"We followed the clues, and this is where they brought us."
"On behalf of the District leadership, let me thank you for your due diligence and dedication to the job. You have gone to extreme lengths to see your investigation reach a satisfactory conclusion. However, I will personally vouch for each of my colleagues; none have taken any part in Malcolm Wolfe's escape from Pause. I'm afraid you have misinterpreted your clues, and put yourself in quite the problematic situation."
"Lovely. Warm fuzzies all around. But I wonder who's willing to vouch for you?" I let the accusation linger before dropping the hammer. "And before anybody jumps at that opportunity, let me share something else that hasn't gone public: the Safeguard's been compromised. Which, ya know, last I checked, only one person has access too."
The District leaders studied Jennings with unwavering intensity. All eyes awaited his response.
All eyes save one pair.
A flare went up in the back of my mind. My nanocomp locked onto something different. Downcast eyes and a squelched smile. It was fleeting, but undeniable. The kid at the opposite end of the table from Jennings was trying to hide something.
Jackpot.
"Do not listen to him," Jennings said. "The Safeguard is perf—"
"Who's that?" I gestured with my chin towards the young man sitting beside the stunning Madame Leader of District Six. I recognized the woman but the man was a blank spot.
"Me?" he said, seeking non-existence in the depths of his chair. "I'm nobody."
The warning bells would have been deafening if I hadn't already muted them.
"Even the biggest somebody starts off a nobody. Maybe yo—" I flicked the barrel of the gun in his direction.
That was a mistake.
Hairs on the back of my neck sprang to attention. They pointed back in the direction from which I'd turned, to the guard beside Moreau, diving for his gun.
He had me by a step. He swiped the weapon from the floor, rolled to his side, and fired. The pistol belched two blobs of energy that scarred the air as they sailed towards me. I ducked with the collaborative efforts of nanotized reflexes and luck.
From my hiding spot beneath the table I heard the thrum of a vortex pistol followed by a scream that sounded more like the tortured yowl of a back-alley cat than that of a man.
A body crumpled, hitting the floor with a heavy thud.
I lifted my head and saw Raines standing in the doorway, gun in hand.
With the support of the table, I stood. Jennings' guard writhed like a worm in the rain, clutching his face where the ring of condensed air had probably perforated his eardrum.
I didn't envy the man, but I also didn't feel bad. He should feel lucky Raines had turned down the intensity of her vortex pistol at all. Any higher and there'd be nothing left of the man but vapor and memories.
"Thanks," I said, nodding to Raines.
"Try not turning your back on the bad guys next time."
I denied my mouth the opportunity to make any comment that might land a bullet in my ass. Instead I turned back to the young man.
We had a lead, but without the ability to jam the Stream, we were helpless to stop anyone from sending out distress beacons.
Distress beacons that would be responded to with a level of force Raines and I weren't prepared to handle with our current cache of weapons.
I grabbed the man by the lapels of his blue pinstriped suit and yanked him to his feet. I tapped the needle-point barrel of my gun against his forehead. The gesture would have been more intimidating had the weapon been of a more substantial make, but sometimes you do what you can with what you got.
"We're strapped for time, so start singing before I get desperate," I said, adding the desired amount of crazy to my tone lest the man think I'd already arrived at a maximum state of desperation.
Man could always sink lower. In my experience rock bottom is a theory. Mostly there's just a point where digging becomes a real pain in the ass.
I'd been digging for a while.
"Hamilton," he said, stumbling over his name a few times. "Derek Hamilton."
The name dislodged a memory tucked deep in my subconscious. Leader of District Two. I'd heard of him during the last election, a time when politics and global culture ceased being topics of interest to me. Though, in fairness, anything that didn't come in a bottle, or at the end of a needle, had lost my interest by that point.
If I recalled correctly, he'd come up through Unity's Nanotechnology Division before making the shift to politics. A dubious switch. Word had it that the current administration was grooming him to succeed Jennings in two years.
