by J. P. Smythe
A small comfort.
The bridge crosses the polluted river that intersects the city. Once it flowed, but you’d never believe that now. Now it’s a mess. It’s a scar on the city. a divider that serves no purpose. The ground is too soft to build on—that’s what the museum said—so it stays; but no water comes, only what bubbles up from beneath the sediment.
As soon as I can, I get off the freeway, down a side street. It’s not far until the scrapers, and then I can lose myself a little more. A car follows me—like a coincidence, but it’s not. It stops, the door opens, and a man leans out.
“You lost?” He’s young. Not much older than I am. He’s wearing a suit, tie yanked up to his chin so far that it doesn’t look comfortable anymore. Augmented facial hair: a cheap job that doesn’t look like it’s taken properly, a beard he’s too young to actually have.
“I’m fine,” I say.
“You don’t look fine.” He shuffles across the seat, gets closer to the door. One foot steps out. “I’m a doctor. I can probably help you. Give you a lift, maybe. You need a lift?” I need a doctor. I don’t trust him. No reason I should.
“Leave me alone,” I say, and he starts to get out of the car.
“You look tired.”
“Go away,” I say. I don’t let him say anything else. He’ll scan me, I know, if he hasn’t already done so. He’ll ID me. He won’t even have a chance to call the police—the central servers will do it for him and they’ll descend in seconds.
The girl who raided the Archives.
The girl who fought the guards.
Maybe if they put two and two together, the girl who came from Australia.
I run away from him. He doesn’t shout or try to follow me. I don’t look back.
The towers in the heart of the city are enormous. A cluster of them, like fingers reaching up—stretching to pluck something from the sky. Ziegler once said that they’re like the citadel in the heart of the Bastion. He told me about how castles used to be thousands of years ago. You build a wall around the city and you put what you really want to protect in the absolute middle. Everything around it? It’s expendable—the most expendable parts being those farthest from the center—like the docks.
As you walk between the towers, you can stand still and look straight up; the buildings make these lines on the edge of your vision, as if they’re guiding you toward the sky. You’re always in their shadow when you’re in the center of the city; they stand hundreds of stories high, taller and more impressive than anything I could ever have imagined. The first time I saw them, I thought that climbing one would be like climbing in Australia—over and over and over, endlessly. Ziegler told me that they’re wonders of construction, the best that humankind has ever made. Apparently they’re perfectly balanced. But, as I said to him, perfect balance doesn’t mean you’ll never fall.
I’ve taken too much time getting here. I no longer know how long I’ve got left. I didn’t set myself an alarm, didn’t even look at the clock when I set out. Going by the sun, I’m a few hours in. What happens after six hours? What can Alala do? She can’t see me, can’t pull the trigger on me. She can’t find Mae that fast, I’m sure. But I don’t know, I don’t know. I follow the pulses on my tracker, moving farther and farther into the city. I’m surrounded by people in suits. It’s much busier here and they don’t care about me. I look wrong to them, out of place; they ignore me and push me aside. All I want is to not let them see my face, not let them get a clear image in case they’ve got augments in their eyes—in case those augs are networked. There are police everywhere, and cameras. Anyone anywhere could potentially spot me. But I’m also conspicuous with my hood over my face, because I look like I’m trying to hide something. But it doesn’t matter if they’re suspicious. I keep moving, they won’t follow me.
I’m scared and worried that I’m lost, that the tracker is wrong, and I try not to focus on what might happen. Agatha says she’ll help me when my task is done—get me out of here, a new identity, a new place to be. Another city. But what about Mae? Will she come? Will I get her first? Or maybe Agatha will—Alala. Alala.
Fingertips, nails, digging into my palms. A reminder. They are not the same. They’re nothing like one another.
