Where Futures End Read online

  He pulled them off again.

  She’d known about the virus. She had wanted it to wipe his hard drive. Why? Why would she want to do that to him? Because she didn’t want another husband. She’d only wanted the visas.

  He didn’t think, just loaded his pockets with as many bricks as he could and left his container. Aedric would be looking for him, thinking he still had Breck’s visa. He had to leave. He didn’t know where to go.

  He headed to the lounge she’d taken him to. If she was waiting for him somewhere, that would be the place. But that was stupid—why would she be waiting for him? She was probably all the way to Canada by now.

  He wasn’t the only one on the street, even late as it was. A knife flicked open behind him, a familiar sound that nevertheless sent a fresh surge of adrenaline through his veins. He turned just in time to avoid a swipe from the blade of a pale-faced junkie. Reef tore a brick of resin from his pocket, flung it as far as he could, and ran in the other direction.

  He was breathless and shaking with exhaustion by the time he reached the gray-painted door next to the noodle place. He pounded on the door. No answer. He leaned his back against it, tried to catch his breath. Then the dark unsettled him and he crossed over to the other side of the street. The neon sign over the Roosevelt Hotel was like a beacon.

  A ping from his goggles told him someone was hailing him on the chat channel. It was Cadence.

  Her voice came through, but not her face: “I’m sorry.”

  Reef bit back his anger. “My entire hard drive is wiped.”

  “I wish Aedric weren’t so good at doing things like that. I only wanted to get rid of the visa. I knew you would have it.”

  Reef pressed his fingers against his temples. Anger boiled in his stomach, no matter how hard he fought against it.

  “Do you remember that night at the lounge?” Cadence asked quietly.

  Reef turned to glance at the dark building. He remembered his hands warm against her back.

  “You said there’s probably some bar in Beijing just like the one in Seattle?” Cadence went on.

  Reef closed his eyes against the blank display of his goggles. “Why did you do it?”

  There was a moment of silence before she answered. “I bet there’s a place up here in Canada that’s just like Seattle, except it’s men and not women that there aren’t enough of.” Shasta’s tiny voice sounded in the background. She was saying something about snow.

  “Why did you do it?” Reef asked again, barely getting the words out through his parched throat. “You didn’t want me to have that visa? Why?”

  “I’m tired of being saved, Reef. I just wanted to get free.”

  “Free of me?” Reef’s heart felt made of paper.

  “Free of all of you.”

  She cut off the channel.

  Reef sank down onto the sidewalk in front of the hotel. He searched for his Alt program and then remembered it wasn’t there anymore. He downloaded it. There was nothing else to do. The bricks bulged in his pockets and his jaw trembled while he thought about them.

  Alt finished downloading. Reef halfheartedly logged on while he wondered where Olly had gone after they’d split up. He couldn’t remember saying good-bye. He tried him on the chat channel: “Olly?” No answer.

  Alt’s cityscape flickered to life around him, copper and crystal dulled by the smoggy mist. A holographic man in a leather vest stood near the corner of the hotel. “You going to tell me about the Fated Blade?” Reef grunted.

  The man bobbed his head as he had the last time Reef had seen him. But an unfamiliar, digitized voice came out: “One hour, seven minutes, twenty-seven seconds.”

  Reef got to his feet. “What did you say?”

  “One hour, seven minutes, twenty-two seconds.”

  The back of Reef’s neck went hot with panic. Breck’s words went through his head: It’s not a real quest. Just the Chinese mocking us.

  Reef raked his hands through his hair, looked down the street as though he’d find someone there who could help him. You know the game is riddled with leeches? All waiting for their creator to say the word . . .

  Down goes all of our infrastructure.

  He opened the chat channel and hailed Olly again.

  “Reef—”

  “Listen, something bad’s coming, something really bad. Get out of the sprawl. Head for Canada. Our infrastructure’s going down—maybe in the confusion you’ll be able to get across.”

  There was a crackle that might have been Olly hitting the mic while tightening his goggles. “You sure this isn’t one of your big conspiracy theories?”

  “Just trust me. Get out.”

  “All right, I’m at the metro anyway. Wouldn’t mind seeing Canada, even if it’s just through the border fence.” There was a pause and then Olly said, “You coming too?”

  Reef slid his hands into his pockets, curled his fingers around the edges of the bricks there. “Just get out.”

  Reef ended the call. He racked his brains for the username the alien had used to chat with him at the steam plant.

  “One hour, six minutes, forty-one seconds.”

  The alien answered his hail.

  “All that crap you told me about the Fated Blade,” Reef said. “Your people are going to help China attack us, aren’t they? You’re going to shut down the sprawl so we’ll stop coming into your world.”

  It took a long moment for the translation program to come back with the alien’s answer: “We’re not helping the Chinese.”

  “Bullshit. I just heard the countdown. In an hour all those leeches they planted are going to activate and overwhelm our infrastructure. And then what? Nuclear attack too?”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “The Fated Blade. The stupid impossible quest. It’s not a quest at all. It’s a countdown to a digital attack from Great China.”

  “I don’t know anything about the quest. Or the countdown. Your wars have nothing to do with me. What I told you is true: Your people have become too dependent on my world.”

