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  Nev smiled as if this were something that happened all the time.

  “Sure thing,” she said. And before David knew it, all seven of them and the pushcart had entered Detroit.

  Normally, visiting Bereft traders reported their names upon arriving and departing through the Detroit wall and were given scanpasses, temporary tags that would grant them access to public buildings. Apparently the Warped Immortal hadn’t wanted to deal with the bureaucracy of handing these out to seven people—and so, here they were, walking freely down what David thought he recognized as Woodward Avenue.

  The first thing that struck David was that the city’s interior was drastically changed from what he had known in the twenty-first century. Detroit had been somewhat of a ghost town, wrecked by the collapse of its auto industry. Its downtown had remained fairly vibrant, but it was closely encircled by block after block of derelict homes, with shuttered or broken windows and sagging porches.

  Now all of that disrepair and blight had vanished. In fact, this city was an almost indistinguishable twin of twenty-sixth century Flint. Its buildings stood tall and stately, all of them covered over in that shimmering solar paneling. In place of pavement, the streets and sidewalks were covered over with metallic plating, which David had guessed by this point was some kind of power conduit for gliders.

  Just as he had seen in Flint, all manner of people were milling busily and peacefully along the sidewalks. They wore the same fashions as the Immortals of Flint: the women in asymmetrical necklines and the men in short jackets with zippered fronts. Their skin was of every color from agate to ebony. And they were all young—or at least, they appeared young. They were Immortal.

  Or . . . Warped Immortal.

  But there wasn’t much “warped” about them. Some were in smiling, laughing conversations. A few were relaxing casually on the polished marble benches that bordered the avenue.

  David saw one woman, her hair so blonde it was almost white, pause at a tree box overflowing with marigolds. She bent and traced one finger over a bright orange petal. Then she slipped a small square device from her sleeve and hovered it over the flowers for a moment, turning it left and then right subtly.

  David threw a questioning glance at Nev. When they had moved a few paces out of earshot of the woman, he murmured, “What was she doing to those flowers?”

  Nev gave him her signature, “Are you serious?” look. By this time, David had grown accustomed to Nev’s gentle teasing about his ignorance of the Immortal world. She still thought he was a bumpkin from Muskegon, and that suited him fine; for now, it meant that he didn’t have to explain himself—or, more importantly, Malcolm—as a time traveler.

  “She was just taking a picture,” Nev said. The corners of her lips were lifting playfully, as if she were deciding whether to press the issue and chide David further. David found himself grinning back, sheepishly.

  “I just—I just didn’t expect Warped Immortals to be so . . .” He trailed off, not quite sure what he meant.

  But it was clear that Nev understood. Her smile grew more serious, and she nodded solemnly.

  “Yeah . . .” she said slowly, looking around at the clean, well-maintained buildings, the organized street, the Warped Immortals going about their day. “There’s something about this place, isn’t there? It’s not quite so . . . well, it’s not quite so warped.”

  David nodded. He was about to reply, but then he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to see Brendle looking at him.

  “By your map, Commander,” Brendle said, “the Bereft Quadrant is this way”—he tilted his head to the west to indicate—“and the Renaissance Center is that way.” He tilted his head in the opposite direction.

  David nodded curtly. He hadn’t realized it in the moment, but speaking with Nev had caused him to lose some focus. In fact, he was feeling a strange sort of rushing sensation in his chest, behind his sternum. The way the corners of her mouth had lifted slightly . . . but he shook this off.

  “Right,” he said in a low voice. He turned and drew the unit into a tight group around himself and Nev. “Let’s move into Phase 3.” He paused a moment, giving them an opportunity to ask questions. But they were all silent and resolute; this was not a group that needed their orders repeated.

  “Reconvene in the central market at sixteen hundred,” Nev said.

  Without another word, Brendle and Anksyr peeled off from the unit in one direction, and Dagmar, Sol, and Tezzlee turned and began making their way casually down Woodward Avenue in three other directions.

