Time to go.
“Lux, armor one with helmet.”
The protective black suit hummed and flashed around me as the lasers wove their dark lattices of cold photons, and I felt the armor gently hugging my arms and legs and chest. It felt warm and cozy, and reassuring. It felt solid and safe, and I was beginning to really trust it to keep the world out, whether that meant bullies or bullets. And the safer I felt, the bolder I could be.
I marched across the street and then across the empty lot leading up to the loading dock. One guy stopped sweeping to stare at me. He called over and a second guy looked up, saw me, and jogged away, calling out to someone else.
Here we go.
I jogged the rest of the way and then jumped up the steps to the dock. A quick glance showed me piles of boxes everywhere, and lots of tools for moving them around, dollies and hand trucks and rollers. And four guys. Big guys. Frowny-faced tough guys.
“What do you want?” the first one asked.
I pointed to the closed-up office. “I want to look in there.”
“Hey, you’re that Ultraviolet chick on the news,” the second one said. He raised his hands and took a step back. “Hey, we don’t want any trouble here. We’re just working.”
“And I just want to look in that office,” I said. “I don’t want any trouble either. Two minutes and I’m gone.”
The third one was whispering to the fourth one. I caught the word “reward” in the mutters.
“You want to call the cops, be my guest,” I said as I started walking toward the office with all the blinds closed. “I’ll be long gone before they get here.”
None of the guys came near me and I shook the door handle. Locked.
“Lux, sword one.”
The slender machete appeared in my right hand, making all four guys mutter and take an extra step back. I shoved the tip of the glowing blade into the gap between the door and the frame and felt the searing laser edge of the sword slice through the lock’s bolt and the door swung open.
“Dom? Dom, are you in here?” I stepped inside. Nothing. Just a desk, a chair, and a couple shelves along the wall covered in family photos, paperwork, and random coffee mugs. Office stuff.
There was a purple envelope on the desk.
Frowning, I went in for a closer look, leaning over the desk but not touching anything. A piece of paper was poking out of the envelope at an angle. There was a single sentence typed on the paper: “Carmen, sorry for the chilly reception. -Frost”
What the hell?
An alarm screamed in my ears, and then a sharp hiss filled the air. The fire alarm shrieked as the sprinklers snapped open and a deluge of freezing cold water sprayed down on me.
No, the suit!
I turned and bolted through the door as my armor began to flicker and fade. But I still had the sword in my hand, and a couple waves of the glowing blade kept the four workers from coming near me as I raced out of the building, jumped down to the ground, and kept running for the street.
I had only been under the sprinklers for a minute, but a minute was all it took to soak my jacket and gloves. My holo-helmet vanished, followed by the rest of my armor and the sword.
Damn it! Now Frost is setting traps for me? And he knows about the water problem, too. Great, just great.
I reached the sidewalk at a dead run. The guys from the warehouse weren’t following me, but I knew someone would be. Frost, or one of his goons, or at least some drones.
A buzzing sound rose behind me.
Drones then.
“Lux, bike!”
Nothing happened.
I kept running, but it felt pretty hopeless. There was no way I could outrun a drone, even a little SkyEye. And then it would only be a matter of time, maybe just a few minutes, before Frost followed the drone and picked me up.
I jogged to a stop and ducked into an alley to catch my breath. The drone buzzed louder over the street. I flopped forward, hands on my knees, my lungs and heart both racing as my side ached and my back ached more.
I hate running.
And then I saw it. My feet. I still had my black, glowing armor on my feet all the way up to my knees. The holo-fabric boots had stayed mostly dry.
I blinked.
“Lux, boots off.”
The armor vanished from my feet.
“Lux…” I paused, trying to think what I could project around my feet that would help.
The buzzing grew sharply louder as the SkyEye zipped around the corner and stopped right above my head, its little camera swiveling down to point at my head. I gave it the finger.
“Lux, skates.”
The inline roller skates blazed to life under my feet, lifting my body a couple inches off the ground. I had only been skating a few times in my life when Mercy had let me use her skates when we were kids, but I was pretty good at it back then. Good enough to try this stunt now.
The holographic wheels started spinning and I started skating down the alley away from the drone. I immediately slipped and had to catch myself on a recycling bin, but I stayed upright and kept going, kicking harder and harder, speeding up, getting a feel for the slippery wheels made of frozen light. At the end of the alley, I swung out into the street and started going even faster, but the drone was staying right behind me.
The wind blasted me in the face, and suddenly I was very much aware of the fact that I had no armor, no helmet, not even knee pads, and I was racing down the middle of a city street. If a bicycle crossed an intersection in front of me at the wrong moment, I’d be dead.
And then I heard the low growl of an engine, a car. I wanted to look back over my shoulder to see what it was, but I didn’t trust myself to keep my balance on the slippery skates, so I had to just assume the bad guys were back there, and gaining on me.
I was really flying now, streaking by houses and bike racks and street lights so fast that I had to focus on the road in the distance to keep from getting dizzy by the sensation of speed. It was so much more intense than riding the holo-bike, even though it was actually slower.
My phone buzzed. I didn’t answer.
