The Nexus

by J. Kraft Mitchell

  They didn’t bout against each other, for which Jill was incredibly thankful. Bear started by leading them through a very long and elaborate series of stretches. Then he gave what he called his “preliminary examination.” The way this worked was pretty simple: Bear asked Jill to stand in front of him, and said, “So...how would you fight me?”

  Jill had been in a fight or three in her day. You didn’t have much of a career as an errander without exchanging fists with someone at some point. But it had always seemed pretty simple to her: Hit the other person; don’t let the other person hit you; get out of there if possible. Now Bear wanted to examine every minute detail. Most of this examination consisted of him grasping his sparse white hairs and moaning about how she’d loose a kicking match with a one-legged old woman. He seemed to want to correct her every move and posture.

  When it was Amber’s turn, Bear’s crooked teeth suddenly appeared. He never seemed to stop smiling while she demonstrated her abilities. Like everything else about her, her moves were graceful and flawless.

  Big surprise, Jill thought. So when were Bear and Corey going to fight for Amber’s heart?

  THINGS were a little different in the shooting range.

  If possible, Amber seemed to know less about guns than Jill did about hand-to-hand combat. Jill had show her how to hold the weapon, how to load it, how to squeeze the trigger instead of jerk it. She even had to remind her to turn the safety off. “Better than reminding you to turn it on,” she said reassuringly.

  “Hey, I got it, I got it!” said Amber the first time she put a mark on the paper target.

  “Nice going,” said Jill. “He won’t be able to run with a gimpy left foot, that’s for sure. Now, let’s go for more of the heart or head area, shall we?”

  “Cowboy movies, remember?” said Amber. “Nothing vital.”

  “Right. The hand, then. Or the neck. That’s where you’d want to put a stunner.”

  Amber emptied another clip without much accuracy, and sighed. “If we’re ever in a shootout, I’m a goner.”

  “I’ll do the shooting,” said Jill. “When I shoot the guns out of their hands, cowboy-style, you can take over, kung-fu-style, and save my rear.”

  “Deal,” said Amber.

  Funny how people didn’t seem so bad in situations where you were just plain better than they were.

  THEY were evenly matched in the gym. They pushed each other at a steady pace around the track and at the exercise machines.

  By the time they showered and went to the caf for a late lunch they were exhausted. It was a nice, satisfying kind of exhaustion.

  WHEN Holiday had first introduced them to Bradley Park, Bradley had given Jill a strange look. It may not have meant much to the casual observer. But to Jill, it was easy to interpret. He saw her Korean roots. More precisely, he saw she came from a partly Korean background. Most wouldn’t have been able to tell. Other than her dark hair and eyes, she didn’t have particularly Korean features.

  But Bradley could tell. And he didn’t like it at all.

  Not many “purebloods” lived on Anterra. Intermarriage between ethnic backgrounds was hardly uncommon. Anterra was a nation unto itself, and Anterrans married other Anterrans regardless of race or national background.

  It was a different story with the Koreans.

  It hadn’t been their fault, really. Korea had joined the United Space Programs late, when the Metropolitan Satellite project was already in full swing. This caused the other nations in the USP to look down on the few Korean scientists and engineers involved, and to make light of their contributions.

  The prejudice continued onto the satellite once it was settled. Of the nearly one million original citizens, most had been from the United States, Japan, or the European Union. Only about 20,000 had been Koreans—a number that was still “way too high,” according to many. The Koreans responded by banding together. Of their own will they became the most segregated group on Anterra, and expressed a national pride unlike any other on the satellite.

  And Koreans on Anterra simply did not intermarry with/bear children with non-Koreans—not without going against a very strong grain, anyway.

  Jill obviously represented an exception.

  “Was it your father or your mother?” Bradley Park asked her when they were in line at the caf that evening.

  Jill hadn’t even seen him approach. He hadn’t greeted her. This was apparently his way of starting a conversation.

  “What do you mean?” she asked. She knew very well what he meant, but she wasn’t going to play along.

  “Your mother, I would guess,” he said, ignoring her question.

  How had he gotten it right? “My mother was Korean, if that’s what you’re talking about.”

  “So was mine...and so was my father.” He gave her that same look—a look of superiority, a look of disdain, a look of pity, almost, that she didn’t have the pedigree that he had.

  “It looks like you chose excellent parents,” Jill said blandly. “I didn’t get to choose mine, actually. They were already together by the time I came along.”

  He sniffed at her, mostly because he didn’t know how to respond. “Well,” he said after a moment, “I guess we’re on the same team, now.”

  “Were we ever not?”

  He sputtered again. “I just mean we’d better find a way to get along.”

  “Were you thinking it would be difficult for some reason?”

  He clenched his teeth. “You know what you are, and what I am. We can’t just ignore our differences. We have to face them.”

  “I freely admit our differences: I can’t choose to stop being half-Korean, whereas you can choose to stop being an arrogant jerk about it.”

  “What’s up?” asked Corey Stone. He’d come over from his table when he saw their conversation heating up. He was giving Bradley a look that could freeze a polar bear.

  “Just meeting the new girl,” Bradley said in a flat tone of voice, then walked away.

