by Therin Knite
Knowing her?
Both.
I unpack all the gear in my trunk, including three rifles, four handguns, two boxes of combat gear, all my drawings of the Heights, the printed pictures, and a heavy, thick briefcase with sixteen explosive devices inside. Reggie’s eyes bug out when he notices the case, and he puts a safe distance between himself and a few small squares that could render him a few hundred charred hunks of flesh.
"Where the hell did you get all this crap, Marco?"
"Some of it I stole. Some of it I made. Some of it I procured through personal resources. I have buddies, too, Reggie, and not all of them run the straight and narrow."
There’s a flicker of disappointment in his expression. "Careful, Marco. You’re starting to sound like you’re eighteen again."
"Maybe I should be, under the circumstances."
"No." He raises a hand but doesn’t touch me. It hovers, trembling, in the air. "Don’t even suggest that. The place you were in then—before you met Anise—was darker than any place you have ever been since. Including where you are now. You don’t want to be that guy again."
"I want to kill Q."
"That’s beside the point."
"No, it isn’t. I want to kill Q like I killed—"
"Don’t go there!" His voice echoes through the parking garage, rebounds off stone columns, disturbs puddles of stagnant water. He’s quaking, head to toe. "Don’t go there. Ever again. Don’t think about it. Don’t speak about it. Don’t."
I drum my fingers against the rim of the trunk and try to ignore the ache in my chest. The ache and the burn. One for the pain I’m causing my best friend. The other for the pain I want to inflict on Q. "Are you afraid of me, Reggie?"
"No," he says and means it, "I’m afraid for you."
He lifts the combat gear boxes, places himself about twenty steps behind me, and speaks no more. To me. But I’m pretty sure I hear him swearing like a sailor several times during our short trip. I lead him through a maze of abandoned buildings toward a base location I selected using my Jackson City maps: a six-story tenement building. Close enough to the Heights for quick and easy access. Far enough away to run if anything goes wrong.
The Dead Divide lives up to its name. We run into no one on our way to the building. Granted, we’re sneaking around through alleys and crossing the streets only when they’ve been checked for signs of patrolman activity, but still, the complete silence is unnerving. Not even the Heights itself makes a sound. The Sims Center, which towers over the rest of Jackson City by several stories, sits quiet. As if there isn’t a single human soul inside.
Q doesn’t count.
He’s a monster.
Instead of entering through a ground-level door, Reggie and I ascend the fire escape. It takes us about half an hour to haul the equipment to the fourth floor, which keeps us beneath the sight of the nearby guard towers. There’s an empty studio apartment next to the escape, the window already broken. I climb over the pane, avoiding the jagged glass, and inspect the musty room. Mold. Dirt. Bugs. Standard fare for a squat, I’ve learned.
Reggie enters with the combat gear and drops it on a filthy box spring. He digs a bulletproof shirt out of the clothing pile and offers it to me. "Since we’re in the danger zone, it’s best to be prepared."
"Of course." I accept the shirt, and my hand brushes Reggie’s. His palms are sweaty.
Odd. Rarely does Reggie sweat from nervousness. Even during our formative years, he was cool under pressure. Is the situation that stressful for him? Has the prospect of my death left him so shaken? Or is it from the fatigue? The running and hurting and starving and living in the gutter. I can’t tell.
I’ve long lost track of what "stress" means to the average person.
As I’m tugging the shirt over my torso, I examine him more closely. He’s busy sifting through the combat gear boxes, tossing aside pants and boots and various joint guards. Looking for another shirt, maybe? Every few moments, he glances out the window. Subtly. The way he’s standing, it’s difficult for me to spot such an understated motion. I wouldn’t have noticed if it hadn’t been for his sweaty palms.
Some damaged puzzle pieces start clicking into place. My chest tightens. I think back to the previous couple of days. The patrolmen haven’t ambushed me once since I ran into Reggie, even though I know they must have been following him after he escaped from their clutches. In fact, despite being forced to drive down several roads in wide, flat areas, there haven’t been any signs—not cars, not search helicopters—of pursuit by Q’s forces. Add that in with Reggie’s refusal to explain what Q told him about the Heights...
