by Posey, Jay
Cass’s heart fell with the knowledge. The situation wasn’t quite as dire as when she’d bailed Gamble and her team out and gotten cut off, but it wasn’t far removed. But if they were tracking her, they were reacting, and if they were reacting, they were a step behind. She’d have to stay ahead of them, evade contact as much as possible, strike only as a last resort. It was going to be a long night; an hours-long game of cat-and-mouse, with the highest possible stakes. And the cats had the numbers. At least this mouse had claws of its own.
Maybe it was because her conscious mind was so preoccupied with the now, or maybe it was just a gift from her well-honed survival instinct. Whatever it was, a thought slid sideways into her mind, like someone had slipped her a secret note. The Weir knew when one of theirs was killed or incapacitated. She’d seen it during her ambush run; it had nearly cost her her life when she’d stunned Swoop. And that thought triggered a distant memory that invited her to recall her old life, to go further back than she’d allowed herself to go in a long, long time. From her days with RushRuin. Back to when she’d given away her name. A tactic she’d occasionally employed with Ran and Dagon, when a target’s security or a rival crew had them outnumbered on force or outgunned on paper.
The main downside was that it usually required at least two to work. Usually. Cass decided to put it to the test. She switched tactics. Evasion was still part of the equation but now only part. The other part was locating an isolated target. She didn’t know what trail she was leaving that the Weir could follow; so she was going to leave a bigger one.
She slowed her pace, started using her ears as much as, if not more than, her eyes. The shattered cityscape wreaked havoc on sound waves, made it difficult to ever be certain of distance and direction. But after two or three minutes, she’d managed to pick out the direction that offered her what she figured was her best opportunity. Cass slipped into a lane between two buildings, barely wide enough for her to squeeze through sideways. If her guess was right, it’d lead her out to the lowest concentration of Weir. If not, well... she’d just wedged herself into a choke point that didn’t even afford her enough room to throw a solid punch.
As she was approaching the midpoint, a croak came from behind her. She glanced back over her shoulder, but didn’t stop moving. The end of the lane was clear, and it was impossible to know if something had just passed her by, or if the sound had merely been channeled by the buildings she was passing between. Cass picked up her pace, told herself it was the right move and not just because she was starting to get claustrophobic. When she was six feet from the exit, a shape flashed by. She inhaled reflexively. A heartbeat, two, three...
A twisted face manifested, blue-eyed, howling rage and warning. The Weir launched into the narrow space, lunged for her with arm and claws extended. Cass intercepted the Weir’s forearm with her own, crushed it into the wall and pinned it. A quick cross-step, and she drove her shoulder into the chest of the creature, checking its forward movement and enabling her to grab its trapped wrist with her other hand. She rolled back, snapping her elbow up from underneath. The Weir’s head whipped back with the impact, and Cass stomped a low-angle kick into its knee. The creature collapsed down, toppled forward towards her. She wrenched the captured arm back and around, dropped her hip onto the back of the Weir’s head and let gravity do the rest. The creature folded up at unnatural angles with sharp cracks. After that, it didn’t make any more sound.
Not quite how she’d planned, but she got the result. From all around her, alerted howls went up as the Weir’s companions sensed its demise. Cass vaulted up from the broken Weir, clambered over it and escaped the alley. She didn’t take time to evaluate her options for paths; she just took off towards the nearest route that offered cover. If she’d judged correctly, the Weir would rush to encircle the location of their fallen broodmate, which would buy her some time and distance. Knowing where they’d be headed improved her chances of avoiding them.
As she cut her way back and forth through the crisscrossed lanes and alleys, Cass had another realization. Even with all she’d been through, after all she’d discovered about herself in the past twenty-four hours, she was still operating in her old mindset, using her default tools and skill set. When the danger had come, she’d fallen back on old ways without even considering if there might be new options available to her. After she and Wren had left RushRuin and gone on the run, her son had taught her how to mask her passive signal to escape intrusive traceruns and prevent Asher from tracking their movements. Maybe, she thought, with what she’d come to understand about the connection that the Weir shared, she could adapt the same concept. If she could just find the space to try it.
