Thread War Read online

  Torres gazed at her with a bemused expression, then looked at Johnny. “Doesn’t anyone like you?”

  “Hey!”

  “I don’t mind him much,” Torg said.

  “Me either,” Shabaz murmured.

  “Stop it!” Kesi yelled, popping a Hasty-Arm and slamming it down. “I’m not joking! We want some answers.”

  Torres looked like she wasn’t going to respond, then her stripe tilted. “Okay, fine. What do you know already? I don’t want to waste time.”

  “Not much.”

  Torres scowled at Johnny. “You couldn’t have filled them in while you were fleeing?” She caught sight of Krugar leaning against a wall, scanning the flashing hollas. “By the way, does he talk?”

  “I talk fine,” Krugar said, continuing to study the hollas. “Right now I’m listening.”

  Torres grunted. “Him, I like.” She turned back to Johnny. “Next time fill them in a bit, maybe?”

  And that was just about enough. He’d been patient with an awful lot of things recently, but Torres was beginning to act like Albert. “Like you did on the way here?” he snapped. “No matter what it looks like, Kesi’s right—we’re not exactly all together. In fact, for a time there, we weren’t together at all.”

  “All right, we get it,” Kesi said, rolling her eyes. “Breaking off was a bad idea. Trist is dead—do you think maybe he paid a big enough price for not obeying the great Johnny and Shabaz?”

  Torres barked a laugh and looked at Shabaz. “Ha, it used to just be Johnny Drop, but now they hate both of you. You’re moving up in the world, sister.”

  Shabaz held her gaze. “Torres, you’re starting to sound a lot like Albert and not in a good way. I don’t know what happened in the last three months, but I get that it’s not going well. But we’re not the reason Betty’s doing whatever she’s doing.”

  “Who’s Betty?” Kesi demanded.

  “Betty Crisp,” Torg said wearily.

  “Betty Crisp is still alive?” Onna said incredulously.

  “Yes,” Torg sighed. “Although that has now come to have a number of meanings, depending on the skid.”

  “And she has Albert?” It was shocking to Johnny how upset he was that Albert wasn’t here. The second he’d seen Torres and Wobble he’d expected to find Al behind him, undoubtedly with something critical to say. To his surprise, he’d been hoping for it.

  “Maybe,” Torg said.

  “Not maybe,” Torres snarled. “You think he’s just gone for a roll, Torg? Your girlfriend’s gone berk, deal with it.” She turned on Johnny. “And someone better sound like Al. He’s the only one who ever kept you in check.”

  “Torres,” Shabaz snapped, her voice rising. “I love you like a sister but—”

  “Can you freeze these?” Krugar said suddenly.

  “What?” Torres asked.

  “These holograms,” Krugar said, pointing. “Can you pause them? Before they switch to another scene?”

  They all hesitated. Then Torg said, “Sure. Which one?”

  Krugar pointed at the ceiling. “That one. Two up from the wall, four over.”

  Torg went to a bank of controls. The holla in question froze on a jungle scene, a mountain top poking out from the trees.

  “What’s up?” Johnny said, watching Krugar.

  Krugar stared at the scene, the light from the unfrozen hollas dappling his face. Then he grunted. “I know that place. I’ve been there.” His head came down. “Except I’ve never been there.” He took a deep breath, appearing to come to some inner conclusion. “All right. I understand that everyone has questions that need answered. But right now, I need that explained.” He pointed at the holla. “Because I’m terrified. I can deal with fear, but I don’t understand this at all. I feel like I’m going mad.” His eyes swept the room. “What am I looking at?” He glanced at Shabaz. “Are any of these the place you came from?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Not right now, but the sphere shows up from time to time.”

  “So they’re real?”

  Shabaz winced. “Yes and no.”

  “Explain that,” Krugar snapped.

  “It’s all information,” Johnny said, waving his hands at the hollas. “Everything you see here is part of a massive collection of information and data called the Thread. Everything in it—the Skidsphere, your home, those woods we went through to get here, where we are now—it’s all just information.” Remembering Betty, he rapped his hand off one of the holla banks. “All of it. Including us. We’re all programs inside it.”

