by James Knapp
On the other side of the panel, I heard gunfire and the shriek of a flamethrower. I felt the heat on my face as it radiated from the panel in front of me.
I checked the magazine of the gun Cal had handed me. Half the rounds were left.
“Stick close,” I told them. The heat was starting to get intense, and at this depth, between the fire and the smoke, the air would get used up fast.
We didn’t encounter any soldiers on the way back. We ran through the passageway until we came out near the elevator, which was shut down, so I followed the route Cal had taken us when we came in. We headed back up the stairs, back out through the bombed factory entrance and into the underground parking garage, where the shells of the cars were still burning.
As we moved up the ramp, the hot air below became a warm breeze, rushing over us from behind and smelling like smoke. We stepped out into the night and the crisp, cold air. Snow began to fall on my face. It felt good.
The helicopters had been joined by three more, sitting there quietly in the dark. There were no soldiers around, so they had to still be down there. Did they follow the revivors as they tried to get out, or did the whole lot of them burn?
I tried to open a connection to Faye. She didn’t respond.
“What do we do now?” Cal asked.
Sean.
Yeah?
I need an EMT at my location.
You got it. Good to hear from you, Nico.
You too.
I knelt down in the snow next to them, the last reserves of my energy trickling away. Zoe stood near me, shivering in the snow as the wind whipped through her thin white linens. I took my coat off and pulled her down to me, placing it around her shoulders.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Come here.”
I guided her into my lap to keep her bare feet out of the snow, and held her as she shook.
She’s just one of many, Agent. Your friend isn’t unique; she’s one of thousands….
Fawkes believed it. He’d provoked the deployment of the National Guard so he could take control of its revivor ranks, then used them to kill the people on his list. He thought he was bringing down a massive conspiracy. He’d been torturing those people in that underground facility to try to learn how they did what they did and how to stop them.
Zoe shivered in my arms. Was Fawkes insane? Or could there be some truth to what he said?
Nico, what happened down there? Sean asked.
If my memories had been altered, I wouldn’t know it. Zoe proved that the day I first met her.
…she’s one of thousands, and they have been using you to get to me….
The kind of destruction going on below us wasn’t sanctioned by the FBI. Whoever was behind the operation, it wasn’t us. They were destroying everything. Faye was gone, this time for good.
Nico, respond. What happened down there?
I don’t know, I said, and cut the connection.
Cal scowled as a gust of wind blew. She looked down at me.
“Hey, what do we do now?” she asked again.
“We wait.”
“Wait,” she snorted.
“Quietly,” I said, and that’s how it ended.
Well, more or less.
13
Dawn
Zoe Ott—Pleasantview Apartments, Apartment 613
“Hey, you okay?”
I caught myself staring into space again. I’d been doing that a lot. After everything was over and I finally got back, nothing felt the same. I guess I hadn’t really been gone very long, but it felt like forever.
I tipped my glass back, smelling the licorice and letting the fire fill my mouth, then my throat and belly. Karen watched me do it, but even though I don’t think she approved, she still smiled. I think she didn’t expect to ever see me again. I know I didn’t expect to see her again.
“I’m okay,” I said. “Thanks again for letting me stay with you. My place is kind of a crime scene.”
They had held me for a while and asked a lot of questions. I wanted to see Nico, but they wouldn’t let me. I was brought to another room where they tried to stick me with a needle, but I made them let me go. When the cab dropped me off, there were some cops still in my apartment and yellow police tape was all across the front door. The place was totally trashed, and no one would tell me anything. There were markers on the floor around a giant bloodstain, and kind of in the middle of it was the outline of a body in white tape. I found out later that it was my next-door neighbor. The revivor that took me killed him right there in my living room.
They asked me if I had anywhere else to stay while they finished their investigation, and when I said I didn’t, they said I should get a hotel for a few days. I was too afraid to ask what happened to Karen. I was looking around, afraid to find another outline, when she showed up in the hallway. She got me something to eat, and better still, something to drink. It was like she was waiting for me.
“Did they tell you anything?” she asked. I shook my head.
“Me neither,” she said. “Did they find out who it was?”
“No.”
“Well, you can stay here as long as you need.”
“What about what’s- his-face?” I asked. I didn’t see the oaf in the tank top anywhere around.
“He doesn’t live here; he just stays here,” she said. “He’s going to stay at his place for a while.”
Her eyes got kind of teary, and she wiped at the big, nasty double shiner she got when she ran in and tried to rescue me.
“Sorry you got hurt,” I said. She smiled, but she didn’t even remember how it happened. She never mentioned the revivor that broke in and attacked me, because she didn’t remember it. When I wiped her memory, it was like for her that part never happened. She knew only what she’d been told afterward. “What about your friend, the agent?” she asked.
“Nico’s going to check in later.”
