The Renegade Within

by Mark Johnson

  Other than the tall clock in the corner, the only other sounds were her stylus’s grinding scratches and her own loud sighs.

  As the warning bell chimed five minutes before closing, Terese lifted her map to the grand parchment in the folder on the wall. She overlaid Jools’s transparent route over the land west of Sumad Reach, stretching out to the Hem Kader, hoping the coinciding points of interest would find one another and hint at whatever Jools’ dark ops unit was up to.

  Nothing matched.

  Terese hissed and shifted the sketch back east over the map, in case Jools had mentioned the wrong departure point. No, nothing in common there. Further west? No.

  It was as if Jools had happily given Terese the precise description of an imaginary landscape. Which was impossible, for that evening Jools had been no more capable of lying than of flying. And Jools wouldn’t have made many errors in her retelling, given her passion for architecture and urban planning.

  Terese almost scrunched the map in her fingers. What was going on?

  She shifted the paper irritably. The scale was perfect. She’d checked! There had to be something obvious she couldn’t see. What was it?

  The clock in the corner chimed twelve times at the same moment dozens of other library clocks took up the chorus. She couldn’t concentrate. She let go of the paper with one hand to tuck a stray lock of hair behind her ear. As she did, the paper slipped downward from Sumad Reach.

  South?

  Her curse echoed though the room as the chimes finished.

  Of course, some dimensions and landmarks were off-target, but everything generally matched. There were differences though, for where Jools had described the bustling markets just short of the Hem Kader, were the trading grounds south of Sumad Reach. A similar landmark, certainly. Then, Jools’s open-spaced town squares coincided with empty housing lots south of the trade grounds. The abandoned, empty spaces of the Hem Kader corresponded to the dilapidated borderlands, leading toward the Refugee Territories in the south.

  “Closing time,” came a woman’s voice from behind her. The skinny librarian fidgeted with her hair tie.

  Terese jolted. “All right!” she snapped.

  A lump rose in her throat. She had a feeling where the map’s destination was leading. She tracked the route south to the finishing point. The antique shop Jools’s complement always ended up visiting, surrounded by struggling clothing stores, questionable food vendors and shacks. But the library’s map said that area was vacant and abandoned! And it could be no place for retailers, for she’d seen it with her own eyes. The antique store Jools’ complement routinely visited was no store at all. It was the ‘workshop’ that Terese, Jools and Toornan had found. The one with the horribly strong chaos surges, where humans had been torn apart and every ornament, tool and upright surface destroyed.

  That was why the complement had taken such enormous stores of water on their wagons—working pipes were scarce in Chastity Territory. That was why Toornan hadn’t tracked the complement further west—they’d turned abruptly south after removing their plate.

  Gods, Terese had even seen the wheel tracks at the workshop!

  “Don’t you have a home to go to?” the librarian hissed.

  Terese was panting. “Right. Yes,” she called.

  Get yourself under control, Saarg.

  She shut the folder and stuffed the sketch into her pocket, ignored the librarian’s terse farewell and hurried back to her apartment.

  Chaos mechanisms. She’d traced the chaos mechanism trading route to that strange workshop. And Jools’s dark ops team was visiting there.

  She didn’t put on her bulbs when she reached her apartment. Instead she stared up at the half-moon.

  These chaos mechanisms could be related to why Lijjen was studying golem. Had his group tested some proto-artifact or anti-golem technology?

  Gods, that was it. A golem! At that workshop. Sumad Reach had created and tested some sort of golem, which had gone rogue and killed its makers. Was the golem roaming Polis Sumad’s Refugee Territories right now, crazed and homicidal? If it was, the Refugees were in danger—at least they already had their massive Walls to fend against the cadvers. But if a golem—which Seekers shouldn’t have been able to create—was tearing people apart in the Wastes, then what had scrambled Jools’s brain into this hallucination? Into unknowingly breaking the very natural laws the Seekers had sworn to protect?

