by Simon Archer
Semra pulled on the rope, testing its strength. She frowned at it.
“I don’t know,” she said, eyeing me up and down. “It’s a makeshift tool, and you’re pretty damn big, Joch.”
“Why, thank you,” I said, flashing her a grin.
“Get your head out of the gutter,” she scoffed before arching an eyebrow at the chasm, “though I suppose that is literally where we are. Anyway, I’ll go down. I weigh the least out of us. Then you can pull us up. Just don’t drop me, okay, you dumbfucks?”
“We’ll do our best,” Clem sneered, and she rolled her eyes at him before handing me one end of the rope and keeping the other for herself.
“Here,” she said. “Hold on to it while I make my way down.”
I nodded and planted my feet firmly on the ground.
“Help me,” I instructed Clem and a couple of other nearby binders. They fell in line behind me and held on to the rope, too, so I wouldn’t fall in when Semra stopped hugging the wall.
With one swift, adept motion, she transitioned from standing to leaning against the side of the wall of the chasm with her feet, holding tightly to the rope with her gloved hands. Slowly but surely, she inched her way down. Then, when she was finally at the bottom, we heard her call up to us.
“Hey, this guy looks sort of familiar,” she said. Then, presumably talking to the man, “Hey, is anything in there? Hello? Do you talk?” I heard her snap her fingers a few times in his face.
“Just grab onto him and bring him back up, we can talk to him here,” I instructed, with a loud voice so that she would hear me all the way down there. If anyone was going to get this guy to talk, it wasn’t Semra with her sunny disposition.
The guys and I held onto the rope and helped them back up. It was harder to hold on this time, and there were a few times when I thought the rope might not hold when some of the places it was tied together looked like they were going to snap.
“Doing okay down there?” I called down when they seemed to be about halfway up the side of the chasm.
“Yep,” she called back, practically in a grunt from holding the guy up. “This guy’s basically a vegetable, I think.”
I froze when she said that and immediately realized why the guy looked so familiar. I was so shocked that I stopped pulling on the rope.
“Nic!” Clem cried from behind me. “What’re you doing?”
“I… I’m…” I stammered, gathering myself. “Never mind, I’ll explain in a minute.” I shook my head to clear it and resumed pulling.
When Semra appeared over the top of the chasm, dragging the man behind her, my suspicion was confirmed.
“It’s Beaufort,” I hissed, staring at the blonde man in a hospital gown, his mouth hanging open, drool dripping down the side of his face, his eyes gray and lifeless.
“Who?” Clem asked, shaking his head in confusion.
“Beaufort,” I repeated, bugging out my eyes at him, trying to get him to understand. “The client.” Clem’s eyes grew wide with understanding.
“The one you practically lobotomized?” he asked, leaning in close and whispering to me. I nodded.
The last time I’d seen this guy, Kira and I had left him in a dark alleyway and exchanged his clothing with a homeless man’s. I’d performed a binding on him without a binding chair in an attempt to prevent him from blabbing about Kira or me, back when Elias Berg was still the CEO of TelCorp. It had not gone well, and the guy had ended up a vegetable. He hadn’t been seen since.
He also worked for whoever these tunnel people were.
“What?” Semra asked, looking between Clem and me and clearly noticing there was something going on. Then, her eyes grew wide with realization as well, “It’s that guy, isn’t it? The one who you performed that binding on or whatever. He worked for some secret organization, didn’t he?”
Clem and I exchanged a wary look. Then, I made a decision.
“Semra, shut up,” I said sharply. “Take him up to the boardroom with us. Come on.” She looked angry at first for having been spoken to that way, but she followed my gaze around to the other, watching binders and realized we were trying to keep things quiet.
“Okay,” she said, nodding with understanding. “Let’s go.”
“The rest of you, stay here and protect our turf,” I ordered the remaining binders before darting off upstairs with Clem, Semra, and a drooling Beaufort.
“Wait, but what…?” one of the nearest binders started to ask. But I shot him a sharp look.
“Just do as I say,” I said, and he shut his mouth along with the rest of them.
I led the way through the transparent doors and over to the elevator. Inside, I called Malthe.
“What’s up, boss?” he answered. “We’ve been watching through the windows the best we can--”
But I cut him off. “You, Lin, and the foxgirls meet us in the board room,” I said shortly before hanging upon him. We weren’t going to discuss this out in the open like this.
“What’s going on?” Semra asked, but I shook my head.
“Wait until we get in the board room,” I said. “This is sensitive information.” She looked annoyed by this but accepted my judgment.
Once on the top floor, we ran through the empty room of binders desks and over to the cylindrical tunnel leading to the board room. It was weird, seeing it empty, especially after it had been so packed with employees earlier.
I scanned my ID, pushed the door open, and then led my friends and Beaufort down the tunnel and into the board room itself. We were the first ones there. The second we shut the door behind us, Semra started blurting out questions again.
“It’s this secret organization that you’ve been obsessed with for months, isn’t it, Joch?” she asked, still standing and holding onto Beaufort’s arm as Clem and I took our seats. “Why didn’t you tell us in the board meetings? Why are you keeping shit from us?”
