by Rajan Khanna
All this movement is shaking me more than I want to admit. Amidst the churning nausea in my belly as the Juice ebbs, I feel something, like hard, jagged ice scouring my insides.
Claudia opens the door and flashes me a surprised look.
“Miranda and Diego,” I begin, then my legs go soft and I’m pitching back, falling. Rosie moves forward, catching me, and together with Claudia pulls me into the gondola.
They escort me to a chair and put me down. Claudia grabs a plastic bottle full of water and hands it to me. I drink some of it, careful not to take too much, knowing it’s probably some of her good supply.
“You need some rest and some medical attention,” she says. “Only I don’t know that it’s a good time for that.”
“Miranda and Diego aren’t in the Osprey,” I say. “We need to look for them.”
Claudia frowns. “We don’t have much time.”
“Which is why we need your help. And maybe some more Juice.”
Her frown deepens. “I have some, but you shouldn’t have too much in such a short time. Too much of that stuff will kill you, too.”
“Claudia—”
“No,” she says. “My ship, my call. You’re only going to slow us down anyway. And we can’t afford to be slow right now. You stay here. Rosie and I will do a quick search and then bring your friends back here. Then you can all get out. Okay?”
“Claudia . . .”
“Just say yes. Or try to stop me.” She flashes Rosie a smug look and then they move toward the door.
As another trembling fit hits me, I realize they’re right. “Just . . . hurry,” I say.
Claudia nods, then they leave.
I swear I’m only going to close my eyes for a second. Just one second to rest them, to get the fatigue to relax its grip on me. But I feel like it’s longer than that.
What eventually rouses me is Claudia gently shaking me. I grunt and wince as the pain returns, even stronger than before.
“What is it?” I say as soon as I can focus on her face. There’s something wrong. I can tell.
“Is it Miranda?” I ask. I can hear the panic in my voice. “Where is she? What happened to her?” I start getting out of the chair.
Claudia pushes me back down and lifts the bottle back to my mouth. “Not Miranda,” she says. She flashes a worried look at Rosie. “Diego.”
“What?”
“I checked with one of my contacts. He was able to confirm that Diego got hauled off by the city’s thugs.”
“What about Miranda?”
Claudia shakes her head. “I don’t know. My contact didn’t know anything about her. She could’ve escaped.”
“Or she could’ve been taken, too. With Diego.”
“We have to get him back,” Rosie says.
“It’ll have to be fast,” Claudia says. “These boys aren’t the gentle types.”
I nod. “You’ll have to sew me up as best as you can.”
“You can’t go with us, Ben. Don’t be crazy.”
“I need to go with you.”
“Ben—”
“If he’s being held somewhere, we’ll need someone to be ready to get him out of there. On a ship. One person is not going to be able go in after him alone.”
“He’s right,” Rosie says. “We need him.”
“Not if he’s just going to pass out on us.”
“Then cut me open and sew me up,” I say.
Claudia sighs, then shakes her head. “I suppose it’s time I return the favor.”
“Yeah, I guess I have this coming.”
Claudia starts removing my shirt and pulling back the soaked bandages. “At least Rosie had the good sense to let the bullet pass through. You have to do everything the hard way, don’t you?”
I try to shrug, but the pain stops me. I grit my teeth. “It’s a gift.”
I move over to the counter on one side of the gondola that is secured to the wall and I lay myself down on top of it. It’s not the first time it’s been used for medical reasons. Or others. Claudia disappears and returns with a bottle. I recognize it as some seriously strong rotgut that I picked up a while back, back before the raiders took over Gastown. It’s the color of rusty water. She holds it out to me and I flip off the cap and take a long swig. It’s harsh, and it goes down my throat like whirling blades. But as the acid taste fades, a torrent of warmth follows it and I can feel the alcohol swim out into my muscles. I take another swig, then another, and then I lie down.
“Try to make it quick,” I say.
“I’ll do my best,” Claudia says.
I roll over onto my stomach, and Claudia hands me a wooden stick, which I slot into my mouth. We both know the drill. I did the same for her back when she first got her scar. It seems like another lifetime ago.
As the knife pierces my skin, cutting through to where the bullet is lodged, I focus on that memory and call it to me.
It was back when Claudia was running with us—after the night we’d had sex, but before she’d got the Valkyrie. That’s a different story—an epic story—but not the one that’s flooding through my pain-filled mind.
Dad was at the controls of the Cherub while Claudia and I were on the ground, preparing to forage. Our target was a fancy apartment building in Seattle. Dad had read about it in an old magazine, of all places. The article had mentioned how this was one of a slew of new buildings that used biometric locks on all the doors, even those on the stairs and elevators. “Biometric locks mean that Ferals can’t operate them,” he’d said.
“But then how do we get in?” I asked.
“Through the windows. We can smash through those. We just check out the apartments, see if there’s anything there.”
“But what if the security has failed after all this time?” Claudia asked. She was always pointing out flaws in Dad’s plans. It was something he hated, but it was valuable. I used to get a big kick out of it.
“It may well have,” Dad said. “But I know the ways these things work. I’ve seen enough security systems in my time. If they’re off, they stay closed.”