Up ahead I saw a big flat intersection and decided to take a chance. I braced my knees and leaned, swung across in a wide turn, and just barely got onto the next street without hitting the curb. The wind stung my eyes and I squeezed them to slits to see.
A flash of black in the corner of my eye made me jerk, almost losing my balance. It was a big black car with Frost at the wheel, cruising along right next to me in the middle of the road. There was a moment when we just looked at each other, and I felt terrified and ridiculous and angry. And then he reached out with one arm and nudged the car toward me, aiming his hand for my arm.
I yanked away, and another flash of black surprised me on my left, but this time it wasn’t a car. It was a section of my armor from earlier. It was coming back online. The jacket was drying out!
Frost lunged for me again by jerking his car even closer. I was running out of room between him and the curb, and I was going too fast to really do anything about it. We were heading down a long smooth hill, and we were both accelerating, and I had no breaks at all.
A piece of armor flashed to life on my chest.
Frost yanked his car closer still, and now I only had a couple of feet of space, trapped between the car and the sidewalk with old telephone poles whipping past just inches from my elbow. A pothole, even just a crack in the pavement, would probably be fatal. But I didn’t hit a pothole or a crack. I hit a storm drain.
My left foot hit the edge of the drain and shot out from under me. I tried to regain my balance for a whole second, but I was falling and I knew it. On instinct, I wrapped my arms around my head and curled into a ball. There was no time to think, no time to act, no way to save myself. I went down fast and I went down hard, the gray asphalt flying up to smash me in the face in a blur of light and shadow.
I felt my body jostling and shaking, I felt my head slamming back and forth against my arms as I r
olled. I saw flashes of bright sky and dark pavement. I rolled and rolled. I don’t think I breathed at all.
But I also didn’t feel any pain.
When the rolling stopped I was lying on my back, staring up at a fluffy white cloud that looked like a chubby unicorn against a deep blue sky. The houses at the edge of my vision kept tilting and rocking drunkenly, so I couldn’t sit up.
But nothing actually hurt.
Blinking and gasping, I forced myself to sit up. And then I saw the armor, the perfect black armor with its bright glowing edges all over my arms and legs, with the full helmet wrapped around my head.
Nice timing.
I staggered up to my feet and promptly fell back down to my knees. The world was still spinning, and I wanted to throw up.
I heard a car door slam.
Frost.
I staggered up a second time and turned slowly, struggling to focus on the man in the dark suit walking toward me. He had stopped his car a little farther down the hill, and now he was coming back up on foot. There was something in his hand, but I couldn’t see it clearly.
I turned around and started walking the other way as fast as I could. I was too dizzy to run.
“Carmen! Just stop. I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “You probably need a doctor as it is. Just stop before anyone else gets hurt.”
“Where’s Dom?” I shouted as I jogged a little faster.
“He’s safe, for the moment.” His shoes chuffed a lot faster behind me.
“Where?”
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
Yeah, I know.
I still wanted to throw up, but the world was spinning less now. “Lux, bike!”
I didn’t jump so much as slide onto the black motorcycle and let it whisk me up the hill. I glanced back once at Frost, standing alone in the road. And then I turned a corner and I was gone.
Chapter 11
Bankruptcy
“So what do we do now?”
I didn’t answer. I was sitting alone on a rock in a cemetery, staring at a tree with my phone pressed tight against my cheek. It was mid-afternoon and my jacket was still a little damp and clingy, and my hair was sort of tangled, and it slapped my cheek when I moved my head too fast.
No one had followed me after I got away from Frost. No cars, no drones.
He was waiting for me. It was a trap. Which means we can’t trust anyone anymore, none of the tips, none of the offers to let me crash on a couch. Any one of them could be a plant from Cygnus to catch me.
Hell, all of them could be plants.
“Carmen?”
I sniffed. “Yeah.”
“I said, what do we do now?”
“I don’t know.” I wished Felix was there with me. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to go back to last night when everything seemed better, before we got the tip about the delivery center, before it all fell apart. Last night things looked tough but I had hope.
But now, things just look terrible.
For a second, I even wondered if Felix really was who he said he was. Maybe he was the most elaborate spy of all.
No. That’s too crazy. He’s real.
“Well, maybe I can come up with a system,” Felix said. “Some way to screen the tips, to figure out if they’re for real or not.”
I shook my head. “You really think you can out-smart all the goons at Cygnus?”
He sighed. “Maybe not.”
I stared at the gnarled tree a little more. There was a chipmunk on one of the lower branches. I wished I was that chipmunk, without any complicated problems. Just simple problems. Find food. Run away from everything bigger than me. Easy.
“We need to make this easy,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“I mean, we need to stop trying to out-do Cygnus with the technology and the media campaign. It’s too complicated. There’s only two of us. I don’t even have a bed. No, we need to make this easy, make it simple.”
“Okay, but how?” He sounded more than a little skeptical.
“We change the rules. Break the rules.”
“What rules?”
“You know, decency.”
He paused. “You’re planning to do something indecent?”