  Nev lingered a moment with David. To his astonishment, she reached out and brushed the back of his hand with her fingertips. The rushing sensation in his chest intensified the moment she touched him.

  “Okay, this is weird,” David thought to himself.

  He definitely had a crush on Nev—that was undeniable. And that, in itself, was surprising enough. He had been on a handful of dates since the divorce, mostly awkward set-ups with women recently divorced like him. Each time, David and a different woman would sit around miserably sipping their cocktails until enough time passed for them to politely extricate themselves, and then they’d be on their separate ways, never to hear from each other again. David was attracted to women all the time, but the feeling of being truly drawn to a woman, much less finding her intimidating in a pleasurable, almost delightful way, was something he hadn’t felt in years. Possibly ever.

  But even his growing awareness of how much he liked Nev didn’t quite account for this feeling in his chest. When Nev’s fingertips brushed his hand, he had felt something distinctly physical. As if all the cells surrounding his heart had suddenly pulsed at once. It wasn’t altogether pleasurable. A small piece of him wondered if this was the early warning sign of a cardiac infarction.

  “Are you okay?” Nev asked.

  David realized with a start that he had been frowning at her.

  “Yes! Yes, of course. Just—focusing on the mission,” he stammered.

  Her face fell. It was unmistakable. He had hurt her feelings.

  “Idiot,” David thought to himself. It was just like reliving his most awkward dating memories from before his marriage to Lila. “Leave it to me to say the absolute clumsiest possible thing,” he thought.

  But Nev had already recovered. “Right,” she said, all business. “Just wanted to confirm you know your route?”

  “Yes,” David said, trying to recover by matching her curtness.

  “See you at the server,” she said and was gone.

  David was alone on the streets of Detroit. For a moment, he balled his hands into fists and allowed himself a long intake of air.

  “Here we go,” he thought. “You wanted an adventure. Well, you got it.”

  And then he set off at a steady clip southeast on Woodward Avenue, toward the Renaissance Center.

  The plan was that Brendle and Anksyr would take the pushcart to the Bereft market and ditch it somewhere inconspicuous. They’d be back for it at the end of the mission so that they could pass back through the wall undisturbed. If they somehow triggered an alarm during the mission, their last resort would be to fight their way out through the gate with the long-range biotogglers hidden in the pushcart. This would be virtually impossible given how heavily the wall was guarded and how many Warped Immortals had the shooting advantage from the high ramparts. It was far preferable for all to go according to plan: for them to pass back through the gate virtually ignored, just a group of seven farmers and their goods.

  Their target was in the central tower of the seven skyscrapers that comprised the Renaissance Center. Malcolm had learned this from a reconnaissance mission he had sent out a few weeks earlier—from which the Immortal spy he sent had not returned.

  The spy had discovered the server and sent word of its location back to Flint via his radiacomm. In the twenty-sixth century, communication devices were no longer handheld; they were literally hand imbedded. Via a tiny microchip injected into the fleshy part of the palm dire
ctly between the base of the thumb and the radius, one of the bones of the forearm, Immortals could make voice calls to each other over any distance, just as people used to make calls using cell phones. The devices were voice activated, so dialing numbers had become obsolete.

  Thanks to a final communication with his spy via radiacomm, Malcolm knew precisely where the server in question was located, in a basement vault three floors below the tube-like center building of the Renaissance Center. Unfortunately, immediately after discovering the server, the spy had been killed by a Warped Immortal guard. This had stalled Malcolm’s offensive—until now.

  The seven members of Nev and David’s unit would make their way to the Renaissance Center individually, to avoid attracting attention as a band of Bereft in the Immortal sections of the city. Anksyr, Tezzlee, and Sol would then take up defensive positions at the entrances to the server vault while Nev, David, Brendle, and Dagmar went inside to disable the server.

