Flight of Shadows: A Novel

by Brouwer, Sigmund

  He’d heard the padding of Abe’s feet on the floor but had not turned. The old man wasn’t a threat in any sense, except that Abe talked and talked and talked, irritating enough that Mason wasn’t against killing the old man just to make the world a quieter place.

  Not yet though. Mason needed access to the old man’s knowledge. When Mason had taken a sip of the second cup, he finally leaned on the counter and faced the old man, as if giving Abe permission to speak again.

  Abe was dangling an eye patch, holding it out to him by the string. “Your visit to the medical center is this afternoon. They’ll x-ray the arm you said was busted, just to make sure the bone healed straight. Maybe today they’ll stitch the eyelid over the socket, but it will be temporary, until you get a glass eye. Might be best for now to cover your eye with this.”

  “Don’t need it,” Mason said. He’d been vain in Appalachia, doting on his appearance in a place where appearance mattered more than inner self. Keeping his hair long and curly and his mustache neatly waxed. But that was his old self. Time in the cave had been like time in a kiln, burning away the outer self to reveal what was pure inside. He’d learned what was important. Making it through one minute and then the next. He’d gone to the edge and back. Was supreme now. Didn’t matter how the world looked at him anymore. He was his own man. Had earned that by finding a way out of Appalachia. On his own terms.

  Abe glanced at Mason’s face. Then away. “Might help other people though.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Until they got to know you, they’d be nervous. Just looking at you, I mean.”

  Abe was right about that. Mason had looked in the mirror earlier and noted with satisfaction how monstrous he appeared. That would help him. When he needed to force people to talk—and he could anticipate this happening more than once over the next few days—the more he scared people, the more they talked. He’d wear the patch and pull it off when convenient. Flash them the shriveled eye and stare at them with his milky left one.

  Mason finally reached for the eye patch, feeling a twinge of pain in his right arm. Weeks in the cave, with a diet of rat meat, high in protein, low in fat, had knitted the bone. The arm was skinny, needed exercise. But it was serviceable.

  He decided he didn’t need the medical center. His arm was fine, and he didn’t care about stitching the eyelid over his blind eye, or even having the remnants of the eyeball removed. Going to the medical center would just waste time.

  Mason first wanted the girl. Then the agent, Pierce—the one who had broken Mason’s arm.

  “Where’d they end up?” Mason asked. Again, too cagey to reveal he wanted Caitlyn.

  Abe was confused at the switch in conversation.

  “My friends,” Mason said. “Remember? The big slow one. Billy. And his friend.”

  “You want to get settled first, don’t you?”

  “I feel fine,” Mason said. “Be nice to see familiar faces.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Abe said. “You’d be better off cutting your hair first. Put on some good clothes. Use the eye patch.”

  “I feel fine,” Mason said.

  “You grew up your entire life inside Appalachia. There’s things you need to know about Outside, now that you’re in it.”

  Mason savored another cup of coffee. The old man was a useless windbag, but he could at least make good coffee.

  “What it comes down to,” Abe said, “is that society here has what I call strata. Separate layers. Easy to tell apart.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “At the top, you have the Influentials. At the bottom, the Industrials and Illegals. Between, well—as an Invisible, you get ranked according to a lot of things. Not like Appalachia, where everyone pretty well lives the same kind of life. Here people judge you by how you look. If you want to be part of this world and move in it without interference, you need to look like you fit in. Invisible.”

  Mason grew still. He was, first and foremost, a hunter. He knew there were times when blending in was paramount.

  “A person needs papers to move around? Identification?”

  “You’ll want to keep your papers on you. Just to prove you’re not an Illegal in case Enforcers ever ask. Other than that, you have rights that the Illegals and Industrials don’t. Go wherever you want. Inside the city walls though. Out in the shantytowns or soovies, it’s a different story. Mostly, outside the walls they’ll have to leave you alone. But if anything ever happens, they’ll make your body disappear. ’Cause they know if you’re in a position to report being robbed or assaulted, Influentials will take down their entire neighborhood.”

  Mason frowned. “GPS doesn’t track everyone? A person doesn’t have to carry a registered vidpod?”