“You’ll get to see him again, then.”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t know how I felt about that. He didn’t just say he’d check in; he wanted to use me as a consultant, on the department payroll. He wanted to keep it very quiet, though. I thought that would make me happy, but it didn’t.
Mostly that was because he changed. At some point between the time I left him in the storage unit and the time he held me in his lap outside the factory, he’d changed. Not his personality, even though his face had changed a little and his left eyelid had gotten a little droopy. He still acted the same, and he still talked the same, but he was different.
“I can’t change him anymore,” I said into my glass.
“What?”
“Nico,” I said. “I can’t change him anymore. I can’t—”
I almost said “control him,” but I stopped myself. When I looked, I could see the colors around him. I could see the pain and the confusion and all the rest of it, but when I pushed, the colors didn’t change.
“It’s not the end of the world,” Karen said. She didn’t get it. She couldn’t.
“How am I supposed to know what he’s thinking?”
“You’re not supposed to know,” she said, smiling a little.
“Then what do I do?”
“Get to know him.”
Get to know him. That was easy for her to say.
My drink was gone, and without asking she poured me another one, but a small one.
“Oh, by the way, I found this slipped under the front door,” she said, fishing in her pocket. She pulled out a blank business card with some writing on it. “It doesn’t mean anything to me. Is it for you? From your friend Nico, maybe?”
I took the card and turned it over. There was handwriting in small print on the back of it.
You did it. Your place is with us. My stomach dropped a little.
“It’s not from Nico,” I said.
“Do you know what it means?”
I crumpled up the card in my hand, then dropped it in the trash.
“No,” I said. “If
it’s okay, I think my place is with you.”
Calliope Flax—Bullrich Heights
A couple days after the whole thing went down, I stood out in the cold to wait for the bus, and it was goddamn gray out. The sky, what you could see, was gray; the buildings looked gray; everything was gray. The wind howled down the street, kicking up the dusting we got. It was cold. I heard that where I was going they had the opposite problem, but it couldn’t be much worse.
When the bus finally showed, it looked like it was going to blow by, but he saw me there and pumped the brakes. It rolled to a stop, front tire half in a puddle of slush when the door squealed open.
I hoisted my bag up on one shoulder and got on. It was warm in there and all the glass was fogged except the front. The driver looked like he came with the bus, and he’d get buried with it too.
“Pass,” he said.
I took out the little yellow chit they gave me when I signed up to serve. The driver gave it a look and I dropped it in the slot. It landed in the box with a few others.
“Just you?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Have a seat,” he said. “It’s a long trip.”
There were three other guys in the back. Two looked like they were passed out, and the last one looked like he wished he was. I sat down as far from them as I could and put my bag in the seat next to me. I wiped the fog off the window and watched with my head against the cold glass as we pulled out of Bullrich Heights.
I’m not sure what made me do it. Part of it was the G-man and something he said. He said he thought I was worth more than the arena. He said I impressed him down in that hellhole. He didn’t say “Go sign up”—that part was my idea—but I think I believed him.
That was part of it. The big thing, though, was that once it was all over, nothing felt right anymore. When I got back to my place, it was like it didn’t even look the same. As soon as I was through the door, I knew I’d leave. Anyplace had to be better than there, even the grinder.
The guys made some noise and we all went out for a big bash my last night, and I drank until I puked. I passed out facedown and said good-bye to my life, for what it was worth.
As the bus took me out of there, I thought about the G-Man, Nico. The training and the skills were just the start. The implant, the wiring, the strength, and the power …it could all be mine. I held his card in my hand as the bus took me where I was going, reading his message and his number.
For better or worse, things were going to change.
Nico Wachalowski—FBI Home Office
The first thing I saw when I finally woke up was the last of the diagnostic messages scrolling past the darkness behind my eyelids. The second thing I saw was the communication-pending message from Noakes marked URGENT.
Opening my eyes, I saw Sean sitting at the monitor on the bench in front of me as I lay in the maintenance chair. The rice paper underneath me crinkled as I cracked my back, and he glanced over, thin lips grinning. The dark shadow still floated in front of my eyes.
“Welcome back,” he said.
“How long was I down?”
“A long time.”
He got up, and I saw he hadn’t shaved. He looked tired as he stepped over to the chair and looked down at me, holding the scanner up to my right eye.
“How am I doing?”
“All things considered, pretty well,” he said. “I had to call in some help on this one. Your sternum was split, so it had to be replaced with an artificial one, and that plate you had behind it got dimpled, so it had to come out.”
“What about the rest of me?”
“You suffered a severe myocardial infarction and a lot of blood loss,” he said. “The chemicals released by the JZI kept you alive, but they take their own toll. It took almost a total transfusion to get you right, but you’ll be back on your feet.”
