The Sapphire Shadow

by James Wake

  “Come on,” Jackson said, dragging Ortega along by the arm. “He wants us to take transit to sector five, we’ll goddamn well do it.”

  “Turn back.”

  “Uh…hey, uh…” Ortega said, letting himself be pulled anyway. “I’d really like to not get killed, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “Man up a lil,” she said, her accent slipping out. “If there’s anythin’ down this hall, drinks are on me.”

  The hallway led them to a turn. Still following the blue stripe, Jackson checked around the corner, and saw nothing but more empty corridor. She tapped Ortega, asking him to take a look for himself.

  “Holy shit,” he muttered, staring at nothing.

  “Got anything to say, cat man?” Jackson said.

  “I’m trying to help you.”

  “Thanks. Heard that one before,” Jackson said, flat and mean. She moved down the hall, approaching another blind turn. “Now be straight with me. What’s waiting for us at sector five?”

  Nothing in her ears. Jackson checked over her shoulder, making sure Ortega was hot on her heels. He was, looking more lost and scared than ever.

  Jackson paused at the corner, waiting and listening. Nothing but the same distant drone of engines up above.

  “Don’t shoot. I warned you.”

  Odd. Of all the things he could’ve said, Jackson would never have guessed it’d be that. She lowered her gun anyway, just a bit, just to be safe. With one last glance at Ortega, she rounded the corner.

  * * *

  Nadia crept through empty corridors, checking each corner with the camera on her wrist.

  “You can calm down,” Tess said in her ears. “I have the cameras.”

  She panned her feed around anyway: red, blue, green, orange. Follow the blue. Easy enough. Not even a door to distract her, nothing but winding halls with colored guides. She strolled on, trailing the fingers of one hand along the blue guideline.

  “Whoa, uh…” Tess said, static crackling in the background of her comms. “Hang on. Turn around.”

  Nadia froze. “What is it?”

  “Wrong way. That’s all.”

  “I thought you said follow the blue?” Nadia said, checking behind her—empty, quiet, still.

  “Trust me. You want to turn around,” Tess said. A small feed lit up in the corner of her HUD, showing a trio of Domes moving down a hall.

  Nadia scoffed. “Only three of them? You want me to delay for that?”

  “Remember the last time you got all cocky?”

  “Oh, please,” Nadia said, climbing up the wall until she crept along the ceiling. “That was a year ago. The Sapphire Shadow fears no man.”

  “No one would even be calling you that if it weren’t for me! Will you please listen?”

  Frozen again, this time hanging upside down. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean will you play it safe? Please?”

  “That’s not what I—hold on,” Nadia said. Voices ahead, low even in the enhanced ears of her mask. She crawled toward a blind corner, expecting Tess’s rising voice to berate her ears. All she got was silence. Waiting, pressed flat against the ceiling, watching below.

  A woman stepped around the corner, pistol held low. Nadia recognized her instantly, even with the ski mask. The leather bomber jacket gave it away, if nothing else. She barely registered the second person, barely gave thought to the why or how or what sense any of this made. Instead Nadia darted forward along the ceiling and dropped behind her favorite police officer.

  Catching the movement, Jackson turned with her gun ready. Too close, too quick. Fractions of a second for Nadia to attack before—

  “Whoa! Whoa, whoa, hold on!” Ortega said, jumping between them. “Everybody calm down.”

  “Get out of the way!” Jackson said.

  “Yes,” Nadia said, crouched, sparks flying from her gloves. “Please do.”

  “Same team!” Ortega said, holding his hands up. “We’re all on the same side here!”

  Of course. Officer David, another of Tess’s lackeys. Nadia should have known. Although she had thought better of Jackson, had assumed her very favorite officer was above such foolishness.

  “What is she doing here?” Nadia said, shocked and abhorred to hear Jackson say the exact same thing at the exact same time.

  “I told you to turn around,” Tess said in her ears.

