The woman stepped forward, swinging her rifle toward Kevin. Not pointed directly at him, but close enough to make a point. She pushed a strand of loose black hair behind her ear. The rest of her hair was pulled back in a ponytail so tight it looked painful. “What do we have here?” she said. She smiled at Kevin, but her grin was more mocking than welcoming. Kevin took an instant dislike to her.
“Human adolescent male,” said the male bot. “Found on patrol and taken into our custody for protection.”
“Boy mugged in the woods,” said Kevin. “Broke his nose, knocked him out, kidnapped him, and refused to give him water.”
The woman laughed. “Seems to be a difference of opinion here,” she said. She shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter, although I’m sure our patrol knows what it’s talking about. You’re here now, and you’ve seen the Island, so you’re our guest.” She turned to the bots escorting him. “He’s clean?”
“Yes,” said the female bot. “No tracking device that we can detect.”
“Okay,” said the woman. She pointed her gun toward the entrance and waved Kevin forward with her free hand.
Kevin didn’t move. He had a bad, bad feeling about stepping into this place.
The woman frowned and turned to the large man at her side. “Grennel, please?”
The man nodded, then walked toward Kevin. Grennel was weaponless, but he was huge, with a long scar running up his right arm and a flattened, crooked fighter’s nose. Kevin stepped backward, but the bots were right behind him, and he had nowhere to go. He folded his arms over his chest, trying to appear tough and unconcerned.
Grennel stopped at arm’s distance from Kevin, towering over him. “Come,” he said, his voice deep but surprisingly gentle. “We’ll get your nose looked at. Get you some water.” The big man smiled, and it was genuine, and Kevin let himself relax, just a tiny bit.
Passing through the gate, Kevin could see that the walls were thick—probably about two feet deep—and he could see more cabling running through the interior. Even dizzy and scared, Kevin couldn’t help being curious—what was the tech here? How was the Island camouflaging itself? He unconsciously slowed down, studying the wall, and Grennel laid a massive hand on his shoulder and nudged him forward.
And then he was in, and the gates were sliding shut, and Kevin thought wildly that maybe he should make a run for it, but Grennel still had his hand on his shoulder and the woman had her burst rifle and the bots were nearby, so he just watched the gates shut with the sick feeling that he might never see them open again.
CHAPTER 6
NICK SPENT THE REST OF THE DAY IN A HAZE, LOOKING FOR KEVIN. He grew more and more frantic as the day wore on, and he found no hint of where Kevin might be. If he lost his brother too, he’d just sit down among the trees and give up. He’d wait until he died from thirst or the bots came to get him and finished him once and for all.
He roamed as far as Kevin could possibly have traveled in the short time he was gone, checking everywhere Kevin might be hiding, for whatever reason—under bushes, even up in trees. Nothing. No clues. Just an empty forest. He even called out “Kevin!” a number of times at the top of his lungs, a stupid thing to do when bots might be nearby. He got no reply. Had Kevin been taken by bots as well? Were both his brother and sister already back in the City, being re-educated, so soon after their escape?
At nightfall Nick returned to his morning campsite, utterly defeated. He sat down heavily and held his head in his hands, his eyes closed. His sister gone, possibly dead. His brother vanished. What was left? As exhaustion set in, he curled up in a ball and closed his eyes. Some time later, he woke with a start. How long had he been asleep?
A fire was crackling near him. Nick grabbed for his pack and his knife, but they were both gone. “Not very attentive, are you?” he heard a voice say. The girl was tall, almost Nick’s height, with brown hair that was cut raggedly, unevenly short in a bob around her chin. She wore brown cargo pants rolled at the ankles and a green sweater, and had a backpack slung over her shoulders. Nick’s hunting knife was sheathed at her belt. Her arms were crossed in a casual pose as she looked at him, but she stood on the balls of her feet, balanced lightly, and gave the impression that she could bound off in an instant like a deer if she wanted.
“Who the hell are you?” said Nick. “What do you want?”
“I’ve been watching you wandering back and forth in the woods yelling.”
