Deprecated

by Michael Karr

  Then he kicked Preston in the face. A crack sounded as his boot met Preston’s nose. Preston let out a cry of pain. Stepping to his side, William laid a few swift kicks into Preston’s ribs. He heard none of them crack. He contemplated kicking harder, but stopped. Someone undoubtedly had heard the gunshot. It was time to leave.

  Turning, he made to run. Just as he did, Preston’s leg shot up and tripped him. William tumbled forward, but rolled out of the fall and was instantly back on his feet. He turned back to find Preston picking himself off the street, apparently intent on fighting back.

  Impressive.

  “You devils think you can get away with whatever you want!” he growled, staggering forward. “You killed my brother.”

  Blood poured down Preston’s face. But he kept coming toward William.

  Should have kicked harder.

  Preston looked in no condition to run. So, William turned and sprinted away.

  “Come back!” came Preston’s cries from behind him. “Come and fight me!”

  William could hear him try and pursue, but in his current state he likely couldn’t muster more than a pathetic jog. Rounding a bend, William disappeared down an alleyway. He ran as fast and as hard as his legs would go. One downside to the PNUs is that they couldn’t boost his muscle power. They could, however, force the muscles to work at their maximum ability for a long time—essentially until his body collapsed, or his PNU drained of power.

  And so he ran.

  * * *

  Rylee dabbed Preston’s bloodied and bruised face with a damp rag. The skin around his right eye wrinkled up in pain. The other was too swollen to show any expression. Blood had finally stopped streaming out of his nostrils. Serghei had set the broken nose a half-hour before.

  It pained her to watch. Still, as painful as it was to see Preston like this, it wasn’t anything compared to what she had felt when she had heard him screaming at that Elect. The one who got away. The one who would have been dead if it weren’t for her own weakness. Never had she witnessed Preston lose control of his emotions like that. Not even the night they had killed his brother. There was such a raw anger. It frightened her.

  The crew was back in Serghei’s hideout. On the couch sat Feng, his leg propped up on one of the worn armrests. A broken tibia. Not a compound fracture. But broken nonetheless. Serghei had set that bone, as well.

  “This is all my fault,” she said softly to Preston as she tried to clean his face. He looked terrible. His strong, confident face. Broken. Broken by an Elect she should have shot.

  “I’m the leader of this crew,” Preston said. “The decision to let him go was mine. There is none to blame but me.”

  Rylee shook her head. “And if I hadn’t said anything…you’d have shot him. And if I hadn’t talked us in to go looking for information at Duncan’s Warehouse—”

  “Oh, I’m totally blaming this on you, Ry,” Feng groaned from the couch.

  “Are you forgetting about me?” Serghei said from across the room. He was tending to Grant, who was still on edge after the night’s events. “I’d be dead right now if Ry hadn’t come to my aide. Grant too.”

  “Small loss,” Feng muttered.

  “Small loss, is it?” Serghei cried. “That’s gratitude for you. Next time, you can set your own broken bones.”

  Feng grimaced as he shifted his position on the couch. “Like it matters. It won’t heal fast enough. They’ll Deprecate me long before I can walk again.”

  The group fell silent. They all knew it was true. With a broken leg, Feng couldn’t do his job. If his supervisor was particularly lenient, Feng might get away with one week of Infirmary leave. But that would require him to report his injuries to the Infirmary. Only the extremely desperate did that. Checking yourself into the Infirmary was the surest way to get yourself Deprecated.

  “We won’t let that happen to you,” Preston said, after a moment. “We’ll figure something out.” It was just the sort of thing Preston would say. His words, though, lacked any of their usual conviction.

  “Like what?” Feng said, his voice bitter.

  “We could amputate your leg,” Serghei offered, his voice excited. “I have always wanted to try cybernetics on a human subject.”

  “Just shut up!” Feng cried. “All of you…just shut up! You’re not helping one bit.”

  Rylee looked away from him. It was easier to look at Preston’s battered and bloodied face, than to see the anger and bitterness in Feng’s. What would happen to his mother if he were Deprecated? Feng was all his mother had left.

