by Karen Hayes
Adam presses a button on his earpiece. "Yes?"
I shrink back, in case he turns around and sees me. He doesn't. He keeps staring at the motionless people behind the glass.
"Hill? What about him? Are you finished over there?"
I startle. Is he talking to Greene? Or Heaven?
"What do you mean he's alive?" Adam doesn't sound pleased. He keeps listening. "No," he finally says, "Sarah's not a problem. I've taken care of her."
I freeze at the sound of my name. He's taken care of me? So that's what it was, then?
"She's too powerful," Adam continues. "It would be a shame to lose her. Once the big day is over, we'll think what we can do about her."
He pauses again, listening. His assistants wait patiently. So do the bleeding people behind the wall. I'm waiting, too.
"Chris Brana? What about him? No, I don't think I'll need him. I already have everything I need," Adam brushes away a strand of hair from his forehead. Such a dear familiar gesture. "Yes, sure you can. We don't need him anymore. Are Trace and Job back already? Well, tell them to take care of him. Yes, right now. I don’t want to see him again."
Chris! Oh my God...
Cautiously I turn round and step away from the door, moving slowly at first, then faster and faster - past the frozen Sam, past the albino man still hovering in mid-air, past the man in the glass coffin, past the security guard...
Time to get out of here. I need to find Chris.
The elevator barely moves. It crawls up the shaft like a sedated earth worm - and I used to think it was fast! The digits on the display aren't in a hurry to change. Come on! Do it!
Adam, damn you!
How I hate him. What an embarrassment. He lied to me. Now he wants to take the only person I have left. The only one who still cares about me.
I try to contact Chris mentally. Just as the elevator clears the 30th floor, I think I caught a wisp of his thoughts; it feels like a touch of warm breeze... then it's over.
Chris! Chris, please! Where are you?
Finally, his floor. I dash out and run blindly until I ram into a hydrant round the corner. I suppress a groan without stopping.
Finally, Chris' room. I start slapping the flat of my hand hard on the door. The sound is loud but I don't care anymore.
The room is silent. I pull the handle: locked. What if he's in there bleeding to death? What if he's so weak he can't even call for help while I'm stuck here like an idiot?
I need to break in.
Just as I'm thinking this, I can hear Greene's voice coming from the same direction I've just come from.
He's the last person I need.
I hide behind the nearest corner and press my back to the wall. Let him open the door, then, and I'll be closely on his heels. He won't expect me to be here. With any luck, I might be able to neutralize him.
"Yes, yes, I'm here already," he says, apparently into a microphone. "Stop shouting! I'm doing it, I tell you. Give me a few minutes!"
The lock pings. I cling to the wall, listening intently. He seems to have walked in.
"There's nobody here," he says.
What? No Chris? Sure it's a relief but... where am I supposed to be looking for him now? How can I find him before Adam's henchmen get to him?
"Where did you say?" Greene's voice sounds surprised. "No way! Well, in that case he's toast. He can't get out. I'm coming now."
Have they already found him? That was quick!
But of course. The pass card! It's equipped with a tracking device, isn't it? That's how they located him so fast. And that's how they'll locate me, too.
I rummage through my pockets, find the card and discard it. That's me done. But Chris... he has no idea they're coming for him.
I won't let them kill him. That's one thing I can't let them do.
I can hear Greene's footsteps as he walks out of the room and heads for the stairs. I slide from behind my corner and follow him.
Chris
I can't believe it!
I jump up and grab at the pipe with one hand, pulling myself up, then feel under the insulation.
Nothing.
What if I'm looking in the wrong place?
I peer down. There's the gray square of concrete where the missing floor tile is from. And here's the broken tile itself, leaning against the wall. Everything's right. Nothing has changed. This is the exact place where I secreted the memory stick, in the small corridor between the parking lot and the elevators.
The files are gone.
When did that happen? It's only been a few hours. I planted the memory stick, then I saw Sarah and the two pyrokinesists, spoke to them, then went to see Adam in his office and we all drove to Hill's mansion which we then left in flames...
It's been less than three hours. No one in their right mind would have bothered to check the pipe in the meantime. Unless...
I jump down, brush the dust from my hands and walk toward the elevators.
Oh, well. It only means that there's another surveillance camera here somewhere. Someone might be watching me right now, grinning and trading jokes with their colleagues, ridiculing the idiot who delivered their boss the information he needed with his very own hands.
The elevator doors open. I walk in and press the button for the living quarters. The memory stick is gone, which is another reason not to linger here.
There was a point when I almost believed Adam - almost - but he seems to be playing dirty. If he was so desperate for the files, he should have discussed it with me, not steal it when I wasn't looking.
Had it not been for those files - and had Sarah not been so bent on talking to Adam first - I wouldn't have come back at all. Nor would I have let her come here on her own. But she sounded so desperate, so convinced that Adam had nothing to do with the fire... there was no stopping her. I could have used force, I suppose, but that wasn't the right thing to do. God knows where that route might have taken us.
