He sat her on the bike and held her there, putting her hands on the sides of the seat in front and telling her repeatedly to hold on until finally her hands gripped. He put his arms around her to reach the handlebars and let her head rest on his upper arm. It wouldn’t be an easy ride, but they could do this. If the cops didn’t see them go, they might just avoid disaster.
“Stop! NAPD!”
The cops had split up; a woman in a long black coat looked down at them from the fire escape. Not a uniformed officer: a detective maybe. Express started the engine as the cop raised her weapon.
He blasted under the building and through the old, unused parking lots, gaining speed. Debris littered the ground, but the Qianju sailed over it all, sending the trash spinning. They shot out into the open and climbed to reach daylight. The sky was clear, sunlight cutting through the smog. He rode the updraft of the Omnicorp Arcology and joined a skylane, trying to lose himself in the traffic.
He glanced back when the siren began to wail. The windscreen of an unmarked black hopper a few vehicles back flashed NAPD blue. Every camdrone would be tracking him now, all cops alerted to a rogue Tenma, and Jinteki too, most likely. This sort of attention could get him killed, never mind what would happen to Randi.
Around the NAPD hopper, autopilots took control of nearby vehicles and moved them out of its way, but Express knew these lanes so well he rode them in his sleep. Ensuring Randi was as secure as possible between his arms, he twisted so the bike swung with his momentum, and he was off between the lanes and weaving through the traffic like one of his icebreakers working its way through a server’s defenses.
He looked back. The cops behind him must have been desperate, the way they plowed through civilian traffic to keep up, barely giving vehicles time to move out of their way. The Qianju’s maneuverability was usually its greatest strength, but Randi’s weight shifted with every turn, and even Express, who could factor in variables with little effort, struggled to keep his lead. If the cops got close enough, they might even be able to take control of his vehicle. He could fend off any efforts they made to access his flight control through the autopilot—any streetbanger could do that—but if they got close enough to attach a grapple to his bike it’d be as good as theirs. Of course, they might just shoot him, if they got in range. He was only a clone, after all.
There was one sure way to shake them, though Express had never tried it before, and certainly not with a drugged-up celeb on board. It might wreck his bike, but frag it, he’d lost his home today, the cops had found him, and his plan was falling apart, so he might as well risk it all. The Qianju lurched forward and took them down, straight down, diving toward the boarded-up entrance of an old freight tunnel. As though anticipating the impact, Randi curled into him, bringing her head down behind the handlebars. Express gritted his teeth as they crashed through, boards splintering, and they bumped their way down the cluttered ramp into the darkness.
The smell of burning plascrete made his eyes water. Any squatters had run the moment his bike burst its way in. The cops could not follow them in here with their larger vehicle. Shame he couldn’t use the tunnel to get out of the city, but Mayor Wells had ordered most of the tunnels filled in, to prevent smuggling. Express knew where each began and ended, knew how far they could take him.
Wherever they emerged, the NAPD would be watching for them. They had to make a break for it, get out of the city. What he needed now was some way to recharge his bike’s fuel cells before they completely ran out. There were no recharging pads down here, and the power cells only had so much held in reserve.
The hoverfoils echoed in the tunnel and made the space sound enormous, but Express knew they were already nearing the exit. Randi squirmed, the drugs wearing off. Express tried to keep her from sliding out of the seat and falling to the ground, all while holding the bike straight so they didn’t veer into the side of the tunnel.
“Hold on!” Express demanded, and he hauled the front of the bike up as they neared the stairs and rose over them, the engine emitting a high-pitched squeal as he aimed for another blockaded entrance. He watched their speed on his lenses and counted the seconds to impact, listened to the straining engine. He twisted the throttle and pushed his Qianju harder, the engine grew louder, and Randi found her voice and screamed.
“What are you doing?” Randi tried to throw herself from the bike, and this time he let her go. He pushed himself forward in the seat, squeezing the last of the power from his ride to break through, then released his grip, kicked out and back, let the bike tear away. He let his body go limp. Jinteki had not designed his body to survive an impact. Tenmas shouldn’t crash.
