For-real fire alarms were loud. He had no idea they could hurt his ears. Mike barely recognized the hallways now that they were bathed in the freakish emergency lights. He had to yank back into the room to avoid a nurse running at full throttle down the hall.
The guard on their door was gone.
“Mike, what wrong me?”
It took him a second to understand what she’d said. The alarms didn’t help.
“You’ve lost your realm connection before your integration completed. You have to keep yourself synchronized without your daemons.” He didn’t have time to explain further. He needed to find everyone and get out of the building.
There were several rooms with flickering orange light peeking out from under closed doors. Fires, and they were everywhere. Smoke curled through the emergency lights thick enough to cast their own shadows. It turned the hospital into a weird, very dangerous circus.
Kim’s voice echoed from a corridor right in front of him. A simple sound after such a long silence meant so much.
“Spencer McKenzie, they’re tits, okay? If you keep staring at them you’re gonna fall into a fire. We have to move.”
He rounded the corner and there she was, standing with her back to him, shouting orders at everyone, stark naked. They all were. Tonya, Spencer, Shan, and the stranger that’d been kept in their room didn’t have a stitch of clothing on. They all stood in a semicircle around her at the other end of the hall. The tattooed wings that covered her entire back flexed and shimmered in the flashing lights.
To his credit, Spencer did look up. He pointed over her shoulder. “Kim!”
Kim had set the whole place on fire with her mind. No wonder she was ten feet away from the rest of them. Her sensitivity must have been insane. She spun on her heel and ran toward him anyway. When she hit the limit she stumbled into a heap on the floor.
She held up a hand before he got close. “You can’t, Mike. Not now.”
Kim put her head in one hand, dry heaved a few times, and then looked up at him with tears streaming down her face.
Kim was awake and healthy. They all were. He’d been so afraid they’d never come back.
She asked, “Are you all right?”
An explosion echoed somewhere behind him. “I’m fine. You need to follow me; I know where the exits are.”
Scouting the exits was practically the first thing he’d done when they’d let him roam the halls with Helen. Even with the weird lights and thickening smoke he was able to navigate them down an emergency hallway and out a side door. The alarms just added to the general chaos. He led them to a clutch of bushes and trees well clear of the building. Mike turned around.
Flames shot out of shattered windows. Clumps of Chinese milled around in the dark outside all the major exists. They were miles away from even a small town, so it might take hours to assemble a major response. Fire suppression systems, no matter how advanced, weren’t designed for a building that’d been set alight everywhere all at once. The whole place might be reduced to ashes before sunrise.
Mike glanced over at Kim.
She threw him a lopsided smile. “Can I cook, or can’t I?”
“You never were much for doing things small.” He picked Helen up out of her wheelchair. She’d passed out but was still breathing well and with a strong pulse. Her skin was hot to the touch, though. “Come on. The farther we get away from here, the less likely they’ll be to find us.”
Saddled with an unconscious Helen and five stumbling, complaining naked people slowed them down some, but he still knew instinctively when they’d gone far enough to lose any pursuit.
An explosion far behind them extinguished the occasional street lamps they’d been using to pick their way forward.
“Shit, like this isn’t hard enough,” Spencer said.
“No, it’ll work in our favor,” Kim replied. “The cameras are off now.”
“You think they’re still guarding the gate?” Tonya asked.
It turned out they weren’t. He wondered just where in the sanctuary they were. The facility had to be enormous; maybe Kim wouldn’t manage to burn it all down.
He kept them to the cleared trails. They were easier to walk on in the dark and far better on everyone else’s bare feet. A half-moon had risen at some point in their escape, which made walking easier.
But he still had to deal with distractions.
Silently chanting “eyes up, eyes up, eyes up” whenever he looked at Kim or Tonya at least kept it from being too embarrassing. Spencer, Shan, and the new guy were walking behind the two women. Their whispers and giggles set his teeth on edge. They could at least try to be classy. Kim’s sensitivity had fallen as the hours had passed, so she was now able to walk beside him.
