by K. M. Ruiz
“Crazy, yeah, but it might work,” Kerr said as Quinton took the car out of park and pressed his foot to the gas pedal. “I don’t think we’d have gotten this far if he didn’t believe we could make it all the way.”
It was funny, Threnody thought as Quinton drove into the storm, just how much faith all of them were putting in someone who was supposed to be their enemy.
PART SEVEN
APERTURE
SESSION DATE: 2128.05.26
LOCATION: Institute of Psionics Research
CLEARANCE ID: Dr. Amy Bennett
SUBJECT: 2581
FILE NUMBER: 487
“We can’t go aboveground anymore,” the doctor says as she sits rigidly in her seat. “Too much fallout in the air is killing us and the towers aren’t sealed yet. I haven’t seen the sun for almost three years.”
“Don’t worry. It’s still there.”
“Aisling.”
She is coloring again, rubbing her crayons to small nubs. “Shh, be quiet. He’s talking.”
“Aisling.”
The girl looks up and frowns at the camera as the machines behind her whine. “I could never promise you the world, Lucas. Simply a world.”
The doctor leans forward. “We need answers, Aisling. Not these disjointed reports of people we can’t locate.”
“You want what he wants.” Aisling sounds frustrated as she slowly slides her crayon off the paper and onto the table, forcibly staining the room with color. “He wants what I want, but they aren’t the same thing.”
“We need to know when the next bomb will fall.”
“Lima, Peru,” she says, the tip of her crayon breaking off. “Five, four, three, too late. Can I have another box of crayons, Doctor?”
[TWENTY-SEVEN]
AUGUST 2379
BUFFALO, USA
The maglev train slid slowly into Bunker North, but no one was expecting anyone on it to still be breathing. Neither were the Strykers lining the platform expecting enemy psions to still be present in any of the cars as they worked their way through the stinking mess left behind.
Shielded tight on the mental grid, wrapped in a telekinetic shield to stave off the soaking wetness of the storm, Lucas was aboveground. Standing beneath a metal overhang of a building that did nothing to keep out the wind and the rain, Lucas ducked his head against the storm and reached through the psi link for Jason.
Tell me you’re close to being done, Lucas said.
It’s makeshift, but it should hold. Long enough to get us out of here, at least, Jason replied. I don’t know about this storm. You trust Matron’s scavengers to be able to pilot through this?
Enough of them will make it.
What do you mean enough?
Lucas ignored that question. Get those shuttles prepped for launch, Jason. As soon as Threnody gets the electrical grid back online, those launch silos will activate.
You better not fucking leave them behind.
I still need them.
It wasn’t really a promise. Lucas cut the connection with a thought, the psi link going dormant. Where he was standing, the world was nothing but darkness and sound. Unlike in the tunnels, no emergency lights were shining to show the way on the streets. Closing his eyes didn’t really change his situation, but it let him concentrate that much harder as he expanded his power through the mental grid for that one shining mind he would know anywhere. Through the other person’s eyes, he got a glimpse of an office in a city tower, wide, familiar. Empty.
He teleported with that visualization firmly in his mind, arriving beside the woman he had first met when he was a child, and later, at the age of fifteen, when he realized he needed her help to change everything.
“Security feed is being blocked,” Ciari said as she stared out the plasglass window at the storm that was hitting Toronto the same as it was hitting Buffalo, with only slightly less force. “My Strykers here are busy and the World Court is dealing with the media. They won’t interrupt us.”
Water slid off the telekinetic shield Lucas still had up, then fell in spatters when he dropped his defenses. “I can’t stay long.”
“You never do.” Ciari turned her head a little, just enough to look at him. “Did you get what you needed from the Strykers you took?”
“More than. They’ll be enough in the end, I think.” Lucas frowned. “She hasn’t been wrong yet.”
“Yet,” Ciari echoed.
“You gave me the best you had,” Lucas reminded her.
“If I could have kept them from you, I would have.”
He reached for her, let his fingers curl around hers for a second or two, no longer. “Maybe in some other future you did. We wouldn’t be here today if you had.”
“I like to think my choices are my own.”
“You’re not stupid, Ciari. Your life has never been your own and you know it.”
Lucas stepped in front of her, blocking her view of the storm and everything they had made together. He was taller than she was, younger, more powerful; everything she hadn’t been in years, but she still reached for what he offered. Ciari liked to think that maybe whatever was between them was real, or had been at one point. They used each other to save their own lives, and the taste of his mouth now was so different from the memory in her head.
His hands were cold against her face, grip painful as he explored her mouth with a ferocity that would have spoken of quiet desperation in anyone else. But this was Lucas, and he didn’t do desperation. He only took and never gave.
“She told me you’ll be carrying a girl,” Lucas whispered against her mouth before he pulled back, a faint, mocking smile on his own.
Ciari closed her eyes, refusing to flinch away from his touch. “I shouldn’t be carrying anything, much less a child.”
