by Mara, Alex
"Hold on," I said to Darcy, my chin atop her blonde hair. In my arms her body felt impossibly light, like I carried a blanket. "We're getting out of here tonight."
I knew as I promised it I would do everything in my power to at least save her. After what she'd done for me, it was less than she deserved. If we both made it out, I'd give her much more.
And though she didn't respond, the arm she'd managed to sling over my shoulders offered a minute flex, the fingers squeezing.
"How are you?" I said to 54, who had fallen into stride beside me.
"Two fingers less than before," she said, her voice still husky and low. I could hear the pain in it.
"I'm so sorry," Darcy breathed.
54's shoulders went up. "When you get out of here, you can thank me by engineering organic limb regrowth."
Not "we," but "you." When you get out of here. I glanced over at the sweetheart, whose eyes remained on Terrell, and I understood she wasn't expecting to escape with us. She'd never expected it.
"It's a promise," Darcy said, and her voice trailed on the last word. "Well, assuming we last."
"Of course," 54 said.
Something struck me about the way she'd said that—"of course"—as though she knew what lay above ground. The facility drip-fed us that information, probably because it wasn't important for their infiltrators to know more than necessary.
In fact, it was dangerous for us to know things. Especially if we were to escape, to behave autonomously—as 54 and I were doing now.
I knew at least that we had to "survive" the world up there, just as we had survived the one down here. Which, all things considered, I was exceptionally predisposed to doing.
That was the only life I knew.
Darcy seemed to sense what I was thinking, because she angled her face up toward me, her eyes half-lidded. "I'll tell you everything when I'm not..."
"It's fine," I said. "I know you will."
Even as I said it, every fiber of me yearned to trust her, and a quiet, doubtful part of my brain wondered whether this was all part of their testing. Whether Darcy actually felt for me what I'd sensed. Whether she'd shot herself to save herself.
Whichever it was, I'd chosen my course. I would see it through.
"Here we go," Terrell said as we came to a keypadded door. "Who's got the second skin?"
"I do," Darcy breathed; the side that had been tourniqueted hung limp, her arm dangling. "This hand."
I stepped forward, stooping until Darcy's fingertip reached the height of the keypad. Terrell lifted her hand, set her fingertip to the activation screen.
The screen lit up, scanning up and down across the fingerprint. "Can't you just input a keycode?" I said.
"Not now—we're on a curfew. Only Ides can access anything at this time of night. Plus, the Gales will be notified of any access attempts by anyone else right now."
"They've already been notified," 54 said. "8013 and 7150 found us."
"The Gales know we've been in this room. But if we use Ides's print, they won't know which exit we took. There are three of them that lead off this room."
The scanner finished, and the screen blinked five times in some sort of initialization process. When it flashed green, the door hissed open.
Terrell stepped through, and I followed him into the next room with Darcy in my arms.
* * *
The door to the cryostasis chamber hissed shut behind us, and we came into a bigger space than I could have imagined. Even 54, quiet as she tended to be, sounded off with a sharp inhale.
On the other side, the ceiling swept away all at once, arcing skyward to form a space far, far larger than even the obstacle training room. It could probably have fit twenty obstacle training rooms.
The metal walls left and right of us curved around and up to a frosted dome that rose hundreds of feet. Halfway up, segments of what appeared to be glass refracted light from above, which had so far to shine it diffused completely before it even reached the floor.
At either end of the room, high ledges swept away into dark crevices I couldn't have seen into unless I were a hundred feet tall, or I could fly.
"Is that the sun?" 54 asked, face upturned, eyes fluttering under the unfamiliar light.
Ahead, Terrell might have been an ant in a castle. He turned, palms lifting at either side, as though the whole thing spoke for itself. "It's the aerie."
Darcy moaned. "Why this room?"
"Sorry, West—this was the quickest route," he said, and with that as his cue, he started off along the left wall. "At least it's empty," he offered over his shoulder.
I followed with her in my arms. "The aerie?" I said, half to her and half to him.
Terrell glanced back toward Darcy, one eyebrow raising. "What do you s—"
"No," she said in a sharper voice than I'd have thought a woman with a fresh bullethole would be capable of. "Don't, Mike."
And while I knew she had her reasons for cutting him off, still the drip-feed of hints persisted. I wondered when I would be privy to everything they wouldn’t speak of.
"Sorry, kids." Terrell followed the left wall around toward the far end of the room, his footsteps tip-tapping an echo. "Mom says no."
Terrell's voice carried, pinged off the dome, came back to us as the ghost of Terrell's voice, a small whisper. The small hairs on my arms rose. I followed, and for a time we were all silent.
"These are claw marks," 54 said, her finger tracing a vertical scar in the wall beside her. She could have very nearly fit inside it.
Once she'd said it, I could see them all in perspective: five rivulets, the others equidistant from the one she'd traced. Claw marks.
And those claws had scoured the entire room, like a prisoner marking time. Some vertical, some diagonal, some completely horizontal.
And as desperately as I wanted to know everything, my brain resisted this information—this room, these marks—processing it all with a strange apathy. I wasn't meant to see this yet. I wasn't ready.
