by Alex London
“Fine,” Egan grumbled. “But he tries anything, I get to fry him, okay?”
Syd nodded and Knox realized he’d gone from accomplice pretending to be a hostage to an actual hostage. He was unarmed and at Egan’s mercy.
Knox had heard about the kids who lived in the Valve since he was little. The ones who survived into adulthood were mostly criminals, unrepentant debtors or worse. They didn’t respect contracts or property; they all took knockoff syntholene and expired biode patches. They’d all quite happily watch the Upper City burn if they were allowed to. Egan was about as typical a Valve kid as Knox could imagine, even in his knockoff Upper City clubbing outfit.
“The Valve is going crazy.” Egan leaned in to Syd. “Tearing itself apart looking for you. There’s a reward—dead or alive—it’s insane. Enough to pay off five lifetimes of debt. They even came for Baram.”
“Yeah,” said Syd. “I know.”
“Old bastard fought off a dozen Guardians.” Egan laughed. “Gave ’em all the slip.”
Syd felt a weight lift off his chest. Mr. Baram was okay. For now.
“Speaking of giving them the slip,” Egan added. “It’s time to go.”
“We’ve got to wake Marie,” Syd told him.
“Better do it fast.” Knox pointed out through the glass doors of the café. Just on the other side, a security guard led a line of weary penguins back toward their exhibit. Past the penguins, a half-dozen Guardians were walking in a V formation through the zoo, straight for the café. Behind them, three Arak9 bots clattered across the floor.
Egan cursed.
The boys rushed to rouse Marie.
“Sorry I zapped you, sweetheart.” Egan smiled down at her. “I was looking after my boy here. But now, we gotta go.”
Marie rubbed her eyes and shook herself awake. Now she knew what the proxies went through with every EMD hit. It wasn’t the most pleasant knowledge in the world. She pushed herself off the floor. Her left leg kept vibrating and Knox watched her try—and fail—to put weight on it.
“I guess I could find a use for that one.” Egan winked.
“Knock it off.” Syd cuffed Egan on the ear. Marie looked up at him with hellfire in her bright purple eyes. Pure hate.
Syd wanted to let her know that Egan talked big, but he was really harmless. Then he glanced at the dead body on the floor, the chaos of the zoo, and it struck him that that wasn’t true anymore. Egan was far from harmless.
“Follow me, kiddies,” Egan said and guided Syd to the far corner of the room. They stood beside a plexi wall with a commanding view of the canyon land beyond the city. It stretched on, desolate and lifeless, all the way to the horizon. It was the land of drought and earthquakes, volcanic surges and flash floods. It was a land that humans had long ago abandoned.
It was where they were going.
“You’ll never get out this way,” Marie said, but Egan tapped his hand on the wall and a projection popped up. A few taps and a service door in the wall slid open without a sound. Egan gave Marie a cocky smile and pulled Syd through.
“We can’t go with this guy,” Marie whispered. “I don’t trust him.”
“I don’t trust you either,” Knox whispered back from the corner of his mouth.
“He’s a murderer,” she said.
“He’s Syd’s friend,” answered Knox, as if that explained anything at all.
A sudden crash as the glass entrance to the café exploded. The Guardians rushed in, the bots blocked the exits.
“Stop,” one of the Guardians commanded and Knox met her eyes. He felt a tug in his stomach. He wanted to obey, wanted to surrender to her authority and put all this behind him.
“Snap out of it!” Marie pulled him back through the service door, which slid shut in his face. He gave her a meek nod of thanks and they turned to sprint after Egan and Syd.
Knox had never seen the working areas behind the zoo exhibits before. This was for staff, security, and their bots only. There was no reason a patron would ever need to know what went on behind the scenes. Now they were racing through the inner workings and it wasn’t quite what Knox had imagined.
The walls were brown concrete, dripping with moisture from the tangle of pipes and conduits that ran along the ceiling. Raw LED lighting made the hallways shine like day. And the light revealed all the grime and dirt on the floor.
