by Dan Wells
She was still frightfully amateur when it came to processing link data, but she tried to think hard about what it felt like when Samm and Heron had entered Afa’s compound, trying to truly read the emotion behind it. All of it seemed to be coming from Samm and Heron, not the attackers. That meant the ambushers were either human or Partials wearing gas masks—a common tactic when Partials fought one another. Kira stayed still, listening, trying to figure out where each person was. The generator had been turned off, or outright destroyed, which meant that one of the attackers was there; Afa’s screen had shattered, too, which meant one of the attackers had been somewhere with a clean shot at it. That would likely be two rows to her right, though whether they were in front of her or behind her, she didn’t know. Had Afa been shot as well? She felt something in the link about a wounded comrade, but she didn’t know who or where.
Someone moved to her left: friend or foe? She couldn’t tell; she listened to the footsteps, trying to tell which direction they were moving, and heard the unmistakable squelch of water. A wet boot, but whose? Unless they’d come in from the roof, the invaders would have shoes just as wet as Samm’s and Heron’s. Possibly wetter, since they’d been in the water more recently. That could be a clue in and of itself, but without more information, Kira had no way of knowing. She reached for her own boots, slowly easing them off, never making a sound. Her wet socks followed, leaving her barefoot. She’d be the only one in the room who didn’t squeak and squelch as she walked.
Another flash of link data cascaded through her mind—THEY’VE FOUND ME—followed seconds later by another burst of gunfire. There was another sound behind it, like a gunshot but different. Kira couldn’t tell what it was, but the gunfire stopped and a body fell heavily to the ground; Kira estimated it was about ten yards away, behind and to her left. She felt the sudden, confusing sensation of being sleepy and not sleepy at the same time, and interpreted it as another message from the link: One of her companions had been drugged or sedated. The not-quite-gunshot she’d heard had been a tranquilizer dart.
That means they’re not trying to kill us, thought Kira. Who wants to capture us? Dr. Morgan? But how does she know where we are?
Kira rose to her feet, her back pressed tightly against the computer tower. She glanced up and down the row she was in, seeing nothing, and slipped forward to the next one as lightly as she could. Her bare feet made no sound on the concrete floor, but she felt cold drips on her legs and looked down in frustration; her boots had been left behind, but her pants were still soaked from the flood below, and she was leaving a dim trail of water showing exactly where she was. She heard another squelch, behind and to her right. Someone was getting closer. She slid to the floor and wrung her pants dry, twisting the legs as tightly as she could to get rid of the excess water. It was nearly impossible with her legs still in them. The squelch came closer—she guessed he was three rows away. She gritted her teeth, wringing out her second pant leg, trying to make them as dry as possible. Another squelch. She rose again, her pants cold against her legs but not dripping, and slipped lightly to the next row down. She left no trail this time. She moved another row, then another, slipping to the side, trying to put as much distance between her and the attacker as she could, in the direction he least expected.
The room erupted in noise again, shouts and automatic weapons and the harsh metallic rips of bullets tearing through computer towers. Two bodies slumped this time, and Kira felt again the faint of whiff of prescience from the link: sleep, pain, and victory. Her final companion was down but had taken at least one of the attackers down in the process. Kira was alone, and she had no idea how many enemies were left.
She heard a footfall, but she couldn’t tell where it had come from. A voice, too soft to understand. A sudden sense of determined pragmatism: to find the last target and complete the mission. Had that come from her, or from the enemy? Kira was frustrated that she still wasn’t adept enough to tell. She took a deep breath, crouching low in the darkness, sorting through her limited information: If that last impression was link data, then the enemy were definitely Partials, and at least one had removed his gas mask. The Partials worked in two-man hunting teams—she’d heard them constantly on the radio in the raid of Long Island—but they used larger teams as well, depending on the job. She might be facing a single combatant or a dozen. The reigning silence in the data center suggested that only a very small team had infiltrated; if there were more, they were waiting outside.
