Thread War Read online

  Albert?

  But the shape wasn’t silver, and it didn’t reflect light the way the Antis did. A sinking sensation sank into his stripe, as Johnny pushed his scope farther than he ever had before.

  The shape was black.

  With a single pink stripe.

  Oh snakes, he thought. Betty was still behind them, gaining slowly. But in front, coming from the Core . . .

  Far out in front, he could swear he saw the black shape grin.

  “It’s Betty,” Johnny said, snapping his vision back. “She’s vaping with us.” He didn’t understand how it was possible, but she was more experienced then all of them put together. She knew tricks he hadn’t even thought of yet. She’d attached herself to the Core, which meant that when she’d met them she’d already been two places at once.

  They really needed an exit.

  The closest trailing Anti exploded and Wobble soared overhead. “Wobble,” Johnny said, “can you find a door?”

  “Negatory. Signal is still jammed.” He screamed towards the oncoming Antis and their owner.

  It wasn’t going to be enough. There were too many already, with more still coming from the Core. Cut off forward and behind, it was left or right and right was cut off from that scar, still cutting through the plain.

  That scar . . .

  When they’d first come to the Thread, Betty had explained how everything was just a metaphor for the programs they represented: the way the Core appeared, the hallways they travelled, the skids themselves. Johnny remembered passing that scar in the plain, wondering just what it represented, how deep it went, where it led. . . .

  “It just needs to be not here,” he murmured.

  He cut right.

  “Everyone grab someone else!” he bellowed, popping his Hasty-Arms and clutching onto Akash as he rebounded in his direction. “Get tight and follow me!”

  “Uh, Johnny?” Torg’s voice came over the com. “I know it’s been a while, but please tell me you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking.”

  “If you have a better idea, I’m listening. Anyone?”

  “Why, boz?” Dillac said. “What are we—oh, shiz.”

  “Wobble, slow them down. Then get back here, we might need a guide.”

  “Affirmative. Don’t worry Cho-May, someone’s got to run the Kessel someday.”

  “I sure hope it’s us,” Johnny said, squeezing Akash to his left and Zen to his right. He eyed Shabaz. “Please tell me you got a better idea. You’re smarter than I am.”

  “You know, less than an hour ago I was thinking about the Leap. About how I never would’ve had the grease to try it. Lot changes in an hour.”

  Snakes, my girlfriend is as crazy as I am, Johnny thought. But a feeling for her surged through his skin like it was being driven by one of the pressure plates in the Combine. “I love you,” he said out loud.

  “Can we run the race we’re in?” Kesi yelled.

  “Yeah,” Torres half-snarled, half-purred. “Save it for the woods.” Apparently, she’d found her Torres again.

  The scar grew quickly. Off to their right, Antis closed in, the original Betty gunning through them less than forty metres away. To their left, wave after wave of white, racing in from the Core. Wobble fired a final delaying shot, then turned and burned towards the line of fleeing skids.

  Johnny suddenly remembered Betty’s final words to Wobble: “You got what you were looking for.” He hoped the machine knew Albert’s location.

  Then they hit the edge and, once again, Johnny was falling into the unknown.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  They fell so far that Johnny began to worry.

  Three seconds, four seconds of falling; not into the black, just . . . falling. He felt that tightening surge in his stripe he felt any time he jumped off something particularly high; Up and Down was good for that, if nothing else.

  Five seconds, six. The walls of the chasm raced by. Buried far inside them, the fractal grid that underlaid the Outer Core.

  Okay, this is not too . . .

  Black.

  They plunged into the biting darkness, Johnny’s hands reflexively clamping onto Akash and Zen, sending colour and names down the line. They could handle this. He didn’t know where they were falling, and Crisp Betty he was tired of it, but they’d been here before, even the new ones, and they had Torres and Torg joining Johnny and Shabaz. He hated the biting sensation and he could feel Zen’s horror, but they were all holding on. If Wobble caught up, they’d be all right.