They caught up to Egan and Syd at an intersection of tunnels. Egan looked down at his feet and then turned left.
Knox realized that Egan had augmented-reality lenses in. He was getting the layout of these tunnels from a datastream that only he could see. How would some slum rat get access to a plan of the tunnels at the zoo? Knox wanted to signal Syd somehow.
At the next junction, Egan turned around. “Hurry up!” he said. “We’re not waiting for these patrons if they fall behind.”
“You two,” Syd told Knox and Marie. “Go in front of me. Now.”
Marie nodded and stepped past him. Knox stepped up too, making sure to brush against Syd as he went past.
“Be careful,” he whispered into Syd’s ear. He wanted Syd to remember who warned him first if things went wrong.
Then they were running again.
They ran past embryonic tanks where new animals were grown. Half-formed penguins and lions and shapeless blobs that hadn’t been given their stem cells yet. Life without a program. It was kind of how Knox felt right now too.
They ran past transformers and solar batteries, network servers blinking and humming, a row of huge cooling fans that blasted hot air away from the exhibits and down the corridor. Knox was soaked with sweat. He was in good shape, but felt like he could barely breathe. There was no climate control back here, just heat and damp.
They reached a heavy steel door, pocked with rust. The pipes and conduits turned away from it, bent back into the rest of the building. There was no handle, no sign.
“What now?” Syd panted, catching his breath behind Knox. They heard noise in the tunnel behind them, the thump of feet coming their way.
“Under control,” said Egan.
Knox saw the twitch of his eyes as he accessed something on his lenses, maybe sent a message.
Knox gave Syd a look to make sure he noticed. Syd nodded. Secrets had a way of driving wedges between friends, and Egan was definitely keeping secrets from Syd.
Someone on the other side of the door knocked three times. Egan knocked back four and the door slid open.
Marie gasped and Knox stumbled backward. Syd caught him from falling.
“What the hell are those things?” Knox cried out.
“What?” Egan sneered at him. “You rich kids don’t know what horses are?”
[33]
THE LONG-FACED CREATURE SNORTED and kicked one of its legs. There was a man holding it by some kind of strap and he whispered into its furry ear. It snorted again and made a strange kind of grunting, whining sound.
“I know what a horse is,” Knox told Egan. “I’ve seen the old holos.”
“I guess you don’t know how to ride one, though, huh?” Egan stepped outside into the bright midday sun.
The others followed, squeezing around the horse at the doorway. Knox pressed himself against the door frame as flat as he could, keeping his distance. Syd tried to move with confidence. He figured that wild animals could sense fear. Then he wondered whether horses were wild. He had a sense that they weren’t, but he’d never seen one in person before. He was pretty sure, in spite of his attitude, Egan hadn’t either.
There were four horses and three riders with them, rough-looking people with skin cracked and weathered like the landscape of a nightmare. Bandits, for certain. They could probably sense fear too. They were definitely wild.
Syd had to wonder what Egan was doing with this crew.
Only one of them stood on the ground; the other two sat on the backs of their horses, straddling them and holding primitive weapons in their hands. One held a broad sword of rusted and pitted metal. It still look
ed sharp enough to cut through flesh and bone. Another held some kind of tube weapon that Knox tried to recall the name of from history class. Rocket-propelled something or other.
The one on the ground wore a black scarf around his head so that only his cloudy eyes and wind-burned nose were visible. He held two horses by leather straps.
“How about you?” Egan turned to Marie. “You know how to ride?”
“I’ll manage,” she said back. Syd had to respect her confidence, even if it was faked. This was a girl who didn’t know how to be a victim.
They stood on a slope of rough rock on the edge of a canyon. The zoo was behind them, two hundred feet up on a cliff. They’d run a long way downhill in the tunnels. They still had a long way down to go. A narrow path in front of them led into the canyon lands and the lifeless nothing beyond. Somewhere on the other side was Old Detroit, where Syd’s blood was supposed to change the world.
No turning back now.
