Firebreak

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  For a second we all look at one another, and in that silence I hear it. It’s the first rain after long months of sleet and filthy snow, and it’s battering the fire escapes and pounding on the roof and sizzling to the street in sheets upon sheets of water.

  Water.

  For a second we’re all held there, tense and undecided, while the rain hammers down. It sounds like all the barrels in all the storage rooms in all the buildings in every street in old town being emptied out at once. We all stand and look at one another, listening. Waiting for someone to make the first move.

  Then somebody below us shoves that downstairs door open, and we pour out into the lobby. “Keep recording,” Tegan shouts as we get swept down the stairs, jostled by a few more people as they detach from the group and push their way back up the stairs. Their voice is lost in the commotion. “Keep recording and watch the guards!”

  By the time I get out into the lobby, the guards have abandoned their post at the water-storage room in order to cover the stairwell with their guns. “We’re not doing anything,” a man shouts at them. He holds up his protest sign. “Just exercising our free speech rights. Last I checked, we still have those. And we’re all streaming this.”

  One of the guards grabs him and slams him to the floor with one hand. The other hand waves the protest sign in his face. “This is libel and defamation against Stellaxis Innovations, subject to prosecution. Stream that.”

  “That’s not prosecution—that’s assault,” a woman yells back, and rifles swing around to bear on her. She kneels, hands in the air, sign held up above her head. It reads WATER-FOR-ALL™ MEANS WATER FOR ALL. Another guard rips it out of her hands, sets one booted foot to her shoulder, and pushes her over sideways. “Stay down or get put down!” he screams at her.

  “We are being assaulted and demeaned by Stellaxis’s sec forces,” Suresh is yelling, sweeping his head back and forth to get a nice clear panning shot of the action. He points down the hall toward the water-storage room. “There are thousands of gallons of water locked up in there while people are dying—”

  I crash to my knees. They recognized me, I think. It’s over. But it’s just the crowd that knocked me sideways. Jessa hauls me back up.

  “Disperse!” another guard is shouting at us in a tinny monotone through the bug helmet. “Disperse. Disperse.”

  “You heard him,” Keisha shouts. She’s holding the outside door open. The crowd disperses into the street. The guards chase after, shouting, having abandoned the man and woman on the floor, so a few of us help them up, and then we all run out together.

  It’s funny how you forget how hard it can rain. It drenches us immediately, and it’s cold as hell, and it melts my protest sign to sludge in my hands, and I turn my face up to it and open my mouth, and it’s delicious. They always try to scare you out of drinking rainwater. It’s a crime, of course, but they always hit up the disease angle for good measure. There are at least twenty-five commonly known waterborne pathogens in everyday rainwater. That’s why we at Stellaxis Innovations spare no expense in running every drop of our water through state-of-the-art filtration systems. We see that safety alert every time there’s so much as a drizzle. And at the moment we don’t care. It’s colder than what comes out of the ration barrels or the hotel sinks and it tastes completely different and it’s free and it’s water and it’s ours.

  “Disperse,” the guards are shouting. “Return to your homes.” Some people lose their nerve, break, and run, but a surprising number of them stay. It’s hard to hear threats over this kind of rain. Besides, we’ve all seen the news clips of protests being disbanded before. They don’t open fire into a crowd, not with live rounds anyway, not when so many people are watching. And there are hundreds of us out here. Thousands, maybe. People are walking and running and biking in from other streets. Some of them are flying drones before them, getting footage from a bird’s-eye view. There are countless eyes on these guards. Countless eyes broadcasting to the world. Whatever these guards’ orders are, for now they’re stopping right at the threshold of what they’d clearly rather be doing, which is beating our faces in. Lucky for us, the last thing the company needs to top off their week is a bunch of trigger-happy security guards doing target practice on unarmed civilians exercising their free speech rights all over the internet.