She thought further, looking for anything she could use to her advantage. Her rifle was on the far side of the room, but she still had her sidearm. Would it be of any use at all? Partial soldiers had vision enhancements, and better night vision in particular; it also stood to reason, given that they’d started the attack by cutting the lights, that they had some additional way to see in the dark, perhaps light amplification goggles. That would put Kira at a distinct disadvantage, but if she could turn it around, blinding them with the beam of her flashlight, she might be able to get off a shot before the target recovered. She drew her pistol in her right hand and her flashlight with her left, holding it across her body, aimed straight ahead with her finger on the switch.
A boot crunched down on something, echoing through the silence. One of the attackers had stepped on something, probably the shattered glass from Afa’s screen. Was Afa okay? She shook her head. Focus, Kira. If someone had stepped on Afa’s glass, then she knew where he was, and she could find him. She slipped from one tower to the next, crouching below the sight line as she moved from cover to cover. A moment later she felt a delayed link response: OVER THERE. This was definitely a Partial, and probably two, using the link to coordinate silently. Two against one, and both of them Partials. They would surround her and trap her, fill her with tranquilizer, and carry her back to Dr. Morgan.
Unless . . .
Kira remembered what Samm and Heron had said after their raid on Afa’s building: She could feel them on the link, but they couldn’t feel her. She was only beginning to learn how to use her link, but it was possible that she only had receptors for link data, didn’t transmit any herself. This weakness was now her greatest advantage. She could link everything, and they couldn’t link her at all.
Except for movement, Kira thought, cursing her lack of stealth training. Heron couldn’t link with me, but she could hear my movements. She decided the best course of action was to move as little as possible. Instead, she reached for a spare ammo clip attached to her belt and slowly, carefully, making as little noise as possible, pulled a bullet from it. The bullets beneath were spring-loaded, designed to snap up and into place each time a bullet was fired, so she kept her finger in the way, letting the spring ease up instead of clicking. She dropped the bullet in her pocket and did it again, slowly, listening for any sign of the intruders. A third bullet. A fourth. She kept each one in a different pocket so they wouldn’t clink against each other. Slowly she raised the first one in her hand, cocking it back, and threw it, arcing it high over the computer towers and into the far wall. It clattered against the plaster, bouncing back and into a computer tower before rolling to a stop on the floor. Through the link she felt her attackers snap to attention, alerted by the sound, followed a split second later by a tactical warning: IT’S A TRICK. Kira shook her head, angry at herself for thinking it would work, but an idea struck her. She pulled the second bullet from a pocket and threw it lightly at the tower nearest her, listening to it smack into the side and bounce across the concrete floor. The link lit up again, sending the same coordinating message: I HEARD A SOUND. IT’S A TRICK.
The next footstep she heard was moving away from her. Her double fake-out had worked.
She twisted to the side, peeking past the tower she was using for cover. One of the towers, maybe ten rows down, was misshapen in the darkness, lumpy and round. One of the attackers, she guessed, his knee or elbow disrupting the silhouette. She hugged the floor, readying her flashlight again, watching the malformed tower. It moved, expa
nded, separated into a vaguely human shape as the Partial stepped out from behind it. He was moving away from her, a thin pistol raised in front of him—the tranq gun. Kira rose to her feet and slipped after him, stepping slowly to keep her bare feet as silent as she could. He moved two rows and she moved two; if she could keep this up, she’d be in effective range to shoot him. There was still one other, though, and she didn’t know where he was. Every time she crossed an open aisle, she ran the risk of exposing herself.
On her next step her foot came down on something and she froze, not wanting to put her weight on it. She looked down and saw faint lines in the dark, curves and twists like tiny snakes, and she cursed silently. This is one of the rows we unplugged, she thought. The floor’s covered with cords. She moved her foot to the side, finding a safe place to put it down. The floor was a maze of looping cables, and she placed each foot strategically to avoid them: here, twisted this way, oriented just so. Each step seemed to take an hour.
