Some things you never forget. For me, the thing I couldn’t leave alone was the way Faye looked at me just before the panel slammed shut between us. I remembered the fire raging behind her when I took her by the arm. When she pushed me away, her hand was cold. The big revivor shoved me back, and when the panel started to close, she looked me in the eye. I was sure an automaton couldn’t have looked at me like that. It was the last time I ever saw her.
“Revivors aren’t people,” someone had once said to me. “Remember that.”
“I know what they are,” I had answered.
But I didn’t.
Everything should have been different. If I couldn’t save her, I should have at least put her to rest. I never should have done what I did. The Leichenesser would have destroyed her body, but I’d removed the capsule myself. The soldiers didn’t get her either. When I had my chance to put an end to it, I couldn’t. I put her right into the hands of Samuel Fawkes.
The rain was beating down, streaking diagonally across the glow of the one remaining streetlight. The hotel across the street was dark. It hadn’t been occupied in years and no one had come or gone for hours, but it wasn’t empty. The satellite confirmed it was tapping power off the grid, and had identified multiple heat signatures inside. Someone was there.
A message from the SWAT leader came in over my JZ implant. The words floated in front of the fogged windshield.
They’re inside. We’re just waiting on confirmation.
Things stayed quiet after the attacks, at first. For a week or two, revivors were news again, and images of their reanimated corpses stalking the streets alongside the National Guard circulated day and night. The questions the government didn’t want anyone asking got asked again as people looked at the images and wondered what signing up for revivor status really meant. The footage of the walking-dead soldiers so close up disturbed them, and for a while they wondered, Was avoiding third-tier status while keeping out of the grinder really worth becoming one of them? There were protests and debates and investigations, until public opinion tired of the whole thing and the buzz moved out to the fringe, where it was mostly forgotten. It wasn’t until two months ago that, out of nowhere, a bomb went off at the Concrete Falls recruitment center, where they did most of the city’s Posthumous Service signups. Despite the initial backlash against revivors, the facility was turning bigger numbers than ever. The economy tanked, and holdouts were lining up to trade their third-tier status for second. A spike in PS recruits put numbers at a five-year high. Concrete Falls had supplied the military with greater numbers of revivors than anywhere else in the country, but not anymore. No one claimed responsibility.
It had been a dead end until the group moved again. Information trolled off the communications networks suggested another high-profile strike was being organized, and this time we caught it early. No target had been confirmed, but both the seller and the buyer were involved in the previous bombing—I was sure of it. A shipment of heavy explosives had been smuggled into the country, to Royal Plaza, where it was about to change hands. There was a lot of pressure to put a name, any name, to the Concrete Falls attack, and to bring the people in.
My old friend and tech man, Sean Pu, was the one who tracked them down. The two of us went way back, having served together in the grind. He’d saved my life back then, and two times since. He had a big interest in the case, and for some reason he didn’t want me on it. Something had him nervous and although he never said anything, another agent, Mike Vesco, was brought in to take point. I was being edged out completely, until wire-taps uncovered illegal revivors at the site.
Sean had saved my life three times, but two years ago things had become more complicated; Sean turned out to be something other than what I thought he was, something he’d hidden very well. I always thought he was my right-hand man, but it turned out I was wrong, and it was the other way around. I was his right hand, and he used me as a fist that he sometimes struck hard with. The fact that he kept up that lie for so long didn’t jibe with what I knew about him. I hadn’t decided yet where we stood.
Whatever his reasons, he wanted me kept out of this one, but impounding revivors on UAC soil still fell into my jurisdiction. After Fawkes’s attack, no one wanted revivors in the city. If he decided to keep me involved, it was because he thought he could control me. I wondered how much longer that would last.
A helicopter floated between the buildings high overhead. The hotel was being monitored from the air, and the scanner had isolated twelve voices inside.
This is Vesco. We have confirmation. The shipment and the buyer are both on-site. At least six revivors are confirmed inside as well.
Roger that.
Move into position, I told them.
I pushed open the door and stepped out into the rain. Sticking to the shadows, I headed toward the building.
Wait for my signal.
The building’s layout was projected via my implant back onto my retinas so that it glowed softly against the dark alleyway. I pinpointed the revivor signatures, and placed them over the map. Most of them were on the first floor.
Up ahead, under a rusted fire escape, a fire exit led inside. I flashed my badge at the scanner there, issuing a federal override and suppressing any alarm they had rigged. A light on its plastic housing flickered and turned green. When the bolt snapped, I drew my gun and went inside.
I pulled the door shut, blocking the sound of the rain behind it. Inside it was dark. I adjusted my visual filter to let in more light and looked around.
I’m in.
There was a swinging door ahead of me, and I pushed it open into an old kitchen area. Thermal signatures from rats scattered when I stepped through, and disappeared into the walls. The short-order line was covered in grease and dust, with spiderwebs stretched between stray pots and pans that still hung over it. Brown water had collected in one corner near a crack in the wall.
They’re working out of the large, highlighted area, Sean said. I’m still trying to pinpoint the shipment.
Understood.
The area he referred to might have been a restaurant or bar at one time. Corridors headed off in four directions from there, three of them flanked by small hotel rooms. Five of those rooms had a revivor signature inside.
Opening the kitchen door a crack, I used a backscatter filter to peer into the walls on the other side. There were two cameras hidden behind the tiles there, one watching the kitchen and one watching a corridor to the left.
I’ve got some security here. Visuals will be offline for a minute.
Roger.
The baffle screen would disrupt the cameras, but also my internal recording buffer. They’d send someone to check out the disturbance, but I didn’t need long.
I slipped past the camera and headed down the corridor. There were a few rooms on the south side of the area. Two of the rooms had revivor signatures present.
I’m past the cameras and heading into the room on the right. You see it?
I have you.
I listened at the door but didn’t hear anyone inside. Sticking close to the wall, I reached out and tried the knob. It was locked.
Give me an override on the door.
Done.
I showed my badge to the scanner and the bolt clicked. No one inside moved or spoke. Using the backscatter, I looked through the door. No one was waiting on the other side.
I pushed open the door and slipped through. There were more cameras mounted in the ceiling but they were turned away, watching the bed.
We’re picking up some activity in there. How long, Wachalowski?
Not long.
The hotel room was lit by simulated candlelight. As soon as I was inside, I caught a blast of perfume and damp air. There was a water stain on the far wall where a strip of wallpaper had been torn away. The bed was made and the blankets turned down. The revivor signature was coming from the bathroom.
Moving into the room, I noticed something under the bed.
Hold on.
Across from the foot of the bed I saw the revivor through the open bathroom door. It was standing in the dark with its back to me, looking into the mirror over the sink. It was female, with stick-thin legs and a pair of sheer briefs hanging from a flat behind. It wore a wig the color of bubblegum.
I got down on one knee and looked under the bed. In the shadows, I saw a pair of bare feet, toes down.
“She put her there,” the revivor said from the bathroom. When I looked, it still had its back to me.
I grabbed the ankles, and the skin was cold. Keeping out of range of the cameras, I dragged a second female revivor out from under the bed. It didn’t have a signature.
“Who did?” I asked. In the bathroom, the revivor just kept staring in the mirror. I left the body and moved in behind it.
SWAT, get ready to move on my mark.
Roger.
I came within a foot of it, until I saw its eyes reflected back in the mirror. It had a pair of large, bare breasts thrust out in front of it with the characteristic dark gray nipples and black veins tracing the curves. Underneath them, ribs stood out, and down the middle of its back, I could see the knobs of its spine. When I leaned in, I caught a whiff of decomposition underneath heavy perfume. Wherever the thing was made, it was a botch job. The inhibitors were failing, and the body was beginning to rot.
