by J D Cortese
As for the vegetation, it was out of control; it overgrew up and away in every corner and at every turn. Agdinar was tempted to use his suit's heat beam as a machete to cut some branches, but he thought better of it after considering the energy expenditure.
They started walking, unthinkingly enough to be doing it in the opposite direction from where Sarinda's father lived.
Sarinda soon noticed their mistake and grabbed Tysa by the shoulder, hard enough to make her sway to the side. “This isn't right,” she said. “We need to be moving north, to the new sector.” A whole new park, floating in the heights between shifted buildings, was now trying to take a brand-new and even higher High Line way up north on the city.
“That place would be crawling with tourists—and cops.”
Agdinar was surprised by Tysa's use of the old word for police. It was something he'd had trouble with the human languages: how fast they changed, their flexibility. But the fireworks between Sarinda and Tysa took him back to their reality.
“We need to go to my father's.”
“You haven't told me why.”
“I don't need to—we must see him and explain what happened. He will—”
“He's not going to do anything. He is just like the police, one more of them.”
“Dad works with the police, and they follow orders.”
“From whom?”
“Him, of course.”
“Oh, you're so innocent. The whole city is in the hands of the military. They control the police. Control everything.” Tysa had approached Sarinda until they were facing each other very close.
“That's not true,” said Sarinda. “We have been trying to retake Manhattan South.”
A mistake. Even Agdinar knew it, and he took a step back.
“We,” said Tysa, stretching the pronoun until it sounded like a cry of pain. “You just repeat the propaganda your dad's spewing on the video-walls. It's all nonsense; the Hawks are beating the cops, one street north every couple of months. At some point, the whole city will fall.”
He had to intervene. They had been in the open—being targets—for close to ten minutes.
“You, and you,” Agdinar said, putting himself as a breach between the bodies holding those two angry faces, but only touching Sarinda's elbow. “We need to take care of ourselves first, find safety, and do it soon. There's no point in arguing about...politics. The Major is her father; so, Tysa, let her respect him. And the city is, it has been a mess of infighting for decades. The best we can do is to stay away and find refuge somewhere. Is this all right?”
Tysa smiled with a few teeth more than what was needed. “When you put it this way...I didn't know you could make such pretty speeches. We should have him arguing for your father, right, Sarin?”
Sarinda smiled, but with a smile that was less complete than Tysa's.
Agdinar would take a truce as victory, and with a friendly gesture to Tysa he pointed north. They corrected their course without argument.
* * *
Knowing that the northern extensions to the High Line were some of the best-cared-for attractions of what was left of New York, the disrepair of its middle section was unforgivable.
They were walking above the boundary between Manhattan North and the broken lower half of the city. What surrounded them resembled a jungle made from mutated gardens, with vines running along the streets like scared snakes, and bushes so overgrown it was impossible to detect any edges between them.
Even more unbearable, they had to contend with the smell coming from the corpses of a million rats, dead far away from their natural habitats. Floods, mega-hurricanes, and superstorms had all added to the count; the poor things had thought escape could be found in the sky.
Agdinar knew that no escape for rats, or humans, would be found in the sky.
It was hard for him to understand how a city so beautiful could have rotted so much under the control of its own inhabitants. Something was amiss on how humanity acted, a blind spot which didn’t let them see how badly they were behaving toward each other.
He felt a hard edge to his breathing and constriction in his chest. He knew—or had known but was trying to forget—that it was too late, and this period of apparent stability was coming to an end. Soon, they would be hit by an earthquake long in the making.
And he also knew that they—the Watchers—were not necessarily better than the people down-world. Hiding in their air-cities, owning the future as if it was theirs alone, and empowering themselves to let humanity continue in this disastrous path.
He just didn't get it, the craziness of all.
For a moment, he forgot how he felt about it and saw the city for what it should have been for him, someone from five thousand years in the future.
A prehistoric cave.
He was really an archaeologist, and the fact that this was a reality he could touch didn't make it any less extinct.
It was a distant world that had never existed for him, which had come and gone.
He was sauntering through the Rome of this time, wondering why it had fallen. Not knowing, really, the why, and not having been told, exactly, the how.
The fact that he was falling in love with someone from that past was irrelevant for the city’s dark destiny.
Chapter 26
They were trying to hide in a very exposed place. And their situation among known enemies—the Hawks—and those who somehow had joined them—the police force and the Towers—had not improved.
The morning brought cleaning crews to the city's west side, the last quadrant claimed in the battles that had piled up rubble all over Manhattan. Only very powerful explosions could have reduced those old warehouses down to sandy-looking mountains of debris.
A robotic cleaners' swarm entered the next street north of them. They moved in a triangular formation, shining like green stars in the yellowish sunrise. Every day, they made rounds to pick up junk in their elastic bags, and then, like engorged insects, returned to trash-processing plants.
A little of the city cleaned up and recovered every day.
