“We were taking those people to the doctor, the medical bay, whatever you call it here. Their lenses had melted to their actual eyeballs. That’s what you’re looking at. That’s all that happened. Watch the video again. Does it look like I’m trying to sneak around taking secret footage? We go to the medical bay and then to the cafeteria. Then I go home.”
“Oh, but you’re leaving out one of the most interesting parts.” Suit guy swipes the video forward and forward, the whole way to the end. 22 stares up from the table at me. Suit guy unpauses the video, and my voice drifts up tinnily from the smart surface: Wait. Wait. “You stop recording here. In the elevator. Why?”
I open my mouth, then close it. I wanted 22 to trust me isn’t going to get me very far here. Or, for that matter, why I needed him to. What I was about to say to him next. I can help you.
Sure I can.
I’m trying, man. I’m really, really trying. But I’m useless at this. You should have been in that elevator with someone else. Someone who can make good on the shit that falls out of their mouth.
“I panicked,” I say. “I thought he was going to kill me.”
“One would think you might have attempted to exit the elevator in that case, Ms. Parker. Not lock yourself in with him.”
“Like I said. I panicked.”
Suit guy gives a disappointed little head shake. “Well. This is confusing. Up until that point in the video, the overwhelming impression one gets is that the two of you were getting along rather well.”
“I was in the right place at the right time,” I say stiffly. This part is, at least, true. “I helped them with those people. They got me some food and gave me a free ride home. Benefited everyone.”
“You like to help people, don’t you.” The image on the table changes. Surveillance footage. Me giving up my spot in water line. Me swiping water to the people in line behind me. Me buying those candy bars for those sad kids. How did they even know I did that? Watched me and made an educated guess, based on the rest of it?
Because there’s a lot of it. Going back years. How the fuck much homework have they done on me? “Then help us. Tell us what we need to know.”
“About what?”
For a moment he seems to weigh something in his mind. “About this.”
The image on the table changes. It’s newsfeed footage. Blurry, drone-taken, distant. A figure in dark clothes stands in the middle of a city intersection, a ring of bodies around its feet. All the bodies are in uniform. Stellaxis army uniform.
The image zooms in slightly, sharpens. It’s 06.
I suck in a breath.
“What am I looking at?” Suit guy says nothing. I look up to find him scrutinizing my face. “That can’t be 06—those are your guys on the ground—” Reflexively I go to shake my head, then realize that doesn’t work here. “When did this happen?”
“Yesterday.” Not that this means anything to me, really. I couldn’t have told him what day it is now, not if I had a gun to my head. Is this still the day of the supposed riot? It feels like days later, but I can’t say for sure. This white room eats time. “SecOps operatives 06 and 22 smuggling you into Stellaxis headquarters, your amateurish exposé, the riot in old town, and now this? These things are obviously connected. We need your help to figure out how.”
I bark a laugh. “My help? I didn’t know anything about this. She—” I can’t stop staring at the footage. Are all those people dead? I blink, and 22 is in the ring of bodies with 06. A glitch in the footage? Or are they really that fast? He’s holding 06 up two-handed by her jacket front. He looks epically pissed.
The drone cam doesn’t pick up whatever he says to her or what she replies, but he puts her down. They talk for a few more seconds. Then 06 takes off running, and 22 lets her go.
It’s a moment before I find my voice. Pride be damned, stoicism be damned, I have to know. “What is this?”
“Treason,” suit guy says, “is what it is.”
“But what exactly did she—”
“You ask a lot of questions for someone who refuses to answer any. The details are a bit above your pay grade, I’m afraid.” He chuckles. “Or are they? For all I know, you know more than we do.” Abruptly he switches gears on me. “I don’t want to have to send you to questioning.”
“What’s this, then? The waiting room?”
“Something like that. I’m what you might call the first line of defense. The gentler, more civilized line of defense.” He holds one hand out over the table and makes a crumpling gesture. 22 and the ring of bodies vanish. “Someone got to 06. Put ideas in her head. I am thinking you were the courier of said ideas. That your meeting with them on the fourteenth of March was arranged for the purpose of delivering said ideas. That you delivered them at some point after you stopped recording that video. And that the riot you incited was a ploy to distract attention from 06’s sabotage of a hostage transfer.”