“Who put the revivor under there?” I asked.
“She did.”
I blinked hard, deactivating the JZI. For a few seconds, I’d be completely offline. The revivor looked at me in the mirror, and met my eye.
“Am I for you?” it asked. I spun it around so it was facing me. I took a photograph from inside my jacket and held it in front of its face.
“Have you seen this woman?” I asked it.
“It’s a revivor.”
“I know that. Have you seen her?”
“No.”
“Do you know the name Faye Dasalia?”
The factory fire where I’d last seen her burned for three months straight. When it finally died down to the point where it could be scrubbed, there was nothing left. There was no way to know if Faye or any of the other revivors had come out of there intact, or where they’d gone if they had.
It looked up from the picture, focusing on me again.
“I don’t know that name.”
I blinked and the JZI reinitialized. Before it could say anything else, I touched the scanner to the back of its neck and squeezed the contact, firing a wire filament up into the spine. It made contact with the primary revivor’s node, and the body went rigid for a second before it went limp. I caught it as it started to fall.
Sean, Vesco, I have a connection.
You dropped. What happened?
That was Vesco. He’d been keeping an eye on me, a little too closely. Someone had their hooks in him.
Repeat: you dropped. What happened?
Cut the chatter and wait for my signal.
The revivor felt cold through my wet shirt. Hoisting it up, I eased it back into the bathtub.
The data miner started boring through the security they’d installed on it. A central command was being used to control them, which meant they needed an open connection to each revivor. A centralized hub like that, in the hands of an amateur, could allow access to all their systems if you made a direct connection with one of the revivor nodes. I was counting on that.
On the edge of my peripheral vision I could see audio waves piped in from the eye in the sky. The analyzer was pulling out three voices spiking over the haze of conversation. They were coming from the basement level, where a second group of revivors were located.
The miner drilled down and opened a channel. Using the JZI, I joined the revivor network.
Node count: eleven.
Five upstairs. The rest had moved to the basement. The link went green, and I tapped into the central node. They’d put plenty of security on all the typical channels, but sure enough, the revivor spokes were wide open.
I’m in.
Moving in now.
I started pulling the files. Less than ten seconds later, I heard a boom that vibrated through the floor. The audio being monitored spiked, and I heard shouting as footsteps tromped down the hallway. The last of the files came through, and I broke the connection to the revivor.
The door opened and a man came through, pointing an automatic pistol. I fired twice and he pitched back, his gun clattering across the floor.
“This way!” someone yelled from outside.
I picked up the pistol and handed it to a SWAT officer as I stepped back out into the hallway. Several more of them had men under armed guard.
“This is a raid! Get on the ground now!”
Down the hall, uniformed men were holding rifles on three guys. Two were in sports jackets and the last was in his underwear, holding a balled-up bedsheet to his chest. Mike Vesco waded through the mess, holding up his badge.
“Drop it and get down!”
“Step away from the—”
A high-pitched hiss blasted through the air back in what used to be the hotel lounge. Behind the bar a white light flared up as smoke blew through the seams of a computer chassis.
“Get an extinguisher over there, goddamn it!”
Watch those exits.
Down a side hall, hotel room doors were hanging open as SWAT cleared the rooms. Through one of the doorways I saw an overweight, middle-aged man standing naked with his hands up. A revivor was bound on the floor next to the bed, gagged and handcuffed.
Do we have a lock on the shipment?
Negative.
In the next room down was the only guy who hadn’t gotten caught with his pants down. He was an Asian man, dressed to the nines, with an expensive watch and long, thick hair. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, unconcerned. There was no revivor with him.
Who is this guy? I asked Sean.
He’s not involved.
How do you know that, Sean? Who is he?
No one. Come on, leave the pervs for Vesco.
When I scanned his face, I found him in the system. His name was Hiro Takanawa, and he was as rich as he looked. It looked like it wasn’t the first time he’d been caught paying for time with a revivor.
“Where’d the revivor go?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “I don’t see one here,” he said. “Do you?”
I didn’t. I shoved open the bathroom door and looked in, but it was empty.
SWAT, how many revivors are accounted for?
We got four, plus the two defunct in the room where you found them.
I checked the remaining signatures. There were six more beneath the floor somewhere, down on the basement level. Six up here, and six below. One was already defunct when I got there, so that put the node count at eleven. That was all of them.
“Which one was with you?” I said to Takanawa. He just shrugged.
“Understood,” Vesco said into his radio. He turned to Takanawa. “All right, you. Get out of here. Sorry, Wachalowski, that comes straight from the top. Let him go.”
Takanawa stood up and walked calmly toward the door. He gave me a wave over his shoulder as he headed out the door.
Sean, who is that guy?
He’s no one, Nico. Leave it alone.
The particle analyzer’s picked up the chemical signature, Vesco said. The explosive materials are nearby.
Takanawa headed down the hallway, hands in his pockets and a cigarette already in his mouth. He left a thin trail of smoke as he turned the corner.
In spite of whatever else he might be into, I trusted Sean; I’d known him too long and watched him put his life on the line too many times not to. He’d earned a certain amount of faith from me, but he knew more than he was saying. He knew who Takanawa was, and he knew why he’d been released. I suspected he might know Takanawa personally.
On a hunch, I followed him. Moving away from the crowd, I hung back and followed the heat traces left behind by his footsteps. They led down a dark corridor to an emergency stairwell.
Vesco, I’m heading down to deal with the remaining six revivors.
Roger that.
Have SWAT just keep the others together for now.
A metal door slammed down below, and I eased the door open and slipped through after Takanawa. The stairs took me down a dark, musty corridor. More rats scrambled as I came through, and I pushed the light filter up until everything turned black and white. The sounds of the raid faded behind me, then were gone altogether. Up ahead there was a stairwell door. His handprint was cooling on the handle.
Got it, Vesco said. We’ve secured the explosives. Bomb squad, prepare for transport.
Nico, I’ll move a team downstairs. Wait for them. That was Sean.
I pushed open the door and started down the stairwell. It was pitch-black, but on the landing below I could see the other side of the door was lit. Just then, the audio spiked as someone shouted on the other side. Six revivor signatures glowed on the scanner.
Nico—
I cut the connection. As I went through the door, I heard voices from down the long, cinderblock corridor. The far end opened into a storage area that was lit with floodlights. Chain-link enclosures were assembled there, each one with a naked revivor sitting in it. Each revivor was shackled with a collar that was chained to the fence.
“…want to think about getting out of here,” I heard Takanawa say.
A woman’s voice answered, “I didn’t expect to see you so soon.”
“They’re here.”
The thermal footprints I was following skipped for a second. A few steps later, the glitch happened again as more rats scurried down the hall.
“Leave them alone,” the woman said up ahead.
Around the corner, I saw Takanawa standing in front of a good-looking woman in an expensive suit. There was a metal briefcase on a desk next to her, lying open. Inside I saw a series of boxes, each the size of a brick, nestled in a bed of black packing foam. One of the slots was empty, and Takanawa held the box in his hand.
“Hard to believe they’re so small,” he said.
“Put it back, and get out of here already.”
He slipped the box in his jacket pocket instead. She made a face and reached over, slamming the case shut.
“What about you?” he asked. “Aren’t you coming?”
“Shortly. Go.”
