by Julie Hyzy
Above the quivering calls of birds and clicking insects came a low blast from her far left—the sound was out of sync with the environment. She changed direction and called for Charlie again.
The deep bellow split the jungle’s calm a second time. The flat blare of a car horn blasted, then faded to an intermittent bleat.
Kenna picked up her pace, using her right arm like a windshield wiper to thrust away the plant barriers a split second before she broke through.
Other than the basic olive T-shirt, green khakis, and hiking boots envoys usually started out wearing when entering VR, she’d come in with nothing. She hadn’t known enough about the scenario to properly outfit herself. Now as she ran, she whispered commands to the program, arming herself with as much firepower as she could, given this reality’s parameters. Concentrating on her needs slowed her down, but one never went into a potentially hostile scenario unarmed.
The system responded briskly to her orders. A leather belt appeared at her waist. Seconds later, she felt the added weight as a whip, hefty switchblade, rope, and other armaments latched on. In the next moment, a bow in a shoulder harness along with a quiver of arrows bounced against her back. Her left hand searched the new belt to locate the machete she’d called up. She stopped dodging branches long enough to slide the weapon from its sheath. Properly armed, she raced forward again, slicing at the heavy vegetation.
As she ran, her silver heart pendant bounced just below her neckline. It lay tucked beneath her shirt, clicking brightly against the signal medallion Stewart had slipped over her head.
Insects dive-bombed her face, biting and pinching. She blinked stinging sweat from her eyes. The source of the horn blasts couldn’t be much farther. The pounding pulse of her feet on soft soil matched the beat of her heart.
“Charlie?” she yelled, straining to hear him answer.
She nearly tripped on a deep groove in the muck. Tire treads.
At a small clearing, Kenna sheathed the machete. The land rose sharply before her, and she blew out power breaths as she sprinted up the steep embankment, grasping for handholds, fighting the bursting heat in her lungs.
At the top she stopped, breaths coming in shallow gasps. The tire tracks ended just ahead, at the edge of a grassy precipice. She raised an arm to shield the sun’s glare. Before her, spanning a canyon-like gorge, a primitive suspension bridge swayed as though someone heavy had just bounded across.
On a wide outcropping ten feet below, a camouflage-green Land Rover lay upside down like a helpless turtle, its wheels twisted at odd angles. Kenna blew out a breath of relief. This had been easier than she expected. Finding lost adventurers was often the hardest part of an envoy’s job.
The Land Rover had obviously gone off the precipice. Charlie and his client would likely be hurt—tactile experience was part of VR’s allure, after all—but safety protocols kept participants from suffering mortal wounds. The two were probably unconscious, unable to activate their signal medallions.
All this worry for nothing. She should have known Charlie better than that.
She dug her heels into the crumbling ground and grasped sturdy weeds to slide sideways down the shallowest path toward the vehicle.
Warbling screams rent the silence, echoing in the chasm below her. So raw, so primordial were the cries that chills trickled up Kenna’s sweaty neck. She scanned her surroundings but couldn’t pinpoint the sound’s source.
A heavy silence settled in. What sort of fantasy was this place? The sooner she got the two of them out of here, the better.
She’d just made it to the rear of the upended Land Rover when a man crawled out on his forearms, panting. Bloody spittle dangled from his lips. Long-limbed and thin, he had sun-crusted skin and scrub brush–short pale hair.
Kenna took a step closer. “Where’s Charlie?”
The man’s eyes widened and his mouth went slack. He scrambled to his feet.
No doubt about it, the man was a sentient. This must be Charlie’s client.
He started toward her. “Who the hell are you?”
From high above, more trilling screams.
The man stopped. His eyes went wide.
“Shit.” Turning, he ran.
Kenna started to follow, but the cries were much closer now. When she looked up, five warriors lined the ridge of the embankment. With armor worn across their shoulders and chests, they glistened in the sun. Pointy helmets topped their strangely elongated heads. They carried bows, arrows, ropes, and pickaxes. These were Huns, or someone’s interpretation of them, at least. All men, they wore skirts made of patterned metal scales that clacked and snapped as they lumbered closer to the precipice’s edge.
