by Terry Brooks
He is afraid.
When a man finally enters the room, he is a vague presence and his features are unclear. He is dressed in white, and Ash presumes he is a doctor or at least a medical professional of one kind or another, but he is not entirely sure. The man does not speak. He stands over Ash and looks down at him. Perhaps he is deciding something. It is difficult to tell.
Abruptly, Ash is walking down another endless corridor of closed doors. This time there is definitely someone walking beside him. He recognizes the white medical coat, but without looking up at his companion’s face, he cannot know who it is. And he cannot look. Will not look. He wants to, but his mind is telling him not to. Instead, he must concentrate on traversing this corridor to whatever waits at its end.
Because something is about to be done to him.
He will be changed in a way he does not fully understand.
Reassuring words are whispered in his ear, but they only frighten him more. A violation is about to take place. An intrusion will be made into his body, and no amount of reassurance can dispel how this makes him feel.
The scene shifts. He is in an operating room, lying on a medical table atop a cushioned, sheet-wrapped pad. His clothes are gone, and he wears a patient’s white dressing gown. Bright lights beam down on him, blinding him, forcing him to squint. There are hands on him, probing. But his thoughts are scattered and unclear; he is sleepier than ever. He thinks he should not be, that it is dangerous to be sleepy, to be muddled about what is happening. Because something is being done to him, and he is not at all sure it is good.
More words are spoken, soft and comforting, but confusing too. The words linger momentarily, and then he slides into darkness, adrift on a raft of numbers and words and symbols. Where did they come from? They are long and complex, a tangle of equations and explanations, but he knows he needs to remember them. He thinks he has seen them before. They mean something to him, and he desperately wants to know what that something is.
He nearly wakes this time, the insistence of his determination to understand what is happening propelling him out of his sleep. But when he wavers, exhaustion pulls him back down, and he sleeps anew.
Still, he dreams. Bright lights continue to shine from overhead. He can hear the soft hum of machinery. The figure standing next to him braces against the table with his hands gripping the cushion and leans down. Soothing words are whispered, telling him it will be all right, everything will work out. He believes the man. The words and the voice convince him.
They should. They belong to his father.
A soft beeping wakes him. His father and the operating room fade, and the dream vanishes. He drifts in darkness, the beeping a slow and persistent presence.
When he is sufficiently awake to do so, he sits up in his bed drowsily, reorienting himself to where he is. The beeping, he realizes, is coming from his vidview. Since fleeing his home for Street Freaks, he has received only one communication—the one from Cay on the day of the Sprint about ProLx. Otherwise, nothing has come in or gone out. He has barely thought about his vidview in weeks.
He glances over at Woodrow, parked in his usual corner of the sleeping room. The beeping hasn’t woken him. The room now belongs to just the two of them.
Because T.J. is never coming back.
As much to silence the beeping as to find out who is calling, he presses the node embedded behind his left ear and activates the message. A familiar face springs into view on the air screen directly in front of him.
Cay—and her expression is frantic.
GET OUT. ACHILLES POD IS COMING.
The screen goes blank. He is reminded instantly of his father’s last message. For a moment, he doesn’t move, remembering. Then he leaps from his bed, pulls on his clothes, nudges Woodrow awake, and charges down the hallway to the women’s sleeping room. He is fully awake now and moving quickly. He flings open the door without knocking and rushes in. Jenny is sitting up in bed, reading from a screen. Holly wakes the moment the door opens, eyes fixing on him.
“We have to get out of here,” he whispers, half afraid that whoever is coming might be close enough to hear. “Cay sent me a vidview. Achilles Pod is coming.”
Jenny is already climbing out of bed. Her voice is calm, her words measured. “Go down and see if you can spot anyone outside. Holly, get Woodrow. Take him downstairs. Open the door to the underground and wait for us to join you.”
They are all moving quickly now, not panicked yet but well on the way. Holly is pulling on a suit of body armor over her sleep clothes. Seconds later, she is on her way to fetch Woodrow from his bedroom. Ash follows her out the door, heading for the stairs leading down to the bays, intent on discovering how imminent the danger is.
