by J. P. Smythe
“You don’t have to tell me that,” I say, “I know. We were chased by birds.”
“What?” His voice trembles, shocked.
“When we escaped. They sent birds.”
“They chased you? They’ve already followed you?”
“Rex shot them,” I say. “We found a gun.”
He slams his foot on the brake and pulls the car over to the side of the road. “They followed you?”
“No,” I say, “I don’t know. No. We escaped.” I see his hands as he squeezes the wheel, his knuckles whitening under the tightness of his grip. “Okay.” Squeezes harder. “Get out,” he says.
“What?”
“I’m sorry, Chan,” he says. “But no. Not if they know you’re here already. Stupid. Okay.”
“Ziegler, please! This is Alala’s fault. Alala’s fault I was screwed over, her fault that I was caught.” It hits me like a fist—that’s where Rex is. “Please take me to her. Then I’ll—”
But his door is already open and he’s already walking around to mine. He pulls up and hauls me out, throws me practically, onto the sidewalk.
“Please!” I shout.
He stands by the car, doors open. “You’ve ruined everything, jeopardized everything. Don’t you think about anybody but yourself?”
“I do,” I say, and I think about Mae and Jonah and Rex, and I want to tell him that, but he doesn’t give me a chance.
“I came here because I thought you might see sense, see that whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re hoping to achieve, it’s over. It was over before it began, before you told me your story. And now you’re going to be taken off, and they’re already here, already chasing you. I can’t be seen helping you. There’s too much at stake.” I reach for him, because he’s all I’ve got now. But he looks angry, disgusted even. “Don’t ever get in touch with me again,” he says.
He climbs inside and the doors slam shut. The car makes no noise as it leaves.
The city looks the same as I run through it. It’s morning, just barely, and it looks like it always has. The rising sun reflecting off the glass of the buildings, the gloss of their polished marble, of their metals, of the haphazard way that the old city has been mutated and beaten into something entirely new—pieces stuck on, changes adopted, adaptations made. People are leaving their houses and apartments to walk to work or take the transports; they talk on their cells, project games in front of them, ignore everything but their own little world. There’s traffic, lines of cars that slow but never stop; they’re always moving, the computers dictating how the traffic flows. People on basketball courts, leaping, augmented; joggers running on the tracks in public spaces, their legs bowing beneath them; tourists from smaller cities, cities far less advanced than this, milling about, excited to see what Washington has to offer. Every part of the infrastructure of the city—every person, every car, every building—is automated, perfect, secure and safe. Every part but me.
This is not my home. It’s just where I am. The glow from the signs above me spills down. When you look at the signs for too long, the technology recognizes you and targets you with sound.
I’ve really only ever known three places properly: Australia, Pine City, and Washington. And really, they’re not so different.
They’re all prisons in their own way.
It’s late morning by the time I reach the docks. I can’t remember having ever felt so wrecked. I’m tired but my eyes don’t feel as though they could close. They’re dry and painful but pinned open by adrenaline. Nothing in the docks has changed since I was last here; they’re still quiet, still divided by a fence from the rest of the city. The fires burning in trash cans; the makeshift homes built from tents, old fabric, debris, garbage; the ramshackle divisions for each person’s shanty. There’s no sign of Rex yet. I’m hoping that I beat her here because I know where I’m going at least. She’s fast, but she likely got lost in the city on her way here. That must have bought me some time.
But as soon as I hear the shouting, I know I’m late. Not too late, that’s all I hope. I see people running as I get closer to Alala’s house, hear the sounds of panic: the screaming of some, the muted murmuring of others. Rex is here, and I know exactly why.
She came here to do what I said I couldn’t.
She came here to kill Alala.
I can’t get close to them at first. There’s a crowd but they’re holding back, staying away. Alala must still be alive or there would be no crowd, no noise. Everybody would have run because the birds would be coming. So the fight must still be going on. I push through. I can hear them talking, shouting at each other—Alala almost screaming, begging for her life, begging for the lives of those with her. I push through the spectators who don’t even seem to notice me and I see her, sprawled on the floor. Her clothes are torn; her face is a mess. Rex has already had a go at her, already taken a lump from her.
“Where’s the little girl?” I hear Rex ask. It sounds like it’s not the first time she’s asked it. She’s tired of the question, reaching the end of her tether. When I finally see her, she’s got something in her hand. A striker? No. It’s smaller. A gun. Alala’s gun, the one she keeps hidden. Snub-nosed, really old. A proper antique. It should be in a museum. I only know what it is because I saw one like it in the museum, before I spotted it in Alala’s house. She aims it at Alala’s head, her arm tight and tense.
Alala is on the floor, scrabbling in the mud. The rain last night has turned the dirt to wet muck underfoot. She’s cowering, but there’s something behind her back—something hidden that she’s fiddling with, trying to get loose. Alala’s people—a few mutes, some junkies—stand back, hands flat and out in front of them. It seems like Rex is in charge, that she’s got the upper hand. But this won’t end how she wants it to. This isn’t Australia. Even if Rex shoots Alala—even if she kills her—Alala’s people won’t hold back. There’s no power vacuum to be filled, no licking wounds until a new leader rises. They’ll tear Rex apart. They’ll take revenge.