One of them bared his teeth and aimed his pickax at the pale-haired man. The projectile whistled past Kenna, chunking into the sentient’s right arm. The impact sent him rolling sideways in a shower of blood. He screamed. Kenna started for him, intent on helping, but the man managed to get to his feet on his own. He took off toward the suspension bridge. From the way he cradled his right arm, she knew he’d been hurt—or at least, he believed he had. Out here, pain wasn’t the enemy. Panic was.
Kenna spoke quietly into the program again to provide the command necessary to take charge of the scenario—to make these warriors disappear. Overriding existing parameters required a standard four-digit confirmation code. As she recited the proper sequence, she looked up in anticipation of watching the men vanish.
Nothing.
She tried again. Still nothing. Whoever had designed this scenario had password-protected elements of the scene. Frustrated, she smashed her hand against the Land Rover. It hurt more than it should have. Had she actually smacked the wall of her capsule in real life? That would be a first.
An arrow chucked into the ground next to her. The five Huns warbled rallying cries.
As one of the attackers raised a rope as though to lasso her into submission, Kenna yanked the bow from her back, nocked an arrow into place, and drew back the projectile with ease. She pulled a deep breath, held it, and let the bowstring roll off her fingers. The arrow whistled through the air.
The point plunged straight into the neck of the closest warrior with a cleaving sound that made her smile. Killing virtual bad guys was always fun. And with VR’s safety protocols in place, she knew she couldn’t be seriously hurt. Not physically, at least.
The warrior fell over, hands clutching at his throat, heels banging the rocky ground. The other men raced down the precipice. Kenna nocked another arrow into place and sent it screaming into the left eye of the next closest warrior. He sprawled backward onto one of his comrades. Those behind them rushed forward, heaving axes at Kenna.
She cut to her far left and had just pulled up another arrow when she spied an arm flopped outside the Land Rover’s open window. Distracted, she aimed at the lead Hun, only to have her shot deflected by a well-timed sword swing.
Kenna slung the bow back over her shoulder and raced around the far side of the Land Rover, using it for cover. She threw herself to the ground and peered in.
“Charlie?”
He didn’t answer.
Ducking her head, she crawled on elbows and knees along the inside roof of the vehicle to reach him. Suspended from his seat belt, his neck was twisted sideways and backward, wedged between the vehicle’s roof and the steering wheel. Kenna’s breath caught in her throat. Inching closer, her knees scraping against the edges of the open window, she reached across the cramped area and dug her fingers into his neck to twist his face in her direction. Half of it had crushed in on itself.
Kenna recoiled, then blew out a quick breath of relief. Not Charlie. It had to be a virtual.
The man’s arms drooped like twin vines, swaying side to side as the vehicle shifted under Kenna’s weight. She scooched closer to inspect a metallic glint at his waist. This virtual had been equipped with a Beretta? H
ow odd. She hauled the firearm free, taking two precious seconds to engage the arming overrides.
As she drew back, her fingers grazed a chain around the man’s neck. She tugged, disbelieving, until a bright silver medallion came loose from beneath his shirt. She stared at the two-inch oblong in her hand. There was no mistaking the emergency signal button. This man was very real. Belatedly, she noticed he was also very dead. But he couldn’t be.
“My god,” she said, dropping the medallion as she inched away. She hadn’t expected to find two unknown sentients here. What the hell was going on?
Screaming wails brought her back to the present. She scrambled back out of the Land Rover and dispatched the remaining Huns with swift nine-millimeter spits to their foreheads.
A second later she heard crazed yells in the distance. It wouldn’t be long before replacements arrived.
FIVE
Charlie snapped awake to find his wrists and ankles bound together tightly behind him. His quads and shoulders screamed with hot pain. His chin pressed hard against cold dirt so packed and scuffed that it had taken on the luster of black linoleum. He gritted his teeth to keep from crying out.