“You guys couldn’t find any clothes on the way out?”
Kim rubbed her bare shoulders. “I didn’t know where the guards were, so we got out of there as fast as we could. I thought we might find some with you, but the building burned a lot faster than I counted on.”
“I could give you my shirt.”
“And leave Tonya the only girl like this? No, it’s okay Mike. Naked never hurt anyone, although I may have to figure out a way if the boys don’t shut up soon.”
Which reminded him. “Who’s the new one?”
Kim replied, “That’s Ozzie. The real one. Finally.”
It was hard to tell in the broken moonlight, but now that he thought about it, the man did faintly resemble the Ozzie he knew. If he stuck him inside a fat, whiny, naked Chinese guy, anyway.
“Is that who I think it is?” she asked, pointing at the sleeping body in his arms.
“Yes. Helen’s outside. We need to get her a realm connection. Her integration can’t be more than half complete.” An earlier explosion made Helen spasm hard enough he’d almost dropped her. Mike was certain she’d finally gotten free of the lab’s private realmspace. The expansion should’ve helped her integrate more, but now all she did was whimper faintly when he tried to get her to talk. Her skin was much hotter than it should be.
After he finally found a crossroads marked on the map he had in realmspace, Mike led them to a small, remote clearing well away from the main sanctuary. He set Helen down gently next to Tonya. She immediately examined her like it was the most natural thing in the world to be naked in a Chinese bamboo forest checking the vitals of a human-AI hybrid.
“She’s running a high fever, but otherwise seems okay. I’ll do what I can.”
He stood. “I need to go back. I have to find you guys some clothes and maybe a vehicle so we can get out of here.”
Kim’s lower lip trembled, and he had to fight, again, a deep urge to grab her and protect her against everything.
“Please, be careful.”
She was awake, all there, and not crazy. It was a relief on so many levels. “Hey. I’ll be fine.” He winked, and then vanished into the bamboo behind him.
Mike hiked up to a ridge that overlooked the main campus. The hospital wing they’d been staying in was gutted, and the rest of the buildings were scorched to one extent or another. The place crawled with firemen, police, soldiers, and paramedics. He hoped there hadn’t been any serious injuries.
The sun was well up now, which complicated his options if he wanted to get in and out without raising an alarm.
Mike scanned the valley to find his target: a storage shed well outside the main compound. It took most of an hour to reach, and when he did, the door was locked. Any other time he’d let Kim sort it out—she picked locks like other people breathed. But she wasn’t here.
He heard a man marching down the path. Mike faded into the shadows cast by the bamboo. When the other man unlocked the door, Mike slipped in behind him.
It wasn’t a shed on the inside. It was a lot bigger, clean and air conditioned. When Mike’s shoe squeaked on the tile floor, the man spun around. A precise blow just behind the ear knocked him out.
What he found were clothes only in the broadest sense, but they�
�d have to do.
Chapter 27: Kim
It fell to Kim to put the Butthead Brigade in check. She grabbed a thick stick of bamboo and tossed it at them.
“Shit! Kim!” Spencer shouted as he dodged. The other two weren’t as quick and fell like bowling pins. They sat up holding their noses.
“Damn it!”
“Holy shit!”
“Turn around!” she said. “Now!” Kim threw another set of bamboo chunks at them to drive home the point. The giggles and snorts she’d put up with on the walk to the clearing had seriously gotten under her skin. Spencer took a stalk between the eyes before he finally got it.
She went over to Tonya. “Is she okay?”
“Kim, this is amazing. She’s amazing.”
Tonya had missed the earliest stages of Mike’s integration. Now she had another one to examine. Even seeing it a second time, Kim didn’t know what to look for.
“Tonya, will she be all right?”
Tonya sat back and sighed deeply, very serious. The more professional she got, the worse the news was. “The fever is high enough to be dangerous. We didn’t learn about these kinds of people in nursing school.”