  As if on cue, a blaze of white appeared above and then dived below, matching speed just ahead of their fall. Wobble blazed a path through the inverted snowstorm of black shapes flurrying against his white light. No matter how long they fell, they should be able to—

  Abruptly, the inverted snowstorm around Wobble vanished and, a heartbeat later, the biting sensation stopped.

  What the—?

  Then the snowstorm and biting returned. Then vanished. Then returned again, this time for a long stretch, although the severity of both lessened.

  Then . . .

  They fell through a darkness that did not attack.

  “What the hole?” Shabaz said, and both she and Johnny realized she’d spoken out loud at the same time.

  Ahead of them, Wobble remained the only light in the darkness. Over and over, he repeated the same words: “No end, this is the end, no end, this is the end . . .”

  Off to their left, Wobble’s light caught something. Then off to their right, and then again.

  Then . . .

  White light reflected off a clear surface that rushed up to greet them. At the last second, Wobble grabbed Johnny and blasted upwards, killing most of their momentum.

  They still hit pretty hard.

  Torg and Torres caught it the worst, each on an end of the chain, slamming into the surface with an impact that reminded Johnny of the time he’d won his second name. They weren’t moving quite that fast—Wobble spared them the worst of it—but they both straightened their treads with a groan.

  “I have most certainly not missed that particular aspect of the games,” Torg sighed. “Is everyone okay?” He looked at Onna, who’d landed beside him. “You?”

  “I’m fine,” Onna said, shaking her eye-stalks and spitting blood. She glanced at Torres. “You guys got it the worst.”

  “Speak for yourself, squi,” Dillac said, blinking rapidly as he popped a Hasty-Arm and flexed. “I think I sprained my chi.”

  “Pretty sure it was sprained already,” Onna murmured.

  Dillac gave her a look, then tilted his stripes. “True words.”

  Johnny rolled over to Shabaz. “You okay?”

  A small smile. “I’d like to stop falling. Onto things, through things, over things. Seriously, can we do that?”

  He smiled back and bumped her treads. “I’ll see what I can do.” He looked around. “Anyone know where we are?” Around them, complete blackness. No glowing lines, broken or whole. The white coming from Wobble was the only light, but it was bright enough to reflect off the surface of buildings that reached up into the darkness.

  “No clue,” Torres whispered, her eyes wide as she looked around.

  They were on some kind of highway, the surface beneath them clear like black ice. A corridor perhaps; there were buildings on either side, stretching out ahead of them, maybe behind—it was hard to tell. Some of their surfaces reflected more light than others, what might have been windows: row upon row, column upon column. There was something vaguely familiar about the whole thing.

  “Oh snakes,” Johnny whispered, looking down. Wobble’s light reflected off the glassy clear surface, but below that . . . below that, the light reflected faintly off another surface. And below that, very faint, another.

  Johnny’s eyes came up and he rolled over to one of the buildings. “Wobble, can I get a light over here?” The light swung and the building lit up in reflected ghostly glory, window upon window, stretching up until the light fa
ded away.

  Except they weren’t windows. They were holla displays.

  And they were all dead.

  When they’d first fallen into the Thread, Wobble had found them and led them through a city of hollas. Now, they were in another one. Except the other city had been alive with light: thousands upon thousands of hollas, stretching up and down and along every corridor, enclosed by the sharp gold lines of the Thread itself, outlining every building. Here, the only light was Wobble.

  “Crisp Betty,” Shabaz swore. “Is this . . . ?”

  “It’s all dead-dead,” Wobble said softly, his battered surface gleaming in his own light. “The archeologists just disappeared. All is silence-silence.”

  “All right,” Johnny said, shuddering, “everyone stay tight, keep an eye out for Vies.”

  “What’s a Vie?” Dillac asked.

  “One of the spiky black bad guys.”

  “Unlike the knifey white bad guys or the spooky grey bad guys,” Kesi said sarcastically.

  “Or Betty freakin’ Crisp, boz.”

  “Right,” Johnny said, eyeing them both. “Starting to get it yet?” Kesi held the look for a minute, then rolled away, staring up at the buildings in awe. Johnny grit his teeth. He didn’t need her to acknowledge him, but he did need her to get it. “Kesi, seriously, stay close, they can come right out—”

  “They’re not going to,” Torg said, staring upwards.

