by Jacob Gowans
After weeks of work, the Queen believed she knew who aided the fox in his escape: Jeffrey Markorian. With all her other responsibilities acting as the fox, the narrowing of the list had not been easy. She had studied phone and bank records, emails, private messages, package delivery scans. She had monitored homes with drones and satellites. Now it was time to capitalize on her time and energy spent.
Hunting down Markorian reminded her of the old days, being sent on search and destroy missions by the fox. She was a woman of action—a predator—not meant to be sitting in board meetings and debating matters with hand-wringing council members.
By the time she reached Dogwood Trail, where Markorian lived, the sun was low in its arc while a light breeze made the leaves twirl on the lawns and streets. When the Queen saw Markorian’s house, she pulled over and watched it until the sun went down. Using thermal goggles, she checked the home for signs of activity, booby traps, and any other signs of potential danger. Her scanners told her the house was clear and empty, an odd thing considering she had confirmed he was still at home earlier that morning.
He knew. Somehow he knew I was coming.
“Jeffrey Markorian,” she told her com. “Trace call.”
When he answered, she assumed the voice of the fox and said, “It’s me. Where are you?”
“Have you seen the news?” Markorian asked.
The Queen paused. That question. I’ve heard it before. Diego. Diego had asked her the exact same thing when she’d spoken to him pretending to be the fox.
“I haven’t seen the—”
Markorian terminated the call. The Queen smirked.
“Location,” she told her com.
“Current location of caller is westbound on I-20 in Territory of Texas,” answered the robotic voice.
“Trace the GPS signal.”
“GPS has been deactivated—”
The Queen swore. Her next call was to Chad. She skipped the pleasantries. “Run face-recognition software on traffic cameras on I-20 westbound for Jeffrey Markorian. Once you have him, track him, and patch his location to my com.”
One thing the Queen could not fault the fox for was the width and breadth of his net, capable of closing in on any target in suburban and urban areas with astonishing speed. If Project Orwell was ever completed, the net would be inescapable.
She got back on her bike and headed for her cruiser. Once airborn, she turned her sights west and waited for Chad to call back. He did so less than a half hour later with Markorian’s exact position.
“Also,” Chad continued, “I have a report on the Rio situation. The man sent down to investigate never responded. I gave him my number to call me directly, but nothing. Nor has he returned any of my messages.”
The Queen’s mind churned out data like a well-oiled machine. Something is going on, but what? “What can be gained in those sewers? Is there some sort of entrance into the Tower? Could this be some remnant of the resistance trying to destroy another clone production site?”
“Nothing that I can see.”
The Queen pondered a moment longer. “Dispatch a small Aegis unit. I want to hear their report the instant they have it.”
“Consider it done.”
Two hours later, she had a visual on Markorian’s vehicle heading west on the freeway toward a bridge. Putting her cruiser on autopilot, she dropped the back hatch and drove out on her motorcycle, then cut up the road until she was directly behind him. Slipping one hand to her holster, she removed her gun, aimed, and blew out the rear driver’s side tire. Even through her helmet, she heard the sounds of children screaming.
Children … None of the records she’d read on Markorian said anything about a wife or kids. Revulsion swelled in her gut and tightened her chest with an overwhelming sense of wrongness. Then Markorian’s car swerved and screeched to a halt. The Queen got off her bike, gun still in hand. Jeffery Markorian was in the driver’s seat yelling to his family to stay calm. His wife unbuckled her seat belt and climbed to the back to cover her children, two little girls and a boy, but the Queen acted quickly, killing one of the girls with a single shot. The old sense of satisfaction and triumph returned, roaring like a dragon inside her chest. But along with it came a terrible pain in her left breast and a dull ache in her head.
After blasting apart the window, she grabbed Markorian and yanked him off his seat. “Where is he?”
“I—I—I—”
The Queen shot his wife next, and more screams came from the car. Several other vehicles came to a stop around them. Other cars weren’t prepared for this and slammed into those that had stopped. She pointed her gun at another child, this time the son. “Who dies next, Jeffery?” she yelled at him. “Your boy?”
“He’s in Quito! Quito! He has an apartment there. Stop!”
The Queen dropped Jeffery back in his seat. For a moment, she considered just shooting him and leaving the other two children alive. Part of her wanted to do it, wanted to do it desperately. She heard their cries faintly, the sounds drowned out by the Queen’s memory of another girl screaming as the Queen had beaten her to death.
Weakness. Pain is weakness.
The Queen shuddered as though snapping out of a dream, tossed a grenade into the car, and jogged back to her motorcycle. The explosion was a pleasant warmth on such a crisp fall day. She used her com to order a clean-up crew for large incidentals, then signaled her cruiser to return and retrieve her.
She flew the cruiser back to Orlando where she spent the rest of the night researching the fox’s apartment in Quito. Over the last several weeks, she had checked all of the fox’s residences, some as many as three times. All of them had turned up empty. Why would he go there now? How did he get there? Who is there with him?
Satellite feeds and drones were no help. Like many of the areas where the fox had residences, scramblers had been placed to cause interference with surveillance. Thermal imaging was blocked and from the available schematics, all she could find was that the structure was heavily reinforced to withstand many different kinds of attacks. She left early the next afternoon to check it out herself.
