Infiltration (Implanted Book 2) Page 2

  He chuckled. “We have to eat them first. But I’m dying for some life in this place.”

  “What were they called? Disco balls? We could use one of those in here.” Now she laughed. It was higher-pitched than her voice and Jamie was reminded of Emily. Her laughter faded away and she murmured, “I don’t think he was all bad. I think he had good intentions. My mother loved him. Loved him.”

  It struck Jamie then. “Is he your father?”

  She was quiet a moment, and then said, “Yeah, he is. It’s like she got nothing from me but her standards, but even those…well, I wonder if I’m doing to her what my mother had done to Stevie and me.”

  “What did they do to you?”

  She pushed her legs out in front of her again. “The Company had an inside system of people who got different implants. These implants, like the one I have, like the one Steven had, well…they are similar to the UNE’s specified legal implants, but they have very different purposes.” She opened her bag of granola and took a handful out but didn’t eat. “I don’t know how to explain them. They are another form of control, but their original intention was to be, hmmm, what I guess you’d call a rebel implant. Something like that. And a network.” She slowly ate her granola.

  Jamie opened his bag and took in some food too, but he’d lost any appetite he might have had. “Network?”

  “My implant, I can use it. I can see what they are going to do, kind of like that.”

  “Is that how you knew the bombers were coming to your compound before they hit?”

  She nodded, tipping her chin low. “Yeah,” she whispered. Her voice was stronger as she said, “The network was originally designed by Michael for people to use base emotions in the brainstem to communicate with each other. You ever heard of mystical empathy?”

  “You mean feeling other people’s emotions like they are your own?”

  “Yeah. Well, the implants from them do that. We can all feel one another, and it is almost like hearing thoughts of other people in the network in your head, but…oh…how do I put it? For all my life, I’ve felt other people’s emotions. People I don’t know. My father made sure we had the most sensitive implants. I think he loved my mother, but she was nuts. Nuts.”

  He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to feel other people’s emotions. He was getting more of a picture of exactly what these implants did. They must be networked through the satellite system, like the implants he knew, but everyone in the network would feel each other. A thought occurred to him. “Do you mean there was an overall feeling? A group feeling? Like, if most of the people in your implant network felt something, and less of your people felt another thing, then a dominant emotion would be there?”

  “Yeah!” she said. “But it’s like I owned them. It was like those emotions were mine.”

  “Was? You still have it.”

  She ate more granola and the spark that held her eyes for the last few minutes was gone. “I have to analyze every emotion. Check out whose it is. Is it theirs, or mine? I’ve gotten pretty good at it.”

  “You’ve had to block your own emotions for some reason. Why?”

  She looked at him. “How can you tell?”

  “It’s in your eyes and in how you are with your daughter. She adores you. I’ve noticed that whenever she shows you affection or love, you accept it at first, and then you push her away. I know how I feel about the twins, and I haven’t even met them. She is your kid. You can’t help but feel strong emotions with your kids.”

  “You’re clever,” she said softly, looking away.

  “I’m curious as to how your singular emotions could make anyone in this network notice you.”

  “You mean just me alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I have one of the first of these implants from the Company. There were initially twelve. My mother and I were two of them.”

  “What about your father?”

  “Michael. Oh, he has an implant, a special one. His implant is what you might call the brain of the network. He knows what everyone is doing, and nobody knows what he’s doing. He designed it that way.” She ate a little more, and then rolled her baggie up and put it in the backpack.

  Jamie did the same. “How did he get away with it?”

  “He was on top. There weren’t many people to hide these new implants from. You know how I said he designed his implant to read everyone, but nobody could read him? It ended up driving him mad with power. That’s what I think. He was afraid of the UNE having that kind of power and becoming corrupt, but he’s the one who got corrupted. Paranoid, too. He started acting like the whole world was against him. He said things like, ‘the rest of the people of Earth, those not like us, they are going to kill us any chance they get’. He wanted the other eleven of us, the ones with the most sensitive implants, to become monitors.”

  Jamie took a sip of water. “Monitors of what?”

  “Michael thought all the people with his implants would turn against him if they weren’t monitored.”

  “The paranoia you talked about, or was it real?”

  “Complete paranoia. We could all feel it. Especially my mother. I think she fed his delusions. She wanted power as much as he ended up wanting it in the end.”

  Jamie was quiet for a moment, trying to figure out how to phrase his next question. He decided to just ask outright, making sure his tone was delicate. “You say ‘was’ when you talk of your mother. How did she die?”

  She shook her head, a lock of hair falling down the right side of her face. “My mother killed herself when Stevie had his implant removed,” she said softly. “She thought he was dead because she couldn’t feel him anymore. That’s what Michael told me…later.”

  “Does that mean you felt it when she died?”

  Cecily cleared her throat. “We should get moving. Let’s get these stones out of the way.” She took a swig from her canteen and stood up, immediately shifting rocks without another word.

  Chapter 4

  Jamie held his lantern out of the large hole they’d revealed once they’d moved all the rocks, sticking his head over the cliff. He looked down, but couldn’t see the bottom of the sheer drop to the cave below.

