by Jim Heskett
Diego held up a hand to the closed door. He hesitated before striking it. Something wasn’t right. So much had happened in the last few days, he needed to present his best self on the other side of this door.
So, he retreated back down the hall and ducked into the stairwell. He skipped down a flight of stairs to the seventh floor, then he exited onto the carpeted walkway. His room was the first door on the right. A private room, which was not common. Being the leader of a team of guerreros did have its perks.
He strode into the attached bathroom and stared at his face in the mirror for a moment. There were hints of lines around the corners of his eyes. The other day, he’d found the first gray hairs in his mane. With black hair cascading down past his shoulders, they were easy to spot. His chronological age told him he was too young to have gray hair and wrinkles, but he’d done a lot of living for someone in his mid-twenties. He’d had many names and faces. He’d served a lot of masters. Too many.
He opened the medicine cabinet and removed a small case. Inside it, he found the tin of white powder, the mirror, and the straw. No time to carefully carve out lines this evening. The Reds were waiting for him. So, he dumped out a pile of powder onto the mirror and dipped the straw in it. He ripped back a snort with one nostril and then the other. The feeling began to overtake him as he put away the case and shut the mirror. His eyes dilated, and the scowl on his face turned into a smile. Shoulders relaxed. Breathing at an even pace. The action of pushing air in and out of his lungs pleased him. A worm of energy spread out, like the illuminated lines on a battle suit.
With a chuckle, he tied up his hair and checked his nose in the mirror to make sure there were no bits of telltale powder hiding in plain sight. When it was clean, he left the bathroom and then his dorm room and jogged along the stairs. He didn’t have to run, but that felt good, too.
Everything felt good. Throat numb. Lips tingling. He raced up the steps, back to the eighth floor. He eased down the hall to the sixth door on the left.
Diego strode inside the ready room to find a collection of Red guerreros. Eighteen young minds and hearts, ripe for education. To replace the one they had lost, Diego would meet with the Quartermaster later tonight. They would usually pick someone from the kitchen staff, but Diego thought maybe he’d lobby to get a field worker. Someone raw and unpredictable.
But, the team seemed on edge. Instead of being seated to observe the customary evening-post-battle notes session, many of them were pacing. Staring out of the window. In general, tense.
“Guerreros, please take a seat,” he said. “We need to get started.”
The loose crew didn’t snap to it as quickly as they should, but none of them refused his call. They settled into chairs, looking up at their leader with expectant eyes.
“What is it?” Diego said.
José, one of the youngest Reds, cleared his throat. “The Royal Army, sir.”
“Yes, I saw them arrive this morning.”
The kid drew back into himself, unwilling to speak.
“Please, José, say what’s on your mind. We don’t have any secrets in this room.”
“Why are the soldados here?”
“That’s not your concern,” Diego said. “Not anything to worry about.” But, when he could see this didn’t alleviate the fear on the kid’s face, Diego ran a hand through his hair and breathed. Diego knew he had to do better than ordering them not to worry about the Royal Army. Most of these young ones had never seen the king’s troops before. They’d never been outside these plantación walls. Probably, they had never even dreamed of going outside the walls.
A few options of what to say occurred to him, but he didn’t like any of them. These kids needed something visual. Plus, his mouth felt numb enough from the drugs that he was having some trouble getting words out this evening.
Diego walked to the whiteboard on the wall and uncapped a marker. He drew a large rectangle and made four smaller rectangles inside that one. In the upper left, he wrote forest. Upper right, warehouses. Lower right, block. Lower left, foxholes.
Heads all around the room were trained on his drawing. He tapped the marker on the board, now that he had their attention. “This is where we live. Not in a shabby dormitory. Not in the plantación that surrounds it. Not in the valley outside, or the mountains, and not even in this greater world. We live in the battlefield. We breathe it, we take it into our bodies, we expel it as mierda into the toilets.”