  It was true that Rylee didn’t feel the same bond with Feng as she did with Preston or even Serghei. He was not the sort of person that made it easy to feel close to. His caustic, flippant attitude was deceptive, though. He cared about people. And he was tenacious when they were hunting Elects, even though he would pretend to complain.

  Though she felt tears fighting to fill her eyes, she staved them off. Tears wouldn’t help Feng. They wouldn’t help her own grandfather. They wouldn’t bring back Boney. They wouldn’t heal Preston’s face. She didn’t deserve to cry. All she could do was try to fix what she had broken.

  Oh, Desolation! Can things possibly get worse?

  That night, Feng slept on Serghei’s couch. Preston offered to go speak with his mother so that she knew where he was. But Feng adamantly opposed that idea.

  “If I don’t show up myself, she’ll be all kinds of suspicious,” Feng had said. “This won’t be the first time I haven’t come home at night.”

  Not knowing what else to do, Rylee went home and attempted to sleep, but found that she couldn’t. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw that Elect. And every time, the same desire surged inside her: to shoot him in the head.

  Finally, she threw off her patchwork blanket and rose from her cot. She quietly slipped on her boots and stood. Her muscles protested—still sore from her crash on the electrocycle. Ignoring the pain, she took her pistol out from under her pillow and holstered it. Then she grabbed her rifle, shouldered it, and climbed out of her bedroom window.

  * * *

  Rylee stalked the streets of the slums all night without a trace of that Elect. Many times she wished to use her earpiece to call Serghei. Maybe he’d caught something on his cameras. She resisted, refusing to involve the crew. This was her mess. No one else was going to tidy it up for her.

  Deep down, she knew killing this Elect wouldn’t fix anything. At that moment, she wasn’t listening to that part of her brain—the rational part. She needed vengeance. For Preston’s sake. For Feng’s. For her grandfather and Boney.

  As she walked, she constantly blew air into her cupped hands to keep them from freezing off. Lingering bouts of coughs still afflicted her. Why hadn’t she remembered to grab her gloves? Not only did it expose her fingers to the elements, but made it easier for her to scratch the tattoo on the back of her hand. The skin had become red and raw.

  Abandoned building after abandoned building, alleyway after alleyway, street after street, she hunted. Her fingers frozen stiff, her throat raw and sore from coughing, her thoughts muddled with drowsiness. Not a trace of the Elect.

  Eventually, she became aware of the waning darkness. Morning approached, and she had failed. Almost too exhausted to care, she turned her numb feet toward home. Keeping to the alleyways, with her head bent low, and her hood pulled forward, she trudged back to her housing unit. Except for a cat with a mangled tail that hadn’t been caught and eaten yet, and a few mice, she met with no signs of life.

  After what felt like hours, she reached her building. Fingers numb with cold, she gripped the icy handrails of the fire escape, and climbed two stories up to her room. Pulling up the window sash, she climbed inside and collapsed onto her cot, her eyes snapping shut like steel traps.

  Almost as quickly as they closed, her eyes snapped back open. Voices? Someone was talking. Muffled though they were, she could distinguish her grandfather’s voice, and one which was undoubtedly not. She slipp
ed out of bed, unholstered her pistol, and crept to the door. Gently, she turned the doorknob and pushed the door ajar.

  Through the crack in the door she saw a man sitting at the table in the kitchen. About her own age. With stubbled chin and…arrogant face. The Elect!

  Bursting through the door, Rylee aimed her pistol directly at the Elect’s head and fired.

  SIXTEEN

  The Elect’s head jerked forward. But there was no spray of blood. Rylee moved to take aim again, but the Elect had already slipped under the table.

  Desolation! How do they move so fast?

  She’d missed the easy shot. Perhaps she shouldn’t have made such a hasty entrance. The Elect had plenty of time to react.

  Moving into the kitchen, she prepared to take another shot at the cowering Elect.

  “Rylee!” her grandfather shouted. “What in the blazes are you trying to do!”

  “Kill vermin!”

