Wachalowski, where are you?
I was stepping off the elevator when the call came in from Vesco.
I’m at Flax’s apartment. What have you got?
Buckster’s long gone. Looks like he cleaned out a safe and left in a hurry.
You find anything?
Yeah. There’s something you need to see.
A window opened and live footage streamed in. Vesco moved through Buckster’s apartment and into the bathroom. He looked down into the tub, where a set of women’s clothes were sprawled. They were arranged in the shape of a person. The body that was in them was gone. One high-heeled shoe was lying on the floor next to the toilet.
Looks like he killed an unknown female and then used Leichenesser to dispose of the body. Trace particles indicate it happened recently. Could it have been your civilian?
The stream moved closer, looking over the shirt and pants. They looked expensive. A pin on the collar of the shirt looked like a diamond set in gold. The shoe had a three-inch heel.
No.
You sure?
Someone died in Buckster’s place, but it wasn’t Calliope. Whoever it was, she was wealthy and fashion conscious. She didn’t leave any components behind.
Flax has a JZI.
Got it. Nothing like that here.
Any sign of the radiation signature?
Nothing. If he was hiding something here, it wasn’t the nukes.
Understood.
What about your end?
I’ll let you know.
When I knocked on Calliope’s door, there was no answer. I listened, but didn’t hear anything inside.
Alice, I need an override on a residence at my location.
No.
What?
I’m denying that request.
Do you want to find the case or not?
Yes, and tracking down those weapons is more important than tracking down your friend.
I hadn’t told anyone at the bureau about getting Calliope involved. It was a safe bet Calliope never told them.
Are you watching me?
Yes. Your friend is fine. Get back in the field and—
Are you refusing to give me the override?
Yes. Don’t go in—
I cut off the connection and aimed my gun at the lock housing. Using the backscatter, I found the bolt, then fired two bursts into the door.
It bent but didn’t break. I stomped my heel down over the still-smoking hole as someone shouted from the floor below. With gunshots and a break-in reported, it was only a matter of time before the police showed up, but with everything else going on they’d be tied up for a while.
I threw my shoulder against the door and it finally gave, flying open and slamming into the wall as I stumbled in after it. I turned on the lights. The place looked okay. It was a mess, but it hadn’t been tossed.
“Cal?”
The living area was set up with a couch, a TV, a weight bench, and a heavy bag that hung from a chain. According to the thermal scan, she’d been gone for a while.
I looked over the floor, turning up the filter’s sensitivity until faint footprints appeared. I knelt down for a closer look.
There was more than one set of them. I counted maybe four in all, but it was hard to pick hers out of the mess. The freshest ones were small. They looked too small to belong to her. I followed them from the kitchen through the living area. They passed out of the room to a short hallway that led to a bathroom and a bedroom. Whoever it was had sat on the toilet.
I smelled the air. It smelled like sweat, but there was something else under it, something antiseptic.
Wachalowski, this is Noakes. I’m getting grief from Agent Hsieh. What are you doing?
Following a lead on Buckster.
Well, wrap it up there. It looked like the satellite just got a hit on your missing ship.
Where?
About fifteen miles offshore, and getting closer by the minute.
That was lucky; if it was the ship we were looking for, it was in UAC waters. We could seize it.
Are they sure it’s the right one?
It has to be. It was practically invisible since it’s running on minimal power, and the comms, transponder, and sat-nav are all dark. It’s hiding.
We need to coordinate with the Coast Guard.
Already on it. They’re putting a safety and security team together. You can go in by air.
Understood.
The team will be assembled and ready for launch within the hour. Be ready.
Zooming in, I followed the footsteps from the toilet back out the bathroom door. They didn’t head left, for the bedroom, or right, back to the living room. They went right up to the wall across from the bathroom door. A large flag from one of the African republics was hung there from ceiling to floor.
I knelt down. The stride of the footsteps took them right into the wall. There was heat concentrated at the base of the flag, rippling out from underneath it.
I pushed the flag out of the way. There was a door hidden behind it. Whoever the footprints belonged to, that was where they’d gone. Another pair overlapped them, heading back out in the opposite direction. I knocked quietly.
“Cal?”
No one answered. I didn’t hear any movement. Looking through the front of the door, I couldn’t make out anyone inside.
