The Nexus

by J. Kraft Mitchell

  It wasn’t until several steps later that she realized she’d dropped the package.

  She ducked into another dark suite, hurried through the reception area into the office in back, and locked the door behind her. She went to the window, and looked down at the side parking lot ninety-nine stories below.

  There was her skybike, a dot near the corner of the lot.

  She pushed a button on her electronic key.

  There was a thump and a yell at the office door. Another thump, and the doorknob shook. They’d be inside in a minute.

  She found a short metal file cabinet next to the desk. It was too heavy to lift.

  “Put down the weapon, girl!” a voice came from outside the door. “We’re coming in, and we don’t want to shoot you. Just come quietly, why don’t you?”

  She yanked files out of the cabinet until she could lift it. Then she hoisted it on her shoulder and heaved it at the window. The glass cracked but didn’t break.

  She threw the cabinet again. The glass wouldn’t last long.

  Neither would the door. The frame was about to give way. Another thump...

  On her third throw a spider-web of cracks spread across the window. She grabbed a floor lamp, using the pole and base to whack the glass out of the frame.

  The door burst open. The two cops dashed inside just in time to see Jill throwing herself out the window. Then they heard the roar of her skybike, ninety-nine stories above the ground, booking it away from the TSC building.

  A voice crackled in the man’s earpiece again. “She, uh...”

  “Got away,” he finished.

  “Yeah.”

  “How?”

  “Out the window onto a skybike.”

  “Alright, backup, you heard. Get after her.” He didn’t sound angry in the least. “She’s good, eh?”

  “Hope plan B works,” one of his men muttered.

  The boss shook his head. “Nothing unexpected has happened yet. This is still plan A, believe me.”

  JILL dropped to the legal sixty foot elevation and headed away from the Avenue of Towers. Seamlessly she slipped into the flow of traffic on Twentieth, heading north through the rain.

  Two other skybikes started following her from a block behind. They hadn’t had any trouble finding her; she hadn’t had time to put on her helmet. In her rear-view mirror she saw them weaving closer to her.

  Forget trying to seem unsuspicious. Jill came to an alley, gunned her engine, whipped around into the narrow space between two office buildings. She killed her lights as she descended suddenly. Her stomach lurched.

  Overhead the lights of her pursuers showed in the alley. By the time they saw her she’d spun around and darted back out into traffic—this time at the thirty-foot level. She flicked her lights on again, edged into the passing lane, flew past a stream of skycars. She sneaked into a side street a few blocks later.

  Had she lost them?

  No. There they were.

  At least she was getting some separation. She gunned it again, angled upward. She raced toward the gap of night sky showing above her between the buildings.

  Her bike shot over the edge of the top of a building to one side. She glided along the rooftop and checked her mirrors again.

  They were still tailing her.

  She cursed and dipped down behind the building. The long alley stretched away from downtown and emptied into the street right in front of the cathedral.

  She knew what she had to do—didn’t want to, but had to. She unbuckled her security harness and swooped the bike down near ground level.

  Across the street at the far end of the alley the massive round stained-glass window over the cathedral doors grew closer and closer—a giant bull’s-eye, and she was the dart.

  There was a dumpster coming up on one side of the alley, overflowing with swelled garbage bags.

  She gunned the engine one last time.

  And kicked herself off...

  She winced as she plummeted into a sea of garbage.

  It was a long moment before she swam up through the trash and peeked over the edge of the dumpster.

  The two skybikes that had been after her were now parked next to the cathedral, and the drivers were running up the stone steps to the front door. Above them the round window had exploded inward. Smoke rose from somewhere inside the building. People were shouting and talking excitedly in the street. A siren sounded from somewhere in the distance, getting closer with each second.

  Jill pushed herself out of the dumpster, and walked quickly along the alley away from the cathedral.

  “DIRECTOR?” The voice that crackled in the man’s earpiece was not happy.

  “Let me guess: She got away again.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “It’s all right. You did what you could, I’m sure.” He looked at his other two associates, now standing in the office with him. “Don’t worry,” he told them. “Still Plan A.”

  IT was almost dawn when Jill reached the cheap motel. The Avenue was now far behind her. She was in a rundown part of town where it wasn’t unusual for suspicious characters to need a room in a hurry any time of day or night. Around here motels would take cash and not your name—not that Jill’s ID had her real name anyway.

  Still, the sleepy-eyed clerk did stare a little at the young woman in a rain-soaked and garbage-smeared business suit. She carried a plastic shopping bag with some clothes and toiletries she’d bought at a 24-hour convenience store on the same block.

  Her room smelled like stale cigarettes. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked out the grimy window. The sun was a bright red jewel, rising over the dark orb of Earth on the horizon. The artificial sky over Anterra was a nice sunrise orange. She watched it turn to gold, to gray, to blue.

  She couldn’t go home. The people after her would be able to find where she lived. She wondered why they hadn’t found her there in the first place...wondered why they wanted her at all, whoever they were.

