Dante

  We troop out of the Embark, Anton taking a large white carton from a waitress that smells incredible. “Fried mushrooms. And dipping mustard,” the large teen clarifies as he drops a couple of bills by the cash register. “Keep the change,” he tells the young woman ringing up his bill.

  And then we’re out the door and in the parking lot. A magnificent silver Corvette sits in a space by the door, and Andrea stands next to it.

  She eyes Anton’s box. “You’re not eating that in my car. I’m still not sure how you got pine sap all over it, but I’m drawing the line with your magic mushrooms.”

  “We won’t leave any crumbs. And we’ll be starving before you know it if we don’t eat them.” He opens the carton and pulls a smaller box out of it. “Also, you won’t be sharing with us peasants.”

  Christopher nudges me. “Oh, we’ve got your bag in the trunk.”

  “At least, we figured it was your bag,” Anton explains. “As opposed to some random bag full o’ stuff that just happened to be at your feet.”

  Andrea beeps the trunk open, and Anton fishes out a bag from the only space not filled with what looks like broken motorcycle parts and four shattered turbofans. I blink at them, and then Anton slams the trunk closed.

  “Here you go,” he tells me, handing over the bag, which seems none the worse for wear. I open it, and nod at the familiar electronics within, absently wondering why none of the AIs are greeting me.

  I pull out my iPhone. It’s dead. I pull out my other iPhone. It’s dead, too. So are both my laptops. Finally, I dig deep, open an insulated box, snap a battery into place, and pull out my backup smartphone, which still has a charge.

  Actually, it’s my backup, backup smartphone, and an Android, but it still has some functions. “Astra, where’s my car?” The phone’s power is critically low, which is unusual. I normally have all my tech fully charged, or close to it, and this one was just sitting in a box.

  A cool voice speaks as I glance down at the screen. “Right where you left it.” A map of the nearby streets appears, a red dot marking my position in the parking lot of the Embark. A thinner red line forms, threading its way from my location to another red dot, marked ‘Dante’s Car.’

  My car is in town, but about five blocks away. “Is that where you found me?” I ask, gesturing at the screen. They all look.

  “No,” Andrea says. “That’s the rich part of the town, not the forest. You were much closer.” She taps a stretch of road a few miles from the Embark.

  “So I was out of my vehicle.” I concentrate, closing my eyes as I think back. The fog once again rises to meet me, but it’s thinner now, and I’m beginning to see the streets we just traveled through.

  “Were you trying to do something?” Chris wonders.

  “Or were you just stumbling around in a trance?” Anton adds helpfully.

  “Astra?” I ask.

  “No idea, boss,” the AI instance responds. “You stopped talking to me a while ago. I haven’t been out of the bag since Chicago. And you weren’t ‘out of your vehicle.’ You’ve never been in it. That’s the new one your uncle bought you. It’s still sitting in the garage at his vacation home.”

  “What was I doing, then?”

  “No idea. No updates since you took photos in Greywood.”

  “Show me the photos,” I order.

  “Some are videos,” Astra replies. “I’ll start with those. I have to warn you, though—”

  “Andrea,” a sharp voice cuts in, “where is my bike?” A blonde girl is marching across the parking lot towards us, her eyes flashing from Andrea to Anton to Christopher in turn. A big blond guy strolls after her.

  As she approaches, a flash of lightning glitters on the horizon, beyond the mountains, followed by a rumble of distant thunder.

  Anton nods to them. “Hey Arden. Hey Gavin.” The blond guy nods back. He’s a handsome, muscular guy, though not so huge as Anton, and with an easy-going smile on his face. Arden seems like a blonde, younger echo of Andrea’s implausible beauty, though not so tall or toned. She’s closer to average height for what I guess is her age – fifteen, though she seems shorter with so many teens towering over her.

  “Arden?” Andrea says, surprised. “How did you find us?”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  The new girl taps her SmartShades, anger flashing in her Arctic-blue eyes even as a wireframe of the parking lot gleams in the reflective lenses just below them. “I added a tracker to my bike, fortunately, and it led me,” she glances down at her display, and then up at the Corvette, “to your trunk?” She blinks in disbelief from the simulation to the reality. “How could it be in your trunk?”

  “That we’re a little less clear on,” Christopher admits.

  “Oh no,” Anton corrects. “It’s in there because I put in there. Why it’s in the state it is so that I could…”

  “How could it fit? It can’t be disassembled that far.”

  “Oh, it definitely can be, but I wouldn’t recommend the method.” Anton sighs, and clicks a remote. “Arden, we literally found it this way,” he says as the trunk whooshes open. “We didn’t even hear what happened, much less saw it.”

  We all stare down at the wreckage, Arden’s eyes widening.

  “Um,” Gavin says. “Is it supposed to look like that?”

  “No.” Arden’s voice is icy. “It’s not.”

  We all keep staring at the broken machine in unbroken silence.

  Until Anton breaks that, too. “How’d you get here, anyway?” His voice is curious as he eyes Arden. “I thought you didn’t drive. Legally.”

  “I caught a ride out here with Gavin, because somebody borrowed my self-driving airbike and promised to take care of it.” Her eyes flash. “And you ‘don’t remember’? Please give me a better reason than ‘the dog ate my homework.’”

  Anton shrugs. “Okay. ‘The dog ate my flying bike,’ then. But really, we don’t have any idea.”

  “Arden, seriously, we’ll pay whatever we need to pay. And then some. You know we’re good for it.” Christopher seems pained by both the state of the bike and the state of their excuses.

  Andrea seems more bothered by not being able to explain it. “We will. And we’ll find out what happened.”

