Tracer

by Rob Boffard

  Brilliant.

  Sometime later – hours, maybe – I hear a noise from beyond the cell. The main lights in the prison were turned out some time ago, and I can’t see anything. I sit up on the bed, squinting, trying to peer into the blackness. There: footsteps. Very faint. Someone approaching from the end of the block.

  In an instant, I’m up and banging on the plastic. “Hey,” I say, my voice ringing inside the small space of the cell. “Need some more water in here!”

  As my voice fades, I hear the footsteps again. If whoever it is heard me, they give no answer, and continue walking steadily towards the cell. I fall silent, waiting, my hand on the plastic, and Janice Okwembu walks out of the darkness.

  She wears the same white jumpsuit. Her expression is grave, her lips set in a thin line. She folds her arms, and her luminous eyes lock onto mine. I’m so surprised that I just stand there, staring back at her.

  “You’ll have to forgive my lateness,” she says. Her voice is dulled by the plastic barrier, stripped of its warmth. “I was in Apex when I heard you’d been found, and it took me some time to make my way over.”

  My voice comes back. “What am I doing here?”

  “You’re here for your own protection. Or wasn’t that explained to you?” Her voice is even, her expression impossible to read.

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  I don’t have an answer for her. She pauses, then continues: “People seem to believe you are responsible for the bombings today. I can’t allow any more vigilante justice. Not now.”

  “But it’s not true. I had nothing to do with it!”

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “You can’t think I did?” I stammer, my confidence leaving me. The room seems suddenly smaller, the darkness at the edge of Okwembu’s feet becoming thicker.

  “All you have to do …” My voice cracks. The thirst is raging worse than ever. I start again. “All you have to do is get on the comms and tell people that I’m not responsible. That way, I could move freely. My crew could protect me. And I saw the people outside – if they get in here, I’ll be trapped. Out there, I can run. Please.”

  I’m regretting the last word the second it leaves my mouth. Okwembu seems to sense the give, the little pressure point, and steps forward, closer to the barrier.

  “How much control do you imagine we have, really?” she says. “The only way we keep the peace any more is by letting people do what they want. We have to give them so much room. If the council were to crack down, to try and force people to do things in a certain way, even on the smallest thing, we’d be destroyed in hours. The only thing we can do any more is advise, and protect.”

  “So you’re just going to leave me in here?”

  “Until this crisis is over, yes.”

  Something occurs to me. I stare at her through the plastic. “And you came down here personally to tell me this?” I say, fear lending an edge to my words. “With Darnell about to destroy the station, you come down to Apogee to tell me that you’re going to keep me in jail? I sort of knew that anyway. Why are you really here?” I’m slightly out of breath, but I hold her gaze.

  Eventually, she says. “I’ll be honest with you, even though you haven’t been honest with me. When I asked you if there was anything else you wanted to tell me about Oren Darnell, you said no. You lied.”

  “What?”

  “If you’d told me what you knew, we might have been able to stop Darnell’s plan before the bombings. But that doesn’t matter now. What matters is that you tell me everything, before more people die.”

  My heart is beating too fast. I turn away from her, my hands on my head. “This is crazy.”

  There’s something else in her voice now, and it takes me a second to pick it up: she sounds almost excited. “Marshall Foster’s assistant is missing,” she continues. “A woman named Grace Garner. She worked with him for years on the council, and now she’s vanished. Nobody’s seen her since the bombings.”

  “So?” I shrug, feigning nonchalance. “What if she was killed in the blast? Or maybe Gray took her. Who knows how many people he was responsible for?”

  “Don’t treat me like an idiot, Ms Hale.” Her voice is soft, controlled, but her eyes are angry. “She was last seen after Darnell was caught. Talking with you, up on the catwalks. Oh, don’t look so shocked. Do you think we’d be able to operate without informants here?”

  I’m silent, and she goes on. “Foster could have been working with Gray and Darnell. If he was one of the Sons of Earth, then Grace Garner would know.

