A Question of Will Read online

  Will practiced the technique, which amounted to building a mental barrier of insulation around the Energy, forcing it to remain inside him. The trick, as Adam noted repeatedly, was awareness; he would only Shield when he made the conscious effort. Over time, it would become a skill like driving, able to be done with less conscious effort, but in these early days he needed to be quite diligent. They were essentially copying Aramis’ Damper skill, but voluntarily using it on themselves.

  They were just finishing up and starting back to the camp when they heard loud, rumbling noises overhead. Adam’s face tightened.

  “Thunder?” Will asked.

  “No,” Adam replied. “Hunters. They’ve found us.”

  Will’s face fell. “No. They’ve found me.”

  XVII

  Machines

  Adam sprinted back to camp, bursting through a haze inside the tree line that Will hadn’t noticed before. Will trailed closely behind. Nearly all of the buildings in the clearing had vanished, leaving not even a trace of a foundation or imprints in the grass. Only three remained, one of which was the building Will used for lodging. Adam headed that way now. Will noticed a similar haze overhead, as if a cloud had formed over their clearing, level with the tree canopy above. Fil and Angel burst from another of the remaining buildings. Angel’s face was fearful, but Fil’s face showed nothing but mangled fury. “You!” he screamed, sprinting at Will. “This is entirely your fault!”

  Fil was on him faster than Will believed possible, and the two fell to the ground, with Will landing on his back. Fil threw fists and elbows at the pinned man, and it was all Will could do to get his arms up and defend himself. The blows came at a rate which eliminated the possibility of fighting back, and Will felt his skin bruising, his arms becoming numb. Angel looked like she wanted to say something, but opted against speaking. Both spectators looked nervous and antsy at the sounds of the nearby Hunters, glancing in the direction of the noise, watching as the hundred or more craft in the original convoy split up, presumably chasing after fleeing Alliance members they’d detected.

  The attack by Fil finally stopped, Will lowered his arms. Fil’s face was one of pure fury, obvious despite the sunglasses that masked his eyes. Will didn’t need his empathy training to know what fueled it. Will’s growing Energy, and the leakages he’d never Shielded until moments before, had drawn the attention of the Hunters and brought them here. Will hadn’t fought back because he believed he deserved each and every blow.

  Adam pulled Fil off of Will. “We need to get moving. Now. Deal with this later.”

  Will glanced up. Aircraft of the approximate size of bicycles were visible over the nearby forest, the spot Adam and Will had just vacated. Had they zeroed in on the tree? A burst of flame erupted from one of the aircraft, igniting the trees in the distance. His tree. Will felt his own fury mount, and he started toward the trees.

  Adam grabbed him. “No. There are too many of them, and too few of us. There were at least a hundred craft initially, and most of them are chasing others of our group who have already fled. We need to escape.” Adam pulled him along until Will moved of his own volition. Out of the corner of his eye, Will saw Fil and Angel vanish inside one of the remaining buildings, just as he and Adam entered Will’s room. “Stand still,” Adam ordered. Will, not sure what to expect, did as he was told, standing still directly behind Adam.

  The bed and chairs in the room melted into the floor, and the walls, floor, and ceiling collapsed inward toward the two men. Will felt a moment of panic; perhaps he was being executed for his role in leading the Hunters to camp. Adam looked calm, watching as the modest-sized room reformed around them and shaped into what looked like a flying bobsled with a clear top.

  “Sit,” Adam said, and Will sat without thinking, surprised — though he wasn’t sure why — to find a seat had formed under him. The chair molded itself to him, and restraining bands serving as a seat belt held him in place. Will looked out of the clear, seamless top, and saw another vehicle where Fil and Angel’s building had stood. Shape-shifting buildings? He wondered what type of Energy enabled that. The third building remained in place and unaltered.

  Things had definitely changed over the past month or so. Now, a building that stayed in one place and maintained its shape was the oddity.

  The building — now a vehicle — lifted silently off the ground and followed Fil and Angel’s vehicle into the forest, away from his tree. Will glanced behind them, back toward what was left of their camp. “What’s that last building?”

  “That’s where the Mechanic works. He’s usually the last one to leave. I hadn’t thought that would be your first question, though.” Adam steered the craft expertly through the trees. Will turned around, and noticed that there were no controls. He would have been surprised if there were.

  Will considered the comment. “What was I supposed to ask?”

  Adam risked a quick glance back at him, before returning his focus to the flying vehicle in front of him. “Perhaps why Angel and I stood back while Fil... well, while Fil vented some frustration. Given that you didn’t try to fight back, though, I imagine you figured that one out on your own.”

  “He’s mad at me for drawing the Hunters here. I don’t fault him for that.”

  “You should be faulting me, though. As your trainer I should have recognized that your Energy levels were going to make this inevitable, and taught you to Shield sooner. I really should have told you to stay in camp; we have a technology that Shields all of us while we’re in the clearing, so if I’d told you then you could have stayed where it was safe and nothing would have happened. Fil really should have come after me, but he chose you instead.”

