by Therin Knite
But (like usual) I’m too damn slow. The moment my knees start to bend in a vain attempt to simulate a forward movement, a tall shadow veils my fallen form. A man in SWAT gear—laser-guided gun aimed at the middle of my neck—halts beside be, hitches a boot under my stomach, and flips me over. I’ve never known the pain of bone shards piercing my shoulder muscles before. The blood-curdling scream I vaguely recognize as my own tells me I should avoid it in the future.
Light blankets my face. The SWAT agent leans closer before freezing in an awkward stoop. His face is obscured by his computer-enhanced field helmet, but he’s sporting a standard uniform adorned with rank-declaring insignia. That’s what tells me who he is during his dismayed revelation of who I am.
“…Adamend?”
“C-C-Commander Briggs. Good evening.”
“Why the fuck are you—?”
A VERA blast erupts above us, swallowing Briggs’ head and shoulders. He seizes, contorts, and drops straight backward, unconscious before he even hits the ground.
“In the name of every old god, Adem, how the hell do you keep getting into these situations?”
* * *
“Careful with him. We could puncture a lung. Or worse.” Dynara’s hands support my back while someone else heaves my quivering legs up. “Where’d you park the car?”
“Around the next corner like you asked. I should have parked closer.” His voice is gruff, and when we pass under a streetlight, I glimpse his features: mid-fifties, tan skin, stubble-lined frown. It’s the scruffy-faced hungry man who was lounging on the bench in Pentagon Park—because why would EDPA send someone as essential as Dynara Chamberlain into hazardous situations alone?
“Someone could have seen you. I knew we were being watched.” She steps off the sidewalk, scuttling across the street backward with me in tow, eyes and ears alert for the whirring of hovercopter blades or the smooth hum of car engines.
“By who? The Manson killer?”
“Doubtful. Calling a low-class hit man doesn’t fit our guy’s pattern, so someone else must have ordered the hit. We’re searching for multiple suspects now.” She balances my upper body on one hand while the other pops a car door open. “Easy does it.” They slide me onto the back seat, the friction gnawing at my mangled shoulder. The door closes, but the one on the opposite side opens a moment later, and Dynara climbs in, adjusting my head slowly until it rests in her lap. She pulls a medikit from beneath the passenger-side seat with her foot and gathers a mountain of gauze.
Half the pile is stuffed under the entry wound a hairsbreadth to the left of my spine; the other half is pressed against the contorted mound of muscle and skin and bone that used to be the front of my shoulder. Pain shoots up my neck when one pad snags on a bone shard. A wet gasp passes my lips. I can’t scream anymore.
“Book it, Murrough. He’s going into shock.”
Murrough takes her order to heart. He illegally switches from auto-drive to manual and floors it. The car lurches forward, blowing past the inner-city speed limit. We must hit a hundred miles per hour. More. One slip of concentration and we all end up burst organ balloons on the asphalt.
But he doesn’t have one. His hands are as steady as rocks, the result of decades of laughing in the face of death until he came to believe it was truly funny. He never takes his eyes off the road, transitioning from one-way city streets to the highway and back again without missing a beat. I don’t know where we’re going. My eyes won’t stay open long enough to recognize any landmarks.
“Adem? Hey, can you hear me?” Dynara leans over my face. She doesn’t sound worried. She sounds curious.
“Y-yes.”
“You doing all right?”
“N-no.”
“Are you in pain?”
“N-not anymore.” The intense agony that surged through my body has faded into numbness.
“Pick up the pace, Murrough. He’s lost way too much blood.”
“What happened?” I ask.
For a moment, she appears genuinely startled. “Do you not remember? You were shot.”
“No, not tonight.” My voice is a soft whisper, and she bends closer to hear me. “Last night. In the dream. After I was attacked. What happened? I didn’t get a chance to ask while we were d-dancing.”