Marie grabbed the reins attached to the horse nearest her and pulled herself up onto its back with a deft movement. The big creature bucked and resisted, but Marie held on tight. The rider on the ground laughed, pulling down the black scarf. She was a woman.
“Feisty,” she said. “We’d get a good price from the slavers for this one. Don’t see a lot of patron flesh in the harvester camps.”
Syd saw a ghost of fear glide across Marie’s face.
“We’re not here on slavers’ business,” one of the riders grumbled from the back of his mount. “Which one’s our swampcat?”
It was Syd’s turn to tense, but Egan nodded at him that it was okay.
“I am,” Syd said, stepping forward. “And whatever happens to me, happens to these two.” He glanced at Marie up on her horse and then back at Knox, standing wide-eyed before the animals. “Think of them as my proxies.”
The woman laughed.
“Check him,” ordered the guy on the horse.
“I’m telling you, we’re tight,” said Egan, but his friends didn’t seem to care.
“Keep your horse steady or we’ll be picking your guts off the canyon floor,” the woman told Marie. She nodded down the slope to where the canyon dropped away, then she spat on the ground and stepped away, leaving Marie to hold her horse alone. Marie gripped the reins tightly. The horse shuffled its feet, but it didn’t bolt or buck.
The bandit grabbed Syd and pushed his head down; she wrenched his neck to the side. He had the urge to raise the EMD stick in his hand and knock her straight onto her back. But he fought the urge. She bent his ear and touched the spot where his birthmark was.
“It’s him,” she said.
“I told you,” said Egan. “You guys have some serious trust issues.”
Syd wondered if they knew what his birthmark meant. Were they Rebooters?
The woman let his ear go. “We don’t have enough horses for everyone.”
Syd went to the other empty horse, grabbed the leather reins and climbed up, just like Marie had. If she could do it, why couldn’t he? The horse moved around under him, started to turn in a circle, but he pulled it back and straightened it out.
“I’ll ride with Syd,” Knox volunteered immediately, stepping to Syd’s side. He needed to stay close.
In a scramble of grunts and curses, Knox hauled himself up onto the horse behind Syd.
Egan raised an eyebrow at Syd, to make sure he was okay with this, like Knox needed Egan’s permission. Syd said it was okay, so Egan climbed onto the horse behind the bandit with the rocket weapon.
“Stay on our tail,” said Egan. “I don’t want to lose you and that patron of yours. And you!” he called back toward Marie. “Don’t fall off . . . we’re not waiting for you.”
“You made that clear,” Marie called back and Syd had to admit, he liked her. She was calculating and tough and though she was clearly out of her element here, she held her own.
Egan raised his hand toward the zoo and the Upper City behind it, pressed his forefinger to his thumb and flicked. “Bye-bye, you knockoff town!” he shouted, then called back to Syd, “Just a few days to freedom, brother!”
Suddenly, the steel door beside them burst open and two Guardians rushed out, their gray jumpsuits shining in the sun, their perfection a jarring contrast to the jagged landscape.
“Stop!” the Guardians shouted, their voices identical.
The woman next to Marie’s horse simply raised her weapon, two rusty tubes stuck side by side on some kind of wooden base. She pointed it at the Guardians the way you’d point an EMD stick and she squeezed a little metal trigger with her finger.
A deafening blast and a puff of smoke from the tubes sent both the Guardians sprawling backward through the door. A splatter of bright-red blood painted the walls beside them, and without hesitating, the woman rushed to the door and slammed it closed on the Guardians.
She leaned her back against it as she split her weapon open and dropped two round cartridges into the tubes and snapped it shut again. She was whistling as she did it. Then she turned and squeezed the trigger again, with another explosion, the metal of the door bent and twisted.
The woman strolled back over to the horse and climbed up behind Marie.
“She just . . . ,” Knox whispered in Syd’s ear. “She just killed those two . . .”
“I know,” said Syd, staring at the flecks of blood on the walls around the mangled door.
“Let’s move,” the woman called ahead from the back of her horse. “Pull your reins and give a nice loud heyup!”
