by Barry Lyga
“Breach! Breach!”
It took Cassie a moment to recognize the voice — it came from one of the rugby guys, now charging into the room, waving his arms wildly. She stepped away from the kitchenette and over to TonyStark’s cube, where Tish was also hanging out.
“Get out!” the rugby guy shouted. “Breach! Get the fuck out!”
Someone yelled, “Is this another fucking drill?”
Rugby Guy just kept shouting. “Breach! We’ve been breached! Get out!” as he ran through the room.
TonyStark and Tish looked at each other. Tish was already on her tablet, tapping away. “Oh, shit! Our location’s been BLINQed! Cops and Hive Mobs en route.”
“En route?” someone snapped. “Sounds like they’re here.”
Before anyone could respond, the sound of gunfire, muted by walls and doors, blasted out. Bullet holes appeared in the door from the corridor and then the door crashed inward. The other rugby guy — and dammit, she’d never even learned their names! — collapsed backward, shaking and bleeding profusely, crashing to the floor.
TonyStark tapped his earbud. “Rome burns!” he shouted. “Rome burns!”
The surviving rugby guy was charging around the room, still screaming “Breach!” at the top of his lungs. The room became a chaos of bodies and then gun smoke drifting in. A stray bullet from somewhere hit the window behind Cassie, exploding the glass outward. The black paper ripped outside with the force of the shattering glass and suddenly daylight bloomed at OHM.
A hand grabbed her by the wrist. Cassie looked down and saw TonyStark holding her fast. “Come on!” he shouted, and pulled her after him.
She opened her mouth to ask about Tish, but as she looked around …
Tish had crouched behind a partition and was wielding a long rifle with a wicked-looking scope mounted atop it. Cassie had no idea where it had come from and it seemed insane that Tish was brandishing it.
“We have to help her!” she cried as TonyStark dragged her toward a door. “We have to help her!”
He ignored her and tugged harder, almost yanking her off her feet as he bore relentlessly toward the door. She fought back, but he had a grip like a boa constrictor, and he forced her through the door and into a dark corridor she’d never seen before. Some other OHMers pushed past them, running frantically toward the other end of the hall.
“Let go of me!” she screamed, pulling. “Let go!”
“You want to die?” TonyStark snarled. “Settle down!”
There was no light in the corridor, save for flashes from cell phones and the LEDs in earbuds as people dashed past them. Cassie was buffeted by bodies, knocked against the walls. The sounds of footsteps and screams and panting breath and bullets became her world, steeped in darkness.
Eventually, TonyStark kicked open a door with a savage grunt. Sunlight spilled in, blinding her. They were on the rooftop.
There was nowhere to go.
Nowhere.
She had no screams left. Only a whimper.
“Listen,” he told her, dragging her out onto the roof, “I can’t do all of it for you. You’re gonna have to do some of it, grok?” When she said nothing, simply stared back at the black hole of the corridor they’d just walked along, he shook her violently by the shoulders. “You grok?”
“I grok!” she said. “But all our work’s on the computers. And Tish!”
More gunfire echoed along the hall, exploding out into the day.
“Rome burns,” TonyStark reminded her. “That crashed our network and executed a mass-deletion protocol. Better the data’s gone than in their hands.”
“But Tish —”
“Tish did two tours as a sniper in the ’Stan. She can take care of herself.”
“How did they find us?” she demanded, her heart pounding too hard, too loud. “You said we were safe.”
It wasn’t her text. Her phone had no way to transmit location. Even if someone had intercepted the texts and decrypted them in record time, there was no GPS data to use.
“Nowhere’s safe forever,” TonyStark told her.
Cassie stared at him. Someone ran past them, elbowing her out of the way. Swept up by an adrenaline high, she scarcely registered it.
“Where do we go?” she asked, her mind racing. Escape seemed impossible, and she was #KillOnSight. “We’re up too high …”
“We thought of that,” he told her. “We thought of everything. You have to run now, OK? Can you follow me?”
She nodded.
TonyStark grinned. “Knew you could. Let’s go.”
100101500101
She and TonyStark ran across the rooftop, gravel crunching under their feet, kicked up in a solid wake behind them. Once — just once — she dared fire a look over her shoulder.
Men in black body armor weren’t too far behind them, wielding large assault rifles. Other OHMers ran here and there, scattering to the edges of the rooftop. Some of them, to her alarm, dropped right over the side.
Others never made it that far, cut down by bullets before they could escape. Cassie thought, for one second that filled her with relief, that she was simply watching a movie, something VR immersive.
Then her left foot came down wrong, twisted in the gravel. She gasped in shock and at the sudden lightning bolt of pain, then thought of the guns, of the men, and forced herself back into balance and into reality.
She kept running.
At the edge of the rooftop, TonyStark paused just briefly. Then, without a word, he vaulted over the parapet into thin air.
A scream curdled in Cassie’s throat. Good thing, too. Had she given it voice, she never would have heard TonyStark’s stagewhispered, “Come on!”
