Active Memory

by Dan Wells

  “What do you think I mean?” Sahara snapped.

  “Where’s Memo?” asked the Braydon.

  “There were six of you before,” said Marisa, steeling her resolve and returning to her interrogation. “Plus who knows how many others. Why are there only four here now?”

  “She got them all,” the man mumbled, trying to shake himself awake. “That’s why we need to find Memo.”

  “Who got them?” Marisa demanded. The ghost of Zenaida loomed large and deadly in her thoughts. “Who are you talking about?”

  “She’s here,” the man said. He sounded more lucid now. “We thought we could get help from La Sesenta, because she’s after them, too, but I don’t see Memo. My tracker app tells me he’s here, so I assume this is a trap. Which means we’re all dead: my team and yours.”

  Marisa stepped toward him. “Who’s here? The other person moving around in the darkness—who is it!”

  The man glowed a nauseating green in the nightvision filter, and his voice shook with fear from inside the bag: “The witch.”

  “Chuy’s down!” shouted Sahara. “Camera nine! I can’t tell if he’s unconscious or dead—”

  Another Braydon moved, and Marisa screamed for Anja: “Anja! Get back in here now!”

  “It’s too late,” said the Braydon in the chair. “I had a gun in my waistband. Whoever you are: pick it up, and shoot the next thing that comes through that door.”

  “My friend’s still out there!” shouted Marisa.

  “Tā mā de!” said Sahara. She leaped to her feet, stumbling into the table and knocking it over. Weapons and Memo’s djinni scattered across the floor. Sahara looked wildly around the room, struggling to refocus on the real world, and then stumbled toward the door, slamming it closed with a reverberating clang.

  Marisa shouted at her: “Anja’s still out th—”

  “No she’s not,” said Sahara. “I just saw her go down.” Marisa was stunned into silence. Sahara fumbled for a lock, but there wasn’t even a knob. She backed away from the door, then turned and scrambled on the floor for the weapons Chuy had taken from the chop shop boys. She pulled up a thick black handgun—not accelerated like Chuy’s was, but with a wide barrel that hinted at a massive-caliber bullet—and pointed it at the closed steel door. “It’s her.”

  “I told you,” said the Braydon.

  Marisa pulled out her stun gun, increasingly terrified that it wouldn’t be any use at all. “Who?” She gulped. “Zenaida?”

  “Zenaida’s dead,” said Sahara. “This is the woman from Omar’s house—the hacker.”

  “The ha—”

  “At least I think so,” said Sahara. “She’s barefoot, and she has the same silhouette, but I . . . I saw her eyes this time.” She glanced at Marisa, but only for a second, and then she looked straight back at the door, the heavy pistol shaking in her hands. “She’s not human.”

  Marisa gripped her stun gun tighter, her jaw hanging down. “What is she?”

  “Hell if I know. Some gengineered banshee.”

  “She must be searching for Memo, too,” said Marisa. “Right? His djinni is a beacon to anyone looking for him.”

  “She might be after Memo,” said Sahara, jerking her head toward the Braydon. “Or us, even.”

  Marisa shook her head. “She’s looking for Zenaida. Just like everyone else.”

  “Who’s Zenaida?” asked the Braydon.

  “You cut off her hand,” said Marisa.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the Braydon.

  “Twice,” she snarled.

  “I’ve never cut off anyone’s—”

  Marisa heard a puff of air, and Sahara collapsed to the floor. The gun clattered away from her limp fingers, and Marisa barely had time to look up at the door before it burst open and a woman stepped in, a wraith in the green nightvision, her pistol raised in front of her. She fired, and Marisa twisted, and she felt the impact against her cybernetic arm with a soft, metallic clink. She looked down, seeing a tiny dart dangling from the fabric of her sleeve, and thought: a tranquilizer.

  She made her decision in a split second, hoping it was the right one, and sank to the floor behind the Braydon’s metal chair, draping her arm across her face and pretending she was unconscious. She tried to breathe as lightly and as evenly as possible.

