These guys are well-trained, Kate thought. Ex-military, perhaps.
How can you tell?
"Who are they?" she asked Dae. "Mercenaries?"
"Nobody I've worked with," he whispered. "The guys we buy the stem-cells from, I think."
"Smugglers. From the EU."
"I honestly don't know."
She gave him a withering look. Whoever they are, they're professionals. Our best bet is the skyway.
It sounded like a plan to me.
Kate crouched low, pushing Dae ahead of us, crossing the atrium. The sides of the walkway should keep us hidden until we hit the stairs.
It caught us both off-guard when Dae suddenly lunged sideways, tipping his chair, falling out of our grasp to the side with a crash. "Up here!" he shouted. "67th floor!"
"You dumb fuck!" Kate hissed.
Her verbal abuse was answered by a round of automatic weapons fire from below. Rounds slammed into the side of the walkway, punching through the plaster and blowing great chunks of it into dust. It wouldn't protect us for long.
Kate lunged ahead, keeping low.
I grabbed the back of Dae's chair, dragging him along with us.
Leave him!
We might still need him!
She tried to let go, but I poured all of my willpower into the grip. Not as badly as we need to not get shot!
We're taking him!
We didn't have time to argue, and she knew it. She grabbed the back of his chair with both hands, dragging it sideways.
"Up here!" he screamed again. "Careful! I'm a hostage!"
"They know." Kate slammed the butt of her pistol against Dae's nose, shattering it in a gout of blood. "They don't care."
He howled in pain, shaking his head from side to side, splattering the walkway as we dragged him along.
We'd barely reached the end of the walkway when Matthew's men emerged from the elevator back near Matthew's office. They fired a few rounds towards us while moving to secure positions behind the reception desk.
Kate fired a few shots back in their direction while crossing the last few feet to the alcove between the suspended hallway and the stairs, pulling Dae out of the narrow kill-zone.
A final burst of fire shattered the wall alongside us in a line that crossed Yeong's lower chest and abdomen.
"Fuck! I'm dead!" He screamed, breath coming in gasps.
Kate pulled him the rest of the way around the corner. "Not yet."
"Fuck! They shot me, fuck!"
"What did you expect?" She placed an ear against his chest. "Doesn't sound like they hit your lungs. Lucky."
"Lucky?" Dae's wide eyes were wide but blank. Shock was setting in. "I can't believe they shot me."
"Believe it." Kate paused to fire a few rounds back down the hall. "Fuck. It's a straight run down the skyway... they'll mow us down before we take three steps."
What do we do? I asked.
"I can't believe it," Dae gasped.
Kate fired another round up the hall, then drew back to press a hand above Dae's wounds. "You're expendable, Dae. Matthews can always get another PA. One just as hungry as you."
"That bastard."
Kate grinned. "If we can hold out until the cops show up they'll pull back." She leaned back around the corner.
One of the mercenaries had emerged from cover, starting down the hall.
She fired at him twice, and he recoiled as his companions returned fire.
"Shit. Only three left in the magazine."
"Go. Leave me," Yeong said.
"Trust me. I would if I could."
"Fuck Matthews. This is how he repays loyalty?"
"Tell me about it," I said.
He grabbed my shoulder. "I was lying before. About not knowing why he was after you."
At least you can die knowing why, Kate thought.
"I'm listening," I said.
"I heard him talking about it, after you showed up."
"About what?"
"Curoxetine. Something about Curoxetine."
Curoxetine. It was something we were promoting back in 2015. Something about it tickled my brain, but there were so many products, always something new, always a new marketing platform to learn. What was Curoxetine? An anti-depressant, I think, but not anything new or special, despite the ad copy I had to memorize.
There was something else. Something I couldn't quite remember, not yet.
"Give me the gun," Dae said.
"What? No."
"I'll cover you. Untie me, give me the gun, and I'll keep them busy."
I was bewildered. "Why?"