The cruiser took her to Quito, but dropped her off several kilometers from the fox’s residence. She made the rest of the trip on her bike. Knowing that Markorian could not have warned the fox of her knowledge of his whereabouts, the Queen wasted no time approaching the tall apartment building, stacked with balconies jutting out like building blocks in a child’s poorly made castle. When she reached a spot with a good view, she waited and observed.
Two hours of surveillance told her nothing. No movement, no heat signatures, but an open window. Her brain whirred more. An open window. It was too good to be true. He knows I’m coming and wants me to enter.
Her com rang. Chad. “What?”
“The team of Aegis I sent into the sewers called for backup. No response since then. The audio had gunshots in the background. I’m sending a drone in there now to give us a visual.”
“Patch it through to my com.”
Less than two minutes passed before the holo-screen on her com blinked to life. Through the drone’s camera, her view went down into the sewer manhole.
“Go to night vision!” she hissed to Chad.
Immediately the spotlight blinked out and her view changed to night vision. Everything looked normal until the drone flew past three large equipment bags and four dead bodies: three Aegis and one older man wearing a safety vest.
On the left wall she saw a large black spot, a hole. Someone stood just inside the aperture holding a thick pipe that pumped out a liquid. The person’s head turned at the sound of the drone. The drone’s scanner required less than a second to locate the person’s eyes and scan the retina.
Identification: 13F712072-Jane, Psion Dark agent, captured by the resistance.
Behind her, two others appeared to be dragging a massive drill out of a tunnel that went into the wall. As the group discarded the drill and grabbed the large packs on the ground, the drone scann
ed again.
Identification: Albert Choochoo, captured Anomaly Fourteen, escaped imprisonment.
“Drone!” the girl cried. Then she whipped the flexible piping and slammed it into the drone. The camera feed cut out.
“Get a team into the sewers to find them!” the Queen ordered.
“Who are they?” Chad asked.
“He’s in Rio,” she told Chad. “Berhane is in Rio.”
“Are you going to deal with this personally?”
The Queen didn’t answer. What is he doing in the sewer? A trap. They’re all laying traps. The fox, Sammy … she didn’t have time for these games. “Send in the rest of my Aegis first. Find out what he’s doing. Constant reports every step of the way. I’m heading to Rio soon. I just have to do one more thing.”
Using her blasts, the Queen jumped from balcony to balcony until she reached the highest one where the window was open. Before she let herself in, she muttered, “You underestimated me once,” she said. “I wager you’ll do it again.”
She expected to find an immaculate, well-organized, and lavish apartment similar to the fox’s other penthouses in Orlando, New York City, and Los Angeles. Instead she found a place in disarray. Tools littered the floors and tables. The smell of blood and chemicals hung in the air, thick and fresh. In the main room she saw a cot, heavily used, and a small kitchen in the corner. In the back room was an operating table and used medical and mechanical equipment. The Queen didn’t need to spend much time examining the mess to know what had happened.
“Bionics,” she told herself. The fox had built himself bionic limbs. “Where are you, you son of a—”
A worn, outdated holo-screen in the corner of the living room blinked on. The fox’s face showed on it. His skin had more color, his cheeks and eyes less emaciated than they’d been under her care. “Hello, Katie. I thought you’d find me sooner than this.”
She ignored the insult. “The world is a small place. You can’t run for long.”
“Oh, I’m not running. Do you want to know where I am? Back trace the signal and you’ll find me. But we should chat first, I think. How are you faring in your management of the core CAG objectives? The Council? Do they still expect you to win the war?”
With a whisper, the Queen ordered her com to trace the fox’s signal. “We destroyed the resistance base. We’re primed to snuff out this offensive coming from the NWG and any CAG insurgents. I expect President Marnyo to surrender soon after.”
“And then what? Will you continue to use my identity? I think it’s highly unlikely that you’ll just disappear.”
“I have a plan.”
“I once had plans.” The fox frowned. “Recruiting you was a mistake, Katie. Perhaps it was my youth. And your beauty. Yes, I think that was it. Those days I believed the end was justified by the means, but now I see that it is never so simple. The means taint the end. I was corrupted. And how can a corrupt man change the world for the better? It took me losing my arms and legs to see that … and lying in a bed with nothing else to think about but where I’d gone wrong. Now I know. I thought I could shape the world. You say it’s small, but that’s wrong. The size of the planet doesn’t matter, but the diversity of the people. It’s richness of culture and thought makes it huge and untamable. To try to homogenize the human race was a mistake.”
“Your only mistake was to cross me. And now you have lost your vision. I shouldn’t be surprised that you have given up, claiming to have seen some kind of light. You are weaker than ever. And friendless.”
“Not friendless. A friend risked his life to carry me out of my prison. He restored me to health. And then he allowed himself to die to protect my secrets.”
The Queen laughed. “Protect your secrets? He sang like a bird when I killed his wife and children. You see? You are a fool!”