  “How is that possible?” Krugar said, stunned.

  Not: impossible. Johnny’s first thought when Betty had explained the Thread was to disbelieve what he was hearing; he could see that disbelief on the faces of the skids around him who’d never left the Skidsphere. But Krugar was, already, instinctively believing it.

  The soldier scowled and looked back at the hillside he’d recognized. “Why would . . . ?” He stopped. “Levels . . .” He paused, sorting it out, then looked at Shabaz and said, “You said your kind played games. That’s what you said—games. Where you kill each other. Why?”

  The intensity rolling off him was astonishing. “Listen . . .” Johnny said, trying to protect Shabaz.

  “You don’t have to get it perfect,” Krugar said, exasperated. “Just what you know.” He waved at the hollas again. “These aren’t for us, are they?”

  The soldier was making leaps faster than Johnny could fathom. “No,” he said uncertainly. “They’re not. We play them for something we’ve always called the ‘Out There.’” Krugar looked up and Johnny shivered in his stripe. That was exactly where a skid looked when the Out There was mentioned. “We don’t know exactly who the Out There are, but a . . .” he glanced at Torres and Torg “. . . a friend of mine was pretty sure they existed and that they were the ones who created the Thread.”

  Krugar took some time to absorb that, but not as much as Johnny would have expected. “So you’re entertainment. Like sports.”

  He didn’t know what sports were but it sounded right. Leaps and bounds. “Sure.”

  Krugar took another second. “And my world?”

  “Uhh . . .”

  “Because in my world we have programs. We have games. And some of those games involve soldiers like me killing other soldiers. I know because we play them around the base sometimes.”

  What?! Johnny thought, stunned. The idea that a part of a game would play the game it was part of was something Johnny could not wrap his stalks around at all. But more importantly, Krugar had just—with very little information—summed up who he was and where he came from.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” Krugar said. “Please, just tell me what you know.”

  “Okay, and again, I’m just going off what someone told me but . . . yeah. You’re part of a war game where . . . where everyone kills everyone until everyone’s dead. Then you all start again.” As he said it, it sounded horrible. The concept was horrible, even worse than the Skidsphere. Johnny remembered how much it had bothered Albert.

  Krugar listened without flinching and then asked, “War or battle?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Is the game the whole war or just a battle?”

  Johnny had no idea where Krugar was going with this line of questioning. “I don’t know.”

  “How long does each . . . ?” Krugar frowned, figuring it out, as if he were trying to remember something. “God, it’s been a long time since I hung out in the barracks. How long does each session take? From the beginning when we start killing each other, to the part where we’re all dead?”

  Johnny swallowed. Now he understood. “Two weeks. Roughly. Then . . . then the system resets.” Although the soldier was no longer inside the game, Johnny didn’t know if Krugar would reset when his game did. Which meant it was possible he only had two weeks to live.

  But apparently Johnny hadn’t understood why Krugar was asking after all. “Laleh . . .” the soldier said,
and he collapsed against one of the banks.

  “Whoa,” Johnny said, rolling forward, but Krugar stuck out a hand. He held it there for a long moment, as around them hollas flickered from scene to scene, snapshots of a million different places, a million different lives.

  Finally, his hand dropped and Krugar raised his head. His eyes were wet, but his face was set and dry. “I can deal with death. I’ve had men and women under my command die. Friends. I deal with death because . . .” His face flinched. “Doesn’t matter. We deal. But I have a wife. Laleh. And she isn’t a soldier. She has no part in what I do; she stays as far away from it as she possibly can. With my kids, Aden and . . .” For a second, his whole face spasmed, as if he were going to lose the struggle with what he was trying to keep down. “Huma,” he said finally, swallowing hard. “They had no part of the fight I left when I came here. I haven’t seen them in two months.” He took a deep breath. “So if what you’re telling me is true, then my wife and kids . . . then they . . . then they don’t exist. They never existed. My past is a lie.” He looked at Johnny. “Right?”

