Maybe they did autolock. Maybe he was full of shit.
I didn’t have it in me to argue.
Wasted time, at this point, would see us dead. Chewed up by the things out there or gone necro ourselves.
No. Just no. I’d escaped this hell once. I’d do it again, with my Koupra in tow, or so fucking help me...
I followed him, limping badly. The door at the other end opened as I approached, so at least I didn’t have to break my other arm to get in.
This room gave every impression of lockdown, security only. A row of tables took up one wall, the kind of tables bodies get strapped to, and a bank of computers took up the next. Lockers dotted the bare space in between, each labeled neatly. Gomez. Jones. Dent. Rogers. Atwater.
A wide viewing screen looked out into the dark chamber, where orange muzzle flash and gouts of flame briefly illuminated the struggling necros and the fuckheads they danced with.
Indigo hunched over a computer, his isolated unit already wired in. He didn’t look up at me. Didn’t say anything. The blue text on the screen and the corresponding amber data on his unit lit his face, but all I saw under black grit and blood was an empty slate. Nothing. No hey, sorry about that or sure glad you’re alive.
Nothing at all.
Then I saw the body laid out on the third table, dusky feet pallid in death, and it all made sudden, achingly logical sense.
“So,” I said. Desperately nonchalant. “Guess you found Nanji.”
28
I didn’t know why she’d be in here, except maybe she posed some kind of security risk, even as a corpse. Maybe especially as a corpse, given the chaos outside that window.
Half of her face and most of one arm was charred, leaving one delicate ear untouched and most of her back and legs. Her skin, a softer shade of Indigo’s brown, had turned gray in death. She was laid out on her stomach, leaving her ass exposed and baring the raw, ruined channels of her back. They’d torn out her spine. The back of her ribs.
The tech was gone.
I dragged myself to the table. “What did they do to her?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. It was obvious what they’d done. Removed everything, left her empty and spineless and alone.
I swallowed hard, unable to scrape the image of her as I saw her last from my mind. All that shiny chrome. The black tint to her blood. She’d still been alive. Fighting, and alive.
I’m sorry.
Necros didn’t fucking apologize.
I was too late for her then. Too late to save her, too late to be the one to end her misery.
Just another fuckup in a fantastic array of them, wasn’t it?
And now her brother looked on, that same gray tint to his eyes. The same thickening black smear as his nanos overcompensated for the hell I’d put him through.
The ache in my skull pounded in time with my heart. A vise wrapped around my head as I reached out with my shaking hand, the Adjudicator throwing back trembling glints of flickering blue light. My knuckles skimmed over ragged, blackened flesh. The smell of necrosis hung thick and rank in the air.
Indigo stood, the chair creaking as his weight left it. Dimly, the crackle and echo of repeated gunfire peppered my awareness, but it was the small handheld he thrust into my face that grabbed me.
The vid screen filled with silent footage.
A chopshop. Maybe the one upstairs. Nanjali lay on one of six tables – tables remarkably similar to the one she occupied now. She was asleep, a mask banded over her head. I stared, empty and cold, as I recognized myself from behind. Bleached hair swept to the side. Black long-sleeve shirt, black pants, boots hidden by the frame.
A man gestured from the other side of my girlfriend’s naked body. He wore black BDUs, a black T-shirt. I couldn’t see his face, but he carried a small tablet. I gestured with my metal arm.
Imprinted my good thumb on the tablet.
My guts twisted. I felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach.
As soon as the man powered down the tablet, I turned away. From him. From Nanji, quiet and sleeping so innocently. I didn’t see my own face. I wanted to. I needed to know what the hell I’d been thinking. What my face looked like when I sold my girlfriend to this necrotic shithole.
The man in black gestured again. Four more men in identical clothes, eerily familiar, stepped into view from all sides. I turned, said something. Raised a hand and beckoned them.
Indigo turned it off.
I knew the end. Me, only a couple days ago. Waking up on a metal table. Blood in my head. Ghosts of nightmares.