I bend down to the foot of the box spring, grab a handgun and my IED detonator from the weapons stack, and take three steps away from my best friend.
"Reggie, you—"
He darts across the room, cups my cheeks, and places himself between my body and the window. He stares into my eyes. Apologetic. Afraid. "Sorry. So sorry. There was no other way. If I’d told you on the way here and you’d changed course, they would have chased us down. They were too close. So I had to wait, you see, wait until you were in a fortified place with protection. A place where you knew the terrain. A place where you knew every avenue of escape."
"Reggie..."
"I didn’t get away, Marco. He put a tracker in my splint and released me in the woods near your location. I wanted to tell you, but I knew he was watching. Waiting. He wanted you here. Knew you were coming. He wanted to take you out once and for all, using me as bait. To lure you into the open where the patrolmen could easily gun you down. But, you see, I didn’t do that. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t." His breath catches. "Sorry. Sorry. So sorry. I’m so fucking sorry." He violently pushes me away from him, toward the door of the apartment. "Now run, you stupid bastard! Run as fast as you can r—!"
The sniper’s bullet bores a hole through the middle of his chest and comes to rest as a piece of bent metal against my armored shirt.
Reggie falls.
10
Quentin
( 2 Years Ago )
I’m watching the lead patrolman’s feed at my desk. Martin, released back into the "wild," acted as he promised he would. Flagged down Salt. Rode with him into the city. The tracker in his splint is active, relaying his location with an accuracy of two feet. Despite his undying loyalty to his friend, he agreed to help me kill the man. And by "agreed," I mean he made a halfhearted show of pretending I’d convinced him of the value of my efforts to murder his friend so that I would free him from captivity.
That was never the point, however, convincing him to betray Salt intentionally. The whole idea behind explaining the Heights’s purpose was to confuse him, to leave him emotionally compromised, to diminish his capacity to make logical decisions in the face of further adversity. And my, didn’t it work beautifully? He’s done all the wrong things to protect Salt and everything to damn him.
If only Howard understood the craftiness of such a tactic.
Speaking of Howard, his face is on my window again. He’s been silently watching me since the patrolmen began to close in on Salt’s location. A derelict tenement building. The lead patrolman is waiting in front of an abandoned jewelry store, searching for signs of activity in the fourth-floor apartment where Salt is preparing some sort of attack on the community.
"Quentin."
"Yes, Howard?"
"Why did you tell him about me?"
"Is this the time to discuss such things?"
"You have never told anyone about me. It is dangerous. You should not have done so."
"He’s not going to tell Salt."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I do."
"He will betray you. He will protect his friend."
"Yes. I think so, too."
The lead patrolman signals for the group to surround the tenement. Several of them sneak toward the fire escape that Salt and Martin used to access the apartment.
"Then why allow him to do t
his?"
"Because he’s conflicted. He won’t act in my best interests, but he won’t act in Salt’s either. If he was going to, he’d have told Salt everything before they reached the city. Salt would have scrapped the plan. Martin would have removed his tracker. They’d have come up with some sort of evasive maneuver to throw us off their trail. We would have had to chase the pair of them down and, yet again, hope we caught Salt’s slippery ass. But we didn’t have to do that because Martin followed my instructions." Whether he realized it or not.
Howard’s digital eyes narrow. "Salt is not in an open location, as you specified. He is quite well hidden inside a building."
I shrug. "Close enough. He’s trapped. There’s nowhere to run."
The lead patrolman prepares to advance on the tenement. Everyone is in formation.
Then they aren’t. The patrolmen assigned to surround the building break their orders and regroup at the tenement’s front door. They move with deliberation. Together. In sync. As if someone has overridden their regular programming.
"Howard, what are you doing?"