“It’s sensitive information,” I repeated. “Let’s wait for the others.” Semra really didn’t like this.
“I’m not waiting for another second to get the truth out of you, Joch,” she said, pointing ferociously at me.
“Why don’t you just take a seat?” I sighed, motioning for her to sit down.
She opened her mouth to protest but saw how serious my expression was and gave in, sitting down and pulling out a chair to force Beaufort into a sitting position, too. He acquiesced, looking around the room without really seeing it and continuing to drool.
Not long after that, Malthe, Lin, Cindra, Kira, and Kinley all came bursting through the doors.
“What’s going on?” Kira was asking before she even got into the room. “Are you guys oka…” But her voice trailed off as she laid eyes on Beaufort, who had abducted her and brought her into this whole mess against her will three months before. Her mouth fell open, and she took a step back, her hands trembling in front of her.
“It’s okay,” I told her, giving her a warm smile. “He can’t hurt you. He’s just an empty shell of a person. Sit down over here away from him if you want.”
I pulled out a chair between Clem and me, and she slowly walked over to take it. She was still shaking when she sat down, and I reached out and squeezed her hand.
“It’s okay,” I repeated.
“What the fuck is going on?” Cindra asked, her hands already on her hips. “And what’s she doing here?” She gestured at Semra.
“Hey,” Semra protested. “I have just as much a right to be here as any of you.” Cindra opened her mouth to argue, but I jumped into the fray first.
“Semra found Beaufort,” I explained. “And she seems to have worked out what’s going on for herself, so there’s no point in keeping her in the dark anymore.”
“Well, shouldn’t you check her just like you checked us?” Clem asked defensively.
“Check me?” Semra repeated, indignant. “Check me? What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means looking into your soul,” I said, not meeting your eyes.
“Like we do with clients when a binding doesn’t go according to plan.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said, turning her ire at me now. “You can’t be serious. I’m not a client, I’m a member of this board, and I’m dedicated to this company just like every one of you people!”
“I know,” I murmured, still avoiding her piercing gaze. “But Malthe, Cindra, Kira, Kinley, and I have been through a lot together, and the foxgirls and I are already bound to one another. So I knew I could trust them from the beginning. Clem and Lin accidentally found out like you did. Well, sort of. We didn’t tell them, at least.”
“You should know that you can trust all of us,” Semra said, crossing her arms. Clem and Lin turned to gaze at me as if they agreed. They probably did.
“Look, it’s not that I don’t trust you,” I said, rehashing what I’d told the other two when they found out. “It’s that I need to be more careful than I would like given the sensitivity of the situation. You get that, don’t you? You can’t tell me that you wouldn’t have done the same, were you in my shoes.” I looked at Semra then, meeting her eyes. Clem and Lin might’ve told everyone, but I knew Semra and I thought alike. She would have kept everyone just as in the dark as I had.
“Fine,” she relented after several long moments of silence. “I guess I would have had a hard time trusting people, too.”
“So, will you let me check you?” I asked, still not looking away from her, wanting her to know that I was confident in all of my decisions. She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes at me, her arms still crossed across her chest.
“Fine,” she said again, though she did not look happy about it. Like at all.
“Alright, we should go to my office then,” I said, looking around the table. “There are too many people in here and moving Beaufort would be too much of a hassle. And too much of a risk, at this point, too.”
“Very well,” Semra said, rising and leading the way out the door, back through the tunnel, and across the room of binders’ desks toward my office. She didn’t speak at all the whole way and stayed a few steps ahead of me, so we weren’t walking together. Her straight blond hair sped out and up behind her, just as proper and rigid as she was.
She stopped in front of my office and crossed her arms again, waiting for me.
“I’m sorry about all this,” I grumbled as I opened the door with my key card. She merely arched an eyebrow at me in response.
I held the door open and gestured for her to take a seat in the cushioned chair in front of my desk. Elias’s desk was still pulled out of the closet from when Malthe and I had looked through it for the burner phone the day before. Instead of sitting down, Semra gazed at it.
“That’s Berg’s desk,” she said simply.
“Uh-huh,” I confirmed.
“What’s it still doing here?” she asked.
“We found a burner phone in it,” I said.
“You found a what?” she asked, furrowing her brows together in confusion.
“I’ll explain later,” I said. “After I check you.” I pulled my desk chair out from behind the desk itself and positioned it across from the cushioned chair. I motioned for her to sit down again, and reluctantly she did. I sat across from her and held out my hands for her to take. She just stared at them.
“Is this really necessary?” she asked, heaving a big sigh.
“You know it is,” I said softly, and she rolled her eyes, sighed again, and took my outstretched hands.
I looked right into her piercing blue eyes, looking deep into her soul. It took me longer than usual to catch hold of it. She had as many defenses up on the inside as she did on the outside, it turned out, but eventually, she let me in.
And to my surprise, there was more to her than she let on, though I supposed that was true about everyone to an extent. She really was loyal to TelCorp. She liked what we were doing here. It had been tough on her, pressing through the binding program as the only woman. And she’d been pissed as hell when she’d found out what was really going on with the foxgirl bindings, even more pissed than I had been somehow.