Helen groaned, and then thrashed around. Kim had to dodge out of the way of Helen’s arms. They hit the ground so hard it kicked up dust from the bare floor of the clearing. There was nothing she could do, and this was Mike’s sister.
“Stop, hey, no, it’s okay,” Tonya cooed as she stroked Helen’s face and hands, a nurse on the wrong side of the world. “We’re here. You’re safe.”
Helen’s Mandarin was mushy, like her mouth was full of cotton. “Where am I? Where is Mike?”
“She’s confused,” Kim said in English, and then knelt beside Helen and replied in Mandarin, “He’s fine. We’re all fine. Are you okay?”
Helen groaned again, and then opened her eyes. Kim and Tonya both rocked back. Helen’s left eye glanced around frantically, independent from the right.
She moaned and slurred something Kim had trouble understanding.
“My head, nothing’s working.”
“Helen,” Kim asked in Mandarin, “can you hear me?”
“Where’s Mike? Can I please have some hot water? My mouth is so dry.”
Kim translated. Tonya looked grim. “Her fever’s spiking. We need to get her to a doctor.”
“We need to get her a realm connection.” Kim slapped her hand on the ground. “We need to get the hell out of here. Spencer, you really can do those things, be all Boy Scout, right?”
“It won’t be as easy naked.”
“Do you think you can find us some water?”
“I saw a garden spigot sticking out of the ground not a hundred yards from here.”
“Good. Take Shan and see if you can find a container of some sort. Be careful, but don’t take too long.”
Ozzie sat far away from the others, shaking in silent sobs. Kim had forgotten she had two people she needed to take care of.
It was tricky trying to gauge just how close she could get to him, especially like this. He’d stayed behind far enough on the walk over that Kim was afraid they might have lost him once or twice, but he’d kept just close enough to stay in sight. She sat against bamboo stalks that formed a kind of fence between them.
“Ozzie, what was all that back there?”
His voice, at least, was right, as was his flawless English. “I don’t know. I was so wrong. I shouldn’t have interfered with your arrest. They discovered everything after that.”
“So there really is a cache of stuff in the mountains out here somewhere?”
“Yes, but it won’t help us now. The realm was accurate, so they must’ve found it.” He gasped and sobbed quietly again. “How do you stand this?”
“Do I need to move farther away?”
“No, it’s not that. How do you stand all this?” He gestured at the sky. “It’s so open. It’s terrifying. I can barely think.”
He panted and made strangling noises. Great. “Ozzie! Listen to me. You’re having a panic attack. You need to breathe.” She’d trade her kingdom for a paper sack. “Hold your hands over your mouth, the CO2 will help. Close your eyes, don’t look up.” The storm passed after a few minutes. “Ozzie, how long have you lived in that compound?”
“That one’s pretty new, only a few years.”
Literal was still an Ozzie trademark. Okay, try again. “When’s the last time you went outside?”
“I’m not allowed outside. It’s too dangerous. People can touch me if I’m outside.”
“People can touch you if you’re inside, too.”
“Not if I’m by myself.” His voice fell into a hoarse whisper. “I’m so scared.”
After all this time, it turned out he was just another misfit. “That’s why you wanted out, isn’t it? They never let you go outside?”
“For a little while I could go out with Grandmother during Ancestor’s Day, but then I had a panic attack.” He started panting again but managed to hold it together. “I have lived completely by myself since I was eleven years old. I was thirteen the last time I saw the sky.”
She’d known Ozzie was about her age ever since their first match. The first big caper The Machine brought her along on was probably the last time Ozzie had ever been outside. She turned twenty-six the day they flew out here.
Thirteen years without meaningful human contact.
Kim had the same syndrome. She knew the longing, the desperate desire to be around people in realspace. She’d ended up managing a Taco Bell just to make sure she saw the sun a few times a day. It really made a difference.
He needed help. “Okay, Ozzie. If you’re going to function out here, I’ve definitely got some things to teach you.”