“Jeffery Markorian doesn’t have a wife or children, Katie. Everyone in that car with him were holograms. You only killed him. And only after he told you exactly what I asked him to say. I knew you’d find him. And that you’d come here. This was where I needed you to be.”
“Here I am. Yet you talk to me via holo-screen like a coward.”
“I think it’s because there is one thing that still tickles the back of my mind.”
The Queen gritted her teeth, hissed a command into her com, and said, “You’re wondering why I didn’t kill you?”
“No.” The fox’s face told her he already knew that answer. “The cave.”
A lump formed in the Queen’s throat. “What cave?”
“I think it’s a fascinating thing, the cave. Every Thirteen sees the cave and the shadow. The cave is always there with a second choice. For each person that alternative choice is different, but not the cave. We couldn’t explain it no matter how deeply we examined the phenomenon. Our best guess is that on some evolutionary level the cave is embedded into our genetic memory. Each Thirteen chooses the cave over the other option. Don’t you find that fascinating, Katie?”
She bristled at the name. “No.”
“But what they find in the cave, that’s not the same for each person either, I think. Just the cave.” He gave a sort of shrug. “Tell me something. Now that you have spliced yourself, have you seen the cave again? Was there a second chance of sorts? I am still not certain that the Anomaly Eleven and Thirteen can permanently coexist.”
The Queen did not answer, but what he said gave her pause. Images from her recent nightmares returned: herself, an adult, standing at the bottom of a cave at the fleshy door she had once cut open, now resealed, rotted, and blackened like leather. On the other side of the door she heard a teenage girl screaming to be let out. No matter how hard the Queen and the girl on the other side tried, nothing could reopen the door. Somehow she had become locked on each side of the door.
“I told you before that each person who has Anomaly Eleven—Tensai—whatever you want to call it—each person tends to develop a genius in a specific area, often something they are already good at. For me it was reading and manipulating people. Have you figured out what it is for you?”
“Being you,” the Queen growled. She glanced at her holo-screen. He’s on the North American east coast.
The fox laughed. Several metallic bangs and clangs came from around the room as windows and doors sealed shut. The Queen screamed curses even as she calculated her odds of escape.
“Empathy, Katie. I saw the way you winced in real pain every time you looked at what you did to me. I heard your whimpers as you tried to numb yourself with those creams. You feel other people’s pain.”
“Let me out of here!” she shrieked.
“And that makes you more dangerous than any other human. The idea that you can feel what you feel, and still do what you do … The new world I will build has no place for Thirteens and Hybrids, Katie. And certainly no place for the likes of you. I had hoped that when you gained your new intelligence you would regain some measure of your old humanity, but I see that will never happen. Goodbye.”
The Queen removed an explosive from her pack and threw it at the fortified window, shielding herself with the strongest blasts she could summon. Fire and heat swirled around her with the fury of a dragon’s breath. The Queen sprinted at the window, blasting with all her might. The metal peeled outward like a grinning demon, so she kept at it knowing only seconds remained before—
KCHOOOOOM!
The Queen blasted again just as the concussion of the explosion hit her, hurling her at the window. Energy poured from her hands as she flew. Metallic claws pulled at her skin and clothes and hair, but she found air and space as her body squeezed through the crack. Blackness overtook her, and then she was falling falling falling …
The Queen opened her eyes and blasted just before hitting the ground. A smattering of people had stopped what they were doing to stare, a few screamed. The Queen blasted and blasted, her body bounced off the cushions of energy before smacking her ribs and face on the concrete. Everything was pain: breathing, moving, thin
king, but she got up and made it back to her bike all the same.
The cruiser’s auto-pilot returned her to Orlando. As the Queen rode the elevator from the rooftop to the penthouse, she collapsed and lay on the elevator floor for several minutes before she found the strength to stagger out of the lift and into the fox’s apartment. Mirror … Where’s the mirror?
The closest was in the bathroom. She nearly tripped twice as she stumbled that way and opened the door with a weak shove. The light brightened at her presence. Crimson red skin was the first thing she saw. Blood everywhere, from her forehead to her chin. A deep cut ran across her nose and cheek, smaller ones on her arms where the metal had eaten at her as she passed through the demon’s grin. She had become as hideous as the worst of the Thirteens. I look just like them.
The Queen blasted the mirror into shards, bellowing and shrieking in rage. When the anger burned away, she passed out again.
The beeping of her com woke her. The first thing the Queen noticed was that her body didn’t hurt nearly as bad as she’d thought it would, especially her face. She was tired and sore, but not in agony as she’d been.
Getting to her feet, she stumbled to her bedroom, passing two mirrors on the way. When the Queen passed the second mirror, she stopped and jerked backward. She gazed at herself as though a stranger stared back at her. My face … my beautiful face …
It wasn’t as bad as she’d thought. The deep cut would take some work, but her surgeons had repaired far worse. Her arms were badly scratched with a few deeper cuts, so was her chest and back. But those would heal in time. Medicine. I need medicine for my face. Then a surgeon before the scarring sets in. The damage can be repaired.
The Queen dug through her supplies until she found the ointments she needed. The com rang again. It had fallen out of her ear when she hit the floor. She let it ring while she treated her wounds.