by H C Edwards
Misao tried to shake the cobwebs from her brain, but it was hard to focus. Her thoughts kept bouncing back and forth from memory to the present, where she tried to account for her whereabouts and situation. Just as she realized that she was in an upright position in some sort of cushioned chair, she immediately flashed back to the hub and the hail of gunfire that had enveloped her like a whirling cyclone.
Who had shot first? Had it been Stanton? She was almost sure of it. He had said something to the younger guard, something about-
“Are you awake?”
The voice cut through the fog that was enveloping her brain. It made her focus despite the pain, jolting her back to the present. The tone she heard was wary, but it was steady and contained little in the way of compassion. This prompted Misao to move slowly as she opened her eyes and attempted to focus.
The first thing she noticed was that she was in a transport moving along towards some unknown destination. How or why seemed less important than the second fact, and that was the young woman sitting beside her with the pistol pointed at her belly.
Misao tried to gauge the steel in the woman’s countenance, judging whether she had the conviction that the weapon in her hand demanded. After several seconds of staring into the girl’s unwavering gaze, she decided to err on the side of caution and consider the pistol aimed at her as intent should she provoke.
“I’m awake,” she whispered, wincing; it even hurt to speak.
“Who are you?” the girl asked, not quizzical so much as demanding.
“I told you,” Misao replied, her tongue thick and swollen in her mouth. “I’m Councilwoman Hideshi.”
What she would give for a drink of water at that moment.
The younger girl seemed nonplussed by Misao’s repeated revelation.
“There are only twelve members that sit on the council. I know every one of them. You are not one of them.”
As she said this last part she gestured with the gun. It made Misao flinch slightly.
“I don’t know what rock you’ve been hiding under the last few days, but I was appointed in Councilman Talbot’s stead,” Misao explained, each syllable driving the needles deeper in her brain. “I am his successor. It’s been announced on every screen across the city.”
The girl frowned for a few seconds then lifted her eyebrows in sudden comprehension.
“You’re Misao,” she said, and for the first time her voice took on a less hostile tone.
“I am,” Misao responded, though it was with confusion and uncertainty.
She hated the feeling, not being in control of a situation, someone knowing more than she.
“Who are you?” she boldly asked in return.
“You changed your last name though,” the girl replied instead, ignoring the question. “Why?”
Misao thought about not answering out of sheer stubbornness, but figured it wasn’t the best avenue to take for answers.
“I didn’t change it. It was my grandfather’s name.”
The girl nodded.
“I get it,” she said, then seemed to hesitantly ask the next question. “Councilman Talbot then…is he dead?”
The girl whispered the last word, as if she was reluctant to say it. Her body language had changed completely with the last sentence. The gun dipped towards the seat, expression bordering on consternation. If Misao would guess, she would say that the girl was disturbed by the thought.
“No,” Misao replied, gauging the reaction.
Just as she surmised, the girl appeared almost relieved, but there was another emotion there as well, one that was not so easily identified.
“Do you realize how much trouble you are in?” Misao asked, hoping to talk some sense into the young woman. “Harboring a fugitive, inciting violence, kidnapping a council member; you will be lucky to avoid a wipe. At this point the best you can do is-”
“You don’t know who I am, do you?” the girl asked, interrupting Misao again.
It was frustrating for the councilwoman. She was usually accorded some modicum of respect, whether the person she was conversing with actually held any for her or not. This was a completely different situation than any she had encountered before. There wasn’t disrespect so much as indifference. It was galling, but more than that it was infuriating.
“I don’t care who you are. You are in violation of at least-”
“I guess Talbot isn’t much for talking about himself,” the girl brooded. “Or his family.”
“Councilman Talbot,” Misao seethed.
“To me he’s always been Grandpa Talbot,” the girl added matter-of-factly.
Misao caught her breath, the shock of the statement making her fumble over her words for a moment.
“You…I…”
Her mouth became a thin line as she composed herself.
“You are a liar as well as a criminal.”
The girl smirked.
“My name is Claire….Claire Talbot,” she said. “I’m head of the gene therapy project. Or at least, I was before all of this happened. And I know who you are, Misao Egbert. My grandfather talked about you sometimes; whip smart and driven but flawed. He said you were constantly trying to prove yourself, as if nothing you ever did was good enough. Is that true? Do you feel that way?”
Misao felt the heat rising in her cheeks. Through gritted teeth she replied.
“If you were really Talbot’s granddaughter you wouldn’t be following through with this criminal enterprise.”
Claire frowned as if deep in thought.
“There are real crimes going on that you are not aware. This woman you have been looking for, this Mia, wanted for the crime of murder?”
Misao lifted her chin.
“That’s right. She killed her husband, a human; crushed his windpipe and set fire to the house to cover her tracks.”
“Strange,” Claire said thoughtfully.
Misao couldn’t help herself.
