by Astrid Amara
I collapsed. More bullets fired, but then Mack was beside me, holding up the shield. “We’re about to lose it,” he said, shaking his arm. “So whatever your plan is, do it now.”
Electrical pulses shot up my leg. I had to tune out all the sensations in my leg, my body, and focus solely on the small release switch on the side of the Recon’s helmet.
I lifted my rifle, breathed out, and fired. The switch exploded. Her helmet retracted. She lifted her weapon in surprise.
I dropped the rifle and lifted the mag pistol. I only had a second for a clear shot of her face before she moved. The charge pierced her left cheek and she collapsed.
Mack ran ahead of me. He knelt to retrieve the woman’s automatic, then gripped the cable of the closest gyropod. He clambered inside, then tilted the pod to allow me easier access.
I tried to run, but something in that last shot had damaged part of my artificial knee, and it moved awkwardly, jerking back with each step.
I reached for the cable. Something powerful shot me in the back near my neck. I crashed down onto the metal grates of the roof. I turned over and saw a large black armored figure approach me from one of the other gyropods with unnatural speed.
The soldier’s stride was familiar. So were the colored designs on the hard plates over the polymesh fabric, the stars patched on the shoulder. I didn’t have to see the face behind that black helmet to know I stared at the man who had been my commanding officer, both while I had been in Calypso Recon, and as a slave for Trust. My handler. My tormenter.
“Cole,” I growled.
He shot me in the face. I expected to die, and I knew the feeling now—I’d died three times already. I knew that terror and drain, that bowel-emptying finality.
But instead of that shock of pain and emptiness, a slow numbness sank through my skin. I reached up and felt the contours of the dart he’d shot me with.
So he wasn’t going to kill me. He was going to take me back.
Bullets fired into Cole’s body from the gyropod. I got to my knees. The cold, slick effects of the drug already coursed through my body. Mack hovered above me, emptying his weapons into Cole’s armor.
I waved my hand as best I could and said on my osys, “Get out of here!”
“No fucking way!” Mack shouted back.
Cole calmly lifted the weapon strapped to his right arm to fire at the gyropod. I gathered what strength I had left and got to my feet. I lurched forward, ramming my shoulder into Cole before he could shoot Mack. We both tumbled onto the wide concrete ledge of the Fishman building. Cole’s blast went wide, and Mack stopped shooting long enough to move the gyropod out of range.
“Go go go!” I yelled over our comm.
“Are you crazy!” Mack shouted back.
Cole’s helmeted face showed no expression, but I heard the anger in his voice when he growled “Agent 505!” He easily pushed me off him, slamming me back against the ledge. He climbed over me, clutching me around the neck. He used his other hand to rip off my helmet. He tossed it off the side of the scraper. We were too high to hear it hit the grates below.
Now he squeezed my exposed throat. “Free time’s over, asshole.”
I hefted my rifle, but he slapped it easily out of my hand. I gagged for air. Cole was strong, unnaturally so. He had clearly also been rebuilt at some point, but he didn’t have ten years of rage, humiliation, and pain to fuel his actions. Shivery pain shot through my body as I tried to speak.
“What are you doing here?” I gasped.
“When your tracking beacon went blank, we knew you’d gone rogue. The hack happened the next day. How hard do you think it was to put the two together? And unfortunately, you’re my responsibility, fucker.”
“Why?” I asked, desperate to know. “Why did you set me up ten years ago?”
His fist tightened around my throat, and he shook me. I gagged.
“What do you think?” he hissed through his speaker. “You’re a traitor, a fucking rev. There you were in Recon, reporting all our movements. I wanted to kill you as soon as we saw you delivering reports, but the managers overrode my decision, and used your contract to revive you.”
He must have understood my puzzled looked, because he added, “Your dad!” He shook his head. “God, they really do turn you guys into morons, don’t they? Part of the contract for Trust management is that family members are enrolled in company life insurance. It helps keep brand loyalty.”
