Gamechanger Read online

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  Tom Doherty Associates ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  FOR LINDA CARSON: FRIEND, MENTOR, SUPERGENIUS, FOUR-COLOR HERO, ACADEMIC ASSASSIN. YOU ARE A GAMECHANGER, IN EVERY SENSE OF THE WORD.

  Prologue

  THE SURFACE

  (TAGS #REALITY, #CONSENSUS-REALITY, #THE-REAL-WORLD)

  WEST EDMONTON EVACUATION ZONE, AUGUST 2060

  Misfortune Wilson had a ticket to Neverland.

  Kids never talked about Neverland when adults were about. Only when their VR rigs were safely stowed, when they had slipped parental oversight and Sensorium pickup, did they whisper and speculate.

  Some believed Neverland was a deep-sea technosphere, safe from scorching sun, flying hail, from gale-class winds and the plagues running through the densification camps. Kids told stories of submarine apartments walled in mother-of-pearl, a futuristic Atlantis circled by reefs of jewel-toned fish.

  In Neverland, nobody tracked your location.

  Nice enough fantasy, Misfortune supposed, though most stories said they kicked you out when you turned sixteen.

  Other kids had told her Neverland was on the moon, or hidden within the protected remains of the Amazon rainforest. Snakes and frogs and warm air, they said. Butterflies and waterfalls.

  Her newest @CloseFriend, Calla, believed that kids who made it to Neverland would be put to sleep for a hundred years. These lucky dreamers would sleep out the plagues, waking to the task of renewing Earth. They would rebuild the forests, rewild everything their elders had spoiled.

  Misfortune had scoffed … until she got her own invitation. Now she favored the underground theory. Caves and repurposed diamond mines seemed more realistic than a deep-sea habitat or something with butterflies.

  The problem now was meeting their pickup.

  Wrapping a shawl tightly around her head, she peered around the corner of the bombed-out Misericordia Hospital. Her slitted eyes picked out pink electric light obscured by dark streamers of wind-borne dust. The light winked in Morse code, signaling from the remains of West Edmonton Mall.

  She decoded the message: Darlings, darlings, here, come …

  “See it?” Thick American accent, barely audible over the wind. Garmin’s breath was hot on her ear and smelled of their last meal, a mash of printed apricot, fauxmeat, and unidentified flying protein. Moths, probably.

  “What?” Calla was a scabby whiner of a kid. She’d stowed away on the same water convoy as them.

  Misfortune pointed. “Beacon.”

  Calla peered beyond the dubious shelter of the hospital’s shattered foundations, shrinking back as an old camper blew into view. It was rolling, becoming obscenely rounded as its corners bounced off the ground.

  “That parking lot’s a death trap!”

  “Missy’ll think of something,” Garmin said. He and Misfortune were on their third set of foster parents; their being tagged #siblings was a mere formality. Still, the younger boy—he was ten, she twelve—hadn’t slowed her down.

  “We’ll never make it!” Calla said.

  Misfortune considered as the trailer fetched up against a heavy concrete divider. Wind howled and the old vehicle groaned, lofting up over the barrier before continuing its murderous roll eastward. An old shopping cart whipped past, chasing it, and slammed the barrier as well.

  The dividers weren’t much shelter, but they’d have to do. She pointed out a heavy-looking van at the midpoint of the lot. “We’ll catch our breath there.”

  “If it doesn’t flip on us,” Calla groused.

  “Follow me!” Head down, Misfortune leaned into the wind. Dirt and pebbles smacked with bruising force against her sleeves. Nanotech cleats in the boots she’d stolen from her foster mother made each step sticky, forcing her to peel her feet off the ground … but keeping her from blowing away. Garmin and Calla held hands—they were sharing Dad’s cleats.

  Forcing herself to it step by step, she made an exhausting progress to a vintage traffic signal. It was bent like a stalk of grass, its half-severed top swinging wildly. Misfortune spared a glance back, saw the huddled shadows of the younger children plodding through the dust, and hurled herself onto the parking lot.

