“I think he knew I was recording,” I say slowly.
“He what—”
“I needed him to trust me.” I pause, remembering. The words come to me slowly, one by one, feeling my way through a maze in the dark. “I needed him to know that whatever he said, it was safe with me. That I wouldn’t go rat him out to the company.” The Director, I think. I have no idea who that is. Bad news, I imagine, anycase. I find I’m picturing her like something far worse than, but not unlike, a mean teacher. 06 and 22 passing notes under the desks. Until one of them found its way to this hopeless dumbass right here.
“Rat him out to the company? Mal, he is the company.”
“I know,” I say. “But I don’t think he wants to be.”
“Tell them to come live with us,” Jessa says, like this hasn’t occurred to me, like it hasn’t been occurring to me at full blast for seven solid hours at this point. “We’d make room.”
“Make room,” I say. “Where? Under the bottom bunks?” Monsters under the bed skims across the surface of my thoughts, but here’s what’s really got me. Here in old town, we’re free. A whole lot more free than 22 and 06 and 08 and all the SecOps dead back at company HQ. As long as you don’t look too closely at the part where Stellaxis owns our water. Our power. Our privacy. Even if we could somehow rescue them, fuckwit fangirl daydream though it is, what do we have to offer them?
What, for that matter, do we have to offer ourselves?
Jessa gives up on getting any further response out of me and goes back to staring at the screen. “22. Shit. The real one. 06 also, because of course you’d run into both of them when I’m not there. I’ll have you know I am insanely jealous right now.” She shakes her head, holds the screen up to scrutinize 22 at eye level. “He looks like he’s about to kill you.”
“I think that was a reflex. He had no idea what I was doing.”
Jessa side-eyes me. “Did you?”
It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for hours.
When we got out of the elevator, 22 brought me back to the front desk, where the security guard eyed me suspiciously and caused a sleek black car to materialize out front of the building, leaving me to wonder all over again what I was doing eating dinner in the cafeteria if summoning company cars had been an option all along.
22 walked me out through the grassy-smelling night to the car, opened the door for me, and said absolutely nothing. I’m going to try to help you, I wanted to say, but the car was probably listening, and I had no concrete plan to back it up anyway. So I just gave him a little nod and tried to project my intentions with my eyes and said, “See you,” like an idiot, and he watched me for a second, not visibly disappointed but not visibly not-disappointed, either, and then turned on his heel and stalked away.
The car was about a million times nicer than the one we’d taken to the coffee shop. It slid out of company grounds and into the city, slicing silently through the dark while I sat staring out the window at nothing, my thoughts a tangle of razor wire.
After a while I put my lenses back in. Jessa’s messages were still there sitting in the corner. No new ones for hours. Not surprising. Power curfew would have been in effect since early evening, taking her internet access with it, and it was going on ten p.m. Apparently, along with water accounts, they don’t have power curfew on Stellaxis property either. Fantastic.
I skimmed the messages but saw nothing I didn’t expect to see. Worry and anger and more worry taking turns in the driver’s seat.
The last few were a little different.
dude. where the exact fuck are you? they’re saying on the news that zone 15 is total chaos, there’s some greenleaf mech shooting the news drones out of the air, nobody knows what’s going on
desperately sorry to keep pestering you in the middle of WHATEVER THE ACTUAL SHIT YOU’RE DOING but we have no idea what’s going on, all the footage coming out is garbage and we’re all super worried about you
At one point she attached a grainy image from a newsfeed. From the angle, it must’ve been taken by a drone, hovering at a high diagonal beyond the reach or notice of the mech. It showed the same trashed street we all had fled down initially. I could make out the wreckage of the thrown helicopter, the pillars of the ugly building all those people had tried to take cover behind. In the background was the mech, its glossy finish streaked by the long chemical burns of the drone swarm’s fléchettes. Memory slammed me with the smell of that street. Blood and burning. I swallowed.
please tell me you’re in a different part of the city and it’s at least 200% safer than this
Then another image: 06 and 22 battling the three mechs. This one looked like someone might have taken it with their lenses from a window a block or so away.
