by Jay Posey
“Can you put me down now?” he said quickly. “Please?”
“We’ve still got a few more flights to go–”
“Put me down! Put me down please!”
Jackson dropped quickly and let Wren slide off his back, then turned to face him. Wren dropped back two steps, and pressed his back against the wall.
“What is it, kid? What’s wrong?”
Wren felt the tears welling up, and he swallowed hard, trying to hold it together.
“What’s going on?”
“Are you sick?”
The question took Jackson back. He shook his head slowly.
“Not that I know of… why?”
“There’s something…” Wren took another step back down, afraid to say the words. “Something’s wrong. With you.”
Jackson gave a curious look at Wren. Studied him. Then, he sat down on the stairs and crossed his arms, resting them on his knees.
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Yeah, I know.”
“What is it?”
He didn’t answer for a while. Just dropped his gaze to his feet. Eventually he rubbed his face with both hands, ran them back through his greasy hair.
“The night they came…” he started. “I just needed a few minutes. You know?”
Wren waited, not sure where Jackson was going.
“I thought I was going to die. I knew I was going to die. So I shipped. I just needed a few minutes to do it. I hid in the safe place.”
Wren didn’t understand. People often shipped in the final moments of their lives, sending their consciousness off to a digital warehouse for preservation, effectively ending their own life.
“But… if you shipped, how can you be here now?”
“They didn’t find me. So I came back.”
He paused, sucked his teeth.
“But… I don’t think I came back alone.”
Jackson dropped his head into his hands, clenched his eyes tight. Pulled his hair back, tight.
“Night is a bad time for me.”
The two stayed silent for a time, Wren not sure how to respond, and Jackson seemingly lost in his own thoughts. Finally, Jackson was the first to speak. He stood.
“It’s alright, I’m not going to hurt you. Sometimes I just have trouble remembering which one is me. But I’m OK. Right now, I’m OK.”
Jackson stretched out his hand.
“Come on, little one. Let’s go get your mama.”
Three crouched at the entrance of the Vault, running his fingers along the edge of the gate where it separated from the wall. Eyes closed. Hunting for a mechanism or release that might activate the door. For now, he focused on solving the problem at hand, on reuniting Cass with her son. Once that was taken care of, then and only then would he let his mind consider the gathering storm that RushRuin surely presented for them.
His fingers brushed across a small, angular piece of metal just inside the gate. As he probed it with his fingers, he snuck a glance at Cass, standing nearby, wearing his coat. Chilled, pale; fragile. And somehow in her raw humanity, utterly captivating. Her eyes flicked to his, as if she felt his gaze. He didn’t look away.
“Any luck?” she asked.
Three shook his head, opened his mouth to explain he was unlikely to find any sort of way to open the gate from the outside. Instead, the sudden sound of straining steel. The gate shifted, rose in jerking steps. And suddenly, a gasp from inside, and a cry from without. A blur of motion. Cass on her knees, Wren in her arms, both sobbing. Inside the Vault, Three saw a gaunt young man operating a jury-rigged crank. The two nodded to each other. But for a time, it just didn’t seem right to speak. Even in this collapsed and decaying world, the reunion of mother and child demanded some semblance of reverence.
Three looked at the two of them, the delicate pair that he had brought out into the open. Without question, he was responsible for them now. And in a sudden flash he felt, without question, they were the mistake that would cost him his life.
And he wasn’t sure it was a mistake at all.
Fourteen
Three sat cross-legged on the floor, staring down the empty corridor, letting the hollowness fill him until he could taste it. He wanted to feel rage, wrath, a burning righteous fury to unleash upon the Weir when next they met. But here, now, in this heavy, silent hallway where the air barely dared to stir, he felt nothing. The emotions he had expected to surge and seethe were as dead as the shell of this underground city.
Loss was nothing new. He’d lost more than a few acquaintances out in the open, and even a couple he’d have dared to call friends. But Gev? If there was anything like family left in the world for Three, Gev had been it. And he’d never seen the Weir hit anything on this scale before. Gev, the Weir… Dagon. Too much to process.
And Cass. She’d played him, and he’d let her. He’d killed for her, nearly died for her, even left and come back for her. Even now he didn’t know why. Or wouldn’t admit that he did. He’d seen women and children plenty of times before, in the shelters, in the gutters, never thought of them as anything more than human debris. But these two… he felt something for them, but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, identify it. Pity? Compassion? Was it the boy? Or his mother? He found her intensely frustrating. And even more fascinating. Such a small thing to be so fierce. He cursed himself for getting involved, for taking responsibility for someone else’s mistake. And all the while he felt that he’d never had a choice.
Cass and Wren were somewhere upstairs, in the top third of the Vault, high above him. At Three’s direction, Jackson had taken them to the Vault’s medical apartment, where they could get cleaned up and reconnected. He knew they needed that time together, to be close again, to know the other was alive, and safe, and real.
And he knew every minute he sat in the disquieting silence of these vacant catacombs was another minute lost. Standard procedure dictated that any action was better than none. But Three couldn’t shake the feeling that in this case the wrong action would be impossible to correct. It was chess, and he was running out of room to maneuver. His mind churned, rushing from one thought to the next, trying to sort through the collision of events. Searching for the solution. For an escape.