  Reef was hardly listening. “You’re tired of us coming into your world and funneling out your money. You don’t need us anymore now that you’ve got the solar energy you want. So you’re going to wipe Seattle off the map—”

  “You do not understand. This is not about your war. The connection between our two worlds is harming both worlds in ways you do not yet know about. Ways which we have only recently discovered.”

  Reef’s breath went cold in his lungs. “What’re you talking about?”

  “You have joined your world to ours willingly. And we do not want to harm you. But it must end.”

  Reef balled his fist against his forehead, struggling to understand what was going on. It didn’t make sense. The alien was only going in circles. “You want to destroy us, same as China does.”

  “We never wanted to harm—”

  Reef grunted with impatience. “Why are you telling me any of this?”

  “Because it cannot go on. We will separate. We must.” Another long pause. Reef couldn’t tell if it was because of the translation program or something else, but he thought the alien’s voice sounded strained: “And I wanted someone to admit . . . anyone . . . I want you to admit that you would do the same thing if you were in our place.”

  “Do what? You’re going to cut us off? It’ll be chaos, worldwide war. Our economies will collapse.”

  Silence from the alien.

  “You want to know if I would screw you over to save myself?” Reef went on. An image came to mind: Shasta sleeping in her mother’s arms. His throat constricted. “Sorry, I’m not interested in easing your conscience.”

  “If you understood how the connection between our worlds is harming both—”

  “You want to know what it’ll be like?” Reef cut in. “
Stick around and see what happens to Seattle. See what happens when China sends a nuclear warhead to the sprawl. Take a look at the death and smoke and chaos and then tell me you can keep your conscience clear while you screw us over.”

  Reef cut the channel. He was shaking.

  Smoke and chaos. There was a better way to die. He could go back with the resin to his container and just float away.

  His goggles flashed. Olly was hailing him. “Hey, are you coming?”

  Reef hesitated, didn’t know how to answer.

  “You better hope there are at least a few leeches in Canada,” Olly said, “or I don’t know what you’re going to do with all your time.”

  Reef peered down the dark street in the direction of his container. “I don’t think hunting leeches did much good, in the end.”

  “It was as effective a way as any to annoy China—and me.”

  Reef grinned in spite of himself.

  “Hey, we might need some money when we get across the border,” Olly said. “Got anything you want to sell?”

  Reef tightened his grip on the bricks of resin in his pockets. He thought about going back to his container, lifting into an electric-blue sky, lost to gravity and to the world forever.

  “Reef?” Olly said, a note of concern in his voice.

  Reef’s tight grip on the bricks of resin was making his hands sweat. He let go.

  “Yeah. I do. I’ll meet you at the station.”

  5.

  WHEN WE ENDED IT ALL

  (more than one hundred years from now)

  DYLAN

  On the first day, you will tell your story. On the second, I will tell mine. On the third, one of us will die.

  You will choose who.

  The First Day

  QUINN

  My name is Quinn, and it’s past time I came of age.

  Some of the girls in my band of kin have already married. Even ones younger than me. But I’ve been busy with my Special Work.

  I only started a couple years ago, but I was meant for it. Something in my bones makes me forever restless. When I was little, I would turn over every seashell nestled in the rocks along the coast. “Like you forgot what you were looking for,” Truley once told me, “and you’d remember once you found it.”

  Now I know what I’m supposed to find. But I’ve no time left for searching. Like the other girls in my band, I must come of age.

  Where I live used to be called Canada but isn’t called anything anymore. When a land starts splitting into pieces, one name won’t work. We live on the move between the great crevices to the north and east, and the Ruined City to the south. Setting up tents and tearing them down, traveling to sanctuaries in season.

  Coldest times, we live in the White Hall, a big block building with carved columns all around. We burn wood right there on the blackened floor and let the smoke go out through the high windows while our Eldest tells stories of the Other Place and the Girl Queen late into the night. White Hall goes away before the cold ends, just vanishes like it was never there and leaves behind a big sloping hill you could get buried under if you don’t get out in time.

  So we go next to the Library, where we have only a month to read before the whole building disappears, and the books with it. You can’t burn anything there because you might send the papers up in flame, but we rip the soft layer from the floor and make blankets of it. Do you know, that soft stuff comes back every time the Library does, but if you try to take it with you when the Library disappears, the soft stuff vanishes too. Same with the books, although I don’t mind when they go, because our Eldest tells stories about the Other Place all year round.

  In burning season when the trees catch fire in the heat, we take shelter in the High Tower, which is a stacked-up building taller than the trees and all covered in vines and crawling with creatures—mice and shrews and raccoons. The creatures come there to get away from the smoke and the heat from the trees on fire, like we do. High Tower vanishes quick—you can’t stay for more than a few weeks. If you were standing on one of the tallest stacks of the building when it disappeared, you would fall right to your death, which is what happened to Truley’s mom when she went back for something she forgot.

  The last part of the burning season, we try to get to the coast, where it’s cooler. There are sanctuaries that come and go much quicker than High Tower, like the Room With Medicines, which stays for maybe a day. And the Place Of Soft Seats—cushy chairs lined up in long rows under the trees—which you can only use for about half a day on your way to somewhere longer lasting.

