Crossover (3 page)

It saw the jump, he
thought. It knew what I was – and decided to let me go.

He listened as the Taur
stomped away through the corridors of the building. Then he
clambered to his feet and returned to the window. The two
cockroaches lay unconscious beside the razor wire. Two was nowhere
to be seen.

Yes,
Six thought.
Much
smarter than I realised.

'Everything?' Six
repeated.

Kyntak nodded.

'Everything,' Six said
again.

'That's what I
said.'

They were in Kyntak's
office at the Deck, hundreds of metres below street level. Kyntak
sat in one of four swivel-chairs, his feet resting on another. Six
remained standing, as usual. Years of unexpected flights from
sudden dangers had left him feeling vulnerable whenever he was
seated.

The
office was decorated according to Kyntak's unusual sense of humour.
A tattered poster read
You don't have to
be crazy to work here, but it helps to have a rocket
launcher.
Most Deck agents mounted old
photographs of landscapes on their walls to take their minds off
the fact that they were underground, but Kyntak had hung a picture
of tightly packed dirt instead.

Six still wasn't sure
he understood. 'Hoth Amet wanted to make an index of
everything.'

'That's right.'

'Every place, every
person–'

'Every book ever
written, every advertisement ever broadcast, every sentence ever
typed,' Kyntak said. 'Everything.'

'Why?'

'Some people said he
was trying to make a point about the information age. Others
thought he was just crazy. I suspect we'll never know.'

'But the index of
everything already exists,' Six said. 'It's called the
internet.'

'You're only sixteen,
so I'll forgive that remark–'

'We're twins.'

'–but Amet's index was
way, way bigger than the internet,' Kyntak said, ignoring him. 'It
covered all aspects of everyday life, including–'

'Wait. He actually did
it?'

'Yep. He programmed
what might be the most successful computer virus in history, which
turned more than ninety-four per cent of the world's electronics
into 24-hour recording devices. He was able to catalogue almost
everything which was transmitted through cyberspace, anything which
went near a camera lens and every word spoken within range of a
phone. No-one even noticed what he'd done until the early 20th
century.'

'The early–' Six broke
off. 'So this guy's been dead a long, long time.'

'Oh, yes. He was
assassinated in 2029. Several governments still existed then, all
with secrets to keep, so any one of them could have been
responsible. But no-one ever found the server farm which hosted the
index itself.'

He looked at Six
expectantly. Six said nothing.

'Until now,' Kyntak
added dramatically, not bothered by his brother's lack of
input.

'So where is it?'

'A fallout shelter in
the City North East.'

'Who found it?'

'No-one. It switched
itself on. We detected it when it tried to index our employee
database.'

Six exhaled. 'So you
want me to go out there and destroy it?'

'Destroy it?' Kyntak
looked horrified. 'It's an important historical artifact! Just
disconnect it from the internet before ChaoSonic finds it. We don't
want them to know what it knows.'

'Which is?'

Kyntak smiled.
'Everything.'

* * *

It didn't look like a
fallout shelter. The crumbling walls were dotted with holes. The
gate had rusted away to almost nothing. It looked like the ruins of
a toilet block, an artefact from when the City still had trees and
camping grounds.

Irradiated dust swirled
in the headlights. Six pulled up the handbrake and shut off the
engine. If he was in the wrong place, he would know soon
enough.

The silence was
overwhelming. As crowded as it was, the City still had deserted
spots, usually because of a bad smell – or, in this case, the
half-life from a long forgotten nuclear test.

Six got out of the car,
closed the door, and moved quickly toward the shelter. The index
had probably tried to break into the systems of various other
organisations. There was always a risk that someone else might show
up. He had to move fast.

The gate screamed as he
pulled it open. A startled rat darted between Six's feet and
scuttled away into the fog. He hesitated for a moment, but heard no
other movement. So he slipped through the gap and crept down the
concrete steps toward the shelter.

A titanium door stood
at the bottom of the staircase. It looked thicker than Six had
expected. He hoped there was enough gas in his cutting torch to
slice through it.

But when he got closer,
he realised that he wouldn't even need the torch. The bolts weren't
engaged. He gripped the handle and heaved, dragging the door open
centimetre by centimetre.

The darkness loomed
before him. He could hear hundreds of tiny fans whirring, keeping
the servers cool. The building wasn't connected to the power grid,
so he could only assume that a reserve battery had somehow kicked
in. If he waited long enough, the index would probably switch
itself off.

But he didn't want to
give ChaoSonic the chance to find it. So he crept forwards, eyes
adjusting to the blackness–

Click.
A harsh neon glare filled the
room. Six ducked, looking for the motion sensor which had triggered
the lights. There could be an alarm, he thought. I have to shut it
down.

He didn't see a sensor
or an alarm panel. Instead, he saw row after row of server towers,
connected to the concrete ceiling by a coloured web of cables. And
he saw the person standing in the shadows – but not before she saw
him.

Two barbs punched
through his clothes and dug into his skin. He didn't have time to
feel pain. Suddenly his limbs were shivering, his fists clenched,
his teeth rattling in his mouth as thousands of volts ran up the
wires and darted through his body.

He couldn't move as the
woman approached him. He couldn't avoid the approaching syringe. He
couldn't even widen his eyes as he recognised her.

'Agent Six,' Soren Byre
said. 'You're right on time.'

The syringe plunged
into his neck. Everything went black.

* * *

When he woke, the cuffs
were so tight around his wrists that his hands had swollen up. His
ankles were chained. He couldn't lift his head to look at the
restraints – a metal band around his forehead held his skull to the
operating table – but they felt strong. He wouldn't be able to
break free.

