Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2)

by Knite, Therin

  Chelsea Lang does not wake up at all.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Days pass in a blur of sights and sounds and dreamless sleep.

  There’s a glimpse of midday light when a slab of concrete is lifted away from my body in the rubble of the tunnel collapse. A group of shadows ringed in light that descend upon me. A flash of grass and clouding sky as I’m wheeled away on a gurney toward a waiting emergency copter. Voices asking after me, alive or dead, alive or dead. And finally, the sound of the copter engines, the lurch of takeoff, before my consciousness fades to grainy static.

  There’s a penlight in my eyes, and a doctor in a white coat murmuring to a nurse in pink scrubs, who taps away at her tablet chart. A flurry of bystanders near my bed, some in EDPA gear, some in IBI navy blue. Briggs is a looming shadow, his features blurred by my damaged eyes, and Weiss, at his side, is no more than a fair-haired ghost. Dynara and Chai and Murrough and Lance whisk in and out of my hospital room again and again, and I can’t tell whether their visits occur two hours apart or six or twelve, or whether they only stop by once a day to wish me well.

  There’s a feeling of weightlessness brought on by my meds, a darkness at the edge of distorted vision, a soft murmur of a nurse explaining the surgeries I need, the med-four procedures, the recovery times. Harsh fluorescents flash over my head in quick succession, and I’m vaguely aware I’m being wheeled down a hall toward a surgery room. And then there’s a surgeon, dressed to the nines in sterile wear, who promises me everything looks good, and the surgery is low risk. I’m so far out of the world, I don’t even comprehend what body part the surgery is for.

  Finally, after infinite hours and infinite days in a hazy world I cannot grasp with my damaged, brilliant brain—I wake up. Truly wake up.

  I’m in a hospital bed with the sheets pulled up to my chest, an IV in one hand. Pain medication seeps into my veins from a self-access medicuff on my right wrist, but it’s either weak or non-narcotic because my mind doesn’t feel fuzzy and my limbs aren’t too slow. My entire body aches, though, a monotonous, dull throbbing sensation, like someone beat every inch of my skin with a blunt object. The aftereffects of being crushed by tons of cement—not a thing I needed to know. Not something I’ll soon forget.

  My lids are lead heavy, but I’m strong enough to keep them raised, and I scan the room around me for signs of what’s happened since I brought the tunnel down. In the far corner is an Oscreen bolted to the wall, tuned to the news. The main report concerns the attack on the IBI convoy on the Beltway. There’s a brief shot of Lang’s sandstorm, but the info hawk was so far from the scene that even the press crew’s best camera footage can’t be enhanced enough to clarify the image—it could be a cloud of chemicals. And that’s what the news anchor relays. A finely woven tale about an underground pipe carrying chemical runoff that burst due to lack of maintenance. Leaked a massive toxic fog onto the road. Brought down a floodway tunnel with a bang when an errant spark caused the chemical haze to catch fire.

  Casualties from the “chemical spill” and the resulting floodway explosion include three IBI agents and two civilians whose car couldn’t vent the “fumes.” Surprisingly, the media footage declines to show the affected vehicles. I guess trying to spin a chemical spill with the power to crush cars into balls of broken metal wouldn’t fly.

  Someone clears their throat, and I snap my gaze to the left. There’s a man in the chair next to my bed, wearing civilian clothes. But even dressed in a loose T-shirt and jeans, his stiff posture gives away his true nature. Donovan of Day Team Four fingers a pack of mints in his palm and stares at the Oscreen on the wall for a second more before he turns his attention to the redhead on the sick bed. “Morning, Adamend.”

  “Morning?” My voice is raspy, so Donovan retrieves a water cup from my nightstand and hands it to me. I haul myself into a sitting position, minding my full body ache, and gulp the cool liquid down. Then I try again: “What day is it?”

  “Friday,” the man replies. “You’ve been in and out for a while. Internal bleeding. Concussion. All the fun stuff. They had you in surgery yesterday—to put all your bones back in the right order—then they gave you med-four and sent you on your way. Doc says you should be out sometime today, if you’re feeling up to it.”

  I rub my face with sweaty palms and sigh. “You here as my guard or something?”

