But what comes out is “Not dead?”
“Not quite. You were lucky.”
Too fast for bullets, I think. Then I realize I said it aloud.
“Smart of you to hide that,” he says. “Twelve years ago. You would’ve ended up like me.”
Laughing hurts. It hurts a lot.
It’s worth it.
I struggle to get a grip on my situation, but all my senses are muddled. We’re under trees, at the edge of the woods. Through bare branches I can see the fields beyond. The dirt smell is because I’m lying on dirt, propped up on something that feels an awful lot like a rock. At a guess, it’s midmorning.
“You weren’t awake to see me land the helicopter,” he says. “Pity.” He lifts his chin toward something to the left, where the trees fade into abandoned farmland.
I try to prop myself up on my elbows and at once regret this intensely. He raises me up to see.
Out in the fields, something’s burning. Something big.
“They don’t have helicopter piloting in your combat simulator, huh?”
“They do,” he says deadpan. “My landings look like this there, too.”
His breath catches in a way I’ve only heard it do once before, but I know at once means pain. Too much of it to hide. Of course. The burns. For all I know he’s been shot too. It’s been that kind of fucking day. He held it together long enough to dig the bullets out of me, but now he’s visibly spiraling.
22 reaches out, sets one hand against the earth to steady himself. There is very little skin left on that hand. I can’t tell how much of the blood is his versus mine.
“In the house,” he says. “Emergency kit. Flare gun. They’ll come for you. You need a—hospital.”
“Fuck a hospital. They’ll just arrest me anyway. Stay still.”
I grit my teeth and push myself upright.
Whatever was in that first aid kit, he hasn’t used a bit of it on himself. He’s burned horrifically. The jacket of his uniform is pretty much of a piece with his body. There is nothing between the insides of his hands and the air. You flew a helicopter like that, I think. You caught me when I jumped. You pulled bullets out of me.
I look around for the rest of the first aid stuff. Whatever he dumped out of the box and rifled through to find the things he used on me. I don’t see much. There are a few smart bandages, a nearly empty tube of antibiotic cream, a splint, a few painkiller dermal patches, and some insta-stitches that turn out to be mostly wrappers. He must have used those up on me.
There’s nothing here I can heal him with. I mean. There’s nothing in a hundred untouched mint-in-box first aid kits that could heal him. He needs a medbot. A long stay in a good hospital. Whatever that thing was 06 used on those injured people a lifetime ago. But I could have at least tried. If he hadn’t used it all up helping me.
“What the fuck,” I whisper, “did you do.”
“Told you,” he says. “Should’ve died a long time ago. You heard what the Director said. All borrowed time now. Makes no difference.”
“Bullshit,” I say. “Blood transfusions, remember? Organ transplants. I could crowdfund that for you in five seconds flat.” Remembering the look on his face, seeing the SecOps posters in that dead kid’s room. You have no idea who you are, I almost say, but what comes out is: “You have no idea how many people you have behind you. And we are not letting—you die—in some—fucking—field.” I get one knee under me, shove myself to standing. It hurts. Way worse than laughing. It feels like someone is drilling holes in me, and someone else is putting out cigarettes in them. It gets worse when I reach back down and try to drag 22 up with me.
I can’t lift him. He’s deadweight. Worse, he’s starting to look like he’s about to pass out. Whatever reserve of will that’s carried him this far ended when he pulled that fifth bullet out of me. The dry humor from a minute ago was the last light left in a sinking ship. He’s dying.
“Get the fuck up,” I grit at him, categorically failing once more to heave him to his feet. Something in my side gives way. I ignore it. “You’re not done.”
He blinks up at me in bleary surprise. Somehow, seeing him like this—all the sharp edges of him dulled to mush—is almost worse than the evidence of injury. It isn’t that he’s unrecognizable. It’s the opposite. It’s that he’s recognizable and broken.
