I left the hospital room in a daze. The circuit request still flashed in the corner of my eye. MacReady hadn’t picked up. Maybe he wasn’t going to.
Because of the trouble in the streets, the halls were crowded. Patients sat, holding bloodied gauze in place, outside doors while doctors rushed by. People were shouting, but I barely heard it. I felt like I was moving through the chaos in a bubble. Numb. Blood dotted the floor in a wandering line, and I followed it, heading toward the elevators.
I eased relaxant into my system, but even with the drugs I couldn’t shake the jitters. One of those things had cut off my arm. While I’d lain there, bleeding to death, they’d carried it away and eaten it. The last man I’d seen with any link to what was happening out there was somewhere in the building right now.
Halfway down the hall, I stopped, and an angry looking nurse brushed past me. I accessed the hospital’s records again.
Rafe Pena. Room 9E-C.
He was on that same floor, being held for questioning. The next time someone in scrubs moved past, I grabbed his arm. He looked irritated, but winced a little when I applied pressure.
“Room 9E-C,” I said.
“Back down the hall and to your right,” he said, pulling his arm free. Before I could say anything else, he was gone. I turned away from the blood trail and began moving back the way I’d come.
The room had three gurneys, but only one was occupied. The empty ones were still dressed in bloodied sheets, and on the third lay a whip-thin man. His pockmarked face was slack, and there was gauze covering the right side of it. I watched my hand push the door closed and then lock it.
“Wake up, Mr. Pena,” I said. He didn’t respond right away, and I kicked the gurney. One of his eyes cracked open, and when he saw me, the other one followed suit.
He sat up as I approached him, and when I breathed in, my nose filled with the stink from my clothes: rank blood and sweat, combined with the fouled basement water. I unbuttoned my jacket, the thick, gray fingers tripping me up for a second, then removed it and tossed it onto one of the empty gurneys. Sprouting from the rolled-up sleeve underneath, the thing that took the place of my arm didn’t look human. Muscle striations stood out in bands under the gray skin, webbed with a network of black veins. Just the sight of it brought back memories I’d give anything to forget, memories of that damp, dark pit and the cold hands that held me down as they …
I overrode the JZI and eased another dose of relaxant into my bloodstream. Warmth and numbness crept through my body as I closed my eyes and counted back from ten. My teeth chattered as I sucked air through my teeth and let it out slowly.
“You can’t—” he started to say; then I clamped that gray hand down on his neck. His skin felt hot underneath it, the signals jumping up through the grafted nerves like sparks of electricity. His eyes popped open as the fingers squeezed.
“What was going on in that basement?” I asked him in a low voice.
“Fuck you.” He grunted. I willed the dead hand to squeeze tighter, and it responded. His face turned darker, and blood began to bloom through the gauze over his right cheek.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Fuck …”
He grabbed the forearm and pushed, but I leaned into it. As he struggled, in my head I heard Sean’s voice from long ago, back in the grinder. I was underground, where they’d dragged me. Their cold fingers dug into my skin from all around.
“Wachalowski! Wachalowski, where are you?”
In my mind, I heard the crunch as the first set of teeth bit down. I felt the impact of a knee in the side of my head, and that cold hand that clamped down on my face.
“Wachalowski!”
Rafe threw a punch that thumped into my ribs, but there was no power behind it. He threw two more, then tried to kick me, but got tangled in the blanket.
“I want to know what was going on down there,” I said. I eased up on his throat, and he gasped in a breath, then coughed through strings of spit.
“I don’t know anything,” he wheezed.
“You know who you worked for.”
He got one leg free from the blanket and thrust his knee into my side, but again, there was no power behind it. He was weak and injured. An IV tube still trailed from one of his arms. I didn’t need to strong-arm him, but something was building inside me, out of my control.
Still feeling like I was moving through a haze, I let go of his neck and reared back the fist. I fired it down like a piston, and his teeth broke against the knuckles of the dead hand. A front tooth and canine disappeared into his mouth and he coughed through a spray of blood, both red and black. He held one hand between us as I hammered his face again.
“Hey!” someone shouted from the hall. The person worked the handle and found it locked.
This is wrong, a faint doubt whispered in my ear. Al can make him talk without hurting him. Something inside me had tipped over the edge, though, and I was beyond listening to the voice.
I grabbed Pena and hauled him off the gurney, carrying him across the small room before slamming him back into the wall. My fist thudded into his cheek, and the gauze tore away to show a deep bite wound underneath. I fired my other fist into his gut and the breath went out of him. He slid down onto the floor, where he doubled over and vomited.
I raised my foot and stomped down on his left shoulder. He screamed as his collarbone broke and the joint dislocated. Blood was running from his mouth and nose, drops bleeding into the splash of puke in front of him. He put his other hand down in it and slipped forward on the floor.
“Get that door open!” a voice shouted outside.
The dead hand grabbed him under the armpit and I heaved him up until his toes brushed the floor. Red drops pattered down onto my shirt as I flipped him over my shoulder and down onto his back. His head struck the tiles and his eyes swam.
“Wait—” he started to say, but I hit him again. The dead fist went up, leaking black blood, then hammered his face again and again. Even when his hand stopped clawing me and his body went slack, I kept driving that gray fist down. In my mind, I was back in the grinder, back down in that hole, and they were around me, pushing their faces in closer.
“Wachalowski! Wachalowski, where are you?”
Pins and needles pricked through my knuckles, pulsing each time they connected with meat and bone. The sensation was muted and flat, as if the nerves in the skin registered pain, but not like before. It reached my brain through a filter, sanitized and scrubbed.
Distantly, I remembered once telling Faye that revivors didn’t feel pain. She hadn’t looked sure then. There had been some part of me that was never sure either, but I knew now. I was right.
Faye. I wondered where she was now.
“Stop!” a voice shrieked, a woman’s voice.
I felt blood under my fists with each impact. I’d forgotten who Pena even was or what he was. He became the thing that had transformed a piece of me into what I hated and feared more than anything else. Something primal wanted to destroy the thing underneath me, to pull that meat from the bone, like they had done to me.
“Stop!” the woman screamed again.
There was panic in her voice, and it snapped me back. I blinked something salty from my eyes and registered the scene in front of me.
I was kneeling on the floor over Pena, who wasn’t moving. His lips were split, and his mouth was filled with blood. His face and the floor around it were a mess of red and black, and I saw thick drops of nanoblood dripping from between the fingers of my closed revivor fist that was still poised for another strike. At some point, they’d gotten the door open and come inside. A crowd of people had gathered to my left.
My jaw was pulled open, teeth bared. A string of drool hung from my lip.
Bite …
It was like an itch, deep in my brain. When it registered, I felt my stomach begin to turn. I wiped the drool away and closed my mouth, resisting the urge I couldn’t explain. Having a revivor limb didn’t make you a revivor. It didn’t …
Do it …bite …
I slammed my good fist into the wall, and the people around me jumped. One of Pena’s eyes was sealed shut, but the other one moved. He was still conscious, barely. I leaned in close so he could hear me.
“Names,” I said in his ear. He gagged and choked up blood onto my collar.
“Deatherage,” I heard him whisper.
“Who else?”
“Let him go, Agent!” the woman’s voice shouted.
“What were they doing down there?” I said.
“He’s …going to …wake them …up …”
“What?”
He choked again. He couldn’t speak. I scanned through his wrecked face, past hematomas and chips of bone. I was looking for augments—a camera eye, anything that might give me more information. A small object stood out behind two teeth lodged near the back of his throat. He had an implant, some kind of slimmed-down JZI.
I used a ’bot to drill through its security and began pulling data. There wasn’t much stored there, but I got three names: Harold Deatherage, Ang Chen, and Dulari Shaddrah.
“Ang Chen,” I whispered. I knew that name. Ang Chen was one of the high-level Heinlein researchers that was helping to develop the virus that would hopefully shut down Fawkes’s network, when the time came. How did his name end up in Pena’s JZI?
“What about Ang Chen?” I said in his ear. He didn’t answer. “Who is Shaddrah?”
The connection between us dropped as the implant shut down. Rafe’s vitals began to dip.
“Damn it! How are they involved in this?”
Pena’s remaining eye closed, and blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth. My fist, still in the air, tightened.
“I said, ‘stop’!” the woman’s voice screamed again. I turned to my left and saw several men and women dressed in hospital scrubs. In front of them was Doctor Pellwynne, her eyes wide with shock. Her expression was horrified. Tears had formed in her eyes.
