“Ok.”
“Bad news two. I’ve been running a scan of activity. They’re coming your way.”
“You’re sure?”
“You’re in the basement?”
“I’m in the basement,” he said.
“Everyone’s going to the basement,” she said. “I figured that was you.”
“Right.”
“The good news,” she said, “is that I’m pretty sure I can get that off.”
“I thought you said you didn’t know what it is?”
“Yeah. No clue. But I can get it off,” she said. Mike felt the link flare wide with data, his local systems reaching out. “Wait just a… There.”
There was a click, and the collar sheared down the back, snapping open and falling to the ground. Zacharies’ eyes flicked open, and he looked at the door.
“They’re coming,” he said.
⚔ ⚛ ⚔
“So,” said Mike.
Zacharies nodded at him. “So.”
“Bunch of guys,” said Mike. “They’re going to come down that corridor, and they’re going to shoot at us.”
“Are they bad men?”
Mike looked at Zacharies. Good kid. Gets confused on the details. “I guess?”
“What have they done?”
“They work for Reed, for a start. That’ll send you blind.”
The kid looked at him, face blank.
“Fair enough,” said Mike, “bad joke. They work for the people who’ve got your sister.”
Zacharies looked at the door, then back at Mike. “That doesn’t make them bad.”
“It what?”
“They’re… They’re just in the way.” Zacharies got up from the chair, his posture slack and unsteady. “What did they do to me?”
“Probably nothing permanent.” Mike looked back at the door. “Sam? Link the kid in.”
“He’s not—”
“Don’t care. No time for that.”
“He doesn’t have an overlay. Or a lattice.”
“He’s got a name and a voice though,” said Mike. “I’d like to have this conversation with the three of us.”
The link spat and hissed, and Zacharies’ eyes widened. “What—”
“Kid?” Mike shook his head. “Not with your voice. Talk in your head. The link will pick it up.”
“LIKE THIS?”
“Jesus Christ,” said Sam. “It’s like sleeping with a virgin, isn’t it?”
“WHO IS THAT?” Zacharies was loud and bright inside the link frame, thoughts becoming words.
“Not so loud, but good enough,” said Mike. “Sam? Zacharies. Zacharies? This is Sam. She’s my—”
“I’m his best kept secret.”
“She’s my handler. Sam. How long?”
“I give you five or six minutes before you’re dead.” Her voice was flat, distracted. “You want in on the pool?”
“No, how long before they’re down here?”
“About four or five minutes.” She paused. “The thing is, there’s something weird in the Reed tower.”
Mike opened the door, then nodded down it. “Kid? Let’s get going.”
“WHAT DO YOU—”
“Not so loud,” said Mike and Sam together.
“Sorry,” said Zacharies, the link hissing for a moment. “What do you mean, weird?”
“Dark, quiet,” said Sam. “Nothing digital. Or not a lot.”
“People?” said Zacharies.
“Yeah.”
“Are they…” Zacharies looked down the corridor. “Are they walking all the same way? Their legs, arms, all moving at the same time.”
There was a crackle of static before Sam said, “How’d you know?”
“Seekers,” said Zacharies. “Puppets of the Keeper.”
“A what?” Sam sounded confused.
“Seekers. Thralls, men and women under the spell of the Keeper. You would call it a demon, or a spirit. Keepers are the masters.”
“Huh,” she said. “Kid?”
“Yes.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Sam, it’s legit.” Mike stepped into the corridor, his weapon hanging loose and ready in his hand. “You know it’s legit. You’ve seen the vids.”
“Sure, fine,” she said. “I’ll humor you. You’re going to be dead soon anyway.”
“No,” said Zacharies. “We won’t be dead. Not yet.”
“Odds aren’t—”
“It’s not about odds,” said the kid. “The Master has my sister, and… That just can’t happen. Not again.”
Mike looked at him. There was something in his eyes, something buried deep. “Kid?”
“Yes, Mike.”
“We’ll get your sister.”
