Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2)

by Knite, Therin

  “We’re not going to talk about that.”

  “Okay. Okay.” He raises his hands in a placating gesture. “But hear me out, Adem. What you want out of EDPA is something they can’t really give you—a kind of absolution for a tragedy that happened when you were six years old. Something that was totally out of your control. Something that wasn’t your fault.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Yes, it is. And I’m going to keep drilling that into your head until you accept it.”

  “You’ll be drilling forever, and all you’ll ever hit is dirt, Jin.”

  “Gods,” he mutters. “You’re a hard-headed son of a bitch. And your mental health, on a scale of one to ten, is, like, negative four. I hope you know that.”

  “Says the man who gets blackout drunk every weekend.”

  Jin frowns. “Don’t go there.”

  “I won’t poke your dark places if you don’t poke mine.”

  “Fine. Have it your way.” He shakes his head, as if he can jostle all the bad blood out of his brain. “Let’s talk about dinner instead. Specifically, will you be back in time for dinner? Or should I just make you something and stick it in your oven?”

  “You don’t have to cook for me, Jin. I’m perfectly capable of feeding myself. Which I’m pretty sure I’ve told you about a thousand times this week.”

  “Microwaved chicken dinners don’t count as food.”

  “I eat them, and they don’t kill me. Pretty sure that makes them food.”

  “By the old gods, Adamend. Your dining standards are so low I’m almost offended to call you my friend.”

  “Criticize me later, Connors. We’re here.”

  The car makes a swift turn off the highway into the mostly empty parking lot of a nondescript six-story office building. The sign on the snow-covered front lawn reads EDPA and nothing else, but I know the meaning of that acronym by heart now. The Echo Detection and Prevention Agency, a top-secret organization tasked with stopping those who have the power to make dreams come to life. Stopping them from harming and killing others (or themselves). Unintentionally, as is usually the case…

  …or by design.

  My team, the premier team, Night Team One—we’re the people called in when the designs are diabolical and the goal is always, always death and destruction. For Night Team One to get called in during the day, when dreams are scarce, can only mean that a deadly, violent crime has occurred via echo, one the Day teams are not equipped to handle. For Dynara to call me (the kid still under training restrictions) in as part of the team can only mean she either thinks I’m ready for real work…

  …or the crime in question will be insanely difficult to tackle without my particular skillset.

  The car pulls into the first available parking spot and begins to idle. I unbuckle my belt and pop the car door open, a wave of cold air washing into the cabin. Jin shivers and eyes the distant office entrance, a row of simple black glass doors that obscure a unique security system Dynara designed in her “free time” (so I was told). “I know you know this,” he says, “and I know I say it every time, but please be careful, Adem.”

  I step out of the car and into the swirling snow, flakes sticking to my coat and hair, and reply, “Yes, dear.”

  Jin scowls. “I’m serious, Adem. If you go into a real echo fight, watch yourself. No more dragon spike impalements. No more heart attacks. No more getting shot in the shoulder by your ex-boss.”

  I duck my head back into the warmth of the cabin. “That last one didn’t happen in an echo.”

  “But it still happened.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “Then don’t fuck up again.”

  “You’re one to talk.”

  He orders the AI to take him back to his apartment, then crosses his arms and gives me his best impression of an angry puppy. “I’m going to make you a real dinner, and you’re going to eat it when you get home tonight. And you will get home tonight, in one piece, or so help me I’ll go into an echo myself, if that’s what it takes to beat the bastard who hurts you. Understand?”

  I stare at him for a moment, trying to fight off a smirk. But it breaks free, and I have to roll with it:

  “Yes, dear,” I say again and slam the car door in Jin’s face.

  Through the tinted glass, I hear him swear at me, muffled, but before he can roll down the window to tell me off at an acceptable volume, the AI follows his most recent order and backs out of the parking space. As the car merges into highway traffic again, I catch one last glimpse of him: a pouty-faced child in the body of a thirty-four-year-old man, glaring at me while he flips me off with both hands.