  She’d have to start over—get a new alias, a new false ID to match, a new place, a new contact to get jobs. It wasn’t the first time. Erranders had to start over all the time. That was the way it was in this business. It didn’t stop her from being one of the best at what she did.

  She sighed, took off the filthy suit jacket, and flopped backwards onto the bed. Thoughts turned into dreams.

  SHE’D slept maybe an hour before her rude awakening.

  Her first conscious thought was, How did they find me?

  They were at the door and the window, wearing those same armored suits and visored helmets. She had no chance, but she fought anyway. She always fought when she didn’t have a chance...and sometimes she won.

  Not this time. She’d landed one good kick or two

  before they took her down. Her flailing and screaming didn’t stop until a stunstick was pressed into her neck.

  Fat Frank, she thought as she slipped into unconsciousness. It had to be him.

  3

  JILL had never met her dad.

  She’d asked about him all the time as a kid, obviously. Who was he? Where was he?

  Her mother always had answers—vague answers that had something to do with Mommy and Daddy not getting along. Sometimes she sounded angry that Daddy had treated her wrongly. Sometimes she sounded like she felt sorry for him for some reason, and she’d shake her head and call him, “Poor guy.” Sometimes she was brief and blunt in her answers, like she didn’t care or just didn’t want to talk about it.

  One day when Jill was ten years old, she asked about her dad one last time. Her mother gave her a cold look and said to stop asking about her father.

  So Jill stopped.

  At least, she stopped asking out loud. The question was still there inside, unrelenting. How could it not be?

  Jill had questions about her mom, too. She’d always known her mother was involved in things...secret things that she wouldn’t talk about. Jill had tried spying on her, even following her when she left in the middle of the
night one time. But she couldn’t keep up long enough to discover anything.

  When Jill turned twelve, her mother finally confided in her. She told her that she was an errander. She had been ever since Jill’s father had left.

  And she would teach Jill to be an errander too. She’d teach Jill to be the best errander Anterra had ever seen.

  That was how it began.

  SHE was thirsty.

  It was her first sensation as she woke up. She’d been thirsty for a long time in her dreams. Now she was consciously, painfully aware of it.

  She was lying on something soft but not too soft. There was a greenish-white light that blinded her when she opened her eyes. Finally she got used to the light and saw that it came from a panel in the ceiling.

  She sat up groggily and looked around. She was still wearing the same filthy remnants of her disguise from last night’s errand, and she was on a cot in a cement-walled room.

  A cell of some sort.

  Something about the room wasn’t quite right.

  Besides the cot there was nothing here but a toilet and a sink. She went to the sink and took several gulps of cold water straight from the tap. It tasted a little rusty.

  Now she saw what wasn’t right about the cell. There was no door.

  Then with a deep grating sound one of the walls started sliding slowly open. A cop came into the cell.

  “Good, you’re awake,” he said. His masked helmet distorted his voice, making it unnaturally deep and mechanical sounding. “This way.”

  Another cop was waiting in the dark cement-walled hall. There must be other cells behind the slabs in the wall. They cuffed her hands behind her back, and she walked between them while they held their guns on her.

  They came to the end of the hall. One of her escorts key-carded the door open, and they were in a cramped switchback stairwell with daylight coming through small windows at each landing. While they led her downstairs Jill glanced through the windows. She saw a view of the Avenue of Towers across the lake.

  And she suddenly knew where she was: the Anterran Governmental Complex building—GoCom, as most called it. Up to now she’d only seen the massive island building from the lakeshore. This was her first inside view.

  Not that she was especially glad to be here.

  They got to the ground floor, keyed through another door, and proceeded down a narrow hall. They passed no one. Finally they emerged into a small room with red carpet and wood-paneled walls. Old fashioned lamps stood on the floor and hung from the ceiling.

  They led her to an elevator at one end of the room. The console inside had buttons for floors one through twelve.

  Her escorts ignored the console. One of them slid aside a panel in the elevator wall. There was a numbered keypad behind it. He typed a twenty-digit code from memory.

  When he’d finished the elevator started moving. Jill knew they had been on the ground floor, but the elevator was definitely moving down.

  And down.

  And down...

  THE doors finally opened.

  Between her escorts Jill stepped out into a wide lobby. The furniture was modern, black edged with silver. The walls were polished black, accented with panoramic shots of nighttime city skylines. Jill recognized some of the cities from pictures she’d seen of the home planet—Hong Kong, New York, Tokyo, London. The carpet in the lobby was deep indigo-blue. In the very center of the room the carpet was embellished with a large, official-looking shield insignia with THE NEXUS written across it.

  There were several exits from the lobby. The escorts led her up a short stairway to one side.

  At the top they entered an office of similar décor. At the back was a massive black desk. Next to the desk hung a long gray coat and brimmed hat. Behind the desk sat the owner of the coat and hat.