  Abe laughed. “See? Appalachia was your whole life. No, the government doesn’t watch your every move. We have vidpods, but they aren’t registered to keep track of your movements by GPS.”

  “A person can move anywhere. Anytime.” This thought was intoxicating for Mason. To be a predator with no fences.

  “Not quite,” Abe said. “There are times I miss Appalachia for how it protected a person. Sure, you lost some freedom. But what you got in return was safety. Here, it’s the law of the jungle.”

  Mason smiled at the thought.

  “In the jungle,” Abe said. “Might is right. And might comes in your right hand.”

  “People go around fighting?” Mason’s heartbeat rose a little.

  “Nope. That would be too uncivilized.”

  “But you said the law of the—”

  “Jungle. You establish your power around here with money. That’s why all the strata. Money is power. Power establishes where you fit, which layer is yours. The government doesn’t follow your every move. But the banks do.”

  Mason swished some coffee in his mouth before swallowing. “I don’t understand.”

  Abe held up the fingers of his right hand. Spread them apart. “These put me in a position as far above the Industrials and Illegals as I am below the Influentials.”

  Mason didn’t like it when people made him feel stupid. “Do me a favor. Spell out what you mean.”

  “Once an Invisible establishes good credit with a bank,” Abe said, “you’re eligible for implants. Doesn’t hurt. They’re tiny computer chips injected into your fingertips with a syringe. When you buy something, you wave your fingers over a register, and the computers debit your bank account. You get cash from money machines the same way.”

  Looking at Abe, he felt the hunter’s adrenaline. Like a big cat. Discovering wounded prey.

  “Nice to know,” Mason said. “Doesn’t sound safe to me. Anyone could chop off a person’s hand.”

  Abe laughed again. “You’re sharp. That’s what Illegals used to do if they managed to get you alone somewhere. Until we put in security measures. For starters, you need a password too.”

  “Good thing,” Mason said, wondering how long it would take to learn Abe’s password.

  Mason drained his coffee and set the cup on the counter.

  “Thanks for explaining things,” Mason said. “Maybe you can help me get cleaned up right away for the trip to DC. I’d sure like to find Billy and Theo.”

  TWELVE

  Caitlyn stood in darkness, a prisoner in a long, narrow closet with a high ceiling. She was alone, prepared for the actions she had decided to take when the door finally opened.

  The night before, Razor had taken her down a hallway in the basement of one of the downtown skyscrapers, getting access through a side door beside the loading dock.

  He had unlocked the bolt on the outside of the door and led her inside the room with exaggerated politeness that Caitlyn guessed was the result of the awkwardness of the two of them entering such a confined area.

  Although she was curious as to how he’d gotten the code to the security pad that let them into this building, or how he was able to maintain a secret room inside it, she’d informed him she was not in a mood for conversation. J
ust in a mood for food. Razor had obliged, giving her bottled water and fresh fruit and cold chicken from a small cooler.

  He’d watched in silence as she ate. Then Razor had set up the bed by pulling it like a shelf from the wall and promised she would be safe. Now he was gone.

  It was obvious this was where he lived. On one of the long walls was the mattress shelf that folded upward when unused. When out, it filled half the width of the closet. On the wall opposite the mattress shelf, a few pairs of pants and shirts on hooks. At the far end, away from the door, with the small refrigerator tucked into the corner, other shelves had been built across the width of the wall, holding locked rectangular boxes. The lowest shelf served as a desk with a small chair tucked beneath it beside the refrigerator. Candle holders, with white candles burned halfway down, had been screwed in three places on the walls. Not much else. Just earlier, in Razor’s absence, she’d explored the small space and found some books on magic. Under the mattress, there were small unmarked vials. With hypodermic needles nearby. And a short length of surgical tubing.

  Upon first stepping inside this cubbyhole, Caitlyn hadn’t asked about the full-length mirror on the wall opposite the bed shelf. Anyone who called himself fast, sharp, and dangerous obviously had enough vanity to demand the mirror.

