22 draws himself up and looks at me. If he’s conceptualized the difference between these two outcomes, it’s not obvious. His face twists, like something behind that welded-in-place calm demeanor is trying to leak out. “If you had any idea what this—person—put us through—”
“Okay, but… don’t I? At least a little? Either of you, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. She took you. All of you. Forty-eight of you. As children.” I look at 22, then at the Director. I hold my giant gun where she can see it. “Sit down.”
The Director looks at me, then looks at the gun. She sits.
“She took you from the wreckage of your families and your homes. The recovery crews that found the survivors in the fallen buildings brought you here. You, and all the children they didn’t end up taking. You were in a big bright room. Lots of kids running around. All of you were being observed. Asked questions. Given worksheets to do. Puzzles and things. You were being tested for candidate suitability somehow. While all any of you saw was a safe place. A roof over your head. A place to stay while your family was rescued too. I know. I know all of it. I was there.”
The Director opens her mouth, shuts it. As well she fucking might.
“There must have been a hundred kids there the day I was brought in. When they were done with us, they sent us to the camps. Everything we’d ever owned was gone, but they gave each of us a plastic bag with the company logo on the side, with a toothbrush and a blanket and I forget what else.” I twitch the gun toward the Director. “Help me out here.”
She swallows. “That wasn’t my department.”
I want to clobber her. Instead I talk over her head at 22. “It wasn’t her department. But here’s what I think was. They put us on the news as they led us out of there. Big publicity stunt. Big distraction. Waving our company-logo plastic bags. Tell me, Director Reyes. Out of those hundred kids that day. Just that one day, when I was processed. How easy would it have been for a few to just… not leave?”
22’s gripping his sword so hard that either his hand or the hilt is going to break. “Go on,” he says. His voice is nothing. How can he still stand here, menacing her, when he can barely speak against the SecOps program aloud? He’s going to black out. He’s going to have an aneurysm. Hurry up, Mal.
“Nobody was left to come looking for you. Not in the camps, not in the lists of dead, not anywhere. That was probably part of the appeal of the four dozen kids she chose. She kept you in this building. Probably in this basement. Didn’t let you out much. Something was done to you. Something to change you. Make you into weapons. It took a long time.” I think of 17, the first to die, and of the damage under 22’s gloves. I realize the next part aloud. “I’m not sure you all survived the experience.”
“The biotechnology was bleeding edge, unprecedented,” the Director protests. “As such the methodology was unavoidably uneven in its advancement. Unfortunately, hindsight is—”
“If you tell me hindsight is twenty-twenty in the context of systematically kidnapping and torturing children for profit, I am going to knock your fucking teeth in,” I inform her. “Did any of them actually die in combat? Or was that just what we were told? Remembrance flares for those who were killed in action fighting for our economic freedom. It probably sells more mourning swag than if you say slowly tortured to death in a basement over the span of a decade or more, I guess.”
The Director sits up a little straighter. “I never meant those children harm.”
“And yet you never stopped harming them. Or letting the company and the media lie about what the operatives are. Where you got them in the first place. They’re not some kind of biological robot thing that grows like a person but is conveniently too hard to replace when it dies. They’re children Stellaxis stole. And gave to you. To change. To use. To cover for the lie. Because if people knew the truth, there’d be outrage. And that’d look real, real bad for the company. Just like it does now. Because I put the truth out there. And I’ll keep—”
The barest noise reaches us from farther up the hall. A tiny scrape, like someone’s armored elbow brushing a wall. More security guards, maybe, trickled down from the building somewhere, coordinating an assault on this room.
I raise the gun, but 22’s holding up one gloved finger: Wait. He listens for a second, then strides straight across the Director’s office, throws the door open, walks out. There come panicked shouts, bursts of gunfire, wet slumps as bodies hit the tiled floor. 22 returns. The sword is still unsheathed. He stalks toward the Director’s desk, and I scramble back around it and walk up at him until he’s forced to either go around me or through.
He does neither. He stops.
“She knows what she did,” he says, not taking his eyes off the Director past my head. “I know what she did. It doesn’t—”
“Listen to me. Our goal here is the same. Just hear me out. How did 17 die?” I ask over a shoulder.
“He drowned,” the Director says, too startled by the change of subject to prevaricate. “In his blood. In his sleep. I believe it to have been painless. We were still fine-tuning the—”
“How many were actually killed in action? Not deployed. Not saw action. Killed. In combat.”
The Director squirms a little. “Does it really—”
“Yes,” I say, at the same time 22 says, “Two.”
“Two?” The Director’s brow furrows. Even here, even now, a discrepancy in her data is enough to snag her attention from imminent death. “38, certainly. Who’s the—”
“Catherine,” 22 says, his voice terrible. He’s passed beyond murderous rage and into something far quieter, colder, held perilously in abeyance. At the moment it’s working out well for me, but whatever’s at the end of this tunnel isn’t going to be pretty. “Catherine was killed in action. At war with you.”
This hits home. “Catherine was—”
“Catherine,” 22 practically whispers, “was what?”
“Two out of forty-eight,” I say loudly. “As an experiment goes, those aren’t great results. You’re running out of subjects. What about the next batch?”