  “Riley,” she says, and the use of my first name nearly makes me recoil. The word is like a pointed fingernail touching bare flesh. “I have to know what she said to you, and where she was going. Where did you send her?”

  “She said she wanted to tell me something. She didn’t say what. I told her to meet me in the mess later. But then, there was the explosion, so …”

  “You’re lying to me again.”

  She takes a step closer to the glass, and this time a note of anger creeps into that silken voice. “Outer Earth is my charge and I will do everything I can to protect it. If you won’t help me, then I won’t help you.”

  “I’m telling you, I don’t where she is. But she’s probably still in Apogee. Maybe someone saw her in the mess.”

  There’s a long silence. Eventually, Okwembu says, “It would be so easy to torture you. But I’ve seen people like you before. When you’ve suffered loss, physical pain means nothing. But what would you do if we were to hurt your friend Amira Al-Hassan? Or cut off Kevin O’Connell’s fingers in front of you?”

  Anger and fear are swirling together inside me, creating something else, a new emotion, something big and bruised and awful.

  “I’m going to let you think about our conversation,” Okwembu says. “I’ll be back soon. And do try to remember that those prison doors won’t hold forever. I can only devote so many officers to guard duty in these troubled times.”

  She turns and walks away, vanishing into the darkness.

  I lose control. I bang hard on the plastic barrier with both fists and scream myself hoarse. The sound is the same as the one I made when I slammed my hand on the outside of Darnell’s cell, but in here it’s louder, echoing around the space. I shout Okwembu’s name over and over, yelling that I’ll kill her if she so much as touches one of my friends. I scramble around the edges of the plastic, hunting for a seam or an edge, but there’s nothing, and after a while I sink to my knees, my fists sliding down the plastic.

  I’ve never wanted to kill someone before. It’s an odd thought, sitting strangely and quietly in my mind like an unwelcome guest. But instead of turning it away, I feed it, nurture it. If Okwembu hurts Amira, or Prakesh or the Twins or anybody else, I will kill her.

  I whisper the words to myself, and in the cell they sound closer than they have any right to be.

  I sleep in snatches. I don’t dream, but I’m restless, tossing and turning on the thin mattress, trying to get comfortable. There’s no way to tell time in here, but I lie on that cot for what feels like hours, grinding my teeth. Eventually, when I’m right on the edge of sleep, I hear footsteps, approaching from the far end of the cell block. She’s back.

  I rise off the bed, my fists clenched, my nails digging into my palms. Defiance courses through me. Whatever she does, I won’t tell her a damn thing. I step to the barrier, place a hand on it …

  … and have to yank it away quickly when the barrier slides quietly into the wall. Stunned, I step forward, into the tiny circle of light beyond. It’s bigger now that the slightly opaque barrier is gone, but the rest of the block is still dark.

  An electric charge crackles up my spine; Okwembu wouldn’t let me out. That can only mean one thing: the people outside have come for me. They’ve overpowered the guards and they’ve busted their way in. I shift into a fighting stance, keeping my centre of gravity low, my arms ready. I can hear the footste
ps again now, getting close.

  A figure steps out of the gloom, and holds out a hand.

  Amira.

  40

  Darnell

  Oren Darnell takes a deep breath, and jumps.

  For a moment, his body is suspended in space. The gap is eight feet wide, and there’s nothing below him but a long fall, all the way down six levels to a very messy stop at the bottom. Just as he thinks he’s misjudged it, that his body is too big to get enough power into the leap, his fingers grasp the ledge on the other side.

  He slams into the wall, barking his knees on the surface, nearly toppling backwards. The ledge he’s holding on to is nothing, a protuberance where two sheets of metal are joined. Hot, noxious air wafts up from below.

  He tries to be as still as possible. He can hear his heart beating through his shirt, and it’s as if each beat is trying to push him away from the wall. His jacket flares out behind him, and the tab screen, carefully slipped into an inside pocket, comes loose. It bounces off the walls as it tumbles, and it’s a full five seconds before Darnell hears the faint smash.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he says to himself. “Won’t need that any more.” He barely realises he’s voiced the thought aloud.

