Tracer

by Rob Boffard

  He thumbs a switch on the far left of the panel. Nothing happens.

  Royo stands, brow furrowed, staring at the controls. After a full minute, Prakesh leans forward. “Ah, Royo, maybe you should try some of the other buttons?”

  Royo turns slowly and stares at him. Prakesh raises his hands in apology. “OK, then. Sorry,” he mutters, then glances at me as if to say, what’s with this guy?

  Eventually, Royo stabs a few more buttons, and the engine below us hums to life. The rest of the control panel lights up, clicking gently. Royo exhales, turning to us to say something, but as he does so we hear the crackle of the comms system. We all spin round at once, to see a large screen above the loading doors – unnoticed until now – briefly flash up the Outer Earth logo. This time, there’s no trickle of fear down my spine. Just cold intent. Whatever Darnell’s doing, I know we can stop it.

  He’s no longer in the council chamber. Instead, he’s somewhere in Apex, and the feed is almost too glitchy to make out. His words mutate, twisting themselves into new and hideous sounds, and his face is a mess of damaged pixels. Blood soaks the top half of his body.

  “It’s time to talk about those sleepers,” he says. “Actually, it’s time to talk about one in particular.”

  I know what he’s going to say. I squeeze Prakesh’s hand tight.

  “She’s a tracer, and she’s been planting bombs all around the station. Her name is Riley Hale. Kill her and bring her body to the gallery in Apogee, where we can see it, and you get to live. Everyone else gets to die.”

  He leers. “In fact, you don’t have to kill her right away. If you bring her to the gallery and set her on fire” – he lingers on the words, tasting each one – “then we’ll make sure that some food gets left somewhere for you.

  “Until then, I’d like to show you what happens to people who think they can stop us.”

  The camera pulls back. He’s in front of an escape pod access point. Inside the pod, hammering on the doors, are three stompers. The pod isn’t big enough for all of them; I can see their bodies squashed up against one another.

  Without another word, Darnell launches the pod.

  59

  Riley

  The feed ends.

  I can feel Prakesh and Royo staring at me. Below us, the train idles. Darnell kills the feed.

  I turn to them. “Well, it wouldn’t be much fun if it wasn’t a challenge, right?” I say, but their faces are grave.

  Without a word, Royo pushes a large lever forwards, and the monorail begins to slide slowly out of the station. For a moment, we’re swallowed by the blackness of the tunnel, but then the massive lamp on the front of the train flickers to life, bathing the track ahead in a soft, yellow light. Royo pushes the lever forwards a little more, and we begin to pick up speed, the struts on the side of the tunnel starting to pass more quickly.

  Not quick enough.

  “How far to Apogee?” I say. I have to raise my voice to be heard over the train.

  He shrugs, his eyes on the tunnel ahead. “Twenty minutes, maybe? Half an hour?”

  “Can we go any faster?”

  “We’re at full acceleration already,” he says.

  I look over my shoulder. Behind the cabin, the empty pallet cars rumble and shudder over the track, bumping together. I turn back to Royo: “What if we got rid of the other cars? Would that make a difference?”

  “Good thinking,” says Prakesh, and before Royo can say anything, he hops down onto the back of the car and begins to walk his way to the end. Kneeling down, he begins pulling at the coupling. After a few seconds, he looks back to us, yells something, but in the noise of the tunnel I can’t make it out.

  “What?” I shout, barely able to hear myself. He jabs his finger downwards.

  Realisation dawns. “Is there a control for the coupling?” I yell to Royo.

  “I don’t know,” he says, looking around the console. “But if every car unhooks at once, this entire damn train could derail. We have to make sure that we only unhook our car.”

  Visions of tumbling train cars bearing down on our little cockpit fill my head. I glance around the console, appalled by the number of buttons and levers and switches. How many controls do you need to make a train go forwards and backwards? It’s not as if this thing’s going out to catch asteroids.