So it had seemed worth a look. We brought the Cherub in, and while the lower windows seemed to be completely smashed in, and thus off-limits, the upper windows seemed mostly intact.
So Claudia and I went down on the ladder and smashed our way into one of the rooms, a living room, from the looks of it. We got in without any problem, but as we were brushing glass off our coats, we heard a loud engine, and gunfire.
Looking out the window, we saw another ship—a rigid—firing on the Cherub. Dad began to pull away.
We had a plan for this, of course. If the Cherub took fire, Dad would pull away, get to safety, and then come back for us when he was able. Our job was to find a safe place to hole up and forage for what we could. Seeing as we were in the building, it seemed like that wouldn’t be difficult. I was even excited by the idea of the two of us having some time alone together, with Dad not being around.
It’s not that I didn’t care about Dad’s situation—of course I did—but I knew he could outrun that other ship. He’d done it before. And as I’ve always said, the Cherub is fast. He knew the tricks, how to take advantage of the terrain. I was sure he’d be fine.
Of course, safety first. We started exploring the apartment. Everything inside was covered with a thick layer of dust, muting the colors of the furniture and the artwork that hung on the walls. It was largely untouched, and already I saw some valuable salvage—a computer, for one. Other electronics. Plenty of books. We walked into the kitchen. Loads of pots and pans. Again, valuable for their metal content. It was, in any terms, a score, and it was just the first of many apartments.
Claudia looked at me and smiled. I smiled back. Then she kissed me. I kissed her back. We escalated in that way.
I know what you’re thinking—it was unprofessional. And it was. But we were quick about it. And we got on with our business. And I didn’t feel badly about that at all.
We gathered together
everything we wanted to take, moved it by the window, and then Claudia said, “Should we try for another?”
I shrugged. “Why not? We have to wait for Dad anyway. Might as well make the most of our time.” There were, of course, other ways to spend our time. Reading, talking, fucking our brains out again, but we were high on the score and it was singing in our blood.
“What about the doors?” I said.
“The locks won’t work on the inside,” she said. “We can prop this one and then see if we can get in anywhere else. If not, we come back here.”
“What if there are Ferals in the other apartments?” I said.
She shook her head. “Anyone trapped in here when the Sick came down would have died off long ago. We should be fine.” And it made sense. So, like she said, we opened the front door and propped it open with a sturdy chair. Claudia ventured out into the dusty hallway and I followed closely behind.
We tried the next apartment door and it wouldn’t open. It appeared as if Dad had been correct. But Claudia wanted to try a few more, so we tried the next one, and the next one. It seemed that Dad’s hunch was right and we felt secure enough, so we were making noise and laughing.
Claudia was just walking up to the next door when we heard a snarl, and a shape flew out of the doorway and into her. I saw an arm flash out, and Claudia was falling back.
Even back then I had been programmed on how to respond to Ferals, so I jerked out my pistol and fired across the corridor. Once, twice, three bullets, four, until it dropped to the ground.
I ran to Claudia.
She was reeling, leaning back against the wall of the corridor. And when I saw her, I almost backed away. The Feral’s long nails had torn her face from her cheek to her forehead. Blood gushed everywhere and I wasn’t even sure if her eye was still okay. I reached for her.
“It got me,” she gasped. “It got me.”
I wanted to hold her, to go back for water, to do what I could, but my upbringing overrode all of that. So I turned to the open door where the Feral had appeared from. And I saw why the door had been open. Someone had wedged it. When the Sick came down, when people were trying to escape, someone must’ve not wanted their doors to be locked and they wedged something wooden underneath it, and it had stayed that way all these years.
I pushed into the door, which smelled of Feral, and I took the place room by room, my body on fire, my veins pulsing with my racing heart, adrenaline sparking through my body. It was a similar apartment to the one we’d seen, but it was wrecked. Glass was broken. All the belongings had been shredded or mishandled. Ferals had been here. But it seemed like none of them remained.
I rushed back for the front door, kicked free the wooden block that held it open. Then I grabbed Claudia, still in shock, and pulled her back to our original apartment. Then I closed that door behind her and got her onto the bed in the bedroom.
The blanket was thick with dust, but I pulled that off and put her down on the sheets beneath. Already blood was soaking into the white. “Water,” I said. I pulled free my bottle of water and, holding her down, splashed it over her face.
She gasped, but in that moment I could see that her eye appeared okay. A moment later, the blood had welled up from her cuts.
“Is it bad?” she said. She was gasping and kind of whimpering, but no more than that.
“It’s bad, but your eye’s okay, thank God.”
“You’ll need thread,” she said.
“Oh shit.”
“See if you can find some.”
“Oh shit.”
The miracle of that day was that I found some. And a needle. So I threaded it and stood over her. And paused.
A Feral had cut her. I had been so concerned about how she was that I hadn’t stopped to realize. A Feral had cut her. Its nails had torn into her. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a fluid exchange. But how could we know? It was only the one strike. It didn’t even get close to her. But still. A Feral.
Yet it was Claudia. A friend and the closest thing I had ever come to that notion of Love I’d read so much about in the old books. The thought of leaving her to this, of not doing something, made me frantic. I felt tears forming in my eyes.
