by Unknown
Ravi followed the instructions, then waited at the wall of the tent.
“I told you I’d make you pay for what you did to my family. But first you’re going to fix this.”
“By standing against the wall?”
“No, you’re going to fix this later. You’re standing against the wall so you’ll be out of the way and won’t get hurt.”
“Wh —“
“Shut up.” Ary then turned back around and screamed, as loud as she could. Ravi ducked instinctively, but he couldn’t see what she was screaming at.
The two guards that had manhandled him into the chair rushed in immediately, where Ary was waiting. She raised one of her hands in the air — the hand carrying the small knife — then thrust it forward, releasing the blade at the last second.
The knife flew through the air and landed in the first man’s chest, stopping him cold. The second man, following behind the first, hadn’t noticed the attack, and just as the first man fell forward Ary was using him as a mount, catapulting off his shoulders and flying directly toward the second man.
Ravi watched in stunned silenced as Ary wrapped her tiny body around the man’s neck, tightened, then ripped herself sideways, using her entire body as leverage to break his neck. He crumpled easily to the ground as Ary hopped off his frame. She dusted off a pant leg, then walked back over to Ravi.
She wasn’t even breathing hard.
Ravi’s mouth was wide open. “You — you’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Nope. Not a joke. Just happened.” She reached forward and grabbed his arm, and Ravi discovered that her strength wasn’t just surprising, it was terrifying. He thought his arm might go numb before they even left the tent.
Ary pulled Ravi out the front of the tent and to the side.
She whispered as they walked. “Keep moving, keep your head down, and by God when I say run…”
“Got it,” he whispered back.
They reached the edge of the line of tents and she ducked between two of them, heading to the back of the camp.
“They have this entire place bugged with Sentinels, so they’ll know as soon as we get past the perimeter markers. That means we’re going to have to move. Got it?”
Ravi nodded, then felt stupid when he noticed she was in front of him and couldn’t see the motion. “Y — yeah, got it,” he said.
“And Ravi,” she said, still not turning around. “Do not die.”
PETER
HE ARRIVED AT THE FIRST security tent, where two men stood waiting for their leader.
“Sir,” one of them said, extending a hand. He didn’t recognize the man.
He frowned back. Unders despised formalities, and hated being referred to as anything other than “man,” or “hey,” or by name. They were a society of simplicity, crude but effective. He assumed this guy must be new.
Grouse entered the tent and walked to the makeshift terminal that sat on a table against one of the walls. He assessed the room, and its occupants. Two men and a woman were inside. One of the men was manning the controls at the SentinalCam station, maneuvering a manually-operated flying version of the security camera floating above the camp.
The woman’s name was Ailis, the leader of the security detail at the massive camp. She wasn’t much of a fighter, but Grouse knew she could hold her own. Her skill set was computers, and she was a major player in the underground hacking scene before the Grid was erected and the System took over. Ailis was pale white with a face full of freckles, bright red hair extending all the way down her back in dreadlocks. She had items tied into the dreadlocks, trophies and memorandums she chose to carry with her at all times.
She stood next to a large, tattooed black man — Grouse’s second-in-command — named Raven. Raven’s arms and face were covered in swirling, interconnected tattoos that his former wife had designed and given him over the years, before she died. Grouse and Raven hit it off as soon as they met, and together they rose to their positions of leadership.
He eyed the man and gave a slight nod. “Raven’s” real name was Ralph, but he’d chosen the moniker long ago and stuck with it. Grouse didn’t know the full story behind it, and he’d never asked.
“Is everything ready for the attack?” he asked.
“It is, Grouse,” Raven grumbled back. “We’re finishing the weapons check and then will be waiting for the word to advance.”
Grouse felt the chill of excitement and adrenaline fill his bloodstream. It won’t be long now, he thought. This will all be over soon.
“What is the weapons situation, on that note?”
“Number, or types?”
“Yes.”
