Coda (11 page)

After dinner, the news channel tells me about pod upgrades and mainframe enhancements, which isn’t worth much but is better than silence.

Message received: the Corporation is strong, powerful, and doing all it can for us.

Through my open bedroom door, the console screen glows. My nails dig into my thighs, I grit my teeth, my jaw aching from every time I’ve tried and failed to resist since Johnny died.

If I don’t track, they’ll come for me.

It killed him.

The twins laugh in their room at some private joke. A few feet away, my father snores. Cold sweat breaks over me as I close my bedroom door behind me and take the headphones from their hook, running my thumb over the edges. The track I choose drifts up, tinny and distant, not strong enough to affect me, thin plastic cutting into my hand. It’s so close. The wall is cool and smooth against my forehead. I breathe and lock my knees so they’ll stop shaking. I can just stand here, the track playing. They’ll never know I didn’t listen.

I know. My screaming brain knows.
Want. Need
. I crumple to the floor along with my willpower.

Loud and perfect, a room of sound. I can just hide here forever, wrapped in these strings, blanketed by warm, heavy drums. The room’s edges blur, tinge with color, melt into something soft and liquid. Johnny’s here, smiling with his weird mix of cheerful seriousness
.

It’s raining. I can feel the drops on my cheeks
.

The room reforms, the floor morphing into a conduit chair. Fuzzy green words I can’t read slide across the ceiling and my fingers tap out a rhythm until I realize and stop myself. When I stand, Johnny follows me out into the street, catches my arm, and my heart speeds up. I don’t
know him! What does he want?

I can help you,
he says
.

No, no, I don’t need help. I’m fine, everything is fine and I have to get home. I have to leave now. Alpha and Omega are waiting for me; they need me
.

I’ve seen you,
he says
. When you think no one’s watching.

Thunder hammers a relentless beat. The rain falls harder from the sky, then from a dirty basement ceiling, soaking my face. He shows me a guitar, and I smile and laugh as the strings get louder. It’s battered, ugly, a relic so holy I’m afraid to touch it, but I do, reaching out, wood and metal smooth under my fingertips. The paper he gives me is thin, creased, but I can read these words. I can sing these words, here in this safe room where no one can hear us
.

We start and my voice sounds like someone else’s in my ears; the guitar is loud, confined in the small space. I laugh again, keep laughing and singing until I run out of lyrics and the music begins to slip away. It can’t be over yet. The walls shimmer; the strings tug me one last time before letting go, and Johnny smiles but it’s wrong, all wrong that I can see through him to the solid, hard lines of my bedroom. I blink, once, and he’s gone
.

They killed him. I don’t care if it was an accident. Right now, I don’t even care that we’re all going to die because of the music. Johnny had so much life and talent, so much bravery.

He was my friend. My fucking
friend
.

Haven and Scope will be wondering where I am; they’re probably already in deep at the club. I want to puke.

And I want to be there, which just makes me want to puke even more.

My dark clothes are a blessing, as is the shadowy doorway that hides me from the view of a passing patrol-pod. I could talk my way out of it if they decided to ask why I’m not at a club or home tracking, but I can’t promise not to do something stupid if a guard gives me a hard time. I’m not Haven. I can’t get away with that.

I’m just conduit scum.

Aimlessly, I wander along quiet streets. I’m almost at the South Shore, in sight of the warehouse, when I realize I was coming here all along. It’s as close to a real good-bye as I’ll ever be able to give Johnny. I slip through the fence, biting my tongue at the sharp slice of barbed wire into my palm.

Something scuttles in the pitch darkness of the basement and I jump. I don’t even want to know what that was. My hand fumbles over greasy slickness for the light switch.

Everything’s still, quiet, exactly as we left it before going to his place. Knees weak, I sink to the floor beside it, my back to the filthy wall.

Faces flip through my mind. Johnny, sure, but not just him. Haven, her open expression not quite hiding the hardness in her eyes. Alpha and Omega, who depend on me for protection and safety and
home
. Mage’s easy smile. Phoenix, always a wild tangle of emotions that lash out in whipping tendrils when she’s unsettled. Scope, who I trust more than anyone, and Yellow Guy, who Scope loves even if he hasn’t admitted it to me yet. My parents, who did the best they could and who I can’t disappoint, no matter how uneven and backward that is.

I’m not sure how long I sit there; my watch is still on the edge of the sink at home. Long enough that when I shift, stiff-limbed, to a more comfortable position, I have to peel myself from the sticky floor.

The guitar is a mix of textures under the fingertips I stretch out—smooth wood, sharp strings, and cold metal. No sound comes from it, but my own voice is loud.

“I’m sorry, Johnny.”

Disapproval settles in the air, his ghost lingering. I doubt it’ll ever completely go away, and I don’t want it to. I leave and slip wraith-like through the streets, my brain in overdrive.

This isn’t right. None of it feels right.

“Yo, man, you’re late, even for you. And you’re bleeding. What happened?”

I look at Pixel, then my hand. Shit, I forgot.

“Oh,” I say. “Um . . .”

