She slumped forward over the desk, shivered, and lapsed into a mild seizure. Right as Kevin moved to run to her side, she recovered and sat up straight.
“Ouch.” Tris unplugged the wire from her head.
“What the hell was that?” He took a step, backed up to take Aura’s hand, and pulled the girl over to Tris.
Tris frowned at the desktop computer. “This old piece of crap doesn’t have enough RAM to process a smooth transition between VR and reality. Felt like I went face-first into a bathtub full of ice water and needles.”
“Are you done? Can I go now?” asked Aura.
Tris stood and embraced him, trembling as if about to explode into tears, but kept quiet.
“What happened in there?” He pulled her tight with one arm, keeping Aura’s hand in a firm grip with the other.
“That AI kept teasing me with my past.” She took a step back and gathered her hair into place. “I’m fine. Just… emotional. We need to do two things before we can go. I know the path… got a map in my head now.” She put a hand on the girl’s shoulder and stooped to eye level with her. “Aura… I need you to stay with us for a little while longer. We’re going to the surface, and I want you to come with us both because I think you need to see this, and because people will die if you run off and sound an alarm. Can I trust you to stay quiet while we move?”
Aura shivered.
A momentary vision of carrying a struggling girl with a hand over her mouth reddened Kevin’s face. “What are we doing? Is this kid really going to be that much of an issue if she runs off?”
Tris looked up at him for a second before standing straight. “I have no way to know that, but are you willing to gamble Abby’s life on it? Or everyone else out there? Zoe? Bill? Ann? Emma? The whole town?”
“Okay… okay…”
Aura bowed her head, trembling. “I won’t scream. Please don’t hurt me.”
Tris crouched again and looked the girl in the eye. “I need to go to a room and push a couple of buttons. When we get there, you’ll see what I’m saying is true. The Enclave has been lying to everyone about everything.” She glanced up at Kevin. “There is no Core City.”
“What?” Aura blinked. “No way.”
“It’s all virtual reality. Kids live with their families here in the Quar. As soon as they turn eighteen, they get put in stasis again and plugged in. The parents think they ‘went off to University,’ and a day or so later, the parents get put back on ice too. Everyone in the Enclave except for parents, children, active military, and the politicians, are frozen.”
Kevin blinked. “Okay… I’ve seen some wild movies, but… damn.” He chuckled. “I get it. That’s why you had no toilet.”
“What?” Aura looked back and forth between them. “Where did that come from?”
“Come on.” Tris took Aura by the hand and headed for the door. “They paired me with this guy who hit me in the face after only a half hour alone in a room with him. I said no, so I got put in Detention.”
“You rejected a pairing?” Aura gasped. “Why would you do that? I’d give anything to be chosen. I want kids someday. My friend Dhara doesn’t. She thinks kids are a waste of time.” She frowned. “Not everyone is allowed to have them.”
Tris headed left out the door, moving a brisk pace the girl had to struggle to maintain. “Yes, I did. Would you want to be told who to marry and then spend the rest of your life living in fear of what he’d do to you?”
“But… it’s the pairing. We’re supposed to… for the good of humanity.” Doubt crept into the girl’s voice. “He really hit you?”
“Yep. He was First Tier and thought I was worker caste. When I refused to talk to him like he was better than me, he punched me straight in the nose. I was just there for him to…”
Aura grunted with her effort to keep up. “You can say it. I’m old enough to know what sex is.”
“That. I would’ve been a possession to him, not a wife.”
Tris jogged down a long corridor and stopped in an area that widened out to both sides. Three elevators lined the wall on the left with still-perfect looking ferns between them, obviously plastic. An information desk took up the majority of the opposite side of the space, and a handful of decaying chairs and sofas sat in the middle of the room.
Kevin followed, eyeing books laid out on a coffee table. Course catalogs, admission guidelines, and a couple of issues of Time from 2020. “I think I get why you always stare at this shit. It’s like the world stopped when all the people disappeared.”
She forced open the elevator doors, since they didn’t react to the button. “Yeah.” Her voice echoed in the shaft. “Okay, we have to climb up one floor. Aura, do you want to climb? Or do you want me to carry you.”
