Shattered Roads

by ALICE HENDERSON

  “Who are you?” she asked, finding her voice.

  “Rowan. And you?”

  “Um . . . I don’t have a name. My worker designation is H124.”

  “Nice to meet you, H.” He smiled again, then turned and sprinted down the alley, vaulting over the fence at the end.

  Now she was truly alone, her attacker’s blood pooling at her feet.

  Heeding Rowan’s advice, she followed suit, taking the same course as he had. She would take these side alleys as far as she could toward the Tower.

  Chapter 7

  When she got within a block of the Public Programming Control Tower, H124 stopped to catch her breath. Leaning against a brick wall in the shadows, she stared up at the immense building. City lights reflected on the underbelly of the clouds above the shield, making the night sky a luminescent orange. Bright lights flashed along the Tower’s height. The building was massive, easily ten times the height of the surrounding buildings.

  Now that she was here, she didn’t know how to proceed. She’d never been this far away from her station. Through the glass of the lobby entrance, she spotted a guard at a long desk. A bank of floating displays gleamed above his head. She checked the street for Repurposers but didn’t see anyone. Her scalp stung where the Repurposing tool had cut into it, but at least the bleeding had stopped.

  She hurried toward the front door. It didn’t open, so she knocked on the glass. The guard peered out, then minimized one of his floating displays to get a better look at her. He stood up, brow furrowed, and came around the side of his desk.

  She knew that the media officials all lived in this building. She wondered how many people actually came and went through the entrance. Most probably worked and went to sleep with nothing more than a floor separating their work and living spaces.

  The guard stopped in front of the glass door, staring out at her. Finally he moved to the TWR on his side of the glass. The door slid open.

  H124 entered, her legs aching.

  “Where did you come from?” the guard asked.

  She decided to skip all that. “I need to see someone in charge.”

  He leaned from side to side on his stocky legs to examine her head. “You don’t have a head jack.” Deep concern wrinkled his face. “What are you doing out there? Where is your office?” He took her arm and gestured her all the way inside. The door slid shut.

  “I have important news,” she said, “and I need to talk to someone in charge.”

  He moved back to the large desk and called up one of the displays. “Not many people up at this hour.”

  “Anyone will do. I have information that needs to be passed on.”

  He scrolled through a directory, his moving eyes causing the names to cruise by. At last he stopped at a name glowing in red.

  “James Willoughby is still in his office. I could call him.”

  “Yes, please,” she said. She had no idea who that was. As a worker, she lacked a head jack and had no way to watch the media broadcasts. But meeting with anyone was preferable to standing out in the open like this.

  She waited nervously while he activated the comm link. “Mr. Willoughby, someone is here to see you. She says she has important information.” He waited. “I don’t know. She just walked in. I don’t know why she didn’t use the comm link.” He frowned in confusion, then turned to her. “We’ll need to know your name for the log before we send you up,” the guard said.

  She stared around at the lobby. Already the black behind the glass doors felt oppressive. If the Repurposers came this far to find her, she was an easy target right now in this overly lit room. “H124.”

  The guard stood up abruptly. “What? You’re a worker?”

  “Corpse cleanup.”

  He spoke into the comm link. “I’m calling security, sir. Don’t come down.”

  He pressed a button on the floating keyboard. An alarm erupted in the lobby.

  “Just stay there,” he commanded her, coming back around the desk. He pulled a weapon off his belt, a thin black cylinder with two metal prongs. An arc of blue electricity sprang from one prong to the next.

  A flurry of footsteps echoed from a corridor at the end of the hall. There a metal door burst open, and a dozen armed men in black uniforms stormed through. The guard pointed at her, and H124 ran. She raced to the front lobby doors, but they’d locked again. She faced the TWR, but when she commanded it to open, it didn’t. She knew how to do workarounds with locks, but there was no way she had the time right then.

  The security team poured into the room, all pointing weapons at her, long-snouted things with currents buzzing at their ends. She saw another door, one behind the guard’s desk, and ran for it. The guard tried to grab her, but she slammed an elbow into his face, and he reeled back.

  She heard a strange ding, and a voice that yelled, “Wait, wait, wait!”

  H124 tried the door behind the desk. It was also locked. The security team closed in, forming a tight semicircle around her.

  “Wait!” sounded the voice. From the security corridor came a man dressed in an elegant suit. His black hair was perfectly styled, and kind blue eyes twinkled in a pale face with chiseled features. “I want to talk to her. There’s no need for all of this. Timmons!” he barked.

  The guard, grabbing his bloody nose, stood up. “Yes, sir?”

  “You should have cleared this kind of action with me before you did this. There’s no need for this show of force.”

  The man stepped closer as the armed men lowered their weapons.

  “Miss?” he said to her, gesturing for her to come forward. “I’m very interested in hearing the information you brought.” He flashed an angry glare at the guard. “Timmons, you don’t want the higher-ups to find out you escorted a perfectly good story to the brig without even finding out what it was, do you?”