  I’ve been so caught up staring at whatever is unfolding here that I’ve lost sight of Jessa. And now I can’t find her. It’s chaos out here. Total chaos. I don’t know where anybody is. Jessa, Tegan, Suresh, Keisha—the rain has drenched us all, rendered us all practically unrecognizable from a distance. The guards are yelling and firing their guns above our heads and people are yelling back and waving the sodden mess of their signs and more people run out of the hotel, maybe having seen us from the windows, and a little group of them comes out with giant packages of company-store plastic cups under each arm and they rip them open and people take stacks of cups and dash around handing them out and everyone holds them up above their heads and the rain falls and falls. People are pouring out of other buildings now too, people and guards, and some of the people bypass the guards by filing down the fire escapes, and some of them just stay put but start holding their own cups and bottles and bowls and even plastic baggies out the windows, throwing more plastic cups and baggies down to us in the street.

  There’s a sound that starts to grow, a soft, low rattling that swells louder and louder and eventually reveals itself to be the sound of rain falling into red plastic cups held in dozens and then hundreds of hands raised to the sky.

  I have no idea how this happened. I guess somebody posted the idea and it spread fast. Or maybe it’s a thing that just occurred. We’re thirsty, after all.

  It’s a nothing little symbol of a protest or a resistance movement or a riot or a revolution or whatever this turns out to be, but at the moment it strikes me as oddly beautiful. Red plastic cups full of rain.

  Still the guards don’t make a move. Which is strange. People are overtly poaching water right under their noses. But they’re just hanging back by the buildings, yelling at us to go home. They’re not even firing taggers. It’s almost like they’re waiting for something.

  Then it happens.

  All at once, almost everyone around me stops like someone’s hit pause. At first I think it’s something the guards are doing, but it’s not. It’s their lenses. Stellaxis shut off the power again.

  And then comes a new sound. From the left and the right of us, all up and down the sidewalks lining the street, back where the guards were standing. It’s a sound like water being sprayed into a fire and sizzling into nothing.

  I turn, already knowing what I’ll see. The sound is rain vaporizing against the guards’ repulsor shields, which they’ve activated at some point in the five seconds since the power shutdown.

  From each side of the street, the guards advance. Not one by one. In lockstep. Together.

  Something very close to panic seizes me by the spine. “Jessa!” I scream, but my voice is swallowed by the sound of the shields and the rain and the yelling of everyone else around me when they notice what’s going on.

  The guards take another step. Steam pours off the glowing orange wall of the collective shield projections. The rain that falls before them doesn’t get a chance to hit the ground.

  “Jessa!” I can’t see her anywhere. I squelch the reflex to try to message her. The people around me are getting agitated. The crowd is rocking back and forth, fighting to keep clear of the repulsors. People are pitching their cups at the oncoming shield wall. It’s like throwing mosquitoes onto a bug zapper. At least three separate groups start chanting some kind of protest thing, which breaks up immediately into screams. “Jessa, where are you!”

  A rushing, shouting sound from up the street toward the school, and more people start stampeding down toward us from somewhere. It’s getting too crowded to move.

  “They’re herding us!” somebody is shouting, hoarse and strange. Gas? Or did they ju
st blow their voice out trying to project? “Stop moving! This is organized assault! They can’t chase you if you don’t run!” I catch a glimpse of the speaker—a waterlogged person that might have been Jackson, standing in the stirrups of somebody else’s hands, shouting through a crappy makeshift megaphone made out of a red plastic cup—before he’s toppled from his perch by the jostling crowd.

  Herding us where? Away from the school puts us down toward the old highway to the city, where the checkpoints are. I remember the interrogation pods, the boy on his face on the pavement. But there are too many of us. It makes no sense.

  I whirl back around as something bright catches my eye. Brighter than the shields. A teenage girl runs down the street from the direction of the school, holding something burning in her hand. She pitches it in a high overhead arc above the shield wall, forcing the guards beneath it to break the wall and raise their shields over their heads like umbrellas.