“There won’t be a next batch,” the Director says. “They axed the funding years ago. The project’s done.” Her face does something I can’t place. If Jessa were here she could. I’ve never been able to read people like she can. But from where I’m standing it looks a lot like anger. “There were any number of phases of this project I never approved. My concerns were overruled. But I was always…”
When she trails off, I turn in time to see her eyes widening. I track her stricken gaze to 22. I don’t even know how to describe the look on his face. But I know what it means.
The project is done. It was over anyway, it would die with the last of the twelve, and she never told them. Which means 06’s death stopped nothing. No more SecOps machine for her corpse to jam the gears of. The war trundles on without her, without 22 or 08 or anyone, no matter how special they were raised to think they were. And my chance of keeping the Director alive has just evaporated.
I push the air in front of me with both palms, a futile gesture with a decidedly nonzero chance of ending with my hands getting lopped off. “Wait. Please. Just—”
The door cracks open behind me, and something rolls into the room. 22 moves so fast he practically vanishes, and the next thing I know he’s opening the door and throwing something back out, then slamming the door and locking it. “Gas grenade,” he tells me.
Not resonance grenades. Not frag grenades. Not any number of awful things it could have been. For one pants-shitting second I imagine being stuck in a room with a hallucinogen burst and 22.
I look at the Director. “Guess they don’t want you dead either.” Even as I’m saying it, I wonder. If the SecOps program is over, is it her they’re protecting? Or the last remaining part of their investment?
Do they actually think he’s going to let them take him alive?
The Director perks up a little at the either. Then looks confused. Glances from me
to 22, who very obviously doesn’t share the sentiment.
“She can’t help us if you kill her,” I tell him.
“Help us,” 22 says, voice curdled with hate. “The furthest thing possible from anything she has ever done is help—”
“Well, today she’s going to broadcast a live confession. Everything she just told us. She’s going to take us to wherever in this godforsaken building she can do that from.”
I look the question at her. The gun looks too.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Communications?”
I nod. “I think I saw that on the list for the sublevels.”
“No,” she says. “Ours is for internal communications. Reporting results back upstairs, that kind of thing. You’ll need theirs. I don’t know the floor. I don’t get out of the basement much either.” A watered-down smile. Then an idea hits her. “Actually. I have a map.”
The glassy-eyed stare comes over her as she accesses something on her lenses. Within about a nanosecond 22 is beside her, the point of his sword set just below her right eye. “Careful.”
But she only gestures, throwing the map up on the wall.
Lenses. Lenses that interface. I could make her get word out to old town. Tell Jessa I’m sorry, but I might not be coming home. I don’t want to leave her wondering what happened to me. Most of our families’ bodies were never found, or at least not identifiably. I can’t put that kind of question on her all over again.
Shit. I could have asked 22. If his implant will even let him access anyone who lacks high-level Stellaxis clearance, which I doubt. They’ve got him on a tighter leash than that.
Or thought they did.
The Director runs a search on COMMUNICATIONS and finds it, way up on the fifty-third floor.
“There,” I say. “Okay. Let’s move out.”
22 doesn’t budge.
“Look,” I tell him. “You kill her, they replace her, end of story. The program’s done. They barely need her anymore.” The Director makes a face at this but knows well enough to keep her trap shut. I ignore her. “But we air the company’s dirty laundry in public? They don’t like that shit at all. Why do you think they put me in that cell? Exposing Stellaxis’s lies got old town’s water rations cut. It got my implant put on lockout. It got me thrown into interrogation. And most people didn’t even believe me. But they’ll believe it when it’s coming from her. Being broadcast from this building. With the only surviving operative to corroborate her story. This is a major corporation,” I add, because for all I know this is news to 22. “Kill their people, they send more people. Destroy the building, they build another. But my way? We burn this fucking place down from the inside. And that is how we’re going to finish what Kit started.”
22 studies me for a long evaluating moment. Then he nods once at the box on the Director’s desk. “There are files in there? On us?”
The Director touches the box unconsciously, protectively. “Yes.”
“Then pick it up and start walking.”
She doesn’t protest. While the Director retrieves the papers from the floor and stuffs them in the box, 22 draws me aside. “I’ll take point. You follow with her. Whatever she says, whatever she does, don’t trust her. Not for a second. Maybe she didn’t want to hurt us, but she still took notes while she watched us die. We’ll do it your way, but after that, she’s mine.”
I swallow. “Maybe she’s trying to make it right.”
“She can’t,” 22 says simply. “But it’s as good a use of her last minutes as any.”
0020
“WAIT,” 22 SAYS. HE’S OPENED THE DOOR to the hall and is standing half in, half out of it, pistol in hand, listening to something I don’t have a hope in hell of hearing. “They’re at the elevators. They’re waiting for us.” He smiles coldly. “I imagine they got tired of sending their people down the hall to die.”
“So they’re going to ambush us instead?” I say.
He holsters his pistol and draws both swords, the whole one and the broken. “No. They’re going to die there instead.”
I glance back at the map on the wall. “Show me this sublevel?”
The Director complies.
