Firebreak

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  It’s talking, and I almost drop my taser and my backpack when I hear it.

  “Hold tight, we’re gonna get you out of there,” it says, and even with the speaker out of sight I know that voice, I’ve known it for years, game update by game update to keep it sounding as old as it should.

  It’s 06.

  She glides into the alley, all in black, weapons in her belt. She stands with easy confidence, the kind of predatory grace I can’t even compare to anything else except the in-game versions of the operatives, or maybe a tiger or something, if those extinct-wildlife minidocumentaries are true.

  Jessa isn’t going to believe it. I barely believe it. I check to make sure I’m still recording.

  “Stellaxis StelTech SecOps operative 06 reporting,” 06 says. “Who’s in charge here?”

  The woman with the gun steps forward amid a general background wash of exactly the kind of chatter you’d expect from several dozen people being paid a personal visit by a real-life SecOps operative, specifically the one who’s pretty much universally lauded as a real-life fucking folk hero, fucked circumstances or no. Of course, they only show up when the circumstances are fucked. They’re held in reserve for precisely that. The problems nobody else can or wants to fix. They’re the shitshow brigade.

  “Nobody really,” the woman says. “I was leading them for a while because I knew the way to the hospital, but then…” She trails off, gesturing at her face. “We tried putting water on it.”

  06’s brow furrows. She takes the woman’s face in one gloved hand and tilts it into the light. She’s obviously trying to be gentle, but the woman’s expression makes it very clear this is not 06’s strong suit. “Can you see?”

  The woman shrugs, a little twitchily. She’s got fifty-plus sort-of witnesses of 06 physically touching her. That’s a story she’s going to be telling for a while. “The water helped some. I’m at, I want to say, maybe sixty percent.”

  “I don’t think this is one of ours,” 06 says. “If I treat it wrong, it could just make it worse.”

  “We don’t know what it was,” one of the men says. “Some kind of blue mist. Kind of… sticky, almost? We were hiding under an overpass. I don’t think it was meant for us. It just kinda slid the whole way up the street like fog.”

  “No,” 06 says, her face clouding over. “I don’t think it was meant for you.” She sighs and lets go of the woman’s face. “Well, I’m seeing plenty of busted legs and things. That at least we can do something about.”

  We?

  Then I realize who’s standing behind 06, facing out into the street, watching for trouble.

  No, I think. No fucking way.

  Though I’ve seen enough newsfeeds, read enough articles, to know the likelihood is high—they’re partnered, they work together, 06 is known to help civilians more than the rest of them combined, and where she goes he goes, intellectually I know this—it still hits me like a slap.

  As if he can feel the force of my stare on the back of his head, 22 breaks focus just enough to glance over a shoulder. His gaze slides off mine like rain down a window. He goes back to watching the street.

  All my plans of bus-finding and home-going vaporize.

  06, meanwhile, has taken some kind of little black device out of a pocket. She checks something on it while gesturing one-handed at the crowd. “Whose vision is the least compromised right now?”

  I freeze.

  The woman hooks a thumb over a shoulder toward me. “Hers.”

  Before I can so much as throw my hands up in protest—I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m nobody useful, wrong place wrong time, I don’t even know where I am, et cetera—06’s gesture turns into a two-fingered beckon. “I need to borrow you a sec.”

  I don’t feel myself move forward. I’m not aware of so much as peeling myself off the wall before I’m standing in front of her. I resist the urge to do something unfathomably pathetic, like copy the SecOps salute they’re constantly doing in-game when you recruit them or fulfill a mission with them or just do something they’re programmed to respect.

  “Sure,” I croak. “Happy to help.” At least that’s what I mean to say. Let the footage be the judge of whether any voice comes out.

  “Want to bring me some injured people?” 06 asks. “The worse off the better.”

  I nod and scurry off, feeling somehow both uplifted and diminished by 06’s presence. The way she moves, the way she carries herself, she’s like an alien trying to pass as human by crushing herself down in our miserable mold.

