The Forever Watch

by David Ramirez

The air is hot and fetid, but there is power.

  Drawing on a touch of the grid through my modified amplifier, I change our jackets and cold-weather gear into waders rising up to our chests and masks to filter out the fumes.

  Walking through the thick, foul slime, I wonder about the monstrous children that sometimes escape from the black city. Could we escape if one attacked now?

  From there, it takes a few hours to get to where I punched down from the bottom level of the ISec holding facility. I shake for a moment, physically weak. These moments are coming more frequently. Annoying.

  Barrens takes my hand, and my knees steady themselves. He nods at me once.

  “Let’s go, Miss Dempsey,” Bullet says.

  I raise the hand with the amplifier. The muck below us is pushed apart and away from us, and the ceiling above opens up into a short shaft. Aglow with my touch, I float Barrens and Bullet up through the hole first. Barrens reaches an arm down and pulls me up.

  And we are here, alone, in the basement of the only ISec installation I have been in. The kitchens I ran through are empty.

  The floor above is covered in dust and rubble, and the floors above that are just gone. The building has been torn apart. We sit on the steps beyond the double doors. We are on a tall hill, overlooking this section of the Hab.

  It is burning. Pillars of smoke rise in the distance. In the sky, one of Hennessy’s psychedelic sunsets flickers on and off, sometimes revealing the cracked Dome above. Pipes are leaking, spraying down, here and there. The glittering spire of the Eiffel Tower–inspired vertical farm in the center of the district has been shorn in half. The streets are twisted and torn, filled with dust and debris and ash. The buildings have been warped into windowless, armored bunkers, except for where they have been blasted apart—the lonely bones of their corpses eerie by the light of the distant fires, which glow and shimmer through the dull haze of particulates in the air. Breathing in, the air tastes stale and old and smoky. The lungs of this section of the Habitat, the algal purifiers and the biomes and the crop zones in the vertical farm, must have been badly damaged, or they are simply overwhelmed by the load of the fires burning throughout the city. Below us, a few crewmen are in sight, staggering along, covered in soot, shuffling between the shadows.

  It is quiet. Silent except for the absurdity of some holographic billboards hovering over the cityscape, still advertising different varieties of tofu, vegemeat, wine, dresses, watches—the trappings of a consumer culture that was only the shallowest mask, a costume of individual choices over closed lives.

  It is a war zone kin to the distant memories of burned-out cities from Earth conflicts.

  Bullet’s face has gone completely pale. His mouth hangs open as he wrings his hands. An inarticulate, low wheeze escapes his lips.

  I consider the implications of a mob with psychic talents driven to extremes of fear. Anyone that has touch is a living factory, capable of turning plastech to weaponry, the designs of which can easily be spread by engineers just by telepathic contact. Any bruiser is a deadly soldier, even without training. Psychic surgeons can use their healing to kill. Those who can read and write are more effective communicators than radios or messenger runners or smoke signals.

  I lean, boneless, against Barrens. He is folded up inside himself. Haunted. Behind us, I think I hear Bullet crying.

  Again, I tap into the local data-lines.

  Karla. We are here.

  About fucking time. Welcome back to gay Paris. So, Miss Dempsey, do you like what your friends have done with the place?

  Please. I send her an image of us, with our approximate location. Barrens never wanted anything like this. He tried to talk them out of it, he …

  The hostility in her thought stream pounds in my head, sets the blood throbbing through my temples: He started something bigger than himself and lost control and fucked us all.

  We are here to help.

  There is no response for several minutes. If Karla has cut contact, I suppose it is no more than we deserve. Perhaps a strike team is already on its way to erase us. The gasps of my companions draw my attention, and from the way their eyes are rolled back in their heads, I know Karla is scanning them through her tenuous connection with me. Could she Adjust us even from here? What could I do if she chooses to? If I interrupt, I may only cause more damage.

  Eventually, I see the tension leave their faces, and I relax when Barrens murmurs softly, “Guess I … Yeah. Fuck it. I accept.”

  Bullet also murmurs his assent.