“Of course I am,” he says, in a voice like sleeptalking. “The Director is dead. The project is dead. I finished what she started.” Effortfully he draws me into focus. “We. Finished what she started. The Director’s confession is out in the world. You were right about that. It is exactly what Kit would have wanted. Not just killing the people behind it. Shutting it down. You—”
He stops moving. His eyes close. He doesn’t even fall over. He’s still kneeling in the dirt, like a decommissioned mech. Switched off.
“No.” It rips out of me more breath than voice. “No you fucking well do not.”
He’s breathing. I see that now. Still breathing. Shallowly, erratically, but there.
I start rummaging through the pile of scattered first aid supplies. Ripping smart bandages open with trembling hands. Put them on the worst of the burns, I think, and then almost start laughing hysterically. The worst of the burns cover probably forty percent of his body.
I apply them as best I can. His back, which he put between the burning room and me, is the worst of it. I crawl around behind and stick smart bandages to the red mess of him.
They won’t even stick. They need skin around the edges to adhere to. They shift wetly and peel back at the corners.
And right then, right at that moment, is when it starts to rain.
There’s no cover. The trees do nothing to stop it. A few degrees colder and it’d be sleet.
The ground liquefies to mud beneath me instantly. My feet skid as I try once more to pull him to his feet. My field of vision darkens and slews ominously. White sparklers fall through it. I might be in less rough shape than 22, but not by much. I have to watch out. We both pass out in this, we die. Either from hypothermia or blood loss or shock or because the company—either company—comes back and finds us. At least the downpour will put out the helicopter fire, making us harder to spot.
If it’s not too late. If this area was visible from the Stellaxis building rooftop, then the fireball definitely is. It’s too much to hope they’ll assume we burned up in the wreckage. Far more likely there was a tracker in the helicopter, and they’re on their way right now.
Who is they? I don’t even know anymore. That was a Greenleaf helicopter. Maybe it was just taking potshots at its enemy’s HQ. At the exact moment Stellaxis stumbled into a trap it couldn’t get out of on its own.
Sure.
I need to get in front of this. Throw them off the scent. In the slim-to-nil chance we actually make it out of this field alive.
I can’t go back home. Not after what I’ve done. I can’t do that to Jessa. To any of them. But I can’t let them catch me either. Me, or 22. Will they track his implant? Or mine? Almost definitely. But I’m not a brain surgeon. I have to do what I can.
What if I leave something at the crash site that makes it look like we burned? Something that we wouldn’t leave behind.
It might give them pause, anyway. Buy a little time. I have to try.
Taking quick inventory of our possessions doesn’t turn up much. A nearly empty first aid kit. Some bullets. Our clothes. 22’s weapons.
06’s broken sword.
I half expect him to snap awake and grab it from me when I pick it up from the ground beside him. After all, he refused to leave it behind in the Stellaxis building. But he doesn’t move.
There’s no room here for sentimentality. I don’t know 06—Kit—very well, of course, but I can’t see her wanting 22 to get himself killed over some relic of her service to the company.
Carrying it across those few hundred yards toward the guttering blaze of the helicopter feels like miles, but I get it there. I can’t bring
myself to pitch it in the fire, so I drop it nearby, hoping it looks like it was flung free in the blast. Hoping the rain will erase my footprints. Hoping I can get 22 to cover before it’s too late for him, or for me, or for us both. If it’s not too late already.
We’re dangerously close to city limits. In the middle of a field. A drone could pop out of nowhere and shoot my bloodstream full of two dozen separate biohazards before I make it to the trees.
I have to find the trail. That busted house is the only cover I know out here.
Squinting through the rain, I maybe catch a glimpse of the trailhead, a gap in the trees about a quarter mile off. The crumpled shape of something that might be the remains of the sign. It’ll be hard going through the woods, suicidal going out here over open ground.
Fast as I can, I limp back to where I left 22 and kneel in the mud beside him. I can’t carry him. He’s going to have to walk.
“Sorry,” I whisper, and jam my thumb into the burned flesh of his arm.
It works pretty much exactly as well as it did when suit guy did it to me in the white room. 22 jolts awake, grabbing my wrist hard enough that my bones creak, then letting go when he sees it’s just me.