This last comment elicited giggles from some, especially the younger ones.
Diego drew a giant circle around the rectangle. “As long as you live here, in your heart and mind, then nothing else matters. Whatever the lord does or doesn’t do, whatever the Royal Army does or doesn’t do… it won’t matter.”
He swallowed, hoping they didn’t see the uncertainty living behind his eyes. Of course, calling in the soldados would complicate the situation inside the plantación. Was Wybert a fool? Did he not know how easily everything could slip out of his control?
“We are Reds,” he said, clenching his fist to hold their attention. Heads around the room nodded. “We push forward, no matter what stands in our way. We hold together, looking out for each other. Nothing less than victory. That's what we demand.”
He waved them forward, and all of them rose from their seats. He beckoned them to join him, to form a circle. And, as they gathered around and began the chant for victory, Diego almost believed it. He almost believed that this whole situation would not end in flames.
Almost.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Yorick slid into the tunnel underneath the warehouse. Flashlight in one hand, Tenney’s lock-picking device in the other. Heart thumping. A mission to locate Tenney seemed foolish and destined to fail. Yorick didn’t want to be here.
Rosia touched down on the grate behind him, and she turned on her light. The look on her face told Yorick she wasn’t going to change her mind anytime soon. He was along for the ride. So, he would go with her and protect her as best he could.
“Wait,” he said as she turned to go. He held up a hand, pointing out of the open cellar door. Had there been a noise? They’d sneaked onto the battlefield carefully this evening. Had to wait several minutes for a couple of guards atop the wall to turn their heads. Plus, the searchlight made a few rotations across the warehouse quadrant. With the Royal Army here, everyone seemed to be extra mindful and tense and ready to slip into insanity.
But they hadn’t heard anyone close by until now.
They both tilted their heads toward the opening. Nothing in the room above them. No screeching of the warehouse bay doors opening, no bang of the interior doors opening, either.
“We could close the cellar door,” she whispered.
He shook his head. “I’d worry about finding our way back. We can’t count on exiting by the garage. Plus, we don’t know for sure this thing won’t lock behind us.”
She tilted her head back and forth, mulling over his words. For another thirty seconds, they stood, breathing. He heard no follow-up noises.
Yorick held up a closed fist and then extended his pinky finger. Rosia did the same, and they touched pinkies together.
“Always,” he said.
“Always,” she said. “Let’s hurry.”
She shined her light along the hallway until it faded into utter blackness. “I think we should head for the mansion.”
“And do what, exactly, to fulfill this great rescue mission?”
She pursed her lips and squinted down the hall. “We open a door into the mansion. If they have Tenney, he’s probably in the same room where we were questioned.”
“But we don’t know where that is. Bags over our heads, remember?”
“I remember coming up one flight of stairs on the way out. That tells me the interrogation area is in the basement. It’s probably in one of these doors down here, so we actually don’t even have to go into the mansion. But, it might be easier to find, if we do go up and in. He’ll be well-se
cured. Hard to see all that in darkness.”
He grinned. “So, the plan is to find the highest concentration of guards, and that’s where we go.”
“Yes.”
He noted they were no longer talking about finding Hamon inside these walls as one of their goals. They hadn’t spoken of him all day. Maybe they had both come to accept that recovering him alive was a fever dream. “I’m all in, jefe1. After you.”
She held her light low and skulked down the hall, with Yorick close on her heels. The lock picking device could easily function as a weapon if need be. Solid, heavy, he could break a jaw if he gripped it in his hand when throwing a punch. Not that he would throw a punch if faced with a rifle. But, maybe he could catch someone by surprise. Assuming the interrogation room was underneath the main body of the mansion, they had a long stretch to travel before reaching it. Plenty of opportunities to meet their demise in any number of ways.
When they came to the first intersection of the hallway, it was once again a four-way stop. His girlfriend hesitated a moment before proceeding, but she said nothing about it. Why in the stars these tunnels shifted every day baffled Yorick. Made no damn sense at all. Rosia didn’t have comment to offer, either.
