Ethos Page 5

  The Bereft Rebels surrounding the doorway on the right side of the shelter moved as a unit, taking several steps backward before resuming their crouches, weapons raised. Other Bereft closed ranks around them. Everyone was now focused intently, mutely, on the doorway from which the explosion had come. Shouts could be heard coming from the corridor, then a rumble of pounding footsteps—then smoke began to seep into the shelter.

  It only took a few seconds before David’s vision was obscured. He felt his lungs seizing as the smoke curled around him, filling the air and seeping into his every pore.

  He thought he might lose consciousness, but just as he was casting about himself for a place to fall, Nev’s hands on his shoulders pushed him to a crouch. The smoke was rising naturally, and the air closer to the floor was clearer. David took several gulps of it.

  He heard a crackling somewhere over his head, and wondered if the explosion had somehow damaged the integrity of the shelter. Was the roof of this underground network of chambers and corridors about to collapse in on him?

  But then, a split second later, he heard an amplified voice. The crackling had been a sort of P.A. speaker system.

  “We have you surrounded,” the voice said. It was a man’s voice, clipped and clear. “We have infiltrated both your entrances, and a second battalion of armed officers is waiting above ground. Your foreguards are dead or captured. We have Rebel Commander Niko in custody.” Here, for the first time, David saw a wave of something like fear pass through the Rebels crouching around him.

  “Lay down your arms and prepare to be taken peacefully,” the voice over the P.A. commanded. “Anyone with weapon in hand will be toggled on sight.”

  The surrender was completely calm, as if the Bereft Rebels had practiced exactly how it might take place. The instant the voice said the words, “Lay down your arms,” the shelter filled with the metallic sound of guns and canisters meeting the concrete floor. And then, silence.

  “Up!” This time the voice was not coming from the P.A. “On your feet and out.” David squinted through the smoke. Police officers had arrived in the shelter. Their faces were covered in masks and goggles that David guessed were for filtering the smoky air. But they wore the uniforms that he recognized from before, blue-gray, narrow-legged pants, and jackets with collars that rose high above the collarbone.

  “Stick with me,” David heard Nev’s voice low and gentle in his ear.

  “Silence!” An officer near them barked. David could hardly see through the smoke, but he followed the order, filing out with the rest of the Bereft Rebels, putting one foot in front of the other even as his eyes and lungs burned with smoke.

  They walked for at least ten minutes. The bunker, as Nev had called it, was an endless maze of passageways and small rooms, interconnected and fortified by corrugated steel walls. The smoke and crowd of tightly packed bodies—both Rebels and police—made the going slow.

  Eventually, Nev pulled him along into what looked like a freight elevator, a huge metal box with sliding doors at its mouth. The smoke was somehow clearer here, and David saw that he was in a tight cluster of Bereft, surrounded on all sides by masked officers. Their weapons were trained on the Bereft, the black barrel of one of the guns hovering close to David’s head.

  The doors of the box slid closed, there was a series of electronic beeps, and then the floor lurched, and David felt himself traveling upward at high speed. Only a few seconds later, the floor lurched again as the elevator car came to a stop. Its doors slid open, and sunlight struck David’s eyes, sharp and strong.

  He stumbled out, surrounded by police. Nev lost her grip on his arm, and David realized that in place of her firm hold, he was being handcuffed. He squinted in the sunlight, trying to see the face of the officer putting the restraints on him, but whoever it was still wore a gas mask, and David looked only into round, reflective, inhuman goggles.

  The “handcuffs” were not actually the metal rings David knew so well from movies and cop shows. He gazed down at his secured wrists where they hung uselessly bound in front of his body. They were enclosed in glowing sheaths of light that felt slightly warm against his skin. He tried tugging his hands apart, and found that he could not move. The light was actually substantial, as strong as steel manacles.

  “Commander Nev,” a voice near them said.