Express could see every detail of the boards—the grain on the faux wood, rust on the protruding nails—as the headlight smashed and carbosteel bent and peeled with a metallic scream. Particleboard crunched and splintered as metal and plas twisted together. In the split second between separating from his bike and hitting the ground, he wondered if his flesh would do the same.
Chapter 5
“It’s all right; I’ve got you,” she heard someone say as arms wrapped around her and lifted her up from the ground. She felt the world tilt. She couldn’t feel much else, but was aware of the warmth of a body against hers, and her booted feet hanging loose and heavy.
The world was dark with flashes of pain and neon lights, and voices that were whispers one moment and shouts the next. She opened and closed her eyes but it made no difference. Perhaps she wasn’t seeing the world through her eyes at all. Maybe there really was nothing left of her; maybe the doctor had peeled it all away.
What was left? Clones weren’t people; they weren’t even animals. They were nothing: tools to be used and discarded, living dolls. It seemed a lifetime ago that she’d been dancing on the top of the NBN starscraper, queen of the universe. Now here she was, her body broken, her face altered, her name taken by someone else, her humanity stripped away. Even her memories weren’t hers anymore. She didn’t know how long she’d been alive; she didn’t know what was real. How much of what she thought she knew was a lie?
“Hold on,” she heard a familiar voice speak softly by her ear. He was breathing hard, and his breath was hot on her skin. It left her with a prickly sensation, like a burn, even though her limbs had gone numb and she couldn’t even feel her feet anymore. “We’re nearly there.”
She couldn’t ask him where. She wanted a hospital, but they wouldn’t treat a clone. Clones were recycled, to make more clones. That was what Jinteki wanted to do to her. The Tenma had been right. She had to get away. She couldn’t end up like that.
“I’m going to put you down now, just for a minute.”
The world was coming back into focus around her. She could make out stained walls, the bulk of trucks, hoppers, piles of crates looming in the shadows, empty cages. A holo-ad for a bar lit up the side of the building before her, shot glasses dancing around in a hypnotic sequence.
She couldn’t see anyone nearby, and the thought that she might have been abandoned with the trash made her suddenly frantic. She tried to move and found she could raise her arms, but her control was off, like they belonged to someone else. She moved her tongue around inside her dry mouth, tried to call to that Tenma clone. What had the doctor called him?
“Express?” Her voice was weak, but he appeared, stepping down from the cab of a groundtruck under the floating shot glasses.
“Are you all right? Can you move?” He took her hands in his and she used them to pull herself to her feet. The world moved and settled back into place.
“I thought I was dead,” she breathed. “Did we crash? Or did I dream it?”
“We did, but we got lucky. What you’re feeling now are the drugs, but they’ll wear off soon. That was quite a cocktail the doc gave you. Come on, I’ve disabled the security; you can get in the back while I finish working on it.”
“Working on what?”
“The truck. Getting it started isn’t a problem. Accessing the transp
ort log and reassigning the delivery job to an alias so the cargo won’t be marked as stolen: that’s the trick.”
He took her to the back of the truck, where the door to the cargo container hung open, making a ramp. It was full of overflowing boxes stacked haphazardly. Fingers protruded at unnatural angles, cut wires trailed, faces stared blankly. Bioroid parts. Sticky lumps of synthskin remained in some places. Fake flesh, but it looked too real.
“It’s just until we get out of NA,” Express reassured her. “The doctor didn’t have time to change your face, so we’re going for the smuggling option.”
“My face? It’s the same?”
He nodded, but he didn’t meet her eyes.
“I need a mirror,” she said.
“Later.”
She let him help her inside, where she crawled into a gap between boxes. She put her fingers to her cheeks, but her fingertips were numb; it felt like someone else was touching her. She let her hands fall to her lap.
“I don’t want to be found like this,” she said.