This perks me up. He’d said that was yesterday. Does that mean the so-called riot was somehow yesterday too? Fuck, it feels like ten times that long ago.
Wait.
“Hostage transfer?”
Suit guy draws himself up and glares at the sudden brightening of my expression. He’s said too much. “The only piece I am missing,” he hisses, “is the name of the person or persons who hired you to do so. That is what you are here to provide, and you will remain here until you provide it. Is that clear?”
I turn my face away, inasmuch as the restraints allow. Suit guy literally tsks. Gets up. Crosses over to my side of the table. Cups my face in one hand. Jams his thumb in under the smart bandage.
I can’t help it. I scream.
“Take your time,” he whispers. And then he’s gone.
* * *
ALL MY FEEDING and hydration gets done through the IV. My toilet is the pink plastic bedpan. My bed is the chair. Occasionally they bring in food and water, as before, to try to break me. But what they don’t seem to understand is that old town people are used to being hungry and thirsty, used to food scents blowing over from city restaurants when the wind is right, used to seeing ads for delicious things we can’t afford to eat. They’re not breaking shit.
Nobody lets me wash. My mouth tastes like something died in it. The lights stay on.
My face is healing, though. Bit by bit. The pain has receded to a dull wash of background noise. When did that happen?
I can’t feel my legs anymore. It’s a goddamn miracle I haven’t died of a blood clot, sitting here this long. Maybe the doctor shot me up with something to prevent that from happening. How considerate.
They bring the food at odd times. Sometimes it seems like one meal has just grown cold on the table before the next one comes. Sometimes it seems like a plate will sit for days. It’s hard to say for sure. I can’t picture anything rotting in the aggressive air-conditioning of this place. No flies or ants appear. Anyway, I can’t judge time from the level of my thirst or hunger. They do not lessen.
At one point something slams the wall to my left, hard, once. I think of calling out to whatever made that noise, then think better of it. The sound doesn’t come again. Nothing else of note occurs.
Suit guy comes with questions. Leaves with the same answers as before. He seems harried now, distracted, like I’m an afterthought, a sideshow to some main event happening elsewhere.
I have a long, long time to think about what suit guy said to me. What 06 and 22 said two—three? more?—weeks ago. What they didn’t say. What they were speaking careful circles around.
They wanted out. I could tell that much from two hours in HQ. I don’t know what 06 was doing in that clip, I don’t know what hostage transfer she’s supposed to have sabotaged, but I don’t think she switched sides or whatever it is they’re accusing her of. I think she was looking for the exit.
I wonder where they are. 06 and 22. I hope to whatever the fuck is listening that they got away, and the company is sitting on me like an egg because the answer they’re trying to
hatch is where the hell they’ve gone.
“Go,” I whisper to the white room airily. “Run. I told you I could help.”
I’m probably losing my mind.
Whatever else happens, Jessa’s not here. That much I’m sure of. If she was, they would’ve used her against me. Or me against her. They would have tortured one of us in front of the other. They would have at least threatened it.
Which means either she’s still in old town or she’s dead.
“Did you ever consider,” I say to suit guy at one point, “that maybe 06 wasn’t working for anyone? That nobody got to her? That maybe she just wanted out of the war? Out of this place? And she decided to do something about it?”
He stares holes through me in silence. He looks almost as tired as I feel. Then he leaves.
The white room lines up hours and chain-smokes them, one by one.
I have a lot of time to think about everything 22 said to me in that cafeteria. And everything he didn’t say. But I try not to. For all I know, they’re reading my thoughts through my implant, lenses or no. Who knows what kind of nefarious-shit tech they have here.
I have an equal amount of time to think about how stupid we’ve all been, all this time. Believing everything the company told us, whether it made sense or not, just because it had a full-scale media/marketing juggernaut to back it up. And what were our suspicions in the face of that? I’m sorry, I think at all ten dead operatives in turn. We were all too fucking dumb to save you.
