"We can help you," Raines said, taking a step towards the Keeper, "but you have to tell us what's happening."
The young man looked desperately in need of somebody to tell him it was all going to work out. Raines was the right person for that task.
"I don't know." He shook his head. "We were following orders. Returning you to the Precinct, and then there's the beeping. It's like a watch alarm, you know? But then my partner seizes. Puts his head into the goddamn window so hard it cracked the glass. I don't understand—he had thirty years left, easy. He didn't get a countdown, no nothing. Just—"
Once the floodgates opened the kid loosed a deluge of questions mingled with rapid-fire pleading, as if the act of speaking and hearing the sound of his own voice would bring clarity.
"It's going to be okay," Raines said, her voice smooth and modulated. She gestured with bound hands to the Kestrel. "Who's that?"
He shook his head vigorously. "This is where he told me to bring you, that's all I know."
"Who?" Raines asked.
"Don't know. He appeared on the holo-screen after..." His eyes fogged with a memory still too fresh to process, "After my partner—he said I'd be next if I didn't stop here and let you out."
"Raines, we're about to have company," I said, gesturing to the three armed soldiers exiting the Kestrel.
The Peacekeeper followed my gaze. Poor kid made the mistake of turning with his rifle still pressed to his shoulder. The soldiers didn't pause to find out if he had hostile intent. They fired in unison.
Bolts of blue energy tore into the Keeper. The air filled with the stench of scorched meat. He teetered and fell, dead before he hit the ground.
Everything inside me clenched. It took all the willpower I could muster not to run. That, and the fact there wasn't a clear place to run to.
The three men formed a triangle in front of the Kestrel, their weapons sighted on us with cold, calculated precision. They were blank canvasses, devoid of emotion, and primed with a single purpose. The man at the head of the triangle waved us over with a flick of his wrist.
We dragged our feet, trying to buy time to think. The hamster spinning the wheels in my brain sprinted at full capacity, looking for a solution, but all plans followed different roads to the same destination: we'd be dead.
"Stop," the soldier said when we were within twenty feet.
We did; neither of us was eager to board the Kestrel with three men willing to murder six Peacekeepers without even getting a little misty eyed.
The smallest of the three men, who stood a clear foot over me, approached. He held his rifle loosely in one hand and fished a portable weapons detector the size of a deck of cards from his pants. The sensor beeped rhythmically as he waved it over us.
"Clear," he said, returning to his place in the formation without turning away from us.
The speaker for the group nodded towards the Kestrel. "Get in."
I had taken exactly two steps when I saw the white plume of smoke streaking across the sky.
I thought, That's odd. And then the world exploded.
To be more precise, the world occupied by and in close proximity to the Kestrel exploded.
The blast hit me a second later, hurling me across the roof. I landed with a thud that invited fresh reminders of injuries recently sustained. I swallowed hard, forcing a mouthful of blood down my throat, chapped raw from the heat.
From the flat of my back I watched wispy gray clouds dancing across the sky. A peaceful interlude despite the carnage nearby.
I rolled onto my knees before eventually standing, a task of considerable difficulty with hands fastened behind my back.
A second fireball, weaker than the first, erupted from the Kestrel, a gutted machine that would never fly again.
I scanned the sky for whatever had launched the missile and locked onto a matte black Peregrine, with rounded curves and sharp angles, blitzing towards us. The jet did a tactical drop, plunging hundreds of feet like an aerodynamic rock. It pulled up at the last second, rearing like a horse spawned in hell and ridden by the devil.
Something moved in my peripheral vision and I remembered the other people caught in the blast with me. Raines, hunched over on all fours, coughed up flecks of red. She looked shaken, but alive.
Two of the soldiers had found their feet and took aim at the Peregrine. The third man was gone entirely, presumably blown from the roof by the blast.
Blobs of energy burped from the soldiers' rifles, sizzling through the smoldering atmosphere before absorbing into the smart-metal sides of the Peregrine. The men continued firing, oblivious to the fact that their shots were wasted on the Peregrine's superior armor, until their batteries were dry.
The side door to the Peregrine swung open like a bird spreading its wings as the soldiers reached for fresh clips. A small girl with silver hair cannonballed out of the opening. She arced across the sky in a slow swan dive, somersaulting when she hit the ground.
Being no stranger to Quick Sliver-induced hallucinations, I watched, with a healthy skepticism, as the girl rolled out of the somersault and sprinted towards the two soldiers. She moved with a nanite-infused power that allowed her to cover the distance to the soldiers in a three-step blur too quick for my unaided brain to track. An instant later my nanocomp compensated for the girl's inhuman speed.
At that velocity I figured she must be running at full capacity. That is, until she morphed into a veritable lightning bolt. At least, that's how it looked through the lens of my speed implants.
She leapt into the air and tucked her limbs into a tight ball. In the penultimate moment before impact, she thrust her tiny legs forward and became a flying torpedo, smashing into the chest of one of the soldiers. The transfer of force sent the man flying across the roof and the girl into the most graceful back flip I had ever witnessed.
She landed softly. The man crashed hard into the side of the Peacekeeper transport vehicle.