  “Got it,” says Royo, and his hand flies out, turning a raised switch one click to the right. Behind us, I hear a loud clunk over the roar of the train. The car gives a huge lurch forwards as it disconnects from the others, and as I turn I hear a cry of surprise. It’s Prakesh; the car disconnecting has hurled him backwards, and his feet are hanging off the edge, his fingers frantically scrambling for purchase.

  I throw myself at the back of the car, reaching down to grab his arm. He grips my wrist tight, and with strength I didn’t know I had, I haul him over the side.

  We lie on our backs, breathing hard. And then, to my surprise, Prakesh begins to laugh.

  I stare at him like he’s gone mad, but soon I’m laughing too, falling into full-blown hysterics, the sound flowing out of us like water.

  “What the hell are you two doing?” yells our driver. I tilt my head, expecting to find him furious, but instead his expression is one of bemusement.

  “Wow,” says Prakesh, sitting up. “I think I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve saved each other.”

  “Maybe you should stop getting into trouble then.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  I shake my head. “How did none of us realise that was going to happen?”

  “Oh, I knew it was coming.”

  “So you didn’t need my help at all, then? You had it all under control?”

  He nods. “Of course I did. I just thought that after running through the entire station, suffocating on smoke and then fighting off every Lieren on Outer Earth, I’d cap the day off by falling under a train.”

  We sit against the control platform. My feet are pulled up to my chest, my arms wrapped around my knees. Prakesh has his feet stretched out, his arms by his sides. The noise of the train has lessened somewhat; we’re passing through what looks like a siding, and I can see the dark shapes of other trains to either side of our track. Prakesh finds my hand, his fingers closing over mine. This time, I don’t freeze. I don’t pull away.

  All at once, I realise just how much is riding on me running the Core. If I can’t get through it, if I’m not fast enough, then everyone on this station will die. It’s all on me. And I’ve been wrapped up in this since the beginning. If I hadn’t discovered Marshall Foster’s eye in my pack, then I’d just be part of a panicked crowd somewhere, fighting for food. Like it or not, I’m in the middle of this.

  The train dips into a narrower tunnel, and around us the rumble grows until it shakes my insides. We can’t be more than a few minutes from the main station in Apogee.

  I turn to Prakesh, trying to keep my voice steady. “If I can get to the main control room in Apex, I’ll try to restore the heat convectors. I don’t think they’ve damaged them, just shut them down. It’ll buy us some time at least.”

  He looks worried. “If Okwembu’s really responsible, that’s where she’ll be. How do you know she won’t just kill you on sight?”

  “I don’t. She might. I don’t know. Look,” I say, trying to marshal my thoughts. “The answer’s in Apex. One way or another, someone’s gotta get there, and I think I might stand a better chance than a bunch of stompers.”

  I don’t know if that’s true or not. But I know that the stompers won’t send more people straightaway – not when the last attempt failed so badly. By the time they get going again, it’ll be too late.

  “You ever been?” Prakesh says. “To Apex?”

  I shake my head. Compared to the other sectors, Apex is tiny: a main control room surrounded by living quarters for the council and their families. Since the sector is so self-contained, they’ve hardly ever needed tracers. Strange that I’ve lived my entire life inside
an eighteen-mile ring, and there’s a whole part of it I’ve just never seen. I have no idea what it looks like, or what kind of security there is.

  “How are you planning to access the computers?” Prakesh asks. “You don’t just walk into the main control room of Outer Earth and start tweaking the systems. There’ll be passwords, fail-safes.”

  “Well, we’ve got one password at least,” I say, thinking back to Grace Garner. The entire conversation with her seems blurred in my memory, like something out of a dream. I shake it off. “Maybe it’ll get me through the system security.”

  “You’ll need to find a way to lock the control room down. How are you …”

  “I don’t know, ’Kesh!” I say – louder than I intended, and above us I see Royo look round, puzzled. I lower my voice slightly. “I don’t know. But if you’ve got another way for us to get to Apex, I’m waiting to hear it.”

  “We could go around—”

  “One that doesn’t involve running through crowds of people who’ve just been ordered to kill me.”

  He opens his mouth, closes it again.

  “What can I do?” he says, his voice steady.