The Partial she was following was getting farther away. Kira pulled out her third bullet and hurled it at the wall ahead of the Partial. He froze, and she crept forward while their link conversation cascaded through her mind: I HEARD A SOUND. IT’S A TRICK. IS IT A TRICK? He figured it out a second too late, turning to shoot her just as she stepped up behind him, shoved her semiautomatic pistol into the gap between his helmet and his chest armor, and fired. He fell to the floor, firing his dart gun harmlessly into the ceiling, and instantly she felt the pounding link message—DEATH!—and heard the sound of footsteps running toward her. She dove to the side, dropping her flashlight and ripping the ammo clip from her belt, popping the bullets into her hands as fast as she could, not caring about the noise. She hurled the entire handful into the air, her back pressed up against a computer tower, and then ran as fast as she could when the bullets clattered down, masking her movements in a raining metal cacophony. She felt frustrated snippets of the link from her last pursuer: SOLDIER DOWN. TARGET LOST. ANGER.
Kira realized she’d lost her flashlight, and with no more bullets to throw, she was out of tricks. She checked her pockets for something she could use, for anything—
FOUND HER. DEATH.
Kira gnashed her teeth—how could he have found her? She wasn’t on the link; the first one had been three feet away from her and hadn’t felt a thing!
DEATH.
She felt it again, the overwhelming feeling of death, and cursed silently. It’s me, she thought. The link data is all pheromones—tiny particles—and I was standing right next to him when he released a cloud of them. The death particles are on me, trailing behind me like a path, and he can follow them right to me. She looked at her pistol, too small to make a stand against an alert Partial in a direct assault. She had nothing else. If only I had my flashlight.
The Partial’s boot clicked against the floor, closer than before. He was almost on her. I have one chance. She closed her eyes, remembering the layout of the room, hoping she hadn’t gotten turned around. She opened her eyes and ran.
She heard a soft whoosh of air, and something darted past her in the air, missing her by inches. She dodged to the side, running in a different row, then dodged back again. Another whoosh, and another tranq dart slammed into a computer tower right as she passed it, close enough that she flinched involuntarily. She leapt over a body, sensing rather than seeing that it was Samm. There were footsteps behind her, pounding heavily on the floor, charging toward her at top speed. Almost there. The Partial knew he had her, that she had nowhere to go. A great round shape loomed up in the darkness and she slid against it, searching frantically in the dark for the thick lever handle on the generator. She found it, slammed it down, and stepped back into the aisle.
The lights came on and the Partial stumbled just two yards away, blinded by the sudden burst of light overloading his night-vision faceplate. Kira raised her pistol and shot him three times in the helmet: crack, split, and through into his head. He dropped like a bag of sand.
DEATH.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Afa had been shot through the thigh by a bullet from one of the invaders�� guns—the only shot that had been an actual bullet. The rest of the shots turned out to be tranq darts, presumably intended to incapacitate their victims. The same bullet had also shattered Afa’s screen, and Kira wondered which had been the true target: the man, or the data? Had the Partials followed them here to capture them, or to stop them from learning what was on the computer? Had it been both?
Kira couldn’t help but wonder if it had been neither. She glanced at Heron, slowly regaining consciousness on the floor. Had she shot Afa? Had Samm? What motive could either of them possibly have for doing so, and why now? If they were colluding with the attackers, why go through the ruse of pretending to get tranqed? That would only make sense if they knew they were going to lose, and if they knew they were going to lose, why bother with the attack at all? It didn’t make any sense, and Kira knew it; the most likely explanation was that the Partial attackers had come to kill Afa and capture the others. Even so, Kira couldn’t shake the lingering doubts. How could the Partials have even found them, unless someone had provided them with a location? She cursed herself for not keeping one alive to interrogate, though she had to admit that she’d barely made it out alive as it was.
Kira finished binding Afa’s wound while he was still unconscious, and checked each attacker in turn, pulling out their weapons to count the bullets. One of them, in fact, had a sidearm that was short one bullet. Kira couldn’t tell how long ago the weapon had been fired, but it didn’t seem likely that a trained soldier would enter combat with anything less than a full clip, and so this was likely the one who’d shot Afa. But “likely,” she knew, wasn’t the same as “true.”