The little girl had her back to the remaining soldier, who pressed his positional advantage. He gripped the barrel of his rifle and swung it with enough force that it would've cut the girl in half had it connected.
The soldier ran some nifty upgrades too, but he was decidedly slower than the feral child.
Sensing the attack, she jumped, spun, and kicked all in one coordinated movement.
With flawless precision her foot found the end of the rifle arcing towards her. The two weapons clashed, with the foot being the improbable, and yet decisive, victor.
The rifle snapped in half with a shearing of smart-metal audible across the roof.
The soldier, now holding half an energy rifle, looked at the remains of his weapon with wide-eyed disbelief.
"What the hell?" he said, which adequately surmised my feelings on the topic as well.
When he looked up the girl was there. She stood a hair under half his height, which brought her to the general region of the man's stomach. She lashed out with a flick of insect-like speed, her foot plowing into the man's kneecap, blowing it through the back of his leg.
He collapsed forward, bringing his head into range of the girl's fist, which popped him between the eyes. The man's unconscious body crumpled.
The little girl stood over the body of the incapacitated guard like the pre-pubescent angel of death. She brushed the dust from her shirt, turned towards Raines and myself, and said, "Get in the jet."
Something about being intimidated by a child felt so wrong that I wanted to light a cigarette and drink whiskey simply because it was something I could do that she could not. A veritable pissing match with a little girl.
I had reservations about being rescued, or kidnapped, by a child, but with hands cuffed behind my back, what was the point in arguing?
A black cord unfurled from the side of the Peregrine, still hovering overhead. Raines complied with the child's request without a word, not looking at me. She grabbed the cord and a thin blue bubble pulled her up into the Peregrine.
I pivoted to show th
e girl my hands and asked, "Any chance you got a key for these?"
She took the metal rings in either hand and tightened her grip. The bands crumpled beneath her fingers. She pulled them apart and the cuffs released their hold. My intestines quivered.
I'm not too proud to admit; the child terrified me. The combination of youthful innocence and deadly ninja ass-kicker can unnerve a man.
If you were going to design the perfect assassin, you could do worse.
I brought my hands to the front of my body, ignoring the protests of aching shoulders and rubbed my wrists. Not because the metal had chafed them, but because it felt like the thing to do now that my hands were free.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Ash." She extended a small hand, trim, with nuclear pink nail polish. "Pleased to meet you, Tom."
More precocious than I'd expected from a child who'd just dismantled a duo of well-trained soldiers.
I took Ash's hand and shook; my grip was a wet leaf in hers. I offered a final glance to the Peacekeeper who'd released us from the van; his panic and ignorance replayed in my mind. Poor kid couldn't understand what he'd done to deserve that fate.
For me it never changed. Always the same story, same ending.
Innocent lives caught up in the endless loop of violence Malcolm and I were destined to play out. Trapped in a struggle where the only consideration, only outcome, was total devastation for ourselves and anybody unlucky enough to share the same breathing space as us.
This had Malcolm's fingerprints all over it. Not many people have the emotional numbness and technical capacity to murder six Peacekeepers in broad daylight.
For Malcolm to make this play now meant he was both overconfident in his abilities and nearing the end of whatever he needed me for. He'd shown his hand to the world, a questionable maneuver where covert operations are concerned.
I shifted those thoughts to the backburner and eyed the child before me. There were more pressing matters requiring my attention now.
I grabbed the black cable and a force field encircled me. My mouth filled with wet ozone.
The filmy blue sides pressed in tight. Hot stale air clung to my skin inside the bubble. The world felt three sizes too small. I closed my eyes and steadied my breathing. When I opened them the soap bubble popped. Raines sat across from an old man who turned and offered me a passing glance.
I studied the man while sinking slowly into the seat beside Raines. His skull had a landing strip of bald skin ringed by a horseshoe of white hair. His skin, having lost much of its elasticity, sagged off his bones.
He was old by all standards, a source of peculiarity in a world free of aging. That this man had chosen to age naturally was entirely unnatural.
A blue bubble appeared in the doorway to my right. It popped, releasing its hold on Ash. The door hinged shut behind her. Powerful engines awoke from a nap and pulled the lower stratosphere down to us.
The windows of the Peregrine were blacked out and our access to the Stream remained suppressed. The combined effect elicited feelings of entrapment and isolation. I couldn't decide which I disliked more.
"That was a hell of an entrance," I said, my eyes bouncing between Ash and the old man.
"Sometimes you have to send a message," the old man said, his voice rasping.
"Don't know what the message says, but pretty sure everybody in Terminus saw it."
"An unavoidable consequence I'm afraid, now that Malcolm has forced our hand." The old man held out two vaporizers. "Take these."
I plucked the vaporizers from his fingers, but had no intention whatsoever of inserting the nanotech into my body. "What is this?"
"I'm told that Malcolm has hacked both of your nanocomps. That booster will shield your system from his meddling."
On second thought, that was precisely the sort of thing I wanted in my body. "How long will it last?"
"It'll outlast you," Ash said with the sort of matter-of-factness reserved exclusively for children.