  The guard shook his head. “No, sir.”

  “Well, then.” He turned back to her. “Miss? If you’d kindly come to my office.”

  H124 took him in. Something about him made her trust him. He was good. Her gut could feel that. She came toward him, letting him usher her past the guards to the bank of elevators. They stepped inside.

  “Short ride,” he said, smiling. “Only a few floors to my office.”

  When the doors slid shut and the elevator began to rise, H124 let out a huge breath.

  He studied her. “I’m fascinated. How did you get here?”

  “I’ve got some very important information.”

  “That I gather. But how the hell did you make it all the way here?”

  “It wasn’t easy.” She furrowed her brow. “But I needed to.”

  “Fascinating,” he said again and turned to watch the numbers growing higher as the elevator climbed.

  They got off on the fifteenth floor and walked down a short corridor. He used the biometric scanner on a door, and it hissed open. “My office,” he said, waving her in.

  She entered, gazing around at the immense space. It was easily twenty times bigger than her living quarters. “This whole place is yours?”

  He smiled. “Yep. Took a long time to get it. Had to produce a lot of hit shows.”

  She tried to guess his age, wondering how long he’d been working toward this. He looked to be at least twice as old as she was.

  He took her in, looking at her head. “Of course, you’ve never seen any of my shows.”

  “No, not really, not up close.”

  “That’s good,” he mumbled. He waved her over to a chair as he sat down behind his desk. “So what is this pressing news?”

  She hesitated, then pulled out her PRD. She really didn’t want to turn it back on, but she knew that he’d have to see the animation and movies. She studied him, still deciding if she could really trust him. He wasn’t checked out like the residents she’d seen over the years. She gla
nced at the side of his head and saw that he didn’t have a head jack either. Before now, she thought only workers like her didn’t have them.

  She glanced over her shoulder, half expecting his door to slide open and the Repurposers to charge in. She met his gaze. “I don’t have much time. I’m being chased.” She held up her PRD. “As soon as I turn this on, they’re going to know where I am.”

  “Who?”

  “The Repurposers.”

  He stared at her, a hint of fear stealing over his face.

  Then, steeling herself, she switched it on. Scrolling through the contents, she pulled up the movie she’d made of the animation, showing the collision course of the asteroid.

  She handed it to him, and he watched the animation as it floated in the air above the device. When it finished, he squinted up at her. “What is this?”

  “I didn’t know at first either.” She pulled up the rest of the files, the ones she’d recorded of the destruction.

  He watched them in silence. “I don’t understand what this is.”

  “I found something. The ruins of an old building under one of the residence structures. There’s technology down there, old tech. And a warning system.”

  “Warning of what?”

  “Earth’s destruction.”

  He took a deep breath and ran his fingers through his hair.

  She leaned forward, triggering the animation to play again. “See . . . this shows the path of three objects that are going to collide with the earth.” The display showed red across the globe. “The fourth one is the biggest threat. It’s going to destroy everything.”

  Willoughby blinked, looking down at the PRD. He was frozen. Silent. His relaxed demeanor vanished.

  “We have to warn people,” she urged him. “We have to stop it.”

  He looked up again, incredulous. “Stop it?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?” He watched the animation and gestured at it. “We don’t have the ability to stop something like this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He threw up a hand. “That knowledge is gone. Wiped out. So long ago it’s almost legend . . .”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No one would know how to stop something like this now. This kind of scientific knowledge vanished so long ago that there’s simply nothing left of it.”

  Her heart hammered. “I thought . . . I thought the PPC knew everything.”

  He gave a disheartened laugh. “Hardly. We don’t know anything. Nothing useful, anyway. Just how to keep people tuned in. How to gain more power.” He gestured at the animation. “Are you sure this is right?” He frowned. “Maybe the calculations are wrong. Maybe this is old information. Maybe the person who gathered it was a crackpot.”

  “That could all be true, I guess. But you should have seen the photographs of the destruction this thing caused before. They were plastered all over the walls. That was real.”

  He ran his hand over his chin. He watched the movie again, studying the havoc it had wreaked. “They say on here we had eighty to two hundred years for us to figure out how to deflect the asteroid and its fragments. But there was one thing these reporters didn’t count on.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “That we wouldn’t continue to learn,” he went on.

  She felt sick.

  “What about these ruins you found?” he asked.

  “They’re under Residence Building A-12.”

  “There might be more information there. Something we could use.”

  “There could be. But they didn’t know how to stop this thing either. Just a few fragments destroyed an entire city. It says these three fragments are much bigger.” She looked down at her PRD. “This time the destruction is going to be a lot bigger than parts of a single city. And that’s not even the main one that’s going to hit later.”

  He fished around in a drawer. Pulling out another PRD, he quickly copied the contents of hers onto it, then handed the new one to her and powered down her old one. “Use this. They can’t track it. I need some time to think.” He hid her PRD in the same drawer and slid it shut.

