by Sam Sisavath
She acted on instinct, and without thinking, she reached up with her left hand and grabbed the wrist holding the baton and let out a scream that pierced everything, even the whirring machines around her. The pain was immense, but she pushed through it (Do it or you’re going to die!) and held on.
Quinn wasn’t sure what Blue Eyes was more stunned by—that she had grabbed his arm or the intensity of her scream. Maybe a little of both, because the man hesitated for a brief second and it was just enough for Quinn to finish pulling back, then swing forward with the staff again. This time she went low, where he was defenseless, and shattered one of his kneecaps before pulling his legs from under him.
He slammed into the floor on his back, but if she thought she was going to get a few seconds’ respite (Just a second. Can’t I even get just a goddamn second to breathe?), the man was already sitting back up.
No, you don’t!
Before he could push himself up from the floor, she smashed the end of the rod into the man’s head and his entire body snapped sideways and crashed back down. It was as hard as she could swing with just one good hand, but it seemed to be good enough because Blue Eyes didn’t try to get up a second time.
She was out of breath, but that was secondary to the wave of pain surging from the entire left side of her body. She was trying to deal with that (and failing miserably) when she heard shuffling behind her.
Quinn spun around and found Hofheinz retreating.
“And where are you going?” Quinn asked.
Hofheinz stopped moving, but he had put enough space between them that Quinn wasn’t sure she could catch him if he turned and ran. And with so much pain roaring inside her, she wasn’t entirely sure she could afford to give chase if he did.
“Going?” Hofheinz said. “I’m not going anywhere, Quinn. Whether you like it or not, we still have a lot of work to do.”
“You’re right. I don’t like it.”
“I don’t think you have any choice.”
“We’ll see about that.”
She took a step toward him and he took one back. He should have been afraid—his actions said he was afraid—so why was he grinning at her?
“What the hell are you—” she started to ask when something hit her in the back and electricity raced through her, and Quinn screamed.
Her entire body shook from head to toe and she stumbled down to one knee, and should have followed suit with the other one before falling flat on her face as thousands of electrical volts coursed through her.
Except she didn’t, because her body refused to give up.
How is this possible? she thought as she braced herself on one knee, even as every hair follicle on her body burned like someone was putting a flamethrower to them. And yet she didn’t go down.
Quinn remembered the sight of Porter back at the warehouse being hit with not one, not two, but four separate TASERs before he would even let himself drop to his knees.
But I’m not Porter.
I’m…who the hell am I?
Jesus, who the hell am I?
There was an upside to being hit with electricity—the vicious pain from her left arm went almost completely numb, and that allowed her to gather what little strength she could find and swing the staff backward as hard as she could.
She had no targets, just a general vicinity, but the counterattack did its job by forcing her attacker to jump back out of the arcing weapon’s path instead of hitting her a second time with his stun baton. That gave her the three or four seconds she needed to fight back to her feet and turn around. She was moving almost entirely on pure adrenaline now, the sudden numbness replacing pain where it mattered the most.
Baldy. He was back on his feet even with that grotesque hole in his cheek that dripped blood with every flicker of his head. He gripped the stun baton in one hand, eyes narrowing back at her.
She looked to make sure Blue Eyes hadn’t also gotten up, but he was still flat on his stomach on the floor. Either dead or unconscious. She couldn’t care less which.
Quinn focused on Baldy and clenched her teeth. “You’re going to pay for that.”
“It’s not personal,” Baldy said. He looked hesitant as he stepped around Blue Eyes’s body. She wasn’t sure if he was trying to outflank her or look for an opening.
“It is to me,” Quinn said.
“Why don’t you just go down like a good girl?”
“Why don’t you make me?”
Baldy smirked just before he lunged at her, the stun baton charging the air between them.
He was fast, but she had expected that and made up for it by making her move a split-second before he did. She pivoted out of his path and swung the staff from top to bottom, right to left even before he offered her a target. She guessed right and shattered both his arms at the same time.
The move shocked Baldy, but it surprised her even more, and Quinn thought, How the hell did I do that?
Baldy dropped the baton and staggered, his forward momentum momentarily paused. He looked confused, dizzy. She didn’t give him any time to gather himself and struck him in the temple, dropping him to the floor in a heap.
Then she quickly spun back to Hofheinz.
The man had put more spaces between them, and his beady eyes shifted from Quinn to the two bodies on the floor and back again. She grimaced against the pain and took a step toward him, and he immediately took one backward.
When she stopped, he stopped.
“What’s the matter?” Quinn asked. “Skittish?”
“Where did you come from?” he asked.
“What?”
“Where did you come from? Do you even know?”
None of your goddamn business, she was going to spit back at him when the floor trembled as another thoom! echoed from above them.
