Broken People

by Ioana Visan

  “It worked.” Dale ran a hand over his face. He needed a shave.

  “But…?”

  He stared at the floor for a second, seemingly putting his thoughts in order. “It’s too big, too loud … It draws too much attention. I don’t know what act they can use to distract the audience long enough to make him disappear. I don’t know if they can.” He paused. “I don’t like the odds.”

  Aurore’s bare fingers twitched on the table. Was he serious? Had he really come to complain? “Luckily for me, my whole purpose in life is not to make you happy.”

  “No, of course not.” He leaned forward, his elbows propped on his knees, and tilted his head as he looked at her.

  She blinked. “Then why are you here?”

  “I was just getting to it. It’s time for you to tell me what you want from the vault.”

  Ah, that. It was a reasonable request. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll be there to take the items myself.”

  “That’s out of the question. What was supposed to be a two-man job has turned into a circus parade already. There’s no room for you there. Let the professionals do it.”

  Aurore arched an eyebrow. “The circus crew are professionals when it comes to burglary now?”

  “No, but I’m stuck with them because of you.” Dale pointed at her. “I don’t need any more amateurs involved. I’ll get your items, but in order to take them out of the Hrad, I need more info about them … or are they small enough to carry them without being noticed?”

  “Well, no…”

  “Okay, tell me the metrics then.”

  Aurore hesitated. She didn’t want to tell him all of the details in advance. He’d think she was insane. But he had a point. Getting them out could be tricky. “There are four items, two of a kind, so there could be either two or four boxes. I don’t know how they’re packed.”

  “Size?”

  “About one meter long, forty centimeters wide.”

  “Weight?”

  “Including the storage equipment, under fifty kilos total.”

  “Are they fragile?”

  “Yes, but the cases should provide protection against impact.”

  “Is there anything inside that might trigger an alarm?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  Dale nodded, his face void of expression. It was impossible to guess what he thought. “And, lastly, who will be coming after me if I steal them?”

  “That’s the best part. No one.” Aurore smiled. “Those items belong to me.”

  “Then why are they in the vault, and why are you stealing them?”

  “Someone put them in there for me a long time ago.”

  “Your uncle could get them for you,” Dale said. “He pretty much runs the whole town.”

  “He could … if he wanted to.” Aurore paused.

  “Ah. But why wouldn’t he—” Dale raised both hands. “I know. Not my business.”

  “Right.” Aurore nodded, pleased he understood. “Anything else?”

  “Are you sure they’re in there?”

  “Yes. It’s been confirmed from two reliable sources who have no interest in lying to me.”

  “Okay. How will I recognize the boxes? I assume there are quite a few things stored in there, and I don’t suppose they have your name written on them.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if they did actually.” Aurore gave him an amused smile. “But I’ll spare you the trouble of searching for them and tell you exactly what to look for when we get there.”

  “Am I supposed to be your escort again?” Dale made no effort to suppress a sigh.

  “Do you have a better explanation for your presence at the Hrad?”

  “I thought the museum would be open for everyone that night.”

  “Oh yes, and you’ve been such a tourist since coming into town.”

  “Maybe I like the circus. I’ve been seen roaming around the premises lately.”

  “Maybe you have a crush on one of the girls.” Aurore pursed her lips in a teasing smirk.

  “Maybe I do.” A faint grin relaxed Dale’s features. “Speaking of girls, do you know where I can find Rosie? She hasn’t stopped by the loft today, and she’s not in the square.”

  “Rosie? Why?” She narrowed her eyes at him, reluctant to get the little girl involved in whatever he was planning.

  “I have a job for her. There’s a little guy who’d enjoy some playtime with her, and they’d make a great distraction at the Hrad.”

  “More than the circus acts?”

  “After the show.”

  “Hmm. Is it safe? I don’t want to put her in danger.”

  “Rake and Spinner claimed so. Of course, it will only work if you can get her cleaned up and convince her not to bite people for one evening.”

  “Rosie doesn’t bite people!”

  Dale’s fleeting smile returned. “Right. But she needs to pretend to have better social skills at least. We won’t get anywhere if people are afraid to approach her.”

  “That can be arranged,” Aurore said. “She can be very versatile when she wants to be. It depends on what you offer her in return.”

  “A night full of bliss and laughter.” Dale got up.

  Full of suspicion, Aurore watched him, not sure how he was going to achieve that. “I’ll talk to her.”

  “Tell her it involves the menzataxor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She’ll know.” He started for the door.

  Aurore frowned at his back. The situation was getting out of hand, and she hated that.

  39

  The cannon sent Fei Lin soaring towards the sky and, for 4.6 seconds, she saw only the bright face of the moon. The wingless flight reminded her of the time when her robo-suit could actually fly, but her anti-gravitational field wasn’t working, and Rake and Spinner hadn’t been able to fix it yet. So, for now, she was confined to the ground, walking among regular people and flying only when they put her in that cannon and turned her into Rocket Girl. She despised that name, along with all of these cheap, western thrills.

