by C. J. Hill
“Should be,” Ren muttered.
Joseph scanned over the descriptions of men on his site. It wouldn’t be hard to find Enforcers. They always had a way of bragging about their jobs. “The men won’t look enough like you to fool the guards. We’ll have to depend on the holocameras for that.”
“Career preference: Enforcer,” Lee murmured. “I like all types of foods. . . .”
Ren stopped typing. “What do you think—do I want a serious relationship?”
“No,” Lee said. “Because Enforcers never do.”
“All right,” Ren said, returning his attention to his comlink. “Just fun and more fun . . .”
A few minutes later Ren and Lee had enough names for Joseph to start plugging them into his comlink’s address database. It didn’t take long to locate two men in the same apartment building. Then Joseph pushed the car-call button.
Ren took the mobile crystal from his pocket and kept it hidden in his palm. “How are we going to get past the elevator security?”
Nonresidents had to check in with the lobby guard and tell him who they were visiting. The guard would message the resident to make sure it was legitimate.
“We stun the guard,” Lee suggested.
“Too many witnesses,” Ren said. Apartment buildings had foodmarts on the ground floor, and people were always coming and going to those. “We’ll have to do it the Traventon way. Find some women at the foodmart, flirt them up, and get them to invite us to their apartments. Once we’re in the elevator, we stun the women and go to the Enforcers’ rooms instead.”
Lee nodded. “Easy enough. The hard part will be finding a way to drag unconscious Enforcers to our car without people reporting us. How are we going to do that?”
A car slid to a stop on the rails in front of the bench. Its door opened, waiting for someone to get in. Joseph stood up and headed to the car. “I’ve got the plan figured out already. I’ll explain on our way to the building.”
Lee followed Joseph. “Does it involve flirting with women? I thought that was a good idea, and I don’t usually say that about Ren’s suggestions.”
“Sorry,” Joseph said. “Mostly it involves scaling the building.”
Chapter 24
Taylor stared at the blood on Xavier’s chest, dread gripping her. He’s going to die, she thought, and then, No, I won’t let it happen.
She took his pack of medical supplies and opened it. “Xavier, tell me what to do.” She sifted through syringes, bottles, electronics. “What do I need to fix the wound?”
“About two years of medical training,” Xavier said, and put his hand over the wound again.
Taylor gripped the pack harder. “I’m serious. How do I stop the bleeding?”
He didn’t answer. His breathing was jagged, shallow.
She turned to Echo. “Help me. Take his shirt off so I can see the wound.”
Echo reached into the pack and took out a small white box. He held the box over Xavier’s chest, watching it glow and flash out a diagnosis. He read it and sighed. “His heart is damaged. We can’t fix it.”
“We’ve got to try.” Taylor’s voice spiraled upward. A sense of panic wrapped around her. “We can’t just let him die.” She fumbled through the items in the medical kit, spilling some in her hurry. There were surgery tools in here. Things to fix major damage. Xavier had been prepared to work on Echo in much worse condition.
She vaguely heard Echo telling Allana to look for something to soak up the blood. It didn’t need to be soaked up; it needed to be stopped. Allana took Xavier’s other pack and went through it.
“Xavier,” Taylor said. “Tell me which instruments to use and what to do.” She could hear the hysteria in her own voice. It was almost as though someone else spoke. “I’m a genius, remember? I don’t need two years of medical school. Just tell me what to do.”
He opened his eyes. They were rimmed with pain. “I promised I would keep you safe. I kept my promise.”
The panic grew and spread inside Taylor. Xavier was going to die, and not because of Allana. It had been Taylor’s fault. She’d been too slow getting out of the building.
She grabbed items from the pack, held them up, but couldn’t concentrate enough to read their labels. Her hands were shaking. She threw things back, spilling several onto the floor. “You saved my life,” she told Xavier. “I’ve got to save yours.”
Xavier had gone pale. His skin looked colorless, like plastic. Blood had soaked through his shirt and onto his pants. Allana dabbed at it with medical sponges, but it didn’t do any good. Blood dripped on the seat, the floor, everywhere.
