James Knapp - Element Zero

I would like to acknowledge the following people:

Kim, who puts up with the many, many hours I spend writing.

Jessica, who puts up with my endless (occasionally last-minute) adjustments, and who helped make this book, and this series, the best it could be.

Jack, who is far more savvy than I, and who tells it like it is.

And my parents, who are both rocks—not everyone can say that.

This series wouldn’t have been possible without all of their help.

It was warm inside the noodle house, and the window to my left was fogged at the corners. The place was crowded, full of bodies and the blanket of conversation that bled through the noise screen at my table. It looked, as far as I could remember, the same as it had five years ago. The only difference was that this time I was alone.

The last clouds of steam drifted up from the bowl of ramen that sat untouched in front of me as I looked out onto the street. It was dark, and the snow had piled up. Streams of people wrapped in coats and scarves moved down the narrow sidewalk between the restaurant and a snowbank that had reached waist height. At the intersection vehicles idled, big flakes beginning to accumulate on their hoods and roofs, while a crowd trudged down the crosswalk. To see it then, it was hard to believe any of it had ever happened.

The permanent dark spot swam in front of my eyes as I stared out the window. The brain scans always came up green, but sometimes I thought that spot had grown larger over the past five years. The damage had made me immune to a type of mind control I hadn’t even known existed before then, but I wondered if there wouldn’t eventually be a price to pay for that. One more, on a growing stack.

My eyes wandered to the other side of the table, where the chair sat empty. I found myself wishing I had used my JZI to record our last conversation. Too much had happened since then. Now when I thought of her, I saw her moonlit eyes staring out from the shadows of their sockets. Her warm, full lips had turned bloodless and cold. My memories of her were fading, replaced with the face of her revivor.

Did I choose the wrong side, Faye? I knew what she’d say now. When she came back, the person she’d been was lost. Now she worked directly with Samuel Fawkes, the same revivor that had her killed, and that fact didn’t even seem to faze her. Now, like Fawkes, she believed any cost was acceptable if it meant destroying their enemies. It didn’t matter that I found myself sitting in that camp, however uncomfortably. I knew where she stood now, but I wondered what she would have thought back then.

Five years ago, when I first met Zoe Ott, I found it hard to believe she had the power to alter people’s memories, and maybe even see the future. Even after I experienced it firsthand, it was hard to believe. Later, when I traced that first string of terrorist attacks back to Fawkes, and he told me that Zoe wasn’t unique, that there were hundreds or even thousands just like her, it didn’t seem possible. Now Zoe had been whisked away somewhere, out of my reach, and I was working alongside that very group because they offered something no one else could—the chance to stamp out Fawkes. The difference was that I was doing it to protect the city. They were doing it to protect themselves, and I knew it.

I’d told myself early on that it was a means to an end—that I’d address the threat they posed after they had helped me stop Fawkes. As the years went by, though, it became clearer that Fawkes might actually be right about one thing: he might be the only one in a position to stop them, but to do it he would destroy the city, and everyone inside it.

Did I choose the wrong side?

The food in front of me was getting cold, but I wasn’t hungry. I don’t know why I’d come back to that place, what I thought I’d find, but it was the last time I’d seen her alive. We’d been apart so long, but her quick hug and the smell of her had brought it all back in an instant. All the reasons I’d had for staying away evaporated, and I’d never been able to get them back. It was a chance to change things, to fix things, but I didn’t. No matter how many times I played back that meeting in my mind, it kept coming up the same, and there was nothing I could do about it.

I sighed, leaving my breath on the cold window glass. The trip had been a waste of time I didn’t have. Whatever I was looking for wasn’t there. All that was there was an empty chair where Faye might have been if I’d done things differently.

Every day that passed was another day lost. It had already been three years since Fawkes had stolen the next-gen revivor prototype Huma. That was three years of distribution, and with the ability to create potential soldiers with a simple injection, we had no way of knowing where his numbers were currently at. We assumed he was administering the injections the same way he had before, to third-tier citizens through free clinics, but so far our canvassing hadn’t turned up anything. I’d personally visited more than I could count, and found no sign of Fawkes anywhere. He’d lived under our radar for far too long, and he had his thumb on a button that could claim thousands of lives whenever he wanted. For all I knew, half the people sitting around me were among them.

I have to get out of here.

I was just about to push my chair back, to get up, pay my bill, and leave when someone stepped close to the table and spoke from inside the noise screen.

“Was there a problem with your order?” It was a young Asian man in a black, frog-closured shirt. He’d served me when I first came in.

“No problem,” I said. “I just need to settle up.”

“No charge,” he said.

“Really,” I told him. “The food was fine, I just—”

“I remember you.”

I took a closer look at the boy, but he didn’t look familiar. He noticed the orange flicker in my pupils as I ran his face against my list of past contacts, and smiled slightly.

“You won’t find me in your system,” he said. He was right.

“Where do you know me from, then?” I asked.

He looked out the window, out onto the street, toward the intersection where the line of vehicles had begun to move forward again.

“The revivor stood right there,” he said, pointing. He was looking at the spot where, five years ago, the van had stopped and the revivor stepped out, strapped with explosives. I could still see its face and the way it looked around almost curiously when I tried to contact it over the JZI. I remembered its stony stare as it pinpointed the source of the transmission and made eye contact with me.

Time to wake up, Agent Wachalowski. At the time, I’d had no idea what it meant.

“I waited on you that day,” the boy said. “You and your lady friend.”

“Oh.” I didn’t remember him at all.

“I didn’t see the bomb at first. By the time I did, you had run outside to confront the revivor.”

He stared out at that spot. His face was calm, but his eyes were intense.

“You want to sit down?” I asked him. He glanced back at the front to make sure no one would see him; then he took the seat across from me.

“It was hard to see what happened after the explosion,” he said. “I thought maybe you died that day. I’m glad you didn’t.”

“Me too.”