  Gods, the potential damage to Jools was terrifying. For all Terese knew, Jools’s brain could be melting into dysfunction each passing day, or programming her to kill herself when this mystery project was complete.

  A week earlier she’d convinced herself the dead of the Armer Immersion Chamber deserved justice. A justice she could slowly and quietly grind into creation.

  But this pushed everything into urgency. Terese had to protect her complement.

  16

  Breathe, Terese. Keep your hands steady.

  Gently, slowly, she turned the two pins in the lock. A rusty whine trailed from the cylinder, narrating the pins’ rotation. She’d been at this for three minutes already, far longer than she’d allowed in her practice runs. And it wasn’t just the lock that was overloud, but also her shaking breathings and frantic heartbeat. All three taken together would surely wake the dead, or worse, the apartment’s inhabitants.

  The faint click, muffled by the wooden door, was warm as a sunrise. She removed the pins and leaned gently against the door, gathering her breath before slipping the tools back into their thin leather wallet. From her satchel, she retrieved the wooden implement she’d spent a week crafting by hand. She pushed the door slowly open. A silver chain binding the door and doorframe slowly straightened as she pushed on the door.

  No hint of movement beyond. Despite the lock’s difficulty, her plan was still working. To make certain, she rolled the dial at the side of her new helmet. It took some seconds for her lenses to shift from green-tinged infrared to thermal. The foggy display showed two reclined orange and red forms hovering some twenty feet away. The thermal vision didn’t show their bed. She switched back to infrared.

  Not only her helmet was new, but also her entire set of plate. Anyone watching her would assume the wearer was a female Sumadan Head, given the plate’s earthy red undertones and silver joints. Her Armer plate lay unused in her apartment closet.

  She’d desperately wished the door hadn’t opened. For it to have been bolted from within. If so, she could have gone back to her apartment to ponder her next move and sleep easily, possibly deciding to do away with this absurd gambit altogether when she woke.

  But no, dammit, her plan was working.

  She clenched her teeth and went through practiced motions, sliding the wooden tool through the door, gripping the small lever and releasing. The chain dropped from the slider. Gods, even that worked! It would have been simpler to use bolt cutters, but then the apartment’s inhabitants would have questions in the morning. She pulled out her perfume bottle and entered the apartment. In her other hand, she held her shockpole at a light setting.

  Polis help her, she really was doing this!

  Holder Moorcam would disapprove of using this much of the ‘perfume’, but she had no other choice.

  She neither tripped on discarded clothing nor bumped into chairs as she padded through the green-lit corridor to the bedroom. It was no small relief that both sleepers’ faces were to the side and not buried in their pillows. One deep breath. Hold it for one minute. She released a gentle, dusting spray over their faces, then gently shook the sleepers.

  “Mistress Fejak, Master Fejak, awake and lie still. Mistress Fejak, Master Fejak, awake and lie still.” When both had opened their eyes, she continued. “You will obey my voice and none other. Mistress Fejak, I have need of your husband’s service and skill. He will return in good health and conscience to this bed before sunrise. You will forget I have awoken you, and go back to sleep. If you wake to find he is not here, you will recall he had difficulty sleeping. Y
ou will recall nothing of my intrusion. I was never here. Repeat these instructions.”

  Mistress Fejak’s voice was halting and breathy at first, but by the end, the stout woman had mostly relaxed.

  Terese bade Head Arlun Fejak, GarageMaster, stand in his thick woolen bedclothes. The man examined her, eyes wide in confusion but tight with anger at the edges. He was not a large man, but his bearing hinted that he would be difficult to manage, should he break free of the mindlock.

  “Head Fejak, I require your knowledge in execution of my duty as a Seeker. You will dress for work and come with me to the garages. You will open the hidden accessway within the garages and accompany me within. You will defend me, and only me. You will obey me, and only me. You will take every precaution possible to ensure we are not discovered and that our presence remains unknown and unrecorded. If this is not possible, you will behave and act in such a manner that casts our presence in any hidden places as acceptable and normal. Repeat these instructions back.”

