Firebreak

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  It’s a remembrance flare.

  I don’t know whose idea it was, somewhere in Stellaxis’s probably labyrinthine marketing department, to send one of these up whenever an operative dies. It’s a weirdly touching tribute, the modern-day equivalent of the last centuries’ gun salute and half-mast flag. I stare at it, white-knuckle on the parapet, my breath a blade in my throat.

  There were three operatives left alive this morning. 06, 08, and 22.

  Now there are two.

  I have never grabbed for a newsfeed as fast in my life as I do now. But of course there’s no newsfeed to be found. Not until morning, when power curfew lifts.

  I don’t remember turning from the parapet, or crossing the rooftop gardens, or descending the stairs. I fumble my sensor reading twice before I a) remember it’s past power curfew and b) realize someone’s left the door ajar. When I burst into the room all I have to show for my haste is a twisted ankle and a panicked tightness in my chest.

  “Who was it?” I rasp out as the door clicks shut behind me. The words are like a solid weight I have to squeeze through the constriction in my throat. Even as I stand there like a person who has some reason to expect a response, I know it’s hopeless. They don’t know any better than I do.

  Allie sits up, rubbing sleep from her eyes. Was I up there that long? “Who was what?”

  Ryan looks up from the chair, where he’s been reading a comic book by headlamp. “Christ, Mal, where’s the fire?” But he puts the book down. They’re not used to seeing me this worked up. I’m the levelheaded one. The one who doesn’t get riled by drama. Joke’s on me, I guess. “What’s wrong?”

  I point at the window. “Flare. Just now.”

  Allie goes gray. “Oh. Oh no.” She flings herself out of her bunk and skids to a halt at the window. Then she seems to realize it’s over and done and she missed it. She turns around, still clutching the curtain like it’s holding her bodily upright. “When?”

  “However long it took me to run down here.”

  “Shit.” Ryan joins Allie at the window. They stare out over the night together like there’s ever been a second flare. “You’re sure?”

  My teeth are chattering. Adrenaline. Jerkily, I nod. “I have to find out whose.”

  “You and everyone.” Allie is climbing back into bed. “Got six hours left before power comes back on. Goes faster if you sleep.”

  I look around, helpless. Everyone else is either asleep or out somewhere. It’s just me and Ryan, and he gives me this what-can-you-do? shrug and goes back to reading.

  “It’ll be all of them eventually,” he says, not looking up. “Does it really matter which one it was tonight? It’s shitty news regardless. Honestly, I’d rather not even know.”

  It’s like he’s speaking a language I don’t understand. I turn and push back out of the room and run straight into Suresh, standing in the hall in the classic power-curfew stance: fist raised to knock on a door his lenses won’t open. “Flare just now,” he says. “You heard?”

  “I fucking saw,” I hiss at him. “Who was it?”

  He shakes his head. “That’s what I came up here to find out. Nobody downstairs knows.”

  Of course they don’t. We’re all in the same awful dark until curfew lifts. But sometimes people have their ways. When 02’s flare went up a couple of years ago, somebody rode through old town on a hoverbike yelling at the top of his lungs, presumably having come the whole way from someplace on a different curfew cycle. Sometimes flares go up after they’ve announced the loss of an operative, because they always wait until dark to set them off. Usually, though, we get to settle in and wait.

  I wish Jessa were here, but she’s off babysitting for a friend a few streets over. I need someone to help me hold this in my mind, this thing that’s spinning its wheels so furiously, gaining no traction.

  Three operatives left this morning. Now two. Every flare I’ve ever seen, I’ve wished the same wish on it, like it was some kind of birthday candle and anyone was listening.

  One in three odds that was 06’s flare. Or 22’s. Did I do this? Would they vanish an operative the way they did B? They’d lose the war for sure if they started eating their own.

  Wouldn’t they?

  I shoulder past Suresh and out into the hall. People line both sides of the space, on foot and in sleeping bags and sitting against the wall, doing whatever evening things by the light of solar lamps. I hear plenty of chatter about the flare, but no number attached to it.