“Oh, that.” Her ungloved hand runs through my hair, but her fingers twitch and falter. She doesn’t comfort people much. “The dream collapsed not long after you were hurt. My coordinator, the guy I was talking to before the dragon attacked, spotted the signs and pulled me out of the Nexus. Getting caught in a dream collapse isn’t fun.”
“W-why did it collapse? Because he changed it?”
“Exactly. His hubris caught up to him. He managed to hold it together for a few good minutes after changing the laws of his little universe, but he’s not a magician or a god. He made his world too rigid, so when he altered it a bit too much, it crumbled around him. And if the dragon’s reactions are anything to go by, I don’t even think he realized it was falling apart until the damn sky started cracking. ”
The car slows, and the man parallel parks us across the street from a towering government building I’ve seen at some point but can’t place at the moment. “I’ve already alerted medical. They’ll be out with a gurney in two.” He unbuckles himself and turns around. “Do you need any help?”
“S-so he was good enough to change a complex echo but didn’t realize it would collapse after he did?”
Dynara and the man share a glance. “Yes,” she says. “And?”
“That means, I think, that he hasn’t been making echoes long. He’s good, naturally, but he doesn’t know everything. He’s smart, but he hasn’t had any formal training. He’s not EDPA, then, but managed to get enough of your info for a crash course in echo-making. He doesn’t just have clearance. He has connections.”
Someone knocks on the window, and Dynara opens the door, revealing a team of emergency doctors prepped with every type of lightweight life-saving equipment I’ve seen in my life. Dynara props me up again, and two doctors gently pull me from the car onto the gurney. A third scans my injury with a high-powered handheld medical computer and winces at the image on the screen. “Call Dr. Carson,” she says to the younger medic by her side. “Tell her to prep surgery for a type F shoulder wound.”
Dynara glides out of the car, waving off a couple of doctors who try to scan her, too. “I’m fine. The blood’s not mine.” She maneuvers her way ahead of the gurney as they wheel me inside the government building through a side door, telling anyone who crosses our path to move it or lose it. We pass through hallways littered with agents—EDPA agents—some wearing field uniforms, others business suits. A team dressed in military-grade defense armor storms out of an elevator as we near it, and all five line up before Dynara, saluting.
“Get non-echo field teams eight, nine, and ten,” Dynara says, “and head to Club Valkyrie. Paolo De Saint’s body is in a dumpster in the alley on the north side of the building, if the IBI jocks haven’t already found him. Tell Greta to send a jurisdiction override ASAP. Those idiots have gone and rescued a hit man from my ‘evil clutches.’ I want the bastard booked and tossed in a holding cell in less than an hour. Designate him ANONYMOUS. No interrogation. No ID run. Got it?”
The man in the middle gives a sharp nod. “Yes, ma’am. Move out!” His four comrades follow him down the corridor, and a throng of agents who’ve gathered to watch the drama unfold parts for them without question.
I’m rolled into the elevator, but Dynara remains in the hallway, tapping five commands a second into her Ocom. Behind her, the crowd continues to build, many of the agents gawking at her blood-spattered appearance (but few of them stunned or revolted). There’s a hush of admiration and the low undertone of worship that accompanies the performance of miracles by gods in human form. And such a scene makes perfect sense, I think as the elevator doors slide closed—because Dynara Chamberlain is such a god.
She is the god of war.
&nbs
p; Chapter Ten
Ingram Walker squats beside a dumpster for three hours, playing a popular shooter game on his Ocom to pass the time. He scoots closer to the overflowing trash pile every time a car goes by, and each voice that sounds off across the street breaks his rapt digital attention and costs him half his life points. Thirty seconds after his tablet time bar reads 8:00 PM, a young man with firecracker red hair hops off the bus at a street corner stop and approaches the target location. Ingram reluctantly ends his game before reaching a save point and exchanges his Ocom for a polished government handgun. He considers shooting the man—the kid, really—while he’s pacing outside the club doors, but even on a slow Saturday night, the random passerby risk still stands. No reason to waste a bullet.
