by Nirina Stone
When I feel a slight release around my neck, I take a painful deep breath and decide not. He’s still choking me but adjusts his arm slightly, needing more purchase from a different angle to throw me into the chute. Hot air hits my face and I know I have mere seconds.
Without thinking, I pull my head back slightly so that I can dip my chin down and to the right, under his forearm. I lean in—and bite. I bite down so hard, my eyes are shut tight when his scream shrills in my right ear. I bite harder still, until his skin gives way under my teeth, along with a flood of coppery-tasting blood. For a moment, his other arm tightens like a vice around my ribs and I’m sure one or two are broken. My teeth clamp down harder as I grimace. I’ve broken enough bones training under Sanaa, but it still hurts like the first time.
Then Sheppard pulls away and punches the back of my head with his other hand, but my teeth have a mind of their own. My head jerks forward with his arm and I keep my jaws clenched until my front teeth snap together. He keeps pulling away from me and I realize, This is my chance. I throw my head back and slam it into his face. Hearing a crunch, and hoping it’s his nose or his teeth, I do it again. And again. Ignoring the pain in my ribs and the back of my head, I turn to spit out the chunk of his arm, and look up.
He’s wailing, futilely stemming the gush of blood from his arm with his other hand. His face is a red mess of flesh and snot and blood. Despite our location and the loud sounds of the incinerator, there is still a chance someone can hear him. So I run into Sheppard, my right knuckles formed into a ginger fist, and ram it into the front of his neck until I hear a sickening gooey crunch.
He can’t make any more noise. His nose is broken and he’s choking on his own blood. He bends forward with a low gargle as he holds his neck. I kick my leg straight behind me, breaking his knee, and he lands hard on the ground. He’s whimpering and gagging; a small bruised mess. I could put him out of his misery, but turn to finish what I started with the incinerator. Sheppard’s nanobots will work their little metal bodies off to heal him, but there is so much blood on the floor already, and they’re not that fast. They’re impressive, but they’re not miracle workers.
My hands only have a little bit of slippery blood of them so I wipe them quickly on my jeans and go back to the incinerator.
When the machine dies, I hurry to grab a few books I don’t recognize and shove them down my shirt and pants. I walk past an unmoving Sheppard toward the door, and look up and down the hallway. I pull out the smoke bomb I’ve been saving for the entrance and use it to prop the door open. Here’s as good a place as any.
Sheppard was a bigger dolt than I anticipated. He was so busy looking for me, he didn’t raise the alarm when he lost me. Maybe his ego didn’t let him? Maybe he figured he could take care of me quickly and go back to his bosses a hero? I’m late for my rendezvous with the other Sorens so I stop wondering, and run. I run like there are a hundred more burly Sheppards behind me, but there’s no one.
I run right past the attendant who reported me earlier. Her eyes bulge out of their sockets when she sees my state and she opens her mouth as if to scream, but the look in my eyes silences her.
It’s only later that I take a closer look at my face and clothes in the mirror, and can only imagine what the attendant was thinking. The entire front of my light green shirt is crimson, with large splatters of blood all over my jeans, around my mouth and chin and neck. I’m a mess.
But it’s the shiny determined look in my black eyes that take me aback. I’ve never noticed that look before.
Even Eric and the other Sorens stand back and watch me, the looks on their faces a mix of awe and repulsion and—fear? Is that fear?
I dispose of the clothes, take a quick shower and join them all in the Living room of the Sorens’ secret safe house, right on the outskirts of P-City.
Eric sits in front of the screen and leans forward to shut it off when I enter the room, but I see it’s a news report about the Knowledge Hub and ask him to leave it on.
The pretty Prospo Reporter has a small delicate tear on her cheek while she speaks. “Another example of their extreme callousness and disregard for human life,” she sniffs. The words sound familiar, and I remember the news clip Isaac and I once watched together in the Diamond house. It’s not the same Reporter, but the words are nearly identical.
