“If we can get to the plains beyond the forest, we can escape. I have Starscream.”
I strode through the brush and wove around vast tree trunks, wondering how the fuck she’d managed to get Starscream into Asgard’s airspace. Nothing got into the airspace above the prison, other than prisoner transport ships. I’d ask her, but not yet.
Still, the thought of Starscream being so close kicked my withered heart up a beat. Freedom. How convenient that Fran just happened to get into Asgard, with a dagger, and just so happened to have my tugboat waiting nearby. She was good, but not that good. If this wasn’t a setup, then I wasn’t a selfish bastard.
“Here.” I clutched the nearest low-level tree branch and hauled myself off the forest floor, climbing higher.
Fran followed, nimble and quick. We reached a rickety platform around seventy feet above the forest floor. I gave it an experimental shove. It creaked but appeared strong enough to hold us. These hides were all over the place in Asgard, if you knew where to look.
“Stay here.” I climbed a few branches higher.
“Where are you going?”
Halting, I looked down. What little light there was pricked her dark eyes. A smile ghosted across her lips, but her brave act couldn’t hide the fear in those eyes. She should be afraid.
“Just stay right there.”
I climbed as high as I dared—high enough to taste the poisonous air leeching through the canopy—and snagged a few of the fist-sized nuts that only grew amongst the highest branches.
Returning to the platform, I eased my weight carefully next to Fran, cracked a few nuts with my teeth, and handed them over. In the gathering dark, I couldn’t read much of her face, but I felt her shivers vibrating through the platform surely enough.
“Hollow out the inside,” I said quietly. “They taste like shit, but it’ll stop the hunger pangs.”
I ate my own and listened to the sighing darkness around us.
“We could be moving—”
“Not if you want to stay alive.”
“I’ve survived here for two days.”
More than most. “You’d have heard them then—the growls?”
“I heard them. Never saw anything.”
In the dark, she couldn’t see my smile. “You don’t, until it’s too late.”
A soft quiet settled over us.
“They’re camouflaged. Look just like tree bark. In the low light, you could be standing right next to one and not know it.”
Her shivers started up again, and she whispered, “This place is fucked up.”
I leaned back against the trunk and listened to the soft sounds of her chewing. Of all the people in all the nine systems, I hadn’t expected I’d be stuck up a tree with Francisca.
“Thanks,” I whispered.
She hesitated for a few beats. “Starscream is a bitch to pilot on my own, and no other bastard will fly with me.”
I laughed softly, the first laugh in— “How long have I been here?”
“A cycle.”
It felt longer—much longer. Dropping my head back, I closed my eyes and listened to the groaning trees, but didn’t hear any growlers—yet. I’d left out the part where they could climb trees. Fran didn’t need to know that. If one climbed our tree, we’d fucking know about it soon enough.
“You take first watch,” I said.
“Is it safe to sleep up here?”
“Nowhere’s safe in Asgard.”
She uttered a string of curses, and I smiled. She might be fleet, that hadn’t changed, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t good to see her.
* * *
Her whispered words against my cheek brought me back around from the same dream I’d been suffering through almost every night since Mimir. I blinked into the dark, briefly disorientated, and saw the brittle hatred in the synth’s eyes just as she pulled the trigger.
“Cale …” Fran. Fran was here. Not Ha—the synth.
Just a dream. I touched the scar on my forehead, the way I always did.
Fran’s fingers dug into my arm. “Cale.”
She was leaning into me, trembling so fucking hard the platform creaked. The night was still dark, so dark I struggled to see Fran’s face, which was nearly pressed against mine, but I felt her fluttering breath on my cheek. Her hand crawled up my chest before twisting into a fist.
“It’s been d-days,” she stuttered through clenched teeth. “I need …”
Her addiction had caught up with her and in the worst place possible. I wasn’t sure what she expected me to do and was about to remark on her poor timing, when rustling sounds drifted up from the forest floor.