  Chuckling, I swivel around on the snow-covered asphalt and march toward the entrance. When I get within ten feet of the black doors, I’m scanned by a pair of green, biometric sensor bars set into the walls on either side of me. If I was an uninvited guest, a security alert would be sent to the front desk, and whoever is currently manning it would watch me like a hawk through an array of cameras hidden around the parking lot. As it is, I walk up to the leftmost door, tug my Ocom out of my pocket, and wave it over an almost invisible square of wire embedded in the glass. A series of loud clicks signals five locks disengaging, and a computer-toned voice says, “Welcome to the office, Agent Adamend.”

  The door slides open by itself, the biometric sensors return to standby, and I step inside the lobby of the world’s most secretive government agency.

  Chapter Two

  There’s blood on the ceiling, the walls, and the floor, and the god of war is pissed.

  When I reach the front desk, a dark-skinned woman named Cassandra Jo directs me to Neural Nexus 4 with a “Step on it, boy!” command, and I stroll through the high-ceilinged, gray-walled lobby to the row of busy elevators. Men and women in combat armor rush into the one farthest from me, on their way to the “secret” underground garage, where EDPA’s army of black vans and SUVs are hidden from prying eyes. Several doctors in white coats empty out of the elevator directly before me, talking in hushed, rapid tones about the state of a patient in the building’s main infirmary, whose wounds were so severe she required med-four. The world’s second most advanced medical technique. A person injured in today’s level three?

  I skirt around the shuffling doctors and into the elevator they vacated, pushing the button for the fourth belowground floor. It zips down so fast my stomach churns—no surprise; it’s a Chamberlain Corp. design—and an artificial bell dings a split-second before the doors roll open to reveal a quiet hall.

  A too-quiet hall. A hall doused with the kind of quiet that accompanies a funeral, a wake, a ground zero. Tragedy written into the absence of sound.

  My feet take me forward two steps, and I scan the hallway for the source of the dampened atmosphere. At the end of the hall, in front of an enormous steel barricade with NEXUS 4 stamped on it in orange paint, stand two EDPA Security men, rifles on their backs and helmets on the floor. Staring at the ceiling like the answer to life, the universe, and everything is hiding inside the fluorescent blue glare of the central row of lights.

  Their faces, one light and one dark, are warped with pained expressions, mouths curled into grim grins and eyes crinkled at the corners. One of them taps his boot against the floor in a rhythm I recognize as a popular hop-top song. The other man whispers the lyrics, words about happy days and nights and fun in the summer sun. The contrast between those images and the state of the hall strikes me as oddly…morbid.

  And then I get it: someone died.

  EDPA lost an agent today. Mere minutes ago, it must’ve been.

  While I was loitering inside an organic wholesale store making dumb observations about holiday shoppers.

  I clench my teeth together to ward off a strangled sound of frustration and trudge toward the Nexus chamber. The two guards tense up at the sound of my footsteps but relax when they spot my unmistakable head. Despite the abundance of dyed-haired modders in EDPA’s ranks, my carrot top somehow stands
out above everyone else. (We’re wonders of the world, us natural reds.)

  The guard to the left of the door, who wears a nametag that reads Rider, nods at me and gestures to the chamber. “We’ve been expecting you, Agent Adamend. The Commissioner wants you to survey the scene and then head up to the foxhole for a debrief at noon. Your coordinator, Lovecraft, is already in there, looking over the code records for the breach event.”

  I swallow to wet my dry throat. “What happened? Do you know?”

  The two guards trade winces, and the one on the right answers, “Not the specifics. Only that Donovan’s Day Team Four went into what seemed like an average level two, but…wasn’t. A guy named Geller, complete newbie, died on his connector before the medical team even arrived from the infirmary down the hall. His blood is everywhere in that chamber, man. I only saw a glimpse of it as the medics were leaving, but…”

  “May the old gods help us,” continues Rider. “Another team member, Monica Wallis, had both her legs severed at the knee. She’s alive, last we heard, but she’ll be out of the game for a while. Takes months to grow organic replacements for legs.” And you can’t use the Neural Nexus with synthetic replacements, I learned during EDPA orientation, because the modified nervous system signals aren’t “legible” to the Nexus supercomputer. It’ll transfer your consciousness into a dream body missing whatever synthetic parts you happen to possess.