  The woman looked at her for a moment, and Marisa looked back through the tiny crack between her eyelids and arm. The woman was dressed in black, with the hint of a shimmer that suggested it was some kind of stealth fabric—a chameleon suit, maybe, or a thermal dampener to hide from infrared. Her feet and hands were bare, which struck Marisa just as oddly tonight as it had the other day, and her skin, up close, was somehow odd, but in the nightvision green, she couldn’t tell exactly how so. The worst part, though, was just what Sahara had said it was: her eyes. Instead of a white and an iris and a pupil, each eye was a single iridescent mass, with a stripe across the middle and three vertical irises running in perpendicular lines. Marisa had seen plenty of cybernetic eyes—even Anja had one—but these were organic. The woman’s face was smooth and beautiful, and hauntingly familiar, but those eyes . . . They looked almost like compound eyes, like an insect’s eyes, and the contrast of those eyes in a human face nearly shook Marisa with a wave of revulsion. It took all of her self-control not to gasp out loud at the sheer alienness of it.

  Who was she?

  What was going on?

  The woman looked at Marisa for what seemed like an eternity before finally looking away. The Braydons against the wall were struggling, still blind and deaf but nearly awake, and she shot each with a tranq dart from her pistol. They collapsed, motionless, and she retrained her gun on the Braydon in the chair.

  “Where is he?” she hissed.

  Marisa knew that voice. This was the woman from the police station—Ramira Bennett. The ZooMorrow agent. What was she doing here? And why did she look so strange?

  Marisa suppressed a shiver. At least now she knew why Bennett usually covered her face with a holomask.

  “You’re looking for Memo, too?” asked the Braydon. “He’s a popular man.”

  “His djinni signal is here,” said Bennett, “but he’s not. I assume this is a trap?”

  “Meant to catch me,” said the Braydon. “They’re looking for someone named Zenaida.”

  Shut up! Marisa thought. Stop telling her everything!

  Bennett nodded. “Zenaida Padilla Lozano de Maldonado.”

  “Maybe?” said the Braydon. “I only heard a little before you took them out. But you don’t have beef with me, and I don’t have beef with you, so let’s just walk away, okay?”

  “I wasn’t asking, I was telling,” said Bennett. She looked away from him for a second, taking in the rest of the room, and Marisa used the moment to blink, turning off her nightvision app. It was much darker without it, but there was still enough moonlight to see. Marisa nearly gasped again at the sudden change—or rather, at the part that didn’t change. The tinted glow of the nightvision was gone, but the woman’s skin didn’t change.

  She had green skin.

  Bennett’s insectile eyes found something against the back wall, and Marisa did everything she could to stay motionless while the woman walked forward and stepped over her. As soon as Bennett was behind her, she risked a tiny glance around the room, and saw that one of Braydon’s combat knives was barely inches from her hand. She could grab it, but what could she do with it? Farther away, but still in arm’s reach, was the handgun Sahara had picked up. She could do some damage with that. Though as fast as this woman moved, she might not even get a shot off.

  “You’re going to let me go, right?” asked the Braydon again. “Now that you know Memo’s not here, you can just—”

  “This is his djinni,” said Bennett, walking back across the room. Marisa had just a few seconds before Bennett could see her face again—if she wanted to do something with her djinni, she had to do it now. A message to Fang or Jaya? But wha
t could they do? Maybe the police? Maybe Omar? But she needed someone here—someone who was close enough to help now. Could she control one of the taser drones? Not with a single blink, and that’s all she had time for. She had one chance left: Had the woman already taken out Bao, or was he simply hiding, like Marisa had guessed? She gambled everything on a single message, and sent it: Make her turn around.

  Bennett stood in front of Braydon again, and held up the bloody djinni. “This is how they baited us here—you and me both, though I don’t think they were expecting me. They turned on Memo’s djinni, and waited for you to track the signal.”

  “Yes, yes, okay,” said Braydon. He spoke like he didn’t know why he was still alive, and was trying to be as agreeable and helpful as possible before she changed her mind and shot him. “We can usually tell if it’s a spoofed ID tag, but this looked legit. I guess it was.”

  “Do you know who they are?” asked Bennett.