It was dangerous to stay on the move while splitting her focus, but she had to risk it. So while she navigated the urban wreckage, Cass recalled her experiences with Swoop and Orrin, formed a clear picture in her mind of that churning datastream. More, she concentrated on the way it had made her feel. The last moments of her rescue of Orrin rose sharply to the surface, when she’d turned and fled. When the Weir had first noticed her intrusion. There was something there, something for her to notice. She tried to roll the image around in her mind’s eye, tried to shift the perspective to get a clearer view.
There was something there. Something she’d seen on Orrin. Wispy tendrils clinging to him. Though she hadn’t noticed it before, she felt certain now that having interacted with the Weir’s datastream, having spent so much time in its proximity, she’d somehow drawn traces of it out with her. Or, perhaps, had left some trace of herself tangled in. And the horrifying thought emerged that she may have inadvertently begun a process of reintegrating with the Weir. Had she given Asher what he needed to find her again? To reclaim her?
Something rose up in her then, something born of raw emotion and instinct, equal parts anger, revulsion, and desperate need to get away. And in that moment, in that swell, Cass felt power go out from her. The surge was like nothing she’d felt before; a sensation halfway between physical and imagined, a bubble of raw energy bursting and dissipating into the air around her. She went momentarily weak, her legs hollow, her hands and face clammy. Still she pressed on, pushed herself through the faintness. Time and distance were her only allies now, and she needed as much of each as she could get. It wasn’t until three or four minutes had elapsed that she realized the cries of the pursuing Weir had faded behind her. She slowed to a jog, but it took another ten minutes before she let herself believe she’d done it. Whatever it had been exactly. Between intentionally drawing their attention to a specific location and disrupting her own signal, she’d managed to escape.
It was fully night by the time Cass found a place that looked sturdy and disused enough to shelter in. Some kind of warehouse or storage facility, wide and subdivided into many chambers. She spent the night tucked into one of the smaller cubical rooms on the top floor, hidden behind two stacks of metal pallets. Tired as she was, she refused to let herself sleep for the time being. Though she’d shaken the Weir off her trail for a while, she wasn’t positive that her escape was permanent, and she had to stay awake and alert for sounds of danger. She’d sleep in the morning, once the sun was up and the Weir had returned to their holes for the day. The night was long, and it took an incredible effort to stave off sleep for the duration, but she managed. She even stuck it out for almost an hour after sunrise before she finally gave in and let herself get some much-needed, and much-deserved, rest.
When she woke shortly after noon, Cass had a small meal and some water and let her mind wander through all the broken thoughts and emotions that whirled in her head. Thoughts of Wren, and of the team, and of Orrin. Orrin. She was conflicted about him. There was no way she could have known about his fragile mental state before she brought him out. Even so, she wondered if there was something else she should have done; if she should have left him as she’d found him, or if she should have let Sky shoot him when they’d seen him the first time at the gate of Morningside. She’d almost convinc
ed herself that interacting with him at all had been a mistake. But then she pictured the node, and knew that whatever the outcome for Orrin, she’d learned something significant from him. Small comfort for Orrin, if he’d met a nasty end, but she couldn’t count it as a total catastrophe.
Cass had launched herself into the unknown based solely on the disquiet she felt in her spirit, not for any grand plan or purpose. She’d simply felt in her heart that there was something for her, for her alone, to be found out here. But as she sat in the decaying warehouse, contemplating her next steps, she couldn’t escape the image of the node. The more she tried to ignore it, the more prevalent it became in her mind. And something else was bothering her. Something she’d been avoiding. For all her plans and high-minded ideas of living on her own terms, she knew deep down she was still running. Reacting. Even now she was letting Asher define her possibilities. And when she finally allowed herself to accept that realization as true, it filled her with indignation. She wasn’t free. In fact, for all that had changed, for all her transformation, and for Wren’s, she was still in the exact same situation that Three had found her in. Harried. Under pursuit.
