The Illusionists Page 11

  It was something from beyond the walls.

  Cho muttered a sharp word under her breath. She took something small out from her shirt and pushed it into her ear. Rue watched her in astonishment.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Rue.

  ‘They’re early.’

  Cho turned and slid through the small crowd towards the door.

  ‘Wait,’ said Rue, puzzled.

  Thunder rolled through the room from outside. You couldn’t hear it exactly. It was more that you felt every cell of your body vibrate with it. The room held nothing but statues, silent.

  A voice spoke into the quiet. ‘Shit, I think it’s –’

  The walls shook. The low roar from the ground climbed higher into a scream.

  People had their mouths open, crying out, but Rue could hear nothing over the noise, the colossal wave of sound that pushed over everything else and smothered senses. She clapped her hands to her ears, but it did nothing.

  Everyone around her was dropping, falling hard, their hands clutching their heads, screaming silently, voices unheard.

  Rue looked around in amazement. She was the only one left standing.

  Everything told her to run. She stood, fingers in ears, fighting hard, fighting to stay, to think.

  I’ve dreamed this, she thought, filled with horror.

  I’ve seen this before. People dropping. Only me left standing. In a grey place. Gods. A grey, empty place. I dreamed it. Months ago.

  What in seven hells is happening to me?

  She dropped to her knees, crawled to the nearest figure.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she screamed at him. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  He was moaning. She pressed her ear to his mouth.

  ‘MyheadmyheadmyheadHURTS’ was all she could hear, over and over.

  She stood up, panic bucking at her, a terrified horse.

  Why was she unaffected? What was different about her? Immediately, the answer came.

  You don’t have an implant.

  Bodies pressed into themselves, curled on the ground like beetles.

  She searched for Cho, but couldn’t see her in the dimness. Just still bodies. Some with their mouths open and their eyes screwed shut, moaning soundlessly.

  The rumbling went on.

  Rue ran to a window, her heart pounding at what she would see outside. A face appeared, and Rue felt her heart stop.

  It was Cho. She jerked her head impatiently. Come outside.

  Rue ran to the door, hauling at it.

  The noise was so loud.

  She pressed her hands to her ears, tears streaming from her eyes.

  Cho appeared, her face urgent. She gripped Rue’s arm, tugging her out of the driveway and along the grey streets.

  Others were running, too, but not many. Most, supposed Rue, were still curled on floors, trying to process the shock of whatever had been done to them.

  Pounding feet. Cho’s back just ahead. Rue focused on it. Cho’s determined back and small shoulders would get her through this.

  There were two, three, four booms then. More felt than heard.

  Cho sped up. So did Rue.

  They came to a building that had the distinction of a startlingly blue segmented globe symbol set into the door, overlaid with a curly, three-pronged design. Rue had never seen anything like it before.

  The door opened. A man stepped out, moving his hand frantically at them to hurry. Rue could see running people swerving from the street into the open door, relief on their faces. The relief spurred her forward.

  She passed through the door, Cho just ahead. They shuffled through a brightly lit hallway that sloped gently downwards. She could hear the frantic chatter of people ahead of them.

  ‘He just dropped. I mean dropped, like his legs had been cut out from under him. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘On the floor and in so much pain and I didn’t want to leave her but –’

  ‘I was just about to jack in. JUST about to.’

  ‘I’d only just jacked out, and that’s only because Evelina was shouting at me to eat dinner in the real as usual.’

  They trooped ever downwards, voices like panicked birds around them.

  Rue reached forward and tapped Cho on the shoulder.

  Cho turned her head. She was fiddling with her ear. The hallway was wide enough for two. Rue squeezed in beside Cho as she slipped a little disc out from her ear and put it back in her shirt.

  ‘Cho. What is going on?!’

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s over. We’ll be okay down here anyway.’

  ‘Cho.’

  But she didn’t reply. Someone behind them piped up.

