Shattered Minds Read online

  He brings up the draft, a simple message saying there’s been a slight change of plans and to please see the attached flyer. Raf opens the attachment, which is sleek, professional and profoundly boring. It looks just like an older flyer for Alacrity, except it has some additional information about hovercar parking.

  ‘Ah,’ Dax says, understanding.

  ‘So simple, eh?’ Raf beams. ‘Sometimes old-school is best.’

  Charlie nods. ‘Hiding the virus in the flyer?’

  ‘Yup. The personnel files don’t have implant serial numbers, and I couldn’t find them another way. His assistant might open it first, and we get his access, but I’m betting he’ll forward it on, or Mitford will open it briefly anyway.’

  ‘I’m missing something,’ Carina says. ‘What does the virus actually do?’

  ‘It’ll lock onto Mitford’s implants,’ Raf says. ‘Connect back to the attacked infrastructure. Breaking it down even further: say Attacked System A – that’s Sudice – connects to Attacker Infrastrucure B. That’s us. We’ll also attack on System C and connect to B. B will broker connections to A and C, but on C we’ll use loads of relays so if they find B, we’re still safe from tracking. The hydra will stay in neural pathways in the implants that Wasps tend to overlook because they’re so chaotic anyway. So we can see everything Mitford’s accessing without Wasps being any the wiser. Hopefully we’ll get something we can use right away. If we’re unlucky, we’ll have to try this again with someone else in Sudice, until fortune favours us. Once we’re in, it’ll be easy to access sensitive information. Clever little virus.’

  ‘It’s pretty,’ Kivon says, giving his boyfriend a little smile, which Raf returns. Dax feels a weird thrum of jealousy – to be totally safe in the assurance that the other person loved you in return. He had that with his sister, in a non-romantic sense. He’s never had that belly-deep clench of being in love.

  ‘How does locking onto the implants work?’ Carina asks, forcing Dax to focus. ‘We wouldn’t be able to look through his implants for long. If we try to download all he’s seeing and hearing on the implants, it’s a lot to process. Even if it’s not quite brain recording, there’s a risk of the same side effects.’ Carina wouldn’t be able to download any of it herself, Dax knows. Her implants are stretched to the absolute limit whenever she unlocks one of the images, though she would never admit it to the others.

  ‘It’s going to a remote server and I’ve written an AI script to sift through it and forward on the relevant info.’

  ‘What if it misses something?’

  ‘It won’t,’ Raf says, a little shortly. ‘And even if it does, we can go in and sort through it manually. Time-consuming, but still works. OK, is that enough questions from everyone? Can I send the ping yet?’ He rocks on the balls of his feet, either a nervous tic or a gesture of excitement.

  ‘Let’s set your trap,’ Charlie says.

  There’s not much for the rest of the Trust to do. Kivon is on surveillance and Charlie, Dax and Carina are the audience.

  Raf’s code swirls around his head like a crown. He sends the email. Though it’s eight o’clock in the evening, the email is opened almost immediately by Mitford’s assistant, Gareth. The assistant spends all of three seconds reading it before forwarding it to his boss.

  ‘Bingo,’ Raf says.

  TWENTY SIX

  CARINA

  The Trust headquarters, Los Angeles, California, Pacifica

  Since resisting Zeal, Carina has become an early riser.

  She likes the quiet and stillness before the rest of the house awakens. Being alone is preferable, even if that means facing her tangled thoughts. At least she’s not constantly analysing the others, second-guessing what to say, how to act, to appear at least somewhat normal. She makes coffee in the replicator and watches the light change in the false windows, wishing it was easier to go outside. Breathing recycled air is growing old.

  Nettie Aldrich is a puzzle that keeps niggling at her, just as it does Dax. It’s a face to put to the many terrible things Sudice has done. If Carina focuses on Nettie, it’s easier than all the other things she has to concern herself with; the Trust leaving her, Sudice finding them, her own weaknesses.

  They’re all moving forward, barrelling into attacking Sudice thanks to Mark’s information in her head, and it feels like so much, so fast. Dax is worried about it – he told her about the time they were nearly caught, and then a little about his sister, Tam. Carina did more research on Tam on her own, looking at the information on her from the Rose. Dax doesn’t want to lose anyone else.

