by T. C. Edge
Gambling dens, bootleg drugs and alcohol, and certain appeals of the flesh were all commonplace. All gave distraction to people who otherwise had nothing, and thus were accepted for what they were. The security here, paid little more than minimum wage themselves, turned a blind eye to it all in order to avoid mutiny, and often even indulged as well. Only when the soldiers of the Western States of America (WSA) came calling did people shape up, and that was rare.
Of course, Chloe didn’t partake in any such things herself. Her months here had been an exercise in secrecy, her plan to hide in plain sight. Los Angeles, capital of the WSA ,was not a friendly place to her.
Nor, in fact, was anywhere else.
Don’t trust anyone, came her father’s voice in her head as she wandered down the corridor, seeking the safety of her little apartment.
It had become her mantra, and had served her well so far. Since just before his death three years ago, she’d been on the move. And most aggravating of all was that she didn’t know exactly why.
“The truth will be revealed in time,” her father, Remus, had said as he set her on her way. She was a girl of 16 then, living in a comfy apartment near his laboratory in New York. He was an eminent scientist, the foremost thinker in a range of cutting edge technologies, and loyal patriot of the Northern Democratic States of America (NDSA).
Ironic, then, that their soldiers had been chasing Chloe down too…
She didn’t know at that point how serious things were. She didn’t know that she’d see a news report the following week, telling of how Professor Remus Phantom had been killed in a lab fire. She didn’t know that the mystery of his death, and his final words to her, would be left unrevealed.
All she knew was that she was different.
And that her father had made her so.
2
Chloe reached her apartment with the evening steadily, and monotonously, advancing.
There was no natural light in the pit to signal the changing of the day. This wasn’t one of the luxury residential earthscrapers, designed to provide a warm and enriching living experience. Chloe knew them to be bright and breezy, the corridors open and apartments large, all the many halls and atriums and public places filled with greenery and colourful flowers.
The idea was simple - to ensure that no one living there ever really felt they were beneath the earth. It wasn’t a natural state in which to live, these subterranean environments. And though the luxury sub-towers managed to divert attention from that fact so successfully, here in the pit there was no such hope.
It was dark, dingy, and hopelessly devoted to getting the most out of every spare inch of space. The corridors were often narrow and low. The apartments were tiny. The working conditions were sufficient to slash life expectancy significantly, and that was saying something in a world where nanotechnology had seen such advances in slowing the ageing process.
A man any taller than six feet would often have to stoop in certain places to avoid banging his head. It was proper underground living, as though the men who devised it had looked at a rabbit’s burrow and assumed it suitable for humans too.
They were wrong. It wasn’t. And anyone living here knew full well they’d been handed a pretty raw deal.
Still, despite the lack of natural light, Chloe knew it was late by the simple fact that she was home. She’d been working all day in the textile factory, whittling the hours away doing nothing but inspecting the half-completed products that passed before her eyes. Her job was a mind-numbing slog, but required her to stay alert. A product might have a default one in ten thousand times, but miss that single screw up and she’d lose her job.
Lose her job, and she’d be tossed out to the world above.
She didn’t want that…
Her shift had lasted a full twelve hours with minimal breaks. It was, therefore, creeping past 8PM now, more likely 8.30PM after the delay with poor old Harriet.
She unlocked her door using her unique code, praying the lock hadn’t malfunctioned. It made a strange clunking sound, before giving in. Chloe was all but ready to kick the door off its hinges if it didn’t play ball.
Mercifully, it did, the bolt sliding with an awkward rattle and the door opening a few inches. She immediately pushed it open, stepped inside, and locked it tight behind her.
The space that greeted her was no longer enough to set that feeling of claustrophobia inside her. It had when she’d first arrived, as the entire sub-tower had. After spending much of the past few years in the open, this change to being so oppressively cooped up had taken some getting used to.
The apartment, or ‘box’, included the bare minimum of amenities. It had a simple bunk to one side, just about fitting in from wall to wall, and a sink on the other with a wardrobe next to it. Above the sink was a mirror, filthy from several days of accumulated grime, turning Chloe’s reflection to nothing more than a murky blur. She wiped her hand across the cracked glass and revealed her face in all its shabby splendour.
She hadn’t done so in days, and understandably so.
The sight that greeted her wasn’t a pleasant one.
Her face was blackened by the filth of the factory and lower levels, her once glossy, jet-black hair hidden beneath a dirty cap, formerly white and now far from it. Her body was covered in her work overalls, coloured a sickly grey and hardly fetching for an attractive girl of 19.
Well, once attractive. She could hardly consider herself as such right now.
Despite her grim visage, however, one feature couldn’t be entirely hidden. Her eyes, coloured a bright electric blue, shone from the shade, unable to stop from sparkling even with all the twists and terrible turns Chloe’s life had held, and the dismal form she’d been forced to adopt here beneath the earth.
They were often a cause of concern for her, unusually captivating as they were. For a girl whose face had been paraded all over the continent, they made her more recognisable than she’d like.
Pulling off her cap, she let her hair drop down to her shoulders as she unravelled her ponytail. She shook some of the soot away and washed her face clean at the sink, before stripping out of her work overalls and tossing them into a dusty heap to one side, leaving her in only a pair of simple black undergarments.