  I double back for my headlamp and go downstairs. Same deal as in the hall: people talking, no answers. Just your regular battery of rumors, which I make myself ignore. Something about 22 being assassinated by Greenleaf Industries drone fléchettes. Something about 06 throwing herself on a grenade to save some civilians. Something about 08 taking a hallucinogen blast to the face and jumping off the roof of the Stellaxis building. Something about none of them actually being dead and it all being a marketing hoax to sell funeral memorabilia. I tell myself it’s all bullshit and power walk across the lobby toward Comforts of Home. Being a company store, it runs on its own generator, even when the whole rest of the hotel has gone dark.

  I go straight to the back, where the coffee machines are, and the touchscreen to project the TV on the wall while you wait for your coffee to dispense. A crowd has gathered around it, but there’s nothing on the news any of us didn’t know already. Just the remembrance flare playing over and over in slow motion and regular speed and from five different angles, but nothing about whose it was.

  Typical. They did this last time, when 21 died, and the time before that with 11. I don’t know why they don’t just get it over with. It’s like they enjoy leaving us wondering. People more entrepreneurial than myself will be using this window of time to buy up as much SecOps stuff as they can get their hands on, knowing an operative’s merch will skyrocket in collector value posthumously, and Stellaxis gets to sell three times as much crap this way. I don’t know. Some back channel of my brain is babbling nonsense like this. It’s like it’s trying to distract me from thinking too hard about how I will never have a chance to use the information 22 gave me to help him. How I left him there to die while I dicked around in-game for half a month because I didn’t have a solid plan of action. How the in-game version of him, that sad, flat, hollow approximation, may well be all that’s left of him forever.

  I wheel back around and take inventory of my options. I’m about to go outside and start shaking people down in the street, as if they’re likely to know something the news isn’t saying, when I’m struck by a truly terrible idea.

  The water distribution people are long gone for the night, but the standard armed guard is stationed by the supply closet where the barrels and the tap on the ration main are locked away. I march straight up to him, semiautomatic rifle and all. From the look on his face, this does not happen often. I am in no mood to care. This is a Stellaxis employee. He might have answers the rest of us aren’t authorized to deserve.

  “Excuse me,” I say in my nicest no-trouble customer-citizen voice. “The flare a few minutes ago. I was hoping you could tell me who they sent that up for.”

  The guard looks me up and down before settling his gaze on mine expectantly.

  “I don’t have much money,” I tell him.

  “Then I don’t have much info.”

  “Okay. Okay.” I go to check my account, then remember that’s shut off for the night too. “I’ll give you what I can. You just have to come with me to the company store so I can access—”

  “We’re done here,” he says. One finger reaches down lazily, switches off the safety on the gun. “Get lost.”

  “You don’t understand,” I hear myself say. I need to stop talking. Right now. But I can’t. “I need—”

  “You need,” the guard says, sharper now, “to get the fuck out of my sight before I report you for attempting to bribe a security officer.”

  I don’t even know what’s gotten hold of me. Something st
upid and desperate. Something that shut down my higher functions the second I saw that white light scattering.

  I take a step forward. Something grabs me from behind and spins me around.

  “Oh hey, there you are,” says the something. Jessa. She’s dialed the loud-and-bright up to eleven. People glance over. This is probably the point. She starts marching me toward the door to the street, still hollering. “Been looking allll over!”

  She gets me outside and backs me straight into the wall. “The fuck? Are you actually trying to die.”

  I shake her off, miserable. “There was a flare—”

  Jessa flinches like I’ve slapped her. “When?”

  “I don’t know. Ten minutes ago?”

  She runs her hands over her face. “Fuck.”

  “Guessing you don’t know whose it was either.”

  “Obviously. I didn’t even know it happened. I must’ve just missed it before I left for home.” She looks up at the sky, like she can will the sun to rise faster. “Fucking curfew.”