  Corey looked at Jill questioningly.

  “He’s a little proud of his heritage, isn’t he?” Jill asked.

  “Cut him some slack,” said Corey. “He doesn’t have much else to be proud of.”

  Jill chuckled.

  It wasn’t until Corey was walking away that it hit her: Corey had come to her defense. That was a good sign, right? She tried to tell herself it was nothing, that he was just getting after Bradley because he didn’t like Bradley much. Still, it gave her a good feeling.

  A little of that good feeling actually stuck with her when she noticed Corey was now sitting next to Amber.

  A third hard day of training was rewarded with a night out on the town. As Jill rode the elevator up toward the ground level of GoCom, she realized this would be her first glimpse above the surface of Lake Anterra in almost five days.

  She and Mandy caught a bus to the Raging Bowl on the south rim. In a haze of cigarette smoke they watched Dizzie’s band, the Lawn Flamingos. Jill didn’t know if she could call them “good,” but she felt secure calling them “loud.” Dizzie never stopped grinning or bouncing up and down while she hacked at her pink guitar.

  While another band played Jill bowled against Mandy and Mandy’s boyfriend, Broderick Sebastian Rawlings, a.k.a. Rawlie-boy. Mandy was good, as promised. Jill was even better. Rawlie-boy licked them both.

  “Does professional bowling pay better than being a lawyer?” Jill asked him.

  Broderick laughed. “It might be more fulfilling,” he said.

  Dizzie joined them at a table for pizza and sodas. They laughed and talked about the concert, about Mandy and Broderick, about bowling...about anything but work. Jill even threw in a comment or two, though she mostly just sat and listened. She wondered if this was something along the lines of how normal people lived.

  Then she remembered she was a special agent for a secret government department.

  AFTER dinner Jill’s sixth evening in The Nexus, Corey Stone told her and Amber to follow him
. “There’s another part of our department I’ve got to show you.”

  They went above HQ and down a short hallway.

  “The garage,” Corey announced.

  Several sleek black vehicles were parked in the wide cement-floored space—ground cars, skycars, motorcycles, and even a few skybikes.

  Jill did a double-take of one of the skybikes. “Is that...?”

  “Yours,” Corey confirmed. “We brought it down from the ferry docks the day you got here.”

  “So this is where we head when we go on missions,” Amber said.

  Corey nodded. “This way to the locker rooms.”

  Men’s and women’s locker rooms off the garage were divided into narrow sections. Each section included glass doors with full uniforms propped on stands behind them. The full body armor and masks looked like actual agents standing stone-still behind the glass.

  Corey led them down one branch of the locker room where two new uniforms, external armor gleaming, were propped behind side-by-side glass doors.

  “Yours,” said Corey.

  Jill’s breath caught in her throat. She stared at the uniform, and the dark, reflective surfaces of the mask’s eyes seemed to stare back. It felt like looking at a person...the person she was supposed to be.

  She wondered if climbing inside the uniform would help her make the transformation.

  “Jill?”

  She started, looked back at Corey. “Did you say something?”

  “I said let’s head back to the garage.”

  “Sorry. Coming.”

  She glanced over her shoulder at the uniform one last time as she walked away.

  BACK in the garage Corey told them to climb into one of the black cars. Jill gestured for Amber to ride shotgun before Corey could ask her to, which she figured he would.

  They drove away from HQ via the tunnel under the lake. The tunnel dead-ended, and Corey parked and waited. A platform lowered, and Corey pulled forward onto it. Then the platform rose back up, and they were in the warehouse of Pete’s Fish Cannery.

  They drove out of the warehouse into the dark streets of the old industrial area east of the lake.

  “This part of the city is abandoned,” said Corey, “like a lot of districts these days. It makes an ideal exit and entrance. It’s the only way to get into or out of the department besides the elevator from inside GoCom.”

  “Won’t anyone get suspicious seeing vehicles coming and going?” asked Amber.

  “We rarely pass any other drivers on these roads until we’re a fairly good distance away from the cannery. Even if someone did happen to suspect, only a department vehicle can open the garage doors of the cannery or signal the floor panel to drop into the tunnel.”

  “So it doesn’t matter that we’re being watched?” asked Jill.

  “What?” asked Corey. Alarm threw off the tour-guide tone of voice he’d been using.

  Jill pointed. “Someone just ducked behind that brick wall.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I saw him too,” said Amber.

  Corey pulled over. “We’d better check it out.”

  “We’re not dressed for a mission,” Amber said hesitantly.

  “Or armed,” Jill added.

  Corey opened a console between the front seats. “We never go anywhere unarmed,” he said, grabbing a handgun loaded with stunners. Jill grabbed one too, reflexively. Amber finally did as well, slowly, like she was grabbing a snake and trying not to get bit.

  Jill was alarmingly used to this kind of situation—the kind that included being armed and dealing with other people that were probably armed too. “I’ll follow him,” she said. “You two double back around that warehouse and try to spook him back toward me.”

  “We shouldn’t split up,” countered Corey.

  “He saw us,” said Jill, “and he knows we saw him. Our only advantage is that we outnumber him. We’ve got to try and trap him.”