  I bring 06 a woman with a splinted leg, another woman with a dislocated shoulder, a teenage boy with a horrifically busted kneecap, a man with his hand wrapped in a huge mitt of bloody gauze. That’s just the first batch. Lots more where they came from.

  I gather them and lead them back to 06, each holding on to the other.

  “Perfect,” 06 says. She kneels down, resting on her bootheels in the middle of this filthy alley, and gestures at the empty space in front of her. I lead the splint-leg woman forward first and drag over a crate for her to sit on. She sucks in air through her teeth as 06 and I work together to get her leg unwrapped.

  It takes some doing because the splint isn’t any kind of proper medical equipment, just a piece of a plastic toy running down the inside of her leg and what looks like most of a hoverbike bumper running down the outside. The whole thing is strapped together with the better part of a roll of duct tape.

  06 pulls out some kind of fancy utility knife and makes a long careful cut the whole way down, then tugs the duct tape cast away and opens up the jeans leg to get at the injury.

  Underneath, the woman’s ankle is swollen, puffy, and green, practically double the size of the other.

  “Hang on,” 06 says, and the gentle medbot tone coming out of her is like hearing a lullaby from a shark. “You’re doing great. That’s the awkward part done.”

  She takes the little black device and presses the pad of her thumb to one side. It lights up with a little trill as it powers on. Whatever this thing is, I’ve never seen it before. They haven’t even added it into the game. I don’t know if that’s because it’s too new or too classified, but I realize I’m staring at it in open fascination.

  The injured woman, about to have rather a more intimate relationship with whatever this thing turns out to be, is squinting toward it doubtfully. “What is that? Is it going to hurt?”

  “Less than walking on that mess,” 06 says. “I promise. Try to stay still.”

  She presses the other side of the device to the most trashed-looking part of the joint. It chirps twice and starts humming, a sound like the way a robotic cat would purr. The woman winces, bites her lip, and visibly rides out a wave of pain, then another.

  It’s maybe twenty seconds of this before 06 lifts the device away, and the woman rotates her foot experimentally. “It feels different.”

  06 is grinning like she invented the thing. “That’s the idea.”

  I help the woman get up and the next person—bloody-hand guy—gets into position. I try not to sneak too many glances at 22, though it’s hard, it’s very hard, and Jessa will cackle herself stupid when she sees this footage later. He just stands there, so still I’m not entirely sure he’s breathing. He might as well be a statue. Except that even from here you can feel the coiled tension radiating off him. He’s not standing still because he’s bored or powered down or whatever. He’s standing still because he’s on high alert. He’s three hundred percent business. He’s like a bomb that hasn’t yet been set off, waiting for a reason.

  Then I realize how he’s positioned himself to keep watch. He’s occupying the exact slot of space that specifically covers 06’s back most precisely. Not the civilians. Not even the babies and little kids. 06.

  I wonder if he knows there’s an echo of him wandering around somewhere in a game right now. Being made to follow dipshit players around like a heavily armed dog on an invisible leash. I almost want to tell him, to have the excuse of ru
nning my idiot mouth at him, maybe to prove to myself that he’s real. You came down on a suborbital drop right onto 08’s head, I could tell him. Took out three hundred people. Just a few days ago you stabbed me in the throat, and now here we both are. What are the odds, huh?

  I want to talk to him. I don’t care what about. I want to stand there in companionable silence and help him watch the street. I want to drag him out of here and get him drunk and make him tell me stories.

  I get it. It’s weird to want to be best friends with a piece of biotech, a robot or clone or monster or whatever it is he’s supposed to be. Now ask me how many fucks I give about that.

  Bloody-hand guy gets fixed, and I bring over busted-kneecap kid. That one takes a little longer because 06 has to pop the kneecap back into place in two pieces before she closes the wound with her piece of classified hardware or “it’ll go all weird,” quote. Looking at it makes me feel like I’m going to hork up my protein drink and granola bar all over 06, and if that happens, I’m heading right out there to feed myself to a mech because it’s either that or die slowly of shame.