  “Lucky me,” Will muttered. “Why?”

  “We go back a long way together. I helped him during a rather difficult time of his life, and so I think he feels a sense of obligation to give me a break when I don’t deserve it. In the circumstance just now, he was simply too angry to let it all go, and you were the second best candidate.” He shook his head. “I thank you for your patience with him there, and with me now.”

  “So since I wasn’t going to ask you that question,” Will said, “what question was I supposed to ask?”

  “You already know. Ask now.”

  Will shrugged. “How is it that my room is now a flying bobsled?”

  Adam laughed. “I hadn’t expected quite that wording. This is your introduction to our most prized technology, the one that the Elites don’t have. They can match us for Energy easily — well, except for Angel, and especially Fil — but this...this technology gives us the edge we need to survive.” He made a sharp left turn to avoid a tight cluster of trees, and then straightened back out to track behind Fil and Angel. “And the reason that they don’t have this is that we borrowed this technology from humans, then enhanced it in our fashion. What you are seeing is our version of nanomachines.”

  Will was stunned. The stuff he’d used to build the Dome over Pleasanton was a material that could shape-shift from stationary building to flying vehicle? “I own a company that makes nanos, and we’re not building any that can...do all of this. And we’re the only ones, too. Other than my company, everyone’s pretty much abandoned the technology.”

  Adam sighed. “For decades, nanotechnology was hailed in human circles as the next great leap in technology. Microscopic machines were going to heal our wounds, cure us of diseases, and make materials stronger and lighter than anything seen before. And then the advancement stopped. Why?”

  Will shrugged. “A lot of research stopped during the depression. Nanotechnology is expensive to research. It was a pretty easy thing to cut. That’s why I had the only company left. Nobody else wanted to throw the necessary capital at it. I do remember hearing of some failed trials for the medical applications, though.”

  Adam nodded. “Exactly. The Elites got wind of it. Humans becoming healthier and stronger runs counter to what they stand for. Though it’s not technically a violation of the Firs
t Oath, because the technology initiated with humans rather than Aliomenti, it was still seen as a threat to the Elites’ power. And so, they used their wealth and influence to sabotage research, and encouraged businesses to pull investments. That included those medical trials, by the way; the Elites sabotaged the samples so that patients died, rather than getting healthier. They weren’t worried about a mere construction company like yours, so you were left alone. With their mission accomplished, the Elites forgot about the technology, because after all, no human idea could have enough merit to warrant further research by the Aliomenti.” Adam laughed. “The Alliance thought otherwise. We picked up the scraps, bought the research and prototypes, and even brought in the top researchers, who were now without jobs. Those men and women became full Alliance Aliomenti and focused on the research they had thought lost to them forever. That’s where we got the Mechanic, by the way. He was the best, and his theories were among those supposedly disproved by the sabotage. The Mechanic, along with a few brilliant youngsters, made nano-machines far beyond any they thought possible before, making huge amounts of progress in only a few years.”

  Will smiled. Served the Elites right. “So this flying ship is made of a few thousand tiny machines, then?”

  “A few trillion, actually, maybe more.” He chuckled. “When you’re dealing with machines smaller than cells, the numbers get very huge very quickly. A thousand machines are a number you’d use for internal work, inside the body. For anything tangible...you’d need far more.”

  “Inside the body...there are nanos that are part of The Purge, aren’t there?” Will asked. Fil had mentioned “special additives of our creation” as being part of the formula.

  “Correct,” Adam said, as he swerved to avoid another tree. Just how large was this forest? They’d been traveling at a high rate of speed for quite a while. “There are foods and other natural substances which will accomplish the same thing, but at a much slower pace. Less trauma as well. That’s how our earliest members achieved what they did. With nanos, however, we could rapidly accelerate the timetable of advancement. That’s why all of us go through the Purge a few times a year, and why we had you go through it right away. We couldn’t afford to have you wait twenty years to clear your system and start sensing Energy.”

  Will shook his head. “No, definitely not. It was horribly unpleasant, but now that it’s over with I’m glad you went that route with me. So what else can these machines do?”

  “Well, we’ve built some to protect our camps. There are always a few set up overhead that reflect the image of trees so no clearing can be seen; another type actually blocks Energy, and keeps it inside; so we put a thin layer around the whole perimeter of camp. If the Hunters are spotted, we put a lot more of those up.” Adam smiled. “And we have a few folks doing research on how they can affect the human brain.”

  “I will not get in there.” The Assassin glared at the Mechanic, arms folded across his chest in a show of defiance. Everything in him screamed at The Assassin to draw his sword and execute the man. But he knew he’d be stopped.

  “We’ve discussed this. The Hunters are arriving even now. If they find you here, they will assume you’ve gone rogue. If they see you fleeing with me, they will assume you’ve gone rogue. If they see you with me and you then go back to Headquarters, they will take you for a traitor. You must flee with me, and you must not be seen.”

  “Then leave me here.”