  With Razor on the floor, Caitlyn had spent the night on the mattress shelf, huddled beneath blankets. All through her childhood in Appalachia, she’d been safe and secure in her solitude with Jordan. As she remembered it, she had spent this innocence on a broad plateau between the past and the future, where little happened on either side to affect their lives. After Mason Lee had begun pursuit, though, she’d been thrust off that plateau into a life where nothing, not even survival, was certain from one hour to the next. Not even her father’s love for her.

  After her escape from Appalachia, in the weeks of living in the city, miserable as it had been, she’d at least found the plateau of routine again. Predictability. The safety of boredom.

  Until the night before, when she’d been forced to leap from the top of a building. Once again, the present had become a knife’s edge, where the past on one side seemed beyond existence and the future on the other consisted only of the danger that might arrive in the next hour, the next minute. The next opening of a door.

  Like now, waiting and waiting for the outer bolt to scrape, a warning that someone was about to enter. She couldn’t even be certain it might be Razor. For all she knew, he’d locked her inside and sent someone else to take her, for any of a number of possible reasons, none of them good.

  THIRTEEN

  Another hot, cloudless day, and Carson Pierce was well protected by the solar-reflecting glass of his hotel room, giving him a view of mirrored windows of the building across the street.

  Pierce rarely presented any vibe except relaxation. It wasn’t a pose. Simply an undeliberate result. Part of it was his clothing. He was far enough up the NI food chain to ignore dress code. Never a suit jacket. Today was a black mock turtleneck, short sleeves. Not fitted so tightly as to blatantly show off his work in the gym, but not loose enough to hide the coiled physical strength in his body, even at rest. His face and blondish hair would put him at thirty, but his eyes, a blue so pale they verged on gray, had a hardness that to close observers would add another decade.

  When possible, Pierce preferred to be at street level. He needed to be near the action to understand it better, for it to seem real. That’s why he was now in the Pavilion hotel, in the downtown core. Able to get onto the street for action in seconds, but in a place that allowed him to be wired for connection.

  Otherwise, whenever he was forced to be cocooned in a sound-deadened, sanitized, and air-conditioned office at the big building, Pierce would stare at the computer screen’s images as abstractions. He’d watch and make keyboard commands and phone calls, but it felt like a multiplayer warrior game, one without the special effects to compensate for the artificial stakes. Some midlevel agents preferred it that way. If the game didn’t seem real, neither would the blood. Easier, then, to sacrifice players.

  That’s why he avoided the office. Outside of the cocoon, weather and smells and sounds reminded him that operations were flesh and blood and the clumsiness and randomness of people responding to pressure and relationships. It’s why he’d gone into Appalachia himself to find the girl instead of sending in a lower-level operative wired for 24/7 audio and video.

  It also meant he carried full responsibility for having returned without her weeks earlier. Why he’d wanted to remain responsible for the continued search.

  After her escape the night before, Pierce had taken a train from home and checked into this hotel suite at the Pavilion, within a few blocks of where Caitlyn and the Illegal had fled the NI Agents. The suite was still a form of cocoon, but when things broke loose—a certainty sooner or later—he’d be out in the street immediately, in the action. Bean counters might argue the hotel was unnecessary, given that his home was only twenty minutes away, but Pierce wasn’t worried. He had no desire to move further up the NI food chain into political territory, so another hand slap added to his docket was one more reason he wouldn’t have to face a promotion. He also knew that Daniel Wilson, his immediate boss, who did work at a level where politics were unavoidable, would ensure that the costs were buried.

  The reason was simple. This operation was high priority and tightly controlled.

  Roughly two decades earlier, just before the Wars, the military genetic experiments that had spawned Caitlyn had been classified with code-ten security. Pierce knew nothing had changed the secrecy level or the urgent need for the code-ten. As Wilson had explained, the discovery of Caitlyn’s existence in Appalachia had given the government a chance to recover crucial experimental knowledge that had been lost when a rogue scientist destroyed the laboratory and found a way to melt down all the software and backups. As proof of the politics Pierce would have to face if he couldn’t avoid promotion, not even Wilson’s higher-ups wanted to know details of how recovery of data would be accomplished. They wanted deniability, and they wanted the experiments resumed, but as before, out of sight. Pierce’s small team of operatives understood the goal was to capture the girl; only Wilson and Pierce knew some of the reasons for it.