  “Girls,” said Braydon eagerly. “They look familiar, though—”

  “Girls,” said Bennett, examining the djinni curiously. “They didn’t steal this against Memo’s will, and the man outside has La Sesenta tattoos, which means that whoever these girls are, they know where Memo’s hiding. My toxin wears off in about half an hour, so: you have thirty minutes before they wake up to tell me what I need to know. After that, I won’t need you anymore.”

  “But—you’re not going to kill me, right?” asked the Braydon.

  “You work for a chop shop,” said the woman. “Give me a reason to leave you alive.”

  “But—” said the man, though before he could finish he was interrupted by a loud clang from the doorway, and a sudden shout:

  “Hey, guys, whatcha doin’?”

  The woman spun toward the doorway, firing tranq darts from her pistol, and in that instant Marisa lunged for the gun on the floor. Bennett saw her, and started to swing her pistol back, but a drone flew in from the doorway, distracting her again—it wasn’t flying straight, just spinning end over end, like it had been thrown. Bennett hesitated, and Marisa brought up the gun, clicked off the safety, and fired. The boom was deafening in the concrete room, and Marisa screamed at the shock of it, and the barefoot killer with the alien eyes clutched Memo’s djinni tight in her hand and ran out the door. Marisa staggered to her feet and ran after her, blinking to call back her nightvision, but when she came out of the room all she saw was Bao, waving his arms and shouting silently.

  Silently? She wondered for half a second, but of course she couldn’t hear him—the gunshot had been literally deafening, at least temporarily. She sent him a message:

  I can’t hear anything. Where is she?

  Bao frowned but looked at his phone, and then ran around the corner to the far side of the concrete room. Marisa followed him, but he pulled her back sharply; she looked down and saw the deep black pit of the elevator shaft yawning barely an inch in front her.

  And down inside of it, two floors away and scuttling on the wall like a spider, was Ramira Bennett—a green-skinned monster with inhuman eyes. She clung to the brick walls with her fingers and toes, and as she looked back up at Marisa her eyes flashed, reflecting some shaft of ambient light. Marisa was too unnerved to fire again, and the woman scuttled away, straight down the wall into the darkness below.

  TWELVE

  Bao’s message popped up in Marisa’s vision: What the hell was that?

  She’s a ZooMorrow agent.

  Are they hiring nightmares now? Bao sent back.

  Find Chuy, sent Marisa. The heavy silence in her damaged ears was slowly turning into a high-pitched ringing. She ran to Anja, lying slumped on the floor about ten yards away, and checked her pulse; she was alive. Whatever tranquilizer Bennett had used on Sahara and the Braydons, she’d apparently used the same thing on Anja. Had she tranqed Chuy as well, or was he dead? She didn’t wait for Bao to come back; she jumped up and ran through the empty concrete room toward where he was struggling with Chuy’s body. Bao looked up, let go of Chuy’s arm, and gave a thumbs-up: he was alive too. She nodded, and helped him drag her older brother back toward the others. Soon Jin and Jun joined them, and together they got both Chuy and Anja toward the service room.

  “She said it wears off in thirty minutes,” said Bao. Marisa’s hearing was almost back to normal. “They’ll wake up, and we can get out of here.”

  “She could have killed us,” said Marisa.

  “She didn’t,” said Bao.

  “She’ll come back,” said Marisa. “She wants Memo, and she knows we know where he is. We caught her by surprise, but she’ll come back.”

  “Maybe not,” said Bao. “She took Memo’s djinni, and there’s probably enough data in there to lead her straight to him. She doesn’t need us anymore.”

  “Great,” said Marisa. “Then La Sesenta’s going to kill us instead of ZooMorrow. I don’t know how much better off we are.”

  Back in the service room, the Braydon in the chair had knocked himself over, and was awkwardly crawling across the floor, chair and all, trying to reach the fallen weapons. Marisa shouted, “Stop moving, and tell me everything you know.”

  He froze, still lying on his side. “I don’t know anything!”

  Anja coughed, and Marisa knelt by her side and helped her sit up. “Hey, babe, are you awake?”

  “Awake or dead,” mumbled Anja. “Is this hell? Which religion was right?”

  “You’re alive,” said Marisa. “You got tranqed by that ZooMorrow agent we saw at the police station.”

