Control

CHAPTER 30

HOW AM I GOING TO FIND DYL in this swarm of everything?

What I need is a lesson from Marka. But even Marka said she had trouble identifying all the separate chemical signatures she encountered. I don’t have time to learn new things. I have to work with what I know.

And what I know is . . . Cy’s delicious aura. Vera’s baked parsmint squares. The dry, yeasty warmth of the agriplane. The unique, familiar essence of family, the kind that envelops you when a door is opened to a house, signaling that you’re home. My memories. They’re my guide.

Eyes closed, I carefully lift up my nose and let the smells enter me and try to focus. Like index cards, I let them flip by, abandoning one and concentrating on another and another, until I hit something familiar and useful. The first one confuses me.

Neurodrugs. Not like the ones from Ren’s black-stained mouth, but others . . . pink clouds I’ve known from before. And then more, the smell of bodily sweat, but far more than the ten people or so who live in Aureus. Droves of different people. Then alcohol, like the kind we use in the lab, but mixed with exotic, synthesized fruits.

And then one scent flips by so fast, it makes me gasp. I have to squeeze my eyes and zero in on it. It’s faint, as if worn down by time and nearly washed free from the inside of the transport. One more open door of cleansing air, and I might not have caught it.

Persian freesia, mixed with the scent of despair.

Dylia.

Thank goodness Dyl always bought the scents that lasted a month before the program ended. I remember the birthday present of the electronic sliver inserted next to her collarbone when she turned thirteen. She’s smelled like exotic flowers ever since.

Sweat plus alcohol plus neurodrugs plus Dyl. Multiply by the driving heartbeat pounding insistently from the walls of Aureus since I stepped my mutant foot inside this place. The beating is becoming less like a giant, relentless heart and more like a drum. The drumbeat of music.

I have no time. Ren’s finger is cold and may be no good, but I try it anyway. I press it into the pad, carefully and gently, and speak to the transport.

“Alucinari Rooms,” I say. At first nothing happens, and my confidence withers a fraction. I squash Ren’s finger against the pad again, and this time, the transport jerks so fast I almost fall down, holding on to the slick white walls before I lose my balance.

Aureus is below Argent, which is too convenient. Aureus. Au. The shorthand for gold. Gold is directly under silver on the periodic table of elements. And judging from the minutes gone by, it’s about one in the morning, which means the club is in its full hallucinogenic and illegal swing.

The transport opens to the thudding music and a dark hallway snaking before me.

A large guy with a potbelly walks by, smoking cherry-flavored cigarettes.

Ham sandwich for dinner. Vanilla antiperspirant. Fat bubbling in veins. Too much sugar in the blood. Too little happiness.

I step out of the transport, and a tall, willowy girl in a satin mini-dress stares at me with red eyes. Soundlessly, the doors slip closed behind me.

Soap and luxury shampoo. Peppermint swirl cocktail still lingering in her mouth. Blood stinking of neurodrugs. Currently concocting a lie in her mind, probably what she’ll tell her parents when she comes home in the morning.

Her eyes bug out as she sees my green-spotted arms. “Whoa.” She shakes her head, as if the neurodrugs might lose their potency with vigorous head-swishing. The two guys flanking her are amused by her response, waiting for her swaying legs to finally give way. I lean in and whisper out of earshot of her companions.

“I’m a message from your conscience. Go home before you get a disease that will permanently make you ugly.”

She blinks at me, dazed. “Oh. Okay.” Her companions stare on confusedly as she wobbles for the exit down the hallway. I hear a faint “Goin’ home now!” as she disappears.

Well, at least I can say I’ve done one good thing tonight, saving this girl from a resistant STD and a one-night stand she’ll regret.

Before me is the hallway of rooms, each heralded by body part holograms bobbing and beckoning people inside. The tentacled brain, hand, and ear. It’s time for me to concentrate. Tipping my nose in the air, I sway left and right, trying to find Dyl’s scent. I probably look like a dog let out of the house for the first time in months.

There are too many things to sift through. How can you find the tiny grain of diamond within a handful of plain old sand?