  For Pierce, it had not taken much to transform the Pavilion’s hotel room into a base of operations. Just his gym bag with a couple of changes of clothing and a toiletry kit. And his laptop and a vidphone and an encrypted Internet connection.

  At a table near the window, with a view of downtown DC, Pierce had his laptop open and was ready for Wilson to come on the line for vidchat. A room service tray was on the floor behind him. Good as the scrambled eggs and croissant had been, he didn’t think it was worth what the hotel charged. Coffee, on the other hand, was such a priority for him that the price could have been double and he wouldn’t have cared. The Pavilion’s coffee was excellent—he didn’t spoil the dark richness by adding cream.

  With a confirmation ding, Daniel Wilson’s head and shoulders filled the computer screen. Wilson had a block of a head, covered with close-shaved hair that had once been deep red but was silvering after his three decades in the agency.

  “Forgot to ask,” Pierce said. “Did you get my postcard?”

  Pierce had spent two weeks in Cuba after returning from his unsuccessful foray into Appalachia.

  “I did,” Wilson said. “So original. ‘Weather is here. Wish you were beautiful.’ Shared it with all my friends.”

  “But I was in Cuba. So that left nobody for you to share it with.”

  “More idle chitchat?” Wilson asked. “Apparently it’s a bad habit that you’ve obviously passed on to your team. What’s her name? Holly? Ten seconds into reviewing last night’s mess-up on the Enforcer monitor, and I discover she’s hot for you.”

  “That’ll change,” Pierce said. “She doesn’t know me yet.”

  “You know I don’t like complications anytime. This would be the worst of times fo
r you to be tempted to do something stupid. Maybe she needs to be transferred. And the bigmouthed clown with her.”

  “I’ve looked at the tape a few times too,” Pierce said. “They couldn’t expect what happened, so I don’t blame them for the escape. We’re trying to keep this under wraps. No sense sending them out and bringing others in. And you know I hate the suits who expect their operatives to act like machines. If Holly and Jeremy go, I’d just bring in a couple more smart asses. More fun to work with.”

  “Don’t make it too fun,” Wilson said. Paused. “And thought I already made it clear I was done with idle chitchat.”

  Pierce rubbed his face with both hands. He looked at Wilson on the screen again. “Yeah. We almost had her. The Illegal knew what he was doing. He knew that everything was recorded.”

  “All of them do. Nobody lives on the streets long without understanding what happens when Enforcers show up.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Pierce said. “He did a good job of orchestrating it. It’s one thing to dodge Enforcers. It’s another to be conscious of where the camera is while you’re doing it. He’s not a run-of-the-mill Illegal.”

  “We’ll get him,” Wilson answered. “He kept his face off the camera, but there’s enough there. I mean, how many Illegals pull that kind of stunt? Forensics is pulling together the trace elements of what caused the flash. We’ll track him backward when we find out how he got the chemicals. And we’ve got her face locked in with face recognition software. It won’t be long. We’ll have her.”

  Pierce had given plenty of thought to the girl’s face on the video. He’d tracked and lost her in Appalachia, never once seeing her. If it hadn’t been for a set of x-rays leaked from Appalachia showing the unusual bone structure that would support wing development, they would have had no chance of finding her Outside either. All they’d had to go on was the tracking device they’d managed to put into the glasses of a kid named Theo, because Pierce had been with them going out of the underground river and was able to find them later in Lynchburg. When Billy and Theo had fled Lynchburg and moved into the shantytowns outside DC’s wall, it helped narrow the search. NI had access to all local Enforcer communications. It had been a simple thing to have computer software monitor for keywords that triggered an alert and to have his team on 24/7 notice. The previous night, all it had taken was the word wings, and Pierce had been notified in seconds, with operatives on the way less than a minute after the video feed confirmed the girl in the squad car was likely Caitlyn. Pierce was grateful for the lack of vehicular traffic on the streets—he was aware that a generation or two earlier, his counterparts would never have been able to strike with such swiftness.