"I do not like your plan, Quentin. I have another. The ultra-light patrolman aerial gear prototype is in the sky. I have a proper sniper angle. More reliable than a tactical assault on the tenement. And quicker."
"Howard!" My workstation screens switch from the lead patrolman’s view to the camera of someone hovering in the low-hanging clouds near the tenement building. The camera sensor switches from normal vision mode to advanced real-time L-array vision and zooms in on two highlighted figures on the fourth floor of the building. The shorter one, standing in view of the window, is Salt. Martin is rifling through a box on the other side of the room. "Howard, stop."
The readout on the patrolman’s program screen indicates a kill order has been given.
"Howard, if you miss..."
"I will not miss. I have him in my sight."
A cold sweat condenses on my forehead. Howard has never subverted my plans this way before. He’s always deferred to my judgment. Why now? What’s changed? Was it the conversation in the car last week? That was hardly the first time I’ve insulted him, derided him, blasted his decisions. What tipped him over the edge?
What did I do?
"Howard, please reconsider."
"I have locked onto his location. Readying rifle. Shot in five, four—"
Martin dashes across the apartment room without warning. He situates himself directly in front of Salt. Directly in line with the anticipated bullet trajectory.
"Howard, wait! You’re going to hit Martin! He is not the intended target."
"Three, two—"
"Jesus, Howard! Stop!"
"One."
The patrolman fires.
11
Marco
( 2 Years Ago )
No sound escapes Reggie’s wide-open lips. Just a weary breath.
He loses his footing and slumps to the floor, blood spreading across his shirt so fast you’d never guess it was a color other than saturated red. I bound forward, catch hold of his fallen form, and drag him into the tenement hallway as another four sniper rounds rip holes in the wall behind me. A trail of blood follows Reggie’s deadweight down the ruined hall.
Men in combat boots are charging up the fire escape steps. No voices. No hesitation. Patrolmen.
I kick beer cans and paper scraps out of my path, my thoughts in disarray. The shots were angled down and right from the sniper’s point of view, but there are no buildings tall enough in the area from which to make such shots except the Sims Center, which is in the wrong direction. Did it come from the sky? Is Q God in disguise?
I deposit Reggie on the stairwell landing and bar the metal door shut with a thick rusted pipe from the corner debris. A gurgled moan draws me to the ground next to my best friend’s bloody body. His eyes are open but distant, his hand resting on the bullet wound between his ribs. If he’d found that second armored shirt, he’d be fine. If I hadn’t let him move me out of harm’s way, he’d be fine. If it wasn’t for my screwed-up self, he’d be fine.
I can’t save anyone, can I? Not Anise. Not Clarissa. Not Reggie. And certainly not the world.
"Run," Reggie whispers. His lips are red. His breaths are drowning wheezes.
"I’m not leaving you here. I’m not leaving you in this filthy city next to that fucking death camp."
"Doesn’t matter whether you leave me here or take me with you. I’m going to die in a death camp either way. We all are. It’s coming down, Marco. Everything. The whole world is one big killing field waiting to catch fire. They saw it coming, too. They planned for it. And still, it wasn’t enough. We’re doomed. All of us. Me just a bit sooner than you." He tilts his head to view his ruined chest, and blood bubbles up from the hole. "Won’t be much longer. They can’t hurt me worse than this. Run."
"No." I wrap my arms around him and try to lift him up, but Reggie isn’t light enough for me to carry. "If I leave you, who’s going to keep me in line? Who’s going to talk me out of suicide missions, huh? And when I can’t be talked out of them, who’s going to make sure that suicide gets scrubbed off the title and replaced with achievable? Tell me, Reggie. Who?"
"My ghost. Now go." He weakly jabs my chest.
Someone slams into the stairwell door, rattling the pipe. When the door doesn’t open, the man kicks at it, over and over. The pipe starts to bend. It isn’t going to hold. The patrolmen are too damn strong.
"Reggie..."
"Give me the detonator."
"What?"