“Great,” said Sam. “Tell you what, though. If you can get out of the basement I might be able to help out. You guys think you can do that?”
Mike nodded. “Yeah.”
⚔ ⚛ ⚔
“Any second.” Sam’s voice was tense.
“You need to relax,” said Mike. “It’s just Reed.”
“I… I can’t see them,” she said. “It’s just—”
“Sam?”
“Yeah.”
“It’ll be ok. Talk soon.” Mike dropped the long link. He turned to Zacharies, local link still live. “We need to get through here, kill these—”
The doorway at the end of the corridor exploded, the charges tearing the doors free and sending them spinning through the air towards them. Mike felt the overtime come over him, started moving in front of the kid to try and catch the debris, but he was going to be too slow —
The doors slowed, held themselves in the air. Zacharies walked past him, striding down the corridor. He held up a hand and the doors lapped over each other, a moving barricade. Small arms fire started from the other side, before Zacharies pulled his hands wide, then clapped them together in front of him.
The doors were flung down the corridor, colliding with the men and women on the other side. Mike couldn’t see how many there were, and he clicked his overlay over to thermal to get a better view through the smoke. He saw —
A man, held twisting in the air before his body was pulled in half in a spray of heat. A woman’s weapon, pulled from her hand and spun around to face her before blowing a hole through her visor and out the back of her skull. Another man swung through the air by an invisible hand, slamming into two of his comrades, the sound of bones breaking. A final woman lifted, arms pinwheeling, before she was slammed headfirst through the ceiling.
Mike coughed, then looked down at his sidearm. He hadn’t even got a shot off.
“You didn’t even get a shot off, did you?” said Sam. It wasn’t a question, not really. He wasn’t sure when the link had gone live again, but it felt new and steady.
“Kid?”
Zacharies turned back to face him. “They aren’t evil,” he said.
“No.” Mike was looking into his eyes, looking for something. “Kid? They’re—”
“They’re in my way,” said Zacharies. “He has my sister, and they’re in my way.”
“Kid.” Mike jogged to catch up, clapping a hand on the his shoulder.
Zacharies spun, embers burning bright in his eyes. “Don’t touch me.”
“Zacharies.” Mike pulled his hand back. “It’s me. It’s Mike.”
Mike watched as Zacharies’ face softened, the hard edges dropping away. “Yes,” he said after a moment.
“You don’t need to do this by yourself.”
“He kind of doesn’t need your help,” said Sam.
“Sam? You should practice not using your outside voice for a little bit,” said Mike.
Zacharies looked around at the twisted remains of the Reed strike team. “I’ve got to find her, Mike.” He reached up a finger, touching at a spot of blood coming from his nose.
“Yeah. Yeah, you do.” Mike looked at the tip of Zacharies’ finger, the blood almost black. “You ok?”
“It’s�
� hard.” Zacharies looked up. “Sam said we needed to get out of the basement.”
“I’m right here,” she said. “I can hear you. But yeah. You need to go up.”
“Up it will be,” said Zacharies. He closed his eyes, and Mike was about to say something before the ceiling down the corridor bucked, twisted, metal and rebar and concrete spilling in from above. Dust hung lazy and dim in the air, and something electrical was sparking in the hole.
“I’ll be dipped in shit,” said Sam.
Zacharies turned towards the hole, then stumbled. Mike grabbed him by the shoulder, holding him up. Zacharies’ finger came away from his nose glistening and bright.
“Maybe we could take the stairs next time,” said Mike.
“We don’t have the time,” said Zacharies. “Come.”
“You’re… Are you going to be able to keep this up?” Mike looked at his feet. “It’s going to kill you, doing this.”
“I don’t know,” said the kid, pulling away. He started to climb the rubble. “If you knew… If you’d seen her and him… If I had to die twice over, it would be a cheap price to pay.”
Mike nodded to himself in the dim and the dust and the smoke. “Tell you what.”
“What?” Zacharies face was guarded.
“Let’s see if we can make other people do the dying. As a game plan, I like it better.”