“Find what you know,” I say to myself. I concentrate and let the unimportant scents just drift by. It takes me a full five minutes of dodging the half-drugged people swimming around me, but eventually, I find my microscopic diamond.

The freesia. I sniff in short bursts and keep her front and center in my search as I inch my way down the hall. Except for that one girl, no one else cares that my shirt is torn and my bare arms are covered in green splotches. They probably think it’s the latest trend in makeup. Count on Argent to be the perfect place to blend in.

Of course. That’s why Aureus is situated under Argent. It’s the playground of the members. The neurodrugs are the perfect cover. They can come and go as they please, and even if one of them had three heads and seven legs, no one would admit to the police that they saw such a thing, because doing so would land them in detox. Or jail.

My nose pulls me to the left. Ten feet away, there’s a door with the ear doing flips and spins before an orange-framed doorway. The freesia is stronger in here. As I look up to get my bearings, yelps and shouts come from down the hall.

“Ow!”

“Watch it!”

The volume increases. The corridor is packed, as usual, but the crowd divides like a coat being unzipped, separated by someone pushing club-goers roughly aside.

At first, I don’t recognize him, because his eyes and nose are obscured by a white mask, marbled in gray and silver. The mouth is set in a grim line. He scans left and right, pauses when he sees me motionless by the Alucinari ear room. The grim mouth melts into a smile.

Only then do I see the skin, just under his neck. It’s thickened, brown and hard. Tegg has come to find me.

I run into the ear room. I try to breathe through my mouth so the odors in the room won’t overwhelm me. Inside, all I hear is a muffled humming. Some people clutch their heads, as if unable to handle the pleasure of the drug. What drug? I expect fluffy clouds or rivulets of smoke, but the room is devoid of any suspicious pastel-colored clouds.

“It’s coming,” a boy’s voice warns from across the room. Everyone freezes, bracing themselves. For what? I run to the opposite corner, in case “it” means “Tegg” and everyone knows I’m about to get my ass kicked with his impenetrable armor. Tegg walks in just as the boom hits.

The sound is like a gong, but louder and more physical than expected. My bones vibrate to their centers. That’s when I see it. Out of every square millimeter of the walls comes a thick plane of gold dust advancing inward to the center of the room.

My eyes are only on Tegg. The dust hits him from behind as it curls around his head, shoulders, and body. As it passes over the terrain of his mask and mouth, I see it get sucked into his nostrils. He exhales it from his mouth in a puff of sparkling smoke and takes another step closer. It hasn’t affected him at all.

The others around him aren’t immune. The gold passes over them, and they hungrily suck in the glistening fog. Everyone standing hits their knees, their hands cupped over their ears, keening in delirium.

I’m not here to experiment, so before the wave of drug hits me, I hold my breath. It passes. I exhale, unaffected.

Too easy.

Eventually, the drug concentrates at the center of the room in a sphere the size of an apple. The rich, glowing orb plummets into a tiny hole centered in the floor.

Tegg doesn’t come after me, just stands by the door, guarding my exit. He leans against the wall and lights a cigarette.

“Increase infusion to zero point two hertz,” he says, and takes a puff of his cigarette. Immediately, another gold wall of drug puffs out of the walls. Five seconds later, another puff emerges, following the first one in a parallel plane that approaches me. I time my breathing through my mouth, sucking in air and exhaling, dodging the drug. Tegg just watches me. He shakes his head, unsatisfied.

“Increase to zero point five hertz.”

Puff. Puff. Puff. They come out so much faster. I increase my breathing to match the blank spaces of air between the collapsing walls of gold. But this way, I can’t breathe deeply enough. I’m panting like an overheated dog. I accidentally inhale the plain room air through my nose, and the smells overwhelm me. There are too many people, too many problems in their bodies encoded in scent. It’s too much of everything. My timing slips. I inhale a wall of gold air.

I hear a wall of glass shattering, except there’s no glass. The tinkling of broken shards increases to a higher pitch, then changes timbre. Each shard begins to grow into a separate melody, winding around my body and playing each note to extremes of beauty I can’t stand. I’m afraid the perfection will kill me but I don’t want it to stop.

