by K. C. Finn
The alarm sounds. It happens faster than I’d thought, the deafening crack of the doors overhead making me judder on the step. My shaking hand loses its grip for a moment, but then there’s a shove to my elbow. Livitka catches me, pushing my hand until it gains purchase, and then we’re up and off. I shut my eyes on those last few vertical steps, waiting for the safety of the windowless workspace that lies above. When I feel the pang of artificial light, I open my eyes and climb up into the space. I lend a hand with my good arm, pulling a few more soldiers up until our small squad of six is in place. We close our emergency door against its magnets, securing it with manual bolts.
The space is full of robots. We have emerged in a place where the monorail track is directly overhead, and from all angles there are mechanical arms with devices like spray nozzles, pistons, pumps and suction cups. This is full automation, a place where trains come to be fixed by precision machines, and there’s no sign that human beings would ever enter the place except for a flashing emergency path. The path leads from where we’re standing up onto a raised balcony, via another ladder. My stomach does a little flip. Upwards again.
“This doesn’t look likely for the staff to escape, but two of you need to stay on this door and await further instruction.”
“I will,” Dad says, his gun in ready to fire position.
“I will,” another rebel joins him. A youngish chap with piercings all over his face.
I ought to know his name. I’ll bet Malcolm knows every man, woman and child in his crew. The other four of us head off, up the ladder and onto a balcony where people might be able to survey the works taking place. That’s when I spot the security camera embedded into the ceiling. It turns on us at once, and Livitka holds out a hand across my belly.
“Freeze.”
The camera stops moving, but it’s squarely trained on us now. Livitka moves for her radio, whispering into the receiver.
“Apryl, can you tell me if these cameras are locally linked to the building, or linked out to the System’s whole network?”
“Shit,” comes the reply.
There’s a pause. The cameras clearly detect movement. I reach back into my pack and find one of the grapples I haven’t had occasion to use. I throw it in a wide arc, and the camera follows its path like a dog waiting to play fetch. Livitka gives me a nod, and then the radio blares into life again.
“We’re good,” Apryl says. “The cameras are totally local. There’s no incoming feed from the System at all, actually. The network here is wired and self contained.”
I wave a hand, and our crew presses on to find our way out of this maintenance shed.
“Prudell’s probably afraid that if someone got in here, they could hack into her network from the borders.” Livitka huffs the words out, jogging at my side. “Makes good sense.”
“Use your code,” I breathe back. “You never know what other kinds of robots might be working here.”
“Copy that, boss.”
Whenever I get inside a System facility, I can’t help but expect some homicidal Reborn to shoot around a corridor and try to kill me. But even as our crew finds a map of the works and starts to jog towards the staff quarters, we get another call on the radio. My teeth are on edge at the sounds of a struggle, but it doesn’t take long to realise it’s not my crew that are struggling.
“We have all the current staff contained,” Andrew says, his voice laden with strain. “Keep your head down, you bastard!”
There’s a groan and some kind of shout in reply, then a loud thud. The radio clicks off. A moment later, the shrill background blast of the alarm is gone, and I had no idea how much it was hurting my ears until it died. The radio blares again, this time Apryl’s voice is much more like her usual bubbly drawl.
“All right y’all. Prep the doors for B and C company coming in. Squad leaders to the offices. Let’s make it look like this never happened.”
For once, I’m not at the centre of things, and for once the operation is a total success.
Nineteen
“We’re getting de hang of dis now.” Goddie speaks with a mouthful of Legion-issued protein bar. “How do you think de staff here get food?”
“It must be delivered when the trains come in for maintenance,” Stirling replies. “There’s not much here. And three people’s rations are not going to feed nearly two hundred of us.”
“Two hundred?” I ask.
The Highlander nods. “C company has been training the kids who didn’t want to stay in the Underground. So our numbers are up again, if a little unsteady and under-prepared.”
“Thank God for that,” Apryl muses. “’Cause it’s gonna take some serious power to overtake a trainload of people and get ourselves to the Heart.”
It’s just us, the core four, holed up in a technical office at the very top of the building. There’s a mezzanine balcony outside that looks down on the rest of the works, very much like the highest point of the Atrium where our Underground security personnel used to work. I’ve put myself as far from the door to the balcony as possible, curled up in a corner with my sleeping bag and my pack for a pillow. I can’t sleep yet, my skin is still humming with the feel of being somewhere new again. The interior walls here remind me too much of those laboratories where the Reborn are built. More machines powering Prudell’s rule.
Stirling and Goddie have taken opposite positions in the room, neither one of them daring to come near me in the presence of the other. They’re civil, though, and actually having a practical conversation instead of some dumb contest for my attention. When Goddie finishes his food, he tips me a grin and a wink. Stirling sits cross-legged on the floor, his blades making a metallic scrape now and then when he fidgets. He doesn’t look at me. At all. He just rubs his neck.
Apryl is at the computer, to no-one’s surprise at all. She’s been tapping away ever since we got into the room and made it into some kind of bunkhouse. I’m told that the basic accommodation here only holds ten people, so I reckon our three companies are doing a lot of improvising of their own down on the factory floor too. I watch my dear friend work, her rounded shoulders hunched hard over the machines.