Many times, city workers would follow the robots to work in the internal pipelines of the city. And police guards could be coming with them, to protect the crew and catch fugitives of the law.
They were now part of those fugitives, even when being chased for fake crimes. How much of this was caused by Agdinar’s cardinal sin of leaving the Towers, he didn’t know.
He looked up. The sky cities were there, and he was sure they were waiting for the right moment to enact their own laws on him.
* * *
The police had arrived and started to come over the rails not more than a block away—and a short one at that—but the more troublesome event was the arrival of the legged white robots. The police called them "the rabbits" but they were closer to white wolves. They didn't have teeth and compensated for it with burst-laser lines that could maim, or even kill, anyone who resisted arrest. The police would take it easy and let them do damage ahead of them.
Six of the attack robots started moving in a tweezer formation toward them. Tysa had distanced herself and was in front of the group. Agdinar yelled to call her back; she seemed hypnotized by the machines.
The lead white robot initiated a run and two small groups of three started to move sideways, attempting to surround them from the flanks. As the point robot began to run, the similarity with a wolf was striking.
Agdinar wasn't going to care about spending his suit's remaining energy on their attackers. But, unfortunately for a fight, the charge on his suit was only halfway to full.
He joined the palms of his hands and pointed his fingers at the lead robot. A blast of blue light came off them.
The front legs of the robot vanished in a cloud of gray smoke, leaving the thing unstable and tumbling its way forward, like a rolling boulder rushing downhill.
Agdinar didn't have enough suit energy left to oppose the rest of the hunting robots one by one, and signaled Sarinda to start running
south on the trail. The path was clear there, and she could find places to hide. He ran in a sweep in front of the other robots, trying to draw their attention to him.
The police had barricaded themselves on a patch of inflatable bulletproof barriers; they wouldn't risk their lives when their dogs could easily do the job for them. The machines started repositioning to cover all exits, remaining within distance for a quick sprint. They were moving like panthers—not like rabbits at all—and the slow and deliberate motions left no doubt they were in control.
Tysa was trapped in a gap behind the robots, and they seemed to be ignoring her—busy with Agdinar, a better target and one who had demonstrated aggression toward their kind. He couldn't see Tysa’s face, as she was looking at the police, and beyond them, to a wall on the arched gallery between them and her. She scrambled to a dark spot underneath, where an open door swallowed her in an instant.
Her escape brought some relief to Agdinar, as he thought it simplified his problems. Simplified, not eliminated them.
He just had to save Sarinda for now. And maybe then find a way for all of them to escape.
He thought of Dhern, Vaxeer, and Bethlana. They would miss him.
Nobody else in the Towers would.
Agdinar walked left, two steps, and the white robots matched him—he was trapped. The lazy policemen of the morning shift knew it; two of them parsimoniously started to open a large container.
Agdinar's viewers told him what it was, and he didn't like it.
A pack of police drones. They could be over him—and worse, over Sarinda—in seconds. He couldn't tell their kind from his checkered position on the board, but some of these flying patrols had electric darts, designed to stop any unruly protesters. And, if the group of protesters became numerous and were still unruly, they could unleash clouds of non-lethal nerve agents to knock them out.
It was time to do something, even if it was extreme and reckless.
He vanished and started running toward Sarinda. A counter showed him how much he could keep invisibility going—sixty seconds at most—but it refused to show him any numbers on transiency.
Even with such discouraging information, he turned and smiled at the robots, which, like real dogs, had started to move around, trying to catch a scent of where he had gone.
Agdinar was starting to feel relieved, when he saw three larger-than-average drone fighters flying toward him, way too fast to escape them on foot.
Sarinda was still running, a block ahead on the path. One of his viewers was telling him she could reach a set of stairs near 16th Street.
The other viewers, which tracked the drones, told him that she'd never make it.
Agdinar was trapped between the white robots, which were trying to track his heat signature, and the drones, which moved in circles over Sarinda like vultures.
His invisibility counter was down to thirty seconds, and he couldn't reach her before the drones fell on her.
He turned back and saw four policemen, advancing with shoulder rifles, their attitude suggesting they had orders to kill rather than capture.
To add even more trouble, one of the white robots had somehow detected him and was approaching by the flank opposite to the group. A second later, three of them corrected their moves on sync with the first robot.
If Agdinar hit those dogs again with his power field, the invisibility would flicker long enough for him to be seen—and likely killed—by the policemen.
A vulture fell over Sarinda, suddenly changing direction on approach, but not before launching two electric darts straight to her chest.
One missed; the other didn't. She fell.
Chapter 27
Agdinar was inexplicably feeling both angry and calm. He took one step toward the lead dog and extended his hands. The robot reacted by recoiling a couple of steps; the other two machines approached, their heads scanning the world with evil-looking black eyes.