  “We go all the way to an underground pool, then swim to the edge and climb out. Don’t worry,” Cecily added. “The lanterns are water-proof.” She unwound the blue nylon rope she’d found behind the rock pile.

  “Where does this lead?”

  “We’re going to their Phoenix hideout. It’s actually Chandler, the suburb, where Michael lives now. Lots of them live there. The Company people I told you about.”

  “How in the world did you find this passage?”

  “As you can tell by Steven and Em’s accents, and probably mine too at times, we were raised in the South. But Michael was from here. My mother convinced him that Virginia was a safe place after the first twelve implants were put in. I mean, the kind of implants I have, you know?”

  “When I was twenty, we moved out here, except for Stevie. He stayed. He knew all along the implants were bad. He had nightmares…and Michael had this underground kind of hideout for his people, as he called us, built while we were in Virginia. Here, I’d met Emily’s father and we planned on escaping together, getting our implants removed. He was with them too, but that’s another story for a different time. We looked through satellite imaging programs for underground connections in the caves and found this way to Gold Canyon. After we got out, we traveled a lot to stay hidden, but I came back to help the ones who escaped with us. The ones in the compound.” Her voice grew soft, distant. “The ones who used to be in the compound.” She wrapped the rope around her waist, and then tied the other end to a boulder nearby.

  “How did you climb up here?”

  “We used the same thing as G-Float technology. You remember those old skates from the 40s?”

  “You mean the ones that were like roller skates and kept you hovering above the floor? I thought those only worked if you were a fe
w inches off the ground.”

  “It was after those kids had the accident in Washington Territory where they fell off the mountain.”

  “Mount Rainier.”

  “Yeah. The skates were outlawed, but not the technology. One of my friends on the inside fiddled with that tech based on G-Floats, and created make-shift floats that we used as elevators. You think going down the rope looks scary? Try riding a four-by-four square of plastic and machine up without a light. Our group only had two lanterns at that time.”

  “How many of you were there?”

  She squinted in thought. “When we first left, there were twenty-four of us.”

  “Jeez, when you said there was a group of people with your kind of implant, I thought there would be about fifty with them.”

  “Oh no,” she said in all seriousness. “Michael made thousands of us.”

  He nodded slowly, trying to comprehend. “What happened to your floats?”

  “Batteries died. That’s what they ran on. Couldn’t get any more, unless we wanted to go into the city, and that was too dangerous. So, the rope. Only those leaving the Phoenix Company compound knew where to go, and we’d meet them, dropping the rope.” She turned her back to the void of darkness, and tied the lantern to her hip with the end of rope around her waist. “I’ll go first, then you pull it up and follow. I’ll holler up to you when I’m in the water.”

  She strapped their bag of food and canteens to her back and he watched her drop down, following her light until it practically faded from view. He didn’t hear a splash, but moments later heard her call up, “Okay, I made it. Your turn. Water’s warm.”

  He dragged the rope back up and tied a wet end around his waist, doing the same with his lantern as she’d done with hers. He thought Cecily must be incredibly strong to have made that climb down so fast and seemingly without effort. He doubted he’d have the same stamina.

  With a deep breath, he gripped the top of the rope and faced away from the drop. “I can do this,” he muttered to himself, trying to believe it. Planting his toes onto the rock, he leaned back and held hard to the rope. He steadied himself and half-walked, half-dropped down the cliff. The rock was orange-brown in the lantern light, and was about two feet from his face. He kept lowering himself and walking downward like he’d seen Cecily do.

  He had no idea how far he had gone, but Cecily’s light was brighter when he looked below. Right after he did that, he thought he shouldn’t have. He felt dizzy and his hands started to sweat. “Dammit,” he whispered, trying to reestablish his grip on the nylon rope. At least he knew the rope led all the way to the water. It had been wet.

  He went down a little more, hand over damp hand, feeling his grip weaken. Then, he slipped. The sweat on his hands caused the rope to slide through his fingers as he fell a few feet in the darkness. His heart came alive and seemed to jump into his throat as he desperately fisted his palms around the rope, reaching and searching for the strength to hold on. The rope burned, taking layers of flesh with it before his grip held true. He dangled there, hands burning. How could he possibly keep going?

  He looked around. All was dark except in front of him where the lantern hit the orange-hued cave lining. He wasn’t going to look down again, but the one time he had, Cecily’s light had been off to the side where he assumed the bank was.

  He loosened fingers from one hand and instantly, his other hand cramped completely. His pulse pounded through his head and body as he lost his hold altogether, and he felt himself falling, as though in slow-motion, through the darkness. He didn’t even have time to let out a scream—it happened fast. Pure adrenaline pumped through his system, everything stopped…and his back hit the water with a splash.

  He sunk deep under the surface, and he had the split-second to think that he was going to crack his skull open on the cave rocks under the pool, but the rope tightened around his waist. The water had broken his fall and the rope had probably saved his life. He yanked on the rope and his head popped out of the water. He gasped for air, panting like a hunting dog. Lucky to be alive.

  The first thing he saw was Cecily laughing in the water a few yards away. Laughing! The pool was huge. The sound echoed throughout the cave. She called out, “You should have seen your face! What in the hell happened?”