  Slowly, he begins to inch his way along, aiming for an open duct a few feet to his right. Darnell can hear his own breathing, hard and heavy. His jacket has been torn to pieces by the jagged, malformed edges of the back passages and conduits. Doesn’t matter. He’s here.

  This gap, this empty space between the sectors, is the only way into Apex. The main corridors have been sealed off, guarded by stompers with orders to let no one in or out. Hardly surprising, given the precious jewels that Apex holds: the main control room and the council chamber. But it’s not as secure as its citizens might think. Darnell traded a lot for the location of this duct, this one little glitch on the station blueprints that nobody remembered to have closed off.

  Hauling himself into the opening is hard, but he manages it. For a moment, he’s on all fours, and then the duct opens up into a larger space, its walls hidden behind nests of wiring and open fuse boxes. An ordinary person could stand upright, but Darnell has to walk bent over. He doesn’t mind. Low lighting illuminates his lower body, leaving his face in darkness.

  A few yards on, he has to drop to all fours again, to push his way past a protruding power box in the upper half of the space. This close to the ground, he can see a little light filtering through the cracks between the floor panels. When he stands, his hands are caked with dust and grime.

  The access point is a neat white trapdoor, set into the floor. It’s fully pneumatic, and when Darnell presses the recessed button beside it, it slides silently away.

  White light floods into the space from below. Darnell listens hard, but Apex is uncommonly silent. Darnell’s been there before, knows how small the sector is. He should be hearing footsteps, urgent voices, the hiss and buzz and clatter of a very nervous sector. But there’s nothing. Just the thin hum of the station.

  Darnell drops through the gap. He’s momentarily blinded by the harsh white light, blinking as his eyes adjust. He’s in what looks like a small waiting area, the walls slightly curved, the lighting coming from fluorescents in the ceiling. One wall is lined with hard plastic chairs, the other with a slim flowerbed. Darnell’s gaze lingers on the flowers, on their fragile orange petals. Nasturtiums. He wonders where the council managed to get the water to grow them.

  He draws his blade, seats it in his hand, and walks down the corridor leading off the waiting area. If he’s got it right, he should be on the upper level of Apex, a few minutes from the main control room. Skeins of dust fall from his shoulders and hair as he walks, dirtying the pristine white floor.

  “You took your time.”

  Darnell whirls around, his knife slashing out.

  Janice Okwembu steps smartly backwards, and the blade cuts nothing but air. Darnell stares down at her, his shoulders heaving.

  “You shouldn’t have let them arrest me,” he says, after a moment.

  “You shouldn’t have got arrested,” Okwembu says. “In any case, it doesn’t matter. Everything else is on schedule.”

  41

  Riley

  I pull Amira into a hug, squeezing her tight. She pauses for a moment, then squeezes back.

  “How’d you find me?” I ask.

  “Don’t worry about that,” she replies. “Are you hurt?”

  I shake my head. “But what about the crowd? The stompers? How did you …”

  “The crowd left a while ago. As soon as they realised that they weren’t getting in.”

  “But the stompers …”

  She pauses, and it’s only then that I see the thin splatters of blood across her shoulders. She shrugs, and says, “They have no idea how to fight. They think stingers make them invincible.”

  I tell her about my conversation with Okwembu. But before I can finish the story, there are shouts from the other end of the block. More guards, at least four of them. Amira motions me back. “In the cell. Lie down on the bed.” I’m puzzled, but I do as she asks. I see her step into the shadows, flattening up against the wall on the far side.

  I’m staring at the ceiling, hands folded under my head, when they arrive, stingers out. They crowd the entrance to the cell, their stingers sweeping wildly around the tight space. They look young, almost certainly some kind of trainee unit, nothing more than kids with guns. The one who arrives first seems older than the others, but still doesn’t look a minute over eighteen or nineteen. His stinger, at least, stays steady.

  “What did you do?” he yells.

