by James Axler
* * *
BRIGID REACHED THE junction of corridors a couple of minutes later, back where she had become confused. She halted for just a moment, spun clockwise on her heel scanning all routes, telling herself that she was Brigid Baptiste the whole time in her mind, occasionally muttering the words under her breath. Then, making a decision, she turned around and retraced her steps, then continued on into the Residential Enclaves, where she knew the Magistrates would also have their apartments. They would spend their time there when they were not on shift.
Kane could be on shift, that was true, but he might be here. Statistically, she had more chance of finding Kane here than anywhere else anyway—after all, it would be the one location where he would remain in a static place for any significant amount of time, the rest of his hours taken up with patrolling the myriad corridors of Ioville and the area outside.
A line of doors waited on either side of the wide corridor. Brigid halted, watching them for a moment. A Magistrate came striding down the corridor past her, making his way to his room, removing his helmet as he walked. The helmet was painted a dull gray that seemed to suck in all available light and it featured a shaded visor, which entirely hid an individual’s eyes, reaching all the way down to the very base of the nose, leaving only the mouth and chin visible. The effect of that helmet was terrifying, striking dread into any citizen who faced it.
Brigid watched the Magistrate walk the corridor and push the door open into his private sleeping quarters.
Brigid smiled inwardly. Now all she had to do was check the sleeping quarters, hope that Kane was here or, if he wasn’t, that there was some sign, some clue, as to which unit he inhabited.
Be bold, Brigid Baptiste, she told herself. Act like you belong.
She began to walk down the corridor, moving toward the first of forty doors behind which lay the private sleeping quarters of the Magistrates. She pushed open the first door—unlocked—and confirmed that the room was unoccupied. She took a moment to look around the room, seeing the basic bed with gray blanket and wall screen above, single chair and countertop beside which was a lockup box set into the wall where weapons would be held.
There were two doors within the room, standing next to one another at the end of the bed. Brigid walked over to these and tried the first. It slid aside on runners. Inside was a short rail and three fixed hangers on which clothes could be hung. It was a wardrobe.
The second door also slid back, this one revealing a trash unit with a faucet and one single half-pint glass. Brigid drew the door closed again, closing the wardrobe, as well.
Then she made her way to the door, her heart beating a little faster. The thought occurred to her that she might have been observed, that she may have triggered a silent alarm or that there could be a camera watching her.
Doesn’t matter, she told herself. Just find Kane.
Brigid stepped from the sleeping unit and back into the main corridor. Thirty-nine rooms to go.
As she stepped out, two more Magistrates appeared from behind her, striding down the corridor purposefully, their expressions fixed and grim. Brigid turned, her heart racing faster, worried that perhaps they had come for her. Perhaps her paranoia about triggering an alarm had been well-placed after all.
Brigid stepped back, pushing into the nearest open doorway, pulling the gray peak of her cap down self-consciously. The two Magistrates walked straight past her, neither acknowledging her nor failing to see her.
They simply don’t see me as a risk, Brigid confirmed. To them I’m just another obedient citizen, and my being up here must have a rational explanation.
She was barely able to contain her smile as she stepped out from the doorway and strode along the corridor. She moved quickly but tried not to look too hurried.
Please be here, Brigid thought. Please be in one of these rooms.
Most of the doors were wide-open. Brigid trotted along the corridor, peering into each one. The rooms were bland and characterless, gray walls and neatly made beds, sparse furniture and zero decoration. To Brigid they seemed like prison cells, but as she thought that she realized what a bad analogy it was—even prisoners, especially prisoners, personalize their cells, try to make the blandness somehow their own, somehow special. The people of Ioville, however, had lost all of that; that wonderful uniqueness that made them human.
Three doors of the corridor were closed, one after another. Brigid walked more slowly past them, wondering what to do.
She would try a door, but what if someone inside wanted to know why? She needed a reason, an excuse.