  Raf and Charlie are still wary of her, and when they met at the silo, Kivon gave her covert looks out of the corner of his eye. He’s gone back to his squad, slyly using police resources to see if Sudice have circled closer to them. Perhaps they no longer suspect her of being a double agent, or that Mark, or someone pretending to be Mark, planted bad information in her head. The Trust have checked everything multiple times. Carina is still tired of the whispers, the gazes shifting away from hers. She’s an addict: violent, a liability. They might be right.

  Carina brings up Nettie’s information again and searches ruthlessly through the proxy. After drinking three cups of nearly-caffeine-free coffee, she feels her eyes growing dry from staring at the wallscreen.

  When she finds something, she turns away, rubbing her eyes. She’s afraid to actually open it up and read it. Everything is on the precipice of change. She doesn’t want to be alone for this. The kitchen has brightened with the light of early dawn. Draining the last of her coffee, she goes to Dax’s door, pinging his implants.

  ‘Found something on Nettie, maybe. Thought you might want to see.’

  Dax opens the door. His eyes are red – has he slept?

  ‘What’d you find?’ he asks, following her to the kitchen and the wallscreen.

  ‘Deleted drafts of a diary entry.’

  ‘No shit.’ Dax gives a low whistle. There are three entries from a year ago, not long after Carina left Sudice. ‘How’d they miss them?’ he asks.

  ‘Nettie never published it, and they deleted the journal, but I found the drafts on an archive site. Knew someone, somewhere would be sloppy.’

  ‘Have you read them?’

  ‘Not yet. I thought . . . maybe we could read them together.’

  Dax makes himself a cup of coffee and sits down. His hair is still mussed from sleep, and he blinks sleepily, rumpled and handsome. Carina’s also dishevelled from too little sleep and running her impatient hands through her newly purple hair.

  Carina brings up the first draft. All it says is, ‘There’s so much.’

  Carina opens the second one, dated four days later. It’s a little longer:

  There’s so much I want to write and want to say. Everything I’ve wanted is coming together, so neatly I almost don’t trust it. I have a scholarship, but that’s just the beginning. They said I could join the project.

  ‘She never posted it?’ Dax asks.

  ‘No. I think she used the drafts as sort of a secret journal to herself. Probably couldn’t really talk about her work with Sudice publicly. Sure they made her sign umpteen nondisclosures. This is skirting close enough to almost break them.’ She remembers signing contract after contract, nondisclosure after nondisclosure, before they’d let her into the Sudice building for her first day of work. Little had she known what a bad idea it was to walk into that glass-lined foyer.

  ‘This is the last one.’ Nettie had deleted her earlier, upbeat draft. All the new draft says is:

  Maybe I should quit. Maybe this is all just a big mistake. It’s boring and strange. I don’t see the point of it. Every time I go, I say it’ll be the last time, but somehow it never is. I’ve been trying to find out what they’re up to, what the point of the project is, but I don’t even know where to start. Fuck this.

  ‘This is what, four days before Roz killed her?’ Dax asks.

  ‘Think so. So she knew something was wrong, whatever it w
as.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Dax lapses into silence, fingertips trailing around the edge of his coffee mug. They both stare at the last journal entry, lost in their thoughts. It’s strange for Carina to see Nettie’s personal entries. She’d seemed almost a figment, but this drove home that she was a scared, lost teenager, just like Carina had been a decade before her. Carina wonders what Dax thinks of Nettie. If he feels that same niggle that she does; that they’ve missed something that’s right in front of their faces. A way to stop the girl from being forgotten and erased. A sense that she is connected to something larger than they know.

  They’re interrupted by an excited Raf running through to the kitchen.

  ‘I got blueprints!’ he yells, darting back out and into the living room. He does a little happy dance, wriggling his butt. ‘Blueprints! Come on!’

  Carina dismisses Nettie’s journal entries, making sure to save copies. They go through to the living room. Charlie’s already there, crumpled and yawning.

