by Tessa Elwood
“And I told you not to give the jitterbug the damn doser!”
“Shut up,” I say. “It’s hard enough to think already.”
I blink through the fog in my head and the bite in my gut, for all the good it does. The dark is almost thick enough to touch.
“You take her,” says the calm one. “Sans, with me.”
Like hell she will.
I spin on my heel and bolt.
Which sends my footfalls echoing all over the damn room.
“Who took off? That you, Tress?” asks Calm, becoming less calm by the second.
A soft curse and the echoes double. The girl’s following.
I close my eyes and feel the floor. Hard and slick, then harsh and grated, and back again. Every step feels like the next one won’t be there.
Beyond the dark—the space, the room—metal clangs, again, follow by softer thuds. Steps? Sparkguns?
My footsteps multiply by dozens.
They’re following. All of them. A pounding pulse my chest reiterates. I veer left or maybe right—just enough so the echoes shift behind me.
At some point, I’ll smack something. The room can’t go on forever. I stretch my arms in front of me, palms out.
This is going to hurt like hell.
I slam into the wall hands first—bones crunching into each other, ignore, ignore—and push off with the recoil. Their stomps fill the room, the world, my head.
I skid to the side, fingers scraping over metal—sound, too much sound—for a frame, window, door, anything.
A harsh smack. Someone else found the wall. “Ow! Ow ow ow.” High, male.
I don’t slow, palm picking up splinters and rust flakes.
There has to be a door. Has to. No one builds a room without a door.
My fingers catch and there it is, a frame. I skim the edge toward the low center. Over, left, down, handle.
I grab, twist, push through—then swing round behind to slam myself between it and the inside wall. Hold my breath.
Greg showed me this trick, ages ago. He’s going to wish he hadn’t.
The steps pound past and I count. They merge in an impossible din, echoes bouncing in all directions. Enough to cover the lack of mine. This room is bigger or has a higher ceiling.
The echoes grow tinny. Replaced by my heart, which wants to explode.
Not yet, you don’t. Not yet.
I slowly lean sideways and peek my head around the door. Pitch-black dark.
Whoever else is here may be in there, but at least I know for a fact the Brinkers aren’t.
I ease out from behind the door and slip my shoes off to maintain the quiet. Trail my hand over the scraped metal and reenter the room we started in. Continue my previous trajectory along the wall. I run on tiptoe, holding my shoes, ears straining. No new echoes. No sound apart from my breath.
Which would make sense of Enactors, especially Shadows. They’re trained to be silent and have all the latest gear. Like night-vision sensors. They could be tracking me from across the room. They could be sneaking up behind me now. I can just feel it, their breath on my neck—
I bite my tongue and run faster.
My hand hits a corner and I slide round. Fifteen steps, twenty, twenty-five—my fingers hit a raised slat with rounded edges. Another door.
I slide my shoes back on and search for the handle. Grab hold and push.
The click rockets through the quiet, hinges creaking as light spills in. Not much—faint and dirty, but enough. Which means there are windows.
And a door.
I run.
I don’t know where I am.
Dark skytowers crowd the streets. The night is thick, the thoroughfares narrow, and the walkways clean but cracked.
I press deep into the shadows between an alley and an awning, and try to catch my breath. My lungs burn with my legs. I don’t know how many streets I’ve crossed, how many blocks I’ve come.
I don’t know anything.
The city has always been home. Even before Missa gave Yonni the suite, before Yonni came and got me, before Mom left—I always lived here, in the capital. Somewhere. Different districts—hell, once even a different continental sector—but always here. Home.
This doesn’t feel like home.
My feet have stopped, but my heart won’t. Doesn’t. Lungs churning on air that won’t stick. I bend over double. I’m going to throw up.
“You got out,” I say aloud, jarring my already jarred breath. “They had you, but you got out.”
I’m clear.
All I have to do is find a street sign, and if I don’t know it, walk to the next one.
This street is commercial. Dark shopfronts with pale, sloped awnings that flutter in the nonexistent breeze like ghosts. Above them, tower floors rise level after level in cycglass and crisscross steel, up into the night. It’s full dark, no moon.
We left the boarding tower early in the afternoon, me, Greg, and the power tech.
I need to find the power tech.
Greg, I need to kill.
But first the power tech, in case he’s dead.
“Come on,” I tell myself. “Come on.”
My body grumbles but gets its shit together. Eases into a rhythm that won’t make me implode. I straighten, brush myself off, pick a direction, and walk.
They say all roads lead to the House Archive. They’re right.
I didn’t recognize the street two blocks over, but I know this space. This empty block of sky amid a wealth of towers. A gap tooth of quarantined rubble. The city put big sliding fences up to hide the view, but everyone knows what it looks like. We saw the newsfeeds.
I felt the explosion. I was on my way home. Mom had just given me the grand tour of her lab, where she worked in House-wide data storage and manipulation, and then scent mapping on the side.
She’d been normal, as normal as I knew her to be after a month of slow lunches at cafés or in parks. Assured, concise, with that deceptively open air. She seemed confident, trustworthy, had worked her way up to being one of the lead Archivists with—she said—unparalleled security access. She’d spent most of that last night looking at me.
