by M. Van
We had all but reached the end of the hall as Saera threw me a worried glance.
“The window!” I yelled over the sound of magnetic weapons fire.
“What!” Saera shouted.
“Trust me,” I replied with a grin. My heads-up had already scanned the window and had noted that the glass had cracked in the explosion. I had feared the armored glass would have been hard to break, but I guessed the enforcer had done us a favor by setting off that blast. The device strapped to my face had also calculated the best angle to hit the glass and trajectory toward the ground.
Grabbing Saera, I drew power from the exoskeleton suit and jumped. Saera tensed in my arms as I held on to her tightly. The glass exploded into a million pieces as the combined forces of our bodies slammed into it. For a moment, I felt a sense of weightlessness until gravity took hold of us. In midair, I jerked my body, clamping Saera to my chest, my back directed at the ground so I would hit the pavement first. Hopefully, my suit, which should protect me, would also protect Saera.
I hit the ground hard, feeling the painful reverberations through my bones. On the other hand, feeling them at all meant I was still alive. Saera grunted as I held her to my chest. Glancing at her, I noticed that her eyes were open, and my screen told me she was undamaged. We had landed in a side alley adjacent to the main entrance of the old justice house.
My eyes shot up to the second floor, where smoke billowed out through the broken window. Movement at the gaping hole fueled the urgency to get out of there.
“Did we make it?” Saera groaned. I shoved her off my chest, and she grunted some more.
“Come on. We’ve got to move,” I said. She shook her head and clambered to her feet, pulling me up with her. We held each other in balance for a moment, but then I heard the familiar click of a magnetic weapon. I shoved her away from me and against the wall as I caught another round of energy in my back. The integrity of my suit started to fail, increasing the pain as the energy struck and I fell to my knee. I pointed the weapon still in my hand up and fired until the figures hovering out of the hole disappeared.
“Run!” I shouted at Saera as I reached for my upper arm and slid two disks from a holster. Saera hesitated, glancing up at the shattered facade of the building as she stood with her back pinned to the wall. “Go,” I said as I caught her gaze.
As she started to run down the alley toward the back of the old justice house, I flung one disk at a side entrance to the building where it stuck on a metal door. The other one I threw in the opposite direction of Saera running, where it would be likely for enforcers to come bursting through the front door. The magnetic disk clamped onto a ventilation valve near the entrance of the alley. The motion-activated explosives would pack quite a punch, taking out anyone who ran past, even an enforcer. I just hoped there weren’t any innocent bystanders around at the moment of the blast.
With that, I started to run after Saera. The alley intersected a busy street, and even in these early hours, it was already bustling with people. Just as I stepped around the corner, a loud explosion sounded at the other end of the alley. Someone shouted, and people crowded around the entrance to the alley to see what was going on.
The fire evaporated quickly, but the black smoke billowed up until it would eventually hit the dome. A woman holding a young child covered her mouth with a hand as if something horrific had happened, and it probably had for the enforcers or officers that had gotten themselves caught in the blast, but there wasn’t anything to see from this distance.
A middle-aged man glared at me as if I had just kicked him, but I understood what he wanted. I made a show of scanning the alley and gave him and the others my assessment of the situation.
“The disruption is a faulty valve. Please remain calm and continue your business,” I said in my most official-sounding voice. Before I had met Saera and the others, I would have probably stayed and controlled the scene, but times had changed. I turned to see if I could spot Saera, and I saw her short blond hair bounce as she ran against a current of people. Without further explaining myself to the crowd, I ran after her.
As I followed it wasn’t hard to determine that Saera was still focused on the thing that had gotten us into trouble in the first place. She seemed hell bent on either finding Harand Sulos, lord and master of ArtRep Enterprises, or this team of hers. Not even jumping out of a second-story window had changed her mind.
As I caught up with her, the city skyscrapers that could almost touch the dome shield loomed over us. The buildings that held the city’s richest gleamed in the light penetrating the grimy dome. It wasn’t as impressive as the colorful rainbows that decorated the buildings at night, but this felt less artificial and more real. Perhaps that was why no one ever bothered to rinse the dome from all the dirt and grim it had gathered over the decades. It reminded us of the reality that this planet had only a limited lifespan left.
As I jogged behind Saera, the crowd on the street diminished, and she became easier to track. Not that it was hard following her with a high-tech scanner strapped to my head, but I spotted her more easily. It was early in the day, and this area seemed to be still at rest.
These folks didn’t need to get up at ungodly hours. They didn’t have to stand in line for hours at a time to wait at the food distribution centers to get their rations for the week. They didn’t have to work a dirty job that included scraping all kinds of gunk off the spirals of the Hymag lines. It seemed strange that within a society that promised equality for everyone, some always found a way to get ahead of the rest.
The streets were quiet enough that I felt I could intervene, and I quickened my pace. Saera must have heard me, because she glanced over her shoulder and saw me. She didn’t increase her speed, though. When I was running next to her, she gave me a lopsided grin that felt fabricated. She knew she had screwed up and now felt the shame of it.