I turned the knob—it was open. I pushed open the door. It was warmer inside than in the rest of the apartment, and dark. The air smelled like rubbing alcohol and body odor. I reached over and flipped on the lights.
Shit.
Clear plastic covered the floor and had been stapled up the length of every wall. A hospital gurney sat in the middle of the room, flanked by two surgical trays. An IV rack had two bags hanging from it, one of clear fluid and one of blood. Both were mostly empty, the tubes trailing to the floor. Blood spots dotted the mattress on the gurney, and I could see bloodstained gauze wadded up in a wastebasket underneath it.
What is this?
There were scalpels and a suture needle on one of the trays, along with a spent hypo. Impressions were left in the plastic that covered the floor where boxes had been removed. It looked like most of the equipment had been packed up. Whatever happened here, it was over.
I looked around for anything that might tell me where she’d gone. On the metal frame of the gurney, someone had stuck a small note:
Destroy everything. Report to me.
The room wasn’t set up on the fly. From the look and smell of it, it had been occupied for days, maybe weeks. There was no way Calliope didn’t know it was there….
Unless she’d been made to forget.
Someone else must have been there, right in the apartment with her. Ai had planted someone there, and kept Calliope from consciously knowing about it. I stared at the surgical tools and the bloody gauze. What had they done to her?
I picked up my phone and called the contact number Ai had given me. A woman’s voice answered, but it didn’t sound like the woman from the restaurant.
“Hello?”
“This is Agent Wachalowski. Who am I speaking to?”
“You are speaking to Penny. What’s up, Agent?”
“I need to talk to Ai.”
“Oh, now you need to talk to her?”
“Can you put me through to her or not?”
“I can, but I’m not going to.”
“I—”
“Save the threats. I don’t care who you are; you don’t get to demand to talk to her. You’ll talk to me.”
“Put me through to Ai, or I’m hanging up.”
“Fine, but if you do that, you’ll never find out what happened to your friend.”
“What?”
“Your friend Flax. I assume that’s what this is about.”
“Where is she?”
“You found the room, didn’t you? Do you have any idea how many times I had to replant that memory so she’d remember seeing a wall instead of that door? She’s got a stubborn streak, that one.”
“If you know where she is, then tell me.”
“Not on the phone. I want to see you.”
“I don’t have time for this—”
“Make time. I’m at Zoe’s new place. You know where that is?”
“I …” it was the first I’d heard of it. I didn’t even realize Zoe had moved. “No, I don’t.”
“Of course not.”
“Look, just—”
“I’m sending the address. Decide what you want to do.”
She hung up. I checked the time. The MSST would be in the air in less than an hour.
If I hurried, I could make it.
I knelt near a pile of plastic trash bags and looked out through the mouth of the alleyway. Through the LW field, the people who flowed by had a ghostly look. Facial recognition software scanned each one, matching it against my target.
While I waited there, hidden, I looked through the array of my memories for other references to the strange woman. I found one other instance, before Flax had hauled her into the clean room. I’d seen her shortly after I’d been brought back. As the crowds of people streamed by the alley, I brought up the memory and looked inside.
I was in the underground storage unit where Nico buried his past. He brought me there so that he could bring me back, and no one would ever know. The concrete room was cluttered with forgotten boxes and old furniture. He’d chained my ankle to a grate in the floor, and he told me to stay still when a knock came on the heavy metal door.
I watched from next to the bed we’d once lain on, while he crossed the unit and opened the door. A tiny woman stood on the other side. She was zipped up in a huge purple parka, red hair sticking out from under a wool cap. She stared up at him from over a beaklike nose, and I saw heat stream through the veins in her face. She was excited by him.
She’d stepped closer, then, and spoke softly to him. I saw her pupils expand.
“What happened?” she asked. “Why are you so scared?”
“Don’t—”
She put one shaking hand on his. “Shhh.”
“Stop doing that,” he said.
“Why?”
She had put her other hand on his stomach and spread open her fingers.
“I know you miss it,” she said, putting her forehead to his chest. “I know you know how I feel. I wanted to thank you.”
“For what?”
“For caring about me, even a little bit.”