A few feet away, I saw my reflection in the side of a polished steel cabinet. My face was as pale as the revivor’s arm next to it. My cheeks looked drawn, and there were dark circles under my eyes. My face and neck were spattered with Pena’s blood.
“Please,” Pellwynne said, holding up her hands. “Please just let him go.”
She looked at me like I was some kind of lunatic. She was pleading with me. Behind her, two security guards moved in, and when they looked in the room, their eyes widened. One of them said something into his radio.
“I’m an FBI agent,” I said. I reached for my badge, but I’d taken off my jacket.
“Please, Agent,” Pellwynne said again. “I am asking you. We can still save him. Please.”
My mind buzzed as thoughts crowded in faster than I could process them. I realized what I’d done, and my head began to spin. The whole room felt like it was spinning.
“I …”
I lowered the revivor arm and ran the hand over my face, smearing sweat and blood. The fingers and palm felt cold, and I felt myself cringe. This wasn’t who I was. What had I done?
The people in the room were saying something, but it was like the voices were coming from someplace far away. For a second, I couldn’t remember why I was there or what had happened. My brain was on overload, reaching out for something, anything solid to hold on to until it passed.
I didn’t do it consciously. If Faye was still out there she wouldn’t answer, and if she did, she couldn’t help. It made no sense to send the message to her, but I did, like some involuntary yelp.
I need you.
The message went out, and I killed the connection behind it as a cold drop of sweat rolled down one side of my neck. My stomach clenched, and I thought I might be sick.
Harold Deatherage. Ang Chen. Dulari Shaddrah.
I stood up, unsteady, and grabbed my jacket from the gurney. I looked Pellwynne in the eye, and what I saw there made me feel ashamed. I couldn’t explain to her why I’d done what I’d done. I didn’t understand it myself. Without looking at the other people, I pushed my way through them and staggered out into the hallway.
Harold Deatherage. Ang Chen. Dulari Shaddrah. I walked, letting the voices fade behind me as I tapped into the FBI’s network and began pulling information on the names I’d just obtained. I focused on that.
I knew about Chen, but according to the files, they all worked for Heinlein Industries. Chen was a top-tier nano engineer tied to the Huma project, and currently on loan to the DOD. Shaddrah’s specialty was brain work, and she was also tied to the Huma project. Deatherage researched payload and delivery methods for the Huma prototype. How were three high-ranking revivor specialists connected to someone like Pena?
Worse still, Chen was working on what might turn out to be our only viable offense against Fawkes. If he was somehow involved in this …
Incoming call. The request flashed in my periphery. It was Van Offo.
I checked the records and found all three of them were all still employed at Heinlein. Whatever the connection was, they were all involved somehow. Fawkes had contacts inside Heinlein Industries and at least one inside the DOD.
Incoming call. I picked up.
Leave the hospital, he said before I could respond. Someone’s on their way to get you. Go to the corner of Tenth Avenue and Park and wait there.
Van Offo—
Do it, Nico. Your name just lit up the wire. That stunt you pulled is going to disappear, but get out of there.
I glanced back over my shoulder in time to see a group of EMTs push their way into the room. People had stepped out into the hall to see what was going on. I turned away and headed for the elevators.
“Somebody stop him!” a voice shouted, but no one tried.
I don’t know what happened in there, I said.
We’ll figure it out. For now, just get going. Did you at least get any usable info? Van Offo asked.
Three names: Harold Deatherage, Ang Chen, and Dulari Shaddrah. They’re all Heinlein employees, Al, Chen is one of the top researchers on—
I know who he is. Van Offo paused on the other end of the line. This is bad. You want to get back here right away, Nico.
Why? What happened?
Word came down while you were under: Fawkes has taken control of Heinlein Industries.
What?
He piped over some video footage that looked like it was taken from a flyby of Heinlein’s campus. Below I could see a throng of people crowded at the entrance to the security tarmac. Past them I could see an open flame roar through the empty windshield of a large truck. Smoke rose into the air from several locations in the distance.
This was taken less than an hour ago, he said.
How? I asked. And why would he do that?
We don’t know how he managed it, but the current assumption is that it was so he could use their link to the defense grid.
They use that to upgrade revivors in the field, I said, and for the revivor communications bands.
It’s still part of the defense grid. It was a way in. He somehow used it to take control of a satellite armed with twelve nuclear ICBMs less than an hour ago.
What?
Nico, he’s threatening to launch if we try to send anyone in after him.
I rounded the corner and found a mob at the elevators. Turning right, I found the stairwell door and pushed it open, leaving a smear of blood behind. It was quieter in there. I started down as the door slammed behind me.
If he’s threatening instead of just firing, I said, then what does he want?
We don’t know yet.
Can we get control of the nukes back?
They’re trying, he said. But like I told you, I think this could be it. The end. It’s coming.
Not if we stop it.
If they could stop it, they—
Never mind that, I said. Focus. What was going on in that basement? Were we able to figure it out?
Not yet, he said. But, Nico, something strange happened down there.
What?
The people down there, the screaming man in particular—I couldn’t control them. I tried to calm him down, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t influence him.
I remembered the look of fear he’d had on his face when he’d made his way to the cages. Fear and confusion.
Why not? I asked.
You are supposed to be unique, he said. A lot of the path that we’ve tried to lay out hinges on that fact; Ai herself predicted it. One man will be beyond our control—one. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t control those people. Any of them.
What does it mean?
He was idle for a while. I headed down the stairs to the next landing.
There’s more, he said. I wasn’t supposed to live through that attack.
What?
Mother of Mercy. The dark, the water, and those people …I was supposed to die down there. Today was supposed to be the day I die. Fawkes was to destroy the city not long after.
You—
Tenth Avenue and Park, he said. Just get there. We’re off the script, Nico. Something’s gone very wrong.
A map of the park floated in front of me as the virus I’d planted transferred control of the main computer hub over to Fawkes. He gained access to the transmitter array and connected to the satellite network. Feeds from all over had begun to pour in, and I watched as his forces stormed the campus. Teams I knew nothing about had attacked from along the perimeter. They’d crossed the open tarmac, then struck the facilities at their center. Any remaining security forces were quickly torn to pieces as his soldiers occupied the main buildings.
“What the hell is going on?” someone whispered behind an equipment rack, but nobody answered. A loud thud shook the walls, and the lights flickered. It sparked a quick, hushed murmur that stopped when gunshots boomed through the halls outside. The people with me in the Pratsky Building began to realize the trouble they were in as their phones and computers, even their JZIs, had become useless. All data was rerouted through the transmitter array; everything else was suppressed. Everyone but us was completely cut off. Electricity coursed back through the main fence. The Eye resumed its watch over the tarmac, ready to incinerate anything that moved. No one could get in—or out.
I waited in the lab, not sure what to do as gunfire cracked outside. Heinlein’s security team resisted for roughly twenty-five minutes before they finally succumbed. They weren’t set up for an attack of that scale, and when they lost the airstrip, and their air support with it, they were quickly overwhelmed. The sounds of destruction from outside faded, until all that was left were quiet whispers and frightened sobs.
“You,” a voice whispered. I turned to see a young man crouched in shadow. His eyes were intense as he stared up at me. “Revivor …tell me what’s happening.”
A message from Fawkes appeared in front of me, glowing softly as I stared:
Faye, come here.
His location appeared on the building’s map. He was inside the Pratsky facility.
“Stay here,” I told the young man. “Whatever they tell you to do, do it.”
As I crossed the lab, I heard Dulari’s voice come over the intercom. I watched her on one of the feeds as she spoke into a handset:
“Employees of Heinlein Industries, this is Dulari Shaddrah. For those who do not know me, I am a senior engineer in the biotech division. I understand you are anxious about this turn of events, but I urge you to remain calm and at your stations. If the soldiers have not reached you yet, they will shortly. Do not resist them, and I can promise you will not be harmed. Certain employees will have received instructions to assemble in the main hub of the Pratsky Building; make your way there now. If you are—”
She jumped, dropping the handset to the floor, as gunfire erupted through the room. Three of the revivor soldiers lined up near the offices had begun to fire on the row of cubicles. On the feed I saw Dulari’s face lit with the flash of sustained gunfire. As I watched, her expression changed to what I thought might be shock, or fear, or both.
The shots covered the sounds of the screams. Bullets riddled flimsy walls and tore the people who cowered inside to shreds as they began to move down the rows. More gunfire echoed down the halls from throughout the building.
A woman ran out from one of the offices and stumbled into the wall. She made it two steps toward the door on the other side of the room before a bullet punched through her neck and her body pitched forward onto the floor. A soldier farther down dropped an expended clip onto the bloodstained carpet and reloaded. When I looked back to the feed, I saw the handset lying on the floor. Dulari was gone.
