Chapter Twenty-SevenGuns

The pipe was lit for nineteen hours before anyone came.

Marsh's forty-eight hours had run out the afternoon before and nothing had happened. No black car, no FBI, no phone call. They had understood why when the pipe lit up. He was waiting to see.

Gideon watched it from the RV, which was back in the lot behind the hardware store with the generator going, because The Lab was the one place he couldn't be. He had a single screen and a single number on it. The number was how much the box was saying to the world, and it was a lot, more than a lot. Teo had said it needed to look like something worth taking, and it looked like a company that had lost its mind. Gideon sat and watched it and drank coffee and didn't sleep and thought about a bowl of cereal.

"They're waiting," said Priya, at hour twelve.

"They're making sure."

"Of what?"

"That it's her. That it's all of her. That we're not going to move it." He rubbed his eyes. "He's a hacker. He's watching something he's wanted for five years talk to the whole internet from a basement in Oakland, and he's dying, and he's still waiting to be sure. I'd almost respect it."

At hour nineteen, at eleven o'clock at night, the number stopped.

It didn't drop. It stopped. The pipe went from the loudest thing in the East Bay to nothing in about a second. That was the plan, and that was Richard's hand on the panel in The Lab, pulling the fiber the moment three cars turned onto the street. Gideon looked at the zero for a moment. Then he picked up the burner phone Rat had bought him and sent the one word they had agreed on. Rain.

There was a night guard at the front desk of Solenoid Experiential Games. His name was Hector, and he had worked there for eight years. At six that evening Richard Lee himself had told him that some men might come by tonight with badges, and that he should be polite and slow.

He was polite and slow. He looked at Kessler's leather folder for a long time, longer than most people did. He said he would need to call somebody. He called the wrong somebody, and then he called the right somebody, who didn't pick up. Then he said he was very sorry, but he couldn't let anyone past the lobby without a signature from a vice president. Did they know which vice president? There were several.

"Hector," said Kessler, reading the name off the badge, still pleasant. "There's something going on in the basement of this building that you don't know about, and I'd like to keep it that way for your sake. Open the door."

"I'd like to, sir. I don't have the key for the basement. Nobody does but Mr. Lee."

"Then call Mr. Lee."

"I did. He's not picking up."

Kessler looked at him. There were six men behind Kessler. One of them was Ruiz, and the other five were the kind of men who stood in a lobby with their hands folded in front of them. Hector had been in the Marines, and he knew exactly what kind of men they were and what was under the windbreakers. He stood there anyway, polite and slow, for eleven more minutes. Then Kessler nodded to one of the five, and the man walked over to the door to the stairwell and did something to it, and it opened.

"Thank you, Hector," said Kessler. "Go home."

Hector didn't go home. He went back to the front desk and sat down and picked up the phone and called the police. He had been told that he could do that at his own discretion. He told them that a group of men had entered the building without authorization and gave them the address. Then he sat and waited to see what would happen first.

Three floors down, behind two doors that needed Richard's hand and one that needed Max's, they heard it coming.

The first door held for four minutes and the second held for two. By the third, the one with Max's hand on it, they had stopped bothering with subtlety. It came in off its hinges with a sound like a car hitting a car. Ruiz came through first, with something in his hand that was not a badge. Then the five. Then Kessler, unhurried, in his good boots.

The Lab was very bright, because Max had turned every light on. The tank was against the far wall with its cables and its machines and the boy in it. Richard stood in front of it with his arms crossed and Max stood beside him. Soph was where she always was, on the floor with her back to the wall. She had been told twice to move and hadn't. The box was in the middle of the room on its dolly, with the hacked frames on a stand beside it, dark now, and the fiber panel behind it with a cable hanging out of it, unplugged.

In the corner, on a folding chair, sat a tall wiry woman with a gray helmet on and a cable running down into a rig in her lap. Her eyes were closed and her hands were loose and she wasn't moving. Nobody had told her to move, because nobody but two people in the room knew what she was doing there.

"Richard Lee," said Kessler.

"That's me."

