. “This thing has roots.”
It’s true. All around us, bits of black metal poke up from the cracked concrete. There is so much more than we can see, I think, as my head pounds.
Who knows where it ends?
Just then, my foot catches on something in the rubble, and I stumble. It’s hard and metal, and when I bend to pick it up, it’s cool in my hand. I’m already holding it when it occurs to me that it’s a piece of the Icon. It vibrates, radiates its own kind of energy.
A breath. Or a pulse.
“Lucas?”
Lucas looks over at me. “Is that what I think it is?”
“This must have broken off when it landed.”
I turn to throw it over the wall, out into the sea of dead city below. Then I stop. I can’t bring myself to throw it away. Not after feeling it the way I do.
Which makes no sense, I know. The only thing the Icon has ever brought is death.
I should hate it.
Instead, I’m drawn to it.
“Dol? What are you doing with that thing? Get rid of it.”
I can’t. I don’t want to.
I shrug. “Who knows? Maybe Doc can use it to figure something out. Maybe it will help.” I force myself to drop the shard into my chestpack.
“Help what?” Lucas leans against the wall next to me.
I look around.
“What Fortis is planning. To shut this place down, or blow it up? Whatever does the trick, I guess. You heard him.”
When I turn his way, I see the wildness in Lucas’s eyes. “Dol. Look around you. You really think you can just find the on or off switch for an Icon? You think you or Fortis or Ro or anyone can just blow it up?”
I stare at him, confused. “Isn’t that the point? Why we’re here?”
“Are you really that—”
“What, Lucas?”
“Stupid?”
I snort, but he keeps going. “You actually want to listen to Fortis now? Jump on the Rebellion’s cause? Just forget about the fact of the Embassy, the Sympas, the weapons, the House of Lords—everything and everyone who controls the world we happen to be living in?”
Sympas. I’ve never heard him use the Grass word before.
“Lucas. If that’s not what you want, then what are we doing here? In the Hole? At the Icon?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I brought you here to show you how crazy it was. To prove to you we couldn’t win. To end it, Dol.” He looks at me, sadly. “I just want it to end.”
I know he does. But when I look at the Icon, in all its ugliness, I know he’s also wrong.
“This isn’t how it ends,” I say. “Our story. Whatever it is.”
“It could be. We could find a way.”
I shake my head.
“We can’t.”
“What if Fortis is lying?”
“He isn’t. You know he isn’t. Besides, look around. This isn’t a lie.” I turn my back on the city, facing the Observatory now. Lucas doesn’t. He closes his eyes to all of it.
“No. This is a nightmare.”
“And it’s not just Fortis. It’s Doc, too. You have to trust Doc.”
As I stare up at the Icon, I’m struck by how strange it is. That a machine has helped me find my way here, to where a machine has taken over our city.
Lucas’s jaw is set. He shakes his head. “Fortis is not friends with Doc. Doc’s a computer program. Nobody is friends with Doc.”
“That’s not true. You are.”
Now we’re both staring out at the city. Lucas is silent, so I say it again.
“You’ve known him since you were little—you said so yourself.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m going to blow up the Icon, just because some crazy Merk thinks it’s a good idea.”
“He’s not a Merk. And that’s not why you’re going to do it.”
“Yeah? Tell me. Why am I?”
“Because you can. We can.”
“Stop.”
“Only us. That has to mean something.”
The whine of the Icon seems to grow louder and louder, the longer we stay there. Soon I will not be able to stand it.
“Does it?”
He’s thinking, but I already know the answer. Or at least, the question.
What means something?
Of everything I have seen today, what matters?
I close my eyes and the fortune-teller enters my mind, unbidden. I can feel the jade figures in my bag. I try to remember what he said.
There’s a girl, I think. He said I have to find her. I’m not the important one. She is. But how can I do that? I can’t even do this.
Then I remember the gold cross, the one that belonged to my mother. The one the Ambassador pressed into my hand.
You lived so you can pay the debt.
I know why I’m here, even if Lucas doesn’t.
I’d tell him, but the noise from the Icon is making it impossible to think, and it’s all I can do to grab his hand and pull him back toward the downhill trail.
This—all of it—is more than one person can bear, in one day.
More than I can bear.
There is so much to do, I think, and no one else to do it. It’s not the way I wish it was, but the way it is.
We have to be strong.
My parents are dead. Our city is dying. This is about so much more than us.
RESEARCH MEMORANDUM: THE HUMANITY PROJECT
CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET / AMBASSADOR EYES ONLY
To: Ambassador Amare
Subject: Paulo Fortissimo, aka Fortis
Education: Doctorates from MIT and Columbia in astrophysics, neurology, genetics, and artificial intelligence.
Author of Higher Power: Unleashing the Energy of Emotion.
Special Scientific Advisor, US Department of Defense, through four presidential administrations, 2040–2056.
Special appointee to UN Commission on Near Earth Objects, instrumental in the detection and planning of response to NEO Perses.
Purported mastermind and author of research regarding Icon Children.
Location: Unknown.
Affiliation: Uncertain, but is known enemy of Occupation Government.
Highly dangerous.
Note: Standing Embassy order is to kill on sight.