My job was to hijack Heinlein’s transmitter. The others were supposed to smuggle me out. Fawkes was supposed to initiate his code transfer from outside of the campus, but instead he and his men were here, and they were killing everyone.
There’s a lot he doesn’t tell you, Lev had said. Remember that. When I played back the memory, I felt sure Lev knew what the virus was for when he first entered the pipe. Fawkes needed a series-seven revivor to make the jump from the test facility, but something made him doubt me. The operation must have been in the works for several months at least. He had kept me in the dark.
Faye, come here. The message pulsed in the air.
I made my way down through rows of equipment, and saw the processing plant’s inventory get called out in a window. More than one thousand revivors were stored there, awaiting shipment abroad. Manifest numbers were being catalogued, as they got ready for reanimation. Fawkes was going to wake them up, all of them.
I pushed open the door and made my way back toward the main offices, where Fawkes was, as the gunfire continued. Debris littered the tarmac, and through one window I saw the fuselage of a downed helicopter as flames spit into the wind.
The processing plant is under our control, someone reported. Reanimation has begun.
What about the nuclear satellite? Fawkes asked.
The new targets are locked in.
Keep me informed.
I opened a metal door and stepped through it into a long corridor. Rows of glass panels looked out toward the tarmac where flames rippled off two twisted metal husks, and far off in the distance columns of black smoke rose into the gray sky. Between two of the buildings I saw where one of The Eye’s orbital beams had struck. The blacktop had been completely liquefied and blown out to form a wide, blistered crater. Steam drifted from the center while snow streamed down around it.
As I approached the end of the corridor, a brilliant flash from up above threw long shadows across the tarmac. The glass panels tinted darker in response; then the beam arced down like a bolt of lightning. The point of impact rose like a huge bubble, then popped in a cloud of flame as a loud crack, like thunder, split the air. The panels shook in their frames as snow pushed out from the expanding heat wave.
Last hostile Chimera has been destroyed, a report came in. We control the airstrip and the remaining ten aircraft.
Roger that.
Across the way, in the adjacent building, I saw figures standing inside and staring in shock. A jeep lay on its roll bar several hundred yards away, flames pouring from one tire. Underneath it, pinned by one leg, a soldier’s body lay twisted and broken. Blood ran across the blacktop.
I protected these people once.
I stepped through the door at the end of the hall and left the scene behind me. As the door closed, a man crossed in front of me, backing up with his hands held up as a burst of gunfire tore through his chest. He fell back and crashed to the floor. A moment later, the worst of the noise stopped. Sobs and moans and the occasional scream piped up, along with scattered shots.
Fawkes was close; I could sense him. A glass door led back to the R&D labs, and inside soldiers stood watch as workers were herded into offices. Up ahead of me, a man lay on the floor with blood pooled around his head. Past him, a woman’s leg stuck through a doorway, one high heel on its side a few feet away.
Fawkes was set up in the director’s office. As I approached, I saw him standing straight in front of a large, wooden desk while the UAC flag hung from a brass pole in a stand over to his left. Ang and Dulari were there. Ang’s face looked calm. Dulari’s eyes were wide. There were tears in them.
He’d been in stasis too long, and those years in storage had taken their toll. His skin had grown thin and slightly translucent. The black veins underneath were easily seen as they branched along either side of his neck and formed a web across the curve of his scalp. I knew his body was still strong physically, but he appeared almost old and decrepit. He leaned in and spoke to Dulari and Ang. I adjusted my hearing so that I could pick up their conversation.
“ …you found Deatherage?” Fawkes asked.
“No,” Chen said. “I think at this point we have to assume he faked the entry log and he’s not here.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“What about the other problem?”
“I’ll handle that too, Mr. Chen. Leave it alone.”
“Gen sevens retain ties to their old identities,” Ang said. “You yourself have cited her relationship with the FBI agent more than once.”
They were talking about me. It wouldn’t be the first time Ang had recommended that I be destroyed. He was clear on where he stood concerning me.
“I don’t agree,” Dulari managed, her voice shaking. “She can be trusted.”
Fawkes looked past them and the two turned and saw me. Ang had a steely look in his eye as he watched me approach them.
“Hello, Faye,” Fawkes said. His softly glowing eyes stared back at me like those of an owl. I nodded to him.
“We don’t need Mr. Deatherage any longer,” Fawkes said. “We have the variant now. Can you proceed?”
A shot went off nearby, and Dulari jumped.
“Y-yes,” she said. “The reactivation sequence is complete. Transmission of phase two was completed an hour ago.”
“The upgrade was accepted?” Fawkes asked.
“The system shows a failure rate of less than two percent,” Ang said. “It worked.”
I didn’t know what they were referring to. I waited and didn’t ask.
“How long will the change take?” Fawkes asked.
“You’ll begin to see effects immediately,” Ang said. “How long it will take for complete saturation is difficult to say, but the heightened aggression should facilitate that.”
“Monitor the situation,” Fawkes said. “Let me know if there are any problems.”
“Understood,” Dulari said. Fawkes turned to Ang.
“Make sure anyone else who can operate that equipment is eliminated,” he said. “Take the employees the soldiers have reserved and fit them with the devices.”
Ang nodded, and he and Dulari turned and left the room. As they passed by me, Dulari met my eye. She stared at me intently, like there was something she was trying to say. A second later, she sent me a message over a private circuit.
He lied to us. He’s going to kill you. I know you can cut his command spoke. Do it. Find Robert MacReady.
The way she stared back at me made me think she’d known for a while about the override I’d discovered, but she hadn’t told Fawkes. The words hung there in the air between us; then she nodded and continued on out of the room. As the door closed behind her, I sifted back through my memory and found the override. I didn’t execute it, but turned it over in my brain thoughtfully.
He’s going to kill you. The message faded away as Fawkes watched me, his expression not changing. I’d known many revivors, but none that were quite like Fawkes. He was from an earlier generation, but his mind was incredibly well preserved. He could track amazing numbers of details, but even more important, he retained a strong capacity to scheme, and unbreakable resolve. He had big plans for the humans of this world, even though he himself was far from human. The years of isolation and obsession had left their mark on him.
“You’ve kept me in the dark,” I said. He started at me, not moving.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Honestly, because I needed a seventh-generation model to plant the virus, and I wasn’t sure you’d help me if you knew what I had planned.”
“I thought you needed Heinlein’s transmitter array.”
“I do.”
Another long burst of gunfire drowned him out for a minute. He waited calmly for it to subside.
“Then why take the whole facility?” I asked. “We could have done it remotely. By the time anyone knew, it would have been too late.”
“I have my reasons.”
“Why kill them all?”
“So that no one can undo what happens today.”
He leaned back and sat on the edge of the desk. One thin black vein bulged slightly as it squiggled from his scalp to his temple. His eyes stared at nothing for a few seconds, twitching faintly back and forth.
A second later I felt him creep in over the command spoke, that connection that gave him access to me. It had been there every day since I died, and I knew firsthand it gave him full control. He’d used it once to force me to kill Nico, and though I’d failed, I’d stabbed him through the breastbone. There was nothing he couldn’t force me to do, if that’s what he decided.
He could even send me down into the void …and he was.
“Sleep now,” I heard him say, and beneath my memories the void yawned wider. My high-level systems began to wind down. He was in my command node. What I was sensing was my own deanimation.
“What are you doing?” I asked. My vision flickered as I began to sink. In my mind, I fell below my field of thoughts to where the blackness waited. Its threads began to reach for me, pulling me deeper and deeper below.
I tried to force him out, but it was no use. All revivors had free will, but it wasn’t absolute; commands from the spoke overrode everything. I still had access to the override shunt; I could still sense it in my active memory, but…
“Sleep now,” he said.
Maybe this is for the best, I thought. I’d always feared that darkness, but maybe I didn’t need to be afraid. My life had expired a long time ago. Maybe this force that was reaching out to me was something I’d been avoiding for too long.
As my last moments trickled away, the lightless force almost seemed to be alive. It was pulling me deeper down inside it. I thought it would be cold or maybe painful, but instead it was calming.
Time to go, Faye …
I resisted once more before relaxing. I was jarred as my knees struck the tiled floor, but barely felt anything.
Yes.
Time to go …
Yes. Okay.
Just then, I received a communication. It had come from outside the perimeter. Fawkes’s eyes narrowed slightly. He was watching me over the command spoke; he had seen the message too.