  David looked up to see a trim, uniformed man standing before them, squaring off with Nev. He raised his hand to his face and pulled the gas mask off in one quick motion.

  Shock coursed through David’s body. The officer standing before them was Malcolm’s age. He was a kid. His face bore not even a shadow of stubble, and he was gazing at Nev through piercing, pale-blue eyes without a single crease at their edges.

  Nev seemed unperturbed at being addressed by this child-cop.

  “Yes,” she said simply.

  The boy grinned lopsidedly. “It’s an honor to be your arresting officer,” he said. Then he turned and his gaze swept David’s clothing with disdain. “Who’s this?” he asked.

  “He’s from an outlying settlement,” Nev said frankly, “and he has nothing to do with the Rebellion.”

  The boy smirked. “Doubtful,” he said. “But nice try.” Then he put a hand on David’s shoulder and shoved him with surprising strength for his age toward a waiting black-domed vehicle. Just as the tramcar had before, its dome split open. David understood that he was to get in. Nev followed, and the boy took his seat at the front.

  This vehicle was much like the tramcar inside, except that David and Nev were separated from the boy who had arrested them by a gauzy screen. It didn’t seem to be made of anything solid; David would have liked to put out a hand and touch it, but of course, he was restrained. And it didn’t seem wise to make any sudden movements in the presence of this impulsive kid playing dress-up as a policeman.

  The dome closed around them, and David felt the vehicle lift off the earth and then accelerate with the same rapidity and force that the tramcar had, except that it was not constrained to tracks. The boy sat at a dashboard of controls, which he used to navigate. He drove like a maniac, accelerating and decelerating almost at random and turning sharply, so that Nev and David were thrown around the seats violently.

  Through the dome of the vehicle, David could see that they had emerged from the bunker into a dense forest; its thick underbrush and trees were the reason for the kid’s manic steering. He seemed to be taking an odd glee in weaving the vehicle through the trees as if he were playing bumper cars.

  “Taking you back to Flint,” the boy called over his shoulder to Nev and David. The screen between them did not seem to dampen the sound of his voice at all. “And since I have the honor of escorting a Rebel commander,” he added with a mocking tone, “we’ll be going directly to the Chancellor.”

  He spun around in his seat without adjusting the speed of the vehicle, simply trusting that he wouldn’t collide with any of the trees surrounding them.

  “Yep,” he said to Nev with obvious pride. “He’s expecting you.”

  David closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat. He felt sick from the smoke and queasy from the kid’s erratic driving, but something even more unnerving was playing at the edge of his consciousness. Why was he at the mercy of someone his son’s age? What was going on here?

  While the ride on the tramcar from Flint out to the bunker had seemed extremely brief, the return trip dragged on endlessly. David had no sense of whether this was because the hover-car was slower than the tramcar or because his anxiety and confusion were getting the better of him.

  After what felt like at least an hour of hurtling through thick-growth forest without any sign of human habitation, David saw the silhouettes of skyscrapers appear in the distance.

  It was a familiar skyline . . . and yet different somehow. It looked like the Flint he knew so well, with the addition here and there of soaring, spire-like buildings that he had never seen before. The landscape was peppered with wind turbines, and every last building g
leamed with shining solar panels.

  And then they entered the city. The hover-car pulled through a massive gate in a high, black wall that ringed the entire metropolis. David wondered if the wall served some kind of defensive purpose, but he didn’t have enough time to get a good look. A moment later and the hover-car was on the narrow city streets, the boy slowing his breakneck pace.

  David watched in awe as Flint rose up around him, both familiar and curiously foreign. Many of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century brick buildings were almost exactly as David had always known them. But the streets and sidewalks were all covered over in unfamiliar metal plating rather than pavement, and many of the buildings were new, their architecture sharp and angular, their facades gleaming black and reflective.