“Don’t worry,” Xavier said, his voice going weak. “God has me in his grasp.”
“Well, God can just ungrasp you. We need you here.” Taylor knew she sounded petulant, unreasonable. But how did a person reason with death?
Xavier’s chest rose, fell, then didn’t rise again.
“No,” Taylor said. “You can’t give up. You can’t—” Her words choked off and her vision blurred with tears. She pawed uselessly through the things in his medical kit. More spilled onto the seat. “I don’t know what any of these do. Why didn’t they train me to use these?”
Echo took her hand, held it in his. He had streaks of Xavier’s blood on his knuckles. “He’s dead, Taylor. I’m sorry.”
“You’re not!” she yelled.
“He saved my life too,” Echo said, so softly it was almost a whisper. “Don’t you think I want to save his?”
Taylor gave in to her tears then, let them overcome her. When Xavier had given Allana his shirt, Taylor had pointedly thought that Allana’s life wasn’t worth Xavier’s. Now a voice in Taylor’s mind asked if her own life was. Xavier had come on this mission to save Echo. He’d helped Allana. He’d gotten them all out of the Scicenter and through the courthouse. It shouldn’t have cost him everything.
Taylor lowered her head, bitter tears coursing down her cheeks. She didn’t try to stop them; she couldn’t. Nothing had gone right. Sheridan was being held in a prison, tortured probably. Joseph, Lee, and Ren were undoubtedly in danger somewhere, and now Xavier was dead.
Without a word Echo pulled her to him, gently putting his arms around her, “I’m sorry, Taylor.”
“And I’m sorry to interrupt you two,” Allana said, with more ice in her voice than Taylor had thought possible, “but we have to get out of the car. It’s rerouted itself to take us to a med clinic. We’ll be there in less than five minutes.”
Taylor lifted her head. “Will they be able to help Xavier?”
“No,” Echo said. “And Allana’s right. We’ve got to get out before the car reaches the meds. We’ll be taken in for questioning otherwise.” He moved away from Taylor and bent over Xavier, hurriedly taking items from his belt. He flipped the laser cutter on, examining it.
Taylor tried to concentrate on what needed to be done next. They needed to get out of the car. Then they needed to find somewhere safe to go. Xavier probably had a wife and kids. How was Taylor going to tell the council he had died saving her? How could he have traded his life for hers?
Allana sat in the front of the car, arms folded, with a petulant look on her face.
“Aren’t you going to stop the car?” Taylor asked.
“I can’t,” Allana said. “Once a car detects an emergency, it won’t stop until it reaches the med clinic.”
Echo knelt by the car door and turned the laser cutter on. “We’ll have to jump.”
It still didn’t make sense to Taylor. “How does the car know Xavier needs a med clinic? I thought a person without a crystal was invisible to the sensors. He doesn’t have a crystal.”
An orange light as long as a knife blade protruded from the laser cutter. Echo used it to puncture a hole through the car wall. “A large amount of blood is leaking onto the floor. The car’s sensors are programmed to react to that.”
Slowly, Echo cut a square big enough for a person to go through. When it was done, he kicked the broken square outward. It b
ounced onto the street with a metallic crash. Wind gushed into the car, sounding like a scolding roar.
“The edges are sharp,” Echo said. “Be careful not to cut yourself.”
Allana made her way to the hole, muttering things. She grimaced, then leaped out. Echo motioned for Taylor to go next. She turned back to look at Xavier. She didn’t want to leave him here. It didn’t seem right to abandon him that way, to let the people from Traventon find him. What would they do with his body?
Echo stepped over, took Taylor’s hand, and pulled her forward. Toward the hole, toward whatever happened next. She felt numb, horrible. Outside, the street whizzed by. The car seemed to be going faster than normal. Perhaps vehicles sped up during medical emergencies.
