Dante

  Andrea’s dash is showing a holographic display again, clearly of the tunnels we’re racing down. She slows, banks and accelerates as necessary while I cling tight.

  A few minutes more, and the shaft expands out into a huge cavern where dangling stalactites meet rising stalagmites. And I see, for no sane reason at all, a sports car sitting by one limestone wall, all elegant curves and mirror-bright polish.

  Andrea draws in next to it, slowing to a near hover as she edges forward and examines the vehicle. “You got it down here? You’d better not have scratched it.”

  Two teen guys stand beside the silver corvette. One is tall, dark-haired and has Andrea’s intense silver eyes looking over similar mirrorshades. He’s charging the electric vehicle while watching warily in both directions, and he nods sharply to them as they approached.

  “It’s fine. I’ve been driving, Mathlete’s been navigating.” He waves a hand at the hoverbike. “Just keep an eye on Hammersmith’s gear. Whatever it costs to replace, we can’t afford it.” He gives Dante a friendly wave. “Need a charge?” he asks.

  The other teen is a huge, grinning, red-headed mountain of muscle leaning casually against the muscle car.

  “Or are you ready to ride the lightning for a few more miles?” the hulking teen asks.

  Andrea slides to a halt near the charging station which looks, I note, like they slid back a concealing slab of rock to expose it.

  “I could use a charge to top it off since we’ve got a minute,” Andrea agrees. “Dante, these are my cousins. Christopher,” she points to the tall one with the charger, “or ‘Stormforge,’ and Anton,” she waves at the amused, hulking redhead, “or ‘Mathlete.’”

  “Quite the hornet’s nest you’ve stirred up,” Christopher remarks offhandedly, though it isn’t clear if he’s talking to Andrea or to me. “I thought we were going to be dealing with some tracking drones or aggressive college recruiters, not an armed task force.” He drags the charging cable out from behind the Corvette, heading for the skycycle.

  “Quite the storm,” Anton agrees easily as he wandered over to pick up the slack. “I packed an umbrella, but that’s about it. Any idea why?”

  I shake my head. “I’ve seen some strange things recently, but nothing like those two on the train. Were they bots? Power armor?”

  “Mecha?” Anton asks with a shrug, hauling the cable one-handed behind Christopher. “You’ve both got AI, right? What are they saying?”

  “Mine? That this makes no sense,” Andrea says, glancing down into her sunglasses. I notice they’re brightly lit within, scrolling data along the lower edge, and guess she has some VR/AR

  heads-up display feeding her analysis. And maybe decent nightvision, at that. Which makes wearing them while flying through a forest at night a little less crazy than they seem.

  “I concur,” Logos says from Dante’s bag, his stuffy voice raised but muffled by the knapsack. “This is an insanely aggressive attempt at ‘recruitment’ or capture. Suggesting our pursuers are insane, or are acting on information Dante and my colleagues, at least, do not possess. Could you shed light on that?”

  The cousins exchange a glance as Christopher silently hooks the charger cable to the skybike.

  “Something’s off about the drones, also,” Foresight murmurs from Dante’s wrist. “They’re scrambling scans, but that’s not all of it.”

  “Worse, they’re showing up in my searches,” Lyrica notes. “When we have sensor contact, at least.”

  “More brain hacking?” Legios asks. “I miss the old days when we only had to worry about computer viruses, not cognitive ones—"

  “And by ‘Old Days,’ you mean yesterday morning,” Taproot observes.

  “The Circle’s tech,” I think aloud. I glance at my new friends, who are listening silently, Christopher watching the charging bike, Anton both tunnel exits, and Andrea… everyone.

  “What?” Andrea asks.

  “Just something I’ve run into before,” I observe. “I thought I was done with them.”

  “Before? When?” All three are now looking at me.

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  “Yesterday. They didn’t seem to be in any condition to come after me. Definitely not from Chicago.”

  “And I thought they weren’t so advanced,” Logos muses. “Yet Lyrica is sharing some intriguing permutations—”

  “Their tech looks different but better,” Lyrica cuts in. “Something which might have evolved from the same starting point.”

  “A thousand crafty ways to kill,” Legios mutters. “Or confound and confuse, subvert and suborn.”

  “I saw echoes on the Darknet,” Taproot admits with a sigh. “I wasn’t sure before, but what I found might have been a bridge between yesterday and today. In terms of the tech, that is.”

  “Wait, are you talking to your AIs?” Andrea asks. She and Christopher exchange a look, and approach, glancing curiously at my bag.

  “Or has your phone got a party line?” Anton inquires from the cavern wall as he hauls the charging cable back to its station.

  “And what do you mean, you’ve seen this before?” Andrea continues.

  “Patch them in if you can, Lyrica,” I decide.

  “Done and done,” Lyrica replies. “Second ‘done’ is an overview you can all read later. No legal names but Dante’s first.”“Done,” Christopher says, glancing down at the digital overlays blurring past in his shades. “You know Ghost?”

  “Ghost is involved?” Andrea demands, glaring into her own mirrorshaded datastream.

  Anton laughs heartily, hooking the cable back up at its charger. “That little punk.”

  “And she thinks she’s beaten whatever this is?” Christopher summarizes as Lyrica’s report zoom-scrolls through his shades in a haze of data. He rolls his eyes as the last of the glowing blue script zips past them. “Well, that tracks.”