  Fejak repeated the instructions, rubbing absently at his thick moustache. The serum enabled commanded action and supplied memory replacement but, unlike the nail lacquer, couldn’t be used to obtain information. Using the solution in the perfume bottle, all she could effectively command was ‘do this, and act normal’. Whatever knowledge rested within Fejak couldn’t be coaxed out as speech.

  The nail-lacquer solution she’d used on Jools wouldn’t work, as Fejak wouldn’t want to speak to Terese under normal conditions. That left the compulsion solution in her perfume bottle. It was the only option.

  Fejak led her through the sprawling chapterhouse’s empty passages and staircases. When they reached a bolted ground-level gate, Fejak produced a rectangular magnetic key and inserted it into five fitted apertures in formulaic succession, unlocking the door combination. A heavy click sounded, and Terese helped him slide the door open, then closed again once they passed through.

  The knowledge that something was strange in Sumad Reach, if not wrong, had made her question everything. She’d tracked Jools’s electric wagon’s return to the chapterhouse after an excursion, then wondered why this particular garage’s internal door was locked whenever the wagons rolled inside.

  That heavy, complicated door had been her first clue. It looked only a few years old and far more complex than necessary for a simple internal garage access. The second clue had been the wooden wagons with reinforced wheels, a larger battery, and extra storage space at the sides. Finally, there’d been the fine, rounded dust lines on the floor near the back wall, as if a door had swung open from the wall. Those faint lines had been mostly swept away, only a dusty sliver surviving the attack of a negligent broom.

  The clues added up, but only if one knew to look for them. Just like how she’d searched for Jools in the duty rosters.

  The pieces fit: Jools’s new complement had brought their dark golem or dark mechanisms from the Wastes, then stored them, taking a secret passage from the garage, to somewhere.

  Terese knew almost nothing, but suspected a chain of events.

  Somehow, those bloody renegades had upset Patzer’s chaos mechanism smuggling enterprise, which he, Holder Mathra and the Keepers of Sumad Reach were using to create something similar to a golem. The four boys must have exposed evidence of the golem, and Patzer—or someone—had ordered that evidence destroyed with that same golem, in turn killing those running the workshop in the slums.

  She’d seen investigations back home where crime bosses had wiped out their own employees or clients using ‘scorched earth’ tactics after a leak or accident. The whole situation was screamingly familiar.

  Being from Armer, like the renegades, and supposedly tracking them, she’d come to Patzer’s attention and he’d demanded—Patzer was not one to diplomatically ask—to meet her. During their sojourn in the Wastes, he’d somehow determined that she knew little more of them than he did.

  She’d been careful of what she said to him, but how drunk had she been that night in the hideaway? Nowhere near enough to incriminate herself, but then afterwards, why hadn’t Patzer asked more about the renegades if he suspected she was working with them?

  There was one final connection: The massacre at the workshop and the massacre in the Immersion Chamber. The two massacres weren’t quite the same, but the damage done to both places meant something very powerful had done the dark work. What was the connection?

  Patzer had pulled Lijjen off her back, isolating her and saddling her with work. The renegades were still out there, possibly making trouble for Patzer. And whether they knew or approved, she was working with them. Quietly, but steadily. The renegade within the beast’s belly.

  But this garage Fejak had led her to? Mechanisms, artifacts or humans suspected of chaos infection were usually taken directly to the analysis and decontamination chamber via the garages, but a secret door would enable Jools’s complement to take contraband directly to an undisclosed lab or storage.

  In fact, Jools’s group were probably sent out of the garage before the wagons’ large boxes of chaos mechanisms were moved through the tunnel. Whatever mindlocking had been used on Jools was far more powerful than Terese’s solution. Her spray lasted only three hours per dose, but Jools had been mindlocked by something lasting at least five days on her complement’s excursions. She’d not heard of any artifact or concoction that lasted so long, though her imagination supplied endless, terrifying possibilities.

