by M. Van
“And you hope to gain information on what ArtRep is up to,” I said.
“And to get that thing out of your head,” Saera said vehemently.
Harp stood motionless for a moment before his gaze shifted from me to Saera. His face didn’t give anything away, but his silence made me feel uncomfortable.
“Right?” Saera said, searching for confirmation. A sudden tension settled over me, and I wondered if Saera had felt it too. The awkward feeling lingered for several more heartbeats until Harp replied by dipping his chin in a slow nod.
Not sure on what had just transpired, I decided to move on, but I kept an eye on Harp’s stoic expression as I asked, “I assume you have a plan to explain why I’ve been off the grid for so long?” The department must have gotten suspicious after by not complying with their orders.
“You haven’t been off the grid,” Harp said. I cocked my head and waited for an explanation that wouldn’t come. Instead, he peered over my shoulder, and I followed his gaze to see Kyran walking toward us. Then he held a finger to his ear, and it seemed as if he was listening to someone talking directly into it.
“Copy that,” he said and turned to address a man sitting at one of the desks. Before Kyran could reach us, Saera took my arm and pulled me out of direct earshot.
“He’s not good with technology,” she said in a whisper near my ear.
“Who?” I asked in a similarly hushed voice.
“Colrin,” she said, unable to contain a grin. “Don’t get me wrong. He’s a great leader, and he knows how to work with the stuff, but he’s like an infant when it comes to explaining how tech works.”
I glanced at Harp, who had pulled Kyran in for a conversation with the man sitting behind the desk.
“That’s why he doesn’t say much?” I asked.
“Oh no, he doesn’t like talking in general, but he gets grumpy when he’s asked questions he doesn’t know the answer to,” she said. “So, if you have questions, keep to the what and ask the how when Kyran or Tyrel are around.”
The joy on her face was evident, but there was something endearing in the way she tried to safeguard Harp from the awkward moments.
“Whenever you’re ready,” Harp called out. Both our heads shot in his direction, and his gaze told us to move it.
We joined him at a station that sat empty until Kyran took up the seat behind the monitor and pulled up a map of the city overhead.
“This is you,” he said to me. I shrugged as I didn’t understand what he meant. Kyran grinned and said, “This is you patrolling right now.” He pulled up some screens filled with code and continued his explanation. “I hijacked your signal a long time ago, and now I’m using it so that it seems as if you’ve been running around town all night.”
“How does that work?” I asked. “I get tasked to do things all the time, and I have to report back.”
“Well, it seems you’ve been hard at work,” Kyran said. “You solved a lot of crimes tonight, and by the time they figure out that those people are still alive, you’ll be long gone.”
“Okay,” I said a bit hesitantly, “so I can just walk into TED on my own like I’ve always done?”
“If that was the plan,” Harp said. I turned to face him, but his gaze shifted to Saera.
“I’ll be your prisoner for the night,” she said.
Chapter ten
Maece
The old justice house seemed quiet as I peered at it through the green spectrum setting of my goggles. Tyrel had given them back to me after she had finished fiddling with them. Two enormous statues stood like sentries in full enforcer gear at the base of the steps that led up to a set of massive steel doors. Six columns stood in a line to carry part of the building’s roof.
The building was brand-new, but it looked as if it had stood in that spot for centuries. They had modeled the structure after a building someone had found in one of the old archives. It had been a digital picture, copied countless times, which made it impossible to determine its date and origin, but the design was expected to be thousands of years old.
“What do you see?” Saera said, tapping me on the shoulder.
“The usual,” I replied.
“Which is?” she asked, sounding impatient. I switched the green spectrum back to normal and turned to face Saera.
“The night shift has returned already, and the day shift just left,” I said. “A couple of regular law enforcement officers just entered, but it seems quiet.”
Saera bit her lower lip as she peeked around the corner. The alley I had chosen to hide from view was at least two hundred and fifty feet down the street from the old justice house, and I doubted she could make out much. Her jaw flexed with tension, but her eyes were focused.
The sight of Saera made my stomach churn. It was one thing to put your own life on the line but another to drag someone else down with you. I exhaled a long slow breath before I said, “Why are we doing this again?”
Saera eyed me curiously as if she were determining if my question had been sincere or not.
“I wish there’d be any other way,” she said in an apologetic tone, “but you and that enforcer gear of yours are the only things that can get us inside that building to steal the information we—”
“I know. I know,” I said before she explained again about gaining intel on ArtRep and how we needed to find a way to get that thing out of my head. The constant reminder that I had some device stuck in my head that could potentially kill me wasn’t appealing.
“Are you ready?” I asked. I wanted to sound steady and in control, but my voice betrayed me with a slight tremor. Saera must have noticed because she shot me a glance. Instead of a hard look filled with warning, she threw me a nervous smile.
“With your skills and my brains, we should be fine,” she said and turned. She held her hands out, and I cuffed them behind her back.
“Not too tight?” I asked.
Turning, she faintly smiled and said, “They’re fine.”