  The emotion coming off of Krugar—even when it was clear that the soldier was holding the vast majority of it in check—was astounding. Johnny stared at him, appalled. He had never seen anyone care about anything like this. He thought about how he’d felt about Peg. About how he now felt about Shabaz. Even that paled before what he was seeing.

  Betty, he thought. Betty had talked about the Skidsphere like this. That first time, when she’d put it in stasis to save it; the intensity at times she’d get that made Johnny wonder if she was truly sane. That’s how Krugar looked now, except he was holding it in and it was for only three people. It was awful.

  “Listen . . .”

  Krugar held up a hand. “No sympathy. Just the truth.”

  Johnny swallowed. “Like I said, I don’t know exactly how your part of the Thread works but, yeah . . . they probably don’t exist.”

  Snakes, he felt like a jackhole.

  Krugar stared at him for a minute more, then he did the most amazing thing. He straightened up and it was like he put the whole thing away. “All right,” he said. “All right. I’m going to need a moment.” He looked at Torres. “Is this place safe? At least for a while?”

  “For a while,” Torres said, guardedly.

  “Fine,” Krugar said. “You . . . you all get whatever you need sorted out. I’ll just be over here.” He walked over to a corner, not far from the image of a hill that had set off this whole conversation.

  After a short while, his shoulders began to gently shake.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Snakes,” Onna whispered, watching Krugar. “That was awful.”

  Yeah, Johnny thought. He doubted any of them had any idea of just what the soldier was going through. His own love for Shabaz was beyond anything he’d ever felt before, and even that seemed insignificant in the face of the soldier’s loss. Although, as he looked at Shabaz, he had a sudden vision of living without her and a wave of emptiness swept through his skin that threatened to overwhelm him.

  She must have seen it, because an awkward smile crossed her face, and she mouthed the words, “I know.” Which just made the sensation increase.

  “Okay,” he said out loud, trying to control himself. “Let’s give Krugar some space. In the meantime . . .” He looked at the flickering walls, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. He remembered the bunker where they’d first met Betty, how overwhelming the whole thing had seemed: the Thread, the Out There, the danger to the Skidsphere.

  This seemed worse.

  “How could Betty go nuts?” he said. “Wobble, have you tried talking to her?”

  “Dropped the call and three metres short-short of the line,” Wobble whispered in reply, his lens shutters tilting into an angle of pain. “I-We-I have failed-failed. Wobble.”

  “You didn’t fail, Wobble,” Torg said immediately. He looked at Johnny. “He didn’t go with Al when he was captured. There were too many things going on, Al didn’t want to spare anyone else. We were working on the missing Wobbles, the ones SecCore made and then destroyed. Albert thinks there’s a way to make more, so we were working on that. At the same time, we were trying to map the Thread to find the damage already done. We were trying to find all of Betty’s old camps.” He looked around. “That’s what this is. This is Betty’s biggest stronghold. You remember the one we were going to go to?”

  Before the raid on the Core. Before Aaliyah and Brolin had died.

  “How can we possibly be safe here?” Shabaz said. “From Betty?”

  “She already checked for us. Wobble gave us a little warning and we were able to vacate when she came. Then we came back when she left.”

  “Wobble’s got some kind of tie to Betty,” Torres said. “It’s sporadic, but sometimes he knows she’s coming.” Her expression fell. “That’s how we knew she took Albert.”

  At one time, Johnny had thought that Wobble might be in touch with the whole Thread, that he might feel it every time something broke. The machine had been with Betty for so long, it wasn’t surprising they had some kind of connection.

  “Wobble, you can’t contact her now?” he asked. All he got in response was a metallic whine. “Okay, so how do we know what she’s doing?”

  “We don’t,” Torres said. “All we know is after the battle she got way deep into the Core and somehow became part of it. She’s been trying to kick SecCore out ever since.”

