Ivy

by William Dickstein

  I dove again into a buried metal tube, shoving my knees to the side and moving myself forward by bending my body as if I were a fish. Each knee came forward to nearly touch an elbow on the same side as I bent from right to left. Small rocks inside the tubes skinned my arms and shins, but I crawled on through the pain. The blood from my arms splattered on the first low wall, the small red dot catching my eye just before I hopped over. I cleared the second wall by pushing off and swinging my legs to the side over the top, and took three running steps as I jumped to grab the ledge of the third. My fingers latched on as best they could, but I was still damp from jumping into the pool, and my left hand slid off. I grabbed onto my right wrist before my body twisted too far, and pulled myself up until I could get my chin above the ledge, shoving my chest forward as I did. Most of my weight was still dangling off, but I shimmied myself forward and flopped onto the top of the wall, then pushed myself onto my feet so I could get a firm grip on the rope. I secured it once around my right arm and dipped myself into the swing, ensuring I had enough momentum to carry myself to the other side as I swung my legs forward to stick the landing on the other wall. There was a drop to the second wall of about five feet, requiring me to aim before I let go of the rope. I stumbled when I landed, my legs tired from grappling and climbing and crawling, but I managed to keep most of my balance as I slammed into a pole in front of me and quickly wrapped myself around it.

  I was already falling before I finished securing my hold, and I came to a stop using my legs just before I hit the ground. I assessed the floating platforms as I’d done on previous instances, looking for the way they were moving before I proceeded. I wanted to get across quickly, but I had to make sure my feet hit the center of each platform so that when I pushed off to the next one they wouldn’t slide too much. Thankfully, my footing was as sure as it ever was, and I managed to cross the pond, stepping quickly and easily from one platform to the next.

  The damsel scenarios were not as difficult as I had thought they would be. Each person waiting to be rescued was a GHS official, and they were fully compliant with my requests. They latched onto where I told them to and shifted their weight as I asked. The third person needing rescue pretended to be unconscious, but he still set his weight evenly when I put him on my shoulders in a wounded warrior carry. He was also the largest of the three, though, and my legs were on fire as I reached the outside of the circle he’d been laying in. There was a slight decline after finishing the last rescue obstacle that led down to fifty yards of flat space before the chasm. The decline made me want to run faster immediately, but I knew better and waited until the end so I wouldn’t gas myself out.

  I took off as my feet reached the bottom, no idea what kind of time I was making.

  I need to make it.

  We think you will. But the mud is nice if you miss.

  Better not to miss.

  My throat started to close, my chest getting tight as I reached the last third of the flatland, and I took the big steps I needed. My eyes focused on the spot in the ground I wanted to jump from. I had planned to jump off with one leg rather than two, thinking that with enough speed the momentum would carry me across. My legs felt too weak to do much more than run, anyway.

  Everything seemed to slow down as I left the earth, the mud directly below me, and the remnants of tiny air bubbles dotting its surface from the crashes of previous recruits who had failed the leap. I felt good halfway through the jump, but became acutely aware of the earth’s natural pull just after crossing the midpoint, my body beginning a rapid descent. I stretched myself out as much as I could, trying to angle my arms forward so that I could try and catch the dirt on the other side.

  Please, I need this. Please just make this jump. I need to grab that other side.

  The mud really is quite nice, Little One. You should consider coming back when you’re done.

  And then my fingers caught hold of the other side of the chasm, and my face slammed into the dirt, tiny rocks stuck in clumps of dried earth spreading themselves all over my lips and cheeks. I tried to breathe in, but had slammed onto my stomach. The wind had been knocked completely out of me. I was dangling from the edge of the other side.

  But I hadn’t let go.

  Slowly, and with much effort, I pulled myself up, hobbling over to the button to press it firmly.

  I turned around to look at my time and saw that I came in two minutes quicker than the recruit before me. I hadn’t just passed the obstacle course, I’d actually done well. That left just one more thing to do to make it through the day. In two hours, I had to give a demonstration of what my Ch05En gene could do.

  After that, I’d know whether or not I’d get to be a Cape.

  The Journal Of Gerald Roupell–Entry #225

  Even the biggest and surest man is like a feather when faced with the gravity of some situations.

  Her name was Ven, and she reminded me of my mother. I wouldn’t know for some time if she had a last name. That’s how it was in the house I went to on the weekends, where the World Government told people like me I could do whatever I wanted. My first year as a Cape was a total blur, full of illicit substances and punching people. But the GHS academy was no joke, even back then, and through the hungover days that always led to drunken nights, I managed to do some good and had stopped more than one global threat while a Cape. I came out of the academy without a clear name for what I was, though they call big boys like me Strongmen now. I wasn’t anything special, even if my strength as a boy impressed my parents. Plenty of people popped up all over the world much stronger than me.

  I guess that’s why they let me party as much as I did.

  I met Ven on one of the hottest nights I’d ever experienced, spotting her the moment I walked into the place I called the Party Palace. It was an old Californian estate that had belonged to some pop star once upon a time, with plenty of desert and unoccupied land on all sides to make sure we could be as loud as we wanted. There were thirty rooms in the main structure, with another ten or fifteen in both of the smaller houses to the side. The main areas were big enough that two or three separate DJs were often contracted to do their thing in different areas of the house. I could tell Ven was new the moment I looked at her. New people rarely leave the area by the front door.