“No one will look for you in here. The cops will be checking the skylanes; we’ll just drive on by, unnoticed. As soon as it’s safe, you can come in the cab.”
She opened her mouth to speak but he swung the door up into place, and the metal clanged loudly. She waited for her eyes to adjust, but the trailer was well sealed and let in no light at all. She pressed her hands to the cold metal of the boxes on either side of her as sensation returned, and took three deliberate deep breaths. At least she wasn’t scared of the dark.
Rutherford District was far behind them by the time Express deemed it safe to let Randi ride in the cab. The road cut through an unlit forest where there was no other traffic, no seccams monitored the area, and the branches stretching above meant he didn’t even have to worry about satellites. He pulled up at the side of the old road, the camber of the road tilting the truck tree-ward, and stopped. He sat in the dark, listening to the calls and whistles of the forest.
He could leave her in the back of the groundtruck and drive on to the border. It would be easier, probably safer. He didn’t know how she would react when he let her out. She would have recovered from the drugs, and he would have to watch her carefully. She might try something stupid, contact the local police or hitch a ride with someone else when his back was turned.
She was unpredictable.
But if he didn’t let her out as promised, she would cause trouble at the handover. A misstep near the border could be more dangerous than out on the ecological preserve. He dropped silently from the cab to the road, listening for any odd sounds among the calls of the wildlife, which all sounded strange to him anyway. He could just make out the faint whine of hoppers on a skylane a klick above the forest, a more familiar sound.
Metal grated as he slid the bar across, and he paused before opening the cargo compartment. They would be traveling for hours together in the cab if he let her out, but perhaps she would be less trouble after this concession. A rumble in the sky above warned him of impending rain, and he pulled the door open, lowering it to the ground.
“Randi?”
He peered in among the boxes, but only the silver orbs of bioroid eyes shone at him from the interior. Was she unconscious in a box somewhere? He stepped onto the ramp and she dropped on him from above, her weight forcing him onto his back and jolting the shoulder he’d injured when he fell from his Qianju.
He caught himself on the uneven ground, and grabbed her ankle as she tried to run, sending her sprawling on the road. She pulled, wrenching his shoulder, and with a curse he let go. She wouldn’t get far, after being confined so long. He could catch one desperate, damaged clone.
She ran for the cab.
Express rolled to his feet but she was already inside, sliding the manual locks into place.
“Randi!” He banged on the transplas as the rain broke through the trees, soaking him. It was hard on his shoulder, like prodding fingers.
She screamed inside the cab, trying to get the panels to respond, but he couldn’t hear her over the rain. He winced as she banged her palms on the windscreen and the whole cab bounced from the force of it.
If he didn’t break the damned door to get in, she was going to wreck the truck from the inside. He didn’t want to have to drag her through the jungle in the rain. He ran back round to the cargo compartment and rummaged through the boxes for something useful, throwing pieces to the floor. Finding what he needed, he lifted the ramp and slammed it back into place.
Randi was no longer wrecking the cab; her head was in her hands and her shoulders shaking. He forced a bioroid arm’s blunted cutter attachment into the doorjamb and threw all his weight against it, bending the metal and pulling the lock out of position. He threw the bioroid arm into the cab and climbed in after it.
“Get out!” Randi shrieked, her face a mask of mud and tears, eyes red. She looked fierce, demonic.
He grabbed her wrists and forced them together, winding tubing around them. The cutter wasn’t the only tool he’d found. She struggled, but he pulled the tubing tighter, and soon a thick knot of bioplas hid her wrists.
She went quiet, staring at her bonds. He quickly gave himself a shot of the painkiller he’d brought to use on Randi. She shrank away at the sight of the syringe, but he ignored her.
As the sun sank in the sky, its rays glinted off the metal walls of the vast factories and agroplexes that seemed to enclose them again. Miranda tried shutting her eyes against the light, but they still hurt. So she stared ahead, let her vision go fuzzy. The highway had changed from rough concrete to broken concrete to a strip of rubble, given what the ride felt like. So different from hopper travel, so much harder.