I hate the smart and ambitious ones.
"Great! Mr. Hamilton," I said. "Start by telling us what you're hiding."
"What?" Hamilton blushed with a redness that spread to his ears. "I don't know what you're talking about, I swear I don't."
The guy would have made for a horrible card player. Wearing every turn of emotion on his face helped my cause, but it was disappointing to see in a professional politician. Though, admittedly, it wasn't every day somebody broke into the Time Bank and held the world's government at gunpoint.
The audacity of our break-in had contributed greatly towards our success up to that point.
"No? Could have fooled me. You looked pretty smug when I told the room about the Safeguard. Not really the reaction I would expect."
"I'm not being smug, I promise, just scared." Hamilton punctuated his speech with flustered hand movements, like a bird flitting between flowers with a broken wing. "Given the circumstances, I think that's okay, right?"
"Why are y—" An explosion rocked the building. The ground lurched, throwing me into the table.
Raines glanced over her shoulder. Gray smoke filtered out of the hall and into the adjoining waiting room.
"The cavalry's here," she said.
We'd disabled the elevator and barricaded the stairwell, but it would only slow the rescue team—and not for long.
Hamilton was hiding something, but we'd had our shot and missed. I'd learned the hard way, in life and death, there are no do-overs.
"Time to go," I said.
"Really?" Raines said, her words heavy with sarcasm.
I spun towards the wall of windows running floor to ceiling, which offered an unrivaled view from the highest point in all of Terminus. I fired a single round from the gun at my hip. The window shattered. Crystals tumbled down the side of the building, catching the sunlight and casting a million rainbows as they fell to the city below.
I yanked Raines to the window. Glass crunched underfoot. At the lip, I stared down. The world tried to swoon, but I denied my body the pleasure of vertigo. I followed the pyramid's gradual slope with my eye and ran a calculation.
"What are you doing?" Raines shouted in my ear, her voice barely audible over the wind whistling past.
Derek Hamilton quivered like a puppy left in the rain. We didn't get what we'd come for, but it hadn't been a total loss—assuming the next part didn't kill us.
A soldier in full tactical gear appeared through the plume of smoke drifting into the conference room. A bolt of energy sailed overhead, electrifying the air around us as it passed through the broken window and headed towards the clouds hanging full in the sky.
I wrapped an arm around Raines' waist and jumped out the window before she could jerk free of my grasp. The soft fluorescent lights of Jennings' office gave way to the diffused power of the sun, a runny egg yolk bleeding across the sky.
On our third bounce off the plated side of the building, my head whiplashed, cracking hard against the unforgiving glass.
My vision swirled. I struggled to maintain an upright position with feet pointed towards the ground. We bounced again. Gravity wrenched the pistol free of my hand. It skittered alongside us as we continued our descent.
Friction heat from the slide spread through my ass and shoulders. My jacket absorbed most of the heat, but Raines hadn't been so prepared. If somehow we ma
de it through the next thousand foot freefall, she'd be sporting the road rash to prove it.
My heart inched higher in my throat with every foot we fell. The dizziness hit a crescendo, my organs tried abandoning ship through my mouth, and I considered the possibility that I'd made a terrible mistake.
And then everything slowed down, like plunging into a pool of marmalade. The air thickened, matting clothing to skin.
The roar of wind blasting past our ears became a shrill whistle, high but quiet. Our downward inertia sputtered to a halt.
The Grav-Beam had us now.
In the arms of the beam our direction changed course, along with our destiny of splattering upon the ground. Our horizontal pull towards the building increased, giving birth to a new fear that chilled me like an icy wire dragged through my veins.
Grav-Beam is a misnomer. It's named as such because it's an easy concept to grasp, when in reality it's a tractor beam with a pull many times stronger than gravity. If it were a true gravity beam our weight in relation to the system wouldn't matter. But those factors did matter and the force acting upon our couple hundred pounds of body weight was the same as if we were a multi-ton vehicle.
