She shrugs. “I told you. I never meant any of them harm.”
22 gestures. We follow him out into the hall. Communications is room 5302, within easy sight of the elevator. Lenses or no, the Director’s implant still works, so she gives her thumbprint and retinal scans to the biometrics reader on the lock, and it releases with a click. 22 opens the door and rushes in like a wind. Someone yelps, then silence.
We hurry in after. Communications is about twice the size of the Director’s office. A wall of windows overlooks the green lawns, the city beyond. I’ve never been this high up before.
There’s a man sitting in a chair facing an incomprehensible bank of dashboards and panels in front of a smart-surface wall. He’s in the process of removing his lenses, with shaking hands, at swordpoint. 22 holds out a hand, and the comms guy surrenders them without protest.
“We have a video to broadcast,” 22 tells him. “You’re going to help us do it.”
Comms guy blinks up at him. “Broadcast? Like, on the company news channel?”
“There are four company news channels,” I say, “and you know it. You’re going to simulcast this across all of them. Nationally. Farther, if you can. However far it goes.”
He looks at us, the confusion in his face deepening as he places each of us in turn: first 22, then the Director, then me. He stops just shy of saying what the fuck is going on. Apparently having a sword in your face is a great demotivator.
“Okay,” he says shakily. “I’ll set that right up.”
No idea what would have happened if this room had been empty. Communications doesn’t really seem to be the Director’s field, and it sure as hell isn’t mine, and 22’s probably the only person on the planet worse at it than me.
But this guy’s powering up the smart surface, and the Director is gesturing her login credentials over via the interface chip in her palm.
“Do, um. Do you need help making the video?” he asks, his whole body cringing away from the potential answer. I can’t really blame him. He has no idea what we’re doing here, but it’s not rocket science to figure out that it’s every shade of illegal.
“I make video reports all the time,” the Director says, to the guy’s obvious relief. “It’s not like the people up here come down to the basement to see how things are going. All I need is access to the broadcast channels. Then you can be on your way.”
Comms guy blinks his way through a few windows on the smart surface. “There. Done. You’re in. Can I go?”
“No,” 22 says. “You stay.”
The Director pulls up another chair in front of the wall.
“Everything you said downstairs,” I remind her.
“No tricks,” 22 adds. He runs the point of the sword slowly along the top few inches of her spine between her shirt collar and the back of her skull, raising the thinnest possible line of blood. “I can keep you alive for days.” He turns his gaze fractionally to the guy in the chair.
“Hey, man,” the guy says. “Of course. No tricks. Look.” He clasps his hands behind his neck like we’re here to arrest him.
“There’s no need to threaten me,” the Director says. “Did you have to drag me here? I came willingly.” The wall changes to reflect the room as she throws up a recording surface. She makes a doorknob-twisting motion in midair, bringing the smart wall in tighter focus on her face. “There are many decisions I have had to make over the past twelve years that I regret,” she says as she works. “I can’t undo them. But I can do this. Now shut up and let me.”
She starts broadcasting.
“This is Director of Operations Diana Reyes,” she says, as 22 stands by a wall offscreen and keeps an eye on the door. “I have worked for Stellaxis Innovations since September 2115. In the first quarter of 2122 I was put in command of a program with the goal of designing a new breed of soldier. I warn you that what I have to show you may be graphic.”
I expected somebody to shut us down by now. Maybe they’ve run out of guards to send in here, or they’re wary to throw more into the meat grinder of 22’s sword when it’s already single-handedly taken out everything they’ve sent so far, but they also haven’t cut or jammed the broadcast.
Unless they can’t. Unless there’s no failsafe for if a SecOps operative goes rogue and locks himself in this exact room. Certainly nothing they’ve done to prevent him getting here has had the least effect. They’re fucked.
I go over to 22. He hasn’t taken his eyes off the door, but I know he’s listening. I sidle up next to him, still watching the wall, shoulder to shoulder just like in the elevator a million billion years ago. “See?” I whisper. “It’s working. They’ll try to do damage control after, but now they’re trapped. It’s coming from their own house. We got them.”