She’d lied to herself long enough. No more hiding. No more letting someone else dictate her path.
There was no way for her to know what the nodes were, or what function they served. But she guessed that the convergences she envisioned in the digital had corresponding representation in the physical. Whatever they did, they were important to the Weir, maybe critical, and that made them important to Asher. Maybe it was foolish. Maybe it was the last thing she’d ever do. But she decided then and there what her goal was: she would find whatever it was that created that nexus of data, and she would use it, or destroy it, to rob Asher of some portion of his power.
Cass had let herself come to believe that she’d never be able to confront Asher herself; that he had managed to set himself up in a plane of existence that she could never reach. Wouldn’t he be surprised to find her knocking on his door? Asher had always been obsessed with power and with control. Cass could only imagine the height and depth of his godly delusions, now that he’d transcended the physical world and become a mind without a body. She smiled to herself at the image. And she couldn’t wait to see how he’d react when she walked up and punched him right in the mouth.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“It’s time,” Foe said, jolting Wren awake. He’d fallen asleep over his meager breakfast, after successfully enduring another night outside.
Wren dragged himself out of the chair, followed Foe; his steps barely registered through the fog of fatigue. Mindlessly he slipped off his shoes and socks and even his pants. They always got heavy in the water, and more than once the water dripping out of them had given him away. It wasn’t until his feet hit the cold water that he came fully back to himself. And it was a good thing too. Foe didn’t even wait for him to get completely off the ladder before the lights went out. Wren felt a sting in his left shoulder blade an instant later.
He stilled himself, took two more hits from Foe’s clicker as he slid to his right and advanced down the wall towards the back of the room. The pain was still as brilliant as it’d ever been, but it’d lost its power to frighten Wren. He didn’t enjoy it, of course. But knowing it was inevitable, he’d come to accept it. That made it easier to focus on the things that actually mattered, like controlling his breathing, and moving smoothly through the water.
Everything about the Waiting Room encouraged deliberate, fluid movement. No sudden starts or stops. He hadn’t exactly made a conscious effort to memorize the location of all the posts, but he’d spent so many hours moving among them that he’d developed an intuitive sense of where he was in relation to them, and also where he was in the room in general. Before he came into contact with a post or a wall, he managed to... well, to feel it somehow, without actually touching it. He could sense a shadow of pressure. Maybe it was the way the water sloshed against everything that gave him a sense of his surroundings.
And just as he was beginning to feel pretty good about having gone almost a full minute without a shock, he drew his foot up a little too high out of the water. It made a gentle slapping sound. Wren tensed up, anticipating the click. But it didn’t come. Either that meant Foe hadn’t heard it, or–
Before he knew what was happening, Wren felt a sharp tug in the bend of his left knee, and an instant later a light impact on his chest, near his right shoulder. The two together torqued him around, threw him off balance, sent him backwards into the water.
He sat up, coughing and sputtering. The lights came up. Foe was standing over him.
“That wasn’t necessary,” Wren said when he got his breathing under control.
“Apparently it was,” Foe answered. Wren got to his feet, shook as much of the water out of his shirt as he could. “Maybe now you will be awake enough to show some effort.”
Wren didn’t respond. Just waited for the lights to go out again. Foe bowed forward slightly, and dipped his hand in the water. Then, without warning, he whipped his hand up. Wren reacted reflexively, brought his arm up to shield but too late; water slapped his face and eyes. The stings came before he’d recovered. He opened one eye to total darkness.
He lashed out, firing at where the old man had been a moment before, barely able to restrain himself from letting out a frustrated cry. He wasn’t sure where the old man had gotten to, but he fired anyway, even though he knew it would earn him a reprisal. Sure enough, a brand of fire seared his neck. There was no way to know if he’d hit Foe; the old man never reacted or told him. But considering Wren hadn’t fired anywhere near the direction Foe’s last shot had come from, it was probably safe to assume he hadn’t hit anything.
