“Is that what you think I’m planning to do?” he says. “Sit around and mourn her? Kill the soldiers who shot her? They’re all dead. It doesn’t matter. No,” he continues, drawing it out that same extra half syllable as he did when he spoke of the Director back in the Stellaxis basement. “She was my partner. I am going to finish what she started.”
“Then come back with me.” Aware that I’m repeating myself. Aware that I sound like I’m pleading. Maybe I am. I’m straight out of fucks left to give. “Come back to old town. Tell your story. The truth about Stellaxis. We’ll broadcast it to the world. The videos I posted are getting global support. That means beyond Stellaxis. This could lead to worldwide boycotts. Protests. Something. Their stock will fall. They’ll lose credibility. They’ll go out of business. No more war. No more stolen children. They’ll disappear.”
But even as I speak, I’m thinking, Is Greenleaf Industries any better? If the city goes to them, what difference will it make? A different logo on our water kegs, our company stores. And there are no stolen children left to save.
I wish to fuck there were a third option I could give him. Or myself. Or all of old town. Right now I’m looking at this house and thinking: What else is out there to be reclaimed, beyond the supercities? We old-town people are resourceful. We know how to purify rainwater. We know how to sprout greens. We know how to cobble together a living out of anything. What else might we learn, given time?
He doesn’t say yes, but he doesn’t say no. Either way, I can’t think of anything new or useful to add. I consider giving him some cheesy line about redemption, but I bite it back. That’s not a useful angle here. Maybe after we sleep on it, I’ll find a way to convince him.
We pass the remainder of the bottle back and forth in silence, gazing out the window. The moon paints us silver-blue and luminous, like something put on ice and preserved outside of time forever. Its light is the only light we have.
0019
I WAKE UP ON THE COUCH. THE cushions that were on the floor are under me. There’s a blanket on me I didn’t put there. It smells of mildew. It’s patterned with flying birds. I vaguely recognize it from one of the bedrooms farther back in the house.
It’s still dark. The empty bottle has fallen over on the table. Moonlight shines through it. 22 is nowhere to be seen.
Panic spikes me. He didn’t, I lie to myself. He’s just gone to sleep somewhere.
I rush through the house, smashing my shins on furniture, my shoulders on doorframes. He’s nowhere. Not dead, not alive. All I find is the clothing I gave him, folded neatly on the bathroom sink. His uniform is gone. The whole sword and the broken one, gone. I stand there, my head pounding, my whole body shivering like flu.
I am going to finish what she started.
He’s out in the yard, I try to convince myself. He’s gone back to the grave. I should have stayed awake. I should have kept an eye on him. Please be alive, please be alive, please be alive.
But when I open the door, something catches my eye. I look down. There are words facing up at me from my feet, carved quickly and crudely into the wood of the porch. A message.
I HAVE TO
I take off running.
* * *
THE BIKE IS where I left it, lying in a faint blue patch of moonlight. I haul it into an about-face and start pedaling toward the city, battling my adrenaline-fueled way through the grass. It’s cold enough to see my breath out here. Probably cold enough to snow. How long ago did he leave? How far ahead of me could he be? There’s the slightest wash of light off in the distance. The sun is coming up.
I have no idea what I hope to accomplish here. Whatever he’s gone back there to do, I’m not going to be able to do anything to—what? Help him? Stop him? Protect him? I’m not sure which of these notions is more outrageous. Maybe 22 has a solid game plan here, but I don’t. All I know is I’m pedaling back toward Stellaxis HQ faster than I’ve ever pedaled anywhere before, dehydration or no, hangover or no, darkness or no. Because everything I’ve been moving toward since Jessa and I agreed to meet B in that coffee shop, it all points in one direction. I couldn’t do anything to avenge Elena, to prevent 08’s flare, to help old town get its water back, to save 06 from throwing herself on the gears of the machine to slow it down. It may be my last act on the face of this forsaken earth, but I will do anything and everything in my power to see this—whatever it is—through. I’m unarmed, unprepared, running on fumes. I don’t know what’s going to be happening at that building when I get there. Only that I have to get there before it does.