  “You all know her. Okay.” I think about that.

  “Kid gets around more than Santa,” Anton tells me, tapping a panel and letting a slab of limestone slide back in place over the car charger. “Let me guess, she showed up with a bag of gifts and her tiny reindeer drones, stomped the bad guys, and told you your family’s on the Nice List.”

  I blink but say nothing, reconsidering. I owe a lot to Ghost, and now to these strangers. Who are apparently connected.

  “This could be worse than expected,” Andrea observes, leaning against the skycycle.

  “That tracks, too,” Christopher adds grimly, quickly checking a sensor display on the dash of the Corvette.

  “Worse?” I ask.

  “How could it be worse?” Legios growls, now apparently looped in.

  “It can always get worse,” Taproot assures him, in his hollow ‘The Things I’ve Seen’ voice. He’d make a great ghost, as opposed to a ghost in the machine. Or Ghost the friendly hacker, for that matter.

  “Ghost is great,” Christopher tells us, touching a few screens inside the Corvette. “But she has a… gift for underestimating the situation.”

  “Could be hardwired,” Anton adds. “She’s smart, but a ton of us came with built-in personality…”

  “Quirks.” Andrea interrupts, her tone firm.

  “Sure. Let’s call ‘em that.” Anton sounds like he’s about to start laughing. Again.

  “Not funny,” Andrea tells him.

  Mathlete laughs out loud. Again. “It really is.”

  I eye them. “What’s so not funny?”

  “Inside joke,” Christopher shrugs, checking something in the Corvette’s glovebox.

  “If you mean ‘inside’ all of Waycross, then sure,” Anton snorts. He catches my eye and shrugs. “I don’t know how it was in your family, bud, but most of us are not ‘accidents.’”

  “Or we are,” Christopher adds wryly, “but by people who thought they knew what they were doing.”

  “Some extreme personalities are almost as much of an upgrade as ‘Gifts,’” Andrea explains. “But push the traits that make you an obsessed athlete or student or ‘Alpha’ far enough and you just get…”“Crazy,” Christopher sighs. “We’re as much an open-air psychiatric ward, some days, as we are a pressure cooker full of competitive geniuses.”

  “Bottom line,” Anton says, “if you ever thought being too positive, gung ho or responsible couldn’t be a problem, or too competitive, aggressive or fearless, you should really come to Waycross. Bring your delusions. They’ll make nice confetti for the crazy parade.”

  “Enough,” Andrea tells them. She turns to me. “I haven’t read your full file, but if you’re the product of genetic engineering or epigenetic design, you know what it is to be… ‘intentional.’” She looks him up and down with those intense eyes, and nods. “From what I’ve read and seen so far, you came out well. But some of us are more… extreme.”

  “Ranging from awesome to strange to raging lunacy – often at the same time,” Anton adds.

  Christopher offers a wry smile. “You’re about to see some of the greatest masterpieces of the world’s craziest black clinics and richest, most-desperate helicopter parents. It’s pretty cool, but you can tell not everyone thought this thing through.”

  “Yeah, you can see that. And plenty of things you can’t unsee.” Anton seems gleeful at the thought.

  I’m already thinking all of this through, though. So I bet my family’s safety on the judgement of someone who…

  “Hey, hey!” Anton interrupts my thoughts. “Don’t take me wrong. Ghost is amazing. Her tech’s solid – almost as good as Hammersmith’s. And screwing up the Circle is her specialty.”

  “But when she says ‘It’s Over’ where they’re concerned, don’t take her at her word,” Christopher clarifies. “She’s too optimistic and… she’s right. The Circle would have to be crazy to keep coming after her. Or you, at this point.”

  “But they are insane,” Andrea acknowledges. “Irrational enough they make the Academy look well adjusted.”

  “So they’ll keep coming.” I feel restless, and not just because of my pursuers.

  “If they think there’s a reasonable chance,” Andrea agrees. “It’s just that ‘reasonable’ means something different to them.”

  “A brainwashed band of superbeings?” Anton concludes. “Yeah, they’re definitely crazier than we are.”

  “And they’re all expendable to whoever’s calling the shots.” Christopher’s swiping through Corvette screens on the dash. “It’s just that things get worse for them whenever they cross blades with Ghost.” On the dash, views of the cavern maps, scans of the outside terrain and data files whip past almost too fast to see. “Sane people would have fled Chicago the first time she broke them. But they keep coming.”

  “Speaking of which,” Andrea says, throwing a leg over the skycycle, “we can talk about this later. We need to move while our trackers are still confounded.”

  “We can take New Guy,” Anton says, waving at Dante. “It’s a tight squeeze, but…”

  “Three of you in that front seat?” Andrea asks, staring back at Anton. The Corvette has no back seat.

  Anton shrugs again, imitating an inconspicuous mountain, and failing. At the inconspicuous part, anyway. “I’m not that big.”

  Andrea waves me in her direction. “On the bike.” She looks over at Christopher and Anton. “We’ll lead. I’ll run out of countermeasures, but this is far faster and more maneuverable than the car, even in hover mode. And it can actually fly.”

  “Got it,” Christopher nods. “I didn’t bring much, but if something gets on our tail, we’ll make do.”

  Anton shrugs. “Let’s go. Storm’s coming. At least I brought an umbrella.”

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