  “Nothing like that. Everybody else is out helping with the cleanup efforts. The highway and the floodway took a lot of damage. The Commissioner can foot the costs, of course, through Chamberlain Corp., claim the company wants to volunteer the funds to help repair our fair city and whatnot; but the logistics of the cleanup are just…nightmarish. The structural damage is immense. It’s going to be months before that section of the road reopens. Lang’s sandstorm tore it to bits, and her monsters punched holes straight through the asphalt. There are bits and pieces scattered all around. And don’t get me started on that flood tunnel. A goddamned mess.”

  “And Lang?”

  Donovan slips his mint packet into his pocket and leans back in his chair, locking his fingers together in his lap. “Dead. Killed in her own dream. We found her body in another one of the tunnels, hidden in a maintenance shaft. If you hadn’t headed off Anderson when you did, she probably would have gotten away. With all the havoc she wreaked on the road, we’d have been scrambling way too long to stop her from skipping town. Thanks to your stubbornness and tendency to disobey direct orders, her reign of terror is over.” Exhaustion washes through his face, wrinkling at his eyes and mouth. “For good.”

  His hand lands on my shoulder, a gesture of respect. “Thank you, Adamend.”

  “For what?”

  He glances at the closed door to my room and shakes his head. “I know that we at EDPA are out for justice, but this time around I couldn’t help but feel the need for a little vengeance. If not for you, that bitch might have escaped, with Geller’s life trampled under her feet, and Wallis’ legs…” His voice catches. “You did what I failed to, kid, and for that, I owe you. So if you need anything, now or ever, don’t hesitate to—”

  A horrible thought strikes my chest, and I gasp out, “Jin!”

  Donovan recoils. “What?”

  “Jin! Where is he?” I picture him in a body bag, light brown skin washed gray with debris, stained with blood, broken and cold. “Is he…? Was he…?”

  Donovan leans forward and grabs both my shoulders, gently pushing me back toward the pillow. “Whoa there, Adamend! Calm down. Connors is alive. He’s down the hall, another room.”

  My throat struggles to swallow the ball of spindly nerves. “Is he okay?”

  “Well,”—Donovan cringes—“he’ll be okay. But he’s a bit worse off than you, I’m afraid.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Missing an arm, a leg, an eye? Organs damaged beyond repair? That much debris falling onto a human body could have maimed him in a million awful ways and—

  “Minor brain damage, from his concussion.”

  My chest seizes up. “What?”

  Donovan raises his hands in a soothing gesture. “It’s fixable. Not memory damage or personality damage or any of the other stuff we can’t repair. I think the doctors said it was, uh, motor function problems. He’s receiving targeted med-three treatments for the injured bits of his brain, and I think a few months of rehab is somewhere in the works. But he will make a full recovery. I know that much.”

  I let my body go limp on the bed, half my face pressed into the pillow. “Gods, I thought I’d lost him.”

  Donovan’s lips curl into a rueful smile. “I know the feeling.”

  Teeth nip at my tongue, and I clench my eyes shut for a moment. When I reopen them, I meet Donovan’s stare and say, “Sorry. I know what you went through. I should be more considerate.”

  “Not your fault. Place the blame where it belongs. On Lang. On Finn.”

  My fingers run over the controls of the medicuff, searching for the dial to turn it off. “With Lang
dead, is there any way…? Did we get any more on Finn while I’ve been out?”

  “No.” Donovan’s boots scuff the tile. “We did catch up to the Baltimore kids. Stopped them at the Dakota border, moving as a group, the idiots. And we’re onto the rest of the competition groups as well, thanks to Delacourt’s sudden chattiness. That is, the Commissioner’s offered to keep him alive as long as he keeps squealing. But the closest we’ve gotten to the mastermind is his little cipher trick, and nothing in those decoded messages leads to their source. He’s in the wind—he was never out of it. He’s a phantom, the worst sort of criminal, the hardest to catch.”

  Donovan’s calloused hands grip the railing of my bed. “But we’ll catch him, Adamend. I’m sure of that. The Commissioner won’t let a threat like Finn stand, not now that he has Somnexolene in his possession. He could do so much harm in so little time. No, Dynara Chamberlain won’t let that go unchecked. And you know as well as I do that her resources extend far beyond EDPA, beyond the Corp. even. If she puts her mind to catching Finn, she’ll get it done. And we’ll all be the better for it, no matter what shady tactics she employs.”