“I’ve got a blind spot in front of my right eye.”
“You had some oxygen starvation even despite the implant; you were down for a long time. I won’t lie; you had some pinprick necrosis in a section of your brain, but you got lucky.”
Wachalowski, it’s Noakes.
“Hang on,” I told Sean.
What do you want?
I want your report, Wachalowski.
I’ll file one when I get out of here.
Where is the revivor?
The last time I saw Faye, she was with one of the black-market revivors Fawkes had brought in. While I waited with Zoe and Calliope outside for the EMT to arrive, I’d searched for her signature, but I never picked it up again.
She—I mean it—was still down in the factory last I saw. No one found it?
Whoever was behind this rigged the place to do a very slow, very hot burn. Experts are saying the lower levels could smolder for months. Nothing past the parking garage can even be accessed by firefighters right now.
I thought the soldiers burned the place. Weren’t those their orders?
I don’t know what their orders were and neither do you, Wachalowski. The people responsible for this burned the place, along with the prisoners they were keeping there, to cover their tracks. End of story.
My memory of what happened down in the factory was a little fuzzy, but that didn’t sit with what I had seen. Still, I knew when something was a done deal. If I was going to pursue this further, it wasn’t going to be in front of Noakes.
So, we stopped them.
The ring of smuggled revivors and weapons was traced to a terrorist cell that was using the old factory as a base of operations, from which they organized a series of kidnappings, murders, and terror strikes. We’ve broken up the smuggling ring, found those responsible for the attacks, and, with the aid of the military, taken out them and their headquarters. Yes, we stopped them.
Noakes, this is Sean.
What is it?
I’m sorry, sir, but I need to finish the reinitialization of the JZI, and that will include the communications array. Can this wait until I’m finished?
Fine. Agent Wachalowski, good work. The governor is happy. The mayor is happy. I’m happy.
Yes, sir.
You are too, Wachalowski.
Yes, sir.
The communication broke; then the array went off-line, thanks to some internal tweak from Sean.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
“What happened to Zoe and Calliope?”
“They interviewed them, of course. Ott insisted she was unconscious the whole time and didn’t remember anything about her capture or her abductor.”
“They believed that?”
“I can’t explain it, but they just let her go.”
Maybe he couldn’t explain it, but I could.
“What about the other one?”
“Flax backed up the story you gave when you were brought in. They held her for a couple days, then cut her loose.”
“So that’s that?”
“Yeah.”
“No one cares about Cross, or the breach at Heinlein, or what was really going on down in that factory?”
Sean smiled faintly, then sat down next to the maintenance chair. He leaned in a little closer, putting his face near mine, like he was going to whisper something to me.
Instead, his stare became fixed, and a second later I watched as his pupils dilated almost all the way open. I felt a little wave of dizziness, but then it passed.
“Mark one three one,” he said. I was about to ask him what he was talking about when he spoke again, this time in a different tone of voice.
“Stop pursing the specifics of what was going on down in the factory,” he said, his voice authoritative and calm. “Any and all links to Heinlein Industries were opportunistic, to make use of their resources in order to maintain their smuggled revivor soldiers. There was no link between the murders investigated by Detective Dasalia and the events leading up to the strike on the factory. You never found the prisoners being kept in the underground facility, and as far as you know, they were bu
rned along with everything else. Do you understand?”
His stare and his statements took me by such surprise that I thought I almost said something before I realized what was happening. As I watched him from the other side of that dark spot swimming in front of my eyes, I realized he was staring at me the same way Zoe had that time, the way I’d seen her stare at others when she was controlling them.
He was one of them.
Sean was looking at me, pupils still wide, waiting for an answer. Except for some reason his little trick wasn’t working, and he hadn’t realized that. Not yet. His eyes narrowed.
I’d had pinprick necrosis in a section of my brain. Whatever had happened to me, it seemed to have left me immune to their influence.
I let my mind go blank. I stopped thinking about anything else except what he’d said.
“I understand,” I said. His face relaxed.
“This was a win across the board,” he continued. “Whatever you saw or heard down there, forget it. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
Sean’s eyes stayed the same, but his face relaxed a little and his tone of voice changed when he spoke again.
“This is for your own good, Nico. Stay out of this.”
I had known Sean for years. Our relationship had always been the same, and I trusted him with my life. Seeing him then, it was like he had pulled off a mask.
“Just tell me one thing,” he said, leaning closer, “then forget everything to my statement ‘mark one three one.’ I need to know one thing.”
“Okay.”
“Where is Samuel Fawkes? Did he get out of the facility?”
I knew there was a lot riding on my answer. This was important to him, very important. I had never seen him so serious about anything before in my life. Fawkes had been telling the truth. The group he described, they did exist. They had infiltrated even the FBI, and they knew about him.
“No,” I said.
