Guardian

by Alex London

  [29]

  AFTER EXPELLING THE RECONCILIATION from Mountain City, Kaspar Maes had moved his gang into the former headquarters of the Oosha Panang Chemical Supply Company. It had been one of the grandest skyscrapers before the Jubilee, which meant it had been quickly looted afterward. What remained, however, still impressed.

  Its curved steel frame twirled from the base of its own plaza, and the building seemed to corkscrew into the polluted haze. Maes had ringed the plaza with a barricade of concrete and razor wire, and he used a horde of hangers-on as guards. His own enforcers strolled the perimeter and took what they wanted from the squalid encampment.

  He had transformed the skyscraper itself into a vertical farm, growing food for himself and his followers up and down its exterior. In the early days of the revolution, slave labor had been easy to come by. When the Guardians were no longer able to work, he started using regular people for the dangerous sky-high planting and harvesting.

  Entire ecosystems developed in the smog and he’d quickly found that some of the strange mutations that occurred in his crops caused euphoria and hallucination when ingested. He’d launched a new business in the ruins of the old. He’d thrived.

  People like Maes always thrived.

  His success, as Cheyenne explained it, eased Syd’s mind as they approached the plaza on foot. A man with success had interests to protect. A man with nothing was far more dangerous. Syd hoped they could simply negotiate and walk away with what they needed.

  If not, however, there was a backup plan.

  “I don’t like it,” Liam had said when Syd laid it out for him. “I shouldn’t leave you alone with them.”

  “You’re the only one of us with military experience,” Syd told him. “You’ve led this kind of attack before.”

  “Never from a hovercraft,” Liam said. “Never with a band of untrained kids.”

  “We don’t have any trained kids for you,” Syd said. “We use who we’ve got.”

  The plan couldn’t be too complicated. They only had a few hours to put it together. Liam would take a group of each corporation’s best in the hovercraft. They would wait for the signal nearby and, if called on, they would launch a surprise attack, evacuate Syd and the others, and, if possible, take Maes hostage. Then they would negotiate with his men for their boss’s life.

  “It’s crazy,” said Liam. “It’s not even elegant.”

  Syd scratched at his arm. He couldn’t help it. “We don’t have time for elegant,” he said. “We go first thing in the morning.”

  “Why wait until morning?” Nine asked. He winced when he spoke, like the effort hurt him. His veins had begun to turn black.

  “When I was a little kid, my friend Egan and I would rob Upper City construction sites and sell the stuff to Maes’s goons,” Syd explained. “Morning was always the best time to visit criminals. Their thugs are usually still sleeping off the night before.”

  Nine agreed, reluctantly. Liam too.

  “Promise me,” Liam said. “Promise me that you’ll send the signal at the first sign of trouble. I’ll be there.”

  “I know you will,” said Syd.

  “Do you really think this will work?” Marie asked.

  Syd didn’t answer. There were times that silences were exactly the same as confessions.

  • • •

  Syd’s theory about thugs sleeping it off in the morning was a good theory . . . if only it had been true.

  Though the concrete barely shone orange in the first light of the day, a dozen sentries blocked the plaza entrance, all of them wide-awake, jumpy, and all of them armed with bolt guns. They pointed their weapons at Syd, Marie, Cheyenne, and the small entourage they’d brought with them. Syd had to hold his hands up in the air and urged the others to do the same, walking slowly. He doubted whether splitting up from Liam had been a good idea after all. He knew he couldn’t send the signal yet. It was too soon. They weren’t even inside.

  “Don’t shoot,” Syd called out, which wasn’t part of a well-thought-out strategy. It was just the first thought that occurred to him while staring at the business end of twelve spring-loaded bolt guns.

  “What you want?” one of the sentries grunted. He wore the uniform of a Purifier from the Reconciliation, even the white mask, but the uniform was filthy and frayed. He was either a deserter or had taken it off a dead Purifier. It hardly mattered. He was the one pointing the weapon at them, and his personal history wasn’t really the issue at the moment.