The message was from Nico. A single sentence:
I need you.
The blackness recoiled, and the field of memories churned inside my head. The lights swirled and scattered like coals that had been raked as my consciousness rose back through the field, and for a second I was standing with him, back at sea, on the tanker. The rain pounded over me as a tarp cracked in the wind. Nico stood in front of me, a gun smoking in his hand, but the murder had left his eyes. I reached him and grabbed hold of his slick lapel. Before he could move, I pressed my lips to his.
“Good-bye, Faye,” I heard Fawkes say, and the memories collapsed.
The rest of my systems began to shut down, rapidfire, one following another. Before I could even grasp what had happened, half of my modules had winked out. Warnings spilled by through the air in front of me as my awareness began to fade away.
I saw Fawkes’s leather shoes, then nothing at all as my visual feed cut out. My balance went next, and I began to fall to one side. There wasn’t time to do anything else; before I lost control of my core systems, I launched the override program.
Code flooded past in a stream as the shutdown was halted. The program infected my control nodes and targeted the command spoke. It began to tear it down, and purged all outstanding instructions from Fawkes….
…And for just a second, it was wide open. For just a second I could see into him as completely as he could see into me. Unlike Lev, or any of the rest of us, Fawkes maintained a command spoke with all of us. Different ones were active at different times, but they never went away. I could sense his connection to all of them, clustered like individual memories somewhere deep inside his mind. They didn’t link to stored information, though. Those portals gave him control over each of the revivors in his network.
Fawkes’s mouth parted slightly.
“What did you—”
He was speaking, but I could barely hear him. Everything else fell away as I stared past the collection of command spokes to another construct that hung behind it. There were thousands of portals, hot orange embers that floated in the dark to form a vast, hazy sphere. It emanated a continuous hum, the combination of thousands of voices, and I knew then what it was.
I’d been outfitted with a secondary communications array that tuned me in to their collective network, so at least on some level, I could sense them. Their constant whispering, like wind or water, had become more pronounced since they’d all been turned and I knew that there were thousands, but to see Fawkes’s connection to them all …it was hard for me to grasp.
“I can see them—” I whispered.
The words got stuck in my throat as thousands of connections opened at once. A flood of data came crashing down on me, choking my buffers before they adjusted in order to keep pace. I felt the field of my memories recede, the points of light sinking into the darkness as a new field of light appeared above them. The individual points in that new field were sharp and clear, like hot embers in the dark. I could sense them all, and like my memories, I could pull them up individually. Each one was a constant stream of information. I watched the embers as they swirled through the void, around that huge, smoldering mass of white light. I could sense their eyes all over the city. They were still concentrated in several large pockets, but that changed by the second as they spread farther, and farther away. It was amazing he could keep command of so many.
“Faye, stop.”
I chose one of the cinders at random and pulled it into the foreground. I was able to coax it open like a portal and look inside. At first, I saw only darkness, but then something moved. Sensations flowed through the connection and into my consciousness. I sensed a bitter cold, and could hear the crackle of ice and grit under many feet as it echoed through the blackness. The unit was underground somewhere. Many more shapes moved through the shadows in front of it.
I reached through the portal and tried to make contact. The images shifted as the revivor turned. When it moved, hundreds of eyes looked back from out of the dark, and each set flashed like those of an animal. They were all together. The sea of eyes flowed by until the revivor stopped moving again, and I caught a glimpse of a tunnel’s concrete wall where someone had spray painted graffiti:
ELEVEN FROM ZERO.
“How are you doing this?” I heard Fawkes ask.
ELEVEN FROM ZERO. It looked like it had been painted a long time ago. I wondered what it meant….
The portal closed. The field of cinders faded and disappeared as Fawkes managed to lock me out.
My HUD flickered, and then I could see again. Fawkes’s blade was tracing an arc toward my neck. I blocked him, and the point embedded in the wall with a thud. The rest of my systems were coming back. Fawkes’s eyes widened slightly as he pulled the bayonet free.
His command spoke had been severed. Orange light burned in Fawkes’s pupils as he tried to issue the override code and realized he no longer had control of me.
Before he could swing again, I struck him in the ribs with my palm and fired my own bayonet. His expression didn’t change as the blade penetrated him and cool, thick blood oozed between my fingers.
He pulled away and the blade came free. He kicked me in the chest with his heel and drew a pistol from inside his jacket. I swept his legs out from under him, and the shot fired into the ceiling as he fell back. He struck the corner of the desk and spun onto the floor as I pulled open the door and scrambled out into the hall.
“Stop her!” I heard him shout.
I kept low as I ran back the way I’d come. Revivors patrolled between the rows, and as they received the order, I saw their guns come out. Several shots boomed behind me, and I heard screams as glass shattered. I caught a glimpse of a woman in one of the cubes as I passed, her face streaked with tears.
Bullets punched through the drywall next to the door’s frame as I reached it and ran through into the hallway beyond.
I woke up on my back. It was hot and bright, and right away I knew it wasn’t real.
I rolled over and felt warm pavement under my hands. The sun beat down hard, and the dry air had a bitter, smoky smell. Somewhere under that I caught a whiff of gas fumes. When I was caught in a vision, a lot of times sounds and smells from the real world crept in. Those smells weren’t good.
When I opened my eyes, I saw I was facedown on a big chunk of blacktop that sat at an angle in the sand. All around were other pieces of what at one point must have been street, but it had all been torn up.
A little ways off, I saw half a body buried in the dirt. A harsh wind peppered my face with grit and made the shredded remains of clothes flap around the corpse so that I could see bones underneath.
This is it, I thought. The wasteland vision, the vision Ai has been waiting for me to have again. I was there.
The next time it happens, try to get more information, she had said.
I got my footing and looked around. The city was gone and all that was left were pieces of buildings—jagged walls with burned-out windows and twisted metal beams. The sky was kind of reddish-brown with no clouds, and it was weirdly quiet. A big gust of wind stirred up dust in the distance that formed a big spiral. I watched it get bigger, then blow itself out. There was no sound but the rush of wind.
Something vibrated in my pocket, and I reached in and pulled out my cell phone. It buzzed again in my hand. I shaded the LCD with my hand and squinted at it. The display said NOELLE HYDE.
“She had a name!”
I answered the phone, and static crackled in my ear.
“Hello?” I asked. The wind blew again and made my clothes snap.
“We were wrong,” a woman’s voice said. I could barely hear her over the wind and the static.
“What?”
“If any of this gets through,” she said, “you have to do it.”
“Do what?”
“We made a mistake. You have to be the one to—”
The line cut out.
“Hello?” The display on my phone said the call was disconnected.
“What mistake?” I wondered out loud. I had to be the one to do what?
I looked out over the wreckage again. Wind kicked up more sand and I saw more bones underneath. More than sixteen million people had lived there once.
We were wrong. What did that mean?
When I tried to call back, the phone wouldn’t work. It lost power and went dark.
“Come on …”
I shook it and was trying to get it to turn back on when I heard a growl in front of me and looked up. A dog was standing at the base of the blacktop slope. It was a big, black-and-white dog with blue eyes that stared up at me. One of its haunches was shaved, and there was a bite mark on the bare patch.
Standing next to the dog was a woman. She wore combat boots and an army-green T-shirt, and with her almost-shaved head, she looked like a guy. She had on black lipstick, and a spiderweb tattoo covered one side of her neck. A pair of dog tags hung around her neck, and I could just make out the name FLAX, CALLIOPE T.
My face flushed, getting hot as anger surged up from inside me. I knew that woman. I’d never forget that face as long as I lived. That was the bitch that went to Karen’s apartment that day, looking for me. Because of her, my best friend was dead.
“It’s a bitch, huh?” she asked. The dog let out a low growl, and when I flinched, she smiled to show a missing tooth in the front.
“What the hell do you want?” I asked. She knelt down and pet the dog on the side near the shaved patch. When she looked up at me, I could see there were black spots, like ink, spreading through the white parts of her eyes. It was like the carriers Penny and I had just seen at the Stillwell lab. The Huma carriers got them after they died and came back. She smiled again, and all of a sudden, I understood.
“You’re one of them,” I whispered.
Ai and the others knew she was still alive. They even knew she was important, important enough that they wouldn’t let me or anyone else kill her no matter how many times I asked. She was off-limits, one of the elements that would play a crucial role when the event either did or didn’t occur. They didn’t know she’d been injected, though. They didn’t know she was a carrier. That could be a game changer.
I leaned closer to get a better look. I couldn’t see inside her or anything, but somehow I knew. I was sure. How was it that no one had picked her up?