  But she looked thirsty, and I hoped right away that I looked like a tall drink of water.

  She was wearing a tight dress that came down to just above her knees, and she made me introduce myself, pretending like she hadn’t heard the people next to her say hello to me by name. Any other night I might not have gone for the chase, but something about the way she slowly blinked when she acknowledged me, coupled with the face she made as her right eyebrow shot up, drove me absolutely wild. I let her know there were drinks in the other room, and she grabbed my hand, telling me to lead the way. I was worried that my skin might feel too rough on hers, but she didn’t flinch or pull back as our fingers laced.

  As big as the estate was, we never left the kitchen. I got it in my head that she was special during our fifth game of pool, when I’d started to sober up. We had already been chatting for hours, the thought of getting wasted the furthest thing from my mind, but only as I was finally coming down did I realize there was a language barrier. Ven barely spoke any English, though she understood a great deal. We’d gotten into a pattern without me realizing where, when she would get stuck on a word or phrase, I would throw out a suggestion that she could confirm or deny, words like “schoolhouse” and “garbage” outside of her vocabulary at the time. It probably sounded strange to others, but it worked for us, and I learned a lot about her even before. We played thirty games of pool that night, rotating between as many variations as I could remember from nine-ball to cutthroat, and I asked every question I could think of. When the sun was finally coming up, I was clear enough to drive, and she planted a firm kiss on my mouth to say goodbye.

  Over the next nine months, we fell in love, and I didn’t have a drop of anything other
than water.

  The Party Palace is a different place when you aren’t there to party. It loses nearly all of its appeal, many of the rooms too loud, much of the space too crowded. But it was the only place for us to see each other, and the both of us made searching for new places to sneak away to into a sort of game. Ven’s English improved rapidly as the seasons changed, and when the warmth of the returning summer made the lower temperatures seem like they’d never be coming back, she was speaking better than some of the people I’d grown up with. Her English was very proper, and she hardly used any slang.

  We knew each other for almost a year before things between us got serious. I’d never come together with a woman before—I was too afraid I’d hurt someone if they let me. A big part of my training at the academy was learning how to be delicate, but something inside of me nagged that I’d lose myself too easily if I were to be intimate with someone. It might have been a self-fulfilling prophecy if she hadn’t done most of the work, and before long we were not unlike the rabbits that scurried away from us when we walked too near to them in the dark. We could see each other one hundred and four days a year, and nobody worked harder or better than I did on Fridays.

  And then, one weekend, Ven wasn’t there.

  There were words like “funding” and “regulation” when I asked why she wasn’t at the Palace. I was given a swath of phrases laced with so much bureaucratic jargon that I swear to this day I could have run for office myself when I got off the call. None of what they told me made me feel better, and none of their words solved my problem. I walked through the kitchen that night, then leaned against the same pool table where Ven and I had spent our first night together. One of my teammates quickly handed me a drink. My stomach was in knots from the phone call, and the smell of whatever he’d given me made me gag. I walked outside, beyond the grass and landscaping that marked the property line, and into the desert. I startled a coyote who had been crouched, and his scurrying paws brought me out of the fugue state I’d entered, giving me the wherewithal to turn around and look back.

  At that point, I’d walked so far away that I was nearly to the city, the lights of the estate not much bigger than the few stars I could see up above. I knew if I went back, no one there would ask where I’d been. I knew if I went back, I’d never find Ven. So I said goodbye to the Party Palace.

  And goodbye to being a Cape.

  CHAPTER 7—LOCHLAN’S CONFUSION

  Lochlan and Khard looked at the liquid, a mixture of pus and radioactive blood that had pooled on the soft earth before them, the only trace that O-Rell had been with them less than an hour before. The Agents knew that chasing after O-Rell without proper transportation would have proved fruitless, the both of them clocking the running Cape at upwards of fifty miles an hour. Lochlan had thought to at least track the Specian at first, but Khard quickly set him off of the idea, saying that, “even a gut-shot animal can travel a long way if it’s pushed hard enough.” When the Agents looked at it that way, they realized it was better to try and work with their current situation to try and get ahead of O-Rell, rather than chase after him.

  The two robotic men spent time analyzing as many things as they could with renewed vigor, even going so far as to crawl into the space that had been dug underneath the creaking, water-damaged house. They stored everything in their electronic notebooks, and ran algorithms that searched for correlations in data points. That happened whether they liked it or not, of course, since their standard-issue notebooks were programmed with software that ran the numbers for them. The Control, probably more than any other branch of the World Government, reduced anything they could into numbers and patterns.

  Khard’s notebook buzzed, and he shared the update with Lochlan. “Well, it’s definitely blood from the same person as the sample collected a few days ago.”

  Lochlan looked over. “Indeed.”

  “Has anyone ever told you,” Khard said as he walked over. “That it wouldn’t kill you to lighten up a bit? Maybe turn that module down. I’ve heard that—”

  “Khard,” Lochlan broke in, somewhat annoyed. “I’m agreeing with you. Let’s try to stay on task.”