When I released her hands, she looked away and got up to leave almost immediately.
“Am I good then?” she asked, practically refusing to look at me.
“Yeah, you’re good,” I said softly, still not standing up. Then, looking down at the ground and not looking at her, either, “I’m sorry.” She merely huffed and stormed out the door.
I followed her back to the board room the same way I had to my office, trailing a couple of steps behind her. She was far shorter than me, but she had speed when she wanted it.
She got back to the board room before me and didn’t bother to hold the door open for me, so I had to scan in again. I could only imagine how much she hated having to be vulnerable to someone else like that. I’d seen as much in her spirit. So I scanned myself in without comment and sat back down. She had already taken her seat. Everyone stared at me, the obvious question in their eyes.
“She’s good,” I said, still avoiding looking at Semra.
“So is someone going to tell me what the fuck is going on?” she asked, throwing her arms up in the air in exasperation.
31
“Okay, so long story short,” I began, wanting to get it all out as quickly as possible to avoid wasting any more time. “We figured out that this secret organization Mr. Potato here worked for has been basically running the whole city from the abandoned underground tunnel system for years. Decades even.”
“Wait, the old train system?” Semra asked, genuinely surprised to the point that she momentarily dropped her tough girl act.
“Does everybody know about this shit except me?” Malthe asked, throwing his hands up in the air, too.
“Hey, we didn’t either,” Cindra said, gesturing between herself and the other foxgirls. “This sounds like a north side thing to me. They have schools.”
“Right,” I said, moving on quickly. “So basically, they hate tech and don’t use it, but have above ground operatives like Beaufort here to use it and interact with the city above, feed them intel, and basically control shit better. And Elias Berg was just another one of their pawns. So’s the conglomerate.”
“Wait, Berg worked for these people?” Semra asked, still looking a bit shell shocked by all this new information. I couldn’t really blame her.
“Well, worked for is a strong term,” I admitted. “They controlled him, pretty much. They didn’t pay him as far as we know. They just threatened him and got him to play along. They were behind killing my dad, too, it looks like. They got Elias to do it for him and made sure he was promoted to CEO when it was all said and done.”
“Wild,” Semra said, shaking her head.
“You could say that,” I agreed, laughing under my breath a bit. “So when we took over, they got really mad and started planning all this stuff to get rid of us. And they ended up calling all the Parliament members the other day to threaten them and make them go along with what the secret org wanted, right before we were about to change the laws for good. And, well, you can probably guess the rest.”
“What about this burner phone you were talking about?” she asked. “What’s that all about?”
“Oh right,” I said, remembering Elias’s desk back in my office. “So they hate tech, right, but they have to communicate with the above-ground world somehow, and in a way that’s completely untraceable using modern technology. So they started using these burner phones to communicate with people. Well, I shouldn’t say they. It’s really just this one main guy who’s making the calls.”
“How do you know that if it’s untraceable?” Semra asked.
“It’s not untraceable, just untraceable with current tech,” Malthe jumped in to explain. “So, I just used old tech once we worked out the theory.”
“Okay then…” Semra said, her voice trailing off as she mulled all this over. “Is there anything else? Or is that it?” She gave a sarcastic laugh because, well, that
was already quite a lot by anyone’s standards.
“Pretty much, I think,” I said. “Other than that, we have a general idea of where these guys are in the tunnels. Or where the main head guy is, anyway. They’re all spread out throughout the underground.”
“Yeah, we found that out the hard way,” Clem said, grunting in dismay and pointing at his black eye.
“Wait, you went down there?” Semra asked, leaning forward on her table, her curiosity getting the best of her.
“Oh yeah, that too,” I said. “Clem and I went down there last night. Or this morning. It’s all blurring together, really. It was either really late or really early, anyway, depending on your point of view.”
“Get on with it,” Semra said, making a rolling motion with her hand to indicate that the timing was not the point.
“Right, so basically we went down there and ran into all these goons,” I continued, “and they did a real number on us at the beginning. Just look at the state of Clem’s face. And then we blew ‘em up with our grenades, but the tunnel collapsed, so we can’t use that as an entrance anymore. Plus, they know we know about them now most likely, so they’ll be waiting for us at all the entrances, anyway.”
Semra whipped her head around to look at Beaufort, who was still just sitting there drooling, unable to process much of anything that was going on around him.
“He was down there,” she said. “They were keeping him in some room down there. We could try to get in that way.”
“My thoughts exactly,” I said, allowing a grin to spread across my face.
“Wait, you found him in the tunnels?” Cindra asked, flabbergasted. “How? When? What…?”
“So one of our grenades blew a giant hole in the ground,” I explained, “and revealed this asshole locked away in a tiny room down there. Way down there.” I jerked an almost dismissive thumb at Beaufort.
“You blew a hole that big?” Malthe asked, his eyes wide. “Cool.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said, shrugging. “Semra went down there and got him. Now maybe we can use that as a way to get in the tunnels without them noticing. But we need to act fast. Even though the conglomerate’s drones are down, it won’t be long before someone notices. They might’ve already for all we know.”