Data Runner

by Sam A. Patel

  The bike lurches forward as Pace opens up the throttle and sends us screaming toward the fiery center of town.

  33

  Coming down Main Street is like driving straight through a furnace. The air is baking hot and the flames are even hotter. I’m about to tell Pace to head to the hospital since no one could survive inside one of those buildings, when I hear something. Barely. It’s something like a cry. It’s so faint that Pace probably can’t hear it through his helmet and the roar of the fire and whine of the bike, but I do. I punch his shoulder to stop. He hits the brakes so hard that the rear tire nearly slides out on the slick road.

  Pace removes his helmet. “What?”

  “Listen.”

  Nothing.

  “What?”

  “Help me…please.”

  “Did you hear that?”

  Pace nods.

  “Help me, I need help, somebody please help.”

  The voice is too faint to discern, but there is a certain quality about it. Timid, almost childlike. I know I’ve heard it before…

  And suddenly it hits me. Red Tail. The first time I met her, back on the train. The voice she used to ask for the time. That was it. That’s the voice I hear now, calling for help from inside the building. I pull Pace off the bike. “Come on.”

  Pace and I run into the three-story redbrick building. Inside, ripples of flames pour off the walls and fill the air with hot, gray smoke that immediately catches in our lungs.

  “Where was it?” Pace coughs.

  “It sounded like it was coming from upstairs.”

  A long, hard crack echoes through the building, the sound of something in the structure destabilizing. Pace and I make our way up the stairs to the second floor, where the fire and smoke are just beginning to appear. “Hello?”

  “Up here,” calls the voice from the floor above us. “I’m up here…please help.”

  Pace is already on the move, but now my suspicions begin to kick in. And when we get to the top floor and see no one, I know right away that something is amiss. “Hello?”

  “Over here. I’m trapped. Please help.”

  It’s coming from the far side of the floor, just beyond the load-bearing wall. Pace is about to run straight over, but I hold him back and instruct him with a hand signal to make a wide arc around the wall. That way we can see what’s back there without having to stick our necks out.

  “Over here,” calls the voice as we come around. “Over he-ere, Carrion-kun.”

  “Jesus!” screams Pace, who nearly buckles backwards. Me, I was already expecting something like this.

  Mr. Ito leans on his katana as if it were a cane. He smiles. “Help, help,” he says in the voice. He breaks into a laugh. “See, I knew that little girl was important to you. If Red Tail-chan in trouble, Carrion-kun will run into the fire to save her. Too easy, deshyo?”

  Yes, it was too easy. I should have known better. But then again, so should he. “You’re too late,” I tell him. “The cargo has already been removed.”

  “Yes, I already figure that,” he says. “But we have a contract with Blackburn to disrupt you, and we don’t stop until that obligation is fulfilled. In this business, reputation is everything. Mr. Ito has not failed a single job yet, and this will not be the first.”

  “Blackburn contracted you to disrupt the cargo, not me!”

  Mr. Ito seems amused. “You are Arcadian, Carrion-kun. You are the cargo, and the cargo is you. I don’t stop until your wing is clipped.”

  Pace backs away as Mr. Ito twirls his katana into his hand, rips off the scabbard and throws it aside like he doesn’t have the slightest intention of recovering it afterwards. By the look in his eyes it’s obvious only one of us is leaving this building alive.

  “Run now!”

  The thing to remember is this: when I tell Pace to run, it isn’t an indication of panic. When a traceur says run, it’s a call to action—an instruction to do exactly what we do best. When I tell Pace to run, I’m telling him to trace.

  We go in separate directions and Mr. Ito follows me. I run straight at a column like I’m going to hit it and keep going, vertically, all the way up to the ceiling. That’s how you have to approach it, believe that you can in fact run straight up the column until you hit the ceiling, even if you are just taking two steps and kicking off. That forces Ito to turn sharply to follow me, swinging his katana through the air behind me. I run straight for another pillar. Two steps up and kick off, this time throwing in an aerial twist as I change directions. Again Ito swings his sword at air as he is forced to turn. Up another pillar and kick off—360—another whoosh of the katana. Again and again. Midair breaks that are nothing for me force Ito to make hard turns. Tiring his knees. Tiring his legs. Tiring him out. This time he strikes the pillar well after I’m gone.