  Nobody knows where we are, nobody knows … She’d thought it would be a heady experience, being off-grid.

  Boom! Wind knocked her sprawling even as it snapped the stem of the traffic light. Then the whole storm blew out. The shrieking wind stilled to whispers.

  Windblown trash crashed to earth. Smash bang crunch. Green glass tinkled from the traffic light. Her ears rang.

  “Scramble!” Misfortune clicked her heels together to retract the nanocleats. She sprinted across the parking lot toward the boarded-up mall, the flickering beacon.

  “Slow down!” Calla shouted.

  On the horizon, the turbulent Alberta sky was turning the sickly green of rotten flesh.

  “Missy…”

  “I see it!”

  “Tornados!”

  “I know!” Green skies meant fast death, few choices. Easy maths.

  “Mostly they miss, mostly they miss…” Her wrap had torn loose. She let it unfurl in her hand, the better to pull it tight again. Her dirty tongue rasped over dust-crusted lips.

  “Misfortune…”

  “Just run, Calla!”

  “It hurts—”

  Halfway across.

  “Freeze!” Deep, amplified voice. A spotlight pinned her.

  Misfortune screeched to a halt so sudden, her knees popped and the cleats reactivated.

  You are not taking me back to the densification camp!

  The drone had been sheltering under the armored car. Toaster-sized, with squeaking rotors, it tried to hover equidistant between the three children.

  “Vrrrrah trespassing in an evacuation zoooooohhhh. Identify cahh zzzurrender!”

  Beyond the glitching drone, the roof of the sky was twisting into downward spikes. On the horizon she saw funnel clouds forming and retracting. Dip down, swirl up. Closer each time.

  The bot extruded arms—one, two, three—with tranq darts. Two it aimed at Misfortune and Garmin. Red laser dots winked on their chests. The third, Calla’s dart, was drooping.

  “Remove masssshhh and submit to facieee recognition!”

  Massshhh? Masks. Her face was that dirty.

  Boom! A needle-thin wisp of lightning sizzled something within the remains of the hospital.

  Mostly it misses, mostly …

  The lightning strike startled Garmin. He twitched, just enough. The drone fired.

  Misfortune was moving even as her brother made a soft oh! sound and staggered back. She leapt up to the traffic divider, shawl in hand, tackling the bot. They hit the pavement hard; its whirling chopper blade cut into her cheek.

  “S
abotaaaa of densification bots izza offense!” it wailed.

  Misfortune scrabbled under the drone, scavenging darts. She almost got her fingers broken when Calla ran up, hefting a hunk of concrete, and began smashing it down on the bot.

  “Careful!”

  “Trying to help!” One of Calla’s busted-up fingernails had peeled right off.

  Misfortune rolled off the drone, panting, tucking a dart into her sleeve as Calla continued to kill the drone. Garmin had dropped to his knees. The tranq protruded, right below his sternum.

  Could they still beat the wind? Misfortune slung his arm over her shoulder. He sagged like bagged sand.

  “Calla, help!”

  “He’s too big!”

  “Bloody get over here and—”

  “Give me the other nanoboot!” Calla said. “I’ll run ahead for help.”

  Wind lifted Misfortune’s hair, scouring grit over her unprotected face. “Get back here!”

  Calla wavered, just for a second.

  Drop Garmin and pummel the other girl into submission?

  Before she could decide, the armored rear doors of the van burst open, disgorging two well-fed adults. One charged them, tearing Garmin from Misfortune’s grasp.

  “Ride’s here, kiddies,” he said. “Saddle up!”

  Calla scrambled after him without missing a beat.

  Thunder boomed above.

  Misfortune hesitated. These didn’t look like rescuers from a magical utopian city. They looked like better-fed versions of the camp guards.

  “Neverland express, kid! Shit or get off the pot—we got a storm to outrun!”