  “She’s here?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Good,” said Anja. “I need to lie down again. My head feels like someone beat it with a hammer.” She lowered herself back to the cold cement floor. “Wake me up if I die.”

  “Okay, wow,” said the Braydon in the chair. He was still on his side. “Did you just say that woman works for ZooMorrow?”

  “We need to stop saying things in front of you,” said Marisa.

  “You need to stop saying everything,” said Chuy. He was sitting up, rubbing his head with his hands. “This entire thing se fue a la mierda.”

  “Technically we’re supposed to be interrogating you,” said Bao, looking at the Braydon pointedly. “You’re supposed to tell us . . . crap, what was he supposed to tell us?”

  “A bioprinter,” said Marisa, her ears still ringing. “A black-market bioprinter who sold organs made from illicit DNA. I need his name.”

  “Look, I know a lot of bioprinters,” said the Braydon. “They can be handy for cheap merchandise in a pinch, or . . . they can be bad for business.” He seemed as eager to help her as he’d been to help the ZooMorrow agent. “Narrow it down for me.”

  Marisa shrugged, helpless. “He . . . had a woman’s left hand?”

  “Ugh” said the Braydon, wrinkling his nose. “That guy? Really?”

  “You know him?” asked Chuy. He pulled himself to his feet, bracing his hand against the wall as the world spun around him. Marisa stood as well, and tucked herself under his arm to support him. “Who is he?”

  “His name’s Song,” said the Braydon. “Andy Song. I can even give you his address.”

  “If you know where he lives,” asked Marisa, “why is he still alive?”

  “Haven’t you been listening?” asked the Braydon. “That bug-eyed monster person has been trying to kill us. When are we going to have time to take out a bioprinter?”

  “Give us the address,” Chuy repeated.

  The Braydon blinked, tagging Marisa’s ID and sending a message. “Done. Now let me go.”

  “Sure thing,” said Chuy, and grabbed the back of the man’s metal chair, standing him up and dragging him out of the room.

  “Whoa,” said the Braydon. “Please don’t tell me you’re going to chuck me down the stairs.”

  “Close,” said Chuy, and shoved the chair over the ledge of the elevator shaft. Marisa shouted, but it was too late. The man screamed and tumbled out of sight. Three agonizing seco
nds later, the screams stopped abruptly.

  “What are you doing?” Marisa smacked Chuy in the arm, and when he turned to face her she punched him harder. “Are you crazy? Are you insane?”

  Chuy frowned. “What did you think was going to happen?”

  “He helped us!”

  “He’s a kidnapper and butcher,” said Chuy calmly. “You knew we were going to kill whoever we caught here tonight.”

  “I’m not a killer!” shouted Marisa.

  “I am,” said Chuy.

  “What’s going on?” asked Sahara. She was leaning on Anja’s arm, staggering out of the service room, still groggy from the tranq.

  Marisa shook her head, still furious. “This chundo just murdered one of the Braydons!”

  “Too bad,” mumbled Sahara. “Can’t have a self-respecting boy band with just three of them.”

  “This isn’t a joke,” snarled Marisa.

  “No it’s not,” said Chuy. “And it’s not a video game, either. We’re not fighting them because they got matched against us in a tournament bracket—we’re fighting them because they are human predators, who kidnap and kill and maim people in our neighborhood. How did you think this was going to end? You wanted to capture a bunch of murderers, get the name you needed, and then what? Just put them back out on the street?”

  Marisa had never wanted anyone to get hurt, on any side, but she’d also known . . . well, she’d known that people would. She just hadn’t let herself think about it. Until it was too late not to.

  “The police,” she said softly. “Detective Hendel. We could have left them tied up here and then called her to come and get them. An anonymous tip.”

  “They’d be back on the street in a year,” said Chuy. “Assuming she had enough evidence to get them convicted in the first place.”

  “Then I guess we’ll see,” said Marisa, folding her arms. “Because that’s exactly what I’m going to do with those other three.”

  “Not a chance,” said Chuy. “You lost Memo’s djinni, and the person who has it is going to find him and kill him. Those three chop shop thugs are the peace offering that’s going to keep you alive when he finds out how badly you messed this up.”