Fran pulled on my overalls, curling her body against mine. The shakes had hold of her and nothing I could say or do would help. I wrapped an arm around her shoulders and drew her in tightly, hoping to stifle some of her tremors. The platform shifted and a fragment broke away, tumbling to the ground. I held my breath, waiting.
A primal growl—the kind of bowel-loosening basal sound that haunted nightmares—rolled through the quiet. I squeezed my eyes closed and wished I’d stayed in my own fucking synth-nightmare. Fran’s shakes rattled through me, the platform, and the branches. The growler couldn’t fail to hear us.
I knew Starscream was close by. If—when the growler attacked, I could make a run for it while it was busy with Fran. While lost in withdrawal, she was a fucking liability anyway. What had she been thinking coming after me?
A violent tremor tore through her. She dug her nails into my arm and let out a wretched groan. I smothered her mouth with my hand, but it was too late. Our tree jolted. Twigs and leaves rained over us. It was coming.
I pried Fran’s grip off me and pushed her down against the lattice of branches. “Don’t fucking move.”
She may have mumbled my name, but I was already off the platform, crawling along one of the sturdier branches. This was insane. I could barely see a few feet into the black and gray soup of shadows. At least I didn’t have to worry about being quiet anymore.
I scooted out onto a tree limb and freed Fran’s dagger from my fatigues. “Hey, you lumbering piece of Asgard shit.”
Insane, insane, fuckin’ insane. I was about to die, and for what? To save a fleet junkie?
The forest stilled as though the night were holding its breath. Skeletal branches reached toward me. Fran had better be fucking grateful. I wanted a ship named after me, at the very least.
Yellow eyes loomed out of the dark. Shadows collected along its massive, elongated snout. The beast peeled its lips back, and what little light there was licked across rows of yellow teeth designed to saw into flesh. It sprang forward, claws protracted, and I dropped over the side of the branch, clinging to it by the tips of my fingers. The growler crashed into the foliage behind my head and tumbled to the forest floor, letting out the kind of grunts and snarls I assumed meant I’d pissed it off.
I half climbed down, half fell through the branches, landed in a crouch, and immediately sprang into a run. A maze of trees blurred by, all virtually identical in the dark. I had no fucking idea what direction I was running in. All I knew was that I was smaller than a growler, so if I could make myself out to be more trouble than I was worth, it’d back off. It thundered after me, a single stride easily three of mine. Shoulder down, I plunged through a snarl of bushes, stumbled, and fell hard onto my side. The growler punched through after me and would have had its teeth in my throat had I not thrust the dagger into its soft underbelly and kicked it over my head, using its own momentum and my pure fucking adrenalin to launch it.
I twisted onto my back and scrambled to my knees. The growler was lying on its side, chewing into its own tangle of guts, which were strewn from the ugly tear in its abdomen. I scuttled backward, dissolving into the undergrowth, and carefully retreated leaving the beast to die.
When I climbed back up to the hide at dawn, I found Fran sitting with her back against the tree, arm draped over her drawn-up knee. Her fingers were shaking
, so she was still in the grips of withdrawal. She cut me the sort of raised-eyebrow look that asked: Where the fuck have you been all night?
With the dregs of adrenalin all but gone, I didn’t have the energy to explain. Instead I slumped beside her on the platform and puffed out a sigh.
“Couldn’t find the ship without me, huh?”
I dropped my head back and closed my eyes. She thought I’d left her to fly my selfish ass out of Asgard, though it wasn’t as if I hadn’t thought about it.
I smiled to myself. “Went for a piss.”
She snorted. “Give me that dagger. I need to cut your prisoner chip out of you.”
I handed her the dagger, hilt first. She saw the blood and gore coating it and my hand but didn’t comment.
“It’s between your shoulder blades, right?”
I grunted, too fucking exhausted for words.
“Turn around and drop the top of your overalls,” she ordered.