He kept his bearings and tapped on her right shoulder, telling her to go that way. The mansion would be south and east from here. He would have to focus to keep it all together. With each step, he ticked off a running distance counter in his head.
After ten more minutes of creeping along hallways, passing doors with a nonsensical numbering strategy, he tapped her again. “We’re close. Might already be underneath the mansion. If you can find some way to go up, or some special door, now’s the time.”
Rosia stopped at each door after that, pressing her ear against it. Five doors, then ten, pausing to listen to each one. Yorick kept behind her, eyes forward and backward, checking for guards. There were no sounds of boots like before. No far-off beams of flashlights or the echo of voices. Maybe with the soldados here, there was no time to play underneath the mansion.
Then, he felt something. A change in temperature. “Wait,” he said, and turned to face the nearest door. He lowered himself to a knee and held his hand in front of the base of the door. He could feel air pushing out in the small crack between the bottom of the door and the grate.
“This leads somewhere not… not… built-in? All-in-one? I can’t think of the word.”
“Self-contained?” she said.
“Yes. Self-contained. I can feel air coming in.”
Rosia knelt next to him and checked for herself, then she nodded at the door device. Yorick held it next to the panel by the door. It clicked and then drifted open a couple centimeters.
He let out a titter of a laugh. Tenney’s little device had actually worked.
She pushed open the door to find a set of dark stairs, highlighted by muted running lights on every third step. About fifteen steps in total, leading up into darkness. That cold and damp air filtered down from above them.
“This what you were expecting?” he asked.
“I don’t know what I was expecting.”
“Well, we’re here. Might as well see where this leads us.”
They both killed their flashlights and stowed them. Yorick gripped the lock picker in his palm. He held it hard enough to make his hand ache.
As they ascended the stairs, his heart rate climbed to another new level with each step. At the top, they found a darkened door with a regular knob. No metal panel. At the bottom of the door, gray light leaked out. He felt a bit woozy.
Yorick opened his mouth to discuss their strategy, but Rosia pushed the door open. It swung wide, silent and moving like water. On the other side was another hallway, bathed in dim light. No grates on the floor, they seemed to be covered with the same sort of smooth but non-slip tiles as the dorm lobby and cafeteria were. Like a workspace.
Yorick stepped into the hallway and noted the area reminded him exactly of the floor in the cafeteria building where they had taken classes as small children. Doors lined the hallway, marked with windows at eye-level. Crisscrossed with black lines, maybe reinforced to make the windows harder to break? There were numbers on the doors, but these numbers didn’t seem so random in here. A perfectly normal sequence.
He approached the first door across the hall from him and tried the knob. It was unlocked, and he hesitated before turning it all the way. He pushed the door open to find a classroom. Whiteboards on the walls, desks lining the room.
With the lights off, Yorick couldn’t see much, so he retrieved his flashlight. He shined it across the room and noted writing all over the whiteboards. Rosia crossed the room to approach the whiteboard at the front, and he followed after.
The writing on the whiteboards confused him. Symbols and words that made no sense. The writing seemed to be in a completely different language, unlike the one they’d learned growing up. The symbols were connected by lines and triangles, some of the writing haphazard and frantic. Like a grand explanation for a math problem, diagrammed all over the available space.
“What is this?” Rosia said.
“I have no idea. I can’t even read it.”
She touched his cheek to get his attention. “Tenney isn’t here, so it doesn’t matter what it is. We have to hurry and find him before anyone realizes we’re gone. The play will be over soon.”
Yorick snapped out of his fog of confusion and followed her back out of the room. They picked a direction along the hall and headed that way. More doors, and he shined his light into the window of each one. More of the same.