  ‘Do you know what’s happening?’

  Rue looked over her shoulder. A well-groomed woman with her hair striped like a tiger cat was peering at them both, her face shifting desperately between a patina of calm and frightened misery.

  ‘No,’ said Rue. Cho was silent.

  ‘Oh my. Oh my,’ said the tiger woman, muttering. ‘Oh, it was nearly me. I was nearly – I mean – oh. What if he’s dead?’

  Her voice had risen.

  ‘He’s not dead,’ said Cho. ‘No one’s dead, okay? Stop panicking.’

  The tiger woman looked at her, caught by the anger in her voice.

  ‘But what if … ?’ she said, lamely, and trailed off. ‘I just left him there.’

  ‘You did the right thing. You remembered the training and came to a safety hall. He’ll be fine. Don’t worry.’

  ‘But what happened?’ said the tiger woman. ‘What happened? Why aren’t they telling us what happened?’

  ‘It was Technophobes,’ said someone else behind her. ‘Isn’t it blindingly obvious?’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ said a third. ‘That’s everyone’s hysterical fallback to everything, that is.’ The stranger’s voice took on a whiny, sneery tone. ‘It’s the Technophobes. Your Life account loads slower than usual – it’s the Technophobes. Your dinner comes out warm instead of hot – Technophobes. Don’t you think they have better things to do with their time?’

  ‘What, other than disrupt technology?’ said the second man’s voice, sharply. ‘Which is basically what they exist to do?’

  ‘But they’ve never done anything like this before,’ said the tiger woman, bewildered. ‘All that happened before was that they’d manage to shut off Life for a few minutes. You just couldn’t jack in, that was all. This was … this was horrible.’

  Rue glanced at Cho. Her face was carefully rigid.

  After several minutes of walking downwards, they came out into a medium-sized hall. It was a white and austere tiled blankness, with a vaguely concrete floor. Dotted about were angular tables and chairs. A few people were milling about or sat down, talking. The atmosphere seemed shockingly, positively relaxed. Rue looked at the thin crowd. Some people were even smiling and laughing.

  ‘Why is everyone so happy?’ said Rue.

  Cho muttered something under her breath. ‘Because they’re stupid,’ she said out loud. ‘And probably because they’ve taken calmers. Look, you can see a drug-dispensing machine over there. These halls are always filled with them. It’s mandatory, in case people turn hysterical. Wouldn’t want that, would we?’

  She sat at an empty table, and Rue slid into the seat next to her. The chair was hard and cold against her back.

  ‘But,’ said Rue, trying to understand and feeling once again forever lost, behind, somewhere back there, ‘what is this place?’

  ‘See the segmented globe image on the door? It’s the symbol for World, right?’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Well, these halls, they started building them after the first few signal bombs. Safe houses. They’re filled with signal dampeners. Means no one can be hurt through their implant. Also means the implants are completely useless. Can’t track anyone, can’t jack into Life, can’t find anything out. It’s horrible to find yourself alone, where you can’t just … shift your focus and
find out anything you want. You’re totally helpless, unable to connect to anyone else.’

  ‘You can connect to someone else,’ said Rue. ‘It’s called talking.’

  ‘Look, I know, okay? I’m the first to admit we’re too reliant on Life. But when it’s taken away, everything stops. It wasn’t just pain that stopped the jacked-in people from doing anything except lying there. It’s the body shock of silence. It’s never silent in World. You’re never alone with your own voice in your head and nothing else – not unless you want to be. And most people don’t.’

  ‘You’re confusing,’ said Rue. ‘You talk one way and then the opposite, and you’re angry about both of them. So which one do you believe more?’

  Cho sighed. For a moment, Rue thought she wouldn’t speak. Then she twisted in her seat to look at Rue directly.

  ‘What do you believe? Really.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Rue, taken aback. ‘I just … with this ability, I suppose I see things a different way to most other people.’

