are easy and expected: childhood, school, family—two children and a loving wife, Spain, Malta, Triumph Towers. Getting closer—Triumph Towers is where the government works. Campaign, compromise, duties, cabinet meetings.
Secrets.
I snatch the folder up and toss it on the desk. My mind’s eye wavers as I look at the contents. Focus. I have to focus. But the insides are a jumble. Representative Belles himself isn’t sure of everything he’s learned—the seeds of his rebellion are just beginning to form.
I pick up the largest paper in the folder, and a moving image loops over and over—Prime Administrator Hwa Young stands at the head of a long wooden table, shouting at a representative administrator I don’t know. She’s utterly eviscerating the man seated before her, globules of spit flying in his face as she tears him apart. Slowly, her voice rises from the page, deep for a woman, cold, furious.
The dreamscape rumbles.
I slam the page face-down on the desk, shut my eyes, and think of sunlight and oranges and the buzzing of bees and the way old men’s voices crack when they speak of the past. The more I focus on something, the more Representative Belles’s mind will focus on it, and it’s important that I keep him in his reverie long enough for me to discover the terrorists.
I flip to another page in his file. It’s a spreadsheet of data—money. I scan it, trying to make sense of the numbers, but I can’t. Sometimes the mind works that way—it remembers things in a way only that mind can interpret. This chart would make sense to Representative Belles, but not to anyone else.
This isn’t working. Representative Belles might be seditious, but I’ve found no proof that he’s a key player in the terrorist plot. The number data could be tracking where funds shift to a rebel group… or they could mean nothing. He might not even be in any rebel groups yet; he might just be considering it.
Maybe he’s been approached, though…
If he knows any of the known terrorists, that might be the link we need to find them. I pluck out another file from the cabinet, this one marked simply, People. I open it on the floor, and, rather than paper falling out, a city street explodes into being around me. I’m in a crowd of people, maybe a hundred or more. These are the people in the representative’s immediate memory, the ones he’s been thinking about most recently. They’re grouped in different places, his family in one corner of his mind, a wife and two children; his friends crowded around a bar, drinking beer; his fellow representatives in suits and business clothes, around a long, polished wooden table. And more: a group of schoolchildren—part of his charity work, I think; employees standing around a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Madrid; crowds of everyday people. Street androids selling pastizzi and honey rings. The girl who makes his coffee. The representative from Brazil who flirts with him when he works late.
A boy with dark hair and pale eyes.
My heart stutters.
“I know you,” I whisper.
It’s the boy from the gardens, the one who approached me with a warning and stopped to pay respect to my father’s grave.
Looking at him makes my heart race, my breathing come shallow. I feel…
Fear? No, that’s not it.
I sweep my arm out, and everyone else disappears. Just me, and this boy.
His face is made of sharp angles and shadows. He has the clearest eyes I’ve ever seen. His shoulders are broad and lined with hard muscles hidden under a long-sleeved black t-shirt. There’s a flash of gold—some sort of pin—near his collar. His skin is tanned and his hair is dark, but he’s white—he doesn’t have the deep brown coloring of a native Maltese like me. Judging from his accent when he spoke before, he’s probably English. I ruffle my cropped dark hair nervously. Despite the fact that this is all just echoes in Representative Belles’s mind, it feels as if his eyes are resting on me and me alone.
I
Secrets.
I snatch the folder up and toss it on the desk. My mind’s eye wavers as I look at the contents. Focus. I have to focus. But the insides are a jumble. Representative Belles himself isn’t sure of everything he’s learned—the seeds of his rebellion are just beginning to form.
I pick up the largest paper in the folder, and a moving image loops over and over—Prime Administrator Hwa Young stands at the head of a long wooden table, shouting at a representative administrator I don’t know. She’s utterly eviscerating the man seated before her, globules of spit flying in his face as she tears him apart. Slowly, her voice rises from the page, deep for a woman, cold, furious.
The dreamscape rumbles.
I slam the page face-down on the desk, shut my eyes, and think of sunlight and oranges and the buzzing of bees and the way old men’s voices crack when they speak of the past. The more I focus on something, the more Representative Belles’s mind will focus on it, and it’s important that I keep him in his reverie long enough for me to discover the terrorists.
I flip to another page in his file. It’s a spreadsheet of data—money. I scan it, trying to make sense of the numbers, but I can’t. Sometimes the mind works that way—it remembers things in a way only that mind can interpret. This chart would make sense to Representative Belles, but not to anyone else.
This isn’t working. Representative Belles might be seditious, but I’ve found no proof that he’s a key player in the terrorist plot. The number data could be tracking where funds shift to a rebel group… or they could mean nothing. He might not even be in any rebel groups yet; he might just be considering it.
Maybe he’s been approached, though…
If he knows any of the known terrorists, that might be the link we need to find them. I pluck out another file from the cabinet, this one marked simply, People. I open it on the floor, and, rather than paper falling out, a city street explodes into being around me. I’m in a crowd of people, maybe a hundred or more. These are the people in the representative’s immediate memory, the ones he’s been thinking about most recently. They’re grouped in different places, his family in one corner of his mind, a wife and two children; his friends crowded around a bar, drinking beer; his fellow representatives in suits and business clothes, around a long, polished wooden table. And more: a group of schoolchildren—part of his charity work, I think; employees standing around a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Madrid; crowds of everyday people. Street androids selling pastizzi and honey rings. The girl who makes his coffee. The representative from Brazil who flirts with him when he works late.
A boy with dark hair and pale eyes.
My heart stutters.
“I know you,” I whisper.
It’s the boy from the gardens, the one who approached me with a warning and stopped to pay respect to my father’s grave.
Looking at him makes my heart race, my breathing come shallow. I feel…
Fear? No, that’s not it.
I sweep my arm out, and everyone else disappears. Just me, and this boy.
His face is made of sharp angles and shadows. He has the clearest eyes I’ve ever seen. His shoulders are broad and lined with hard muscles hidden under a long-sleeved black t-shirt. There’s a flash of gold—some sort of pin—near his collar. His skin is tanned and his hair is dark, but he’s white—he doesn’t have the deep brown coloring of a native Maltese like me. Judging from his accent when he spoke before, he’s probably English. I ruffle my cropped dark hair nervously. Despite the fact that this is all just echoes in Representative Belles’s mind, it feels as if his eyes are resting on me and me alone.
I
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