  I almost feel Karla’s strained, bitter chuckle vibrate through my skull. As it happens, Dempsey, there are still things only you can do. And our resources are so strained, I’ll even take on that twerp and your fuckwad lover.

  She sends me the image of her location, and a series of pass codes. ISec is holding the vertical farm and the immediate area around it. Section v-farms are vital for food and water and, more important, the cycling of breathable air. At the false horizon, the flicker of the sky simulators end where the great vault doors have been sealed, isolating each section. We are to meet an Information Security team halfway to the farm, close to the commerce plaza.

  Get moving. The codes will unlock the amplifier restrictions. There’s also recognition codes to get through the checkpoints. Watch out for nutjobs.

  She cuts our mental line. There’s not much point in saying I’ve already bypassed the power-draw restrictions on our amplifiers.

  Barrens shakes his head one more time. He produces a shiny bit of metal out of his pocket; a badge is on his breast again.

  Would things be any different if I had tried to track him through it the very morning he had left? Or would all this be even worse—Karla would not have gotten to me, and with me joining the Archivists sooner, how much more could the Archivists have done with Archie? Perhaps things would be even worse. Or, with me at his side, perhaps Barrens would have never recruited others at all.

  … But it was not just him anymore by then. Bullet was with him, and he brought in his own friends, and they brought in more.

  There is regret, but no time for self-pity. We see that in each other’s eyes.

  There is not much of a discussion. I look at Barrens and he looks at me, and we both know and nod.

  Bullet’s eyes sweep back and forth across the cityscape, his fingers trembling around the flask of water as he fumbles at unscrewing the cap. Maybe it is just too much. In a matter of weeks, the things we’ve seen, and with how he absorbs these experiences …

  “Bullet, we’re going.”

  “Y-yes.”

  We head for the least damaged car in sight. Hooded men appear out of the alleyways to surround us just briefly—it only takes a flare of Barrens’s badge and his glowering stare to back them off.

  With the crackle of my own heavily modified defense amp, I feel safe for a moment, then realize that I have not programmed in anything that can handle crossbow bolts. Ah. Then a brief, dizzying flash has me stumble. It is already there, in my head, from when Karla uploaded so much data into my mind. An algorithm for exactly that purpose, one that creates a touch field that is permeable to air and slow-moving objects, but which will catch and immobilize any high-speed projectile. I draw on the power of the grid, and the world around us becomes tinted a faint blue. We cannot see the boundary, but those around us might see the slight blue shimmer of a dome that keeps pace with us.

  Barrens recognizes it, bites his lip, and says nothing.

  The vehicle we stop in front of is a six-wheeled transport used by construction and maintenance crews. The elongated beetle-shape has been thrown onto its back. Crossbow quarrels have punched into the door. Two of the wheels have been blasted off. It smells of smoke. A trail of blood starts at the shattered window and goes off into the alleyways.

  “I’ll have this running in a few minutes. Please keep an eye out.”

  “Sure, Ms. Dempsey,” Bullet says.

  “Got it.”

  My hands conduct the music. T
his is a lot easier than growing a building or even fixing a broken tablet. One sweep of my left gets it right-side up; with my right, I slice off the cargo bed, the rearmost axle, and rearrange the remaining wheels. With a snap of my fingers the bloodstains and soot peel away. The last exertion draws the most power, into the high-kilowatt class, as I compress the material I removed and recrystallize the plastech into the hardened, toughened configuration that is used for the structural skeleton of skyscrapers, then cut and fit the pieces to fit over the body, as well as using them to replace the clear windows with opaque armor leaving only narrow viewing slits for us to peer through.

  When I am done, the innocuous hauler is much smaller, a sedan from the end of the twentieth C, ominous black, all ugly, hard-angled surfaces.

  We are not alone when I come out of the trance. Two hundred meters down the street, Barrens faces off against a pair of young men. Much closer, beside the smoking shell of another burned-out transport, a third would-be attacker is dead, with Bullet’s quarrel projecting from between the boy’s eyes.

  The three attackers have symbols on their coat sleeves: a large eye, the pupil of which consists of many smaller eyes. Is that the new symbol of the Archivists?

  “Dempsey! Watch out!”

