Zero Rogue

by Matthew S. Cox

  Aaron shook his head. “Must you be a pain in the ass?”

  He fished out his NetMini, which already displayed the translation of her words. Her continued primal grunts took on a blurry, distant quality as his surroundings hazed. The text hovering in front of his eyes―‹sleep fog›―barely registered meaning. His focus weakened; his brain pulsated at the sensation of her slipping out of his telekinetic field.

  Rakshasi sprang to her feet. Aaron stumbled to the side, trying to hold his breath while lashing out at the closest, most lethal object he could find. He launched the onyx coffee table at her, spinning it like a three-tiered saw blade. Her lithe body shot upward so fast she seemed to disappear and reappear with her back to the ceiling as the thousand-pound stone stuck in the wall. She landed in a crouch, red eyes glaring at him.

  “Oh, of course. Noxious gas… you’ve got a tox filter.”

  He gasped and shoved her away. Her bare feet squeaked over the smooth white floor in the kitchenette. Unable to summon enough clarity of mind to kill, he flung her into the cabinets with barely enough force to leave a bruise.

  “Aapaatkaal andhera!” she yelled.

  Aaron leapt for the door. The console ignored his touch, offline as though it had lost power. The window blinds whirred tighter with a click.

  The lights went out.

  ‹Emergency Darkness› hovered over his NetMini, the glowing words throwing off enough light for him to make out the shape of his hand. Wobbles crept up his legs. Distant red cat-eye slits turned green. Soft thumps raced toward him, followed by the delicate click of deploying claws. Aaron released an omnidirectional pulse of telekinetic repulsion, but felt no resistance.

  A bare foot caught him across the face, spinning him chest-first into the wall. Unseen blades speared his left forearm; the NetMini slipped from his grasp and clattered to the floor. Searing pain lanced his left thigh from a stabbing wound, a surgical strike that severed his femur in four places. Aaron wailed, gritting his teeth at the feeling of bone pieces grinding over each other. His cheek squealed on the metal door as he slid down. After another faint click, fingers dug into his shoulders and flung him onto his back.

  Dazed by the chemicals in the air, he flailed at the endless darkness with one arm. She stepped on his thigh, triggering a blinding flash of pain and a throat-ripping scream. He rolled onto his side, cradling his wounded leg. Angry muttering came from everywhere. Panic set in, and he fired off telekinetic thrusts in random directions. Aaron cried out as four searing lines of pain plunged into his right thigh and withdrew as fast as a wasp’s sting, severing the bone there as she had done with the left.

  He grabbed at the rug with his one usable arm, dragging himself in the direction he believed would bring him closer to the door out. Whatever chemical he’d inhaled left him disoriented and feeling as if he floated in an endless morass where up and down meant nothing. Perhaps its effect also explained how he hadn’t yet passed out from pain. The rasp of her breathing faded to the corner of the room. Fleeting impressions of a sentient mind circled him, fifteen feet away. Between the chemical vapor and the agony in his legs, he couldn’t even concentrate on her surface thoughts. Weak light welled up out of the floor on the far side of the room, a faint presence hinting at a woman’s outline.

  “Allison,” he whispered, reaching.

  “You think you’re so impressive with your mind powers.” Rakshasi’s thick-accented English surrounded him. “You think you’re so much better than us. All it takes is a little poison in the air. Go to sleep, bastard. Wake up in Hell.”

  Ten burning nails sank into his back, flooding his throat with hot blood. He ceased feeling the blades, instead reaching for the ghostly figure drifting closer.

  “You are a strange man,” said Rakshasi. “Never have I seen my prey smile.”

  He let off a wheeze as she jerked her talons free, and blacked out.

  aron, what are you doing?”

  “Allison…”

  Aaron felt weightless, nonexistent. He couldn’t perceive limbs or any sense of being able to move.

  “Aaron, why are you doing this?”

  “I’m sorry…”

  Cold fingers slid over his cheeks. A woman’s hands cradled his face. “You’re a bloody idiot, Aaron.”

  Night faded to a grey blur. A thick, coppery taste flooded his mouth. Blood and chai-laced bile dribbled between his teeth. The haze gave way to distinct carpet fibers the color of pewter. Ozone hung thick in the air, mixed with the scent of overcooked meat and burned hair.