There are emergency exits from sublevel A up to the ground floor. Four huge, round hatches, set into the ceiling. Like the lower floors of Stellaxis HQ are more of a bunker than a basement. And maybe they are. This building was put here with the expectation of a corporate turf war, after all.
But all four of those are situated at some distance from the elevators. We either fight our way to one of them and then back across the ground floor to the elevator up, or we fight through to the elevators here.
“Don’t let her out of your sight,” 22 tells me. “If she tries to run, shoot her. If she tries to call for help, shoot her. Take your lenses out.” This part is pretty clearly aimed at the Director. She obeys.
“Put them on the floor.”
She does, and 22 grinds them to jelly beneath his heel. “Anything suspicious,” he tells me. “Take the shot.”
“We need her,” I say. “Alive. Remember?”
“Then shoot her in the stomach,” he says, “and tell her to walk faster.”
The Director blanches.
“They weren’t like this as eight-year-olds, huh?” I murmur to her. I poke her in the back with the rifle. “Let’s go.”
Backtracking along the halls to the elevator is uneventful. But 22 stops me before I lead the Director around the final corner. He holds one gloved finger to his mouth. Quiet. Then gestures wait here. The unspoken threat he glances at the Director looks elaborate. I press the gun against her spine for good measure.
A sword in each hand, 22 takes off running.
The second he turns the corner there’s a deafening rattling noise as easily two hundred bullets gnaw a hole in the wall to our left. Perimeter gun. Fully automatic. Motion sensors. It’s all I can do not to do something stupid. Attempting to provide cover fire will just get me reduced to stew within seconds. I’ve never seen perimeter guns in real life, but in the game, my semiautomatic would be about as effective as a water gun against one.
I drag the Director back and down into a crouch just as a spray of bullets clips the cinder-block corner less than a foot from her face.
Then I realize the burst of gunfire didn’t come from the perimeter gun. Or anything else out of sight by the elevators. It came from behind.
I whirl around, still crouched, already strafing with the rifle. My aim is for shit, but the safety’s been switched off since before the Director’s office, and it’s just point and shoot, ridiculously easy. A few shots catch my attacker across the middle of the body, most of them absorbed by the smart armor, but not all. Something takes me over. Panic? Anger? Protectiveness? I don’t know. I keep firing until he stops moving.
Stops moving.
I stare at him a second. He doesn’t get up.
“Fuck,” I whisper. The gun falls from my hands. Only the strap around my neck keeps it from clattering.
Behind me, the noise at the elevators stops. A hand reaches around the corner and grabs the Director by the arm, dragging her forward so hard she goes flying, the box skidding across the floor.
I sprint over, gun at the ready—but it’s 22, now in the process of bundling the Director and her box of stuff into the elevator. There are more dead soldiers here, along with the mangled wreckage of the perimeter gun, which looks to have been picked up, sentry tripod and all, and twisted into a one-ton heap of legs and barrels, then flung into the ceiling. 22 catches me staring up at this like some kind of war tourist and makes a hurry-up gesture with one hand. I hustle over as, down the hall, booted footsteps close the distance. 22 covers me with the pistol as I get into the elevator, and smart armor or no, each shot is a kill. When he runs out of ammo, he draws 06’s broken sword and hurls it, like some kind of oversized throwing knife. It goes end over end and buries itself in somebody’s faceplate, thirty yards down the hall. 22 stares fixedly after it,
like he’s only just now realizing what he’s thrown.
“Come on!” I shout at him because there are now a dozen or so live soldiers running past the dead one in our direction, and he’s standing there, out of ammo, presenting them with the clearest shot they could have asked for on all their birthdays combined. Even if by some miracle he gets past them to retrieve 06’s sword, it’s a delay that gives more company goons a chance to catch up with us on our way upstairs, or worse, just freeze the elevators and strand us. “We’ll come back for it after, let’s go.”
Bullets whistle past his head. A drone tries to dive-bomb the open elevator, spraying fléchettes. 22 shears it from the air, then sprints down the hallway and plows into the oncoming enemy. He cuts one down, then another, slides under a spray of bullets, and before I know it he’s beside me in the elevator, 06’s sword in his hand.
I eye him. “Really.”
“I can’t leave it,” he says. To his credit he looks at least somewhat repentant. “Long story.”
He closes the doors and inputs 53 on the touchscreen. The elevator climbs and climbs. No knowing what will be waiting when those doors open. I push the Director behind me.
“No,” 22 tells me. “Keep her in front of you. Back up into the corner.”
This seems backward to me. “The hell? I’m not using her as cover. We need her alive.”
“You are probably the only person in this entire building who doesn’t deserve to die,” 22 says. “I am asking you—”
“What about you? You deserve to die?”
It takes him a second to reply. The Director is watching this exchange like her fingers are itching to take notes on it. “I should have died a long time ago,” he says eventually.
“That isn’t—” I start to say, but the elevator pings and the doors open.
Onto an empty hallway.
I look at the Director. Her lenses are out now, but she still had them in when she realized where we were going. She could have contacted whoever’s been sending these guards and soldiers after us, told them to set a trap for us when we arrived. But she didn’t.
Firebreak Page 35