My brain struggled to make sense of all I heard. That day, over ten years ago. Me delivering Mack’s letter. They’d assumed I’d been undercover, not Mack.
I struggled, but Cole remained crouched over me, gripping my throat like he’d crush it in his hands. I clawed at him, but my hands were ineffective and weak thanks to the drug. Everything felt sluggish, and I knew I’d lose consciousness any moment.
Mack continued to fire from the gyropod. He got a lucky shot, and Cole’s helmet retracted at last, showing the face of the man who’d ruined me.
His dark hair was gray now, short and brushed to the left. His hard brown eyes and gray stubble made him look old and yet powerful. He grimaced as he turned from me long enough to fire at Mack again. But Mack was in a gyropod, and maneuvered out of the way.
It would only be moments before the rest of the soldiers joined us on the roof. If I wanted answers, I needed them now.
“I get why you wanted me dead,” I gasped, pain crushing my throat, “but why resurrect me?”
“You were a great shooter. Besides, it was fitting revenge for your traitorous father. The consequences of Andro’s change of heart served as a powerful reminder to the rest of management.”
“And Andro Industries?” I gasped.
Cole smirked. “A subsidiary of Trust.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. Andro. My dad…
And there I was, back again, five years old.
“Do it, Ivo, sweetness, do it. Just like I showed you.” My father’s hand guiding me to a space on the back of his head, holding the scalpel at an angle. “I can’t do it myself, and we must be fast. They’re coming.”
Tears on my face, my hand trembling.
“I can’t, Papa.”
“Yes you can, son. I need you to do this for me. Don’t cut deep, cut thin and fast. The tracker is there.”
The blade in my hand, trembling. My father’s calm voice, telling me it’s all right, he wants me to do it, that it will be good for us both, we can get away…
And the blade in my hand. The cut, too deep, I knew it at once. I yanked on the wire I found and pulled, but they’d embedded it so deeply, and part of his brain came out with the chip.
And my father’s garbled moan, the look in his eyes. I’d fucked it up, I’d fucked it up, but I was only five…
The door crashing down, the men and women with guns, surrounding us, telling me to drop the scalpel. The blank expression on my father’s face as he collapsed, face-first. From my hand.
And the device he’d hoped to rip free—bleeding in my hand, still with a piece of my father’s mind attached. They tried to take it. I wouldn’t let them, and they forced me to drop it.
They beat me so hard I couldn’t walk out. And when I came to, I was in the center for disadvantaged persons, and there was Mack, asking me my name…
I stared at Cole’s neck. His neck would have the device the Security Director’s had, the memory and tracking implant that was different, that wasn’t controlled by the same chip in my head. The one that would kill a person if removed.
Moving my left hand up to the back of Cole’s neck felt like swimming through oil. I had no strength left, and he didn’t fear me, because he didn’t even both to shake off my hand as I closed it around the back of his neck.
My scalpel came out.
I sank it into the back of his neck, and he immediately went rigid. He shot me with the energy pistol in his other hand, and pain ripped through my gut. The polymesh was too weak to protect at point-blank range.
I fished ar
ound the wound in his neck with my scalpel. He tried to pull free of my grasp, but I held on, desperate for the feel of that hard ridge of metal. Mack shot Cole in the leg, and he buckled and fell on top of me.
I screamed as the weight of him crushed my shot stomach. I was in so much pain. At last my scalpel hit something hard, either bone or metal. I pushed my fingers into the wound. Cole started to scream. I felt the contours of the small metal chip, slick with blood. I yanked as hard as I could. He garbled and gagged. The chip came free, dragging a piece of flesh with it.
Strangely, Cole still struggled atop me. He shivered and reached out, as if on some sort of instinct. I grasped the chip in my hand, feeling my whole body being taken over with shudders.
“Fuck… You…” I managed to say at last, before shoving with the last of my strength. I rolled him over the ledge.