  The Elect toppled the table onto its side, creating a barrier between himself and Rylee. Plates and forks and cups crashed onto the floor, spilling their breakfast with it.

  That pathetic particleboard tabletop wouldn’t stop her bullets.

  “Rylee, stop it!” Her grandfather seized her arm and forced the muzzle of her gun down. “Have you gone mad? Tell me what is going on.”

  Despite his age. Despite that he was soon to be Deprecated by the Alliance because he was no longer any value to them, her grandfather easily overpowered her. Still, she struggled against him.

  “Rylee!” her grandfather said firmly. “This is not what I taught you. I armed you with a gun so you could defend yourself, not kill innocent people.”

  “He’s not innocent.” Rylee’s chest heaved forcibly as she pressed her lips together.

  “You know this fellow? Has he done something to you?”

  “I’ve never seen either of you before in my life,” came the voice of the Elect, still cowering behind the table.

  “He’s an Elect,” Rylee said, her eyes fixed with anger at the table, as if she could burn a hole through it with her gaze. “What else do I need to know?”

  Her grandfather shook his head. “I know you’re upset about the new mandate from the Alliance. But this isn’t going to fix anything. You’ll have the Regulators crashing down our door any minute.”

  Then he slowly moved in front of her, until he stood between her and the Elect. His gray eyes, lined with thick veins, bored into her own. Though she tried to look away, she found his gaze held her own, gripping her eyes like he now gripped her arm.

  “I want you to hand me your gun,” he said.

  Like ice melting under the sun’s heat, Rylee felt her anger melt away under his gaze. Slowly, she moved her finger away from the trigger, then placed her pistol into the firm grip of her grandfather’s hand.

  He patted her on the shoulder.

  “Good,” he said softly. Then he removed her pistol’s magazine, and locked back the slide. A single brass cartridge glinted in the dim kitchen light as it ejected from the chamber. Plinking to the floor, it rolled until it bumped against the wall. He walked over and picked it up.

  “Now,” he said, inspecting the cartridge before loading it into Rylee’s magazine, “I believe it’s safe for you to come out, Grayson.”

  Grayson? So, now her grandfather and this Elect—who she should have just killed—knew each other? What in Desolation’s Thunder was going on? Had this Elect done something to take control of her grandfather?

  “Safety is a relative term,” the Elect—Grayson—said from behind the table. “You have a lovely floor. I’m quite content here.”

  Her grandfather chuckled. “Smart man. Knows better than to show his face to an angry woman. Come on out. We’ve got to get this mess cleaned up.”

  Cautiously, Grayson lifted his head over the top of his barricade. Rylee glared at him, and instantly felt her anger surge again. His eyes looked her up and down. His gaze hovered lower mostly, apparently checking to ensure she was indeed disarmed. Once satisfied, he rose gracefully to his feet. To see him move sickened her. Everything about him—his appearance, his movements, his way of speaking—reeked of an Elect.

  “I found Grayson, here,” her grandfather said, clapping him on the back as though they were old friends, “huddled in an alleyway just next to us when I went for a walk this morning. Said he’d nowhere to stay.”

  Her grandfather bent over to pick up the scattered dishes on the floor, and scooping up lumps of the spilled pinto beans. Grayson stood the table up, and walked around to help. Rylee watched him.

  Seeing the spilled food reminded her of the rations she had lost. How long before her grandfather noticed?

  “I invited Grayson to stay with us,” her grandfather said. “Just until he can find something more permanent.”

  “Something more permanent?” Rylee said, staring at her grandfather is disbelief. “He’s an Elect. He probably has his own building. Why does he need to stay with us?”

  “I do have a place,” Grayson said, setting a plate back on the table. “I just can’t go there right now. It’s…complicated.”

  He looked at her with a face that asked for sympathy. Instead of feeling sorry for him, she just felt like punching him.

  “Don’t you have other lowlife Elect friends? Why don’t you burden them instead of us? Or do the other Elects not like you either?”

  “That’s quite enough, Rylee,” her grandfather scolded. “I’ve offered to let Grayson stay with us until he figures things out. He’s our guest. I expect you to treat him with some amount of civility. Or, at least, without hostility. Understood?”

