by Peter Watts
A collective Hmm that went through the class, as though they hadn’t really considered that side of things, before. Which they probably hadn’t. But you couldn’t grow up with Sunny as your mother and not start seeing opportunities for emotional manipulation for exactly what they were. In the specs, Hwa watched the baseline green ripple into contemplative orange.
Mr. Branch’s mouth thinned. “Things have changed, since you dropped out three years ago.”
The rest of the class Oooh’d. The orange turned back to green. Beside her, Joel winced. He shot her a look that begged her not to take this any further. He was worried—the aura around him was a thin bruise blue. She winked at him. Anybody who thought she was hurt by comments about having dropped out didn’t really know her. The day she turned her back on this place was one of her favorite memories, and thinking about it never failed to make her feel better. She leaned back in her seat and looked at Mr. Branch. She crossed her hands over her stomach, like she’d just finished a big meal and was ready to relax.
“You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m sure they gave you a whole seminar on the new rules, once you were come from away.”
Nothing happened. Branch appeared to be processing what she’d said. She’d said it in slang deliberately, so he’d have to spend time working it out in front of the whole class. Because while he was her teacher, he was also being an asshole, and if there was anything she’d learned in three years of bodyguarding it was how to deal with assholes. You had to puncture them like the inflamed little sphincters they were and watch while all the pus drained out until they were just shriveled little rings of nothing special. Words were good for this. Like subtly reminding an entire classroom that Branch was a stranger, not a rigger, not even from the mainland but from Away, from Vancouver or wherever clear on the other side of the country.
“Just get me the assignment,” Branch said. He started calling off more names.
“You can have mine,” Joel whispered to her. “I wrote two.”
Of course he did. “Why would you do twice the homework?”
“I’d already written one, on faster-than-light travel,” Joel said, “but then I pinged him about it, just to show off, and he shot me down. Said he wasn’t taking any science fiction questions in science class. Real problems only.”
“So what’d you write about, instead?”
“How the ITER failed, in France.”
Hwa nodded. “That’d be good for science to figure out.”
“Science has figured it out.” A smirk tugged at the edges of Joel’s lips. He lowered his voice still further. “That’s why we’re building another one.”
Hwa turned to him. “We?”
“The company,” he said. “We’re building another experimental thermonuclear reactor, right here. Underwater.”
“Underwater.” Hwa pointed at the floor. “Under this water?”
Joel nodded. “Under the city.”
Hwa drew breath. “What the hell kind of James Bond villain bullshit—”
“You promised your father you wouldn’t discuss this outside the family, Joel,” Síofra said. “Hwa signed a non-disclosure agreement, but you shouldn’t make it difficult for her to adhere to it.”
“You’re building a fucking sun under this town, and I’m the one you’re worried—”
“Miss Go!”
Hwa’s head snapped up. Branch did not look happy. Shit.
“Since you and Mr. Lynch have so many things to discuss, perhaps you’d like to discuss them in the hall. Eight bins of fetal pigs were just delivered for Miss Jarvis’ biology class, and they’re not getting any colder sitting out in mailroom. I’d like you to bring them from downstairs to the science lounge, and load them in the refrigerator.”
“Can we have the elevator pass?” Joel asked.
Branch smiled. “No.”
Hwa shrugged. She stood. “Come on.”
“But—”
“It’ll be good for your arms. Let’s go.”
“So, are you guys gonna disconnect the whole rig and fire everybody, or just wait until your science experiment explodes and kills us all?”
“It won’t explode.” Joel grunted, lost control of his one bin, and set it down on the floor. “Why wouldn’t they give us a dolly or a hand-truck or something we could use to lift these things?” He flexed his fingers. “My hands hurt.”
They were barely out of the mailroom off the main entrance. They’d been walking for all of two minutes, and hadn’t even cleared the lobby, yet. Even if the death threats against Joel were totally bogus, and Hwa was inclined to believe they were, she’d be damned if she didn’t whip him into shape. The kid could barely lift twenty pounds.
“That’s because you’re using your hands and not your arms. And that’s because you got no arms.”