Until they came to a door near the end of the hall. Instead of a regular doorknob, this one had the same metal panel as the doors in the tunnels. Plus no window to spy inside. This door had been installed recently. It was made of heavier metal than all the others, plus the hinges were on the other side of the door so it couldn’t be broken into from this side.
A door unlike all the others.
Rosia took the door unlocker device from Yorick’s hand. “This is something. Has to be.”
She pressed the unlocker device against the metal panel, and the door drifted open. Again, no creak, no stutter. The hinges moved as smoothly as silk.
They entered. And what Yorick saw inside blew his mind. This was like the classrooms, except instead of desks, there were workstations with screens sitting atop boxes. The boxes had whirring fans and lights, and after a couple seconds, Yorick registered the devices as computers. Dozens of them. As far as he knew, there were no computers at the plantación. He remembered them from when he was younger, but Wybert had said they had been destroyed years ago.
At some point in his education, Yorick had entered the classroom, and they were all gone. Lord Wybert himself had come to class that day to explain. The teacher, a rotund woman Yorick knew only as “Miss” stood off to the side, cowering in Wybert’s presence. The lord had explained that computers were bad, and they were going away, and all learning would be done with regular books from now on. Even at age seven or eight, Yorick knew something wasn’t right about the situation, but he didn’t know enough to protest. He just accepted the new reality. No computers.
But, here they were, live and in color. And why?
Before he could come up with an answer, his eyes drifted to the right of the door they’d entered, and he jumped, snatching Rosia by the arm.
A giant hunk of glimmering metal in the shape of a man. But not exactly like a man, it had angular arms and a blocky head. Pincher claws for hands. But, it wasn’t moving, and unlike the computers, there were no lights on. The machine seemed still.
“What is that thing?” he asked, holding Rosia behind him.
“Robot,” Rosia said. “It’s a machine that can think and move like a human.”
Yorick held his arms out, bracing against her, but she slipped out from around him. “It’s okay,” she said as she put a hand on it. “It’s disabled, or in sleep mode, or something. Like one of our suits without the chi
p in it.”
Yorick approached slowly, then touched the machine, finding it cold. Also, incredibly heavy. The thing stood on two legs, and when he pushed against it, it barely moved. Solid, like a metal wall.
“It’s incredible,” he said. “It’s a person made from metal, like a car. But it can stand upright. How is this possible?”
Rosia’s fingers drifted down to its hands, which were claws, but with four fingers and a thumb on each. “I’ll bet it can hold a rifle.”
“How did you know what it is?”
“I guessed,” she said. “You remember the one play last summer? The one about the husband and wife who move to the First City? They had a robot in their house.”
Like a switch flicking on, he did remember. The robot had been played by a janitor, wearing boxes painted silver. In the play, every home in Denver had a robot in it, to assist with household chores. The general consensus was that these Denver robots didn’t actually exist.
And that didn’t explain why there was a real-life robot here in the room with them. Yorick’s brain churned, and then a realization bubbled up from his toes, making him shudder. “Is Wybert trying to replace his human guards with machines?”
Rosia’s eyebrows lifted as she looked over the robot. “Yeah, maybe. Actually, that makes a lot of sense. Machine guards don’t need sleep or food and don’t get old.”
Something about this made Yorick cringe. The thought of machines watching over them as they battled and ate dinner and slept. Machines that were always watching, vigilant, uncaring. You couldn’t talk your way out of a bad situation with a machine.
And another, more sinister idea occurred to him. This was why the losing battle guerreros were escorted into the mansion. It had something to do with these robots. Maybe they were being cut up and fed to these things. Maybe their bones became parts. He squinted at the robot’s square head with its lack of eyes or other features. Was Hamon in there?
He almost laughed. What a ridiculous idea. So glad he hadn’t said it out loud.
Rosia wandered away from the robot and strolled through the aisles of computer desks. Yorick joined her, trying to still the swirling mass of thoughts in his head. She tapped on a screen, and it came to life. The words enter password appeared on the screen.