I need to wait till they've finished talking but I really don't want to stay in my room. Also, I have those snapshots of Hill's file in my phone. I need to find a quiet place where I can look through them undisturbed.
I exit the elevator and head toward the emergency exit. I swipe my pass card, open the door and walk down the stairs.
The stairwell is completely deserted. So are the living quarters. Do they have cameras here as well? Are they following my progress throughout the building? Could they have even seen Sarah and myself enter it? Or could I be having delusions of grandeur? They probably don't give a damn about me anymore now that they have the memory stick.
In any case, I need to be doubly careful.
I reach the next floor down. I've never been here before even though it too belongs to the Hermetis-owned part of the building.
This floor is empty and quiet. Every other lamp that lines the walls is dimmed. Two corridors lead from the emergency exit adjacent to each other: one long, spacious and plushly carpeted, the other short and dark, its walls lined with closets and storerooms. A battered couch sits by the wall. This is probably the maintenance area.
The window opposite offers a vertiginous panorama of New York at night which resembles a miniature mockup of the city in a film designer's office. The pale LED lights of stars glow in the pitch-black sky; streetlamps below outline the angular silhouettes of the buildings.
I slump onto the sagging couch and take out my smartphone.
Suddenly I feel Sarah. It's as if the touch of a warm breeze is reaching under my skull. Sarah's ephemeral whisper touches my mind.
I swing round, expecting her to appear from around the corner... but no. It's only my imagination playing up. Or did she really try to contact me?
I shake my head and return to my phone. There were about fifteen documents in that manila folder: scanned printouts as well as newspaper clippings and pictures.
I scroll through the automatically generated file names and click on the first one. This is a copy of a short newspaper clipping:
> Over Twenty Killed in Textile Factory Fire
A fire has killed at least twenty-two people and left fifty more injured in Gazipur, Bangladesh. According to eyewitnesses, the fire raged for over three hours at the TexoChem garment factory, the city's biggest manufacturer situated twenty miles to the north of the country's capital. The victims, some of whom are in a serious condition, have been rushed to hospitals. The cause of the fire is yet unknown. The textile industry plays a major role in the country's economy...
Frowning, I stare at the picture of a scorched factory floor and the bodies in plastic bags lined up on the floor. What's the significance of this?
Having said that... I think there was something printed on the document's other side. I took a picture of it too, only where is it now?
I open the next file. That's right. These look like scaled-down scans of several documents. I have to zoom in on them in order to read them. Now the text doesn't fit on the screen which makes it a bit of a pain to read, but I don't feel like going back to my room just to read them on my computer.
This looks like some legal document with a note attached. The burned-out factory used to belong to TexoChem Corporation which in turn is a subsidiary of AIFB, an "international business association" which owns most of the textile factories in the central and southern regions of Bangladesh. The fire has triggered public unrest incensed by the poor safety measures at TexoChem factories and the environmental threat they present to the area. The rioters have torched another factory and looted several more.
The note ended with, "The police has been mobilized to deal with the situation."
I look up, trying to concentrate on the events of my past life. Yes, I seem to remember something... it was on the news. The rioting spread; the Bangladesh government was forced to resign. Now they have this crazy dictator who's already had almost twenty-five percent of the population killed. And all of that was caused by that one initial factory fire.
The third file is even more interesting. It traces the ownership of AIFB to one Johnson Kirk, a Republican and a major financial supporter of Chloe Walker who was - surprise surprise - McAllister's rival in the presidential elections.
The Gazipur fire and the consequent regime change in Bangladesh has destabilized the financial empire of the very person who financed Chloe Walker's presidential campaign. Could it be why she lost to McAllister?
I reread the information, then check the rest of the files, sinking deeper, becoming mired in a quicksand of crime, murder and sabotage...
Lake Superior nuclear power plant. A level 6 accident: one level short of nuclear catastrophe. Apparently, the electric cables connecting the station to the external power source were damaged. So were the backup diesel generators. Both main and reserve cooling systems failed, causing a meltdown. The entire state of Minnesota was exposed to the fallout, tens of thousands had to be relocated; hundreds died. The Canadian authorities filed an official protest against the radioactive contamination of the lake. The whole of North Minnesota was proclaimed a Total Exclusion Zone (TEZ). After some prolonged debates, its control was handed over to the so-called Ecological Fund for the Development and Distribution of Organic Produce - a shady establishment which immediately triggered a flood of complaints from the locals signaling the authorities about the strange goings-on behind the Fund's electric barbed wire fence.
I opened the next file. And who was in charge of the Fund? Surprise... Adam Vector.
Refusing to believe my eyes, I reread the documents several times. All this happened about a year ago. And this is what happened afterward:
Six months ago: the disappearance of Takeo Mishima, a leading Japanese sociologist and futurist.
Five months ago: the Hermetis-owned Ecological Fund received the government's permission to erect a new reinforced fence around the Minnesota TEZ, limiting all entry.
Three months ago: the mysterious disappearance of a secret file from the NSA's vaults. The scan of a printed page is attached, some of the lines blanked out with a marker. It looks like a memo written by a police official,
"The disappearance of the above evidence against the Environmental Fund has brought the investigation back to square one. The only difference being, both our operatives who managed to infiltrate the TOZ have disappeared and no longer make contact."