  “You can get me into the Core. Keep me safe. And from there …” I shrug, try to inject some humour into my words. “Well, I’ve always wanted to go zero-G.”

  “We’re nearly there,” says Royo.

  Prakesh stands, strides to the cockpit. “Do you have a first name? Seems kind of strange to be calling you Officer Royo all the time.”

  Royo glances at him, irritated. “Is this really important?” He turns back to the tunnel, softening a little. “Sam,” he says.

  Prakesh laughs. “Pleased to meet you, Sam Royo. I’m Prakesh Kumar, and in case you haven’t already met the most wanted woman on Outer Earth, this here is Riley Hale.”

  But I’m not listening to him. I’m looking at the tunnel ahead, into the darkness just out of the spotlight’s range, and my heart has started to beat a little too fast.

  There’s something on the track.

  I can see the orange glow of the Apogee loading dock ahead of us. But something is blocking out the light. I squint, trying to make it out, telling myself that it’s nothing, a shadow. But I’m not fooling anyone, least of all myself.

  “Guys,” I say, trying to keep my voice even. “What is that?”

  Prakesh peers into the darkness, his hands on his hips and his eyes narrowed. “Yeah, what …”

  The light from the train’s headlamp washes over the thing on the track. It’s a huge pile of cargo containers, like the ones we saw back in the loading dock in Gardens. The rusted metal crates have been piled on the track, right where the tunnel opens up, pulled on top of one another to form a makeshift barrier.

  Prakesh has seen it too. He turns to me, his eyes wide. “They can’t know it’s you on this train. There’s no way.”

  “They don’t,” says Royo. “Assholes think it’s a food train coming from Gardens.”

  “Can we stop in time?” I ask. Royo shakes his head, even as he yanks back the power lever. A horrible squealing sound fills the tunnel as the brakes kick in, but even as I’m trying to work out if it’ll be enough, my mind is racing ahead of me. We’re going way too fast, and in about ten seconds we’re going to hit the crates.

  Royo is hanging on to the power lever, desperately trying to coax everything he can out of the brakes. “Hold on to something!” he shouts. Prakesh grabs me and pulls me down, using the raised cockpit as a shield between us and the barricade. Royo growls in fury and abandons the brake, hurling himself down onto the car’s main platform, scrambling for a handhold. The struts on the side of the tunnel are passing way too fast.

  A half-second later, the train hits the barricade.

  The impact is enormous, a bang that shakes the tunnel and lifts the entire back end of the car clean off the track. Prakesh and I are thrown against the cockpit platform, and I hit it so hard that for a moment the world turns a dull red. Royo crashes into us, squashing us against its surface as the train bucks and screams, and then he’s over us, crying out in alarm as the momentum carries him over the cockpit, his arms flailing wildly. The tunnel is filled with tumbling shapes, and I realise we’ve hit the barricade so hard that we’ve smashed through it.

  “Watch out!” yells Prakesh, and yanks my head down just as one of the crates collides with the spot where I was a second ago, hitting with a clang that rattles my teeth.

  At that instant, the back of the car, freed from its coupling to the rail, swings out. Prakesh has just enough time to yell out something before the car flips onto its side.

  We’re hurled forwards, our arms thrown out in front of us. Time does its big slow-down trick again, and the crates, smashed into the air by the train, hang in space around us. I see our shadows, two huge Xs on the track, cast by the light from the platform. The tunnel is quiet suddenly, the roaring and squealing dwindling to nothing.

  My muscle memory kicks in, and I tuck for a roll, swinging my body to take the force of the impact. Images of broken bones and shattered shoulder blades have half a second to dance mockingly through my memory, and then I hit the ground.

  I hit it shoulder first, tumbling end over end, like someone rolling a barrel down a corridor. My left shoulder has maybe a nanosecond to realise what’s happened to it, and then it begins screaming in huge, horrid pain, which rapidly spreads across my back, forcing me to cry out. I lose count of how many times I tumble, but it’s punctuated by me cracking my head on the track. Twice.