The road was empty. Tourists, locals, even delivery drivers would be riding the skylanes above. She should have escaped back in the city. Out here, where would she go?
“We have to go back,” she insisted.
The Tenma ignored her. He hadn’t spoken to her since he’d tied her up. And with what? She dreaded to think where her bonds had come from. The tubes were stained blue in places, in others a creamy substance coated the inside. When she moved her wrists, cracks appeared in it.
“Please,” she begged, swallowing her pride. “I can’t just let some new clone take over my life. You can help me get to her, take her to live a new life instead, let me get mine back.”
“You’d die trying.” At least he said something. It was a start.
“Not if you help me.”
“And why should I do that?” he asked, refusing to look at her, keeping his eyes on the empty road.
She wanted to say, “because I’m Miranda Rhapsody,” but she knew how he’d react to that. She wished she hadn’t knocked him down, made him angry. She should have been trying to get him on her side, which was how she usually worked. Sitting there in the dark, she had become so desperate, she’d been thinking like a character in one of her sensies. Thinking she could do impossible things, like liberate herself and survive against all odds.
She needed the help of this clone, for now.
“I’m sorry,” she began. “Back there, in that wilderness, I was just afraid.”
“Ecopreserve,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s not a wilderness. It’s a carefully regulated ecological preserve, designed to maintain the environments of indigenous flora and fauna. Technically it’s still New Angeles, but no cams.”
He didn’t sound angry; his voice was calm, neutral. Did Tenmas even have emotions? She wasn’t sure. It had never occurred to her to find out.
“Oh,” she said. “I see, so you let me out before we left NA. Thank you.”
He glanced at her before turning his eyes back to the road.
“Are you hurt?” she asked.
“No. Are you?”
“I don’t know. My face aches.”
“If that’s the worst of it, then you’re fine,” he said. She tried to take them as words of comfort, but she needed to see her face
herself to know.
“Jinteki was really going to kill me?” she asked.
“They’d call it ‘recycling,’ but yeah.”
“And you save clones. You’re some kind of hero, right?”
This time when he glanced at her, his eyes were dark under his frown, his lips a tight white line.
“I make two million credits by delivering you,” he said, “and I’ve earned it twice already.”
“You’re doing this for money?” She paused. It was a very human motivation. “Who’s paying you?”
Express said nothing, and she waited as patiently as she could. If someone was “helping” her, she wanted to know who, and why.
“I don’t know who’s behind it,” he said at last. “Some self-righteous ristie, I guess. I have a contact —well, I had. She arranged these jobs, and now she’s gone. So you might be the last clone I deliver.”
“I never met anyone who’d pay that kind of money to help a clone,” Miranda said, but Express ignored her. That changed things; she’d have to rethink her plan.
The Tenma was hard to read—he wasn’t quite a clone, and yet he wasn’t quite a person. He probably wasn’t going to help her out of the kindness of his heart, but he had saved her life. Was she really like him? She shrugged the thought aside; she had to focus on getting away. She could ask deep questions later.
She began working her boots off, each foot using the other as leverage, squirming in the seat. She couldn’t get the clasps to open without her hands, and she tried lifting her knees up to her chin, to reach despite the bonds.
“What are you doing?” Express asked. “Stop it.”
She put her feet back on the floor. “I was just trying to get my boots off,” she explained. “My feet are sore, and I’m tired. I thought I might try to sleep.” She sighed. “Is that okay?”
“Sure, that’s fine,” he said, reaching over to undo the clasps. Air hissed as the boots expanded to release her.
She put her bare feet up on the dashboard, nudging aside the figurines some driver had collected from McKing’s meals. Her feet were a patchwork of bruises, but the scarlet lacquer on her nails was intact, wasn’t even chipped. Who said it wasn’t worth paying more for a good pedicure?
Exodus Page 5