“Listen,” I started to say, “to make this look good, I might have to—”
“Get a little rough,” she said, cutting me off. “This isn’t the first time I’ve been arrested, although this is the first time by you. Usually, it was because of you.”
Startled by her words, I shifted the goggles up to my head so I could see her with my own eyes. “What does that mean?” I asked. Saera closed her eyes and sighed audibly.
“Sorry,” she said, “I keep forgetting about the memory thing. Forget about it.” She started to turn toward the edge of the alley, but I took her by the shoulder and pulled her back, so our eyes were level again.
“You can’t just drop something like that on me and then pretend it didn’t happen.”
“Maecy, this isn’t the time or the place.”
“Fine,” I said in a hard voice and placed the HUD over my face. I took her arm and started around the corner.
“Maecy,” she said and pulled us to a stop. “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you, but I think it’s better if you remember these things on your own, so they won’t get tainted.”
“Tainted?”
“You know, colored by another person’s memories,” Saera replied.
“How would that happen?” I asked.
“Because we’ve sorted it out…” she said hesitantly, “but…”
She hesitated again. Not sure I would be able to make any sense of Saera’s vagueness, I took a quick scan of her vitals. Saera’s heart rate was elevated, but that didn’t stop the blood draining from her face. I detected the increase of moisture in her eyes, and I decided to lighten the mood.
“Have I been that much of a handful?” I asked. She nodded and rested her chin on her chest, but not before I caught nervous grin that had quickly faded. Taking a breath, she looked up, and even if I hadn’t worn the heads-up device, I would have been able to tell she was fighting tears.
“I can’t explain why, but telling you who you were…we were or should be…it’ll
never work,” she said, and I heard the crack in her voice. “Does that make sense?”
I pondered her words for a moment as I took in her pale face. The fact that we looked as different as we did could count as an interesting turn of events in how we’d become sisters in the first place. But considering her explanation, it seemed our history could be even more complicated than I would have guessed.
“I think so,” I replied. Saera chuckled nervously.
“You can arrest me now,” she said.
We climbed the steps leading up to the giant doors. With a steady grip on Saera’s arm, I held her close. My heads-up device was working overtime, scanning anything and everything. It still felt a bit weird that I wasn’t receiving any incoming orders or verdicts from judges. Instead, Harp and Kyran were connected through the heads-up’s long-distance communications array, and rather than information scrolling down the screen, I had a direct link with them into my ear. If they wanted me to know something, they could just tell me. Saera had a similar device implanted in her ear that linked with my heads-up, and I hoped Kyran was right when he told me that TED scans wouldn’t pick them up.
I walked up to the front desk and jerked Saera’s arm, pushing her forward until her body hit the desk. She whimpered, and I hoped I hadn’t hurt her. This was how enforcers treated their prisoners, and I needed it to look convincing. What I hadn’t thought of was my strength. The enhancements made to my body by ArtRep along with the exoskeleton suit made me physically stronger, and I had never thought about the effect on people. Thinking wasn’t something that had come with the job description.
“Intake,” I said, sticking to my part. The officer grunted, dropped a chunk of fried fungi beef into a bowl, and wiped his fingers on a napkin. Then he glanced at his pad and slid his still-greasy fingers over the slick surface. From the old leftovers on the pad, I could tell this officer liked to indulge in greasy foods. Looking up from his pad, he glanced at Saera.
“Subterran,” he said. I nodded my answer.
“Nice catch. ArtRep will be pleased,” he said with a smirk. “Take her to MJ105.”
This wasn’t standard procedure. A criminal taken off the streets would never be taken to Memory Junction, but as we had gone over the plan, Harp had told us that it would be likely to happen. He had seemed convinced that this would prompt a change in procedure and it turned out he was right. How he had come to know all this remained a mystery even though I had asked him. Harp turned out to be very masterful at evading questions
I jerked Saera’s arm and forced her to walk. Fortunately, she complied and didn’t speak up, which could have ended badly for her. If I wanted to stay true to my part, I should have at least knocked her to the ground if she had done that.
As we passed the main intake area, I noticed her watching me from the corner of her eye. I wished I knew what she was thinking—whether she wondered what I had done to all those other prisoners that I had brought in over the years or that after seeing me in enforcer mode if she sensed doubt about whether I could ever become the Maece she once knew.
The crowd of officers, enforcers, and the people dubbed thugs thinned once we passed the main intake area, and I guided Saera down a long corridor. The place looked and felt like the hospital. The floor had a soft gray tint, and the walls were white. It had an impeccable appearance with a hint of chemicals wafting in the air.
We passed the main entrance to Memory Junction, and several doors were marked with a green light. This meant the rooms were occupied by enforcers getting their minds wiped. The thought made a shiver go down my spine. As if she sensed my discomfort, Saera glanced up and whispered, “We’re almost there.”
The main reason Harp had sent Saera along as my pretend Subterran prisoner was because he believed that I otherwise would never have gotten past those first few doors marked with the green lights. Although the room that the officer at the desk had directed me to was located within Memory Junction, it wasn’t an area where I usually would have ventured—except when assigned guard duty and apparently escorting a Subterran prisoner.