  “I’m being literal this time. You are an idiot and you’re bloody.”

  Allison’s voice changed, deepened. Less innocent, haughtier.

  The ghostly figure solidified into Aurora; naked as can be, kneeling with his head on her thigh. His attempt to speak sent a crimson sluice down her pure white legs. His head throbbed; the feeling of air moving inside several holes in his back made him shudder.

  “Oh, that’s disgusting.”

  She turned into a silvery mist, letting his head fall to the ground with a muted thump. More fluid came out of him to join the glop that had passed through her ghostly form. Aurora coalesced a pace away, clean and standing. His skull felt as though it expanded and shrank in time with his heartbeat. Continued effort to breathe speared him in the chest with icicles. Aaron wheezed, flapping his one movable arm.

  “He’s got a sucking chest wound,” said Aurora. “Looks bad.”

  “Bitch,” said Anna, right before the faint pop of an electrical shock occurred somewhere out of sight.

  She skidded to a halt on her knees at his side, fumbling with a stimpak. He grunted and gurgled, failing to speak and unable to move. One after the next, Anna stabbed him in the shoulder blade with four autoinjectors. The portable medical devices weren’t supposed to cause pain, but they also hadn’t been designed for repairing serious internal injuries. He howled and rolled flat on his back as the ragged wounds flared up with a feeling like thousands of tiny mouths gnawing on his flesh. Burning became itching, causing a soundless scream. The second time he attempted to howl, his lungs managed to hold air.

  “Hang on, Aaron. We’ll call for a MedVan.” Anna scrabbled at her purse, stymied by the closure.

  “Sih…” he wheezed.

  “What?”

  “Sih…” Aaron coughed up blood.

  “What are you trying to say?” She wrenched the purse open and gathered her NetMini, spilling a number of other random items to the floor in the process.

  “Six… Six of one.” Whatever the stimpak fluid attempted to do to his femurs felt like an army of furious fire ants going off on a drunken bender. “Oh, fuck this hurts.” He grabbed at the sectional.

  Anna clamped onto his arm, squeezing. “Hang on, luv.”

  “MedVan’ll bring me to Prince George Regional Medical… Zero’ll be waiting for me. I… Might be better for everyone if I just kicked off. I saw Allison.”

  Aurora’s face lit up with inspiration; she vanished in a cloud of luminous fog.

  “Dammit, where the hell is she going?” Anna clutched his arm to her chest, rubbing the back of his hand. “Don’t give up, Aaron.”

  A feminine gurgle came from behind her.

  “Look out,” he rasped.

  Anna twisted her head around to peer at something. “Don’t worry about that bitch.”

  He tried to chuckle, but the attempt only triggered a coughing fit. “Looks like Manchester won this match.”

  She gave him a look as if she wanted to punch him and cry at the same time. “What were you thinking coming here alone?”

  He interlaced his fingers with hers and held on. “Wasn’t expecting the gas.”

  “Gas?” Anna smirked at a scorch mark on her coat sleeve. “That explains the fireball.”

  Though his legs remained numb and unresponsive, and his chest felt like a pub dartboard on Friday night, he managed the strength to prop himself upright―or maybe Anna helped.

  Chemical fumes replac
ed the smell of incense. The formerly white sectional had browned in places like a tortilla. Tiny flames licked up from the carpet at the kinks in a jagged lightning-like burn, and the front door control panel was missing, the space it once occupied a charred ruin of smoking wires.

  Rakshasi lay on her back near the kitchenette. Her unfocused gaze searched the ceiling without sentience, while her body twitched in the throes of random convulsions. The blade on her right forefinger snapped in and out. White foam dribbled down both cheeks.

  “Which one of you is the mind blaster?” Aaron coughed.

  “Didn’t need that. The ones with that much ’ware are rather vulnerable to me. Neuralware is basically conductive wiring all through the body. She’s alive, but I’m afraid I’ve made a hames of her.”

  “Fuck.” Aaron let his head sag back. “She might have some idea of where Talis went. If you’ve cooked her brain, I’ve got nothing to work on.”