Joel flapped his arms at his sides.
“No. I mean, you got no arms.” Hwa squatted to put her two bins down and straightened up. Her spine popped as she rose to her full height. She’d been slacking off on her vinyasas, and that was clearly a mistake. She stepped close to Joel and flexed her right arm. “Feel that.”
Joel poked her arm. His eyes widened. “Is that your bicep?”
“It’s discipline, and years of training. That’s what it is.”
Sheepish, Joel shuffled back to his bin and tried to lift it in a single mighty move. Hwa winced as his back sloped forward. He was trying to carry the thing on his non-existent belly, like a fetus. Which was ironic, given the contents of the bin.
“Okay, lesson one,” Hwa said. “Put that thing down.”
“We have to get back to class.”
“Oh, please. Fuck that guy. Seriously. Besides, this is physics too. Sort of. The physics of not fucking up your lumbar region.”
“I think that’s kinesiology.”
“Whatever. Put that down. No, really, put it down. Now, watch me. See how my back is planked? It’s a straight line, from the back of my head to the bottom of my spine. See?”
Joel cocked his head. “Okay.”
“Now, I squat down like I’m doing a clean lift. Because that’s basically what this is, is a clean lift. I’ll show you one later, in the weight room. And I lift from the knees—”
“THIS IS A LOCKDOWN. ALL STUDENTS MUST REPORT TO CLASSROOMS IMMEDIATELY.”
“Is it a drill?” Joel asked.
“Probably. I’ll check.” Hwa’s gaze slid slowly over a series of icons in the far right of her vision. One of them was an exclamation point. It was blinking. She focused on it and blinked three times. An alert swarmed up in her vision: THIS IS A LOCKDOWN. ALL STUDENTS MUST REPORT TO CLASSROOMS IMMEDIATELY.
“No shit, Sherlock,” she muttered.
“Is it a drill?” Joel asked.
“THIS IS A LOCKDOWN. ALL STUDENTS MUST REPORT TO CLASSROOMS IMMEDIATELY. DOORS WILL BE LOCKING IN SIXTY SECONDS.”
Which one was the goddamn security icon? Why weren’t these things more intuitive? She blinked out of the alerts menu and roved her gaze over the others. There it was. A badge. Security. She blinked three times.
“FIFTY SECONDS.”
There, in her left eye, was a juddering video feed of a man in a long coat. He was carrying a shotgun. He was on the edge of the atrium at the end of the lobby. Any minute now, he could change direction and cross the atrium, where he would see them. They were boxed in.
“THIRTY SECONDS.”
“Is it a drill?”
Hwa focused on Joel. “No,” she said. “It’s not.”
“TEN SECONDS.”
Joel bolted back to the mailroom. He pounded on the door. He tried the knob. It was locked. The blinds were down. Hwa began stacking bins. If they couldn’t find shelter, she would have to make one. Maybe if she stacked the bins outside the mailroom, they would just look like another delivery that hadn’t been processed yet. Or maybe fetal pig bodies were especially good at absorbing hollow-points.
“Sorry, piggies,” she murmured. “Joel!”
“They won’t let us in!”
“Not so loud!” Hwa gestured for him to hunker down beside her in the shadow of the bins. He came over and crouched. “Here’s what we’re gonna do,” she said, and belatedly realized that phrasing something that way meant she actually had to have a plan.
“What?”
Hwa watched the shooter in her left eye. He was moving in the other direction. Good. “We have to be really quiet,” she whispered.
“Okay.”
Hwa tried to remember what the school security briefing had said about lockdowns. She’d gone through lockdown drills before dropping out, but being on the other side of all that procedure was different. In the security tab, she found a subheading marked “Evacuations and Drills,” and blinked at it. It unfolded across her right eye, and as she read, her heart sank.
“All the doors are locked, now. The whole school is sealed. Main doors, fire exits, everything. It’s all remote; the cops are the only ones who can open it back up.”
“Daniel could open it back up,” Joel said. He focused elsewhere and whispered. “Daniel? Are you there? Daniel?”