  He looked at her sternly. Ordinarily, she would have cowed beneath that gaze. Not this time.

  “We don’t have enough food to feed another mouth,” she said between clenched teeth.

  Especially, now that I’ve gambled away a whole week’s worth of rations. She wasn’t about to point out that fact now, though.

  “We’ll get by.” The fallback response for everything her grandfather didn’t know how to deal with.

  “Right,” she said, pursing her lips and glaring at the Elect. “I need to get to work. Can I have my gun back now?”

  “You can have it back once you’ve proven I can trust you not to harm Grayson.”

  Little chance of that happening.

  Giving Grayson one last glare—which he actually met with an arrogant smile—she turned and stormed out of the apartment, making sure to slam the door as hard as she could.

  * * *

  William felt glad to see the girl leave. She was psychotic. He looked over at the cabinets along the wall. A ragged hole gaped in the bottom corner of one of the cabinet faces. He was lucky he’d been able to react so quickly. As depleted as his power reserve was, he felt surprised his PNU’s AVSP system had kicked in so rapidly. He didn’t want to contemplate what would have happened if it hadn’t.

  Within a few minutes, the girl’s grandfather—Kenny, he’d called himself—reemerged from a side room. “Well, Grayson,” he said, rubbing his gray beard. “I’m off to work. The pot’s in there, when you got to do your business. Don’t help yourself to any food. We’ll eat supper after sundown. If I were you, I’d stay off the streets and out of sight.” Then he turned and walked out the door, leaving William alone.

  Grayson. Why had he used that name? Couldn’t he have come up with a better alias than his actual middle name? He shook his head at his own stupidity. Even the name Bill was less identifying than Grayson. No one ever called him Bill. Physical exhaustion. PNU-overworked brain. Starvation. They were to blame for his lack of coherent thought.

  It was that same lack of coherence that made him think staying here was a smart idea. Now he wondered if he shouldn’t find a safer place to stay. But where? He’d wandered around the slums the whole night without finding anything better than a bunch of derelict warehouses. Here, at least, there was food—of a sort.

  But that girl—Rylee—she had attacked him so rea
dily. It was like deja vu from last night. Could she be the same girl? He wasn’t about to waste precious power reserves to perform a voice match.

  The real question for him was, what to do next. If he stayed here, he might avoid starvation. But at the risk of dealing with psycho-girl. Perhaps he should beg asylum from Adrianna. He sighed. As tempting as that sounded at that moment, he knew he couldn’t do that. Not until he figured out what was going on, and understood what kind of danger he was in. Besides, going to Adrianna’s was a predictable move.

  William…no, Grayson. He needed to think of himself as Grayson. Grayson. He was amazed at the cramped confines of the apartment. The rooms felt more like closets than places to live in. As he browsed around the apartment, he contemplated his conundrum. Since receiving Lander’s cryptic message on the energy drink, Grayson had heard nothing more from his friend. He considered sending Lander another secure message with his PNU, but dismissed the idea. A waste of power, and likely a waste of time. He’d just have to wait for…something.

  Where was Lander? This had better not be some twisted game he’s concocted. He only wished that were true. Deep down, he knew it wasn’t. But what should he do about it?

  His bodily and mental faculties were too far depleted for him to assess the problem logically. Noticing a cot on the floor of one of the rooms, he laid down and immediately fell asleep.

  * * *

  Rylee raced her Harley through the narrow streets as though she were in hot pursuit of an Elect. Weaving sharply in and out of downtrodden clumps of Norms trudging home from work and transport trucks, she earned the angry shouts of many calling for her to slow down.

  Not today, she thought, as the chilly November air streamed in through the cuffs of her jacket and up her back. She needed to get home. The thought of that Elect home alone with her grandfather sickened her. For the entire day, she’d been able to think of nothing but that Elect…in her apartment. What was he doing in the slums? He didn’t belong. And if she got home before her grandfather, she planned to make sure he understood that. If only her grandfather hadn’t confiscated her Glock…