  Then she catches sight of me, staring off into the distance and blinking hard, willing my face to stop crumpling ominously. I don’t want to fucking cry. I want to go and smash things. My biology is betraying me.

  Jessa swoops on me, all concern. “Hey—”

  “Allie said to sleep,” I manage. “How the fuck am I supposed to—”

  “Easy,” Jessa says. “You’re not. You’re coming with me.”

  “I don’t want to go anywhere.”

  “Nobody asked you, you giant baby. This is me as your roommate and your teammate and your business partner making an executive decision. The same teammate who tanked a whole building full of assholes so you could have a picnic in the woods with my booze. I think you’ll find you owe me.”

  “Virtual booze,” I mutter, because it’s either banter back or lose my shit entirely, and once I uncork the panic in my head, it’s not getting put back in.

  “Fine,” Jessa says, like she’s acquiescing to something I never asked for. “Then let’s go find some that’ll get you good and drunk for real.”

  I don’t have much counterargument. So Jessa drags me the long way around back to Comforts of Home, out of view of the guard, and she buys us a bottle of dirt-cheap vodka and we work our way through the crowd, which has only gotten larger. They’re seated all around the screen with their drinks and snacks, and the AI says nothing, because the longer they hang around, the more chips and beer and shit they’ll buy. Jessa sits me down on the floor and sits herself across from me, and we pass the bottle back and forth for what feels like a million years. It’s like some weird mirror-world inverse of my few minutes in the virtual woods, pouring shots out for the dead. Except now we’re pouring shots into ourselves, keeping vigil for the not-yet dead, like we’re holding up our end of a bargain nobody else agreed to.

  My sodden brain informs me if I don’t leave this spot, if I don’t let my guard down, it can’t have been 22 they set that flare for. If I get up, if I fall asleep, if I pass out, all bets are off. So we sit, and we drink, and we wait. Around us the crowd dilates, contracts. People give up, go to sleep. A few stick around. Nobody talks to anybody else. The newsfeed cycles through stories about some pop star’s outfit, spiking costs of suntouch paint and solar batteries, a hot new game module on BestLife, yesterday’s death toll from an ongoing protest on the Greenleaf Industries side of the city, drone recovery efforts of the wreck of some free-trade gunship being delayed by Superstorm Emmeline, and so on.

  No security guards show up to kick us out. The AI, having flagged us as paying customers, leaves us alone. So we keep holding up our end of this batshit unspoken agreement with the universe until at one point Jessa stretches out one leg and jabs me in the hip with her toe. “Look.”

  I look. The newsfeed has cut back to the remembrance flare story, but this time the report has changed. Now, overlaid on the footage of the flare, there’s a picture of 08 looking dutiful and dignified, gazing out of the screen with his eyes on some unseen horizon. From down here it looks like he’s making wistful eyes at the soda machine.

  Killed in action, the newsfeed says. Some engagement out by the Monument. Details emerging.

  I gape at the screen, too drunk or stunned or both to process this at first. I’m startled out of this glue-brained stupor by a sound, a loud harsh exhalation that I then realize came from me.

  “That—” I say at the same time Jessa says, “It was 08.”

  I don’t hear much past that. The blood is too loud in my ears. For a second I think I might faint. I feel like I’ve dodged a bullet. A barrage of bullets. It’s not too late to help them, 22 and 06, and live up to whatever the hell it was they expected of me. I won’t see them again, not up close and personal like before, but that’s almost okay, because I didn’t bring this down on them, they’re still alive, 22 is still alive, it wasn’t—

  Jessa is staring into the bottle. She looks every bit as wretched as I felt up until a second ago. She swishes the last two inches or so in the bottom, then pours a little out on the tile floor of Comforts of Home and pounds the rest. Then she wings the bottle at the recycling bin near the coffee dispenser and misses spectacularly.

