by James Knapp
“Nico!”
According to the counter, Faye had only minutes left before the Leichenesser capsule triggered. The Special Forces team was close. It was only a matter of time before they found the clean room. I opened the revivor’s coat and saw the LCD ticking down in the mass of wires. There was no way I could defuse it, but it had a reset mechanism . . . a dead- man’s switch in case the revivor was taken down. The revivor watched, unable to move as I pushed the button and the timer reset.
“Faye, come here,” I said, pushing a chair toward her. “Sit there. Hurry.”
She did as I said, then turned suddenly as something crashed behind us. I saw her hands go up as the door flew open and Calliope stormed in with a gun in her hand.
“Don’t shoot!” I yelled, holding out one hand. Zoe was with her, blood smeared under her nose as she lingered by the doorway.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Cal barked, and there was fear in her voice but not panic.
“Hold on,” I said.
“Now!”
I spun the chair around and used my knife to cut through the skin at the base of Faye’s skull. As I scanned through the muscle and bone, I could see the revivor components clustered there. I had to go deep, but not too deep. The tip of the blade shook and I grabbed my wrist with my free hand to try to stop the tremors caused by the stim.
“What the hell are you doing? Let’s go!” Cal snapped behind me.
Faye, hold still. This won’t take long.
Okay.
If it doesn’t work, I’m sorry.
I dug the tip of the knife through to the casing where the Leichenesser capsule was housed. The black fluid was greasy under my fingertips as I coaxed it back.
Using the edge of the blade, I pried the casing free and pulled, breaking the connections. It slid out of its chamber and I pulled it away. The unit popped in my hand and white smoke began to pour off my fingers as it consumed the revivor’s blood.
“Faye?”
Black fluid leaked from the hole, branching down the back of her neck, but the Leichenesser hadn’t touched her. She turned back and looked at me from the corner of one eye. Cal was still sticking the gun out, not sure what to do. I waved the remaining smoke from my hand.
“Faye, you’re okay,” I said. “You’re okay; I’m going to take you out of here.”
“What happened to Fawkes?”
“He’s shut off from the rest of the revivors, but it won’t last. We have to get out of here.”
Footsteps were clambering up the steps toward the clean room. Two figures barreled through, and I caught the glow from their eyes before one turned to shut the door behind them. They were both armed with automatic rifles.
“This way,” Faye said, pushing a narrow panel open. Her voice was swallowed by a high-pitched shriek from the stairs. Flames poured through the space in the doorway, crawling across the ceiling, before one of the two new revivors managed to push it shut and cut off the flow in a puff of blue. Its palm sizzled as it held the door shut and then locked it.
“Cal, Zoe, this way!” I shouted. Cal was one step ahead of me, and Zoe followed her. I pushed them through the narrow opening.
“Where does it lead?” I asked Faye.
“I don’t know. He said away from here.”
Something hit the door to the clean room hard, and charred paint chips scattered to the floor. The two revivors ignored us and took up positions at the corners of the room. Each took aim at the entrance, waiting for the Special Forces team to come.
I took Faye by the wrist.
“Faye, come with me,” I said. She didn’t move. Cal grabbed my arm and pushed a gun into my hand.
“Faye, come on,” I said. “Come with me. I’ll take you out of here.”
She just put her hand on mine, though, and pushed it away. She gave it a gentle squeeze, her palm and fingers cool and dry.
“Faye—”
She put one hand in the middle of my wounded chest and shoved me back.
That was the last time I saw her.
Cal pulled me the rest of the way as the panel slammed shut.
Go, Faye said; then the link cut out.
When I looked back at them, Calliope was shouting something and Zoe was just staring up at me like she was seeing me for the first time. Even for her, there was something strange about her expression. It was like she had forgotten who I was.
On the other side of the panel, I heard gunfire and the shriek of a flamethrower. I felt the heat on my face as it radiated from the panel in front of me.
I checked the magazine of the gun Cal had handed me. Half the rounds were left.
“Stick close,” I told them. The heat was starting to get intense, and at this depth, between the fire and the smoke, the air would get used up fast.
We didn’t encounter any soldiers on the way back. We ran through the passageway until we came out near the elevator, which was shut down, so I followed the route Cal had taken us when we came in. We headed back up the stairs, back out through the bombed factory entrance and into the underground parking garage, where the shells of the cars were still burning.
As we moved up the ramp, the hot air below became a warm breeze, rushing over us from behind and smelling like smoke. We stepped out into the night and the crisp, cold air. Snow began to fall on my face. It felt good.
The helicopters had been joined by three more, sitting there quietly in the dark. There were no soldiers around, so they had to still be down there. Did they follow the revivors as they tried to get out, or did the whole lot of them burn?
I tried to open a connection to Faye. She didn’t respond.
“What do we do now?” Cal asked.
Sean.
Yeah?
I need an EMT at my location.
You got it. Good to hear from you, Nico.
You too.