She was placing Nico under her control. At the time I didn’t realize what I’d seen, but I recognized it now. I saw the guilt in her eyes as she touched him, knowing his acceptance of it was coerced. I stepped out from the shadows, and she saw me.
“You’re dead—you can’t be here!”
She’d recognized me back then. We had never met, but still, she knew my face. She stared up at me, hands curled into tight fists, as heat coursed out from her chest. Even then there was something, some base instinct that told me she was trouble.
A small figure passed the mouth of the alley and toward the entrance to the convenience store. The computer took a snapshot of her face. It ran the comparison and got a match.
Target is spotted.
I stood and walked to the mouth of the alley. People streamed past me less than four feet away, but under the cloak, I was invisible. They’d see her, of course, and hear her if she screamed, but it would be over in a few seconds. By the time anyone realized she was dead, I would already be gone.
I watched her enter the store. Through the window, I watched her make her purchase. When she came out, she had a brown paper bag. Her red hair was draped around her sullen face, her lips drawn into a frown. She walked quickly, with her eyes on the sidewalk, and it looked like she’d been crying.
Now.
When she passed by me, I grabbed her by the wrist. I put my other arm around her thin waist and pulled her into the alley. She stumbled, but I held her as the brown paper bag slipped out of her hands. A bottle popped when it fell and hit the ground. An older man who passed by glanced down toward us, but didn’t even slow down. He could not see me; just some staggering drunk.
“Hey!” she yelped, and I clamped my hand over her mouth. She stuck both her legs out straight, but her heels just scraped along the wet blacktop as I pulled her deeper into the alley.
“Quiet,” I said in her ear.
I hauled her behind a trash bin, out of view. Running water ran down an open storm drain and helped cover the sound of her struggling. I forced her back and slammed her to the brick wall, then moved my right hand over her bony chest. I shut off the stealth cloak’s field, and her face went white as she saw me appear.
“You,” she whispered.
My open palm snapped apart, and my forearm split apart to my elbow. As the two halves splayed apart, she stared at the tip of the blade hidden there.
“Wait!” she said. “You’re not supposed to kill me!”
The blood rushed under her skin, and I watched the veins that pulsed along her neck. The blade was in position. One pneumatic blast would send it through her heart.
“You need me,” she gasped.
“There’s nothing I need you for.”
“You said the fate of everything was in my hands.”
“I never said—”
“In my visions. You said it.”
I was about to kill her, but that stopped me. The exact nature of their abilities was something that we hadn’t determined yet, but there was no disputing that they were real or at least based on reality, on possible outcomes. Imposing will or manipulating minds could be done by anyone, if not as well, but not the precognition. We didn’t know what it was, but we knew what it wasn’t, and it wasn’t prediction. The data points to lead them to their visions simply never existed. Nothing led them to the conclusions they reached; they just saw the end result and they were usually, if not always, right.
Fawkes had warned me against listening to her, but still, I was curious.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but that’s what you told me. You come to me in my dreams, and sometimes when I’m awake. You keep trying to tell me something, something important.”
“You saw me in a vision?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“The green room,” she said. “You come to me in the green room.”
I didn’t know what she was referring to. “And I spoke?”
“You were the one who told me to go to Nico two years ago,” she said. “The last time, you told me the city will burn.”
I remembered her back at the restaurant. Motoko had said that too.
“What did I mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know why the messages come through you. Maybe I’m fixated on you …”
She stopped to think about that, curious, like she’d forgotten where she was. It wasn’t until I moved, stepping in closer to her, that she snapped out of it.
“You know something,” she said. “Or …some version of you does. You told me the fate of everything will be in my hands. You need me….”
She was bargaining for her life, I knew that, but I believed she meant it. I didn’t know what it meant, but I believed that she saw what she’d described. Part of me wanted to question her further, to extract the truths out of her ramblings, but there wasn’t time for that.
“You’re trying to tell me something,” she stammered. “You need me for something, or else the whole city will—”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I have my orders.”
Her eyes were desperate for a few more seconds, and then she seemed to give up. She closed her eyes and let out a long, hoarse sigh.
“Can I at least have a drink first?” she asked. One of the bottles from her bag was intact. I reached down and picked it up.
“Here.” I held it out by the neck.
She opened the bottle and then tipped it back. She drained nearly a quarter of the bottle before she choked and sprayed liquor from her nose. She bent over coughing and, I thought, laughing.