The lights came up again, and Foe was halfway across the room. How did he move so fast without making any noise?
“Boy!” Foe said. “Intensity is good. Anger is not. Emotion is to be drawn upon, not relied upon. A little water in the face is nothing worthy of upset.”
Wren nodded. Everything a lesson. Always a lesson. Foe was right. It was such a stupid trick. Something unexpectedly petty, and it had thrown him off. He was tempted to credit the minor outburst to how tired he was, but he rejected his own excuse. Asher wouldn’t give him any room just because he was tired, or cold and shivering. Foe was giving him practice at mastering himself.
“Again,” Foe said, and once again all was darkness. Wren lowered himself into a crouch, slid silently forward through the chilled water towards where he’d last seen Foe. He pressed into a pole, listened to the water sloshing gently. The old man was hiding his movement in those waves somehow, small as they were. But how? It was mindboggling, as if Foe had figured out a way to defy reality, to hack the physical world and bend its rules.
Wren closed his eyes, strained to listen for a hole in the water where the old man must be. Whether it was the fatigue or the undulating motion of the water, or some combination of the two, Wren felt his balance escaping him. He reached up and put a hand on the flat top of the post, using the solid surface to steady his sense of balance. And as he crouched there in the water, it finally struck him. He almost laughed, it was so simple.
Quietly as he was able, Wren slipped his clicker into a pocket on his chest and edged his way up the nearest pole. He put both hands on top of it and then slowly, carefully, he lifted his right foot out of the water. There was another pole about a foot over; Wren stretched until he found it with his foot, then followed it up and placed his foot on top. He leaned forward over his hands, levered himself up, eased his way completely out of the water. It was harder than he’d thought it would be, and his muscles strained and trembled with the effort. But he managed to keep his balance. A few moments later, he stretched his left foot back and found a third post to rest it on. The two poles his feet were on were separated by maybe thirty inches. He rocked back in a crouch and stood up on them. He stood there for a moment, feeling the posts with his feet. They were hard and slightly rough, but now his train
ing with the petals came into play; he had a sense of himself in space that didn’t require his eyes.
Wren knew in all likelihood he was going to fall from his perch in some painfully clumsy fashion. But he’d take it slowly. He took his clicker back out of his shirt pocket and rocked to his right, got his balance, lifted his left foot. His thigh muscles burned with the strain as he lowered himself down, but he was able to stretch his left leg forward enough to find the pole he’d had his hands on just moments before. In his mind, he pictured what he could remember of the posts’ arrangement.
Left foot secure, he shifted forward to it, and then stepped out, probing the darkness with his right. Wren found another post, slipped his foot around on it to find the center point, shifted his weight. Moving this way was brutal on his muscles; not just his legs, but his whole body, it seemed. Back, stomach, he’d never realized just how many muscles it took to keep his balance. He was getting a complete lesson on it now, though.
More importantly, Foe hadn’t shot him yet. Wren found his way to a pair of posts that were only a foot or so apart, and he paused there, standing upright with a foot on each, and listened intently. Still he could hear nothing but the motion of the water. And even that seemed to be subsiding.
Wren determined to hold his position until he heard Foe, or Foe shot him again. Three minutes, five, ten. It was always hard to judge time in absolute darkness, but Wren had no doubt this was the longest he’d ever gone without taking a hit from the old man.
And then, Wren thought he heard the slightest shift in the water, off to his left; a bare ripple. Maybe he’d imagined it, and it certainly wasn’t enough for him to locate the source, but he turned and pointed his clicker in the direction anyway.
A moment later, the lights came up, dazzling. Wren squinted against the glare. Foe was standing about ten feet away and, much to Wren’s surprise, Wren was pointing his clicker only about two inches too far to the right.