It was just a bunch of cells right now, no more than five weeks old, dividing and multiplying along human DNA with incredible psion potential. She was determined to see the baby born free, outside of the collars the government issued and away from the human veneer Lucas had been forced to wrap around his entire existence.
Aisling had promised her that much, at the least, in exchange for the world. Some new future to survive in. Pipe dreams were something Ciari never normally believed in. Maybe it was the hormones.
Trust me, Lucas said into her mind before he disappeared, teleporting out beneath everyone’s searching thoughts on the mental grid.
She didn’t. She never would.
Opening her eyes to her empty office, Ciari thought maybe that was the reason why Lucas kept coming back to her. She was the product of a way of life that kept his side of this fight free to do what needed to be done. That didn’t necessarily mean that each side was in the right, just that they believed in one simple truth.
No salvation was to be found in anything except escape. Maybe their ancestors had it right all those years ago, when countries fought each other for the chance to leave this world behind.
Ciari liked to think otherwise.
[TWENTY-EIGHT]
AUGUST 2379
BUFFALO, USA
Lucas’s mental order left a distracting ringing sound in Jason’s ears, or maybe it was just the way his own mind acknowledged the tension and worry that was holding his body stiffly hostage. Days of working with too little sleep and too much stress had resulted in the completion and installation of the hive connection among thirty-six shuttles. The program that the scavengers had started, and which Jason had finished, would slave the systems together so the shuttles would hopefully read as a single entity on any scan that might hit them if it got past the jamming technology. In the event that they were captured or shot down, every shuttle’s black box could instantly be wiped clean with a single command.
With no time to test the code he had written, Jason needed to believe that it would hold up. He’d hacked through enough pirated and government-sanctioned defenses in his time to know what worked and what didn’t when it came to security. He wished that they’d had time to do a
dry run on everything, but that wasn’t possible. Right now, all that was left was to input their destination coordinates, but that upload wouldn’t happen until the electrical grid was back up and running. Lucas had been adamant on not plugging in their route until they were in the air, so at the moment all Jason had left to do was wait.
He hated waiting.
“Did you finish?” Matron said tiredly as she came through the hatch into the flight deck, looking worn-out.
“Yeah,” Jason said as he rubbed at his burning eyes, the neuroports up and down both arms swollen and red from overuse. “The hack is good. I told Lucas it should hold.”
“Guess he was right to bring you people in on this,” Matron said as she squeezed his shoulder. “Now get out of my seat. You ain’t piloting this shuttle.”
“I’m your anchor,” Jason shot back as he got up. “How else do you think you’re going to be able to fly through this storm without telekinetic help?”
“Go check on my demolitions, Jason. And lock the blast doors open to take the explosion while you’re at it. I’ll worry about our flight plan.”
Matron promptly ignored him, used to instant obedience. She knew what needed to be done, and Jason had been buried beneath code for the better part of the week. He’d trust her judgment, for now at least.
The air in the hangar was a little too warm, the generators working overtime to keep them breathing. It was still barely enough power, stretched thin from hard use. They needed the government’s electrical grid to come back online if they were going to get off the ground.
The three shuttles on the launchpad were slowly powering up to standby mode in preparation for flight, Matron and two other scavengers the pilots for this launch. Matron had handpicked every assignment because she knew her people better than Lucas did, despite all his psionic interference. She was as good as her word, not leaving any of her people behind, but only because Lucas actually did need them all. If that hadn’t been the case, Jason knew there’d be more dead bodies than live people, and Matron wouldn’t have mourned their passing for even a second.
Jason made sure he still had his comm unit with him, hooked to his belt. It was tuned to Matron’s frequency, and the soft hum of the connection followed him out of the hangar, back down the tunnel to the empty tenement, a thin beam of light from his flashlight shining the way.
All were already at their posts, had been for hours, and the building was dark. Every available hertz of electricity was being funneled into the hangars. Every block of C-4, every wireless receiver, was set to green, ready to receive the detonation signal. Once they were in the air and they tripped the detonation codes, this place would blow itself up into debris the size of his hand. The tunnels would buckle and collapse beneath the blast, the hangar following suit, which was Matron’s intent. Leave nothing behind. They were cleaning house and Jason was making sure no one had cut any corners.
He climbed out of the tunnel sometime later, the blast doors open flat against the floor of that heavily fortified room. A block of C-4 was encased in stabilizing plastic by the entrance to the room across from him, a lead of the stuff stretching out in one long, uninterrupted line that surrounded the tenement. Every level had the same setup. Jason followed the plastic-coated wiring with his light, checking every receiver he came across and making sure nothing critical had been left behind.
Threnody had slagged every computer in the place. All weapons had been distributed equally among the scavengers, any and all personal effects taken along or otherwise destroyed. For all intents and purposes, the tenement had been abandoned.
The people who knocked down the front door to get inside didn’t know that.