"Because you need to get out of here, go to Matthews', and teach him he can't use people like this. That there are... consequences for betraying people like this. What he did to you. What he did to me. He can't... not pay."
"They'll kill you."
He looked down at his wounds. "I'm dead already."
"You're not—" I started, but Kate seized control of my voice. "You're not going to die in vain, Dae. I'll make Matthews suffer for you. For us."
The expression on his face was almost pathetically grateful. "Thank you."
She gave him the pistol, pointed his chair in the right direction, and gave him a push. We ran down the hall, away from the sounds of Dae Yeong screaming and automatic gunfire.
That was cruel.
She shouldered through the glass doors into the parking garage, crashing through them, glass falling about us. It was what he wanted.
You killed him.
He died in the manner of his own choosing, with a sense of meaning, and purpose. We should be so lucky.
I didn't respond, wrestling with my own mixture of grief for Yeong, and betrayed outrage towards Matthews. My elder. My mentor. My killer.
CHAPTER 29: LIKE YOU CAN DO BETTER
Ten minutes later we were on a Metra train, heading north, out of the city, towards the affluent suburb of Highland Park. Towards Greg Matthews, the man who had betrayed me, the man who sought my death.
It was nicer than the El trains, roomier, intended for the commuters who were coming an hour in from out of the city, with view-screens built into the back of ever plush seat. They were miles nicer than they'd been in my time, and far more expensive... commuting had become rare enough within the city, let alone out to the burbs, and we were alone in the cabin save for a single older man dozing a few rows up.
All we need is a strong vantage point above the party, Kate thought. See who's there. What security he has in place. See his patterns. Then we walk up and put a bullet in the back of his head.
No. I want answers. I need to know why.
Why doesn't matter. There was disdain in Kate's mental "voice." Survival does. Getting out of this alive matters. I can live with the mystery.
I can't.
It's a terrible idea—
I don't care what you think!
The dozing old man started, and I realized I'd sub-vocalized my shout.
I folded my arms, keeping my inner tone quiet and level. It's my body. It's my life. You're just a... symptom of the trauma I've been through.
You go ahead and think that. Kate sounded bitter. I'm what's been keeping you alive.
After this I won't need you to. You're just the attitude, remember? The killer instinct. Maybe I don't want to be that person. And the skills... the muscle memories... I still have those.
Kate didn't respond, and for a brief moment I thought she'd left. But no, I could feel her inside, watching, waiting.
I don't want him dead, I said. It's too easy. Too simple. He doesn't deserve that out. Maybe you're my survival drive, but I need more than that, Kate. I need my life back, and the first step is finding out why he's trying to stop me. Something to do with Curoxetine.
Fine. She actually sounded petulant. See how far you get without me. But when you fuck everything up — and you will — I'll be the one who has to step in and save us. The sooner you accept that, the better off you'll be.
We'll see.
I didn't want to entertain the possibility that she might be right. We'll see.
Kate had fallen entirely silent again by the time we reached the Braeside stop up in Highland Park, enough so that I felt almost alone again. I knew she was there, in the back of my mind, watching and waiting for me to fuck up, but I couldn't feel her. She'd retreated too deeply into my subconscious, or however it worked.
What was she? Exactly? The anthropomorphism of my survival instinct? A personality shard of someone I no longer remembered being? Some childhood alter that I didn't remember having? A symptom of my PTSD? There was no way to tell. I should probably take up the city's offer of therapy. Lord knew I needed it.
For now, it was enough to think of her as a different mode of thinking. A lens I could adopt. But, fundamentally, she was still me. Right?
The trains didn't go out as far as Greg's estate, but it wasn't a long walk. I figured that maybe I didn't want a record on my ChicagoCard of taking the bus out all the way, so we hoofed it, walking alone through increasingly suburban residential neighborhoods. It was a bit of a shock, the way the urban sprawl shifted as the property values rose... there were more trees, fewer buildings, and larger yards the further we got from the train station.