  “Ah, I see,” Nadia said, ignoring the officers in front of her. “A new prospect. A valuable new asset, no doubt. My replacement?”

  “Pfft, no!” Tess said. “You’re one of a kind. You know that.”

  “And you thought yourself clever enough to keep us from running into each other?”

  Nadia could practically hear Tess shrug. “Look, it’s a huge compound.”

  Jackson’s face changed, at least what Nadia could glimpse of it through the mask. Only her eyes and lips, enough to see her glare soften. The officer lowered her weapon and pushed her partner to the side slightly less than gently.

  “Hey, Blue Shadow,” she said.

  Nadia harrumphed. “Sapphire.”

  “Whatever,” she said, tapping the side of her head. “Cat in your ears?”

  Nadia narrowed her eyes, knowing Jackson could see it on her goggles. “Something like that.”

  “Hmph.” She turned to Ortega. “You workin’ with this criminal?”

  “Privileged to say yes.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. I work alone,” Nadia said.

  “Ha!” Tess squealed in her ears.

  “Quiet, you.”

  Jackson gave her a long hard glare, seeming to chew on nothing. Then it was gone, like flipping a switch. “Alright, miss. I’m willing to hold off on arresting you. For now.”

  Nadia gave her a look of disbelief as she held out a hand, showing off the secure facility the three of them had broken into. “Arrest me? Are you quite serious?”

  “Okay, well, uh, this isn’t exactly how I planned this,” Tess said, “but if you three could proceed to sector five and patch me in, that would be great.”

  Ortega’s and Jackson’s ears pricked up, no doubt receiving a similar instruction.

  “Ladies, how about we get a move on?” Ortega said.

  “Yes, let’s…” Nadia started.

  “…get this over with,” Jackson finished for her.

  * * *

  Transit was an empty platform, a raised monorail that ran through the sprawling sectors of the Omniplant. Still not a single person, no guards, no drones. Nothing.

  Nadia glanced around them, picking out small plastic domes on the ceiling—no doubt housing cameras. No doubt taken over and looped as they came into view.

  “This place is creeping me out,” Ortega said. “Where is everyone?”

  Nadia barely heard him. A display on a wall caught her eye, a zoomed-out map of the entire facility. Sector five was directly in the middle of the entire complex. They were currently in sector nine, a short ride away.

  “And what is so special about sector five?” Nadia asked Tess.

  “Hidden research complex buried underneath.”

  “Researching what?” Nadia said.

  “I don’t know,” Ortega said, searching along the edge of the platform. “We’re gonna find out, though.”

  Tess offered nothing more. Not surprising. What was surprising was Ortega popping open a small hatch near the closed doors of the tram, exposing a bundle of network cable. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a very familiar device.

  “Excuse me,” Nadia said, sliding over and pushing him out of the way. “I believe this is my job.”

  “Man, what did I do to piss the two of you off?” he said, as Nadia thumbed through the bundle of cables. “I need one on there. That’s how Cheshire…”

  That name, like a needle in her chest. Nadia glared at the cables, making no joke
about the various colors. “Which one?"

  “It doesn’t matter,” Tess said, “Tell him to calm down. Cheshire and I are sharing the connection anyway.”

  Of course. Nadia said nothing, clipping a splice connector of her own to one of the runs then slamming the hatch shut. No peppy little snark from Tess about taking over the network this time. The lights flickered. The edge of the platform lit up, glass walls showing an empty tram car sliding down the track, stopping for the doors to open.

  “Your chariot, miss,” Tess said.

  “This our ride then?” Jackson said, eyeing the car suspiciously.

  “Blue line. Transit to sector five,” Ortega said, hopping into the car. “Just like the cat said.”

  “I don’t like this.” Jackson carefully leaned into the car and looked around. “Something goes wrong, we’re trapped.”

  As inclined as she was to agree, Nadia made a show of strutting into the car. “Don’t worry. I shall protect you.”