So he waits until a suited someone escorts the kid inside to set the killing scheme in motion. Enter through a side door? Check. Locate target within building? Check: he’s dancing in a darkened room with a girl several inches shorter, and their mouths speak volumes lost among loud pop songs. Pacing the perimeter is the well-dressed bodyguard, who has all the signs of being a prim and proper professional assassin. Ingram chews his bottom lip (until it splits) mulling over how to get rid of his occupational brother.
In the end, he chooses the simplest method. He steps out of the shadows for a split second, setting off his colleague’s danger alert, before hightailing it back the way he entered. His brother pursues (unexpectedly fast), but Ingram has enough of a head start to bolt out the alleyway entrance and come to a stop behind the dumpster. Dumpsters have been Ingram’s best friend since his Under Leaguer days for this exact reason: the high-class hit man barrels out the door without bothering to stop, and though his gun is poised to shoot without hesitation, the brief moment needed to relocate his prey is just enough for Ingram to pop up from behind his rubbish pile and nail the guy in his stoic right eye.
Dumpsters are also great places to hide bodies.
Congratulating himself on half a job well done, he charges into the club again and settles himself in a post at the edge of the dance floor nearest to a stage exit. The target and the short girl are spinning in slow circles to the rhythm of a new song, and as it comes to a long-winded close, the kid bares his back to Ingram, inviting the kill shot.
His aim is for the heart. He fires. His reality is the wall.
The short girl drags his target out of the way at the perfect moment, and the next thing he knows, she’s popping rounds his way. One hits the speaker above his head. A third one whizzes past his ear. And the second? That one blows a fleshy chunk off the top of his shoulder. Mentally screaming shit, shit, damn it, Ingram flees for his life. The exit—thank the old gods!—leads to the street where he parked his car. He’s booking it down the sidewalk, faster than he’s run since high school track, and he’s seconds from driving off…
When the VERA burst gives him the nastiest bitch slap in the universe.
In his next waking moment—
“Wow, that’s a big one!”
The story of Ingram dissolves into the straight-up view of a post-modern metal ceiling. In my periphery, a shadow of the EDPA doctor (call me Lana) peers down at a fascinating hunk of shoulder bone. I turn my head and exhale, blowing the white cloth erected between my face and the grotesque surgery taking place a few inches away. Lana’s dark-haired head pops up over it, and she lifts the tongs to show me her gory treasure.
“This bit was hell-a close to your lung, Adem. You would have had a much nastier experience if you’d been any less lucky.” Her struggling grin, the distinct sign of an overworked surgeon, suggests she could have had a much nastier time if I’d been brought in with more than an hour or two’s worth of effort.
“Oh, look. A brief point of relief in the middle of my nightmare,” I say.
She releases the bone shard into the little metal basin on her surgery cart. It’s two-thirds full already. “Aw, don’t be like that. I swear life around here isn’t usually this bad. The Manson case is a rarity. It’s got the whole office buzzing. Different teams keep bugging Dy for permission to join the investigation, and she got so annoyed by Custer from Floor Eight last night that she poured her coffee on his head.”
Intense painless pressure resonates up my neck.
“Are you sure you’re not amputating my arm over there?”
“Positive. Although it doesn’t look much like an arm right now. More like ground beef.”
“Wonderful.”
Another piece tops the pile. “No worries. As soon as I get these last few chunks out, I’ll set the nanos to work, and you’ll be fully healed in about six to eight hours.”
“That long?”
“Med-three isn’t quite so quick as med-four, I’m afraid.”
“Was that a jab at my propensity for being seriously injured?”
“Now, wherever would you get that idea?” She hums a happy tune to liven up the surgery room, and the soft vibrations of her voice make my eyelids sag. My gaze falls to the right, where the double doors sit as still as they’ve been for the past two hours. Dynara has vanished into the inner workings of her beloved government agency, leaving me to suffer at the hands of a fatigued, scalpel-happy surgeon.
