The Kota

by Sunshine Somerville

  The hum of the overhead lights was all that remained for company, so Bullseye exited the training room and went back to her living compartments to shower.

  Edlyn was right. Bullseye was admittedly thrilled to hear of Malice’s totaled ride, but she regretted drinking to the point where she’d blacked out and missed doing it. She’d blended in with the Youth so much that she’d lost herself. That would not happen again. The first rule of undercover work was to keep your head in the game. She shouldn’t have gotten caught up in the Youth’s careless fun.

  I’m not allowed to be a normal girl, she thought. I’m not sure what I am.

  After their mission briefing, Matsuri and Bullseye loaded into a luxury hover car. The driver was to drop them off near the rebel facility in Resistance City, which was a few hours’ drive from Capital City. The facility was in the richer district, which meant a Dominion-only part of town. It seemed an odd locale for the Underground to choose, but the trained operatives knew something about hiding in plain sight.

  Bullseye tried not to squirm in the chauffeured hover car, but the plush seat didn’t offer much support for her bruised side. She knew she should’ve bandaged the wound, but she didn’t want anyone to notice she was injured. Dressed in civilian clothes, they had to be cautious.

  Her partner noticed her discomfort. “You need to be more careful,” Matsuri said in his usual, brotherly tone. “You should’ve invisibly snuck past the executive’s bodyguards.”

  “That’s just your pure genes talking, Mat.” She knew that Matsuri, unlike many Dominion operatives, was not one of the Misfits of Breeding. He was skilled enough without mutate-genes, but it was something about which she often teased him. “What glow would slaying him have been if he couldn’t see it coming? Besides, I can’t always dematerialize. It gets tiring.”

  “What’s it like?”

  Bullseye rolled her eyes, growing tired of the topic. “Stop worrying. I’m chief.” She smiled at her use of Youth slang, knowing it irritated her partner.

  Matsuri sighed. “I know you’re making friends with the Youth to protect yourself. But if you start talking like Nikki or Jib, you’ll have to find yourself a new partner.”

  “I’m kidding. I just…” She raised an eyebrow as a grin spread across his face. “How did you know I was with Nikki and Jib?”

  “I went for an early run before breakfast, and I saw you guys climbing back over the compound wall. Jib and the others were too wasted to realize they walked right by the scanners. I over-road the security system and let you guys inside the compound. And I didn’t tell Edlyn, although she probably figured it out.” He smiled. “Jib and those guys can flush themselves, but what kind of partner would I be if I didn’t cover for you? But I won’t always be up at five in the morning to see you stumbling in, so don’t make a habit of it.”

  Bullseye had to smile. “I knew you were hiding something! So you brought me to my room last night?”

  “Yeah. You cacked on my shoes, by the way.”

  “Oh, flush me! I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m just glad Jib and your new buddies brought you back in one piece.”

  Bullseye looked at her partner as he smiled and turned to his window.

  This is a friend, she thought. Mat’s saved my butt a hundred times. In the field and off.

  Bullseye decided to tell him a part of what was on her mind. “I needed to get away last night. I’ve been… I had another dream about the day the Dominion took me from my mother. I can remember that day so clearly, but everything before that’s a blur.” She reached into her boot despite the pain in her side and pulled out the ancient knife to look over the treasure.

  “We’ve been over this a thousand times,” Matsuri said when he saw the knife. “Your mother gave you to Cruelthor willingly, so there’s no point digging up details. Vedanleé knew you’d have a better life inside the Dominion because of the advantages we-”

  “I know, I know. I’ve been schooled and trained, and I even have the great-and-mysterious DRK treatment injected into my bloodstream every month. I know I have nothing to complain about. It’s just…” She tried to find the words. “I sometimes get this feeling, you know? Like something out there’s bigger than this.”

  “Oh, so now there’s more to life than the mission? Since when?”

  Bullseye rolled her eyes and gave up. There was no use trying to explain. Matsuri was largely right, and she knew it. She only let people see the part of her focused on the job. But she was more than that too. Wasn’t she?