Nico.
I frowned. He knew; he had to. He knew, and he kept it quiet. He was immune to our influence, so he was one of the few people that could keep secrets from Ai. He’d done this.
The dog barked, making me jump.
“Good dog,” Calliope said. It bared its teeth and growled again. When it did, I saw its gums were bleeding. A string of rust-colored drool oozed between its fangs and blew in the wind.
My heart started to race, but instead of lunging, the dog turned and ran off. It kicked up sand as it headed toward the remains of the skyline. I let out a breath and looked back at the phone. It was still dark. I stowed it in my pocket. When I looked up, Calliope was gone too.
“Hello?” I called. No one answered.
Carefully, I stepped down the slope. Sand squished under my leather boots as I followed the dog tracks toward the broken wall of a building. The remains of a stairwell there led up to a chunk of what used to be the second floor. I climbed up and stood on the edge, then looked out over the wreckage for anything that seemed like it might be important.
If you stay calm, Ai had told me again and again, then you’ll know what you’re looking for when you see it. You’ll feel it.
Ai was, hands down, the strangest person I had ever met in my life. Never mind her stunted body with its baby hands and too-big head; half the time it was hard to understand what she was even talking about. Half the time she wouldn’t look at you when she talked to you, and she’d answer things you said like you’d just said something totally different. She spooked me at first, and sometimes, secretly, she frustrated me.
I realized, though, after a while that all of it was because she was like me, only worse. She had visions almost all the time, but she learned to stay at least semilucid during them. When you were with her, a lot of times there were others in the room that only she could see. Sometimes I think they were other versions of people who were already there. I don’t know how she kept it all straight. Honestly, I don’t know how she didn’t kill herself years ago. It was bad enough when it happened on and off. If I had to live in that nightmare full-time, I’d have gone off the deep end before I hit puberty.
She was strange, and she spent half her time floating in an isolation tank, and the other half running on custom-made psychoactive drugs. But she was, in a weird way, almost like a mother to me, which is something I hadn’t had in a long time. She taught me more in just a few years than I think I’d ever learned before in my whole life.
I looked out over the ruins and sighed, smelling gas fumes again. If Ai was right, then this place really did exist somewhere, just one version of the city in an endless string of them. The closer that one of them matched ours, the more it bled over for people like me to see. Visions like the wasteland bled over a lot. It meant that’s where we were headed.
“We made a mistake. You have to be the one to—”
Me. Element One. I was supposed to somehow help stop all this. But how?
In the distance, more bodies lay half-buried in the sand. The sun glinted off shiny, metallic bits that were scattered around. They were some kind of components that came from revivors. From the amount on the ground, there must have been thousands of them there at one point, but whatever happened, they were long gone, along with everyone else.
Up ahead, I could make out one building that was more intact than the rest. It must have been huge when it was still standing, because what was left looked like it could fill a city block. The wreckage drew my attention. It seemed to vibrate, almost like a tuning fork. I could actually sense a far-off, high-pitched wail. That spot was important.
That’s it. That’s where it starts, the thing that triggers all this destruction. When I looked at it, something almost pulled me forward. I brushed my hair out of my face and climbed back down the steps.
I hiked toward it while the sun beat down on my scalp and sand got in my boots. The air was so dry, it made my throat hurt. When I finally got close enough, I stepped into the shade of what was left of the building and rested. The base of the building was piled with rubble, and nearby a big metal trash bin lay on its side, scorched and warped. Crushed against the pitted concrete were the remains of a sign that might have been mounted on the side of the building at one point. Sockets for lights were arranged to form big letters, but it was too damaged to tell what it said. Giant metal brackets ran down one edge of the frame, twisted and snapped.
I stared at the sign and let it fill my line of sight like Ai had told me. I stared until it blurred in front of me and the light around me got brighter. Sometimes if you focused just right, you could see not just the possibility being presented in the vision, but all the ones before it too. The farther out you went, the farther ahead the timeline went so if you flipped through them going backwards …
The light got brighter and the air rippled in front of me. My vision collapsed to a tunnel, until all I could see was the shape of the ruined sign. The surface of it began to warp. The blackened metal on the sign inverted and the soot began to fall away. The bent brackets straightened and turned shiny again. Powder boiled around it like fog and then formed lights in each empty socket, while pain began to build in my head.
“Zoe,” a voice said. It was Ai’s voice. The scene in front of me wavered as my concentration threatened to break.
Come on …
The building began to reform. Dust and debris and a zillion glass shards rose and took shape. It was huge. Mirrored glass formed massive sheets that tumbled back up into the air, then back into place as the walls reformed. The structure grew until it would have towered above even the other skyscrapers that once surrounded it. A warm trickle began to creep from one of my nostrils as the pain in my head got worse.
“Zoe, listen to me.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her. She was standing a few feet away, staring up at me with her large, penetrating eyes.
“Wait,” I told her. “I can see it…. ”
“You’re in terrible danger,” she said. “You have to wake up now.”
The twisted sign broke free of the sand and rose into the air to remount on one side of the building. As it did, it turned slowly, and I saw the lights that spelled out its name flicker on.
ALTO DO MUNDO
I gasped, and the sign fell. A loud boom went off, so loud it made my teeth rattle. The building’s glass panels warped and all of them blew into dust. I clamped my hands over my ears as a sound like thunder cracked through the air and the ground shook under my feet. I stumbled and tried not to fall as the dust mushroomed up all around me.
“Zoe, wake up!”
The last thing I saw before I closed my eyes was the silhouette of the building’s peak as it sank down into the cloud. The whole building was imploding, crashing down toward the street as voices all around began to scream….
I snapped awake to the sound of a car horn and sirens. Nearby I heard people running, their footsteps crunching on broken glass. Over the racket, someone was screaming.
What the hell?
All the blood had rushed to my face and my head throbbed. I opened my eyes and saw blacktop through the windshield, which had been webbed with cracks. My hair hung down over the blood-spattered dome light, where the neck of a glass bottle lay among broken shards. I was upside-down, hanging from my seat belt. As I watched, more dots of blood appeared to join the others.
“Penny?”
Several pairs of feet ran by the window to my right, and I heard something smash in the distance. A voice was barking over a bullhorn, but I couldn’t make out what the man was saying. I could smell smoke and gasoline.
I pawed the deflated skin of the airbag away and looked to my left. Penny’s body hung limp from her seat belt, lines of blood painted down one side of her face. Behind her eyelids, I could see her eyes moving back and forth.
“Penny, wake up,” I said. “We’re in trouble.”
A gunshot went off somewhere close by, and people screamed. Penny sucked in a quick breath and her eyes snapped open as two more gunshots went off, their muzzle flashes reflecting off the ice through the window.
“Zoe?” she called.
“I’m right here.”
She looked over, and for a second I saw tears shine in her eyes. She reached out and touched my face, turning my head gently so she could see better.
“I’m okay,” I said.
She clenched her teeth and held on to the steering wheel with one hand while she reached down and released the latch on her belt. She lowered herself carefully, then crouched on the roof’s interior while she twisted around to face me.
The latch on my seat belt was stuck, so she took a thin knife from her boot and cut it. I slipped into her arms and she guided me down.
“Let me see,” she said, brushing my hair away from my face. I could feel it was wet with cold blood, and tried to twist away.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m …fine. What happened?”
“Fawkes did it,” she said. “He sent the trigger code. The Huma carriers, they’ve all turned.”
“I saw her,” I said. “That bitch Flax …she’s one of them.”
“The slum rat?” I nodded.
“I saw her. She’s a carrier—”
We both jumped as something hit the window next to me hard, and I turned to see a homeless man crouched there with a brick in one dirty hand. Black spots had bled through the whites of his bloodshot eyes, and through the gap in his disgusting beard I could see teeth that were yellow and brown. He stared at us through the glass as he reared back the brick again and smashed it against the glass. If it hadn’t been bulletproof, it would have broken for sure.
“Here,” Penny said, grabbing my elbow. She pulled me over next to her, away from the window, as a loud boom went off and something left a big divot in the glass right in the middle of a big splash of blood. The homeless man convulsed and went face-first onto the pavement, the brick tumbling out of his hand. A second shot went off and the body twitched. More blood splattered against the outside of the window and began to roll down it.
“Idiots,” Penny snapped. She slammed her fist against the car horn and it blared. Through the bloody glass I saw two uniformed soldiers with assault rifles peer toward us. One signaled for the other to hold his fire.
Penny checked the video phone on the dash, but the screen was cracked and it wouldn’t come on. She dug her cell phone out of her pocket and made a call while the soldiers approached the car.
