Tracer

by Rob Boffard

  I’ve never had a problem with enclosed spaces – when you live with a million other people in close quarters, you sort of get used to the idea – but the tunnel ahead seems to tighten as I look at it. My throat twinges – the familiar thirst, biting down again. I shake it off, and begin to crawl, using my arms to pull my body forwards. My jacket hisses as it rubs against the side.

  My fingers scrape a wall ahead of me that I can’t see. I run my hands along it, and discover that the path turns sharply to the right.

  There’s no way I’m going to turn the corner prone. I push my body up, leaning hard onto my left side. The zipper of my jacket digs into my waist, an unexpectedly sharp pain that I can do nothing about. I concentrate on slowly inching forward, pushing past the turn: first my head, then my shoulders, squeezing through. A skein of dust falls onto my face from the roof of the tunnel, tickling my nostrils.

  Something moves under my hand. Something alive.

  Forcing back a shriek, I rip my hand away, and in the darkness I hear a tiny flutter, a skittering sound as something crawls along the metal. A bug. A beetle, maybe. One that got lucky and escaped from the buzz box. I shudder as I imagine them breeding, forming colonies in the blackness of the vent systems. The fear is back, fighting for control.

  I’m halfway around the turn, about to reach my arms out and pull my legs around, when I feel it. The vibration. It’s only slight at first, a tiny tremor in the back of my heels, which are forced into the far wall. But it rapidly grows, and the entire crawlspace begins to rumble and shake. The noise is huge, a low rumble that takes hold of a deep part of me and shakes.

  The train. A monorail passing on the tracks behind me. I’m in no danger, but every fibre in my being wants to scream. I try to clamp my hands over my ears and shut off the insane noise, but they’re pushed ahead of me, and I can’t get them back far enough. I lie, trembling, until the train passes, its behemoth rumbling replaced by a high-pitched whine in my ears.

  I remain still, breathing hard for a moment, before reaching out and pulling myself round the corner. The crawlspace is still completely black, and I realise that at some point, if I can’t find a way to Gray, I’m going to have to push myself backwards down the tunnel.

  I’ve been crawling way too long. I could be anywhere, maybe even near the outer hull, unprotected by the thick shielding and getting a dose of lethal radiation. I pause for a moment, panting, the exertion of pulling myself along seeming to catch up with me in one awful moment. Thick, sour saliva coats my mouth. I swallow, and as I do, I hear them: voices. Very faint, but there.

  I stop, hardly daring to breathe. For a moment, I think I’ve imagined them, but then they catch the edge of my hearing again. I force myself forwards, pushing on through the blackness. The voices get louder. I can’t make out the words. One of the speakers is Gray, I’m sure of it. But who is he talking to?

  Around another corner, I see a tiny shaft of light, piercing the darkness of the tunnel and revealing grimy, dirt-blackened walls. The light is coming from a small chink in the tunnel’s bottom panels, a gap which looks like it wasn’t welded properly and which came loose over time. The voices are louder now; I still can’t make out who Gray is talking to, although I have a good idea who it might be. Slowly, I pull myself along to the gap, and look through.

  A room. Brightly lit, with the usual plate-metal floor. A storeroom of some kind. Gray is there. He has his back to me, and he’s talking to his companion, a blur at the edge of my vision. I can finally hear his words, coming up through the gap in the tiles. “I did what you wanted,” he says.

  The other person in the room replies, “No, you didn’t. You screwed up, Arthur.”

  I know that voice. It’s the same fluty, gentle tone that offered me a job barely hours ago.

  Oren Darnell steps forward, into my field of vision. And as he does so, I catch sight of Prakesh.

  He’s behind Darnell, sprawled on the floor – not bound, but unconscious. My breath catches in my throat. Not just because of him.

  Lying next to Prakesh are Yao and Kevin.

  18

  Prakesh

  Prakesh doesn’t realise he’s awake until he hears the voices. They’re muffled, metallic, but as he slowly fights his way out of the darkness, they become clearer.

  “I ask you for one very simple thing, and you can’t deliver,” a man says. “I don’t have a lot of respect for people who can’t keep their promises.”