Willis Tower is tucked away between other towers, like it’s ashamed. Compared to the other buildings I’ve walked past, it’s almost faded, filled with offices that aren’t attended to or that look vacant. The building is from the city before everything happened, before the renovation projects and the rejuvenation. It’s been painted, but that’s not enough to disguise its age and its decrepitude. It’s shorter than the others, stumpy. Floors have been added, struts jutting out at the base, but it’s tired and permanently in the shadow of the other buildings.
I have no idea what to do once I’m here. All I have is his pseudo name, his photograph, the address. The AI at the desk terminal inside the building asks me what I want. Gaia’s voice, just like everywhere else, but this version of it, I swear, has a distinct tone. Brusque—like it doesn’t want to answer any questions. They’ve set the mood to sound hostile from the get-go.
“I’m looking for Hoyle Grant,” I say.
“Nobody by that name here.” Get lost is implied, a bit of programming that pushes you away. There’s nothing to see here.
“H O Y L E, second word G R A N—”
“Nobody by that name here.”
You can’t argue with a computer, so you circumvent. I walk past it, down toward the elevators. But I don’t have a pass and I can’t get into one without it.
The fire doors, though.
“Exit the building now,” the computer tells me.
“No,” I tell it. The door only opens from the inside. Alarmed, reads the sign across it. I charge, slamming my shoulder into the wood. It buckles, almost crumbling under the weight, and reveals a staircase beyond. I crouch, braced for an alarm.
Nothing comes.
So I start upward. At the first floor, I prop the door open. It’s vacant. Why is there a vacant floor in a building like this? This is the center of the city. The important part. The protected part. I shout The Runner’s name, because he might respond. Or he might run. Either way, I’ll know he’s here.
I try not to think about what I’m doing.
But then, it’s the only reason I’m here. I never had a choice. I always knew this moment would come.
There’s no coming back from murder. That’s something my mother told me once—she and I sitting together, watching the chaos that consumed the rest of the ship, watching the gangs tearing each other apart like starving animals. She sat there, feet dangling off the edge of the floor we lived on at the time—I don’t remember which home this was, which berth, which floor. I remember clinging to the railing that ran along the side (so this was when the railings were still there), before they were wrenched out and turned into whatever they became. That was destiny on Australia: everything having one purpose but another use. I was young then. I didn’t have my purpose, not yet.
“They don’t know what it does to you,” she said. Her voice was so soft when she wanted it to be. Talking to me—unless she was trying to scare me, trying to make me realize that she wasn’t kidding around, that something was so desperately serious that she needed to drive the point home—she was always soft. It was for the benefit of others that she used her different voice: stronger, more bitter, sharper. A smack of every syllable as she spat words from her lips. “They don’t realize that it’s not inside us to kill.”
I asked her what she meant. Inside us? Like guts? Like blood, bone?
“Something else. In here.” Tapped me on the skull. “It’s not part of who we are. It’s part of what we can become, and those are different things. We’re not born with it. It’s not in the blood—that desire, that ability. The people here all started as babies. They were babies and then they were your age and then they were adults, and somewhere in between all of that . . . Somehow, they became these people.” Ta
p, tap to my head. “Something changed up here to make them think this way, to change who they are, to give them a different part of their personalities. Do you see me killing for fun?”
I told her that I did not. I had seen her kill, of course. But that was different. That was defense. It was protection, for me and her both.
“When you do it and you are the aggressor, something changes inside you. You kill somebody without a good enough reason—and the only good reason to act viciously is survival, Chan, that’s the only thing that justifies blood on your hands—you will change. These people?” She pointed down to a group of Lows holding a body between them, tearing it apart, starting a fire, licking their lips. “They’re not even human anymore. They have become something else. They’re too far gone to be saved.”
We sat and we watched. There was nothing else that we could do.
I shout his name, but there is nobody here. I return to the stairs and I continue up. More abandoned floors, more and more. I can’t do this all day. I don’t have time and even if I did, it’s likely that the desk called the police or raised an alert with a security team. There will be somebody coming to look for an intruder and I don’t want to be here when they arrive.
That’s when I notice the elevator.