“It’s me,” she said after a second. “Yeah, we’re okay. We need a pickup.”
The two soldiers came up to the car door, and one of them shoved the homeless man’s body out of the way. The other one wiped blood from the window and looked in at us.
“Is there anyone else inside?” he shouted, trying to see into the back. I shook my head.
His partner fired a couple shots at something I couldn’t see down the street, as Penny snapped her phone shut. The soldier who had spoken to me tapped the other one on the shoulder and pointed at a woman, wearing a bloodstained nightshirt and nothing else, who was running barefoot down the rows of stopped traffic. One of them held up his hand as she closed the distance between them.
“They’re sending a helicopter to pick us up,” she said. “We just need to get to—”
A loud, low boom thumped through my chest as the woman in the nightshirt exploded just a few feet from the car. I caught a flash of pieces—an arm and a head—as they blew outward. Then the soldiers crashed back against the glass and everything was covered in blood. The car rocked as shrapnel slammed into it.
“Shit!”
Penny grabbed my arm and heaved the driver’s-side door open with a loud groan I could barely hear through the ringing in my ears. She dragged me out into the street and hauled me to my feet as a blast of cold wind blew black, stinking smoke over us.
The street was a mess. As far as I could see, traffic was stopped, and it looked like a lot of the cars had been abandoned. Lights from police cars and a fire truck flashed, and I could hear sirens wail in the distance. Groups of people ran every which way while others lay bleeding in the snow on the sidewalks. Gunshots echoed between the buildings, and I saw them going off down the street in the distance. A chopper banked overhead and shined a floodlight down over the mayhem.
I jumped as a shot went off behind me, and I spun around to see Penny fire a second shot into a shambling homeless man with black spots in his eyes. He staggered back, then turned and ducked behind a box truck that had one wheel up on the curb.
“Come on!” she yelled. She grabbed my hand in her free one and squeezed tight. “Stay close!”
She almost pulled my arm out of the socket as she ran for clear spot between the jammed vehicles and I stumbled after her, holding on. I reached inside my jacket and pulled out my own gun as we ducked down an alleyway and underneath a group of sharp, brown icicles that hung from the grate of a fire escape. We slipped past a row of rusted trash cans and out onto a side street where a stream of people ran down the sloping sidewalk.
We almost got knocked down as she shoved our way in. I hoped she knew where the hell she was going. We went with the flow, while the faster people pushed their way through on either side of us. When we got to a parking garage, she slammed a metal side door open with one shoulder.
“Up!”
She let go of my hand and fired a shot back behind us as I ran up the concrete stairs as fast as I could go. My heart was pounding and my throat was raw from the cold. I thought I might throw up, and I wasn’t sure how much farther I’d be able to run. I’d started to slow down when I felt her arm around my waist, pulling me up along with her.
“Faster. Move!”
I don’t know how many flights we took. By the time we reached the top and I staggered out onto the roof behind her, my legs were like jelly and I could barely breathe. Against the lights of the city, I saw bunches of figures standing near the rails at the roof’s edge. Some looked back at us, while others pointed at a helicopter as it approached and began to descend.
When they realized it was going to touch down on the roof, they began to crowd it, and a voice yelled over a bullhorn as a floodlight shone down on them. Penny grabbed my hand again and weaved through the ring of people as the wind from the rotors kicked up snow, salt, and sand.
“Back away from the landing area!” the voice from the helicopter boomed. The helicopter hovered fifteen feet above the crowd and a door on the side slid open. Two soldiers with assault rifles were crouched on either side of it.
We pushed out into the open area in the middle of the circle, and I shielded my eyes with my gun hand as my hair whipped around my face. I was going to pass out; I was sure of it. Other people saw us break the barrier and started to follow. The helicopter wouldn’t be able to land.
“Back away from the landing area or we will open fire!” the voice echoed over the thump of the rotors.
Penny spun around and fired two shots over the heads of the crowd. Those in the path ducked down in a group, and there was a collective gasp before some of the tougher-looking customers recovered and began to focus on us. I could feel the minds changing around us as they began to realize the helicopter was not there to rescue them. It was there to pick us up, but not them.
I wanted to tell them the helicopter wouldn’t take them, that it wouldn’t matter what they did. Even if they killed us, it wouldn’t take them. I tried to focus on them, to calm them down and ease them back before someone got hurt, but I couldn’t. My head was spinning and I couldn’t concentrate on even one of them.
The helicopter managed to touch down, and as the bodies surged around us, the two soldiers jumped out and aimed their rifles out over the crowd. One fired a long burst over their heads and didn’t let up until they were all crouching. Penny dragged me along with her, out into the clearing and toward a third soldier, who signaled us from inside the helicopter.
“Get down on the ground now!” a voice boomed. The soldier fired another burst, and they started to get down on their knees.
“You can’t leave us here!” a man screamed, his voice hoarse. He had gotten back up and started toward us. “Fuck you. You can’t just—”
A single shot cracked and the man staggered back before falling to the ground. I saw blood begin to burble out of a hole in his chest. Penny and I marched between the two soldiers as I looked back and saw faces that were full of fear, anger, and hatred.
The man on the ground stared up at me, his breath coming in puffs that were carried off by the freezing wind. The light that swirled around his head was confused and scared in those last moments before his eyes went out of focus and it evaporated into the night air alongside his last breath.
Cal, are you there? It was Nico.
Nico, I said. Shit, it’s about time. Are you in one piece?
The whine from the incoming signal had cut out about a mile back. The transfer was done, and the jacks were on the move again. Police and soldiers were trying to keep them in check but there were too many streets not enough bodies to cover them.
I’m okay. Where are you? he asked.
Heading back to base.
Down a slope on the other side of the guardrail, I saw a pair of cops put three jacks against the wall behind a drugstore and shoot them. I cruised behind a strip mall and saw blues flash between the buildings where a group of soldiers were moving in. More gunfire cracked behind us as I squeezed back out into the parking lot, then back onto the sidewalk. People hugged the storefronts as they saw me coming.
“Out of the way!”
Vika bucked on the seat behind me as we hit a ridge of ice and caught air for a second. The bike fishtailed just as a man shoved a sheet of plastic out of the way and jumped out of the alley ahead of us. Vika squeezed my waist tighter as he grabbed for us and I steered out of his way. When I blew past him, I caught a flash of light in his eyes, and the static in my head crackled.
It’s nuts out here, Nico.
I know. I’m at the FBI building. Can you get here?
What for?
I want to run something past you. Off the wire. It’s important.
I looked down the street. The traffic was jammed as far as I could see. The Federal Building was a lot closer than the base, and I could drop the kid off there too.
I’ll be there.
Thanks. I cut the line, and called in to get a new route to the FBI. Dispatch pulled up the traffic reports and drew one out for me.
Stay off Stark Street; it’s gridlocked, the guy said. He fed me a new route.
Roger that. I changed direction and took us down a narrow ramp with chain-link on one side and pitted concrete on the other. We passed into the shadows under the monorail, and a couple pairs of eyes flashed in the dark. Something knocked over a shopping cart and stumbled behind a rusted pylon, but I didn’t see if it was human or not.
A shot boomed and more people scattered as I veered past a line of cars stuck behind a crash. Two more went off behind us as we approached a vehicle rolled over on its side, fire and smoke pouring out from the undercarriage. When we passed it, I saw a burned body through the back windshield.
This is fucked.
I took us through an alley to the main drag, where the Federal Building was. Something else scrambled across the street ahead and the static in my head picked up, a spike in the white noise. There was one nearby.
Vika tapped my back. Up ahead the space between the brick walls got narrow and there was a trash bin at the mouth of the alley.
Thrs 1. The message popped up on my JZI. The little shit had some kind of implant. She tapped my back again, and I saw her point from behind me.
Thr.
The crackle got louder. I saw something move from behind the trash bin. In the shadows, a pair of eyes flashed.
I cruised to a stop but kept the engine running. The thing trudged out from behind the box, and I drew my gun.
The static hissed as its feet scraped on the pavement. It was a street guy with a nasty beard and gaps in his teeth. I caught him in the headlight and saw that the whites of his eyes were stained black.
I put one in the guy’s forehead. The back of his head blew out, and he fell back against the metal bin. Steam rose off his sticky hair as he slumped over into the snow.
Nice shot.
I glanced back at her. When I scanned her, I found a JZI, or some half-assed version of one. It had a com link, but not much else.
Where’d you get the hardware? I asked.
Army. 2 yrs.