If Dagon had reported their location, it was possible that RushRuin was already on the way. But Dagon had crossed through the open by night, during the Weir’s peak hunting hour, without any apparent concern of being tracked. That gave Three a critical piece of information: Dagon must be disco’d. Which meant he had to do all his communicating the old fashioned way, face-to-face rather than via pim. That was some comfort, as Dagon couldn’t just tail them and constantly update the rest of the crew as to their location. It was equally troubling, though, to know that Dagon had tracked them precisely to their hiding point by purely physical means. Up to that point, Three had known they were being followed, but had assumed that it was the woman or the boy whose residual signal was giving them away. But now he couldn’t be sure. If Dagon was off-grid and a hound, he was a master tracker that even Three might not be able to shake. How exactly he had done it was a mystery. Three hated mysteries.
There was some calculated risk in lingering at the vault. By his way of thinking, with the time it took for Dagon to return and report their location, RushRuin would assume Three and his companions were on the move again. And even if they did send someone to the Vault to check, chances were Three had a better shot at picking them off or slipping them entirely here than in the open.
His thoughts flashed back to the early morning hours, outside the gate. Gev, his friend. Or rather, the husk of him, inhabited now by something completely other. Three wondered how many of the Vault’s old inhabitants were dead, and how many had instead been cored. And he wondered if there was any real difference between the two.
Jackson he’d known tangentially, remembered him as the kid who liked to wander. Gev had spoken of him often, usually complaining about his recklessness but always with a hint of fondness, like the proud uncle of a mischiev
ous nephew. He seemed decent enough. A bit scattered, but clever enough to survive on his own for however many days or weeks it’d been since They had come.
And Three wondered for the first time if he’d have to add Jackson to the list of dependents. It seemed likely. Surely the kid wouldn’t want to remain behind, no matter where Three decided to lead them. As if there were anywhere left this side of the Strand that RushRuin wouldn’t follow.
He shook his head, trying to clear the scattered thoughts. Took a final deep inhalation, resigned himself to the fact that he’d have to rejoin the others sooner or later. The fatigue was getting to him. Tonight they would remain at the Vault. At first light, they would set out again, somewhere, and he knew that for every step by dangerous step of the journey they’d undertaken, what they had accomplished was nothing compared to what lay ahead.
Cass wondered what Three was up to. He’d disappeared a couple of hours before, saying he needed to scout out the rest of the Vault, leaving Jackson to look after her and her son. While he was away, Cass had bathed in crystal clear water that ran hot, hotter than she could stand. It’d been so long she’d almost forgotten it was possible to feel clean. Jackson had provided her and Wren both with clothes, worn but comfortable. And after she’d bathed Wren, Jackson had led them to the Commons, a section separating the entrance and work areas above from the living quarters below, and given them hearty rations in generous portions. Now, meal completed, feeling contented in nearly every way possible, Cass sat back in her chair with Wren on her lap, and for the first time really took notice of her surroundings.
The room was large enough for a hundred or so people to find places to sit, with tables of various sizes and shapes and salvaged chairs gathered into small knots and clusters. If not for the obvious scavenger atmosphere, the room wouldn’t have been out of place in any number of the outpost towns that Cass had been through before she’d left RushRuin, or after. But it had a cavernous feel now, with places for so many occupied by so few. And clean. Almost sterile. For all the trauma the Vault must’ve endured, it was strangely tidy. Jackson had kept busy.
Wren drove his shuttlecar back and forth along the oval flexiglass table making soft, rumbling engine noises. Jackson watched from across the table, fixated on the toy but eyes unfocused, distant. He’d certainly proved to be an almost overwhelmingly generous host, but there was an edge about him that Cass couldn’t place. Something wild lurked behind his youthfulness. The fitful attempts at small talk always trickled to nothing; Jackson seemingly content to sit in silence, and Cass unsure of what questions were safe to ask.
The bath and food had done her well, but the gnawing hunger of her nerves was growing steadily, and she could feel her eyes dancing in their imperceptible rhythms. At least she hoped they were imperceptible. Three’s synth had been surprisingly effective at preventing her cells from imploding, but it was becoming painfully apparent that the dose had been a substitute and not the real thing. Her limbs burned with pinprick fire, angry, like long-compressed nerves reawakening. Occasional flashes of pain shot through her tongue without warning, stainless-steel pangs without apparent cause or reason. She figured another two days. Maybe less.
“How long have you known Three?” she asked, rousing Jackson from his daze.
“Couple years, I guess. Maybe longer. Hard to say. He was always just sort of there, then not, if you know what I mean.”
“I do.”
“Strange one, that. Gev always had good things to say about him, but he always made me nervous. Not in a bad way, like he was going to hurt anyone or anything. Just kind of. I don’t know. Doesn’t feel right, yeah?”
“He isn’t real,” Wren said, still pushing his shuttlecar back and forth along the table.
He said it so matter-of-factly, but the comment hit Cass like a concrete wave. Wren had only ever described one other person that way before.
