The Body Electric

Chapter 13

“I don’t like it,” Ms. White says once we’re back at the Reverie Mental Spa. She barely spoke at all after PA Young dismissed us and she kept her cool the entire cab ride back, but now that we’re in our own building, she’s pacing back and forth, twisting her hands in worry.

“He won’t see me,” I point out. “The secondary reverie chair, the one I used, is in another room. We’ll just give Representative Belles a reverie, and I’ll slip into it like I did with Mom’s and…”

“Too much can go wrong!” Ms. White says. “It’s far, far too dangerous.” She spins around to face me. “Can you honestly tell me you’re not afraid?”

“Of course I’m afraid,” I say immediately, without thinking. The words take even me by surprise, and I bite my lip, considering.

When I shut my eyes, I see the way my father died.

“Do you really think that the terrorists will come here?” I whisper.

Ms. White wraps me in a hug. “I don’t know,” she says. “Your mother has kept her technology a secret, even from me. But if they can’t steal it and replicate it… they may try to destroy it.”

I see the way the bomb exploded, the way everything went white.

I am scared. I’m terrified.

“We could go somewhere,” I say. “Destroy Mom’s tech, sell the building, move somewhere else.”

Ms. White holds me tighter. “Maybe…” she says, her voice trailing off, but we both know it would be a long shot. It’s hard to disappear. We’d have to disable our cuffs, and that would make us look suspicious anywhere we go. Besides, if the terrorists could reach someone as high up in the government as Representative Belles, then how hard would it be to take us out? As long as Mom’s alive, she’s a threat—even if she destroyed the reverie chairs, she still has the knowledge to make more.

And we’re both forgetting the most important piece of information. “Mom’s too sick to go on the run,” I say. I pull away from Ms. White. “And we can’t tell her about this.”

“But—”

“She’s getting worse. You said so yourself. We can’t let her know about the danger.”

Ms. White nods slowly. “Are you going to do the reverie with Representative Belles?” she asks. “We could refuse. No one knows you can do this except the two of us and PA Young. If we hide your ability, the terrorists might not…”

“PA Young said they were already a threat to us,” I counter. “We can’t run, and we can’t hide. We have to beat them at their own game.”

The next morning, I watch Representative Belles arrive at the Reverie Mental Spa from the security feed while I hide in the secondary reverie chamber. His face is full, but overall he’s slender and tall. He looks nervous. This is his first reverie. He has no idea how nervous he should be.

The Prime Administrator arranged it so that Representative Belles “won” a raffle for a series of free visits to the mental spa. Hopefully, even if the terrorists know that Mom’s technology can be corrupted to be used for spying, Representative Belles doesn’t. He doesn’t appear to be suspicious, at least, and Ms. White is a master at putting clients at ease.

When they enter the reverie chamber, I start to get ready. While Ms. White is giving the representative a dose of the reverie drug, pressing electrodes into his skin, and hooking the interface system up with his cuffLINK device, I’m doing the same in this hidden room, connected by wires to the representative’s reverie chair.