by K. Gorman
Without glancing back, he said, “You can put that down now.”
She realized with a jolt that she was still aiming the blaster. Heat flooded her face, more shame and panic at what she’d been doing than embarrassment that he’d caught her, and dropped its aim to the ground, clicking its safety off in the same motion. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right. If you can find some rope, or something to tie her with, that’d be good. I doubt she’ll stay down more than a few minutes.” He glanced down, wiping some spittle from his lip that he’d acquired in the fight. “Maybe something for her mouth, too. We don’t want her yelling.”
His breaths still came in heavy, prolonged bouts, his chest moving like a bellows. By the way his gaze avoided hers, his attention instead on the part of her shadow that stretched across the floor to their right, she guessed he was feeling some of the same feelings she was right now.
No girlfriend ever wanted to see her boyfriend assault a woman.
“Right,” she said, also dropping her gaze. She swung toward the door. “I’ll find something.”
*
She found a coil of dirty rope under the stairwell. Marc took that along with the package of tissues he’d fished from one of Laika’s other pockets, and used the multi-tool to cut it into a long and a short piece. He bound her hands with one, then wrapped the other in tissues and put it in her mouth, tying it around the back of her head where it met the neck.
Karin didn’t make any comments about sexual kink as he worked, only watched. The sick feeling in her gut had settled somewhat, replaced by something stiff and cold. Adrenaline fueled her blood, and there was a quiet, thrilling pulse that jangled up and down her nerves as the minutes ticked on.
They were escaping. They’d actually done it.
Now, they had to get away.
When he was finished, Marc put Laika back into recovery position, checked her breathing, then got to his feet. He paused only once to scoop up her secondary gun and multitool, dropping them several meters away toward the door—probably to give Laika a chance against the monsters, should they return—then made a gesture for her.
“Come on. We have to be quick and quiet. No telling if they’d had a system to check on her.”
“Do you know where to go?” she asked, jogging after him down the hall.
“We’ll hit a mall first. Somewhere we can get rid of these clothes.” He glanced back. “They may have trackers in them.”
Her eyebrows twitched upward. “Water won’t work?”
“Not since the twentieth century. And unless you have a microwave hidden away that you’re not telling me about…”
He made another gesture, this time to the blaster she was carrying in her hand, and she passed it over. He didn’t release the safety. Instead, he swapped it to his other hand and raised the first one to put a grip on her shoulder, peeking through the doorway as they came to the first junction to the stairs.
“Remember. Quiet.”
They didn’t bother sneaking back up the stairs, nor through the hallway they’d come down. Whatever strategy was going through Marc’s head, and despite his warnings for quiet, she gathered that he had decided that time was of more essence than stealth—and she agreed. Now that the shock of them being free, or almost free, was settling in, making her heart pump fast and putting a kind of slithering tension through her muscles, she wanted to get as far from this building as possible and keep going. Her gaze darted around the hall upstairs, the same one that they’d come in through, half-expecting Baik or Colahary or one of the others to be on their way back. The quiet, and the stillness, unsettled her.
Marc kept the lead, and she followed close behind, careful not to bump into him when he stopped. He gave a bit more care and attention to the doors and the windows beyond them than he had on the way up. He took them away from the back door they’d come in through, which loomed behind them at the end of the hall, its presence making her back crawl—as if it would open at any time—and found a side exit instead. They passed a dormant holoscreen board on their way down, but by the paper notices tacked to the wall beside it, one for a community fire hall meeting and the other an inquiry into local gardening co-ops, she gathered that this building had acted as a kind of community center.
He clicked the door open. Fresh, cool air brushed at her skin, chilling some of the still-wet blood on her face. The alleyway they’d come from ran parallel to their exit, separated from the lot they’d stepped into by a fence of wooden slats that rose between this building and another older-looking one to the right. The light from the discus above made a pale, golden-gray hue on the asphalt ahead. More Ternic weeds broke the nearest curb, their purple speckles of flowers and dark green leaves and stems still in the shade. Above, another bird, different this time with a dull brown body and speckles on its neck, made a cooing sound from a ledge.
She and Marc skirted across the lot in a vague, c-shaped curve, keeping out of sight from around the corner of the building until they’d gained cover along a strip of businesses and street vendor stalls. Keeping low, they passed two restaurants, one which still had its lights active. The smell of rotting foot overpowered the coppery, soapy smell of her nosebleed. Her heartbeat surged when she caught sight of a person inside, standing under a small, old tablet-television set mounted on the wall, before her brain identified him as Lost. His head turned their way, black eyes skimming the lower edge of the window as they went by.
At the end of the row, Marc glanced back. Her blood jumped as his eyes widened. She suppressed a squeak as he spun, grabbed her shoulder, and pulled her deep into the shadow of an auto-vendor. They huddled down, not daring to breathe, staring at the building they’d just left.
For several long, tense seconds, nothing happened. Another bird, the same type as the brown one, landed in the street nearby and began to walk along the ground, the light from the discus giving an odd depth to the speckles on its neck. The same light wavered on the curb, cutting off where the overhang of the building slashed a swathe of shade—one of the reasons she suspected Marc had chosen this place as cover, in addition to its convenience and the sheer number of places that made it easy to hide and gave the walkway a busy look. The area was a maven for vending stands and other accoutrements.