  “Bother that wench.” Anna went for her NetMini.

  He put his hand over it. “Don’t. I’m done. I’m so fucking done. Spare me the five minutes of NewsNet infamy. No MedVan.”

  “You bloody coward,” she yelled. “We’ll get you out. Even if they stick you on the Moon somewhere, we’ll find you.”

  Aaron winced from a ripple of pain. His left leg set about a rhythmic tremor that caused the separated bone segments to grind. He wondered for a moment how he could still be alive, having a vague recollection of a major artery right around there in the leg. Missing one could have been luck, missing it on both sides wasn’t. He scowled at the twitching body, but no matter how much he tried to smash her into the ceiling, all he managed to do was lift her an inch before his head throbbed.

  “Save your strength.” Anna pulled his hand away from the NetMini.

  “You’re right.” He slumped to the side. “I’m an ass, drowning my sorrows in cheap booze and cheaper women. I deserved this.”

  “Don’t,” said Anna.

  “I deserved to get chewed up and spat out, just like I did to all those ladies.” He thought about gesturing with his left arm, since Anna clung to the other, but it didn’t move. “Bollocks, look at me. I’m… Probably losing both legs, half my arm”―he coughed to the point of seeing spots―“and a lung.”

  “You’ll be alive.”

  “Will your Archon boy still want me if I’m barely psionic with all that hardware in me? Why’d you have to pull me away from Allison?”

  “That wasn’t Allison, you twit.” Anna gave him a light slap on the cheek. “You’re fading out. You saw Aurora scouting the room and hallucinated. She went into a trance and started screaming, said you were going to die.”

  “How’d the devil did you get in here?” He slumped left.

  Anna pulled him upright. “Aurora borrowed one of the guards; I acted like his one night stand.”

  He let gravity pull him to the right. “Why do you have her eyes?”

  Anna blinked. “What?”

  “You’ve the same look Allison did. Am I seeing things again?”

  “You’ve said that to me before, Aaron. You’ve gone loopy. It’s the blood loss.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “Of course.” She looked away. “He’s a good man. He pulled me out of the gutters of London. He gave me my life back.”

  “Why can’t you look at me?”

  “Garden variety contempt for a wanker who roots for Arsenal.”

  “You’re still not looking at me.”

  “That’s it; I’m calling for a MedVan.”

  A wave of fear, partially of getting cyberware, but mostly of being arrested, surged from within. He lunged, rather lurched, into an aimed fall at her hand before she could dial―but wound up tasting carpet.

  ait on that van,” called Aurora from the back.

  “In there?” asked a child’s voice.

  Aaron grunted, coughing up a glob of blood as he raised his head to look down the interior hallway. A shadow stretched along the carpet from the bathroom door. A bare child-sized foot stepped out into view, followed by the blurry shape of a naked tween. The girl let off a yelp and flew back out of sight.

  Aaron blinked a few times, trying to get his vision to clear.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” said Aurora, giggling. “Take this.”

  “But, you said he was going to die!” said the child in a raised, pleading voice.

  Anna’s eyes went wide; the NetMini slipped from her hand and hit the rug with a plop.

  A girl, perhaps eleven, with waist-length blonde hair and luminescent blue eyes hurried out of the bathroom. She clutched a plum colored towel to her chest, which covered her from armpit to knee. Aurora followed, wrapped in a similar towel, though on her it stopped an inch away from indecent. The girl stepped with care around the debris, hesitant and making faces as though she put her feet down on some alien substance rather than carpet. As soon as she caught sight of Aaron, all hesitation left her and she rushed to him with such urgency she lost her towel. The girl fell to her knees amid the blood, and tore Aaron’s shirt open enough to get both hands on his bare chest.

  Anna hadn’t moved so much as an eyelash since the child appeared; her hand curled as though she still held the NetMini.

  Aaron looked into the most innocent face he’d ever seen, fascinated by the blue light shining out of the child’s eyes. Her hands pressed warm against his skin; a sensation of numbness spread out from where she touched until he felt nothing at all. Pain from stab wounds in his back became noticeable by its absence. He let his weight pull him to the floor, certain the loss of sensation was the first step into the next world. The sight of Aurora wrapping the towel around the little girl lingered on his retinas, melting to a ghostly image and then a smear of color.