Two years in the army. The kid was sixteen, if that, so it wasn’t the UAC army. She had to be a refugee from somewhere in the Slav bloc. Who knew how she ended up here?
I drove past the body and back out onto the street. On the main road, a Stillwell truck used a winch to pull a wreck out of a snowbank. The FBI building was up ahead.
I parked on the sidewalk next to the entrance, and when I stood up my knee buckled for a second. The HUD on my JZI flickered, and a band of static squiggled past.
“You okay?” the kid asked.
“I’m fine. Come on.”
I tasted bile in the back of my throat as I headed up the stairs. Fawkes’s trigger didn’t kill me along with the rest, but something was wrong. I didn’t feel right. I was wound up, like I wanted to break something, but I didn’t know why. I took a deep breath and blew it out my nose as I pushed open the main door.
Inside I flashed my badge at the guard. He gave a nod and buzzed us in.
“I shouldn’t be here,” Vika said in the lobby. It was a madhouse in there. Security was doubled and people were backed up coming and going. I shoved my way past them and dragged the kid after me.
“They got better things to care about,” I said. “No one cares if you’re illegal.”
“I’m not illegal.”
“Whatever you are, no one cares.”
“I’m not a criminal either.”
“Shut up.”
Nico, I’m here. Where are you?
Fifteenth floor, east wing.
I picked up a kid on the way. Where do you want her?
Put her in Conference Room B and someone will take care of her. Meet me outside the war room.
Got it.
At the fifteenth floor, I took her east and dumped her in the conference room like Nico said.
“Give me five minutes,” I told her.
“Wait—”
“Five minutes. Don’t wander off.”
Vika opened her mouth again, and I shut the door.
Bch.
I made my way down the hall and picked Nico’s node out of the mess. When I got close, I tuned in on their chatter.
“ …analysis of the canines recovered at the storage yard is more or less complete. There’s no doubt at this point—the nodes we recovered from the animals were created by a version of Heinlein Industries’ M10 series, code named Huma. However, after some study, it would appear that there are key differences in the underlying nanotech.”
“What differences?” That was Nico.
“We’re still trying to determine that,” a voice said. “We’re working to bring in experts in the field, but without access to Heinlein, there’s only so much we can do. All I can say right now is that it’s not the original prototype. It’s been altered.”
I opened the door, and when I stuck my head in, a bunch of suits looked over. A shit-ton of photos were up on the wall in front of the table; I saw a train yard, some burned bodies, and a bunch of wire cages that were ripped open. One was a close-up of wet fur and a shaved patch of gray skin. There was a big bite mark that was puffed and scabby.
“All of the animals we recovered exhibited these wounds,” a woman said. “We were able to match at least some to the recovered canines.”
“They bit each other?” That was that prick, Van Offo.
“So it would seem. That behavior isn’t completely unusual in revivors, but the number of wounds suggests the urge to attack and bite was amped up in these specimens and that would fit with what we’re seeing on the streets right now. The shaving of the fur seems to suggest the sites were either being treated or monitored.”
“Why reanimate dogs at all?”
“We don’t know yet, but those animals appear to have been the main focus of whatever they were doing there.”
I saw Nico across the room and snapped my fingers in the air.
Hey, asshole.
He looked over, and when he saw me, he smiled. His face had taken a beating. He had a cut through one eyebrow, and there was a bad bruise around his neck. When he stood up, I saw him wince, but all in all he looked okay.
“The basement caller has been identified as Harold Deatherage,” Nico’s boss, Hsieh, said. “Agent Wachalowski has provided two other names as well: Ang Chen and Dulari Shaddrah. All three were involved with the M10-series project. And as I’m sure you all know by now, Ang Chen has been assisting directly with the development of the countervirus.”
“Where is Chen now?” someone asked.
“Not at his residence or at the Stillwell base. We believe he is most likely somewhere inside Heinlein Industries.”
“So Fawkes has him?”
“We now believe he’s been working with Fawkes all along. The program responsible for issuing the activation sequence was embedded in the computer systems at the Stillwell compound. They were able to trace it back to his ID.”
“He was vetted,” Van Offo said. “How was he able to lie to us?”
“We don’t know,” Alice said. “But it looks like that’s what he did.”
“What about the other two?”
“Shaddrah is most likely also on the Heinlein campus, but we think Deatherage might be on the run. The statements he made during his call suggested that whatever they were planning he might have gotten cold feet at the last minute and tried to back out. A team hit his residence an hour ago and found the body of a woman identified as his wife, but no one else. We know he bought a plane ticket out of the country, and we’re covering the airports, but so far there’s no sign of him.”
“I might have a lead there,” Nico said. “It looks like he had a woman, probably a mistress, set up in an apartment in Palos Verdes. I doubt the wife had that information to give up. Agent Van Offo and I will head over there.”
“So we’re unable to verify the purpose of either the Mother of Mercy or Black Rock facilities at this point?” a guy asked.
“Not yet,” Hsieh answered. “Scans have detected traces of nanostructures inside all of the recovered brain tissue, but nothing resembling revivor nodes in any of the human victims.”
“What about the transmission from earlier in the day?” Van Offo asked. “The one that froze them temporarily?”
“I know what that was,” I said. Everyone turned around to look at me. Nico grinned just a little.
“Who the hell are you?” some guy in the back asked.
“I’ve seen it before,” I said. “A field upgrade will make them freeze up for a minute.”
“What makes you think—” the guy started, but Hsieh cut him off.
“Quiet, Vesco,” she said. “Miss Flax is correct. As of twenty minutes ago, our techs were been able to decipher at least a portion of the transmission, and it looks like it was some kind of field upgrade that caused them to reinitialize afterward. Right now, our best theory is that Fawkes somehow enlisted the help of the individuals from Heinlein, Ang Chen in particular, to develop a Huma variant that would not be vulnerable to our countervirus. As of oh-eight-hundred hours this morning, his entire army may or may not be completely protected against that contingency.”
That got some fur up. Voices rumbled through the room, until Hsieh shut them up.
“We don’t know that for sure!” she snapped. “The current plan is still to attempt to use the virus. We could be wrong. We could be right, but Fawkes’s attempt to guard against the virus could have failed. We don’t know yet. After the transmission there have been more behavioral changes. So for all we know, that might have been the whole point of the alteration.”
“What kind of changes?”
“Heightened aggression, mainly. An increased impulse to attack and bite even without specific direction over the command spoke. Some have begun eating from victims—the ghrelin inhibitor has definitely been switched off since they first went active. For all we know, that was the only purpose behind this. The good news, if you want to call it that, is that this upgrade appears to have affected all M10 nanoblood in the field, including the payloads found in prosthetics. Agent Wachalowski has provided a viable nanoblood sample. Once it’s analyzed, we’ll know more.”
A lot of eyes looked over at Nico.
“Should he be in the field?” someone asked.
“He’s fine,” Alice said. At least one guy didn’t look sure, though.
“That stunt he pulled this morning was a long reach from ‘fine,’” he said. “I think we should …” He spaced, then, drifting off midrant like he was stoned or something. Hsieh’s pupils opened as she stared them down, and the rest shut up.
“Agent Wachalowski is not a revivor,” she said, clipped, “and he is vital to this case. Nanoblood from prosthetics doesn’t intermingle with a person’s organic systems, and he has experienced no symptoms of any kind. Right?” She shot that last bit at Nico.
“Right,” he said, but there was something off about the way he said it. Was he lying?
“How’d he manage the code push?” I asked. “Back in the grinder, command used a satellite for that.”
Hsieh turned to the wall and a photo popped up of a big cluster of satellite dishes mounted on a frame behind a wall of buildings.
“This is Heinlein Industries’ transmitter array,” she said. “It’s used to communicate with the UAC satellite network for defense, and also for the specific purpose of field upgrades. We’ve verified the transmission was sourced from this array and bounced back from Heinlein’s satellites. This transmitter is also how Fawkes is currently controlling the nuclear satellite, Heinlein’s Eye, and his Huma units in the field. It’s the lynchpin of his strategy and a high-priority target, but before we can move on it the Department of Defense needs to determine whether or not this might trigger a launch of the ICBMs.”
Woah, I said to Nico. What launch?
He waved at me to shut up.
“And what if it will?” he asked.
“Osterhagen has a team working on taking control of the grid back,” she said. “Stillwell is ready to move on the facility the second we do. They’re doing everything they can. For now just get over to Palos Verdes. I’ll keep you informed.”
Nico signaled to me, and I saw Van Offo watch as he took me back out the door and into the hall.