For a while I dare to hope suit guy’s forgotten to follow through on his threat of having me tortured.
He hasn’t.
He comes in empty-eyed, hands in pockets. His jacket is gone, and the rest of his suit looks like he slept in it, and not for very long. His shirtsleeves are rolled up. There’s dried blood on them. “Who sent you to the Stellaxis building?” he asks. “Who paid you to incite the riot on April sixth? What message did they have you deliver to SecOps operatives 06 and 22 on March fourteenth?”
A litany I know by heart. But the syringe he’s pulling out of his pocket is new.
“Do you know what this is?”
I try to come up with some snarky response, but what’s on his face sobers me. He looks like someone who’s about to have to do something he really rather wouldn’t. I shake my head. In the restraints it comes out as more of a quiver.
“I don’t like blood,” he informs me.
“Really? You got some on your shirt.”
He grimaces faintly. “Yes, well. It’s been a trying few days. You’re not the most interesting puzzle down here this week. Or the hardest to crack.”
06, I realize. He means 06. The blood on his sleeve. The most interesting puzzle. They didn’t get out after all.
Which makes no sense. I saw that video. 22 and 06 in that ring of bodies. He let her go.
I scramble to throw a mask of defiance over the alarm on my face. “I don’t know,” I say weakly. “I think I’m doing okay so far.”
He doesn’t deign to reply to that, just stalks over and jabs me in the muscle of my shoulder, right through the hospital gown. “The fuck—” I gasp, but he ignores me. Takes a step back, as if to admire his handiwork, and throws up an image on the tabletop. It takes me a moment to recognize it as a person. It’s curled up unnaturally, like someone who’s been imprinted upon by a resonance grenade, but the bones don’t look to have snapped. It looks more like it’s been mummified. Like something dug out of a desert cave. And yet the color of its skin is weirdly mottled. It’s hard to tell through all the desiccation, but it looks bruised.
It’s obviously dead. Long dead.
Then it moves.
“As I said, I don’t like blood, and as you’ve noticed, I’ve seen more of it this week than I’d prefer. This way is much cleaner, wouldn’t you say?” His eyes do the classic dart-to-the-corner of a person checking the time on their lenses. “Within about twenty minutes, you’ll start to feel very thirsty. You will want to be talking by then.” He taps the table. “This is you in about five hours. By that point you will have passed the point of no return. You will be experiencing the onset of cascading organ failure two hours before that. At some point your airways will become so dehydrated that the mucous membranes in your throat and lungs will rupture and bleed. Ditto the mucous membranes in your mouth and nose, your intestines, et cetera. Ditto the walls of your blood vessels. By that point it will really be in your very best interest to have already answered all my questions in as much detail as you feel inspired so to do. Now.” He pulls a case out of a pocket. In it is a second syringe. “This will deactivate the nanobots that are currently swimming around in your bloodstream. And it’s all yours. As soon as you tell me what I want to know. At which point—”
He breaks off as a look I remember all too well comes over his face. Something happening on his lenses. Something big.
At first he looks almost relieved he doesn’t have to stick around and watch this nightmare scenario play out on my body. Over the next few seconds the enormity of whatever he has to do instead visibly sinks in.
The condescending dickhead demeanor falls away. Under it he’s pale and scared. His eyes flick back and forth, scrolling through something. “Shit,” he whispers. Then, in a very different voice from any of the ones he’s used on me in however long I’ve been here: “I’ll be right back.” He whirls around, one hand held out to the keypad. It’s shaking so hard the reader is having a hard time recognizing him.
“Wait!” I start yelling. “You can’t fucking leave me here with that stuff in me. I’ll talk. Okay? I’ll tell you everything. Don’t—”
I’m still yelling as he steps out into the hall without looking back. As the door whispers shut behind him. As I hear his footsteps hurry away.
The tabletop catches my eye. Overlaid on the image of the dying person, there’s an alert banner flashing red. It’s still interfacing with his implant, and he’s not yet out of range. ATTENTION. EMERGENCY ON SUBLEVEL A. ALL SECURITY PERSONNEL REPORT.