Static.
“All the communications are being jammed,” Hwa said. “That’s part of it. In case there’s a bomb. Or in case there’s a hack in the system or the augments. Or a toxin. It’s a total quarantine, until the cops come in. Nothing goes in or out. No people, no information, not even the air. Nothing.”
There was a terrible silence. The silence of scared kids hiding behind locked doors. The silence of fans that have stopped spinning. Dead air, closed mouths, and empty halls. Hwa had never known the school to be so quiet. It sounded like everyone was already dead.
“We’re alone,” Joel said, finally.
“Yeah.”
“So what do we do?”
Hwa looked again the shooter. He was far on the other side of the atrium. “We move. Now. Quietly.” Hwa pointed to the left of the atrium. “We need to get to the elevator on that side. I’ll force the doors open. We can use the elevator shaft to get into the ducts. Then we use the ducts to climb into the lighting booth above the auditorium.”
Joel looked at her as though she had just relayed all that information in Korean. Given the situation, maybe she had. “You’re crazy.”
“The lighting booth is the safest place in school, Joel. It’s why everybody goes there to make out. There’s only one way in or out, and it’s a ladder that pulls up behind you.”
He didn’t look any more confident.
“Joel. Come on. Your dad hired me for a reason, right?”
He nodded.
“This is that reason.”
His lips firmed and he nodded again. “Okay.”
Hwa poked her head out first. The shooter was peering down another hallway. This was the perfect time to move. She gestured behind herself. “Go. Now.”
Joel skittered around from behind her and started running. She chased from behind, keeping herself in line behind him. Their new shoes squeaked across the floor; it was recently waxed and Joel wiped out and yelped. In her left eye, the shooter’s head came up and she saw him raise his gun—
—heard the dry pops of fire—
—felt her right arm open up—
—skidded to the nearest bathroom. It was the girls’ room; there was only one door and it didn’t lock. Hwa pushed Joel toward the back stall and locked the door behind them.
“I thought we were going to the elevator!”
Hwa held up her arm. It was as though a mouth had yawned open across her flesh. Yellow globules of fat dangled from underneath her ragged skin. “Plan’s changed.”
Joel went even paler than usual. “Oh, no.”
“Yeah, karma’s a bitch,” Hwa said. “Shouldn’t have showed it off to you.”
“We have to apply pressure.” Joel grabbed her arm and held it. His hands shook. He seemed entirely too focused on his hands. “Wait. I have a better idea.” He put Hwa’s hand over her wound and held it there. “Hold on.”
Hwa watched him hop off the toilet and open the stall door. “No, don’t!”
He darted out and she heard a rough scraping sound and a few grunts. Finally there was a terrible screech, and he came back into the stall with a maxi pad in each hand. “I got the extra absorbent kind.”
Hwa forced her grimace into a grin. “Nice work.”
Joel removed the tie pin from his tie, loosened the tie, and pulled it off without un-knotting it. He tore open the packaging around one pad and frowned at the wad of antibacterial memory foam in his hand. “That’s it? That’s the best they can do?”
“Hey, those were miracle Space Age fibers, back in the day.”
“Wow. No wonder you’re so pissed off, all the time.”
Joel wrapped the pad over Hwa’s wound. Then she helped him slide his tie up her arm. He tightened the loop around the pad and then wrapped the rest of the tie’s length around her arm and tucked the end into the wrap.
“Can you still move your fingers?” he asked.
Hwa flexed them. “Yeah. Thanks. You’re kind of a genius.”
Joel shrugged. “I know. That’s what my test scores say.”
“Seriously?”
“Pretty much. I have a certificate and everything.”
She licked her lips. The wound in her arm was now more of a dull, throbbing ache. She could work with that. But only so much. “Well, you got any genius ideas for getting us back into that elevator? I can’t force the doors with this arm.”
Joel pulled the tie pin from his pocket. “Actually? I do.”
The elevator had two access mechanisms: a standard chip-reader, and an old-fashioned turnkey system for when the power went out. Hwa stood guard as Joel worked the pin into the elevator’s key slot.