“Scavenging ammo?” asked Heron. Kira turned to find the Partial spy standing behind her, looking disheveled but alert. Kira slapped the clip back into the gun and dropped it on the fallen Partial’s chest.
“This one shot Afa,” she said, and rose to her feet. She tried to keep her voice casually curious. “Why do you think they shot him and tried to tranq the rest of us?”
“They were probably shooting the screen to kill the light,” said Heron. “They were prepared for the dark and we weren’t—standard ambush procedure. Those tranq darts don’t have the penetrating power to shatter a piece of glass like that.”
“That makes sense,” Kira admitted, and it did. Maybe. She shook her head. “Shooting the screen almost guaranteed hitting Afa in the process. If they were trying to take us alive, why risk hitting him somewhere lethal?”
Heron smirked, and pulled the Partial girl’s helmet off. Her face was Chinese, like Heron’s, and strikingly gorgeous. “She’s espionage. There was no risk.”
“How many?” asked Samm. He came around the corner of a computer tower, still shaking off the effects of the drug; he was groggy, and his speech was slurred. Kira added “recovering from sedatives” to her long list of things Heron seemed to be better at than the other Partials. She wasn’t kidding when she said she was designed to be superior.
“Three,” said Kira, looking down at the girl’s body. “One spy and two soldiers, I guess, though I’m obviously not as familiar with the model types as . . . whoa.” She knelt down, seeing something strange under the folds of the Partial’s hair. She brushed it back, revealing three rows of frilled slits on the girl’s neck. “Heron, do you have gills?”
Heron crouched down, pulling the girl’s head to the side to inspect her neck. “These are Morgan’s,” she said. “Special operatives, complete with Morgan’s recent ‘adaptations.’ Check the others.” They pulled the helmets off the two males, finding the same gills. Heron whistled. “Not exactly soldiers at all, then.” She looked up at Kira. “And you killed two of them?”
“Skin of my teeth,” said Kira. “These look like wet suits under their armor. Do you suppose they swam here? We’re right on the shore of Lake Michigan, and unless there are any talking freshwater shark
s you haven’t told me about, traveling by water would be a lot safer than traveling by land.”
“Part of the way, maybe,” said Samm. “They’d still need to cross Michigan on foot, it’s too wide to go around it.”
“They seem perfectly capable of breathing on land,” said Kira. “They could have done both.”
“It doesn’t check out,” said Heron. “If they’d followed us from Manhattan, they wouldn’t have bothered sending gilled agents, because they wouldn’t have known where we were going—for all they know we were headed to the plains, or west into the toxic wasteland. If Morgan had agents stationed here already, though, some kind of outpost in Chicago, what better agents to guard a flooded city than ones with gills?”
Kira nodded. “That’s true. Or—” She stopped herself, not wanting to propose the other explanation so brazenly: Or one of you is a spy, and used our radio to tell them exactly where we were and where we were going.
“Or what?” asked Heron.
“Nothing,” said Kira. She looked at the gills again, avoiding Heron’s eyes, though the faint touch of the link hinted at her feelings: LACK OF TRUST. BE ON GUARD.
CONFUSION. Kira was pretty sure that was from Samm, and felt a wave of relief. If he was confused, then he wasn’t in on it. She’d have to find a way to talk to him in private before Heron did.
“Take their gear,” said Samm. “I’ll dump the bodies in a closet upstairs.” He and Heron began cleaning up the mess of the battle, but Kira went back to Afa. He was breathing better now, thanks to the painkillers she’d given him, but he was still unconscious. The shards of his screen lay around him in pieces, the gray side handle still attached to the server with a cable. The screen was like a smaller version of the glass desk upstairs; the glass was just the monitor, and all the processing and memory were housed in the frame; in this case, in the handle on the side. The server itself seemed undamaged, and for all she knew the data transfer was still going, dumping all of ParaGen’s secrets into the handle. Without a screen, though, they wouldn’t be able to read it.