I try not to think about how awful I feel. I try not to think about leaving Jessa and the others behind to mourn my terrible decisions. I try not to think of what I’ll find when I get to that building. Another massacre? Is there anyone even in the building at this hour to be massacred? Is he waiting for them to arrive in the morning? Are they waiting for him to? What the hell is he after? Finish what she started, sure. But does he have the first fucking clue how to do that? Can one lone superhuman end a war single-handed? For my money, 06’s grave answers that question tidily. He said he wasn’t going to avenge her, but from where I’m sitting, it looks pretty much like a death wish. Like another remembrance flare by nightfall. And nothing will have changed.
I try not to think that they’ll be ready for him. That I’ll get there as 22 is striding up the lawn into an ambush, his sword in one hand, 06’s in the other, while the glowing dots of sniper sights swarm like fireflies on the black of his jacket. Arriving just in time to watch him fall.
I try not to think that the easiest way to break the SecOps program would be its last surviving operative walking through those black glass doors to die.
But when I get there, the grounds are quiet. It’s early morning, the sky the color of blue milk. On the far horizon, some stars haven’t yet winked out.
Everything at the checkpoint by the entrance to that long winding drive up the green lawn is dead. Humans and security bots, neatly dispatched. It looks to have been very fast. Most of them didn’t even draw their weapons.
I can only hope that I woke up when he left the bombed-out house. I’m a light sleeper. Exhausted as I was, I obviously didn’t wake up when he moved me to the couch or put the blanket over me, but it might’ve started the process. Closing the door behind him might have done it. A creak in the floorboards. The message he left.
I can’t be too late. I can’t.
I pedal hard through the busted checkpoint and up the hill, wincing. Expecting to get headshot straight off the bike. But if there were snipers, 22’s either taken them out somehow or they missed their shot and have gone down into the building after him, because nobody fires on me, and I don’t see his corpse.
I expect the front doors of the building to be similarly trashed, but they’re not. They’re pristine. The part of my brain that’s watched too many movies goes, It’s quiet. Too quiet. I push my way in cautiously.
There were more security guards posted down here this time. At least five. The way he’s left them, I’d have to count their heads to be sure. Swallowing hard, I tiptoe over the body parts between me and the elevators. To my right, the water feature tinkles serenely. The sound of all those hoarded gallons—decorative gallons—hurries me past faster. I don’t have much time to put something together here. Something that will save 22, help old town, protect Jessa and the others from ending up in an interrogation cell by association with my ineffectual ass. Something better than following 22 in order to bear witness to his death.
My toe bumps something hard. I look down. It’s a semiautomatic rifle, like the ones the guards have for the water lines. I have no idea how to use one, if it’s loaded, if it’s broken. I pick it up anyway and head for the elevators, where my momentum hits a wall.
There’s no trail of bloody footprints to follow this time, and this building has seventy-six floors. 22 could be anywhere.
“Okay,” I whisper to myself. “Think.”
This is harder than
usual. My brain fog is thick enough to cut with a knife.
There’s one of those maps on the wall by the elevators, this one with a separate set of plaques indicating the rooms on each floor. I skim the lists, my vision blurring like a migraine coming on. Public relations, human relations, research and development, marketing. It’s just corporate word salad after a while. Nothing jumps out.
Then I realize the plaque for the four sublevels is off on the far side of the others, not before the lower levels but after the higher ones. There’s MEDICAL BAY and DINING FACILITY and INTERROGATION, familiar from before. I keep reading.
I notice that the sublevels don’t only have their own cafeteria and medical facilities. They also have their own air/water filtration, their own laundry, their own public relations office. Like, for whatever reason, these four floors are self-sufficient by design.
But they have some weirder stuff too.