Then she’d given me her bracelet, cupping my hands between her cool ones to blow one hot breath into our palms.
You’ve the whole world, remember? Mom said, smiling. What will you do with it?
I opened my mouth and her smile grew.
And don’t say ‘give it back,’ she said.
I said it anyway.
She kissed my temple. The first and only time she kissed me that I remember.
Then she sent me home and bombed the datacore of our House.
Light tubes burn along the fence surrounding the space where the Archive was, bright enough to pick out the pockmarks in the street. Cast harsh shadows under the hats of the City Enactors, even as the light shows off their shiny boots. The guards walk the circumference, stopping at intervals, keeping watch.
I pull back into an alley before they get too close. Kreslyn Franks returns to the scene of her mother’s crime is not a story I want to read.
At least I know where I am.
Home lies between me and the boarding tower. I swing the extra three blocks out of the way. I need a bathroom and a shower and a change of clothes. It has to be past midnight, maybe later. Whatever has happened to the power tech will have happened by now. Another half hour won’t hurt. Just as long as I don’t sit down.
If I sit, I’ll crash.
I pass through West 1st’s shopping district with its broken windows and barred doors, and round the corner to my street. My tower slides into view. Squat and boxy, the forgotten stepchild of its taller neighbors. I haul myself up the cracked steps and press my keypass to the security panel.
The door clicks and I’m home.
>
I hit the stairwell. It takes forever, making my feet rise, but I manage. Five floors later and I’m at my door.
It’s ajar.
Dad.
My keypass slips from my slack fingers, and I bolt into the suite. The couch is empty, the curtains drawn, the place dark.
I told him to be here. He said he’d be here.
Which means the Brinkers got here before me. I’ve been walking in circles, but they knew where to go.
A cry from my room, a groan, a growl. The door half-closed.
Dad.
I grab one of Yonni’s empty vases from the couch side table—a sleek metal cylinder and heavy as hell—and inch toward my room on quiet feet. Press the door open with silent fingertips. Heft the vase.
Naked. They’re naked. My bed is piled with naked people. A dark-haired breasty woman—no, a dark-haired breasty Annie from level four—astride some sandy-haired guy with stringy limbs and—
“That’s my girl,” says a voice I’ve known since birth.
I drop the vase. It thuds. They don’t hear.
I run.
Out the door, down the stairs, through the lobby. Out into the muggy night with its muggy air that fizzes down my throat and expands into knots.
In my bed. He was in my bed. I saw him, saw his—oh god. I rub hard at my eyes but the image won’t scrub out. Emblazoned in sweaty neon.
Oh god.
I sink, collapse onto the outer steps. Curl over my knees until my arms hang near my toes. “Bastard,” I whisper. The empty street doesn’t answer and doesn’t care. “Bastard.”
With Annie of all people. Someone from my building and whom Mrs. Divs likes. Who can’t be that much older than me. And when Dad switches from screwing to screwing her over, they’ll be two more people in the world who hate my guts. Because obviously, if I hadn’t let him in, none of this would have happened.
In my bed. In Yonni’s bed. I wouldn’t put much of anything past Dad, but hell, even I wouldn’t have thought—
I laugh. Or choke.
Idiot. I am such an idiot.
My stomach wants to upend my guts, but there’s nothing to heave. I haven’t eaten since—I can’t even remember.
I knock my head against my knees.
Get up.
I will get up and get Dad’s ass dressed. Then he’ll not only escort me to the boarding tower, he’ll share a room with the power technician and nurse him back to health or consciousness or whichever’s required.
My muscles refuse, fight every attempt to stand. Finally I press both fists to the cracked steps and force myself upright. My legs will either work, or I’ll dive headfirst down the stairs. They work.
I climb to the door and dig in my back pocket for my keypass. Then in my side pocket. Then pat myself down all over.
Nothing.
I dropped the pass on the floor of my suite.
“God dammit.” I slap the door, but it doesn’t magically open. Stupid, I am so damn stupid.
I am not buzzing Dad to let me into my own suite.
Not that he’d even hear. Bastard.
I scan the thin digiscreen embedded above the entrance intercom, with its rotating list of names and apartment numbers.
Mrs. Divs would buzz me, but I’d have to wake her. She doesn’t need that. Nobody needs that. Certainly not any of the other names I can’t match to faces, despite having seen them around.
The list cycles in order through the floors. Ten, one, two—three.
Niles Ryker, 308.
Our dinner.
I stood him up.
My forehead drops to the intercom box as the list cycles to the next floor.
He’s going to kill me.
But at least I didn’t kill myself in the process, so he can’t say I don’t keep my word.
I didn’t keep my word to Yonni about Dad.
I slap the wall, hard—rough, grating stone that scrapes my wrist and doesn’t care. I don’t care. I absolutely do not care.
Any second now, I’ll bawl.
I plug in the suite number and hit the intercom.
Several long seconds, then the speaker barks a tight “Yeah?”
“Niles?”
Silence. “Kit?”
“I locked myself out. Can you—”
The door buzzes open.