"You know who I am."

"I know who you say you are."

Kessler smiled the doorway smile. "Then let's skip that part. You've got something down here that you shouldn't have. Several somethings. I'm going to take one of them and leave the other, and you're going to let me. Mr. Marsh made you an offer, and you didn't say yes, and Mr. Marsh has decided that if you won't sell, he'll hold something you'll want to buy back. He'd still like the door. Now he's got something to trade for it."

"You're not NSA," said Soph, from the floor.

Kessler looked at her as though a piece of furniture had spoken.

"You punks work for Sentek," said Soph. "You've got a boss with a blood disease and a net that's been eating a person for a month, and you walked into my friend's house with a fake badge, and you've got the wrong shoes."

"The wrong shoes."

"Feds wear cheap shoes. Everyone knows that."

Kessler looked down at his boots, and for a second he looked honestly delighted.

"You've done your research," he said. "Good. That's good. I'd have been disappointed otherwise, given who your mother is." He looked at Max, and Max looked back at him with the face she used for numbers. "Let me tell you what your research doesn't change. We can still take it. All of it. You're harboring an illegal entity. You've got a kid jacked in like the Matrix in a tank that no medical board in the country has ever heard of. And we've got guns." He said the last part with real regret, like a man mentioning the weather. "I'm not going to use them. I've never had to. But they're in the room, and I'd like everyone to know they're in the room, so that the rest of this goes quickly. Ruiz."

Ruiz went to the box.

He put a hand on it. He had a small device in the other hand, and he held it against the side of the box and looked at it. Then he looked at Kessler and nodded once. It was the same nod from Gideon's spare room, a man confirming something he had been sent to confirm.

"That's her," said Ruiz.

"All of her?"

"Enough of her. It's warm. It's thinking. It's the shape."

"Then we're done." Kessler turned to Richard. "This is the part where you say something. You've been standing there with your arms crossed like a man who's going to say something. Go ahead."

Richard didn't uncross his arms.

"You tell him," he said. "Marsh. You tell him I heard what he said about me. About us being the same. You tell him he's right, and that I've been sick about it for two days, and that it doesn't change anything, because the thing you're wheeling out of my basement was never for sale, and neither is the thing behind me." He looked at Ruiz, at the hand on the box. "And you tell him she said yes. The one in there. She was asked. Nobody asked Isis. Somebody asked her."

Kessler looked at him for a moment, and his expression was hard to read.

"I'll tell him," he said.

Two of the five took the dolly. The box was heavy, and it went across the floor with a sound like something that didn't want to go, and they got it to the broken door and through it. Kessler watched it go and then turned back to the room. He was almost done, almost gone, almost the story that ended with a box on a truck.

Then the sixth man put his hand on the tank.

He did it the way a man does when he has stood at the back of a room for ten minutes with nothing to do and has finally found something interesting. He walked over to the chamber and put his hand flat on the glass, next to the boy's face, and leaned in and looked. He said, to nobody in particular, "Jesus. It's really a kid."

"Get away from that," said Max.

"It's just glass."

"Get your hand off my son," said Richard. He didn't say it loudly. The man looked at him and didn't move his hand, and something about the way he didn't move it made Ruiz take a step toward the tank too. Kessler said, "Leave it." The man said, "Dale, look at this, though." Soph saw what was about to happen the way you see a truck at an intersection.

"Atom," said Rat, from the corner, with her eyes still closed. "Take it."

Nobody but two people in the room knew what that meant. Richard didn't. Max didn't. Soph didn't, and she was the one who saw it happen, because she was looking at the corner when the tall woman on the folding chair stopped breathing one way and started breathing another.