He finds out quickly. He is halfway to the bottom of the stairs when he hears the horrendous crash that takes out the front gates. Through the front windows he sees a massive assault vehicle lumber into view. As Jenny stumbles down behind him, the AV shoves its way through the wreckage of the gates and rumbles toward the building. It is already at their front door by the time Holly catches up, bearing Woodrow in her arms. Terrified now, they hurry to reach the maintenance closet and the secret passage that leads to the underground. They are still a dozen feet away when escape hatches pop open on the AV to disgorge the black-clads of Achilles Pod.
Holly shoves Woodrow at Ash and pushes past him.
“We need more time!” she snaps over her shoulder.
She reaches a locked cabinet fastened to the wall and yanks the lock off with a single wrenching motion. Reaching inside, she brings out an assault weapon. It looks incredibly heavy, but she handles it with ease, releasing the safety, pulling back the charging lever, and swinging it about. Ash has no idea what it does, but as their attackers arrive at the entrance to the building bearing a portable battering ram, Holly faces them from across the room.
“Get out of here!” she hisses at him.
Jenny appears, and together they move toward the maintenance closet, their arms wrapped tightly around Woodrow, bearing his weight together. They are just inside the tiny room when the front door gives way. He shudders at the sound. It is the attack on his home all over again. These intruders are every bit as lethal and relentless as the Hazmats he faced when he fled the sky tower. Then, he believed he could find safety here. Now, he knows there is no safety to be found anywhere. Not for him. Not for any of them.
Carrying Woodrow, he and Jenny go through the trapdoor. At the bottom of the stairs, after setting the bot boy down, he thinks of Holly, facing their attackers alone, and runs back up the stairs to help her. He hears her weapon firing, a series of staccato grunts that end in sharp explosions. Smoke and gas fill the air with a choking, stomach-wrenching stench. He cannot see anything. A moment later, Holly is next to him, the weapon abandoned. She pulls him after her as she slams the maintenance closet door shut. Her face is flushed with excitement and streaked with smoky grit.
“Coming to help me, were you? With no weapon?” Her grin is fierce. “You’re no fish, Ash Collins. Never were. Come on!”
Holly pushes him ahead of her down the stairs, closing the trapdoor and throwing the magnetic locks. Sweeping up Jenny and Woodrow, they hurry over to where the Barrier Ram is parked and scramble aboard.
“Drive, Ash,” Jenny orders. “Stay calm.”
She joins him in the front seat while Holly remains in the back cradling Woodrow in her arms like a baby. Ash powers up the Barrier Ram, its engine a nearly silent hum. No one attempts to break through the trapdoor. Ash feels his pulse begin to slow and his heart steady. It won’t be so bad this time, he thinks. He won’t have to fight to get free.
The heavy door leading out rolls up as Jenny triggers a release, and abruptly they are through the opening and barreling down the tunnel, the ceiling lights barely sufficient to show them the way. Behind them, the door closes. Ash increases their speed. He is unfamiliar with the Barrier Ram and sweeps too close to the walls. But only once does Jenny caution
him, her voice soft and reassuring. Then they are climbing the ramp leading out of the tunnel and into the warehouse. They pull to a stop inside the sliding doors that front the Straightaway, and Holly sets Woodrow down and leaps out.
“Stay here,” she orders. “Let me see what’s happening.”
She hurries over to a platform ladder and climbs high enough to be able to see out through the windows. She stands there a long time while the others wait.
“Cyrus must have found out I’m not dead,” Ash whispers to Jenny. “Maybe he knows the truth.”
She pauses. “Even so, this was awfully quick. I was sure they would wait a day or so before acting, even once they found out the truth. Makes me wonder what happened to change things.”
