22 nods at me once, like he’s just satisfactorily completed a transaction. Then turns on his literal heel and stalks back out.
“Wait,” I yell after him. “I need to find—”
I scramble to my feet and fall over. My legs have forgotten how to work. By the time I stumble out into the hall, he’s gone.
Knowing what I’m going to see out here isn’t nearly enough to prepare me for it. Every door has been ripped off and flung hard enough to crater cinder-block walls. There’s blood everywhere. Bodies everywhere. Heavily armed bodies. Security officers. Walking arsenals. All dead. It’s so over the top that I’m staring around me in a kind of numbed awe.
I have no idea what happened to provoke the massacre I’m looking at, but I don’t see suit guy, and I don’t see his antidote syringe, and at the moment that’s enough to narrow my focus to a laser point. I pick up a gun from the floor, hoping to all the gods of handheld weaponry that it works enough like an in-game blaster that I can figure it out, and I start walking.
I’m starting to feel like reheated shit now, and it’s slow going. My throat feels like someone took a belt sander to it. My head is pounding hard enough to make my vision pulse white. If someone takes a shot at me, I’m going to absolutely die.
Nobody does. This wing of whatever sublevel I’m on is dead, figuratively and literally. Whatever sent 22 on this rampage, he’s executed it with characteristic meticulousness. I can hear more screams and gunfire in the distance, but it’s moving off. Nobody’s paying any attention to me.
I go from body to body, looking for suit guy and his syringe. He’s not here. I zigzag up the hallway, checking each room. No suit guy there, either. I find a map on the wall near a water fountain. It’s not a holoscreen, just old-school printed plastic with a YOU ARE HERE star on a branch of blue-coded hall. I bend my head to the water fountain and drink and drink. Then I force my attention to the map. The white room is labeled, predictably, INTERROGATION. There are six of these rooms in total. Why the fuck they need a half dozen interrogation cells is beyond me. The rest are empty, but one looks to have been recently used. There’s a coffee ring on the table nobody got around to cleaning, and a faint smell of cigarettes. Also, this room’s version of my chair has been ripped partially out of the floor. Blood spatter on the tile. The same blood I saw on suit guy’s sleeves? 06’s blood? I don’t stick around.
Halfway up the hall I double over coughing. I spit out phlegm, which turns out to be a blood clot the size of my fingertip. I stare at it for a second. Then I hurry on.
The hall ends in a T junction. I go left. Gun first, I slip into each room. No suit guy. No syringe. No 22.
One room is obviously empty of these things, but I linger anyway. There’s a bank of holoscreens displaying what I assume to be surveillance footage. One screen is frozen in place, flickering, like the security camera that informs it has been damaged and this was the last image fed back to this room. It’s timestamped, but after the white room, that tells me almost nothing. From the carnage in the halls, I’m guessing it wasn’t all that long ago.
It shows a room I don’t recognize. It’s big and dark and full of dead bodies. Easily twenty of them, scattered around the floor like they’ve been dropped there from a height.
A little ways away from them there’s one that doesn’t match. All the others are wearing security uniforms or lab whites. This one’s wearing a jumpsuit with two bullet holes punched through it, belly and chest. It’s lying there, and 22 is kneeling beside it, fists knotted in the front of the jumpsuit like he’s trying to shake this dead person awake.
Since the image is frozen in such a way that 22’s shaking has angled the body’s face toward the camera, I can make it out. Although, given 22’s reaction, I could have figured.
I guess I know now where 06 went, when her own white room was done with her.
Another coughing fit doubles me over. My mouth tastes like rusty nails.
I lose track of how long I walk. I have no idea how it measures against the time I have left. Cascading organ failure, I think. Point of no return. I stagger past more bodies than I can count. I can’t tell how much blood smell is coming from them and how much is coming from inside me. The next left takes me to the cafeteria where I sat with 22 a million years ago. That door doesn’t have a keypad lock, so it admits me. I poke the gun in first. But nobody’s there.
I’m running out of time.
I try to retrace my steps to the medical bay where we brought the civilian casualties. It’s a last-ditch effort. Even if there are preloaded syringes there, they’ll be locked up, and besides I won’t know which one I’m looking for, but I have to try. When I eventually find the room, though, the door’s locked, and I have no way of opening it. Outstanding.
Strange, though. Medical isn’t trashed. It’s pristine. Then again, so was the cafeteria. And every room I passed since that last left-hand turn that took me there. I wasn’t paying full attention because I was so bent on reaching the medical bay. But I’m paying attention now.
I pause to drink from the water fountain here—the same one 06 pointed out to me two weeks ago, and by no means is this getting less surreal—then start retracing my steps again. If suit guy is dead somewhere, he isn’t in this hall. I go back to where the bodies were. I’m falling over my own feet at this point, and I’m pretty sure my tongue is actually leaking blood. My gums and my nose and the beds of my fingernails definitely are. One foot in front of the other, I drag ass down that endless hall, and then the next, and then the next.
And then I find him. Suit guy, lying across what used to be a doorway, his bottom half in a room marked OBSERVATION CELL 26 and his top half in the hall. I recognized him from a distance by the dried blood on his sleeves.