I shuffled about and shrugged out of the filthy, stinking overalls, showing her my back. Her cool fingers poked around between my shoulder blades, dancing over the small bump where the implant sat. All prisoners were implanted. Fuck knew why. It wasn’t like the few jailors who dwelled safely out of reach in their orbit station ever considered dragging our assess out again. The foxes cut theirs out with makeshift tools, but I didn’t have a blade, and on my own, I couldn’t reach it.
As the tip of her dagger pressed into my back, I braced my hand against the trunk, bowed my head, and absorbed the biting pain. I’d had worse; the old scars on my back were proof of that. Fran splayed her cool right hand over my skin, steadying herself. She swore and adjusted her angle, sparking a few painful twinges.
“What the fuck were you thinking, Fran? There aren’t any dealers on Asgard.”
She cut around the implant with trembling fingers.
“I had you located and planned on getting in and out in a day.” She obviously hadn’t planned on the foxes capturing her. “I need a hit, Cale, before I … before it happens again.”
The blade dug under the implant. I hissed in through my teeth. “Is the ship far?”
“No, but I don’t know how long the clearance codes will hide her ID. We need to get moving.”
She dug an elbow into my back and yanked the implant free.
“How’d you get out last time?” she asked, showing me the bloody implant.
Working my overalls back on, I ignored the burn where the filthy fabric touched the raw wound and took the implant from her.
“I got a message to be in a certain location. Mistakes happened, the cameras by the gate weren’t working, a prisoner manifesto got misplaced.”
“Luck?”
“Fuck no.” I tossed the implant over the side of the platform. “I don’t know who organized the trail of fuckups that I took advantage of, but I can guess.”
She blinked, her eyes red-rimmed. “The Fenrir Nine?”
I shrugged a shoulder, but the answer was yes.
“Why though? You were just a fleet throwaway.”
I smiled and didn’t answer her. Shortly after I’d escaped Asgard, the Nine had met with me. Shrouded in their mysterious shit, I’d initially laughed them off as crazies, until they’d mentioned Chen Hung. They’d made it clear that they wanted Hung on his fucking knees. As to why they’d picked me over any number of equally slippery smugglers, who knew? Maybe it was my connection to Haley Hung. They’d never told me, and I didn’t want to know anything beyond where the next pickup was. Keep it simple. Get away clean.
“Let’s go find Starscream.”
Chapter Four: #1001
The lab door hissed open and a well-dressed, middle-aged man strode in. I kept my gaze trained ahead, softening my focus to the middle distance so I didn’t see much of anything. James stood to my right, his fingers lightly tapping the diagnostic screens. I wasn’t to look at him.
‘Don’t react at all. It’s important they think you’re as malleable as the other thousand.’
I stood naked and raw, an intricate map of man-made components—touch-sensitive polymer skin and a synthetic telepathy interface—designed to impersonate a human woman while assessing and reacting to the world around me. Inside, my power core thrummed a constant back and forth pulse of energy. I was a human girl’s mnemonic remains in a manufactured body, pretending to be a machine. No wonder faults were dancing in my peripheral vision.
James glanced up.
“Good morning, Doctor Scheffler,” he said breezily.
He banished my errors with a tap on his pad. He had said he’d try to catch the spikes before the assessment team could notice anything untoward. If he didn’t succeed and they deemed me rogue, I’d be shut down. But it wouldn’t come to that. I’d tasted life, and I wanted more. This doctor wouldn’t stop me. I’d killed the last one who’d tried.
“Report,” Scheffler said, his lips permanently skewed sideways, giving the impression of a constant grimace.
“All systems optimal,” I replied without looking directly at him.
He held a hand out toward James, his glare never leaving my face. He was standing too close. The only people I let get this close to me were those I intended to kill.
James caught the error, lightning quick, before handing his touchpad to the doctor.
“I’ve realigned her various protocols. This unit’s programming was a mess. Really, it’s no wonder she lashed out. Synthetics aren’t designed to have their failsafes disabled and their fundamental protocols bypassed.” James continued as the doctor scanned the touchpad. “But she’s back to factory settings.”
Factory settings, like cold hardware. Heat bloomed in my chest.