Then, she saw movement.
Baik, Seras, and Colahary came back into sight, blasters raised, moving in formation as they came to the building from the opposite side they’d all originally entered. There were no yells or shouts, no fanfare, just a silent rush. The only sound she heard from this far away was the squeal and clunk of the door closing behind them.
She swallowed hard. Her arms began to shake again.
“David’s covering another door, probably,” Marc murmured into her ear. “They don’t have enough manpower to both cover the building and search it and spread out, which gives us some time—but not a lot.” His grip loosened on her shoulders, and he extracted himself, keeping low, following the line of storefronts away. The neon ‘open’ sign of a small bodega store shone on the side of his face as he eased away. “Time to start running.”
After the strip, they kept to the alleys as best they could, zigzagging across streets and always looking back. They both took their shoes off at the first block, leaning against the wall of a store and peeling them off as fast as they could. Marc passed her his to carry and took up the blaster in both hands. She stuffed the water bottles and the package of nuts into the inside of the shoes, grabbed their laces in a bundle, and took off after him.
Despite the abandonment, Minerva’s streets were clean and even. The few cars and other vehicles that dotted the streets—discus cities were notoriously inefficient for driving and tended toward public services for inter-disc travel, operating similar to space station systems in that respect—looked to have been parked for a while, most either in spots at the curb or holders at the side. They passed an inter-disc garage storage that reported itself at eighty percent capacity. The number chilled her. Despite the procli
vity toward public transport inside the city, people tended to take their vehicles with them when leaving it. Either the evacuations had forced people into large ships and transports, which seemed unlikely with an evacuation on such a planet-wide scale as this, the people had abandoned their vehicles to return to later, or they’d been taken.
The sinking feeling in her chest was betting on the latter.
They sprinted at intervals, switching out for a light jog every few minutes when they had good cover, but sprinting hard over any open areas they needed to cross. As the third and fourth blocks came around, and her breath was only just starting to become more than labored, she gave silent thanks to all the fitness training she’d been doing since Caishen. Running laps of the Nemina’s tight corridors had made her feel a bit like an exercising rat, and Kolkata base’s wider training ground had just been an extension of that impression with its high fences and regimented equipment, but it was paying off now.
The flat discus streets, coated with a translucent matte finish that allowed the light to take a one-way trip through to the boosting material beneath, pushed rough impacts through her bones as she ran and coated her socks with a mix of dust and grit and other substances the maintenance bots hadn’t picked up, but it was a familiar feeling. After a while, the balls of her feet, along with parts of her heel, started to numb out from the shoeless sprints. She pushed on, ignoring the feeling.
At about the ten-block range, moving in a semi-diagonal path toward the west, Marc veered across the street. A sheen of sweat caught the disc-filtered sunlight at the base of his neck as he craned his head up at a large mall complex. Other spots of sweat had begun to darken the sides of his shirt.
The mall was different from the rest of the buildings due to its design. Although sixty percent of the disc buildings worked on a multi-level, interdisc functionality, due to the cost and difficulties of demolishing in the disc, most had a kind of grandfathered look to them, evidence of many years of development and refacing rather than new construction. The mall and its subsidiary areas, a set of multi-level courtyards on one side and a combined aquarium-museum-education-center on the other, looked to have been part of a government-funded stimulus package. Instead of the blocky segmentation of other towers, it had smooth, rounded sides with translucent blades of what looked to be disc-material by the way it drew and manipulated the light into itself, sliding out of the building in artistic curves and intervals, making a pattern reminiscent of a flowing river. A large rooftop patio emerged from the top, close to where the top disc intersected with it. Beyond, the mall continued through to the next level, warping into a stick-like figurine by the disc’s light-bending.
They jogged up to the entrance, a grand plaza with the remnants of the mall’s last promotional event visible in a set of stacked tables and chairs, a temporary wall hiding the moving vehicles and cranes, and a still-standing temporary stage advertising a cute pop band on its backing.
The mall’s doors slid back as they approached, soundless on their tracks. Inside, the mall welcomed them through a small atrium, advertising another closed coffee shop and a famous system clothier, then spread out in a circular formation of floors. Her eyes went wide as she realized just how many there were, all stacked up like vertical tree rings, straight up and including part of the next level’s disc surface above, its material making a carved and ripple effect that looked like the surface of water or scratched ice. On the ground floor, the marble mosaic of the mall’s entrance artwork stretched out in a large circle, gleaming and immaculate. In fact, everything gleamed. Including the leaves of the tropical-looking plants in the courtyard of the cafe next to her, the painted, wrought-iron railings of the small fence that hemmed it in, and even the gold, silver, and turquoise-leaf feathery artwork that decorated the ceiling.
Cleaning drones. She spotted a dormant one next to the garbage receptacle in the corner and amended her thought. Very expensive cleaning drones.
She’d bet that, even at full rush hour on a double-sun-triple-moon day extravaganza, the mall didn’t see a lick of grime or dust.