And so on and so forth. What the hell's going on in Minnesota? Or in the country? In the whole world, dammit!
I'm trying to piece the isolated facts together. They're all links of one consequential chain which stretches into the future, ending in an event which is... which is...
Three more scans.
Two months ago: rioting in a military psychiatric clinic. Violent patients killed the guards, seized their weapons and escaped the clinic, heading toward the nearest town. The Department of Defense had to employ gunships in order to minimize the threat to civilian population.
Forty days ago: the riot police's biggest training had to be canceled after the committee chaired by Ben McAllister accused it of being a burden on the taxpayers, to their unanimous and indignant agreement.
Twenty-three days ago: NSA agents discovered a deserted lab in an empty Detroit apartment building destined for demolition. Inside the lab, there were some tissue samples as well as cryogenized human bodies sporting unusual mutations. The same night, a powerful explosion shattered the building, destroying the lab and killing the special-force guards posted there. It happened only ninety minutes before the arrival of a team of biochemistry experts who'd been urgently summoned by the NSA in order to analyze the samples.
Events seem to be snowballing, becoming denser and more interconnected, pushing other incidents into their path. I'm developing a splitting headache already from trying to cram everything into my head while new facts keep coming...
Finally, in the very last paragraph of the last printout, I see something that seems to sum up the whole thing. The Presidential debates. The second televised round is due to take place in Las Vegas in three days' time between Ben McAllister and Chloe Walker. And who's hosting the show? That's right, Andy Hill, the guy we so helpfully saved from his own burning house.
Now I get it. This is what Adam is waiting for. This is the climax.
I look up from my phone and whisper, "What are you up to, Mommy's little boy?"
As if answering my question, the rapid patter of footsteps comes from around the corner.
I slide the phone into my pocket and spring to my feet, then take a peek down the bigger corridor. Trace and Job are walking quickly toward me, the two guys who controlled us in Times Square.
Trace's T-shirt and track bottoms are streaked with sweat. They must have interrupted their gym practice. Job is wearing some jeans and a sweater with rolled-up sleeves.
Instinctively I turn around, just in time to see Heaven's black-clad outline loom out of the dark, heading toward me. Startled, I shrink back.
I thought it was a dead end! Apparently, there're more elevators or stairs that way - which could explain Heaven's arrival.
At least Greene isn't with her. Not that it helps me much, though. It looks like I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place.
They walk fast, their faces grim. They aren't here for a night stroll along the company corridors. They've come for me.
I whip out my pass card and sink it into the lock of the nearest door.
Nothing happens. The little light remains red without changing to green. I can't hear the lock clicking open.
They've blocked my card, the bastards.
I leave the card in the lock, swing round and punch Heaven hard.
Her reaction times are incredible. Almost imperceptibly she ducks to one side and knocks my hand away while grabbing my wrist with the other. She swings round and twists my wrist sharply, continuing to press against my elbow. It snaps.
Had I been a normal human being, I'm sure she'd have broken my elbow joint. Luckily, I’m a guardian: my joints and sinews can sustain pressure for a much longer time. I make a
sharp movement with my other arm as if trying to hit her. When her attention shifts to it, I give her an almighty kick. Simple but very effective.
She's not a normal human being, either. A normal one would now be scraping herself off the wall. As it is, Heaven recoils with a quiet yelp and grabs at her thigh, allowing me to deal her a classic punch to the jaw.
She crashes onto the floor behind the couch. I swing round just in time to see Trace and Job who are mere feet away from me.
With my back safely against the window, I whip out the Taser which I'd taken off Andy Hill's guardian and zap them.
The corridor fills with the loud crackling sound. I hoped I might hit both of them with one shot but unfortunately, I didn't. The electric charge hits Job. I already know he's the guardian in their tandem. Even though he's not as big as Heaven or myself, he's still bigger and burlier than Trace.
Job screams out in pain. His legs slacken. His fabled guardian's strength didn't help him much! Slowly he collapses to the floor.
But before he can pass out, Trace throws his hand out palm first, shouting something.
No idea what he's just done. This isn't the repulsion force I feel when I try to approach Heaven. This is something different.
The air fills with a low humming noise, then explodes in my face, throwing me back. It feels like being rammed in the chest with a steel bar.
My ribs crack under the pressure. My head fills with a thunderous roar.
I drop the Taser. My back hits the window behind me, shattering it. I grab at the edge, slicing my hand on the busted glass.
Then I drop - a long fall through the cold city night.
Sarah
Greene hurries up the stairs. I can barely keep up with him. I'm trying to step as noiselessly as I can, even though the echoing sounds of his own stomping feet are so loud he's unlikely to hear me.
From time to time I stop and lean over the railing, peering into the dark. No one seems to follow me.
Finally Greene's stomping stops. I freeze too, listening hard.
"What do you mean, downstairs?" Greene yells into his mouthpiece. "Shit! I've only just got up here!"