“Heyup!” Syd said, pulling the reins, and the horse started off with a jolt.
The horse sped under Syd and he felt a tingle up his spine, a thrill. He’d never sat on anything alive before, never felt this much power beneath him, knowing the animal was only just barely under his command. He squeezed his heels into its sides and found he could steer the horse that way, or at least make suggestions to it. As long as his suggestions were respectful, the horse obeyed with tremendous force.
All this death, he thought, and I’m just starting to feel alive.
The horse ran along the edge of the canyon, its hoofs stamping into the dust, as it made its way through the cut in the rocks and started down. High shadows rose above them. The trail wound and twisted and the temperature dropped quickly. Syd caught a glimpse of the horse ahead of them, the horse with Egan, as it rounded a corner.
“Heyup!” he said again and jostled the reins. His horse moved faster.
“You’re pretty good at this,” Knox said. Syd felt Knox’s arms wrap around his waist. It didn’t feel like flirting this time, more like the desperate fear of a guy holding on for his life. In that sense, they weren’t so different right now. It was the first time Syd didn’t actually mind Knox touching him. He sped the horse up.
He heard the snorts and grunts of Marie’s horse right behind them. It couldn’t be easy for a patron, one minute sitting at home in luxury, the next racing off on horseback through the wilderness.
All for Syd, all because she believed some story about him.
Then there was Egan, who showed up with such convenient timing, who was running with this gang, who’d killed a woman. Again, all for Syd.
He didn’t like all this unprovoked generosity.
The only person he felt he could actually trust right now was Knox. Knox’s reasons for helping were all about Knox and Knox’s hatred of his father. Self-interest made sense to Syd. Everyone else was playing some other game.
They heard a crash behind them. Knox looked back over his shoulder and saw three Arak9 combat robots kicking up dust as they pursued. The horses were fast, but the robots were faster and they were closing the distance between them rapidly.
“Trouble!’ Knox shouted.
The lead bandit turned his horse around and waved for the others to pass him. As they galloped by, he swung his weapon off his shoulder and took aim.
A projectile shot from the front of the weapon and zipped through the air straight into the fir
st of the bots. It hit with an explosion of flame and smoke. The bandit was already reloading as the next two bots leapt through the flames. Syd goaded the horse forward, faster. Behind them, they heard two more explosions in quick succession.
Whooping and cheering, the bandit galloped back into the lead and they resumed their course behind him. In the clear blue sky above, a drone circled.
“Why isn’t it firing?” Knox asked as they galloped toward the cover of the canyon.
Syd glanced up at it, a black winged shadow overhead. He felt the comforting pressure of Knox’s arms around him. Having the patron on his horse was the only reason that the drone hadn’t blown Syd into dust. Yet.
“Because it would kill you too,” Syd told him. Knox stared up at the drone, wondering how long his father would let them go before he wrote Knox off as collateral damage and let the drone fire. He wondered if his father would even mourn him.
[34]
THE HORSE MOVED STEADILY beneath Syd and he got used to guiding it with a nudge of his heels and a tug on the reins. Knox bounced behind him. He’d gotten more comfortable after a few hours of riding and he didn’t need to hang on so tightly to Syd anymore, but he leaned forward to whisper into Syd’s ear.
“You know your friend isn’t telling you about his datastream,” he said. Knox probably didn’t need to whisper, but the overhanging rocks and strange turns of the canyon channeled winds and noises in crazy ways. He didn’t want to take any chance of being overheard. “Egan is hiding something from you. No way a swampcat and some bandits could rig the zoo to go glitched like that. He’s got partners here, powerful ones. We gotta watch out.”
“We?” said Syd. “You throw that word around a lot.”
“We,” Knox repeated firmly. He didn’t want Syd to doubt it. They were on the same side here. They had to be. Otherwise, Knox had no one.
“You should know, Egan’s not a swampcat,” Syd said. “Egan was born in the Valve. He’s not a refugee from outside the Mountain City. He was just unwanted. I met him at the orphanage.”