One of the government officials moved to take the microphone from Elliot, but then Elliot did the astonishing—he unlatched a door in the missileproof wall and slipped out to stand in front of it. None of the CEOs behind him dared to do something like that. They shoved the glass barrier closed immediately. Elliot stood before the crowd, defenseless, microphone in hand.
“What you saw tonight was me registering my formal objection to this situation,” Elliot said. “That’s why I destroyed those skyboards.”
A roar of approval swelled from the crowd. Tom knew the sound techs could’ve cut off Elliot’s microphone by now if they’d wanted to, and they’d probably been told to do it. Maybe they had no real motivation to make Elliot stop either.
“In fact,” Elliot went on, “this is my last act as an Intrasolar Combatant. I believe this is the proper moment to tender my resignation to the military. A friend told me once that compromise with someone who won’t give an inch in return, well, that’s no different than surrendering to them. My friend was right.”
Tom’s jaw dropped.
“The truth is,” Elliot said, “I’ve surrendered for too long, and today I’m through.” He turned slightly to address the Indo-American CEOs while still facing the crowd, ever the showman. “Thanks for everything, ladies, gentlemen, but associating with you any longer would tarnish me. If you don’t like that—” he waved to the roaring crowd “—take it up with my friends here.”
And with that, Elliot jumped right into the crowd, into the protection of fifty thousand people and straight out of the Coalition’s control.
Even as the White House press secretary hurried forward with another microphone and tried to calm the crowd, the roar of approval for Elliot drowned out her voice. It was like the crowd had become a single, living beast that utterly overwhelmed the most influential power players standing on the stage.
As the scene unfolded, the screen cut out. Tom squinted until he made out the Coalition CEOs, tiny figures cowering behind their shelter of protective glass, and below them, Elliot Ramirez borne by a ring of supporters like a massive tidal wave. Tom could see unmanned drones soaring in from the distance. At the periphery of the crowd, he glimpsed riot cops preparing microwave weapons to disperse the mass of people, and automated patrollers powering up, ready to deploy tear gas. The men and women on the stage were already being hustled away for their own protection.
For a moment, with the crowd stirring about him, and the CEOs fleeing, Tom felt like he was back on the suborbital, gazing down at the planet and perceiving just how tiny one human being was—even these men. For all their power and influence, the executives on that stage were as fragile and easily ruptured as any other human being.
And he realized that General Marsh had only been half right. The security state was tightening its grip on their throats, but there was one thing driving it: fear. The oligarchs were deathly afraid. They’d snared the rest of their species in a trap of security and surveillance because that was the only way to protect themselves from the natural consequences of seizing everything and reducing the vast majority of people to bare subsistence. They’d doomed themselves with their greed, and all these measures, all these riot cops, all the isolated fortresses like Epicenter’s Tower or Sigurdur Vitol’s private national park, couldn’t protect them.
For all their power, none of those executives would be able to walk down a public street without bodyguards. None of them could have the simple freedom Elliot Ramirez did to stand before a massive body of people without fear of being torn apart. That missileproof glass might as well have been electrified fence and barbed wire. No one could fashion a prison so perfect, so complete, as the one the masters of humanity had created for themselves.
There was justice in the world. There was. And with that realization, something began to lift from Tom’s vision, like some dark haze had finally cleared away. He knew now that this didn’t have to be the world Neil hated, this didn’t have to be a world where the worst of humanity always won and everyone else surrendered to what couldn’t be stopped. There was nothing inevitable about the supremacy of sociopaths.
Vengerov may have gotten away with destroying Yuri, but that only meant one thing: someone hadn’t stepped up and made things right yet.
So Tom would do it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
WHEN TOM RETURNED to the Pentagonal Spire, he found Wyatt in the infirmary, sitting in the chair next to Yuri’s bed with her legs drawn up to her chest. Ever since she’d resumed talking—to Tom, at least—she’d finally started coming here again.
His gaze shifted to Yuri. The Russian boy seemed smaller now and far more fragile. Tom had an idea about what he could do for Yuri, an idea about how to get to that transmitter in Antarctica, but he couldn’t pull it off without help.
“Wyatt, I need a favor,” Tom said in a low voice. “There’s something I can’t do by myself, but you probably could.”
“There are a lot of things like that.”
“There was this one time when Heather Akron downloaded a memory segment from me. . . .”
“What segment?” Wyatt said.
He shook his head. “It’s not important. The thing is, it gave me an idea. There’s a specific time frame when I was stuck outside at Obsidian Corp. in January. Could you somehow do the same thing she did and get everyone’s memories of that time for me? Maybe during Applied Scrimmages?”
“Why?”
Tom hesitated. He wanted to create a mental map of sorts. If he accessed what everyone had seen at Obsidian Corp. that day, with all their photographic, perfectly detailed memories, he’d be able to put them all together into one image and create a comprehensive, three-dimensional layout of the place in his brain. Once he had that he could figure out how to break into Obsidian Corp. in person.
He couldn’t explain that to her without telling her what he planned to do, so he thought quickly of a lie. “Olivia Ossare wants me to do it. She thinks I’ll be able to make peace with what happened if I, uh, see it from another angle.”
She frowned. “Are you sure you want to do this? This won’t be like memories from a census device, Tom. They won’t be audiovisual. It’s a lot more intrusive. You’ll remember the actual experiences like they happened to you. It will be intense.”
“Look, no one else lost fingers that day, so I figure most everyone else had a better time than I did. I can handle it.”
AN HOUR LATER, they were in the last of the Middle training rooms on the thirteenth floor, and Wyatt was sprawled on the floor, accessing a processor right beneath a floor panel.
“The memories will feed directly to your processor in the middle of Applied Scrimmages,” Wyatt informed him. “Try to stay in the sim as long as possible without getting killed. They’ll only download into your processor as long as you’re hooked in.”
“Got it.” He pulled out the neural wire, and Wyatt was getting ready to shove the floor panel back in place when the door slid open and Vik strode in.
He halted inside the doorway, and Tom could see from the shock on his face that he hadn’t expected to see them. Wyatt sprang to her feet, startled.
“What are you guys doing here?” Vik said.