  “Language, Burke!” said his partner.

  “This vicious little fuglet busted our bot!”

  The guard—Burke—made as though to close the van up. Misfortune bolted inside, cowering against Calla’s twiggy frame.

  Doors slammed. The vehicle leapt forward, accelerating. Misfortune’s cleats dug into the van carpet.

  One of the soldiers unmasked. “Hello, girls,” she said. “I’m Gladys. I’m a medic. Do you mind if I…”

  Calla stepped forward, allowing the adult to wipe her face clean.

  “What sweet, obedient children! Want some hydro gel?”

  They grabbed the water capsules gratefully, biting in, chewing.

  “Rinse your teeth and just spit—” Gladys gestured at the floor.

  Wide-eyed, Calla obeyed, swishing the gel and then dribbling out a glob of black and red. The carpet ate it without protest.

  The whole van must be top-line tech.

  Misfortune strained jellied water through her teeth. It was cool and tasted faintly of apples, nothing like the chewy, sulfur-tasting water rations from the camps. Spitting to clear the dirt from her mouth seemed an almost criminal act of waste.

  She swallowed the second gel, then a third. Finally, she held her hand out for a wipe. “I’ll clean myself, thanks.”

  The medic continued to swab at Calla as Misfortune tried to stanch the gash the bot had left in her face. “What’s your names?”

  “Calla Hudson.”

  “Misfortune Wilson.”

  “Well, Miss Fortune—”

  “Ain’t Miss Anything. Tell us about Neverland. Is it—” Her breath hitched.

  “Is it better?” Calla finished for her. “Than the camps?”

  The van lurched. The other guard, Burke, was muttering over tornado proximity alerts on its screens.

  Suddenly, a new voice spoke. “Why not let Gladys stitch your wound while you and I talk about Neverland, luvvie?”

  “Poppet!” Misfortune relaxed, fractionally. “Where are you?”

  The medic, Gladys, handed her a battered doll with green glass eyes and auburn hair done up in a bun. It wore a long black dress and had a pair of felt glasses that hung on her chest, strung from a gold ribbon.

  “Now, luvvie.” Top-of-the-line speaker in its gut, crisp voice, no fuzzing like that old security bot outside. “Can’t Gladys see to your pretty face?”

  “Not pretty.” Still. Misfortune dropped her guard, allowing Gladys to spray her with cleansers and cooling foam. She hadn’t realized how much her face hurt until it stopped throbbing.

  “There’s a love. Let’s see. You never went for the nonsense about underwater cities, did you?”

  “Then Neverland is real? Truly?”

  “Try not to talk,” said the medic.

  “Real as this lorry,” the doll said. “Real as these medics. You have proper families waiting for you at Neverland. You will be cherished.”

  Parents, version four. Misfortune fought a sigh. She spoke from the good side of her mouth. “And when we grow up?”

  “That rather depends on you.”

  Misfortune held the doll in the center of her field of vision, the better to take in the others’ faces in her peripheral. Under his goggles, Burke was sneering. Gladys was holding a neutral expression.

  “Little Calla, I know, is interested in cooking. She’ll make a good worker bee. And your brother is such a smart, attractive, healthy boy! A proper prince!”

  “But. A stroppy fuglet with a cut face?”

  “Hush hush,” Gladys said. “Almost done. I’m going to cut out your tracker chip.”

  “My chip?”

  “You don’t want the camp coming after you, luvvie, once the storm’s passed?” the doll chirped.

  Misfortune shook her head.

  Gladys produced a small glass tube containing a slice of printed beef. The muscle tissue twitched faintly as she pressed the tube against Misfortune’s upper arm, isolating a circle of skin.

  “Your user account locks if the chip reports tampering, so we have to confuse it.” Deploying a wide-bore needle, she injected something under the edge of the glass, numbing Misfortune’s flesh before using a third probe to dig for the chip.

  An emerald point cut upward through Misfortune’s skin like a tooth breaking through gum.