I’m on the fifth floor, and the elevator is stopped at the thirteenth. Somebody’s been here, and they’ve gone up there. It’s as good a place as any to start. So I run up the stairs, thinking about Australia and about running, always running. That has to stop. I wonder if the body ever forces you to stop. Like, actually shuts down. Screams, No more!
I arrive out of breath, but this is his floor. I can tell. Everything in this building is abandoned apart from this floor. A policeman, asleep on a chair. Uniformed street police, but lazy. He doesn’t wake up when I’m next to him, and he can’t when I find the target. He’s armed.
Okay, I tell myself. My mother’s words, Don’t die.
No, before that. Before that. The only good reason to act viciously is survival.
From behind, I put my hand on the cop’s mouth. I clamp down harder, my fingers pinching his nostrils. He wakes, struggles for breath, beats at me, but it’s not enough. He’s down faster than I thought he would be. But he’s not dead.
I go quietly down the hallway. I don’t want my target knowing I’m here. If he runs—and I’m guessing from his nickname that’s what he’ll do—I don’t know if I’ve got the energy to catch him. Besides, he might not be alone. One policeman might mean more. I slip through the strong door, into a hallway. I can see four doors from here. I open the first. A bedroom, beautifully made and laid out nicely. Clean. Nothing else, nobody here.
The second room is the same. This one has been lived in because the bed isn’t made, some clothes on the floor, the bathroom messy with stuff. But he’s not here.
The third—I hear movement behind the door before I open it. Something soft and quiet, whirring. The sound of a weapon, most likely.
Okay, okay. Think, Chan.
I’m a pawn. That’s what Ziegler would say. He tried to teach me chess: A game of war, he told me. People think it’s thoughtful, intelligent, all about strategy and planning. It’s still war, though. It’s killing and it’s brute force; it’s scaring your opponent so much that they make rash decisions that betray them. You win by making them lose.
Alala is making me lose. She’s making this Hoyle guy lose. That’s how she wins.
He’s waiting in this room. He knows. But the room I tried before had a window. It was adjacent to where he is. Maybe there’s a way to surprise him still. I go back, flick the latches, push it open.
I’m good with heights. But there’s never usually people below me. I’m only used to a dark, bottomless depth. This isn’t that. This is alive, full of movement. But nobody spots me. I hope that there aren’t any birds doing circuits around here.
I cling to the ledge that runs from this window to his apartment. His window is open. I don’t know what I’d have done if it wasn’t. Broke the glass? I don’t know. I don’t have to know. I creep toward it.
I can’t see much through the window—too much glare—but I can make out his outline by the door, waiting for me. He’s primed to make a move.
Don’t look down. It’s scarier than on Australia. Who knew it was easier not being able to see what was beneath you?
Breathe. Hands on the open bit of the window. Breathe, quietly. I wrench it open as he turns. The Runner. It’s him. I see the scars, recognize him. He’s a blur, moving across the room faster than I thought possible—faster than I ever could. A flash of gray and silver, of augmented limbs; the window open as he reaches me, reaches his hand out, grabs me around my neck. Cold metal on my skin. He pulls me inside, holds me up in the air as I kick out.
“Who are you?” he asks. His voice is cracked and broken, the buzz of something mechanical helping him speak. “Who sent you?”
There’s no time to pause. I kick at him and he scowls.
“Don’t,” he says, and he throws me—hurls me—at the wall. I collapse into it and it cracks, I crack. My pain, all of it, smashes right back into me. I’m on the floor—push up, try to get to my feet—but he’s already in front of me.
And then he’s picking me up; I’m on my feet, his hand on the back of my neck. He doesn’t know what to do with me, and I can see him now, hesitating. He’s broken and repaired. His skin is peeled back from bits of his face; where there should be bone there’s metal—or this smooth pink replacement that looks like skin but with the wrong texture, like it’s cheap, a lie. I take his whole body in, as much as I can. He has one arm and a space where the other should be. The legs are there, but they’re not wholly original. He’s in shorts and I can see the lines on his flesh where the replacements swoop and slide through the skin that’s left there.