  That’s Mr Darnell, Prakesh thinks. The thought is fuzzy, indistinct. His eyes are closed. He tries to open them, but it’s like they’ve been glued shut. For some reason, he finds this very funny. Not that he can laugh; there’s an ache in his throat, a hot ring above his Adam’s apple. It doesn’t seem important.

  “You wanted him dead, he got dead!” says another man. And that’s when Prakesh remembers everything. Remembers his boss’s hands around his throat. He is suddenly awake, more alert than he’s ever been, but his body refuses to obey him. His eyes remain stubbornly shut.

  “I also wanted his left eye delivered in such a way that it didn’t attract the attention of every tracer on Outer Earth,” Darnell says. “You should have brought it to me yourself, instead of using a little delivery girl to do it for you. Now I have to kill a lot of people to make this go away.”

  This is all wrong, Prakesh thinks. With an effort of will, he finds that he can force his eyelids open a crack. Sharp light lances through, and he closes them again. Pain stabs deep into his skull, takes up residence, starts beating out a drum line.

  “Don’t worry about them,” says the other man. He sounds confident, but his voice tremors ever so slightly. “The quicksleep did the trick, didn’t it? We can deal with them whenever we want.”

  “They belong to the same crew as the tracer you hired,” Darnell says. “It’s not just them. Are you beginning to understand the problems your failure has caused?”

  “But you got the eye, didn’t you?” A sullen note has crept into Gray’s voice. “You can crack the scanner. So what’s the problem?”

  It’s all Prakesh can do to open his eyes again. He focuses every ounce of energy he possesses into the muscles around his eyes. He makes them stay open. Slowly, with every moment bringing agony, Prakesh lets the light in.

  He’s on his back, staring up at the ceiling. He can just make out Oren Darnell, upside-down above him, and he can see the person he’s talking to – a bald man, his skin shiny with sweat.

  Darnell’s eyes are cold and black, and the face they’re set into seems made of steel. “Do you know why you’ve been left alone for so long? Why the stompers never cottoned on to this nasty little habit of yours?”

  The other man moans, sweat dripping down his face.

  “We spent a long time recruiting sleepers,” Darnell says. “People we could count on. And you – you were the only one who knew about killing.”

  It’s then that Prakesh sees movement. Up in the ceiling. There’s a smudge on one of the plates – no, not a smudge, a gap. And there’s something behind it. An eye. Someone is watching them. Someone is looking down. The eye isn’t focused on him; it’s looking away, flicking between Darnell and his accomplice. Prakesh wills his eyes to stay open, wills the other eye to look at him.

  The eye shifts. Prakesh gets a quick glimpse of a nose, the edge of a mouth. And at that moment, the person in the ceiling snaps into focus.

  No, Riley, Prakesh thinks. Don’t come in here.

  “You could have been very useful in the days to come,” Darnell says.

  “I still can!”

  “I disagree,” says Darnell, and whips a knife into the side of the man’s neck.

  Prakesh can’t scream. He can’t do anything. As blood spatters onto the floor, dotting his cheek, he feels his grip on his eyelids slipping. Then it fails completely, and the world goes dark.

  19

  Riley

  The move is so quick, so immediate, that it takes a second for me to realise what Darnell’s done
. Gray gives a horrible, strangled cough, as short and sharp as the blade itself. Darnell pulls it out, with a horrible sucking sound that reaches up into the crawlspace like a long, black tendril. I have to bite my tongue to stop myself from crying out.

  He pulls a rag from his pocket and wipes off the knife, running it gently down the blade. His expression is calm, a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead, and with a sickening feeling I understand that the sweat isn’t from guilt or apprehension, just exertion. He looks as if he’s just hefted a heavy crate.

  At his feet, Gray shudders and jerks as he dies. A gout of dark blood is spreading across the floor.