She stands in front of the entrance to the Knowledge Hub, pointing towards it as she speaks. “Attacking innocent Citizens in their place of work! A Knowledge Hub, of all places, where their only purpose is to share information to make life better for all the people of Apex.” Then she talks about how the enemy’s desperation has led them to resort to cannibalism and cold murder in the middle of the day. She is completely distraught by this point and breaks down and sobs, her face in her hands. Wow. This one will mourn hard for Sheppard.
They don’t disclose that they lost mass critical information or one of their larger incinerators, naturally. That would highlight their incompetence and inability to “protect” the interests of the Prospo in P-City.
The Sorens have since rescued all the books in the small room. They wanted to blow up the entire building, but there is still a chance there are other rooms with other books kept in them, so it is still intact. For now.
“Hmm,” I hear behind me. Commander Blair, of course.
There was no avoiding him during this trip. He was in charge of the intel as well as the Primary team in place to conduct the real assignment while I distracted the Prospo. The real assignment entailed kidnapping four Prospo Instructors, right under their Security’s nose. I was to serve as a mere diversion though my decision to stray worked out for us, anyway.
“How did he taste?” the commander asks.
Eric’s head snaps towards him with a look of irritation. “Not the right time Blair,” he says gruffly. I haven’t heard him speak to the commander, his friend, this way before.
Without turning around, I reply anyway. “Like chicken.”
The commander laughs so hard, I jump in my seat. But I smile, and turn my face towards Eric. He still looks irritated and a bit surprised. He doesn’t move, and keeps his eyes on me even when I shift my eyes back to the screen. Well, I thought it was funny.
Another week later, I stand in the Diamond Family’s doorway, facing a still mute Jerome Forty. His left eyebrow raises ever so slightly in recognition, before he points an index finger to the ceiling, as if to indicate, One minute, and then closes the heavy metal door in my face.
When the door opens again, Isaac is standing in the doorway, his face as wrinkled and kind as the last time I saw him. I almost throw myself into his arms and weep, remembering our last day together. But I stay still and wait for him to speak first.
He looks me up and down. “You’re alive, thank Odin,” he finally says with a slight croak. He ushers me into the house without further delay.
We sit in the employee’s kitchen to discuss what happened since we saw each other. He offers me a cup of joe, but I decline. I still can’t remember the last time I had any, but it was not long after my stay with the Sorens.
I tell Isaac I was indeed taken by the Sorens, but they were not able to use me as a surrogate.
My instructions are to say, “They found issues with my ovaries that are not fixable.” And so I repeat it word for word, hoping Isaac will not ask me for an explanation or details. I explain that they opted to release me after a year of ongoing tests and treatments which simply did not work.
He watches me intently while I speak. I realize I’m talking too much because, naturally, I’m nervous, but he doesn’t interrupt me or challenge me. His small dark eyes stay on my face until I finally stop talking, and bite my lips. He knows, I think. He knows I wasn’t released because of busted ovaries. He knows the Sorens have sent me back here on an assignment.
I wait for him to say as much and have Jerome throw me out or worse, call the authorities to have me escorted out. Yet, he still doesn’t speak, in fact I wonder momentaril
y if he’s fallen asleep with his eyes open.
That is until he stands with a shuffle and a groan and asks me to follow him. He deposits me in my old room, closing the door softly behind him. I sit on my old bed and look around. It is exactly as I left it, the day I was kidnapped. Other than the lack of sheets on the bed, it looks as though no one else has been in here after my departure.
I miss my piney-smelling room on the Iliad. I miss my balcony. But I shake my head and refocus. I am here for a purpose, and I have up to three days to do it.
Mother gave me some ideas on how to accomplish it but, now that I’m physically here, my confidence is waning.
“What about Isaac?” I had asked Mother. “What will happen to Isaac if I succeed?”
“When you succeed,” she corrected, “because you are more than capable of this.” Then she paused and finally said, “Our world is not meant for the dependent.”