  As the descent began, her body instinctively reacted, preparing the robo-suit for landing. She’d done it in training countless times. Never during battle, though. She hadn’t made it that far. Sometimes, she wondered what her life would have been like if that storage facility she was in hadn’t exploded. What if the circus crew hadn’t salvaged a pile of scrap metal, finding her inside?

  The ground shook under her feet when she landed. She missed flying already. The flip she’d performed turned her around so she was facing the tent. Inside, the aerialists had to have started their act already. The robo-suit’s internal clock said so. One would think they had a lot in common since they were all passionate about flying, but Fei Lin didn’t feel any connection with them. It was difficult to forge any when she only spoke a few words in their language. The translation module had been disabled, along with other functions. For obvious reasons, she couldn’t tell Rake and Spinner about it. After all, she was the enemy.

  The crowd cheered and yelled something she understood to mean “more”. There were four more charges in the cannon, enough for the rest of the night. To the delight of the kids, she did a little victory dance. She picked two faces in the crowd her database had identified as having been there before. To the horror of their parents, because she stood a half-meter taller than everyone else, she high-fived them. Her helmet was unable to convey emotions, but light flashed on the breastplate of the robo-suit.

  It was all part of the show. They had trained her well. Granted, she had to earn her keep somehow. No one would feed her—or, in her case, provide the required nutrients—for doing nothing. Once she’d been discovered in the junkyard, she was lucky no one had cut the robo-suit and sold it by the ton, although it had come dangerously close to that. Of course, it could have been worse. They could have delivered her to the army and let them torture her until they extracted all the information she had. So, in the end, being fired from a cann
on each night wasn’t such a bad place to be.

  Fei Lin danced her way back to the cannon and positioned herself inside the long barrel. Around her, the clowns burst into the crowd in their colorful costumes and made a big fuss out of firing the cannon with lighters borrowed from the audience. They refused to return them when people failed to produce papers proving their ownership. In the middle of the debate, one of the mimes dressed in black-and-white, with reflecting lines along the arms and legs, climbed on top of the cannon, straddled it, and pulled the switch, releasing her.

  She couldn’t feel the wind brush against her skin, but the sensors told her it was cold. The robo-suit kept her well-protected from the outside world. While she flew above the circus, she checked the activity on the ground as part of her payment for being rescued. See if anything out of the ordinary is happening. Spot the intruders. Prevent any casualties. Well, the last part was the enforcers’ job because they didn’t think she was capable of such violence, a fair assumption if you saw what poured out of the robo-suit in the rare occasions that she left it.

  The food kiosks looked all right. It helped that they kept the alcohol in the beverages to a minimum. It was enough to give a faint buzz, but no more. The game area was another place that could experience a disturbance if people got too excited. Her optics had no problem adjusting to the distance to the big wheel and the machineries surrounding it. Nothing there, either. A quiet night, as usual.

  Only that the usual monotony had been interrupted the past week by some brave and obviously insane burglars who wouldn’t make the same mistake again. It was only by accident she now glanced past the train. No one else would have spotted those shadows. Nobody had any business on the other side of the tracks. What to do? Land first. She couldn’t fly all the way there, but she could run.

  Fei Lin took off through the crowd, her motion sensors informing her the enforcers were sprinting after her already. She was not supposed to leave the fairground, either.

  Taking a five-ton bot across the fair during the peak hour without crushing anyone in the process was not an easy task. Her systems were able to predict people movement patterns, but it slowed her down. There was no time to make it around the train. So she jumped.

  The suspension held.

  She hadn’t realized she had been holding her breath until an alert flashed at the edge of her visual field. The oxygen level in her blood was getting low, and her heartbeat reacted accordingly. The robo-suit provided her all the oxygen she needed, but it couldn’t force it into her lungs. Fei Lin inhaled deeply and rotated her head in search of the enemy. The target display locked on the two shadows fifty meters away from her. Patched sheepskin coats. Cheap, old prosthetics. Obviously locals.

  They hadn’t heard her land. The stealth module had activated by default, and she hurried to turn it off. It didn’t matter anymore. They couldn’t escape. The enforcers would catch up soon, and it would be better if they didn’t know about the stealth unit.

  She ran towards the men, switching on the lights on her shoulders to blind them. They were too stunned to oppose any resistance when she grabbed them by the neck and pinned them to the ground. The tactical module worked, too. She hadn’t had a chance to use it since joining the circus. This wasn’t war, but if these men had come after the Nightingale, it was now. Big Dino had made that clear to her.

  “Don’t kill them! Don’t kill them!”

  Fei Lin understood the words “kill” and “don’t”, but there wasn’t any danger the intruders would escape, so she waited for the enforcers to arrive.

  The gray masks waved at her to follow them back to the train.

  She had to drag the men, since she’d slammed them against the ground so hard, she’d knocked them out.

  One of the enforcers opened a door, and she tossed the men into the empty car.

  40

  “Oh, not them again!” Spinner cupped the side of his face in a half-annoyed, half-puzzled gesture as he stared at the two unconscious men propped against the wall of the train car. “I thought we got rid of them…”

  Beside him, Rake shrugged.