“Sorry,” I say again, now that he can hear it. I’m already gathering up the first aid garbage, shoveling the sodden lump of it back into the plastic case. No evidence left behind. “I had to wake you up. We have to walk.” I point vaguely in what I hope is the direction of the trail. “Over there.”
“I won’t make it. Leave me here and go.”
“Yeah, that’s going to happen. Come on. I know the way.”
Slowly, laboriously, like a couple of shambling undead corpses, we hold each other up and make our way through the trees. There’s no footing and no path and the world is thorns and rain and everything hurts, and where my hand hits 22’s arm it comes away sticky, and we must both be running out of blood to bleed, but neither one of us quite passes out again, and eventually, long past when we’re soaked through and shivering and I’m certain we’re irreparably lost, we hit the trail.
It’s still over a mile to the house, though, and we’re both fading fast. I black out a few times, coming to as I stumble in the mud. Judging by 22’s weight on my shoulder, he’s faring similarly.
“Hey,” I say. My voice sounds like it’s been tied to the back of a truck and dragged cross-country. I force words out all the same. We fall asleep, we die. Or we wake up back in the company basement, which is worse. “Why don’t you ever see elephants hiding in trees?”
A bit of 22’s weight lifts off me as he rouses a little. Still, there’s a space of silence before he wakes up enough to speak. “What?”
“Because they’re really good at it.”
Silence.
“Get it? My mom told me that joke. Right before she died.” My voice is slurring worse now. I sound drunk. We both sound drunk. We stagger down the trail, only stubbornness and momentum keeping us upright. I understand what the phrase dead on my feet means now. I’m going to be dead in the mud if we can’t keep each other awake. “Your turn.”
There’s a long enough pause that I’m sure he’s fainted again. “Did you hear about the restaurant on the moon?” he says at last.
“Wait,” I mumble. “Don’t tell me.” I’m sure I’ve heard this one before. I just can’t bring it to mind. My brain is a sponge full of glue. I’m going to fall asleep waiting for it to cough up the answer. “I give up.”
“Great food,” he says. “No atmosphere.”
I try to groan.
“One of the guards used to tell them to us, and we’d pass them around. Kit told me that one. A long time ago.”
“That’s truly awful.”
“That’s what I told her.”
“Do you remember any—” I trip over my own feet, land hands and knees in the mud of the trail. White fire lances up my side. 22 drags me up. I lift my left foot, plant it. Then the right. “Any others?”
“Hmm.” Another dangerously long silence. “Two goldfish are in a tank.”
I don’t even bother trying. “I give up.”
“One of them says to the other, ‘Do you know how to drive this thing?’ ”
“Oh my god. That’s even worse than the first one.”
He sounds almost pleased. “I know.”
“Thanks, Kit,” I say, immediately wondering if I’ve overstepped.
“That one,” 22 says, “I told her.”
We carry on like this the whole way up the trail. Not just terrible jokes but whatever random shit falls through our minds. Our favorite foods. Weird dreams we’ve had. The best kinds of weather. Games we’ve played. (“Would a combat simulator count as a game?” 22 asks. “Sure,” I say. “Why not.”) Movies we’ve liked. Turns out 22 hasn’t seen any since he was little, and he’s not entirely sure whether he actually saw any then or only imagined it in hindsight, so I promise to take him to see one when we get out of here, which we both know is a lie but the best kind of lie, the kind of lie that keeps you walking when your everything is shutting down around you, like a house’s lights being turned off, one by one.
After forever, we reach the overgrown yard, slog through the tall grass, drag ourselves up the porch, somehow make it through the door, and immediately collapse. Right there on the floor. We don’t even make it to the couch.
If I can get to the bathroom, there might be more first aid stuff in the medicine cabinet. I have a vague memory of seeing it there. Was that just yesterday?
