by John Carrick
Feeling awful, she realized she'd love to see it all burn. Except for the fact that Geoffrey was out there, somewhere. Even if she could destroy the whole world, she wouldn't, not today. She had to find her brother.
"I have to get Geoffrey back," She said. "Ross gave us travel visas."
"Ross, Kelly Ross? He's here?"
"He was. They killed him." Ash was quiet for a moment. She laughed, "His name was Kelly?"
“Well, Kelton, yes.” Lao looked at her. "You cannot get your brother back without exposing those who have taken your parents."
"Expose them to who? They run the whole world."
"Anyone with power has enemies."
"Is that why you're here?"
"No, I can't really help you. Sitting here with you like this... is the extent of my power here."
"So what, get proof and go to the police?"
"That's what I would do."
"I'm just a kid. This is crazy."
"Your father was a cautious man. If there is any proof to be had, it's going to be at your home. They must have left something."
"Yeah, a dozen agents, staking out the house."
"How do you know?"
"Ross thought there might be some security footage, but he said it was surrounded. They're just sitting there, waiting for us to show up."
"Hmm."
"I told him that we should kidnap one of them and interrogate him, but he wouldn't listen to me."
"Probably very wise. A tortured man can give you nothing but his pain."
"I'll take it," Ash said.
"It would be best for you to remain cautious. You still have much to lose. Your thirst for revenge might be great, but it might also prove expensive."
"I'm sick of running and hiding. I'm not doing that anymore. I can't just give up. If they left something, I will find it."
"People always leave something. It's in their nature."
Ashley laughed. "You're not really here are you?" She looked at the rectangle. "You're in my head."
"Yes and no," he answered.
With her left hand, Ashley reached out and passed her fingers through the edge of the illusion.
"I'm in Jerusalem," Lao answered.
"You're talking to me over this thing?" Ashley nodded to the prototype.
"In a manner of speaking, yes."
"All I can think of is to go home?"
"Seems you've tried everything else."
Ashley laughed. "Seems?" she asked with a smile, squinting into the afternoon sunlight.
Lao smiled.
Ashley and Lao ate lunch together, rather, Ashley ate, and Dr. Te told her stories about her parents. He'd known her mom since childhood, and actually it was he who’d first introduced them. Ashley's father had been infatuated with Ana from the moment they met.
A few times Ashley thought she was going to burst into tears at the stories Lao was telling her. As she finished her meal, Lao explained that he had to go offline and that she would be on her own for at least the next twenty-four hours. At his advanced age, his health required long periods of rest. He wished her luck and asked her to be careful. Taking his leave, he simply rose and walked through a nearby wall.
Chapter 66 – Agents
Sunday, August 2, 2308
A short time later, feeling good after the proper meal, Ashley moved stealthily through the sporting goods store. She didn't think anyone was looking for her, but she reasoned that it would be profitable to avoid others, so that when the time came, she wouldn't be out of practice.
She found the most expensive hoverboard in the shop and a top-shelf whip-sail. She picked out a new set of clothes, changed in the dressing room and carried the items and tags to the automated check out.
When asked for payment, she entered the family code into the terminal. Alarms didn't go off, the terminal didn't hiss, smoke, or burst into flames. It processed her purchase and asked her to have a lovely day.
Outside, Ashley ripped open the kite. It was tricky, but she assembled the sail and attached it to the board's central grommet. Standing the board up was more difficult still.
The sail restricted her to just a couple directions, forcing her to acknowledge the breeze and respond to it. She practiced in a small abandoned parking lot near the shopping center. She had two walls to bank off of, and if she wanted to get creative, there was a parking garage across the central walkway.
It was the railing she was preparing for. From this level, there were eight railings she'd need to clear before it would be just her, the board and the horizon. Ash wasn't sure she was up to it just yet. The way she'd done so far, she was more likely to fall off the kite than ride it.
It had taken Dr. Te the better part of an hour to properly modify his server to mirror Ashley’s ocular streams to Captain Snow’s amplifier. And as helpful as this was, it didn’t actually help Ana pinpoint her daughter’s location as fast as she’d have liked. They’d cut in after Ashley purchased the kite and watched her during her practice. To say the child struggled was an understatement.
Ashley had been at it for almost twenty minutes when the federal agents showed up, putting an end to her practice. They waited until she had a particularly ugly spill.
She saw them coming, four men in two teams, from both directions. She picked herself up and dusted the dirt from her new jeans and sweatshirt.
They stood all around her now. Two of them, the junior two, had their hands on their weapons.
"Is there some kind of problem?" Ash asked. The idea of picking up the kite and running for the rail had occurred to her.
It seemed to have occurred to them too, they had positioned themselves to block her in every direction. They would catch her, and they knew it.
"We need you to come with us." The closest one spoke. Ash suspected the role was interchangeable.
"I need your gun," she said.
The agents looked at each other, confused.
Ash stepped forward, her hand snaking into the man's jacket. She spun, coming away with his weapon and ending up behind him.