  SecCore had been a huge pain in their stripes the first time Johnny had fallen into the Thread. On the other hand . . . “Isn’t SecCore also fighting the Vies?”

  “Do we really want him gone?” Shabaz added.

  “Not a chance,” Torres said. “He’s a megalomaniac and he’s horribly misguided, but the minute Betty started trying to wipe him out, he’s had to focus far more of his attention on surviving. Here, take a look. Torg?”

  Torg merged four hollas into a larger holla. A new image appeared.

  “Betty Crisp,” Shabaz murmured.

  “What is that?” Akash said.

  “That’s a war,” Krugar said, coming out of the corner. He nodded once at Johnny, then turned his attention back to the holla Torg had made.

  They were looking down on the Core from a great height, the cylindrical chasm sinking deep into the plain surrounding it. None of them knew how deep the Core went, but even from this distance they could see flashes of black and white, far inside. Johnny had seen it before, a black and white kaleidoscopic battle between the Vies and Antis. But this battle was sped up and ratcheted to insane levels. It was hard to look at; the flashes were so frequent it made his skin buzz. Plus, there was something . . .

  “What am I not getting?” He stared at the hypnotic carnage. “This isn’t just more intense, something else is different than before.”

  “Oh, snakes,” Shabaz said, looking at Torg. “It’s who’s attacking who. Is that it?”

  Torg bobbed an eye. “The Vies are attacking Antis, the Antis are attacking Vies. That hasn’t changed. But now . . . Antis are also attacking Antis.”

  They were going to tear the Core apart. Johnny could see it, despite the distance. Crisp Betty, he could feel it.

  “We can’t get a closer view,” Torres said. “It seems to tip Betty off. That’s the crazy thing. Both she and SecCore are still splitting their focus, but they can’t do it enough. Some of the Antis have gone rogue, no longer with either SecCore or Betty. They’re just roaming through the Thread. Some still hunt Vies, but some are just doing damage. So there are fewer of them hunting Vies.”

  “Which means more Vies,” Shabaz whispered.

  “And that’s not even counting the damage that the battle itself is doing. Everything is breaking faster.” Torres looked disgusted. “Here’s the truth: the Thread could last another hundred years, maybe a thousand. Or with the damage that’s getting done, it could end tomorrow. If we don’t find a way to stop this, it could go bad . . . fast.”

>   Johnny couldn’t help but keep one eye on the war in the Core. “How the hole do we do that?”

  “We have to get SecCore and Betty to work together,” Torg said firmly.

  Torres barked a laugh. “Yeah, like that’s going to happen. She’s gone spare, Torg, accept it.”

  “It doesn’t change what we need to do,” he said, an edge in his voice Johnny had rarely heard. He looked at Johnny. “We’re going to go talk to Betty.”

  Johnny frowned. “Didn’t Albert already try that? Didn’t you already turn down an invitation to talk?”

  “This time we’ll have Wobble and Torg with us,” Torres said. “We’re hoping that maybe the gearbox will listen to reason from people she likes.” Torres made a snorting sound that made it clear exactly what she thought of that. “Who knows, maybe it works. Doesn’t matter, that’s not why we’re going. The whole thing’s just a feint.”

  “For what?” Krugar asked.

  “We want to get Wobble close enough to Betty and the Core that he can scan her, find out where Albert is. So we can go rescue him.”

  Johnny looked at Wobble. “Can you do that?”

  One of Wobble’s shutters clicked halfway shut. He really did look much worse than he ever had before. “The dice-dice may be flat. I-We are uncertain, but We-I have hope-hope. Wobble.”

  “Wait,” Kesi said. “Didn’t you say Betty—who I still can’t believe is alive—didn’t you say she already captured this squid Albert when he went and talked to her? What’s to stop her from doing the same with us?”

  “For one thing, we’re going in more wary than Al did,” Torres said. “Second, we’re betting on how much she likes Wobble and Torg.” She snorted again and looked at Johnny. “Come to think of it, now we got you as well. She always did like you more than Al.”