He shrugged and stepped out of view. A service door began to grind open.
Keeping low, I moved in as the door began rattling shut again. When I looked around the corner, I saw Takanawa’s expensive shoes just before the door came down. A green light on the wall turned red as the lock engaged.
“There you are,” a man said from somewhere off to my right, his voice echoing in the open space. Three sets of footsteps were approaching the woman. She crossed her arms and leaned back on the desk, waiting.
“Yes, here I am.”
Two men in suits came into view, tailed by a big revivor.
“The fucking Feds are here,” one of them said. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
She drew a pistol from inside her jacket fast enough to surprise both men. The first shot caught the man who’d just spoken in the face, and his head jerked back. The next hit the other man in the side. He staggered, and managed to draw his gun as she shot him a second time.
I crossed in front of the chain-link cages, my weapon drawn.
“Federal agent!”
“What the fuck are you doing?” the bleeding man grunted to the revivor that was with him. “Kill her!”
He went down on the floor next to his friend. The big revivor stepped over them, toward the woman. It reached out and grabbed a fistful of her shirt as she shot it three times in the chest. Her heels came up off the floor as it hauled her forward, then slammed her back down on the desk.
It grabbed her head in its hands and leaned in, baring its teeth. I fired a shot into its temple and it jumped back, letting her go. It swung one arm at the open air, black blood squirting from the hole as I put a second shot through its open mouth.
It gagged, black specks spraying from between its teeth, then fell onto its back. Its signature warbled, then blinked out.
The woman sat on the edge of the desk, wincing as she looked over at me. She still held her gun in one hand, pointed down at the floor.
“Who are you?” she asked.
The other revivors had started shaking their cages, trying to get out. The closest one had its face pushed into the chain-link, fingers straining through the holes as it ground its teeth.
“FBI.”
“You with Sean?” she asked.
“Slide the gun over.”
She did. I stopped it with my foot, then picked it up.
“Put your hands up.”
She nodded, cracking her back and wincing again as she lifted her hands up over her head.
Scanning her, I didn’t see any hidden weapons. She wasn’t wired and didn’t have any physical augmentations. Her face didn’t match anything in the databases.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Jan Holst. Can I put my hands down?”
“What is that?” I asked her, nodding at the briefcase. She frowned, but didn’t answer.
“Open it,” I said.
She turned and keyed in the combination to the case, then lifted it open and stepped away. I looked inside, and a warning appeared in the JZI.
Radiation detected.
The particles were coming from the case. I looked through one of the bricks and saw it contained a metal capsule. Inside the shell were wires and components, tightly packed around a radioactive core. There were eleven devices inside.
“What are those?”
She sighed, crossing her arms. I closed the case and contacted the SWAT leader.
I found the rest of the revivors. Six total. One is down.
Good.
I found something down here. I think it’s what we’re looking for.
We’ve secured the shipment, Wachalowski.
I don’t think so. I’m looking at eleven nuclear devices. The suspect who was just released, Takanawa, may have a twelfth. We need to lock down this area now.
There was a pause on the other end of the connection that went on longer than it should have. I opened an emergency channel back to Assistant Director Noakes, and sent down an alert.
Agent Wachalowski, what’s going on down there? he responded. I recorded the image and radiation signature of the case and transmitted it to him.
The buyers were here to pick up nuclear weapons. They’re handheld, and at least one of them is moving. We need this whole block contained right now.
A terrorist alert went out and began branching down to response teams.
Understood. They’re mobilizing now. Find that missing weapon.
“Are you the buyer?” I asked the woman. She didn’t answer.
Just then a revivor spoke connection opened. I looked around for the source but couldn’t find it. The signal hadn’t come from any of the revivors in the cages.
Someone just opened a connection to a revivor band down here. Any missing from upstairs?
Negative.
It was close. Too close to be from upstairs.
I’ve got a stray down here somewhere.
“How did you know—” the woman started to ask but I held up my hand. She frowned.
I tapped into the signal, listening. The source was close by, somewhere in the room. I did a slow sweep, looking into the dark. No revivor’s signature was showing up, but it had to be there.
I moved past the cages to the edge of the lit area and scanned into the shadows. There was nothing there.
…eral agent here.
The partial message came across the connection. It was a fragment of a text communication.
…should I abort?
No. Upgr …forget the target …the case.
…about the …
Kill her.
The revivors began shaking the cages harder. Something had them riled up. I couldn’t hear anything over the racket.
“Shut up!” the woman snapped. “Just shut—”
Her voice cut out. I looked back at her and she was clutching her throat. Her eyes were wide, and blood had started leaking from in between her fingers. The big revivor was still on its back. I didn’t see anyone near her.
Vesco, one of the prime suspects is down. I need an EMT here, now.
I ran to her as she took her hands away. Her palms were covered in blood. Her face turned white as blood poured from a gash in her throat, and she slid down the desk, onto the floor.
“Hold on,” I told her, easing her onto her back. “Help is coming.” Her eyes lost focus. Her mouth moved, but she couldn’t speak.
The revivor connection cut out. I heard the flutter of fabric next to me, and the case on the desk flickered, then disappeared.
Shit.
The nukes are moving. The target is cloaked. Coordinate with local authorities and initiate a lockdown in a three-block radius.
Leading with the gun, I scanned the room. There were no heat signatures, no heartbeat—nothing.
It’s a revivor…. There was no revivor signature either, though. It was keeping itself well hidden.
I scanned for radiation. It was faint, but I found a concentration of particles a few feet away. They were clustered around an object floating at chest height.
The case. The Light Warping field could bend visible light, but not radiation. The pattern swayed back and forth slightly. The revivor connection opened again.
…about the agent?
…ut don’t ki—
But—
Don’t kill him.
I reestablished the link with Sean.
Wachalowski, what the hell—
Sean, show me all the ways in and out of here.
The case appeared on the concrete floor and I heard something heavy shift its weight. I took a step toward it, and a cold hand clamped down on the back of my neck, hard. It pulled me back onto my heels as another hand grabbed my wrist, slamming my gun hand into a support column. I caught a glimpse of the woman’s face, flecked with blood, as I was dragged away from her.
Nico, what’s happening? Vesco said. I could hear footsteps pounding down the hall in my direction.
Something connected hard with my cheek and I was spun around. One leg went out from under me, and I went facedown on the concrete. When I tried to get up, a boot landed between my shoulder blades and my chest slammed into the floor under it, forcing the wind out of me.
I need backup down here, now. Where the hell was SWAT?
The boot lifted and I heaved myself onto my hands and knees, firing a back kick blindly into something solid. Heavy footsteps staggered back and I swung around, pointing my gun.
Before I could pull the trigger, a sharp pain stabbed into the side of my neck and the strength went out of me. My arms got heavy and fell to my sides. The gun slipped out of my hand and clunked onto the floor. Toxin warnings flashed as I staggered and started to fall.
Smooth material brushed my face as someone darted past me. The case disappeared again, leaving only the radiation signature. The cluster of particles moved away quickly, fading away to nothing as they moved out of range.
It’s doubling back the way I came in. Intercept it.
I went down on my knees, shaking. One of my internal stim packets popped as the JZI tried to cut through the fog. My stomach churned, and I had pins and needles in my legs as the feeling came back. I manually popped two more.
That did the trick. Everything got brighter. My heart pounded as oxygen and adrenaline flooded my bloodstream. I picked my gun back up and pushed myself to my feet, the room spinning around me.