  “If I were her,” adds the right one, “I’d probably just exercise my retirement rights. She’s a vet. Twenty years in echo field. After this kind of nightmare, I’d give up the glory and settle for the pension.”

  “Damn straight,” mutters Rider. He steps out of the way of the access pad attached to the wall next to the chamber door and motions for me to swipe my Ocom and type the passcode. “Careful not to lose your lunch, rookie.”

  “Thanks for the warning, but I was a CSI guy over at the IBI, you know? I’ve seen dead bodies in every condition you can think of.” I tug my tablet from my pocket and punch in the code with my finger.

  Right guard sighs. “There is no body anymore, Adamend. They carted Geller off about five minutes back. All that’s left is what he lost in that godforsaken echo.”

  I wave my Ocom over the pad, and when the scanner light blinks green, the locks on the chamber barricade recede, and the thick hunk of metal ascends into a wide slot above me, clanking into place as it waits for me to cross the threshold. And I do so without thinking, an absent motion, before my brain catches up to the image beyond the doorway searing its memory onto my corneas. I stumble farther into the room in shock, the door slamming shut behind me, and my jaw drops so far from my skull it hurts.

  The guards were not exaggerating. At all.

  Geller’s blood is everywhere. The area around his connector chair is swimming in red, not a speck of the normally spotless metal frame or black cushions to be seen. The shallow pool of coolant water beneath the connector circle is darker than wine and bubbling from the heat of the submerged wires, strained from the recent echo activity, threatening to melt. On the ceiling above the connector setup, where there normally hangs a blue, glowing supercomputer core, now hangs a half-sphere of phosphorescent violet, the core’s shell coated in a layer of drying crimson.

  Every nook and cranny in the walls. Every tile on the ceiling. Every miniscule gap between the floor panels. It’s like someone painted the room with poor dead Agent Geller. The man must have lost every drop of blood in his body.

  I feel a mental reconstruction coming on. As my brain attempts to make sense of what’s in front of me by taking all the minute clues (every spot of runny red) and piecing them together like a time-lapse puzzle. Start to finish. Cause to effect. Normal echo mission to horrific tragedy. A young man with a new job and a bright future to a ripped-to-shreds body still strapped to his connector chair.

  It begins to come together, and my stomach rumbles in anticipation of vomiting at the sight of a coworker exploding before my eyes. And I know I should stop before I let the reconstruction play out like a snuff film in my head, but I can’t overpower my innate desire to know, know, know, and so I’m on a collision course with a level of gore I will never forget in a thousand lifetimes, and—

  “Adem?”

  I pull my mind free from the impending reconstruction and lock the damn thing away in the vault in my brain where I hide all the thoughts that could drive me insane. Then I look for the source of the voice that called out and find it in the form of Lance Lovecraft. He’s standing in front of the workstation screens, mouth green around the edges, cheeks puffed out like he’s holding in a regurgitated breakfast. His workstation glasses are perched on his golden hair, a streak of blood across one lens—he absently wiped a bloodied finger on it at some point—and his deep blue eyes are wide with terror and disgust. He’s trying to study the code stream on the center screen, but fresh blood still dribbling down the glass obscures it.

  He waves a shaking hand at me and groans. “Morning.”

  I swallow my own stomach’s attempt to purge Jin’s blueberry pancakes and acknowledge my new teammate with a matching hand motion.

  Lance Lovecraft is a good coordinator, one of EDPA’s best, and in any situation that requires his quick-thinking skills and immense amount of Nexus-related knowledge, I would never doubt his abilities. But his specialty is watching events unfold through words and symbols on a screen. He sits in a chair at a workstation, typing away, while the rest of his team enters dreams to fight with guns and knives and fists. His experience of an echo is limited to his own imagination of what unfolds. He cannot truly see what lies beyond the Nexus coding.

  Unless his teammates are injured.