  I finally take in the dark streaks flying for me and stopping in flashes of light. Glittering sparks as kinetic energy is instantaneously converted to light and heat in midair and they fall, a rain of marbles. Atop the ruins of a brasserie on the corner, a cackling woman is pointing at me, lit up in blue. Her hair streams behind her, long, black waves, and her eyes are wide, and behind the flashing blue glow of touch, I see the telltale web of broken blood vessels around her pupils and the edges of her emitter plates—Psyn overdose.

  She laughs and shrieks. She tries to overturn the car onto me, and I settle it with a thought. Wind whips around her, dust flies, and cracks propagate across the wall she is perched atop. With so much Psyn in her blood, she is powerful, even without access to the grid, but it is too much for her; she cannot control it. Raw psi flares around her, leaking out of her will’s grasp.

  Foiled, she grows angry. She thrusts her fists down at me. Force presses down on me—I barely manage to shield myself and the car. The road under my feet explodes, sinks into a crater, pushes even deeper until a great hole opens beneath me revealing sewage tunnels twenty meters below. I float myself over to the car, and standing atop the hood, I roll it backward.

  Perhaps if I get out of sight, she will lose interest. Then I can support Barrens and Bullet. Right now, this woman is taking all I’ve got.

  The vehicle stalls, wheels squealing as she gets a hold on it too. Stops it.

  She stamps her feet, utterly maddened. Like a child. The buildings around us sway and rumble with her undisciplined fury.

  She can barely think. She is burning through her talent so quickly, she will probably drain herself unconscious even if I do nothing. A hail of stones and boulders rain down on me.

  I’m more worried about my companions.

  I lose sight of Barrens as he vanishes, a bolt of red lightning crackling across the road. Two other trails of fire blur about his path. Thunder, whip cracks, concrete shattering. They are three shooting stars blasting the ground with each leap, ripping through the air as they strike at each other. The comets spiral up the side of a ten-story office building, breaking what’s left of the glass façade, colliding again and again.

  I cannot help screaming when I see a dark shape fly out of one of those red explosions. A large man, already broken. No. It’s not Barrens.

  Hana! Pay attention to yourself! I can handle these amateurs fine!

  My jaw drops when I turn back to this madwoman. In the moments I looked away, she has become totally unhinged. She lifts the entire three-story shophouse unit off the street, tons upon tons of stone-textured plastech. As it breaks apart, she throws half-ton chunks my way.

  Now, I stress the grid. My rewiring of the civilian amplifier is not as good as I’d hoped. At sustained high-kilowatt-class draw, I can smell its circuitry starting to burn out as I deflect the paths of truly dangerous building chunks. Most of them are pulverizing the hillside behind me, overshooting badly. Her poor aim is all that saves me.

  I am about to reach out and snuff her out with a narrow, focused burst of force when the woman’s eyes roll back in her head. She starts trembling, shaking. Blood is pouring down her face now. She is in full psi-seizure.

  The remnants of the building fall back onto its foundations, burst apart in a cloud of dust and stone.

  And all is quiet again.

  Barrens is striding back. His jacket is somewhat torn, and a bruise is on his cheek. I did not see how he disposed of the last attacker.

  Closer, the young man I’ve started to think of as a little brother is still staring at the one he’s killed. He shakes. His mind’s voice calls out, Why?

  They probably saw us using psi and assumed we’re ISec. Or maybe they’re just handing out jackets and Psyn like candy.

  Only when I walk closer do I see the wet stain spreading across Bullet’s black T-shirt. “You’re bleeding!”

  “I am? Oh.”

  Barrens just catches the boy. “Kid!”

  Bullet’s knees give way slowly. “Huh. So this is what it’s like.”

  “Bullet!” I catch him telekinetically. Try to smile at him. “You’ll be … you’ll be fine.”

  “Naw, Dempsey. Boss. I don’t think so.” A spasm starts, stops, leaves him coughing blood. “We were trying to do good, weren’t we?”

  “We were,” Barrens rumbles.

  “Isn’t so bad … hurts less than … how everyone dies … anyway…”

  By the time we get his jacket and shirt off and spot the crossbow bolt that has gone almost completely through his torso, Bullet is gone. His face is caught in its last moment, a soft smile, remembering.