"You keep creatures in here," 54 said. "What are they?"
But Terrell didn't answer; he'd come to another keypad. He stood before it, motioning me forward.
I hesitated, surveying Darcy. She seemed to be lapsing into a semi-consciousness, but as I looked her over, her eyes flicked up to me. "I know you move faster than that, 8024." And the barest flicker of humor touched her lips.
She probably had no idea that for a second, she'd lit every nerve in my body.
We proceeded as we had last time: I lowered Darcy to the door, Terrell set her finger to the scanner. The system processed, and then we were free to pass through.
"Before we go in here," Terrell said, raising a finger, "I just want you to know that I wasn't personally responsible for anything you're about to see. You may direct any negative feelings you have toward everyone's favorite boss, Luther Ides."
"Just walk, Mike," Darcy murmured.
54 and I met eyes for a moment, and then the four of us passed through the door.
On the other side, death.
54 gasped, her good hand set to her mouth.
"Don't look," Terrell said. "Just follow me."
We followed him, but he knew we would look; it was in our nature. We were infiltrators, both designed and trained to look.
And what we saw as we proceeded through recycling burned hot and hard inside my chest. We swerved past machines, each of them designed to process a single component of human anatomy. Skin, hair, muscle, sinew, bone.
And all of them drew from a repository of those things. Skin like spools of fabric, hair like skeins of thread. Somewhere beyond those machines—deep in recycling's recesses—I knew the base materials were originating from somewhere—someone.
I thought of 8017 and 8018, and without my knowing, my fingers gripped Darcy harder. I felt her flinch before I relaxed them.
Beside me, I sensed 54 was experiencing a similar shock. She walked unusually stiff and slow for how I'd seen her move before.
This wasn't the time to ask, but I couldn't stop the words coming out. Had Darcy known about all this? I wondered. She must have, given she was a geneticist.
For five years, she'd engineered our traits—both physical and cognitive. She must have picked the parts, chosen their assembly ... and their means of disassembly. Did that responsibility lie with her, too?
And the more urgent question—the one I couldn't bear to ask in the midst of all this—was whether I was the composite of the ones who had gone before. Pieces, parts reassembled. In which case, what made me, me?
But Darcy hadn't answered my first question. For the moment her head had gone limp, her face turned full and slack up toward me.
"She's lost consciousness," I said to Terrell. "How much farther?"
Terrell had stopped at the next door, and I brought Darcy forward so we could set her finger to the pad. "Eight minutes to the elevator—If we're lucky."
"Just show us the way," I said, my face in her hair. "I'll make our luck."
Twenty
Friday, May 8, 2053
12:45 a.m.
Darcy
Most pain came in waves, in manageable spurts. That was the way of the human body: the heart's beat, resting as often as it pumped. A moment of reprieve before the next effort to keep the blood flowing.
Not so when you've got a gunshot wound to your chest and you’re being carried. Every step brought a fresh agony, and every moment between brought a poker jabbed right into me.
Consciousness came to me at intervals. Haloes of light swept by, Blaze's stony face illuminated and darkness returning.
I tried to speak, but he turned us sidelong to pass through a doorway. He broke into a jog, tucking me painfully to his chest so all I could see and smell were the essentials of him.
That powerful shoulder. That intoxicating scent.
I wanted to explain to him about everything he'd seen. We weren't the cruelty he'd witnessed, the body parts he'd observed. The world wasn't so harsh, so bleak.
But I had told my sister those things, too, and they had been reassurances—not truth.
They needed my help to get through this, but things were hazy; I needed the drug in my bag. "Blaze," I said, muffled into his shoulder.
He felt the vibrations in my chest, my mouth moving, because he lifted me toward his face. "What is it?"
We didn't stop moving. The pain still came in great, agonizing blooms. "The first aid kit in my bag. I need it."
He stopped hard, and even that hurt. "Terrell, she's got a painkiller. Give us thirty seconds."
"We don't have thirty seconds," Terrell said. He appeared in my vision, his face redder than red, sweat pouring from his forehead. "What is it?" he said to me.
"The morph-adrenal shot in my bag," I whispered. "It'll give me enough energy to get to the emergency lift.”
Blaze lowered me, set me upright against a wall. I gritted my teeth, letting a gasp of pain. 54's small fingers were exploring my bag, and she came out with the needle at once.
"Let me do it," Terrell said, receiving the shot from her. Blaze rolled up the sleeve on my good arm, and I wanted to say something about their expert coordination—the three of them worked seamlessly—but the needle went into my skin and the cold flooded through my arm.
And then everything went placid and clear at once. We were in the quiet hallway on the other side of recycling—the part of the facility that had fallen into some disuse in recent years.
Now, most activity in this area had more to do with getting from one place to another than being any real destination itself.
Which meant things were still catastrophic, but not as bad as fraught as they'd have been if we'd try to go back the way we'd come.
That way would be angry Gales. Here, it was quiet. We were alone.
Also in our favor: the alarms hadn't gone off, so the facility wasn't on alert yet. Which didn't necessarily mean we weren't being chased—only that perhaps 8013 and 7150 hadn't decided to hit the big red button.