“Then use the truth,” she told herself in a whisper.
Brigid knocked on the first door, painted a kind of oatmeal gray, then opened it. It was a bunk room like the others, a single cubicle where a Magistrate would sleep while off duty. No one was inside and the bed was neatly made. She wanted to stop, look around, hoping she might see a clue that it was maybe Kane’s room, but she knew how ridiculous that was—Kane was a part of the system now, and he had lost his individuality just like everyone else.
She exited the room, then tried the same knock-open pattern on the next door. A voice spoke up even as she swung the door open, and Brigid saw a man lying on the bed, holding his hand up before his eyes. The man was in his twenties, dark-skinned with black hair and a muscular torso, naked but covered by a rough blanket.
“Is it shift?” he asked groggily.
“No,” Brigid said, and she began to step from the cubicle. She stopped herself, eyes still on the half-asleep Mag, and something occurred to her. “I have the wrong instructions,” she explained, taking a single step back into the room. “I was told to meet a Magistrate called—” she thought back, remembering the number Kane had given her when he’d told her to report her behaviour “—620M. He’s new.”
The man in the bed looked mystified, then pointed vaguely in the direction that Brigid had been headed. “Six doors down. 620M should be about to start shift, I think, but you may catch him,” the man explained, his words slurred.
“Thank—” Brigid stopped herself, swallowing the word. “Acknowledged,” she said, stepping from the apartment and closing the door.
She hurried up the corridor, counting six doors farther along until she was faced with her next dilemma. There were two doors there, one on either side of the bland corridor. Which one? Which one?
Brigid tried the one to her right, entering with a single knock.
Kane stood before her, dark Magistrate uniform on, the top not yet zipped up. Brigid gasped, seeing him look up as he reached for his helmet. She had seen him like this before, years ago when she had first met him in Cobaltville. He had come to her apartment there and challenged her, alcohol on his breath, fear and disarray clouding his mind. He glared at her now, the cruel armor of the Magistrate Division making him into as much a symbol as a man.
“Do you require something, citizen?” Kane asked.
Chapter 25
“Kane, it’s me,” Brigid said, suddenly finding it hard to swallow. “It’s Brigid.”
The man in the Magistrate armor glared at her, challenge in his steely blue-gray eyes. “Citizen, what is your purpose?”
Brigid stepped into the tiny, single-room apartment, pushing the door closed behind her. “Kane, it’s me. Snap out of it.”
Kane looked at her, a hint of confusion furrowing his brow. “Citizen...?”
“Kane!” Brigid blurted, striding across the room and grabbing Kane by both biceps, the same way he had grabbed her just a few weeks ago when she, too, had been lost in the miasma of Terminal White. “You need to listen to me and really try hard to hear what I’m saying—”
Kane flexed his muscles and shoved Brigid away, dropping the Mag helmet he had been holding so that it rolled across the nightstand.
“Take your hands from me, citizen,”
Kane snarled, as she stumbled back into the nearest wall.
Brigid saw Kane turn, reaching for something on the side table next to his cot. It was a gun, long and needle-thin at its end, like the ones that she had encountered out in the snows, outside the ville.
“Kane, don’t,” Brigid commanded. “Just think for a minute, let it—”
Kane raised the tranquilizer gun in a rapid sweep, bringing it up to target Brigid, his face fixed in a cruel sneer. Brigid leaped, springing from her place against the wall to the opposite wall, even as Kane squeezed the trigger and fired a tranquilizer dart at her.
“Cease and desist, citizen,” Kane snarled.
The dart cut through the air past Brigid’s retreating form before burying itself in the plasterboard wall behind her.
Kane was already shifting his aim, drawing the long-nosed blaster around to shoot at this red-haired intruder a second time. With nowhere else to go, Brigid leaped at him, arms outstretched, head low as the blaster fired again. A second dart zipped past her, cleaving a web of strands from her gray overalls as it went wide before colliding with the sliding door of the refresher station.
