by Kyle Harris
Kennedy directed his attention to the city outside. For a while he was quiet. The whole office was. Then he said, “Travis, notify the police. Fire department, paramedics. Get everyone.”
Travis pulled out his tasker, tapped in a connection to emergency services, and spoke to a dispatcher.
“If it keeps at that altitude,” said Kennedy, “it’s liable to hit a building.”
Oh. Yeah. She’d almost forgotten.
“Boss?” Franco again. “It’s heading this way.”
Kennedy didn’t say anything. He was watching it. They all were.
At night, and with all the reflective buildings around, it wasn’t clear where it was at first. She thought a cluster of lights was moving, maybe growing in size, although she wasn’t sure if that was it. But she knew about where it was supposed to be.
Then it appeared from the darkness. A Nike advertisement flashed up on one of the gigantic signboards, and the bright white light reflected off a dark silhouette of a hull and wings. The distance between the buildings didn’t look wide enough for it—and indeed, as they all watched, the left wingtip gouged glass, shards scattering into the night like an explosion of glitter. The aircraft started to dig in and veer off course slightly, but then it cleared the gap and straightened itself. The gash it left behind must have been fifty meters long.
Come on, you bastard.
Now the course adjustment, just how she had programmed it. The nose began to pivot around, the flaps and thrusters working together to push it along the predetermined flight path. When it was staring them down, the engines kicked up for a final burst of acceleration.
Come on!
“Uh, boss?”
It was already past the Metro station and over the square itself, and it was coming fast. Seconds away. Kennedy didn’t seem to register that there was any imminent danger.
When he finally hollered for everyone to run and get away from the windows, it was too fucking late.
Over the sudden roar of the engines, Chaz shouted, “EAT THIS SHIT!”
When the Hamman hoverplane smashed into the office, she ducked and shielded her head. The sound of the thrusters and the crash was one deafening noise. Fragments of glass and other small debris pelted her hands and arms, some painfully. The entire seventy-floor building seemed to vibrate underneath her, the shock wave of the impact traveling through the concrete and steel. Even her bones rattled. The surge of cold nighttime air was replaced with a wave of hot exhaust.
It seemed like hours later when Chaz decided to look up. A chrome-plated nose cone was about three or four meters away, scarred and dented up. The whole aircraft had wedged itself between the floor and ceiling. The left wing had ripped a slash all the wall through the office wall from the exterior; the right had been shredded from the fuselage. A moment later, the mangled remnants of the right wing tipped off the newly created edge and disappeared, presumably plummeting all the way to the ground.
Kennedy’s splintered desk was all over the office. Papers whirled around from the idle thrust—which then cut out. Fire-suppression nozzles snuffed out some small flames near the portside engine.
It was a fucking disaster scene.
Chaz heard a cough to her right. Then a shift in the rubble. She grabbed her batons off the floor.
Franco had been partially buried by a section of plaster ceiling tiles that had collapsed on top of him, but he wasn’t displaying any serious injuries. And he still held his pistol. When he saw her approaching, he started to raise it.
She kicked his hand; the weapon went tumbling off behind him.
“This one’s for Libby, you fuck.”
Chaz drove the batons into his chest, ramming the electrodes all the way in. With the lethal amperage, death happened in a matter of seconds, and then she was just watching his dead body convulse from the electricity. The clothing around the puncture wounds caught fire; the room’s suppression system targeted the new source of heat with a foam spray.
She kept the juice flowing until the smell of burning flesh entered her nostrils, at which point she figured he had twitched enough. Once the electrodes were out, his body went limp.
Chaz wiped something wet from behind her ear, then held it to the light. Blood. The part of her scalp just above it was painful to touch. She hadn’t even realized she’d been injured. Looking at the blotch of red on her fingertip, she saw other cuts on her hands. Probably from all the glass. Nothing serious.