you will not believe this, 06 and 22 are out there protecting a ton of wounded civilians from THREE greenleaf mechs and it’s the most on-brand 06 thing i’ve literally ever seen, someone posted this shot earlier and people are losing their absolute minds
In hindsight I don’t really know why I did what I did next. Maybe some useless part of my brain thought it was still in the game and there were no real stakes involved in sticking my neck out. Maybe I was still pissed about what I had seen earlier at the checkpoint, about Comforts of Home where B’s sister’s coffee shop should have been, about all that green grass and those ponds and fountains at Stellaxis HQ. About 22’s hands and B’s photo and the dents in that table and how the man in the alley said Thank god they sent you in for us and 06 said They didn’t, in this tone like they were more likely to be rescued by the tooth fairy than by the company. About the note in both their voices when they talked about the Director or Stellaxis. What was it 06 said? I ever get out of here, I might just take you up on that. About 22 and 06 covering for me when I was recording, and how I was too stunned or too stupid to figure out why. About 22 looking the closest to scared I’d ever seen him when he dropped eye contact and said Forty-eight. There were forty-eight.
Or maybe it’s just that my footage sucks a whole lot less than this one blurry photo, and if 06 and 22 are out there putting their asses on the line to help a bunch of civilian casualties, then people should know the truth.
Right there in the car, I pulled up my recording. My connection was still solid, but by now the car had taken me out of the city limits—I’d passed the trash-fire constellation of the mall camps a minute ago—so I had to be fast. And I had to decide what I did next alone. I had no way to confer with Jessa, who’d be under power curfew until morning, just like I would be as soon as the car dropped me off. Whatever happened would be on me.
I saved my footage as two separate files: one for everything before we left the alley for the hospital, one for everything after. Not perfect, but the easiest way I could figure out how to divide the footage, keeping aside anything that seemed likely to get 06 and 22 in trouble.
I swiped the second file over to the drive in Jessa’s pocket screen, along with the in-game footage of 08. I logged in to our streaming account and posted the first file online. Then, as an afterthought, I backed up that one too. Whatever happened next, there was a lot that had happened already. I wanted all this evidence somewhere I could keep it.
Now, back at home, Jessa hits the replay button on the second file. I’ve already told her almost everything. I left out the part with B’s sister’s coffee shop for right now because she’s already so keyed up with worry she’s practically vibrating. She hasn’t even asked about my meeting with B, so I guess I’ll leave that for the morning, or when she brings it up, whichever comes first. I told her the rest, though, from the first appearance of the mech on down, but she keeps poking and swiping the screen to skip around, seemingly at random. Shaking her head in disbelief pretty much everywhere she lands. She’s been doing this for the past fifteen minutes or so, just jumping back and forth between both files, eating through all the remaining battery on the screen. Before that she watched them in their entirety. It’s past four in the morning, and we’re t
ucked up together on my bunk, whispering. It was way too cold in the garden, and the hallways are full.
When she gets to the last few minutes of the second file, she lets it play through. I watch it with her. It feels like it happened a million years ago. It feels like it’s still happening now. I rub one hand across my throat. He could have killed me. I could be a corpse abandoned in an elevator right now. I might have never come home.
Instead of… I’m not entirely sure. I’m alive, anyway. Alive and confused. My whole body aches. My eyeballs feel like they’ve been exfoliated. I’m too tired to sleep.
Onscreen 22 opens his mouth to say You wanted to get home, yes? and the battery finally dies. We both stare at the blank screen some seconds longer.
“Okay, but,” Jessa says. “What happened after the elevator?”
I force a shrug. My mind feels like a buzzsaw. Do I give the impression, 22 whispers in my head, that I am in need of your help. “They sent me home in a company car.”
“And I’m supposed to believe you really think that’s what I mean?”
“I posted the footage.”
“You know what I’m talking about. You had a real-life operative about to real-life mess you up and you talked him down. In what reality is that actually a thing you can do.”
“I—” My voice catches. To my horror, the backs of my eyes start prickling.