“You can take a break, you know.”
She just shakes her head at me.
“Really. Surely we’re safe here until a train comes in for maintenance? We’ve got time to prepare.”
Apryl turns in her seat, a brow cocked. “Would you like to know when the next scheduled maintenance is? Because I just found it, and it’s not good news.”
She turns her monitor to face me. Stirling gets up with a slicing sound, coming to see the screen too.
“What does it say?” Goddie asks, his head resting against the wall.
“Monday,” I read. “Shit. That’s the day after tomorrow.”
Apryl nods. “We have about forty hours to figure out how to hoodwink the driver of that train. Either that or we have to move before they get here and sound the alarm. There’s also this.”
She taps the screen, swiping the schedule aside to reveal a message labelled ALERT. I read it aloud so that Goddie can hear, whilst Stirling stands beside me shaking his head.
“Warning to all external staff operating outside main perimeter. We have received intelligence that the strike over our Young Person’s Rehabilitation Military Facility may not have neutralised the Northern Threat. Be on the lookout for suspicious groups moving southwards.”
“It only came in this evening,” Apryl says, pointing at the timestamp. “So we’re damned lucky these guys weren’t prepared yet.”
Lucky. I don’t like the word. It makes my skin jitter even more than the sight of these walls, or the feel of being on the System’s doorstep. Being ‘lucky’ implies that we should all be dead by now, and even if that’s true I don’t want to face it. I retreat to my corner and bed down, closing my eyes even though I know there’s no way I can sleep yet. Apryl keeps tapping, and I watch with a slanted eye as Stirling joins her at the computer desk. They talk in
hushed tones, or at least they sound hushed to me.
Soon the sound of Goddie’s snoring overtakes their whispers, and the more I listen to his rhythmic breaths, the more I realise I’m not so opposed to sleep after all. The world slows, turning dark, and soon there’s no sound at all in my head.
But then someone has their hands around my middle. I’m thrown onto a shoulder and I try to shout, but my groggy words are blocked by a hand on my mouth.
“Shush, it’s me,” Stirling says.
He’s carrying me out of the office and down a flight of stairs to the main level. For a moment I bounce along, my sleepy brain convinced that this is some kind of dream, but the more the clang of the metal stairs rings into my head, the more awake I become. Soon I’m slapping Stirling on the back, watching his blade legs bounce us down into the main corridor. He turns to and fro as I pound hard on his shoulder.
“What the hell are you doing to me?”
“We had to be quick,” he says, panting. “We have to be alone.”
He ducks down another corridor, and I see the makeshift camp as I go by. Stirling is avoiding many of the main routes, where former Legion kids are sleeping in the corridors and there’s an overflow of people in every storage room. He brings us down low in the building, back to where the robots live, and soon I find that we are in some kind of fuelling place. There’s traditional fuel as well as huge electric charging points here, and the white tracks of the monorail are soon overhead. Another chamber. Two of three.
“Put me down, dammit. I can walk.”
He does so now, at last, then starts looking around in the big, dark space. There are fluorescent lights somewhere very high above us, casting a dim white glow over my floundering Highlander. I sit where he’s left me, nursing my groggy, aching head. The first sleep I’ve had in ages, and this is how he chooses to wake me from it. I watch as Stirling picks up a chunk of metal, maybe a small offshoot from a broken train or one of these machines. Stirling drops to the ground on his knees, leaving a wide space in front of us. He looks at me, but his eyes seem far away somehow.
“It wants to speak to you,” he says. “I didn’t know how else to do it.”
Before I can ask what he’s talking about, Stirling’s head drops and he starts to scrape into the floor tiles with the metal. The sharp offcut makes a decent dent in the thin metal floor covers, letters slowly forming words. I crawl forwards to watch them form, reading upside down as Stirling grunts with the force of the carving.
You said you needed help to get into Tania.
And now I know exactly who I’m talking to. Stirling might not be able to speak for the One at the Heart of the System, but his body knows how to convey the message. He wrote a message once on Dr Lau’s temple walls, words he knew were just for me to see. And now here we are, alone in the dark, with someone else’s voice in his head.
“You saved me in that fight. Your left hand. Thank you,” I reply.
The One controlling Stirling scrapes a heart into the floor. It’s so strange, so raw and utterly emotional, this little rough heart scraped into the space before Stirling and I.
“Who are you?”
I have to ask. I have to know who it is that wants to reach me.
I am the System now, and I’m here for you. When you need me, use your name. Your real name. I’ll hear it, and they won’t. I’ll help, whenever I can. Anything that’s networked, I can get into.
Stirling gives a cry, the muscles in his bare arm straining to get all the words out. He has to crawl back to make space and I follow him, a soothing hand on his tight shoulder. I rush through the thoughts that were spiralling before I fell asleep. Apryl’s words and warnings make better sense now that I’m rested.
“Can you control the monorail trains?” I ask.
Not the drivers. But the software.
“Make them break,” I say, close to Stirling’s ear. “Make two trains malfunction so that they come in for maintenance on Monday, alongside the one that’s already scheduled.”