The revivor had gone back down the corridor, but it had too much of a head start. If it left through the closest exit, then it would come out near the loading dock. I made for the freight entrance instead and slapped my palm on the button.
The stim wouldn’t last long, but if I didn’t beat him down there, it wouldn’t matter anyway. The door began to rise on its track and I ducked through the gap, my muscles starting to tighten. It was getting hard to breathe. A cold gust of wind and rain hit me as I crossed the dock and slipped on the steps. People stopped on the sidewalk a few feet away from me and stared. Sirens had begun to wail, and I saw red-and-blue lights flash down the length of the street.
The map put me on the western side of the building. If the revivor made a run for it, it would be through the alley out back. Rain pummeled me as I tacked left past a pile of trash and between the buildings. Water was running down in a stream from a clogged gutter up ahead, and I headed toward it, looking for signs of the radiation signature. It was getting harder to move. The side of the building was veering away. I shook my head, trying to focus. Something splashed in a puddle near a pile of trash bags. I stood there, trying to keep my balance, and watched it.
Where is it?
Every time I took a breath, my chest got tighter. Looking back and forth down the alley, I didn’t see anything.
It’s gone. I missed it.
I watched the rain stream down from the gutter, splashing into a puddle formed around a crack in the pavement. The stims weren’t working anymore. My arms and legs started to get heavy again.
I’m going to need a medic, Sean.
There was no answer. I was still staring at the water kicking up droplets when I realized the words never appeared in the HUD. I hadn’t sent the message. The coupling to the JZI had dropped.
Sean?
The air blurred in front of me. The water was streaming in slow motion, and for just a second I saw it stop about five or six feet above the ground. Water sprayed off something I couldn’t see; then it continued like it never happened.
Sean?
Something moved next to the pile of trash bags; then a dark shape flew toward me. A large plastic bag hit me and tore open, scattering garbage as I heard feet hit the pavement, running for the street.
“Stop!”
I couldn’t get a bead on it. I lunged and felt cloth under my hand. I grabbed a fistful of it, but it slipped through my fingers as the footsteps moved away. My chest burned. When I took a step, my leg crumpled under me and I went down on the wet pavement.
From the blacktop, I could see the crowds of people moving down the sidewalk. Wind blew sheets of rain across the street as I watched them pass. One of them glanced over at me, but kept walking.
Everything was going blurry. The blind spot floating in front of my eyes started blooming, getting bigger until everything began to go dark.
The revivor had gotten away. Along with the one Takanawa had taken, twelve nuclear devices had just left the hotel and disappeared into the city.
I’d been sitting on the bench, watching it rain for, like, an hour, and even with an umbrella, it was pretty miserable. The slicker kept me mostly dry, but it was cold enough that I could see my breath coming out through my nose. I figured I’d probably end up getting sick. I don’t know why I didn’t just go home.
Everything had changed, back when I first met Nico. I still don’t remember a lot of it, since I had been drinking nonstop then, but I know at some point I had gotten sucked into whatever he was involved in, and I almost got killed. A lot of it was a blur, but I remembered a revivor came into my house and dragged me away. My downstairs neighbor almost died trying to save me. Nico brought that woman—the one from my dreams—back to life, and she almost killed him. I think I might have actually killed someone myself.
After, when the FBI questioned me, I told them I didn’t know anything. I made them believe me, and I went home. It seemed like a long time ago.
Nico kind of took me under his wing after that. He started bringing me to help with interrogations at the FBI, which, in a weird way, was kind of how we first met. No one knew how I got my results. They just knew I did. I got cleaned up, sort of, and got semiregular work there. I moved with Karen downstairs, and we got to be good friends. The roommate thing was doomed to fail, though, and I was back upstairs in four months. The drinking just got to her after a while, and she never said it, but I think the visions did too.
“I’m so stupid….” I muttered, watching the rain fall.
The rain was supposed to go all week, I’d heard. It was so dark and gray all the time that most places kept their lights on even during the day. It was the most depressing time of year, and it was the first time I’d tried to face it when I wasn’t drunk. So far, I’d hated every minute of it.
Something hissed next to me on the bench, and when I turned to look, I saw a woman sitting beside me. She was hunched over with her hair covering her face, and her coat was black and burned. When the rain hit her body, it sizzled, and smoke drifted off her. The ends of her sleeves still smoldered. She wasn’t real.
They never were.
She didn’t look at me. After a minute, she looked up at the apartment building across the street, and I saw her face was scalded and covered in soot. The rain that fell on her face turned black, streaming down her neck. She looked sick and in pain.
“Why?” she whispered.
A line of cars went by, almost splashing me. The last one in the row rolled to a stop and I saw it was a police car. When I looked back at the bench, I was alone again.
Great.
I waited to see if it would just drive off, but it didn’t. The window went down and an officer with a square face and a mustache looked out at me. He waved for me to come over.
There was no point in trying to ignore him. I got up and went over to the car. Warm air drifted out through the window, and I could smell his cologne when I leaned over.
“Evening, ma’am,” he said.
“Hi.”
“Hell of a night, huh?”
“I guess.”
“Security camera has you watching that building for over an hour,” he said. “You want to tell me why that is?”
“A friend lives there.”
“A friend?”
“Yeah.”
“If you know someone who lives there, why are you out here in the rain?”
“He didn’t come home.”
“Was your friend expecting you?”
He wasn’t, but I didn’t want to say that. I felt my face getting red. The cop sighed. He looked like he felt sorry for me.
“Okay,” he said. “What’s your friend’s name?”
“Nico.”
“Last name?”
“Wachalowski,” I said. “Agent Nico Wachalowski.”
He raised his eyebrows, and I could tell he didn’t believe me.
“Hold on.” He leaned back into the car and I saw the computer screen light up his face. He fiddled with it for a while and said something into his radio.
I looked back at the apartment building. His window was still dark. He said if I ever needed to talk to him I could, and I just needed to talk to him. I should have left when I saw he wasn’t there, but I figured I’d wait a few minutes, and then, somewhere along the line, it turned into longer than that. I didn’t even think about the security cameras. If he saw a recording of me standing out there, he’d think I was some kind of stalker or something.
The cop leaned over again. The expression on his face was a little different.
“How do you know Agent Wachalowski?” he asked.
“I work with him sometimes.”
“Doing what?”
“It’s classified.”
He looked tired. “Lady—”
“I really do work with him sometimes. Look,” I said, fishing out my contractor’s badge. It had my picture on it. He looked between the picture and me for a minute.
“Look, ma’am, it’s late. Other people live here besides just your friend, and I can’t have you just hanging around watching the place from across the street because then I have to check it out. You get me?”
I shrugged.
“If you don’t clear out, I’m going to have to come back and ask him about it directly. Is that going to be okay with you?”
My face got even hotter. He got that pity look again.
“Ma’am, come on. It’s raining out—”
I focused on him and everything got bright around me. The raindrops looked crisp and sharp, like little pieces of ice, as they dripped off the edge of the umbrella between us. The lights came up around his head and I eased them back, smoothing them down until they were all a calm, deep blue.
“Sleep,” I told him. His eyelids drooped.
“Can you hear me?” I asked. He nodded, barely moving his head.
“Did anyone call this in or did security just see me on the camera?”
“Just the camera.”
“Go back and tell whoever sent you that you checked it out and it was nothing. It was just a woman waiting for her friend, but she got tired of waiting and left. Understand?”
“I understand.”
“You have better things to do than check out stuff like this. You should get back to doing real police work.”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
The colors faded and the light dimmed back down again. The cop looked out of it for a second and then his eyes cleared. He picked up his radio and spoke into it.