Rex might be strong, but she’ll never make it out of here alive.
So I don’t hesitate. I don’t even think about it.
I run and I launch myself headfirst into a tackle that slams into Rex’s body, that drives her to the ground. The gun flies out of her hand and slides across the ground in the mud.
“No!” Rex shouts, but I had to. I press her down, my face close to hers.
“I can’t let you do that for me,” I say. Maybe I shout it. Maybe everything is louder and faster than I realize.
“It’s who I am,” she spits.
“But what if it’s not?” I reply. She’s still for that moment.
One single, quiet moment.
I look back at Alala. Her people are helping her to her feet. “Deal with them,” I say to Rex, “I’ve got her.” And I leap up and charge headfirst into Alala, smashing into her with my shoulder (feeling the pain of having used it over and over again), driving her through her people and knocking them down, slamming her into the wall of her shanty. She’s no fighter. She’s not ready for me and she’s not able to fight back as I club her in the face, my fist finding its way to her teeth, smashing the bone of her nose. Rex is dealing with Alala’s people, but there are too many for her to handle and some of them break loose and come for me. They try to pull me off Alala but I fight back. I snap arms, drive my fist into faces, crack the back of heads on the ground, stamp my foot into the bones of their ankles. I wreck them.
I think I even enjoy it.
When they’re broken and Rex is dealing with the rest—chasing them away, taking them out of the fight, stupid as they are—I’m alone with Alala, finally.
She cowers. I’m glad. I want her to feel what I’m going to do next.
Her face is swollen and bleeding. She’s lost an eye. I think about how she can get an augment if I let her survive—and she might not. I won’t kill her outright. That doesn’t mean she’ll survive her injuries.
“Little girl,” sh
e says, her mouth black with blood and drool, teeth crooked and loose. She coughs, spits up thick red. “You came back.”
“Of course I did,” I say.
“So what is this? Revenge? You want your revenge on me?” She reaches into her mouth and pulls a tooth free; she stares at it as if it’s going to do something, as if it’s not even hers. “You won’t kill me.”
“How do you know? You would have killed me. You said that you would help me get Mae and then you tried to kill me.”
“The little girl.” She smiles. That’s the name Alala calls me. “The even-more-little girl.” That makes her laugh, a creak that makes it sound like her injuries are worse than they first seemed, like there’s something wrong with her insides. “Everybody is somebody’s little girl. You work for me. I work for somebody. On it goes, up and up.” She tries to stand. I let her. She’s broken, but it’s more than the damage that I’ve inflicted. She was broken long before Rex and I got here. “Maybe you should ask your friend Ziegler about that, eh?”
They knew each other. He told me to find her when I first got here. And the EMP: They had the same weapon. Exactly the same kind. How—
She looks behind me. It’s a trick, one that I’ve used. Act like there’s something worth being distracted by and you can get the upper hand.
But there’s no upper hand for her to get. She’s done, lost. In her way, she’s won.
The expression on her face: It’s not that she’s won, not quite. But she’s got hope.
“Step away from her,” I hear Zoe say. Alala’s prime junkie. I look over and I see her cowering, terrified. She’s thinner than when I left here. She’s twitchy as well. Hasn’t had a fix recently—the worst state for her to be in right now.
She’s got Alala’s gun, I realize. It’s aimed at me—pointed right at my head, too close to miss. Even if she hasn’t used one before it would be hard for her not to kill me.
The end of the gun trembles in her hand as her finger twitches.
Don’t die.
Then . . .
Rex’s knife flies through the air, plants itself into Zoe’s arm, just as—
Zoe pulls the trigger, the bullet screams at me, I feel the thud—
Alala’s on her feet rushing toward me, past me, past Zoe, screaming this bloodcurdling scream that’s the sound of a nightmare—the sound we used to make when we did impressions of the Nightman, or what lived inside the Pit, or the noise you would make when the Lows got ahold of you. She’s running faster than I’ve ever seen her, running toward a few of her people who cradle her, pulling her close. They want to make sure she’s all right—not because they care about her, but because she’s still got what they want. They’re locked to her now. She points toward us and a group of them charge.
Zoe flies at me as I’m feeling myself, trying to find where the bullet went in—though there’s no pain, not really—and then she’s on top of me, scratching and clawing, Rex’s knife jutting from her arm, dug in deep. There’s a curious look in her eyes, something between the withdrawal and her haunted devotion to Alala. The others are here as well, coming for me or for Rex. I can’t see Rex now, though. I need to see where she—
I see Alala staring at us, at Zoe.
She raises her finger and points.
No, no, no. I kick Zoe off—hurl her back toward Alala as close as I can manage.
The girl explodes. There’s no pause, no stages of pain and suffering. Instead, a crack—like a bone breaking but amplified—and then there’s a spark, a shower of blood. We’re thrown aside; there’s smoke where Zoe was, a crater in the ground.
The others either don’t realize what happened or think that I caused it. They turn and they come at me. Rex has a jagged edge of rock in her hand—a blade made out of the ground thrown up by the explosion—and she chases one.
