“How’s my favorite skinny blond?” Rachel greeted him.
“You and Santino are still at your house? Are you on your way?” Phil’s voice in her head was dressed for business. Now that she was paying attention, she could feel his anxiety through the link.
“No, should we be?” Rachel began to speak aloud for Santino’s benefit. Her partner’s lack of an implant was a major inconvenience. “We were about to get some food.”
“Holy… I can’t believe nobody’s called you! Turn on the television.”
“What channel?” she asked, as the pit of her stomach turned to cold lead. When the news was bad, there was only one answer to that question.
“Any,” Phil replied. “Track me and meet me on the scene. Get over here as quick as you can… We need you to look for survivors.”
The small Agent broke the connection.
Rachel closed her eyes, flipped off visuals on her implant, and savored the last few moments of her day off.
“Suit time?” Santino asked.
She nodded, and ran back upstairs to change.
THREE
ONCE UPON A TIME, back when she was in the Army and climbing the ranks as fast as she could, Rachel had been ambitious. She had lost that drive over the past five years—nothing quashed ambition quite like realizing your employers had screwed you—but she tended to think of it as a cancer, sometimes in remission, but never fully gone. Every time she walked down the administrative wing at First District Station and saw those shiny brass nametags, she would feel the distant tug of a General’s star.
One day, she’d tell herself. Maybe. If you get bored.
Since the events of last August, she and Santino had been anything but bored. The two of them had recognized that playing cat-and-mouse with a maniac on the public stage had provided them with an opportunity that might never come again, and they had seized it. Their partnership at the Metropolitan Police Department might have started out as a publicity stunt to promote goodwill between OACET and local law enforcement, but they had kept the momentum going long enough to turn their temporary partnership into a formal unit within the MPD. When August came to an end, they found themselves with a budget, a supervisor, and business cards with fancy raised type.
Santino was thriving. Until Rachel had come along, the D.C. Police had neither a title nor a position for a nerd cop with multiple graduate degrees in computer engineering and information technologies. It was only after First MPD had agreed to take on a liaison from OACET that they had finally figured out what to do with him, and Santino had been given an office and told he could start wearing suits.
And Rachel, who had spent the last five years doing as close to nothing as could be arranged by the U.S. government, was working again. The ambition would probably return, but for the time being, she was content to hunt the bad guys and put them in jail.
Life’s simple pleasures.
They were First MPD’s new problem-solvers. Officially, she and Santino were specialized technicians that other MPD officers called when they ran into a technological wall. Unofficially, the two of them had become everything from repair guys to a portable diagnostics machine. After August, word of Rachel’s abilities had gotten around, and Santino, who was so much better with technology than she would ever be, was the one who fixed what she couldn’t.
He could not, however, see through walls. Which, on days like today, put him in the unenviable position of providing nothing but support.
Or, more precisely, a distraction which kept her from dwelling on the bad stuff under the debris.
They pulled up to the curb in silence. The first part of the drive had been filled with the babble of near-panicked reporters, every station turned over to cover the breaking story. When the news began to repeat itself, Rachel had flipped off the radio and immersed herself in the link to see if anyone else at OACET had inside information: they didn’t; they were waiting on her to get down to the scene before they cranked up the gossip mill.
She had dropped out of the link and stared straight ahead, keeping her scan as narrow as possible as Santino, white-knuckled hands on the wheel, drove them through the checkpoints and barricades. They parked on a street cordoned off for law enforcement and first responders. Santino tucked his little car among the police vehicles, and took a breath; Rachel recognized it as his own private moment of peace before the storm broke.
A fighter jet screamed by overhead.
They opened the doors, and the chaos hit them.
Sirens, dozens of them. Camera crews and shouting reporters followed Rachel and Santino as they stepped out of the car into a too-sunny autumn morning. Across the street, the public cried for answers. The D.C. Police pushed back against the press; a harried sergeant checked their credentials, and let them cross the final barrier.
They made an odd pair, her and Santino. A Chinese-American woman walking in step with a tall, dark Italian-American man didn’t make much of a ripple in this day and age, but the two of them weren’t exactly welcome here. If Rachel’s abilities hadn’t been needed, the two of them would have been stuck on the sidelines with the civilians. The crowd parted for them, the police and EMTs pulling away. She noticed her partner was wearing dark glasses and a too-familiar stoic expression he had adopted from her own. Had circumstances been different, she would have teased him about trying to pass himself off as an Agent.
“How bad is it?” her partner asked.
“I’m running a tight scan,” Rachel replied. “I see what you see.”
He nodded.
“Phil’s there,” she said, pointing at a high-end shoe shop. “He’s on the other side of this building.” She was following the other Agent’s GPS; Phil was too busy to give directions.
They followed the block to the end, then turned the corner onto what had once been a street.
“Oh,” Santino breathed.
Rachel placed a firm hand on his elbow to steer him forward. She had seen worse, but not since the last time she was in a war zone.