How long had this girl been tracking him? thought Nick. Was he really that easy to shadow? He shrugged, as if the news that he had been tracked was irrelevant. “You haven’t answered either of my questions.”
“I’m a survivor, like you. Revolution 10,” said the girl. “I was going to just leave you to your own business, whatever that is, but there’s a rebel patrol coming through here soon from the west, and I decided why not, I’ll let this guy know, because it doesn’t seem like he has a clue.”
“Rebels?” asked Nick. Were they the armed men he had seen?
She uncrossed her arms and tucked her thumbs into the front pockets of her pants. “They’re unpredictable. Might just leave you alone, but who knows? Better to avoid them.”
“Well, okay, thanks. Can I have my knife back?” said Nick.
She tossed it to him. “Sorry. You can never be too careful.”
He didn’t know what to make of the girl, or the situation. She could have robbed him or left him to get caught by the rebels. Was she really on her own? Could he trust her? But if she was lying, then to what end? He struggled to see what she stood to gain. The girl nodded. “Have a good life. Down with the bots, and all that.” She began walking away.
“Wait,” said Nick. If this girl had been watching him, maybe she had seen something. . . . “My little brother. He’s missing. Thirteen years old. Have you seen him? Seen anything?”
The girl stopped and turned back to Nick. “No. Kevin, that’s the name you were calling? Didn’t see anything. And what about the other one? You missing a third person too?”
“How’d you . . . ?” began Nick.
“Three packs,” said the girl, pointing at the backpacks near Nick’s feet. “Educated guess.”
Nick hesitated. “My sister,” he said. He paused again, then continued, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Not missing. Taken by the bots.”
The girl stepped toward Nick. She pushed up the sleeve of her right arm and held her forearm up to Nick. On the arm, in black ink, was a rough, obviously homemade tattoo that read “Peter, Amelie, Oliver.”
“My parents and my brother,” said the girl.
“I’m sorry,” said Nick quietly. He didn’t know what else to say.
“They’ve done it to all of us,” said the girl. “Hope they all rust in hell.” She pushed her sleeve down, backing away from him. As her eyes passed over Nick a last time, her face softened, and she seemed to change her mind. “Your brother, Kevin. Maybe he was taken to the Freepost by a Post tracker. Or the rebels could have picked him up and dumped him in the Freepost. They’ve got no use for a little kid.” The girl studied Nick appraisingly. Nick returned her stare, fighting the reflex to hide his bot eye. She had large brown eyes, with flecks of gold. Pretty eyes, he couldn’t help but notice.
The girl, apparently satisfied, nodded and held her hand out. “Erica.”
Nick shook her hand. “Nick,” he said.
Erica bent down, picked up Cass’s backpack, and slung it over her shoulder beside her own. “Come on then. The Freepost is your best bet. Try to stay quiet and keep up, and I’ll take you there.” She began walking north.
Nick hesitated a moment, then grabbed his backpack and Kevin’s and hurried after her.
CHAPTER 7
THE ISLAND, ON THE INSIDE, REMINDED KEVIN OF HIS FREEPOST— scattered trees defining clearings and pathways, and clusters of small structures. The buildings had the Freepost’s same mix of materials—Kevin could see timber mixed with high-tech military plastics, concrete, even masonry u
sing some sort of dull metallic bricks. Obviously these Islanders were a bunch of scavengers, just like Kevin’s Freeposters.
The few people Kevin could see—two men, walking into a building in the distance; a boy, about Kevin’s size, stopping in his tracks to stare at Kevin for a moment, then dashing away down a tree-lined path—seemed normal enough. But the four patch-faced bots strolling along with him were anything but normal. What was this place? They led him into a small one-room structure with a large window that looked out at the Island gate. The room looked like prefab military construction, with thin metallic gray walls and plastic slats for the floor. The only furniture was a roughly made wooden table and three chairs. Grennel led Kevin to a chair, then left when Kevin and the woman sat down. The bots waited outside. Kevin didn’t like being alone with the woman, even though she had given her rifle to one of the bots and was ignoring him, staring silently out the window. He was relieved when Grennel returned after a few moments with a canteen full of water, an apple, and a slab of bread. Kevin drank greedily, then began working on the bread, which was warm and buttered.