  “What?”

  “I don’t think we’re going to see any Vies.”

  “Torg, every time we’ve been near anything broken . . .”

  “This isn’t broken.” Torg popped an arm and ran a finger along one of the darkened displays. “This is dead.” He waved the arm down the corridor. “The darkness was biting us, then it wasn’t. Look around. Not one broken, sparking line of gold. Nothing. This is dead.”

  Johnny shifted nervously on his treads. “We still don’t know if the Vies—”

  “He’s right,” Krugar said abruptly, studying the buildings. “Vie stands for virus, right? Well, that means there has to be something alive for it to infect. There’s nothing here.”

  “There’s the buildings,” Johnny said skeptically.

  “They’re just the shell, the bones. There’s nothing here to infect.”

  Johnny peered down the corridors. The first time they’d seen the lit version, it had deeply disturbed him that the hollas ran but no one was watching. What that had meant for him, what it meant about the Out There. But if the hollas weren’t even running . . .

  “This is how it ends,” he murmured, glancing at Wobble. The machine seemed to have shrunk in on itself, keening softly and rocking on its treads. Johnny rolled over and put a hand on its surface. “Wobble, are you all right? Does this hurt?”

  Gears and lids spun. “No,” the machine said. “I-We wish it would.”

  What could he say to that? Wobble was experiencing things on a level Johnny couldn’t even comprehend. What could he possibly say that would make things better?

  “Hey,” he said, waving a Hasty-Arm around. “It doesn’t have to end like this. The Skidsphere was in trouble, on its way to being just like this maybe.” He shivered at the thought. “We stopped that from happening. We fixed it and you’re a big reason why. We’ll do it again.”

  It took some time, but slowly, the lenses shifted. “Thank you, Johnny-Johnny-friend.”

  Torres rolled over, her stripe twitching. “Wobble, I hate to do this, but I got to know: did you get it?”

  Instantly, Wobble straightened up and his lenses spun as his metallic mouth split into a wide smile. “Affirmative! The hen clevered the fox! Wobble.”

  “Show me,” Torres growled.

  The lenses spun downward once more. “Inaccessible here-here. No maps. Regret and Listen waited-waited by the sea. Wobble.”

  “Oh,” Torres said, deflating.

  “That’s fine,” Torg said. “We’ll find a way out of here and then we’ll know. Right, Wobble?”

  And the lens swung upward. “Affirmative.”

  “All right, all right,” Torg said. He put a hand on Torres’ stripe. “Don’t worry, Torres, we’ll find him.”

  “Right,” Torres said. She grimaced, as if caring this much was embarrassing. “Good work, Wobble.” She rolled back to the others and yelled something at Dillac.

  Torg looked at Johnny. “She’ll be fine. She’s just been trying to do everything since Albert got captured.” He sighed. “No one saw Betty coming. Not like this.”

  “How about you?” Johnny asked. “How are you doing?” Torg had always been the one who never lost his cool; the calm, collected drawl stopping fights in the sugarbar and making jokes in the middle of the craziest game. Now he looked like his stripes were weighing him down.

  Torg chuckled. “You mean, aside from the fact that, if I don’t die today, I die in less than two months, no matter what? I don’t know . . . lately I’ve been having rather unhealthy dreams about me and a pile of sugar.”

  “Hey,” Johnny said, “you don’t know that. You don’t know when you’re going to die. Betty survived out here for fifty years. Maybe as long as you’re out here, you’ll do the same.”

  “Yeah,” Torg sighed. It turned into a grimace. “’Course, that means I can’t go home again.”

  Johnny blinked. “Did you want to? I mean, you stayed out here with Albert.”

  “’Cause I was looking for something. I knew what I wanted and Albert was the best shot.” He paused, sinking into his treads as he looked around. “That’s the thing that bugs me. I spent my life knowing what I wanted and what I was going to do. Sure, maybe I wasn’t you or Albert, but I was pretty good and if that wasn’t always good enough, well, it was a hole of a ride.” For a brief moment, a grin stretched over his face that Johnny knew and loved. Then it faded.