  Matsuri changed the topic to the mission at hand. He always did that. “Why do you think it’s so important we destroy this rebel facility? We just took care of that executive, and now we’re on another job already. What makes this so urgent?”

  “Don’t you download the economic reports?” She saw that he thought analyzing these reports to be one of her overachieving tendencies. “Mat, the Dominion executives got where they are in citizen companies because they’ve had cerebral augmentation. These executives are smarter than people without the operation. They have to stay in power in order to maintain the Dominion’s status. If citizens got in top offices, we’d lose control over those businesses. The finances would go elsewhere. If the rebels are the ones performing the operations to make citizens smarter, then the rebels will get the finances. That’s why the Dominion is supposed to control cerebral augmentation. It’s all about control, Mat.”

  “Why doesn’t the Dominion seize control of the companies anyway?” he asked with a slight scowl. “Then we wouldn’t have to worry about citizen-run companies.”

  Bullseye shrugged. “You gotta give people something. The illusion of free enterprise is better than nothing. We just can’t let things slip too far, which they would if cerebral augmentation was accessible to the masses.” She remembered another report. “And can you imagine if rebel scientists and military leaders had augmentation? The Dominion has weaknesses, you know. If rebels were smart enough to figure out how to exploit those weaknesses, they could cause all kinds of trouble. I mean, sure, they’re trouble now, but let’s not let them engineer geniuses.”

  Matsuri looked at her with a furrowed brow before glancing out his window. “Bulls, when we get to this facility…”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Just be careful. You haven’t been doing that lately, and I can’t watch out for you every second.”

  A short time later, the driver announced they’d arrived at the drop-off location. Bullseye and Matsuri stepped from the hover car onto a sidewalk, and Bullseye recognized the street. They were in downtown Resistance City.

  As she inspected the city blocks around them, Bullseye thought it looked like most other Northern Continent cities. Towering skyscrapers blocked most of the overcast sky, and many layers of traffic cluttered the air overhead. On the ground, Resistance City was immaculate. The homeless Bullseye had seen in other cities were noticeably absent. Well-dressed men and women entered and exited buildings across the street. Stores and food stopovers lined their sidewalk.

  Matsuri elbowed her in the arm, and she turned the other way. A block down stood a three-story building with a sign proclaiming it was a Dominion medical facility. Right next door was a Dominion drones’ security station, and a patrol machine orbited around the station. Luckily for the rebels, Bullseye saw that its cameras and ID scanner never aimed in the medical building’s direction.

  She smirked.

  Not that I have to worry about cameras either, she thought.

  “Should be glow.”

  Matsuri shot her an exasperated glance as he swung his bag over his shoulder.

  “Sorry. No more slang. Should be fun and absent of problematic complications.” She reached up and flicked his ear.

  They crossed the street to the medical facility. Matsuri reached the door first and pulled the handle, which didn’t budge. Glancing around, he then worked with the lock.

  Bullseye noted, “No cars out front. Must b
e closed for the day.”

  “Looks like.”

  While she waited, Bullseye casually leaned on the building and kept watch. She scowled as she noticed that the Dominion security station also seemed empty. “Anything strange about this to you? I mean, on top of the rebels choosing this location in the first place.”

  A green light flickered above the door, and Matsuri turned the latch to open the door for her. “Seems a little weird, yeah. But this is a pretty straightforward mission.”

  He’s right, she thought. I’m just trying to make this more interesting.

  Matsuri pointed at the open door. “Come on, would you? Let’s set the explosives.” He adjusted from foot to foot. “If you hurry up, I’ll buy dinner on the way back.”

  She couldn’t argue with that, so she stepped through the door and entered the main lobby of the building. Matsuri followed right after her.

  Door closed, they stood in the empty lobby and scanned the interior. Bullseye saw waiting area chairs, a reception desk, a side hall with patient examination rooms, and a separate hall ending with a set of closed-off, double doors. The blueprints of the facility had entertained them during the ride, and they knew these doors led to the operating room with the cerebral augmentation equipment.

