by Nadia Afifi
Hadrian.
Unleashing a torrent of obscenities, Pierson stormed back into the interrogation room. Hadrian followed closely behind. He wore a starched white shirt and NASH jacket that concealed his more colorful tattoos, but still looked out of place next to the officers around them with his bloodshot eyes and unshaven face. Hadrian glanced casually in Amira’s direction but gave no outward signs of recognition. Taking her cue from him, Amira turned angrily to Pierson.
“Now what’s going on?” she asked, slipping indignation into the words. “Who is this?”
“This is Inspector Hadrian Wolfe,” the detective said with forced composure. “He has some questions for you related to your compound friends. So in the spirit of interagency cooperation, I’ll hand it over to you, Inspector.”
Pierson left the room and Hadrian took the opportunity to lean over Amira, shielding both of their faces from view from the remaining officers.
“You have to find a way out of here, love,” he whispered. “Aldwych is coming for you.”
“How can I—” Amira whispered back, then Hadrian winked with a subtle gesture at his coat pocket.
Sounds of a scuffle erupted in the hallway, followed by a loud bang. Shouts and curses devolved into violent coughing, followed by thick, white smoke streaming into the interrogation room.
“They’re here,” Hadrian said. “Let’s go!”
He grabbed her arm and ran past the two police officers, both on their knees already retching and gasping for air.
Hadrian and Amira covered their mouths and crouched low into the hallway to find a small battle underway.
A team of police officers, including Pierson, took shelter behind a wall of boxes, firing stun guns at a line of intruders in bright red uniforms. The fighters wore gas masks and powerful armor, their fluid, irregular movements suggesting that they were not robot, but human.
“Who the fuck are they?” Pierson yelled over the gunfire. “You’re all under arrest!”
Whoever they were, they did not fire with the intent to kill, using stunners instead of electromagnetic fire.
“There she is!” one of the masked intruders shouted.
Amira lunged toward Hadrian’s coat pocket, where he gestured earlier, and retrieved a finger-thin metal rod with a small button. Though she was not law enforcement, she had seen enough crime videos on the Stream to guess its purpose.
“Fuck!” Pierson yelled as Amira crouched down and raised her arm in the air. She pressed her thumb down on the button. She was quick – the end of the rod erupted, sending a translucent wave through the air in every direction, rippling like a stone thrown in smooth water and sending bodies to the ground.
The pulse from the aerial stunner struck the top of Hadrian’s head, rendering him limp and helpless. He fell against the wall with a violent thud.
Police officers and mercenaries lay unconscious on the floor with one exception; Pierson was also quick, having ducked down immediately at the sight of the stunner. He crouched on his hands and knees, momentarily dazed.
Their eyes met and Amira scrambled to her feet, sprinting in the opposite direction.
They charged down the hallway. A rush of air to her right side whipped at her hair, accompanied by a large cracking sound. Pierson’s stun gun narrowly missed her. Before he could fire again, she rounded a sharp corner down another pathway, her feet skidding on the marble floor.
Two women emerged from a side room into the hallway, barely managing a double-take before Amira collided with them, knocking them to the ground.
“Stop her!” Pierson cried.
The women shrieked again as Pierson tripped over them and smashed into the floor with a harsh thud. Amira barreled through a door leading to a stairwell and descended. The stairs were cold and unforgiving, but though still barefoot, she kept up her furious pace. She would have no hope of exiting through the front door of a police station, and the others would regain consciousness soon. Her only hope was another way out.
Another door awaited at the lowest stair level. Without any alternatives, Amira slammed through shoulder-first. The room on the other side was pitch black. Without an Eye or a handheld device to light the way, she moved forward blindly until her shaking hands found a handle. She pushed through and stepped outside, the cool air of early morning blasting her cheeks and hair.