  “Fine, but when we get back from this messed-up mission, I’m taking some personal time. I suggest you do the same. I bet you’ve got over a thousand hours at this point.”

  The comment hung in the air, and Lochlan’s mood module tingled, the accumulation of his paid time off seeming more like an insult coming from the older Agent. “Eight hundred and forty-one hours,” Lochlan said plainly.

  “Close enough,” Khard said. “Alright. There’s nothing here for us, and I’m open to suggestions. There’s a lot of threads for us to pull. You have any thoughts?”

  “We’ll want to talk to Chief Rainch, if she’s gotten back. She has some explaining to do about that underground control center. We should talk with O-Rell’s team again as well, to see if he’s been by there at all. Then there’s our current dilemma: figuring out why O-Rell shambled his way back to the Halley’s property. I know we haven’t found anything yet, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a reason he came back here.”

  “Sounds like we’ll have to split up,” Khard said. “Probably a good idea for one of us to stay here in case O-Rell returns again. I didn’t get the impression that he was mentally sound, so if he’s got something driving him to be here, it could be good to wait. I’ll call Chief Rainch to have her meet me, maybe I’ll relax up on the roof or something.”

  “What if she’s working with Wallace, and they show up together?”

  “I think I’ll be alright against an old policewoman and her smelly friend in dirty overalls, Lochlan. As long as I keep a good vantage point, I’ll be able to see if she brings anybody who could give me real trouble. You got the harder task, I think. I get to sit on the roof, but you’ve got to walk all the way to that Cape house. We still don’t have a car.”

  Lochlan’s mood module tingled as he thought about the distance, the heat of the night continuing to linger even with the prolonged absence of the sun. The younger Agent took his jacket off and folded it neatly in half before throwing it over his shoulder. “Call me if anything worthwhile happens,” Lochlan said.

  There was no reluctance as Lochlan started his journey from the Halley’s property back to the house where Gil and Frikshen were set up. He might have been internally bothered, on some level, at the thought of having to walk all the way there in the sweltering, humid heat of the night, but he accepted that there was no other option. Their replacement vehicle hadn’t arrived yet, and wasn’t safe in any other automobile, mostly because Agents are too heavy. If he were to call a taxi and there was an accident, the meager safety belts designed for people not full of machinery would snap, turning him into a big, heavy missile. Agents were forced to watch the simulations every time they received a new upgrade, a captive audience to the rendered footage of the many ways their heavy bodies could become murder weapons due to simple inertia. Even if it wasn’t true, it had been too ingrained into his mind not to travel in anything other than a vehicle rated to carry him. Still, the logic did nothing to cool of his skin, or keep the sweat from pouring out of him. If Choudrant was good for nothing else, the city seemed to know at least how to be humid, and suffocatingly hot.

  Sounds kind of nice, to us.

  Whatever gets you there, I guess.

  Gets us where?

  That’s not what I… ah, forget it.

  Fresh sweat dripping down the back of his neck, Lochlan settled into a calm pace, not bothering to jog or run. At that time of night, there was a good chance O-Rell’s teammates wouldn’t even be awake, so there was little point in hurrying. If they were home, they weren’t going to be leaving any time soon. Lochlan appreciated the break he was giving himself, as well, as he and Khard had been hitting the mission hard since they’d started. The young Agent had cleared nearly all of his previous missions in less than half the time of his current Choudrant debacle. Lochlan was finding that he was growing
tired of being away from the office. He thought about the stack of work that was likely already waiting for him, and the possible political plays he could have been making. Khard’s initial proposal played back in his mind, and Lochlan found himself wondering why he’d bothered to listen to the older Agent. If his mood module would have allowed him to feel regret, he was certain he would have been—the whole endeavor felt more like lost points than anything. If he and Khard could manage to wrap everything up within the next three days or so, he wouldn’t be too far behind on his work, and if nothing came of the mission Khard had convinced him to go on, at least he’d be able to catch up to where he’d been. There were other valuable people he could get in with, he knew. He’d only picked Khard because the former Cape had presented a unique challenge.

  Lochlan calculated how much work was likely waiting for him in that moment, rounding up as he visualized the potential stack of reports he’d have to check. As he finished running the numbers for the average amount he received an hour, he realized quite suddenly that he was racing against a very real clock. It had been a guess at first to say that if he wasn’t back within a few days, he might have too much work, but the reality appeared to be worse.

  Lochlan had thirty-one hours to finish his mission and send in his report. If he wasn’t in a car and on his way to his desk by then, he’d fall too far behind to hit his quota for the month. While he might be officially excused for not performing his primary function, he knew the mark would follow him no matter what. A missed quota was a death sentence to someone like Lochlan. It could stall his career for a decade or more, regardless of how well he played The Game once he got back.

  He wondered whether he couldn’t simply find a way to get some work done while he was in the field, but his notebook buzzed in reply to his thoughts, the small device called up the specific chapter in the Agent’s handbook that spoke to whether or not he could perform other duties while in the field. It was expressly forbidden, of course.