“What is?”
“That a woman capable of such brutality could be so…empathetic and kind.”
Misao didn’t know what to say, couldn’t trust herself and her words at the moment. It wasn’t her place to speculate or judge the Zhuk woman’s character. She had tasked herself with the job of bringing her to face justice. Once that was done, the council, as a whole, would decide her fate.
“How long have you been on the council, Misao?”
“A few days,” she replied, feeling defensive though she was warranted none.
“I need to tell you a story,” Claire said, moving the pistol to her other hand and lowering it to her lap. “After that, we can decide what to do together.”
Misao listened with disbelief to the tale, but slowly and grudgingly she found that her skepticism was leaning towards acceptance. There was no reason to lie, no point in concocting a story such as this. She thought of the vague references that Talbot had kept making about the greater good, how choices needed to be made to preserve humanity and their way of life. She thought of the ICBMs that Claire had described. Misao could guess what they were; old tools from the old world, weapons of mass destruction undoubtedly, the same that had wiped out cities and civilizations, covered the world in an invisible cloud of death. Why keep them maintained if not to use them? Or had they already been used?
And the survivors from Charlottesville…what possible need was there to imprison all those people, to torture them with a pseudo-life spent dreaming in the Cloud? How did that equate to the greater good?
When Claire was finished with her account, leading up to the decision that Bear and the others made to mount a rescue, Misao found herself in the unique position for the first time in her life of having absolutely nothing to say.
The tale was wild, no doubt, and had she not witnessed everything that occurred in the trade hub, she would have dismissed it all, but she had seen those people defy every expectation. Even with the very real threat of a wipe, they had not budged. It had cost some of them their lives, as well as the liv
es of the two guards, and still they went forward. A lie did not propel people to those extremes. Only the truth could do that.
What did that say of the council? They were the only ones who could approve the capture and transfer of those people. And what they were building in The Mountain…how did that tie in?
Misao reached up to the screen on the console of the transport. She accessed the database and input her codes to bypass the security system. Once in, she did a search for Claire Talbot, the young woman watching all of this patiently, knowing exactly what Misao was doing.
When the search turned up with no references, however, is when Claire did show some emotion, the first expression being incredulity.
“Perform the search again,” she said, clearly agitated.
Misao did as asked but knew it wouldn’t do any good.
“Either you are lying or someone erased your file,” Misao said, not sure which of the two she believed.
“Can you check? You’re on the council. There has to be a way.”
Misao thought about the options. Every file left a trace. Nothing was truly purged from the system. She knew from experience that deleted files were merely hidden until the space was overwritten with new data. Sometimes that data was quarantined so as to be retrieved later if necessary.
“Hold on a second,” Misao said, her fingers running across the screen pad.
A few moments later she pulled up a cache of deleted files but they numbered in the thousands. She sighed. There was no way she could make heads or tails of the information, and then inspiration struck. On a hunch she narrowed the search parameters to files accessed by computers using council access codes.
She gasped as a single entry popped up with a time stamp of roughly three weeks prior. What elicited the response, however, was that it lent truth to Claire’s story. Someone on the council seat had accessed the file and deleted it from the database. That person, whoever it was, knew enough to find and delete the file, but was not aware of the inner workings of the mainframe.
Why go to the trouble of erasing a person? What sinister purpose lay behind that action? It tied, no doubt, into the unlawful experiment that the young woman had described, a joint operation between Akropolis and The Mountain. Such a thing had to be sanctioned first, and the only ones that could do that all sat on the council.
“What did you find?” Claire asked, staring at the console screen in confusion.
“A piece of a puzzle,” Misao replied numbly.
“So you believe me?”
Misao’s expression turned grim.
“If I do then we need to know why. We need to find someone who can corroborate your story and these-”
She couldn’t say accusations because if what was happening to those people was true then it was a crime, pure and simple.
“-charges,” she ended up saying instead.
“We can’t go to my grandfather,” Claire stated evenly.
Misao shook her head, knowing that was out of the question. If even a part of the young woman’s story was true then Talbot was the last person they should talk to. No, Misao had someone else in mind.
“If I trust you, I need you to trust me,” she said intensely to Claire. “I don’t know what’s going on but if everything you say is true then we need to expose it.”
“Even if it implicates the council?” Claire asked.
“Especially so. And when we get to the truth of this,” Misao continued, thinking of Todd and the glassy look of his eyes as he faded away. “Those people in the trade hub are going to be held accountable for the deaths of those guards…every single person.”
She emphasized the last few words.
Claire looked down at the gun she held in her lap. She took it by the barrel and held it out to Misao.
“How’s this for trust?”