Taylor took a breath and jumped onto the street. As soon as her feet hit the pavement, she knew it wasn’t going to end well. She lost her balance, pitched forward, and tumbled across the ground in a dizzying blur of pain and colors.
When the world finally stopped moving, she lay on the street and wondered if her lungs still worked. She couldn’t breathe. Her head hurt.
“Taylor!” Echo called. She didn’t turn to him. He was going to ask her if she was okay. She wasn’t sure if she was. The sting in her back and the heavy feeling that pressed against her lungs were subsiding. She could breathe now. That was good at least.
“Taylor!” Echo called again, more frantic this time, and getting closer.
He’s afraid I’m dead, Taylor realized, and lifted her head to reassure him. It was then she saw the car heading toward her. It was coming fast, and she didn’t have the strength to move out of the way.
It will stop, Taylor thought. The cars were programmed for safety. They had sensors that prevented them from running over people.
She struggled to get up. The car didn’t slow. And then she realized why. Cars here were programmed to recognize people’s crystals. Hers was a fake. The car couldn’t tell anything was in its way.
Chapter 25
When her cell door slid open, Sheridan expected to see Tariq. He was the guard who usually came in.
She had first met him about a week and a half after she’d been imprisoned here. The Enforcers who brought her food always followed the same schedule. One came inside, put the day’s nourishment bars in an alcove by the door, said, “Visual check complete,” and then left.
It seemed an odd routine. The detention center could have engineered a way for the food to come in without sending a guard in. Every time a person walked into a cell, they risked an attack. Perhaps the guards wanted that. Perhaps it was some sort of test. Five more guards probably waited outside.
Sheridan had tried talking to the guards who brought her food. One was a burly man who flatly ignored her questions. The other was a woman with a pinched face, who always told her that guards weren’t given information about prisoners.
Tariq was different from the start. He was younger than the other guards, mid-twenties probably. And he was handsome. Unlike most of the people in Traventon, he hadn’t used his face as some sort of doodle pad of personal expression. Even through the smoky visor Enforcers wore, she could see his features clearly. They were smooth and strong. He had warm brown eyes, and a smile that was all the more brilliant for its contrast against his tanned skin.
Or maybe it seemed more brilliant because smiles were so rare here. None of the other Enforcers ever smiled at her.
On the first day Tariq came into Sheridan’s cell, he set her food in the alcove, said, “Visual check complete,” then took off his helmet and stood by the door, watching her. The black hair she’d only caught a glimpse of before was thick and shiny, mussed.
He hadn’t needed to run his hand through it to make it look good, but he did. “Hello,” he said, and gave her a lopsided grin. “I’m Tariq, your new guard.”
Sheridan kept her distance. She spoke slowly to enunciate the modern accent. “What do you want?”
He gave her another smile. “For starters, I want more women to ask me that question.”
She raised an eyebrow at him, not sure if he was serious. The other guards never joked with her. Humor didn’t appear to be part of their job.
Instead of making demands or leering at her, Tariq turned his helmet upside down and spun it on one finger, the way Sheridan had seen people twirl basketballs. It didn’t work quite as well. She kept a cautious eye on him.
“You’re special,” Tariq said. “Do you realize that?”
“Well, my mother always told me so, but I suspect she was biased.”
“You warrant a personal guard outside your door twenty-four hours a day. All the other criminals on the floor just get the usual precautions. Impenetrable walls, sensors that keep track of you, that sort of thing. You get nonstop personal attention.”
“Hmm,” she said, still keeping her distance. “I do feel special now.”
Tariq’s helmet toppled off his finger. He managed to catch it before it dropped to the floor. He put it back on his finger, twirling it again. “Eight hours a day, five days a week, I get to stand outside your door. It’s dead boring out there, so I have a request: if you’re going to escape, can you do it soon? I’m already tired of waiting.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Maybe if you gave me weapons and an escape plan, I’d be quicker.”
He let out a short laugh and spun his helmet faster. “I can’t help you there. I’m bored, not suicidal.”
“You think I’d kill you?”
