False Hearts (30 page)

If he knew it wasn’t real, it’d alter the readings to the electrodes. And, in any case, the Test for him could be completely different from mine.

“And if I fail, I’m stuck as a Knight or a Pawn for good.” Or worse. Nazarin’s heard of the odd Pawn or Knight disappearing after their Test.

We’re silent. I slosh more drink in the cup. I’m drinking too much. Before all this, I hardly ever touched the stuff. At least my liver will be safe. Whoo.

“So what does the SFPD want our next step to be?”

“I take the Test. We keep playing our roles. Kim’s been perfecting something she thinks can help us gather evidence.”

I let out a slow breath. “How soon do you think she’d be able to do this?”

Nazarin perks up. “Why?”

“Because there’s going to be a drop in a few days.” I project the scanned pages of Ensi’s notebook onto the wallscreen. He squints.

“I have no idea what any of this means.”

I walk him through what I found in the planner. He also has no idea what the link between the Hearth and the Ratel could be, beyond inheriting occasional men and women without identities that Ensi can brainwash into working for them.

“We still don’t definitively know if that’s what they did,” I say, thinking of Adam, the way he’d smile more on one side than the other. The way he loved to play with the younger children, and how he loved to go swimming in the lakes with the others, turning back to wave at us as we watched from the shore, unable to join him. He’d never harm another person.

Everyone has a darker side.

I still think there must be more to it than that. Adam was sixteen when he supposedly died. How could he change that completely? I suppose being torn from everything you’ve grown up with could do that. I remember how confused Tila and I felt. How it was like we were drifting, unanchored, in this strange new world we knew nothing about. Is that enough?

“Verve,” Nazarin says. “He’s rewriting personalities.”

Rewriting personalities. I still don’t know if I believe I changed Mia in any way in the Vervescape. Maybe it was only my words that got through to her, rather than a deeper sort of push. Imagine not remembering who you were. Becoming exactly what Ensi wanted you to be. A weapon. An assassin. A tool.

The only reason he didn’t do it to me in the Test is because it doesn’t work on lucid dreamers.

“You can’t do the Test,” I say.

Nazarin’s eyebrows lift. “You think he’ll change me.”

“Of course he will. Your loyalty doesn’t matter if it’s not completely guaranteed. He can make sure you never dare to cross him.” I think of the Zealot lounges where he experimented. “I worry he might have found a way to reprogram people on a wider scale via Zealot lounges by now. He’d start with his own people and then cast his net wider, wouldn’t he?”

“That’s what my superior says. He has other sources in other areas. We are certain he can expect them to amass an attack sooner rather than later.”

“We still haven’t been able to get any coverage. All recording devices were dampened in Xanadu, and they’re dampened in the Verve lounge. We can’t pin anything on him, even though we saw him gun down insurgents and splatter us with the blood.” I look up at the wallscreen. “Does the notebook help?”

“It’s a start, but not enough. They’re too carefully intertwined for us to barrel in now. Ensi will disappear, along with the Verve, and it’ll still trickle its way to the masses. We need concrete proof we can show the public, to turn everything against him. A few scanned pages with some acronyms won’t do that.” Nazarin licks his lips. “That’s where this new tech from Kim comes in. It might record, even if we’re somewhere the signal’s jammed. It’s dangerous, but it might work.”

“I don’t understand,” I say. Nazarin is animated, driven. It should scare me, but it doesn’t. It’s infectious. My fingernails trace across my scar.

If we succeed, we’ll take down the biggest mob in the city. The government and Sudice will be in our debt. That’s not what I care about; it’s a side effect.

I’m going to find out what you were up to, Tila. Once and for all.

TWENTY-ONE

TILA

Do you know why they really built that swamp around the Hearth? I mean, the “why” is pretty obvious, I suppose—to keep some people on one side of it and everyone else on the other—but there were events that led up to it.

I can’t tell you everything about them because I don’t know that much. I’ve managed to gather bits and pieces over the years, but I still don’t understand how they all fit together.