“And you really think,” 22 murmurs back, “that this will make any kind of difference.”
Fuck if I know. Part of me wants to say yes. Wants to trust that people will be galvanized enough to effect change. An overlapping part of me points out that it’s their beloved operatives we’re talking about. 06 martyred for what we came here to resolve. Maybe that will mean more to them than a town with its water rations cut. Which is pretty fucked up in and of itself. I wonder how much it matters what the catalyst is, as long as there is one. Not that I can begin to say which is more important or worthy of attention. A few thousand people without water, or four dozen children stolen, tortured, used? We should never have let either of those things happen. We should be fighting both.
“I don’t know,” I say. “But do I think it’s the best play we have? Yeah.” I nod. “I do.”
He leans back against the wall and folds his arms. “Good enough.”
Now the Director is gesturing something from her implant over to the screen. It’s a photo of a girl, maybe fifteen years old. Lying on some kind of hospital table. Instantly recognizable as 05. Elena.
Did the Director choose 05 deliberately because of my videos? Impossible to say. I’m not even thinking about that yet. I’m wondering what happened to the girl in the photo. She’s very obviously dead and very obviously did not get there by being killed in action. Or by drowning in her blood in her sleep. Whatever happened to her is the furthest possible point from painless.
She looks burned. Almost. What it’s more like is the footage you see when a nuclear reactor explodes and they have to evacuate towns, and then they bring reporters around in hazmat suits to show the viewers at home what advanced radiation sickness looks like. But it’s something else, too. I have no comparison for what this dead girl looks like, except maybe a zombie, but that’s not right either. Whatever it is, she’s very, very sick. Her skin looks blistery and loose and weirdly gray. Her eyes are open and red-rimmed and just red, like all the capillaries in both of them have ruptured all at once. There’s blood crusted around her nostrils and tracked in dried paths down from both ears. The skin you can see is mottled, bruised, covered with weeping lesions and places where patches have shed damply away. I can’t get a good look at her hands to see if they bear the same weird old damage as 22’s, but I can make out similar evidence on her arms and shoulders. A network of scar tissue, ridges and valleys, like something has burrowed underneath her skin.
22 doesn’t turn to look, even when my breath catches audibly. He doesn’t need to. He’ll have witnessed the play-by-play, up close, inescapably, forty-six times already.
“One by one, the subjects’ bodies rejected the treatment. Very few survived the crisis period, pictured here. We lost three-quarters of our subjects before they could be released for duty. One promising subject, known to you as 17, almost made it through the crisis period before dying in his sleep, age nine. Those who survived this period—the eleven remaining SecOps operatives with whom you are familiar—were not immune to further damage. Their life expectancies were… severely curtailed. They were subject to periodic flare-ups of debilitating illness. Autoimmune responses. Organ replacement and skin grafts slowed the process, and blood transfusions met wit
h moderate success, but we were unable to find a permanent solution. The treatment ate away at them, month by month, year by year, and one by one it overcame them.”
So this is the occupational hazard that killed 08. That would have gotten 06 eventually. That will get 22.
06 was wrong. I was wrong. There was never any escape for any of them.
“Stellaxis was aware of this and did not allow my staff to discontinue the treatment. Though I petitioned them for years in my monthly progress reports. I called for conferences with every department I could think of. The marketing people laughed in my face. I have transcripts of all of this.”
This comes as something of a surprise. I had the Director tagged as some kind of paint-by-numbers evil scientist. But now I’m not so sure. She’s certainly not the highest rung on the ladder of who stands to gain. Does it make it better, what she did, if she was only following orders when she did it? Fuck if I know that, either.
If 22’s body language is any indication, he’s not inclined to think so. He’s got his arms folded like he’s holding himself together. Like how you’d hold a detonation shield over a grenade. It’s a wonder I don’t hear his ribs breaking.