By then Brigid was in Kane’s face, driving one knee up into his groin even as she reached for the outthrust blaster. Kane grunted as her blow struck, and in that moment of pain Brigid tugged the tranquilizer gun out of his hand and tossed it across the room. The blaster landed with a clatter in the corner.
Kane shoved forward, an automatic reaction, pushing Brigid away. She recovered instantly, coming at him again, delivering a brutal leg sweep that forced Kane to struggle to retain his balance as he went dancing back into the cot.
Brigid followed through, kicking out at the room’s sole chair, using it to push herself up and forward, propelling her lithe body at Kane’s stumbling, uncoordinated form. Brigid’s left leg fired out toward Kane’s face but there was not enough space—instead, she caught the side of his head with her calf, but it was enough to send Kane reeling against the wall.
Brigid landed in a tumble on the freshly made bed, bounded against its paltry springs and flipped herself around to face Kane, poised in a crouch like a jungle cat. “Listen to me, Kane,” she hissed. “Get this through your thick skull before you get us both killed.”
Kane had recovered also, muscle memory kicking in as he struck the wall, reaching out for the discarded Magistrate helmet and throwing it in his attacker’s direction as he fell.
Brigid batted the flying helmet aside, pounced from the bed toward Kane once more, launching herself like a projectile from a catapult.
Brigid was not stronger than Kane, nor was she faster. He was an expert in all forms of combat, trained from birth to be a Magistrate, master of a dozen deadly forms of unarmed combat. But she had something that he did not in that moment—free will, the ability to think, to process, to react.
Kane crossed one leg over the other, trying to flip Brigid, but she danced out of his reach, then drove a fist into his gut in a rapid rabbit punch. She followed this with another, forcing the man she knew as Kane to suck heavily to get his breath, doubling over in surprise and agony.
“Slow down,” Brigid snarled at him. “Think! You are Kane of the Cerberus organization. You’ve been tricked into serving the Magistrate Division here in a ville you never chose. Think!”
Still doubled over to catch his breath, Kane charged forward, drilling his head into Brigid’s chest and driving her back until she slammed against the wall behind her. The wall shook, plaster breaking loose, and Brigid grunted in pain.
“Think, dammit,” Brigid growled, slumping down against the wall. “Try to remember.”
They were anam-charas, these two, soul friends throughout eternity, linked by some deep, impossible-to-define bond that promised they would always be tied together, looking out for each other no matter what the turn of destiny’s wheel. They had lived a thousand lives, as friends, as lovers and as something more, their bond never explicit but always drawing them together, magnetic poles finding each other in the darkness. Now Brigid needed that link they had, that tie—and yes, that love—to draw Kane back to her, to bring his brain back to life and away from Terminal White. “Try to remember,” Brigid muttered again, struggling for breath.
“Remember this,” Kane spit, lunging for her. He snatched Brigid up in his arms, dragging her to a standing position. As he raised Brigid, his head came rushing toward her face, striking her in a vicious head butt that knocked her back against the wall with a loud thump.
Brigid sagged back, seeing swirling black dots cloud her vision, pain running through her forehead. She felt herself slide down the wall, a mixture of dizziness and nausea threatening to overwhelm her. She was defeated, had no hope of recovering before Kane came at her with another attack.
But he didn’t.
Instead, through the haze of dark smears that occluded her racing vision, Brigid saw Kane just standing there, confusion contorting his features, looking down at Brigid where she was sprawled at the juncture where wall met floor.
“Baptiste...?” Kane muttered, shaking his head.
“Kane? You remember me,” Brigid said, her voice suddenly loud in her ears, the sensation of air against her vocal cords making her choke back bile. She coughed, tried again. “Kane, it’s me. Yes—Baptiste.”
But Kane was barely listening. Instead he seemed to be transfixed, caught in the mire of his own terrible confusion, a man waking from a nightmare but still reliving the horror of it. “Baptiste,” he said uncertainly. “I know you.”