My Ocom beeps. I have another message from some EDPA agent named Frederick, G.R., who’s been sending me Manson case updates since my surgery started. (I’m even on the EDPA mailing list now. Ha. Ha. Ha.) It contains four additional pages of information on Ingram, filling in the blanks left by the rough outline he sent me earlier. The one I based my reconstruction on.
Furthermore, the origins of the call that spurred the botched IBI operation to “save” the assassin from dastardly hands have been clarified and confirmed: someone made a call to the emergency hotline from an untraceable restricted profile and requested an IBI SWAT team. Using a Level Six clearance code.
Retracing Ingram’s steps was easy. He’s about as complex and interesting as watching broken windshield wipers. But retracing the moves of his one-off employer is proving strangely difficult. Even the amateur accomplice to the Manson murder has enough connections to hold in his or her possession a code that makes the IBI jump through hoops—the kind of hoops that get Briggs out of bed and back into a SWAT uniform he hasn’t worn in twenty years. Who are these people?
I reopen the Manson Clients file and pick up where I left off the night before. It is possible, especially at this point, that the killer isn’t one of Manson’s legal enemies, but I’m still convinced that the bastard is in some way related to Manson’s work. Unless the lawyer really pissed off some government higher-up at a local upper-class gathering, he probably made himself a target through helping the enemy of someone with Level Six resources, thus becoming an enemy himself.
Last night, I stopped in the middle of the C list, and it’s about two-thirds of the way through that I discover a problem. For several cases, all of the client information has been redacted, including the clients’ names. All I have to work with is a single picture and a brief summary of the case details. The A’s and B’s were all intact, which is why I didn’t notice anything amiss until now. If I had, I would have looked at this case a hell of a lot differently. These are IBI files. Briggs’ IBI files. The only possible reason that someone could have for withholding valuable information from an IBI Commander with Level Five clearance is that information having a Level Six designation. Either Manson was working top secret cases, or someone doesn’t want prying eyes investigating some of his clients. Maybe both.
“Reading up on the case?” asks Lana as she maneuvers her way around the surgical cart to the cabinet on the far wall. She sifts through a lineup of labeled syringes—S+, R1, UT, OP12, Q9—and picks one with the delightful name of UnP1, also known as blank nano-machines. Her Ocom is used to program them in under a minute with the necessary shoulder-rebuilding code. Then the static red light on the syringe’s cap switches to a blinking green—ready for injection! “Manson’s case is a tough one, or so I’ve heard. Things always get tricky when you hav
e lawyers and politicians involved.”
“Yeah, of course, with politicians.” At least the redacted files have an image of the client. I can read a great deal from the way a person looks. That and reverse image searches work wonders when it comes to tracking a person’s movements. After filtering out all the regular files, I’m left with an assortment of lonely photos and inadequate descriptions of complex crimes. I skim through them to see if I recognize anyone in particular.
There’s an old man with teal hair whom I’m sure I’ve seen during a few televised Columbia Senate sessions. There’s an up-and-coming moderate party leader, whose stretched-and-stitched smile is plastered on every billboard from here to Richmond City, and who has apparently gotten herself into bribery trouble lately. In total, there are fifty-two people of various ages and heights and builds with various motivations for hiring a hyper-expensive lawyer to remedy whatever career-killing faux pas they’ve made in recent…
I zoom in on the last redacted client until her face doesn’t even fit the frame, as if blowing up her image to match her ego will make a difference in the truth.
As it turns out, heterochromia lady is a killer.
* * *
“An intellectual orgasm.”
My head snaps up, the healing muscles in my shoulder tightening so hard a hiss blows through my teeth. I was so engrossed in heterochromia lady’s case file that I didn’t hear anyone enter the surgery room. The man standing opposite me has a skewed grin. It matches his skewed workstation glasses, on which top secret information from some specialized computer somewhere in the EDPA office scrolls and pops up and flashes and fizzles out and alters in various colors of the digital rainbow. A hazy image of him floats to my mental surface: he was at the Manson house with Dynara.