The dust had settled. The asphalt was pitted and cracked where pieces had been blown out. The side of the block where the explosion had occurred was punctured by a broken hole. Signage was scattered across the street; Rachel recognized a distinctive green-and-white mermaid, and when she scanned the deepest regions of the crater, she found scraps of tables and the charred husk of a serving counter.
The other side of the block was almost pristine. In the bakery across from the coffee shop, the plate glass was broken but the bread behind it was still neatly stacked in thick loaves. The Halloween decorations were up in the neighboring drug store, cutouts of witches and cats strung alongside each other in black and orange.
She expanded her scan and sent it out across the ruins of the coffee shop, staying as shallow as possible. The upper layers of the debris were almost unrecognizable, garbage and metal ripped apart and thrown together without reason or meaning. A layer of broken glass was spread across the top, forming a scatter of sadly bright confetti. Figures in sealed uniforms carefully picked through the rubble to search for survivors, their surface colors dark and hopeless.
It looked like a battlefield after the survivors had fled, leaving dead and broken things beneath the wreckage. Rachel hadn’t seen this level of destruction since Afghanistan, nearly six years before.
She dropped those frequencies which expanded her vision and restricted herself to simple radio waves; it cut her range of sight down to bumps and pulses, but there wasn’t enough alcohol on the planet to blunt the sensation of her mind tripping and falling straight through a corpse.
“Holy shit,” Santino whispered. He took a few hesitant steps towards the husk of the store before Rachel could grab his arm again.
“Don’t.” She shook her head and pointed at the third story. “It’s unstable.”
“You should warn them,” Santino said, glancing towards the D.C. Police bomb squad combing through the rubble.
“Phil’s with them,” she said. “They alrea
dy know.”
The smallest of the uniformed figures broke from the others and jogged over to greet them. It pulled at a strap around its neck and the hood fell away. The Agent shook his head like a horse, his lanky blond hair whipping the sides of his face. His conversational colors were reds and grays, and she could barely see his bright silver core through the clouds.
“Hey guys,” Phil said. He removed a glove to shake Santino’s hand, looking intently at Rachel as he did. She nodded through the link and pulled up the memory of her morning jog, the simple rhythm of her feet on the bright metal of the train rail, and held that tight as Phil reached out to her under the pretense of politeness.
For Agents, skin contact was a curse or a gift, depending. She shut her eyes against his hard rush of feelings and hoped what he took from her could help.
“That bad?” she asked through their link.
“Worst I’ve ever seen,” he replied with a mental sigh. “Don’t go deep. You won’t like what you find.”
“Yeah. Try low-frequency radar as your main and drop the others to secondary status. You still get the penetration, but you don’t get the sensation.”
“Oh, Jesus, why didn’t I think of that?” Phil said, and his colors lost some of their grays as he shut part of himself down.
“What happened?” Santino asked him.
“Gayle Street’s basically gone,” Phil told them. Gayle Street was part of Washington D.C.’s shopping district, within easy walking distance of the monuments and heavily traveled by locals and tourists. “There’s a fourteen-block stretch where a bomb was detonated almost every other block. Seven bombs in total. It was a coordinated attack. The bombs started down there,” Phil said, pointing west. Over the arc of his finger were Capitol Hill and the White House, the first of which was barely a mile away. “The first one went off, then there was a small delay—we’re thinking maybe two, three minutes, tops—before the second bomb was triggered. Sequential order going bomb, delay, bomb, delay, bomb, delay.” Phil was a hand talker and pounded one fist against his palm to underscore those two hard words.
Rachel took a couple of steps backwards and swept her scans up and down the street. “Maximum confusion and damage?”
Phil nodded. “Looks that way. There’s an explosion, people’s first instinct is to take shelter. Nothing else happens, they get curious and go exploring.”
“Or they turn into Good Samaritans and break cover to help the victims. Either way, they’re just more fuel for the chaos.”
In the nearby ruin of the store, a member of the bomb squad yelled at Phil to get his ass back over to them and help.
“Agent Peng’s here!” he shouted to them. Their conversational colors brightened; Rachel was surprised. A lot of things had changed for her and Santino over the past few weeks, but it was still rare for anybody from the D.C. Police to be happy to see them.
“How can we help?” Santino asked.
“Rachel’s Rachel,” Phil replied. “We’ve filled up a dozen hospitals with the wounded, but there might be a few we haven’t been able to locate. It’ll be a while before the search dogs get here, and the rescue teams have to go slow because of the structural damage. Our best chance of finding survivors is if she and I start from here and work our way up and down either side of the street.”
It was a good plan. Phil and another bomb technician headed east, while Rachel and Santino went west. Gayle Street was deserted except for the emergency crews, and the black body bags slowly beginning to line the center of the road. She had reactivated her full spectrum scans and was juggling multiple perspectives simultaneously. Her targeted scans penetrated the buildings on a straight line running perpendicular to her feet, hunting and pecking through the bomb sites for survivors. Distance scans came next, searching the rooftops for any sudden movement: first responders were a juicy secondary target.