“Is it dirty?” asked the girl.
“Filthy.” Tris squeezed in and moved to a ladder on the right side wall.
Aura crept to the edge and reached out. “I don’t wanna get sick.”
Kevin grasped the girl under the armpits and lifted her over to Tris, who wore her like a backpack.
“I know you know that I’ve got a gun in my pocket. Please don’t do anything stupid.” Tris checked her footing on the ladder, and climbed.
Aura sniffled. “I don’t wanna get in trouble for touching a gun.”
Kevin blinked. He forced the doors open a little more and shimmied in after them. The ladder rung squished in his grip, coated with dust-encrusted grease. “Wait… you’re really more afraid of getting in trouble for handling a weapon than you would be if you needed to use a gun to protect yourself from a pair of kidnappers?”
“Uh huh. Guns aren’t allowed unless you’re in the military. If they find out I touched one, they’d lock me up.” Aura paused a tick. “I thought you said you weren’t kidnapping me.”
Kevin smirked up at them. Little brat. “We’re not, I’m just… Wow. Tris, tell me that kid’s taking fear a step too far and those idiots aren’t that bad?”
Tris stopped at the inside of the doors one floor up. “Since we’ve repeatedly told her we don’t want to hurt her and haven’t been violent, if she told them the truth of what happened… yeah they would charge her with a firearms offense if she got her hands on my gun and used it to escape. Even if she didn’t fire it.”
“What the hell kind of fucked up shit is that?”
“What do you think, Aura?” Tris pulled the upper set of doors open and crawled out on her knees. She shifted to the right and lowered the girl to sit on the edge, feet dangling.
Aura scooted back, whimpering while staring down the shaft. “Guns are bad. They hurt people.”
A Cheshire cat grin formed on Kevin’s face. He climbed up into the hallway and eased the .45 out of his pocket. With Aura distracted by backing away from a deadly fall, he popped the magazine out and ejected the round from the chamber.
“There are a small number of people running everything,” said Tris. “They want everyone afraid so they can be controlled. In a little while, everyone will learn the truth.”
“What does that mean?” asked Aura.
Kevin stepped up behind the kid, reached around to grab her arm, and put the .45 in her hand.
Aura stared at it as if he’d handed her a dead baby.
Tris scowled at him. “What are you doing?”
Tears rolled down the girl’s cheeks, though she didn’t make a sound.
Kevin took his weapon back and reloaded it. “She had a gun. Now she can’t run to the ISF. No need to worry about her causing an alarm.”
Aura continued to stare at her empty hand as though it needed to be ‘cleansed.’
“I was trying to make this as un-traumatic as possible, and you just…” Tris sighed.
The girl looked back and forth between them, her face warped with dread and shame.
“Look at her.” Tris picked the girl up and cradled her sideways across her chest. “She looks like we made her shoot someone.”
Aura burst into tears, clinging to Tris and sobbing into
her shoulder. “I don’t wanna go to Detention.”
Kevin winced. Though having her afraid of the ISF instead of wanting to run to them made him feel better. Now they could be the good guys again. “I’m sorry, Aura. I won’t tell anyone you touched a gun.”
“You made me touch it.” The girl sniffled.
“Will the ISF care?” asked Kevin.
Aura stared at him with a blank-faced gawk. “I don’t know.”
Tris carried her down another hallway past doorway after doorway of classrooms. “They’d probably think letting her handle a firearm would diminish the fear they try to cultivate. Even if we forced her to, she’d at least get some kind of punishment. So, as far as anyone here is concerned, that didn’t happen.” At the corner of the hall, she booted open a classroom door and crept inside. “Stay down.”
Kevin crouched, ducked into the room, and pushed the door closed.
Day shimmered in from windows covered in grime, painting a dry erase board along the right wall with blotchy shadows. Jagged silhouettes over the glass suggested an irregular barrier of scraps or debris outside. Tris crawled past student desks to the windows and peered up. A raccoon-band of sunlight lit the upper half of Tris’ face.