Quinn nearly lost her balance, not because the explosion was that much stronger than the first one, but because her footing was already precarious from fatigue and pain. The aftershock rippled through the room and made the glass doors of the boxes clack loudly against their frames.
In all the flurry of activity and trying not to let Baldy or Blue Eyes overwhelm her, Quinn had forgotten all about the first bomb (Was that what it was? Who was dropping bombs at the building from the air?) or how long it had been. But just as the first explosion had given her and Porter the distraction they needed, the second one did the same for Hofheinz, who turned and fled. Quinn was about to go after him (Oh no you don’t!) when someone screamed loud enough to temporarily drown out the machines around her.
Porter!
She gave Hofheinz’s fleeing form a last look (You can’t run forever, you prick!) before turning and taking off in the direction of Porter’s scream. She had to jump over Baldy and Blue Eyes and expected one—or both—of them to come back alive and grab at her legs while she was in midair, but both men remained crumpled on the floor as she sailed over them.
She didn’t know where she got the sudden renewed bursts of energy to even move, much less run, but didn’t spend too much time thinking about it. This was one of those questions she could go without answers to, especially with Porter potentially dead or dying somewhere else in the room.
Fortunately it didn’t take very long or was very hard to find him. All she had to do was follow the grunting and shouting and the echoing sounds of fists hitting flesh. And the continuous jagged line of spew (as Porter called it) on the floor didn’t hurt, either.
Porter was lying on his back as one of the suited men held him down while a second hit him with his stun baton over and over again. Each blow left behind black marks on Porter’s chest, and Quinn swore she could smell burnt hair in the air.
“This is for betraying us, Porter,” the man with the stun baton said as he hit Porter again. “You have anything to say in your defense?”
“Fuck off!” Porter shouted.
“At least buy me dinner first,” the man said, and was laughing when Quinn stepped up behind him and broke his head open with the staff,
swinging it in a wide arc with one hand.
A part of her was shocked at the brutality of the blow—she could actually feel the man’s head opening against the smooth end of the staff—but there was another part of her that didn’t care even as the Rhim operator toppled sideways, the baton falling from his suddenly lifeless fingers.
The man holding Porter let him go and tried to get up, but Porter grabbed his legs and pulled them out from under him. The man slammed into the floor on his back and head, and before he could make any effort to get up, Porter rolled on top of him and began raining down one savage blow after another, and didn’t ease up even after the man had stopped moving under him.
“I think you got him,” Quinn said.
Porter stopped punching long enough to glance back at her. “You’re alive.”
She couldn’t decide if that was awe or shock on his face and wasn’t sure which one made her feel better. But she couldn’t blame him. She was still trying to relive what had happened, how she had fought (and beat!) two Rhim operatives while nursing a broken arm.
How in God’s name did I even do that?
“So are you,” she said instead.
He stumbled off the still body, but his legs were wobbly and Porter grabbed at a nearby black shelf to keep from going right back down. He wiped at a thick layer of blood around his broken nose and busted mouth and spat out a big gob of it. His bare chest, dotted with red burn marks, heaved like a runaway train.
“You good?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said between gasps.
“You don’t look so good.”
“I’m okay,” he said, and spat out another gob.
“What about the rest of you?”
He started to answer, but shook his head instead. Then, after taking a deep breath, “I’ll be fine, Cindy. Just give me a second to catch my breath.”
“Quinn.”
He glanced up at her. “What?”
“Quinn.”
“What did I say?”
“Cindy.”
“I meant Quinn.”
“Of course you did.”
“The spew…”
“I know. It messed with your head.”
He nodded and reached back to steady himself against the shelf again.
Quinn looked down at the man with blood (and other things…) oozing out of his cracked head.
She’d done that. She hadn’t even felt anything when she did it. But now, in the aftermath…
What’s happening to me, Ben? What am I becoming?
“You didn’t have any choice,” Porter said.
She nodded, but thought, I had a choice with Ringo, and I chose to walk away. I thought that made me better than him, but now…
I don’t know. I don’t know anymore, Ben.
“You think his clothes will fit?” she asked instead.
“Too short,” Porter said.
She pointed at the other one. “What about him?”
Porter crouched next to the man he’d bludgeoned with his fists. The guy looked unconscious—or dead.
“About your size,” Quinn said.
Porter shook his head. “He’s got small feet.”
“If I can go without shoes, so can you.”
Porter grunted, then went about stripping the man of his clothes.
He was pulling on the slacks when another thoom! shook the floor and vibrated through the metal shelves and their glass doors around them. This one hadn’t come from above like the first two and sounded much closer—from behind them?
She was still trying to decipher the distance when she heard the very faint crackles of gunfire.
“You hear that?” she asked.
Porter nodded as he zipped himself up. “They’re on our floor.”
“‘They?’”
“It’s Xiao,” Porter said, as if he knew it was a fact.