  I’ve got to get in there. I’m the only person who knows where Prakesh and the Twins are. Going back isn’t an option; it’ll take far too long to squeeze myself backwards in the black crawlspace, and even then I’ll be stuck facing the locked door with no other way to enter, while Darnell does to them what he did to Gray. I’ll have to keep moving forwards, but even as the thought occurs I realise with a start that I can’t do that either. The crawlspace I’m in goes right over the middle of the room, and I can’t move along it silently enough. If I make even the slightest noise while pulling myself along, I’m done for. I see the knife rammed upwards through the thin metal and into my stomach. Darnell could do that and walk away, leaving me to bleed out in the duct, with no one to hear my screams.

  Through the gap, I see him turn to the Twins, his knife in hand, and my heart leaps up into my throat. But all he does is look at them for a long moment before striding out of view, stepping over Gray’s body as he does so. I hear the door below me open, and close again. Faint footsteps echo up into my crawlspace as Darnell heads back towards the tracks.

  Very quietly, I take a few deep breaths, and then pull myself forwards through the tunnel. The noise of my elbows and knees banging the metal seems far too loud, but I’m pretty sure that Darnell won’t hear them, and before long I’ve reached the wall at the other end of the room.

  I badly want to rest, to lie in the tunnel and let my aching arms and legs take a break. No chance.

  Ahead of me, the tunnel splits in a T-junction, and I impulsively take the right fork, bending my body past the turn, my fingers feeling ahead of me for changes in the tunnel floor. And suddenly, my fingers collide with something: a raised knot in the floor, gritty with rust. I pause, and slowly move my hands over the surface. I thought my eyes would adjust to the dark, but after the piercing light of the peephole I’m blind again.

  My fingers feel out another knot. It’s a hinge. I’ve happened on a trapdoor, another entry into the crawlspace, and relief floods through me. I hurriedly scratch around, locate the outer edge and pull it up. By now I’m beyond caring about how much noise I make. I just want out.

  A little light brightens the tunnel, coming from the room below. I pull myself forwards, past the open trapdoor, then gingerly lower my legs backwards into it. It’s still too dark to see where the floor below is, or even what I’m dropping into, so I take it as slowly as I dare.

  I quietly move down to a hanging position, and let go. My feet hit metal, and I drop to a crouch, scanning the room. The light is coming from a tiny crack under a door to my left, and I can see that the room I’m in is another storeroom, stashed with old electrical equipment. Puffs of cold air are coming from vents set low in the wall, but there’s no way of knowing if it’s air conditioning, or just the breathing of the station. Despite that, the room has an odd smell – thin, unpleasant, almost chemical.

  There’s a row of big lockers lining the back wall, and stray wires and tools lie stacked on shelves around the room, dimly visible in the low light. This place would be a goldmine for the guys in the market.

  The pain in my right hand flares, and I clutch it to my chest. Opening it gingerly, I run a finger along the gash. It’s already crusted with dried blood and dirt, and even the slightest touch makes me wince. But I can’t worry about it now. By my reckoning, the crawlspace has dropped me into a room just off the one where Gray and Darnell were talking. I drop to one knee and lower my head, tilting it sideways and squinting to see under the door. Nothing: just a bar of blinding white light.

  I don’t want to go into that room.

  The thought of finding Darnell there causes little electric shocks to rocket up my spine, and as I slowly raise myself up, I have to struggle to control my breathing. I should have waited for Amira and Carver. Three of us against Darnell might even the odds; hell, Carver alone could probably take him down with a little luck. But me?

  And that’s just it. Right now, there’s only me.

  Slowly, I pad towards the door. What if it’s locked? Sealed by a keypad on the other side? No. Can’t think about that now. I have to get to the Twins. I push my ear to the door, listening intently. Unlike a lot of the doors on the station, this one isn’t electronic. It has an old-fashioned handle, caked with dust.

  For what feels like a whole minute, I listen, but there’s not a single sound. Very slowly, I reach towards the edge of the door, grasp the handle, and pull.

  With a click that’s too loud, way too loud, the door clacks off its lock. Dazzling white light shoots through the crack, blinding me for an instant. I blink several times, and very carefully step into the room.

  The place is sparsely furnished, with workbenches pushed up against the far wall. It must have once been used by repair techs working on the monorail. Gray’s body is on the other side of the room, and I do my best not to stare at it.