“I’m going to die in an alley,” she said, smiling with tears in her eyes. “I knew it was too good to be true…. I knew all this was too good to be true….”
“It usually is,” I said.
“You want to know what I did last night?” she said, ignoring me. “I killed someone. I killed the guy that killed my friend…. I think I might have actually done it before. I actually killed somebody. Hey, didn’t you used to be a cop?”
“Detective.”
“Right …so doesn’t it bother you, then? To kill people?”
“Did it bother you?”
“Hmm …not really. It felt …good, actually,” she said, taking another drink. “It’s weird. I thought it would freak me out, but it felt pretty good. It felt …right, like he deserved it. You know? Is that how it feels when you do it?”
“No.”
“I saw you die, you know.”
“What?”
“I saw it right before it happened. I called Nico, and he tried to save you.” She frowned. “I actually tried to help you….”
“What do you know about that?”
“I know he went down there, down in the factory, for you, back then. I know he’s been looking for you ever since.”
I’d indulged her, and myself, for long enough. I positioned the blade back over her chest.
“He does it because he still loves you,” she slurred.
I heard the shot before I knew what it was. It boomed through the small alley, and I pitched back suddenly as a collective gasp came from the sidewalk. I noticed several people on the street stop, and some looked over toward us. When I looked down, I saw black blood blooming there. I looked back at Zoe and I saw the gun. It was small, with silver plating and a pearl grip. Smoke drifted from the barrel as warning messages appeared in the air, flickering in between us. My signature wavered before snapping back.
The gun was small, but it had left a large hole. The armor plate under my skin had been pierced. Blood gushed as the nanos assembled a clot, then jetted in a stream as the pinhole closed. Zoe stared with her eyes wide.
I pushed myself off the brick wall behind me, the bayonet firing out as I did so. It whipped through the air as she stumbled backward, then slipped and began to fall. The blade’s tip snagged on her coat, slashing it as she fell into a puddle.
She kicked back, away from me, pointing the gun in front of her. I reached to bat it aside and land the blow, but wasn’t quite fast enough. She fired two more shots into my torso, and I staggered back from her. My signature warbled again, then came back, but not as strong as before. Back on the street, people had started to run.
The blood was coming out fast. My system couldn’t work around the trauma.
I’m hurt. Requesting retrieval.
The confirmation came back as warning messages continued streaming. I tried to reach for Zoe, but she was too far away. When I tried to move, my leg didn’t respond. I stumbled forward and went down on one knee.
I could still kill her if she came close enough. I held out my free hand, the blade by my side with its tip scraping the ground.
“I need to tell you something,” I whispered.
“Why do I keep seeing you?” she asked, looking down at me through the tangles of her hair. “Who are you?”
My heart signature flickered. She stood five feet away, not sure what to do.
“Come closer …and I’ll tell you.”
She stepped through a puddle toward me, and I lunged. My leg didn’t perform as well as I’d hoped, but it held as I pushed off the blacktop. I grabbed her collar and pushed the gun aside as she went back on her heels. We fell into a pile of wet trash bags, her struggling beneath me as the blade came down.
She twisted away, and the blade grazed her cheek before it punched through the bag and hit the ground. Blood welled up inside the wound and began to run back into her wet hair as the gun barrel pressed into my rib cage. It fired off its last round, then just clicked as she kept pulling the trigger.
I tried to raise the blade back but I couldn’t. It retracted on its own, and without its support I slipped to one side. I fell into the trash, face-to-face with her. I could smell the alcohol fumes on her breath.
She realized that she’d stopped me and let out a single, explosive laugh. Then the smile faded and her eyelids drooped. The way she flipped between relief and anger was almost mechanical.
“I remember now,” she said. My blood sizzled on the end of the barrel as she pulled the gun away. “Thirty, one hundred, and zero. Respectively.”
She shoved me over on my back as she stood. I didn’t know what she meant.
“In my visions, you like to give percentages,” she explained. “You said we meet three times. You said my chances of winning were thirty, one hundred, and zero. This is our second meeting. You can’t win.”
Her statement implied that she couldn’t either, but that fact seemed lost on her. She reached into her jacket and pulled out a fresh magazine for the gun. She removed the spent one and tossed it away.