  I used to think that the good sanctuaries were created by magic from the Other Place, in order to give us aid. Now I’m older, I understand different: The Other Place doesn’t create sanctuaries out of nowhere—our Eldest says the sanctuaries are “ghosts of our ruined past, come to haunt us as much as to save us.”

  Some of the oldest ones will tell you that they remember a sanctuary—or one that their fathers had told them about—that isn’t quite like the others. Because when it vanishes, it takes you with it. It launches you not back into the past but into the Other Place. Into a land of plenty—always enough food, enough medicine. Babies born all through the warm seasons and no one freezing in the cold. Sanctuaries that stay put. Houses instead of tents, and nothing ever torn down. No need to move on to the next place. No need to war with another band over what you don’t have enough of.

  This is the reason I have put off my coming-of-age until now. I must do my Special Work, which is to find this sanctuary some say doesn’t exist, the Transporting Sanctuary.

  Once every few years we might travel down to the Ruined City, to look for quarry if times are hard or we’ve missed an important sanctuary. But the Ruined City has a bad air. I’ve never gone very close myself. From a long way off I can see all kinds of High Towers that aren’t sanctuaries but just old buildings stuck to the spot and probably ruled by hordes of rats. We only go there if we’re desperate, because it’s the lair of the evil mages, shadowy men who want only to destroy everything good. Times have happened that some kin who went into the city didn’t come back out. That’s what tells us the mages live there. That, and the foul look of the place.

  The mages are a plague to us, venturing out in secret from their lair and setting spells to work against us. Long ago, they were banished from the Other Place, and they’ve been in a rage ever since. They know they can never get back there, so they plot to destroy it. In the meantime, they play spiteful tricks on anyone they think has it better than they do.

  It was like that once when Artak killed his first wild dog. We roasted it on the spit, but then after we ate it, it appeared right back on the spit again. We said to ourselves it was magic from the Other Place helping us eat our fill, so we ate again, and again the meat appeared back on the spit. But this time we realized some trouble: We’d eaten the meat twice, but our stomachs felt emptier than ever. It was the evil mages—they were taking the meat from our stomachs and putting it back on the spit so we couldn’t ever get full. We had to pack up camp and leave that place so the evil spell wouldn’t spread to our other food.

  Sometimes the mages conjure up not-sanctuaries with food all rotten, or with great machines that grind and scream. Once when I was out scraping bark for medicines, I saw a house appear like a beautiful dream, bright yellow with a peaked roof to let the rain and snow slide off. But when I went in through the door I saw the back wall had been smashed in. There was so much rubble everywhere it was like someone had grabbed the house and shook it and shook it until everything was bits and pieces. There was something under the rubble too, which I couldn’t see but smelled rotten. I turned and went out of the house. I ran hard until the bright yellow was lost in the trees.

  No good magic would conjure a sanctuary like that.

  I told our Eldest about the yellow Dream House once I could bring myself to talk about it. That’s when
she told me that the evil mages like to torment us with bad things from our past. I asked her what had happened to that yellow house in the past, why it was so terrible inside. Eldest thought for a while. Her gaze went narrow like it does when she’s sorting the good dried berries from the spoiled ones. Her clothes were the only ones that hadn’t gone to rags, since we always gave her the newest felt to wear, and I started to feel twisty-nervous standing in front of her with my skirt in shreds.

  “How do you think the Ruined City came to be?” she finally said. I had never imagined the city as anything else but what it was now—a terrible play-land for angry mages. I started to tell Eldest that it must have been the mages who had created the city.

  Except in my heart, I knew that it hadn’t been the mages. I knew from Eldest’s hard stare. From the way her chin wobbled just before she turned away. Mages never create anything at all. They only conjure things that already exist from other places, or turn good things bad.

  It was the people, then.

  It might be difficult for you to imagine how people could smash up something as big as a city without any kind of magic. But I’ve seen a whole camp trampled and charred. I’ve seen the look in someone’s eye when he means to kill—like there’s nothing that can stop him from tearing the whole world apart. And long-ago times, people made those great screaming machines the mages conjure in their not-sanctuaries. Machines can do about as much as magic can, I’ll bet.

  So it was people and their machines who ruined the yellow Dream House, same as what happened to the Ruined City.

  The evil mages probably sent the Dream House to me to hurt me because they hate my special love for the Other Place. No one else has ever seen the yellow house. Only me, who loves the stories of Dylan and the Girl Queen and the beautiful land they live in. Who has been visited by visions no one else has seen.

  When I was a young girl I was once alone in the forest, gathering plants for medicines, when I caught a rare sight: a girl lifting up out of the ground as if out of water, her wet hair shining in the sun. Just for a moment she appeared, only one moment and then gone—vanished like a sanctuary. She was an avatar, a magical sighting sent to us from the past for shoring up our hearts. This avatar was the Water Nymph, a symbol of that which belongs to two worlds—water and land, our world and the Other Place. I am the only one who has seen her since the time our Eldest saw her, as a young girl.