OBSERVATION CELLS 1–30. QUARANTINE. DORMITORY A. DORMITORY B. COMBAT SIMULATOR. TRAINING HALL. MORGUE.
Not only that, but the sublevels are huge. Each one has as many entries on the plaque as any two or three upper floors. They must stretch for acres, past the manicured Stellaxis lawns, beneath the streets of New Liberty.
“What the fuck—” I whisper, and then my attention lands on something vaguely familiar.
DIANA REYES, DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS
Now I don’t know if this is the Director 06 and 22 referred to before. And I don’t know what 22 meant exactly when he said he was going to finish what 06 started. But it’s the best and only lead I’ve got.
Director Reyes’s office is three floors down on sublevel C. Room C312. I make a note of it and punch the button.
While the elevator arrives, I check out the gun. It’s like and not-like Jessa’s Corviss A9 Devastator in the game, but now that I’m looking at it more closely, most of the differences might well be cosmetic. The way a citykiller mech is a TacSystems X10 in real life, but still recognizably the same machine.
I’m debating whether to test my theory by firing into a wall and possibly drawing unwanted attention—countered by the almost definite benefit of being able to deal with unwanted attention I run into below via knowing how to work my fucking weapon—when the elevator arrives.
22’s been here, too. There are two dead guards crammed in here with me. I hesitate a second, eyeing their smart armor vests and helmets, before deciding against it. 22’s going to be the most dangerous thing in this building by far, and if his pattern-seeking flags me as one of them, I’ll be dead before I hit the floor. This armor, expensive though it looks, didn’t do much to protect them against him.
There’s a mess of blood smeared on the keypad touchscreen. I have to wipe it off with my sleeve before it will register my floor selection. It’s only barely dried. It smells how your hand smells after holding loose change for a while. The guards’ eyes are still open, and there’s nothing for them to look at in this elevator but me. I hurry to wipe my sleeve on the elevator wall, keeping my stare glued to the front of the elevator so I don’t have to make eye contact with the dead.
The cheery ping of the elevator is exactly as incongruous as the calming water feature upstairs.
I step out into carnage. At first I think it’s left over from yesterday, but no. This is all fresh. Guards, sentry bots. A drone lying in clean halves, each piece landed in a different puddle of organic mess. There’s so little clear space on the floor that I have to tiptoe. They must have been waiting to ambush him out of the elevator.
Although. I think back on the checkpoint, the security guards in the lobby. Nobody got a chance to raise an alarm.
They were already down here. There’s something on this floor they were protecting.
I wish I was more confident I knew how this fucking gun worked.
I follow the hall around past C301, C302, C303. It branches after that, but it’s easy enough to follow the sounds. Gunshots, screams. It’s like yesterday all over again. Like I’ve rewound twenty-four hours. Or like I never left. To my compromised higher functions, the dream logic is bizarrely compelling.
I switch off what I hope to hell is the safety and make my way down the hall, gun first, hugging the wall, willing myself to be invisible. No Jessa to have my back here. I’m glad. I don’t want her within five miles of this.
I reach room C312 as a body flies out through the open door. It connects with the far wall with a kind of wet crunching smack and slides to a heap on the floor. On top of another guard who landed there first.
Before I can stop myself, I throw myself into the room, slam the door, mash the locks, then move to the side of the doorframe in case somebody out there tries shooting through.
Stupid. I should have announced my presence first. Done something to alert 22 that it’s just me and not another guard coming after him. If his reaction times are faster than his decision-making processes, I’m done.
But it turns out I had no need to worry. He just glances at me and turns back to whatever hasn’t yet been dealt with in room C312. His expression changing only slightly when he realizes who he’s looking at. Like he suspected I might follow. Like he’s at least a little surprised I actually did.
“Go home,” he says, his back to me. His uniform and boots are exactly as encrusted with dried blood and grave dirt as yesterday, except there’s more fresh blood on top of it, and it’s impossible to tell whether he’s been injured somewhere under all that. “Get out of here. It isn’t safe.”