“I’m going to do something bad, yeah.” I bit my lip. If I said it out loud, it would be real. He would know what I was thinking, and he would judge me, maybe even fear or hate me. But Dom was out there somewhere, in danger, and everyone else who knew me was in danger, too. Hell, everyone in the city was in danger on a long enough timeline. “I’m going to go see Frost.”
“See him? You want to arrange a meeting?”
“Yeah.”
“Shouldn’t you meet with that Brian guy? I thought he was the one in charge.”
“Technically. But Frost is the one pulling the triggers. Orders don’t mean anything unless someone follows them. I don’t think I can make Brian stop giving the orders. Actually, I don’t think he is giving the orders, they just come out of some legal office and he has to pass them along. There’s no brain there, no thinking, nothing to reason with or argue with. They’re just a bunch of bureaucratic robots. No, Frost is the one with a brain. He’s the one making plans, trying to out-think me, dealing with the real world outside of Cygnus.”
“So, you’re going to meet with Frost? And say what?”
“I don’t know. Do me a favor. Put a message up on the Ultraviolet profile. Say, ‘Druid Lake at 3pm today’, okay? He’ll see that.”
“Okay. Done.”
“Thanks.”
“Hey, Carmen?”
“Yeah?”
“Please be careful.”
I smiled. “I promise.”
It was a short drive from the cemetery to the park. Druid Hill was big and full of random things, from baseball fields to the zoo, with lots of winding roads and thick wooded areas in between. I knew Frost would take the bait, and he’d bring a whole SWAT team and a flock of drones, probably. I might even get a few real fans to come see what was going on, but Frost would probably keep them out. He’d want to control the place. I had no problem with that.
I hadn’t said where near the lake to meet, and that was on purpose. I didn’t know where, and I wanted him to have to find me. I didn’t want to make it too easy.
So I got there first and did a quick look around on my bike to make sure the area was deserted. No zoo visitors, no joggers or dog-walkers, and no suspicious black cars.
Funny. If the bad guys ever start driving red or green cars, they’d have a huge advantage in these situations. No one would ever see them coming.
I looked around for a good place to wait. I thought about sitting in a tree on a high hill, or maybe on the roof of a building so I could see Frost coming, but instead I chose to sit right down near the lake itself. Maybe I was just in a bad mood. Or maybe I wanted to show him that I wasn’t afraid of the water. Or him.
I sat on a bench and took out my phone. I had half an hour to kill. That’s a lot of time. Time to sit in the sun and recharge the suit. Time to download new object specifications. I kept myself busy.
So when three o’clock finally arrived, I was no longer sitting on a bench by the path that goes around the lake. I was sitting in a holographic kayak out on the water. The purple glow from the edge of the boat lit up the water around me, and I also had my armor and helmet on too.
Frost appeared at the top of a path and walked down to the edge of lake. No goons, no drones. Just him. He paused, saw me, and start walking again. I sat and waited for him. As he came closer, I heard the hum of a drone’s rotors and a moment later a little red SkyEye drifted down from above the trees and stationed itself over the lake, but off to one side, far out of reach.
Frost walked down to the edge of the lake, as close as he was going to get to me without getting his feet wet, and said, “I’m here.”
“Let Dom go.”
He shook his head. “Miss Zhao, we’ve been over this. I understand the position you
’re in.”
“No, you really don’t.”
“Well, maybe not. But I appreciate your needs. Your need to protect your family and friends. Your need to have a home and a job. All perfectly understandable. That’s why it’s my job to take those things away from you to pressure you into giving Cygnus that technology.”
“Why do you do it? Your job, I mean.”
“Why does anyone do anything?” he said.
“Money.”
“Money.” He nodded. “It’s just a job, nothing personal. When you’re in custody, I’ll go home, eat a burger, watch some TV, and go to bed just like anyone else.”
“Yeah, but you’re not like anyone else. Other people have jobs that may be stupid or even hurtful to people, but not up close. Other people don’t shoot and kidnap for a paycheck.”
“No, they just manufacture addictive medications and cancer-causing foods.” He looked and sounded bored. “I like to think my position is a bit more transparent than that.”
“It is.”
“So what’s this all about, Carmen? Why am I here?”
“I wanted to talk. Like people. No chasing. No shooting.”
“You’re not in charge here. I’ll chase and shoot as much as I need to.”
“Well, I think it’s time for a change.”
“I have my gun. I have my drones and my team standing by. Nothing is different.”
“Everything is different.” I swallowed. “I’m not running away this time.”
“No, you’re not. Not that you would get very far in that thing. The lake isn’t very long.”
“I need to know where Dom is. I need you to let him go. I need you to stop harassing innocent people.”
“Easy. Done. All you have to do is surrender. Hand over the holo-tech and it all ends right now. Cygnus isn’t evil, anymore than any other company. They don’t care about hurting you or anyone else. They just want to protect their market share and profit margin.”
“Yeah. Sure.” I took a deep breath. “I have a counter proposal. You surrender to me, and I let you go when I know that Dom is free.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because I have a sword pressed to your back.” I shut down the hologram of myself floating out on the lake as I stepped out of the trees behind Frost and pointed my sword at the center of his back, poking him gently. “Hands up.”
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