Firebreak

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Firebreak Page 32

by Nicole Kornher-Stace


  Every so often I stop to consult my map. It’s still reminding me of something. Maybe if I’d slept properly within the last however many days, or had something more in my system than a protein bar and some IV fluids, it’d come to me. For now I just follow the map out of the city and toward the fields and woods beyond.

  The supercities aren’t like the cities of the old world, with a couple of centuries to accrue suburbs around their messy borders. At least this one isn’t. New Liberty is bounded on two sides by the river that divides it from old town and feeds the reservoir to the southwest, but the other sides are clean-cut. Like they dropped the city in one preassembled piece out of the sky. I follow the map out from between two apartment buildings, and that’s it—the pavement is just gone beneath me, and I’m pedaling on dirt, dead plant matter whipping at my legs.

  There are no signposts, no streets, no nothing. It’s a field. Maybe it used to be farmland, but it’s overgrown with last year’s dead grass and the beginning of this year’s new shoots. Trusting to the map, I head leftward, which is approximately south.

  I pedal for what feels like hours, but my sense of time has been put through the blender of the white room and can no longer be trusted. When I get hungry, I stop and eat snacks from my pockets. When I get thirsty, I pedal faster. Eventually I hit the woods and work my way around the tree line until I find the remains of the wooden trail sign, posted there over a century ago. It’s rotten and overgrown, and the trail behind it is almost unrecognizable, but I made it. I’m here.

  I head in under the trees.

  It’s theoretically a straight shot of a few miles from here to old town, but it’s starting to get dark. In a way I’m almost glad to see it. It anchors my sense of time.

  The grass is too tall to bike here. Walking is difficult enough. Suit guy’s shoes don’t fit me right, and by this point I’ve got blisters on my blisters, but I try to ignore them. I wish I had my backpack. Then I’d have my headlamp, my warm hat, a water bottle I could’ve filled at the fountain back at HQ. My taser. Are there bears out here? I read once that this used to be black bear country, and sometimes somebody still spots one. It’s rare enough that it makes the local news, but still. If I were a bear, and they’d dropped a couple dozen million tons of steel and glass and concrete on the land my parents’ parents used to walk, this untouched stretch of trees would look like paradise.

  I squint at the printout in the dying light. Looks like if I just follow this, eventually I’ll hit the part of the trail that will be familiar from my dog-walking days, and I can find my way out from there. I can’t march straight back into old town with my face all messed up, probably covered in nanobot bruises, wearing the clothes of the Stellaxis HQ dead, so I’ll have to be careful not to draw attention to myself. That thing Jessa said about guards in the street. I wish to all that’s holy I still had my fucking taser.

  Every sound in the woods stops me dead in my tracks, my heart trying to headbutt me in the throat. Squirrels, probably, or chipmunks, or whatever’s in these woods anymore, but I’m convinced I hear something louder. Something rhythmic. It doesn’t sound exactly like footsteps. It’s more of a shhh, shhh. With a few seconds in between each one.

  Deer, maybe. Bears would be louder still. Who am I kidding, I have no fucking idea how loud a bear is. In a fair world, I’m hearing deer. Or hallucinating, thanks to the nanobots’ damage of my system. How bad was it? I haven’t seen much of my own skin since putting on the jacket, but if the bruising looks anything like how it feels, that’s probably for the best. All I’ve gotten a good look at is my hands, and the glimpse I got of my face beneath the bandages in the library bathroom. I don’t feel any blood leaking out of any orifices. Would I be aware of internal bleeding before I collapse of a massive hemorrhage? Nobody knows I’m here, and I have no lenses to call an ambulance and no money to pay for one, and the ambulances all looked pretty busy last I saw and couldn’t drive this trail even if they weren’t toting all the Stellaxis dead to some hospital morgue. I’d be bear shit in these woods inside a day.