I find myself on the floor, weeping for the threads of melody that can’t possibly be produced by anything born of this earth. This is what the Sirens sounded like before the sailors drowned. And I’ve entered someplace in between, someplace more indistinct than myth. The terrifying nether region between ecstasy and death.

A shiny, tailor-made black shoe stands in front of my foot. I know it’s Tegg’s. I have enough awareness to know that I’m still in an Alucinari Room, but the sounds are too much for me to break free.

“Didn’t get very far, did you?”

When his words hit my eardrums, they transform into tones far more beautiful than those of a simple human voice. He could say he’s about to cut off my head and bake it for dinner, and it would still be the loveliest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

“Get up.” Tegg leans over and pulls on my already tattered shirt. He tries to yank me up and I get halfway to my feet when my weight wins the tug-of-war. Tegg’s still got what’s left of my torn shirt high up in the air, but I’m still on the floor.

“Good lord, what disease is that?” he says, and I follow his eyes down to my body. My skin is all green splotches. The beautiful sounds and noises dancing in my head become muffled. They swirl and shrink, and in seconds, it’s quiet again, except for the humming of the drugged people nearby.

I survey the other people around me. The waves of gold are still coming at high frequency and everyone is still content within their personalized, hallucinatory operas. Why not me? What happened? The same thing happened when Ren pulled off my sleeve and exposed my skin.

The spots. Vera’s borrowed skin. I remember what happened to her after we went to Argent together. How she was short of breath because her body was covered. I don’t need to breathe as often so long as the green spots are exposed. And what’s more, they must be rapidly metabolizing the hallucinogens in my body, like they did with Ren.

I can feel it. There’s a sense of, I don’t know, refreshment with my skin exposed now. The hungry breaths are no longer necessary.

Tegg drops my shirt but is unsure what to do with me. His mouth is still closed. He’s not breathing through his mouth.

He’s breathing through his mask.

I don’t have time to think. I hurl my body straight toward him, the last thing he’s expecting. Tegg puts his hands out to thwart my attack. His arms are so long I can’t reach his face. Finally, annoyed at my squirming and kicking, he grabs my neck and begins to squeeze.

“I’ve had enough of this,” he says. Tegg starts to drag me to the door, but while he’s busy squeezing my windpipe, he’s not watching my hands. I reach into the back of my leggings for Caliga’s knife and flick it open with my fingertip.

I can’t stab him through his armor, but at the junction between his forearm and upper arm, a line of smooth cream-colored skin allows his elbow to bend freely. I aim carefully and stab.

“Argggggghhh!”

Tegg lets go of my neck to shelter his wound. I drop my bloody knife and jump toward his face, grabbing his mask. It’s on tight, sealed over his eyes and nose. This is no cheap Halloween deal with a flimsy elastic string holding it on. His hand swipes at my face, smearing blood across my cheek and jarring my head. Still, I don’t let go. My fingertips dig under the edges of the mask, prying it off. A hard, rocky fist finds my chest and I fly backward, skidding across the floor and leaving a wake of curling gold dust behind me.

Poufs of drug fly up at Tegg as he pats around his body, panicked. He looks like a groom at the altar who can’t remember where he stowed the rings. It’s amusing, really.

“Looking for this?” I wave the mask cheerfully at Tegg. There’s a thin nano-pore filter where the nose goes.

“Give it to me!” He starts to gallop toward me, his face parting the parallel walls of glistening dust. As I jump to my feet to run away, he’s already realized his mistake.

“Decrease . . . decrease rate to seven, no . . . ten hertz. Dammit, off, OFF!” he coughs into the clouds. It’s too late. Though no new drug pulsates out of the walls, Tegg is still surrounded by five bursts of drug enclosing him. I watch a plane of gold funnel into his mouth as he sucks in a breath. Tegg’s eyes are on me, but as he takes one more step in my direction, his hands fly to his face.

He falls to his knees, his eyes rolling back into his head as he feebly swats away the mist near his face. His armored hands slide past his cheeks to cover his ears as he crumples over to the floor. His body jerks once, twice. Then he is still. As I step over him, I hear a faint song vibrating in his throat.

“Enjoy the show,” I whisper.