Three steps away a man was turned from Charlie, hands clasped behind his back. His boot heels made quiet creaks as he rocked back and forth.
To keep his mind alert, Charlie fixated on a spot just to the right of his captor’s foot where a prickly weed had managed to break through the tight soil floor.
Where was this place? Where was Larry? Who had done this to him?
The standing man twisted to his right, pacing the length of what appeared to be a small hut. Charlie breathed through his nose, keeping his gaze on the tough little weed, watching it flex back and forth in the air caused by the man’s footsteps. Focusing on the sharp-edged leaves helped Charlie keep his mind off the pain. He needed all his strength to figure out what was happening.
The man’s heels made soft chuffing sounds against the dirt floor as Charlie worked his aching jaw, tasting a metallic gush of blood when his swollen tongue disturbed a flap of sliced cheek.
Something was very wrong.
VR technology allowed for sophisticated tactile interaction, but limits in the program and safety protocols prevented participants from experiencing this level of pain. At least, they were supposed to. Charlie blinked, trying to clear his muddled mind. Then it started to come back to him. How Larry had promised to demonstrate what he’d uncovered about Virtu-Tech’s experimental remote technology and about the company’s alarming future plans.
Larry had been driving the Land Rover when an explosion threw them over the nearby ledge. Charlie remembered the bone-crushing pain upon landing, as well as unlatching his seat belt to reach for his and Larry’s emergency-signal necklaces. That’s when he had been yanked out of the Land Rover, rolled onto the ground, and smashed in the face with what felt like ten pounds of pipe.
Now, with his nose pressed into the dung-smelling dirt, his face crusted with dried blood, he lifted his head.
“Finally awake, I see,” the man said. “Good. This was not how I’d envisioned our meeting, you understand. My apologies for that.”
Charlie raised his head to get a look at his captor. He blinked to clear his vision. “Who are you?” His voice sounded as broken as he felt.
The man wore a sharply tailored dark suit over a ramrod body that spoke of pride and middle-aged paunch. The jacket was double-breasted with shiny buttons, and polished black boots poked out from beneath crisply seamed dark pants. The boots took two steps back, and the man folded himself into a crouch, resting his elbows on his knees, as though ready to address a recalcitrant toddler. “Exactly who do we think is interrogating whom?”
His vaguely familiar face was unremarkable and bland with gray hair cropped so short to be nearly invisible. He had hard green eyes, their whites oversize and bloodshot, brows wiry and furrowed.
Charlie remembered the signal medallion on the chain around his neck. If he could access it—press the emergency-rescue button—he’d be pulled from this scenario before anything else could go wrong.
Charlie coughed. “What do you want?” he asked. His gaze swept the floor. If he could buy time—if he could find a rock or other outcropping—and position himself against it just right.
The man extended two fingers, touching the underside of Charlie’s chin, which he raised until their eyes met. “Answer my questions and the worst you’ll face is loss of your envoy status. Fight me and I’ll see you locked up,” he said.
Reaching into his coat, the man pulled out a folded leather wallet and flipped it open. The top half of the identification bore his unsmiling face and his name—Werner Trutenko. Recognition clicked even as Charlie’s eyes glossed downward to the insignia below. Virtu-Tech’s infinity logo.
Fighting the nausea of knowledge and pain, Charlie stared up into Trutenko’s icy gaze. “So we were right?”
“Yes, Mr. Russell.” He smacked Charlie’s bloody cheek to punctuate his words. “But the time has come for you to open your eyes.”
Charlie tried to blink away the pain.
Werner Trutenko stood, clapping his hands together in a thoughtful motion. “The world is in chaos, young man. You see it every day. And without intervention, there will only be more of the same. Can’t you understand that?”
Charlie turned his head.
“Why do you fight us?” Trutenko asked. “Join us. You’re an envoy; that alone elevates your status. You can be part of the solution instead of one of our problems.”
Charlie stared again at the scrappy weed. He ordered himself to focus on it as he blew out a long breath, releasing as much pain as he could. He rocked himself backward, trying to urge the medallion on the chain around his neck to swing a little so that he could locate its position under his shirt.