Spotting an enforcer stepping around the corner, I withheld my reply. Saera noticed him too and lowered her head. The green light on the enforcer’s headset blinked on, ready to scan Saera. There would be no reason for the enforcer to scan me or the other way around, although my heads-up had been scanning from the moment we stepped inside the building. Tyrel had disabled the light and had added an extra command to switch it on if needed. I had kept the light off because there had been no reason to scan 877.
Like mine, the enforcer’s face was mostly hidden behind his heads-up, but I had clearly seen these features the night before. As 877’s light blinked, I focused on my breathing. Besides the standard information concerning height and facial feature, the heads-up was perfectly equipped to pick up a person’s heart rate, and at this point, my heart was hammering inside my chest. It was as if with every step drawing closer to 877, my heart rate shot up.
To my right, I noticed the door marked MJ105. It was the room where I was supposed to take Saera. I took a long, slow breath. After completing Saera’s scan, 877 would have been informed of our destination and reason for being there. Even though he wouldn’t have remembered me from last night, I had to tell myself to breathe. As he passed by, it was as if he hadn’t even noticed us.
I had known it to be unlikely for an enforcer to scan another enforcer if there wasn’t any direct indication of something being wrong, but I still felt relief wash over me.
Lingering at the door that would lead us into MJ105, I waited until 877 disappeared from view. Instead of going inside, we went around the same corner 877 had come from, and I was glad to see it abandoned. Three doors into the hall, Saera stopped in front of a sleek metal door that lacked any markings or designation. “This is it,” she whispered.
She was right, of course, because she had seen the same plans as I had. We had found the location of the central mainframe, and with any luck, Kyran would be able to access the information Harp was looking for. Hoping to find something that would help get the device extracted from my head felt like pushing that luck, and I set the thought aside.
My eyes roamed the empty hall, searching for any kind of disturbance. I scanned for sounds that might become a problem for us, but as far as I could tell, there were no footsteps or voices. I tapped my heads-up. Without me having said anything, Kyran’s voice rattled off in my ear.
“I’m on it,” he said. I flinched at the sound of his loud voice. Saera grinned.
“It’s as if he’s inside my head,” I whispered.
“And loud,” she replied. There was still a bit of a grin detectible on her face, but the way her head shifted from left to right told me she was as apprehensive as me.
“Kyran,” I said in a whisper.
“Yeah, yeah, hurry—I know.” His voice sounded as if it would alert the entire station of our presence, and I almost told him to tone it down. I heard him tapping his virtual keyboard while he spoke.
“I need two more minutes to deactivate surveillance so you won’t be detected going inside or being inside.”
“Two minutes,” Saera said, sounding agitated. “Are you kidding me? We can’t just stand here like some dumb-ass puppets. What if someone comes?”
“I don’t know. Think of something,” Kyran replied, “but I need you to stay in that exact spot or else I’ll lose the connection. Now shut up and let me work.”
Saera and I shared a glance. She didn’t like this any more than I did. We were easy targets standing here in this pretty, white hallway, but the way this worked was that inside the old justice building every area was divided into its own security network. This meant that if anyone tried to hack the system, they didn’t just need to hack one system, but several correlating systems, and triggering one meant triggering all of them.
Inside my heads-up, a message blinked red, and I swirled my head around. Footsteps sounded down the hall and not just one set. These were at least fiv
e, and from their tread, it was obvious that these were enforcers coming our way.
“Kyran, get this door open,” I whispered as softly as I could but in an urgent manner.
“I know. I know,” he replied. “Almost there.”
It wasn’t long until the sound of boots barreling down on us wasn’t just something my heads-up registered. Saera heard and glared at me, wide-eyed. She fidgeted with her hands bound behind her back, and the metal clinked. Her head shot to the right where the sounds were coming from, and I could read the fear on her face. If they caught us here, I wouldn’t have any explanation to get us out.
The other enforcers would probably assume something had gone wrong with my programming, and by checking the building’s system, they would know Saera was supposed to be around the corner and down the hall in room MJ105.
“Get these off me,” Saera whispered.
“Shh,” I hissed.
“Maece,” she said. Her using my actual name proved she must have been terrified, but I couldn’t let her freak out, which was what my scans had started to indicate. I placed my hand on her neck and pulled her close so I could whisper in her ear.
“They’ll hear you.” My words were barely audible, but a slight nod of her head told me she understood. Leaving Saera’s cuffs on would be her best chance. Worst case, they would take her to ArtRep, and then maybe Harp and Kyran could find a way to help her.
The sound of boots clomping down the hall became louder, and they could appear around the corner at any second. I tapped my ear twice, hoping Kyran would understand the urgency I couldn’t spell out. He didn’t reply, and I feared the worst. I pulled Saera close and positioned my body in front of her so I would be the first thing the enforcers saw.
Engaging them would probably be useless, especially if there were five of them. Frantically, my head shifted from left to right as if scanning the hallway one more time would reveal something I had missed in my previous scans. As if suddenly some escape route would appear. I glanced at Saera, who looked as I felt—mortified.