“This is car seven-oh-one.”
“Go ahead, car seven-oh-one.”
“She checks out. It’s nothing.”
“Copy that.” He switched off.
“Be careful out there,” I told him. He nodded.
“You too, ma’am.”
The window went back up and he drove away. I watched him go until his taillights got lost with all the rest; then I figured I’d better get going. At that point, it seemed like it would be worse if Nico actually did come home and found me.
I made my way back to the subway entrance, and the closer I got, the more crowded it got. A few blocks away I saw the first dealer, or maybe prostitute. There was more and more neon until between the cars and traffic lights and signs, it was nothing but squiggles of bright color. It took the edge off the rain, but there were too many people. I found the stairs and made my way down into the tunnel.
Once I was through the turnstile I started to smell food and coffee. I followed a row of stands selling anything and everything, and headed for the platform. The whole area smelled like a mixture of meat, bread, and spices. Places like those stayed open all night.
The next row of stands sold drinks, with all the same variety: one sold beer, the next one sold absinthe, the next whiskey. One sold sake. I slowed down and stopped for a minute.
Stopping something you’ve done forever is hard, especially something like drinking. Even if you take away the shakes and the sweating and just the physical need to do it, there’s still this other part that’s almost harder to let go. It’s hard not to do what you’ve always done. I couldn’t remember a time I lived in the city when I passed by a row of those stands and didn’t have a drink. Even if I was already drunk and even if I had a bottle in my hand, I always stopped. I just always did. Now I had to just walk by, and so far I’d managed, but every time I did, I wondered how much longer I’d make it.
Why weren’t you home? I thought.
I wondered where he was and what he was doing. I wondered if he knew that I thought about him, or if I was just invisible to him like I was to everyone else. I wondered if he’d met someone, and if that wasn’t why he had drifted off like he had lately.
The sake stand was run by an old Asian guy who kept a little TV mounted in back of the little bar. He filled the little ceramic glasses in front of the people sitting there, steam rising off the tops of each one while the TV flickered. I could smell it from where I was standing.
The nights were too long now. I stayed in my apartment as long as I could, but I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to go down and bug Karen but she’d gotten back together with that asshole and I could hear her down there with him.
I stared at the big ceramic jug in front of the Asian man, and the steam coming out of its spout. I wanted to talk to Nico. I wanted …
A hand touched my shoulder and I jumped. When I turned, I saw a woman, about my size with straight black hair and bright blue eyes. She was wearing a red rain poncho with a wool hat, and around her neck was the tattoo of a snake. It went all the way around, until it swallowed its own tail. Its red eye stared from over her jugular.
She pinched my shoulder and my arm locked up as she turned me around so we were face-to-face. One second she wasn’t there and the next she was, right up in front of me. She was looking right at me.
Without thinking, I focused on her and everything went bright, but only for a second. In that second, I saw the colors come up around her and something else, a band of white that circled her head like a halo. As soon as I saw it, it was gone. The lights went back to normal and it was just her, standing there staring right into my eyes. Her lips curled just a little bit.
My breath caught in my throat. I’d first seen a halo like that after I got kidnapped. I’d seen it down in the cages, where there were others like me. This weird woman was like me.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I just wanted to say hello.”
Her hand moved away from my shoulder and my arm came unstuck. I looked around to see if anyone else thought what was happening was weird, but no one was paying any attention to us. When I looked back at her she was still staring at me.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I’m Penny,” she said. She had this calm, quiet voice that was a little creepy.
“What do you want?”
“Just planting a seed,” she said. “I’m going to be your friend soon.”
I felt like I was falling all of a sudden, and stumbled a little. She reached out and steadied me. I felt dizzy for a second, and she held my arm until it passed. Then, before I could say anything else, she winked at me and walked away. She merged with the rest of the crowd, and then was gone around the corner.
Was she was real? No one else seemed like they even saw her.
I guessed it didn’t matter. Real or not, she was gone. When I looked back at the sake stand, a news lady was on TV, standing outside next to a broken concrete wall with rebar sticking out. Blood was splashed on it and by her feet were what looked like bodies, missing their heads and arms.
“…nightmare in the ghetto of Juba, where scenes like this one are becoming all too common …”
The war. The grinder, some people called it. They were on the other side of the planet. It looked hot over there. It was a hot, dirty place where lots of people died.
I looked back at the sake, but all of a sudden I just wanted to get home. The whole trip had been a bust, and I was really starting to hope Nico never found out I’d been there.
Part of me still thought he might warm up to me. I think there was a part of me that really believed it, but there was another part of me that always knew it wasn’t going to happen. Even if I was prettier or sexier or just had more of whatever it was he was into, it probably wouldn’t have made a difference in the end. He was still hung up on a dead girl.
I should have just accepted that. If I had, I could have saved myself a world of hurt.
On the train, in a car full of dregs and drunks, was the first time I felt like I was home. After two years in the grinder, it was kind of hard to believe.
“…in other news, the last appeal for the controversial ‘Five-Percent Bill,’ which would have allowed offshore UAC company sites to pad up to five percent of their workforce with revivor laborers, was shot down today in a move that was not unexpected, with the note that if the companies are to remain UAC based, then UAC law will apply in this case. Key members of the corporate conglomerate who pushed for the bill were quick to assign blame.”
My left hand tingled. It tingled all the time, and it was always cold, like the blood was cut off. I made a fist and cracked my eyes open, head to the glass. It was dark out there. The TV feed hung in front of my eyes like a ghost. Since I made corporal and got the implant, I had TV twenty-four/seven; the UAC dream.
They cut from the news bitch, and some fat asshole with white hair popped up.
“We were supposed to have Heinlein Industries’ support,” the fat, white-haired asshole said.
“Even Heinlein Industries is bound by UAC law, Mr. Hargraves.”
“This whole thing was a sham! This was going to bring big business to them, and they knew it. They were one hundred percent on board with it, but what do they have to worry about now? With that massive decommission forced down our throats, they’ve got a military contract sitting in their laps like this world has never seen!”
“Are you saying Heinlein was—”
“I’m not saying anything! This isn’t over!”
“According to the UAC Supreme Court, it is over, Mr. Hargraves.”
I shut it off and closed my eyes. The “massive decommission” had geared up while I was over there. Someone got it into their head to scrap every revivor that was stored before a certain date. They said they were obsolete even though they weren’t, and someone up top was pushing it hard. Disposal was a piece of shit work we all got stuck with at some point. I never thought about Heinlein, and how much they’d get paid to replace the ones we threw out. Some shit never changed.
“Next stop, Brockton-Stark Street Station,” a voice crackled over the speaker. I stood up and hung my bag on my shoulder while I held the rail. In front of me, pasted over about fifty other notices, was a pink piece of paper with smeared black print that said TIER TWO IS A LIE.
In some ways, it was like I never left. Two years gone, and it was more of the same; people pissed about tiers, revivors, and the grind. Most people were still tier two, and they still screamed the most. They never shut up about the grind, even though they saw it only on TV. The grind wasn’t like they thought. It wasn’t like anyone thought. The only part anyone got right was how bloody it was.
My unit got dropped in a place called Yambio, or what was left of it. Next to it, Bullrich was fucking heaven. They wanted the place locked down—why, I had no clue. The fuckers that lived there were cut off, and to feed them took more than they had. The ones with the drugs had cash and guns. The rest just had guns. Yambio was a war zone that didn’t know or give a shit about the rest of the grind, never mind the world.
