State Machine

by Spangler, K. B.

  “Fuck,” Rachel groaned, turning her scans towards the back seat. “Come on, guys, we need to—”

  Noura.

  Running wasn’t an option. The thief was moaning and red through and through with pain, her colors starting to fade around the edges.

  And Hill was—

  Rachel jumped, unable to align the strong professional blues of Hill’s conversational colors with his posture. He was lying as if his neck had snapped in the crash, his head and good arm sprawled in plain view from the rear window.

  He muttered something,

  “What?” She couldn’t make out what he was trying to say.

  “Play dead!”

  Hill, you’re a goddamned genius.

  Rachel let herself slump forward, her head coming to rest against the greasy steering wheel. Behind the cruiser, the goon squad was advancing slowly, handguns ready but hidden from plain view in pockets and sleeves.

  Closer…closer…

  The gunmen were distracted; most of them kept checking over their shoulders. Rachel couldn’t hear over the sound of her own siren, but she was sure that backup was finally close. She could have scanned the city, stretching out in all directions until she pinged on their backup, but there was an easier way. She reached out to the Agent on the rooftops instead. “Ami, ETA?”

  “Sixty seconds.”

  Too long, Rachel thought. The men would be at the car within moments; Ami and Ken were racing to get in position, but they were still a block away, and Washington’s rooftops were of all different heights and made for a shitty transportation system.

  The other option was to try to hold them off. A fast scan for her trusty service weapon put it on the floor of the passenger’s side, where it had fallen during the chase. And Hill’s shoulder slows him down…

  They might let me live, but I am not in the mood to turn today into Hill’s last stand.

  She let them get within five feet of the car before she stomped on the gas.

  The cruiser was broken but not beaten. Its engine responded with a thunderous roar, and they were half a block away before the men started shooting. More jolts carried from the back of the car into Rachel’s hands, and she and Hill both yelled as the front windshield turned into a spiderweb of glass, with craters punched straight through it.

  Hill shouted again, but this time there was a joyous yellow streak within him. Rachel checked behind them to see the welcome shapes of squad cars and the furious reds and excited yellow-whites of the officers.

  “We got them!” His voice was hoarse. “We got both drivers!”

  Rachel laughed with relief as two squad cars came up to flank them. “Finally!”

  She turned off their siren, and the world came back to her. Details leapt up to greet her, and she laughed again as she scanned the environment and found herself in what barely remained of a car.

  And then she heard Hill say, “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “Noura,” he said.

  She checked the road ahead, found it clear, and took the time to do a thorough scan of the backseat. It was soaked in blood, and Noura’s colors were taking on an unforgettable blend of vivid blues and deep blacks. The woman slumped in her seat, held in place only by her seatbelt and Hill’s hands.

  “Alimoren!” Rachel shouted, as she turned the siren back on and pushed the details of the world out of her head again. “This isn’t over! Noura’s barely hanging on!”

  She pushed the cruiser to its limits. The rear tires had been shot out, and the car shuddered as it threw the last scraps of rubber.

  “Hospital!” Hill yelled.

  “We’re close!”

  “I know! Left! Left!”

  Sparks poured from the rims as Rachel leaned into the turn.

  Another corner, and a building loomed before them. Rachel ignored the security towers; Hill shouted something obscene as she clipped a concrete bollard.

  “Alimoren!” The rear of the car was all but gone, and she had to shout to make herself heard over the sound of metal grinding across the pavement. “Call Howard University Hospital! Tell them to be ready to receive three patients in critical condition!”

  “Three?” Hill shouted back. “Three?!?”

  “We don’t have brakes!” she told him. “Find me a place to put this beast!”

  She thought she heard him swear, but there was no way she could be sure, not with the noise in the cab. She did see him point, and she steered in that rough direction, realizing as they jerked over the curb that he had put them over a sidewalk, a lawn…

  “Aw shit!” she yelled, as the tall, thin shape in front of them resolved into a flagpole.