  I’m in this wonderful mental state of quietly crawling out of my skin when I hear the sound again. It’s different now. I don’t know how. Maybe I’m just picking up on more levels of it because it’s closer. It doesn’t sound like animals scurrying in the undergrowth. It sounds purposeful. Like someone out here doing something. Which makes no sense. Who the hell is out here? Whatever’s making this sound, it’s not far. Or it doesn’t seem far. Sound carries weird out here. It’s off to the right for sure. Another ten big steps forward might bring me level with it. From there, it’s maybe twenty-thirty feet back off the path.

  I stand there, looking into the woods off the side of the trail. Maybe a minute, maybe ten. The sound stops after a while. I wait. It doesn’t start back up.

  Now I have a real vague memory from some story my mom read to me as a kid that one thing you do not want to do in strange woods is step off paths. You pretty much up your risk of getting ganked by monsters or fairies or whatever by, like, several orders of magnitude. And believe me, I plan to stay on this path. Walk a little faster, in fact. Get away from whatever mystery thing is out there in the rapidly darkening woods.

  But then a thing that’s been bothering the back of my brain for a while now snaps into sudden clarity.

  I know what this map reminds me of.

  The crowdsourced maps we used to use in the game. The way each operative had his or her own color-coded line to show their most-traveled paths.

  Jessa’s voice in my head: They’re all over the place. I mean, look at 06, she’s taken up, I don’t know, hiking or something—

  Hiking. In the woods. Doing laps around the virtual city.

  If there was a flare for 06, I didn’t see it. I never saw her actual corpse. She was shot, yes. But this is 06. It has to be harder to stop her than that. I think of that classified device she used to heal those civilians in that alley. How fucking poetic would it be for her to have faked her death to get away from a company that faked her death to steal her?

  If she’s out here, that means she finally ran. That means we have a common goal. She might know of a safe place. Someplace that might have room for one more.

  Carefully I lean the bike against a tree and tiptoe farther up the path until I come level with the sound. Or my best guess of where the sound was. Sometime over the past minute or so, it’s stopped.

  I don’t want to spook her. If that surveillance footage was true, even if she managed to heal herself partway, she’s badly hurt. She might not recognize me at a distance. She’s going to interpret me as a threat. Company muscle come to bring her back to the fold. And there is zero doubt in my mind that even grievously injured she’s still a hell of a lot faster than me.

  To the right there’s the faint suggestion of a rudimentary path, a place where someone has cut their way through the undergrowth. Recently. And without too much care toward staying hidden. The sliced-off branches lie where they’ve fallen. Beyond is silence.

  This gives me pause. I would have thought a person on the run would have been more discreet. Do murderers dispose of their victims in these woods? Wouldn’t they also try not to be so obvious about it?

  I could go on past. I could get on my bike and speed off to old town.

  But I’m thinking of 06’s in-game map, and how perfectly it lines up to where I’m standing now, and how if anyone could successfully fake their death to get away from Stellaxis, it’s her.

  As quietly and calmly and unobtrusively as I can, I follow this new path. It’s all wintering thornbushes of some kind back here, some just beginning to sprout new growth but densely packed enough that even without leaves, my visibility is reduced to nil. New grass pads my footsteps, for all the help that’s going to be if that’s actually 06 back there. She could’ve heard me coming a mile off.

  I’m going to feel like a big old fucking idiot if this turns out to be a bear.

  I step through into a kind of grassy overgrown
clearing. I think it used to be somebody’s yard. There’s the ruins of a house back there, half digested by thornbushes, the roof fallen in. There’s a sunroom, or what used to be one. All its glass is shattered, and there’s a tree growing up through the rusted framework of the ceiling. A little ways away from that is the dark shape of a tree stump, maybe, or a rock. Sitting in the middle of a sea of tall grass, all alone.

  It’s brighter here, out from under the trees. It’s a shock to see the gray glare of the sky, the faint orange wash of the lowering sun. I don’t see 06. I don’t see anyone. Maybe she’s gone into the house? It looks structurally unsound as shit, but it’s cover. Not totally drone-proof cover, but better than out here.

  As I push my way through the tall grass toward the busted house, my scalp prickles. It’s not movement that’s caught my attention, but a lack of movement. Something that my brain registers as should be moving but isn’t.