I shuddered, something cold wrapped inside my chest. I remembered – didn’t I? Did I remember waking up before that? Sluggish. Angry. Afraid.
So much pain in my head; so much noise, until I screamed and screamed...
The same sense of panic I felt in Orchard’s lab clawed at me.
No. It was real. I refused to deal with post-traumatic stress based on a fucking dream.
I dragged my gaze to Indigo.
He watched me, the skin over his cheekbones so taut, his olive skin looked sickly yellow beneath the grime. I’d never seen him look so fragile, as if one wrong word would shatter him.
If I felt hollow, he looked it – between the two of us, I couldn’t name anyone more fucked up than we were. He dashed one arm over his eye, smearing more blood. More grime.
Thud! The glass pane across the viewing room rattled.
I blinked, staring at him as if I’d never seen him before. As if I didn’t know what my own skin felt like. Everything turned inside out on me. Questions turned into a screaming accusation inside my own head and I couldn’t slog through any of it.
I couldn’t force myself to function.
This was what it was like to have my world ripped inside out, huh? I chuckled. It broke on a ragged sound.
“Fuck.” Indigo leaned over the table. “Are you seriously crying?”
“I don’t cry,” I snarled, but damn, my throat hurt with it. My chest ached. My eyes burned. My only working fist clenched over Nanji’s cold, dead flesh and when I inhaled, I shuddered to smell her rotting flesh.
“Ah, shit. No payoff’s worth this.” Indigo rounded the table, gripped my shoulder and bodily turned me from the slab of his sister’s corpse. He caught my face in his grimy hand, tilting it up so I had no choice but to meet his eyes. Blackening, dot by dot. “Breathe, Ree. Why am I the logical one right now?”
He was right. Indigo was professional as hell, but I was the splatter specialist. Those of us who get this far in the business don’t get there because death bothers us.
But this was different. I couldn’t explain how, it was just different. I squeezed my eyes shut. “Give me a smegging second.”
Thud! The glass cracked.
“No time.” The fingers at my cheeks tilted, forcing my face up. “Look at me.”
Guilt slashed at me from every side. Hating everything about this – the weakness clawing at my guts, the wrenching uncertainty of my own reliability – I obeyed that thread of gritted command in his voice and clasped his wrist tightly before he wrenched me off balance.
He held my stare for a moment more, making sure he had my attention. When I didn’t look away, when I made no move to throw him off – hell, maybe when he found what he was looking for in my face, his mouth twisted. “This is three shades of fucked up.”
“I know,” I croaked.
“Tell me that isn’t you.”
I couldn’t. It was me. Right there, clear as day. My hair, my arm.
Indigo’s wrist flexed beneath my grip, tensile muscles tightening. “Look me in the eye, and tell me that isn’t you on that feed,” he said tightly. “If you do that, I’ll spend every waking second cracking this thing until I figure out where it came from. Do you understand me?”
I wanted to. Everything I was screamed that I’d never sell out my teammates – never betray Nanji and Indigo. Not like this. Never to this. I hated the suit sector. I despised authority
.
I liked my team and the freedom they’d afforded me.
But how could I be sure?
Thud! Thud!
The echoes of the necro assault cracked through the small room.
I stared into Digo’s blackening eyes, read the anguish there. Anger, hurt, yeah, but there was more. Something violent and desperate.
Something challenging.
My dead arm dragged at my ruined shoulder brace. It hurt.
Thud! The glass cracked.
“Riko?” Indigo pulled me closer, invaded my space until I had no choice but to inhale the same air he breathed out, face the demons in his stare the way I wouldn’t face mine.
Maybe I wouldn’t do it for me, maybe I could pretend like I didn’t give a damn, but Digo didn’t deserve that. And hell, I wasn’t enough of an asshole to try.
I owed him more than that.
“Tell me.” He didn’t sound angry. His voice unraveled, until I couldn’t be sure what was fury and what was demand.
Indigo Koupra was pleading with me.