But I can’t get up. I can’t even reach over to the first aid kit I dropped when I fell over in this entryway. We just slump there against the wall, breathing. All our injured places smushed against one another. We don’t even have the energy to move the inch or so that would change this. To do anything. Say anything. Keep our eyes open.
I’m sorry, Jessa. But everybody has to die sometime. I hope you’re not too pissed at me. I hope my plan worked. I hope you get your water back. I hope you find the third option I never figured out. No Stellaxis, no Greenleaf. Something else. Something new.
I had a real-life adventure, Jessa. And I saw it the fuck through.
I’m almost asleep when 22 says something. I can’t quite make it out. It sounds like it might be thank you, which strikes me as ridiculous. As if I have somewhere else to be, something else I could be doing that’s more the culmination of all my life’s pitiful desires than sitting in this spreading puddle on this floor beside him, free, awake, alive.
Later, when I wake up and find his corpse cooling against me, his head lolled on my shoulder like he fell asleep beside me on the bus—later, when I try to shake him awake and part of his burned flesh peels off against me and stays there—later, when I drag myself to the kitchen of the fallen house to find the fucking pie server I’ll use to dig 06’s grave back up, and out to the shed to find the can of gasoline I’ll pour over them both once I’ve dragged 22’s corpse through that tall grass in the lightening rain, and back through the house to find the match—later, when I sit in the dirt under a clearing sky and set the fire that will keep them both out of company hands forever—I’ll wish I’d somehow maintained consciousness just long enough to reply.
0022
I DON’T KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS, what day it is, how long it’s been since the white room, the Director’s confession, the crash, the house, any of it, when I finally stagger off the trail and into old town. It’s dark, and it’s raining again, and I don’t feel the cold anymore, and it smells almost like spring.
It’s past power curfew, whenever it is, so I make my way through empty streets, one hand trailing on the buildings like it’s a maze I’m trying to find my way out of, one hand dragging 22’s sword behind me because I haven’t figured out yet how to let it go.
Nobody stops me. Nobody sees me. Maybe I died out there and I’m a ghost, walking home because there’s nowhere else for me to return to. Certainly I don’t feel like anything more substantial than that. I may as well be made out of the rain.
I can’t stay. I can’t ask anyone to hide me. I shouldn’t even be here at all. But there are bandages and water and clean clothes and food in our room, and as much as I hate the idea of letting Jessa see me like this, I owe her at least the decency of a proper goodbye.
For a while I stood over the pit of flame that was 06’s grave and now is 22’s also, and weighed the pain of burning against whatever the company will do to me when it gets hold of me again. I held 22’s sword to my throat and weighed that quicker pain against the same. How much blood could possibly be left in me? It’d take seconds at most.
But then I remembered what 22 had said. I am going to finish what she started.
And I lowered the sword, and turned, and walked away.
Not knowing what I’ll do. What I can even do. Only that doing nothing isn’t an option anymore. The entire fucking world is burning. Jessa and Keisha and Tegan and the rest of us, we tried to draw a line to stop it. Firebreak, Keisha said. But the fire jumped right over. Over us, and 06, and 22. And it’ll probably amount to nothing, but with whatever life is left to me, I’m going to plant myself right in the path of it and yell my fucking head off.
The Director’s video. It’s out there. It’s not getting put back in the box. I have to hope that someone will connect it to the videos Jessa and I made. What 22 told me in Stellaxis HQ. Fake Nycorix in her RESIST shirt. Old town’s rations cut. That mech on my doorstep, showing up in the internet blackout of an impromptu power curfew to threaten me. A mech of Greenleaf design.
Like that helicopter.
I hope to all fuck that its cute little leaf logo was visible through the window behind the Director’s head just before the broadcast cut out forever—right before the precision strike that just so happened to occur in the exact room, at the exact moment, that something inconvenient needed shutting down.
All this long walk I’ve been wondering, nine-tenths out of my head with blood loss and exhaustion and thirst and bereavement: If you were Stellaxis Innovations, and you wanted to nip a problem in the bud without getting caught holding the shears—what would you do?
Firebreak Page 37