  My fingers grasp the thin fabric of my sheets. “As much as I hate to admit it, I agree with you there. But—”

  A soft knock on the door, and Frederick, General Researcher, appears in the doorway. “Donovan, we need you in the—Oh!” He flashes a tired smile at me. “Adamend! Good to see you back in the waking world. Lance, bless his heart, threatened to buy you flowers if you weren’t up by lunch.”

  I feel my nose scrunch up.

  Donovan glances from me to Frederick, confused.

  “I hate getting flowers,” I say to him. “Pollen gives me sinus headaches.”

  “Ah.” He rises from his chair and stretches, joints popping. “What is it, then, Frederick? You need me?”

  “Well, it’s just that we had a surprise visitor, and I thought you’d want to see her before…”

  Someone hidden behind Frederick’s somewhat pudgy form pushes the door, and it swings open all the way to reveal a middle-aged woman wielding crutches. Her pants are rolled up to the knee, showing legs that match her skin tone but are far too smooth and unmarred to be the true limbs of a woman who’s been in combat for most of her life. Synthetics. Recently attached, hence the crutches. You have to relearn how to walk when you get a new pair of legs.

  Monica Wallis grins at Donovan, who stares at her, mouth hung open. “M-Monica? You’re…”

  “Up and about, as you can see.” From beneath her blond bangs, she throws me a wink. “And pulling my weight in the relief effort, unlike you, old man. Should be ashamed of yourself, watching TV while the rest of us work our asses off.”

  Donovan blinks two dozen times, like he can’t believe the sight before him is real. “Monica,” he mutters again. “Nice to see you haven’t lost your insult skills.”

  “Nope. Just my legs.” She taps one of her new limbs with a crutch. “But this pair isn’t too bad. Almost feel the same, believe it or not. They’ve come a long way with the nerves. Just got to learn how to use the damn things.” She blows her bangs out of her eyes and clicks her tongue. “Want to help a girl out, old man? I’m supposed to practice on the stairs. But I’m not allowed to do squat without a spotter.”

  “I…” Tears well up in Donovan’s eyes, and he blinks them away. “I’d be delighted.” He suddenly seems to remember I exist. “As long as Adamend here doesn’t mind the abandonment.”

  “Oh, no. You go right ahead.” I mock salute to Wallis, and she replies in kind. “I’ve got something to discuss with Frederick anyway; he can help me out with the discharge stuff. So you’re free to go.”

  “Wonderful.” Donovan rounds the bed and almost runs into Wallis’ arms, and they embrace like long lost friends for minutes on end until they manage to maneuver past the door and down the hall, leaving Frederick and me grinning like fools.

  “Nice to see a happy ending,” the researcher says.

  “It is,” I reply. “If only it could last.”

  Frederick turns his head to me, one hand still on the doorknob, mouth curling down. “What do you mean?”

  “Close the door, please. With you on the inside.”

  “Uh, Adamend?”

  “Now, Frederick.”

  The man swallows, worry worming its way into his face in a maze of lines and crinkled skin. He shuts the door and runs a hand through his curly, white-streaked hair, hesitant to move near me. “What is this about? You look a bit…angry.”

  “Not at you. I know better than to think you’d ever commit an act against me on your own time. Unfortunately, you work on Dynara’s time.”

  “What?”

  I pull myself into a sitting position again, eying Frederick with the most menacing expression a man recently crushed by concrete can produce. “I’ve been meaning to ask you this for several days now, but after the Lang case picked up, I pushed it aside. Since all of that chaos has come to a close now, and we’re back to the status quo, I think it’s high time I wheedle the truth out of you.”

  The man fidgets, uncomfortable, and gnaws on his tongue. “About what?”

  “The other day, I had a fan come up to me in the EDPA cafeteria and say the most curious thing. She wanted to know if I really had memorized all the EDPA textbooks. And, not being one to downplay my skills too much, I replied that, Yes, I have memorized all two hundred twenty eight.” My hands slip into my lap, fingers intertwining. “And you know what she said back to me, Frederick?”