  Jackson rewarded her with a string of quiet profanity as she stomped into the car after them. When the doors closed, the car took off with a lurch along the track. Nadia’s eyes darted around—there, what must have been a hatch in the ceiling. Jackson followed her eyes, nodding along and going further, giving the windows a few strong taps with the barrel of her gun.

  “Yeah, we can get out if we need to,” Ortega said, displaying the cutter on his belt.

  “You can’t be serious!” Nadia said. “Did she give this to you?”

  Ortega sputtered, clearly syllables away from uttering the name “Tess”. “Uh…yeah?”

  Nadia stared at the terrible thing. It was identical to her own, right down to the hand-scratched numbers on the dial. “Can you hear me?”

  Nothing in her ears.

  “Answer me!” she yelled, ignoring the compound rushing by outside.

  Their car emerged from a dark tunnel, now suspended in the rain high above the pavement below. They crossed the gap between buildings in seconds, diving into an identical dark tunnel.

  “Answer me right this moment, you…” Nadia roared, on the edge of saying some quite crude things.

  Nadia felt a large, strong hand on her shoulder. “Calm down. Save it for the Domes,” Jackson said softly.

  “You don’t understand,” Nadia said, allowing the hand to stay on her shoulder. For now.

  “You’re right. I don’t. You getting anything from the cat?” she called out to Ortega.

  He shook his head. “Must be some interference here?”

  Walls hugged close to the side of their car. Perhaps it really was interference.

  The walls disappeared. Vast open space stretched out below, numbered bays full of activity. Each one was a riot of movement, automated lines churning through simple motions again and again and again. Directly beneath them, layered trellises of printers and robotic arms were fabricating everything from forks to skirts to firearms.

  “Whoa,” Jackson said, her hand falling away from Nadia’s shoulder.

  “Yeah, wow,” Ortega said.

  Nadia was silent. She had sat through long reports on this facility, pretended to listen as her mother droned on about the world’s most efficient production site, about the benefits of re-shoring and the miracles of automation.

  Not a single person in all the motion below them.

  “I mean, I’ve read about it, but…” Ortega said.

  “It’s much different to see it in person,” Nadia said. “This whole place runs with a crew of less than a hundred breathing employees.”

  As the tram sailed on, the smaller printers and constructors grew larger, these ones building automobiles.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Nadia said, a sad mockery of her mother’s words.

  “What the hell? Is that meat?” Jackson said. Beneath them, giant pods spewed out sticky pink slime. Spindly robotic arms spooled it out into stringy lengths, electrifying the synthetic slop to approximate natural muscle growth.

  Dormant, most of it. Dozens of production lines stood below them, only a fraction of the floor growing food. The rest of it sat motionless, dark, and still.

  “I know, it’s—” Nadia started to say, not getting to the word revolting.

  “You know how many nights I went to bed hungry outside the walls?” Jackson interrupted. “Two miles, maybe three, from here. Every kid on my block. And they can’t bother to crank this up and make more?”

  “They could have,” Ortega said. “But they left you to eat rats instead.”

  “We were fed a person once!” Jackson said, punching a window in front of her.

  Nadia shuffled farther away from the officer at her side. Thankfully something below them stole all their attention.

  Human beings. Finally, for the first time since they’d entered the Omniplant. Nadia dropped to the floor, ducking behind the short wall at the base of the windows. Jackson already had done the same, yanking Ortega down by his sleeve.

  Nadia’s wrist camera, poking up at the bottom of the glass, gave her a view below. Long lines of men and women, cuffed and hooded, wearing identical orange jumpsuits. A handful of Domes kept order, one of them shoving a prisoner with the butt of his gun.

  There must have been a hundred of them easily.

  “What the hell?” Ortega said. Both officers were peeking down as well.

  Jackson shrugged. “Slave labor?”

  “For what? This place doesn’t need them,” Ortega said.

  Long strings of pink goo flashed in Nadia’s head. No, that was…that wouldn’t even make sense. Synthetic meat was easy enough to grow. She knew that.