“I think this is all your fault,” she said, reloading the gun. “You dragged me into this mess. I lost everything …I lost …”
She put her hands to her eyes, the pistol pressed against her face as she cried. For a second, she looked like a little girl who was lost and on her own. Then, like before, like a switch was thrown, she stopped. She looked down at me, and her face became calm.
I managed to reactivate the stealth cloak just as she aimed the pistol. The air rippled between us, and her face changed as I disappeared from view. She still held out the gun, but looked uncertain. I moved away as she prodded with one toe. When I wasn’t there, she turned in a circle with the gun still pointed out in front of her.
“Were you real?” she asked.
“Hey!” a voice barked from the mouth of the alleyway. I looked and saw a uniformed policeman. Another stood behind him. Both of them had their guns pointed at Zoe.
“Did you see someone else here?” she asked them.
“Drop the gun,” the one in front said. She touched the cut on her cheek, then saw blood come away on her fingertips.
“Someone else is here,” she said.
“I said drop it,” the policeman said.
She looked over at the men and realized then who they were. I watched her eyes turn a shiny, tear-filled black and the men’s guns inched downward.
“You made a mistake,” she said. “You heard a transformer blow or something.”
The policemen both began to nod slowly, despite the fact that they could still see the gun. I managed to push back with my one good leg and roll off onto my side. Still leaking blood, I moved toward the open grate.
“You’re not needed here,” Zoe told the policemen. She’d noticed the black puddle on the pavement. “Go away.”
I gripped the edge of the storm drain and slipped through. I fell down in a torrent of rainwater, then splashed down hard on my back.
Request emergency extraction. My vitals were wavering.
Rain poured through the grate above, the stream splashing over me. I saw the shadow of her head appear there, in that circle of gray light up above me. All she could see was darkness.
“Leave me alone!” she yelled from the opening, and her screech echoed down the concrete tunnel. My vision began to fade.
The swirling cloud of embers, that vast field of stars that were my memories, began to grow cold and dim. Beneath them the void waited, cold and black and without end. I felt myself begin to follow them down, and for the first time since my death, I felt fear.
Her silhouette moved away, before the last of the gray light disappeared.
A blast of ammonia went up my nose and I woke up to a cold floor. My head weighed a ton.
“Easy there,” I heard Buckster say from somewhere in front of me. I cracked one eye open and saw him toss a smelling salt capsule to one side.
“Why did you bring her here?” someone asked.
“She’s okay,” the old man said.
“We don’t need a repeat of the Takanawa incident. Fuel is limited, and we’ve already had to alter our course once.”
“She’s not bugged, goddamn it. I checked.”
“What the fuck?” I was out of it, but I counted four of them. I put one palm on the floor and used the JZI to set off a stim. It hit me, but not as hard as it should have.
“You okay?”
I went for him, and I would have had him, but I was still fuzzy. Even with the stim, I was too slow. His pant leg slipped through my hand; then a big mitt grabbed my arm. It squeezed, and I was hauled up on my feet.
“Easy!” Buckster snapped. The hand let up, but not much. There were two jacks in front of me, plus the one in back that had my arm. It spoke, and I felt its cold breath on the back of my neck.
“They know we’re taking them. Takanawa got them too close.”
“She’s not one of them, I told you. Take it easy.”
“Where the fuck am I?” I asked.
“You’re on the KM Senopati Nusantara.”
“The what?”
“A cargo ship. We’re off the UAC coast.” If it was true, then I’d been out a long time.
“Why the fuck am I on a ship?”
“It was that or kill you under the bridge. Besides, in a few hours this is going to be the safest place to be—trust me.”
I tried to call Wachalowski, but there was no link. I kept the channel open.
“He won’t pick up,” Buckster said. “Local communications only; nothing leaves the ship.”
He gave a nod to the revivor behind me, and it shoved me toward a hatch on the far wall.
“Come on,” Buckster said.
“Where?”
“To the brig. Look, this is how it has to be. If you stayed in the city, you’d get killed for sure. You helped me out, so I’m helping you, but I can’t risk you causing any trouble. You’ll cool it in the brig until this is over. Then you’ll be free to go.”