“This is a complete list of the subjects of this project. Some numbers you will recognize. Most you will not. Before now they were never publicly released. The operatives you do know, thanks to the efforts of our marketing department, are simply the ones who lived long enough to be deployed.” She clears her throat. “Subject 2122-01-B, Torres, Inéz. Subject 2122-02-C, Khoury, Safiyah. Subject 2122-03-C, Geissler, Colin. Subject 2122-04-A, Nguyen, April. Subject—”
The helicopter appears from nowhere. On the smart wall it’s a dark shape behind the Director’s head, hovering outside the window maybe fifteen feet from the building.
A dark shape with a pale logo. A tiny two-lobed sprouting leaf.
Not a Stellaxis helicopter. A Greenleaf helicopter.
It adjusts a degree or two, making sure of its angle. Then it fires.
“Get—” I scream, but either the next word never comes out or it’s lost in the explosion when the missile strikes. Either way, too late.
So this is it. After everything, this is how I go. Blown up in Stellaxis HQ by a Greenleaf Industries missile alongside 22 and the Director and some poor fucking guy just trying to do his job.
Faster than dying of thirst anyway.
I don’t have time to turn away from the blast. I barely have time to flinch before the room is swallowed in white-hot billowing flame. The force of the explosion blows me backward through the wall so violently that at first I don’t even feel the pain of all my bones on that side shattering.
Fleetingly I wonder if falling to my death fifty-three floors down will be more pleasant than burning alive.
But I’m not tumbling through the air. All my bones aren’t broken. I’m being propelled sideways by some sustained force that takes me past the smashed-in wall and now sets me on my feet on the carpeted hallway of the fifty-third floor.
“You look like shit,” I tell 22 because the part of my brain that makes words has been utterly short-circuited while the rest of me struggles to piece together how I haven’t been incinerated. He must have grabbed me, shielded me with his body, and run us both straight through the fucking wall. Faster even than the fireball that devoured that room.
Almost.
He’s badly burned. His jacket is still on fire. He doesn’t seem to notice.
“Wait for my signal,” he says. “Then jump.”
Jump?
He vanishes back into the room. No fucking way am I abandoning him in there. I follow.
There was little in this room to burn. What there was—the carpet, the chairs, the bodies of the Director and the comms guy—burned quickly, and the blown-out giant window lets the cool spring air inside. The floor is sticky, which turns out to be the soles of my sneakers melting. It smells like a nightmare. But I can breathe without scorching my lungs.
I have about half a second to register all of this. And then 22 is launching himself out of the shattered window and straight at the helicopter, whose pilot has committed the tactical error of taking more than two seconds to peel away from SecOps leaping range. 22 grabs the skids one-handed, reaches up, and rips the door off its hinges. Then he lifts himself up and inside.
One body goes flailing out the open door and falls, screaming. Then another. 22 says something to the pilot, which I have no chance of hearing against the wind and the buffeting of the blades, but whatever it is, that helicopter stays put.
22 reappears in the space where the door used to be. He holds on to the doorframe of the fuselage with one hand and reaches the other out to me.
It’s at least ten feet of nothing between the wrecked window and him. I go over to the window and make the mistake of looking down. That close, the rotors are deafening, but I can clearly see that he can’t make the pilot bring it closer without clipping the side of the building.
I’m not a fucking supersoldier. Not even a dead one. I’m one of the orphaned kids Stellaxis had no use for, and I can’t make that jump. I will fall fifty-three floors and probably land on that stupid fountain. Behind me, back in the hall, the elevator is pinging.
22 adjusts his grip on the helicopter, leans out another inch. It looks painful. From here I can see how the skin has sloughed off with the burning sleeve of his uniform, leaving something not-skin, something oozing and red.
The elevator doors swish open.
Fuck it.
I back up for a running jump and tear ass across that room while gunfire crackles from the hall. My half-melted sneaker strikes the bare edge of the drop, and I leap, my arms windmilling in front of me. I’m going to wreck hell out of that fountain when I land.