  The trick was not to leave any evidence that they had tampered with the Warped Immortal defenses, so that Malcolm could then mount his offensive unanticipated. The server was a massive biotechnological machine that sent out a wireless signal in a broad circle covering Detroit and about a mile of territory beyond it. Whenever any Immortal, from Detroit or Flint, entered within the scope of this wireless detection system, his or her genesignal was immediately logged by the server.

  The Bereft unit’s task was to alter the code by which the server functioned so that it would continue to log Warped Immortal genesignals but fail to register the genesignals of any of the Immortals of Flint. Thus, Malcolm and his forces could approach and even enter Detroit undetected.

  Dagmar and Brendle both possessed coding expertise profound enough to change the server’s protocol. Nev, who as a Rebel commander had developed a working knowledge of biotech, thought she could probably do it in a pinch, if both Dagmar and Brendle were somehow compromised. David, of course, would be useless in the face of twenty-sixth century technology. His role inside the server vault would simply be to stay out of the way—and defend the lives of Dagmar, Brendle, and Nev if it came to it, so that they could accomplish the mission.

  Now, David was winding his way through the press of Warped Immortals milling about on the sidewalks of downtown Detroit. He walked with his head bent, watching his shoes, feeling exposed and conspicuous. The Catch-22 of this mission was that they needed to look like Bereft to enter the city, but once inside, their older features were a liability. There was no law, in Flint or Detroit, to say Bereft were prohibited from the Immortal Districts of the cities, but nevertheless, David’s presence here was unusual. There wasn’t much reason for Bereft to leave their own Quadrants.

  More than once during his divorce proceedings, David had thought wryly to himself, “Well, at least I still have a full head of hair.” Now he was doubly grateful for this small boon of his middle age. If he was lucky, and kept his head down, he might pass for Immortal.

  He walked along quickly, trying his best to dodge Warped Immortal professionals and businesspeople bustling along around him without looking directly at any of them.

  Using Malcolm’s intelligence, David had mapped a route for each of them through the streets to the Renaissance Center. He had memorized his own with precision, aided by a few images of the interior of Detroit that Malcolm had managed to collect from his spies. As he moved along the metallic sidewalk, he was relieved to find that his mapping had been fairly accurate. The streets he had pictured only mentally appeared now before him, just as he had anticipated. He kept close to the buildings, not registering much besides the street names he needed to find his way, but nevertheless, through his intense concentration—and a steady thrum of fear—he did notice that this city was clean and developed, the people cheerful. It was a far cry from the wrecked and half-abandoned Detroit of the twenty-first century.

  He reached the outer skyscrapers of the Renaissance Center within ten minutes. Here, the press of Warped Immortals grew; this was their center of government and commerce, and it was almost midday, so people were rushing to and fro out of the buildings, heading to lunch meetings.

  “And so then I said all we can do is keep advocating our position—Ow!”

  David’s heart lurched. A Warped Immortal speaking intently into his radiacomm had just run directly into him. David stopped in his tracks, unsure what to do. He couldn’t very well keep walking without acknowledging the collision, but he didn’t dare let this Warped Immortal get a good look at his face.

  “Oh man, I’m so sorry, are you all right?” The Warped Immortal spoke first, before David could even gather his wits about him. The man’s young face was creased with concern. “I really slammed you there—totally my fault, I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

  “It’s no problem at all,” David said as lightly as he could. He couldn’t avoid looking directly into the man’s unlined eyes, fully expecting to see some suspicion or accusation there.

  But the Warped Immortal broke into a lopsided smile.

  “Have a good one, then!” he said. And then he was gone, launching right back into his radiacomm conversation as he disappeared into the milling cityscape.

  David exhaled long and low. That was close.

  It was also odd.

  If these people were driven by some kind of singularly nefarious ethos, it certainly didn’t show. They were the most well-balanced, even polite villains David could imagine.

  He shook off this thought. The mission was more important. He had only a few more minutes to rendezvous with Nev and the others before his absence would start to be concerning.