  ‘Ability?’

  ‘We call it Talent, in Angle Tar. I can do things. With dreams. And some people can Jump to different places.’

  Cho just stared at her.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Rue, giving up. ‘I think I’m still working out what I believe.’

  They sat in silence for a while. The crowd in the hall had grown considerably. It was calm, conversations rustling like paper around them.

  ‘How long will we be here?’ said Rue.

  ‘Several hours. Or only a couple. Depends how quickly they can get everything up and running again. Sometimes they keep everyone locked down here to make sure it’s all over. They never learn. The attacks don’t last more than minutes, and there’s never another one for months. But they can’t have people walking around with malfunctioning implants, trying endlessly to jack in. Down here it’s all blocked. No signals. No World. No Life.’

  Rue tried to imagine what it would be like to lose Life, all that instant wealth of knowledge, all those voices, all that everything. It would be like losing most of your brain, she supposed. Suddenly you wouldn’t know the answer to anything. You wouldn’t be able to know what was going on anywhere but the area within your sightline. You wouldn’t know how to think or what to believe, because there would be nothing authoritative to tell you. Your sister, or your father, or your children – you wouldn’t be able to talk to them if you weren’t in the same room. You wouldn’t be able to play a game to pass the time – you wouldn’t know how games worked outside of Life. You wouldn’t be able to read anything, watch anything except the people around you. There would be nothing there, nothing at all, to distract you from yourself.

  It would be awful. Rue could never understand how awful, because to her Life was a toy, fascinating and occasional. She had not yet learned to incorporate it into her existence. It was quite a terrible thing for someone to do to someone else.

  She thought about the little disc Cho had slipped into her ear.

  ‘You knew,’ said Rue.

  Cho said nothing.

  ‘All those people out there. Did you have something to do with it?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I was just warned about it, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right, then.’

  Cho sighed, her voice low. ‘Just … relax. It was only a couple of cities.’

  ‘A couple of cities?’

  ‘Keep your voice down.’

  ‘Was it the Technophobes?’

  ‘Depends on which theory you believe today. Tomorrow there’ll be another one. I think the current favourite to blame is Ifranland, or maybe China because of what’s happening with trade agreements at the moment. It’s all over the news. People latch onto the news.’

  ‘Who’s China?’

  Cho looked at Rue, the ghost of amusement in her face. ‘It’s another country. They’re more advanced than World in some ways. They like to express their disapproval with World’s lack of cooperation on certain things by financing groups like the Technophobes to drop disruptor bombs and wipe out the Life signal. It’s nothing.’

  ‘But it’s the Technophobes who actually do it. Isn’t it?’

  ‘You’re not seeing the big picture. Who actually calls the shots? That’s more important.’

  ‘No,’ said Rue, her voice rising, ‘It’s really not. One person’s actions are more important than a hundred people’s wishes. So why don’t they just own up to it?’

  Cho hissed. ‘Rue, just please keep your voice down!’

  Cities. Cities, plural. Hundreds of thousands of people. Millions?

  ‘It’s a cruel thing to do,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, what do you know about it?’ Cho sneered. ‘You’ve never even lived here. You’re here for a couple of months and you think you can pass judgement on everything that goes on. You have no idea, none at all. You go on back to your quaint little island paradise and laugh at us.’

  ‘It’s not a paradise,’ said Rue, angry. ‘That’s why I left.’

  ‘You haven’t seen what Life can do,’ Cho said. ‘People can only cope with one reality at a time. They’d like to think they’re cleverer than that, but they’re not. Give them a choice and they’ll kill themselves trying to live three lives at once, when only one is worth it. No one really believes there’s anything after death, because no one can prove it. People only believe in gods when things get really bad, because what else will stop forces you can’t control? So everyone tries to cram everything into this existence, and they should. But Life is a drug, and people get addicted, and they stop caring about anything else. They don’t want to live in reality any more.’