“What do you mean, sweetheart?”
“He’s just pretend. You know, like Dagon… sorta. Except not so weird.”
Jackson looked at Cass with questioning eyes, looking for any clue as to what her son meant.
“Who’s Dagon?”
Cass shook her head, processing. “Just someone we used to know.”
“Just someone who’s still lookin’ for you.”
His voice came from some corner, unexpected, startling. Jackson flinched visibly at Three’s sudden words. How long he’d been standing there, none of them knew.
“Guess I should knock.”
“Doubt it’d help,” Cass answered. “You sneak too much.”
Three half-shrugged a shoulder and approached, grabbing a chair and sliding it to the head of the table. He sat heavily, nodded to Jackson, rested his eyes on her. Studying. Cass tried to hold his gaze, but felt herself wilting. Every time she looked into those dark eyes she felt she was telling him everything she’d ever done.
“Jackson gave us a tour,” she offered. “You wouldn’t believe the Treasure Room–”
“We need to talk,” Three interrupted, more forcefully than she’d expected, almost impatient.
“OK.”
Three didn’t take his eyes off hers, just watched and waited. Like he had a lot to say, and didn’t know where to start. Or like he knew a secret.
“You guys want to work this out alone?” Jackson said. “I can take Wren–”
“Might be a good idea,” Three replied.
“No,” Cass answered. “You can go if you want Jackson, but Wren stays.”
Three and Cass stared at each other. Wren had stopped playing. Jackson just sat with both palms on the table, unsure whether to stay or leave. Three let a tense breath go by, then another. She wasn’t going to back down. The last time he’d separated them had nearly been catastrophic.
“Fine,” he said at last.
Three paused, gathered himself. She’d never seen him like this before.
“We’re in real trouble,” he said. No one seemed surprised. But no one had anything to add, either.
“When I agreed to bring you out here, it’s because I figured whatever heat you’d gotten into, you and the kid could wait it out here at the Vault. Best guess was that you got into owing some chemist more than you could pay. But it’s not like that, is it?”
Cass shook her head slowly, but didn’t offer any more. Didn’t even take her eyes from his. He pushed.
“This… whatever it is. It’s not gonna go away on its own. And they’re not gonna stop looking for you. Ever. That about right?”
She nodded.
“So. Is there anywhere left in the world for you to go that they won’t find you?”
For the first time, Cass let her eyes leave his, dropped them to the table. She felt her shoulders slump reflexively. Three had asked her the one question she’d been asking herself for however long it’d been since she started running.
“I don’t know who they are, but they wouldn’t come looking for anyone out this far, yeah?” Jackson asked. “I mean, why would they?”
“That’s a fine question. Cass. Why would they?”
She didn’t look up from the table. Didn’t answer.
“It’s my fault,” Wren said, in his quiet voice.
“Wren.”
“It’s OK, Mama. I don’t mind.”
Wren looked at Three, then away, like he was ashamed.
“It’s me. I did something bad.”
Cass kissed the top of Wren’s head, hugged him.
“No, baby, you didn’t do anything wrong…”
Three remained motionless. Didn’t even seem surprised. Cass took over the explanation.
“You know Wren is,” she paused, searched for the word, “special. We were on a job. My crew, I mean. Kostya, Fedor, Dagon, we were all on it. And it was a tough one, tougher than most.
“Tough because we didn’t have much time to get it done, and there was this guy, this… individual, who wouldn’t cooperate. He was the key to everything. And I tried to get him to help us, I reall
y did. But he wouldn’t listen. He kept saying we didn’t know who he was, what he could do, kept telling us what he was going to do to us… so one of ours went to work on him. Hard.”
She closed her eyes, hated dredging up the terrible past. Who she’d been. What she’d done. And what she’d made her child part of.
“Wren shouldn’t have been there. I didn’t want him to be there. But he was, and Asher…”
She caught herself, stopped. Glanced up at Three. She’d said more than she’d meant to.
“He was hurting him,” Wren continued. “Real bad. I didn’t mean to.”
“I don’t know what he did,” said Cass, almost whispering. “None of us do. But Wren made Asher stop. Stopped him. Long enough for the target to ship. We couldn’t finish the job. After that, Asher wouldn’t leave Wren alone. He wanted to know what Wren had done, how he’d done it. And Wren, you know, he just doesn’t know sometimes… but he just kept at him, and I couldn’t protect him forever… so we left.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Wren said. “It was an accident.”
Cass hugged him again.
“I know about RushRuin,” Three said. Cass silently cursed herself for slipping up, revealing Asher’s name. If Three knew about RushRuin, he’d know what they were capable of. And there was no way he’d stick around to help them now. “And I know they’re not in the business of running Sec/Nets.”
“I never said they were.”
“Said it or not, you let me believe it. Just as bad.”
She didn’t argue the point.
“Who’s RushRuin?” Jackson asked. Cass had almost forgotten he was there.
“Brainhackers,” Three answered, eyes still on Cass. “Some of the best.”
“The best,” Cass said. “I don’t know another crew that does the kind of damage they do.”
“And you’re one of them?” Jackson said, obvious awe in his voice.