He doesn’t bother looking to see whether I listen to this advice, which is fine by me because I have zero intention of doing so. His focus is elsewhere.
Beyond him is a desk with a woman behind it. The placard on the desk reads DIRECTOR D. REYES.
He’s caught her in the midst of packing up her shit to get out of here, presumably before 22 came back to deal with her. She almost made it too. She must be really kicking herself right now for doing whatever she did to make her operatives move so fast.
There’s an open box on her desk full of papers and devices and, weirdly, a paperweight snow globe of old San Francisco, where I’m not sure it ever snowed even before it was underwater.
Even now she’s standing there with an armload of stuff, frozen in place, like if she stays very still, he might not notice her there. Like she’s wearing a ten-second invisibility cloak and trying to figure out how to maneuver out of this situation before it expires.
A manila folder drops from her armload and falls to the floor, scattering papers. Reflexively she reaches for it, which sends a weird-looking pocket screen tumbling after.
22 shakes his head slightly at her, and she freezes again.
I expect her to be pleading for her life. I expect him to be explaining to her, patiently, levelly, almost lovingly, like a villain in a movie, why she deserves to die. But they’re just looking at each other. Neither one moves. Whatever they had to say to each other, I think, was said some time ago. Or never needed saying in the first place.
22 holsters his gun and draws the sword instead. Begins to circle slowly around to the Director’s side of the desk. He’s moving a little unsteadily, he’s got the half-lidded eyes of a person with a killer headache, but he’s locked on and he keeps on coming. Whatever they’re doing to him over that implant, he’s run out of fucks to give today.
“Wait,” I say.
22 ignores this. Advances another step. Slowly. It’s not just the pain. He’s toying with her. Is this how I was able to catch up with him? Or did he save this tactic for this room?
“Wait. Don’t kill her. Don’t kill her.”
It’s like he can’t even hear me. Like all his senses have narrowed to a point, and that point is making Director of Operations Diana Reyes pay for crimes I can’t even begin to guess at.
There’s a second, maybe two, during which all manner of stuff goes flashing through my head. B and her picture of Elena. Suit guy and his picture of B’s dead sister. That dipshit on the bus with his should’ve comp
lied. Old town dying slowly of thirst because I couldn’t finish what I started. 06 murdered in cold blood because she tried to save some hypothetical next wave of stolen children from everything she’d spent twelve years enduring. 22 in the elevator, saying There were forty-eight.
Suit guy’s voice in my head. SecOps operatives 06 and 22 smuggling you into Stellaxis headquarters, your amateurish exposé, the riot in old town, and now this? These things are obviously connected. We need your help to figure out how.
Well, they weren’t connected before, not in the way he was thinking. But maybe they should be.
I launch myself over the desk and skid to a stop in a drift of paperwork, putting myself between Director Reyes and 22’s sword.
“Move,” 22 tells me.
I shake my head. My heart is pounding so hard my vision is going dark around the edges. I am all too aware that if he wanted me moved, he could move me. Easily. In pieces if he so chose. I don’t know what I would do in his position. What I would have done already. I remember how young Elena looked in B’s photo and think: If the woman behind this desk did to me and my people even a fraction of what she must have done to 22 and his, I’d have probably put a bullet in her head before I fully walked into the room. It’s a measure of 22’s exquisite control that he hasn’t.
He pauses now to take me in: blood-smeared hoodie, deranged dawning-idea face, giant gun. “You of all people would try to stop me.”
“What? No. I—”
22 moves, and before I know what’s happened, he’s reached past me and retrieved a pistol from Director Reyes’s hand. I don’t know if she was planning to fire it into my back or around the meat shield of me at 22, but that ship has definitively sailed. 22 looks like he’s about to feed her that gun. I insert myself in his way as best I can.
“Hold up a fucking second and listen to me. You want to finish what Kit started? Really finish it? Or just get revenge?”
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