“Kane...”
“Who am I?” Kane asked, staring at Brigid. “I can remember you. My partner Grant. Something about a...three-headed dog—”
“Cerberus,” Brigid said, watching Kane’s befuddled features. He looked like a little boy in those moments, one who had lost his parents. “Kane, we’ve been tricked. Somehow, the regime here has us wired into it, hooked into something that’s stopping us from thinking, that’s making us forget.”
“Cerberus,” Kane repeated, barely listening to Brigid’s words. “What’s going on?”
Brigid fixed Kane with her lustrous emerald eyes. “Kane, please try to concentrate. This is so important.”
He looked at her, rubbing at his forehead with his left hand.
“Your head hurts, doesn’t it?” Brigid said.
“Yeah,” Kane confirmed.
“Let it,” Brigid told him. “The hurt may be the only thing keeping you you.
“We’re warriors, Kane, working for an organization called Cerberus that tries to protect the world from all the...the nastiness out there.”
“So I’m a Magistrate,” Kane said, bewildered.
“No,” Brigid told him, pushing herself slowly up the wall until she stood. “You’re something better than that. The Magistrates were a lie. This is a lie, all of it. We came out here to find something but we got trapped inside it.”
“To find something?” Kane repeated slowly.
“Don’t ask me what because I don’t know,” Brigid told him. “They trapped us somehow, locked up our minds so we couldn’t think. Took away our free will.”
She looked up at him. “Stop rubbing your head! Let it hurt, because that may be the only thing making you think straight,” she snapped.
Kane drew his hand away from his forehead. “They took away our free will,” he said slowly.
“Yes,” said Brigid.
“Our lives...”
“Our memories,” Brigid said. “They have some way to jam our memories, and they keep us so busy that we never question, never think to challenge what we’re doing or how we got here.”
The trace of a smile crossed Kane’s grim face as he gave Brigid an up-from-under look. “But you challenged it, Baptiste,” he said.
“I did. My memory works differently to that of most
people,” Brigid said. “I remember detail, fix on to it and hold it with a clarity most people will never know. It’s called an eidetic memory.”
“And that’s how you came to be here,” Kane said, “searching for me.”
“I saw you,” Brigid told him. “First, on the day I arrived, I think. You tried to warn me, but you didn’t know what it was that you were warning me about—”
“Terminal White,” Kane said, speaking the words like a curse.
“Is that what they call it?” Brigid asked.
“There’s a guy at the top—Webb, Supreme Magistrate Webb,” Kane told her. “He talked me through it all before they...I dunno...inducted me into it. He had information about me, knew I was a Magistrate from way back. I think maybe he thought I might side with him.”
Tired now, her adrenaline levels dropping after the fight, Brigid took a seat on the bed, removed her cap and brushed a hand through her flame-red hair. “What does it do?” she asked. “Do you remember?”
“It’s a project dating back to the barons,” Kane recalled. “It saps people of their free will, makes them...docile, I guess. Malleable.”
Brigid nodded. “That’s what I thought,” she said. “There’s something in the air. I don’t quite know what, but they guard the air and the ventilation system here like it’s sacred. I think maybe it distributes whatever this Terminal White stuff is.”
“No,” Kane said with a firm shake of his head. As he shook his head, he winced, the ache from his head butt still nagging at him. “It’s not what’s in the air, it’s the way it’s delivered. It plays with the inner ear, at least that’s how I think Webb explained it.”
“The inner ear creates the sense of balance in mammals,” Brigid said, nodding now. “If it’s disrupted then potentially—”
“A person would fall over?” Kane proposed.
“More than that,” Brigid told him, visualizing ancient biological drawings she had seen. “Forced to constantly compensate for failing balance, a person would be unable to concentrate on anything else. They could become susceptible to hypnotic suggestion.”