  “Is that it?”

  “Pretty, isn’t it, luvvie?”

  The chip was a flattish green teardrop, about the size of her smallest fingernail. Gladys tucked it against the strand of live muscle, screwed a lid onto the capsule, and dropped it into a complicated-looking case. “Chip secured.

  “That’s it for your old life. Now you can start again.”

  Top-flight equipment and chip extractors. Whatever Neverland was, it wasn’t going to be brightly colored fish bobbing around reefs. It wasn’t kids weaving seaweed baskets and getting on fine without parental supervision.

  In that case, Misfortune concluded, the best case was to end up being the one holding the weapons.

  She said to the doll, “Can I become one of these troopers of yours?”

  “You want to join the Shadows?” Burke barked laughter. “Oh, fuglet. You’d be lucky to end up botomized and mopping toilets.”

  “Silence, Mer Burke!” Poppet said. “Misfortune, I do like your spirit.”

  The medic put a bandage on Misfortune’s arm before turning back to Calla. The other girl had curled up on the opposite bench.

  “Calla?”

  “Hurts.”

  Gladys nudged open the girl’s mouth with a gloved finger, revealing bleeding gums.

  Despite herself, Misfortune took a step back. “New dengue?”

  Gladys nodded.

  The adults had put plague-pushers in the hydrogels.

  It happened in the camps, too. People who compromised herd immunity by avoiding their jabs were antisocial. Screening—even by using tests that would doom the afflicted—was routine practice.

  Did she care? Calla was a whiner. She should’ve got vaxxed.

  “Is Garmin okay?” she asked, hating the tremble in her voice. They weren’t really #siblings, after all.

  “Your brother’s negs for plague, same as you.”

  Misfortune let her fingers travel over the newly glued surface of her cheek. She felt pressure but no sensation in that side of her face. Under her hand, the skin was leathe
r. She frowned at the doll, thinking.

  “We were supposed to get tranked by the bot, I suppose. Hauled into the truck and tested while we slept.”

  “Clever girl,” Poppet said. “You understand, don’t you, luvvie, that little Calla cannot be helped? We didn’t give her the fever. We can only make the end easier.”

  “Testing accell—accell … pushes the dengue,” she said. “Some people even live if you don’t test!”

  “Get vaxxed or get #triaged; isn’t that the saying?”

  Misfortune scowled. “In the camps.”

  “Darling, darling,” the doll’s voice soothed. “All I want is for you to be safe, happy, and useful. But you must see that Calla—”

  “Is already #triaged?”

  “It is a terrible shame, luvvie,” the doll said. “Why don’t you go up front and sit with your brother while Gladys helps Calla?”

  Calla lunged off the bench, diving for the space between Burke’s legs. Her hands slipped on the surface of the rear doors, feeling for handles that weren’t there. She let out a bubbly shriek. Then Burke lifted her, with both gloved hands, barely turning his face away as she coughed, misting him with crimson.

  The girl clawed at his goggles, frantic, kicking.

  Misfortune set the doll down carefully, keeping one eye on Gladys as she stepped up behind Burke. “Put her down.”

  “Stay out of this, kid.”

  “I said down!” Her hard-won prize, raided from the bot, had been its third tranq dart. Now she palmed it, punching through Burke’s uniform, into his calf.

  Calla dropped to the floor, crashing like a sack full of bottles. Burke backhanded Misfortune.

  She barely felt the blow, what with her still-frozen cheek, but the lift of it almost tore her out of her nanoboots. She felt the long bones in her legs stretching. Pinwheeling her arms, she fought not to fall on her back.

  “Better sit down, Shadow,” she told Burke.

  “You little—” He groped for the dart in his thigh.

  “Do as she says, Burke.” Poppet’s voice was like steel. Now that was a mom talking.

  He fisted and opened his hands, fisted and opened them. Misfortune crossed her arms, hoping to hide the shakes. She could take another hit. She’d taken plenty.