“How do you know it’s Xiao?”
“The service centers are valuable commodities, and as a result are one of the Rhim’s most well-hidden secrets. I didn’t even know where the Houston branch was.” He pulled a bloody shirt off the unconscious man and slipped it on. “And I guess I still don’t, not while I’m inside it.”
“So how would Xiao know if even you didn’t?”
“The data we took from Kobalcom. Aaron must have sifted through them, found the location that way.”
“Kobalcom was a service center?”
“It was a node. A small backup system.”
“So that’s why you came back home after five years. To steal the data.”
“Data is everything, Quinn,” Porter said. “Everything we buy, eat, say, write, or do is recorded somewhere. Our list of friends, enemies, everyone in between. It’s the gatekeeper to our needs and wants. Our deepest desires. Our greatest fears. Even the dark urges that we’re too scared to tell anyone. It’s all data.”
Quinn looked around her at the machines that surrounded them, that filled up the entire warehouse. “Here? Stored in these computers?”
“Maybe here, maybe somewhere else. The Houston branch is a multipurpose facility, a bigger version of Kobalcom. Data storage is just one of its functions.”
Porter finished tucking in his bloody shirt, then wiped at some of the blood on his face with his sleeve. His cuts had already begun to heal themselves, and if not for the evidence still caking parts of his face, she wouldn’t have known he had been in a life-and-death struggle just minutes ago.
“Come on, let’s get out of here before Xiao blows us all up trying to get down here,” Porter said, and began walking away.
She hurried after him. “Wait, what? What do you mean ‘trying to get down here?’”
“The service centers are located underground. Xiao has to shoot her way down from the surface to get to us.” He glanced back at her. “Did I forget to mention that part?”
“Yeah, you did.”
“Sorry.”
She shook her head. The only reason she wasn’t more annoyed with him was the fact that he hadn’t done it on purpose.
“So we’re underground,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“If it is Xiao causing all that ruckus—”
“It’s Xiao.”
You hope, Quinn thought, but said, “If it is her, how is she doing this?”
“The problem with using real office buildings to hide in plain sight is that you can’t have an army of Rhim operators guarding it. But getting in is the easy part; it’s getting down here, then getting out, that’s the trick.”
Porter stopped suddenly in front of her, seemed to take a moment to get his bearings, before turning right down another row of data servers. For a guy who was barely able to stand up a few minutes ago, he was moving surprisingly fast and she had to pick up her pace to stay with him.
“Do you know where you’re going?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
“Maybe,” he said.
She sighed. She would have taken over if she had even an inkling of where to go. Every black box looked like the hundred other ones around it, and she had lost track of which direction the re-sequencing room was in.
Porter looked over his shoulder back at her and stuck out his hand. “Let me see that.”
“What?” Quinn said.
“The staff.”
She handed it to him.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked.
“It’s a staff.”
“I mean, besides that.”
“It’s a bo staff, Porter, not a rocket ship. This one just happens to be metal. Or some kind of metal, anyway.”
“You’ve used one before?”
“At the academy. But that was wood. Honestly, I couldn’t tell the difference by the way it moved. It’s…deceptively light for metal. It is metal, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “It’s the first thing they give us when we graduate. Any idiot can use a gun, but being able to wield this and do it effectively means something.” He stare
d at her, the way people do when they had questions they didn’t know how to express.
“So what does all of this mean?” she asked.
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
Quinn shook her head. “I don’t have a clue.”
“Not yet.”
“What does that mean?”
He stopped walking and turned around. Porter held the staff at the very center of its length and twisted both hands simultaneously—one forward and the other back—and the long rod retracted into itself until it was just six inches long again.
So that’s how Shorty did it.
Porter tossed it back to her. “It extracts to its full length the same way. You didn’t know?”
“How would I know?”
He shrugged before turning around and continuing through another row of black boxes.
“Say what’s on your mind, Porter,” Quinn said, not bothering to hide the irritation in her voice as she followed closely on his heels.
“We all have our secrets,” Porter said. “Some of us just don’t know it.”
Chapter 29
“How big is this place?” Quinn asked.
“I don’t know, it’s not like I’ve stepped foot into every service center,” Porter said. “But Houston is one of the smaller branches, so I would guess anywhere from five to ten floors and maybe a rotation of forty to fifty personnel, with half of that on scene at any one time. Most of them would be down here while a smaller crew kept the façade going topside. Any more would call attention to their activities.”
“And the floors beyond the lobby are real offices?”
“The spaces are leased just like any other office building. The people working up there just have no idea what’s going on under them. If they really paid attention—which they wouldn’t, why would they?—they might notice a little more activity in the lobby or more delivery trucks coming and going than most office buildings.”
“No one pays attention to those things, especially when they’re just trying to get their work done and leave.”
“Exactly.”