The Dark Intercept Read online

  Violet switched off her computer. She grabbed her bag. Moments later she was crossing the plaza just as Danny had done before her. She wove her way around the food carts. She cut through the lines of people waiting their turn to step up to the little windows to order their meals.

  She tried to keep her head down, in case he spotted her, but she also needed to be alert and observant so that she could spot him. She couldn’t move fast; fast movement in a crowd was too noticeable. She had to be casual but also deliberate. It was dark now but it wasn’t that dark. Streetlights would be switching on any minute.

  People streamed past her in all directions. She heard snatches of their conversations and scraps of their laughter, but she felt very distant from it all. She was focused on catching up with Danny so that she could track him. And figure out what he was up to.

  The last faint remnants of sunlight glimmered in the distance. It had been a beautiful day. But that wasn’t surprising. All the days on New Earth were beautiful. It was always summer, and the air was always spiced with a tender blend of growing things. It was a subtle fragrance made up of oranges and jasmine and cinnamon and freshly mown grass and a rich bottom note of oaky crispness. The odor had been specifically chosen for New Earth. When Violet’s father had conceived of this place, he knew that things like smells would be very important, and that they were the things most likely to be overlooked by the engineers. Engineers cared about structural integrity and metallurgical stresses and optimal environmental sustainability. Not smells. And so Ogden Crowley had hired a crew of Scent Blenders—experts in botany and neurophysiology and psychology who understood what people needed to have wafting past them in order to feel at home. To feel balanced and whole.

  Violet was barely aware of the smell anymore. Hardly anyone was. It was just a natural part of this world. They’d notice if it wasn’t there, her father had explained to her, but they didn’t notice that it was.

  She did notice, however, the way the ground beneath her feet trembled and shifted with a constant vibration, like a lullaby with no words. That was the machinery of the Intercept doing its work, collecting and sorting, labeling and targeting.

  All at once, Violet’s heart gave a funny little lurch.

  There he is.

  Danny was about twenty yards ahead of her, stepping off the curb at the edge of the plaza, heading toward Curie Street. His apartment was on Curie Street.

  It had to be him. Dark hair. Slender build. Dark tunic. Black boots.

  But wait. He was stopping. Something had spooked him. Slowly, slowly, he began to turn back toward the plaza.

  In one more second he’s going to be looking straight in my direction.

  Violet froze. She quickly realized, however, that freezing was an ineffective strategy when you were attempting to avoid visual surveillance and when you were, unfortunately, right out in the open. And so she jumped sideways. That put her behind one of the trees arranged along the plaza’s western border. It was a ginormous sugar maple, so thick around the middle that three Violets, all in a row, could have successfully hidden behind it.

  She pressed her back against the craggy and pitted gray bark, breathing in and out, and in and out again, trying to calm herself.

  Had he seen her?

  And if he had seen her and if he confronted her—what would he say to her? Stop following me, you very, VERY weird girl. You perv.

  Well, he wouldn’t say that. He was too polite. But he might think it, and that was bad enough. That was enough to make her cringe. She closed her eyes, expecting to hear Danny’s pissed-off voice any second. He’d march up to the tree—for surely he’d caught a glimpse of her before she leapt out of his line of sight—and peer around it and stare at her, sadly shaking his head.

  Maybe he’d even call the police.

  Wait. He IS the police.

  But it would still be bad. Very bad. And very embarrassing. So bad and so embarrassing that when Violet tried to envision the rest of her life, all she could see was misery and isolation. She’d hide herself away from everybody she cared about and from everybody who (foolishly, it was now clear) cared about her. She’d stop showing up for work at Protocol Hall, and then she’d get some menial job that she could do in the dark so that nobody would ever have to look at her, and she’d slink around in shame and humiliation, and then she’d get old, and even Shura would shun her and finally forget about her, and …

  Nobody came.