I knelt down in the snow next to them, the last reserves of my energy trickling away. Zoe stood near me, shivering in the snow as the wind whipped through her thin white linens. I took my coat off and pulled her down to me, placing it around her shoulders.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Come here.”
I guided her into my lap to keep her bare feet out of the snow, and held her as she shook.
She’s just one of many, Agent. Your friend isn’t unique; she’s one of thousands. . . .
Fawkes believed it. He’d provoked the deployment of the National Guard so he could take control of its revivor ranks, then used them to kill the people on his list. He thought he was bringing down a massive conspiracy. He’d been torturing those people in that underground facility to try to learn how they did what they did and how to stop them.
Zoe shivered in my arms. Was Fawkes insane? Or could there be some truth to what he said?
Nico, what happened down there? Sean asked.
If my memories had been altered, I wouldn’t know it. Zoe proved that the day I first met her.
. . . she’s one of thousands, and they have been using you to get to me. . . .
The kind of destruction going on below us wasn’t sanctioned by the FBI. Whoever was behind the operation, it wasn’t us. They were destroying everything. Faye was gone, this time for good.
Nico, respond. What happened down there?
I don’t know, I said, and cut the connection.
Cal scowled as a gust of wind blew. She looked down at me.
“Hey, what do we do now?” she asked again.
“We wait.”
“Wait,” she snorted.
“Quietly,” I said, and that’s how it ended.
Well, more or less.
13
Dawn
Zoe Ott—Pleasantview Apartments, Apartment 613
“Hey, you okay?”
I caught myself staring into space again. I’d been doing that a lot. After everything was over and I finally got back, nothing felt the same. I guess I hadn’t really been gone very long, but it felt like forever.
I tipped my gla
ss back, smelling the licorice and letting the fire fill my mouth, then my throat and belly. Karen watched me do it, but even though I don’t think she approved, she still smiled. I think she didn’t expect to ever see me again. I know I didn’t expect to see her again.
“I’m okay,” I said. “Thanks again for letting me stay with you. My place is kind of a crime scene.”
They had held me for a while and asked a lot of questions. I wanted to see Nico, but they wouldn’t let me. I was brought to another room where they tried to stick me with a needle, but I made them let me go. When the cab dropped me off, there were some cops still in my apartment and yellow police tape was all across the front door. The place was totally trashed, and no one would tell me anything. There were markers on the floor around a giant bloodstain, and kind of in the middle of it was the outline of a body in white tape. I found out later that it was my next-door neighbor. The revivor that took me killed him right there in my living room.
They asked me if I had anywhere else to stay while they finished their investigation, and when I said I didn’t, they said I should get a hotel for a few days. I was too afraid to ask what happened to Karen. I was looking around, afraid to find another outline, when she showed up in the hallway. She got me something to eat, and better still, something to drink. It was like she was waiting for me.
“Did they tell you anything?” she asked. I shook my head.
“Me neither,” she said. “Did they find out who it was?”
“No.”
“Well, you can stay here as long as you need.”
“What about what’s- his-face?” I asked. I didn’t see the oaf in the tank top anywhere around.
“He doesn’t live here; he just stays here,” she said. “He’s going to stay at his place for a while.”
Her eyes got kind of teary, and she wiped at the big, nasty double shiner she got when she ran in and tried to rescue me.
“Sorry you got hurt,” I said. She smiled, but she didn’t even remember how it happened. She never mentioned the revivor that broke in and attacked me, because she didn’t remember it. When I wiped her memory, it was like for her that part never happened. She knew only what she’d been told afterward. “What about your friend, the agent?” she asked.
“Nico’s going to check in later.”
“You’ll get to see him again, then.”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t know how I felt about that. He didn’t just say he’d check in; he wanted to use me as a consultant, on the department payroll. He wanted to keep it very quiet, though. I thought that would make me happy, but it didn’t.
Mostly that was because he changed. At some point between the time I left him in the storage unit and the time he held me in his lap outside the factory, he’d changed. Not his personality, even though his face had changed a little and his left eyelid had gotten a little droopy. He still acted the same, and he still talked the same, but he was different.
“I can’t change him anymore,” I said into my glass.
“What?”
“Nico,” I said. “I can’t change him anymore. I can’t—”
I almost said “control him,” but I stopped myself. When I looked, I could see the colors around him. I could see the pain and the confusion and all the rest of it, but when I pushed, the colors didn’t change.
“It’s not the end of the world,” Karen said. She didn’t get it. She couldn’t.
“How am I supposed to know what he’s thinking?”
“You’re not supposed to know,” she said, smiling a little.
“Then what do I do?”
“Get to know him.”
Get to know him. That was easy for her to say.
My drink was gone, and without asking she poured me another one, but a small one.
“Oh, by the way, I found this slipped under the front door,” she said, fishing in her pocket. She pulled out a blank business card with some writing on it. “It doesn’t mean anything to me. Is it for you? From your friend Nico, maybe?”
I took the card and turned it over. There was handwriting in small print on the back of it.