Hubris. They'd thought they could take us. And they nearly had.
I blinked, focusing on Terrell. "Which lift are we headed to?"
"Three." Lift 3 was farthest from our location. I was about to interject, but Terrell was already explaining. "There's no other way, Darcy. We went through recycling."
"Blaze saw the aerie?"
"They both did," he said, extending a hand down to me. "No turning back now, West."
I reached out with my uninjured arm, gritted my teeth as he yanked me up. The pain was there, but sunk beneath the waves of morphine. I felt it and didn't.
Blaze's hand came to my back as I stood, and the concern had etched itself between his eyebrows. "You sure?"
We had a quarter mile, three doors, and six cameras between us and that elevator. It would be the longest walk of my life.
"I'm sure," I said, though I wasn't sure at all until I took that first step and found myself steady enough to take another. "Let's go."
“You don’t want me to carry you?”
“You’re going to need both your hands at some point before we get out of here,” I said.
He nodded.
Terrell took the lead down the hall, and Blaze waited until I followed, and then he kept just behind me—a rear guard with 54. I couldn’t even hear his steps, the brush of his pants, but I knew if I turned, he would be there.
Terrell stopped at the first door, gestured me forward. At this hour, only Ides had complete access throughout the facility, while the rest of us were kept on an 11pm-6am curfew. It seemed almost draconian when I arrived, but the human mind could normalize just about any circumstances, given time.
I set my finger, wrapped with Ides’s fingerprint, to the scanner. The screen pulsed yellow, processing, considering. One, two, three, four, five. I closed my right hand, squeezed to keep myself from shaking.
The pulse turned green, and the door slid open. The corridor on the other side lay empty.
We passed the martial training room, the spot where Blaze had stood, watched the blood spray. Directly opposite this—what had always struck me as wrong—sat the seduction room, the training he had refused to complete.
She wouldn’t have fulfilled him, I thought with a touch of possessiveness. To think: even when I'd been shot and was fleeing certain death, some feelings persisted through it all.
Like wanting what you wanted.
We were already at the second door. The pulse bloomed green after another five-second wait. I heard it decompress, saw it slide an inch, and then I was being yanked in a tight, painful circle and landed hard against Blaze’s chest.
His arm sat flush around me. To my right, the gunmetal blur of a blade retracting from the small opening.
He turned us into the doorway, and I recognized the black of a guard’s uniform as he spun me under his arm and behind him.
He dropped his shoulder, ironing his body almost flat as the knife sang through the air—another strike—and Blaze got a grip on his arm. He slid his hand to the wrist, cracked it downward. The tanto dropped like a weight from his hand, clattered on the metal.
Another Gale.
I backed away, my hands searching for the wall’s reassuring firmness. The two grappled, each meeting the other’s fists and feet, perfect doppelgängers.
It was too fast, a sick beat of skin on skin, hard shinbone hitting kneecap; I couldn’t follow, couldn’t even tell who was who except for the bruising on Blaze’s face.
But even that was hard to keep track of.
One of them ducked a fist, his hand darting out to the tanto’s hilt. He caught the edge, found enough purchase to fling it up into the air. It spun end over end, was caught dead center in the grip of the other, who had driven his boot hard into his opponent’s chest.
The kick was a good one. As soon as he fell back, the blade arrowed right into his heart. I
t lodged at the center with an awful, muted twang.
He fell, did not get back up.
The whole fight had taken place in the span of five breaths.
The other retrieved the blade, swiped it clean on his leg. He straightened, and Terrell and I remained frozen. When he turned his face, the bruise came into view, and his green eyes focused on me. I let a sob.
“Darcy,” Blaze said, slotting the blade into his boot. His hand reached out to me, and I took it.
We ran, his hand hot over mine. Terrell followed behind. “Wait!” he called, out of breath. “I hear the alarm.”
It came as a sweet, far-off belling, like air through a wind chime.
Shit. “Stop,” I managed, but Blaze didn’t stop, and my hand was still in his.
The webbing of lasers materialized faster than I’d ever imagined, the spider threads clicking to place in fine blue strands. This had only been necessary once, and I’d heard about it afterward from Terrell, how the model, a female escapee, had come out the other side in perfect cubes, diced.
Blaze didn’t stop. His hand never left mine, and he dropped, slid beneath the thread before it was halfway down. He pulled me with him, the two of us sliding across the floor.
My shoulder hit the ground, and I screamed.
The pain had even outdone the morphine, but it only came in a massive swell that died away quickly under the waves.
He pulled me upright. When I turned around, Terrell and 54 stood on the other side. Terrell waved. “Hi.”
“I can bring it back up,” I said, spinning around toward the nearest console. I had to disable the webbing.
“No rush,” Terrell said from the other side. “Just me and the sweetheart a whole bunch of assassins coming for us.”
I pressed my finger with Luther Ides’s print on it to the console, and at once, the system recognized me. The webbing started to lift.
“Terrell,” Blaze said, gesturing him forward.
Terrell was already on the ground, his hands and legs working under the net.
But then the chime started again. Someone had initiated an emergency override of my command.