  David wound his way through the open, courtyard-like spaces between the towers of the Renaissance Center. At the entrance of the central tower, a glut of Warped Immortals had formed, waiting to pass through the building’s genesignal scanner. Just to the side of this main entrance was a doorway marked “Utility Entry.”

  Ignoring the voice in his head screaming for him to stop, turn around, get out of this insane endeavor, David made a beeline for the doorway. This door, unlike the ancient doors that swung open in the twenty-first century style, was an automated sliding glass door. David had no idea whether it would open for him on his approach—whether it was motion activated, or whether it only opened for specific, authorized genesignals.

  He held his breath as he approached, trying to look as if he knew exactly what he was doing. Maybe he would run headlong into a closed door, or maybe luck would be on his side.

  The door opened soundlessly, and a moment later, David was inside the building.

  He blinked as his eyes readjusted to the lack of sunlight. How on earth had he just managed to saunter unimpeded into the seat of the Detroit government? How could they have overlooked such a crucial gap in security?

  As if on cue, just as he wondered this, David heard a voice to his left.

  “Can I help you, Bereft?”

  A Warped Immortal was leaning lackadaisically against the wall on the inside of the door. He was dressed in a mauve jumpsuit, the words “Security” stamped over his breast pocket. He had jet-black hair cropped close to his scalp and heavy-lidded eyes that gave him a sleepy look.

  “Delivery,” David said curtly, sticking to the script he and Nev had composed for exactly such an occasion.

  “Room?” the Warped Immortal asked, his voice bored.

  “672-Q,” David replied. He knew from Malcolm’s intelligence that this was the office of the Detroit City Archivist; it was entirely plausible that he might be bringing a record of a new birth in the Bereft Quadrant.

  The Warped Immortal blinked lazily. “Elevators are down the hall on your right,” he said. Then he looked away deliberately, as if to say, “I’m done with you.”

  As David made his way down the hall away from the Warped Immortal security guard, he felt a mixture of relief and wonder. It was exactly as Malcolm had predicted: Bereft were so unthreatening to Immortals that they didn’t attract any scrutiny.


  A moment later and David was riding the elevator into the bowels of the Renaissance Center. His heart hammered in his throat. At any moment, he expected the elevator car to brake abruptly and the doors to slide open to reveal a phalanx of armed Warped Immortals.

  Instead, the car came to a gentle stop and dinged softly, a light illuminating floor 3B. The doors opened—and there was Nev.

  For a moment, they stood silent, staring at each other. David felt that jarring pulse around his heart, as if his cells had all gasped at once. Before he could catch his breath, Nev reached out and took his hand in hers.

  “Come,” she whispered. “The others are already stationed. Brendle is working on the server. We lost Anksyr.”

  “Lost?” David asked.

  “We don’t know,” she said. “He’s not here. Might have been delayed, might be worse. We’ll have to wait to find out.”

  She was pulling him down a narrow corridor, dimly lit by recessed, tubular lighting in the ceiling. Every few feet were armored steel doors leading to various vaults. At the far end of the hall, David could see a figure standing against the wall.

  “Who’s that?” He murmured to Nev.

  “It’s just Tezzlee; she’s standing guard. Sol is at the stairwell entrance. We toggled the Warped Immortal guards who were down here—there were only two of them.”

  Tezzlee greeted them with an almost imperceptible nod as they approached, and then Nev pulled David inside the vault. He noticed as they passed inside that the massive locking mechanisms on the vault door had been melted away—Brendle must have used his ability to manipulate various materials to liquefy the steel.

  Inside, Brendle was crouched over a console, his back to Nev and David. Dagmar was beside him. The entire vault, about ten feet by ten feet, was lined in stacks of black hardware, speckled with small lights and switches. The room seemed to be alive and breathing; the hardware hummed softly with the whisper of hundreds of tiny fans.