Reggie’s eyes are clear now. Too clear. He holds his hand palm up. "The bombs should have enough oomph to at least slow them down, if not take a few of the bastards out. Give me the detonator."
"No, Reggie. Not that. I can’t let you do that."
"Excuse me? Since when do you let me do anything? You’ve got it backwards, buddy. Now give me the fucking detonator and run. And next time, don’t let Q follow your goddamn movements, Marco. You’re too obvious when you’re on a mission, when you’re determined. You need s-subterfuge sometimes, okay?" Red saliva dribbles down his chin. "Please leave, Marco. Please run. And let me take these bastards out for you. Last thing I do is flip off Q. I want to. M-Marco...please..."
I slip the remote from my pocket and place it in Reggie’s trembling hand. "Anything for you, Reggie."
A faint smile. "Kick Q in the balls for me?"
"Anything."
"Good. So run." His eyelids droop. "Run and don’t stop running, even when the world starts crumbling around you. Run until you can make them understand, m-make Q understand why he’s so, so wrong about saving us. Run and don’t stop running until it’s all, all over. Run, Marco."
I run. Down the stairs, out of the building, across a deserted street beneath a gray sky that I’m certain hides some kind of stealth aircraft. I’m right. The sniper fires at me from behind the cloud cover, but I zigzag across the pavement until I duck into an alley, out of sight. Before I descend into the sewer that will take me past the Dead Divide and into an abandoned art studio on the side of Jackson City that still retains a heartbeat, I peer over my shoulder.
Breathe in. Out. In again.
Fire erupts from every window on the fourth floor of the tenement. Smoke spirals upward. Debris jets out into the air, raining down onto the abandoned neighborhood.
I revel in the sight of patrolman ash and bone cascading into the sky.
Behind the tenement, a hazy figure in the distance, the towering Sims Center marks the heart of Arcadian Heights.
I intend to burn it to the ground.
... [ Chapter Seven ] ...
1
Georgette
( 2 Days Ago )
They arrive at six AM sharp. Adele’s doorbell rings three times before I manage to untangle myself from her faded sheets and pull on some old pajamas I found in the back of her top dresser drawer. Yawning, I tread down the hall and try to infuse my sleepiness with a sense of surprise. In a normal situati
on, a recruit wouldn’t know her status until she opened the front door to find the reps waiting for her. So I have to fake it to make my response appear genuine.
Before I unlock the front door, I stand on my tip-toes and peek out the half-circle window cut into the reinforced wood. Four people are waiting on the other side. A genial middle-aged woman practicing her congratulations smile. Two men holding a couple of briefcases. And a third man who must be the examiner that performs the physical tests.
I open the door, and, after a deliberate two-second delay, break out a shocked gasp. As if I can’t believe I’m smart enough for the Heights to even look at me, much less pick me! Oh, my goodness! I’ve worked so hard for so many years, and you finally noticed me? It’s a dream come true!
Drivel.
The woman takes my wordless surprise at face value. "Dr. Adele Marks! So glad we caught you at home. I am Theresa, the local representative for Arcadian Heights. You’ve been selected for the community’s next recruitment session in two days’ time. If you’re interested in joining the community, we’d love to come in and speak with you further about the opportunities that await you!"
I bring my hands to my mouth and whisper, "Oh! Really? You mean it?" A lottery-winner giggle bubbles up my throat. "Please, yes! Come in!"
They file into Adele’s tawdry living room one at a time. The examiner and the rep woman sit on the loveseat where Adele had her freak-out while the briefcase boys remain standing. I find myself on the sofa again, this time wearing Adele’s clothes, Adele’s face, and Adele’s life. But the situation is the same, I guess. Me versus those who would deny me a victory.
Phase Four—deceive the reps.
The woman inspects Adele’s living room, and from her well-styled hair to her designer footwear, I know what her conclusions on Adele’s tastes will be long before her mouth coils into that sour candy grimace. She manages to wipe it away by spewing out the standard congrats, honey monologue and explaining in detail what security tests they’ll be administering in order to confirm my identity.