I lay there, breathing heavily, chip cutting into my palm. The numbness crept over all my limbs, dulled the throbbing pain of my gut wound. Wind from the ledge whipped over my overheated skin. I tried to get to my knees and nearly fell off the ledge as well.
“Mack!” I gasped.
“Don’t move!” Mack shouted back. “Jesus, Ivo, don’t—”
Dizziness overpowered me. I tried to fall to the left, to the grates of the roof, but I glanced at the edge of the building and realized that was the direction I’d fall.
Dead from a height, once again. Everything that goes around comes around.
My heart shot to my throat as I fell off the ledge. Wind hit my face, and then something sharp and painful. Metal. My body crashed into Mack’s as he angled the gyropod beneath me and caught me against him, my legs dangling outside the pod door.
All of his air expelled as I crashed into him, but I heard him wheeze, “Gotcha.”
Epilogue
Working for Cheap
I remembered when I was a teenager, I’d busted my left knee in a fight and spent days in the hospital while the reconstructed joint bonded with my bones.
I remembered.
I remembered hating the hospital. But now, as I lay on clean bedsheets, on a soft mattress that absorbed my aches and pains and conformed to my body, in a gently lit room with cheery yellow walls, I realized this was the nicest room I’d slept in in over a decade.
Snoring had woken me a few minutes prior. Mack slept on the lounge chair beside my bed, mouth open as he twitched in his dreams. Carly, curled in the crook of his legs, glared at his restless face, then looked to me for sympathy.
“Can’t help you,” I whispered to her. “Doc says you can’t sleep with me.”
As if she understood, she let out a little moan and put her head back down on Mack’s twitching thigh.
I took a deep breath, seeing how much it hurt. The pain in my gut lessened every day. The polymesh armor had taken much of the energy blast, but I had a nasty-looking burn across the skin of my abdomen. Just another scar to add to my impressive collection.
Other than the gut, the rest of me felt relatively good. The enhancement surgeon had repaired the connections in my knee that had been damaged in our hasty exit from Fishman. And my head was clearer than it had been in years.
I still wanted Peak.
It was disappointing to admit this to myself but nevertheless true. I wasn’t sure when the desire for a hit of Peak would fade, if it ever would. Luckily, it wasn’t something I could pick up at the local trade store.
In the silence of the hospital room, I studied my cybernetic hand and elbow, both exposed as I lay wearing only a pair of hospital underwear. The arm looked freakish, but it was my arm. I was freakish. But I was me. At last.
“Admiring yourself?” Mack’s voice was croaky from sleep. “Isn’t that my job?”
I dropped my arm back against the heated sheets. “Only if I’m being admirable.” I turned my head and smiled. “How are you feeling?”
Mack stretched, displacing Carly. Her nails pattered against the tile floor of the hospital room, and she put her paws up on the bed beside my head.
“No,” Mack said.
I patted the mattress. “I don’t care, and the doc’s not here.” Carly immediately jumped up. I braced my gut for her to jump on it, but she wiggled and slithered alongside me. I pushed her butt down beside me, and she lay flat, tail thumping my hip.
Mack shook his head. “You’re spoiling her.”
I petted her head. “Her hair’s growing back. She’s gonna’ look good in a few weeks.”
“I took her to a vet yesterday,” Mack said.
“Really?”
“She isn’t chipped,” he added. “And other than skin abrasions from the wind and sand, she’s healthy. He gave her an immune boost and registered her to me, since I was the one who brought her in. But we can transfer her registration to you once you get out of here.”
I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. If she’s with you, I’m with you, same thing.”
Mack’s smile looked fragile. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”
“What? To be with you?” I snorted. “Was that ever in question?”
“I didn’t want to assume anything.”
“Well you may assume this.” I sat up with a groan and reached out for his hand. He got up and stood by the bed, grasping both my hands in his. “I will be with you as long as I have my own will, and my own life.”