I closed my eyes, back teeth grinding. It was too late for Nanji – maybe it was too late for me. But fuck me if I didn’t feel a little less alone. At least for now.
“I can’t,” I said sharply, and wrenched my face from his grasp, planting my hand against his chest to insert enough distance to breathe in. He had to dance back a few steps to catch his balance.
I steadied myself against Nanji’s cold metal table. Cold, gray skin.
Beyond saving.
But I wasn’t. We weren’t. This was not the place I intended to die.
“I can’t say for sure that’s not me,” I said. “But I can tell you right now that the me standing here wouldn’t make that choice. I wouldn’t sell my team.”
Maybe I lied.
How the fuck would I know?
The glass behind Indigo fractured.
He jumped, half-turning. “Fine,” he managed, strained even past fatigue. Any more highs, any additional lows, and a lesser man would have cracked. He was almost there; I could read it in his posture. Too tense. Fragile as fuck – I’d never forget it again.
Indigo cared in ways I’d only ever taken for granted. And it was that caring that might cost me his life, too.
Yeah. I was a real class act.
“I’ll move heaven and earth to crack that shit wide open, so let’s get it together,” he said, eyes on the window, “’cause this isn’t holding anymore.”
“Done.” I reached behind me, picked up the Adjudicator and forced my aching, shattered muscles to obey.
Indigo gave me an out. I knew it was only a matter of time before he regretted it, but for now, I had time to find out what the fuck had happened. All I knew for sure was that if that was me, I had not been in control of myself. Which meant somebody had.
Nobody set me up and lived to gloat about it.
Rage. It filled me. Carved a hole inside me and sheared through my defenses. Self-inflicted anger, chaos and regret; disgust and fury melded into a devastating conflagration.
This is why you don’t piss off a splatter specialist. We have too much broken shit to burn.
Necros pressed against the glass. Beating on it. Hammering on it. One swung a stolen Manticore against it. Again and again. The tempered glass went white under the pressure.
Eradicate.
Wherever the word came from, whatever it meant, it was an order I’d happily fulfill. My way.
Spiderweb fissures spread across the whole pane, turning visibility to nothing.
I pushed away from the cold table. Turned my back on Nanjali for the last time. Sorry, baby. “Did you get what you needed from the network?”
For a moment, Indigo said nothing. I glanced at him, a quick survey to make sure he hadn’t keeled over, and caught him studying me with an odd expression. Like he couldn’t quite decide if he’d just made the best choice possible or the worst. Wary mistrust and a vicious kind of hope.
All kinds of fucked up.
I raised my chin. “We in this?”
He nodded, mouth pinched into a grim line. “We’re in this. I need one minute.”
“You have thirty seconds,” I countered, and kicked over a locker. It crashed hard, spilling its contents – clothing and a woman’s purse – across the floor. I shoved it into place in front of the door.
Indigo flinched as another section of the window shuddered, hammered beneath shapeless shadows. He checked his comp unit screen. “Twenty-five seconds. What are you planning?”
“To get you out alive.” I refilled the Adjudicator, awkward as shit with one hand. “Whatever you do, don’t stop running.”
“You can count on that. But how do we get out?”
I smiled, brain crackling. I didn’t know where the knowledge came from; maybe the same bank of ghostly images that remembered white-gloved figures shoving me down. The same memory that said I’d beat my head against a wall to make the pain stop. They flashed through my mind like the vid Indigo had shown me, grainy and small. Flickering mirages.
I’d sort out what was real and what was wishful cunting thinking when I got out of here.
“When it’s clear,” I told him, “go out and turn left. There’s a narrow corridor just past the security arrow pointing back here.”
“Riko?”
“Pay attention.” I spared him a glance. Terror carved deep brackets into the side of his whitened mouth. His weight splayed on the balls of his feet, he looked half ready to bolt from the fracturing glass – and the comp unit attached to the systems in front of it.
That he stayed for that data said a lot more about him than it did me.
I hauled the Adjudicator into position. “Gather your energy,” I warned. “You look about six fucks past nanoshock.”