  “But now . . .” Torg examined the dead building above them. “I don’t know how we get out of this. I mean, I know exactly what needs to happen: Betty and SecCore have to make peace, get out of each other’s way if they can’t find it in them to actually help each other. They do that, hole, who knows what happens? At least they got a shot at stopping the Vies. Maybe we can’t save the whole Thread, but I bet they could save what’s left. Look what we did with the Skidsphere.”

  “So how do we do that?” Johnny said. It had to be possible. Johnny had made up with Albert . . . kind of. He’d certainly worked with him. Hole, Albert had taken orders from Johnny when he’d hated Johnny’s stripes. If Al could do that, if they could do that together, surely they could make Betty and SecCore at least talk to each other?

  “I don’t know,” Torg said softly, his stripes sinking inward. “I was hoping, praying, that maybe if Wobble was there, maybe if I was . . .” He stopped, staring into space. “They’ve hated each other for fifty years. I thought I’d seen hate, but you and Albert have nothing on those two. I’ve never cared for anything the way Betty cares for things. And SecCore? We all think he’s a jackhole, but he’s, what, thousands of years old? Tens of thousands? What if he just cares too much? What if he just can’t see it anymore?”

  Johnny looked across the corridor to where Shabaz was talking with Onna and Akash. He thought of how different his feelings for her were from anything he’d ever felt before. How terrifying that feeling could be at times. And that was after only a few months. How would he feel after fifty years? After a thousand? Would he care less—would that feeling decay like the Thread had decayed? Or would it grow stronger? A thousand times stronger?

  The enormity of the thought hit him and a jolt went through his stripe. At that moment, Shabaz swung an eye his way, so he slapped a smile on his face and tried to respond with . . . he wasn’t sure what he wanted to show her, but it sure the hole wasn’t the terror surging through his skin.

  “Whoa, squid,” Torg said. “You all right, Johnny?”

  “Yeah,” he gasped, sucking in a breath. Throttling the emotion down—at least he had some experience with that. John
ny appreciated how much his old friend was sharing his feelings, but Johnny sure the hole wasn’t going to share this. “I’m good. So . . .” he added, deflecting, “we get them to talk. Or maybe Albert can.”

  “Looks like he already failed at that once.”

  “Failure doesn’t always lead to more failure,” Krugar said, stepping out from behind a building.

  “Snakes!” Johnny said, jumping back. “Where the hole were you?”

  “Scouting around.” Krugar popped a single beam of light from his light-stick and took a seat. “Sometimes failure is a cycle. But sometimes you figure it out.” He looked at Torg. “Your friend any good?”

  “Yeah,” Torg replied. “He’s not bad.”

  Krugar bobbed his head. “Then maybe he can help us figure it out.”

  “Maybe,” Torg said doubtfully, which Johnny could understand. The person most likely to help them do that, the person who had the last time, was the problem now.

  “Hey, I get it,” Krugar said. “That was another one of your friends we were talking to and two things are pretty clear: she’s not your friend right now and she’s pretty scary.” He glanced at Johnny. “Is it me or was there more than one of her out there at one point?”

  “It’s not you.”

  Krugar absorbed this, then nodded. Johnny thought he’d say something else about Betty, but instead, the soldier cocked his head back towards the direction he’d come. “Had a look around. There’s a break in the corridor floor, big one, about four hundred metres that way. Some real damage to the buildings. Let’s call that north. Same thing to the west, little farther out. East might be good for a while, haven’t checked south yet.”

  Torg and Johnny exchanged a glance. They hadn’t been there that long; the speed Krugar could get around was amazing. “How’d you see anything?” Torg asked.

  Krugar chuckled. “You think Wobble’s the only one with a light? By the way, this place is definitely dead. Night vision doesn’t read anything that isn’t lit up from an external source. Thermal, infrared, ultra, nothing. Whatever this is, it’s dead.” He frowned. “I’m surprised it isn’t colder.”