  Eventually, I come to a stop, lying on my back. I’m staring at the roof of the tunnel, now a mess of flickering shapes and orange light. The enormous ache comes to a stop in my shoulder, pulsing like a strobe light. I gingerly move my left arm; it hurts, but it moves freely, and I breathe a tiny sigh of relief. Prakesh would kill me if …

  Prakesh. Royo. Before my body even has a chance to react I’m sitting up, causing a wave of pain so fresh and immediate that I nearly throw up. I’ve landed closest to the platform, a few feet into the tunnel. I spot Royo immediately: a crumpled form a few yards up the tunnel from me, his head turned away, his right arm twisted at an unnatural angle. He’s not moving. Prakesh has landed a little way behind me. I see the trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth, and then I realise how glassy his eyes are, and all the blood seems to leave my upper body.

  But then he stirs, shakes his head, and the blood comes rushing back, leaving a pounding in my ears and an odd light-headedness. “Riley,” he calls out, his voice harsh. Unable to form words, I lift my hand, and a smile cracks my face …

  … which dies when someone yells the words, “It’s her! It’s Hale!”

  Standing on the platform are a group of people, holding knives, their eyes greedy with bloodlust.

  60

  Riley

  “Prakesh,” I say, shaking his shoulder. “Prakesh, get up.”

  He groans and holds a hand to his forehead, gazes blearily at me. Concussion. Got to be. But if I don’t get him moving in the next ten seconds, we’re going to be cut to ribbons.

  I shake harder. My voice has become an awkward, hissing whisper, repeating the words like a mantra. “Get up, get up, get up.”

  The people have started to jump off the platform and head towards us. I recognise the one at the front of the pack. A teacher. I’ve done jobs for his schoolroom before. But any kindness in his eyes is long gone. “She’s on the tracks!” he yells.

  “Thanks,” says someone from behind him, and shoves him roughly out of the way: a heavily built woman with scraggly hair, holding a metal pole in both hands. I hear her mutter, “You’re mine.”

  I can see the desperation in these people’s eyes now, even as they push past the woman. They’re scrabbling for a chance at life, trying to kill me in the hope that Darnell will save the one who does.

  At my feet, Prakesh groans again, tries to rise, falls back. The crowd is ignoring him, focusing on me. If I can run, draw them away, he might have a
chance. I can’t risk a look behind me – getting a head start is the only chance I have. But I know the tunnel is clear, and I get ready to run.

  And then I pause, confused. The crowd have stopped, their eyes angry. Their weapons are held out in front of them, but almost fearfully now – and the ones at the front are trying to edge away, back into the crowd. I hear a gruff voice from behind me: “I don’t know how long I can hold this gun straight. Get Prakesh, and get out of here.”

  Royo is on his back, between us and the crowd. He’s holding his stinger, pointing it right at the attackers. His left arm lies useless, twisted and bent, and the right side of his face is soaked in blood. He catches my eye and jerks his head, gesturing me back down the tunnel. “I said, move,” he growls.

  “You wanna die along with her, stomper?” someone yells from the crowd. “How many of us can you shoot before we tear that gun out of your hands?”

  “I don’t know,” says Royo, his voice thick with effort. “Thought I might fire a couple of rounds at the ceiling, see if those of you in the middle can dodge the ricochets.”

  I help Prakesh to his feet, throwing his arm over my shoulder. “Can you walk?” I ask him, terrified that he won’t answer, but then he nods and grips my shoulder tight. We start to move down the tunnel, away from the platform, but I linger next to Royo. It seems like everyone around me today has died, and I’m not sure I can lose him too.

  “Hale,” he says. “If you don’t get your ass down that tunnel right now, I’ll kill you before they do.” He keeps his eyes on the crowd, who are edging closer even as he speaks.

  I shoulder Prakesh, and start walking down the tunnel, into the blackness. I force myself to picture the layout of Apogee in my head: there’s got to be another platform somewhere on the line. Then I see a glimmer in the darkness, and my heart leaps. It’s far, but I can see it: the light of a second platform, a little further down. I’ve got no idea where it comes out, but it’s our only shot.