She took a drink - the water just about drinkable - and moved towards the bed, dropping herself heavily onto the thin mattress. The heat here was enough to make blankets redundant. A sheet was all she ever used, if at all.
Another day done, she thought to herself, staring vacantly up at the bare ceiling. She lay there motionless for a few long moments, just waiting to drift off to sleep, before an urge took her and she reached beneath her bunk, pulling up a rucksack safely stowed below.
It was functional, military, scavenged from a dead soldier about a year ago. She reached inside and pulled out a collection of faded papers, about a dozen of them from the last few years.
She lifted a weary and wry smile as she looked at them, many of them faded by time and stained by her travels. Each was a picture of her, wearing various outfits and with various hairstyles - blonde, brown, black, red. Oh, she’d tried them all.
The first few were from the early days when she’d first become a person of interest. They were official pictures of her as a 16 year old, smiling brightly and directly at the camera when life was normal. She remembered them fondly. They’d been taken by her father, and stored around their home in New York. Just regular family photos and nothing more.
She never expected them to turn up in the news, and across billboards and screens in major cities, printed and handed out and spreading like wildfire across the entire nation. At first it was entirely bizarre, and no less than terrifying, to know that she was at the top of a number of watch lists.
Eventually, though, she grew used to it. And as the months and years passed, the pictures began to change. They became unofficial, caught by CCTV drones, or by some amateur paparazzi who’d happened to run into her in the wilds and realised just who she was
. Chloe had grown increasingly careful to avoid ever being spotted, and had taken often brutal measures to ensure she went unseen. For most, spotting Chloe Phantom, despite the possible rewards, wasn’t a good thing.
And the rumours that began to spread about her started to make people wary.
If you spot her, turn the other way, they said. Don’t take a picture. Don’t call the authorities. Just forget she was ever there.
Or you may not live to regret it…
In the early days, sightings were more common. Recently, however, as Chloe had grown more experienced of life on the run, they’d grown rare.
The last poster was dated from roughly six months prior, a good stretch before she’d even ventured towards LA. It came with a caption, as they all did, and that caption spoke volumes.
Chloe Phantom - wanted ALIVE for questioning.
Any information leading to her capture will be rewarded.
Ten Million NDSA Dollars.
Chloe had been surprised when she found it, floating about on the streets of some small town in Appalachia. It told her two rather important things.
Firstly, the Northern Democratic States were still very much after her, and were willing to pay top dollar for information. Ten million NDSA dollars wasn’t as much as it used to be, but it was still plenty to set you up for a fairly comfortable life.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Chloe knew it was time to head the other way, hence her sneaking across the border to the WSA, and into Los Angeles. She felt quite certain that the authorities there would be equally keen on finding her, though as yet hadn’t seen any posters, or heard her name on any public service announcements.
Perhaps, she began to wonder, people were starting to forget about me…
She looked again at the final poster, and shook her head. She was unassuming to look at, really. Just a regular girl, now 19 years old. Pretty, yes, and physically slender and athletic, but certainly not someone you’d associate with a particularly exciting life. Not someone you’d look at and say, “Yep, right there’s one of the most wanted people on the continent, sought out by all four nations of the Disunited States.”
She scoffed at the idea. It was ridiculous.
She wasn’t an elite soldier. She wasn’t one of the strange new breed of military weapons bred for war in this altered America. She was just a regular girl with a genius father, hailing from a once wealthy family.
A family that, aside from her, was now dead and gone.
Yet, despite all that, she’d been turned into something she’d never expected, her blood filled with nano-robotics that augmented her in weird, often wonderful, and most certainly dangerous ways. It was a cutting edge science of which her father had been on the front line, advanced technology that would, he told her, keep her safe.
Safe from what, she didn’t know at the time. Her father had turned agitated, and cryptic. He’d sneaked her out of New York in secret, telling her to head west and lay low. And then, just a week later, he’d been killed in a devastating fire in his lab.
Chloe never believed the reports, of course, that spoke of a tragic accident. She heard the news the day he died, sitting in a diner hundreds of miles from home, and broke down into a flood of tears. All she wanted was to go straight back, attend the funeral, find out the truth.
But in the back of her head, her father’s cryptic warnings echoed.
Don’t trust anyone.
The truth will be revealed in time…
They called the fire an accident, but Chloe knew otherwise. He’d been murdered, killed for something he was working on. Scientists and engineers had become prime weapons in the war, trumping each other with their ungodly creations, and Professor Remus Phantom was most celebrated among them.
He’d died for his service to the NDSA, killed no doubt by a rival nation, and now, for some reason, everyone was after his daughter too.
And all Chloe could conclude was that they must think she knew something. That she might know some secret she wasn’t letting on about her father’s research. It was a mystery she could never quite unravel.
And perhaps one she never would.
A loud knocking at the door thrust Chloe from her sleep, driving her from her dreams and troubled memories.
Her eyes flared, her heart racing. She sat quickly up, a tingle of electricity starting to sparkle at the tips of her fingers, instinctively ready to unleash her fury.