We passed an alley, and I performed a quick scan. As the data returned clear, I grabbed Saera at the waist and lifted her off the ground. She yelped and kicked out her legs, but I didn’t stop until I had us tucked into a recess in the wall of the alley.
“What?” she said, disgruntled as she realized she had no place to go except to talk to me. I opened my mouth to speak but then heard Harp inside my head. From Saera’s rolling eyes, I could tell she heard him too.
“What the hell were you two thinking,” Harp said, not sounding at his most charming best. In fact, his voice would have sounded downright intimidating if it wasn’t for the fact that he was miles away. “Saera, you compromised the mission and you…” He paused as if the right words had slipped his mind.
“We needed that intel,” he continued. “This could be crucial to the survival of the people on this planet.”
“Wait, what?” I said as his words sunk in. How did we get from saving a few thousand Subterrans to the survival of everyone on this planet? Not wanting to sound dismissive toward Subterran lives, I rephrased my thoughts and asked, “What do you mean, the people of this planet?” From what I had seen of the information scrolling down the screen, nothing had indicated anything like that.
“That is not the point,” Harp said defensively, and from the tone of his voice, I sensed he was hiding something. I glanced back at Saera to gauge her response to what Harp had said, but it seemed her mind was elsewhere.
From the moment Harp had started talking, Saera’s cheeks had flared bright red, and her eyes looked wild in her head. I had a feeling she could jump out of her skin at any time.
“You ignored a direct order,” Harp continued to say.
“We can talk about this later,” I said, my voice hard.
Harp either ignored me or didn’t care and said, “Return to the rendezvous point now!”
“You don’t get to bark orders at us,” Saera said, finally snapping. “I’m not your little soldier, and neither is Maecy—not anymore.” Tears sprang from her eyes, and I felt my chest tighten. The word soldier echoed inside my head. Saera had told me that Art
Rep had me working as an enforcer for almost two years. The image mirrored back inside that office at the hospital looked relatively young. How old was I, twenty-two, maybe twenty-three, but more importantly, how old had I been two years ago? At what age had I decided to become a soldier and in what war? Saera had been reluctant to tell me about my past, but I needed to know. I was missing too much backstory here, and Saera needed to fill me in.
“Harp, get off the line,” I said.
“You listen to me—” he started to say, but I cut him off.
“Kyran, I know you’re listening,” I said, and I could almost taste the venom that exuded from my voice. “You cut this feed.”
“I…huh…” Kyran stammered, and I was sure he faced Harp’s cold stare.
“Screw this,” I said under my breath. I was getting tired of this, and I ran a check with my heads-up to see if anyone might be listening in or become a threat, but as far as the device was concerned, there was no one around. No one stood to peer out a window of the two tall buildings rising to create this alley, and no one hid behind a dumpster or the pile of discarded energy cylinders further down the alley. The empty containers that were used to fuel all kinds of devices could be picked up for replacement at any time, but for now, we were alone. With a verbal command, I powered the device down and pulled it from my head.
Sweat covered my brows, and I wiped a hand over my face, and then I listened. The voices in my head remained silent, and I glanced at Saera with my own eyes. She grinned and nodded.
“They’re gone,” she said.
“Talk to me,” I said.
“We don’t have time for this,” she said. “We-”
I shot her a look that basically said: “Dare to contradict me.” It seemed to work. Saera leaned against the wall. Her gaze softened as she raked an uncertain hand through her messy blond strands.
“This is a bad idea,” she said. This time it was my turn to snap.
“You could have killed us both back there,” I said, pointing a finger at where we had come from. “Now, I think you owe me some kind of explanation or else I’m gonna kick your butt.”
“I’d like to see you try,” Saera said, snorting a laugh.
“All right, that’s it.” I threw up my hands in defeat. “I’m leaving.” I turned to step out of the recess, but then I felt Saera’s hand on my arm.
“Okay, okay. I’m sorry,” she said as she tugged on my arm. Her shoulders slumped as she relented to my demand. Then her knees buckled, and with her back against the wall, she slid down to sit on the ground inside the narrow recess.
I mimicked her move, sinking down the wall. Our knees touched as I took up a seat across from her and placed the heads-up on the ground by my side. She wrapped her arms around her waist as if she wanted to protect herself. Staring at the ground, she said, “You know, I said that to you once.”
“What?”
“That you were going to get us both killed.” With that, she looked up, and I could see the guilt appear in her eyes. “Harp had you under his spell of doing the right thing, and you ate it all up.” As she spoke, her voice was soft without a hint of accusation, but filled with remorse. “He didn’t know you as I did—how reckless you could be. He just saw the potential and pulled you into his merry band of rebels.”
From the information stuck in what I used to call my database, I knew the rebels primarily helped workers escape the dreadful situations inside the power plants occupied by the Combined Districts of Tenebrae. I wondered if I had been involved in those kinds of operations. I resisted the urge to ask due to a greater need to hear what Saera had to say.
“It wasn’t all Harp’s fault. I should have warned him, but I didn’t,” she continued. “I was so mad at you—our last words were spoken in anger, and then you were gone.” She tilted her head back and leaned it against the rough granite wall.