  The kid submits to the hydraulic strength and unearthly delicacy of 06’s gloved fingers with, to his credit, just one scream. He passes out at the end of it, but still.

  While the device hums, 06 appraises me. Looking down the barrel of that gaze is like nothing I’ve ever had to do. It’s like she’s running calculations on me, hundreds of calculations all at once, based on data I can’t see.

  Machine consciousness, I think. But there’s something undeniably human about her. Like human dialed up to eleven. I try to weigh that against my other impressions of her and get nowhere. Maybe she’s not human at all, and the uncanny valley is messing with my head.

  I mean, they do say the operatives are essentially superheroes, just not the fake kind from movies who can turn invisible and shoot lasers out of their eyes and move things with their brains. You’d expect a superhero to act, well, superhuman. Regardless, standing in front of one, it’s a lot to take in.

  “You’re not from this group,” 06 says.

  My attention startles back to her. “I joined up with them a little while back. They were taking cover by some kind of museum or something when the citykiller mech started chucking helicopters around.”

  06 looks amused, but not at-my-expense amused, and I begin to see why she, personally, has a fanbase of several million who would happily follow her through hell. “The what?”

  “Citykiller mech? Giant robot suit the size of a building with a person in it?”

  “Oh,” 06 says. “The Greenleaf TacSystems X10.”

  I’m about ready for the street to open up and swallow me. Citykiller is the in-game name for it. I guess it was too confusing or boring to have everything called Stellaxis this and Greenleaf that, so the game devs got creative. I know it’s a goddamn X10. The things show up in the newsfeeds often enough that a toddler would know what they’re called. This all—the day, the mechs, 06, 22—has got me dangerously flustered.

  “Not from around here,” 06 observes.

  “Old town,” I admit. “You guys, um. You don’t come out there much. Well. Ever, really. It’s, uh, that way.” At least with my lenses in I can point accurately. Then, because I am a catastrophe of a person who should be put out of the misery of everyone within a mile radius, I paste on a smile that probably looks more like I’m about to be sick. “You guys should come by sometime. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  I expect 06 to laugh. Roll her eyes. Stab me in the throat. I don’t know. Instead she just looks sad. Sad, but, like, with this weird backlighting of something else. I can’t explain it. Like she sees something in the distance that she knows she’ll never reach. Probably the face I make when I think about 22.

  “I ever get out of here,” she says softly, “I might just take you up on that.”

  I blink. I want to say something witty, something charming, something that keeps her talking, helps me make sense of what she just said.

  I come up empty-handed, and we all—06, the broken-knee kid, the two men, and the woman—all watch as the wound on the kid’s leg finally begins to seal shut.

  The man I talked with earlier edges into the conversation, recycling the same story he told me. “One of those goddamn things took out our complex,” he tells 06. I don’t know if he’s trying to rescue me from myself or he just wants 06’s attention, and right now I don’t care. I shut up gratefully and usher over a new batch of wounded. I tell the rest to get in line so I can get them to 06 more efficiently, and they do their best to cooperate.

  When I come back, the man’s gesturing toward the crowd. “We’re what’s left.”

  06 gives the crowd a once-over. “Sixty?”

  “Sixty-two,” says the woman, joining in. “Eighty to start. It’s been a rough few days.”

  06 makes a face and opens her mouth to say something, and the device in her hand gives three little dead-battery beeps and powers down. “Oh what in the shitting hell now,” she mutters at it, and reaches upward without looking to pluck from the air an identical device tossed to her by 22.

  I swear I didn’t even see him move.

  “If you can walk, get out of line and bring me somebody who can’t,” 06 calls back into the alley. “Fast. Then get ready to get the hell out of here.”

  The medbot-like bedside manner and the neighborly friendliness are both vanished from her voice. Unsheathed is the word that comes to mind. She’s unsheathed her true self from the self she put on to keep us from devolving into panic.