  The researcher’s skin pales to off white, and his eyes bulge out like they’re trying to escape from their sockets. “She said there were two hundred twenty nine?”

  “Precisely.”

  Silence falls between us for thirty-seven seconds.

  And then I ask, “What book did you leave off my list, Frederick? Or, better yet, what book did Dynara order you to leave off my list?”

  * * *

  As I approach Jin’s room with a hobbling gait, Lance Lovecraft emerges from the doorway and pulls the door softly shut behind him. Ocom in hand, he wheels around, thumb already typing a message to someone somewhere about something, and in his haste, he almost runs smack into me. His glance flicks up at the last second, and he comes to a hard stop on his heels, his nose less than six inches from my own. Muttering, “Gods Almighty,” he backtracks until we’re a comfortable distance apart. Then he flashes me a wary smile, pretends to relax, and says, “Adem! Glad to see you up and about. Feeling better?”

  “I feel like I got hit by a truck.” Every word that leaves my throat sends painful shudders through my torso. And yet, there’s not a single mark on my skin that suggests I was almost a tenderized Adem burger. “Although I guess that’s a step up from feeling like I got hit by a train, which I imagine is how Anderson felt when Lang squashed him.”

  Lance abandons his text message and shoves his Ocom in his pocket, grimacing. “Yikes. You saw that happen?”

  “I was standing about fifteen feet away.”

  “Oh, that’s…gross.”

  “You have no idea.” Not for the first time, I curse my brain’s tendency to remember every detail of every fucking thing in ultra-high definition. I’ll probably have dreams for weeks on end about the sound of Anderson’s bones imploding, his brains and blood splattering across that tunnel wall. At the same time, however, were it not for that annoying mental “skill,” I wouldn’t have been able to end Chelsea Lang’s warpath. Tradeoff. Always a tradeoff.

  Shaking the memories of the tunnel away for the time being, I ask Lance, “How’s Jin? Is he awake?”

  Lance rubs his nose with the back of his hand to hide a grin. “Oh, yeah. Awake and annoying. Keeps trying to bribe me into carrying him to your room because he refuses to believe you’re not a corpse in a body bag. Seems to think the only reason you wouldn’t be at his bedside is if you were dead.”

  “Well, he’s not too far off.” I step to the left, out of Lance’s path, and nod at Jin�
�s door. “You been keeping him company?”

  “Under orders.” Lance sticks out his tongue and bites it with his front teeth. “Most people are out doing cleanup or finalizing case reports and such. All my casework is done, and I’m not in the mood to sift through tons of debris and the occasional…body, so I volunteered to be a hospital watchdog for our injured guys. Ended up with Jin because he irritated his first two guards by singing old world folk songs until they wanted to jump out the window.”

  A stifled laugh breaks through my teeth. “Yeah, that sounds like Jin.”

  “I managed to keep him in his bed by challenging him to a game of Who has the better hacker stories?, an old standby of mine. For a goofball who’s spent most of his adult life working mundane cyber security crimes, Jin sure does have a lot of colorful tales to tell.” Lance maneuvers toward a vending machine filled with sugary snacks and starts searching the lineup for something that won’t trigger diabetes. “He make any of those up, you think?”

  “Doubt it. He takes pride in his work, as mundane as it may often be. He doesn’t like to lie about his passions”—my feet shift me in Lance’s direction just far enough to let me grip his shoulder—“which is something you’d already guessed. That’s why you played twenty questions with him about his history with hackers, because you knew if you tapped into his pride about his area of expertise, you’d be more likely to trick the truth about the one-time pad cipher out of him.”

  Lance freezes with his finger over the button for a bag of pretzels. “You really think I’m that damn devious?”

  “Devious? No. Curious? Yes.”

  His reflection on the glass face of the vending machine nibbles on its bottom lip. “He shouldn’t have known that cipher key, Adem. I searched every cipher database the government has access to. I scoured the net. I sent out inquiries to all my contacts in the hacking sphere. I even sifted through hundreds of old IBI Cyber Sec case files. And I found nothing even remotely similar to that cipher. So how the hell did Jin Connors, who is, by all measures, a totally average IBI Cyber Sec agent, pull that key out of his ass like it was public knowledge?”