"And we're just gonna take it on your word that this isn't some kind of poison?" Raines asked.
"We have no need to poison you." The old man shrugged. "You will help us of your own volition."
I ran a quick calculation and determined that Ash could probably have killed me no less than a hundred times since I'd met her. She hadn't, which filled me with a blind confidence that she wouldn't do so now. Maybe Raines was right and they were poisoning us, but I had so little to lose that the cost-benefit analysis came out lopsided.
I inhaled the contents of the vaporizer and waited, expecting a kick in the gut of some kind, but nothing came. I queried my nanocomp, but it couldn't detect whatever I'd put in my body.
"Well, that was stupid, Tom," Raines said.
"I'm not dead."
"That's a horrible metric."
"You don't have to take it," the old man said, "but Malcolm has already tampered with your comp once. Nothing is stopping him from doing so again."
Raines sighed and chewed on her bottom lip. Finally she put the vaporizer to her mouth and sipped on it as if it were a straw.
"There. Happy?"
The old man smiled but said nothing.
"Maybe I'm missing something," Raines said, "but who are you people?"
"Forgive me," the old man said. "My name is Joseph Devers, and this is my associate, Ash."
The two made an unlikely pair. Ash was the model of youth and vigor, while Devers belonged in a brochure for a retirement community.
Ash looked up with startling silver eyes that matched the color of the hair dangling undisturbed in her face. Who would perform an ocular implant of that magnitude on a child?
Raines must have shared my view and asked, "How old are you?"
"That's a relative question, but the answer you're looking for is twelve, so let's go with that." Ash spoke in quick breathy sentences, as if the words would cause her pain if she didn't get them out fast enough.
Raines' face was a puzzle where the pieces hadn't found their home. I probably looked no different.
"Why are you helping us?" she finally managed to ask.
"To bring an end to a war we've been fighting in the shadows for the past two hundred years,” Devers said.
That received an ample amount of reverent silence. War wasn't a word lightly thrown around in the years since mankind tried annihilating itself in the Dissolution.
"Cryptic and intentionally vague, but I'll let it play assuming you start answering questions," I said.
Joseph crinkled his brow and huffed as if he were preparing to give a history lesson on the Class Wars to a group of children. The muscles in his jaw tightened, making his thin lips disappear into one another.
"You've seen firsthand that the Safeguard, along with personal nanocomps, has been compromised," he said. "We've worked to prevent this, but unfortunately it was an inevitable outcome."
"Why haven't you gone to the Peacekeepers?" Raines asked.
"What would they do?" Joseph punctuated the question with a shrug. "What could they do?"
"We could've stopped Malcolm from escaping if we'd known, that's what."
"Malcolm is only a cog in a bigger machine. He is an important piece, but a replaceable one all the same."
"If he's expendable, why go through the effort of breaking him out of Pause?" I said, tossing my voice into the ring for a turn at twenty questions.
"He has one half of the Safeguard Override," Devers said, digging into his suit's breast pocket. He withdrew a small cube pinched between pointer finger and thumb. "Of course, the Override could be recreated from scratch, but it would take time. A very long time."
A warm light flared from the device, projecting a stream of code, incomprehensible in its complexity.
"What is this?" I said, eying the cube in the old man's hand.
"This is the second half of the Override," Joseph said with an unsettling nonchalance considering the magnitude of the revelation.
"How'd you get something like t
hat?"
Joseph fixed his eyes on the glowing orb of code floating in the ether as he said, "Your wife."
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Corrupted Memories
Joseph's words came so far out of the left field that my mind pirouetted clear out of the way, their meaning missing me entirely. Visceral memories rooted in my heart rebuked what he'd said, denied it without considering the validity because the alternative clashed so impossibly with my memory that the two could never be reconciled.
A voice, somewhere along the periphery, spoke.
Salvation spread from those lips. They were familiar, but I couldn't follow them.
Something shook me.
A hand on my shoulder. Skin the color of snowflakes falling in broken dreams. I followed the hand to an elbow, past a shoulder, and beyond to a throat connected to a face.
The face was a memory relived. A ghost reborn.
Diana?
I blinked through the illusion.
The hand was no longer white like bone.
It wasn't Diana's.
Raines.
The weight of the insinuation caused a traffic jam of crisscrossed neurons. The Quick had found a kink in my mental armor, slipped through the cracks. It exposed the flaws hidden beneath, plucking the discordant melody most likely to lead me back to its toxic embrace.
Taunting me with images of my deceased wife had been the Quick's most effective strategy in getting me back to the needle.
The wet smack of flesh on flesh broke the silence. A delayed second passed before my brain decoded the message of pain blistering across my face.
I fell off the twirling carousel ride of inner turmoil paralyzing my thoughts.
"Jesus, Raines," I said, rubbing my cheek. "I'm digesting some shit over here."
"Digest faster. We don't have all day for you to slip in and out of Quick fits. You good to continue or do you need to sit this one out?"
"Are you kidding? You're the one that dragged me into this. Thanks to you I have to deal with government conspiracies, mass murderers, a kid ninja, and who the hell knows what else. You should've left me to die in peace."
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