Privileges of luxury.
CHAPTER 30: BLACK TIE
The lights from Greg's soiree were visible for blocks before I actually reached his estate, and the cars lined up on either side of the road extended almost as far. Nice cars, too, all black and chrome, with reflective surfaces and tinted windows, probably from this year or the year before. Rich people cars. High technology with a veneer of classic design.
My mind drifted back to the parties Greg would throw back in 2015, gatherings for clients to woo and drug company execs to impress. Matthews was old money, living in an old house, an aesthetic that appealed to the up and coming executives who wanted to believe that someday, they too could live this way. As his protégé, I have to admit that I was no different.
I felt out of place, though, a middle-class girl from a small town surrounded by ivy-curled pillars and mahogany woodwork, bombarded by accents that bespoke class and civility, networking in my only nice dress with people who had closets full of outfits that individually cost more than my yearly clothing allowance. I felt a phony among them, an impostor, an outsider barely clinging to dignity by the skin of my teeth, always on the verge of being exposed for the common thing that I was.
Some things hadn't changed, though now I carried a pistol in place of social insecurity. Go ahead. Look down on me. I can end you.
What was most surprising was how much the place hadn't changed. There was still a long gravel drive circling in front of an impressive Frank Lloyd Wright-designed (so Greg would brag) Prairie School facade, still the expensive 1925 Flint car brought out front to show off, still the obedient staff of servants and groomsmen hired from an upscale temp agency to make Greg's rich clients feel pampered. The place had seemed eerily out of time in 2015, and in 2025 retained that quaint frozen charm.
There were differences, mostly among the guests. While in the past a few would have worn Bluetooth earpieces discretely tucked in one ear, now many of them wore the frames of upscale AR glasses, checking out one another's' portfolios as cattily as they gauged the value of their outfits. An outfit — black slacks and vest, white blouse — stolen from the back of a catering van provided me with a disguise to eyes both flesh and electronic, thanks to the RFID identifiers woven into the fabric. I would be attending the party as Maria Cortez, a woman of approximately my height and build.
Lucky, that.
Greg's guests ignored me as I moved among them, invisible the way the help always is among their betters. No one would notice that my eyes weren't the color of Maria's, or that I was slightly taller, and not terribly Hispanic.
My fellow servers seemed preoccupied as well, too focused on keeping their jobs to pay any attention to me. I imagine that events like this were one of the few where human staff were at a premium, but I stuck to the shadows anyway, just in case. They might know who Maria was, and that I was not her.
Men's fashion hadn't changed much. It never really did, did it? Dark suits over white undershirts, though now the priority was given to anything that hadn't been 3D-printed. Hand-stitched was the new tailored, machine-stitched the new standard for the elite.
The women, though, continued to seek out new and innovative design to compete and war with one another. I'd missed the gradual evolution of hem and bust-line, the incremental changes that took us from 2015 to 2025, so to me, the way the women dressed now...
You've seen movies where the design team tries to imagine what fashion will be like in the future, so they come up with something bizarre that just ends up looking hokey? It was kind of like that. Dresses with fiber-optic thread creating shifting color patterns, bizarre jutting pauldrons, elevated collars... as I crept through the crowd I noticed that while there were certain clustered trends, there was no uniformity. There was no single 2020s look. Each woman was an island of fashion unto herself.
"Who are you wearing?" The question bore new meaning. With 3D printed clothing making manufacturing so affordable, I got the sense that the only value lay in scarcity of design. High fashion had become individual designers selling limited runs of their latest patterns to the few who could afford it... the smaller the run, the more they could charge.
Bewildering.
But where was Greg? Where was the host? I'd made several circuits through his estate, through the front lawn, the back garden, the den, the drawing room, the upstairs halls, the parlor... his guests were plentiful, but the host missing.
