“Lower the gun,” he pleads, soft, gentle, unmoving. “This isn’t who we are. It’s not who we have to be.”
A shudder goes through her, as though she can’t contain her response. She’s heaving for breath.
His words are so soft I almost miss them. “I love you, Peaches. I pledge, you’re my best friend. But I’m not going to let you kill them. It’s not too late to stop what we’re doing.”
“Don’t do this,” she whispers. She lifts the gun, this time to aim it back at her partner again, its barrel wobbling and wavering. Her whole body—which had once seemed so alien in its deliberate movements and strength—is shaking. “Please, Dex. It’s not too late foryoueither.”
Dex is shaking too, but he doesn’t move. He stands between her and us, the barrel of the gun pointed at his chest. He says nothing, but I can imagine the pain on his face. Whatever side he’s chosen, he loves his partner, and this is killing him.
My heart thumps. Once, twice, three times.
Atlanta’s finger tightens on the trigger a fraction, and she draws a few quick breaths, trying to force herself to act. But as a tear escapes her reddened eyes and tracks its way down her cheek, shecracks, lowering the gun to her side. She takes a single step back through the doorway, then slams her hand over the button just beside the door frame.
The door slides closed at lightning speed, and a red light springs to life beside it. All four of us lunge forward, tangling together as we scrabble for the controls, but we’re an instant too late.
The door’s firmly sealed, Atlanta’s gone, and we’re locked inside.
“QUICK,” JULES SAYS, STEPPING BACK TO MAKE WAY FORDEX.“The code breaker, open the door!”
But Dex doesn’t move a muscle, simply staring down at the blinking light. “It only works when a lock’s able to be unlocked,” he says quietly. “This one isn’t designed to unlock from the inside.”
“So …” Jules’s voice trails away.
“So we’re stuck here,” I say. “Until someone comes along and finds us.”
“But we know how to block the portals,” he protests, voice rising. “We know how, we can’t just—”
“We know how,” Neal says. “But we don’t knowhow. We don’t have any way to broadcast a jamming frequency worldwide. And there’s no way we can travel around the world to a hundred cities to jam them each one by one, even if we could get out of this cell.Andwe still don’t have any way to make the IA believe us. What are we going to do, point to Dex when they show up and find us here,him with his completely human DNA, and insist he came from a spaceship?”
“Because that worked so well last time,” I mutter.
All the faces around me are grim. “Mia’s right,” Jules says. “There’s nobody out there who’ll believe us. Deus, this is almost worse than it was before. We know how to save our people, and nobody’s going to listen.”
“Not true.” That’s Dex, from his place by the door. He’s speaking slowly and thoughtfully, as if he’s working through an idea. He’s still staring at the door, as if Atlanta might come back through it. “That’s not true. There are some people who believe you. And they’re all over the world, yeh? I’ve been watching them since we landed.”
It takes me a long moment to understand what he means, and I see it dawn on the others’ faces.
He’s right.
We might be trapped in here, but we have allies out there. They’re the friends and colleagues of Elliott Addison, even his competitors. They’re the people online who refuse to believe what they’re told without being shown the facts behind it. They are Luisa, in Dresden. They are everywhere.
They believe in Addison.
But will they be enough?
All we can do is hope.
“I’m posting what we know to the forums,” Neal says, pulling out his phone, and backing over to his uncle’s desk to sink down into his chair. “Before someone finds us here and confiscates my phone. The folks on those forums told me they wanted to hear from me, they invited me to come tell them what’s happening. Maybe they’ll pick this up. Maybe they can build jammers, save their own cities. Save as many as they can.”
We fall silent as he works furiously, occasionally glancing back at the codes his uncle left scrawled above the door. Jules is watching the door, and I’m watching Dex, who’s still hardly moved.
We might have sixty seconds until someone shows up to discover us. Or, if they all think Dr. Addison is somewhere else, if the IA moved him to a new location, then it could be averylong time before anyone looks in here.
However long we have, I don’t want to waste it. I want answers. I have hundreds of questions burning through my mind—questions with impossible answers—and Dex is the only one who can unravel everything that’s happened to us. Jules begins to pace as Neal types, and I find myself walking laps of the little prison-cell-turned-office in the opposite direction, passing him twice every circuit.Like caged animals, my brain supplies.
After a few minutes Neal lowers his phone, cradling it in one hand. “I’ve done my best,” he says. “I’ve given them the specs. Now we have to hope they understand us. That they’re the sort of people prepared to pull apart their microwaves and start modifying them, given sufficient proof of what’s going on.”
“That’s what all this has been about,” Jules says softly. “Truth.”