  I see many hurts. The child’s voice sounded earnest in his thoughts. Do not have the worry.

  Fog overtook his mind. The next thing he knew, he stood alone in the center of a frictionless stadium, in his Arsenal uniform. Intense lights bathed him from all sides. A hovering stone sat on the border of a goal, pentagonal panels opening and closing as it spun about, compensating for the drift with such speed it looked as though the sphere rotated atop a single set of metal studs rather than an ever-changing array of thrusters.

  He glanced at the stands where one person jumped and cheered without sound. Backlit by the floodlights, the indistinct figure could’ve been Allison or Anna. He smiled and nudged the stone an inch forward with a telekinetic poke to score. Aaron squinted at the woman, trying to see past the glare and recognize a face. Lights grew brighter, swallowing her. His hand shielded his eyes, but the whiteness built to blinding.

  Aaron snapped out of his dream with the urge to take a huge breath. The child sat back on her heels nearby, engaged in a staring contest with Anna who had moved to take a proper seat on the sectional. One bloody hand clutched the towel at her chest. Aaron straightened, gazing at his blood-covered hands, confounded by his lack of agony. He squeezed his thigh, finding it intact. Awestruck, he gawked at the child.

  Her little body looked frightfully thin and shook with a faint tremble likely caused by the air conditioning. Something about her pitiful stare and not-quite-closed mouth made him want to squeeze her in a fatherly hug. It took him a second to realize she emanated a mild ‘please don’t hurt me’ telempathic radiation. Aaron’s heart skipped a beat, expecting all hell to break loose when his brain came unhinged, but her emotional projection appeared to be more of a hint than a command.

  The child offered him a genuine smile. “You should eat.”

  As soon as she said it, his stomach growled. He rubbed his gut while Aurora puttered around in the back. She soon emerged in a scarlet silk bathrobe that went all the way to the floor, and sashayed to the kitchenette where she helped herself to the food assembler. Anna flinched first, looking away from the strange child with a guilty, apologetic stare at the floor.

  “Anna?” Aaron gestured at the girl. He couldn’t figure out
what disturbed him the most: his wounds had vanished, this child knelt in gore without caring, or that she had come out of nowhere with no clothing other than a bath towel―and didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed, even perturbed that Aurora had ‘wasted’ time attempting to cover her. “What is a little girl doing here? Why isn’t she dressed?” He glanced at her, at last processing the intense blue light shining out of her eyes. “Her eyes… They’re glowing.”

  Aurora stepped over the still-twitching Rakshasi and sat on the sectional close to Aaron. She offered the girl a cup of hot cocoa, but she didn’t react.

  “Althea,” said Aurora in a soothing tone. “I made a promise to you, and I intend to keep it.”

  The girl looked at Aaron as if judging him.

  Aurora nudged her in the shoulder with the cup. “You won’t regret helping him.”

  “She doesn’t regret helping anyone,” muttered Anna. “She even saved James.”

  “Aurora said my dress can’t go in the magic door.” The girl smeared her bloody fingers down her legs in a futile effort to clean herself. “It maybe is better. I won’t get blood on it.”

  Althea accepted the cocoa and took a sip, giving herself a chocolate moustache. She sent an urgent look at Aurora, forced a weak smile at Aaron, and gazed into her lap. The towel slipped down an inch or so, though she didn’t seem concerned whatsoever at it. Aurora leaned down to fix it back in place.

  “Ironic,” muttered Anna.

  Aaron couldn’t look away from the angel-faced tween clutching a cup of hot chocolate in two bloody hands. She had to be somewhere between nine and eleven, seemed half-starved, and exhausted.

  “Dead material won’t cross over,” said Aurora. “We didn’t have a lot of time to get here.”

  Anna looked up. “Wait, you mean to tell me you could’ve pinched the sprog at any time?” She turned red in the face. “All that running around… the tramps… that clawed monstrosity… You―”

  “No.” Aurora ran her fingers through the girl’s hair in a repetitive soothing motion. “She would have had to be willing to go with me. I can’t force people. I could bring her across, but if she didn’t want to go with me, she’d just pop right back out.”