I’m going to tell it like a story, try and sensationalize it, fill in some gaps. You know when they have documentaries and then the camera goes all fuzzy and golden-tinged if it’s a reenactment of a good event, and dark and dreary if it’s bad? This is the dark and dreary kind, and I guess I’m the dramatic voiceover.

First, here’s roughly how Mana-ma tells the story when she’s lecturing about the evils of the Impure. I’m sure she’s told this story dozens of times in sermon:

Mana-ma’s Cautionary Tale

One night around twenty years ago now—let’s say it was dark and stormy, because what else could it be?—a man from the Impure outside world snuck into the Hearth. In those days, there was just a fence rather than a swamp. There were signs everywhere saying that the fence was charged, but it was a lie. We didn’t want to be surrounded by the new generator that would have been used. Surrounded by an Impure circle, the Hearth would feel just that much more trapped. Makes no sense, if you ask me, since the Hearth was already surrounded by, you know, the entire Impure world.

So this bogeyman came into the Hearth from San Francisco, creeping and sneaking his way closer to the main settlement. Mana-ma took great delight in explaining how horrible he looked, with green hair and metal studs, moving tattoos and Impure clothing, none of it made from good cotton, silk or leather.

Why did he come? Let’s see … perhaps he ran out of money and thought he’d be able to steal from us. (That would have been a failure—we didn’t have anything worth anything, except some vintage stuff in not-too-good condition. Well, at least that’s what I thought at the time.) Mana-ma said he thought he’d be able to get away with a crime more easily here. And that was maybe true, but she left out how low crime in the evil, Impure world really was, which would have made a few people wonder if it was really that bad if it was so safe.

This bogeyman came right into the center of the Hearth and stole a young girl from her own home. He drugged her and dragged her, kicking and screaming (evidently not loud enough to wake anyone up), into the forest. Under the silent redwood trees he had his way with her, holding a knife to her throat and saying if she screamed that he’d give her another smile. So he hurt her and she stayed quiet. Just as she was about to give up and scream so he would kill her (because people would somehow hear that scream), a brave member of the Hearth came to her rescue.

This upstanding member of the Hearth fought off the intruder and the miscreant was slain. Though the girl was obviously traumatized by events, through the help of the Hearth she was able to release the darkness the man had planted within her, at least for a time. Later, the darkness took hold of her again and nothing could be done for her.

“This tragedy is why we must remain separate,” Mana-ma would cry, holding her arm up high at the pulpit. “This is what we seek to prevent. For the Impure can poison the minds of the Pure, and we must guard that untainted spark within us all.”

It was always that sort of lesson—that the Impure would blemish us all and we were the last true humans, unaltered, unsullied.

The thing is: that’s not remotely what happened.

The Real Story

The man who came to the Hearth came to rescue the girl, not hurt her.

A gap in the story is, I have no idea how he knew her. Perhaps they met in the forest: her on one side of the former chain-link fence around the border, and him on the other. I could imagine the romance developing—putting their fingers through the metal wires and touching for the first time.

Eventually, the girl wanted to escape and they came up with a plan. When she didn’t stick to it, he grew worried. Thoughts swirled through his head: maybe her parents kept her in, or she even changed her mind at the last minute.

So he came into the Hearth, worried, not wanting to leave without her. She’d told him where she lived, and he peeked in her window.

He was seen.

The Hearth would automatically recognize someone not of their own, especially this boy in his synthetic clothing, bright green hair, moving tattoos on his knuckles.

They grabbed him, dragged him to the main chapel. Mana-ma had been roused from bed. I can imagine her, hair wild around her face, wearing her dark robes like a witch. The boy was nervous, probably a bit sheepish. Thought if he apologized and left, it’d all be OK.

Instead, they didn’t let him go.

He was thrown into one of the empty rooms that nobody used. They managed to get out of him who he was and why he was there. Then they went and got the girl.

The girl had planned to go. Her parents had caught her leaving with a small rucksack under her arm and locked her in her room. They were the ones to alert the watch, who had found the boy. The girl was more scared than the boy. She didn’t like the blank looks on their faces. They could be thinking anything.