I’ve never seen anybody as not-quite-still-human as he is.
“I know you,” he says. His eyes flicker. Augs in them, scanning me. They’re like Ziegler’s camera, his antique one: the shutter on the lens like a slow eye, closing and opening, whirring while it works out who I am. He’s stronger than I am, I know now. He can stop me from killing him, and now he’ll know that’s what I’m here to do. “Who sent you?” he asks.
“Alala,” I say. I try to reach for my pocket, for the EMP. Now I understand why I needed it. He notices my hand creeping and nods. “She—”
I don’t get a chance to finish what I’m saying. He throws me again to the other side of the room. My head hits something—the bed, the wall, the floor, I don’t know—and everything goes black.
He’s propped me up in the corner. There’s some sort of wire wrapped around my arms and legs. There’s no give, and when I struggle—try to find a loosening, a fraction of something that I can use to escape—they tighten. He smiles as he sits down opposite me.
“It’s an Unabler. They’re synced to you. Touch your skin, they can tell what you’re trying to do. They work with you or against you. You struggle, they go tight. You don’t struggle, they stay loose and don’t hurt you.” I stop wriggling because the wire is digging into my skin so hard I can feel it about to cut me. “You should calm down.”
He pours a drink. Steam rises from it, the smell of sweetness, of fruit stewing. He tells me that it’s Asian tea. Imported. He makes a joke about how expensive it is, how my shaking had better not make me spill any of it. “That’s a month’s wages for every drop that doesn’t make your lips,” he says. He smiles. His jaw is wired; the raised tracks of the electrics run underneath the skin all the way down past his neck, up around his ears. That’s what the scars are for. They’re totally symmetrical, a perfect pattern etched into his flesh. He passes me the cup, I have to lift both my hands at the same time to hold it.
“Don’t kill me,” I say as he presses my fingers around it. It’s metal like cups we used to have on the ship but painted nicely. We had no paint on ours. Maybe we did once. “Please.”
“You think I’d kill you?” he
asks. “Police don’t kill people. Drink that, all of it. You need fluids.” He seems calmer now. “We’re trained to keep you alive. Kind of the point.”
He’s police. Alala didn’t tell me that.
Oh God.
He sits and waits for me to finish my drink. He’s quiet and still. When I’m finished, he takes the cup and puts it onto a table in the corner of the room next to the EMP from my pocket. He sits down again and taps his fingers on his knee: false on false, the hollow sound of whatever artificial material they’re both made of. You glance at him and you’d never tell. It takes closer inspection: the stillness of his face, the smoothness of the skin.
“She made me do this,” I say, and he nods, waves the words away.
“How long have you known her?” He doesn’t need to look at my face to see my reaction. “What has she got on you?” I don’t say anything. “I’m not angry. I understand, okay? We’re the same, you and I. I mean, not exactly.” A flex of his arm—the plates, sheets of metal almost folding over one another. “I haven’t been the same for a while now. I’m not angry.” He has a strange accent. I haven’t heard it before. It’s softer than it should be for how he looks. There’s a lilt to it, an airiness from a different place altogether, I’d guess. He flexes his fingers. There’s nothing threatening to the act, though. “She told you to come here, kill me. In return, what? You an addict?”
“No,” I say.
“I didn’t think so. You don’t look like an addict. How old are you?” He’s older than me. It’s hard to tell his age exactly from the original bits of him that I can see, the lines and tone of his skin. He knows what I’m doing, what I’m trying to tell. “You’re still a kid. Seventeen?”
“Eighteen,” I say. I think. I think it was my birthday a few weeks ago. Maybe I got that wrong. It could be today for all I know.
Maybe I should say that. Maybe as a present he’ll let me go.
“I met her when I was your age.” He looks at my stomach. “She put something on your spine? You know what it is?”