He's dealing with what went down at Novabio Medica, Kate spoke up. Probably yelling at his smugglers for letting us escape.
I bit back a retort. She was probably right. I'd have to draw him out. I'd have to cause a scene, something big enough that he'd need to handle it himself despite his focus on finding me in the city.
That's real damn big.
It'd have to be.
***
Hot-wiring Greg's Flint was easy. Or at least, my hands knew what to do, and they did it quickly and efficiently. I'd slipped into the driver's seat without anybody noticing. I was lucky, too — either Greg or one of the car's prior owners had fitted the car with a more modern transmission.
Pity "driving stick" wasn't one of the skills Kate's experience bestowed upon me.
I'd had one lesson with my dad when I was fourteen, and remembered it well enough.
Okay, so. That's the gas. That's the break. And that's the clutch. What the fuck was the clutch for?
Something. Okay.
Step one. Put it in neutral. Done.
Spark the ignition with these two wires... nothing. Huh. I should put my foot on the clutch. Okay, now again... there it goes.
I took a quick glance over the dash, but none of the party-goers hanging out on Greg's lawn seems to have noticed yet.
Now take my foot off the clutch and hit the gas... oh shit, they heard that. Everybody is staring. Wondering why the serving girl is in the ridiculously expensive vintage car.
Okay, foot on the clutch, shift to drive, hit the gas...
I shot off faster than I'd anticipated. For the three seconds it took me to get from the street back up the circular driveway it was perhaps the most elegant driving experience of my life. Then we hit the flower-bed, launched over it, and crashed full on through the wall into Greg Matthew's solarium, and my head banged against the dash.
I shook the stars out of my skull and slipped out through the passenger-side door, out of my vest and through the hole the front of Greg's Flint had made. Just as I'd hoped, a glance back over my shoulder told me that Maria's identifier had stayed with the vest. I made a quick dash around the corner, crossing to the side of the solarium and towards Greg's back yard.
A few people saw me go, and I'm sure Greg had some security cameras set up, but I only needed to evade detection for a short time. Long enough to get a
hold of Greg.
What then? Kate asked. Too many people saw your face. It's on camera. The cops won't be long.
Long enough to get what I need from Greg.
And then you're pinched.
That didn't matter. Arrest, jail, fine. Institutionalization I could handle... it wouldn't be any more alien than the streets of 2025.
Assuming he doesn't put a hit out on you while you're locked up.
I didn't intend to give him the chance.
CHAPTER 31: NEST KICKED
I hid in the shadows alongside Greg's house as security ran past, gathering to deal with the commotion at the front of the house. They hadn't been sent to find me yet, the errant servant who'd taken the Master's car for a joy-ride, but it wouldn't be long until they were searching for me.
They'll take you down, Kate thought. These guys are good private security. You don't have the chops—
You're not helping, I cut her off, slipping back into the house through a sliding glass door into the kitchen. I ascended a smaller staff staircase up to the second floor, and made my way to the front of the house, crouching below a rail overlooking the scene in the solarium.
Confused guests milled around gawping, chattering excitedly about the incident, getting in the way of the security guards touching their ears and sub-vocalizing into throat mics. Servers stood in the back, rubbernecking to try and see the crashed automobile.
And Greg. Not with the others. Up here on the second floor, just down the hall from me, striding purposefully towards the stairs descending to the foyer, face mottled and flush with anger and frustration. He had a cordon of four security personnel with him, flanking him.
"Sir." One of them spotted me through his light-enhancement shades, holding out a hand in front of his charge.
Greg saw me, and his face paled. "Erica?"
I stood, stepping out of the shadows. "Yeong told me everything, Matthews."
"What are you—"
"Curoxetine."
It might not have meant much to me, but it meant a hell of a lot to Greg. His face went white as a sheet and he stumbled back, away from me. "Stop her! She's here to kill me!"
Cold Reboot (Shadow Decade Book 1) Page 16