  As David watched this new version of Flint pass, he was struck once again by the populace: every conceivable race milling about together, perfectly at ease. And then, something even more astonishing struck him that he hadn’t noticed during his wild flight from the police . . . These people were all young. They were all Malcolm’s age or perhaps a few years older. There wasn’t a single soul his age. He saw no timeworn features, no graying hair. It was as if he were on a citywide college campus where the students had run the professors out of town.

  David was so absorbed in the oddity of the passers-by around him that he was startled when the boy officer brought the vehicle to an abrupt, bucking stop. They were at the foot of a marble staircase leading up to a large white building rimmed with pillars, rising to a large dome at the center. It was a smaller version of the United States Capitol Building. David saw a bronze plaque near the base of the stairs that read “Flint City Hall, Erected 2283.”

  He felt a bubble of inappropriate laughter rise up in his throat and quickly squelched it. The Flint government offices he knew were housed in a dumpy one-story monstrosity that looked more like an abandoned industrial park than a seat of power. This new, stately building put it to shame.

  Just then, Nev leaned over and said, very low, so that the boy could not hear, “We’ll be all right. Just follow my lead, and let me do the talking.”

  A moment later, the shell of the hover-car split open, and David found himself being hurried up the marble stairs toward a towering set of double doors that led into the hall itself. The boy held them at gunpoint, and seemingly out of nowhere, a phalanx of other officers had appeared, closing ranks in front of and on all sides of their captives. David understood then with a shiver of fear that they were expected here. Nev was perhaps more powerful and notorious than David had guessed.

  The doors of the hall swung open to admit them, and David stepped into a massive room. The floor was a black-and-white checkered mosaic, and the domed ceiling rose perhaps a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet overhead, by David’s guess. On either side of the chamber were galleries of benches, filled with young people gazing down at them silently and intently as they entered. There were perhaps fifty of them, young men and women, on either side, seated in neat, tiered rows. They were all dressed in dark gray suits with boxy, square shoulders and collars that closed tightly around their throats.

  David’s knees felt weak at the prospect of being so suddenly the center of so much attention. Was this some kind of hearing? Some kind of trial?

  Then he saw that at the far end of the hall, in the center, was a raised dais. A black-suited figure stood waiting there, flanked on either side by more young people in charcoal. Across the vast, open expanse of the hall, David could see that this was a young man with deep brown skin and close-cropped black hair. He stood with shoulders back, watching David and Nev and their guards approach.

  David felt a cold tremor behind his sternum. He was suddenly overwhelmed by the silence of the hall and the watchful eyes of these youths surrounding him. The boots of the police officers guarding him sent reverberations through the cold marble underfoot and overhead. David let his gaze drop to his own feet, feeling out of place and awkward in his dingy loafers. For what seemed like an eternity, he crossed the hall, his eyes fixed on the floor.

  And then, a familiar, warm voice shattered the silence all around him.

  “Dad?”

  David looked up with a jerk.

  The black-suited figure on the dais was Malcolm.

  alcolm’s face suddenly hardened into a stony expression that David had never seen on him before.

  “Bereft,” Malcolm said, his voice ricocheting off the vast open spaces of the hall. When Malcolm had first called David “Dad” a moment before, a murmur of uncertainty had passed through the assembled youths, but now, at the commanding sound of Malcolm’s voice, they fell silent.

  “Bereft,” Malcolm said again. “You stand accused of conspiracy against the Flint Immortal Council. We have known of your treason for months, and with the discovery of your bunker and the capture of your co-conspirators, we have more than enough evidence to prosecute you under the full extent of the law. You face life imprisonment.”

  David felt as if he were underwater. He had never heard his cheerful, light-hearted son speak so solemnly, so authoritatively. He was used to reminding Malcolm to pick up his socks and get home by midnight, and now, his son held his very life in the palm of his hand. It was like watching Malcolm play make-believe as a child, except that his imaginary superpowers had suddenly become all too real.