  The Twins and Prakesh are on my right. Yao’s face is swollen and bloodied. She must have fought when Darnell hit her with the quicksleep.

  I scan the room once more, and run to them, sliding to my knees as I reach Prakesh. I’m more terrified than I’ve ever been in my life. The fear digging into me is like a creature perched on the back of my neck, running its claws along my shoulders.

  I reach out a hand, gripping his shoulder. “Prakesh,” I hiss.

  His eyes flicker open, and at that moment, huge, damp hands close around my throat.

  20

  Riley

  His grip is steel. I claw at his enormous hands, desperately wanting to scream, but all that comes out is a horrified wheeze. How could a man so enormous be so quiet?

  His hands tighten, those wet fingers crushing my windpipe. A dull ache starts in my chest, sharpening as he squeezes. He lifts me right off my feet, before spinning me around and slamming me into the wall above the Twins.

  His expression is not one of anger, but something even more terrifying: joy. He grins, showing huge teeth. They’re pearly-white, dazzling in the fluorescent lights, and it’s that fact – that he’s somehow managed to keep them clean and pristine – that makes me lose it. I pummel at his arms, try to squirm out of his grip, but his smile just gets bigger. My feet are dancing, trying to kick him, but he’s way out of range, holding me at arm’s length against the wall.

  “You should have taken my offer,” he whispers. He flicks his eyes to the ceiling. “I knew you were there the whole time. I didn’t even have to come and find you. You came right to me.”

  He leans in slightly closer, and I take the chance, swinging my hand up and raking my nails across his face. I keep them cut short, but they’re still ragged and uneven, and they open up three thin cuts across his forehead. He swings his head to the side, but can’t avoid the strike, and when he turns back the childlike joy has been replaced by fury.

  In a rage, he hurls me across the room. I wasn’t expecting it, and there’s no time to drop my shoulder before I hit the ground. The impact knocks what little breath I have right out of me. My head collides with the wall, causing another starburst of pain.

  But I can breathe again, and the oxygen rushing into my lungs fuels my anger. I push off the ground and spring up, woozy but alert. I am through getting my ass kicked.

  Darnell crosses the room in a matter of seconds, his footfalls booming on the metal as he breaks into a run. His left arm is pulled back, level with his waist,
winding up a gut-punch. But he’s coming too fast to control himself: I feint right, then drop into a crouch and throw my left leg out. He sees the move, tries to dodge, but his back foot catches my thigh and he ends up smashing into the wall.

  He roars, but he’s off balance, and as I spring backwards from my crouch I bring my other foot up and kick hard, aiming right for his crotch.

  But for a giant, Darnell is obscenely fast. He grabs my ankle in that tempered-steel grip, and in one movement he regains his balance and yanks me towards him.

  My heart is full go, pounding in my ears, and I’m more scared than I’ve ever been in my life. I see his hands on my throat again, and terror surges through me. If I can get away and get a little head start, I might just be able to find help.

  I twist to one side, throw my torso upwards – and sink my teeth into his calf.

  The thin fabric of his trouser leg rips under my bite, and he howls in agony. Burning-hot blood explodes in my mouth. Every instinct is to let go, and I can feel my gorge rising, but I force myself to hold on.

  He kicks out with his other leg, and connects with my bruised collarbone. He couldn’t have had a better hit if he’d planned it. A grinding agony flares in my shoulder, and I let go of his leg, crying out. My face is sticky with blood. I try to get to my feet, but the balance has been knocked out of my legs.

  Through eyes blurred and wet, I see the kick coming in, and this time there’s no bracing for it. His massive boot connects squarely with my stomach, and every atom of air inside me explodes from between my lips.

  I lie there, heaving, and Darnell flips me over. He straddles me, and with a sound like a dying breath, draws a knife from his belt. His breath is hot, ragged with effort. A short laugh crawls out of his mouth.

  I summon up every piece of energy I have and spit right in his face. The move costs me, and a fresh wave of heaving rolls through my chest. Darnell flicks the spittle off his cheek. I hear it patter softly on the ground. “That’s the spirit,” he says. And with that, he flips the shank in one effortless movement, and raises it above his head to stick me.