  The lights flickered, casting shadows over everyone and giving Fei Lin’s robo-suit a reddish hue. She squatted in a corner, occupying a good part of it, and waited. Spinner didn’t know for what.

  “So did I.” Nicholas climbed into the car. “What happened here, gentlemen?” He closed the door behind him.

  Spinner snorted at being called a gentleman. For as long as he could remember, he’d never been called that, and his memory went back a long way. “You can stop performing. There’s no audience here.”

  Rake crossed his arms but didn’t say anything.

  “What happened here?” Nicholas asked. “Why are they back?”

  Spinner didn’t like the demanding tone, but Rake said, “It didn’t take. Not fully…”

  “Not fully?” Nicholas frowned at them. “How could you screw this up? You know how important this is.”

  “Hey, it’s not like we do this every day!” Spinner gestured at the intruders. “In fact, we never do. We only handle the mechanics. Big Dino deals with the brain.”

  “Why didn’t you wake him then?” Nicholas’s frown grew deeper.

  “You have no idea how grumpy he gets when woken up without a serious enough reason.” Spinner raised his shoulders. It was so not worth the hassle. These were only two small-time thieves who no one would miss if anything happened to them. The police might even thank them if they found out.

  “Why didn’t you wait for me?” Nicholas’s dark eyes pierced through him, and he looked like a leader for a moment. Then he looked lost.

  “Because you wouldn’t get your hands dirty,” Rake said. He turned to Fei Lin. “You okay?”

  She gave him the thumbs up. Her helmet only turned to the left and right so she was unable to nod.

  “Who caught them?” Nicholas asked.

  “She did.” Spinner pointed at Fei Lin with a wide grin. “All by herself. Before they entered the train.”

  “I see …” Nicholas ran a hand through his hair. “Then I take it we don’t know what they came for?”

  “We reckon the same as before,” Spinner said. “We probably didn’t go far enough with erasing their memories. They forgot about the encounter and how it turned out, but the idea to break in had to still be lingering to bring them back.”

  “If they had come for revenge, they would have been better armed,” Rake said. “Plus, they came alone, so we can assume no one else is in on the plan.”

  “It better stay that way,” Nicholas said.

  “We’ll do it again,” Spinner said with a grim voice. “We’ll go deeper this time. It will either work or they’re dead.”

  “It’s a win either way.” Rake smirked.

  “No.” Nicholas raised one hand. “I’ll do it. Wake them up. I need them conscious for this.”

  Spinner hesitated. “Are you sure you’re up for this? Unless you practiced in your spare time … I don’t know—” He shook his head. “This is more than rocket science.”

  “I know exactly what it is.” Nicholas’s lips flattened into a thin, straight line. “Wake them up.”

  Rake pulled a syringe from his coat pocket, a little too fast in Spinner’s opinion. He wrinkled his nose. Aside from Big Dino, Rake rarely took orders from anyone.

  The leg of the man on the left twitched and his collaborator groaned seconds after Rake had plunged the needle into their necks.

  Nicholas took off his tailcoat, folded it, and placed it on a crate. “Now get out.”

  “We haven’t restrained them,” Spinner said. “We can’t leave you alone with them. What if they attack you? This is not a good time to be left without a boss.”

  “You seem to forget who I am,” Nicholas said. Not their boss and a strong telecharger. “Out.”

  “Fine. But she stays.” Spinner pointed at Fei Lin and gestured at her to stay put.

  Rake opened the door, and they both jumped out
onto the frozen ground. The crowd was thinning at the fair, a sign it was getting late.

  Spinner tilted his head while Rake slid the door shut. “Did you screw up that procedure on purpose? Do you want him to get a more hands-on approach?”

  A hazy cloud covering the moon hid Rake’s smirk. “We need a leader,” he murmured.

  41

  Nervously, Nicholas rolled up his sleeves. He didn’t need his hands free to exercise his powers, but it made him feel better. From the corner of his eye, he glanced at Fei Lin. The bot sat on her haunches, hands resting on her massive thighs. From this angle, her shape resembled that of the knife throwers. They both used to be war machines at one point, and despite Spinner’s claims the girl inside wouldn’t hurt a fly, the men in front of him told another story. Someone needed to keep an eye on her and, obviously, that task couldn’t be entrusted to Spinner.

  Shaking his head, Nicholas turned his attention back to the men who groaned and whined about their injuries but didn’t leave the support of the wall. They couldn’t. Nicholas kept them pinned there. During the two long years of hiding from the drafting committee, Nicholas had been in tight situations more than once, and only the use of his power had helped him walk free and in one piece. Those years weren’t far gone, and he hadn’t forgotten how to use it.

  He began with a simple question. “Why did you come to the circus?”

  “Prosthetics …” The man on the left licked his lips.

  “We heard there’s a car full of them here,” his companion said.

  The areas of their brains where those memories were stored lit up, and Nicholas memorized the locations. Some fine-tuning would be needed later on but, for now, it was enough. “Who told you that?”

  “The owner of a pawn shop in town …”

  “We heard him talking with a customer who was looking for something to have fixed here.”

  That made sense. Aside from the circus acts and the Nightingale, this was the other thing the whole city was talking about.