  Nothing was happening. Absolutely nothing. She opened her eyes. She leaned out to one side, twisting her neck so that she could see around the tree.

  In the distance Danny was on the move once more, passing the sign for Curie Street and moving toward Bohr Boulevard.

  Then it struck her: That’s not Danny. His dark hair was longer than Danny’s. And curlier. The tunic was black, not dark blue, which meant he worked for Intercept Security, not the police department.

  So maybe it was too dark to follow somebody. Or maybe her guilt and her nervousness had gotten the better of her. Clouded her judgment. And her eyesight, too.

  Violet slunk out from behind the tree. Now she was sure that she’d lost him. Too much time had passed. Squinting, looking hard into every face that threaded past her, she turned in a complete circle so that she could check in all directions. And then she turned one more time, going the other way, just for good measure. She saw a lot of people—shift change at Protocol Hall was always a mob scene, with some people coming and other people going, and all of it creating a rich and colorful cross-weave of humanity.

  But no Danny.

  Well, maybe that was for the best. What if she’d gotten her wish and actually been able to follow him? What if she’d ended up witnessing something she didn’t really want to see?

  What if her new suspicion about Danny—the one so awful that she hadn’t even shared it yet with Shura and maybe never would—was confirmed?

  Warm as it was, Violet shivered. She wondered how the Intercept would label the emotion that had—just now—officially colonized her brain. What category would it choose? In which of its drawers would the Intercept file away this feeling she couldn’t seem to shake?

  What would it do with dread?

  4

  The Darkening Day

  Following Danny—or trying to—had left Violet with a very bad headache. And put her in a very bad mood. Along with the dread, she felt antsy and sour and sort of hollow. And confused. And more distraught than ever. Her emotions were on the loose, rattling around inside her, unattached to anything solid or dependable. She wanted to yell at somebody. She wanted to take a vow of silence. She wanted to run very fast, and she wanted to stand still. All at the same time. A series of small blue flashes crackled in the crook of her elbow.

  She decided to do what she always did when she was a mess.

  She called Shura.

  “Be there in, like, two minutes,” Shura said, which was exactly what Violet knew she would say, and which was, of course, the precise reason why Violet had called her. There were definitely Best Friend Rules, and Rule Number One was: When a Best Friend calls, you go. Even when the Best Friend—in this case, Violet—had given no details whatsoever about the reason for her distress and only blurted out a few ragged words about needing Shura right now.

  Violet switched off her wrist console. She already felt better. Shura would hop a tram and meet her in Perey Park, which was just a short walk from Protocol Hall. That was where they always hung out.

  Shura was an artist. A really good one. Her paintings were so wonderful that sometimes Violet forgot that anyone had painted them at all; they seemed like natural facts in the universe, random fragments of reality that somebody had cut out and framed. Some of them chronicled the sights of New Earth—the way the streets ran as straight and equally spaced as cello strings, right to the edge of the horizon, or the way the skies looked when the Color Corps over in Farraday was in the midst of its nightly shade-mixing ritual—but some of them showed scenes that had never hap
pened before, anywhere. Those were the paintings Violet liked best.

  Once she had asked Shura about it. They were standing in front of a painting her friend had just finished. The painting, propped on a paint-spattered easel in a corner of Shura’s bedroom, showed a long field of smooth mossy green, framed by swirls and dabs of brown and orange and yellow. A football peeked up out of the grass.

  It didn’t look like any place Violet had ever seen before.

  “The place in the painting—it’s not real, right?” Violet said. “It never existed.”

  “Right,” Shura said. “But it will.”

  That picture now hung in Violet’s bedroom. Shura had given it to her for her sixteenth birthday.

  Shura’s parents didn’t like the fact that their daughter was an artist. They didn’t try to hide it, either. Violet and Shura had talked about it many, many times, because it was so hurtful to Shura, and also so important.