I did my time in a ghetto called Juba. The folks that lived there spent most of their time trying to eat and not get killed. Every night there was a gunfight, and it felt like every day when the sun came up, we pulled bodies off the street. In two years, the body count got a little lower, and that was about it. That’s what I had to show for my two years—that, and losing the fastest pound I ever lost.
Still, to the guys that had to live there, fewer bodies on the street was a big deal. Getting killed out of nowhere was their every-fucking-day. Any one of the bodies you found facedown in an alley, stinking and covered with flies, was somebody to someone. Some extra feet on the ground were a real big deal for them.
“Now arriving at Brockton-Stark Street Station.”
The bell went off, and I cracked my back. That was my stop. I did my part for Juba. I lost my hand, saved a life, and bunked next to five filthy jacks for almost two years. That was enough.
The station was mostly empty when I got off. I’d been on the red-eye all night, and the sun was still down. A few sad sacks stood staring at the tracks. Some got on and a few got off with me. Mostly it was bums, and not many of them. I looked around for my ride, but didn’t see him.
Figures.
When I shipped out, the guys from the fight club moved my shit to storage for me. I signed up for four years on the Army’s tit, but after the hand, they sent me home and I was on my own. My old place had been a shit hole, but at least it was a place to land; it was long gone now, and I had to live somewhere. Some group called Second Chance stepped up to help out. They got me set up with a new place while I was still in the med center. It wasn’t far out of Bullrich, but far enough. They said a rep would meet me at the station when I got back, but so far …
Meeting: EMET Corporal Calliope Flax.
The words popped up on my HUD. That was the guy.
I took a step off the platform, and someone stepped out in front of me. It was some spooky chick with a red poncho and a wool cap. Her blue eyes were smeared with black makeup.
“What’s your problem?” I asked her.
“I want to tell you something,” she said. I felt kind of dizzy for a second.
“So tell me.”
“Come closer,” she said. She waved me in with one hand, and I leaned forward.
As soon as I did, she got on her toes and whispered right in my ear. I didn’t catch what she said because of the noise, but right then I got dizzy like before, but worse. I swayed, and she put her hands on my shoulders and squeezed.
You will remember Zoe Ott.
I got a weird flash. There were guns, fire, and smoke, but it wasn’t Juba. It was before. It was cold and dark. I was heading down, deeper and deeper. I had no clue where I was. All I knew was someone was calling me. Someone needed me.
She pulled back and the flash stopped. She gave my shoulders one last squeeze.
“Jeez, you’re ripped,” she said. The dizzy spell passed. “Beat it, you fucking nut job,” I said, but the little bitch was already walking away.
Meeting: EMET Corporal Calliope Flax.
The words came up again, then faded out. I tried to place the weird memory, but I couldn’t. It was snowing, I thought. Nico was there. When I turned to look for the little weirdo, she was gone.
Meeting: EMET Corporal Calliope Flax.
I shook it off, and followed the strays off the platform. The station was like the land of the dead. One guy stood out, though—an old black dude in a long coat and a hat with a brim. He was parked on a bench next to a bum with shaky hands and a big scar on his face. He talked, and the hobo nodded.
Look up, I said.
The old guy raised his head. With the hat out of the way, I saw there were a lot of miles on his face and his kinks had gone gray. There was a Second Chance pin on his collar. When he saw me, he smiled.
“Excuse me for one moment,” he said to the bum, who dug at his scar with a yellow fingernail. It looked like someone had cut him a long time ago.
“Corporal Flax?” the old man asked as he got up, and held out his hand.
“Cal,” I said. His skin was like leather and his grip was strong.
“Cal it is,” he said. “I’m Leon Buckster. I’m with Second Chance.”
He gave the bum a pat on the arm, then gave him his card.
“You go ahead and call that number,” he said. “Or just come down, and I’ll get you set up.”
“Just like that?” the bum growled.
“We can get you to the minimum requirements. After that, we can get you a whole new level of help. Understand me?”
The guy nodded.
“I have to go now,” Buckster said. “Don’t lose that number. Take that first step. It’ll get easier after that, I promise.”
The bum stared at the card. Buckster turned back to me. “Thought maybe you weren’t showing,” he said. “Shall we?”
“Sure.”
We left, and when I looked back at the bum, he was still looking at the card.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Recruiting.”
“You recruit bums?”
“Indigent,” he said. “Or homeless. Don’t call them bums. We don’t recruit them for ourselves; we help get them rehabilitated enough to qualify for Posthumous Service.”
“You talk bums into getting wired?”
“PS is an automatic upgrade to tier-two citizenship. At tier two they have access to better aid, better facilities. We can get all kinds of help for them we can’t manage for a tier three.”
“They’re okay with that?”
“Did that guy look like he had anything to lose? The homeless are quickly becoming the largest percentage of posthumous servers, above even your educated service-duckers.”
“If you say so.”
“We recruit quite a few from Bullrich. I grew up there.”
“Yeah, well, no offense, but fuck Bullrich.”
“Give it a few years. You may feel differently,” he said.
“You serve?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
It was hard to guess how old he was, but old. Had this shit been going on that long?
“I’ve got a car outside,” he said. “Come on, I’ll take you where you want to go.”
“Thanks.”
I followed him out. Up on the street it was pouring out, but it was home, and it was good to see. Neon was lit up all over, and no matter where you looked, there was a TV screen. It looked great.
We headed to the pickup entrance, then down three flights to the lot. He walked up to a piece-of-shit micro-bus and pulled the driver’s-side door up.
“You can put your pack in the back.”
He leaned inside and popped the trunk. I stowed my pack and climbed in next to him.
“Where to?” he asked.
I fired the address of the storage place to him over the JZI as he backed out and started up the steep ramp toward street level.
“Actually, we were contacted by an old associate of yours by the name of Eddie, from the old Porco Rojo. He provided a bunch of muscle who helped move your things to your new place. It’s all in boxes, but it’s waiting for you. All you have to do is move in.”
“Oh,” I said. I wasn’t expecting that. “There, then, I guess. Thanks.”
“You got it.”
He flashed his ticket at the scanner, then pushed his way out onto the main street.
“How long were you in for?” I asked him.
“Six years. You?”
“Signed up for four. Got two.”
“Wounded?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You don’t have to call me sir.”
“Habit.”
“What happened, if you don’t mind my asking?”
I took the glove off my left hand and held it up so he could see. He looked over, and I thought he’d make a face, but he didn’t.
“I’ll be damned.”
I was glad to have it, don’t get me wrong, but I hated the thing. The new hand was a good match. The skin was about the right color, but it had that gray look and the dark veins stood out.
“It’s revivor tech,” he said.
“Watch the road. Yeah.”
“I heard they were doing that.”
“You heard right.”
“It beats a prosthetic, trust me.”
I looked over at him.
“Left leg,” he said. “Below the knee. Even with the nerve interface, it’s not the same. You have full feeling? Full strength? Full range of motion?”
“Yeah.” The dead hand was stronger, actually. It could crank twenty PSI more than my right hand, which was my good one. The one thing it didn’t have was body heat.
“You were an EMET Corporal …What was it like leading a team of revivors?” he asked.
No one ever asked that before. It was kind of a tough one.
“Quiet,” I said. It was the first thing I thought.
“Quiet?”
Every outfit used them to fill out the ranks, but there was still a chain of command, and the ones on top had pulses. The EMET rank went to grunts who were two things: good with revivors, and bad with people. I’d never seen a jack in the flesh until I went over, but it turned out I had a knack for messing with their heads. I drove them through my JZI, and it was fun—at first.