  Matsuri motioned to this hall. “Take the bomb into the operating room. The explosion will be most effective if it goes off in the center of the building. I’ll work on the detonator.” He set his bag on the reception desk and handed her the bomb carefully. As he did so, his hands quivered.

  “What’s wrong with you? We’ve done this before. Stop worrying your blond little head off.” Bullseye gave him a scowl and took the standard-issue bomb, then walked down the hall he’d indicated.

  The sterile, airtight doors swung inward to let her through, and Bullseye hummed a song to herself. She continued to where the hall branched right. A second set of doors led to the operating room. Pushing these doors open, she stepped inside a typical operating room complete with medical table, monitoring devices, and equipment she recognized from cursory medical classes. The only problem was, she didn’t see any cerebral augmentation equipment.

  Beep.

  Bullseye looked down. Her pulse quickened. The bomb’s display was blinking red, and a timer read ten seconds.

  “Oh, flush me…”

  She lowered the bomb on the operating table, then spun to flee. Pulse racing, she ran back the way she’d come through the halls. Bullseye reached the sterile doors and yanked on the handles only to find them locked.

  “Mat! Mat!” She banged on the doors and tried to shake them, but they were solid, airtight, and without a crack for her to dematerialize through.

  Then she understood why Matsuri had been so nervous.

  The explosion gave her only a split second to dematerialize before a fireball poured through the hall. The walls shook to life, and the ceiling fell as debris shot through the air in a million directions at once. Dematerialized, she was finally able to make it through the doors as they blew out into the main lobby. But there was too much fire, too much debris. In exhaustion, she came back into physical form and was hit by a piece of falling ceiling.

  “Ahhh!” she yelled as fresh pain seized her torso.

  The chunk of ceiling pinned her to the floor as smoke and flames clouded her senses. She coughed and tried to see, but everything was a blur of fire and dust. She was too drained and injured to focus on dematerializing, and she couldn’t move to pull herself out from under the debris. Bullseye lowered her head to the dirty floor and coughed as her head filled with pain. She felt herself drifting out of consciousness, but there was nothing she could do.

  Mat can’t lie, she thought. I should’ve known…

  Her eyes fluttered open as the heavy debris was suddenly cast aside. With a gasp she tried to breathe again, but now her head was pounding. She had a sense of being lifted, and she felt her whole body go limp as someone clutched her to his chest. Someone carried her out of the fiery building, and once outside in the open air she looked up and saw Matsuri’s face.

  He didn’t look at her but carried her away from the rubble in the street. A siren blared somewhere near, and Matsuri hugged her to his chest as a squad of drones rushed to the scene. Citizens crowded along the sidewalks, trying to see. Matsuri ignored these people as he ran with her up a side street, and Bullseye’s head bounced against his chest until he finally stopped. She heard a car door open, and Matsuri lowered her into the backseat of their hover car.

  The stillness was a great relief, and Bullseye could no longer fight unconsciousness. The last thing she saw was Matsuri as he yelled at the driver and slammed the door.

  Maybe Mat made a mistake, she thought. Maybe it was an accident…

  When she came to, Bullseye lay on a medical bed. Medical instruments lined the wall on one side, and she rolled her head to see an empty bed on the other side. Beyond that bed, a table held various medical devices. She looked forward and saw that the wall before her was entirely glass. A drone soldier stood by her room’s entrance, and an empty, windowless hall ran before him.

  I must be in a sublevel of the Capitol, she thought.

  She smelled smoke and realized it was from her hair and disheveled clothing. Cuts and bruises covered her arms. A bandage was wrapped around her head. Her back felt numb, and she lifted her shirt to see a bandage over her side.

  The sound of the sliding door made her look up. Cruelthor entered, wearing a suit and looking as dapper as usual. He kept his hands in his pockets and stomped into the room. His expression wasn’t good and brought to mind inclement weather.

  “Do you remember what happened? You’ve been unconscious since your driver carried you in.”