  Her mother, Anna Lu, was an attorney who specialized in the rights of immigrants on New Earth. Her father, Edgar Lu, performed maintenance work for the Intercept. They were serious people—almost as serious as Violet’s father, the most serious person Violet knew. They didn’t want Shura to be a painter. They wanted her to be an engineer or an architect or a scientist or a lawyer, like Anna Lu was. Or a doctor, like Violet’s mother had been.

  Her parents thought art was frivolous, Shura had explained to Violet, and they thought that only frivolous people would want to have anything to do with it. “It’s not that they’re mean,” Shura added. “They’re actually pretty great. They’re just worried. They know that art is about emotion. And with the Intercept and all—” She didn’t finish her sentence. It wasn’t necessary. Violet knew exactly what she meant: The emotions created by art—both making it and beholding it—would just be more raw material for the Intercept. More ammunition.

  “They want me to do something practical,” Shura had said. “They want me to be safe.”

  Safe.

  That was a word Violet knew all too well.

  * * *

  Perey Park was a giant arena of green with a round marble fountain in the center. The fountain was spectacular. Six tubes jutting from its inner rim sent identical arcs of sparkling water leaping high into the air. The streetlights illuminated each arc, turning them into separate sprays of rippling diamonds.

  Here and there, patches of flamboyant flowers burst up from the soil like another kind of fountain, the living kind, along with carefully spaced trees. The frizzy tops of those trees swayed and trembled in the light but persistent breeze. Along the park’s outer edge was a series of wrought-iron benches, connected like the links of a chain necklace. Violet loved every inch of it.

  She picked a bench that wasn’t near any other occupied benches and sat down. She didn’t have long to wait. Shura showed up right away. She usually wore her straight black hair pulled back tight in a ponytail, but tonight it was hanging loose around her face. Violet couldn’t quite see her eyes, and not just because of the darkness.

  “So,” Shura said. She plopped down beside Violet. “You sounded terrible on the phone. Are you worried about the intervention?”

  Everyone working in Protocol Hall had to undergo an Intercept intervention, so they would know what manner of temporary chaos they were inflicting on others. The tricky part was that you never knew when it was coming. The element of surprise was a crucial part of the experience, because if you knew when the Intercept would be slinging one of your emotions back at you, you could prepare yourself; you could grit your teeth and get through it.

  So Violet didn’t know when it was coming. It could happen next week or next month or ten minutes from now. At any moment, she might be hit with a memory: something so intense and vivid that it would be temporarily debilitating.

  Just as debilitating as the image of his sister’s death had been for Tin Man.

  “That’s not it,” Violet said. “I mean, I’m not exactly looking forward to it—but that’s not it.”

  “So what’s going on?”

  “I followed Danny.”

  “You what?”

  “I followed him.”

  “When?”

  “Just now. And so I feel—well, ashamed, I guess. A little bit. But mainly frustrated. Because I lost him. He could be anywhere now.” Violet gestured toward the enormous glass structure in the near distance, a blaze of cool angular radiance set against the dark horizon of New Earth. “He came by Protocol Hall when my shift was over and we talked and I asked him—like I always do—why he keeps going down to Old Earth. He did it again today, okay? And he almost died this time.” Violet quickly summarized the incident in the alley with Tin Man. Shura winced when she heard the words slab gun.

  “And so I just lost it,” Violet continued. “The second he left my workstation, I thought, Screw it—I’m going to get to the bottom of this myself. Maybe he was on his way to meet somebody. And maybe he’d tell them why he keeps being so stupid. And maybe I’d be able to eavesdrop and then I’d know why he’s doing it, and then maybe—”

  “And then maybe,” Shura said, interrupting her, “he’d catch you spying on him and never speak to you again. Is that what you want?”

  Violet crossed her arms and slumped back against the bench. This wasn’t how she thought the conversation was going to go.

  “So how long did you tail him?” Shura said.

  “Not long. I didn’t even get past the plaza. Too risky. And too dark.”

  “Good.”

  “Good?”