Did she mean that Isaac is dependent? He’s not, though. He’s mobile. He’s clever. He was my mentor for a year. He’s my friend. Isn’t he?
“Citizens who are willing to listen, to learn about the truth about the Prospo,” Mother continued, “are with us. The ones that don’t listen and continue to live with their ignorance, or cannot accept our message, are collateral damage.”
I was confused until Eric explained later on that the Sorens took Isaac several years ago to join them. He lived with them for over two years, on another floating Soren City.
When he snuck away from them in the middle of one night, he left them a letter that he was going back to the Prospo. He wrote that he did not approve of what they were planning.
“He left us a long note,” Eric said, “promising not to disclose a single thing about us, as long as we left him and the Diamonds alone. We’ve been trying to figure out how to infiltrate the Diamond residence since.”
So that explains my kidnapping. They found out Isaac wanted me, so they let him win the bid at auction, then they took me on the day of my additional training.
I am to infiltrate the Diamond residence on their behalf, and steal the memory card from John Diamond’s Advanced Automated Diary Assistant.
When I asked Mother why I don’t just scan the details onto my Alto like I did with the Knowledge Hub’s AADA, she explained that we need the physical memory card out of the Prospos’ hands completely. The information on it is too vital and too dangerous to leave with them.
Taking it will render the Diamond’s AADA and all other machines in their network useless. They instructed me to do what I need to do by any means necessary but there is no way I’d purposely hurt Isaac, or Roberta and Jerome, for that matter.
I have to figure out a way to do this, without any of them around. But how?
Whatever I decide, there are less than three days to get the job done. Then, the Sorens are fetching me, whether I’m ready or not. So I sit and try to remember the hallways around the house, and the fastest way to reach John Diamond’s massive office.
Two days later, and I’m still nowhere closer to stealing the memory card.
Every time I sneak past the office on my various little jobs around the house, Isaac is in the room, or Roberta is adding lines to be synced with every other computer in this house and the Summer Home.
I’m stumped on what to do until one fine day when I watch the small cleaningbots in my room twirling, dancing and vacuuming under my bed.
A plan starts to formulate, though I’m not entirely sure it will work. If it does, I will only have a couple of minutes to run to the office, steal the memory card, and run back out to contact the Sorens to fetch me. The timing will be close, much too close for my liking, but it will have to do.
I’ll probably save time if I contact the Sorens first, but I need to make certain the card is in my possession. One of my first assignments for the Sorens cannot, must not, end in complete disaster.
So I capture one of the cleaningbots. These ones are remarkably easier to catch, though they are a more modern, more high-end version of the swift little ones in my room on the Iliad. I look for the tiny screw that will reveal the tiny bot’s belly, and open it up to tinker around inside.
It’s lunchtime and I’m ready. I head to the kitchen where Isaac and the others will be, tucking into their Prospo food. I haven’t joined them for meals after the first day. It only makes me confused about where my loyalties lay. So I stay away, explaining that I need to catch up on my work or reading, or a nap.
I quietly peek in today though, to make sure they are indeed all in the kitchen. Then I pull out the rough remote I’ve fashioned, and press on the sole button. Before long, I hear every single bot in every single room in the house come alive and run on the floors, rolling down the stairs, all heading towards the kitchen. It works.
I see that all three employees are surrounded by dancing spinning bots already. Roberta squeals and jumps on the kitchen table while Isaac and Jerome rush after bots this way and that.
This is my chance. I run, faster than I’ve ever run before, down the hallway, around another hallway, up two flights of stairs, and down yet another long hallway, where the naked picture of Cassiandra Diamond still hangs.
I’m in John Diamond’s office, avoiding and jumping over all the bots that haven’t made it downstairs yet, and run over to the AADA. It’s a massive black screen attached to the wall, much like their television sets. On the right side, towards the back, is a small enclosure with a keypad.
I type in the code Mother has given me, appropriated from a list of passwords included in the information we stole from the AADA last week.