  The walls closed in around them again, another narrow tunnel.

  Jackson was still crouched close to Nadia. The knuckles on her glove had split open, the skin raw and bleeding.

  “You’re hurt,” Nadia said.

  Her favorite officer was shaking her head and muttering.

  “Your knuckles,” Nadia said. “I said you’re hurt.”

  Jackson kept shaking her head. “Would’ve been me down there.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Eviction,” Ortega said, nodding at his partner. “Any pretense to disappear people out to this place. Now we’re finally gonna find out why.”

  Nadia shrank away from them. Jackson—a fine, upstanding officer of the law—in orange with a bag over her head. Thrown in with the vagrants. Preposterous. If someone like her was doomed to arrest, then…Nadia closed her eyes.

  RESIST RENT EXTORTION

  And

  WE ARE HUMAN BEINGS

  And

  I JUST WANT MY HOME BACK

  Of course. Nadia felt that old familiar nausea, the comfortable pain of self-loathing. She had been wrong. Again. Wrong about Tess, wrong about her many imitators, wrong about the vagrants. Wrong about everyone and everything, her whole life.

  Her hand snuck over to Jackson and rested on one of the officer’s broad shoulders. Nadia opened her mouth to say something but found nothing there.

  Standing up with murder in her eyes, Jackson shrugged her hand off. “You’re recording all this, right?”

  Hopefully whatever interference was keeping Tess quiet wouldn’t harm her video feed. “Why do you ask?” Nadia said.

  “This is United States soil,” Jackson said. “That one little shot of the prisoners here should be enough to light a fire under this place.”

  “That’s optimistic,” Ortega said.

  “I was going to say naïve,” Nadia added.

  “Are you recording or not?” Jackson said.

  Before Nadia could answer, the train slammed to a halt. Still dark walls all around them. The doors didn’t budge.

  “Uh…everyone’s ears still dead?” Ortega said.

  The floor shook, falling out from under them. Nadia braced herself, hands and feet firmly in place, but it was only the tram
car acting as an elevator, plunging them straight into darkness.

  “Deep underground,” Jackson said. “Right. Okay.”

  A few moments later, the tram stopped, and the doors opened to a well-lit platform. It might as well have been the same one they’d left, save for the colored lines on the wall. This platform showed different titles on the same colored strips—AP LAB WING ONE, AP LAB WING TWO, PROCESSING… Nadia’s eyes were drawn to the single word on the last line.

  VAULT.

  “Clear.” Jackson was using the doorframe for cover, sweeping the barrel of her gun across the platform.

  “Comms check?” Tess’s voice buzzed to life in her ears. “Testing. Check, check…”

  “Loud and clear,” Nadia said. She gave Jackson a sharp look. The officer tapped her ear and shook her head. Ortega did the same.

  Of course.

  “There you are!” Tess said.

  “Indeed, here I am. And where are you?” Nadia said.

  “Uh…? Out by the car? Sitting tight and waiting for you to connect me in the lab area?”

  Liar. Nadia could find it in her voice now, more and more. It only took practice. Ortega was already connecting a transmitter, popping open another small hatch next to the map display.

  “Did anyone ask you to do that?” Nadia said.

  “No?” Ortega said, only pausing for a moment. “That’s why we’re here, though.”

  “Yeah, this guy knows the score,” Tess said. “Aaaaaaand, we’re in, thank you very much. Wow, yeah…half this place is shut down, and they’re funneling all the extra power down here. This is definitely it. Sit tight and I’ll have you guys out of there in a few minutes.”

  Nadia had no intention of doing any such thing. “I assume you two have been told to stand by here?”

  “Nothing,” Ortega said.

  “Yeah, the cat man has gone quiet,” Jackson added.

  Interesting, indeed. “Good. Would you terribly mind following me?”

  Nadia took a few steps down the corridor, making for the nearest AP lab. Waiting for Tess’s protests at any moment.

  None came.

  “What is this place?” Jackson said.