  Arden folds her arms. “Do that. And don’t think I’m letting you and Anton off the hook.”

  “We’ll pay—”

  “Nope, not this time. Oh, you’ll pay for the parts, but I know how this works. You need something, talk me into loaning it, and then Chris pays in sweat equity for whatever all three of you break.” Arden shakes her head and points. “This time, you two are going to pitch in. I don’t care if it’s buffing out scratches or polishing hubcaps, you’ll do something.”

  Andrea raises an eyebrow, but said nothing.

  I nod. “I can help, too.”

  “Um, who are you?” Arden huffs. “And why do you care?”

  “I’m Gavin,” the big blonde guy adds. “And this is my sister, Arden. Apologies. She gets like this if you take a sledgehammer to anything she builds. You should have seen her with Lego sets.”

  Arden gives him a hard look, but doesn’t disagree.

  “No problem,” I assure him. “I’m Dante. And I care because I think these guys just saved me, but I can’t remember how we first met.”

  Gavin starts. “Wait, you’re serious about the memory thing?” he says. “I thought Anton was joking.” His expression reads, He does that.

  I shake my head. “No, and I have no idea why we’d all be affected.” I look curiously at Arden. “So you’re Hammersmith?” I shake my head as the word echoes through it. “I think I’ve heard that name.”

  Gavin raises a hand to interrupt. “Yeah, her online handle. Sure. But you all have a memory gap and you’re not freaking out yet?” He looks around. “Do we need to get you all to a hospital?”

  Christopher shakes his head, pulling out his phone. “I’m sure Caduceus would have said something.” He looks at the screen and blinks. It’s dead. “Okay, weird. The battery was down, but I recharged it.”

  “Any of your AIs know anything?” Gavin asks. “I know you guys use ‘em.”

  “Except for Astra, all of mine are dead,” Dante admits. “And I don’t use her for much. She’s got some photos, though.”

  “As directed,” Astra speaks up from my one, barely charged phone. “Foresight had me taking photos from inside the Faraday bag, using the usual fiber optics.”

  I nod. “Backup sensor suite, then. That’s normal.”

  Gavin raises a blond eyebrow at the exchange. “‘Normal?’”

  “Yes,” Astra answers. “He had me shut down before the end of the chase. He detected electrical fluctuations outside and inside the bag.”

  “And then he pulled your battery,” Dante observes, “to make it that much harder to surge. And reboxed you.” The tiny robot arm inside the bag is also drained and dead, with no record of my AIs’ final commands, but I can see Foresight trying to harden their processors if he thought there was a risk. And even starting with Astra, who handled nothing critical but might already have key records. So an emergency shutdown saved her.

  Which raises the question, if Astra is the only one fully shut down, would the other AIs have survived to remember anything? Or would he be backing them up from offsite copies?

  Even though I know it will only be a day of their existence, I feel a slight pang at the thought of their little death. I look up at Andrea. “I’ll need time to recharge them and see if their local copies know anything. Their comms died at the train, so their backups might not know anything more.”

  She nods.

  I hear Gavin laugh behind us. “Well, Casey did say we’d need to go pick up the pieces,” he observes. That lands with a clunk, as does whatever he’s setting down in his truckbed.

  There’s a chilly silence, followed by a mournful sigh from Arden.

  “Sorry,” she says finally. “It’s been a rough year. She also said ‘Better the bike than the planet.’ Of course, that’s after I loaned it out.”

  I look back at the others. Gavin, Anton and Chris are loading the pieces of Arden’s bike into the back of the pickup, while she sits on the edge of the bed and eats Anton’s fried mushrooms. They steam in the evening air and look tasty. Arden looks like she’s at a funeral for her puppy, and watching the guy who drove the car bury his roadkill.

  That is to say, she doesn’t look happy. Resigned, but not happy. I notice she suddenly has a wrench in her offhand, idly twirling it as she watches the shattered parts being deposited next to her. Then the wrench disappears and she goes back to her mushrooms and her sorrow.

  “Welcome to Waycross,” Andrea says with a wry smile. “I hope we live up to your dreams.”

  I snort. “You make an impression, I’ll give you that.”

  “Unforgettable, I hope.” She taps her temple. “Except apparently we’re already long forgotten. Not what you were looking for when you came here, I’m sure.”

  “I’m not sure why I’m here,” I tell her. “And not because of the memory thing. I mean, my uncle convinced me to go to your ‘school for the gifted’…” I spread my hands. “Let’s just say I’m going to your school, but I’m not Archon material.” I pause. “And I don’t want to be.”

  Andrea says nothing, cool grey eyes meeting mine. Nothing flickers behind them and then she nods. “Okay.”

  “Okay?” I’m amused. That’s it? I wonder. No hard sell?

  She shrugs. “It’s not for everyone. I doubt it is for me, either.”

  “So why are you here?”

  Andrea sniffs. “Know many other schools for superhumans? And being hip deep in idealists and overachievers is great for networking anyway. It’s a good starting point. You’ll see.”

  “Speaking of which,” Anton says, walking up behind them, “we should probably start at the Neurogenesis clinic next to campus. They can check us out for free, and keep it quiet if anything weird pops up.”

  “Wait, Transcend Neurogenesis? They’ve got a clinic here?” I ask. TN was a division of Transcend Enterprises, one of the richest tech companies on Earth, but they’re known for having very few real-world places where you could visit them. And a select clientele who can use their services directly.

  “Lotta money, lotta backers,” Anton confirms. “Lotta people want to know how this experiment turns out. Not just our helicopter parents.”

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