  “We’re here for Maes,” Cheyenne said. “We have business to discuss.”

  The sentry swayed on his feet. Through the holes in his mask, Syd saw his eyes were cloudy. Drugged or sick or both. He was on edge. One of the other sentries, a light-skinned girl half Syd’s age and a third his height, stood on her tiptoes and whispered to the boy in the mask. He nodded. “You do business with us first,” he snapped.

  Syd sighed. Everything costs.

  A bribe paid—it cost Cheyenne’s guards three precious bolts apiece from their weapons—and they were inside the perimeter.

  “It’s—” Marie gasped. “It’s everywhere.”

  The plaza in front of them looked exactly like the co-op where they’d left her parents: row upon row of the sick and the dying, black-veined semi-humans suffering loudly. Smoke from countless fires mixed with the smell of every bodily function imaginable and the sounds of groans, coughs, and whispered conversations, all carried on the hot breeze straight at them. The entire plaza assaulted the senses.

  Younger people, still on their feet, wandered through the rows, rummaging in the pockets of anyone too weak to resist, scavenging weapons and food and whatever else they thought could be of use. Cheyenne’s guards did their best to look intimidating so no one would get too close.

  “Move quickly,” Syd suggested and they all picked up their pace. He wished he had Liam at his side. Was it just Liam’s talent for violence he missed, or something else?

  The door to the Oosha Panang Chemical Supply Company had long been torn off. Two catatonic nopes were chained in front of it, staring mindlessly ahead, hairless and black-veined, toothless mouths gaping. They were, however, alive. As he went past, it occurred to Syd that the only dead nopes he’d seen were the ones the Reconciliation had slaughtered themselves. The others he’d seen were . . . well, not exactly living. But alive.

  They crossed through the lobby, bright with the morning sun. People were lying around on the floor, leaning against walls, smoking and murmuring. They fell silent as Syd, Marie, Cheyenne and her small entourage passed them, watching the group with blank stares. The people might as well have been nopes themselves. None made a move to intercept them, which was a relief. None made a move toward the large winch that controlled the elevator either, which was less of a relief.

  “What floor is Maes on?” Syd asked.

  “One hundred and eight,” said Cheyenne.

  Syd felt weak in the knees. No way could he make it up 108 flights of stairs.

  Cheyenne motioned to three of her entourage. They took up positions on the winch. One more took up a position to protect them.

  “Now you’ve only got one person left,” said Marie.

  “Then I’ll have to rely on you two to protect me,” Cheyenne said. “You’ll do a better job than you did with Knox, I hope.”

  There was no clever reply to that, so the three of them boarded the elevator with Cheyenne’s bodyguard, Nine.

  Syd looked at him as the elevator made its stuttering way up the building. The last time they’d met, Nine had been partying at the club, selling fake ID patches and joking around about everything, even as Syd was running for his life.

  Now there was no joking for Nine. His hands shook as he fought the urge to scratch at his skin. The veins were swelling, black, and Syd could only imagine the pain that was to come. He tried to calculate the pace of th
is; how much time did he have left himself? It seemed impossible to predict. Some fell apart fast, others struggled on for days. The terror was in the randomness. What made Nine suffer so much worse, so much faster?

  Nine saw Syd looking at him and spat on the floor, then cursed into Syd’s face. “Chapter Eleven knock-off glitch-brained swampcat.”

  Syd ignored him. Pain made people say all sorts of things they didn’t mean. Or, at least, that they would normally keep to themselves, even if they meant every word.

  “Quiet, Nine,” Cheyenne snapped at him. “We’re on the same side now.”

  “If this doesn’t work I want to kill him myself,” Nine said.

  “Try it and I’ll put a bolt through your balls before I put one through your head,” Marie told him and Syd felt a little better having her around. You’d have to be pretty crazy to mess with Marie. Then again, Nine looked pretty crazy.