  He stood and regarded Jill wordlessly for a time. She couldn’t read his expression—which irritated her, since she considered herself good at reading expressions. He had short silver hair and gray eyes. They were nice eyes, Jill thought. Eyes that could make you feel at ease and filled with curiosity at the same time.

  She didn’t look into those eyes. She couldn’t let her guard down.

  “Well, well...Jillian Branch,” he said. He had an accent something like the British from Earth.

  Jill recognized his voice from the phone call. Watch for the light, he had told her.

  He nodded at her escorts, and they left her alone with the man with gray eyes.

  “It really is a pleasure to meet you,” he said when they’d gone. “Perhaps you don’t believe me when I say it. And even if you do, I doubt you share my pleasure. After all you didn’t choose to meet—would not have chosen to be here at all, which is why I had to bring you here rather by force, I’m afraid. I hope that in the end you will find it has been worth your time.”

  Jill said nothing.

  The man with gray eyes came out from behind his desk and paced slowly while he kept talking. “You have no idea how difficult it has been to find you. Then again, maybe you do. You’re a very elusive person, Jillian. This is one of the first things that drew us to you. There are plenty of erranders out there, of course. But we were looking for someone with a particular combination of characteristics.”

  It was weird being talked about this way, like he saw much more than she could know through those gray eyes; like her whole life had been a film he’d watched carefully. She found him impressive; even a little scary. And she wasn’t impressed or scared easily.

  “Yes, we’ve had our eyes on you for some time,” he went on. “It’s not idle flattery when I tell you we were very happy to have found you. It just so happens that you met our list of requirements to the letter.”

  It sounded like he wanted to hire her. Was the government in the business of hiring erranders now? Or was this guy running some sort of rogue operation? “If you have a job for me,” she spoke for the first time, “you don’t have to butter me up first. Just tell me what you want.”

  “Ah, what I want.” He stopped pacing. The gray eyes were looking right into hers. She couldn’t look away this time for some reason. “The very question you should be asking yourself.”

  Where was he going with this?

  “What is it you want, Jillian Branch?” he asked her slowly, deliberately. His eyes weren’t budging from hers.

  What did he mean what did she want? Maybe this was his way of beginning negotiations for her payment. “If you’re wondering my asking price—” she began.

  The man with gray eyes smirked. “In the first place, you are in no position to, as you put it, ask a price for your services. As you did not willingly come to us, you will not be able to leave us until we decide—if we decide—to release you. And in the second place, don’t pretend that money is what you really want.”

  “No?”

  “Of course not. You could easily have already found another job—a quite legal job, I might add—and be making twice the money an errander makes.”

  Well...that was probably true. “So what is it you think I want?”

  “The first answer that occurs to you will not be the correct one. You have hardened yourself, Jillian; buried yourself inside a thick, protective shell. You’ve learned to hide your feelings and your desires from even yourself. And I’m asking about a desire far beyond those on the surface. The animal drives for food, for water, for companionship...those answers do not interest me at the moment. You are going to have to look far deeper to answer my question.”

  Was he some kind of philosopher? Some religious fanatic who was trying to convert her to a cult? “What does kidnapping me have to do with any of this?”

  “Arresting you,” he corrected her. “And it has everything to do with it.”

  “You have a job for me?”

  “Indeed we do.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  He still had that unreadable smirk. “For now, there are only two things you need to know,” he said. “Number one: Should you accept the
job, your criminal record will be wiped clean.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Number two: Until you accept the job, you will be told nothing more about it.”

  She scoffed. “That’s ridiculous.”

  He scoffed back. “More ridiculous than being a pawn for criminals who couldn’t care less whether you live or die once they’ve done with you?”

  She looked at him sideways. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “I could not be more so.”

  “I don’t take a job unless I know the details.”

  “That’s absolute drivel, of course. You try to know as little as possible about the jobs you take.”

  “I still know more than nothing.”

  “You do know more than nothing. You know that your only other option is jail.”

  She swallowed. “So this job is going to give me this...this thing that I don’t have but I really want but I don’t know that I want it?”

  “It is.”

  “But it isn’t money?”

  “No. But don’t misunderstand me, you will be paid. Handsomely. Handsomely enough to make a generous charitable donation to the cathedral for the reparations they will now be requiring.” He was smiling, but his gray eyes seemed colder.

  She looked around. “We are at GoCom, right? You are with the government, right? Wouldn’t you get in at least a little bit of trouble for hiring an errander?”

  “If you accept my offer, you will no longer be an errander. Not ever.”

  Now there was some food for thought. Then again, what kind of job did the government make you do when they caught you? “I’m guessing it’s something dangerous if it pays so well,” she said with a frown. In her line of work it was the riskiest jobs that paid the best.

  “At times it certainly is. But I’m assuming danger is not particularly distasteful to someone who leaps out of skyscraper windows and throws herself off of speeding projectiles in dark alleys.” He smirked again. Jill was noticing this guy smirked a lot. “Even at your young age, Jillian, you have learned that a life well lived involves certain risks.”