  “Yeah. Good. Because following him was wrong.” Shura shook her head. “For a smart girl, you can do some pretty dumb things.”

  Coming from anybody else, Violet thought, those words would have caused so much heated resentment to rush and boil inside her that her Intercept file would probably explode. Coming from Shura, though, it was okay. Best friends could get by with saying things that other people can’t.

  Especially when those things happened to be true.

  “I know, I know,” Violet conceded. “It’s just eating at me, though. Danny won’t stop going to Old Earth. And he refuses to tell me why he won’t stop going.” She thrust out her right foot as if she were kicking an invisible soccer ball. She’d needed something to do with all the frustration-fueled energy that was stacking up inside her. “They won’t put up with it much longer, you know? One of these days, Chief Callahan is just going to fire him. And then what?”

  “Not your problem.”

  Violet gave her a long, meaningful look.

  “Okay,” Shura said. “I get it. It is your problem. In a way. Because of how you feel. But you can’t spy on him. That’s not the answer. You know that. Right?”

  Neither one of them spoke for a few minutes. The park was busy, even after dark; there was a lot going on, and that was good, because it made the silence seem not like silence but simply a break to watch the action. Thanks to the streetlights, a visit to the park was a spectator sport.

  Two young girls punted a football back and forth. An old lady was doing some sort of original dance with a scarf and a stick, bending and twirling, lifting one knee and then the other while she hummed and chanted. Some people walked dogs along the track that ringed the space. Violet watched a basset hound who couldn’t be moving any faster than an inch an hour, his long brown ears dusting the ground. The owner, a woman in a pink jumpsuit with pearl-white hair, was very patient. She never tugged on the leash. She let the old dog set his own pace.

  Violet wondered how patience would register on the Intercept. Or maybe patience wasn’t an emotion. Maybe it was a behavior that just reflected an emotion.

  Patience.

  The word made her think of Marguerite Perey, the physicist from Old Earth whom the park was named for. Perey died three centuries ago, in the Old Earth country of France, but Violet had loved learning about her back in history class. After years of tedious, painstaking work, Perey discovered an element called francium—the last natural element
. There was less than an ounce of it in the crust of Old Earth, and it decayed in about twenty minutes, but it was real. And its existence was known only because Perey had been patient enough to find it.

  All at once, Violet’s ruminations on Perey came to a halt. She’d heard a snuffling sound.

  To her surprise, when she looked over at Shura she saw that her friend seemed to be … crying. She was doing it silently, except for that snuffle, but she was crying, all right. And as Violet peered closer, she noticed what she hadn’t noticed before—because she’d been so caught up in her own problems. This wasn’t the first time Shura had cried tonight. That’s why she’d pulled her hair forward. So that Violet couldn’t get a close look at her eyes and see how red and puffy they were.

  “Hey,” Violet said. “What’s going on?”

  “I wasn’t going to talk about it,” Shura said. “I didn’t want to bring it up, because you’re the one who called me. This is, like, your crisis. And so I didn’t want to—”

  “Tell me.” Violet’s voice was firm.

  “It’s my mother.”

  “Is she—is she sick or something?” Violet asked. She had to. But she was afraid to hear the answer, because she knew what it felt like to lose a parent.

  “No. It’s not that.” Shura swallowed hard. “You know what some people are saying, right? That somebody’s found a way to get past the Intercept? To escape it?”

  So here it was again. The rumor that wouldn’t go away.

  “Yeah,” Violet said. She tried to make her tone light, dismissive. “But people are always gossiping. You know that.”

  “This is different.” Shura’s face was grave. “My mother has been getting threats. And it may be related to the breach of the Intercept—or at least what people are saying might be a breach.” She needed a deep breath before she could go on. “I only know this stuff because I heard her talking to my dad about it. And it’s scary, Violet. Really scary. I can’t—” The tears started up again. Shura rubbed her eyes.

  “What does that have to do with your mom?”