It was a defensive reaction that came without thinking.
She remembered herself and held back the urge. She hadn’t fried someone in months. That particular gift of her nanobots - the ability to discharge electrical energy from her fingers - was one she tried to avoid using, unless entirely necessary.
Snapping her fists shut, she took a long slow breath to steady herself, and checked her watch. It was past 11PM, a few hours of sleep snatched.
But why the hell was someone banging on her door?
The door knocked loudly once more as Chloe dismissed the shroud of fog from her head. She looked to see the posters of her were still lying beside her on the bed. She began stuffing them into her bag, before smuggling it back under her bed. She’d often considered burning the posters, imagining they may indict her one day. Yet, she couldn’t bare to do so. Somehow, they reminded her of just what she’d been through.
As she began stowing her bag away, she called out to the would-be intruder.
“Who is it?” she asked a hurried tone, her voice still discarding the dregs of her weariness.
Her thoughts took her to dark places. It could be security here in the pit. It could be soldiers of the WSA. It could be a lot, lot worse.
The image of a nano-vamp came to mind.
A lot worse indeed.
“Is that Miss Trayfoot?” came a heavy tone, trying to batter its way through the thick metal door.
Chloe had to remember the use of the name. She wasn’t Chloe Phantom right now, but Layla Trayfoot. Or so her fake I.D. card said so.
“Um, yes…that’s me,” she called. “You caught me at a bad time. I was sleeping.” She yawned audibly. “What do you want?”
“It’s level security, Miss Trayfoot.” Her heart thrashed faster. “I need to have a word about an incident from earlier.”
“An…incident? What are you talking about?”
“I think you’re fully aware. A lady was found dead. We’re required by law to follow up to determine if there was any wrongdoing.”
“But there wasn’t. It was just the fumes,” said Chloe, repeating what the old man had told her earlier.
“Most probably, yes. Now please open the door. I have questions.”
Chloe had no choice. Quickly pulling on a light t-shirt to cover her upper body, she stepped the very short distance to the door, purposely leaving her bottom half covered only in her underwear. She felt a bit of exposed thigh flesh was always a good distraction for certain red-blooded men, confounding them and helping to take the attention off her face.
She unlocked the door and pulled it open. As expected, the man’s gaze immediately took her in, dropping straight to her slender legs. The frown on his face melted away without hesitation.
“Um, right,” he coughed, smiling awkwardly now as he looked up at her. Chloe stood, ankles crossed, leaning lazily against the door frame. She presented her face in a deep frown, showing her annoyance at being woken at such an hour. “So, er, yes, this lady, Mrs Harriet Swan…um, Swanson,” stammered the guard. “So she…”
“Died,” cut in Chloe. “Yeah, I know. What’s it got to do with me?”
“Probably nothing,” said the rather tall, thickset guard, just the sort who’d struggle to navigate around the tight passages here. He was having an equal struggle right here in the open, trying not to let his eyes fall back to Chloe’s legs. “I’m just doing my job, Miss Trayfoot. I was told that you were seen among the crowd when she was found deceased. Is that correct?”
“I was there, yeah,” Chloe said. “How did you know?”
The man checked his notes, scruffily written into a small pad in shorthand.
“A Mr Ambrose. He told me he was friends with the deceased, and mentioned a girl fitting your description. I looked into the records. There aren’t many young ladies who work down on sub-level 75, and none who…look like you do,” he purred. The suggestion was obvious. Chloe rolled her eyes. “So,” went on the guard proudly, “I ran a search and found that a girl matching Mr Ambrose’s description lived up here on 39.” He smiled, happy with his basic detective efforts.
Mr Ambrose…must be that old man.
“Bravo, Sherlock,” mumbled Chloe, unable to hold her grumpiness at bay.
The man’s smile evaporated.
“Well, anyway. Here you are,” he said. “So, you work down on sub-level 75, correct?”
“Yup.”
“And you encountered the crowd at…” he checked his notes again. “…At about 8.10PM, according to Mr Ambrose.”
Chloe nodded.
“OK, so what did you see when you found her?”
Chloe shrugged.
“Just a crowd of people. Some guy was checking her pulse. Then I walked away. It looked like a few scavengers were waiting to steal her junk. But, nothing to report, sir. Honestly, can I just get some sleep please?”
She set a more pleasant tone to her voice, realising that being short and bitchy wasn’t likely to get her anywhere. With a long stretch of her lithe frame, she leaned back, arching her back and causing her t-shirt to slide a little up her midsection, exposing the bottom of her toned stomach. The man’s eyes couldn’t resist the pull.
“I’m real tired, sir,” went on Chloe, her voice increasingly sultry now. “Is this really necessary?”
His eyes remained steadfast on her hips. They appeared to narrow a little as they stared, before rising back to her face.
“Um, I’m sorry, Miss Trayfoot,” he muttered. “I know it’s late. Just following protocol, as I say.”
Well, protocol followed. Now go away!
“Of course,” smiled Chloe, revealing a set of lovely white teeth. She clamped her lips down immediately. Smiling wasn’t advisable. Having white teeth in a place like this was…unusual.