  Bullseye held her head and tried to get things straight. “I was locked inside when the bomb went off, but I dematerialized so I wasn’t slain. It was too hard with the fire, so I materialized again, and then I got pinned. Matsuri saved me. He put me in the hover car.” She looked around, dazed. “Where is he?”

  Cruelthor first responded with a glare. “Matsuri has turned traitor. It seems he joined the Underground, and they ordered him to eliminate you.”

  She felt herself pale. She’d known this. Deep down, she’d known this.

  “That’s what we guess, anyhow,” Cruelthor added with a distracted glare at the wall. “Edlyn isn’t saying much.”

  “What?”

  “Edlyn was caught on surveillance discarding Matsuri’s ID tag. It’s been discovered that she’s been in league with the rebels for years. Edlyn and the brother who’s dead to me-” with a spit “-convinced Matsuri that he should betray the Dominion. When you two got back from slaying that executive, the Underground leaked the location of their cerebral augmentation facility. They set up this whole thing – the equipment was never even there. The Underground was testing Matsuri’s loyalty by asking him to kill you.”

  “Me? They wanted him to…” She put a hand to her throbbing head.

  My best friend tried to slay me, she thought. He’s joined the rebels. Mat knows Beathabane? Edy’s a part of this? That can’t be right!

  “We’re currently looking into whether you are involved as well.”

  Bullseye felt a chill as she looked back at him. “You think I’m a double agent for the Underground? You think I’m in on Matsuri’s plans?”

  Cruelthor scoffed and began pacing the medical room. “Why are people constantly trying to ruin me? I gave Matsuri and Edlyn everything they could ever want, and they’re not the first to turn on me, you know. Am I that horrible of a ruler? I don’t think so. Do I give orders to kill infants like the great pharaohs? Or stamp out an entire people like the Nazis and my father? Do I raise taxes? No, I don’t! I’m just trying to bring a little order to this messed up world we live in. But people still turn traitor and run off to join my enemies, dear baby sister!”

  “I know.” Bullseye winced as he got in her face. She looked away from his eyes. She was starting to sweat.


  If some prophecy says I want to destroy the Dominion, she thought, then of course he thinks I’m a traitor! I have to clear myself of suspicion.

  “Edlyn removed Matsuri’s ID tag?”

  “Yes. There’s no way to track him now. Matsuri won’t have access to his accounts anymore, but he’s free as a bird.”

  “But Edlyn didn’t do anything about my ID tag, did she? Wouldn’t she, if I was-”

  “You don’t have an ID tag! It slipped out of you when you first dematerialized, remember? That’s why I’m spending so much kronar developing new tech. But even if they do make disposable ID tags like I’ve asked, all you have to do is peel them off or dematerialize. I have no real way to track you ever again! You’d be as free as Matsuri! Edlyn didn’t need to do a damn thing to protect you!”

  “But ask her. Investigate to see if-”

  “Edlyn is no longer of any use to you.”

  Bullseye froze. “What does that mean?”

  “It means Edlyn hasn’t had her treatment yet this month. Your instructor was injected with DRK a few hours ago. You know how fast direct injection works – she’s already deteriorating to the factor form. I’m sending her to the DuoPort on the next transport ship.”

  Bullseye tried to make sense of this and then remembered. Because DRK injection punishment resulted in an abundance of factors, Cruelthor had decided to get rid of the diseased as thoroughly as possible. The Northern Continent’s portal was too exposed to the public, but the Mainland-Euro’s portal was more isolated. So, the Dominion regularly sent factor-filled transport ships to a base by the Mainland-Euro’s DuoPort. The transports were then flown up to the portal and thrown in. Since everyone who entered the DuoPorts vanished without a trace, this punishment was viewed as all the more serious.

  Edy, she thought. Oh, no.

  She didn’t know what to say.

  Cruelthor looked at her coldly but with indecision. Then he stomped out of the room.

  As soon as he left, Bullseye slid off the bed and held in a cry of pain. She stood and waited for the security drone outside her door to turn his head.