  “His parents were killed by the Reconciliation,” Cheyenne explained. “Among the first to be executed.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Marie, without thinking. She looked away, out of the open elevator shaft to the sloping Mountain City beyond. She didn’t want them to see her tremble. Her parents—far guiltier in the old system than Nine’s entertainment executive mom and dad—were still alive. At least, they had been when she left them at the co-op. Was that the last time she saw them? Suddenly she couldn’t remember. Her thoughts jumbled. She started scratching at her skin, until Syd reached over and stopped her. She steadied herself. Told herself not to fall apart, not to be the first one to fall apart. She looked at Nine and Cheyenne and decided that she would outlast them, at least. It felt good to have a goal, a little competition, even if she actually had no control over its outcome. The sickness obeyed its own rules and, so far, it had shown itself to be merciless and thorough.

  They rode up without talking anymore. Syd thought through what he would say to Maes when they got there, wondered whether the old crime lord would remember when he’d sent his thugs to kill Syd in the desert. If they’d succeeded then, none of this would be happening now. The old system would’ve gone on, Knox would’ve gone home, been assigned a new proxy, and no one but Syd would know what had almost been and he’d be a nameless corpse, forgotten, and buried in the desert.

  Instead, that was Finch.

  The elevator lurched to a stop, swinging and creaking out of sync with the building, which also swung and creaked. In front of them, the elevator doors slid past each other and then back again the other way, like a pendulum, giving them about a two-second window when they lined up.

  “I guess we’re here?” said Marie.

  “We go one at a time,” said Syd.

  “You first,” Nine told him.

  “Such a gentleman.” Syd gave him a toothy grin and he noticed Cheyenne sigh when he did it. The sarcasm reminded her of Knox.

  Syd pulled open the grate on their side and waited for the doors to line up so he could catch the outer one. When he grabbed it, the momentum almost pulled him off his feet and dragged him into the elevator shaft, but he kept his grip and yanked the outer door open. He let go and let the elevator swing again. The next time the doors lined up, he jumped.

  The 108th floor did not look how he had imagined the lair of a gang lord. He was standing in a bland reception area with frayed industrial carpet from wall to wall in a color that could only be described as “none.” The furniture was gone, and where once there had been a reception desk, there were now just scraps of wood. Everything had been salvaged.

  Behind the desk were two glass doors, both of them cracked. After the others got off the elevator, Syd wondered aloud which they should take.

  “They lead to the same place,” said Cheyenne, so Syd chose the one on the left, which he decided was luckier, and swung it open to a giant room, where ergonomically designed, injection-molded employee workstations were tossed around as if a hurricane had ripped through. The outer ring of the grand room was lined with offices, which took up every bit of window, giving all the light and air to the higher-up executives who would have occupied them. Now, luckily, they were mostly empty and doorless, so the light from outside streamed in.

  At the far end of the great room, however, there was a set of double doors in the corner. Those double doors were flanked with two more nopes chained to the wall, like guard dogs, except they didn’t make a sound, just stared as Syd, Marie, Cheyenne, and Nine walked up to them. The veins on their faces bulged and pulsed, webs of gruesome blue.

  Not black.

  Blue.

  Syd wanted to look closer, but before he was even halfway across the desert of workstations, the double doors swung open and the real soldiers of Maes’s army streamed out, lining the entire opposite wall and blocking the doorway. As if they’d coordinated with the lobby below, at that exact moment, Syd heard the elevator that had brought them up whistle back down the shaft in a free fall, no doubt crashing to pieces in the lobby. So much for Cheyenne’s loyal entourage. They were almost certainly dead.

  Maes was not known to take prisoners.

  “You will surrender your weapons immediately or be killed,” one of the guards shouted. “You are now prisoners of Kaspar Maes.”

  Well, thought Syd, there’s a first time for everything.

  [30]

  KASPAR MAES, THE MOST dangerous man in Mountain City, could not lift his head.

  The gang lord lay entombed in lux blankets and pillows on a grand bed in the center of what had been a giant conference room running almost the entire width of the building. He was surrounded by armed teenaged guards. His hair had fallen out unevenly, his eyes were milky white, and his skin sagged off his jagged skull, like wax melting off steel. The veins through his skin were knobby and twisted. Their throbbing was visible from across the room.