  “Do it!” Hill told her.

  “Alimoren! Front entrance! The flagpole! Tell them—”

  THIRTEEN

  The dream was worse this time. She was in pieces: in pain. Parts of herself spun off and got lost across the ocean floor, and she could see and feel every bit of it, every portion carried away by the crabs, the fish that tore out her eyes—hah! suckers!— the cold, emotionless eternity of the drifting currents…

  She woke shouting.

  “Agent Peng!” It was a stranger’s voice, and she felt a man’s hands press her shoulders down against a bed. “You’re safe—you’re in the hospital. Your doctor’s already seen you. The airbag knocked you out. We don’t think you have a concussion, but you should still try to stay quiet.”

  She closed her eyes. Hospital… “Detective Hill?”

  “Here.” Hill’s voice came from a couple of feet away. Rachel activated her implant and flipped on visuals. Hill was lying in the room’s second bed, his shirt and undershirt gone. A nurse was doing a final cleaning on his arm, a neat line of surgical staples holding together the small entry wound. The exit wound on the other side of his arm was slightly larger, and had already been treated and taped.

  “Noura?” she asked, but she already knew. Beneath the haze of a mild morphine high, Hill’s conversational colors held equal parts of green guilt and Noura’s poppy-seed gray.

  “Didn’t make it,” Hill said.

  Rachel sank back against the bed. “We tried,” she said. “We tried.”

  At least she hadn’t watched Noura die. That twist of vivid blue when a life was extinguished… Terrible. Beautiful. The last time Rachel had seen it, it had taken her months to drink the memory out of her head.

  “She had lost too much blood,” the man who had first spoken said to her. He was wearing a nurse’s scrubs.

  “And crashing a car on her didn’t help,” Rachel muttered.

  “Oh, you guys barely tapped that flagpole,” a woman said as she entered the room. Rachel slammed a hand over her mouth to keep herself from smiling. “You had shed most of your momentum on the grass. Noura was already a goner by then.”

  The nurses paled slightly at hearing this. Their surprise was understandable: the brunette was dressed in scrubs and a white lab coat, and the nurses weren’t used to doctors being quite so callous in front of their patients.

  Rachel, who saw the assassin’s dark gray clothing beneath the stolen hospital outfit, thought that Ami was actually playing the role quite well.

  “Doctor Jenny Davies, OACET physician,” the woman said to Hill. Then, to Rachel: “I made them dilate your eyes to check the stability of your connections.”

  It was such a bullshit phrase that Rachel couldn’t help but giggle. “Thank you.”

  “That’s why it’s so bright in here,” the other woman told her.

  “I had wondered,” Rachel said, and pulled her pillow over her head to try to hide how she was about to die from laughter.

  “Good,” the false doctor said. “Stay like that until I can find you some sunglasses.”

  “Okay!” Rachel squeaked.

  She pulled the pillow tight across her face and started to giggle uncontrollably. It was her normal reaction to stress: once the danger was over, she laughed herself silly. Hill, who had seen it before, assured the nurses that
she wasn’t having a seizure, and made them leave her alone so she could burn off the last hour.

  When she could think again, she reached out to locate Ami. The former assassin had already ditched her borrowed scrubs and doctor’s whites, and was halfway across a nearby parking lot. She had found a pair of jeans that didn’t quite fit her, but otherwise she looked like any other civilian trying to remember where she had parked her car.

  Rachel opened a link with the other Agent. “Please don’t steal one.”

  “Penguin, you are just no fun anymore,” Ami replied, but shifted her path towards the exit.

  Rachel felt Ami’s laughter, and realized the other woman had set her up. Ami knew better than to pop the lock on the nearest Toyota and tootle off down the road. She sighed, and asked, “Why isn’t the real Jenny here?”

  “You hit the flagpole ten minutes ago. I was the only one who was close enough to cover for her before they tested your eyes for a concussion and decided you needed immediate surgery.”