Aura crawled up behind her and huddled in a ball. “I know where we are… we’re inside the wall.”
Kevin took a knee behind them. “I’d hope we’re inside the wall. What else was the point of sneaking through the damn subway?”
“No.” Aura looked up at him. “I mean this building is part of the wall. We’re literally in the wall. No one’s supposed to go here.”
“Right,” muttered Kevin. “Can’t let the prisoners out.”
Aura’s eyebrows scrunched together. “We’re not prisoners.”
“Sure, kid. Keep telling yourself that.” Kevin patted her on the head.
Tris moved left to the last window in the row. A wide rectangular slab at the bottom opened after she twisted a handle, lowering inward like a hatch.
“Ugh,” muttered Kevin. “That’s going to be a tight squeeze.”
“Minute… I’m watching for patrollers. We need to go out and left. There’s a white and silver building about thirty yards away across a patch of grass. I’ll go out first. You lower Aura out to me, then follow.”
“Got it.”
“Can I go now?” whispered Aura. “I promise I won’t tell anyone you’re here.” She wiped her hand on her leg as if trying to clean ‘gun’ off it.
Tris glanced down at her with guilt and temptation all over her face. “When I first saw you, you sounded like a little ISF cadet. I think you really need to see this so you understand what I’m saying is true. Ten minutes, okay? Stay with me for ten more minutes and you can go home.”
Aura shivered, but nodded.
After watching out the window for another minute and change, Tris leapt up and slid through the opening. She landed outside, head-level to the window. Aura climbed up onto the radiator. Kevin again took her by a grip under the arms and lowered her feet first into the open window. Tris caught her and helped her down, out of sight. Kevin moved to climb after and froze, stunned by the view.
Beyond a patchwork of rusting metal welded into a security barrier, a sprawling complex of buildings, perfect roadways, and verdant patches of green grass stretched for miles. Black specks, people in jumpsuits, walked around a city that looked like a scene from a science-fiction comic he once read. Potted trees stood interspersed among fantastic swoops of silver architecture, thin decorative spirals with no purpose he could discern. The buildings had a sameness to them that reminded him of an old video game he’d found, where the lazy designers had pasted the same five houses in a repeating pattern to make a city.
Overhead, a great bubble of thin plastic formed a dome over the entire complex, easily several miles across. Sunlight reflected in hundreds of tiny flares. He shook his head at it. These people are paranoid.
A teenage girl went by on a bicycle with cobalt blue light glowing in rings around the tires and pedals. Two men walked on the opposite side of the street, having an animated conversation involving large smiles. No wonder Zara wanted to come back here… it’s like the war never happened and humanity kept going. All that’s missing are cars.
As if on cue, a boxy vehicle closer to a tiny van than a car glided by. The shroud of its body panels came within an inch of the road surface. He squinted and made out a hint of tiny enclosed wheels. Before he could mock whoever would put such minuscule tires on a car, the realization that the man inside sat back while the car drove itself shocked him mute.
“Kevin,” whispered Tris. “Come on!”
He blinked away the mesmerizing effect of the Enclave city and hauled himself headfirst out the window. Tris grabbed his shoulders and pulled him down, saving him from a faceplant on dirt. Much to his surprise, Aura hovered close, making no attempt to run off. He got his feet under him and blinked at her. Guess the gun thing worked.
Tris again took Aura by the hand and ran, heading across a rectangular patch of grass so perfect he wondered if little robots measured every individual blade to length. Ahead, a small cube of a building perched in the middle of the lawn. The upper part of the walls were white, with about a third of the building paneled in mirror like silver. It appeared only large enough for one room with no windows or decoration aside from some chugging machinery on the ceiling, which he assumed to be overworked air conditioning.
A brief sprint later, Tris flattened against the wall and crept to the corner. Kevin didn’t bother leaning against the building; the exterior barrier around the entire Quarantine Section stood less than twenty yards to their left, no one in sight to look at them.
“Ugh.” Tris gagged and coughed. “Okay. Need to run for the door. Don’t stop for anything.”