Turning around, she spotted Franco’s henchman pal. But there would be no face-off; Travis had been speared by shrapnel from the hoverplane. Maybe a piece of the wing. It had gone all the way through and anchored him to the wall. His eyes were still open, but they didn’t move.
He was as dead as could be.
She picked up his tasker. The latest security notification from Wehrlein had come one minute ago, and it read: TO ALL PERSONNEL IN BUILDING - EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY! CLEAR THE AREA IN CASE OF FALLING DEBRIS.
Evacuation. Hot damn. It was her fucking birthday.
But first.
Kennedy was still alive. He was lying on his back among what remained of his desk. Everything below his waist was pinned underneath the aircraft. That was a few tonnes at least—if his legs were still there, they’d be shattered. He would need prostheses. If he ever managed to make it out.
If. Funny.
Chaz crouched beside him—simultaneously, something skreaked. Like the floor was protesting the extra sixty-odd kilos of her body mass. It crossed her mind that it could give out at any moment. She might not have long.
Kennedy’s skin was blanched, and his hair was having its worst day yet. One of his lenses was cracked. When his eyes found her, the visible pain was lost behind an expression of pure terror.
“You did this,” he rasped.
She couldn’t tell if it was a question, but she nodded.
One of his hands fumbled to grab her ankle. The strength in his grip could only rival a toddler’s. “Help me,” he wheezed. He tried to swallow, then coughed up blood. Chaz just now noticed the shard of glass sticking out of his belly. “Help me out of here. I think I might be—” More wet, chaining coughs.
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. And I saw that they’re evacuating the building. So, no one else is going to come. It’s just you and me.”
“Please.” He was crying now. A loud pop came from the wreckage. “I…I’m sorry for Lilibeth. But she…she—”
“I tried to kill your brother. I had a gun to his head, but I couldn’t do it. Even after what he did to me, I couldn’t.” Kennedy’s eyes were fixed on her; she looked away from them. “I wanted to kill him. I still do. But he wasn’t the one who killed Libby.”
“But…but—” Kennedy winced.
“I’ve been labeled all my life. From bullies, from your brother, from your bodyguards. Even from people who say they’re helping me.” She looked down at him. “But Libby made me feel…like I had a place, for once. I didn’t have to be anyone when I was with her. I didn’t have to be a guy. Or a girl. I didn’t have to be anything at all. When I was with her, I could be my self.”
“I’m…I’m not the enemy. We’re on the s-same side.”
“I’m not on anyone’s side.”
Kennedy looked devastated, like he’d just lost someone close.
The floor shook a little. Chaz decided that she had said enough and stood.
“I hope there is a hell,” she said. “And I hope you fucking burn.”
She found the door in the smoke, exited the office, and never looked back.
It looked like everyone had heeded the evacuation notice—the place was deserted.
There were illuminated arrows and dotted-line pathways for her to follow. It was like the building itself knew she had done the right thing, and it was pointing her toward the exit. Toward freedom.
The lobby was as empty as everywhere else. Looking out front, there were red-and-blue flashing lights in the distance. The cops who had been called on scene t
o deal with an intruder were now tasked with handling the aftermath of an aircraft accident. They probably weren’t too thrilled about that.
Just wait, thought Chaz.
She found her way to the rear fire exit. Peeking both ways outside, she didn’t see anyone in the immediate vicinity. The subtrain grate was exactly where the surveillance camera had shown it to be. She lifted it open on its hinges.
And with her tasker’s light to spot the bottom, she dropped in.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
No one followed her.
The maintenance ladder to the surface put her about a kilometer away from where she’d entered. After walking in what smelled like the city’s lower intestine for fifteen straight minutes, the mildewy odor of the street above seemed clean and fresh. And she’d never been more glad to see stars. She closed the grate, which was in an alley, and went to the nearest street.
Once there, she got a surprise.