Ailis jumped in. “Well, the rifles — one for every three men — are working and ready to go. There are a handful of Spiders, eight total. Ready for use, probably seven. We’ve got a few boxes of grenades, too. Old ones we lifted from an ARU last week. They’re untested, but…” she smiled.
“A grenade’s a grenade,” Grouse said.
“Precisely. Also, we have the Tracers. Two from your detachment, and three here. We —“
“We won’t use the Tracers.”
Ailis and Raven frowned, waiting for Grouse to continue.
“Their reload time will make them sitting ducks after they fire their first round. We don’t need them, and we can’t risk their falling into enemy hands. They’re useful, but they’re far more useful as a last-ditch getaway plan.”
None of them needed to state out loud that it was a “last-ditch getaway plan” for about thirty people only.
“Grouse,” Ailis asked, “what about their Tracer? We know the one that we intercepted at Umutsuz was brought back to the Relics colony. It’s probably in full working order.”
“Again, it will be a sitting duck if they decide to use it. We’ll be able to bring it down without much fuss.”
“I’ve also heard reports that they’ve commandeered a prototype ARU miniature defense system,” Raven said. “They used it to pull in the Tracer from Umutsuz.”
“Still a nonissue — it only has one locking mechanism, so it can’t be deployed with more than one target at a time.”
“Understood. When are you going to initiate the attack?”
“I need to wait a little longer. The boy — Ravi Patel — is here, I believe?”
“He’s in the mess tent, tied to a chair.”
Grouse almost cringed at the crude treatment of the kid, but, then again, he had run away. “Very good,” he said. “I’ll speak with him first, to see if he knows anything else about where we might find Myers Asher.”
“I thought Asher was with the Relics?”
“That’s what we’ve been led to believe, but I was told by their leader that they would make the trade. I have yet to hear anything, so I’m wondering if they’ve decided to change the plan, or if Mr. Asher is simply no longer with them.”
Grouse considered revealing his hand to his fellow leaders, but decided against it. He’d hated keeping anything from them, but there was strategic value in controlling a bit of knowledge. All in good time, he thought. Plus, there’s nothing they can help me with now, besides focusing on the attack.
“I see. What do you need from us?”
Grouse lowered his head, still looking forward. It was a subtle move, but it was a practiced habit that Grouse found allowed him to look more intimidating. If the light caught his facial tattoos properly, it was downright unnerving. “Nothing,” he said, his voice a near whisper. “Keep an eye on the cams, and I’ll let you know when we’re ready.”
Raven nodded once and Ailis immediately turned back to her hovering SentinelCam. Grouse grabbed the radio — a hacked-together assembly of electronics parts and an antenna — before he left the tent and held it up to his mouth.
“Report.”
A hiss of static met his ear as a crackling voice sputtered through from the other end. The deep, Southern drawl told Grouse he was talking to the proper person.
“— Good here —
a slight setback, but we’re good here.”
Grouse waited for the click of a closed transmission, then responded. “Continue moving forward, then. We will proceed on schedule.” He flicked the power switch on the radio to the OFF position, and picked up his pace.
Peter Grouse had one more stop before he declared war on the Relics. Sure, the war was planned, and meant to be a front for the more important positioning he needed to do, but war was still… war.
It would require his attention, and certainly his leadership. If Josiah Crane didn’t come through for him, he would need to reassess and readjust, and still execute the plan. The Unders here expected him to retaliate for Crane’s not delivering Myers Asher to them, and they expected the war to be final.
He’d been tightening the noose for months, and when President Asher himself appeared in Istanbul, it gave Grouse the final amount of tension he needed to carry out the final stage of his plan. All eyes would be on the Unders as they destroyed the Relics, and when the System sent in the waves of ARUs to try to control the situation, it would leave the rest of the world — and the System itself — vulnerable.
The mess tent was still a few paces away, but Grouse already knew there was something wrong.