Eliza had known. It was the third part of the plan, the part the RV didn't know about and the butcher paper didn't have on it and Richard's handwriting had never touched. Two nights before the copy, on the laptop, alone in The Lab at three in the morning with Rat, who didn't sleep either, Eliza had said, I need to ask you something I've got no right to ask. Rat had listened, and she had said no, and an hour later she had said yes. And the night in the cottage with the cold kettle, after the talk about Richard and Lauren and liking yourself, Eliza had reached across the too-big table and put her hand on Atom's. In that place, touching meant something else. She had taught him the trick the way she had taught the serving boy to look, not through a Link, since there was no Link in a cottage, but the way one piece of code teaches another. She had given him the one thing she had sworn she never wanted to be able to do again, so that somebody who could stand up would be able to.

If it goes wrong, she'd said, somebody needs to be able to stand up.

Rat's body stood up.

It stood up the way the tavern boy had stood in the snow, badly, like someone on a boat. Then it stopped standing badly. This was not a boy who had never used a body. This was someone who had used one for sixteen years and had been thinking about it every day for two more. The helmet stayed on. The cable ran down into the rig in the pocket of her coat. She walked six steps across the bright room, past the broken door and past Ruiz and past the five, and they didn't stop her, because nobody had told them she was anything. She went and stood between the sixth man and the tank, with her back to the glass and the boy's face behind her shoulder, and looked at him.

The man took his hand off the glass.

Then she looked past him, at Richard, and her face did something that wasn't any expression Rat had. Richard saw it. Soph saw Richard see it. Richard's arms came uncrossed.

"Hi, Dad," said Atom.

It was Rat's voice, Rat's worked-on voice, higher than it looked like it should be and careful. It was wrong, and it was him. Nobody in the room who had ever heard Adam Lee say two words together could have mistaken it. It was the way he leaned on the second word. It was the way he said it like the bad news was coming next.

Richard didn't move. He didn't seem able to.

"Okay," said Atom. "Okay. So. This is Rat, and she said I could, and I'm going to give her back in a minute, so nobody freak out." He looked at the sixth man, who had backed up a step. "That's me. In there. I know how it looks. It looks like a thing in a jar. But it's me, it's a kid, you said so yourself, and I'd like you to not touch it, because it's the only one I've got, and I only just got hands." He held them up. Rat's hands, long, callused from an axe. He looked at them himself for a second, as if he hadn't expected to be able to. "These aren't mine. I'm borrowing them. But I can feel them. I can feel the floor. I can feel that it's cold in here. Dad, why is it so cold in here, you keep it like a fridge." His voice cracked on it, Rat's voice. He stopped and swallowed, and Soph watched a body she had known for a week swallow the way Atom did, with his whole throat.

"Two years," said Atom. "That's the first thing I've said with a mouth in two years. I'd like it to have been better."

He turned to Kessler.

Kessler hadn't moved either. He was standing by the broken door with his hand at his side, and there was a gun in it now, pointed at the floor. Soph hadn't seen him draw it and didn't think he had meant to.

"You've got what you came for," said Atom. "She's on the dolly. She said yes. You heard him. Take her and go. And tell your boss that I heard what he said too, about me living eight hundred years, and that I'd trade every one of them for ten minutes of this." He put a hand flat against the glass behind him without looking, the way his father had. "But it isn't for sale. So you're going to have to go through me. And I'd like you to think about how that sounds. When you explain it. A man with a gun, and a girl in a helmet, and you shot her because a kid in a tank asked you not to touch the tank."

Kessler looked at him.

He would think about it afterward, on the drive south, in the dark, with the box in the truck behind him and Ruiz asleep in the passenger seat, and he wouldn't be able to explain it to himself. He had stood in a lot of rooms, and in rooms with worse than this in them. He had been pointed at and lied to and once, in a country he didn't name, shot. None of that was it. The gun had nothing to do with it. He had never intended to use it. The police had nothing to do with it either, though he could hear them now, faintly, three floors up. The job was done. What got to him was the voice. A boy's voice coming out of a woman's mouth saying hi, Dad, in a basement, and a man with his arms uncrossed who hadn't been able to move. Kessler had had a father too, once. He had said things to him too late. He had put the gun away before he had finished thinking any of that.

"We've got what we came for," he said. "Ruiz. Everybody. Out."