We know that the shed can house three trains in hiding, and that would give us plenty of space to all escape if we needed to.
Clever girl. My bright little-
Stirling cries out, and blood spatters onto the unfinished sentence. He falls forwards onto the last message, cradling his hand, and I lean over him to turn him onto his side. The skin of his palm has split from holding the metal shard so tightly. I push him until he clenches it tight, then we raise the arm over his head.
“I wish he hadn’t pushed me like that,” Stirling grouses. “It was like this mad urgency in my head. I couldn’t think straight. Everything was a simple command, and I had to do it the quickest way, even if it was the least practical. ‘Get Raja.’ ‘Go somewhere private.’ ‘Write the message’. Jesus…”
Stirling hisses, his eyes damp, and I wipe them for him as he keeps his hand high.
“Come on, let’s get a few stitches across that.”
I help him up, a little clumsy because of the bend in his new lower legs, and we walk with me supporting his raised hand. The blood runs down his wrist and forearm like a head impaled on a spike, but the flow is slowing with the lack of circulation. Stirling’s teeth are set, and once every few steps he hisses out the pain.
“I think Mum has some of that glue that sets gashes back together.”
I nod at him, letting him lead the way back along the corridor to a more populated area. It’s strange the way the System’s Heart controlled him, compelling his mind so powerfully. Even though Stirling doesn’t have outward augmentations on his head like Delilah did, there must be something wired deep into his brain for that to happen. His body is shaking a little as we walk, and I can’t help but study the side of his face for clues. How patched in are they to my brave Highland rebel? Will it be his brain that kills him when that fateful date rolls around?
When we’re back at the edge of the walkway full of sleeping children, Stirling takes his injured hand out of my grip. He holds my hand with his good one, bringing it to his lips and planting a little kiss on the ends of my fingertips. It bloodies his lip, but he doesn’t seem to care.
“I ought to find Mum on my own,” he says. “She’s not going to like it if she thinks you caused me another injury.”
I rile at once, my chest puffing, but Stirling cups my cheek and gives me a look.
“I don’t think you’re bad for me, okay? But in the absence of Malcolm, my Mum needs someone to blame as a bad influence. She can’t possibly believe her perfect baby boy might be a reckless nutter of his own accord.”
We could be anywhere, having this moment. That glint in his eye and my small laugh. The shake of our heads. The way his fingertips linger on my chin, as though he could just invite me towards him with the slightest pull. Breaking contact is painful, but Stirling manages to do it with a smile. I don’t fight it, but I do stall him just a moment.
“You said ‘he’, when you were talking about receiving the commands in your head.”
Stirling nods, pursing his bloodied lips. “Yeah. It felt like a he. I don’t know. I didn’t hear anything exactly, but that’s the feeling I got.”
I let him go, away down the corridor to get himself patched up. More pain for my sake. I suppose I can understand Sheila’s attitude, even if I don’t like it directed at me. By the time I find my way back up to the office where we’d housed ourselves, the others are awake. A blinking display on one of Apryl’s computers says it’s six a.m., and Goddie is stretching against the wall as he limbers up for the day ahead. It’s unclear whether Apryl has slept or not, since she’s tapping away in exactly the same position as before. But now, she has two new figures flanking her on either side.
One is Kip, with his backpack full of computer kit. But the other is Nema, and she too is plugged in and typing away.
“Oh good, you’re back,” Apryl says without looking up.
“Is dat blood? What happened?”
Goddie races to me, but I show him that the bl
ood isn’t mine. He’s trying to ask questions but I bat him off, allowing him to wipe my hand clean but shushing every time he speaks.
“What are you working on?”
I come to stand behind Nema’s chair, and the girl tenses visibly in her neck and shoulders. She keeps working though, her monitor a mass of numbers and codes that she’s scrolling through, entering commands here and there.
“Connecting to the rebel frequency,” Apryl replies. “Nema reckons she’s found the link, but I didn’t want to connect until you were here. I wouldn’t know what the hell to say to them.”
There has been no meeting and no plan since we arrived at our new makeshift base. The rest of the team leaders are probably only just getting up, awaiting my word for a conference, some scrap of intel on the plan ahead. But Apryl is handing me a headset now, whilst the connection is live and waiting. Another link to another voice from someone I’ve never met. I take it, putting it on, a million thoughts swirling in my sleep deprived head. That unstoppable anger and panic threatens me, looming on the edge of every nerve.
But no. I won’t crumble now.
I take a breath, and the face in my head is one I’ve tried not to see for a while. In my mind his body isn’t crushed by Briggs’s, his lips are not stained with his own blood. I see him as I did on those nights after Valkyrie fell, when he was honest and quiet and we shared our grief. Malcolm Stryker, calm and silent, giving me that nod that means I’m doing well.
“Hello, hello, hello.” A voice picks up, female but low. “Codeword please.”
“I don’t have your code,” I reply. “But Sheila Douglas sends her regards.”
There’s a beep, but the faint hum of the line doesn’t die.
“What’s your purpose in calling?” The lady on the line asks.