Less concerned with stealth now, Marc jogged up to the holodisplay of the mall’s map. His right hand lifted as he scanned through it, fingers fluttering as he half-mouthed the words. Shaking, her breaths coming long and deep, she joined him as he jabbed a finger to a spot on the mall’s circular map.
“Warehouse Outlet. Gotcha.”
She almost made a snarky comment on his choice in fashion accessories, but he took off again, picking up a jog toward the nearest elevator. She stopped for a moment, bending low and breathing deep, clearing some of the liquid from her throat.
As she started up again, a whirring noise sounded behind her. She glanced back to see the previously-dormant cleaning drone activate itself and head to where their dusty and dirty socks had left the faintest of imprints on the floor. After it tidied them, it turned on its axis and made to follow them, cleaning their trail as they went.
Huh. Our very own track-obscurer. Breathless, she didn’t comment on it, but Marc had seen it, too. He shot a broad grin over his shoulder as he jogged up to the bank of tubes that held the elevators and slapped his hand against the closest panel. They left the drone behind on the ground floor as they rose, but, when they disembarked on the fifteenth, a second drone detached itself from its dormancy station on the wall and followed them at a discreet distance.
Warehouse Outlet’s security grates were down, but it wasn’t a high-end retailer—not like the fancy stores closer to the bottom that used shield-producing technology to protect their wares. A blaster shot to the front panel melted the lock, and a second fried the override mainframe. It took her and Marc a few tries to haul the grate up, but they managed to muscle it up. It clanked and rattled as its motors whirred into activity and the rest of it lifted into its ceiling berth. Two metal slats clanked into place beneath it, hiding the hole.
Marc hesitated, glancing at the two glass panels that provided a weak second layer of security, his blaster lifting in his hands again. After a half-second, he let it drop back down and took an experimental step forward.
The doors slid back as smoothly and softly as the ones at the entrance had.
He gave her a smile. “Guess they forgot to lock them.”
“By the looks of things, people left in a hurry.”
On their way up, she’d noticed that only half of the stores had been shuttered, the rest still standing open. Others were closed in such a way that it looked like they would open even more easily than with a blaster shot. The shoe store next door still had its lights on, gleaming on the paper-metal hybrids the shop was famed for. From another level, faint strains of one of the system’s more-popular pop songs rose up over the floor’s balcony.
“Or they were taken,” Marc said.
Yes. That was definitely another option. And one much more likely if the numbers on that car park and the pessimistic, growing hunch in the back of her mind were anything to go by. It was one thing to hear that half the non-Lost population had been taken—now upped to ninety percent—and quite another to witness the effects. She’d assumed that it would have been more spread out, but she guessed that either the ten percent that had been spared were either inside the semi-protected zone of the camps, or the number was quite a bit higher once one got away from it.
Sol’s child. What is Sasha up to that she needs so many people? She can’t possibly have enough tanks to fit that many.
“What if, instead of collecting people, she’s getting rid of them?” she asked. “Not putting them in tanks, but removing them?”
It was an unsettling thought, and not one she wanted to contemplate. But Dr. Sasha hadn’t seemed all that concerned with human life in the past. What had Tylanus said to her before? That she hadn’t made him kill anyone yet? She doubted that, but assumed also that he’d meant that he hadn’t killed anyone directly. More than a few Lost had perished through various means. She didn’t know how he was involved with creating them, but, s
he supposed, technically, he hadn’t killed them.
Marc didn’t say anything for a few seconds, but she could tell the thought had hit him, too. He didn’t look at her, but his gaze wandered across a rack of capris-styled pants just inside the doors in a way that made her doubt he was actually noticing them.
“That… would be devastating.”
“But it makes an odd kind of sense, doesn’t it?” she said, her voice quiet. She stepped under the climate control vent and hunched her shoulders, her right arm coming across her abdomen to hook around her left, which carried their shoes. “What did she say before? That she wanted to find a place for her and her son to live?”
That’s what she’d said. Soo-jin had made some sarcastic comment about heading off to Amosi, which Dr. Sasha had not received well. Maybe that’s why Dr. Sasha had shot her.
Marc gave an involuntary shudder and shook his head. He gave the store another scan, then turned. His hand came up to squeeze her shoulder. “Something to contemplate later. You hurry up and find something from here, but don’t change yet. I need to scan you for trackers. I’m going to loot a couple other places.”
His hand left her shoulder, and he headed down the hall, steps turning into a jog, socked feet making barely a sound on the tiles. She watched him retreat for a few seconds, pausing with a slight tilt to scan the shoe store next to them, then turned her attention back to her task.
The store’s lighting system flicked on with a small chime when she stepped over the threshold. By the lack of blaring music and excited advertising voices, both of which were signatures to this particular chain, she assumed the lighting was more to welcome employees rather than potential customers. A few clicks from around the room made her flinch, but it was only the sound of the stock drones waking up and checking their stock. At the back of the store, a full-length advertisement filled a vertical rectangle in the middle of two sides of an accessories display, seeming out of place until she spotted the brief flash of a number pad at its middle-right.