  Pace has already made his way down to the second floor. I vault over the railing and Turn Down but don’t have a chance to shake it out before Ito’s blade comes slicing through the bannisters. I let go just in time to keep my fingers and drop wildly down to the second floor. I hit the deck heels-first and fall backwards, slamming my arms into the floor to break the fall just like Dexter showed me. Then without so much as a blink, I roll back and Kip-up just as Mr. Ito comes dropping down from above.

  The second floor is ablaze. The smoke is thick and suffocating; it burns my eyes so badly I can barely see where I’m going. But from somewhere inside that smoke, I hear Pace’s voice calling me. Until all hell breaks loose.

  A section of ceiling falls and blocks my path with a lattice of beams. I grab a stove-hot two-by-four and underbar through it, singeing my hands but getting through just the same. However, when I land on the other side, the smoke grabs my face and makes me lose my bearings. All I see is a wall of white lit up by orange flames.

  “Jack!” screams Pace. I can’t even tell from what direction.

  Mr. Ito comes somersaulting over the rubble behind me. It’s a sideways somersault that’s supposed to land him in stance, but even he is not immune to the smoke-filled air all around us. He misses his landing and falls. I pick a direction and run. But for all the effort I exert trying to see through the smoke around me, it never occurs to me to watch out for the floor beneath. Three steps later my foot hits the floor and keeps going, straight through the floorboards. I keep scrambling even as my knees drop below floor level, and all I can do is grab a fractured beam and hang on as the detritus drops into the blazing inferno below. I hang on by a single arm.

  Then I see him. Directly below me. Like a monster in a pit, he waits patiently for my grip to run out. Gendo. He doesn’t even care that he’s standing right below me. He wants to be sure it isn’t the fall that kills me. He wants that pleasure for himself.

  “Jack, hang on!” Pace calls out from somewhere above. At that exact moment, patent leather toes and a blade of folded steel appear at the edge of the hole. And that’s when I realize, I’m not just hanging on by an arm, I’m hanging on by my wing. If Mr. Ito wanted to clip and kill me in one fell swoop, he would get no better chance than this.

  Mr. Ito smiles as he taps the tip of his katana on the splintered boards of the torn-away floor. “Chyoto warui, Carrion-kun. Nowhere to go, deshyo.”

  Mr. Ito doesn’t raise his sword. Instead he just lets me hang, waiting for my grip to run out. He won’t have to wait long. The burn in my arm has already migrated to my head.

  Dizzy. The air stings my eyes shut between each blink.

  Dizzy. The rest of my body floats in nothingness.

  As I cough and choke and tighten my grip, the entire building goes topsy-turvy until I don’t know which direction is up. And with the loss of direction, the pain in my arm loses all meaning, until I begin to wonder why it is I’m hanging on at all…if the floor is just inches below my feet.

  Just a short hop to the floor.

  “Jack!”

  I breathe the dragon’s hot breath.

  Just l
et go and float gently down to your toes.

  “Jack, hang on!”

  My fingers slip, from the base knuckles to the middle knuckles.

  All you have to do is let go.

  From the middle knuckles to the tips of my fingers.

  Let go.

  The moment my fingers leave the beam, the entire world comes back into focus. Like the free fall itself shocks me back into cognition.

  All I see now is Pace, who blindsides Gendo right out from under me, clearing a space that is barely big enough for me to land, but it’s enough. I drop straight down onto it, catch the ground and roll across debris that stabs my shoulders and back.

  Gendo already has Pace in his powerful grip, but even still he does not scream for help. He screams for me to go. “Jack, go! I mean it. Get out now!”

  A searing crack rips through the building, shaking the foundation, rattling the entire edifice as the roof finally gives and crashes into the third floor.