22 catches me, wrist to wrist, and hauls me up. He must have yelled orders to the pilot previously, because the helicopter is already taking off fast over the city.
I barely have time to register the troubling pain constellation that’s mapped itself across my body—shoulder, side, leg—before I black out.
* * *
I JERK AWAKE to gunshots and struggle to sit. Thinking: 22’s gun was out of ammo. Thinking: I left my rifle in that room.
Out the door-hole, the city banks and wheels. We’re higher than I thought, spinning erratically above all but the tallest buildings. One more gunshot and then a scream as the pilot tumbles out into the air. Guess he thought he’d take out the last remaining SecOps survivor. Catch him by surprise. Go home a war hero. So much for that.
“Do you know how to fly this thing?” I yell up at 22. It hurts to yell. It hurts to breathe. It hurts to live.
“Not really,” 22 calls back. “You?”
“Of course I fucking don’t!”
I drag myself into the cockpit anyway, like I’m going to pick this up by looking at the controls. He’s managed to straighten us out, at least a little, but we need a plan before we crash or someone shoots us down. “What do we do?”
22 shrugs a little. “I didn’t expect to make it this far.”
“Okay. Okay. Lots of these buildings have helipads, right? If you can land us on one…” I trail off. Almost half of these buildings will belong, in one way or another, to Stellaxis Innovations, who just tried to kill us. Most of the other half will belong to Greenleaf Industries, who also just tried to kill us.
I catch sight of a Stellaxis building with a giant screen on the side. Then another. Then another. All playing static, as of a signal that’s just been cut. Like by a missile sent to stop a video. That, up until a minute ago, had been playing on these screens.
Huh.
“No. Wait. Outside the city. The woods where we were yesterday. Nobody goes there. Maybe you can land us in the trees.”
“Worth a try.” His tone strongly suggests he wouldn’t bet on himself sticking that landing. But he knows the way. You could see this place from the roof of the building. The woods. She always wanted to go.
Which is good for me
because my vision’s starting to go hazy again, darkening to a tunnel, then a point. From some vast distance someone says stay with me, hey, stay with me, and something shakes my bad shoulder. Pain bobs me back up to wakefulness, a cork on dark water. An outrageous amount of pain. It’s only when 22 withdraws his hand that I see the fresh blood on his palm.
The glove burned too, I note fuzzily. My thoughts feel like someone sank them in cement and pitched them in a river. My whole body has broken out in cold sweat. It occurs to me I’m shivering.
22 looks at his palm, then at me, eyes narrowed. He touches something on my shoulder that feels like a laser boring through me, front to back. “Fuck,” he whispers.
“Hey,” I mumble deliriously. “You finally said—”
And the leftover scraps of my consciousness drop me bang on the doorstep of whatever happens next.
0021
I DREAM OF BEING BURIED ALIVE AND wake to the smell of dirt. I’m clawing at a grave that’s not there when something grabs me by both hands. I can tell the grip is meant to be gentle. It isn’t.
“Just a dream,” 22 says, and lets go. His hands drop out of my field of vision. The pain resumes. I struggle to look down. I can’t even orient myself. 22 is kneeling beside me, both swords on the ground at his side. Am I sitting? Am I lying down? Where’s the helicopter?
“What are you—”
“You were shot.” He holds up a plastic first aid kit. It has the same leaf logo on it as the helicopter. The box rattles when he shakes it. Opening it reveals four bullets, slimy with clotting blood. “Several times.” He drops a fifth one in, applies a smart bandage to somewhere on my ribs. “Done.”
I blink. This seems to take several seconds. The gunshots as I ran the length of the communications room, preparing to jump. Guess they didn’t miss after all.
I try to ask him how it’s possible that I’m still alive, that people who have been shot any times, let alone five, are lucky if they survive in a hospital, let alone being field surgeried or whatever you call it in a—wherever the fuck we are.
Firebreak Page 36