  “I didn’t want it to be any of them,” she says softly. “I was hoping maybe they’d say it was a mistake. Somebody fired it by accident. Or maybe, like, to fuck with Greenleaf’s intel? Or to sell funeral merch? I don’t know. It’s stupid.” She gets up abruptly and nearly falls back over. She steadies herself against a muffin display. Shoppers glance over from the front of the store. “I’m happy for you, though. Honestly. I am.”

  We stagger against each other the whole way back up six flights of stairs and into our room. Maybe we brush our teeth? Probably not. Time skips and I’m in my bunk and Jessa’s beside me again and the shelf is digging into my back and I can’t get her to move because she’s already asleep and if I try to push her over, she’ll fall.

  My mental state just now, for any number of reasons, is not maximally displaying its best self. My mind feels like it needs to puke, and not even because of the vodka. The vodka isn’t helping, though. The room is spinning. I close my eyes to make it stop, and instead it speeds up, wobbling on an axis I wasn’t aware it had.

  The last thought that flits through my head before I pass out isn’t even a thought at all, it’s a disembodied voice, a memory.

  08 is lately indisposed.

  Occupational hazard.

  A bit under the weather.

  Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. The last thought that flits through my head before I pass out is: That was two weeks ago, and now 08 is dead.

  * * *

  WHEN I WAKE up the next morning the entire push-pull of emotions that was having its way with me the whole day and night before—starting with my little misadventure with in-game 22 and ending practically blackout drunk on the company-store floor, grieving for something that I thought I’d lost my chance to save—has distilled itself into a pure clean flame of rage.

  I know what I have to do. It’s not much, and in all honesty I could’ve done it before, and it probably won’t make any more difference now than it would have made then, but if I sit around and wait for the next flare, I’m—I don’t even know what. I don’t know what that makes me. Nothing I can live with.

  “Morning, sunshine,” Jessa says. She’s still there in my bunk, doing something on her lenses. “How’re you feeling? I feel like somebody stuffed me in a barrel and rolled me off the top of the building.” She stretches and winces. “Hangover breakfast? You’re buying.”

  “I’m going to post the video,” I say.

  “I’m thinking we go get a pile of really greasy— Did you just say post the video? What video? You already posted the video.”

  “Not that one,” I say.

  I watch it dawn on her face.

  “22 trusted me to do something with that information,” I whisper. She’d pulled the privacy curtain at some point, but you can’t
be too careful. Which is hilarious, given how I’m planning to spend my day. “I don’t know what, exactly, but I’m pretty sure keeping it secret isn’t going to help matters any.”

  “Hold up. My blood sugar’s too low for this. Back it up a little. You’re going to, what? Put the whole second half of that video online? The part that’s full of all the incriminating information that we deliberately did not sign our names to on the entire internet before? I thought we were trying to not end up like B?”

  “I don’t want to. But I also don’t want 22 and 06 to end up like 08, and 17 and 11 and 28 and 02 and the rest of them. I don’t want to wait for the next flare. I want to stop it from happening.”

  I watch this strike her, watch her absorb the blow and keep on coming. “And what do you think this is going to accomplish? If they’re actually trying to communicate with you against orders, what does that mean for them when it gets back to the company? This Director person 22 mentioned in the video? This is going to fuck all of us. Us and them.”

  “This is why I said before I’d go it alone. Okay? That’s fine. I stand by it. But we’ve been sitting around for two weeks waiting for a definitive plan to fall in our laps and it hasn’t. They’ve left us alone, but that’s only because we’re playing along. Not making any noise. Still being loyal customer-citizens who don’t suspect anything about the operatives, who just accept the fact of all that water at HQ while we’re out here paying our dollar an ounce and scrambling to stay out of the company rehydration clinics. Who don’t put this shit together: If they’re lying about these things, what else? I have to do something with this, Jessa. Make some kind of move. While I still can.”

  “What move? We have no move.”

  I ignore the fact she said we. That’s a fight for later. “I have the video. 22 says 08 is unwell. I have that on record. That’s during the same time 08 was supposedly off doing some demonstration in wherever it was—”

  “Moscow,” Jessa supplies.