Jason cut the light immediately, ducking into the nearest room on the first floor and raising a personal telekinetic shield around himself. He hadn’t felt a telepathic probe, which didn’t mean an attack wasn’t pending. One of the many annoying things about being a telekinetic was that telekinetics were always targeted first. They had the only physically destructive, long-reaching psion power in existence. They could do a hell of a lot more damage to property and fragile human bodies than any other psion, and they were numerous enough to be a problem.
The people coming down the hallway found that out the hard way.
Jason couldn’t be sure no psions were in the tenement. He didn’t want to break cover, but he had no choice. He was the first line of defense and that meant going in for the kill. Stepping out of the room with a heavy telekinetic shield between himself and the intruders, Jason peered past the light coming from scopes mounted on the guns to see just who the hell he was dealing with.
Humans, Lucas’s voice said suddenly into his mind. Quads. I’ve got them.
No, Jason said. Your telepathy might ping off the mental grid during the attack.
You’re kidding, right?
You’ve got a lot to handle already, so let me deal with them.
Their conversation lasted no more than a second or two, long enough for the quads to notice Jason. They took aim and fired, the flare of energy darts streaking down the hallway. Jason averted his eyes as the attack hit his telekinetic shield. Tapping into his telekinesis, Jason yanked the weapons out of their hands, wrapped his power around their skulls, and viciously twisted each head. The sound of bone cracking mimicked the thunder that still rolled outside. When their bodies hit the floor, it was with a familiar, distinctive sound.
Is that all of them? Jason asked through the psi link, taking a careful step forward. When Lucas didn’t immediately answer, Jason strengthened his thoughts beneath the other man’s telepathic shields that turned him human on the mental grid. Lucas!
I hear you, I hear you. No need to fucking yell, Lucas said a few seconds later. Those were it for this section. The only problem now is their check-in times.
Pretty sure they’ve got voice-recognition software on their comm units.
Yeah, so don’t even bother trying to use them. Their superiors will just hone in on their last known location, which isn’t here, but close enough to be a problem.
You think reinforcements will come after them in a city this big?
I think we’re running out of time. Hide the bodies, then get below, Lucas said, mental voice distant.
What’s going on?
Those aren’t the only quads I have to deal with. The place rigged to blow yet?
I’m just checking Matron’s work.
That woman never fucks up her bombs. Just get back to the shuttles.
Jason left his position, telekinesis still a strong barrier between himself and the rest of the world. He used it to teleport the two sets of quads out of the hallway and into an abandoned room on the top floor, stacking the bodies against the wall behind a pile of scavenged junk. Out of sight, out of mind.
The lock had been shot off the front door, leaving a hole that acid rain blew through. Jason telekinetically shoved a table in front of the door to keep it shut before retreating back to the tunnel. He checked the position of the blast doors on his way back down, telekinetically holding the flashlight in the air to help him see as he made sure the two main doors in that room wouldn’t close. Only then did Jason take the stairs two at a time back down to the tunnel.
We’re finished with the hive connection, Jason reported, leaving his thoughts open for Lucas to retrieve.
Good. I’m pretty sure we’re only going to have a narrow window of time to get all the shuttles airborne. Lucas sounded tense, power bleeding against Jason’s shields. The lack of control was startling.
Lucas, what’s wrong?
We haven’t been found out, not yet, Lucas said, ignoring Jason’s concern. The quads are pushing through the typical boundaries. They’re hitting up the outskirts.
Jason swore. The other hangars?
No one’s been discovered yet, but I’ve got other problems to deal with.
How far along are Threnody and the others on getting the electrical grid back up and running?
Not far enoug
h.
Jason didn’t know what to say in response, so he kept his mouth shut and his thoughts to himself as he worked his way back to the hangar. He double-checked that the blast doors were secured in their retractable casings. When he reached the underground hangar, the cargo doors of the Alpha shuttle were the only ones open. He clambered back inside, the doors closing behind him as he made his way back to the flight deck.
Matron was there, busily running through diagnostics of the shuttle. She didn’t look at him. “We good?”
“Yeah,” Jason said as he sat down in the navigator’s seat, staring out into the darkness of the hangar. “For now.”
Matron grunted, whispering something under her breath. He had to strain to hear her, but he managed to make out a few words, just enough to realize she was praying.
“That ever work?” Jason felt compelled to ask.
“Does what work?”
“Whatever you just asked your God for.”
Matron offered him a sharp look. “Boy, you leave me and my prayers in peace. If I’m gonna get through this sane, I’m gonna need a little bit of guidance of the sort your government never programmed into you. When you find God, then we’ll talk.”
He didn’t bother to tell her that the Strykers already had, in some way, that it wasn’t a god they worshipped, but humanity itself. It was why he was still here, still working with Lucas instead of fighting him, because this course of action made more sense than the one the government was determined to take.
Matron rolled her shoulders, trying to ease some of the tension in her muscles. “Make yourself useful and go check what medical supplies we’ve got back there. I’ve got a feeling we’re gonna need them.”
Jason obeyed. Maybe it would keep his mind occupied instead of thinking and worrying about his fellow Strykers in the field.
It didn’t.
[TWENTY-NINE]
AUGUST 2379