  Terese handed Fejak gloves from her satchel. It always paid to beware of leaving prints. He crept to the row of lockers against the back wall. He struggled with a release lever; as if he’d not used it before. Curious. If the GarageMaster wasn’t permitted to open this passage when he wanted, who could? After a click, the lockers swung out. A corridor and stairs descended to a depth just above Swallowing level, the point at which Polis Sumad would detect human activity; below that level He’d Swallow whatever He found.

  Fejak led her down the stairway, pulling the secret access closed behind them. She would have liked to speak with the older man, if only to create some semblance of normalcy, but unnecessary conversation could rouse the subject from her control. Also, he might recall flickers of their exchanges upon waking.

  The green, infrared sight that had illuminated their journey suddenly dimmed and shuddered. Terese banged her palm against the helmet. Her lenses darkened even more. She suppressed a curse. All the effort of laying a fake paper trail to ‘steal’ a full new set of Sumadan Head plate, and the helmet broke in its first hour of use! Of course. At least, all the paperwork she had filed in other Heads’ names couldn’t be traced to her. She removed the helmet.

  From the corridor’s distance and direction, she guessed they were beneath the central admin building. They reached a thick door of worked iron, with keyholes like those in the garage door. Fejak paused, pursing his lips in concentration. After some moments, he entered the access code and pushed a hidden latch near the door’s hinge. Once through, Terese noticed copper wires leading from the doorframe into the baked earthen walls. That wiring would have sounded an alarm, had Fejak not pushed the hidden latch.

  A shudder rippled through her. Had she not told Fejak to avoid detection, he’d have likely deliberately tripped the alarm so their intrusion was discovered. Two and a half hours remained before Fejak was due his next dose of memory and behavior solution. She prayed they’d be long gone by then. If she delivered it now, he’d become sick and disoriented. No more than three doses could be administered in succession, lest the subject be brought to the verge of a stroke or heart attack.

  The texture of the walls below the fortress was familiar. Baked clay and earth, somehow hardened into angular contours, supporting the chapterhouse above. The walls of the Immersion Chamber had looked just like this.

  They were in a corridor with an internal door leading further inward. The large metal boxes, used to transport the mechanisms, had been taken from the wagons and lay to the side, next to a shelf of shockpoles.

&
nbsp; A dark tingle drew Terese toward the metal boxes, which were wider and taller than a man. These boxes had transported the dark mechanisms from the wastes. She ran her fingers over the lids’ surfaces. A tremor of chaos energy lingered on them, chilling her fingers.

  A squeaking hinge pulled her back. The internal door swung open revealing Keeper Makkdarm in a soiled white scientific apron, a cleaver in his hand. When he saw Fejak, his dark, jowly face turned from confusion to anger.

  “Arl, what are you doing here? There’s no—” Then he saw Terese. Makkdarm charged, the cleaver raised.

  Years of training and combat kicked in. Terese leapt into a backward roll, reaching for the dagger at her waist.

  “Fejak!” she screamed. “Secure the premises!”

  Fejak rushed around Makkdarm and through the door.

  There was no time to think. The Keeper came at her, the cleaver aimed at her neck.

  She rolled, fumbling, and threw her dagger, hitting Makkdarm in the throat. The wound made a wet sound around the blade’s hilt. She felt a great bite at her side and tried ducking back, but Makkdarm collapsed on her. Hot blood sprayed on her face, thick and bitter.

  She screamed in pain, rolling the man off her and crawling away, one hand at her side.

  Makkdarm tried to rise then fell, the blade pointed at her, wavering. Blood flowed down Makkdarm’s ruined throat to his chest. He took minutes to stop moving, never taking his eyes from her, his face twisted in a rictus of rage.

  So fast. It had happened so fast! Gods, she’d killed a man!

  Plenty of cadvers and infected had died by her hand, or in concert with other Seekers. The Gods and Polis demanded it. But never had she killed an uninfected human.