It’s the stress of the day catching up with me, that’s all. Nervous energy releasing. I walked through an active war zone all afternoon. No fucking way am I about to do something as ridiculous as start fucking crying because I’m pretty sure I failed whatever test 06 and 22 were trying to administer.
Beside me, Jessa pretends not to notice, badly. For one awful second I’m convinced she’s going to try to hug me. But she busies herself dusting the panel screen with her sleeve.
I know she just wants answers, and she deserves them. The account I posted the footage on is half hers, after all. We’ve been a team for years. I don’t know why it’s so hard to tell her. I mean, for whatever incomprehensible 22 reason, he entrusted me with a secret. A dangerous secret. What if whatever happened to B happens to Jessa? It’s one thing to put myself at risk. I’ve done that already. It’s bad enough I had to use our shared account to post the footage. But I was careful not to post the stuff that could get anyone in trouble. Wasn’t I?
Jessa, paragon of mercy, rescues me again. “Let’s talk about it in the morning,” she says in an elaborately sleepy voice she didn’t have a minute ago. “You work tomorrow?”
“Day after.”
“I do but not until afternoon. Breakfast? My turn for it.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“You care if I stay here? I’ll wake everybody climbing over to mine.”
We’re packed in here tight enough she can probably feel my shrug in the dark. She rolls over and is out almost immediately.
I wish I could fall asleep that easily. Instead I stare at the ceiling, reviewing.
I wonder what happened to B and her family. I hope she sensed trouble and got the fuck out before they came for her.
Which leads me to: if it’s actually true that Stellaxis is faking the deaths of children in order to steal and torture them, and then claiming them as intellectual property and making them fight in their corporate war, they nabbed those kids over a decade ago. Someone else must have figured it out by now. B can’t have been the first.
Which leads me to: What happened to those people? Did they get disappeared? Did they have businesses to straight-up erase and replace as well? It makes you think about the eighty zillion company stores you see every day in a slightly more ominous light.
Forty-eight. There were forty-eight.
But we only ever knew about twelve. 02, 05, 06, 08, 11, 17, 21, 22, 28, 33, 38, 42. They’re the ones who got sent on missions, were reported in the news, made into NPCs in-game. The ones who got turned into celebrities, dead or alive.
Unless I’ve monstrously misinterpreted what 22 said in the elevator, there are three dozen others nobody’s making action figures out of, because they died before they got that far. Four dozen little kids in total, vanished off the face of the earth, returning—some of them—unrecognizable. Especially if nobody knows where to look for them. Or that they’re anywhere to be found.
Why not consecutive numbers? Doesn’t that get confusing?
Which leads me to: I am a goddamn idiot.
What should I have said? What could I have done smarter? Was there some kind of clever one-liner I could have dropped that would have translated into some kind of much more chill version of you have to trust me, I will do literally anything within my power to help you, I am loyal as fuck to the few things I genuinely care about and for some reason one of those things is you?
I don’t know. I mean, it’s unlikely. But that doesn’t keep me from sinking into the quicksand of that thought and staying there until the sun is peeking through the curtains.
I must fall asleep sometime after that because when I wake up, it’s not Jessa beside me, it’s 22, and he’s here because I rescued him, and we get up and drink coffee and make breakfast, and I take him down to the company store and we start to get him outfitted with the shit he’ll need for his new life in the hotel, the reusable bottle and headlamp and peanut butter and batteries, but then I start taking all that stuff back out of our shopping basket and put it back on the shelves, and I take 22 outside the company store, outside the hotel, out into the abandoned fields outside old town, and I point into the distance away from the city and I say, Go, I’ll cover for you, and I have no idea how to cover for him but he goes all the same, and it’s both the best and the worst day of my life.
Then Jessa starts shaking me, and I wake up again. I know it’s for real this time, because I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck. Repeatedly. The light through the window has not visibly changed. Why is it that a tiny bit of sleep makes you feel worse than no sleep at all?
My alarm hasn’t gone off yet. From the morning sounds of the room, it’s a few minutes, max, since power curfew lifted for the day.
I try to roll away from Jessa and bury my face in the wall, but she’s not having it. She pulls me bodily over onto my back. I drag the blanket over my face, but she yanks that away too. I open my eyes, ready to shove her off my bunk.