  “Jack, go! Get out!”

  There’s no time to do anything else if I ever want to see the light of day again. I scramble to the door and turn just in time to see a heap of flaming roof come crashing down on top of Mr. Ito and straight down onto—

  “Pace!”

  The heap of flames engulfing them blows me out the front door with an explosion of smoke and fire that knocks me off my feet. I see a flash of yellow at my side. My sleeve is on fire. I try to pat it out before suddenly remembering—stop, drop and roll. I roll back and forth in the dirt until the flames are smothered.

  C-RRR-AC-K!

  “Pace!” I scream frantically.

  All at once but in slow motion, like a controlled demolition, the walls collapse and the rest of the building comes crashing down on itself until all that is left is a burning heap of wood and brick in a cloud of smoldering ash.

  “Pace!” I scream again. But it’s no use.

  I hear nothing but the snap of burning wood because there is nothing more to hear.

  34

  With the sky turning an early shade of blue, the entire town smells of smoke. Not the pleasant kind that rises out of chimneys in the dead of winter—this smoke smells dirty. It is the smell of things that were never meant to be burned. If not people’s lives then surely their livelihoods.

  As I ride Pace’s dirt bike through the drenched remains of Brentwood, it is clear that entire wings of the hospital and high school have been lost. But they are the lucky ones because they were essential enough to get the first response. Not as lucky are the two grocery stores that have burned to the ground, not to mention all three churches. Gone.

  People tried to fight the blaze. You could see them still huddled around the smoldering remains. The residents of Brentwood did whatever they could. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough. The fire spared nothing. Not everything was completely destroyed; some buildings were reduced to ash while others were left standing with little more than smoke scars, but there was no rhyme or reason to any of it. Some things burned a little, some burned a lot. But in one way or another, everything burned.

  Everything burned, just like they wanted it to.

  It is now, finally, as I make my way through town, that my stomach twists into a knot and my quivering hands begin to shake the dirt bike. A feeling of numbness wraps around me like a suffocating blanket. It is now, finally, that it hits me. Pace is gone. Killed in the fire helping me escape. He could have easily made it out, but he chose not to leave me hanging at the tip of Ito’s sword. Pace was a Dragon to his very last breath, and this is something I will never forget. And now, through the trembling in my hands, I feel something else break through the numbness. Something raw. Something primal. Something visceral.

  Pace is gone. And all that is left in the wake of his passing is anger. Pure, unadulterated anger.

  Finding Snake, Red Tail, and Dexter is as easy as riding straight toward the vortex chopper circling near them.

  “Where’s Martin?” I ask.

  “Taking care of your house. Where’s Pace?” Dexter asks.

  It’s one of those times when I don’t even need a mirror, I can feel the look on my face. Dex understands immediately. I don’t even have to tell him the circumstances. He seems to get that too. There’s a little thing we say whenever a Dragon has to leave. Since I’ve been one, we’ve only had to say it once. But I say it now, for Pace. “Dragon once…”

  Dexter joins in, “Dragon forever.”

  Snake’s hands are full. Literally. He’s got soot all over his face and an elderly woman wrapped in a blanket in his arms. They’ve gotten everyone out of the nursing home. Now they’re moving those who need medical attention to triage, and since there aren’t enough gurneys to go around, it’s a job for the biggest and the strongest—Snake and Dex among others.

  “This is bad,” says Red Tail who has been coordinating logistics with others around town. “Everything went up at once. The water spread the flames like napalm.”

  “All the old buildings on Main Street are gone.”

  “There wasn’t enough manpower,” says Dexter.

  “We couldn’t fight the whole blaze,” says Red Tail. “We had to let some of it go.”

  “Just let it all burn…”

  Red Tail purses her lips like I don’t appreciate the difficulty of her task. “Not all,” she says, “but we couldn’t save condemned buildings when hospitals and schools were on fire.”

  It’s not that I don’t understand that, and I do appreciate all of their efforts. I’m just extraordinarily pissed that even one building went up in smoke because none of them had to. Mr. Chupick didn’t have to lose his barn. And even more importantly, we didn’t have to lose Pace.