  “Mr. Maes,” Syd began, trying the humble approach. “We’ve come to make a business arrangement with you. I believe we can cure this spreading sickness and I would be glad to explain how . . . if we were to become partners.”

  The dead-eyed gang lord wheezed.

  “He can’t even hear you,” a little boy said, stepping from behind the legs of the older boys standing around the bed. He stood no higher than Syd’s hips. He wore shining silver pajamas and a flowing golden robe of the most lux fabric Syd had ever seen. Cheyenne gasped when she saw it, and Marie stiffened, still unsettled by the persistence of luxury in the world she had tried to remake without it. The boy’s bright blue eyes looked Syd up and down, and his coils of blond hair, arranged in neat dreadlocks, swished as he approached. He couldn’t have been older than eight, but he moved with the self-assurance of an adult who was used to obedience from everyone he met. “Grandpapa is blind and deaf and dumb,” the boy said.

  “You’re—?” Syd began.

  “Krystof Maes,” one of the guards snapped at Syd. “And you will show him respect when you address him!”

  Syd looked from the guard to the little boy. “Respect is too valuable a resource to be given away to strangers for free,” he said. “It has to be earned by friends.”

  The boy smirked. “You’re the one they call Yovel.”

  Syd nodded.

  “You used to be called Syd.”

  “I still am,” he said. “By my friends.”

  “I will call you Syd.”

  “I’d like that.” Syd smiled.

  “But we will not be friends,” the boy added and turned away, walking back toward the bed.

  “We won’t?” Syd moved to follow him, but the guards raised their weapons.

  “You aren’t the kind of friend I’d like,” said Krystof Maes.

  “But you don’t know me.”

  “Grandpapa told me all about you.” The boy hoisted himself on the bed, flopping across his grandfather’s legs without a thought to the agony he caused. Kaspar Maes lifted an arm, but could hardly move to s
hoo the boy off him. “He’d tried to kill you before you could ruin everything, but that didn’t work. And then you became his enemy.”

  “But I’m not your enemy,” said Syd. He felt like a fool, arguing with the child. His voice had gone up a register, squeaking on the word “enemy.” He never really knew how to talk to children. He wasn’t sure if he should coo at them or scold them. He certainly had no idea how to talk to children who commanded armies of criminals and who held his life and the lives of everyone on the continent in their tiny, sticky hands. Should he tell a fairy story or something? Did he even know any? He remembered one, about a frog and a princess and an unpayable debt. It probably wasn’t the time for stories.

  “Do you want to hear a story?” Krystof asked.

  “Uh . . .”

  “We’d love to,” said Marie, making her voice sound as nurturing as it could. Which wasn’t very nurturing at all.

  “It’s about a group of people who came all the way here after my grandpapa told them never to come to his part of the city.” The boy grinned at Cheyenne. “Do you know what happened to them?”

  “We came here to—” Nine said, but the little boy cut him off with a piercing, high-pitched shout.

  “SHUT UP! I’M TALKING!” He made a quick flick of his wrist and one of his guards fired a bolt. It cracked through the air as the spring released and, before Nine could even close his mouth, it had passed through his throat.

  Nine dropped to the floor, gagging, bleeding. Cheyenne dropped to her knees beside him, held him as he gasped and choked his final breaths. It didn’t take long.

  “You—” Cheyenne shouted at Krystof, but Syd yanked her to her feet and held her close at his side as her faithful follower, her old friend who was not even old enough to grow a mustache, lay dead below her. Syd pictured Nine before, months ago, laughing with Knox, dancing at the club. He didn’t look down at the body.

  “We are very sorry to interrupt,” said Syd, fighting the urge to scream. The little boy had a temper and, if they had any hope of getting out of there alive, of saving everyone else’s life, the boy had to be humored. He had to be appeased. There would be time to grieve later.