The silver oblong didn’t sway when Charlie moved. Rather, it stuck to his sweat-covered chest. He grimaced so hard he felt the blood rush inside his sliced cheeks. Fighting waves of nausea, he stretched his bound limbs, inching toward his captor. Trutenko’s boots were pointed. Pointed just enough.
“You clearly don’t appreciate the trouble I had setting up our meeting here today.” The man took a step backward. “You thought you were going to trap us. You thought you could slow us down. Oh, Mr. Russell. That level of hubris astounds me.”
Noise outside the hut pulled Trutenko’s attention. Charlie twisted his head to see what was going on. The hut’s walls shook. The door opened, and a light-haired man with sun-roughened skin broke through. Charlie took a sharp breath as recognition hit. The guy who’d pulled him from the Land Rover. The guy who’d smashed his face.
“Tate?” Trutenko said. “What are you doing back here?”
Blood soaked the man’s beige flak jacket and he held his right arm tight against his body, eyes wild with panic. “We gotta get out,” he said. “Now. Hurry.”
“What about Wendell?” Trutenko asked. “Where’s he?”
“Dead. When I went back there, I tried pulling him out of the car wreck, but his death must have triggered some alert because they sent an envoy in. Totally screwed up the program, and then the damn warriors attacked me.” Proffering his bleeding arm, the man raised his yellow-blond brows in anticipation. “What do we do?”
Trutenko’s face reddened. “No one was supposed to die.” He paced twice. “Damn it.”
“Yeah, well, at least this one’s still here,” Tate said as he delivered a sharp kick to Charlie’s midsection.
Charlie’s battered body jerked in an effort to double over, but his bound arms and legs restricted his defense.
“Stop!” Trutenko shouted. “I told you I wanted him persuaded to cooperate, not beaten into oblivion.”
Tate grunted.
Charlie closed his eyes, longing for that pain-free existence unconsciousness could provide. But with whatever streng
th remained in his heart, he forced himself to keep alert, straining to listen in on their conversation.
“Can’t you sidetrack this other envoy? Cut off access to the program?” Trutenko asked.
The pale-haired man shrugged. “I don’t know. She saw me. I’ll bet she’s on her way here now.” He kept one twitchy hand on the door as he bounced his gaze between Charlie on the floor and the quiet jungle outside.
“She?” Trutenko asked. “A female?”
“Little thing.” Tate gripped his bleeding arm again, then shook his head as though unwilling to believe what he’d seen. “But tough. I watched her take out two of those armored goons in the space of three seconds.”
My god. Charlie sucked back a gasp. Kenna’s here.
Trutenko spun. He lifted Charlie’s face with the toe of his boot. “Tell me who she is.”
Vomit and blood dribbled from Charlie’s mouth onto Trutenko’s foot. The big man swore, stamping the ground to shake off the filth. His heel came down hard on the little weed in the floor, destroying it. Charlie winced.
Trutenko crouched one more time. “Who is she?” he asked again. “Does she know about Sub Rosa?”
Charlie worked his tongue around the inside of his mouth. “No,” he said, in a rasp so soft that Trutenko had to lean close to hear.
Charlie worked his lips as though trying to say more.
Trutenko pressed closer.
“But she’s going to find out,” Charlie said, and spat in Trutenko’s face.
The big man reared back with a yell. He jumped to his feet, face contorted as he muttered furiously, wiping his face with the back of his hand.
“She’s almost to the bridge,” Tate shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Kick her out of the program; it should be simple enough,” Trutenko said, grimacing as he wiped his face again. “Didn’t you establish control before we started? I need time. I have more questions for Mr. Russell.”
“I didn’t expect an envoy. I’m not prepared,” Tate said. He pulled a small device from a back pocket and flexed the fingers of his injured arm. He hesitated, working the controls with start-stop jerkiness. “This contraption is new to me, too, remember. The best I can do is slow her down. Maybe.”