She moved quickly across the debris, Santino stumbling as he tried to keep up.
“Step where I step,” she told him, her implant helping her find the surest path when the rubble got thick.
The problem with sticking untested experimental technology in human beings is that human beings love to test and experiment. The implant was ostensibly for communication, its primary purpose to allow interaction between two or more Agents, or between Agents and machines. But wireless communications piggybacked on the electromagnetic spectrum, and you didn’t really appreciate how big a role the electromagnetic spectrum plays in everyday life until you were suddenly able to perceive the whole damn thing. With some testing and experimentation, the Agents had learned they could do a lot more than talk to each other over distances. Every day, someone discovered a new trick or technique which looked suspiciously like a superpower.
Rachel had used her implant to develop and improve her perception. When a non-Agent asked her to describe what she could do, she’d shrug and say she could see through walls. If they wanted details, she’d put a name to it and call it her second sight or her sixth sense, but those terms were inaccurate in a whole bunch of ways, and she used them for no other reason than to keep her life simple. Everybody understood sight. They didn’t understand vision entwined with touch, the sensations of light and dark, color and texture, blended together and running through her mind in the same way as if she had watched herself drag her hand across a warm, sunny carpet.
It was a complicated, confusing process, sorting out these crossed senses. Some days she thought she was finally getting the hang of it. Other days found her horribly motion-sick for no obvious reason, and she found her only recourse was to take a Tylenol and a nap.
Today was a very good day, perception-wise. She had no problems finding those frequencies which allowed her to see but not feel. Every detail of the street stood out crystal-clear in her head; she could penetrate fifty feet into the rubble, bumping into the debris of shops and businesses, running across what was left of the infrastructure beneath.
There were bodies throughout.
When she found them, she and Santino would stop and consult with the law enforcement presence at the scene. She would give what details she could, depth and location and similar, and they would move on, searching. Hoping.
There were no survivors.
Two blocks up, they consulted with the FBI bomb squad working the ruins of a drugstore. Eighteen bodies. No survivors.
Another block without a bomb. Rachel glared at the lone coffee shop that was still standing when all others had been blown to dust up and down the street, and idly wondered if its owner had finally hit on a way to eliminate the competition.
The next block was another bomb squad, this one on loan from Homeland Security. Three bodies, this time.
And no survivors.
Rachel had heard stories of search-and-rescue canine units, the dogs brought in after earthquakes or mudslides or whatever tragedy had swept a hundred souls beneath the earth. As the days wore on and the corpses started to outnumber the living, the dogs would become depressed, and would even begin to mourn the dead. She stifled a dark chuckle at the thought of Santino running a few blocks ahead and covering himself in debris, the handlers’ trick to give their dogs the happy thrill of finally finding someone alive.
The next block up was different, somehow. It took Rachel a moment to puzzle out why: this bomb had just taken out the one store and left those to either side untouched.
Santino had seen it, too. “Smaller payload?”
“Or the explosives didn’t detonate properly. Or they put the bomb in a stupid place… Could be a lot of things. Phil will know.”
She turned away from the store and scanned the street, mostly to pretend to herself she was still working and not avoiding the inevitable body count.
Red pain burned fierce beneath a pile of rubble.
She paused, shocked, and stopped dead in her path.
Santino was watching the buildings instead of his feet, and ran straight into her back. “Sorry,” he said instinctively.
Rachel was mov
ing again, more slowly this time. “Shit,” she whispered.
“What?”
Her stupor broke. She sprinted to the rubble and started hurling the top layer of broken bricks and granite aside.
“Help!” she shouted. “Medics! Help! We’ve got a live one!”
Santino swore and dropped to his knees beside her.
The victim had been protected by a scrap of corrugated sheet metal. Rachel thought it might be a scrap of a commercial awning, but didn’t bother to flip her implant to reading mode to check the blurry text printed on one side. She and Santino scraped the debris away and tried to shake the metal loose. When it refused to budge, Santino removed his suit coat, wrapped it around his hands, then grabbed the awning by its sharp edges and hurled it away with a snarl.
The man—Rachel guessed it was a man from his build and his shoes—was conscious. His conversational colors brightened ever-so-slightly through his red pain, and he moaned.
Santino blanched. “Oh God,” he said. “Look at him. There’s barely any skin left… And his eyes…”
The victim’s red pain darkened again, streaks of black and gray anxiety threading through it.
“Quiet!” Rachel hissed. “He can hear you.”
The man on the ground tried to move.
“Stay down,” Rachel told him. She knelt as close to his head as she could. He smelled of raw iron and cooked meat. “I’m Agent Peng, and this is Officer Santino. We’re with the D.C. Police. There was an explosion. You were caught in it and it took us a little time to rescue you, but you’re safe now.”
The anxiety pulled away from the man’s core: she was a strong believer that an informed victim was a calm victim, and it was gratifying to see she was right.
“…can’t see…” His voice was thin and wet.
Maker Space Page 2