The ceiling was made of
pockmarked concrete. He could still hear the servers running, so he
hadn't left the fallout shelter. How long had he been unconscious?
Long enough for Kyntak to come looking for him?

Soren
Byre's face floated into view above him. 'You were right,' she
said. 'I
did
need
ununoctium.'

Six stared at her as
though her presence were an astonishing magic trick. There was no
sign of scarring on her face. 'How did you survive?'

Byre scoffed. 'You
should know better,' she said. 'We were trained by the same people.
It takes more than a collapsing building to kill me.'

'I watched you die,'
Six insisted.

'It doesn't matter what
you saw, or what you think you saw. What matters is that the
machine has been rebuilt. My work can continue, and this time, you
won't be able to screw it up.'

'Byre,' Six said. 'Time
travel is impossible.'

'Just because we can
only perceive one moment at a time, that doesn't mean that the past
is gone. Every particle in your body is entangled with every other
object that has ever existed or will ever exist in the
universe–'

'Listen to me. If you
try to send yourself back in time–'

'Myself?' Byre smiled.
'I'm sending you.'

'
Me?
' Six's
heart accelerated in his chest.
'Why?'

'Because I know the
machine will work, but I can't calibrate it without a test subject.
I don't know if it will send me back ten seconds, or a hundred
years. And you owe me, after making such a mess last time.'

'You'll kill us both,'
Six said. 'The machine won't work.'

'It will, now that I
have the ununoctium. Thank you for the suggestion, by the way.'

'The last stockpile of
that element disappeared a long, long time ago,' Six said. 'I don't
know what you have, but it's not ununoctium.'

'You think I tracked
down Hoth Amet's index of everything just so I could hack into the
Deck and lure you here?' Byre smirked. 'No. I used it to locate the
missing stockpile. And once I've sent you into the past, I'll use
it to determine when and where you showed up, and whether or not
you survived the journey through spacetime.'

She pressed a cylinder
into one of Six's hands. By the time he realised what she was
doing, she was already duct-taping it to his palm. He kept his
other fist squeezed shut, but she just taped the second cylinder to
the back of his hand. Apparently it didn't matter which part of his
skin the machine touched.

'You'll cause a massive
explosion,' Six cried. 'You'll die before you get the chance to see
if it worked.'

Byre shook her head. 'I
fixed that bug. You're not going to explode. Like I said, using
ununoctium was a really good idea. It solved all sorts of
problems.'

She left Six's field of
vision. Her footsteps became more distant.

'Where are you going?'
he demanded.

'Okay,' she called. 'You caught me. I'm only
ninety-nine
per cent sure
you won't explode.'

A heavy door creaked
open, then slammed closed. Six heard an electric lock engage.

'Byre,' he yelled.
'Byre!'

There was no reply.

Something hummed and
whirred beneath Six. The electromagnet. He struggled against his
bonds, but they were too firmly fastened. Even the duct tape around
his hands was painfully tight. He couldn't shake off the
cylinders.

The humming was getting
louder. Six threw his body sideways, hoping to tip over the table.
But he could tell from the sound that it was bolted to the
floor.

'Byre!' he screamed.
'You can't–'

A deafening roar filled
the air. The lights went out. A sickening dizziness flooded through
Six, and suddenly he felt himself spinning down, down, down into
the icy darkness of a bottomless pit.

'So you're telling me,'
Benjamin said, 'that you can't play the drums at all.'

Ash
gritted her teeth. 'I wasn't supposed to have to. Tognetti was
supposed to be on
before
me.'

'Then what were all
those lessons for?'

She was about to reply
when the stage door swung open. Applause echoed through the halls
of the conservatorium. A man with an earpiece and a lanyard leaned
through the gap. 'You'll be on in two minutes, Miss Burnett.'

Ash tried to look
confident and aloof. 'Thank you.'

The man disappeared and
the stage door swung shut, muffling the claps and whistles of the
audience. Ash put the phone back to her ear.

'What am I going to
do?' she hissed.

Benjamin sounded
amused. 'My guess is, you're going to go out on stage and play the
drums.'

'But I don't know
how!'

'Then do what you do
best,' Benjamin said. 'Fake it.'

'Thanks. You've been
really
helpful.'

'Any time.'

Ash looked up at the
TV, which displayed footage from inside the auditorium. Her drum
kit had been set up by the backstage crew. The master of ceremonies
was speaking from behind a podium. Ash guessed he was introducing
her.

The stagehand opened
the door again and beckoned silently. Ash followed him into the
wings, dread curdling in her guts.

From her spot behind
the thick velvet curtains, she could see the stage but not the
audience. The drum kit gleamed, alone in the centre of the
stage.

The
master of ceremonies' voice boomed through the auditorium.
'...headlined at the Tokyo International Arts Festival,' he was
saying, 'featured at the Sunset Celebration of Percussion and named
best new female artist at the New Jersey Soloist Music Awards –
please join me in welcoming to the stage
Daniella Burnett!
'

The audience started
clapping.

Ash looked back at the
stagehand. He made a shooing gesture. 'Go!'

She walked out onto the
stage. A spotlight fixed upon her as soon as she emerged from
behind the curtain. She walked out to the drum kit, trying to look
like she knew what she was doing.

She sat down on the
foam rubber stool and looked out at the audience. A sea of
expectant faces stared back at her.

Ashley's eyes widened.
There must be a thousand people in here, she thought.

The drum sticks rested
on the largest tom. She picked them up and twirled them in her
fingers. A hush fell over the crowd.

From the three lessons
she had taken, Ash knew how to produce a rock beat and a swing
waltz. But she wasn't very good at either of those things, and if
she attempted them now, she would surely be exposed as an
amateur.

She raised one of the
sticks high in the air.