Zacharies laughed, then turned sober. “You’ll look after her, won’t you? When I’m gone?”
“She’s got a guardian angel already, kid.”
“The… An angel. Yes,” said Zacharies, his eyes bright. He looked at Mike from the top of the pile of rubble. “She saw it. He’ll save us all before the end.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
“What’s in the case?” Carter’s voice was softer than usual. “Guns? An explosive?”
“Have a look,” said Mason, his pistol out. He checked the corners as he walked, the little Tenko-Senshin pulling itself between the angles. “Use a camera or something.”
“There’s no X-ray or thermal on this floor,” she said.
“You’ll just have to wait and see then.” Mason flicked the overlay between thermal and optical, the scattering of images fitting into the tactical map at the edge of his vision. “How many?”
“I don’t know. It’s your case.”
“No. How many guys?” Mason frowned. “How many are left?”
She laughed, a hard, brittle sound over the link. “Too many, Mason Floyd. We’re not making it out of this one.”
“We’re making it out.”
A man walked around the edge of a corridor from the left, head down, looking at his weapon. Mason froze. The man looked up, saw Mason, then his eyes dropped to the weapon pointed at him.
“Hi,” said Mason.
“Hi,” said the man. He licked his lips.
Mason’s overlay flickered information up. Harkness. 32 years old. TacOps Strike Division. Not Married. Three kids. “Harkness?”
“That’s me,” said Harkness. His fingers were moving and shifting on the stock of his weapon.
“Two ways this goes,” said Mason. “The first way—”
Harkness ducked back around the corner, and Mason pushed himself into a sprint, overtime pulling the edges from the light. Not just around the corner — go higher. He turned his movement, his left foot pushing off and up, turning his sprint into a wall run. He bridged the gap in the corridor, his right foot catching on the opposite wall as he rounded the corner.
The trail of slugs traced an arc after him, but Mason was already ducking and rolling. He came up face to face with Harkness, bringing the Tenko-Senshin up and under the other man’s hands. The rifle clattered against the wall and off to the ground as the pistol came up under Harkness’ chin.
The man’s eye widened for a moment before the Tenko-Senshin shrieked and screamed, flechettes tearing through flesh and bone. Mason turned his face away as he fired, the heat and light making the skin of his face tight.
Harkness’ body dropped to the ground as something wet dripped from the ceiling. Mason coughed as the taste of limes filled his mouth.
“What’s the other way that could have gone?” said Carter. “Seriously.”
“I had to give him a choice,” said Mason.
“Whatever’s in the case must be pretty important,” she said.
“What?”
“The case. You’re still holding it.”
Mason looked down at the case in his hand. A round from Harkness’ weapon had gouged the edge of the it, but otherwise it looked fine. “Yeah. I guess.”
“So it’s important? It’s going to help you survive in this crazy place?”
“I don’t even know why I’m carrying it.” Mason shrugged, then stepped over Harkness’ body. “It seemed a good idea at the time.”
“You didn’t think it through? It’s not some big gun, not some neat door breaching tool. Nothing like that?”
“No.”
“What the… Jesus Christ, Floyd. What’s in the case?”
“It’s a present,” he said.
“For me?”
“For you.”
“You’re nuts,” she said. “Plain crazy. Out of your gourd.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Feels good though.”
She laughed. This time, it sounded right.
⚔ ⚛ ⚔
“The problem you’ve got is that you’re hopelessly — and I mean, hopelessly — outnumbered.” Carter sounded flat, tired.
“You’re not giving up on me. Tell me you’re not giving up on me.” Mason coughed over the smoke, kicking the body of an Apsel man over. The heat scoring on what was left of his armor made it look like he’d been through a wood chipper made of fire.
“How many clips you got left for that thing?”
Mason eyed the Tenko-Senshin. The little weapon’s muzzle was glowing a soft cherry red. “I dunno. A couple.”