  Corey finally nodded. He and Amber slipped around the corner. Jill rounded the edge of the brick wall at the other end of the warehouse.

  She was peering down a dark alley. It smelled like dank puddles. She heard but didn’t see the guy slinking down it. There was a slight breeze off the lake behind her. She heard the distant noise of city traffic, but no sound nearby besides the slinking.

  Suddenly she was an errander again, with that familiar sensation rising inside her. The sensation seemed more nameless than ever, more distant, even though it was at the very core of her being. She’d felt the same feeling a thousand times...but it was different this time. It felt foreign now, like a puzzle piece that didn’t fit inside her anymore.

  It was hard, but she pushed away the conflicting emotions and focused on the here-and-now. She thought of her new uniform standing uselessly in a glass case back at HQ, while she stood here with nothing but jeans and a T-shirt...oh, and a gun.

  The guy appeared under a flickering lamp at the end of the alley, climbed over a shallow wall, and ran down another alley away from her.

  They wouldn’t be able to trap him now.

  Jill took off after him.

  She thought she heard him round another bend. She followed him, gun raised.

  She was at an intersection of four narrow roads among the abandoned industrial buildings.

  He could be anywhere.

  Corey and Amber ran up behind her.

  “Lost him,” Jill muttered.

  Amber kept her gun raised anyway. Not that it mattered—the safety was still on.

  “Could have been just some homeless guy,” said Corey.

  Jill shook her head. “He was watching us too carefully.”

  “A spy,” whispered Amber.

  “Let’s head back,” Corey said through a frown. “We’d better tell the director.”

  Jill’s heart was still pounding the way it always did on an errand. Only this wasn’t an errand, she reminded herself. It was something entirely different. Something opposite.

  Wasn’t it?

  She was picturing that nameless face again—acne, shoulder-length red hair, sad eyes...How many times had she thought about that face in the last week?

  “...you okay? Jill? Hey, Jill?”

  Her mind snapped back to the present. Erranders were the bad guys; now she was one of the good guys...right? Sure she was. She’d signed the papers, joined the department. She was one of them now. It was official. She knew it.

  But she didn’t feel it.

  “Yeah...I’m fine.”

  Was it really possible change into a different person just like that? The whole ride back to HQ she tried to convince herself that it was.

  PART IV: Cobalt Viceroy

  17

  THE boss was wandering through his arcade in Korean Town, west of the Avenue of Towers. Korean kids on Anterra loved their arcades, and they’d packed the place out tonight. There were modern holographic games, ancient bulky consoles with bubbled screens, and everything in between. Dim violet light from the ceiling mingled with the shifting light of the games. Music thumped from invisible speakers and added to the din.

  The boss liked to wear a tailored suit at his arcade. It made him seem like a CEO instead of the owner of a teenage entertainment center. Then again, he was much more than the owner of a teenage entertainment center, so why shouldn’t he stroll around the place in a tailored suit? The suit was black to match his perfect hair, his eye-patch, and his reputation.

  He lit a cigarette while he walked. He was in a good mood tonight. He wasn’t sure why. The boss’s moods were like the weather on the Home Planet—uncontrollable, unpredictable, quickly changing.

  A quick change happened at that moment, in fact. He saw a hooded guy walk quietly in through the arcade’s side entrance.

  The boss strode to his office at the back of the building. It was a dark, cramped room. Classical music crackled from the flaring horn-shaped speaker of his old phonograph in the corner.

  A minute later the hooded guy came into the office. />
  They spoke to each other in Korean.

  “You are back early,” the boss said.

  “They saw me,” said the other guy. He pulled back his hood. He was a young Korean with disheveled hair. The dishevelment looked deliberately styled, not just a consequence of the hood.

  “You allowed them to see you?”

  “Our source said that the department does not patrol that entrance.”

  “And you believed the source?”

  The young man hesitated. “If we are not going to believe the source, what is the use of having one?”

  The boss sighed. “I suppose you are right.” He lit a cigarette. “Still, it makes sense that the department would keep watch over one of the only entrances to their headquarters.”

  “Perhaps. Then again, why draw any attention to the place by posting guards? No one knows there is supposed to be such an entrance. No one even knows there is supposed to be such a department.”

  The boss nodded impatiently. “I assume you did not find the entrance?”

  “It would not matter if I had. Only department members have the capability to trigger the door open. You need more information from the source.”

  “The source is afraid to say more than has already been said.”

  “The source is only saying that that so you will pay more money.”

  “Perhaps.” The boss went to the corner and switched off the phonograph; then he took a wax cylinder out of it, put a different wax cylinder in, and switched it back on. A different muffled classical tune came on. “Perhaps we must change our focus.”

  “I have been telling you that for a month.”

  The boss didn’t argue. He shook a finger at the hooded kid. “I should listen to you more often.”

  “Then listen to me right now: Do not take this so far.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You have some good resources. Use them to keep your little...side business transactions going. You do not have to take the whole department down.”

  The boss shrugged. “Perhaps I want to take the whole department down. In the future no one will remember me for those little business transactions you are talking about. But if I expose an entire secret branch of the government...!” He blew smoke dramatically at the ceiling.