A group of people stood near the entrance, and he quickened his pace. When he reached the opening, the group split, allowing him access.
“They’re dead,” one man told him as he passed through the open vinyl slit into the mess.
He registered the bodies on the ground in front of him almost too late, but he stopped just short of the first man. A guard, one of the ones who would have been assigned to watch the kid, lay sprawled out face-first on the dirt.
The second man was a bit farther off, and looked as though he’d been shot or struck. Blood pooled around his torso.
Grouse checked the rest of the room. There was a chair at the far end of the tent, rope bindings that had been cut still strung over the arms and on the ground around the chair’s legs. He cursed under his breath.
Ravi Patel was gone.
RAND
THE BUILDINGS IN RELICA MAY have been poorly constructed from whatever materials its inhabitants could find, but they were strong enough to support Diane and Jonathan Rand. Right now, that’s all that mattered. They ran over rooftops, stopping only to peer over the edge into the streets below, checking to see if their route was clear on the ground.
So far, it wasn’t. While most of the residents of Relica were gathered in the main square, there were a few stragglers in the narrow streets and open areas milling about. Rand thought that they might be safe continuing on the streets down below, but after the excitement in the main square with Crane and his henchmen, he didn’t want to take any chances. They continued jumping over rooftops, thankful that the buildings were mostly the same height and placed relatively close together.
They’d run over three buildings now, including the first one that abutted the town square, and Rand stopped at the edge of the fourth and looked around.
“Which way?” he asked. “My plan pretty much ended when we got to the buildings.”
Diane pulled up next to him and took a moment to catch her breath. “Right. Let’s see if we can stay on the rooftops.”
“But if we go straight, we’ll get to the borders of the city faster.”
“We’re not leaving. Not yet, anyway.”
Rand turned and stared at her, cocking an eyebrow.
“We’re staying here. Until we get Myers and —“
“Myers is fine, you saw him back there. He’s safe here.”
“No one is safe here, Jonathan,” Diane said. “They weren’t focused on him then, but they will be. They’ll turn on him, too.”
Rand sat down, shaking his head. Sitting closer to the roof, it would be impossible for them to be spotted from the streets. He pulled Diane’s hand and she sat as well.
“Diane, listen. I know you have, uh, history with —“
“Come on, Rand,” she said. “This isn’t about history. He’s one of us, not them. I know he’s a Relic, but he’s…”
“Different?”
Diane stared straight ahead.
Rand waited a few seconds, then spoke again. “He’s not different, Diane, and that’s what’s bothering you. He’s just like them. Lucid enough to have a conversation with, but somehow… off.”
She nodded, and he noticed the beginnings of a tear forming in the corner of her eye. He squeezed her hand a bit tighter, just as a gentle gust of cool air blew over them. He shivered.
“These Relics, they’re… it’s like they were brainwashed. They had their memories taken, but that shouldn’t have affected anything else. They should be the same intelligent, driven, passionate people they once were. They were leaders — the best there was, in whatever field they were in.”
“But that’s… none of them…” her voice was shaking, and Rand assumed the massive adrenaline rush of the past hour was finally subsiding in her.
“I know,” he said. “I know. They’re not who they once were, for whatever reason. And I thought it was just some weird trippy thing Crane did to them all, but seeing them and thinking about Myers — how he’s the same as they are — it’s uncanny. Too much to be just a coincidence.”
“The System did this?”
Rand nodded. “It had to. How else can you explain it? I mean, they were attacking us, but only if they were doing it together. It’s like a hive mind, or at least crowd mentality.”
“Safety in numbers.”
“Right. You can’t tell me all of these individual, independent leaders would happily coexist in harmony with other Type-A personalities. And they certainly wouldn’t be subordinate to anyone. And especially not Josiah Crane.”
“So what are you thinking?”
He shook his head once, frowning as he considered the question. “I don’t know, not yet. I guess I just want to know if they can be fixed. If we can make them who they once were.”