  But why would we? It’s been calm here. The fighting’s moved off, like a storm, leaving us behind.

  Although if I strain my ears, I can just start to make out the beginnings of a new sound developing out there, somewhere in the unseen maze of streets. There’s a string of explosions like immense firecrackers, a slurry of gunfire, and shouting. Then something else that can only be the weighty, monstrous, elegant stride of the citykiller mech—the Greenleaf TacSystems X10—patrolling.

  Except now—and I can only hope it’s just a trick of the distance—it sounds like there’s more than one.

  No sign of surprise from either 06 or 22.

  If the stories are true, they’ve been listening to it this entire time, keeping tabs on it as it shifted in intensity and tone, not mentioning it because why worry the puny humans with danger they can’t even hear?

  06 drops her voice. Her quiet intensity is more commanding than a shout.

  “You’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, and things are about to get pretty hot where you’re sitting, believe me,” she says. “And you need medical attention.” The two men and woman all nod. “More than we can give,” 06 admits. “But we can clear a path. Hospital’s still standing, last I knew.”

  Something complicated and silent now occurs between 06 and 22, something conveyed entirely in over-the-shoulder looks. Eventually 22 nods. It looks like he’s lost an argument, but they didn’t say anything. Fleetingly, stupidly, knowing full well they have implants like everybody else, I wonder if one of their superpowers is reading minds. If so, 22 is probably wondering which one of these sixty-two-plus-me people is broadcasting such a tangle of thoughts at such high volume in his direction.

  “Food and blankets,” 06 continues, pulling that false good cheer back around her like a cloak. “Worst soup you ever ate, but plenty of it.”

  The two men and one woman all exchange a glance, inasmuch as this is possible. This one I can read. It’s we thought the hospital was full and but she might not know that and if we tell her, she might not try to take us there and if we show up with a SecOps escort, they’ll have to let us in.

  The woman opens her mouth to speak and is drowned out. The sound outside has changed. It’s closer.

  It’s a lot closer.

  22 draws his sword. “You just ran out of time.”

  06 pockets the device and stands, brushing off her legs. “How many?”

  “Enough.”

&
nbsp; The crowd starts agitating. Guns drawn, kids and people with babies guided to the back. I want to help them, I do—they can’t see, someone’s gonna get trampled—but this is a tiny thought that reaches me from the back of my mind, because ninety-nine percent of me is straight-up blaring danger.

  I could leave now. I could head out, on foot, in the opposite direction from the approaching mechs. 06 and 22 are here, these people are in no danger now, there’s no need in the world for me to be here, no help in the world I can provide that they can’t.

  But—apart from all the obvious stuff about how I’m safer here with them than I am out there on my own, and how the concept of me deciding to leave 22’s presence is laughable—06 asked for my help. And when someone like 06 asks for your help—someone who puts her neck out for strangers like these ones every goddamn day she sets foot on the unworthy earth—you put your shit aside and do the thing.

  I’m not going anywhere.

  06 stations herself between the crowd and the street. 22 is already out there somewhere. 06 stands with her hand on her hilt, warning us with her eyes. “Heads down,” she says. “No heroes. I mean it.”

  She turns to leave, and one of the men calls after her. “Thank god they sent you in for us,” he says. “We never hoped—”

  06 shoots him a look like she just bit into something foul. “They didn’t,” she says, and is gone.

  “Stay put,” I tell everyone, because a few of them are starting to look like they might just make a break for it instead. “They’ll come back.”

  “They’re fighting?” someone asks.

  “I’ll check.” As if I need an excuse.

  I plaster myself to the alley opening and peer out up the street to the left. 06 and 22 are standing there facing down not one but three citykiller mechs, barreling down the street in our direction in V formation, their gun-arms lit with blue fire.

  Facing them down—with swords.

  “Yes,” I say weakly. “They’re about to be.”

  “Tell us what you see,” someone else shouts.

  What I see. Of course.

  “They’re—”