  I turn and shade my eyes toward that sea of dead grass where I saw that blackened tree-stump shape.

  It’s not a tree stump at all. Or a rock. Or 06, for that matter, which is my next thought. The darkness of her uniform and hair might have, from behind and at a distance and to my glare-blind dried-out fucked-up eyes, made her look like either of those things.

  But it’s not 06, although I’m getting warmer.

  It’s 22.

  There is no feasible way he doesn’t know I’m here. He probably heard me laboring up the trail from the moment I hit it, crinkling my printout and cursing my wrong-sized shoes and my unrideable bike and the too-tall grass and breathing like a person whose blood is lousy with the flotsam corpses of a slaughtered nanobot battalion.

  He doesn’t attack. He doesn’t retreat. He doesn’t so much as glance up as I approach. If the idea of getting caught out here by Stellaxis drones bothers him, it is not apparent. Do they think their escape plan is that watertight? Was this house their midway point to freedom all along? 06 is in the house, I decide, getting stuff together for the road. Why isn’t he in there helping? He’s not standing any kind of guard at all. He’s just sitting there.

  Then I get closer, and I see what he’s been out here doing, and all the air goes out of me at once.

  He’s been digging a grave.

  I don’t ask. I don’t need to. There is only one person on this godsfucked planet that 22 would be digging a grave for. He’s sitting in the dirt, boots just touching the edge of the mound, his forearms resting loosely on his knees. There are two swords stabbed into the ground beside him. One of them I recognize as his. The other is a short sword I haven’t seen before. He’s cleaned the blood off them somehow, probably on the grass.

  Those swords are the only things he has with him out here. No shovel, no nothing. He must have dug this hole and filled it back in with his bare hands.

  I didn’t see a flare, my brain protests weakly. The rest of me just stops moving. Whatever momentum has carried me this far will carry me no farther.

  I’m not aware of sitting down beside 22, only that time skips and I’m there. He’s covered in dirt and dried blood. A garden smell reaches me. Fresh-turned soil. I could sit here until the earth spins into the sun and still have no idea what to say. The idea that 06 is in the ground because I was never anybody powerful enough to help her, laughably self-centered though it is, is still a wire tightening around my throat.

  I tried. That’s the fuckedest part. I told them I could help them, and I tried my level utter best. I made noise. I uncovered secrets. I outlasted the white room. I escaped Stellaxis HQ. And for what? Old town slowly dying of thirst and 06 about to be worm food in somebody’s yard.

  “You could see this place from the roof of the building,” 22 says at last. I don’t need to ask what building. There’s only one building he knows. “The woods. She always wanted to go.”

  I think again of the game maps, 06 pacing her circuit beyond the city limits. Out where they couldn’t reach her. I swallow.

  “What happened?” I ask before I can come to my senses and stop myself. 22 glances at me sharply. But he doesn’t look pissed. He looks—I’m not sure I’ve ever used the word bereft in my life before, but it comes to mind now. He looks like a person who’s had literally everything he ever cared about ripped out of the death grip he thought he had on it.

  Which, of course, he is.

  “Sorry,” I mutter. I feel like the worst kind of asshole. “Forget I said anything.”

  “This was a long time coming,” he says, ignoring my apology. “She’d been trying to end this war for years. But she had no idea how. Eventually she just—” his hands lift in an incomprehensible, vague sketch of a gesture, like he’s opening two fistfuls of ash for the wind to blow away—“pushed too hard. This time they pushed back.”

  I want to ask what exactly she did. Why she did it. Why she let them take her in. Why, for that matter, 22 allowed it either. I don’t for one second imagine that 06, that either of them, could have been overpowered by anything Stellaxis had to throw at them, short of each other. But I remember the footage suit guy showed me. 22 had her in that ring, and he let her go.

  I think of those bodies fallen in the street, a still frame from some long game I can’t begin to guess at. But I’m looking at 22 and I realize I can’t do that to him. It’s bad enough having to relive my own mistakes, and none of those got me killed.

