C James - Dome Six

It took immense processing power to run the Dome and a shitload of storage to make Legacies possible. But the level of technology and security in the Nexus far exceeded anything available to them otherwise. It couldn’t all be for talking to the dead.

She flushed the corrupted data from main memory but not before making a copy of the original location data from the day of the shutdown. She granted the backup system overwrite access and opened the socket. Glowing blue lines indicated a massive flow of data being sucked back into the Nexus.

Tosh stepped away from the terminal and looked at Downing.

“That’s it?” he asked.

“That’s it, but the restoration will take hours.”

Without Downing realizing it, Tosh had given herself direct access to IDA and omitted her unit from the database. Any diagnostic or query going forward would skip right past her.

“Good. Let’s go.”

He led her back through the airlock to the open elevator.

“What happens now?” she asked as the elevator silently rose.

“Now you forget you were here,” said Downing.

The hair stood up on Tosh’s neck. “What do you—”

She whirled just in time to see him stick something into her neck. Her vision went black and she was unconscious before she hit the floor.

Maybe Elle should have lied about the numbers from outside. Nothing major, just enough to keep hope alive. But she didn’t lie, and here they were. The Fifth Epoch was more bad news at a time when the Dome needed precisely the opposite. Of course, the footage as all anyone really needed to see. Earth was not yet survivable, and they might never live to see a day when it was.

Whether she truly believed Luther’s evidence against Hideki or not, she couldn’t have said.

She’d been there the day Tosh’s parents disappeared. She looked into Daisuke’s eyes moments after he triggered the false O 2alarm. He asked her to look the other way and she did. God help her, she did. All she needed to do was go immediately to Luther and tell him what happened. He would’ve stopped it. Daisuke would’ve gotten in serious trouble, but at least he’d be alive.

He and Minori always treated her like part of their family, so she felt like she owed him. That decision led directly to their deaths. Ever since, she resolved to be the kind of leader who wouldn’t let emotion sway her. She’d be objective. Logical. Just. The kind of person who could make hard decisions.

Hideki was one such decision, and she’d have to make it soon. But first, she wanted to hear his side.

She opened the door to her office and gave the receptionist a tight smile before taking the long hallway to where Hideki was being held. She’d intervened earlier because she could, but the game had changed. All signs pointed to Dek as the saboteur. All she knew for certain was that he rode out the Epoch in the Stores and that he was found in his unit with piles of electronic junk from the Boneyard. But the sabotage charge came from Luther, and she was reserving judgment until she saw the evidence for herself.

No sooner had she put her hand on the door to the holding cell than she heard a commotion from down by Luther’s office. She removed her hand from the handle and followed the sound to a supply closet near Luther’s office. Most of his guards were on patrol, leaving his wing nearly empty. Had the halls been filled with Authority workers, she might not have heard anything.

She turned the handle and yanked the door open.

Luther was crouched over Tosh with a Macro vial in one hand and a pipette in the other. A pressure injector lay next to him. Tosh was unconscious.

“What the hell?!” she demanded.

“Elle, I know how this looks but there’s a lot you don’t know,” Luther said calmly. “Please shut the door and I’ll explain.”

“Explain now.”

Whatever this was, she was a part of it now. She and Luther with an injector and her unconscious friend in the closet couldn’t be anything good. She ensured the hallway was still empty and pulled the door closed. Tosh’s eyes rolled back in her head as she struggled against the sedative.

“I needed her to fix an issue in the Nexus and knocked her out long enough to wipe her memory. That’s it.”

Twenty years ago, Luther came into her hospital room with the same intention, albeit for very different reasons.

“Put that vial down,” Elle said, kneeling beside Tosh. She smoothed her hair and helped her sit upright, quartering toward Luther as she did to keep an eye on him.

Luther looked indignant. “Elle, be smart about this. She’s the saboteur’s sister. If she did something to IDA, you need plausible deniability.”

“Get the fuck out,” Elle said.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.”

“I know you two have a history, but this isn’t—”

She turned her head slowly to him and locked eyes. “Get. Out.”

His face flushed red. Most of the time she saw him as almost a co-Administrator, but this was beyond the pale. Maybe he’d gotten a little too comfortable around her. That was her fault.

“Leave the Macro,” she added.

He held out the vial with the tiny orange Macro inside. “You’re making a mistake.”

She grabbed it off his palm and gave him a look that put an exclamation point on their conversation. She watched him around the corner and waited until she heard the front door open and close. Once she was satisfied he was really gone, she turned her attention back to Tosh.

“Come on,” she said, hoisting Tosh free of the floor. Her legs threatened to buckle so she put Tosh’s arm around her and helped her down to the infirmary.

Whatever Luther gave her made her feel wrapped in a heavy blanket, warm and inviting. She wanted nothing more than to remain in its embrace as long as possible, yet some sliver of consciousness was like a pebble in her shoe, preventing her from slipping completely away. It fought on her behalf, trying to summon words to her lips. Wherever she was, Elle was the last person she expected to see.

Her awareness returned slowly. She was lying on top of the sheets on one of the two small beds in an infirmary. Elle sat in a chair beside her, bleeding in and out of focus. Her mouth felt like the Burn itself.

“Water…” she croaked.

Elle raised a cup of water to her cracked lips and tilted it toward her. She had no idea where her bottle went. She drank half of it in one big gulp and could almost feel it spread through her body like cooling fingers.

“You can have more in a little bit,” Elle said, smiling, rubbing Tosh’s hand.

“What time is it?” Tosh asked.

“Almost four p.m.,” replied Elle. Tosh had arrived around 9:45 a.m.. “How are you feeling?”

“Groggy.”

“Do you remember why you came here?”

Tosh said, “Downing made me fix corrupted data, and then he tried to erase my memory. The only reason he didn’t is because you came in.”

“I’m sorry,” Elle said. “That was wrong.”

“So what are you gonna do to him?” Tosh asked.

Elle looked away. “It’s not that simple.”

“I helped him, and he assaulted me. What could be simpler?”

“Luther’s always been paranoid.”

“How can you defend that scumbag? You can’t actually think he loves you,” Tosh said.

“I should go,” Elle said, and turned to leave.

Tosh stopped her immediately. “Where’s Dek?”

“In holding. I was about to check on him when I found you.”

“I need to see him.”

Elle sighed. “Soon. Right now, you should rest.”

“Downing is up to something, Elle. That much data doesn’t get corrupted on its own. I think he modified IDA to frame Dek.”