“You’ve got one left. The one in the damn thing. I can see you, Floyd. That camera up in the corner? I can actually see you through that. It’s a form of technology. I don’t know if you know how it works.”
Mason felt a smile tug at his mouth. “Carter.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s ok to be scared.” He was walking through an open room, some kind of cafeteria or break room. They’d come at him from two doors the last time, a small team of men with white armor and hard faces.
“I’m going to die, Mason,” she said. “You can’t fix it.”
“Then we’re going to die together,” he said. “Don’t need to fix it.”
“Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t want you to die.” She sighed. “The whole damn point, Floyd, is that you get to live. For me.”
“Can I tell you a story, Carter?”
“Sure. We got about ten minutes before we’re both dead.”
“Gotcha.” Mason swapped the case to his right hand, hefting the Tenko-Senshin in his left. The lattice shrugged inside him, nudging around his right-handedness. “This story is about a, I don’t know, call him a thief.”
“Ok. I don’t know if I like him very much.”
“Me neither,” he said. “One day, this thief — he’s just a kid — sees some guy in a market. Street samurai.”
“I know the type.” He could hear the smile in her voice.
“Yeah, you know the type. He had all kinds of shit on him. Big sword. Some kind of energy field around it. Rifle. And he had this tiny little gun, small for a pistol.”
“The Tenko-Senshin,” she said.
“A bunch of guys jumped the samurai. There were guns, there were knives. That man pulled that blade between his attackers like he was dancing, Carter. He used this sword in one hand and that little pistol in the other. He wasn’t just a samurai, Carter. He was a real kensei. Miyamoto Musashi? Amateur hour compared to this guy.” Mason arrived at a stairwell leading down, poked his head out into the dark beyond. Empty. He continued down. “But he was
outnumbered. There’s some parallels here, if you know what I’m saying.”
“I get it,” she said. “What happened?”
“That thief didn’t know what it was, when he first saw it,” he said. “He just knew he wanted it. Figure, he’s maybe ten or twelve years old, and he sees a gun that makes the air catch on fire. He figures if he pockets the little gun, he could eat tomorrow. Sell it on, you know? He sees that the samurai, he could move like water. Got between all the gaps, then crashed like a wave against his enemies. The thief, he couldn’t use a sword, but he figured any idiot could use a gun. And if he couldn’t sell it, he could use it.”
“Use it against who?” Carter paused. “Use it when?”
“Doesn’t matter. The samurai dropped like a box of rocks in the end. No problem you can’t solve with a big enough gun and enough guys, right? The mercs trying to take down the samurai, they all started arguing about the split, who’s dick was bigger, I don’t know, and the thief scampered out and grabbed the pistol.” Mason paused. “The way the story goes, he was just going to take the pistol, do a runner. Scamper off, night drops around him, and — bang — job’s done. Free and clear. But when he’s there, the gun in front of him, he gets to thinking.”
“A thinking thief?”
“Everyone thinks, Carter,” he said. “It just depends on what. Anyway, what’s bugging the kid is just how unfair it is. Shit situation, right? Samurai’s a hard kind of person, skilled, decked in weapons and armor and tech and God knows what. Fought the good fight, went down anyway. And the thief — the kid — thinks, ‘Fuck this, maybe I can shoot some of these fools as I get away.’ A little parting gift.”
“It wasn’t given to him?” She paused. “How… Why didn’t it kill him? Tenko’s weapons guard their owners.”
Mason wasn’t listening, his eyes looking off into the dark. He wasn’t seeing the walls around him, the concrete and steel. “So this samurai, he’s on the ground. He’s got blood coming everywhere, it’s coming out his eyes, for Christ’s sake. He drops his sword, grabs the thief’s arm. Dude’s there, bleeding out, and I felt like he put my hand in a bench vice.” Mason rounded another corner, dim lighting marking the SUB BASEMENT 12 in big letters over the top of the Apsel falcon crest. His overlay chattered with static, a warning about authorized personnel only. He cleared the error. “Jesus, Carter. How far down is your office?”
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