Chapter 14: AC/DC

The alarms from the facility's interior hadn't stopped. They echoed off the mountain walls behind them, a thin wire of sound that would carry for half a kilometer if the air stayed still. Dinah leaned against the car hood and breathed through her nose while Jolly Roger and Poker Face stood at her back like sentries, their presence humming in the quiet.

"Call's coming in," Dinah said. She held the relay device with both hands, and the screen showed a connection from Osaka. Rina's voice came through garbled and frantic. "They have the relay station. They've got Tony's equipment. I can hear them asking questions, but I can't tell if they're getting answers. Jarrin, they're going to find you."

Jarrin pulled the phone away from his ear. "Find us how?"

"The Architect has Stand-detection arrays embedded in the relay station's antenna. If Rina's captured, they've probably scanned her residual energy patterns. They'll know we're using Tony's broadcast to track targets." Dinah's grip tightened on the device. "They'll find us. That's the whole point of the raid."

Jazz exhaled. "Tokyo or Osaka. Pick one."

Tokyo," Jarrin said before Dinah could answer. He held up both palms in surrender. "Hold on, hold on. I know what you're going to say."

"The Stand user in Tokyo is time-sensitive," Dinah said. "Every hour we waste, the Architect's activation protocol gets closer. Twenty-five hours total, maybe less now."

"And Rina has technical skills that none of us can replace," Jazz countered. "If the Architect gets Tony's equipment and Rina's brain, he builds countermeasures against every Stand ability we have. That's worse than losing Tokyo."

The argument had legs. Both positions had weight. Jarrin knew it, and he knew they both knew it too. Which meant the only way out of it was the one thing neither of them wanted to say: split up.

"Split up," Jarrin said.

Dinah looked at him like he'd grown a second head. "No."

"He and Jazz go to Tokyo. I rescue Rina." That was Dinah's counter. She said it flat, already knowing how this would go.

"And if he gets pinned?" Dinah said. "If a Stand user is waiting in Tokyo and Jarrin takes a hit he can't absorb, what happens? Jolly Roger disappears, he dies, Jazz runs. Nobody covers her back. Nobody absorbs charges. Nobody has a backup if things go sideways."

"He can handle himself. Mostly."

"Mostly isn't a strategy."

"Mostly is the only strategy either of us has ever used."

Jazz stepped between them. "The time issue is the same for both paths. Tokyo has a countdown. Osaka has Rina, and without her we can't relay anything else. We split up, we're cut in half either way. One group goes in blind to Tokyo without backup. The other group goes in blind to Osaka without backup." She paused. "So we both need to be ready to operate without support, and we both need to move fast enough that the other group's delay doesn't kill them."

Dinah stared at the phone. Rina's signal was deteriorating, the connection cutting out every few seconds, which meant the Architect's forces were jamming the relay. "Twenty-five hours," Dinah said. "Maybe less. The implant accelerates if my vitals spike, and every time Daft Punk fires a pulse, my nervous system takes a hit. I've been pushing too hard. The timeline was already compressed before we left Kobe."

"That doesn't change the math," Jazz said.

"It does," Dinah said, and she looked at them both. "Splitting the group means nobody has backup in a fight. Jarrin can absorb charges but not every type. Jazz has portals but limited deck capacity. I have Daft Punk but I've been running it past the point of safety. If we split and half the team gets overwhelmed, the other half is stranded without the assets that make us function."

"Then what?" Jarrin said. "We just pick one path and leave the rest of it behind?"

Dinah opened her mouth to say something else. The sentence never finished.

Her body seized. A violent tremor ran through her spine, up through her shoulders and jaw, and her knees buckled before Jarrin could reach her. He caught her by the arms, and her weight was wrong. Too light. She felt like someone had drained something vital from her in the span of a single shudder. Her skin was cold where his hands touched her wrists, and the tremor hadn't stopped. Her eyes were open but unfocused, the pupils blown wide enough that the irises had barely enough color left to see.

Jarrin's mouth went dry. "Dinah."

"The implant," Dinah said, and her voice had a ragged edge that wasn't from the seizure. "It's burning out my nervous system. The cascade is accelerating. I can feel it. Everything feels like needles, but quieter, like the needles are moving slower. That's bad. That's the worst description for it, but it's accurate."

Rina's voice cut through the relay, thin and breaking. "Dinah. Listen to me. The implant's thermal readout shows your nervous system is degrading in real time. There's no medical intervention. The damage is irreversible at this stage. You need a Stand workaround, and you have exactly one option. Transfer your Stand to a compatible carrier. The donor dies, but you live. That's the only fix that exists."

Silence filled the gap between the phone's static and Jarrin's breathing.

Jazz looked at Dinah on the ground, then at Jarrin, then at the phone. "That's a one-way transfer. The donor clone dies when the Stand moves."

"Everything she freed from that vat dies," Dinah said. Her voice was steadier than her body. "The others I don't know about. The clone who helped us through the corridor. She's still out here, still waiting."

A clone appeared around the car's hood. Jarrin hadn't seen her approach. She was a spare from the facility, one of the autonomous ones, and she stood without moving, watching the scene with the same blank attention she'd shown to everything else. She looked at Dinah on the ground, then at Jarrin. No expression registered on her face, but she stepped forward anyway.

Dinah pushed against Jarrin's grip and got to her feet. The tremor in her legs hadn't stopped. "No," she said to the clone. "Absolutely not. You volunteered once already. I am not taking that from you again."

"You said they were all going to die in forty-eight hours," the clone said. The words came out flat, rehearsed even. "The purge protocol runs on the implant's countdown. If I give you my Stand, you live. If you stay dead, the protocol finishes me anyway."

