Robin Wasserman - Frozen

We wandered down the broad, empty avenues, flashlight beams playing across the pavement. I tried to imagine what it would be like to live in a place where the lights went off two hours after sunset, where you could only link in once a day if you were lucky enough to find a screen that worked, where the punishment for energy theft was death.

I couldn’t.

There wasn’t enough to go around, I reminded myself. Of anything. There wasn’t enough energy for everyone to stay wired all day, every day. There wasn’t enough fuel or enough road for everyone to own cars. There weren’t enough cows—at least not enough free-range, grass-fed cows, now that you weren’t allowed to raise anything else—for everyone to eat meat. There wasn’t enough space for everyone to have a kid. Either we would all have to suffer—or some would have to sacrifice.

I was just glad it was them and not me.

I was also glad my power cells were fully loaded. There was no wireless web of energy here, and if something happened, if I somehow got left behind, there would be nowhere to recharge. After a few days I would just… fade out.

“Those used to light up,” Auden whispered in my ear, pointing at the thick, empty screens papered across almost every building. “Like giant pop-ups. Telling people what to buy.”

“What a waste of energy,” I whispered back. Maybe these people deserved to live in the dark.

Our feet crunched with every step. Crushed glass, I decided, as we passed broken window after broken window. Everything here was broken.

I wanted to go home.

A distant howl cut through the silence.

“What was that?” I whispered, freezing in place.

“Just a dog.” Jude didn’t bother to whisper. “Fighting it out for who gets to run the place. Like the rats and the roaches haven’t already won.” He turned sharply to the right, leading us down another wide avenue, its gutters flowing with trash. Auden was breathing shallowly and, for the first time, it occurred to me how the place must stink, with its mounds of garbage heaped on urine-stained pavement. “This way.”

Two blocks later we heard the scream. High-pitched, piercing, it went on and on and—it stopped. It didn’t fade away. It just stopped.

That was no dog.

We went deeper into the city, and I tried not to wonder how we would find our way out.

Jude stopped short in front of a building so tall it blotted out most of the sky. “Last stop for orgs,” he said, staring at Auden.

Auden glared back. “Meaning?”

“Building’s locked down, and all those biosensors…” Jude smirked. “You don’t want to start panting and get us caught, now do you?”

“I’m supposed to wait out here while you… do what, exactly?”

“Just taking a look around. We’ll be back before you get too scared.”

“I’m not scared,” Auden said fiercely.

Jude shrugged. “Great. Then you don’t mind if we—”

“You’re not going with them?” Auden half-said, half-asked, grabbing my arm.

I paused. “I don’t have to. I can wait down here with you… if you want.” I knew I should stay.

But I didn’t want to.

“No.” Auden closed his eyes for a moment. “You’re the one who wanted to do this. So you should do it. All the way.”

Jude chuckled softly. “Funny, she never struck me as an all-the-way kind of girl.”

I ignored him.

“You sure?” I asked Auden.

“Yeah. Go.” He gave me a weak smile. “Be careful.”

“You too.”

Jude and one of the other guys, the tall, brooding one named Riley, bashed open one of the doors, and we crept inside. It was even darker in there, a broad space smudged with shadows. A screen glinted in the beam of someone’s flashlight, and then another and another. This is where the city people came to link in, I realized. It explained why the building was locked down. It didn’t explain what we were doing there.

Jude led us to a bank of elevators, and we waited as Riley pried open a control panel and dug his hands into the mess of wiring.

“Isn’t the electricity shut off?” I asked.

“They keep it running low-level in this building,” Jude said. “For the hardware. Easy to tap into if you know what you’re doing.”

“And he knows what he’s doing?” I said, nodding toward Riley.

“He knows a lot of things. You don’t hear any alarms going, do you?”

I shook my head.

“Thank Riley.”

A few seconds later the elevator doors popped open. The group stepped on, but when I tried to follow, Jude held me back. “We’ll take the next one,” he said.

Before I could argue, the doors shut, and we were alone.

“What do you want?” I said.

“What do you want?”

Another set of doors opened, and we stepped into the small space. Together. The doors shut behind us, and the elevator whooshed up the shaft. Jude turned to face me, backing me into a corner.

“Touch me and I’ll kill you,” I hissed.

He just laughed. “A, you’ve really got to train yourself to stop thinking in outdated terms, like life and death, and B, I have zero interest in touching you. Not at the moment, at least.”

I promised myself I had no interest in touching him, either. “So what the hell is this about?”

He pressed his hands flat against the elevator walls, one on either side of me, locking my body between his arms. “I thought you might have some questions. About your little… experience by the waterfall.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He smirked. “I think you do. And I think you loved it. I think you came back for more.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Better be careful.” It sounded more like a threat than a warning. “Don’t want to end up lost inside your own head. Better to get your thrills out here, in the real world.”

“Is that what we’re supposed to be doing, wandering around this trash heap of a city?” I asked. “Am I being thrilled? I hadn’t noticed.”

Jude dropped his arms. “That’s how you want to play it? Fine.”

The elevator swept up and up.

“Where’d you get it?” I asked.

He didn’t bother asking what. “As human as possible,” he said bitterly. “That’s the BioMax party line. But it doesn’t mean they don’t have the technology to make us different. To make us better. They just don’t want to give it to us. Not officially, at least.”

“Make us better ? How’s some crazy intense b-mod trip supposed to make me better?”

He raised his eyebrows, and I realized that now there was no denying it. I’d uploaded the program, and he knew it.

“There’s more where that came from,” he said. “But only if you’re willing to look.”

The doors opened. We were on the roof. Three dark silhouettes tiptoed along a railing at the far edge, wobbling in the wind. There was plenty of wind, ninety-eight stories up.

“They’re not jumping,” I whispered in horror. “Tell me they’re not jumping.”

“No, we’re not jumping,” Jude said. “Just playing around. Admiring the view. Enjoy.” And he slipped into the shadows.

I circled the roof, weaving through abandoned solar arrays and broken satellite dishes. The world above was no less shattered than the world below. The three mechs on the railing swung themselves over the thin metal barrier and began scaling it from the outside. I passed Quinn in a dark corner, wrapped around the guy whose name I would probably never know. Riley and Jude argued against the skyline. I veered in the opposite direction and found myself standing next to Ani, her blue hair black in the darkness. She’d folded herself over the railing, elbows propped on the metal, eyes fixed on the dead buildings that stretched beneath us. My eyes had adjusted to the night enough to pick out a few of the closest ones, but beyond that, there was nothing but a field of shadow.