When I got good at it, though, they moved me so I could specialize, and I found out most of the grunts picked for that honor had screws loose. When I got my last upgrade and hit EMET, I was glad to get out of there and far away from the rest of them. When you were put in charge of those things, they were your squad. You ate, shit, and bunked in front of them. They were with you twenty-four/seven, and they never talked.
I didn’t say that to Buckster.
“Driving jacks was easy,” I said instead.
“Jacks?” I shrugged.
“That’s what we called them.”
“Why was it easy?”
They were easy because they never talked. They never ate, shit, or slept; they just always had your back, day or night. When the command spoke was lit, they did what you wanted. When it was off, they watched, and waited for it to come back on.
“They do what they’re told,” I said.
“My men always—”
“It’s not the same. They get imprinted. You could use them for target practice, as long as the spoke is lit.”
“Ever worry the command spoke would drop or the imprint would fail? That you’d lose control of them?” Buckster asked.
“Only every day.”
“That must be nerve-racking.”
“It isn’t. The controls don’t fail. You could shove a bomb up their assholes and point them at a schoolyard; they don’t care. They’ll do it.”
It was nerve-racking at first. I slept the first few months with one hand on my gun, but after a while I got to like the quiet. You spend enough time with five guys, even jacks, and you get used to them. You get used to the smell of them and they way they act. Each one is a little different, but they’re all wired to you, like extensions of yourself. In a weird way, I missed it. I missed my extra eyes and ears.
“You really do that?” Buckster asked.
“No, man,” I said. “Revivors don’t have assholes.”
He didn’t talk for a while. He just drove.
“They didn’t have that many revivors in the field when I served,” he said when he piped up again. “I think they’re relied on too much these days.”
“Then why you pushing bums into jack service?”
“Homeless,” he said. “The military won’t take them on active duty if they’ve got physical or mental problems; with revivors filling out the ranks, they don’t need to. If you’ve got issues like that, the best you can do is tier two, because if you’re just going to get reanimated, it doesn’t matter. What are they supposed to do?”
“You got me.”
“Besides, it beats being dead.”
“It is being dead.”
“They still have the memories and experiences they had when they were alive. They have consciousness, of a sort.”
“Yeah, well, trust me. It ain’t the same.”
He shrugged. “What are you going to do now that you’re back?”
I’d thought about that some, but not much. At first I thought I’d hit the fights for extra cash, but Eddie said my left hand counted as an augment, and it disqualified me from the ring. There were back-alley bouts that pit man on revivor, but those weren’t strictly legal, and I knew better than to go bare-knuckles with a goddamned jack.
“I heard you guys got a job program?” I asked.
“We do,” he said. “Come by and we’ll get you signed up. It won’t be a dream job, but we’ve got a lot of contacts. I can’t promise a time frame, but I’ll set you up with something.”
I watched the rain come down until we got to the place. It didn’t look half bad. It was a long walk from Bullrich.
“Here we are,” he said, handing me a set of keys. “You’re on the tenth floor, unit 3B. You sure you don’t need any help?”
“I’m sure. Thanks.”
He popped the trunk, and I lifted the door open.
“Hey, Leon,” I said. “Thanks. For everything. I mean it.”
“It’s why we’re here.”
The rain was blowing into the car. I went to get out and he stopped me.
“Can I give you one piece of advice?”
“Shoot.”
“Stop wearing the glove now,” he said, “before you get used to it. You were wounded in service to your country. Don’t hide your scars.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You’re tier one now; you can do better than what we can offer, but you’ve got to do the legwork. You got any contacts, use them.”
“I know one guy.”
“Ex-soldier?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. You have my card. Call me if you need anything, or just feel like talking. Take care, Cal.”
I got out and got my pack, and he pulled away. The rain was worse by then, so I hustled in through the gate. At the door I fished out my ID and held it up.
“Flax, Calliope. First Class,” the door said, and the light turned green. I wouldn’t admit it, but it felt good to hear that.
I pushed the door open and went inside. It was warm in there, and it looked clean. I took the elevator up to the tenth floor, then hauled my bag to my new unit. There was a note taped to the door.
Welcome back. I pulled it down and stuffed it in my pocket. I put the key to the scanner, then pushed open the door and took my first step into my new place.
There wasn’t much, but all my shit was there, in a pile. The room looked like a prison cell, but it was big and it was clean.
I dropped my bag and kicked the door shut behind me, then walked up to the biggest pile of boxes. There was note on the top box.
The storage fuckheads let us take all your shit, so I guess you’re lucky it was us and not a bunch of goddamned thieves. Welcome back. —Eddie
There’d be no more fights for me; I was off the roster, and I’d never go pro. The note was pretty much good-bye.
“Fucker.”
I think it was the one nice thing the asshole ever did. It didn’t make me happy, exactly, but it did make me smile.
It made me feel like I was home.
A long, deep unconsciousness brought me back to the grind, like it often did. I’d stopped trying to make sense of it or make peace with it a long time ago, but it had a way of creeping back in when I didn’t expect it. While someone, usually Sean, worked to put my body back together, my mind turned those memories over and over like a puzzle still missing a piece.
“Sean?” I said, but I couldn’t hear myself through the ringing in my ears. My head was still spinning from the concussion grenade, and the stars wheeled by above me as I was dragged through the dirt on my back. Someone had me by one of my ankles and was pulling me behind them. When I lifted my head, I saw three men.
Two flanked the one who had me, and I saw a flash of light as the one on the left glanced back. All of them were naked, and all of them had skin that was starting to wrinkle and pock.
I reached for my gun, but it wasn’t there. My knife was gone too. I struggled, and yellow eyes turned back to stare at me from above. I tried to kick free, but one of them grabbed my other leg. They dragged me out of the brush onto damp, soft soil. I heard the creak of wood, and then I was being pulled downward.
I craned my neck back to see the mouth of a tunnel getting smaller behind me, the earth swallowing the sounds of screams and gunfire. Dirt went up the back of my shirt and I could feel insects scrambling against my bare skin.
They’d dragged me into an abandoned underground supply dump, with dirt walls reinforced by wood planks. An electric light hung from an extension cord, and it still glowed weakly. They pulled me into the middle of the floor, then let me go.
There were bones down there. Whoever deployed the revivors left them out there to eat whatever they could find. I could see a human rib cage in the dirt a few feet away, picked clean.
Revivors came back with what they called a cognitive disconnect. They didn’t exhibit human emotion, and they couldn’t recognize it in others. They didn’t understand fear or pain. Their old moralities and taboos were gone. They only knew their wants. If I wanted to get out of there alive, I had to act, but I couldn’t move even when one of them crouched down next to me. The look in its eyes made me think of an animal staring at fire. There was a primal fascination there, with something it didn’t understand.
The others surrounded me. Fingers slipped in between the buttons of my shirt and tore it open. A string of cold saliva touched my neck.
Move. You have to move.
I didn’t, though, not until the first set of teeth bit down. Pain bored into my shoulder as the thing’s wet, grimy hair brushed my neck and face. I heard the crunch and I screamed. By the time it raised its head and I saw a chunk of my own flesh clenched in its teeth, the next one had already crowded in and bit down where the blood was pumping out. They were eating me. They were eating me alive.
You have to move.
I pushed against them, but the space was too tight. I had no leverage, and they were too heavy. A knee bashed into my ear; then a thumb went into my left eye. I tried to twist my head, but they had me pinned.