Mana-ma was incensed. This boy had infringed on them, slipped past the toll roads, the infrequent park wardens, the fence, to come into the inner sanctum of the Hearth itself. The whole place would have to be Purified to prevent his presence from poisoning everything. The girl was sobbing, but the boy didn’t say anything. He knew crying wouldn’t solve anything when they’d already made up their minds.

They were all up all night, or at least all of them except the boy. He died at sunrise.

They didn’t kill him quickly. Mana-ma did most of it, with only her three trusted right-hand men. (Importantly, my parents weren’t involved. I think they learned about this after, and it was what put the biggest dent in their faith.) One restrained the boy and the other the girl. Throughout it all, Mana-ma lectured about the sins of evil and darkness, all while she tortured a boy to death in front of the girl who loved him. She used a scalpel, and she was delicate and dedicated in her work. The room was soundproof, so nobody else heard the screams.

They took the body of the boy away when the sun had crept over the tops of the redwood trees, but they weren’t done with the girl. Mana-ma used every trick in the book to brainwash and manipulate her. Before long, she believed it was her fault, that the boy was evil, that Mana-ma had saved her. Yet she was dead inside, walking around like a zombie, unable to feel happiness or sadness.

The spell didn’t last forever. Eventually, Mana-ma stopped paying such close attention to the girl. There were other things on Mana-ma’s mind besides a follower she thought had been dealt with. The girl started thinking again. Started waking up. And one night, deep in the dark when the moon was just a little sliver in the sky, she escaped and climbed over the chain-link fence, making her way to San Francisco, where the Hearth could not catch her.

When Mana-ma realized a member of her flock had fled, she was even angrier. That’s when the swamp was created. She said it was to protect us from those outside who would want to hurt us. It’s really to keep everyone inside.

*   *   *

These were the people Taema and I were raised with.

These were the people we were trying to escape from, naive and unaware of what we were really dealing with.

You must be wondering where I learned this story, if we didn’t know it when we left. Or perhaps you’ve already figured it out.

The girl in the story was Mia, the woman who took us in after we left. The woman who saved us before she damned me.

TWENTY-TWO

TAEMA

We’ve come to see Kim again.

We haven’t gone back to that empty safe house; instead, we’re going to her home. She seems nervous as she opens the door and ushers us inside. She’s been sworn to secrecy. At the moment, not even Sudice is meant to know what she’s about to do to us. If they find out she’s lied, even if it’s on behalf of the SFPD, she could easily lose her job.

Nazarin knew, without a doubt, that she’d do it. His former partner, Juliane Amello, had been her partner as well. Her wife. She died, and Kim wants answers, too. Or at least retribution.

“Well, no point wasting time in pointless pleasantries or offering you a cup of tea,” she says. “Might as well come through to the lab.”

We follow. I had forgotten how tiny Kim is. At the safe house, she wore a simple suit, but now she’s wearing something made of strips of fabric in all the colors of the rainbow, and it billows behind her as she walks.

Her home is large and sumptuous. As she’s one of the most talented biohackers in the world, this doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is how cluttered it is. On the way here, Nazarin told me that Kim collects old memorabilia, specifically from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, before the Great Upheaval. I think he told me so I wouldn’t be quite so taken aback when I saw it all.

Most of the cheesy knickknacks from the past have been recycled by now, but Kim hunts down the remaining ones and probably pays a lot of money for the lurid plastic and metal figurines that seem to stare at us as we walk through the lounge. Superheroes and celebrities I don’t recognize, cartoon animals with eyes far too large for their faces. It all seems strangely alien to me as someone who grew up in the Hearth. There, nothing was made by robots or replicators and toys were hand-carved and took weeks to make. Here, in San Francisco, so much was ordered and then recycled the next day. Clothes worn once, plates made of compostable material. Cherishing things from the past was rare. I mean, what in the world was Hello Kitty?

“Like ’em?” Kim asks, noticing my stare. “I got the biggest collection on the West Coast.”

“They’re … interesting,” I say.