Claudia looked up at me with her good eye, seemed to realize the same thing. “You can’t touch me,” she said.
“Shut up.”
“No, you can’t touch my blood.”
“You shut the fuck up,” I said.
And then it came to me. “I’ll use my gloves.”
She stared at me, blood still pouring down her face.
And so I did. It didn’t give me the best control, but I used the gloves and the needle and thread, and with a hairbrush handle between her teeth and about a half bottle of vodka inside her (and some for the cut), I sewed up her torn face.
She passed out somewhere between her cheekbone and her eyebrow, and after I finished I stood over her, holding a towel in place over her face. I stood (or later sat) like that for hours.
My pistol never left my other hand.
It wasn’t until the next morning that Dad came back with the Cherub. He had to lower her almost level with us before I could get Claudia aboard. I explained to Dad what had happened. What I’d done. I expected him to be mad. If there was one thing he’d always said, it was to get as far away from Bugged-up fluids as you can. Even if you weren’t sure. Even if you were covered. It was too persistent. It was too easy for the Bug to win. I was sure he was going to rip into me. Or maybe give me the silent treatment again.
Instead, he looked at Claudia, then back at me, and nodded like he understood.
For the next two days we kept a vigil by Claudia’s side, switching off to take over the controls. We looked for any sign of the Bug. If she was sleeping and began to stir, I would hold the gun up to her head and question her until she said my name or began using words.
In the end, as you can already tell, she survived. She didn’t have the Bug. What she did have was a nasty scar, the result of bulky gloves and a shaky hand.
I always felt bad about that. About feeling caught between the two strongest impulses I had ever felt—of my will to live facing off against my will to love. Seeing her again, even after all this time, brings all of that back.
But with the pain I’m in, I feel like this is payback. Somewhere between the knife entering and the bullet leaving, I pass out.
When I come to, my chest and shoulder are throbbing, but I appear to be patched up. “How is it?” I ask.
I hear Claudia’s voice behind me. “I’d say I did a damn better job on you than you did on me,” she says.
“Well, you watched me,” I say. “You had a good example.”
She helps me up to a sitting position. “Hand me my shirt.”
“You need to rest,” she says.
“I can’t,” I say. “They have Diego and they may have Miranda, and I’m not letting either of them sit in there for a moment longer than necessary.” I look to Rosie for support. “You want to go in now, don’t you?”
She grits her teeth and nods.
“I suppose you’re set on this?” Claudia says.
“Yes. So you better get me that Juice.”
Claudia sighs and shakes her head, but she rummages in a nearby chest and mixes me up a shot. She isn’t gentle when she plunges it into my arm.
Once again it’s only an instant before it starts to take effect and I feel a surge of wild energy and everything becomes hyper-sharp and clear. The pain from my chest and shoulder starts slipping away, unable to get a grip.
“Do you know where they took Diego?” I ask.
“There’s really only one place where they keep people,” Claudia says. “They converted one of the larger warehouses to serve as a prison.” She looks down, then away. “Everyone else they dump down the murder hole.”
“The what?”
“There’s a section of the platform they cut a hole in. People they want to make an example of, they, well, throw in.”
“Oh my God,” Rosie says.
I try to imagine plummeting to my death from up this high. It’s not a pleasant thought. “There’s no chance that . . .”
“No,” Claudia says. “I don’t think so. They seemed to want to question Diego. He was caught poking around. They’ll want to question him first.” The implication is left unsaid. Once they’re through with the questioning . . .
“How many guards would you say watch this prison?”
“Probably four or more,” Claudia says.
“Okay,” I say, thinking. “Two of us will have to deal with the guards and get inside. The third will prepare our exit. Bring a ship around to ferry Diego off.”
I look at Rosie. “You’ll be the exit.”
“What?”
“Claudia and I will go in and get Diego out. You bring the Osprey in and take him out at the closest ramp.”
“If I get clearance to leave, though, they won’t let me cross over the city to get to you. The guns will take me out.”
“Then we’ll just have to create some kind of diversion. Draw their attention elsewhere while you come around the city’s periphery. We get Diego aboard and then you take him straight back to Tamoanchan.”
“I’d rather go in with you,” Rosie says. “Claudia can bring in the Valkyrie.”
I shake my head. “Sorry, Rosie, but Claudia is the best shot I’ve ever seen with a bow and arrow, and we’re going to need that to take out the guards without alerting every thug in this place.”
Rosie’s glare looks like it’s going to burn through my skull.
“We need you to get Diego out. It has to be you. You take him and you sail off into the sunset and you leave us to clean up. It has to be that way.”
Rosie grits her teeth but nods.
“Good.” Then we get down to planning. Timing. Strategies. As much as you can with this sort of thing. A lot of the time it comes down to watching for a bit before you act.
So that’s what we do. Claudia and I, I mean. Rosie heads off to get the Osprey ready and set up the distraction. I jury-rig one of Claudia’s spare radios to work off a battery, which we’ll take with us. When we send Rosie the signal, she’ll bring the Osprey in and take Diego away.