The pressure on my eye built up until I felt something cold slip into the socket. Warmth gushed down my cheek, into my ear. With the eye I had left, I saw one of them pulling a big strip of skin away. In the dim light, I could make out the chest hairs sprouting from it.
I’m going to die, I thought. Everything went black for a second; then I heard a faint voice.
I’m going to—
“Wachalowski!” The voice was Sean’s, coming from back up the tunnel. He’d found me somehow. The fingers and teeth that had borne down on me were gone.
“Wachalowski!”
I turned my head and looked across the dirt floor. With nothing but darkness on the left side, I saw blood and many footprints. I could still hear them nearby, but they’d left me. I tried to lift my head, so I could see….
I opened my eyes. I was lying on my back in bed and I could hear a vitals monitor somewhere behind me. Normally if I hit trouble in the field and needed attention, I’d end up back at the tech center with Sean, but that wasn’t where I was now.
Looking around as best I could, I saw someone in the room with me. A man in an overcoat sat at a console to one side of me, watching information scroll by, his face turned away. According to my JZI, it was well after visiting hours.
“I take it you’re not my doctor,” I said. My voice was hoarse.
The man looked over at me and smiled weakly. He was middle-aged with wavy hair that had grayed at the temples. I’d seen that face before.
“I know you,” I said.
“Bob MacReady,” he said. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”
MacReady worked for Heinlein Industries, the UAC’s largest government contractor and sole controller of revivor technology. It had been largely based on technology discovered by Samuel Fawkes. When my investigation two years ago pointed me at Heinlein, he’d provided a lot of information to me. I couldn’t prove it, but I was sure he also had a hand in transferring Faye’s newly processed body to me too.
“How did you get in here?”
“Money talks,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I got hit by a train. What happened?” The last thing I remembered was lying next to the curb.
“From what I can tell from your records, you were injected with some kind of custom tetrodotoxin variant,” MacReady said. “It causes paralysis even in very small doses. It’s not easy to get.”
“It was a revivor,” I told him.
“Our revivors can be outfitted with injectors capable of administering a payload like that at short range,” he said. “Usually they’re loaded with something a little more deadly, and cheaper, than that.”
I checked the FBI logs; Vesco and SWAT had arrested the survivors at the hotel, and all the revivors at the site had been impounded. No one had found the man, Takanawa, though, and no one had managed to intercept the cloaked revivor. Wherever it came from, it got away carrying eleven tactical nukes. Each one was about the size of a cell phone, and could take down a skyscraper.
I checked my buffers, but the information I’d pulled from the computers at the hotel was gone.
With some difficulty, I sat up and faced MacReady. The only light was from the glow of the monitor, but I could see he had aged visibly in the last two years. He looked tired.
“I assume this isn’t a social visit,” I said. “Why did you come here? Are you here representing Heinlein Industries?”
“No,” he said, “but I am here to talk to you about one of our former employees, Samuel Fawkes.”
Fawkes was officially dead, and even his revivor was considered destroyed, at least on record. Two years back he had orchestrated the largest terrorist attack ever executed on UAC soil. From an unknown, remote location, contained inside a metal stasis crate, he had managed to infiltrate Heinlein Industries. With the help of revivors smuggled into the country, he was able to kill hundreds of people and cause millions of dollars’ worth of damage.
He’d done it, so he claimed, because of information he uncovered while employed at Heinlein. It was there that he learned of the existence of people like Zoe Ott and Sean Pu.
“What about him?” I asked.
“We believe he is still operating.”
“You believe he is, or you know he is?”
“I believe he is,” he said.
“Why?”
“No one was able to trace it, but some weeks ago, his identifier was picked up, attached to a long-distance communication.”
“If that’s true, then why didn’t you report it?”
“I only just became aware of it, and I’m reporting it now, to you,” he said. “It wasn’t reported previously because I assume the recipient of the communication doesn’t want anyone to know.”
“Who was he talking to?”
“I don’t know that either, I’m afraid. But I’m telling you—Samuel Fawkes is still out there and he’s still operating. The events of two years ago are not over.”
I nodded. I’d known Fawkes was never found, but he hadn’t tried to communicate with me since. I had been starting to hope he’d been uncrated and destroyed in the field, but never really believed it. He’d made his intentions clear the last time we’d spoken.
“How much do you know about his motivations back then?” I asked.
“Very little I could verify,” he said. “I know he infiltrated Heinlein’s systems, and used it to gain access to the information he’d amassed on Zhang’s Syndrome back when he’d been alive. I also know he used our systems to analyze huge amounts of recorded brain-wave data.”
“Did you study the Zhang’s Syndrome data?”
“That data has since been classified, and, I believe, destroyed.”
“Destroyed? Whatever else Fawkes might be, that information—”
“That information painted a picture no one inside Heinlein Industries is anxious to see come to light. A long-term study, with hard data, suggesting hidden memories that can only be accessed once a person has crossed over and become a revivor? A shadow government that is controlling the minds of the rest of us without anyone knowing? Can you imagine the media storm that would result if that ever came to light? No matter how crazy it is, it would spread like wildfire and would never go away.”
“So, you think Fawkes was insane?”
“Fawkes is clearly very intelligent, and he’s clearly very determined, but how would you frame it? From the information I have, I can deduce only that Fawkes coordinated the attacks as a means of fighting this shadow he obviously believes exists.”
“Is there any chance he’s right?” I asked. MacReady watched me evenly.
“His data appears very conclusive,” he said, “but there are other possible explanations. Fawkes didn’t pursue them. He followed his paranoia down the rabbit hole.”
“Could he still have been right?”
MacReady sighed. “You can always make a case for these things,” he said. “Not long after the events of two years ago, a new law was passed. It ensured that revivor consciousness would revert to pre-generation seven levels—basically removing some of the higher functions to make them more obedient but less self-sufficient. Now all revivor models of Fawkes’s generation or lower are being scrapped and replaced. One could look at those things and see how it might fit into Fawkes’s thinking.”
I couldn’t tell if he believed it or not. In the light of the monitor, his face was hard to read, and maybe he wasn’t even sure what he believed himself.
“Do you have concrete proof of Fawkes’s communication?” I asked.
“No. You’ll have to trust me on that, but it worries me, and that’s part of why I’m here. It was one thing to have Fawkes infiltrate Heinlein’s systems and access our data without anyone’s knowledge …it’s another for someone inside Heinlein to be willingly communicating with him. Before, he controlled revivors that he’d smuggled into the country to do what he needed done, but if he’s making allies inside the city who are human …”
He didn’t have to finish. That would mean Fawkes had managed to get people, regular flesh-and-blood legal citizens, to buy into his conspiracy theory and help him. That would give him a much, much wider reach. Maybe even wide enough to try to acquire weapons like the ones uncovered at Royal Plaza.
“Does Heinlein know you’re here?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “and they can’t. I don’t know who on the inside might be compromised. I won’t communicate with you over the wire for the time being, until I know, but I’ll try to help you if I learn more.”
“Thanks, MacReady. Looks like I owe you again. Be careful.”
“And you, Agent.”
He got up and headed for the door, stopping to turn back before he left. Silhouetted in the light from the hallway outside, he looked like a shadow himself.
“Even if he was right about Zhang’s Syndrome,” he said, “I would be very cautious of Samuel Fawkes.”
He left, and when he closed the door, the only light left was the soft glow from the vitals monitor. I began to fall back into sleep.
I could almost have dreamed him.