He went through, and I followed. The revivors pulled up the rear. Past the hatch, I saw dried blood on the deck—a lot of it. Balled up near one wall were a bloody shirt and a pair of pants. I kicked a shell case when I went by.
“What the hell are you mixed up in?” I asked him.
“Our country has an infection, Cal,” he said. “It’s not about politics. It’s about freedom. It’s about the freedom to make your choice, whatever that choice is. It’s about the freedom to act according to what you believe in, not what someone else makes you believe. Someone has to stop them.”
“How?”
“With fire.”
“What are you going to do? Blow up the city?” I asked. He didn’t answer. He just kept walking.
“Buckster, what the fuck are you guys going to do?”
“Can you be sure anything, or even everything, you’ve lived hasn’t been a lie?” he asked. “Knowing even the little bit you know, can you say with complete certainty that everything you did while you were over in the grind happened the way you know in your heart that it did?”
I’m going to unstick the elevator now. When I do …
You don’t know me. Tell me you understand.
“Are your actions truly your own?” he asked. “Or are you a tool, a machine, used by someone else, the same way you used those revivors back in the grinder?”
“Answer me. What are you going to do?”
He pushed open a hatch and the jacks behind me pushed me through after him. I stumbled through a bunch of junk and shell casings that were scattered across the floor. A big table had been knocked over and used as cover, but it looked like the bullets had gone straight through. Blood spatter had dried on the walls and floor, but the bodies were gone.
Before we could reach the door on the other side of the room, it opened and three guys stepped through. That made Buckster stop short, and I almost bumped into him. Two of the guys had guns, and one had a metal case in his hand. They made right for us and stopped in front of the old man.
“This the one?” one of them asked.
“Yes. What is this?”
The one with the case opened it and took out a big needle. It was full of black shit.
“What the fuck is that?” I asked.
“Hold her,” he said.
The jacks grabbed me from behind. One held my arms and another one held my head. I tried to move, but they had me pinned. It felt like my neck was going to break.
“What are you doing?” Buckster snapped.
“Don’t struggle,” a voice said in my ear.
“She’s not one of them!” the old man said. “She doesn’t want to be—”
One of the men bashed Buckster behind the ear with the grip of his gun, and he went down onto his knees. He leaned over, and dots of blood started to cover the floor in front of him.
“We don’t need him anymore,” someone said, and the guy that hit him aimed the gun at the back of his head.
“Wait!” I yelled, but never even got the word out before the shot went off. The old man jerked once and went facedown. Blood started to pool around his head.
“Hold her still,” one of the other men said.
The guy jabbed the needle into my neck, and I saw him push the plunger.
“I said hold her still!”
I had only one shot. I brute-forced my way through one of the M8s behind me and dropped in a virus that shunted the command hooks over to me. One, two, and three, they all came up in my HUD. I pulled up their specs, vitals, and visual feeds, then took control of them.
The gun went off behind me, and the guy with the syringe jerked as the back of his head blew out. The case fell out of his hand, and the needle spun across the floor as his body fell in a heap. The other two raised their guns, but they were too late; the jacks shot them to pieces.
With the command spokes in place, I had full control of all three. In the feeds they streamed over, I could see what they saw and hear what they heard. It was like being back in the grind.
Orders?
“Get me off this b—” I started to say, when a sharp pain stabbed me in the gut. It hurt like hell, and my link to the revivors almost cut when the JZI’s power dropped.
What the hell was that?
I pulled inventory from the jacks; they each had a sidearm, extra ammo, and three grenades. They were all strapped with enough C4 to sink the ship. I used another virus to turn off their inhibitors.
Orders?
“Get me the fuck off this boat now—”
The room spun, and I felt like I’d been drugged again. I set off a stim to cut through it as warnings flew past. My heart rate had dropped, but as the chemicals spread through my bloodstream, it spiked back up.
The pain hit again, worse this time. It felt like a hot coal in my gut.
“What the fuck did they stick me with?”
I ran a check on my systems and saw that something in there was drawing power. Whatever it was, it wasn’t tied into the JZI’s control system. There was something inside me that didn’t belong there.
Orders?
Give me a layout of this place.
A map blinked on in front of me. There was a helicopter I couldn’t fly up top, and a small ship-to-shore craft down below. I set a route to it.
There, I told them. We’re getting off this boat.