“I’m fine.”
Sure, and I was the president of this shitshow. “Are you ready?”
“Can you be ready for something like this?”
Point made. I shook my head. “Promise me something, Digo.”
His brow furrowed. “No suicide speeches.”
“Shut the fuck up and listen,” I snarled. “If I don’t get out of this, you get to the bottom of everything.” My arm trembled, screaming against the weight. “If that is me...”
His eyes flinched, jaw locked so hard his cheekbones gleamed sickly pale, but he nodded.
Fucking A.
“I’ll find out,” he promised. One long-fingered hand spread over the comp unit. “Vids have markers, patterns. I’ll figure out where it came from, who made it, and then we will fuck some shit up.”
All things considered, I couldn’t ask for better.
“Hold on to your ass,” I warned, and fired the Adjudicator into the window. A fist-sized hole exploded through the pane, tearing through a necro’s head as the .525 destroyed fractured glass and bone like it was nothing. The cracks spread to meet the other knot of creaking fissures, and before Indigo could stop me, I sprinted, jumped, and barreled through the center.
I would not go down like prey.
The impact stole my breath, but not my rage. Glass erupted in a white shower of shards and dust. Bodies collided with mine, swept back by the impact of the shattered pane, and I rolled with the momentum until I hit a crooked bank of chairs. Springing to my feet should have hurt; it didn’t. I felt nothing but frenzy – I needed to end this, to kill, rend limb from limb. These skull-fucking wastes of tech, these necrotic pieces of walking flesh, would not take me down.
I had shit to do.
I fired twice. I don’t know what the shit was keeping my arm from tearing itself apart in the recoil, but I wouldn’t question it. Two necros hit the floor, twitching.
Three more came at me.
Two others wobbled to a standstill, turned on Indigo as he clambered through the empty frame, the computer cradled under his arm.
I dodged the first gurgling necro – a man, thin and balding where his scalp hadn’t been ripped away – and sighted down my trembling ar
m. Despite the knot of shamblers around me, the necro reaching for Digo earned a bullet in its spine.
The thing staggered back, splattered with blackened blood and glittering shards of spinal implantation decimated by the messy round. Fingernails found my exposed thigh and tore it open again; teeth locked onto my metal arm and splintered, a sickening sound that raised the hair on my body in visceral revulsion.
Another necro jumped on my shoulders. My knees hit the floor. Black spots floated in my vision.
“Riko!”
“Go,” I snarled into the feed.
Nanoshock and I were old friends by this point. I could feel my nanos straining, feel my flesh surging, bloating with the little fuckers. Maybe I’d die here, but it wouldn’t be alone. And it sure as shit wouldn’t be with Digo – my linker had to get to the bottom of this mess.
When it came right down to it, I’d trust nobody else.
The necro on my shoulders fell off. I was struggling to pull away from the jagged fingernails in my leg, blood running fresh and wet, when the tech freak jerked wildly, screaming in a guttural, too-human exhale that echoed and re-echoed. It collapsed, blood seeping from its ears and nose.
I fired a fourth shot, dropping a crawler. The necro trying to gum my useless arm blew backwards in a gory spray. The ozone stench of frying tech filled the air.
Indigo left his EMP knife in the still-shuddering corpse and hauled me to my feet. Its head, I noted, did not explode.
I didn’t get a chance to catch my breath.
Three more crawled from the hall we’d come in from. One stopped to bury its teeth in a black-armored figure, cutting off a short, sharp scream, but the others saw us first. Live prey.
I struggled to straighten. Indigo yanked me upright so hard, I nearly collapsed at his feet.
“Move!” he yelled, and hell if I know where I found the strength to do it. I leapt over the knot circling me, planting a boot in one’s face to do it, and hauled what was left of my hobbled ass.
The door I’d promised was mercifully unlocked. Maintenance tools littered the narrow corridor, overturned crates beside a mangled body. Wild animals wouldn’t do this much damage.
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