She kept a hand around Aura’s wrist and darted around the corner.
Kevin followed, sparing a quick glance up at metal letters over the cube-building’s only door.
“Sewage Processing.”
No sooner had the words crossed the threshold of conscious thought, a stench slapped him in the face. He, too, coughed and gagged on the air wafting from the front of the building. Tris rushed a plain opaque black door resembling a slab of onyx glass, shoving it aside. She let go of Aura’s arm once she reached the doorway.
Kevin came up behind the girl, not sure what to expect, half intending to grab her if she tried to run.
“Afternoon,” said Tris. “I’m here about maintenance order CS-101997B.”
Surrounded by walls of baffling computerization, a pair of Enclave ISF officers staffed a desk facing the door. Both wore the same style of super-thin armor that Zara had, clean, new, and form-fit. Two helmets sat beside them on the desk. Seeing it on people it had been made for made it clear why Amaranth had denied them armor. The difference between these two and the Resistance people couldn’t have been more vast. Even if they had their helmets on, the curvy shape of the one on the right would’ve left little doubt as to her being female.
The woman started to give Tris a suspicious glare, but diverted to blink at Aura, her black bob swaying with the sharp head motion.
“There’s no record of a maintenance request,” said the man, who also had black hair, but streaked with a bit of white. He looked in his middle twenties, as did the woman.
Tris smiled. “You’re probably not cleared to know about it then. It came right from Director Kuroyama himself.” She approached the left side of the desk, nearer the man.
Kevin tried to keep a straight face, but couldn’t help a slight flare of the eyebrows when the smell of sewage ceased as soon as he walked into the air conditioning. He glanced back at the soft hiss of the door closing behind him. Why does it only stink outside?
“What’s the child doing here?” asked the female ISF officer.
Aura slipped into an easy smile. “I’m doing job shadowing since I asked about the waste treatment processor.”
The man’s expression darkene
d as if the girl had somehow given away a lie. He reached for his sidearm. “Don’t mo―”
Tris’ body blurred. An instant later, she held a small black box to the side of the man’s neck, a flickering blue light crackled and buzzed where the tip met skin. His eyes rolled up into his head and he went from standing to Tris holding dead weight.
In another second of blurred limbs, Tris and the woman pointed guns at each other. She let the man drop to the ground, keeping the stunner in her left hand. Kevin eased his hand into his pocket. The woman eyed him for an instant.
“Don’t move,” she muttered.
“No one needs to die here,” said Kevin.
“Kid, go get help,” said the woman. “If that guy touches you, I’ll shoot this bitch.”
“You’re not faster than me,” said Tris.
Aura rubbed her hand on her jumpsuit. “I’m scared.”
“Why don’t you tell her what’s downstairs?” asked Tris. “This isn’t a shit pumping station.”
The woman blinked in shock. “How…”
“I know everything. The real question is how can you go along with it? They’re lying. This isn’t about protecting humanity. They want to destroy it. Go ahead, tell Aura what you’re guarding. Why are there ISF people stationed to guard a waste treatment plant? Why are sprayers making stink outside but it smells like a hospital in here?”
“I was wondering that too,” said Kevin.
Aura glanced back at the door, wide-eyed. She looked up at Kevin with a ‘holy crap she’s right’ expression.
“Drop the antique,” said the woman.
“You first.” Tris’ arm held so steady she didn’t even look human.
Kevin felt a little too much like he used the child for a shield and stepped out from behind her. “Look… just calm down. It’s already over. You can’t stop what’s happening in the computer. The Enclave’s war on the remnants of humanity is going to end today.”
“What are you talking about?” asked the ISF woman.
The instant the woman glanced at Kevin, Tris whirled into a spinning kick aimed at the gun. Kevin lurched to the side and dove on Aura. The ISF woman’s gun went off with a squidgy, muted pop followed by a pair of clanks so close together they sounded like one noise. With a fleshy thump, a starburst of pain exploded in his back, behind the left shoulder. Another pop-pop preceded two more pings and a shower of sparks from somewhere behind him.
The Roadhouse Chronicles Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 121