She was behind the police station. Rows and rows of solar train tracks stretched in front of her, spanning several hundred feet and flanked on both sides by streetlights. It was still dark outside and quiet, the city not yet stirring. The long line of tracks glowed with reserve solar energy and electromagnetic currents that ran below the glassy surface.
Footsteps echoed from the stairwell.
Amira took a deep breath and ran at breakneck speed across the tracks, leaving a fading trail of green, glowing footprints on the surface behind her, an effect of the dormant sunlight beneath the track’s surface.
Pierson burst out of the door. “Stop!” he yelled. “You’ll get hit, you crazy bitch, stop!”
Amira continued to run.
“Amira,” Pierson said. “I’ve put my gun away! Turn back before you kill yourself!”
A meaningless gesture – electromagnetic weapons were notoriously unpredictable near maglev tracks, and he would not risk firing, just as he would not risk following her all the way across the railway.
When Amira continued to run, he resumed the chase. His footsteps, hesitant at first, gained speed behind her. She neared the other end of the tracks, her shadow dancing under the streetlight as her ghostly footprints faded behind her.
The ground rattled and Pierson shouted in panic, leaping to the center platform between two of the tracks. Seconds later, a high-pitched wail announced a train’s arrival, followed by a long streak of green light shooting along the tracks between hunter and hunted. By the time it passed, the lonely roads were silent again, and Amira was gone.
* * *
It was too dangerous to return to the Canary House. The police or the armed goons at the station had probably placed the building under guard now, perhaps combing through her room at that very moment. Though she had never seen the uniforms of the attackers before, Amira guessed that they were mercenaries. Either Parrish hired them directly, or the Aldwych Council had on his behalf. Pierson’s shock was justifiable – security at Aldwych was handled by Westport PD within the district, and by NASH at the corporate space stations. Hiring mercenary fighters was a serious violation of the city’s laws, and the fact that someone was willing to send them to attack a police station to capture Amira meant that she had accrued dangerous and desperate enemies.
She stopped in a thrift store and used the last of her cash to pay for a pair of biodegradable slippers. Cameras blinked from the store’s corners, but she kept her head low. Her feet had already begun to blister and bleed, and she had more walking to do.
The Academy was certainly off-limits, as was D’Arcy’s family home in Sullivan’s Wharf. There was only one logical place left to go. Moving swiftly across alleyways and underneath bridges, she cut through the city’s heart to the dockyards as the sun peered over the skyline.
* * *
Hadrian’s crew was expecting her. She passed the speaker phone on the gangplank without a single threat or sarcastic comment and found the shipmaster back on his perch with his castaways, gathered around a large screen in the entrance hall. Hadrian still wore his suit from the police station, although his tie was now wrapped artfully around his forehead. Though she left him unconscious in the middle of a firefight, Amira did not feel the faintest trace of surprise to find him back on the ship.
“The lady of the hour!” Hadrian boomed, looking over his shoulder when Amira walked in. “We’re catching up on your Aldwych adventures, us and the whole damn world. As a side note, you could have given me just a little warning about the stunner. My head feels
like it’s been fucking split in half.”
Hadrian spoke with an almost giddy lilt, but the young faces fixated on the screen were etched with deep anxiety, terror even, as they watched the display of the Trinity Compound’s power in Westport.
The screen was divided into multiple panels from different facets of the Stream, all covering scenes from the previous night – helicopters circling the dark towers of the Soma, the Trinity flag hanging out of a broken window, men and women in formal dress carried out on stretchers and stock images of Valerie Singh, her arms folded and her expression stern. Rozene was noticeably absent from the news feeds, but Stream commenters referenced the ‘missing clone girl’ feverishly in the side panels that ran below the headlines.
The room spun a little.
“Get some food and rest, missy!” Hadrian said. “Find an empty cabin room, mi casa es tu casa and all. And when you wake up, we’ll see if we have something better to share.” He cast a meaningful glance at Lee, who nodded. The boy’s face was the color of sour milk and more haggard than Hadrian’s, but he navigated his computer with grim purpose.