Ash shakes his head. The databases available to the U.T. are vast and comprehensive. Not much escapes the dragnet that gathers up information on the citizens within its jurisdictional scope. Jenny, Holly, himself—even Woodrow—their files were lodged in there somewhere. Only a single recognizable thread is needed to unweave the whole tapestry of their identities.
“Their security system,” Jenny says suddenly. “That’s how. The computers must have detected my hack into BioGen’s files and tracked it back to Street Freaks. And I thought I was being so careful. All they had to do was match us to the governmental database.” She seems disgusted. “I went too far. I should have done a better job of covering my tracks.”
“Maybe it wasn’t you,” Ash says quietly. “Maybe the Shoe decided to try to save himself by calling my uncle and telling him to come collect me,” Ash says quietly.
Jenny nods. “There’s that. Guess he’s decided to disown us.”
Holly is climbing down off the platform ladder and walking back to join them. “You can get out now,” she says. “Achilles Pod seems to be done poking around. They’re already climbing back into their AVs and driving off.”
“Then we can go back?” Woodrow asks.
Holly shakes her head. “Not yet. They’ve sealed off the building. They might have left a few men behind. There’s an assault vehicle sitting outside the gates. We’ll have to wait them out. We need to be patient.”
“Maybe Ash can contact Cay,” Woodrow says.
“No,” Jenny replies at once. “He can’t risk a trace. Not if they know who we are, and by now I expect they do. We have to wait for her to contact him.
“If they don’t find her first.” Holly doesn’t sound happy. “They’ll be looking for her too.”
“Maybe not. I’m not sure they even know about her. She was gone most of the time.” Jenny looks troubled nevertheless. “Unless the Shoe gave them her name too.”
“We can take turns standing watch,” Holly says, ignoring her. “I’ll go first. Everyone else stick close to the Barrier Ram. I want us prepared to get out of here in a hurry.”
She goes back to her post, leaving the other three still sitting inside the vehicle. After a few minutes, Woodrow asks to be lifted down. Ash manages, but only barely, frustrated by his clumsiness as twice he nearly drops the boy.
“Don’t worry,” Woodrow says cheerfully after he is safely deposited on the warehouse floor. “Everyone but Holly has trouble moving me around. I make people clumsy.”
Ash sits down next to him while Jenny remains in the vehicle, engaged in working on her computer, perhaps searching for better answers about what has happened. When Ash thinks to check on her a few minutes later, she looks up long enough to reassure him that things are fine. She is using a blind link that can’t be traced back to start blogging about what BioGen might be doing with street kids. She chooses her sites carefully, and she covers her tracks. She can’t take it too far because she isn’t certain herself what BioGen’s end game is supposed to be. But she can suggest that kids are dying, and that’s more than enough to get a major online conversation going.
Ash sits back down beside Woodrow.
“Jenny’s starting an online response to kids dying at BioGen,” he says. “She thinks we need to trigger an awareness in the population now, just in case anything happens to us. Maybe someone in a position to do something will hear about it.”
“People are afraid to do much when they would be putting themselves in danger. BioGen is a very powerful corporation.”
“Well, at least we’re doing something besides sitting around waiting.”
“I wonder where we’ll go once this is over,” the bot boy says after a few minutes of silence. “We won’t be able to stay here. Not if the authorities know we hacked into BioGen. They’ll throw us out on the street. They’ll take our home away. Or maybe even terminate us.”
“That won’t happen,” Ash says at once.
“But we won’t have the Shoe to protect us anymore. BioGen will see to that. He’ll be on the streets with the rest of us.”
“My uncle is the one we have to worry about.” Ash looks down at his hands. He feels trapped. “It’s like Holly says. He’s the one behind everything that’s happened. He’s the one we have to deal with.”
“He didn’t turn out to be much of a relative, did he?” Woodrow deadpans.
Ash smiles. “Probably no worse than some others, if you knew the truth of things.”
The boy is silent for a minute. “We might have to move to a different part of the Territories. Somewhere they don’t look at ’tweeners in the same way people in most places do. Up north, they have programs for hybrids; they have schools and training facilities so we can be part of things. They don’t think ’tweeners should be terminated up there. Maybe that’s where we should go.”