  Barrens touches those eyelids, closes them over those once-bright eyes.

  I entomb the corpse in a block of glittering white stone. I cannot think of any worthy epitaph. So I leave only his name, carved into the side. JOE NOVEMBER.

  We drive in silence.

  I have only driven a ground transport a handful of times, mostly back when I was a rookie on a construction crew. It is not difficult with the streets being so empty. Only occasionally do I have to slow down to get around empty vehicles and the smoldering remains of fires.

  Most of the people we see skitter away into the shadows. Some throw rocks at us, yelling. A few have crossbows. Once, I have to ram through a barricade of chairs and tables and chunks of rock and drywall, while bolts ricochet off the car’s armor.

  “How could it have gotten like this so fast?”

  Barrens presses his thumbs to his temples. Whispers, “All along, the others have been planning. Waiting. They must have been mass-producing and stockpiling Psyn for months. Ah, fuck. I was used, me and my boys. My fault.”

  “It’s not all your—”

  Don’t. Please.

  The terraced lines of the three-floor shophouses along the road end, replaced by the large offices clustering around the broad, green gardens leading to the vertical farm. The first ISec checkpoint is in sight.

  Blue-coated policemen, eyes blank, obviously Adjusted, stop us just long enough for me to broadcast the codes Karla gave us. They wave us on.

  A great big tactical transport rumbles up toward us, slamming aside the empty cars on the road. Emitter and receiver plates are all over its surface. It is mist gray rather than the deep ocean blue of the police force. The windshield has spiderweb cracks. A spike has punched halfway in—and I recognize it. One of the Archivists’ crossbow quarrels, only scaled several times up. It must have been launched from … I remember the equipment of Barrens’s cell. This must have come from an even larger version of the Roman-style ballista. Aside from that, the armor is pitted and scarred with little craters.

  I stop the car and the transport stops too. We get out first.


  A heavy door slides open, and a ramp clangs down.

  She strides down to us at the head of a full squad of five Enforcers. They are not wearing just the standard armor, they are outfitted in massive amplifier suits. I only saw Enforcers wearing such gear back in the prison city. Up close, they are walking tanks that dwarf even Barrens.

  The changes in Karla’s appearance since we last spoke are stark. She has lost weight. Those sharp cheekbones are too sharp now. Purple half-circles under her eyes. And her uniform is rumpled, as though she has slept in it. I am shocked to notice that she is so delicately built, and shorter than Bullet and me. She seemed so much bigger back in the detention cell.

  “Well, well. At last we meet, Peace Officer Barrens. I have heard so much about you.” Her smile is sharp, her voice drips with cold poison, contempt. She walks around him, looks him up and down, like an animal. Like a piece of meat. “Did you enjoy the tour?”

  She wants me to cower. After Meena, after the city of caged children, after these war-torn streets, a bitter woman’s cruelty is not much to bear. “It is what it is,” I say.

  Her eyes are on Barrens, only on him. “Wasn’t there another—ah, I get it. Guess you should have picked better followers. Imagine them shooting at their great leader and his companions, no warning at all.” She matches the face in our memories to the file in her head. Dismissal in her face as she changes the angle of her neck, looks down upon Barrens though he towers so far above her.

  “You will obey my commands without question, without hesitation.”

  My man’s teeth are pressed together so hard I am afraid he will crack them. But he nods. “This”—his arms swing out, pointing out the sky, the Habitat all around us—“it’s not…” I can feel him wanting to say so much more.

  “Despite your intentions, here we are.” Karla smiles darkly. “What a pleasure to hear you talking so softly. Meekly. Now, know your place.”

  She snaps her fingers. The green flash of her talent fires and crackles around us.

  I toss and turn, wriggling on the ground. It is like choking down a rock almost as wide around as my throat. There is no “pain,” but there is pressure. Blood trickles down my nose and ears. When I wipe my face, the tears on my fingers are red. I am blinded by light. But it is a light in my head and closing my eyes does nothing to stop it. Through the hard-packed dirt, I feel the vibrations of Barrens flailing on the ground close by.