"That's not the same thing."

"It is." The clone stepped closer and put her hand on Dinah's shoulder. The touch was deliberate. "Designation doesn't matter. I know who you are, and you know who I am. The name is different. The choice isn't."

Jarrin looked at Dinah. His hands were still on her arms, and they hadn't stopped shaking. "Talk to her," he said. "Let her explain what happens if you refuse."

Dinah's jaw worked. She didn't answer right away. The tremor was still running through her body, and her knees wanted to fold again. She fought the folding with every muscle she had, and it showed.

"If I refuse," she said to the clone, "you die in the purge. You don't get to choose how it happens."

The clone nodded once. "Then accept the transfer."

Dinah turned away from both of them. She pressed her forehead to the car's hood and breathed hard, letting the cold metal cool the heat of her skin. The car's surface held condensation where the mountain air had collected overnight, and the water left a damp spot on her hair. She stayed there for ten seconds, then fifteen. Long enough for Jarrin and Jazz to watch without commenting.

"Fine," she said. "Fine. One condition. I choose the carrier myself. Not you. Not the clone. Me."

The clone understood. She placed her right hand against Dinah's left. The contact was brief, almost clinical. Dinah spoke a single word, consent, and the air between them changed.

Daft Punk and its clone's twin erupted in kinetic energy so dense it turned visible. Green and white light filled the space, a pulse that knocked Jarrin's knees out and sent a gust against Jazz's face. The energy didn't dissipate. It collapsed inward, into Dinah's body, and the tremor in her muscles stopped as suddenly as a circuit breaker tripping. Then the light dropped. The clone was gone. Just gone, as if someone had erased a line from the page, leaving nothing but the white space where a figure had stood.

Dinah looked down at her hands. They were steady. She flexed each finger, then each wrist, and rolled her shoulders without a single tremor. The dead-man implant on her neck had gone dark, the small red indicator that had been pulsing for days now completely dead. Whatever the implant had been doing to her nervous system was gone.

A new Stand stood behind her.

It was shaped like a a women, busty, dressed in a leather jacket that seemed to vibrate at a frequency just above human perception. Its right hand held a guitar with a neck that ran longer than the rest of its body. Its head was a cracked speaker cone, visible through a tear in the fabric of where a face should be. Static crackled around it, faint, and the air smelled like ozone.

AC/DC. Dinah had no idea how she knew the name. It just appeared, like a Stand's name always did, settling into her mind like a word she'd known since childhood.

"Test it," Jazz said. She pointed at a dead electrical outlet on the facility's exterior wall, twenty meters away. The outlet had been stripped of power when the facility went to combat alert, which meant the wiring inside the wall was live but disconnected.

Dinah touched the wall near the outlet. Her body dissolved. She didn't move, didn't walk, didn't dissolve in any way Jarrin could follow. She simply became the wiring, passing through the copper and insulation like water through a pipe, and she was through it in three seconds. Then she reappeared ten feet from the wall, perfectly intact, breathing easy.

Jazz stared. "What else?"

"I can hide," Dinah said. "Inside anything with electrical current. Appliances, wires, transformers. Any device with a circuit becomes a hiding spot. The Architect's Stand-detection equipment tracks Stand signatures, and my new signature is electrical. I'd be invisible to anything looking for Daft Punk's frequency."

Jarrin said, "Good. That means we can bring you closer to the Architect's facilities without being tracked. We can get inside."

Dinah picked up the relay phone. Rina's signal was still weak, still coming from Osaka, and Dinah used AC/DC to send a focused kinetic pulse through the power grid. The pulse encoded a pre-recorded message Dinah had set up earlier, voltage spikes that translated to a simple instruction: hold position. Wait. I'll come back. The pulse traveled along the electrical infrastructure and reached Rina's location. Dinah could feel the confirmation, a faint return ping that proved Rina's relay had received it.

"Now Tokyo," Jarrin said.

Jazz nodded. They left the facility grounds, moving fast. Dinah led, AC/DC walking behind her like a silent friend. Jarrin fell into step at her left, and Jazz took the right. No more arguments. The compromise had cost something that nobody could put a price on, and nobody wanted to spend the energy debating the price.

The train station was a twenty-minute drive from the facility's lower perimeter. Jarrin found it on the relay's coordinates and parked in a layby behind a closed convenience store. The station itself was small, a single platform with two tracks and a glass waiting room that looked like it hadn't had any customers since the last bus came through.

Dinah scanned the perimeter with AC/DC. The Stand's speaker head turned in slow, methodical arcs, picking up electromagnetic signatures from every source in the area. Power lines. A generator box behind the ticket office. A few streetlamps. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then AC/DC stopped. The Stand's arm extended, and the guitar's neck pointed at the platform's edge.

Jarrin looked where the Stand pointed. Nothing visible. Just concrete, the platform edge, and the empty tracks beyond it.

"Bomb Voyage," he said.

Jazz squinted. She was a Stand user too. She saw it immediately. Small charges, no bigger than a coin, wired into the platform's concrete seams. Too small to spot with the naked eye. A hundred of them, placed at intervals along the entire length of the track. Kazir's work. The Architect's men had already wired this station, and the charges were set for a remote trigger. One activation, and the platform became a crater.

Nobody on the platform knew it. Nobody without a Stand could see them. Jarrin looked at the charges, then at Dinah, then at Jazz. The three of them stood at the station entrance with the knowledge that a hidden enemy had already arrived, and that every step they took toward Tokyo would carry the potential for an explosion they couldn't see coming.