vN The First Machine Dynasty(58)

"Everyone else has to use I-5," Ignacio explained. "Poor bastards."



Javier didn't answer him right away. He was busy staring at Junior. And Junior was busy staring at Amy. The patch – a method by which the bluescreen specialists overfed Javier, triggered his iterative cycle, and transfused a sample of his stemware into Junior – had worked beautifully. The baby was alive and awake and even sitting up under the tent shaped by their bodies and the blankets they hid under. Whenever they hit a seam in the asphalt, Javier's hand would dart out to keep his son's head from bumping into the back seat. His fingertips were raw bone, jagged and black as winter branches.



"Your hand," Amy said.



"It was a fan," Javier said. "In the ducts. Rookie mistake. Drink your electrolytes."



Léon turned around in his seat. He pointed out the window. "Dad, look."



Something terrible had happened to this place. Amy had studied it one night after being barred from watching a documentary on the subject – her dad said it would trigger her – but it was different up close. After the sudden drop of the Cascadia fault, giant sinkholes had opened up in the land parallel to I-5, swallowing train yards and viaducts and leaving the interstate to hang out in open space like ridges of bone under a thin animal's hide. Boxcars, concrete pillars, and trees sprouted from the water. In the distance, she saw the dark blurs of islands with blinking towers at the tip of each. Beyond those, in deeper water, she saw windmills. She counted three. The middle one, situated a little further out, drooped like a wilting daisy.



They drove the rest of the way listening to the museum radio station. It specialized in music from the Pacific Northwest, songs about the Cascadia quake, and occasional snippets of archival sound. This place was neither a city nor an exhibit, but something else entirely: part nature preserve, part historical conservation effort, part augmented map, part game, part resort. The dashboard display bristled with tabs linked to payonly overlays through which they could view the various districts of the museum: the Viaduct, SubSoDo, New Elliott Bay, Post Alley. The ads read "WEAR MORE LAYERS: CHOOSE YOUR HISTORY," or "SHAKE THINGS UP: SEE THE SEATTLE NO ONE SEES."



"We'll take you there, tomorrow," Gabriel said. "There's someone you should meet. A failsafe expert. His name is Daniel Sarton. He works for the museum, now, but he used to work at the reboot camp. We were going to take Junior to him, if the patch hadn't worked. But he's working with Rory, too. You know, the vN with the diet? Apparently they want to help you."





Amy didn't remember entering the concrete plant. She closed her eyes in the van, and woke up in the dusty dimness on a pallet build from sacks of unmixed concrete. She easily grasped the appeal of the place: the massive hills of sand outside gave the boys cover, and inside, the pallets and the huge steel rebar rafters above gave them plenty of spots from which to jump. They were all up there now, perched precariously but confidently, legs swinging and arms crossed. From her high pallet, Amy could hear most of what they said.



"We found Ignacio first," said Matteo. He was half of a pair of twins. Amy wasn't quite sure how that worked, but they claimed to have been iterated simultaneously and Javier didn't deny it. The other twin's name was Ricci. "It made sense to start with the oldest. If we found him, we could trace your path north, and find our other brothers along the way."



"We're still missing some, though," Ricci said. "But we'll find them."



Javier held his face in his hands. "You wanted to be together?"



The twins glanced at each other. "He and I don't just enjoy living together, we benefit from it. Why wouldn't the rest of us?"



Javier threw one hand in the air. The other clutched Junior. "Do you have any concept of how dangerous this whole thing is? I raised you smarter than this–"



"This from the guy running around with America's Most Wanted," Ignacio said.



Javier snapped his fingers at him. "When I want your opinion, I'll ask you for it."



Ignacio nodded down at Amy. She quickly shut her eyes. "Redmond was just doing a little pest control, and if you–"



"Pest control? Do you even know why your baby brother is alive, right now? Do you know what she did to save him? She–"



"She ate him," Gabriel said. "She ate him, Father. She's probably the reason he bluescreened. We've seen the footage. She probably consumed one of his core kernels along with his toes. Otherwise he wouldn't have needed the patch."



There was a long pause. Amy didn't open her eyes. The other Juniors were right. In trying to save their little brother she had doomed him, just like she had doomed her mother by trying to rescue her that night at graduation. It would have been better for everyone if she had done nothing. Javier and his children would be better off now if she just left. When her body had healed completely, she would. She'd seek out Rory's help on her own, or maybe not at all. Rory didn't need her kind of trouble any more than the others did.