“Rand, you know the System —“
“I know. It’s far more advanced than we ever thought, and there’s no chance it would just allow us to program it to reinsert the memory devices — if we could even find them. But there has to be something.”
It was Diane’s turn to pause for a moment. He examined the silhouette of her face as she looked out over the great flat plain that became the ground beneath Relica. She was stunningly beautiful, her round eyes and nose descending into a sharp jaw that was still feminine in its girlishness, a petite frame that hid her years of experience as a professional businesswoman.
She turned back and looked into his eyes. She hesitated a moment, as if she was seeing him for the first time in days.
“There is something. And that’s why we’re not leaving the city.”
“Myers?”
“Yes, but that’s not it. He’ll be fine, like you said, as long as we don’t wait too long. No… it’s Crane.”
Rand sat up straighter on the rooftop. “Crane?”
“I’m going to kill him, Rand.”
Rand wasn’t sure what to think. “You… you’re going to kill him.”
“I am. For what he did to us — what he was about to have them do. He needs to die.”
Rand shifted again. “Diane, I get it. I do, really. Trust me, I would have killed him too, in the moment, if I could have. But —“
“But nothing, Rand. He’s behind this — all of this.” She reached her arm out, palm upward, and carried it around her body. “He built this, and they followed him through it. He’s been planning something, and it involves Myers. More importantly, it involves killing Myers —“
“It involves giving Myers to the Unders.”
“They’ll kill him. You know they will. Besides, we need Myers too, but we need him alive. Crane has other plans, so we need to kill him, get Myers.”
“But —“
“Stop, Rand. Stand up for yourself. Stand up for us.”
Rand felt the anger flaring just beneath h
is skin, but kept his calm. She’s manipulating me, he thought. She’s good at it, but I’ve known her long enough.
He lifted his chin and smiled. “You’re playing me.”
“Rand,” she said.
“I’m not an idiot, Diane. I know you. I know when you’re —“
“What?” she said, getting worked up. “What? Playing politics with you? Trying to persuade you to ‘follow me’ or something? Rand, wake up. Look around. This is finite. It has a beginning and an end, and this is the end. Okay? We have a role to play in this. It’s what we’ve been working on — the resistance, Solomon Merrick, even Myers.”
Rand tightened his jaw — he could almost feel his dimples becoming exaggerated — as he looked straight ahead, listening, but he didn’t speak. She was right.
“We’ve all been working toward this. We were sidetracked when Myers…” she swallowed. “When everything happened, and it happened much more quickly than we thought. We didn’t have as much time to plan. You were reassigned, I was suddenly a drifter, an ex-First Lady with nothing to campaign for, and Solomon turned into a Hunter. A Hunter, Rand. Solomon.”
It was true, Rand knew. The System orchestrated almost all this, and they all knew it. No one had spoken it aloud as simply as she had, but then again, that was the type of straight-forward approach that had earned her the reputation she had. And it’s part of the reason I love her. She was strong, but in an endearing sort of way.
“Diane, how does this play into the plan, then?”
“We knew going into it that ‘the plan’ was going to have to be malleable. You explained it to me, remember? Any plan we come up with, the System will already know about it. It will already have a contingency plan, a workaround, a solution. It’s a calculator, and it’s the best the world has ever seen.”
He almost shuddered at the thought of the man — his friend — and the person he’d become. “Myers thought that as well. He told me that after we landed, in passing. Something he said he was ‘mulling over’ back before he made it to Umutsuz.
“He was right,” Diane said. She took a moment to glance around at the city of Relica down below. The shantytown was still active, with people moving around, but no one seemed to notice them above their heads. He wondered if they’d already forgotten about the chaos at the square, or if any of them were still looking for him and Diane. “The System will know what we’re planning — if we’re planning something. Plus, none of this works without Myers. He told me that before…” She quickly looked off into the distance.