  It was all Blackburn’s fault. And as the vortex chopper flies over us, I make eye contact with the person responsible. It was Bigsby who dropped the grenade into the mains to start the fire. Bigsby and no one else. Whatever the orders, it was his hand that did it. And I know he wasn’t just following orders, he was happy to do it. He told me so himself. Bigsby has been gunning for me since the moment we first met. For him, setting my hometown on fire wasn’t about Blackburn’s plan, it was one more way for him to come after me. And now that Brentwood has burned, and I am smoked out, he knows there is nowhere left for me to go. And that is exactly what I am counting on.

  “Where was the drop supposed to be?” I ask Red Tail.

  “The mischief plant. Why?”

  The mischief plant. How fitting. The vortex chopper circles around and doubles back. “He’ll be on my tail the whole way.”

  “Why?” asks Red Tail. “There’s no drop to make. You’re not loaded up anymore.”

  “Yes, but Bigsby doesn’t know that, and he’ll want to finish this.”

  Red Tail pulls up a map. “It’s twenty miles away on straight roads. He’ll be on top of you before you even make it out of town.”

  I turn the handlebars and rap the gas tank with my knuckles. “Not if I cut through the woods.”

  “Whatever you’re going to do, do it quick,” says Dex as he tracks the vortex chopper. “Snake’s intel says there’s more on the way.”

  “What are you going to do?” Red Tail asks.

  “I’m going to put that rat where he belongs.”

  Suddenly Red Tail’s eyes light up.

  “What are you doing?” I ask as she rips off my backpack and digs through it until she finds what she’s looking for.

  “Here,” she says and pulls out the rodent repeller.

  “What do you want me to do with that?”

  Red Tail turns the box onto its side and digs her thumbnail into the switch that inverts the signal. Flips it. “I think it’s time to test this thing out.”

  “I don’t even know if it’s going to work.”

  “It will,” she says. “It’ll work because you built it.”

  The vortex chopper comes screaming over us. The bay door flies open, and the blonde kid who bu
rned my town hooks onto a rope to drop down.

  Red Tail backs away from the bike. “You just have to get it on him somehow.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  “Go, Jack!” screams Dex. “Move!”

  I kickstart the bike with a huge turn of the throttle. Dig my heel into the dirt. Slam the shifter down and kick up a rooster tail of dirt as I turn the bike and head for the woods.

  Clutch. Toe the shifter into third.

  Clutch. Up to fourth.

  I try to use a long stretch to get up to fifth, but before I know it the terrain forces me to let up on the throttle.

  Clutch. Stamp it twice down to second.

  In the full light of morning it isn’t hard for the vortex chopper to track me through the woods. Obviously I can’t see it when it’s directly on top of me, but every so often when it gets ahead of me, I catch a glimpse of Bigsby leaning out of it. He must be thinking that he has me; that I’ve started on a road with a limited amount of fuel in my tank, and all he has to do is wait me out.

  What he doesn’t know is, I know exactly where I’m going.

  And I’m just about halfway there.

  35

  There’s a reason why so many people who grow up in the squatter settlements don’t eat red meat, why Dexter and Red Tail won’t even go near the stuff. There is a reason, and it has nothing to do with ethics.

  I grew up in the Free City, where the markets were reliable and you could trust any package that was certified 100% Grade A Bovine. Or at least I thought I could trust it. Then I came out to Brentwood. It was no secret that the North American Agriculture Collective was entirely funded by the very producers they were tasked with inspecting, and for that reason the labels on lesser grades of meat were always a little fudged. But if you listened to the people in Brentwood who actually worked at the mischief factory, they had a different story to tell. According to the folks around town, all of it had mischief. And if that was the case, if the meat that was supposed to be mischief-free had even the smallest amount of mischief mixed in, then you had to wonder about everything the NAAC endorsed. And if you couldn’t trust the food you were putting into your mouth, what could you trust?