  The object—a bottle?—smashes against those horizontal shields, and burning oil slips and skitters off the edge, dripping globs of fire onto the guards. They’re maybe ten feet up the line from me, and I can hear the burning oil hit the wet ground. It smells like a new-paved street after a summer storm.

  The opening in the wall does not go unnoticed. People are pelting the few exposed guards with anything to hand. Cups and bottles, but also broken pieces of sidewalk and glass frontage that have lain in the street since the helicopters arrived. Someone throws a water-credit reader exactly like the one above our sink. Someone else lobs a brick, and it takes a guard square in the face. Bug helmet and all, he staggers.

  That’s all the invitation needed. People rush the weakness in the line, trying to break back through and flee. I try to run after them, but I’m wedged in place by bodies on all sides, and I can’t get any traction on the street. My worn-out shoes slip against the wet pavement, and I get nowhere.

  They push and push, and the line almost breaks. And then the guards swing their shields back down into position. Straight down into that tight-packed mass of bodies.

  And the bodies go flying.

  As far as they can. There isn’t much room. They’re repelled back against the crowd as the crowd is still pushing forward, and four people—five?—get caught between the press of the crowd and the repulsor field.

  And then the real screaming starts.

  “Get back!” I try to yell at them, but my voice is for shit in all of this. I shoulder forward and try to haul people backward away from the ones crushed against the shields, but there’s nowhere for them to go either. Nowhere for any of us to go. The screaming is only rising in pitch and volume both, joined now by a frying sound and a smell to match. And now it’s starting on the other side of the street as the space grows too small to contain the people being chased down from the school.

  They’re not going to herd us down toward the checkpoint. They’re not going to take us anywhere. They’re going to pin us down here with their repulsor shields until a helicopter or drone fleet comes in from the city and gasses us. At which point maybe we wake up in jail or maybe we wake up dead.

  I try to tell myself that this has nothing to do with me, nothing at all to do with that video I took of 06 and 22 that day. Not really. If I hadn’t scared the company into cutting water rations, it would’ve been someone else eventually.

  But this time it was me.

  “I need to get up higher,” I say. Then I say it louder. “Somebody help me get up higher!” Like they did with Jackson, or whoever that was. Nobody hears me, or nobody cares.

  I cup my hands to my mouth and shout, as loud as I can, “I’m Mallory Parker and I give up, I surrender, I turn myself in, just fucking stop—”

  The crowd is surging behind me now, shoving in every direction at once. I get worked some paces away from the place where the shield wall almost broke, and then the tide turns again, and I get shoved back around toward the movie theater across the street. I step on something that is not pavement. It gives underfoot, and I stumble sideways and am steadied by the pushing bodies. I’m bobbing in this fucked-up panic ocean, and I can’t turn around.

  And then the wall of people behind me starts to break and scatter, inasmuch as they can in the press, leaving a gap just big enough for me to lose my footing and pitch into sidelong.

  For one blissful second I don’t know what happened, why there’s now this space. Then I see the orange glow of the shields. Somehow the crowd’s movement has inched me from the center the whole way over to the sidewalk, where the guards are waiting.

  “Hey,” I yell at them. My voice is fucked, and it comes out as more of a shriek. “I’m Mallory Parker. This all started because of me. Just arrest me and leave them out of this.”

  Now, I fucking well know the bug helmets amplify sound. Not to the extent that the operatives can hear with their actual ears, but still I’m upwards of ninety-eight percent sure these guards hear me. They just don’t give a shit. My window of opportunity for turning myself in was narrow and fleeting and closed up shop days ago, and they probably would’ve just tossed me in the plastic digesters anyway, maybe even doing me the kindness of shooting me first.

  As it is, the bug helmets stare me down impassively while the crowd to all sides pitches and I trip over something else lying in the street and I look down to make sure it isn’t what I hope to shit it’s not and it is—of course it is. I’m standing on a fucking person, and she’s not moving, and there’s blood coming out of her ear. “Move!” I scream, and nobody moves, and I’m trying to clear space and haul this girl up by her shoulders when the crowd senses the tiny open space around me and moves to fill it. They heave up behind me, and I’m thrown bodily forward onto the shield wall.