I wanted to say something but heard a rumble in the distance before I felt a slight tremor in the ground. My gaze lifted upward as a shadow started to fall over us, blocking out the orange-red glow casting off the buildings. The rumble grew louder, and I felt an urge to cover my ears. Over our heads, the massive hull of an intergalactic freighter soared by, high above the city and its protective dome. It took few minutes for the large spacecraft to pass over us and about half that long for the engine noise to fade.
I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen one of these ships, which didn’t come as a surprise, but somehow my brain held the knowledge that it could be months between the arrival of these transports. Rumor had it that the crews on these ships were still looking for viable planets that could substitute for a new home, but people had been saying that for so many years that it seemed unlikely. Only those highest in rank would know the real purpose of these ships.
My eyes followed the vessel as it slowly disappeared in the distance, heading for the outer-rim landing platform far outside the city. The ship’s interruption gave me some time to work through the information Saera had given me. It was hard to relate to her story, because even though it included me, I couldn’t remember it. I could tell she was upset, and obviously, I had hurt her, but how could I apologize for something I couldn’t remember? And what would that apology have meant?
“So,” I started to say as I turned back to Saera. Her head twitched before she faced me as if I had pulled her out of some distant world. “If you hated the rebel thing, whatever they do, how come you joined it?” Her face lifted into a half-smile.
“Because I want to stop those bastards from tearing apart our families,” she said, and her half-smile shifted into a malevolent grin, “and for plain old revenge.”
I raised an eyebrow at the coldness in her voice, and her eyes reflected hard and cold as ice. I imagined not many people would be able to hold her stare, but somehow, I managed. A million stories seemed to exist behind those eyes, and I had played a part in most of them. I wanted to know those stories, but would it make a difference in my decisions?
“I trust you,” I said, aware of the lack of logic as the words exited my mouth. “I don’t know why, but deep down in my gut I know I do.” I hesitated, wanting to choose my words carefully, but Saera pushed.
“So…” she said sounding impatient.
“You have to admit that this is totally insane, right!” Saera grinned and then shrugged as if I were exaggerating. “Last night, I was still carrying out verdicts to uphold the law, and now you have me breaking those laws. You can’t expect me to follow you blindly.” The look on her face told me she had expected just that, and she was probably right.
I let out a breath in exasperation and buried my face in my hands. As I rubbed my temples, Saera shifted, and I felt her hand on my knee. I barely detected the touch through the thick layers of my suit, but it made me glance up at her. The hardness in her eyes softened as concern replaced it.
“I know it has to be hard getting into all this without knowing why or how, and I firmly believe that you need to find those memories on your own, but since these aren’t yours…” she said and then hesitated. Saera closed her eyes for a moment as she searched for what to say. The gesture made my heart sink and for some reason I dreaded her words to come. “I am going to this, with or without you, because when you first disappeared and then later they told me you were dead…”
I tried to hold her gaze as she took another pause, but it became harder to do so as her eyes started to fill with tears. “For me that was a hard thing to digest, considering we had spent most of our lives inseparable.”
The pain that had been so evident in Saera’s eyes the night before returned, and my heart sank even further. “And now you’re sitting across from me, and we have a chance to get you back…I’m not going to sit around until someone flips a switch, able to kill you from a distance. I won’t let that happen—not again. And I won’t let Harp use the others for this game he is obviously playing, not without me being with—”
Saera stopped herself from finishing her sentence and took i
n a sharp breath as if she had just caught herself from saying something stupid. I narrowed my eyes, watching her carefully as she seemed to compose herself, and I took the time to pounder the two things she had let slip. I didn’t know who she had meant by “the others,” but it seemed we’ve been having the same inkling about Harp. His words about saving the people of this planet had suggested that he knew more than he was letting on.
“Help me save the people whose lives have been stolen by ArtRep. Help me stop that bastard and save you,” Saera added. “I can’t answer your questions, so I need you to trust me…please.” She sat back and let her head fall back against the wall.
It seemed odd that she was asking me to save myself by walking straight into the face of danger, but the pleading in her voice took me aback, and she had a point. It was better than waiting for Sulos to flip the switch. As soon as anyone found out that I had gone off the grid and that they might have a rogue enforcer on their hands, someone might decide to get rid of me.
Unfortunately, with her actions Saera had probably expedited that decision. I didn’t think killing Sulos was our best option, but as time passed, the odds of him killing me grew.
Once the incident at TED was analyzed, they would know for sure that they were dealing with a faulty AR, and that wasn’t something ArtRep could allow to continue. Besides, this was bigger than me. All those Subterrans living under ArtRep’s thumb deserved a chance to reclaim their lives. The thought of them sent a shiver down my spine.
“What about Harp?” I asked.
“What about him?” she simply replied.
“I don’t know,” I said and hesitated. There was obviously a connection between these two, and I didn’t know how deep it went. I didn’t want to say something that might piss her off. “Something doesn’t add up.”
Without hesitation, Saera shrugged and said, “This is what he does best. I know he doesn’t tell us everything and the occasional slip of the tongue isn’t even that. He tells us exactly what we need to know to get the job done.”