“Not you. The warden.”
Sheridan shrugged. “Then I guess you’ll have to be bored.”
Tariq’s helmet tilted off his finger again. This time when he caught it, he tucked it under his arm. “Boredom is part of a guard’s job.” He leaned against the wall casually. “The government pretends enforcement is exciting, but the truth is the prisoners walk around inside the cells, and I walk around outside of them. Do you know what the three biggest differences in our lives are?”
“Besides artillery?”
“Your meals are free, your clothes are more comfortable, and the warden yells at you less.”
Sheridan laughed. It felt good. She hadn’t realized how much she had missed laughing until right then. “I imagine you get to go home at the end of the day.”
“That’s another difference,” Tariq said, gesturing around them. “Your room is bigger.”
“Really?” she asked.
He let out a chuckle. “All right. That’s an exaggeration. Still, with what the mayor pays us, it’s not much of an exaggeration. You’d think keeping the city safe would be worth enough credits to buy more than a small apartment, but no.” He let out a sigh. “I’m not sure who should feel the insult more—me, you, or the good citizens of Traventon.”
Sheridan didn’t want to like Tariq, didn’t want to smile. She knew full well he was the enemy. He would hurt her if Reilly told him to. But it had been so long since someone besides Reilly had talked to her that she smiled anyway.
“So what city are you from?” Tariq asked. “I’ve never heard your accent before.”
She hesitated. He would probably think she was crazy once she answered. She told him the truth anyway. “I’m from the twenty-first century. Your scientists created a time machine and brought me here.”
Tariq let out an amused cough. “Sangre. They must be getting serious about erasing crime if they’re looking for it in other centuries.”
“I’m not a criminal,” she said.
He looked her over thoroughly, let his gaze linger on her. She wondered which was harder to believe—that she’d come from the past or that she was innocent. He probably thought she was lying about both.
“Well, you can’t be much of a criminal,” he said. “The real criminals—the good ones—they always have someone to get them out of this place. It’s the ones without influential friends who’re forgotten here.”
Sheridan didn’t comment about that. She felt forgotten, friendless. She wondered, not for the first time, if Echo had ma
naged to rescue Taylor. Taylor was the important one, not Sheridan.
Sheridan didn’t let the thought stay. Echo had kissed her, had chosen her over Taylor. If Echo had been able to, he would have saved her and Taylor both. He wouldn’t have left her here.
Of course, Echo hadn’t known how smart, how important Taylor was until she’d asked him to help her destroy the QGP. Maybe he had changed his mind about who he liked after that.
Tariq must have seen Sheridan’s expression darken. He took a step toward her; his humor was replaced by concern. “You’ve got a reprieve, you know. At least a short one. You’re not scheduled for any more interrogations for the next two weeks.”
“Really?” she asked, hopeful and then cautious. “What am I scheduled for?”
“Nothing. That man who interrogates you—the one the warden whisks in and out of here like he was the mayor himself—he won’t be back for at least two weeks. I heard him tell the warden he’s not allowed to do anything with you until then.”
“That’s good news,” Sheridan said, genuinely relieved. A part of her knew she couldn’t trust Tariq, knew it might not be the truth, but she wanted to believe it. And why not let herself feel relieved instead of worried? Worry was a prison in and of itself.
Tariq took another step toward her. “And as long as we’re just spending our time walking around the same wall, I thought we could play a game.” He reached into his pocket and took out two small paddles. “Do you know how to play tryst?”
“Trust?” she asked, not sure of his accent.
He laughed and held up the paddles for her to see. “Tryst,” he repeated. “Because in the game we knock the spheres into each other.”
He threw a paddle to her. She caught it and turned it over in her hand. It wasn’t much bigger than a playing card, and nearly as thin. The only thick part was the handle, and it felt like it was made of bumpy plastic.
Was there any way she could turn this into a weapon? She felt a flash of guilt. Tariq was being friendly, and her first impulse was to sharpen this paddle into a knife and use it against him.