You did it. Your place is with us. My stomach dropped a little.
“It’s not from Nico,” I said.
“Do you know what it means?”
I crumpled up the card in my hand, then dropped it in the trash.
“No,” I said. “If it’s okay, I think my place is with you.”
Calliope Flax—Bullrich Heights
A couple days after the whole thing went down, I stood out in the cold to wait for the bus, and it was goddamn gray out. The sky, what you could see, was gray; the buildings looked gray; everything was gray. The wind howled down the street, kicking up the dusting we got. It was cold. I heard that where I was going they had the opposite problem, but it couldn’t be much worse.
When the bus finally showed, it looked like it was going to blow by, but he saw me there and pumped the brakes. It rolled to a stop, front tire half in a puddle of slush when the door squealed open.
I hoisted my bag up on one shoulder and got on. It was warm in there and all the glass was fogged except the front. The driver looked like he came with the bus, and he’d get buried with it too.
“Pass,” he said.
I took out the little yellow chit they gave me when I signed up to serve. The driver gave it a look and I dropped it in the slot. It landed in the box with a few others.
“Just you?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Have a seat,” he said. “It’s a long trip.”
There were three other guys in the back. Two looked like they were passed out, and the last one looked like he wished he was. I sat down as far from them as I could and put my bag in the seat next to me. I wiped the fog off the window and watched with my head against the cold glass as we pulled out of Bullrich Heights.
I’m not sure what made me do it. Part of it was the G-man and something he said. He said he thought I was worth more than the arena. He said I impressed him down in that hellhole. He didn’t say “Go sign up”—that part was my idea—but I think I believed him.
That was part of it. The big thing, though, was that once it was all over, nothing felt right anymore. When I got back to my place, it was like it didn’t even look the same. As soon as I was through the door, I knew I’d leave. Anyplace had to be better than there, even the grinder.
The guys made some noise and we all went out for a big bash my last night, and I drank until I puked. I passed out facedown and said good-bye to my life, for what it was worth.
As the bus took me out of there, I thought about the G-Man, Nico. The training and the skills were just the start. The implant, the wiring, the strength, and the power . . . it could all be mine. I held his card in my hand as the bus took me where I was going, reading his message and his number.
For better or worse, things were going to change.
Nico Wachalowski—FBI Home Office
The first thing I saw when I finally woke up was the last of the diagnostic messages scrolling past the darkness behind my eyelids. The second thing I saw was the communication-pending message from Noakes marked URGENT.
Opening my eyes, I saw Sean sitting at the monitor on the bench in front of me as I lay in the maintenance chair. The rice paper underneath me crinkled as I cracked my back, and he glanced over, thin lips grinning. The dark shadow still floated in front of my eyes.
“Welcome back,” he said.
“How long was I down?”
“A long time.”
He got up, and I saw he hadn’t shaved. He looked tired as he stepped over to the chair and looked down at me, holding the scanner up to my right eye.
“How am I doing?”
“All things considered, pretty well,” he said. “I had to call in some help on this one. Your sternum was split, so it had to be replaced with an artificial one, and that plate you had behind it got dimpled, so it had to come out.”
“What about the rest
of me?”
“You suffered a severe myocardial infarction and a lot of blood loss,” he said. “The chemicals released by the JZI kept you alive, but they take their own toll. It took almost a total transfusion to get you right, but you’ll be back on your feet.”
“I’ve got a blind spot in front of my right eye.”
“You had some oxygen starvation even despite the implant; you were down for a long time. I won’t lie; you had some pinprick necrosis in a section of your brain, but you got lucky.”
Wachalowski, it’s Noakes.
“Hang on,” I told Sean.
What do you want?
I want your report, Wachalowski.
I’ll file one when I get out of here.
Where is the revivor?
The last time I saw Faye, she was with one of the black-market revivors Fawkes had brought in. While I waited with Zoe and Calliope outside for the EMT to arrive, I’d searched for her signature, but I never picked it up again.
She—I mean it—was still down in the factory last I saw. No one found it?
Whoever was behind this rigged the place to do a very slow, very hot burn. Experts are saying the lower levels could smolder for months. Nothing past the parking garage can even be accessed by firefighters right now.
I thought the soldiers burned the place. Weren’t those their orders?
I don’t know what their orders were and neither do you, Wachalowski. The people responsible for this burned the place, along with the prisoners they were keeping there, to cover their tracks. End of story.
My memory of what happened down in the factory was a little fuzzy, but that didn’t sit with what I had seen. Still, I knew when something was a done deal. If I was going to pursue this further, it wasn’t going to be in front of Noakes.
So, we stopped them.
The ring of smuggled revivors and weapons was traced to a terrorist cell that was using the old factory as a base of operations, from which they organized a series of kidnappings, murders, and terror strikes. We’ve broken up the smuggling ring, found those responsible for the attacks, and, with the aid of the military, taken out them and their headquarters. Yes, we stopped them.