What had happened at the Wehrlein building had felt isolated: a galaxy inside the universe of her own problems. Out here, she saw that wasn’t true. Half the people she saw were glued in some way to the accident—either grouped up and watching the building itself or huddled around advertisement terminals that had switched over to live news feeds. Remarks and theories passed from one mouth to another. Mostly disputes over whether it was just a mechanical mishap or something deliberate.
Chaz lit a cigarette and listened to them, thinking, I did this. This is all me.
The scene of the wreck was a busy place. Police and news hoverplanes swarmed around the wounded skyscraper, their spotlights illuminating the gaping hole and the aircraft parked inside it. Over on the terminal screens, the heads at the Trident News Network’s main desk circulated the known facts so far: the hoverplane involved in the incident was autonomous, and there had been no one aboard it; the total number of causalities was unknown, but unconfirmed reports were coming in of injured security personnel; police had erected a perimeter two hundred meters away from the building due to the risk of falling debris; a statement from the police chief was expected soon.
Doubtful.
Just as Chaz finished that thought, she heard them. Thrusters. The acoustics of the buildings meant she had to look slightly forward of where the sound seemed to originate. Two yellow-hot plumes of exhaust were about thirty floors up, directly over her head. Everyone else saw it too. And they knew, even before the news broadcast cut to a shaky feed of the unidentified hoverplane on its approach. Before the other aircraft buzzing around the crash site scattered like birds. They knew.
Someone shouted what they were all thinking: “It’s gonna hit!”
Watch this shit, thought Chaz, smiling huge.
The second hoverplane ass-rammed the first. A huge fireball went up. The crowd became one collective gasp, then went silent as the noise of the detonation reached them. Not a single head turned away. Men, women. Young, old. Anyone who hadn’t been watching before now was. Other than the undulating bloom of fire and smoke in the distance, it was like the city had come to a standstill. Time had stopped.
A baby started to bawl somewhere. It was unnaturally loud.
Then a report came through of a third hoverplane on a collision course with the building. On the terminals, the news director scrambled through source videos to get a fix on it. But the raw information said enough: the suspect aircraft had been sighted coming from the southeast, not the southwest like the others, and all attempts to hail it were thus far unsuccessful.
A moment later, it came into view off in the distance, a dark shape barreling toward the Wehrlein building at high velocity. At first it seemed to be on the wrong trajectory; then it banked hard right toward its target, its wingtips stirring up twin condensation trails.
Another explosion.
With Kennedy’s office as crowded as it was, this hoverplane couldn’t find a parking space. It ricocheted off, the battered fuselage in a flaming pirouette toward the ground. Other large debris—pieces of the wings, probably—created similar fire trails.
Chaz heard the roar of thrusters again—a fourth.
Then, shortly after, the fifth and final.
The city’s New Year’s Eve fireworks had nothing on this. And nowhere near as many spectators. Where Kennedy’s office had been was now a burning crater. The square was a pulsing orange glow.
And it was fucking beautiful.
The chyron on the news feed had changed: instead of ACCIDENT AT WEHRLEIN BUILDING, it read POSSIBLE TERRORIST ATTACK? She thought that was funny.
Gradually, and with visible hesitation, the crowds dispersed. Gossip circulated that Crystal City police had temporarily closed off the skies—anyone in violation was at risk of being shot down. An investigation into the attack—“attack” was the word everyone used now, not just the media heads—was under way. Also, it was known now that the hoverplanes had been crashing into the thirty-fifth floor, into the office of Israel Kennedy, Wehrlein’s general manager. His whereabouts were unknown.
Chaz said, “Hope you enjoyed the show, Libby.”
She pulled out her tasker. There was a spot by the wall, a little nook that wasn’t occupied by trash or a stinker begging for money. She detached herself from the loose cluster of people and sat down. The name wasn’t in her contacts; she had to scroll through a log of messages and connections to find it. There it was, twenty-one months ago. An ignored incoming videochat. It didn’t seem like it had been that long.