  “Lost my hold,” he sputtered, still breathing air gratefully.

  She stopped laughing, for the most part, and asked, “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, just…a little shook up. That’s all.” He treaded water, untying the rope, mentally thanking it for its existence. “Rope caught me before the bottom of the pool did.”

  “Oh, it’s way deep. You would have been fine.” She swam away from him, light under the water drifting with her. With the water to diffuse the lamps, the pool was lit up like a hot tub. And it could have been a huge hot tub. The water was warm.

  “Is this a hot spring?”

  “Yeah, nice, right?” she said over her shoulder. “Come on, follow me.”

  He swam behind her, leaving the sacred rope behind. Climbing out and lying flat on the cave floor, he shook all over.

  “That really got you, didn’t it?” Cecily asked in wonder.

  “I’ve never done anything like that.”

  “I told you there was nothing to worry about,” she said, smirking.

  Women, he thought. She knew she’d one-upped him.

  Chapter 5

  She didn’t tease him after that. Instead, she led him through narrow tunnels for hours. He had no idea how much time had passed, but the air was warmer and they were going steadily upward. He was exhausted, and just when he was about to give up his machismo and tell her he had to have a rest, she said, “Okay, time to sleep. We’re not far now and we both need our strength for the next part.”

  He plopped down on the ground.

  “Not there, over here. There’s a room. Well, kind of a room. Come with me.”

  Muscles he didn’t know he had screamed at him as he rose. They went to the right and she crawled through a tiny hole. “I don’t know if I can fit through there,” he said.

  “You can.” Her voice came through the hole. “It’s just a little tight.”

  He got on his belly and squeezed his shoulders through the narrow spot, coming out into a roundish cavern room. He got a good look at Cecily, and she was covered in mud and dried blood. He must be too, he thought.

  She sat with her back against the far wall, and offered him a water canteen and more of the granola. He sat next to her, eating and drinking without a word. He’d never been so tired, but he mustered up the energy to ask if she was okay.

  “Yeah, I am. We knew it probably wouldn’t last. That’s why I came out here. The people in the compound were worried Michael was on to our place in Gold Canyon. So anyway…now we have to turn out the lights. Get some rest, Jamie.” She switched off the lanterns.

  They were in utter darkness. He’d never been so completely in the blackness of sightlessness, and there was no sound after Cecily settled into her sleeping position, whatever that might be.

  He tried to lie flat, but felt safer in a ball on his side, so that’s what he did. It was like being in a sensory deprivation chamber. A womb.

  Softly, she said, “Tomorrow it’ll take about five hours to get there.”

  “What are we going there for, exactly?” He kept his voice low too, feeling that to disrupt the absolute nothing around him would bring bad things.

  She was quiet a moment, and then said, “I have to kill him.”

  “Why?”

  She waited even longer to answer this time. “It’s his fault Em was kept from her dad. It’s his fault all those people in Gold Canyon are dead. It’s his fault our lives are screwed up. You know, I couldn’t do this without you. I need someone’s help.”

  “It doesn’t seem like you’re the type to ask for help.”

  “I’m not, but you offered. Besides, Michael knows the inside of the real implant world well. He’ll know what happened t
o the twins.”

  “Why? How could he?”

  “Your wife,” Cecily said, sounding like she was trying to be gentle. “Amanda was one of us.”

  “No.” Jamie was shocked. The word echoed back at him, over and over, as if it agreed.

  “Yes.”

  “I saw her use Xchange Credits. She had a job…”

  “Amanda was the first and only one with Michael’s implant designed to work with the UNE’s implants.”

  They were in silence for what felt like hours. He processed this. How could he not know that Amanda had a different implant than his? Why wouldn’t she have told him? He hoped Cecily wasn’t asleep. There were now a million and one questions to which he could only guess the answers. “Why?” It was all he managed to say aloud.

  “I don’t know everything, but I do know she came to him. She was only sixteen. Her parents brought her to Michael, wanted her to have one of his implants. She didn’t even have one, like Emily.”

  “That’s impossible. She told me things.”

  “Think hard,” Cecily said. “Think back. Did she ever talk about her younger years? Did you ever discuss, I mean, really get into how the Life Point system worked for her?”

  He thought back, but couldn’t come up with a single memory of Amanda talking about her childhood other than their relating on music growing up. “I can’t remember. It’s been so long.”

  “I’m betting she didn’t. When she went to school and met you, she decided she wanted out, that she wanted a regular life like you had. A life with you.”

  “How do you know so much about her?”

  “She’s a legend in Michael’s circles and I met her. Just once, when we were both young. The day she got Michael’s implant. Before the procedure, she told me she didn’t trust the UNE, fed to me everything her parents told her to believe. I was beginning to know the difference. I think I was twelve.”

  “She was in Virginia?”

  “Yeah, she and her family were from the area.”

  “They were from New York.”

  Cecily sighed in the darkness. “That was part of her backstory. I told her about feeling other people’s emotions with Michael’s implant, and she said she would like that.” He remembered the feeling of disconnect he had when his implant was removed.