He shakes his head, disappears through the door into the club room, and returns a minute later with a roll of gauze. “Programmed the DJ-comp to play something for pain next,” he says. “You okay?”

“Yeah, it’s nothing.” I let him wrap the bandage around my palm. “Thanks.”

“Sure. Look, I usually try not to think too much about what Scope does in his spare time, but is he okay? It’s just, he got tabbed yesterday and went, like, paler than usual. You don’t look much better, actually.”

“Yeah, he’s fine.” The message was from me, hours . . . after. I couldn’t get my hands to work.

“Didn’t have a fight with that dude of his?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Okay, thanks, Anthem. Don’t tell him I give a damn, will you?” He grins.

“Our little secret.”

Haven and Scope are way too far gone to comment on how late I am. I get a sloppy kiss from Haven that lands dangerously close to
my lips; my groan is swallowed by the pulsing sound. Soon my mind is, too, but I don’t forget the decision I made. It keeps me lying awake beside Haven and distracts me from my book at work. A week passes, and I barely even notice. The others meet up without me to talk about what happened to Johnny. I ignore my buzzing tablet and close my eyes, the memory of him falling to the floor on an endless loop in my head.

Until Wednesday. If I had the energy to run from headquarters down to the warehouse, I would.

Mage probably won’t care, and Scope will say the guitar should be mine. Phoenix . . . well, I’m just not letting her have it.

Johnny would want it to be played, not sit under a section of rusty old pipe forever, gathering dust and grime.

I carry it to one of the crates we use as tables and pull the cloth away. It doesn’t look like it should be able to produce the melodies Johnny forced from the four remaining strings. I probably won’t come anywhere close, but I have to try.

The strap is made from braided lengths of rough rope that cut into my neck the moment I slip it over my head. Pain doesn’t come anywhere close to denting the sensation of having the guitar in my hands.

A single harsh note, then another, and another vibrate up into the cloying, stale basement air. One of them is off, I know just by hearing it, so I gently turn the tuning peg, careful not to snap a string I can’t replace.

My eyes close. I remember Johnny’s hand dancing along the fretboard, the way he plucked and strummed. Something that sounds almost like music carries through the room and time distorts—not the way I get when I’m tracking or at the club, but just from the feeling of making the music myself. There’s only this beat,
that note, and this sliding, wailing scale. It’s ten times better than anything I’ve ever known.

I think of Haven.

Okay, ten times better than anything I’m allowed to have.

“Thought you’d take that. Not bad, man, not bad.” Mage ignores the last few rungs of the ladder, jumping down and brushing his dreadlocks from his eyes. “A little rough, but I like it.”

“Thanks. I”—my voice cracks—“I’m sorry.” I’m not even sure what I’m apologizing for.

“Yeah.” Mage stares at the filthy floor. “What
happened
, man? What Scope told us doesn’t make any sense.”

The strings dig more deeply into my fingers. “He just . . . I don’t know. We were at his place, composing and hanging out. He decided to track, and . . .” I press my lips together, shut my burning eyes.

“The techs say anything?”

“That bad reactions aren’t unusual.” The lump in my throat threatens to choke me. “Then they covered him up and carried him out.”

“That bad, though? I never heard of someone dropping like that, not from a single track.”

“I know. Scope said the same thing.”
This isn’t right
.

“I said what?” Scope’s boots ring on the ladder, Yellow Guy’s just behind them.

“Hey,” I say. “Johnny. How sudden it was.”

“Oh, yeah. Pixel says he’s heard of it, though. Recently, like about a month ago. Some friend from the club.”

“And it was just like this?” My head starts to spin.

“From what he said, yeah.” Scope frowns at me and puts his hand on my shoulder. “You holding up okay?”

I nod, and we stand in silence for a minute.

“He’d want us to move on,” Mage says finally. “Guess Anthem’s the boss now?”

Phoenix arrives, sparing me from having to answer. She closes the trapdoor behind her, the usual fierce prettiness softened on her face. Mage hugs her, and she clings to him for a second before pushing him away.

“Figures,” she says, shaking out her fiery hair and looking at me. “Let’s get started.”

The guitar is in my hands. I could play. I could try to forget, to not think for two hours.

My hair catches on the strap as I tug it over my head. “No,” I say. “Not today.”

Four faces stare at me. “Anthem, what—?” Scope starts. My feet land on the ladder, my hands reaching to hoist myself up. I stop halfway, my eyes level with the rusted hinges of the trapdoor.

“Play without me. Or don’t. Whatever.” I don’t want to ask Mage to look, to tell him what I’m thinking until I know. “I’ve got to talk to someone.”

I’m right. It doesn’t make me feel any better.

I stare at Haven. Her lips are pursed, waiting for me to say something. She crosses her legs on my bed and I turn around, pacing to the door and back again.

“A list,” I say. I can picture it. White codes on a black screen.

“Of targets.” Her knuckles are white, contrasting against the lurid pink of her fingernails. “I had to dig deep for it, but I got there. Anthem, they’re all . . .”