Leaning over the parapet, she peered down. TonyStark stood on a wooden plank balanced over the railings of an old fire escape. Cassie worried at her bottom lip, tasted her own blood.
Gunshots in the background were even more persuasive than the pleading expression on TonyStark’s face.
Cassie clambered over the parapet and dropped straight down, eyes tightly shut. She landed squarely on the plank, which didn’t budge, and saw that it was bolted to the exterior wall of the hotel. This wasn’t a lucky coincidence.
“Told you we planned for everything,” TonyStark said. He reached out and she took his hand.
The next part was vertigo inducing. Hugging the wall, they inched along a narrow ledge, making their way north to the corner of the building. She risked a single, vertiginous look down — the black ribbon of Carmichael Avenue was clotted with onlookers and vehicles. Police cars spun their lights into the crowd; an enormous military-camo-tattooed thing stood halfway up the block. She dragged her eyes up to fight a wave of dizziness. From below, the street noise of tires on pavement, feet on cement, people barking orders into their earbuds was all muted and distorted. It sounded less like the city’s normal buzz and more like something in a cartoon.
Carmichael ran east–west, and she could see the sun peeking through the skyscrapers. She wanted to luxuriate in its glow for the first time in days, but TonyStark’s hand was an insistent, clutching reminder that someone could look up and see them at any moment.
And then a shout from above made Cassie look up sharply, a move that took her off-balance and almost tipped her backward and into a thirty-story plunge. TonyStark wrapped his arm around her shoulders, pinning her to the walls.
“Don’t look up,” he ordered. “Or down.”
“But they —”
“You down there!” a commanding voice boomed. “Don’t move any farther!”
“Don’t listen to them.”
She had no intention of listening to them, but when a burst of gunfire rattled from above, she froze in place. The whistle-slam of bullets raced all around her, and she knew that if she moved even a centimeter, she’d be hit.
And fal
l.
And die.
“They can’t hit you,” TonyStark told her. “I promise. The angles are all wrong. That’s why we set up this particular escape route. As long as you hug the wall, you can’t be hit.”
“I can’t move,” she whispered. It was true. She was paralyzed.
“Maybe this’ll help: Any second now, they’re gonna come down to the fire escape. And then they can shoot you. And they will. We need to be around that corner before they get down here.”
Yeah, that worked. Cassie tossed a glance back the way they’d come. She was alarmed but also heartened by how far from the fire escape they were already. It had felt as though their progress could be measured with a microscope, but they were already more than halfway to the corner.
“Get a move on, you slowpoke,” she told TonyStark. Bravado was his native tongue, and it was the closest she could come to saying thank you so much without getting all sappy.
With the rough concrete of the building’s exterior wall against her palms and cheek, she made her way along the ledge after TonyStark, all the way to the corner. He went first, disappearing to the other side of the building.
Turning the corner was tougher than she thought it would be. On the ground, it would be nothing, but there was no room for error here. She had to shift her center of gravity at just the right moment, reaching around the corner with her right hand to find the wall on that side …
A wind barreled down the canyon between buildings, threatening to pluck her from the ledge and toss her into the open air. She clutched the corner with all her strength, willing herself to stick to the wall like a bug. At the same time, TonyStark took her hand from the other side.
“You can do this, dig? I can’t help you at this angle. You gotta do it yourself.”
She nodded. Realized he couldn’t see her head. Popped a thumbs-up on the hand he held.
“Good.” He let go. “Now just sort of slide your feet toward the corner until your right heel is just off the ledge. I know it’s scary, but you’ll be OK.”
She did as he’d told her, sidling along the ledge until she felt a drop in her heel. Closing her eyes tight, she gritted her teeth into a new wind. A breeze. On the ground, it would be nothing. Up here?
She blocked it from her mind. TonyStark was still giving commands, but she ignored him. She had this figured out.
She leaned into the building as far as she could and swung her right leg out in an arc, around the corner. Her toe stubbed against the ledge on the other side, and she greeted the pain like an old friend she’d not seen in years.
“You got it, Cassie. You got it.”
With a deep breath, she leaned out as far as she dared, one hand on either side of the corner of the hotel. For a perilous, horrifying instant, her center of gravity was over open space, but then her momentum took her around; her weight landed on her right foot. She now straddled the corner. When she turned her head to the right and opened her eyes, TonyStark was grinning at her.
“Fancy meeting you here,” he deadpanned.
“Now what?” she asked.
In response, he started inching his way along the ledge, moving away from her. Cassie groaned. Her entire body hurt from exertion at this point. Clinging to the ledge taxed her core, her shoulders, her calves and thighs …
From around the corner, she thought she heard the sound of boots hitting the wooden plank. That galvanized her to action and she crab-walked along the ledge with a greater confidence spurred on by urgency.
Near the middle of this side of the hotel, TonyStark stopped. “This next part is tough,” he said without a trace of irony.
Cassie barked laughter. “Oh, the next part is tough.”
“Watch me and do what I do.”
As she watched, TonyStark reached down and threaded his belt out of its loops until it hung loose in his left hand. Cassie wondered what the hell he was up to … until she looked up.