“Maybe,” Ash replies.
But he isn’t thinking about the future. He is thinking about the here and now. That may be all they have time for. How long will it take ORACLE to ferret them out? Can’t be very long, given their current situation.
Time passes. Ash takes the second watch when Holly comes down from the platform. Daylight brightens their surroundings. He spends his time looking out at the Straightaway, watching the cars and the people passing by. He keeps a close eye on Street Freaks, but nothing changes. The ORACLE assault vehicle still bars the entrance, although there is no sign of Achilles Pod.
He waits patiently for a further message from Cay. But there isn’t one. Morning passes into afternoon, and Ash begins to wonder if something has happened to her. His uncle, for instance. He remembers her clinging to him on the vidview. Almost possessively.
He is still thinking about it when Holly relieves him.
Hours later, shaking out her arms and rolling her shoulders, she comes down again, this time looking decidedly irritated. “We need food and water. We can do one of two things. Sneak back into Street Freaks through the tunnel or visit one of the food shops nearby. There’s one less than a block away.”
Jenny, awake now, says to Holly, “It’s too dangerous to go back yet. We’re better off trying a food shop. But who’s going out there?”
Holly shrugs. “I guess I am.”
“You’re pretty recognizable,” Jenny points out.
“Like you aren’t. And we can’t send Woodrow.”
“I’ll go,” Ash says. “I’m the least recognizable. I won’t stand out; no one will notice me.”
“I don’t know.” Holly looks uncertain.
“He’s right.” Jenny fishes in her pocket and brings out a handful of credits. “Just go and come right back. No detours,” she tells him, handing over the money. “Keep your eyes open.”
He nods, and after first checking to make sure no one is watching, he slips out a side door. The sun beats down, its heat rising off the concrete and composite in waves as he makes his way across the surround to where a side gate opens through the fence. Easing through, he turns toward the food mart, which he can already see. Vehicles cruise the Straightaway ahead and pedestrians walk past, but no one gives him a second look.
At the corner, he crosses the street to his destination and goes inside. There is an old woman behind a counter ribbed with steel supports and
enclosed by a protective screen of reinforced flexglass. Ash selects sandwiches and drinks from a counter display and pays. There is only one other person in the mart, a man who pays no attention to him. Ash leaves and goes back outside, taking a careful look around as he does.
Head down, he returns to the side street, walks up to the gate, and slips through. Taking one last peek over his shoulder, he hurries toward the door and suddenly has a feeling of being watched. He slows in response, his uneasiness pronounced. A casual look around reveals nothing out of the ordinary. He wonders if he should just keep walking, right past the building, right past the door, pretending at a different destination altogether. At least he wouldn’t give the others away if someone really were watching.
But he decides against it. He decides he is letting his nerves get the better of him, and he shelves his doubts and continues on. He enters the building once more, sliding the heavy door shut behind him and bringing the sacks of food and drink over to the Barrier Ram. He is joking with his friends and unwrapping his purchases as the side door slides back with a crash and a handful of familiar figures burst in.
Razor Boys, and they are all armed.
“Well, well,” Ponce says, pointing his Gronklin laser from one shocked face to the next. “Looks to me like we’ve trapped us some freaks!”
- 23 -
Ponce teases his captives a few moments longer, swinging the Gronklin from one to another, and then he settles it on Holly and fires. A frayed rope of white fire lances into Holly’s flesh-and-blood leg, ripping it apart and sending her to the warehouse floor screaming in pain. The leg is left burned and torn, the white of her bones exposed, the red flesh raw and bleeding where it isn’t cauterized.
Jenny starts to rush over, but Ponce turns his weapon on her. “No, no, Jenny Juice Box. Leave her be. I like hearing her scream like a little girl. Thinks she’s so tough when she’s got me on the floor. She don’t look so tough now, does she?”
“You animal!” Jenny shouts at him.