Why now? Why here? She didn’t know. And she thought about what that said about herself, that she couldn’t answer either of those questions. Couldn’t have been good.
Timing-wise, it was actually pretty fucking stupid of her. Because right now, law enforcement was already looking into whatever had caused those Hamman hoverplanes to pilot themselves into kamikaze runs. It would happen like so: they’d look through the black box to find the most recent flight path, investigate the logs, and run a trace back to whatever device had last accessed and changed the files that had led to the crash. She figured she maybe had a couple hours at most. Proxies and virtual addresses would impede them, but not for long. Not for something like this.
And after they ID’d and located her tasker? Whatever happened would probably involve a lot of guns. She’d be lucky if she got out of jail before her tits were touching her knees.
But sometimes life and its choices didn’t need justification; it was just about doing what felt right. And this—here and now—felt right.
Chaz flicked her cigarette into a puddle and touched the name with her fingertip.
The face that appeared on the screen didn’t look much different from how she remembered it. It was absent a frown, and there were a few more outbreaks of tiny wrinkles. Otherwise, pretty much unchanged.
Then the face lit up in a way Chaz had rarely seen. “Charlene? Sweetie, is that really you?”
“Yeah, Mother, it’s me. What’s up?”
“‘What’s up?’” There was the frown. Back where it belonged. “Two. Years. Did it slip your mind that long? Or you didn’t have any free time? My teenage daughter didn’t have any free time. I guess I should be surprised you even remember at all.” The eyes narrowed a little. “What’s all over your face?”
“It’s makeup. You got a problem with that too?”
“It makes you look like a…”
“Like a what? A dirty lesbian? Gotta keep up appearances. Can’t let anyone think I’m something I’m not, right?”
The face shook side to side. “I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say it made you look like a ghoul.”
And it’s not coming off for a while, thought Chaz. Maybe forever. Not after the events of this evening. Something dropped in her chest, just then. As heavy as a bowling ball.
“How much do you need?” the face said.
“What?”
“I assume there’s only one reason you would contact me out of the blue.” The camera turned a little; Chaz recognized the tiny apartment. The room that ha
d once been hers and now looked to be storage for boxes and totes. “How much do you need?”
“It’s not money.”
“I hear voices around you. Sweetie, please don’t tell me you’re living on the street again.”
Chaz shook her head, but the truth was a little more up in the air. She couldn’t go back to her apartment. The lease was under an alias, but that didn’t matter. Once the police had her name—and they would if Wehrlein’s surveillance also recorded audio—they had her facial-rec data, and there was an entire archive of a citywide camera network. They could track where she ate, where she lived. They could see people she had talked to. Everything.
Her old life was toast.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty fucking sure.” The f-bomb spawned more tiny creases on the face. “Does shaking my head mean something different now?”
“You shake your head when you don’t want to tell me something.”
“Well, I’m fine. All right? Is that English enough for you?”
“You don’t need to be hostile with me.”
Chaz looked away before she actualized a fist punching the face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sweetie.” The soft, you-know-better version. “When I try to show that I care about you, you always push me away. It’s like you have these thorns all over your body, and you want people to get pricked by them. I just want you to know that I do care, and I’m here for you.”
“No,” said Chaz. “Ever since I told you I didn’t want to be a girl, you treated me like I’m a fucking alien. Like you were ashamed that I came out of your body.”
“Sweetie, I would never, ever be ashamed about that.”
People walked by within earshot; Chaz didn’t care. “You took me to some shrink who tried to convince me that I was insane. And delusional. That was real fucking motherly.”
“Because I needed help. When my fourteen-year-old daughter is drugged out of her mind and tries to use my sewing kit to stitch her vagina shut, what am I supposed to do? I understood your wanting to be a boy—and I never said you should stop that. But you also talked about”—the face sniffled—“you talked about cutting yourself open and removing your ovaries, and lighting them on fire. You talked about ripping your breasts off. I didn’t know what was happening with you.”