The other suits drew but hesitated, as the guy in front blocked Ashley. From behind him, she opened fire, killing two and wounding the third.
The disarmed leader elbowed her in the head, knocking her to the ground. Ashley fired twice, once as she went down and again with her rough landing, killing the lead man.
The wounded agent fired at her. Three rounds zipped by her head and arm as Ashley ducked behind a park bench and trashcan. He'd missed.
She slipped behind a utility box.
Consumed with his injury, the agent didn't see her.
She slipped further away, flanking him. She then approached from behind. The man struggled into a crouch.
Ash stayed in his blind spot, taking the last two steps, she was directly behind him now.
He stood, took a difficult breath and coughed.
She reached forward and closed her freehand over the pistol. Her other hand smashed her heavy gun into the side of his head.
He collapsed unconscious.
Ash tucked the hostage weapon into her belt and dragged the kite away from the bodies.
She took a deep breath and exhaled. Holding the mast as a soldier with his rifle, she ran straight for the ledge.
Ashley stair-stepped a bench and then the rail. Keeping the kite horizontal, as though it were a giant wing, she leapt into the sky.
The next floor was coming up fast, Ashley dropped the board, the mast and sail pivoted, the board swinging under her feet.
She came down, accelerating toward the next rail and over.
With the next level, she fell less, the sail took up more of the weight, and suddenly she was airborne.
Level by level, she gained altitude, until it was clear she was no longer over the shopping center at all. And like some cartoon character who has realized he’s going to fall, gravity stretched its hand out to her and the board began to lose altitude.
Deputy Director Von Kalt stood on the pati
o, several hundred yards behind her, and watched the girl sail out into the empty sky. He held the Metachron in his hand. Three of his agents were dead. Emergency medical technicians were tending to the wounded man. Several agents stood on the balcony, watching her escape and coordinating with pursuit squads.
Her brother was caught. He was in the system. Von Kalt didn’t have him yet, but that was just a formality. If she hadn’t run for an international border yet, she wasn’t going to now. All Von Kalt had to do was find the boy, and she would come to him.
He had felt her presence. Or rather, the Metachron had sensed the Micronix. It was getting more and more difficult for him to tell the difference between the pocket computer’s suggestions and his own desires.
The director dropped the device into his pocket and rubbed his eyes. Even without holding it, the mental projections of the device were still present. Von Kalt was wired into the camera systems of three satellites, his approaching tactical vehicles, and several other reconnaissance teams.
Dr. Fox’s magical little device had given him a hundred hands and a thousand eyes. He was damned if he wouldn’t use every one of them. Yet he found it ironic that none of those informed him, as clearly as his own intuition, as to where the scared child might be going.
Once Ashley had gotten airborne it didn’t take Captain Snow long to spot her. Von Kalt’s pursuing agents found themselves coming under fire from an unidentified source and pulled back.
Chapter 67 – Sky Riding
The wind whipped at her clothes, hair, and skin. The board bucked and snapped under her feet, strained by the opposing forces of gravity and her weight attached to the kite.
The city seemed to hang in place around her, the bulk of Angel City's floating towers behind her and to the left. Below, the hard structures of grounded Los Angeles.
The ocean floated on the horizon. Only the clouds appeared to move, or rather she through them.
It was beautiful.
Ash felt as if she were a bird combined with a jet. She easily adapted to the ride. Leaning into the bowline and the mast, she piloted the kite across the sky at what felt like eighty miles an hour.
The clouds rushed around her, one moment she would be enveloped in white and then suddenly, the world would reappear.
Finally, she was through the lowest ones and there was nothing between her and the sharp-pointed structures of steel and glass, rising from the Hollywood below.
Ashley banked as the buildings reached up for her, their giant metal teeth, disguised as antennae and radio receivers, gnashing at her. The kite snapped in the wind, and Ashley held on.
The kite, board and rider spun toward the ground. She was going at least a hundred now and accelerating. She held on.
The first rip appeared. She saw it, it was small, and then it was huge.
The wind caught the kite and threw her toward a structure to her left. She lifted the board and slid along the side of the building. For a few brief moments, she was in control, then she cleared the building and all was noise and wind.
Ashley felt lifted, she’d caught an updraft, and it threw her toward another skyscraper. This time her approach was smoother and the broad building provided much more stability. She carved a path up the side of the scraper, upsetting business meetings and launching herself from the structure at a forty-five degree incline.
She found herself able to control the free-fall a little better, angling toward one building after another. She even landed on a few flat rooftops and skidded down another's sloped side. She wasn't doing it just for fun, buzzing the metropolitan offices slowed her to fifty and sixty miles per, instead of free fall at over a hundred.
There were four rips in the sail now. Ash started to panic. She’d heard them, now she saw them as well.
She made her way toward the curving arch of the Santa Monica Mountains. She came in from the north, sliding down over the structures of old Hollywood, keeping the Mulholland freeway cable to her right and gradually drifting down over the familiar residential neighborhoods and streets of a life gone by.