“I’m sorry,” I say, but the speaker’s dead. I push inside and retrace the endless, twisting climb to my level.
Niles waits outside my suite. Same outfit as this morning, same rumpled hair, but different. Less sexy, more tired, and tense.
My door stands open, and through it float the duel moans of round two.
Or three. You never know with Dad.
Niles glances from the door to me, and for once there’s no smile in him. He stares long enough at my legs that I look, too. My pants are ripped. Climbed out a busted window getting away from the Brinkers.
A crash from my suite. Breathy laughter. A giggled squeal.
My bones frost, my face heats, and I fist my fingers until they crack. “Sorry to wake you. Thanks for letting me in.”
I move, but Niles slides between me and the door.
“That your dad?” Niles asks. “I thought you kicked him out.”
“I’m about to.” I try to bypass him, but he locks his arm across my doorway.
I close my eyes and manage not to scream. “Please, can you just—”
“I’ll get him out,” he says.
“What?”
We’re very close and even the soft curve of his face can’t belie the underlying determination.
“Do you want him in there?” he asks.
“No, but—”
Another shriek, a second crash. What the hell are they breaking?
“Do you really want to walk in on that?” Niles asks, soft.
The heat in my face centers in my eyes. I look away and squeeze them tight. I’m not going to cry.
“Besides, you look like hell,” he says.
“Thanks for the heads-up.”
“Here.” He presses something thin and flat into my palm. A keypass. “I’ll meet you at my place.”
“It’s not your job, and he’s naked,” I say, already cracking.
“That, I figured.” He gently takes my shoulders and turns me toward the elevator. “Go before you fall over.”
I shouldn’t. I really, really shouldn’t.
But stupidity seems to be my thing, so I do.
Niles’s suite, or rather his grandfather’s, is smaller than mine but more open. A single wide room with gray carpet, with a sterile kitchen and messy bed in opposite corners, and a couch and chair between. Only the bathroom is enclosed. I lock myself in.
Bottles scatter the sink’s counter. Shaving cream, hair gel, some kind of cologne. No wonder his hair is always perfectly messy. Of course there’s a trick to it. I scrub my hands and face the mirror.
I wear the whole day on my skin.
My hair frizzes out of its bun, a ghostly halo around overdark eyes and a scraped temple. Not sure when that happened. I take down my hair and comb it back into a ponytail. Better.
I wash my face and arms, clean up the scratches, brush the worst of the dirt from my clothes. I cup my hands under the faucet and steal a drink, or three. I’m as presentable as I’m going to get, and it’s time to open the door. Instead, I lean into it.
What if Niles is out there?
What if he isn’t?
I open the door.
Niles half sits on the back of his low couch, a glass in each hand. His smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “Better?”
“Dad?”
“Gone. I even let him get dressed. Her too. Here.” Niles hands me a glass and thumps the ridge of the couch cushion with his knuckles. “Have a
seat.”
I sniff the drink. Sweet, but spiked. Not brandy, something lighter. “To drown my sorrows?”
“Would you rather have water?” He stands, moves toward the kitchen. “Don’t have much else.”
I shake my head. Dad lives his life wasted, why can’t I?
The digiclock in the kitchen says it’s after three.
I sink into the couch, but instead of joining me, Niles pulls the chair opposite closer. We face each other, knees almost brushing.
An interrogation then.
He sets his drink aside. I down mine in one gulp. It slides easy and burns a little, a harsh, radiating quiet.
Niles gapes.
I stare into my glass. “What . . . was that?”
He eyes me like any second I’ll burst into flames. “Uh, sweetblue.”
So, lighter than brandy, but stronger than wine. Definitely stronger. And I can’t remember when I last ate. Lovely.
Too late now.
I set my glass on the table and hug my arms. “Okay. Have at me.”
“What?”
“The questions,” I say. “Reprisals, whatever. Shoot.”
He blinks, lips stuck open. Apparently, I’m saying all the wrong things today. He stares and stares, and stares some more.
I know I don’t look that bad.
My chest knots and my eyes heat, and this sweetblue is freakin’ worthless.
“You okay?” Niles asks.
“You’re the one who dealt with Dad; how are you feeling?”
“Fantastic. You?”
“Over the moon.”
He smiles with more warmth, though still no laughter—that constant, teasing undercurrent in every subtle look. Funny how blinding warmth is once it’s gone. “You’re pretty scraped up. Get in a fight?”
Now that he mentions it, my stomach cries murder from a fist-size bruise. I hug my waist and fight the urge to double over. “Don’t remind me.”
The smile disintegrates and he leans forward, elbows on knees, serious now. “You were in a fight.”
“No. One punch isn’t a fight, it’s just—” I reach for my glass, but it’s empty. I set it back down. “I don’t know. I got out.”
“Out?” His voice lowers like it did in the hall, registers with the hum in my blood. “From where?”
“I don’t know, okay? I don’t know where I was.” I grab the edge of the couch cushions, arms straight at my sides. But the dark’s lodged in my head now, along with the slide of the calm one’s hand down my spine. His easy assurance, his assumption of right. They hadn’t intended to dose me, so, of course, it doesn’t matter if I—