“What launch?” I asked. “What was she talking about?”
“ICBMs. Fawkes has twelve of them pointed at the city.”
ICBMs. That meant nukes.
“Why? What the hell does he want?”
“We don’t know for sure,” he said, “but the bottom line is, we have to get to him first. To do that I’m going to need your help.”
“You got it,” I said. He waved me into another conference room and shut the door. He turned on the noise screen and leaned in close.
“When you did your tour, you worked with the M8 series, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you ever hijack a revivor from an existing command network?”
“Sure.”
“Without using some kind of override code?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“There’s only one way to command a jack,” I said, “and that’s over a command spoke. You set up a new spoke, or you take over one that’s there already. You know that. What are you after?”
“I’m looking for a way to take control of one or more revivors from an existing command network, without tipping off the person controlling them.”
“Oh,” I said. I’d pulled that kind of thing off back in the grinder. “Sure. You can set that up, but you need to grab a revivor from the target network.”
“These revivors are behind Heinlein’s security perimeter, Cal. I won’t have physical access to them.”
“You need a live command spoke from a jack that can’t turn you in to the original commander—Fawkes.”
He rubbed his nose, and I saw his right hand. It was gray, like mine. There were black scabs fused over deep gouges in the knuckles. Those came from teeth. He’d bashed someone good.
“Shit, Nico.”
I grabbed his sleeve and pushed it up. The gray skin and black veins went up to his elbow.
“It’s fine.”
“Bullshit.”
I put my dead hand on his. The skin was the same color. Usually skin felt hot under it, but now his hand was as cold as mine. He gave my dead fingers a squeeze with his. Then he pulled away. He yanked the sleeve back down.
“I heard what you did down at the VA,” I said. “That doesn’t sound like you. You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“I’m fine,” he said again, looking at the back of his dead hand for a second. “I think I might have some bleed-through, that’s all.”
He meant nanoblood leaking through the filter that joined a new limb and infecting the real blood on the other side. It happened sometimes with a rush job, or if you stressed a new joint too much, too soon. He said it like it was no big deal, but it was. You could die from that.
“‘That’s all’?”
“I’ll get it looked at,” he said. “Never mind me. What about you? The inhibitor worked, then?”
“I’m still here, aren’t I?”
He smiled. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”
“Me too,” I said. “I mean, I’m glad you’re okay.” He looked like he was going to say something else, but before he could I punched him in the arm—his good arm.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I know. Me, too. I got to get back to base. Tell me what you need.”
“For now, let’s say I’m able to get access to one of the revivors without Fawkes knowing,” he said. “How would I take control of the rest?”
“Easy. My CO showed me on week one. You keep the one you grab on the command spoke so you don’t tip anyone off, then drill into its control center to keep it quiet. Physically drill. After that, you can use a special package to set up your own command net, right on top of the first one.”
“That works?”
“Kind of. Any jacks you spoke to will take orders from either person controlling them, so you can still get caught. How many is he running total?”
“Inside Heinlein, probably hundreds.”
“Perfect. He can’t keep his eye on that many; it’s fucking impossible. Pick a few he doesn’t move, ones on autopilot, and use those.”
“Do you have the modules to do this?”
“I can get them.”
“Do it. Keep this quiet.”
“I’ll need to call in a favor.”
“Just keep it off the network. Fawkes had men inside Heinlein. He might have them here too. I’ll only have one shot at this.”
“Don’t worry about—”
I stopped short. A shiver ran down my spine. I heard it before I even knew I heard it.
“What is it?” Wachalowski asked.
The sound came from outside. I’d heard it enough times in the grinder to know you hit the deck when you did. It was the sound of rotors. A Chimera was coming in hot.
“Nico, get—”
The wall to my left blew into a thick cloud of powdered concrete and glass as a Gauss chain gun unloaded on the side of the building. The turret howled as it tore open the conference room around us. I caught a flash of the building across the street through the hole behind me, then hit the floor with my hands over my head.
Dust and grit fell over me as back across the hall, the wall into the war room got carved out. The conference table inside was blown to sawdust, and the people around it popped into clouds of guts. Some guy’s arm spun in the air as the wall behind him disappeared.
“Nico!”
I couldn’t hear shit. The turret ripped open the floor, and bodies fell through. I saw a bank of screens go down after them, spitting sparks, before a wall of smoke blew over me and the lights went out.
Cal, where are you?
I’m here.
I couldn’t see shit either. I could just make out shapes of people as they got back up on either side of the missing floor. The Chimera peeled off, but I heard it bank back to make another pass.
Cold wind blew through from outside and cleared the air at least a little. Wachalowski got up and jumped the gap between us. The tile broke away under his heel, and I grabbed his wrist, then hauled him over.
Street level, he sent, and pointed behind me at the door back out to the hall.
I ran to it and turned the handle, but the wall had shifted and it was stuck. I put my shoulder to it twice and it banged open as the chain gun went off again and the wall across the room exploded.
Wht the fk?
The kid.
Nico slammed into me and shoved me through the doorway and into the hall. He’d made for the stairs when he saw me stop short.
Cal, what are you doing?
The kid.
She was back in the conference room. There was still a clear path to it. I ran for it, Nico on my heels. I cut across the hall and heard him yell, right before the sound of the turret drowned him out. Hot air hit my back, and the floor dropped out from under me. I grabbed the door handle as tiles fell away, hanging on while my boots dangled in the open air. On what was left of the hall in front of the door, I got my footing and climbed back up.
When I pushed open the door I saw her there, up against the far wall. I turned back toward Nico and saw that the hall behind me was gone. He stood on the other side of the gap, ready to jump.
Don’t. I’m coming back.
“Kid, come on!” I yelled. I dragged her to the door while she screamed something from behind me. I looked down through the hole and saw a two-story drop to the offices below.
“Hold still!”
“Don’t. We’ll fall!”
I cinched her around the waist and she screamed as I hoisted her up on my shoulder, then took two steps and jumped.
I cleared it, but when my foot hit the other edge, the floor buckled, and for a second I thought I’d go right through. I didn’t. I fell forward on one knee and Nico caught me. He grabbed Vika as she flipped off my shoulder, and dragged her back from the edge.
Back this way, he said. Hurry.
Vika stumbled after him, and I kept to the rear to make sure she didn’t fall behind. He took us down another hall to a stairwell. He opened it with his badge and signaled for us to go through.
The stairs shook as we went down. Behind us the wall blew out and sparks sprayed as the metal rails were shredded. Cold air blew in from outside, and as rubble came down, I saw a body fall end over end through the snow.
I hit the floor on the landing and Vika came down on top of me. Nico slammed off one wall and reached for me. A chunk of concrete banged off the wall next to his head. I put my boot on the kid’s bony ass and shoved her down the next flight of stairs as the turret turned its fire back the other way.
For the next eight flights we ran, the sounds of the attack slamming through the stairwell from above. Then it stopped. I could barely hear through the ringing in my ears.
Nico cracked open the door and looked through. He signaled it was clear, and we followed. Outside it was a mess. Glass and concrete covered the street where cars were stuck end to end. A desk had come down through the roof of one of them, and I could see bodies in the road. My bike was totaled, crushed under an avalanche of shit. Blood and oil ran down the blacktop.
Everything sounded like I was underwater, but through the ringing, I could make out the sound of rotors. They were pulling up and away. Nico had his gun out as we followed him to the sidewalk. Up in the air I could see the shadow of the Chimera as it banked around the side of a building down the street.
I looked back at the FBI building. Ten floors’ worth of the face was gone. Junk had spilled out of the hole, down onto the street. A million papers fell through the snow. Vika watched one of them come down like she was in a trance.
Wind sheared down the street and stirred up a cloud of dust. Orange light sparked in Nico’s eyes as he checked for survivors.
“Wachalowski!” The voice came from the gate to the garage. It was Van Offo.
“Come on,” he called. “They could be back.”
“Come on where?” I asked.
“There’s still people in there,” Nico said.
“Rescue’s on their way,” Van Offo said. “We need to go now. We’ll take a vehicle from the lot.”
“Go where?” I asked.
“Stillwell’s got a foothold a few blocks up,” he said. “Your squad will meet us there. Come on, we’ve got to move.”
“They’re here,” Vika said. A burst of static popped in my head.
I turned, and across the street, I caught a flash of moonlight white from a pair of eyes. A jack had been watching us. Behind it, I saw there were more.
Off to the left, another one moved out of an alleyway, then another. The static turned loud and steady.
“Let’s go,” Nico said.
Paper blew down the street like snow as we made for the garage.