Spencer and Shan returned with a full watering can soon after he’d gotten the hang of the first breathing exercises. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
Suddenly the biggest misfit of all materialized out of the woods. She was expecting him to have Chinese army uniforms in tow. Wrong again.
“Panda suits, Mike? Really?” A part of her was impressed in spite of it all. He’d walked past who knew how many soldiers with five fake panda heads roped to his back and nobody noticed.
The boys, Ozzie included, laughed and clapped like idiots. It was the first time Ozzie had laughed about anything.
Then Helen had a seizure.
The costumes thumped to the ground as Mike ran to her. Kim left Ozzie, and then fell to her knees on the other side of Helen. “Tonya, what’s wrong?”
“I’ve got nothing to control the fever. She’s neurologic. Damn it, Helen!” Tonya grabbed her hands. “Hang on, stay with me!”
When Helen’s left eye locked on Mike’s face, the seizure grew stronger.
It must have been some sort of weird connection. They were the same kind of person, so there was no way to know for sure. Mike was involved somehow. Kim heard things snap inside Helen’s body as the gaze from that one eye grew fiercer.
“Spencer! Tackle Mike!”
“What?”
“Now!”
Spindly teenaged limbs clouted Mike out of Helen’s field of view.
“My eye,” Helen said. “Cover my eye.”
Kim translated, and Tonya slapped her hand over Helen’s eye. The seizure stopped.
Helen cried out, hoarse and wet. “It’s not yours anymore! You wasted it!” She grabbed Tonya’s wrist with both hands. Helen’s English was barely understandable. “Don’t let go. Please, don’t let go.” She focused on Kim and switched back to Mandarin. “You can’t let me see him now. I’m not strong enough like this.”
Kim didn’t need to understand what was going on; they had to get out of here. “Mike, find us a way out. Spencer, Shan, get dressed. When you’re done, let me know. Ozzie, breathe just like I taught you. I can’t have you freaking out. Tonya, I’m not sure we can get you dressed. I don’t think we can risk it.”
“Don’t worry about me, I’ve been naked in situations
way worse than this.”
So that was how they traveled down the mountain: Shan and Spencer carried Helen between them, and Tonya kept her hand firmly over Helen’s eye. The boys knew exactly how serious it was and never gave Tonya a second glance as she walked along between them.
Ozzie spent the time practicing the one coping mechanism she’d taught him. Kim had to shout at him sometimes, otherwise he’d hyperventilate. Mike would materialize every few minutes to give them a course correction.
Early on, she finally got a chance to ask him why panda suits. The damned things itched.
“It was all I could find.”
“It’s part of the infant program,” Ozzie explained, his voice muffled by the ridiculous black-and-white head. “They have to be acclimated to pandas, not humans.”
Another facet of Ozzie from the old days was his deep desire to teach everyone about everything.
“Ozzie,” Kim said. “We don’t need a lecture.”
“I’m not lecturing. I’m explaining.”
He then proceeded to do exactly that, in excruciating detail. A costume head must count as inside. He was calmer than ever now.
They crossed the sanctuary’s border around noon, and by nightfall were so deep in the woods Spencer admitted they might be lost. Everyone was tired, sweaty, and starving. Helen would only move if Tonya’s hand seemed about to leave her eye.
They finally got to the edge of the forest. Kim moved over to Tonya. “How bad is it?”
“If she was human? We might have a few hours left. We need to get her a realm connection. The fever’s stayed high for too long now. Whatever is under my hand is getting stronger. It’s not right.”
Mike appeared next to her. “I have good news and bad news.”
She couldn’t deal with how much harder it was about to get right off. “Good news first.”
“There’s a village nearby. I’ve figured out which house belongs to the headman.”
“That’s great. What’s the bad news?”
“I could see through their windows. They’re watching Chinese Idol. I’m pretty sure a bunch of people in panda costumes wandering out of the woods isn’t what they’re expecting. He’s got a shotgun.”
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