  Suddenly the door behind her slid open. Framed in the opening stood two Repurposers with building security. “We have orders for this one,” one of the Repurposers told Willoughby.

  He stood up, hurrying around the side of his desk. “We were just discussing something very important.” He stood in front of her, blocking their way to her. “I told the guard that security wasn’t required. She has news.”

  “That isn’t relevant.” The Repurposer moved forward, followed by the members of the security team.

  H124’s mouth went dry. She backed up, looking for another exit. A second door stood behind Willoughby’s desk, and she ran for it. The men crashed through the furniture behind her, shouting to each other. She got to the door and wrenched it open. It was a fire door of some kind, opening to a gray utilitarian hallway. She dashed through, her boots sliding on the smooth tile floor.

  “Don’t let her leave this building!” a Repurposer shouted.

  Not knowing where the corridor led, she ran on, the men close behind.

  Chapter 8

  She raced down the hall, hurrying to the end of the next corridor. She careened around that corner before the Repurposers saw her. A steel door at the end of the hall opened to a staircase. She slipped inside, taking the stairs two at a time, heading down to the next floor. She was sure they’d cover the exits to the building. She had to think of something else.

  She went down three floors, then opened the stairwell door and stepped into a quiet corridor. Maybe they’d expect her to rush toward the exit on the ground floor.

  Emerging quietly into the new hallway, she glanced in both directions. It was empty. She knew they had to have an incinerator on one of the nearby floors. Most residential buildings had one on every other floor, and she had to hope this building was no different. She chose to run to the left, but a few feet down the corridor, she saw that it ended at another stairwell.

  She bolted in the opposite direction, tearing past the stairwell door she’d come from. No incinerator in that direction either. She doubled back, slipping through the door and descending to the next floor.

  Cautiously, she opened that door and stepped into another quiet hallway. A line of residential doors greeted her in both directions. She chose to run to the right. She was relieved to see an incinerator door at the end.

  She raced toward it, hoping she could crawl inside the shaft, climb down to the incinerator room, and get out through some basement egress. Most basements had ancient, forgotten openings. She’d used them plenty of times in buildings when different theta wave receivers had been on the fritz, which had happened more times than she could count.

  When she got to the incinerator, she slid to a halt in front of the TWR. She closed her eyes, concentrating, sending the thought for the incinerator to open. It didn’t. She heard it whirring and clicking on, listening to her, but it wouldn’t obey her commands. She tried again, with no result. She opened her eyes, muttering a curse. Of course she didn’t have access here in the PPC tower. They probably had a select few workers who could move around the building. The usual commands were not going to work.

  She had to try a work-around. Glancing back down the hallway, she found it empty. She closed her eyes again, sending the incinerator a conflicting message. She told it to open and close at the same time, to begin and end incineration simultaneously. It whirred and clicked, and she smelled an electrical fire.

  Reaching into her bag, she pulled out her multitool and flicked open a blade. She pried off the plate covering the TWR. Flames smoldered inside, so she blew them out. The incinerator door lock disengaged. Then she replaced the cover, making it look just the way it had before she’d hacked it.

  She slid inside the incinerator
, pulling the door shut just as she heard the stairwell door bang open around the corner. She froze, barely breathing inside the tight confines. With the TWR fried, she hoped it wouldn’t malfunction and switch on suddenly. Outside, footsteps ran in the opposite direction. She used the time to switch on her headlamp. The shaft led straight down to the ash collection area in the basement. She shinnied along the warm metal, past the body disposal area and into the narrow shaft that the ashes blew through.

  She stopped when she heard the footsteps double back and head nearer. She switched off her light, holding her breath in the dark. The shaft was unbearably hot. Beads of sweat ran down her back.

  “Anything?” a voice yelled.

  “Negative, sir,” said a man so close to the incinerator door that she opened her eyes wide in the dark and hoped with everything in her that he would move away. “This hallway is clear!”

  The footsteps ran back. She heard the stairwell door thunk open, then swing closed again with a clank.

  She switched her light back on, chasing away the darkness. She shinnied to the edge of the shaft, peering down into the abyss. Her headlamp couldn’t penetrate it.

  Carefully she swung her legs over the edge, then lowered herself into the vertical shaft. She braced her back against one wall, her feet on the opposite, and began crawling down.

  Steadily she worked her way to one floor, then another. She was down five floors when she heard an incinerator door open somewhere above her. Light flashed inside the shaft.

  “She must have gotten into one of these,” a voice barked. “Send a man up and a man down.”

  She froze. She was trapped. In the shaft above her she saw a headlamp flashing, and the metallic thudding of someone crawling in after her. She rushed down to the next floor and climbed into its corpse deposit area. Switching off her light, she lay on her stomach in front of the door and quietly lifted it up, grateful for the fail-safe built into the incinerators that allowed them to be opened manually from the inside in case someone got trapped. This floor was dim and quiet, another residential floor.