He pondered something that had always nagged him. He was getting energy from the sun and cosmic rays, but in the Towers, he just absorbed it from the environment. And, in City Hall, he had been taking it from running electricity. There had to be a way to do the same anywhere in the city. A wordless answer came back as blueprints of the dogs' power core. He ordered the suit to do it.
There was a brief explosion and a green flash. Some of the policemen turned around toward him; three dogs lay now on the floor, one of them truly looking like one, with all four legs sticking up.
The things had been completely drained of power, and his suit was at maximal charge.
He had learned something useful, how to become an energy vampire.
Sarinda was lying on the path, maybe half a mile away. He could see her with a magnification device on his viewer, feeling like his consciousness was extending farther than his eyes. She was still twitching from the electric discharge.
He started to run, maintaining invisibility while considering whether he could deploy an antigravity burst to make himself jump high, so he could reach Sarinda before the policemen did.
Agdinar considered that but never got to do it. A couple of drilling lasers had been pointed at him while he ran, and he felt them now burning his back.
He could have died, severed in half, if it weren’t for his fully charged suit. A radiant blast of light enveloped him as he was thrown against the rails, a laser line powerful enough to set a patch of bushes on fire.
Agdinar might have been briefly stunned, because he found himself lifting his body with two trembling arms. The panorama around him had changed substantially.
Two of the police officers were holding Sarinda’s body, which was hanging limp from their arms. They were dragging her close to the shaded arch of the next passage.
Predictably for a day that was going downhill, two other officers—a short man and a tall woman—now had their handguns pointed at him; they were close enough that his personal shield wouldn't protect him from a barrage of explosive bullets targeting his torso.
He slowly stood, enjoying the little respect he'd been offered by not being grabbed forcefully. He reviewed and discarded several options for escape—including using some martial arts from his training, which he'd been meaning to practice but hadn’t. None of that would work against their guns; he didn't even have the spirit to fight and just wanted to join Sarinda wherever they were taking her.
But he was, after all, a Watcher. And a Watcher was a master of one thing above all.
Disappearing.
He walked toward the two policemen, hands high. They pointed the guns to his head, and one of them smiled.
Agdinar did use his judo training, but not in the way his robo-trainer would have wanted. The proud way.
He threw himself forward to the floor—this, the two police officers got to see—and then he disappeared, while rolling on the floor and straight to them. As he slid, he engaged his suit’s transiency at the highest power he could.
Transiency got deep into the structure of spacetime, and when it radiated outward, it modified subatomic particles to make them vibrate in hyperspace’s extra dimensions. This shook atoms powerfully, causing a wave deep down in the core of matter. It was the price of truly vanishing, and the wake threw both officers around as if they'd been hit by a moving truck. And it did hurt, a lot.
The legs of the two police officers penetrated his body, first tickling his groin as they passed through, and then unleashing pressure and a painful stretching of his viscera. The rebound happened immediately after, when the generator accelerated the process to make the atoms reunite in the empty space ahead; it had a way to reverberate into solid structures proximal to the event. Solids could be shattered if they didn't give way. And the policeman was older, and had had a broken leg, which unfortunately had healed asymmetrically.
As Agdinar's chest passed through the man’s upper leg, the pressure of rebuilding was too much for the bones to bear. The policeman's femur broke like a smashed window.
Agdinar stood, feeling his ches
t explode in pain; he could barely breathe.
The two police officers were now sprawled on the floor, unconscious but alive. Twisting spacetime was not child's play. Those two—and their future doctors—would attest to that lesson.
He was free, but Sarinda was gone. Agdinar had a vague memory—as he tried to focus his eyes—of two other police officers with half-body total armor suits, looking like astronauts as they lowered Sarinda’s body to the street level in a restraining gurney. He couldn't remember the moment when the entourage disappeared over the platform's rail.
But he wanted to know. Losing the control Watchers had been known for, he kicked the policeman who was lying on his side, adding a higher note to his moaning from the broken leg.
“What do you want?” the man said.
Agdinar kicked him again, this time harder and directing the impact to his ribcage. “Where are they taking her?”
“I don't know. They don't tell us much.”
Agdinar swung back his leg for another kick, but he then realized there was something hidden in the man’s answer.
“They?” Agdinar said. “Are you talking about the city’s police force?”
“No, idiot. These days the orders come from far above my...from the big bosses.”
Agdinar wanted the truth, and he was certain enough and cold enough about getting it to kick the guy in the ribs again— “You better tell me what's going on,” he said, “or I'm going to break your ribs one by one.”
So much for the Watchers’ oath of protecting the integrity of the past and the lives of all humans.
The other officer, the younger policewoman, had started to move, surely trying to reach for her gun.
Agdinar joined his hands again, trying to be seen by the writhing policeman, and a wave of liquid blue light hit the policewoman as she grabbed the gun. It was as if Agdinar had kicked her with a gigantic foot. Her body lurched upward and gained height in the air, pushed by so much energy that it rolled away like a ball and disappeared between the bushes.