  The Mechanic laughed. “Not an option. You’ve been gone a long time. You’ll be seen in the empty enemy camp. You can’t think that they’d trust you since you’ve never reported to them about your intentions to spy, now can you? Nor have you returned after your little outing chasing down Will Stark’s wife and child. No, if they find you right now, you’ll be taken for a traitor and executed.”

  “You will not put me back in there.”

  “I’m giving you the chance to climb in on your own. You have five seconds.”

  “I really will kill you....”

  “One...”

  “...as soon as I get out...”

  “...two...”

  “...of this. The...”

  “...three...”

  “...indignity has been...”

  “...four...”

  “...uncalled for, and...”

  The glove snapped around The Assassin, and he was hurled into the trunk of the vehicle, and the lid snapped shut behind him. He screamed and shouted the vilest curses he could fathom at the Mechanic, though he doubted the man could hear a word he said. The Mechanic climbed into the front of the vehicle as the building evaporated around him, and he spotted the fire and heard the Hunters’ craft nearby. He glanced over at Smokey and whistled. The dog trotted over and jumped into the vehicle with him.

  “Too late to run now, girl,” he muttered, giving the dog a friendly pat on the head. “I’ll need to try some trickery on these guys.”

  He concentrated, and the vehicle shimmered...then vanished. The craft hosting the Aliomenti flew overhead and saw nothing but an empty clearing.

  “So that’s why they couldn’t stab me? How you pulled me through the ground into the house?”

  “Yes,” Adam said, still trailing Fil and Angel as the flying craft maneuvered through a seemingly endless forest. “Angel dug a tunnel with nanos to make the passage a bit smoother for you, but we ran out of time when you mentioned your son. I got the nano shield around you just in time. We could have used Energy and teleported you, but that would have told them where we were and we might not have escaped. That’s the nice part about nanos — we can do many things with them that you could also do with Energy, but the Aliomenti can’t detect them.”

  “I still don’t understand how they work. Not at this level of sophistication, at least.”

  Adam thought for a moment. “Each of the machines has several components - a generator, a small camera and microphone, a small panel capable of showing color, some computation circuits, communication circuits, anti-gravity magnets—“

  “Whoa. What? Anti-gravity magnets?”

  “We don’t have much to do here outside performing research. We’ve had the individual components for a while. We just miniaturized them down and taught them how to communicate and problem solve together. Form a wall. Form a room. And so on.”

  “Or form a flying car?”

  “Of course. Might as well take advantage of the anti-gravity capability.”

  “Of course,” Will said, wondering if Adam noted his sarcasm. The machines sounded more like magic than all of the Energy abilities he’d seen.

  “Each of us in the Alliance has a sizable number of nanos inside them. Some fight illness as a supplement to our immune system. Some repair wounds. And some interpret signals from our brains and communicate those to our nanos.”

  “Wait, so you just think something and the machines do...whatever it is you ask them to do?”

  “So long as they can figure out how to do it. There are some limitations. They aren’t allowed to do anything to kill another person, for example, though they don’t know how to think of everything that might cause a death.”

  Will shook his head. “This sounds impossible. Yet I have no reason to doubt it. A few weeks ago, I’d have considered anyone driving a flying car to be impossible, and yet here I am, chased by people who want to kill me because I have enough Energy to destroy a small apartment building.”

  Adam laughed. “You’ve adapted well. We’ll need to get you some nanos for use. You have the health ones in you already...”

  “What?”

  “The ones that patched you up from your last encounter with the Hunters...you didn’t think we took them back, did you?”

  “Well, I hadn’t thought much about it at the time since I’m just now learning about these machines, but...”

  “No, they’re still inside you, making sure nothing bad happens. They’ll patch up the bruises you got from Fil pretty soon, if they haven’t already. We’ll need to get the communication
nanos inside you, and then gift you a few to get started. I’ll ask the Mechanic to build you a batch of a few trillion when we stop running again.”

  “So how often does this happen?” Will waved around. “How often do you have to pack up and move?”

  “It’s probably been about twenty years since the last one, I’d wager. We’ve gotten pretty good at evading their traps since we know what they are. They don’t innovate much anymore, which helps. We build out of the nanos exclusively. We don’t have a lot of possessions because we don’t really want any. It’s easy to move when your home becomes your transport vehicle.”

  “I can see why Fil is so upset about this, then. He must’ve been extremely young when you last moved. Known mostly a stable home location most of his life.”

  Adam chuckled. “Fil’s life has been anything but stable. And he’s old enough to remember the last move.”

  “When do we stop flying?”

  They’d been weaving through forests now for about thirty minutes; Will could hear no sound of the Hunters chasing them in their flying cars, but he had to consider the possibility that the pursuit teams could travel in silence as well.

  “Angel scouted out the next location a few years back; we change it about every three years just to make sure there aren’t any other Aliomenti in the area. This one is about a hundred miles from the last location. Should be there in about a half hour. We like to move enough that they can’t find us again by simply flying circles around our last base, but don’t want to move too far.”