The transport took the exit to the Inner Zone, winding down from the main highway a hundred feet above the ground level. As they descended, Claire stared at the high rise buildings and thought how the beauty of those magnificent structures now seemed tainted, corrupted somehow. Why did those who worked at the Pantheon choose to live apart from the common workers of Akropolis? It never occurred to her to wonder at the separation before. She had merely considered it sensible, but now staring at the luxurious apartments that jutted out at the upper floors, complete with swimming pools and large balconies, she thought that perhaps those closest to the city had lost touch with the simple amenities that the people in the Outer Zone embraced. What did that say of her, that in all these years she had never considered the class separation as anything but logistically normal. Work in the Inner Zone and live there, work in the Outer Zone and live there. So what about Quentin? His father, she knew for a fact, was the lead researcher in many programs. Why had they chosen the Outer Zone to make their home?
“We’re almost there,” Misao said from her right.
The pistol had gone into the councilwoman’s robes almost immediately. Misao stated that she knew absolutely nothing when it came to weapons, but she felt more comfortable keeping it for now.
Claire was frankly glad to be rid of it. The events in the trade hub seemed dreamlike, but the stark reality was that people had lost their lives, and she couldn’t lie to herself that her presence had nothing to do with it.
Heading down that path, however, would only lead to guilt and second guessing, and right now she knew the truth of Talbot’s intentions were what really mattered.
“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” Claire said, wishing she had stuck to her original idea of going to see Quentin and his father. “I still think we should have gone to the Outer Zone first.”
Misao’s brows furrowed.
“I wonder who this friend is you keep referring to and how they could possibly help us.”
“It’s a friend, like I said,” Claire explained, unwilling to reveal Quentin’s name at the moment.
It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the councilwoman, but rather that she didn’t want to bring Quentin and his family into this trouble if she could avoid it.
“My mother is the only person who can give us answers at the moment,” Misao said. “It’s possible that the council is ignorant of Talbot’s plans or objectives.”
Claire could tell even as the councilwoman said this that there was the seed of doubt. It gave her some assurance that she made the right choice in confiding everything to the woman.
The transport slowed as it merged with the street at ground level. The sidewalks did not contain much in the way of hustle. Most people in the Inner Zone worked during the day, and those that didn’t could be seen walking along completing errands or sitting on patios enjoying whatever news was displayed on their screen pads.
Stores and shops were few and far between. Akropolis had little need for commerce; however, clothing and appliances were still necessary and could be bought with ‘living expenses points’ which were accrued based on necessity. After her brief time in the trade hub and among those people who worked it, Claire wondered if the stipend for the ‘points’ system was more than slightly skewed in favor of the Inner Zone. In fact, she was almost certain it was so.
“We’re here,” Misao said, their transport slowing as it pulled to the curb in front of a massive structure that twisted and turned like a curled ribbon all the way to its uppermost levels.
Claire stared suspiciously at every passing citizen, feeling more than a little anxious.
“Are you ready?”
“No,” was her quick reply. “But let’s go anyways.”
The lobby was thankfully bereft of people. The way the two of them looked, they would arouse suspicion immediately, she dressed in a filthy jumpsuit and the councilwoman with a sleeve tied around her bloodied head.
The emptiness, however, far from dispelling her nerves, made Claire even more uneasy. The glass lift they stepped into exposed her to any prying eyes from the street below. Even though she knew that no one could possibly be looking for her she co
uld not shake the trepidation that had dug in its claws.
Misao pressed the top floor button, the suite, and then had to punch in an access code when prompted. Only the council members had such security measures, Claire knew, and they had never seemed appropriate until now.
“Do you know my mother?” Misao asked, and Claire felt better hearing the nervous quality in her voice as well.
She nodded.
“I do. I’ve talked to her a time or two, mostly in the presence of my grandfather. She’ll vouch for who I am.”
What Claire didn’t say was that she was uncertain if that would be so. If the entire council was privy to Talbot’s plan then she had no idea what reception awaited her.
“Are you sure she’ll be there?”
“I’m sure,” Misao replied, a small smile flashing at the corner of her mouth for just a second, even as she reached up to untie the makeshift bandage from her head. “It’s a Tuesday, the only day she takes for herself.”
It seemed an interminable amount of time before the lift slowed and then halted. By then, the councilwoman had tucked the bandage into a pocket of her robe, doing her best to pat her hair into submission, an act that Claire had already given up on for herself.
When the door opened they faced a short hallway with only a single door at the end on their left.
As they walked towards it Claire could feel Misao’s steps slowing, as if she was no longer as intent on her course of action.
Claire put a hand on the councilwoman’s shoulder for support. It was a brief gesture, lasting only a second, but it seemed to solidify Misao’s resolve.
The councilwoman waved at the sensor next to the door. The chimes of bells could be heard. Claire, at the sound of approaching footsteps, shifted to the side so as not to be in front of the door. It was a conscious move, meant to give Misao the time to greet her mother and explain their presence, but also because she still wasn’t sure what greeting she would receive.