  Then he sees what Day Team Four’s coordinator must have witnessed: the sleeping bodies of friends and coworkers lounging in connector chairs, whole and healthy, suddenly being ripped apart by an invisible force. People she had probably known for years torn to bits in moments. People she had probably eaten with, joked with, swapped stories of daily life with only an hour or two ago in the EDPA cafeteria—their lives wiped out or changed forever faster than the mind could comprehend.

  She was probably drenched, head to toe, in Geller’s blood.

  Lance starts to gag and backs away from the workstation. “I can’t do this, Adem. Fuck. I can’t. The smell. The…taste. I can taste Geller’s blood in the air. Gods. I’m going to be sick.”

  I stare at the blood-covered floor, the tips of my snow boots already stained, red footprints in my wake. “How about we get Frederick to transfer the code stream data to Nexus 1? I know that’ll take a while, given the typical file sizes, but you’re not going to save any time analyzing the stream here if you keep throwing up every couple of minutes.”

  He buries his face in his upper arm, avoiding contact with his blood-streaked hands. “I like that plan. That’s a good plan. Any plan that gets me out of this hellhole is a fantastic plan.”

  “I couldn’t agree more. Let’s head upstairs. Dynara’s calling a debrief in the foxhole.”

  Lance rounds the workstation, careful to avoid brushing the desk or any of the sticky wires and cords. “Sounds good to me. But can we hit the locker room first? I need to change my shoes. And wash my hands. And vomit at least four times.”

  “I’d offer to hold your hair, but it’s not long enough, pal.” I quickly pluck the workstation glasses off his head and hide them behind my back so he can’t spot the red smudge. “I can pat your shoulder and mutter meaningless reassurances about the state of your life, if that’ll make you feel better.”

  His laugh is weaker than his words, but he manages to crack a grin as we retreat toward the door. “You sound like you have a lot of experience comforting drunk dates, Adem.”

  “Well...”

  Lance cocks a blond eyebrow. “What? Are you—Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  His tongue clicks against the roof of his mouth. “Got it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is he really that bad?”
His stained hand punches the door switch, and the metal barricade rises again, the sound echoing through the rough equivalent of a torture chamber.

  I motion for Lance to leave first, and he all but leaps across the threshold, gasping for fresh air in the hall. Following him, I cast one last, sad look at Nexus 4 and whisper an apology to Donovan’s team. Those who survived. And those who did not. Then I exit the room and let the door close behind me, nodding again to the guards who must’ve dared to take a closer look when I entered—faces pale as the snow outside and eyes glazed over, stunned.

  I catch up to Lance and prod him with my elbow, sew a smile into my face. “Trust me, he’s worse. You have no idea what kind of binges Jin Connors can manage in a single night. A scientific enigma, let me tell you, that man’s tolerance for—”

  Lance’s Ocom rings, and he reaches for it before remembering his hands are covered in a dead man’s life. Sheepish, he says, “Get that for me, will you?”

  I slip the tablet from his pocket and hold it up at the angle needed for him to open a text with his chin. (Ocoms have biometric locks, so it’s not like I can use it for him.) Amazingly, he manages to hit the open button with a single attempt, and a message pops up.

  It’s from Dynara. It has four words:

  GET. UP. HERE. NOW.

  And I think to myself, as I press the elevator button once more, in a hall so quiet it sounds like death and mourning, that Dynara Chamberlain could write forty thousand words with all the fury she can fit into twelve all caps letters.

  A good man is dead. A woman is hurt. And Nexus 4 is filled with blood.

  So the god of war in all her glory is royally fucking pissed.

  I will definitely not be home in time for dinner.

  * * *

  Commissioner Chamberlain sits in a tall-backed chair at the head of a long wooden table, tapping her manicured nails against the polished surface in a way that suggests she will not hesitate to slit your throat with the pointed French tips if you dare to disappoint her in any way. She wears the face of a high school girl on the cusp of college-hood, but the anger pooling in her wintergreen eyes dispels the illusion. Dynara Chamberlain is a world-weary fighter of fifty-two, and her ageless body isn’t the result of stringent hyper-modding but an echo adventure gone terribly, terribly wrong.