Mack’s eyes got a little misty, and the whole scene would have been ridiculously romantic if it hadn’t been for Carly licking our entwined fingers with obsessive dedication.
I almost said something even cheesier, but the door to my hospital room opened and my doctor entered, saving me from future embarrassment. Mack picked up Carly and the two left me alone while I was informed of my prognosis.
“You’re going to live,” the doctor said, smirking.
“What, again?”
“Try and avoid energy blasts in the future, all right?” He lifted my cybernetic hand, examining the metal contours. “I will put you in touch with a specialist to work with regarding your enhancements.”
“If the specialist is employed by Trust Insurance, no thanks.”
The doctor said, “I don’t think Trust is going to be talking about cybernetic enhancements, resurrected soldiers, or anything to do with its agents any time in the near future.”
While the political and financial repercussions of the revelation that Trust used a clause in its insurance contracts to create an army of indentured servants were still being hashed out, there was a very concerted effort by the company to stay out of the news. I think the past few days I’d been in the hospital had been the longest in my whole life I‘d ever not seen an advertisement for the company.
Once the doctor finished his checkup, he told me I’d be discharged in the next few hours. “And you have a visitor,” he added. “She says you don’t know her, but she really would like a chance to speak with you.”
Curiosity got the better of me. “All right. Send her in.”
The doctors left. I straightened the blanket over my nearly naked body, suddenly self-conscious of my appearance. A moment later the door reopened, and Agent 390 entered.
At the sight of her, I instinctively felt around my bedsheets for a weapon. Pointless, I knew, especially since the hospital had a strict policy of confiscating weapons of all visitors and patients, but I couldn’t help myself. I withdrew my scalpel instead. It was a futile gesture—she was as enhanced as I, and a better shot in any case.
But she hadn’t shown up to kill me.
She silently sat in the vacated lounge chair beside my bed and stared at me, hard. I took in the scar across her neck, the sharp planes of her face. She looked smaller out of armor. She wore a simple, blue, long-sleeved tunic and gray leggings, with bulky black boots that came up to her knees. Her short blonde hair was styled, slicked back and out of her face, showcasing her bright blue eyes. She didn’t look angry, or upset, or even amused. She was blank of all expression.
“Hello,” I said at last, because I wasn
’t sure what else one said to a fellow brainwashed soldier.
“My name is Eleanor,” she said.
I blinked. “Okay.”
“I heard you were responsible for the parade attack.”
I shrugged. “I played a part.”
She swallowed and finally looked away. “I was… I was looking for you, from inside the building. There was a pain, and I fell. I was confused for a moment. There were four other agents with me in the hallway. And when we all regained awareness, we realized everyone inside and outside that was an agent was…changed.”
I said nothing.
“I…” Her brow furrowed. “I used to be a marksman—for sports. I shot competitively on my home satellite of Ishan.” She swallowed again. “And my husband had a life insurance policy on both of us.”
“How did you die?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Heart attack.” For the first time, her mouth curved into a small smile—but it didn’t look to be a happy one. “I was genetically predisposed apparently. Something that Trust fixed for me when they brought me back to life.” She knocked on her chest.
“I’m sorry.” It was stupid to say so, but what could I say that wouldn’t be?
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does.” I stared at my cybernetic hand. “Your family…are they still on Ishan?”
“I contacted them as soon as I realized who I was and what had happened. But they’re all dead.” At my frown she added, “Apparently I’m over a hundred years old by now. I look pretty good for it, don’t I?” She started to cry.
“Hey.” I reached out my hand, but she didn’t take it. With a groan I sat up and moved to sit on the edge of my bed. My flawed body was on display for the world to see, but it wasn’t as sad as Eleanor’s story. I patted her knee. She flinched. “I’m sorry,” I repeated, “but you have a new chance now. You can’t get back what Trust took from you, but you can start fresh. You can create a new life.”
“A new life,” she repeated, wiping her eyes on the back of her hand. “After all the things I’ve done? All the horror I’ve caused?”