  ‘OK, so Mitford is an early riser,’ Raf says. ‘Been watching him since we managed to piggyback, but he hasn’t been giving us much to work with, and I figured we wouldn’t get much today because he’s scheduled to play golf all day, then he has some meetings. Another day of looking busy with networking and shit, but really doing fuck all.’

  ‘I knew so many managers like that in my time at Sudice,’ Carina says.

  ‘I knew many in the government, and Kivon sees them in the force every day,’ Raf agrees.

  ‘Hospital and flesh parlour administration,’ Dax says.

  ‘University administration,’ Carina adds.

  ‘I grew up around them,’ Charlie says.

  ‘So we’re agreed. Everyone’s corrupt.’ Raf fiddles with the button on his pyjama top.

  From Charlie: ‘Amen.’

  ‘Tell us the good stuff,’ Carina prods.

  ‘OK. So yeah. Some architect asked for the blueprints of the LA headquarters today, as they’re going to do some structural changes to add more floating buildings. He sent them right over. So now I’ve got the layout of their internal server room. It’s all air-gapped, blocked off from the internet to keep it safe, but now we know where it is, how many servers there are. This is promising. We’ve got a good lug of information we could send out, but I still want to know what else is hiding in that cerebrum.’ He points at Carina’s head. She blinks at him in response.

  ‘We’ll upload it all to the server and blast it,’ Raf continues. ‘Inside Sudice there’s still the firewalls, but with internal to internal transfer, we can connect to infrastructure outside and relay the information. We’ll be able to get it worldwide before they know what we’ve done. Except there’s one problem.’

  ‘What?’ Charlie asks.

  ‘It’s basically impossible to get to the servers. More locked doors between the outside and that room than the vault of the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Than the Bank of Pacifica. Than—’

  ‘We get the idea,’ Dax interrupts.

  Raf glares at him. ‘There’s robotic security guards, plus AI Wasps watching every interface. But that’s what we can work on next. This gives us a start.’

  ‘And you haven’t unlocked anything else?’ Charlie asks Carina, almost gently.

  ‘No. I’ve been trying to sort through memories, but so far nothing since the Thorn.’ The left corner of Carina’s mouth dips. Dax catches it. It’s a tell, kept over despite the plastic surgery. She does it when she’s lying – she hasn’t truly been trying to unlock the information. That makes sense; it means going back to memories best left forgotten. ‘Mark hinted that they’d unlock at specific times, but this is a longer gap than the first three.’

  Carina is disappointing them. It’s all over their faces. She shouldn’t care. A year ago, she wouldn’t have. Now guilt twists at her. It’s hard to keep this new frayed life together. She’s spent a year away from the actual business of living. That diamond-hard exterior helped her appear to be all right, but inside she feels just as flawed as ever.

  ‘Well, while you have fun with that, I’ll keep watching Mitford’s implants, maybe use them to insert another Viper within Sudice’s servers,’ Raf says. ‘Might be able to get a wider reach, but I’m still a bit nervous the Wasps might sting me for it, even though they didn’t with the first one. Might help me get some of the passcodes, or something else we can use even if Carina doesn’t unlock any more images. If I put it in, I’ll do it from the silo again, just to be safe. Should I plan for that?’

  Charlie and Dax ask him more technical questions, which Carina has trouble following. Dax takes stock of supplies they need – both for the upcoming heist and for life in an underground car park turned secret bunker – and discusses logistics with Charlie once Raf finishes explaining their plan of action. Carina watches them, feeling useless.

  TWENTY SEVEN

  CARINA

  The Trust headquarters, Los Angeles, California, Pacifica

  Raf has planned his next attack. It’s time to send the Viper back to the nest.

  As the Trust prepare to return to the Long Beach silo, Carina locks herself in her room. There are two images left from Mark’s unexpected gift. Two sections of information she wants out of her head. If they’re gone, the Trust won’t need her any more, not really. She has nothing to contribute. Her neuroscience skills are out of date and her hands still shake sometimes, even now that the Zeal habit has been kicked, or at least temporarily suspended. Once they have what they need, she doesn’t have to look back.