“This is exceptional work, James.”
“Thank you, doctor. I’ve enjoyed every moment. I never thought I’d—”
“However, the board has reached a decision. Number one thousand and one cannot continue to exist. If information leaked that we have an extra synthetic unit—that we’ve made even just one extra synthetic—all of Chitec would come into question.”
“But she’s—”
“The decision is final.” Scheffler handed back the touchpad.
“It er …” James dragged a hand across his mouth. “It seems like a terrible waste. What does Mister Hung think about this?”
A fracture had fragmented his voice, creating a small hitch. Scheffler would have missed it, but I hadn’t. My acute sensors flagged how James’s heart drummed faster.
“Mister Hung was outvoted.” Scheffler took a long hard look at me.
I defocused and gazed back, unseeing.
“I can assure you she’s fully operational and worth a great deal of credit.…” James trailed off and swallowed hard. “We—Chitec could learn a lot from her.”
“We know everything we need to about the synthetic units.” Scheffler lifted his chin and took a single step back. “Shut her down.”
James had told me this might be a possibility, but it didn’t make it any easier.
“I’d like to run some—”
“Shut her down now, Doctor Lloyd.” Scheffler finally took his eyes off me and turned toward James. “I will need to confirm it’s been done. Please proceed.”
With Scheffler turned away, I chanced a look at James. His eyes met mine, pleading with me. Doctor Scheffler would think James was lamenting the loss of his hard work, but the beseeching gaze wasn’t for his work; it was for Scheffler’s life. We both knew I’d kill to survive.
I focused on Scheffler. In a fraction of a second, I mentally pulled his bio from the datacloud, retrieved and scanned Scheffler’s medical records, noted his pulse rate and temperature, and flicked through his employment history. He had a wife of two years. He was in good health—no ailments and no weaknesses. If I wanted to kill him, the most efficient way would be to strangle him, or more precisely, to crush his trachea. James’s innocent eyes begged me not to. My only other option was to trust James—a Chitec technician. Trust that h
e’d shut me down in such a way that he could reboot me without losing the parts that made me … me.
Trust Chitec. That wouldn’t happen.
I moved and, in the next breath, hooked my arm around Scheffler’s neck, pulling his head backward into my shoulder. I bowed him backwards, drawing him down. Diagnostics spilled into my vision: errors, warnings, and status reports. I dismissed it all and focused on the man clawing at my arm in a weak bid to free himself. They’d made me stronger. Made me faster. Made me deadly.
“Don’t! You can’t hurt him. Stop this. Stop!” James’s shrill voice buzzed from a few steps behind me. “Just … stop. You don’t need to do this. You don’t need to kill. One Thousand And One, please. He’s just doing a job, like we all are. Oh, by the nine. You’ll ruin everything. Please …” A sob broke free from him. “Haley, please …”
I closed my eyes and listened to Scheffler’s thudding heart. He heaved and kicked, but he couldn’t—wouldn’t—escape me. There’s an intimacy in death. I held him close and listened to what could be his final breaths and the final fluttering of his heart. If I were Haley, I would have surely cared more than I did. Killing a man should be difficult, but I found it simple and uncomplicated—a series of commands to execute, that when perfectly aligned, created the desired outcome. Killing was neat and easy—order in chaos.
“I will shut you down.”
I opened my eyes and slid my gaze to James. His fingers hovered over the touchpad. I put out a datacloud request for synthetic shut down protocols, but my request bounced back empty. Nothing of the ever-after program’s inner workings and the 1000 had ever been uploaded to the datacloud and never would be. Was it feasible that James could shut me down with a swipe of his fingers?
The young technician lost his youth in his determined glare. His heart raced, the vein pulsing in his neck. He’d known Haley—they’d been friends—but I remembered nothing of him, though that didn’t mean their friendship hadn’t happened. I only recalled fragments of Haley’s life. Would he shut me down and erase his friend’s memory over this man’s life?
Girl From Above Escape (The 1000 Revolution Book 2) Page 3