I rush over, my whole chest heaving like it badly wants to vomit up my lungs. I fall to my knees painfully and dig around in his pockets.
The case is there. Even better, it’s intact. I open it with shaking hands. It’s padded on the inside. The syringe is fine. I uncap it and slam the needle into the meat of my thigh. Please be on time, I think at the needle. At the fluid I pump into the big muscle of my leg. At the feeling of not-quite-freezing, not-quite-burning, that spreads from the injection site. Just let this one fucking thing go right for fucking once and be the fuck on time.
When it’s done, I still feel like I’ve been steamrolled. But with luck I’ll have stopped the damage from worsening. After a lifetime in old town, I’m no stranger to dehydration. It’ll slow me down, but I’ll bounce back. Stellaxis itself inured me to this shit long ago. “Should’ve done better research on me, asshole,” I say to suit guy’s corpse.
Then I make myself get up, though every part of me creaks in protest. I have to get out of here. Get home. Make sure Jessa’s okay. But I’m not going to get far in a hospital gown.
I strip suit guy of his pants, shirt, shoes. He has one of those early-wave ID chips implanted at his temple, and for a second I consider removing it. But I don’t have a knife, and I don’t really want to stick around here looking for one.
Suit guy’s shirt isn’t quite dark enough to hide the blood, or the bullet hole that punctured his sternum, and I need something to cover it. There’s a bunch more clothing lying around to choose from, but none of these other people have personally tried to kill me, so I’m a little queasy at the prospect of looting their corpses. Still, if I don’t get out of here, I’m just going to join them, and besides, they won’t miss this stuff anymore.
I consider a white lab coat that somehow has managed to stay relatively clean, but I don’t want to get stopped by survivors looking for medical attention. Every other jacket in this part of the hall is utterly unusable. I scurry up a little farther and find an honest-to-shit treasure: a dark blue suit jacket draped over the back of a hastily vacated chair. I shove my way into it and do a real quick go-through of this person’s desk drawers. There’re some random devices I’ll never be able to log in to, some folders full of paper, office su
pplies, et cetera. The real prize is in the bottom drawer. Apparently whoever this desk belonged to was a snacker. I cram my new pockets full of candy bars and soy jerky and trail mix, shove a protein bar into my mouth, button the jacket over the bloodstains, and whisper thanks to the previous owner of this stuff, like whoever it was can hear me.
Then I lurch back to the second water fountain, the one by the medical bay, and drink until I feel like I’m going to slosh when I walk.
Still nobody. The distant sounds have stopped entirely. It comes to me that it’s been quiet for a while.
I squint down each hall that I can see. I take a few tentative steps in each direction to make sure of what I earlier surmised. The theory holds.
22 didn’t destroy everything in this place. Just what got in his way. He was cutting a path. To or from what, I don’t know exactly, but I would bet everything I have ever owned that it had something to do with 06 dead in that room.
This path doesn’t extend down to the medical bay or the cafeteria, or the length of a couple other halls I glance down. It came up from one direction and only detoured for the interrogation cells when my yelling drew his attention. It’s a clearly marked trail, made of broken doors and dead bodies and bloody boot prints.
It ends at the elevators. I ride them up to the lobby. Similar scene up there. I can hear voices farther back down the hall. They don’t sound like security officers, and they don’t sound panicked. Whatever danger was here has passed. In its aftermath, people are pacing around, talking into their implants, going in and out through the front doors. Paramedics dash back and forth. The place is a kicked ants’ nest. Everybody scurrying. I guess they’re sending everyone home for the day. Clear the way for emergency personnel to do their thing.
I catch up with two women walking side by side in front of me, on their way out of the building. I use them as cover. I put my head down, mutter like I’m talking about something extremely important to someone over my implant, and head for the doors.
Really what I’m doing is watching the floor. The red boot prints are fainter here, tile carrying the blood away one step at a time, but it’s unmistakable. 22 has already left the building. Alive, and on his own steam. Not that I have the first fucking clue where he’s gone.
The state this place is in, I probably could’ve walked out in the hospital gown after all. There are ambulances parked the whole way around the front driveway and out on that lush green lawn. Bodies being shuttled out on stretchers. I doubt there are enough ambulances in the state for what went down in this building. If any of the bodies are still moving, I don’t spot them.
It’s a beautiful spring morning. The air smells like flowers and blood. I put my hands in my pockets and start walking.
0018
ONE TIME, BACK IN MY DOG-WALKING DAYS, I looked up a map of that trail where I used to like to walk Flora. I remember thinking how strange it was that if you just took the time to walk far enough, you could go from old town to the edge of the city proper, on foot, avoiding all the checkpoints and barricades and security bots and tolls and bullshit. But, of course, I never got around to trying. And I only have the vaguest sense of where it is now.
I know it runs along somewhere near the west edge of the city, though, which puts it nearish Stellaxis HQ.
If only my fucking lenses still worked, I could look up that map right now.
Then it hits me.
I get away from the edge of the company property and onto a crowded street. Then I keep walking until I find an information kiosk. “Library,” I tell it.