Just as he was starting in on the apple, another woman entered the room. She had short brown hair streaked with white, and she wore a white apron over a pair of jeans and a green camouflage shirt. A small black case was slung over her shoulder. She set the case down on the table next to Kevin and looked at him appraisingly, her hands on her hips. “Broken, no doubt.”
“Who are you?” asked Kevin.
“Medic, obviously,” said the woman. She flipped a latch on her case and it slid open and expanded, revealing three tiered rows of glass vials, and steel and plastic tools. She pulled out a black cylinder, about the size of her thumb, a cotton swab, and a vial, then turned her attention back to Kevin’s face. He leaned away from her.
“Don’t move,” she said, holding his chin with her left hand and peering at his nose. She swabbed a patch of dried blood, then slipped the swab into the vial and pressed a lid onto it before placing the vial into her case.
She lifted the black cylinder up to Kevin’s face. “Close your eyes.”
“What is that?” asked Kevin. “What are you doing?”
“Fixing your nose. Now close your eyes, and your mouth. It’s better not to ingest the anesthetic directly.”
Kevin shut his eyes and mouth, forcing himself to be still when all his instincts were screaming at him to jump out the window. He heard a hiss, then a moment of cold air on his face, and then the throbbing pain from his nose that had been with him all day was abruptly gone. He opened his eyes. “That’s wonderful!” he said. “Much better, thank you—”
The medic reached out quickly, grabbed Kevin’s nose, and twisted. Kevin heard a loud click and felt the cartilage of his nose shift, and even though it didn’t hurt—his nose was completely numb—he still cried out and jerked away.
“Had to straighten the septum,” said the medic. “All set now.” She tapped on the side of her case and it contracted and slid shut. She slung it back over her shoulder and left.
Kevin gingerly felt his nose, but it was still anesthetized and all he could feel was a dull pressure when he prodded it with his fingers. He looked at Grennel and the woman. “Okay, now what?” he asked.
The woman smiled in that way that made Kevin nervous. “Now,” she said, leaning toward him, “we ask you a few questions.”
CHAPTER 8
CASS OPENED HER EYES AND STARED AT WHITENESS. A CLOUD? DEATH? She was naked, with a thin cloth sheet draped over her to her neck. She felt no pain. She could breathe. Cautiously, slowly, she reached for the area on her chest where the stick had impaled her. The wound was gone. The skin was slightly raised in a jagged circle—scar tissue—but she was otherwise whole.
She shivered. She was lying on something cold. She sat up, and she felt dizzy and weak, as well as famished and thirsty. She closed her eyes a moment, waited for her head to settle, then reopened them.
And then she realized, now fully awake, that she was no longer in the woods. She was sitting on a metal bed, in a small white room empty except for the bed, a toilet, a small table and chair, a door with no handle or control panel, and a vid screen in the corner of the wall.
Where was she? The white cell . . . the vid screen . . . She began to feel a seed of panic rise up in her belly. She stood, wobbly, holding the sheet over her body. And then she saw the gray jumpsuit on the chair, folded neatly, waiting for her—a re-education center jumpsuit—and she sat down heavily, hugged herself, and began to shake. “No,” she whispered. “Nick, what happened?”
The door opened silently and a bot walked in, holding a tray of food and a container of water. It was a Lecturer, Cass knew. Exactly as Nick had described them—the sickly white plastic skin, the long thin limbs and neck, the dead green eyes. Cass felt a jolt of recognition—the bot’s eyes were the exact same shade of green as Nick’s new eye.
The bot set the tray down on the table. “You will be hungry, thirsty, and weak after your extensive rejuvenation,” it said. “First, you will pay careful attention to a message of guidance from the Senior Advisor. Then you will dress and eat.”
The vid screen snapped to life and an image of a bot appeared, sitting at a wood desk, its hands clasped together in front of it. “Greetings, future Citizen,” the bot said. “I am the Senior Advisor, responsible for the management of the ongoing Great Intervention . . .”