  ‘I don’t understand your way of thinking at all,’ said Rue. ‘The Life system is as real as this hall. Who says you can’t live both?’

  Cho just shook her head.

  ‘It’s people like you,’ she said at length, ‘that came up with ideas like Life in the first place, and screwed us all. You’re just like my brother. He lived inside his head so much he stopped caring about anything outside of it. Couldn’t appreciate what he had because he was always looking for what he didn’t bloody well have.’

  Rue crossed her arms and pressed her mouth into a line to stop it from opening and saying very stupid, very pointless things. No one could argue with someone like Cho. It was almost a trait to be admired, except of course when you were on the receiving end of it.

  Cho took a tiny box out of her pocket and popped it open. Inside was a pile of little gold stars. She picked up three with the tip of her finger and laid them on her tongue.

  Rue watched this, wary. ‘What are they for?’

  ‘Go away,’ said Cho. She closed her mouth and swallowed.

  Rue didn’t go away, though. She stayed, even when Cho began to sway on the spot from the drug in those little stars and nearly fell off her chair.

  Rue sat beside her and had Cho lean against her side. Her eyes were closed but she wasn’t asleep. Occasionally she would jerk.

  The sadness and fragility Cho had running through her blood was obvious when she became angry, and she seemed to be angry most of the time. It was easy to be offended by her, but just as easy to let go of it. Rue didn’t want to leave her alone in this state.

  Besides, there was no one else to go to. Just another room full of people she couldn’t connect with, or didn’t want to connect with. Did that make her small minded, or mean? She wasn’t sure.

  Rue knew she didn’t really care about Wren. She had been angry when he had seduced her, with all his silver-eyed charm, away from Angle Tar and White. He’d acted as though she was a special thing, as though he hadn’t been able to stand her staying in Angle Tar. As though he had wanted her for himself. So he’d come to take her away to World, a fantasy place that seemed to fulfil every desire she’d ever had.

  How pathetic that seemed now.

  How childish.

  If she kept chasing dreams, she’d only end up being more and more disappointe
d, until she withered and dwindled and drew into herself.

  It was time to face reality.

  She looked around the hall, wondering how long they’d be stuck here for. Wondering if they’d bring food round. It reminded her of the tunnels underneath Capital City that had so shocked her. The tunnels reminded her of White, and the last words she had ever spoken to him. The dreams she’d been having of him recently, and how they had opened up the beautiful pain of him in her chest, turning her thoughts to him, again and again.

  Nothing happened for what seemed like slow, agonising hours, until she was drooping, and Cho was practically asleep.

  Then movement caught her eye, and she turned to see a clutch of uniformed men she assumed were police, wearing darkened plastic wraps over their faces that hid their eyes and noses, spill into the hall. They drew the eager crowd to them just with their presence. Rue stayed where she was, mistrustful.

  The men told everyone they could go home, and that a list would soon be circulated on Life of people who had been taken to nearby medical halls, and that they should check that list if they got home to find someone they lived with was missing, and someone in the crowd started crying loudly, and everyone else just stood watching with dumb faces until the men herded them up out of the hall like geese and broke them back out into the wide world, and gods it was so dark outside.

  Cho pushed away from her on the way back out, suddenly, and Rue lost her. She tried to see which way Cho was walking, at least memorise a street name, a general direction, but there were too many people in the way, and then that was it. Cho had gone.

  Well, you have her address, she thought. Just go round there and make her talk to you. Don’t let her slip away again.

  Out on the street, people streamed back to their houses, panic in their eyes. Would they find someone missing? Alone, Rue walked home, mirroring the way she had come.

  There was a strange quiet. No one around. An alarm or two in the distance. She could only guess that they were the sound of medical teams. She walked and rubbed her arms, cold. What if she got in and found Sabine on the floor, her eyes blank? Or Lars?

  She reached her building. The key spell scanned her eye and the front door slid open.