  A quick wave of horror crashed over Rachel. “Thanks. And thanks for taking out that sedan.”

  “No problem. We were in the area anyhow. Mulcahy has me tracking some of Hanlon’s employees, and they had an office a block away from that mailbox store. He had me check in on you when you left Indiana Avenue.”

  “We gonna get in trouble with Forensics?”

  “Nope,” Ami replied. “There’s not a lot left of a bullet once it goes through an engine block, and Ken’s already gathered up the pieces. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to yell at him. He can’t find the rooftop where I left my rifle.”

  That comment sounded offhand, but there was an undertone of sadness and worry. Rachel sympathized: she knew she would mourn if her own service weapon went missing. “Good luck. I owe you a huge favor.”

  “Introduce me to your delicious detective friend, and we’ll call it even.”

  “Deal.”

  Rachel came out from under the pillow and made noises about how bright the room was until someone found her a sleeping mask. Hill waited until the nurses had finished cleaning his arm and left the room before he said, “That wasn’t Jenny.”

  Rachel nodded. Hill had gone partying with Rachel on many a Friday and Saturday night, and Jenny Davies sometimes came along. “Ami is OACET,” Rachel said. “You can trust her.”

  “I got that,” he said, and waited.

  Rachel sighed. “She’s the reason we’re still alive.”

  It took Hill a moment, and then three bright white streaks moved across his conversational colors like gunshots. “She’s the one…?”

  “Her, or one of the other Cuddly Hippos.” His conversation colors moved into curious yellows, so she explained: “Hippos aren’t much to look at, but they can kill you without even trying.”

  He thought about this, his colors weaving the yellow uncertainty into reds. “You guys have assassins?”

  “Former assassins,” she corrected him, very quickly. “Mulcahy doesn’t let them kill anyone, so these days, they work our security.”

  His colors went pale.

  “Oh, come on. You and I used to kill people for a living, too. The whole world is full of reformed murderers who were just following orders.”

  A mournful red came and went around his hands. Rachel had never seen that particular pattern before, but she a pretty good idea of what it meant.

  “Sorry,” she said, too tired to offer anything more than a half-assed apology. The adrenaline rush was over, and she was crashing. She tossed the mask aside, pulled the pillow back over her face, deactivated her implant, and went to sleep.

  There were no dreams this time, just the normal background noises of a busy hospital serving an urban community. She woke to heavy breathing, and activated her implant to find Santino peering under the pillow.

  “She’s alive,” her partner announced to the room at large. “She just swore at me.”

  “Yay,” Zockinski said, sarcasm dripping from him in pools of green and orange to hide his blue relief.

  Rachel hurled the pillow at him.

  “Alimoren?” she asked as she sat up. The nap had done her good: she could think clearly again. Head, still attached to neck? Check. Oh, I’m going to be sore tomorrow.

  “Outside at the crash site, sorting shit out,” Zockinski told her. “You and Hill have so much paperwork to do.”

  “Was anyone hurt in the chase?” Rachel held her breath. Please please please…

  “No,” Santino said. “Absolute miracle if you ask me.”

  She glanced at her partner. Santino was still wearing the thick grays of stress. A streak of orange had appeared as he came to terms with the situation; now that he knew she wasn’t hurt, worry was being replaced by annoyance as he could not believe she was so stupid as to have gotten behind the wheel of a car.

  “I didn’t have a choice,” she told him.

  “She reading your mind again, Santino?” Zockinski asked.

  “Shut up,” she told him. God, it’s good to be alive.

  There was a knock against the frame of the open doorway, and Alimoren entered. The Secret Service agent’s colors moved between frustration and relief. “That was some driving, Agent Peng.”

  “There’s a reason I didn’t renew my license,” she said. “Was anyone hurt?” Santino bristled slightly as she asked the question a second time, but she needed confirmation.

  “The downtown area’s pretty shaken up,” he said. “But no serious injuries.”

  “The package?” Hill asked.