A small whirring sound ends in a snap, when the tiny memory card pops out into my waiting hand. I shove it in a tight pocket on my shirt, and turn, ready to run in the other direction and contact the Sorens.
I freeze in my tracks, because Isaac is sitting in the Diamond’s white leather couch, his eyes on me, his hands clasped together on his lap. I’m still breathing heavily from my run, and yet he hasn’t broken so much as a sweat. How did he get here so fast?
My hand automatically reaches up to pat the card in its pocket, and his eyes dart to my hand before he looks in my eyes. Now that I’m standing still, I notice John Diamond has added to his excessive miniature car collection. There are more cars and boats and hover bikes aligning the walls, hundreds more since I was here last.
“Have a seat Romy,” Isaac instructs. By Odin, I do not have time for this. I move towards the door, when he says, slightly louder but with authority, “I think you owe me a quick conversation, don’t you?” I turn towards him and tilt my head. I realize I may have to grapple with Isaac. I can’t do that. I don’t have it in me. So I prepare to turn and run, when he says, “Please, Romy.” His voice breaks slightly. “Please.”
I finally turn to close the door, in case Jerome is waiting to pounce on me. Then I stand in front of the door for a quick escape and turn back to face Isaac.
His posture doesn’t look threatening in any way, but I stay a few feet away.
“You know—” He speaks in the tone that must mean he’s about to delve into one of his stories. It might be the last time we ever speak, so I wait patiently. It won’t take long for the Sorens to collect me once I’ve communicated with them—they have a small team and a copta in place right around the corner. “Even before the Great Omni,” he says, his eyes on me, “it’s been us versus them. It goes back so far, most of us can’t remember why. We all believe we’re the good guys and they are the bad guys, and all our history accounts support our versions, either way.”
Who is Isaac referring to as us, and who as them? The Citizens versus the Sorens? Or versus the Prospo?
“But who’s right?” he asks, though I don’t think he expects me to answer. “And who will lose the most while we destroy one another? We’ve been at this for so long, it’s like we have no idea what else to do.” He coughs, pulling his hand up to his mouth. He wipes away at something with a handkerchief I did not notice before. “They say,”
he continues, with a smaller cough. “They say peace isn’t an option, Romy.”
Then there’s a heavy banging on the office door, and I realize I’m trapped in this room. I narrow my eyes towards Isaac, realizing that his story, his coughing, his begging, is all merely a distraction.
“When really, it’s our only option,” he finishes loudly, trying to speak over the banging. But I’m already moving. I don’t have a weapon, so I run over to grab one of the biggest miniature cars off the shelf and walk towards the door. The toy has a menacing looking metal piece jutting out from the front which will do nicely.
By any means necessary, Mother’s voice echoes in my head the moment I touch the door handle. Before I pull it open, Isaac says, “Complete destruction helps no one, Romy.”
Then I stop listening and pull the door wide open, the heavy car poised up and over my head. It’s Jerome, his bulky frame covering the entire doorway, a mixed look of frustration, surprise, and anger on his face. Deciding that Jerome wasn’t really a good friend anyway, I whip the miniature car around and slam it across his face.
His head snaps back with the collision while he falls. I bring the car back around and hammer it down, on top of his head. I’m not worried about Isaac behind me—Isaac doesn’t attack people.
Jerome moans and collapses in a pile in front of me and, without looking back, I drop the car, jump over Jerome, and run down the hallway at a steady pace. It would probably be smarter to keep the weapon, but I can outrun Isaac, and Roberta is not a fighter. She’s a hand-wringing squealer. I run to my room, communicate with the Sorens, and make a dash to the main entry of the Diamond’s home without stopping.
That takes less than a minute, and I’m elated when I spy the hallway which will lead me outside and away, forever.
But there’s someone standing in my way, holding the door open while he smiles down at me. I skid to a stop, looking at him up and down, not sure what to expect.