Ashley curved down toward the mountains, banking off the slower magnetic-cable traffic. She slid down the side of a moving truck, drafted a cruising flatbed and then kicked out toward a mountain wall.
She caught the cliff side as easily as any of the twenty buildings she'd whipped past, but pushed away quickly as the weeds whipped at the sail, her fingers and her face.
The steep slope leveled out, and Ashley caught her breath. She sailed down the ridgeline, cresting mountaintops as if they were swells on a stormy sea.
Cruising along the peaks, on relatively solid ground, Ash felt her heart, arms and shoulders relax. She realized she'd been clutching the kite with everything she had. Her hands had cramped into claws. It took repeated flexing to get them feeling normal again.
Ash sailed down the paths, coming closer to the neighborhood where she'd lived. She came in from the back, down the side of a steep mountain and then around the base on the low side, sailing into her neighborhood along the retaining walls and unprotected backyards of the families living against the mountain.
The knowledge flooded back, intoxicating her.
Sailing down the familiar trails, Ashley hit turns at full speed, banking off trees into huge vertical jumps and landing in sweeping curves to dissipate the shock.
As Captain Snow watched her daughter fearlessly ride the kite board, several thousand feet above the ground, she was overcome with awe and admiration. There is no way she’d have had that kind of courage at her age.
Ross’s voice interrupted her train of thought and distracted her as Ashley dipped below the tree line.
“We’ve got a twenty on Geoff. He’s at the dog pound.”
“Can you get him out?” Snow asked.
“Not without breaking cover and a bit of gunplay. We’ll post up here until they move him. For the moment though, he’s safe.”
“Says you,” Captain Snow said.
“No need for thanks, really. My pleasure,” Ross chuckled.
“Thank you, Kelly. A thousand million Thank You’s for ever‘n ever.”
“You’re welcome, but we’re not out of the woods yet.”
“Not by a long shot,” Snow replied.
Ashley came toward the house from the mountainside and slid her board to a stop in the backyard. Skimming over the streets and rooftops, she hadn't spotted a single parked car with agents sitting in it. She hoped that, if they were out there, they hadn't spotted her either.
Ash pressed her hand against the panel and the backdoor opened. She hauled her kite into the house and closed the door.
Inside, she looked around for any kind of security system. She looked for pinhole cameras or alarm boxes. Ashley checked the main doors, finding just the basic locks, no hint of any kind of security system at all.
In her father's study, everything appeared to be exactly as he'd left it. There was nothing about the house that looked as if it had been searched, ransacked or pilfered. Whatever the agents had wanted, it hadn't been among the family's material possessions.
Ashley's father owned a pair of Japanese samurai swords, standing on a rack in a glass case. Ashley stared at them from across the room, thinking about the reported incident with the blue goo, from his childhood.
Ash walked over to the computer displays behind the desk. She reached out and waved her hand over the console, waking the display.
It requested a password. “Zelena,” Ash said, giving her mother’s maiden name. Ashley had heard her father give the command many times.
“User recognized,” the computer said. “Ashley Erin Fox, Welcome.”
“I need security footage for this location, for Friday, July 26th, around three pm please?”
“Sorry, that footage is inaccessible from this location. This location has been compromised and all data stores have been scrubbed clean. This station must be reinitialized with a new user before any tasks or applications can be run.”
; Ashley sighed. She otherwise left the study as she found it, not disturbing any more of its secrets or forcing its locks.
Not feeling especially hungry and already bored, Ash headed toward her own room. She moved slowly, just taking everything in. She peered though the windows at the front of the house. She saw no vehicles closing in, surrounding her. She saw no one at all.
Upstairs, she opened the door to her bedroom. It was just as she'd left it. No Goldilocks had been sleeping in her bed, filling the right half of the room. To the left, set at an angle, her desk was exactly as it had been.
Ashley looked at the center drawer of her desk. Of course, the prototype was in her pocket, but somehow the desk would always be it's home.
Between the bed and the desk, the dollhouse her father had built her, years ago. Behind it, the picture window displayed a magnificent view of the canyon and the homes spotting the other side.
Ashley took in the view.
In the distance, the windows of the homes reflected the brilliant sunlight.
She checked her waistband. The agent's gun was gone. Somewhere during the ride she must have lost it. She hadn't felt it fall away, but she didn't have it anymore.
Staring out across the canyon, she remembered the night of the fire, just before she'd come into possession of the prototype. One of the homes across the canyon had been engulfed in flame. She looked for it and picked it out. It had been fully renovated, of course, but she was sure, it was the one on the crest.
Ash had gone into Geoff's room that night. She'd heard her father get sick in the nearby bathroom. Somehow that house was connected. Ashley stared at it. The all-glass wall and cascading balconies stared back at her.
Suddenly she understood, while there were no obvious cameras in her house, there might be other kinds of sensors, but the cameras were all across the canyon, behind those glass walls. That was where she'd find the security footage she needed, she was sure of it. Maybe that terminal hadn’t been scrubbed.