  Alimoren shrugged. “Just papers and that second watch,” he said. “Most of it looks to be documentation on White House protocols and on the Mechanism, but Joanna Reed’s profile was in there.”

  Reed… Reed… Rachel couldn’t place the name until she remembered the alias Noura had used to break into the White House. The alias taken from a makeup artist who was found dead in the trunk of her car… “That’s one more mystery solved.”

  “Reed’s murder? Maybe. We didn’t find any fingerprints or DNA at the scene, but from the other forensics, it looks like Reed was killed by a man. He left a lot of trace—shoe impressions, glove prints, and so on.”

  “You think she’s got a partner?” An uncomfortable orange-red winced across Zockinski as he realized he had referred to Noura in the present tense.

  “We know someone hired her,” Alimoren said. “We also know someone wanted her dead, and they wanted the information she hid in the packet retrieved. At this point, everything else is guesswork.”

  “Sounds like the person who killed Reed is inexperienced,” Santino said. “Noura was careful. She wouldn’t work with a partner who would put her at risk.”

  A flash of orange anxiety ran across Alimoren as Santino spoke. Rachel kept her face blank and went on nodding in the right places. The guys were beginning to use her as their barometer, and any changes in her body language might have repercussions.

  Anxiety can mean a whole lot of things, she reminded that little nagging voice in the back of her head, and Alimoren’s anything but inexperienced. She decided to file Alimoren’s reaction away for later, but another memory came up, this one of blue relief when she told him Noura had been shot…

  Damn, Rachel thought.

  She tried to remember exactly how he had reacted, how the timing of the situation had played out. She hadn’t exactly been paying attention to Alimoren. He showed blue when I told him Noura was shot, she thought, as she pretended to pick at her fingernails. Was he relieved because Noura survived, or because there was a moment when he thought she had been killed?

  She shelved the whole mess. When she got right down to it, she didn’t read emotions as much as she tried to interpret a color wheel. Might as well set her and Santino up in business as a team of feng shui landscapers. Plant red begonias in the southern part of your garden for good luck in spring, or some such… And she abandoned that train of thought, too, before her mental image of her maternal grandmother could yell at her. />
  Rachel’s scans pulled her attention to her hands. The nurse had likely wiped her down while she was unconscious, but there was blood caked around her nails, and had soaked into her shirt cuffs. She didn’t remember touching Noura, but it had been a hell of a five minutes.

  She stood and stretched. Everything seemed to be in working order.

  “Be right back,” she told her team, and left in search of a bathroom.

  Once the door was locked behind her and she was elbow-deep in antibacterial soap, she reached out to the collective. There was a general round of hellos, but the greetings were more subdued than she had expected.

  “We’re used to your near-death adventures by now,” Phil told her. “Get over yourself.”

  She laughed aloud. “Ami already reported in?”

  “Yup,” he replied. “A fake doctor is still good enough to let us know you’re alive.”

  “But you will be getting a full checkup from me this afternoon.” The woman’s voice was strong and sweet, like the best cup of coffee, and Rachel agreed to join Jenny Davies at the mansion as soon as she was released from the hospital.

  She left the link and returned to her bed.

  Alimoren was gone. The nurses had returned, and were forcing Hill to move his arm in gentle circles to test the give and play of the bandages. Hill was told he’d need to stay a few more hours for observation, but Agent Peng? They couldn’t seem to find her doctor, but if she felt comfortable walking…

  She couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

  They snuck out the back to avoid the media, and circled to the rear of the hospital where Santino had tucked his hybrid in a quiet parking lot. Rachel nearly dragged her partner the entire way: hospitals played havoc with her emotional scans.

  “Want to drive?” Santino asked her.

  Rachel shouted at him so loudly that a woman in nurse’s scrubs two rows over jumped and ran for the safety of her car.

  She scooched down in her seat, praying nobody with press credentials would recognize Santino or his tiny hybrid, and didn’t come up for air until they were on the Potomac Parkway.