I freeze when I see her face. My whole yesterday comes flooding back. I’ve fucked us. Whoever came for B is here for Jessa and me. It’s too late.
“Wake the others,” I say. “We can go out the window. Down the fire escape.”
Jessa blinks. “What? Dude, you’re dreaming. Get up. You’re not going to believe this shit.”
“Okay. Okay. Just… coffee first, all right?”
“No. Most emphatically not coffee first.” She fiddles with something online. “Holy shit,” she whispers, not to me. “Holy shit. Are your lenses in?”
Now that I’m awake, her body language isn’t projecting danger at all. She’s just really, really keyed up over something. I nod.
“You are, like, almost admirably oblivious. Are you not seeing your messages?”
I hadn’t, no. I take a look.
Twenty-six thousand three hundred eighty-six new messages.
When the shock subsides, I skim through a few. They’re all the same. Faelynne has subscribed to your stream! Say hello! MyNameIsName has subscribed to your stream! Say hello! LoneWolf14 has subscribed to your stream! Say hello! SummerKnight has subscribed to your stream! Say hello! NOOBCRUSHR69 has subscribed to your stream! Say hello! 08sGrl has subscribed to your stream! Say hello!
And they’re still coming in. They must have been arriving all night, throughout power curfew, and I didn’t hear them land this morning because my notifications are muted until my alarm goes off.
“Is this…,” I say slowly, then stop and start again. It can’t be. It sounds absurd to even say it. But I don’t have another explanation. “Is this because of—”
Jessa nods frantically. Her ey
es are actually sparkling. “You got the only clear footage of what actually happened out there. All the news sites picked it up. It’s massive.”
She has to be exaggerating. I pull up a newsfeed. She’s not.
I scroll past headlines like 62 WOUNDED IN GREENLEAF INDUSTRIES CHEMICAL ATTACK and 2 STELLAXIS OPERATIVES VS 3 GIANT MECHS: WHO WILL WIN? [VIDEO] and MAJORITY OF 62 CIVILIANS BLINDED IN CHEMICAL ATTACK EXPECTED TO REGAIN SIGHT THANKS TO QUICK ACTION BY STELLAXIS OPERATIVES 06 AND 22 and YOU WON’T BELIEVE HOW 06 AND 22 JUST RESCUED THE HELL OUT OF MORE THAN SIXTY CIVILIANS AT THE FRONT.
“Holy shit,” I whisper. I realize Jessa just said the same thing a minute ago. It seems a proper enough sentiment for what I’m looking at.
“Right?” Jessa whispers back. “Check out our page.”
I open the main page of our channel because I’m still having the tiniest bit of trouble believing this is real.
Yesterday, Jessa and I had a little over twenty-four hundred subscribers.
Right this minute we have just under twenty-nine thousand.
Then I see the view counter on the video I posted from the company car, and I can feel the blood drop out of my head. It has over six million views, and the counter is climbing even as I stare at it in disbelief.
“You see the tip jar?” Jessa asks.
I open it. There’s more money in there than I make in two months walking dogs. It’s all small amounts, of course, but it’s a lot of small amounts. I scroll down the list of recent payments for a few seconds, and I still haven’t reached the end. I mean, it’s not like we’re overnight millionaires, or anything like it, but we’re doing a lot better than we were twenty-four hours ago.
For a minute Jessa and I just sit there and look at each other. Then we both bust out laughing, trying to muffle it so we don’t wake everyone up.
I don’t even know why. It’s not that it’s funny. It’s just such a hell of a sideways goddamn thing to happen. It’s like, I stayed in one piece all day yesterday, company store to company war to company building to company car, and this is finally the last straw that crumples my rational mind like paper. Here we are, a couple of nobodies, slapped upside the head by fame. In our sleep. For reasons we wouldn’t have seen coming in a million years. For ages I’ve been chasing the analogue shadow of 22 in a world that’s the analogue shadow of this one, only to get blindsided by the real one in the real world out of nowhere.
Firebreak Page 18