Which meant our speed increased as we catapulted towards the reflective glass surface of the parking garage. We flew through the invisible barrier and saw the wall we were destined to crash into.
I clutched at Raines like a baby koala. Holding her close, I threaded a finger atop hers on the trigger of the energy rifle gripped in her free hand, and fired. The bolt of energy burst on the floor. A mini shockwave smacked us sideways, dislodging us from the beam.
We skipped across the floor. The world spun into an indiscernible cornucopia of sounds, shapes, and colors. Elbows and knees sacrificed in countless collisions with the ground caused waves of blackout-inducing pain.
Pain receptors on high alert jockeyed for position to have their message heard by an overworked brain. The nanocomp dulled the incoming requests. Pain receded to the back of my mind until it became only a mild inconvenience.
That is, until we crashed into the side of a Dragonfly with the sickening crunch of metal crumpling beneath the combined force of flesh and bone.
My head pinged off the side of the Fly before coming to a full, soul-jarring stop. The new batch of pain overwhelmed my nanocomp. Too much to dampen. I felt it all.
Muscles were beaten to a pulp and it seemed too soon to say which bones, if any, hadn't shattered. I breathed into the pain and waited for the disorientation to pass.
I ran a hand along the back of my skull, fingers weaving between blood-soaked strands of hair before finding the gash of torn flesh that'd formed behind my ear.
Using the Fly for support I struggled to my feet only to be driven back to my knees by a sudden wave of nausea. The contents of my stomach refused my request to stay put. My body purged it all. Unfortunately, not having eaten anything substantial in the past twelve hours left only bile and stomach acid pooling in the puddle before me.
When the retching subsided I wiped the spittle from my lips using a hand already slick with blood from a wound yet undiscovered. "Raines?" I called out.
"Yeah?" she answered from somewhere behind me with a voice which was too thin.
"You alright?"
"Been better."
"Anything broken?" I asked, rolling onto my butt. My back slotted perfectly into the groove created by my collision with the Dragonfly.
Fifteen feet away Alaina sat in a Raines-shaped dent pounded into the side of a beige van.
"Besides my faith in humanity?" she asked.
"It wasn't that bad, was it?" I tried to smile, but immediately regretted the attempt.
"I think I would've rather been shot." Raines held her left arm limp in her lap. "How'd you know the Grav-Beam would catch us?"
"Just a hunch."
I didn't have the heart to tell her my original plan had revolved around blasting a window and falling back into the building. A plan that became an impossibility the moment I'd lost my gun.
Sometimes things work out and it's best not to over-analyze the results.
"Good hunch."
I nodded. "How long you think we got before they realize we didn't go splat?"
"Uh..." Raines looked past me. "Not long."
I turned, with no insignificant amount of effort, towards the source of her interest. My stomach dripped into my toes as I looked up into the barrel of a half-dozen energy rifles.
The men, wearing the full nanotized uniform of the Peacekeepers, formed a semicircle around us.
Damn. That was fast.
"Don't shoot," I said, dropping my hands into my lap. "We give up."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Angel Of Death Is Short
Someone with a shaky hand performed surgery in my skull with an ice cream scoop.
That coupled with the blood leaking from a wound behind my ear, the obstructed flow of blood to my hands from immobilization rings fastened with too much zeal, and the hard metal seats delivering shocks of pain to my already aching brain with every turbulent shudder, tested the limit of my naturally sunny disposition.
Sandwiched between two Peacekeepers on the bench across from me, Raines' head dangled loose on her chest. She stared at the ground, waiting for it to reveal the secrets of the universe.
She looked like hell and probably felt worse, but we were alive. So that was something.
Which wasn't the same uplifting fact for some people as it was others.
The Peacekeepers had dosed us with enough healing nanites to ensure we wouldn't die of blood loss in transit to the Precinct. But Raines' arm, from shoulder to wrist, had been rubbed past the point of raw. The nanites could only work so fast.