There’s more, but I don’t have time to read it before his implant finally passes out of range and the whole smart surface goes dark.
It’s all I can do to slow the pulse hammering at my ears. I’m locked in a room, cuffed to a chair, shot up full of slow-acting murder. While fuck knows what goes on out there in the hall.
Sublevel A. That’s where I was before, with 06 and 22. Where Medical is. Am I on sublevel A now?
If I break my thumbs, I might be able to get out of these cuffs. It works in the movies anyway. But that’s with old-timey metal handcuffs, which are not my problem here. All that’s going to accomplish is losing me the use of my hands. If I ever have use of them again before I turn into that thing on the table. Which looks unlikely.
I’m thirsty. Am I thirstier than usual? I’m not sure. My eyes and mouth are dry. But they’ve been dry. The air-conditioning is cranked to somewhere just above freezing, and I haven’t been drinking anything. There’s bruising on my wrists, but that’s from struggling against the cuffs for days. At least… I think it is? Suit guy hasn’t been gone that long. Or has he? How would I know?
I scream at the door for a while. Nobody comes. I’m definitely thirstier now, and there’s a headache blossoming behind my eyes. Part of that could be from the screaming. What does twenty minutes look like in the white room? What about an hour? What about two? The bruises on my wrists aren’t any worse. I run my tongue along my gum line, tasting for blood.
Noise outside, somewhere out there down the hall. Crashing. Shouting. Gunshots. Some crazy fucking notion lodges in my head that Jessa and Keisha and Tegan and the others have led some kind of rescue army in here after me. The white room’s wicking my rational mind away. I start shrieking, help, let me out, I’m in here, and a sudden hush falls on whatever shitshow is underway down the hall. Then another burst of gunfire, the loudest crash yet, the panicked screams of several people all at once—then silence.
I don’t hear footsteps approach the wh
ite-room door. I don’t hear the distinctive beep of the keypad reader. There comes a paint-peeling screech of metal tearing, and suddenly there’s a hole in the wall where the door used to be.
Standing in the middle of it is 22.
He’s got more blood on him than suit guy did. A lot more. His expression is a total blank. He grips his sword—blood on that, too, lots of blood—and stalks into the room.
With sudden, perfect clarity I realize the following four facts:
All the crashes I heard previously were other locked doors elsewhere in the building being ripped out and flung across the hall. All the screams were from the people behind them. I’m looking at the emergency that summoned suit guy from the white room. And the next casualty of it is going to be me.
22 stands above me, flat annihilation in his eyes. I’m not sure he’s even seeing me. Just something in the way. No, not even that. Like he’s pattern seeking, and I’m a person-shaped object.
This is something worse than on-duty 22. This is off-the-rails 22. It’s not that his switch has flipped. It’s that his switch has broken. I never should have drawn his attention. Slowly, casually, almost languidly, he raises the sword.
I try and fail to throw my arms up between my body and the blade. Wait, I try to say. It’s me, I’m not one of them, they locked me up in here, I’m on your side, I promise, don’t fucking kill me. But my mouth won’t work to make words. After all this, I’m going to die here in this fucking chair. At least it’ll be faster than the syringe.
The blade flashes down—and stops, a millimeter at most from my head.
Behind it, 22 has drawn me into focus. He zeroes in on my face. He’s examining me.
“It’s me,” I croak. “Mal. From before. Remember?”
He looks at me a second longer. Then, with a speed and accuracy and delicacy that will break my brain if I stop to think about it, the sword moves, and the nanofilament bindings at my wrists and ankles fall away. Then he slings the blood off his blade, sheathes it, reaches toward my head with both gloved hands. He wouldn’t cut you free and then crush your skull, I just have time to think, when I feel a pressure lift from around my head, a pressure I’d gotten so accustomed to I’d almost forgotten it was there. 22’s hands return to my field of vision with a kind of metal band held between them. I have no idea what purpose it even served, except to maximize my discomfort. At which task it performed admirably.
Firebreak Page 30