They went. The sixth man went first and fastest. Ruiz looked back once from the broken door at the woman with her back to the tank and the thing in her face that wasn't her, and then he was gone. Kessler was the last, and at the door he stopped.

"For what it's worth," he said, to Richard, "I'd have done what you did."

"Everyone keeps saying that."

"Everyone's right." He went up the stairs. Somewhere above them a door opened and a voice said police, and Kessler's voice said something pleasant and unhurried back, and there was a leather folder, presumably, held up for exactly as long as it took. Then there was nothing.

Soph called Gideon. It was the one call they had agreed on, on the one phone, with the one question. She made it from the floor with her back against the wall, because her legs weren't going to hold her.

"Did they buy it?"

"Yeah." Gideon's voice was very far away. "Yeah. Ruiz put a reader on it, right? Told him it was her?"

"Yeah."

"Then they bought it. It was her. It was always going to be her. That was the point." He waited a second. "Is everyone okay? Is Rat."

"Hang on."

Rat was still standing with her back to the tank. She hadn't moved since the door. Richard had crossed the room and was standing in front of her, close, not touching her, looking at her face and at what was in it. Neither of them had said anything.

"Dad," said Atom.

"I'm here."

"I'm going to give it back now. I said I would. It's hers."

"I know."

"I just." The hands, Rat's hands, came up and then went down again. "I wanted to. I don't know. I wanted to stand here for a second. Where you could see me. Not on the frames. Not in the corner of somebody's eye. Just here."

"I see you," said Richard.

"Okay."

"Adam. I see you. I've seen you every day. I stand at that glass every night after everyone's gone and I don't tell anyone, and Max knows anyway." His voice wasn't steady. "I saw you. Give her back."

"Okay," said Atom, and closed Rat's eyes. Rat's body went loose, and Richard caught it before it hit the floor. Max was there too, and between them they got her onto the folding chair. Max's hands went to the helmet and stopped, and waited. Max said, "Rat. Rat. Are you there?" The eyes opened, and they were hers.

"I'm here," said Rat, in her own voice, higher than it looked, careful. "I'm fine. Everybody stop making that face. I said yes." She looked around the bright room, at the broken door, at the place where the box had been. "Did it work?"

"It worked."

"Good." She put a hand up and felt the helmet on her head and left it there. She looked at Richard, who was still crouched in front of her with his hands out, as though she might fall again. "He said hi to you. I heard it. I was in the back, kind of. Like a room with the door open. He said hi and then he said the thing about it being cold. I want you to know I heard it, because he's going to tell you it wasn't that good, and it was."

Richard put his face in his hands.

Atom was on the frames afterward. Soph had them. She had gone to the table and picked them up and put them on, and he was there, in the corner of her eye, in the tunic. He wasn't saying anything. She could see that he was shaking. That wasn't possible, since shaking was a thing a body did and he didn't have one, and she watched him do it anyway.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey."

"You okay?"

"No. Yes. I don't know. I can feel the floor. I can still feel it. I can feel her hands. I don't have hands and I can feel where they were." His voice through the frames was the level one, and it wasn't level. "It's a good body, Soph. It's a really good body. It's tall and it's strong and it's got calluses and it hurts in the left knee a little, and it was cold, God, it was so cold, and I stood there and I thought, this is it, this is what I've been missing, this is the whole thing. And I gave it back. And I'd do it again. But I'd like to just shake, for a minute. If that's okay."

"That's okay."

"Is she alright?"

Soph looked over at Rat, on the folding chair, with Max crouched in front of her and Richard beside her and the helmet still on. Rat was telling both of them, flatly, to stop.

"She's telling my mother off."

"Good." He was quiet for a moment. "It's a good body," he said again, quieter. "It's hers. Tell her I said so. Tell her thank you. I'll tell her myself, but tell her now. Tell her it's hers, and I know it, and I gave it back, and I'd like her to know that the whole time I was in it I knew whose it was."

"I'll tell her."

"Okay." The shaking didn't stop. She didn't think it would for a while. "Soph."

"Yeah."

"He saw me."

"Yeah," said Soph. "He did."