Clutching a sandwich wrapped in tin foil, Amira sank back into a cabin bed near the mezzanine, resting her clammy forehead against the white-paneled wall. Every muscle in her body ached and her head throbbed. She started to eat and suddenly felt famished, biting into the stale bread like a wolf attacking a carcass.
As she stretched across the bed, Amira thought of the ship’s residents, refugees of a failed dream in the desert who wandered the hallways seeking shelter from the world outside. She returned to that day she disembarked the train in Westport, frightened but hopeful. Now, she was a runaway seeking shelter once again, adrift in a deep ocean current where the land was out of her reach, no matter which way she turned.
When she finally faded away, it was into a deep, dreamless sleep, her first in months.
* * *
If Hadrian was giddy before, he was beside himself with jubilation when she arrived in the ship’s gym, the small, musty room where they previously viewed Rozene’s memory.
“Sleeping Beauty is risen!” he greeted her, gesturing her forward. “And you have a visitor.”
A blur with dark hair rushed forward and D’Arcy threw her arms around Amira. Stunned, Amira clutched her friend close until she winced with pain and pulled away. A heavy bandage covered D’Arcy’s throat and right shoulder.
“You’re ok,” Amira said and immediately burst into tears. The full weight of the last twelve hours struck her at once – the loss, the fear and now relief.
“It wasn’t that bad,” D’Arcy said, wiping her eyes. “He missed the jugular, so the cut ended up more on the shoulder. The doctor told me that if I hadn’t moved in that one second, I’d probably be dead.”
Amira recalled the way the masked attacker had swung the knife and the way D’Arcy had been forced to crawl in her own blood. Raw, unfiltered hatred bubbled inside her. Elder Young, Sarka, Reznik and the faceless thugs who followed them – they would face justice, and not the interdimensional kind they preached in the compounds. Real justice, in this world.
“Do we know who they were?” D’Arcy asked.
“Yes,” Amira said, her voice still choked with emotion. “It was the Trinity Compound, Rozene’s compound, that came for her. I tried to get her out, but they were armed and we were trapped. They took her alive and shot Valerie Singh. But that’s not all – Alistair Parrish was there, D’Arcy. He helped them.”
D’Arcy clapped a colorless hand to her mouth.
“The Trinity is definitely planning something, but there’s more to it than that,” Amira said. “Dr. Parrish was helping them, for a start. And when they were looking for us, one of them said something about this drug they were searching for. They needed Barlow to get more of it.”
“Barlow? You mean the drug you stole from the stores?”
“Thanking me yet, missy?” Hadrian called out, clapping D’Arcy affectionately on her good shoulder, but still making her wince. “Old Hadrian has a reason for every season. Got that little vial away from some very bad folk.”
Amira’s head swam, absorbing Hadrian’s words. She had assumed that Tiresia had been a black-market drug that Hadrian wanted for the usual reasons – money, recreation, power. After the events of the previous night, it was clear that Tiresia was no ordinary drug.
Perhaps sensing Amira’s line of thought, Hadrian gestured her and D’Arcy toward the computer screens.
“Come on then,” Hadrian said. “I’ve got some top-rate footage here.”
A slight girl of about sixteen was combing through a long string of data on a monitor, chewing the ends of her dreadlocks. Nearby, Hadrian, Lee and a group of teenagers gathered around a small screen.
“Hadrian,” Amira said tensely. “I have to find Rozene, and quickly.”
“That you do,” Hadrian said. “But you’re a wanted woman now. Lots of folk looking for you when they should be tracking our Rozene down. You need to lie low here for now. We’ve been on the search while you were catnapping. Look.”
Amira leaned forward. A young woman with short, spiky black hair lay on a hospital bed and addressed someone off-camera.
“Wait,” Amira said to D’Arcy. “That’s you!”
D’Arcy smiled. “They didn’t waste any time,” she said. “Got wheeled out to the hospital and had cops in my room the second they finished bandaging me.”