Already her skin looked better than it had in the parking garage. The exposed cherry flesh, where the skin hadn't burned through, turned a glistening newborn pink. The edges were charred black and crispy. Still a couple standard deviations removed from her normally olive complexion, but not seeing the underlying tendons and muscle was progress in the right direction.
The nanobots were kinder to me, but not by much. They'd gone straight to my right leg to begin repairs on a bone shattered like an icicle. A tingle traipsed through me. Ants crawling beneath skin and across bone would be considered a form of torture if those ants weren't in fact fixing me.
A catch-22.
I shifted from one butt cheek to the other, redistributing the weight and relieving the pressure on my leg, accidentally bumping the guard beside me in the process.
The Keeper on my left responded with a sharp shove which sent me into the man on my right, who returned the favor with a shove of his own. Both men kept their eyes forward, unaware of, or simply uninterested in, the plight of the human Ping-Pong ball wedged between them.
The vehicle banked hard, causing the human cargo in the back to shift accordingly. A Stream dampener hummed in the wall separating the cattle from the driver. With our access to the Stream suppressed by Peacekeeper tech, and lacking any windows, I couldn't say with certainty where we were, but we hadn't been in the air long enough to have made it to the Precinct.
The look exchanged by our four babysitters indicated they shared my confusion.
"Bathroom breaks?" I hoped humor would crack their icy exteriors.
It didn't. They ignored me. Very rude.
The guard to the left of Raines slipped into the Stream, presumably to communicate with the driver. Breathing lost its necessity; everybody sat quietly. Agitated glances were exchanged like business cards.
The van decelerated sharply, jerking to a stop before the guard could return with answers.
Something beeped loudly, defiling the silence we had nurtured.
The four Keepers looked down at their forearms.
A second beep.
I knew that sound. So did the guy on my right. He clawed at the cuff of his uniform, desperate to expose his Life Tracker, but he was too slow. It wouldn't have mattered, anyhow.
<
br /> A final beep.
The nanocomp of each Peacekeeper released a fatal jolt of electricity while that final beep still clung to the air like an unrequited confession of love.
The four men danced with death, every nerve firing. With one enormous convulsion muscles contracted, spines twisted, and heads craned towards the sky.
A neck snapped with a hollow crack, but I couldn't pinpoint from which man it'd echoed. For a brief moment that would remain scarred in my synapses; the men sat upright and lifeless.
After a full breath, the rigidity receded, and they slumped to the ground.
I was still struggling to make sense of what I'd just witnessed when the back door swung open. We drowned in the powerful rays of sunlight, the intensity an instant migraine.
Unable to shade my eyes with hands still secured behind my back, I squinted into the light. Slowly, the shape of a silhouetted man came into focus.
"Step out of the vehicle," he said, his voice betraying the nerves holding him hostage.
I stepped out of the Police transport vehicle and into the early afternoon sun. The air radiated a demonic heat. My clothes stuck to my body, instantly slick with sweat, as if I'd been caught in the rain.
Overhead, a Kestrel circled, a vulture waiting for death to take us. Ignoring the Peacekeeper standing a little ways off with a rifle trained on my forehead, I watched Raines emerge from the back of the van like the first Neanderthal stepping from her cave to find a strange new world. Her eyes were tiny slits. The Keepers had cuffed her hands in front to facilitate the healing of her arm, and so she used those free appendages to shield her face from the light.
I envied that.
It's the little things.
I turned my attention back to the Peacekeeper who was studying us through the viewfinder of his rifle.
"Care to tell us what the hell is goin' on?" I asked.
The officer shifted from foot to foot. His face, blanched and dripping with sweat, was simultaneously slack and tense. He was equally if not more disoriented than Raines and myself.
A hot breeze swirled the dust and gravel at our feet. I stared up at the source of the disruption.
The Kestrel, having gotten bored waiting for us to die, landed on a narrow sliver of roof.
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