“This always looks easier, in the dramas,” Joel said.
“Don’t force it,” Hwa said. “Just feel around gently until you feel something push back. You know, like a clit.”
Joel rolled his eyes, but didn’t blush. Hwa coughed a laugh. Maybe she wasn’t doing so great at not getting hurt, but as for teaching Joel some valuable life lessons, she was batting a thousand.
The doors chimed open. They fell inside, and Hwa slapped the “door close” button. Then she looked up at the ceiling of the elevator. There was all kinds of shit up there, wedged up between the lights and the plastic panels that were supposed to protect them. Pencils, rubber bands, dead flies both organic and robotic, even a pink assignment sheet with the word “GULLIBLE” written across it in green marker.
“Bunch of savages in this town,” Hwa said. “Jump up there and take down one of those panels.”
Joel reached up and jumped. It took him a couple of tries, but the panel fell open and showered him with dead flies and paperclips. “Now what?”
Hwa told him how to turn the lights off and gain access to the ceiling panel that would pop open the trapdoor on top of the elevator. She had to kneel down and let him stand on her knee to do it, but he had good hands and worked fast. Soon he had the trapdoor open, and after he climbed up through it, he helped her get up there, too.
“Hold on. Let me get into blueprint mode, here.” Hwa found the blueprint icon in her vision. The school being a publicly funded building, it had to release all its plans. So she could see where all the shafts and ducts went. It took her a moment to orient herself, but the light booth was unmistakable. And as she suspected, it had a major HVAC duct sitting right up on top of it. With the stage lights, the auditorium got awfully hot during performances. The only way to control the temperature was to force the air one way or another. And the only way to do that without impeding anyone’s view of the stage was to stick a big fan on top of the light booth.
Hopefully the quarantine would last long enough that none of the fans would be spinning while they were in the ducts.
She pointed at the spiny ladder leading up the shaft. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Climbing ladders and crawling through ducts wit
h one arm was excruciating. There was no other word for it. Hwa smeared blood everywhere she went. The ducts were smaller and tighter than she’d expected, and the only thing that greased their way through the aluminum tunnels was anxious, frustrated sweat. It felt like being born, if your mother was an unfeeling machine with a pussy made of steel who didn’t really care if you lived or died.
That was a fairly accurate description of Sunny, actually. Hwa would have to remember that for later. If there was a “later.”
Finally they made it to the light booth. The fan was still off. Hwa checked her watch. This was a long time for the cops not to enter the building. What were they waiting for?
“Let’s get through before it starts up again,” Joel said.
“Yeah.” Hwa wriggled around until her feet faced the fan. “Turn around so your back is to mine, okay? I need you to brace me, so my kicks have more force.”
“Okay.” He turned around. Through his shirt, she could feel how hot and damp he was. But he didn’t seem frightened. He was doing well with this whole thing. “You’re doing pretty well with this whole thing.”
“I have an anti-anxiety implant,” Joel said. “It’s perched right on my amygdala. It’s sort of like a pacemaker, for my emotions. I don’t feel high highs or low lows. I’m right in the middle, all the time. Dad had it put in right when my voice started to change.”
Hwa kicked twice. The fan squealed the second time, but didn’t budge. “No shit?”
“No shit.”
No wonder he hadn’t blushed at her clit joke. “That must really fuck up your sex life.”
“I’m fifteen,” Joel said. “I don’t have a sex life.”
Hwa focused all her surprise into her legs and kicked again. “Fifteen? You’re a senior! You’re graduating this year!”
She felt him shrug against her shoulders. “Like I said. I’m a genius.”
“Wow.” She kicked right at the center of the fan. It dented around her feet. Now they were getting somewhere. She could see a rim of light around the panel. “So, that means I’m, what, seven years older than you?”
“I don’t know how old you are,” Joel said. “Does it matter?”
Hwa kicked hard. The fan fell in, and a couple of little kicks at its edges with her heels popped it the rest of the way. “Nope,” Hwa said. And she pushed herself through.