  He doesn’t hear Amira slip in behind him, or see her arms reach around his neck and over his head. She grabs and twists, and I hear his neck snap, a sound that shocks the others into silence.

  It’s all the opening she needs.

  Amira is amazing to watch in battle. She could almost be dancing. Not a single movement is wasted, and each one flows into the next, as if she had practised the entire sequence beforehand. No matter what the stompers try, Amira is three steps ahead, driving elbows into stomachs and open hands into temples.

  She knocks the last one flat, striking the heel of her hand into the middle of his face. His nose explodes in a flare of blood, the crack of the bone echoing through the brig. He gives a muffled howl of pain. As he falls, she grabs his stinger, and in one quick movement dismantles it, dropping out the clip and separating the slide from the body. She tosses the pieces aside, and they strike the floor, the noise echoing in the sudden silence.

  I hop off the bed. “I could have helped, you know,” I say, glancing at the moaning guards. A tiny frisson of fear shoots through me at the sight of the guard who got his neck snapped, but I tamp it down.

  She ignores my comment. “Why didn’t you just tell Okwembu whatever Garner told you?”

  “Because she didn’t tell me anything. Not back at the trial, anyway. I said I’d meet her in the Air Lab.”

  “So why not tell Okwembu that?”

  I shake my head. “Amira, there was something … I don’t know. Off about her. Like she knows a lot more than she’s letting on.”

  Amira studies me. Her eyes reveal absolutely nothing.

  “Well then,” she says after a moment. “We need to find Garner. The sooner we hear what she has to say, the sooner we can stop all this.”

  I think for a moment. “It’s too dangerous for me to go all the way up to Gardens. I should lie low. I’ll go find the other Dancers, you go find Garner.”

  “No,” Amira says. “She sought you out, not me. I don’t want to get all the way there to find that you’re the only person she’ll talk to. We go together.”

  “And after we talk to her, what then?”

  The oddest look crosses Amira’s face. It only lasts for a split second, but it seems filled with sorrow and with anger.

  “What? What is it?” I ask.

  She looks away. Then says, “It’s all gone to hell, Ri
ley. All of it. It’s a nightmare out there.”

  Her words hang in the air, a reminder of what we’re up against. Eventually, she says, “We have to go.”

  “All right,” I say. “But I need water, and something to eat. They didn’t feed me in here. How much time do we have?”

  Another shadow crosses her face at the mention of Darnell’s countdown. “I don’t know. Thirty hours? Anyway, you’re right. There’s some food back in the Nest. We go there first, then we head to Gardens.”

  And then we’re running again, out of the cell block and into the main station. The guards Amira took down outside the prison are still lying there. It half occurs to me that she might have killed some of them too, but I push the thought away. Besides, I tell myself, you were ready to kill someone not more than a few hours ago. Amira did what she had to.

  She takes point, her scarf billowing out behind her. It’s been a while since the bombings, and the station seems to have calmed down a little. But the people we do see are harried and drawn, talking quietly in worried little groups, barely glancing at us. We’re not chased, and as we approach the Nest, Amira slows to a jog, dropping in beside me, her breaths coming quickly. There’s a thin sheen of sweat on her face, and she runs a hand across her forehead.

  She gestures for me to go first, and I tac off the wall and pull myself up through the trapdoor. The entranceway is dark, and as Amira pulls herself up behind me, I stand and reach for the keypad.

  It’s only then I notice that the door to the Nest is slightly ajar, a tiny slash of light creeping through the opening. As Amira gets to her feet, I raise a hand, motioning her to be quiet. I feel her tense behind me, and a growing feeling of dread wells in my chest as I push the door open.

  Whatever Carver was working on has been torn apart, thrown around the room, a blast of welded metal and chemicals. His workbench is on its side. The mattresses are upside-down, with stuffing pouring out of deep slashes. Carver and the Twins are nowhere to be seen. Yao’s mural – her beautiful, beautiful mural – has been sprayed over, defaced with what looks like burn marks, angry, ugly blotches that cover the entire wall. It takes me a moment to see that the blotches form a word: TRAITOR.