  And maybe in the end it doesn’t matter what she did. Just like it doesn’t matter what I do. We’re ants trying to take on a colossus. It’s only ever going to end one way.

  “She was brave as hell,” I say instead, forcing myself to meet 22’s gaze fully. “Fighting her way out of that place.”

  A sound comes out of him at this. It’s almost a laugh, but also very, very much not. “Yes,” he says. “Well.”

  I decide not to insult him with another dumbass apology. I shut up, waiting for the earth to swallow me.

  “It’s what she should have done,” he says after a moment. “It’s what I told her to do. I told her to get out. I told her to run. It would have been easy. But no. She waited just a little too long.”

  He doesn’t clarify, and I don’t ask. The question burns a slow hole in my mind for what feels like full minutes before he speaks again. “For me. To stop being an idiot and decide to go with her. And fight our way out of that place together.”

  “You wanted out,” I say. “You both wanted out.” Captain Obvious over here, wasting breath stating this out loud. I guess what I mean to say is: I’m here, I hear you, I’m listening.

  Then I realize what he’s saying, and my breath catches in such a way it’s several seconds before I figure out how to draw one again.

  22 glances over.

  “This is on me,” I say, helpless. “I took too long. Everything you tried to tell me about that place. You trusted me to get that information out. Of course she lost patience with me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I fucked up. I’m sorry I wasn’t someone… better.”

  He hasn’t even bothered to kill me. It’s anyone’s guess as to why. I’d want to kill me, if I were him.

  It isn’t exactly getting easier to breathe. I will myself not to have a panic attack on top of 06’s grave. You stupid fucking fuck, Mal, this isn’t about you.

  22 says something that I definitely mishear.

  “What?”

  “I said.” 22 shifts a little. It is the second time that I have ever seen him fidget. “She didn’t know.”

  “What?”

  “I couldn’t tell her. They were listening.” Something passes over him, almost like a shiver. “They were always listening.”

  “No.”

  Silence.

  “You’re telling me. When you took me to the cafeteria. And told me all that stuff. You’re telling me 06—”

  “Thought I had sent you home. Yes.” Here he hits some unseen wall, recovers less smoothly than he probably thinks. “Safer. For them to think. That I was.” He sucks in a sharp breath between his teeth. Seems to freeze in place a
second, riding out some unseen assault. “That it was only her.” He sets his whole self like he’s walking into hurricane wind. “That I was. Still. Theirs.”

  “You were covering for her.” I can’t even believe what I’m hearing myself say. “The rebellious one, the obedient one. That was an act? For the Director, the company, sure. But. You’re telling me 06 didn’t even know?”

  He doesn’t reply. He doesn’t need to. Every atom of him answers.

  Too easy to imagine: he went all in and kept it up until he saw the best play at his disposal. Someone who could get the truth out. Who could throw that message in a bottle overboard on his behalf. At which point Stellaxis must have learned what he was up to. I guess I know the rest.

  “Then what kept you there? Why not run? If that’s what you both wanted?”

  I don’t expect an answer. He doesn’t owe me shit. I wouldn’t answer me either.

  However.

  “I think,” he says, “I always doubted it was possible. Getting free of that place.”

  “But not 06?”

  He shakes his head so subtly I’m not sure it actually moves. “No. But she didn’t just want to escape. She wanted for there to be no Stellaxis left to escape from. No facility left for more children to vanish into. No more operatives. No more numbers. She was trying to stop it. The SecOps program that fed the war. The war that fed the program. All of it.”

  “They told me she sabotaged a hostage transfer.”

  The nod is very similar in character to the head shake, and followed by long silence.

  “Stellaxis and Greenleaf have been in stalemate for years,” he says. “She was trying to upset the balance.”

  “She… switched sides?”

  “That’s not how she’d put it.”

  “And how is that?”

  He thinks that over a second. “That she was trying to break through to a place where there were no sides.” Sharp glance in my direction: Keeping up? I nod. As goals go, it sounds familiar. “She was getting desperate. She had some dangerous ideas. But that was how she was. She tried. While I—”

 

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