The message continued, and Cass stared at the screen, nauseous from fear but also feeling anger building up. She was Cass. They would not take that away from her. She would survive, and she would still be herself. The bots would never beat her.
CHAPTER 9
NICK FELT NUMB AS HE WALKED WITH ERICA, DUCKING THROUGH SPARSE woods, quickly crossing the cracked roads lined by burned-out pre-Rev buildings only when they had to. He was leaving his brother and sister behind. He thought about heading back to the City to get Cass, but he couldn’t break her out of re-education on his own. Kevin was gone, vanished, and the Freepost was a good place to look for clues. Erica walked in silence, which Nick appreciated. He wouldn’t have been able to handle a conversation when all he could do was think about his brother and sister and how quickly he had lost them.
Erica seemed to know where she was going—she moved confidently, only occasionally checking an old-fashioned pre-Rev compass that hung on her belt next to her hunting knife. And she was certainly comfortable in the woods and pre-Rev roads—she obviously wasn’t a City dweller, the way she broke a trail with minimum effort and made almost no noise with her passage.
They paused for lunch with their backs against a small house, the roof caved in but the windows and doors miraculously intact. Nick didn’t like stopping so close to the road—he felt too exposed—but Erica seemed relaxed and he decided to let it be. Lunch consisted of water and a dehydrated military supply protein kit that Erica dug out of her pack and rehydrated with a splash of water and a flick of the tiny built-in one-time-use conduction unit that came attached to each kit. She found two spoons, offered one to Nick, and they sat close together, sharing the bitter brown paste. It tasted like hell, but Nick knew from experience that it was good solid energy, better than anything they would be able to scavenge.
“Thank you,” he said. It was a big deal, sharing scavenged supplies with a stranger. Military kits weren’t easy to come by.
Erica nodded. “No problem.” She held up a spoonful of the nasty paste. “Fine meal like this needs company.” She looked away, staring off into the trees as she ate, and Nick took a few moments to study her. Her hair was dirty and ragged, like she had chopped it with that long hunting knife of hers. And she smelled like sweat. Not that he smelled any better. But she was pretty, with her large brown eyes and tan skin, strong but lean arms, long legs tucked underneath her.
She turned quickly to look at him and he guiltily jerked his gaze away, belatedly trying to act casual. “Your eye,” she said, pointing at his face with her spoon. “How’d you get it?”
“Well you must have spent some time with the bots, to be carrying around a piece of their tech in your skull.”
“It’s not your business,” he said gruffly. He instantly regretted his tone, but said nothing else. He wasn’t about to tell this stranger about his time in the City.
Erica stared at him a moment, then shrugged. “Man of mystery. Fine by me. We’ve all got our secrets.”
“I’m sorry,” Nick said.
“Really, not a problem, I understand,” said Erica. “So tell me something that you are willing to talk about.”
Nick thought for a bit about what he could tell her. “My Freepost was destroyed by the bots. My brother and sister and I escaped.” He paused, needing to compose himself. “And now it’s just me.” He took another spoonful of the paste, not because he was hungry but because he didn’t trust himself to say anything else without spilling the whole sob story. “Tell me about these rebels,” he said, finally.
“Don’t know all that much about them,” said Erica. “They got their hands on a bunch of nice weapons somehow, and they run little guerrilla-style attacks on the bots. Don’t really accomplish much, as far as I can tell. At least, they haven’t changed my life for the better. I’ve run into them a few times in the woods, a few more times trading in the Freeposts. . . .”
“I think I saw a few of them, scouts maybe,” Nick said. “They had burst rifles and—” He cut himself off. Erica had suddenly stiffened, staring at something over Nick’s shoulder.
“Don’t move,” she said.
“What is it?” Nick whispered, feeling a rush of dread and adrenaline. “A bot?”
Erica slowly, carefully, reached into her pack at her feet and pulled out a pistol. It was a bolt gun, similar to Nick’s stunbolt, but more powerful, with a longer range. And unlike the stun-bolt, it could kill a person with one shot.
Fugitive X Page 3