  But then again, perhaps this was make-believe. David still wasn’t sure of the precise nature of the world he had stumbled into. Maybe this wasn’t actually Malcolm, but some sinister, VR clone. He resolved to tread lightly until he could discern who this young man was and just how much power he might have.

  “My advisors and I have agreed upon a plea offer to extend to the leaders of your group . . . the ‘commanders,’ as you would have yourselves called,” Malcolm said, drawing David out of his spinning thoughts. “It is your only chance to avoid incarceration. I will confer with you each separately.”

  David threw a wild glance at Nev. She had said to follow her lead. How could he if they were separated?

  Nev gave him a short, sharp look.

  “Chancellor,” she said suddenly, her voice ringing out clearly. David’s breath caught in his throat. He hadn’t meant for her to speak out of turn. He had no idea what the laws of the Immortal Council were or in what kind of peril Nev might be putting herself.

  But it was too late. She was standing with her shoulders thrown back, looking Malcolm straight in the eye.

  “This man is not a commander,” she said, indicating David. “He is not a part of the Rebellion. He is not even from Flint.”

  A wave of hushed commentary passed through the ranks of onlookers. David felt their eyes boring into him, scanning his anachronistic clothing and uncertain posture.

  “Please do not hold him accountable for our actions,” Nev continued. “He was unlucky enough to be implicated in our infiltration of the First National Bank, but he is innocent. I can explain—”

  “Enough,” Malcolm barked. David flinched. He could not reconcile this dark-suited young man with his affable teenage son.

  “The notion of guilt or innocence is for the Council to ascertain,” Malcolm said. “But since you are so insistent on his behalf—” Here, he cast a disdainful look on Nev “—I will meet with him first, and judge accordingly.”

  With this, he turned abruptly and swept off the dais, his cluster of advisors scurrying to keep pace behind him. Before David could register what had happened, he felt a hand close around his elbow, and he was being led roughly in Malcolm’s wake by one of the many police officers. He looked back over his shoulder to see Nev restrained by more officers, but as their eyes met, she gave him one brief nod.

  David had no idea what she meant by this. That it was all right to tell them what he knew? That he shouldn’t worry? Was there some Bereft plan to get them out of this?

  He didn’t have time to consider. The police officer was leading him down a narrow corridor that branched off the main hall. He could see Malcolm’s black
suit retreating down the corridor ahead. Then, abruptly, Malcolm turned and threw open a door to his right. He stepped into a side room, and his advisors broke rank, taking up guarding positions on either side of the door. The officer shoved David after Malcolm, and there was a loud clanking as the door slammed shut behind them.

  He and Malcolm were alone.

  In an instant, the stern expression melted from Malcolm’s face.

  “Dad!”

  Malcolm launched himself at David, throwing his arms around his neck and squeezing so tightly that David felt the air being expelled roughly from his chest. Dumbly, almost instinctively, he returned Malcolm’s embrace, wrapping his arms around the wiry, slender frame he knew so well.

  He still wasn’t sure whether to trust that this was actually his son—but it certainly felt like Malcolm in every appreciable way. At eighteen, Malcolm was already several inches taller than his father. He had always been a bit gangly, but in the last few years, he had started to fill out through the chest and shoulders. David registered Malcolm’s familiar build, the subtle shadow just beginning to appear on his jawline, even the warm, soapy smell of him.

  Through his consternation, a sense of relief flooded David. After all this confusion and terror, he wanted to believe this was his child.

  “Dad,” Malcolm said again, pulling back slightly to look David in the eye, but keeping his hands on his shoulders. “What are you doing here?”

  “What am I doing here?” David burst out, forgetting his resolve to be patient until he could suss out exactly whether or not to trust this VR version of Malcolm.

  “Malcolm, just what the hell is going on here? Where are we? What is this godforsaken game and how the hell do we shut it down? I swear to God, I will tell your mother everything I’ve seen here. This game is off-limits—it’s more than off-limits, it’s going in the garbage immediately, do you hear me? I’ve never seen so much violence—”