  It should be flinging me backward, I have a few seconds to think before I black out. It’s a repulsor. I should be being repulsed.

  But there’s nowhere for me to be repulsed to. My feet aren’t even touching the ground anymore. I’m pinned to the orange glow of the forcefield projection like a fly on a windshield. My teeth are vibrating in my head. It feels like my eyeballs are going to shiver into warm jelly and run down my face. Like every part of me that’s touching the shield is trying to dissolve into its constituent atoms and scatter.

  Disperse is the last thought I can grab hold of, and then I drop down into the dark.

  part four NPC

  0017

  “—THAT IF I WERE YOU.”

  Bright light. White. Smells like a hospital. I try to stand up, and something stops me. A tugging sensation in my arm. But something else besides. I can’t lift my head. A helmet? I reach up to touch it, can’t. Neither arm will move. I try to turn my head, and some injury to my face I wasn’t aware I had rockets up out of nowhere to brush a solid eight on the pain scale.

  “Like I said. I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

  I blink and blink. It’s like I’ve been in a dark room for ages and walked out into the full beam of a spotlight. Shapes blur and resolve. A white room. Small. There’s a table and mirror. Someone sitting across from me: business suit, slick hair, patient hands folded. Heavy door. Keypad, no handle. The light isn’t as bright as I thought, just overhead fluorescents.

  I strain my gaze downward. My eyes feel like someone took them out, rolled them in an ashtray, and put them back in, but they work fine.

  My clothes are gone. I’m wearing some kind of hospital gown, but I’m not in a hospital bed. I’m sitting in a hardback chair. There’s an IV line in the crook of my right elbow. My wrists are attached to the arms of the chair. Nanofilament cuffs. They’ve always looked so flimsy in news clips of arrests. They’re not.

  I try to move my legs. Something around my ankles says no. The chair is bolted to the floor.

  It comes back to me: the crowd, the shield, the repulsor shivering hotly against my face like something alive. And then—

  “Where am I?”

  Though the answer can’t be anything good. White room, bright light, two-way mirror, restraint
s. I’ve seen enough movies to know where this is going.

  “Pleased to finally meet you in person, Ms. Parker. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “Am I under arrest? On what charge? Where are the people who were with me?” Where are Jessa and my roommates, I want to ask, but then I remember something that stops me cold. Something 22 said to me. We could have. And painted those people with a twenty-ton target. I grit my teeth. If by some miracle they don’t have Jessa and the others, they’re sure as shit not going to get them from me.

  He sips from his dispenser coffee, says nothing.

  “I know my rights. I demand to know where I’m being held, and by whom, and why.”

  Silence.

  The phrase intimidation tactics floats up from the murk of my brain. I picture the white room broadcast on all news channels. My reaction. My groveling. My fear. I thought they wouldn’t risk martyring me. Now I’m not so sure. This looks to be skewing alarmingly in the direction of make an example.

  That’s when I recognize the hospital smell of this place. The white walls. Even the pattern of the tile floor is familiar. I’m back in Stellaxis HQ.

  I think of 06 and 22 and B and Elena and whoever I stepped on in the street. Of everyone in old town assuming I sold them out. Of fake Nycorix’s t-shirt: RESIST. There’s a joke here, but I’m too fucked up on adrenaline and shock and fear and rage and pain to bring it fully into mind.

  “I can help you,” I whisper to a 22 who’s not here. A noise comes out of me, half laugh, half cough, when I realize I’ve whispered aloud. Or at least I think I did. My mind is full of dulled echoes, a layer of soundproofing between my thoughts and me.

  Maybe I’m still unconscious. Maybe I’m dreaming. Maybe it’s me being trampled in the street. I hope 22 never believed me. I hope he had a good laugh with 06 about the sadsack fangirl after sending me home in that company car. Help you indeed. Because I’m so good at that. Helping.