“Oh, hell, no!” she exclaimed.
“Double your belt over like this,” he told her, demonstrating. “Otherwise, it won’t be strong enough.”
“No way,” she said. “No way.”
He shrugged. “Feel free to take your chances with the mob, Ms. #KillOnSight.”
And with that, he looped his doubled-over belt over the zip line bolted into the wall just above their heads. He used the additional stability to turn around so that he was facing out from the building, then — with a wink in Cassie’s direction — kicked off from the wall and slid at increasingly terrifying speed across the yawning abyss between buildings.
On reflex, Cassie almost spun around to watch him but stopped herself at the last possible moment, just before her foot turned out into nothingness. She closed her eyes and clung to the wall for dear life.
She couldn’t do this.
She couldn’t actually do this.
Had TonyStark made it? Had he survived? She couldn’t get enough of an angle looking over her shoulder, and she couldn’t turn around …
Well, she could turn around.
Same way he had.
Goddammit, she thought. I hate everyone in the whole world right now.
She had gone zip lining once, actually. With her parents. Six years ago. It had been a place in Arizona during their Grand Canyon trip, the dry heat baking their skin as they waited their turn in line. A guy in his midtwenties who had smiled at her too much made sure safety harnesses were attached and snug. She had suffered his touch because she knew how important the harness was.
Dad went first, skimming the tops of pine trees and whooping like a madman. Cassie went next, eyes tightly shut until about halfway through, when she opened them to the gasp-inducing sight of the treetops whipping by beneath her.
But that had been in a controlled environment, with multiple safety checks and regulation, inspected gear. This was throwing herself at the ground and hoping to miss.
What choice did she have?
She reached down, balanced precariously, aware that a wrong move in the wrong direction could topple her backward off the ledge. Fumbling with shaking hands, she slowly threaded her belt out of her jeans. With a deep breath, she folded it over and then flipped it into the air, over the end of the zip line.
“Sighted!” someone shouted.
She jerked and turned to her left, almost losing her balance. Coming around the corner was one of the men in black body armor, clinging to the building and so unable to unstrap the assault rifle slung over his shoulder. “Sighted! North side of the building! They have a zip line!”
Shit. Cassie did as TonyStark had done and turned around, using her anchor above to keep herself from falling. Across the way, she spied TonyStark, waving frantically to her from a balcony one story down.
One story down and what seemed to be ten football fields away.
It wasn’t that far, she knew. If she’d been on the sidewalk, the distance between buildings would have been negligible. Not even noticeable. Just another skinny alleyway cut between two buildings. Nothing to see.
Up here, it might as well have been the Grand Canyon.
“Don’t move!” the man cried out. He’d made his way around the corner now and was — to her shock — actually moving to unsling his rifle.
Double shit!
Cassie couldn’t afford the luxury of fear or hesitation any longer. As TonyStark had done, she kicked off from the wall and heard herself scream like a lunatic as she rocketed down the zip line. Over the sound of her own yelling came several reports in a row. Bullets whizzed over her head and she screamed even more loudly and the next thing she knew she was crashing into TonyStark, who caught her on the balcony and pulled her down, flattening her on the floor of the balcony as bullets rained around them.
“You’re safe!” he told her. “You made it!”
“They’re shooting at us!” she bellowed. �
��We’re not safe!”
As if to punctuate the point, a bullet pinged off the balcony’s railing and ricocheted into a window, shattering it.
“Wait,” he said.
Just as she opened her mouth to berate him — wait for what? — the gunfire stopped. She peered up and across the chasm, where she spied the gunman making his way to the zip line, his rifle again slung over his shoulder.
There was a knife in a sheath strapped to the railing. TonyStark used it to cut the zip line.
“You guys really planned this,” she said in amazement. Facing the wall as he was, the gunman wouldn’t know the line had been cut until he got there.
“We don’t mess around,” he said. “Come on. Now we go up.”
*
They clambered up a fire escape ladder, then used balconies and fire escapes to zigzag their way up another story, coming around another corner to the west side of the building. There were conveniently placed boards in certain places to lead them to their next step, and Cassie again marveled at the planning that OHM had mastered. When she dared glance around, her stomach heaved; down below, more lights flashed but the sounds of the city were muted, drowned out by wind and her own heavy breathing. She’d been in and out of the city her whole life and had come to understand its rhythms. But from up here, it was an alien landscape, a set of boxes stacked in rigid rows. The lights that were so warm and comforting when seen down on the street were now distracting and dangerous. The slivers of alleyways were obstacles. Everything felt vicious and personal, as though the city she called home had decided to evict her all on its own.
Cassie allowed herself to think for just a moment what would happen if she fell. Or if they caught her.
Each time they crossed a board TonyStark would pause to haul it in. “I don’t think they’ll follow, but just in case.”
“What about other OHMers?” she asked. “What if they need them?”
“We all have different routes,” he said. “We drill. We take it seriously; we have to.”
She thought of the OHMers she’d watched hopping over the side of the roof. She’d imagined them plummeting to their death, but they’d had other escape routes planned already.