“Defuse them!” I scream. “Base of the spine!”
She leaps, trusting me. She barrels into one of the mutes and slams the knife in. He crumbles and Alala points. She twitches her finger.
Nothing happens.
I charge Alala but am intercepted by another mute—his mouth open like he’s screaming in pain, in anger, but there’s no noise from him. Alala’s finger twitches as I reach for his back—there’s no time so I kick him, pivot, and push off. The blast throws me to the ground face down. Another one comes at me, hauls me to my feet. I flip him, using his weight to toss him right into his friends as they pile toward me. This fight isn’t my fault. These deaths are not my fault. They are Alala’s fault. This is on her.
I feel the fire before I see it. Where Zoe was, where I threw her, something’s caught fire. The cracked pavements are burning. There’s a smell in the air of rot. It smells like the Pit—the blood and the gases of the bodies . . . But the air is hazy. It reeks.
Rex screams at me. “That smell,” she says. “On Australia. I remember it. It burned.”
She’s right. It’s the smell of the gases that used to burn off from the Pit when they hit fires.
I catch sight of Alala farther away. She’s created a distance between us. Her hand is raised, her finger extended. She knows about the gas, what will happen if she causes another explosion. The smell coming from the cracks in the ground is overwhelming. Something down there must have broken. A haze drifts up with the smell.
Rex looks up and sees me as I run toward her. I grab her hand and drag her with me; we run toward Alala, desperate, frantic.
Alala’s finger twitches like it’s resting on a trigger.
I thud into her, snapping something as I do, her back bending forward in a way that I don’t like, that I know doesn’t come without a mass of broken bones in her. We don’t stop, Rex and I. We keep running.
As Alala lies on the ground, I glance back at her body. Her finger twitches. I don’t know if she’s making it twitch or if it’s out of her control.
Doesn’t matter.
The body nearest to her explodes. There’s a quiet moment before the flame swells like a balloon. Then it bursts, ripping through the air in every direction.
“Faster!” I scream. I don’t know if Rex hears me. I don’t care. I pull her hand harder, and I feel like I’m nothing but my feet slamming into the ground, over and over. Head pulsing, vision blurry. Through the docks—faster, faster. The flames behind us.
This part of the city should be cold and now it’s not. The fire licks our heels as we run.
I see the Wall. I see the edge of the dock.
I see the ice as we’re in the air, leaping as the fire swallows the space we were just in, as it swallows everything above us, as we plunge into the ice—smashing through it and down, deep into the water. We look up to see the air a glow of reds and yellows, and behind all that, the blue beyond the top of the Wall, the sky the color it should be. I can see the floes melt away, becoming one with the water under the heat of that fire.
The police are swarming the docks by the time we get out. We hide on roofs, paths that I learned months ago when I lived here, scurrying out of view as best we can. We wait until night when the cops go home—there’s nothing they can do now; this is a bomb site, everybody who survived evacuated to God-knows-where. And then we look for Alala’s body.
We have to hide from the police who are guarding the site, but they don’t really care. Dead junkies aren’t high on their list of worries. We stick to the rooftops of the shanties and eventually find her, piled up with the others. There are too many dead to be dealt with in one go, so they’re laid out under a tarp. They likely won’t even try to identify them. Too much work for no reward. Alala’s body is badly burned, but not so badly I can’t tell it’s her.
I reach for her hand. Rex doesn’t ask what I’m doing; she doesn’t care. I snap her finger off and pray it will still work. Then we walk to her shanty. The police haven’t gotten to it yet. They will. They’ll find contraband, drugs, medical equipment. They’ll find things that will support their theories about the sort of people who live in this part of the city. But
I don’t want them to.
I go for Alala’s computer first. I open it and try her finger on the scanner. It works. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I know somebody who might. I put her finger in my pocket and I feel the metal jabbing from it. I remember the other use she had for it. We take medical supplies, food, water, clothes, another knife for Rex’s arm.
Everything else we pile up in the middle of Alala’s home. Furs, papers, books. Everything. I take a bottle of the poutín and pour it over the mound. Then I take one of the devices that Alala put into people—one of the bombs—and I throw that on top.
Outside, far away from it, I twitch Alala’s finger. The bomb explodes. The flame erupts into the sky, a tower of it that I imagine you can see for miles.
Rex takes my hand.
She doesn’t need to say anything.
Not yet.
EPILOGUE
I put Alala’s computer onto the front desk and the surly version of Gaia asks me why we’re here.
“We’re here to see Hoyle Grant,” I say. “The Runner.”
“There’s nobody here by that name.”
“He was here before. I know you’ll be able to find him. Tell him it’s Chan. He knows who I am.”
We wait. Rex is antsy. She keeps leaning over the desk, peering at the terminal.
“That won’t make him come any faster,” I say.
“I know,” she says. So she hits it, smacks the screen.
“That’ll do it,” I say.
“I’m not waiting,” she tells me, and she walks to the stairwell. She opens the door and there he is. Police officers with him and they’ve got weapons—real hardcore weapons, not just strikers. Uniforms on them all, and their eyes flicker with the glints of expensive augments. Rex backs up.