“I know you’re not telling me everything.” Amira immediately recognized Detective Dale Pierson’s low drawl as he addressed D’Arcy on camera. “Do you really expect me to believe that Amira Valdez made no attempt to contact you or speak to you since yesterday? That she didn’t come back to your residence?”
“I’m in the hospital,” D’Arcy said. “Getting stitched up.”
“All the more reason for her to look for you.”
D’Arcy rolled her eyes.
“She’s one of the top students at the Academy,” D’Arcy retorted. “She’s not stupid. Why are you after her? She had nothing to do with the attack on the Soma! You should be asking for her help, if anything.”
“Did she ever talk to you about problems on the cloning project? You are a fellow Pandora colleague, after all.”
“No.”
“Did she ever mention any pressures she was under, from her superiors or somewhere else?”
“No.”
“Then what the hell did you two talk about? You’re her best friend, or so I’ve been told.”
“Oh, you know…boys. Our periods. Girl stuff.”
“How are we seeing this?” Amira asked Hadrian. “Do you have access as an ISP—”
“Nope,” Hadrian said cheerfully. “They kicked me out of their shared system completely after that business at the station. I had my kids do a little foraging through the PD’s archives and found a whole folder with your name all over it.”
“You hacked into the Westport Police’s server?” Amira asked incredulously.
“Well, Lee hacked into it,” Hadrian said. “With a little help from Hadrian and his connections. Lee, you know how they say parents love all their children equally? It’s fucking bullshit. You’re my favorite, Lee, of all of my kids!”
The screen switched to Julian, who was in the middle of his own heated exchange with Pierson.
“Think about this logically—”
“Just answer the question!” Pierson snapped.
“I am answering your questions,” Julian replied in a calm but insistent voice. “What I’m asking is why Amira would assist a group of religious fanatics at a compound she didn’t grow up in, when she ran away from that life years ago? What incentive would she have?”
“Oh, you tell me,” Pierson replied sarcastically. “Maybe she wanted to go back, and this was her ticket home. Maybe she never really left!”
“That�
�s bullshit. Anyone who knows Amira knows that’s the last thing she would do. She hated that life and she’s moved as far away from it as possible. She’s a star Academy student with a top assignment in Aldwych, why would she throw that away?”
“Are you going to start cooperating?”
“I’m done cooperating,” Julian said. Next to Amira, D’Arcy beamed. “Unless you have some legal reason to keep asking me stupid shit, I have better things to do.”
“Don’t think we’re done here,” Pierson warned.
“I’ll bring a lawyer next time. Idiot.”
“Remind me to apologize to Julian,” Amira said to D’Arcy, while Hadrian howled with laughter.
“My boyfriend,” D’Arcy said to Hadrian in explanation.
“He’s a keeper,” Hadrian cackled. “This is my favorite one. I’ve already had Lee download it to my Eye. Oh, and there was one more.”
The screen switched to a young woman seated behind a table, and Amira sighed with relief to see that Naomi appeared uninjured after the attack. Though visibly shaken, Naomi sat upright while Pierson interrogated her.
“But Amira was with me the whole time,” she said.
“When the terrorists entered the Soma?”
“Well, no, not then, but right before. We were all up with Rozene – with the subject, and she stayed up there when I went down for more cake. Then a crowd of men burst through the door and shot their guns in the air and….” She buried her face in her hands and sobbed.
“Poor Rozene,” she continued, wiping her eyes. “You need to find her. She’s in so much danger this late in her term.”
“She wasn’t as interesting,” Hadrian said impatiently. “He stuck to facts with her, asking the same question about fifty times, and didn’t sound like he got anything. If it was me interrogating her, I’d have pushed a little harder.”
“What else did you find from the police files?” Amira asked. Though the display of support from her friends was heartening, it revealed nothing about the Trinity or Rozene’s whereabouts.