  Carina can fall. Fall back into Zeal, to her world of blood and death. She can forget this brief return to reality. There’s nothing here but a group of hackers who don’t trust her. Dax is the only one who truly interacts with her, and Carina sometimes feels he only thinks she’s an interesting case from a doctor’s point of view. The rest of them hang back, watching her like a feral dog with a rabid bite. How much do they know about her Zeal dreams? It makes her want to prove them right.

  The urge to kill has not left her. It’s burrowed so deep that no amount of surgery or abstinence from Zeal will be able to take it away. She’s a killer, and has been for a long time.

  Carina shuffles through the memories like ragged playing cards, trying to find the two jokers, those hidden wild cards that will set her free.

  So many memories don’t seem like hers. Once she moved to San Francisco, she actively stopped herself from thinking of her life in Woodside. Life began when she returned to Sudice. After cordoning the memories off for so long, actively reaching for them is strange. Once, she climbed to the top of her school, looked down on the people walking to their brainloading Chairs within, and wondered what it’d be like to jump, spread her wings wide, and pretend she’d fly instead of sink like a stone.

  Carina keeps searching through the memories, hunting for the key. None of the memories give her what she wants. Everything’s a jumble. The friendships she abandoned once Roz sunk her fingers into her brain. Brief blips of happiness in a childhood tainted by the acrid tang of fear. Standing up to receive the diploma for her PhD, knowing there was no one in the audience clapping for her. Learning she’d be going back to Sudice, unable to fully feel the import of what it meant to return to the place that had destroyed her.

  A ping interrupts her. Dax is at the door. Carina comes out of her fuzzy, fractured memories. She opens the door and raises her dry eyes to his calm brown ones.

  ‘You coming?’ he asks, holding out his hand.

  She stands unsteadily, reaches out and takes it.

  As the Trust set up their gear in the silo in Long Beach, Raf dances a little jig in the middle of the room.

  ‘I am a magician, and this –’ he gives a dramatic gesture – ‘is my stage!’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, let’s get on with sawing Sudice in half, then,’ Charlie says, but she smiles at his enthusiasm.

  Kivon is back, and Carina still doesn’t know what to make of him. He more or less acts like she doesn’t exist, which suits her wel
l enough. He helps Raf set up the kit – location blockers, White Noises, electrodes to attach to their temples for VR access so the rest of the Trust can go in and protect Raf from Wasps. Alarms to sound if anyone gets close enough in the real world to worry them. DNA bombs for when they leave. They’re surrounded by metal, like some sort of technological fairy ring.

  Carina clicks her teeth together. At least if she doesn’t manage to unlock the rest of the crap in her head, if Raf finds enough to take on Sudice another way, then what does it matter?

  Kivon stays as the bodyguard. Carina eyes his belt, bristling with weapons, the muscled, agile body. He looks like a cop. Strong, intimidating, but his face is not cruel. It’s approachable. It’s the face of someone you’d run to for protection.

  He meets her gaze, stares at her, deep and piercing, unblinking. I’m watching you, he seems to say.

  I’m watching you, too, she wants to reply.

  ‘You should stay out with Kivon,’ Dax says.

  She’s about to ask why, play innocent, but she doesn’t bother.

  They need the tiniest bit of Zeal to prep the implants for VR. She’s been dreaming about it all day. She can almost taste it.

  ‘I can handle the dose.’ Carina keeps her voice calm and steady. ‘It’s less than one tenth of what I used to take.’

  ‘It could still trigger a relapse. And you know what we discussed.’

  ‘It’s worth it. I want to see what’s happening. I want to help.’ They all think she’s a liability, but she can’t sit meekly on the sidelines.

  ‘Fine, but I’ll be detoxing you again right away.’

  ‘Deal.’ Her heartbeat quickens with anticipation. She thought Dax would put up more of a fight about this.

  Carina hasn’t spent much time in virtual reality. The few times she tried, it seemed like a pale echo of Zeal. At Sudice and during university, VR was used for aspects of her work – brain-mapping and other neuroscience. Even then, it’d made her itchy. She should stay out – it’s not like she’ll be able to do much in the VR if they are attacked.