The nearest library turns out to be a solid twenty blocks away. I’ve lost my backpack and my coat and all my cash, and I can’t swipe a reader to buy anything to drink, and with those nanobots freshly neutralized in my system after merrily wreaking havoc for however long, each block feels like a mile. But once I drag my carcass up the shallow steps and into the building, there’s a water fountain. It’s not free, like the ones in the Stellaxis building, but I guess I look pitiful enough that a librarian comes out and swipes me a couple ounces from her account, which very nearly makes me cry. Even better, there’s a bike-borrowing station right outside, and best of all, that is free. I drink my water, and then I go into the restroom. I thought I’d have to pee, but I can’t. Still too dried out. I walk past the sinks I can’t pay for and stop as I catch sight of my reflection.
Much of the left side of which is swaddled in bright blue smart bandages. Noticeable from a block away, if anybody’s looking. Carefully I peel them back.
What’s underneath isn’t too pretty, but smart bandages work fast, and honestly, I was expecting worse. And at least it isn’t blue.
There’s the tiniest puddle of water on the sink counter. I soak it up with a paper towel. I’m not putting standing water anywhere near those half-open wounds, but I wet the back of my neck and I start to feel a little better.
Then I go to find myself a computer.
* * *
IT’S BEEN THE better part of a decade since I’ve touched an actual keyboard. It’s been nearly half that long since I had to remember a password. They’ve locked me out of Jessa’s and my streaming account, my water account, my bank account, everything that was currently in use on my implant when they got me.
But Jessa and I go way back. And lucky for me, I used to use the same goddamn password for everything.
I log in to the oldest email account I possess. It’s so ancient I’m surprised it hasn’t timed out by now and been deactivated. I use that to sign up as a subscriber to our stream. Jessa’s not live now, and I wince at the way my mind phrases this, but she’s Jessa, and if she is physically capable of checking messages when they come in, she will.
I should be thinking of something clever to say. Something only she and I will know. Something she can recognize me by, leaving any eavesdroppers in the dark. But this isn’t a fucking movie, and I need to know she’s okay.
jessa?
A minute passes. Two. While I wait, I pull up the trail map and print it. Still no reply. I sit and study my map and tap my fingers and glance over my shoulder like any second a pile of company sec goons is going to bust down the door and black-bag me. Something about the map looks familiar, but I don’t have anything like the attention span to put my finger on it now. “Come on,” I whisper at the ancient screen. “Come on.”
Just when I’m finally convinced she’s either dead or arrested, or has finally done something to get her implant put on lockdown, she responds.
mal??
tell me you’re ok
holy shit. it can’t be you, they took you. wait. where are you?
i’m coming home. i just needed to know you were ok. what about the others?
bruised. pissed off. thirsty. couple of fractures. guards in the street now. we’ll live A pause. wait. how do i know you’re you? quick, tell me something only the real mal would say
fuck off, you first
…ok, good enough
I have to shove part of one fist in my mouth or I’m going to start laughing my head off. They’re okay. They’re all okay.
No time to ask Jessa any of my billion questions. What happened after I passed out against the riot shields? How long ago was that? Did 06 and 22 make the news? The footage suit guy showed me of 06 standing in that intersection. What was that about? Is 06 really dead? Given what 22 did to the building, signs point to yes. But why would they kill her? They were the only two operatives left. What does Stellaxis’s play look like without them?
What happened to 22 after he left that building? Did they bring him back? Shoot him down where he stood? I never heard a flare for either of them. And wouldn’t Jessa have mentioned it if—
No. No time.
i gotta go i’ll see you soon stay safe
And then I disconnect.
* * *
THE QUICKEST ROUTE to the trail involves retracing my steps from the library to Stellaxis HQ, but it’s a million times faster on a bike. I give the company prop
erty a wide berth of several city blocks and pedal past it quickly. Eventually they’re going to realize their prisoner is gone. I can only hope they assume I’m somewhere among the bodies and leave it at that. It might buy me some time anyway. They kind of have a lot on their plate right now. Either way, I’m leaning pretty hard on the hope that most people don’t even know about this trail, this overgrown path connecting New Liberty and old town. Safer than the checkpoints, goes the rhythm of my pedaling. Safer than the checkpoints.
What will I do when I get back to old town? I’m not honestly sure. Pack a bag, I guess. Get gone. No matter how well Jessa and the others try to hide me, eventually a surveillance feed will pick me up. A guard will recognize my face. Mr. Assan or the Carvalho family might turn me in for a reward. What kind of punishment gets doled out to people who harbor an ex-guest of the white rooms of Stellaxis HQ? If this works, Jessa and the others will never find out.
I can’t stay in old town long-term, not after that escape. They’ll have me on camera, being deliberately spared the bloodbath in the subbasements. Far as they’re concerned, I probably just got a whole lot more interesting.
All I need is a breathing space to knock a game plan together. One more night of sleep in my own bed. One more hot meal in me while I can. Get some supplies in order. Give everyone a proper goodbye.
But first I have to get there.
Firebreak Page 31
